Most spy thrillers are big-budget, big-screen affairs — extravaganzas whose leading men speed down narrow roads in vehicles with glove compartments filled with cash and beautiful women in passenger seats.
Accompanying all that action are musical themes specially composed and loudly performed that, once heard, become fixed in your mind earworms — like “Goldfinger”, lurking, waiting until just before you drift off to sleep.
Give me a more subdued approach, like John LaCarre’s “The Spy Who Came in from the Cold”, a cold of believable intrigue wrapped in subtle coverings without all the pumped-up music.
LaCarre intentionally created his main character, George Smiley, as a foil to James Bond, who he believed depicted an inaccurate version of actual espionage. Unlike Bond’s chiseled good looks, Smiley was short, overweight, balding, and bespectacled. But even this portly dismissive spy wasn’t real.
Around here, to find real spies, you have to go back to the summer of 1943, to a broad expanse of sugar sand beach north of Rogers City, by Sacred Rock — to a cottage there.
And it wasn’t a Smiley or a Bond who caught them.
It turns out that, to catch actual spies, you have to know how to knock knots out of old board fences so as to peer into strangers’ yards, know how to climb those fences to have a closer look — and how to run — fast.
But, most importantly, you have to realize, going in, that following parental rules had limitations — that real adventures could require exceptions be made.
In a summer’s continuous game of hide-and-seek, where hats of competing military forces were regularly exchanged, and after the participants had been reminded yet again that, when snuck up on and “shot,” they had to take their “deads” — everyone scattered off to familiar hiding places — except William Nowicki, his brother, Robert, and their cousin, L. Latulip.
These three followed a different course — off to a place discovered in earlier reconnaissance — a forbidden yard with a pond, a place Grandma told them not to go, as they had no business or permission to be there.
But on this day, not only did they look through the fence’s knot holes, they climbed the fence.
This is what they saw: a radio antenna moving up out of the cottage’s fireplace chimney, a large telescope pointed toward the lake, a wall panel — or was it a bookcase? — that moved aside to reveal what appeared to be a radio next to a man wearing earphones.
Suddenly, a lady came out of the cottage screaming at them in a most threatening way! L. Latulip remembers experiencing fear of bodily harm.
So they ran, scrambled back over the fence, to run again as fast as they could to William and Robert’s grandmother to tell her what they’d seen.
Grandma told their father, he told the sheriff, the sheriff called the FBI, the FBI came.
Why?
Because, earlier that week, FBI agents stopped at Nowicki’s store and spoke with Phil, advising him they were in town trying to locate a clandestine short-wave radio transmitter. Did he know anything that could help? At the time, he didn’t.
But now he did.
The agents went into the premises without pausing to look through knotholes and took its occupants into custody. They found codebooks and other information that, from what I understand, helped break a ring of German spies who were monitoring Great Lakes shipping.
The cottage’s occupants, Mr. and Mrs. Schuler, were incarcerated at the federal penitentiary in Joliette, Illinois, where Ms. Schuler died. After the war, Mr. Schuler was deported.
Even though these children helped their country in a significant way, their involvement was not revealed — for their own protection!
Their parents were concerned that some community factions would be upset with their actions and the resultant Schulers’ imprisonment. So they were told not to tell — and they never did — until William revealed the story in 2018, then retold it to me a few days ago.
Even present members of the Nowicki family, including Phil III, Phil IV, and Brian Peterson, didn’t know the whole story, and, after all these years, L. Latulip still didn’t want me using her full name.
In 1943, Rogers City youth uncovered a truth they had to hide from people not on their team for fear of retaliation.
Today, Big Bird tells children to be vaccinated for COVID-19, wanting his team members to be protected, only to have a U.S. senator from Texas seek vengeance, accusing the Bird of spreading propaganda.
This senator — not of any children’s team — comes from an adult team refusing to “take its deads.”
Doug Pugh’s “Vignettes” runs weekly on Saturdays. He can be reached at pughda@gmail.com.
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