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<p>Librarians - feel free to share the link with your patrons.<br>
</p>
<p><strong>Note: this event was originally scheduled for July 11th
but was postponed to September 12th</strong><br>
<strong><a
href="https://UPPAA.us3.list-manage.com/track/click?u=b1016c5c910959a236f2ff48f&id=95a863d9cc&e=fd2c186103"
target="_blank"
style="mso-line-height-rule: exactly;-ms-text-size-adjust: 100%;-webkit-text-size-adjust: 100%;color: #007C89;font-weight: normal;text-decoration: underline;"><img
align="right" alt="Official Seal of the U.P. Notable Books"
data-file-id="5478685" height="209"
src="https://mcusercontent.com/b1016c5c910959a236f2ff48f/images/a820f93a-c8e9-4ac1-90d6-113beff7cce0.jpg"
style="border-image: none 100% / 1 / 0 stretch;margin: 0px;border: 0;height: auto !important;outline: none;text-decoration: none;-ms-interpolation-mode: bicubic;"
width="213"></a><br>
<span style="color:#006400">UP Notable Book Club</span>:</strong>
The Crystal Falls Community District Library in partnership with
the U.P. Publishers & Authors Association (UPPAA) has
scheduled author events with winners of the <em>UP Notable Book
List</em>. The 38th event is with author and retired fire safety
professional Greg Lusk who was the Assistant Fire Boss for the
many months of the 1976 Seney Fire. According to <a
href="https://UPPAA.us3.list-manage.com/track/click?u=b1016c5c910959a236f2ff48f&id=56ae256977&e=fd2c186103"
target="_blank"
style="mso-line-height-rule: exactly;-ms-text-size-adjust: 100%;-webkit-text-size-adjust: 100%;color: #007C89;font-weight: normal;text-decoration: underline;"><em>The
Mining Journal</em></a>: "All told, the fire spread over
72,500 acres during a period of record drought, requiring an
interagency firefighting force of more than 1,200 firefighters
from twenty-nine states to achieve containment. It burned until
the winter snow extinguished it."<br>
<br>
<em><strong>When: </strong></em>September 12th, 2024 at 7 pm
Eastern / 6 pm Central<br>
<em><strong>Where: </strong></em>Join Zoom Meeting
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://us02web.zoom.us/j/86284714758?pwd=sTHe6NYXBJl7heVzQ2NY9p9agE0X18.1">https://us02web.zoom.us/j/86284714758?pwd=sTHe6NYXBJl7heVzQ2NY9p9agE0X18.1</a><br>
Meeting ID: 862 8471 4758<br>
Passcode: fire<br>
</p>
<p
style="margin: 10px 0;padding: 0;mso-line-height-rule: exactly;-ms-text-size-adjust: 100%;-webkit-text-size-adjust: 100%;color: #202020;font-family: Helvetica;text-align: left;"><strong><a
href="https://UPPAA.us3.list-manage.com/track/click?u=b1016c5c910959a236f2ff48f&id=b09e0db8c8&e=fd2c186103"
target="_blank"
style="mso-line-height-rule: exactly;-ms-text-size-adjust: 100%;-webkit-text-size-adjust: 100%;color: #007C89;font-weight: normal;text-decoration: underline;"><img
align="right" data-file-id="7972576" height="218"
src="https://mcusercontent.com/b1016c5c910959a236f2ff48f/images/458cdc08-28ef-e93a-5328-ca48f2eb0faf.jpg"
style="border: 0px;width: 200px;height: 218px;margin: 0px 0px 0px 12px;outline: none;text-decoration: none;-ms-interpolation-mode: bicubic;"
width="200"></a>GREGORY M. LUSK</strong>, a native Yooper,
who grew up in lower Michigan and southern California, has two
grown sons and now lives in Hancock, Michigan, with his wife,
Sandra. He spent the long, dry summer of 1976 helping to suppress
the largest, most costly forest fire that had burned in Michigan
since 1908. In early August, he left his regular duties as a fire
management specialist for the Michigan Department of Natural
Resources in Marquette to work on the fire as the assistant Fire
Boss for the State. His experiences several years earlier in
Vietnam as a platoon leader were as valuable as his degree in
forestry from Michigan Tech and his extensive training in forest
fire behavior in the effort. The leaves had fallen, and the early
winter snow was starting to fall by the time he got home. Long
after he retired as the Upper Peninsula State fire supervisor in
1997, he dug out his news clippings, maps, and notes and began
writing the history of the Great Seney fire. He was partly
motivated by the aphorism that "those who cannot remember the past
are condemned to repeat it"; with hopes that this account will
help others remember this essential piece of Michigan history.</p>
<div class="AuthorBio__author-bio__author-biography__WeqwH">
<p
style="margin: 10px 0;padding: 0;mso-line-height-rule: exactly;-ms-text-size-adjust: 100%;-webkit-text-size-adjust: 100%;color: #202020;font-family: Helvetica;text-align: left;"><a
href="https://UPPAA.us3.list-manage.com/track/click?u=b1016c5c910959a236f2ff48f&id=f912b6b525&e=fd2c186103"
target="_blank"
style="mso-line-height-rule: exactly;-ms-text-size-adjust: 100%;-webkit-text-size-adjust: 100%;color: #007C89;font-weight: normal;text-decoration: underline;"><img
align="left" data-file-id="7972572" height="299"
src="https://mcusercontent.com/b1016c5c910959a236f2ff48f/images/69ff5ea1-29ca-cbe2-8c3a-60ca5f61bfc9.jpg"
style="border-image: none;width: 200px;height: 299px;margin: 0px 12px 0px 0px;border: 0;outline: none;text-decoration: none;-ms-interpolation-mode: bicubic;"
width="200"></a>"Greg Lusk is a native Yooper who had a
front-row seat for the Seney Fire. Specifically, he left his job
as a fire specialist for the Michigan Department of Natural
Resources (DNR) to become the Assistant Fire Boss for the
State’s suppression of the Seney Fire. As such, Lusk would need
to call on both his experience as a seasoned veteran of Vietnam
as a platoon leader as well as his degree in forestry from
Michigan Tech to succeed. An inveterate and meticulous
recordkeeper, he unearthed his many boxes of official and
unofficial documentation after his retirement to write <em>The
Great Seney Fire</em>.</p>
<p
style="margin: 10px 0;padding: 0;mso-line-height-rule: exactly;-ms-text-size-adjust: 100%;-webkit-text-size-adjust: 100%;color: #202020;font-family: Helvetica;text-align: left;">I
can only describe as eerie the sensation of reading Lusk’s story
of a nearly 50 year-old-fire while similar events unveiled
day-by-day in Lahaina, Hawaii as I read on. One of these he
describes in detail is how a fire can burn underground following
tree roots like a long dynamite fuse and emerge on the other
side of the fire suppression line. Literally, the next day a
photographer reported seeing this phenomenon in Lahaina. I am
generally not a person to dog-ear pages, but as I read about the
scale of firefighting, possible mismanagement by the Seney
Wildlife Sanctuary, and the heroics of men and their machines I
was marking page-after-page! Today, I can watch the progress of
wildfires on the NASA FIRMS page (Fire Information Resource
Management System) with fresh satellite imagery on my laptop.
This was not the case in 1976 where the only communication was
old-school police radios and visuals were just photographs
snapped from aerial surveys.</p>
<p
style="margin: 10px 0;padding: 0;mso-line-height-rule: exactly;-ms-text-size-adjust: 100%;-webkit-text-size-adjust: 100%;color: #202020;font-family: Helvetica;text-align: left;">Lusk
leads off with a complete “natural history” starting millions of
years ago before the U.P. itself was even a land mass! This
continues on as the ever-changing parade of flora and fauna
cross the U.P. and leave their mark. In 1908, land speculators
purchased the Seney marsh from Cleveland Cliffs in hopes of
selling it on as arable farmland. To that end, they dug the
Walsh Ditch, a 16-mile-long trench between M-28 draining into
the Manistique River. The main problem being that, although the
soil was rich, it would simply not hold water and after Spring
rains the soil would quickly dry up. Such a summer drought was
well underway in 1976 when the great fire broke out. A normal
summer in the central U.P. would see 13 inches of rain in the
summer but only 5 inches had fallen and August of that year saw
barely ½ inch of that total. ." -- <strong>Victor R. Volkman, <a
href="https://UPPAA.us3.list-manage.com/track/click?u=b1016c5c910959a236f2ff48f&id=cf852f0d66&e=fd2c186103"
target="_blank"
style="mso-line-height-rule: exactly;-ms-text-size-adjust: 100%;-webkit-text-size-adjust: 100%;color: #007C89;font-weight: normal;text-decoration: underline;">Read
the entire review on <em>U.P. Book Review</em></a></strong></p>
</div>
<div class="about_content" id="about_author">
<div id="about_author_v">
<div class="textmodulecontent">
<p
style="margin: 10px 0;padding: 0;mso-line-height-rule: exactly;-ms-text-size-adjust: 100%;-webkit-text-size-adjust: 100%;color: #202020;font-family: Helvetica;text-align: left;">More
information about the U.P. Notable Book list, <em>U.P. Book
Review, </em>and UPPAA can be found on <a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="http://www.UPNotable.com">www.UPNotable.com</a><br>
</p>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<div style="text-align: left;"><strong><a
href="https://UPPAA.us3.list-manage.com/track/click?u=b1016c5c910959a236f2ff48f&id=d28421e267&e=fd2c186103"
target="_blank"
style="mso-line-height-rule: exactly;-ms-text-size-adjust: 100%;-webkit-text-size-adjust: 100%;color: #007C89;font-weight: normal;text-decoration: underline;"><img
align="right" data-file-id="4246885" height="150"
src="https://gallery.mailchimp.com/b1016c5c910959a236f2ff48f/images/fdff6d7d-ca6e-4f62-80ad-49c5258d320e.png"
style="border-image: none 100% / 1 / 0 stretch;width: 225px;height: 150px;margin: 0px;border: 0;outline: none;text-decoration: none;-ms-interpolation-mode: bicubic;"
width="225"></a>About the Upper Peninsula Publishers and
Authors Association (UPPAA)</strong></div>
Established in 1998 to support authors and publishers who live in or
write about Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, UPPAA is a Michigan
nonprofit association with over 100 members, many of whose books are
featured on the organization’s website at <a
href="https://UPPAA.us3.list-manage.com/track/click?u=b1016c5c910959a236f2ff48f&id=c195f97e96&e=fd2c186103"
style="mso-line-height-rule: exactly;-ms-text-size-adjust: 100%;-webkit-text-size-adjust: 100%;color: #007C89;font-weight: normal;text-decoration: underline;">www.uppaa.org</a>.
UPPAA welcomes membership and participation from anyone with a UP
connection who is interested in writing
<pre class="moz-signature" cols="72">--
Regards,
Victor R. Volkman, President
L H Press Inc.
<a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="http://www.LHPress.com">www.LHPress.com</a></pre>
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