Smelt v. Tourists

The smelt takes its name not from its peculiar cucumber-like smell but from Anglo-Saxon smeolt ("bright and shining"). It is a small, slender fish with a silvery belly and an olive-green back. Fried like a doughnut in deep fat, it is a distinct delicacy. When smelts are running, they run in enormous schools, can be easily scooped up in hand nets. Last week 20,000 curious tourists were welcomed with open arms by the 15,000 natives of Escanaba, Mich, for that city's fourth annual smelt jamboree.

Each spring since 1918, when Benzie County (Mich.) Clerk Newt Ely found the creek near his house green with smelt struggling upstream from Lake Michigan to spawn, fishermen have flocked to brooks around the Great Lakes, have taken in 8,000,000 pounds of smelt annually. Softspoken, bespectacled William J. Duchaine, managing editor of the Escanaba Daily Press and the town's unofficial pressagent, sniffed a chance for the town to recoup its losses in local mining and lumbering declines. Having initiated Escanabans to profit-making outdoor fun with logrolling contests, deer hunters' powwows, he sold the town its first smelt jamboree in 1935. Scooping smelt from streams has never concerned him as much as scooping up tourists. Wryly he says: "It has not yet been determined whether smelt in the Great Lakes are a curse or a blessing."

Last week the 1938 jamboree opened with a Graustarkian comic opera entitled Smeltania, followed by coronation of a Smelt King & Queen. Next day jamboreers jammed banquets, watched smelt-eating contests, sang an official smelt-jamboree song, learned to dance "the smelt run," a cross between the shag and the big apple. At week's end the festival wound up with an afternoon parade and a mammoth bonfire at a nearby river. To this last flocked natives and visitors alike, armed to the ears with butterfly nets, bird cages, sieves, kitchen strainers, washtubs and burlap bags, for the season's wildest smelt-dip.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.