M is for Menominee

One comment I've received this month wanted to know more about me, so here's a post on the city that shaped my life.

I was born in Fort Huachuca, Arizona, but I spent most of my life in a small town in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan called Menominee. It's situated literally at that point along Lake Michigan's Green Bay (not the city) where Michigan comes down and touches Wisconsin. Menominee is the city on the top of the picture below, while Marinette, Wisconsin is on the bottom.

It's a small town of less than 10,000 people, and if I had to call it, it's quaint. Once we reached middle school, all of the kids were in the same classes together. I lived in an old house and walked to school for most of the 11 years I went. I will admit that while we were about a block and a half inside the cut-off point for the buses, my brother and I managed to get to ride the bus during the winters.

This train station was near my house, though I don't think that there were really any train tracks nearby. If there were, it was only used by freight trains that practically crawled along.

While we lived in Menominee, most of the business and action was across the river in Marinette. We would ride our bikes across the .6 mile wide Interstate Bridge and go wherever we wanted in Marinette. Most of it was done in the summer, because obviously the weather's not the best during the winter. I tended to spend most of the summer at the mall on the other side of Marinette at the bookstore.

Being an old town, Menominee has a lot of old buildings. Grant School, on the northern edge of the city, has always been boarded up for as long as I can remember. It was really rather creepy, and looking at a picture of it now, I imagine that some horrible thing happened there and that it was abandoned quickly like Chernobyl. It's probably a lot more benign than that though.

In the winter, children would either go to Marinette's city park to sled or they would come here to the welcome center. It's a log cabin at the top of a nice, big hill. Snowplows clearing the parking lot below would create this tiny mountain range of snow that kept the children safely out of the parking lot, which could get quite busy at times. It was a pain to drag your sled up the hill, but it was fun.

A good little place near the middle school and next door to one of my friends is this little pasty shop. They are basically like... hot pockets. I got a small addiction to pistachio ice cream from this place.



Images from viewfromabove.com, Flickr, Wikipedia, Michigan Department of Transportation, & johnsonmatel.com.