Phones Reach Out to Backwoods at Last

Nine years after Lester and Glenna Sturgeon moved into their backwoods cottage, a neighbor called early on a recent one day to say hello. It took about that long to get telephone service.

The couple and 60 other customers went on line deep in the Kalkaska County woods in central Upper Michigan in September. The area is believed to be the last populated fragment of the state to have phones installed.

Previously, residents relied on a neighbor with a cellular phone.

The call to the Sturgeons’ home was hardly unexpected, but the couple’s startled expressions made clear they were unaccustomed to the jarring ring.

“Hello!” Glenna Sturgeon said, more loudly than necessary. A pause. “Yeah, it’s working. I can hear you just fine.”

A call from overseas? No, from a mile or so down the road. And those are unpaved roads folks must drive 5 miles to pick up their mail.

“It’s been a long, hard fight,” said Byron Shimel, 74, who lobbied for seven years before the Michigan Public Service Commission, telephone companies, state legislators and anyone else who would hear his pleas for phone service.

The roughly 11 1/2-mile stretch is one of about 18 areas in Michigan that the commission hadn’t assigned to a phone company.

But the others are unpopulated or nearly so, said L. G. Matthews, president of Upper Peninsula Telephone Co., which last year won commission approval to serve the Portage Creek Road area near Grayling.

“This is probably the last area in Michigan where there are enough people to make it feasible,” he said.

Seven of the households that signed up have year-round residents--and Shimel reckoned that there are another three dozen potential customers.

Matthews’ company, located in the Upper Peninsula town of Carney, has just 5,300 customers. It covers spots that bigger companies don’t consider worth the trouble.

Shimel, who worked as a tool-and-die maker in Michigan and Ohio, used to spend vacations in the Manistee River area with his wife, Mary. They loved it so much they built a retirement home a dozen years ago.

It wasn’t long before Shimel became a sort of unofficial sheriff’s deputy, patrolling the area in his pickup truck, watching for suspicious-looking vehicles or forest fires.

He installed a two-way radio linking his house with the Kalkaska County Sheriff’s Department. If anyone spotted a prowler or had a medical emergency, they notified Shimel via citizens-band radio, and he called the sheriff.

Last year, he bought a cellular telephone.

“I enjoyed the work,” Shimel said. “But I was getting rousted out of bed at all hours of the night.

“It was especially busy in deer season . . . trying to find people, give them the message that there’s been an emergency, a death in the family or something. I’d never break news like that to them, I’d just say call home.”