The Quest for Tepee Island

By Paul Gordon

This is a true story of one mans life-altering odyssey to fulfill the dream of acquiring ownership of an island in the wilderness of Northwest Ontario, Canada, and how the whole adventure was triggered by a major snowstorm that blanketed the Chicago area in 1967.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Trafford Publishing
• Release date: Nov 23, 2011
• ISBN: 9781466903784

Paul Gordon

Dr. Paul Gordon has spent much of his education career working for the Adams 12 Five Star School District outside Denver, Colorado, where he served as a classroom teacher, a middle school principal, the director of professional development, and the chief academic officer. During the last 10 years, Paul has served as the superintendent of three school districts. Early in his career, he worked with students with significant reading challenges, which forged his path toward creating inclusive environments for each student and understanding the impact this has on the overall system. As a practitioner, Paul continues to learn from students, teachers, parents, and others working in inclusive classrooms about the challenges and the incredible opportunities that inclusion offers each student.

Book preview

© Copyright 2011 Paul Gordon.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written prior permission of the author.

Printed in the United States of America.

isbn: 978-1-4669-0377-7 (sc)

isbn: 978-1-4669-0376-0 (hc)

isbn: 978-1-4669-0378-4 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2011960472

Trafford rev. 11/18/2011

7-Copyright-Trafford_Logo.ai

www.trafford.com

North America & International

toll-free: 1 888 232 4444 (USA & Canada)

phone: [phone] . fax: [phone]

Contents

Chapter I

How IT All Began

Chapter II

The Road To Windigoostigwan Lake

Chapter III

My Discovery of Tepee Island

Chapter IV

Meeting Mrs. Hess, The Owner,

and Trying To Buy The Island

Chapter V

The Home Stretch of

The Tepee Island Quest

Chapter VI

Building A Cabin On Tepee Island

Maps and Pictures

This book is dedicated to my wife Ilse who never dissuaded me from my quest and who has accompanied me to Tepee Island on many joyful fishing trips.

Paul Gordon December, 2008

1.jpg

Chapter I

How IT All Began

The following narrates a sequence of events that traces the marbleized, odyssey like, happenings in my forty year quest and efforts in acquiring Tepee Island. Tepee is a dab of forested rock that was untainted by the handiwork of mankind, that is located in the remote wilderness area of Northwest Ontario, Canada and on picturesque Windigoostigwan Lake. Windigoostigwan is an Ojibway Indian word whose full meaning is not known. However, Windigo in the Ojibway language refers to the great spirit.

This yarn starts with a meteoric event, of a catastrophic nature, that began on the morning of January 26, 1967, a Thursday, and concluded by midday of January 27, 1967 and which triggered the story that is about to unfold. The reader should be aware that the narrative road ahead is fraught with reversals, set—backs, detours and switchbacks Only the tenacious and intrepid will stay, as did I, the course of the happenings that are now about to be narrated.

The event was what has been referred to as the Greatest Snow Storm in the history of the Chicago Area. The Chicago Tribune has chronicled the event as The Blizzard of ‘67 and as one of one-hundred & fifty defining moments in the city’s history. There was a total snowfall in a two day period that was in the range of twenty inches to thirty inches and attendant with fifty-three mile per hour winds. These snow and wind conditions collapsed many roofs in the Chicago area and in the suburban areas ringing the city. The collapse of one such roof, at a shopping center in Markham Park Illinois, was really the initiating event in a chain of enchanting events that was to follow.

On the Thursday morning of January 26, 1967, I left my home in Lincolnwood Illinois to go to my near Michigan Avenue, downtown Chicago, structural engineering office. It was snowing heavily and there was already a substantial accumulation on the streets and on the main thoroughfares. However, I was not concerned with the snow because I would be taking a suburban bus from a main intersection within walking distance of my home. The suburban bus was not one of those modern transit authority buses but was more like one of those lopsided beat up buses that one associates with a third world country. Without any particular difficulty, the bus delivered me downtown in the morning. The trip home in the evening was another matter that took nearly four hours for a normally forty minute trip. Traffic was almost at a standstill and had the bus driver not taken an alternate route home I might not have gotten home on the night of January 26. Many people did not get home that night or for several nights after that.

Because of the snow, I stayed home all day on January 27 and for the weekend that followed. The days I stayed home were spent shoveling and mining out snow that accumulated in nearly six foot high drifts in portions of my more than one hundred foot long driveway. It was quite a challenge to figure out ways to move the snow with the least effort and in a manner that resulted in the final positioning of the snow without the need for reshoveling or rehandling. Others must have stayed home but had not spent their time shoveling because it was reported that there was a significant surge in births in the late fall of 1967.

On Monday, January the 30th, the sun came out, the roads were passable to some extent, and the rickety suburban bus was running on a reasonable schedule. Consequently, I thought it was time to take a trip downtown.

I walked down to the corner amid a canyon of snow drifts and caught my rickety but reliable bus for a scenic trip downtown to the office. The regulars on the bus were overflowing with accounts relating to their personal battles with the snow and the adventures of getting home on the first day of the storm. Although imperfectly plowed, the streets were unimpededly traversable and the trip downtown was without event. The scenery along the entire route was magnificent and with a hint of being some place in the arctic. The segment of the bus trip that is along Chicago’s Lake Shore Drive was particularly enchanting in that the view of the undisturbed snow in the park, through which the drive wends its way, and the view over the vast expanse of Lake Michigan, along which the drive skirts, was breath taking. Breath taking, that is, except for the random but frequent appearance of a mound of snow blanketing an abandoned auto or the occasional group of shovelers trying to liberate their vehicles from their burial in the snow.

The scene on Michigan Avenue was one of desolation and quietude except for those poor souls engaged in snow removal activities and a few intrepid workaholics, as I may have been termed at that time. Arriving at the office, I tried to refocus my thoughts and efforts to the point of work that I was at before the distracting interlude of the snowstorm. While trying to rebury myself in my work, the phone rang. Little did I know then that caller would be the instigator of the onset of events relating to my pursuit of the ownership of Tepee Island. The caller was a Mr. Melvin A. Kahn who was a part owner of a shopping center in Markham Illinois. The caller related that I was highly recommended to him by a prominent Chicago realtor, Mr. Arthur Rubloff, and that he immediately needed my services to assist him in directing the shoring up of a portion of a roof collapse that had taken place at his shopping center and to organize and initiate a snow removal program for the other roofs in this rather large shopping center that had several large department stores. Mr. Kahn wanted me to be at the site that day and as soon as possible.

Now you have to know that Markham Illinois was a remote, semi rural town, emerging into a suburban community in the mid 1960’s. Markham was about twenty-eight miles to the south/southwest of downtown Chicago and the location of my office. Further, one has to realize that the region was reeling from the worst snow storm that it had ever experienced and that except for a few arterial roads being cleared, traffic in the region was at a near standstill. With these facts in mind, my first inclination was to tell Mr. Kahn that he was crazy and normally I would have done so. However, being that I was already distracted by the disruptive effect of the snow storm and being challenged to get involved in the interesting and adventuresome engineering problems that were sure to surface, I decided to inquire further of Mr. Kahn. I asked about the details of the collapse, the snow conditions at the site, the condition of the other un-collapsed roofs and foremost, how was I to get to Markham from downtown Chicago under the transit circumstances that prevailed.

Upon inquiry of Mr. Kahn as to exactly where the shopping center was, I was shocked and electrified with curiosity when I heard the name of the shopping center. It was the Canterbury Shopping Center, a shopping center that I had designed a part of in 1959 for an architect who was a prominent shopping center architect in the Chicago area from the mid 1950s to the late 1980s and for whom I had designed the structures of the shopping centers for that entire era. I had designed a large Goldblatts Department store and several satellite buildings at the center and with my heart pounding with professional anxiety, I asked Mr. Kahn about the status of the structures. I was immediately relieved to hear his assuring response that the buildings that I had designed were fine but in need of snow removal from their roofs.

Apparently the roof that had collapsed was a loading dock roof that someone, other than myself, had designed in the early 1960’s and without due regard for snow drift potential to develop as a load on the roof that collapsed. Interestingly, the state of the art of structural engineering up until the mid 1970s did not require formal recognition of the potential to develop snow drift loads on roofs that were adjacent to and lower than higher roofs of larger area. I know that the failure to require recognition of the potential to develop snow drift on a roof seems to be a fundamental engineering design error but such was the then state of the art and common practice of many engineers.

Fortunately it was not my practice because of my training at the University of Illinois, my awareness of the Canadian Building Codes and my common sense and experience, from childhood to the present, that snow does drift. Rest assured that current building codes, in all the states, require the accounting for snow drift loads in a formal manner, regardless of whether a building is in a snowfall area or not.

Having been reassured that I was in no danger of exposure for the consequences of a faulty design, my attention returned to the matter of getting to the shopping center in a timely and expeditious fashion. Many options were considered among which were taxi, limousine, Chicago Transit Authority or Mr. Kahn coming to pick me up at the office. The former three options didn’t seem very practical but the latter seemed out of the question because of available time constraints in coming to get me and then returning to Markham with enough time left for me to do my work with available