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Chapter I

Two Cases of Eggs (1942–1950)

Franklin D. Roosevelt (1933–1945)

I, Terry A. Maurer, was born in Grayling, Michigan, on October 1, 1942, because that’s what my parents, Bernard and Pauline (Cherven) Maurer told me and also what it says in the archives at the Crawford County Courthouse. Jimmy Carter was also born on October 1, so also were my Grayling friend Sammie Williams and HDC friend Emery Rebresh. Grayling is a town put on the map by its Hanson Logging history at the turn of the last century, it is famous for the Au Sable River, once home to many Grayling trout, now extinct like its prairie pike.

Prairie pike

(Piscatorious terra)

This unusual specimen was the only true fur-bearing fish known in Michigan. Although its natural habitat was the Au Sable River, it would not hesitate to sneak ashore in order to avoid fishermen. Once on land, it was difficult to track down for its feet faced in opposite directions; thus, one could not tell if it were coming or going. This one was caught by Harold “Spike” MacNeven, who had it mounted for display in Spike’s Keg of Nails, Grayling’s famous liquid refreshment emporium.

Then came the great fire of ’48, which destroyed the Tavern, but Spike at great risk to life and limb rescued the mount from the holocaust and gave it to Fred Bear for safekeeping.

The prairie pike is now completely extinct. This being the only know preserved mount is extremely rare and valuable.

Grayling is also the birthplace of the famous Bear Archery Company. In 1961, I sat with Fred Bear watching his grandson Chris Kroll play basketball for Grayling High School. Going forward, Spike’s Keg of Nails bar, Old Au Sable Fly Shop, and the new Ray’s Grill, Lake Margrethe, Camp Grayling, Avita Water Black Bear Bike Tour (organized and managed by my good friends, Wayne Koppa and John Alef), fly fishing, hunting, snowmobiling, the Au Sable River Canoe Marathon, Hartwick Pines State Park, Wellington Farms Historic Theme Park, Fox Run Country Club, Forest Dunes premium golf resort featuring one of the first reversible courses in the country, the Loop, and the Kirtland Warbler and the new Kirtland College and Deerfield Estates and now the Arauco plant on four mile road draw folks to Grayling.

ARAUCO’s Grayling Particleboard operation officially opened its doors on April 16, 2019. Gathered for the grand opening and ribbon cutting were board members and executives from Chile and North America, state and local officials; ARAUCO employees, and project suppliers including Dieffenbacher. The Grayling facility is the most modern and productive mill of its kind—and marks the renewal of the composite panel industry in North America.

Dr. Martzowka delivered me. I met the doctor’s son who was treasurer for the NBD Bank in 1977 when I needed a loan to start my second company Maurer-Shumaker. My dad told me that he’d read something about a Mr. Martz in the Detroit Free Press and that his father had delivered me in 1942, and maybe the son would give me a loan. I did meet the doctor’s son in the bank’s headquarters at the top of the Renaissance Building, now the G. M. Building on the Detroit River downtown. I learned that Mr. Martz was the chief financial officer for the National Bank of Detroit, and he told me that he loans billions to foreign governments over the weekend. He was very considerate and bought my lunch at the NBD executive lunchroom on the top floor. He put me in touch with a branch manager in Livonia who would consider my request for $25,000. I think I did get the loan from his bank, or maybe it was a different bank.

About five years before my dad died in 1985. He told me that when it came time to take me (the newborn) and my mother home from the hospital, he was told by the administrative clerk that he had to pay $35 for the delivery fee. Well, my dad did not have $35, but he knew the hospital still owed him for the last two cases of eggs he had sold them. So my dad told the clerk, “Just keep the egg money and call it a day.”

The clerk must have been new to the job because she could not figure out how to make such a transfer. She said, “Mr. Maurer, I can’t do that, and you can’t take your wife and baby home until you pay the hospital. The delivery department and kitchen department are two different units of the hospital.”

So my dad, getting hot under the collar, said, “Okay then, you feed her and the baby all winter, I’m going home.”

The next day Bernard Maurer, my dad, was out in the field on the farm in Beaver Creek Township, starting his fall plowing. Sheriff Bill Golnick pulled up in the barnyard with lights flashing. My dad told me he knew the hospital had called the sheriff. Walking down the field where Dad had stopped the Allis-Chalmers with its single bottom plow, Sheriff Golnick was smiling. “The hospital called,” Mr. Golnick told my dad. “They figured out how to transfer the egg money they owe you over to the delivery department. So the bill is covered. The hospital wants you to come in and pick up your wife and kid.” So I know I was worth at least two cases of eggs.

I don’t remember much about that first winter of my life in 1942. I know now that I was born in the middle of World War II. The winters were long and cold in Crawford County, Michigan. More snow then than now (global warming, you know). So cold that our mother frequently heated flat rocks in the kitchen oven and placed them in our bed prior to Tony and me getting in. Mom gave us baths in front of the wood-fired kitchen oven in a metal tub. The outhouse and outdoor clothesline was accepted as normal, more challenging for sure in the winter.

A typical day in 1942 on the farm was sort of like this. My dad would be up around 6:00 a.m. to milk the four to five cows by hand, then carry the milk to the house basement from the barn about seventy-five yards away. He would run it through the hand-turned milk separator. We sold the cream to a butter maker in West Branch, the second town east of Roscommon on the New York Central Railway. Once a week, the seven-gallon cream can would be taken to the station and then shipped to West Branch. A week or so later, the five- to six-dollar check would be delivered to our house by my uncle Frank Cherven, our rural mailman. My uncle would also deliver the day-old Bay City Times, his own paper. I looked forward to the comics, especially Alley Oop and Joe Palooka.

We did not have electricity in 1942. I believe we got the Delco-Light Plant going around 1945; we could run low voltage appliances off that unit.

I always was aware, even as a little child, of the danger of taking a kerosene lantern into the hayloft when Dad threw the hay down for the cows. The salt we threw on the warm hay in the summer was to prevent spontaneous combustion at haying time. It would do nothing to stop a fire if the lantern fell off the nail hook in the rafters. The lantern hanging in the kitchen didn’t concern me. Normal electricity arrived at our farm sometime in the very early fifties when Tony and I were already going to the military school in Monroe.

In those days prior to my older brother, Tony, and I being sent to the Catholic military boarding school Hall of the Divine Child, I started first grade in Frederick, Michigan. Frederick was and still is a small village located nearly twenty-five miles north of our farm yet still in Crawford County. We were bused there because the closest town, Grayling, did not have room for the Beaver Creek kids when the one-room schoolhouses in the townships were closed down, probably in 1945 or 1946. I believe I rode the bus about seventy-five miles per day. Sometimes, with either Andy Nielson or Roy Millikin as our bus drivers, on the way home from school, I’d fall asleep on the shoulder of a cute fourth-grade girl from Harry Fiyan’s junkyard.

Once the cows were milked in the morning by my dad, he would then take care of the chickens. We had cows and chickens, probably three hundred chickens in two different coops: one coop for the laying hens and the second coop for the pullets. Both groups of chickens required feed and water. Dad would carry in five-gallon pails of water from the house during the winter. He would need to break through a thin layer of ice before adding more water. The next chore would likely be tending to the wood furnace. The wood we threw down the basement always seemed to be coated with ice and snow. The next morning the whole chore routine would be repeated again. What happened between morning and evening chores depended upon the time of the year.

In the late fall, there was wood to cut up using the tractor, and a long fast-moving belt hooked to an open buzz saw—not to OSHA standards, that’s for sure. Holding my end of the log two feet from the buzz saw while standing on uneven ground covered with ice and snow always got my attention. Remember Johnny Cash’s brother in Walk the Line. During the winter there was less to do between chore time.

In the spring, it was all about cleaning the barns and chicken coops (ahh, the sweet smell of fresh manure in May; chicken manure was the worst) and getting ready to plant. We enjoyed watching the new Holstein calves jumping and kicking their heels in the fresh spring air as they were let out for the first time. We were basically subsistent farmers living off venison and eggs, and all the vegetables we stored in our root cellar, and the berries we picked and canned during the summer. We did make some cash by planting extra potatoes, squash, cabbage (unfortunately, my dad did not know brussels sprouts, later my favorite vegetable), strawberries, tomatoes, green onions, and sweet corn to the local wholesaler, Mr. Warren Gill in Grayling. Planting all these vegetables (that’s what dirt farmers do) led to drilling for more water at the springs near the swamp. The wells turned out to be flowing wells, wells which we much later, in 1987, started bottling first under the franchised name de Maurier. Later we called this water Avita and Ecoviva.

Summertime was a fun time on the farm for Tony and me. It was finally warm enough to swim in the fish ponds, both the two “little ponds,” and then our favorite one, the “big pond.” Creative names, but what do you expect from four- and five-year-olds. Our cousins Sue and Sally would spend much of the summer at what we called Mose’s Cabin. Our uncle, their dad, was the famous Al “Mose” Leonard, who built his cabin on the northeast corner of our two-hundred-acre farm. The cabin was close enough for Sue and Sally and later Beezer, Mary Margaret, Joey, Tommy, and Jimmy, their younger siblings, to walk over to the farm. Mose was famous in my eyes because he could shoot straighter and faster than anyone I ever knew. He could drive faster than most people too. He always scared the devil out of my mother when he would take us to mass during those summer Sundays. Mom would scream “Slow down” most of the way to church.

Mose liked all things fast, motorcycles and ice planes. The ice plane took his life on Saginaw Bay later in 1971 or 1972 when he hit open water at seventy miles per hour in early spring. Uncle Mose was my confirmation sponsor in 1954 and always was fun to be around. He took us boating on Higgins Lake and rabbit hunting in the swamps with my dad and our best rabbit and deer dog Poochy, also known as Caesar by the adults. Mose always carried hard Christmas candy for the rabbit hunts, usually passing it out after we started a big fire amid the snow-covered cedars in the middle of the mud lake swamps just west of the New York Center railroad tracks.

Louis and Poochy the dog

Summertime was still the most fun, especially when our Leonard cousins could walk to the farm across the Sixty—that’s what we called the big area between Mose’s cabin and the farm. We never really had a name for the farm; it was just our home. Other people called it the old Barber Place or the Godfroy Farm. Dr. Godfroy was my godfather and my dad’s cousin and business partner. It eventually became the Maurer Place by the neighbors. The closest neighbors were the Millikins, nearly three miles away. We were in a very remote part of Beaver Creek Township, on a dead-end road. This is definitely an advantage for Avita Water now. The old farm, now in 2011, is owned by my aunt and uncle, Andy and Margaret Cherven, left to them through Doc Godfroy’s will in 1980.

When Sue and Sally would make the walk over to the farm, we would usually end up down at the fish pond, swimming. Always we would get a drink at the flowing wells. Sometimes we could get the girls to help weed the carrots or pick strawberries before the swim. Prior to 1950, when we were all under eight years old, my dad did not work us too hard. Picking up the eggs was something Sue and Sally always wanted to do, being city girls from Saginaw. They also preferred city milk to cow’s milk, as they called what we drank, and sometimes squirted them when Tony and I would do the milking.

In the fall, it was time for school at Frederick. I went to first and second grade there. The time before first grade is not very memorable, and even first grade is difficult to remember since I was four years and eleven months old in 1947 when I started school. My parents wanted me to be in the next grade to Tony, so I started early. Tony was five years and seven months old when he started first grade. I think my math is correct.

At any rate, I don’t remember too much about first grade. Mrs. Odell was my first-grade teacher, and she gave me a set of cookie jars which looked like strawberries to give to my mother, who loved anything strawberry. I disliked phonics and still don’t understand it. Floyd Millikin was my buddy and neighbor from Beaver Creek and was in kindergarten when I started first grade. I skipped kindergarten. Floyd was the third born of this close Millikin family; Marian, Connie, Floyd, Pauline, Bob, Luella, and finally Marci is the birth order. Our families always enjoyed getting together. Floyd and I were friends until he died of a heart attack while presiding over a Road Commission meeting in Crawford County in 1994 or 1995. Floyd helped me set up the first water bottling plant for de Maurier in 1987. Floyd also told me about a week before his death (he already had a heart attack about six weeks earlier) that he had eaten too many doughnuts at his job with the Michigan State Police and that he also smoked too many cigarettes. Floyd was fifty-one and is buried in Grayling.

Roscommon was six miles from the farm, and Grayling was ten miles. We went to church at St. Michael’s in Roscommon. I remember the first time I saved somebody’s life from drowning. I actually saved friends from drowning three times. The first time was during recess from catechism at St. Michael’s in Roscommon. It was probably in December 1947; the ice under the bridge on Main Street was frozen but not too thick when Tom and Jerry (the McCutchison twins) and my brother Tony got on the ice. I was still standing on the shore when they, all three, went through the ice with their winter coats and boots.

The water was just over their heads, not really very deep but deep for five- to six-year-olds. Tony immediately started hollering to me, “Help, help!”

I said, “I’ll go to town and get somebody. I’ll be right back.”

He said, “No, we’ll drown, you’ve got to crawl out on the ice and pull us in.”

I lay on the thin ice and stretched my arms out to grab my brother. I got Tony’s hand and started to pull while Tom and Jerry clung to the ice, treading water in the frigid hole. I got Tony nearly up on the ice when it broke beneath me landing. Now all four of us in the icy water. The good news, we learned that the ice would break all the way back to the shore, probably ten feet. We all managed to get to the bank. The twins, who lived in town, ran home. Tony and I went to the nearby rectory where Father Grill’s housekeeper stripped us down, got the priest’s bathrobes, and sat us on the floor radiator until our mother came to pick us up. I never heard nor do I remember what she said about the situation. I am sure it wasn’t good. She was always worried, maybe from that time on that Tony and I would fall into mud lake and drown on our many hikes to the fish ponds with the flowing wells.

Frequently after church in Roscommon, our family would stop at Grandma Cherven’s little farm for a visit. She always seemed to have Glenn Miller on her big old radio. My mother was the third of ten. She had three sisters, Ann, Teen (married to Mose), and Fran. She had six brothers, Frank, John, Al, Mike, Ed, and Andy. All but Frank served in World War II and all returned in one piece. Here is an article published in the newspaper The Roscommon Herald in 1942:

Five sons in U.S. Army

This week we pay tribute to Mrs. Justine Cherven, the mother of five sons in the US service. Mrs. Cherven, the mother of 10 children, was born in 1886 in what was once Slovakia and then Poland after the First World War.

Mrs. Cherven came to the U.S. and Chicago when she was 16. She was married there in 1907 to Andrew Cherven who was also a native of the same country. The Chervens then moved to a farm 4 miles North of Roscommon in 1910 and moving in 1923 to their present home one mile Northwest of Roscommon. Mr. Cherven passed away three years ago.

Mrs. Cherven has worked hard through the years to raise her fine large family and the esteem with which the community looks on them shows how well she has done her job.

One by one Mrs. Cherven has given her sons to fight for America, her adopted country. Alois, 27, left first and is now Sargent at Camp Murphy, FL; Edward, 25, left 14 months ago and is stationed in Orlando, FL; Andrew, 21, enlisted and is in Colorado Springs, CO; Pfc. John, 29, now en route to a California camp; and Michael, 18, the youngest son, left Tuesday evening for Camp Custer.

Mrs. Cherven’s other children are Frank, Mrs. Bernard Maurer, and Frances, all of Roscommon, the latter daughter, living at home, Mrs. Henry Friday, Jr. of Cheboygan and Mrs. A. L. Leonard of Texas, whose husband is in the army.

To Mrs. Cherven, a quiet, pleasant woman, and wonderful mother we pay her tribute, in giving her five sons to fight so that this land of ours may remain forever the home of the free and the brave. She is more than giving her share.

To our knowledge, Mrs. Cherven is the only mother in Roscommon County with five sons in the armed services.

Roscommon, Michigan

Terry’s Cherven uncles—Michael, Edward, John, Andrew, and Albert—with their mother, my grandmother, Justine Cherven in 1943, all WWII veterans.

Nashville, Michigan

Terry’s Maurer uncles, Lenny, Bug, Dale, and Edward, in 1943, all WWII veterans.

On those visits, I would go upstairs and find khaki uniforms hanging everywhere. It was from 1944 to 1947 I’d see this. It looked like a military barrack, something I saw a lot of in the early ’60s when I worked summer jobs at Camp Grayling, the Michigan National Guard Camp near the four-mile road farm. I personally spent six years in uniform from 1950 to 1956 at the military school. I always say that my dad was too old for World War II, I was too old for Vietnam, and my son, Stephen, was too old for Iraq. The US would have a war every twenty-five years, whether they needed one or not. My family was just born at the right time. I think it was Will Rogers who said there should be a law saying, “You can’t start another war until you’ve paid for the previous one.”

My grandma Cherven would always have a bag of wax bread wrappers for my mother to take home to use for cleaning the top of the woodstove in our kitchen. Sometimes my grandma’s brother, Uncle Emil Glusak, would be there. Once, he asked Tony and me to help find his eyes. We really thought he lost his eyeballs. I thought, How can he look for anything? “None are so blind as those who can’t see,” according to Yogi. Then he told us that he lost his glasses. I don’t remember if we found them.

There was another great uncle in my life in those early days. Uncle Mac was Doc Godfroy’s (Uncle Doc is what we called Dr. Godfroy) father. I am sure he was in his late eighties when he lived with us on the farm. He had his own room downstairs in the big house and even had furniture (fancy stuff) made of horsehair, I was told. Besides remembering his funeral at the house, he was laid out in the front room for everyone to see. Probably a year or so before he died, Uncle Mac gave me a dime once and said, “Split this with Tony.” I knew I had a big job to do, so I got a hammer, placed the dime on the metal piece cemented to the back steps (the piece of metal used to scrape manure off your shoes), and proceeded to pound on the dime. I thought the thin piece of metal and the hammering would allow me to cut the dime in half. My mother saw me and asked what I was doing. I told her, “Uncle Mac said to split the dime with Tony, and I’m splitting it.”

Uncle Mac and Uncle Doc came to Roscommon from Monroe, Michigan, at the start of the Depression (1930 or so). I learned that Uncle Mac worked for the railroad which traveled from Detroit to Mackinaw City, traveling through Roscommon. Somehow, he learned about the (Fred) Barber Farm and decided to move north from Monroe with his son and only child, my uncle Doc, and a bunch of chickens. Sometime in 1985 (some fifty-five years later) I met the man who drove the moving van from Monroe to Roscommon loaded with Mac Godfroy and his son, Bernard Godfroy. We were visiting Dick and Marie Powers, longtime friends of my wife, Mary Ann Horning Maurer, on their son’s (Earl’s) farm near Battle Creek, Michigan.

It wasn’t until 2011 in Redwood City, California, when Mary Ann and I were visiting the Powers’ daughter, Barb Kirkpatrick, when I asked her who it was I met in Battle Creek, Michigan, twenty-five years earlier at her parents’ farm. It didn’t take long to figure out that it was her great uncle, Lauren Munson—wife was Mae from Monroe, Michigan, who moved my uncle Doc and his father to Roscommon in 1930. Munson owned a general store in Monroe and had no children. Uncle Doc’s mother had died earlier of what I don’t know, maybe from the flu of 1918. They are all now buried in the big cemetery on Front Street in Monroe, Michigan. It is the same cemetery where the IHM nuns are buried. There is a very large marker near their site for a Maurer. Must be a distant Maurer to my dad’s family, which was from the Nashville and Hastings, Michigan, area.

Actually, my grandpa Laurence Maurer and his father, I think Jacob, are both buried in Hastings. There is a Godfroy Street in Monroe, just south and adjacent to the IHM motherhouse and St. Mary’s Academy, and the old military school where I spent six years of my life. That academy was called the Hall of the Divine Child (HDC), and in 1985 it became Norman Towers retirement home. The Hall was closed due to declining enrollment and the high cost of lay teachers after the Second Vatican Council.

Actually Uncle Mac or maybe it was his father who lived in Monroe, in the very early days of the state, was friendly with the local Native Americans. Michigan became a state in 1837. At any rate my dad told me that my Uncle Doc’s father or grandfather smoked the pipe with the Native Americans who lived along the Raison River. Sometimes Mr. Godfroy would wake up in his house to find six or eight Native Americans asleep on the floor in front of the big fireplace. They frequented the warm house, especially in winter. His house was always open for the Indians.

Monroe is the birthplace of General Custer, and there is a large beautiful statue of the general on his steed. The statue is directly across from the Catholic church on the corner of Elm and Main Streets, next to the river. Well, the reason for mentioning Mr. Godfroy and the Indians is that one night, the chief had a dream about Mr. Godfroy riding into the Indian campgrounds on a great white stallion. The chief interpreted the dream, believing it was a sign that he should give the property along the east side of the Raison River from Dundee to Monroe to Mr. Godfroy. That would be about thirty miles of river frontage valuable then but a fortune in 2010. My dad says I could go to the Monroe abstracts and verify the claim. I never took the time, but you can only claim what you can defend I always say.

Just a note about the relationship of my dad, Bernard L. Maurer, to Dr. Bernard Godfroy. My dad’s maternal grandmother was a sister to Doc Bernard Godfroy’s mother. I think that made them second cousins. So now, here is how I came to be born in Grayling and raised in Roscommon.

In 1935, my dad went to visit his cousin Bernard Godfroy for deer season at the Roscommon farm. He never returned to live in Nashville again. Godfroy wanted to be a doctor, but he had to finish high school first. So he made a deal with my dad to milk the cows and take care of the farm while he finished high school at night. He then went to Olivet College and got his medical degree from St. Louis University in the mid-1940s. He was a dermatologist. My dad met my mother, Pauline Elizabeth Cherven, at church in Roscommon, and they were married in 1939.

Here now is a letter from my dad, Bernard Maurer, soon after his marriage to my mother, Pauline Cherven, in 1939, to Bernard Godfroy, who was in med school at St. Louis University. This letter really lays out what a dirt farmer was doing on the farm as the country is coming out of the Great Depression.

November 9, 1939

Dear Bernard,

Winter is here, for the ground is covered with snow and looks as if it would stay, it came yesterday, plenty, wild and woolly.

Been busy every day, thought that my work would be all caught up by this time. Am after the wood, just seemed as though I couldn’t get to it before. Have just one load of ashes to put on the potato ground, then that is all done. About three loads left so I’ll put that on the corn field. The wheat looks good, have but two loads to finish covering the whole field on the hill. The quack grass should be sick for spring. Dragged it four times and disked it once, of course each time I went over it twice. Annabell had a heifer calf the other day and it was a nice one, about time, luck was coming our way, don’t you think?

The pullets are coming right along and the old hens are taking their own sweet time. Most I get from them is 15, am putting the lights out at 2:30, going to put them out at 2:00 next week. Wish they would get going so I could get some money for us.

It is giving just about enough for feed, cost an average $17.00 every 10 to 12 days. But in ten days I expect them to get over the 100 mark if they keep on the way they have. The pullets sure are laying big eggs, you wouldn’t know they were pullet eggs, no small at all so far, mix them up with the eggs from the old hens and you can hardly tell the difference.

I am going to try cooking up the scraps from the table along with a little mash and give it to them about four o’clock, what do you think about it? If it works it would pay to buy some cull potatoes at Gaylord for 20 to 25 cents to cook up.

Am feeding them 100 lbs. of whole corn a night. By this I mean a 100 lbs. lasts as long as a batch of mash so they are getting with the ground corn 250 lbs. Most of the corn goes to the pullets.

Pauline is still cleaning house and getting things the way she wants them. You won’t know the old shack when you come home. I tell her not to work so hard but it does no good, she is going from the time she gets up until 8:00 or 9:00 o’clock at night.

About the wedding I’ll send you what was in the paper and that will tell you better than I can. Everybody gave us a good time. All the presents I’ll leave that up to Pauline to write and tell you.

Oh yes the shamrock is blossoming. The rose is growing ail the old leaves died but is starting up again. Was real green until I brought it in the house but guess it’ll make the grade. Here is one of Pauline’s flowers she wore at the wedding. Not much else to say for this time. Save the piece about the wedding for Pauline wants to keep it.

Will sign off.

As ever,

Bernard

I remember my mother crying in the old farm kitchen in 1948. My dad had just told her he’d been charged by the State of Michigan for shooting deer out of season, something Doc Godfroy and Uncle Mose did a lot of. He said he had to either pay $5,000 in fines or go to jail for six months. My dad said, “I don’t have $5,000, so I guess it’s jail.”

My mother was pleading, “Who’s going to feed the chickens and milk the cows?”

Just then, Doc Godfroy walked in. He said, “Don’t worry, Bernard, we’ll get you a good Jewish attorney.”

My dad said, “Where are we going to find a Jewish attorney up here in Crawford County, Northern Michigan?”

Doc said, “Well, you have a cousin who is a monsignor and lives in Mt. Clemens near Detroit. He must know a rabbi and the rabbi would surely know a Jewish attorney.”

The call was made to the cousin in Mt. Clemens, and the rest is history. My dad did not serve time nor pay the $5,000. Dad’s attorney countersued the State of Michigan for crop damages, suing for the same $5,000, saying that “if the deer belong to the state, then it was the state’s responsibility to keep their deer out of Mr. Maurer’s crops.” The trial took three years, ending essentially in a draw. My dad and Doc Godfroy were ultimately fined six cents. I was in the courtroom when the judge pronounced “guilty” and “The fine is six cents.”

Uncle Doc said, “We are not going to pay it.”

I then said, “I can pay it. I’ve got six cents in my pocket left over from my school milk allowance.”

My uncle slapped my hand with the nickel and penny, saying, “I said we’re not paying it.” The change flew across the floor. Somebody must have paid, maybe the attorney, because no one went to jail. I was five years old.

In preparation for the final days of the trial, the conservation department, under the direction of Officer Clarence Roberts and Mr. Wright of the Crawford County field office, staged a twenty-man raid on the Godfroy farm, where we lived. My mother told me later that the “bad” conservation officers searched every inch of the farmhouse, including under the bed where Tony and I were sleeping, looking for canned venison. All the canned venison had already been buried in wooden wine barrels under the apple trees in the orchard. The officers did collect as evidence many horns nailed to the rafters in the new tractor barn.

Here now is a portion of the write-up in the Bay City paper, first laying out the pending case against my dad for shooting deer and then the article on the six-cent judgment.

Two Pending Cases

The Bay City paper

October 1947

The pending cases involve the alleged killing of a vast number of fish in the Kalamazoo river by the spot dumping therein, a deadly poison in the form of industrial waste (filed weeks ago at Albion but not yet tried) and last week’s filing of a $5,000 damage suit in the Crawford county immediately followed the sentencing of Bernard Maurer, a farmer, in justice court, on a jury finding of guilty on two counts of illegal possession of venison. The suit is directed at Maurer and at Dr. Bernard M. Godfroy of Traverse City, owner of the farm where conservation officers, during the recent deer season, searched a barn and said they found portions of the remains of 55 animals both does and bucks. The penalty imposed of Maurer for the purported game law violation itself was 60 days in jail plus $19.85.

Scalps Put in Evidence

Specifically involved in the trial were scalps and other remnants of 49 animals which officers said they found tacked up on inside walls of a barn at the Godfroy-Maurer place. They were exhibited in court.

The defense contended all the deer were killed from May 20 to Sept. 30, a period covered by a permit, which required Dr. Godfroy and Maurer to turn the slaughtered deer over to proper authorities within the meaning of the permit provision. At one point Attorney Nicholas V. Olds for the state told the court the purpose of certain testimony was to show a studied intent on the part of these defendants not to comply with the provisions of the permits issued in 1947 and subsequent years. Crux of the defense case as presented by Attorney Fred Van Fleteren was that the deer were doing tremendous damage at the Godfroy-Maurer place, that Dr. Godfroy had to fight through two months of delay and red tape to get a permit, that the deer were “turned over” even though not immediately and that wording of the permit did not specify immediate notification or any obligation whatever to deliver the slaughtered deer to Conservation Officer Clarence Roberts. Over objections of the state, the defense was permitted to enter as evidence copies of deer killing permits for years after 1947, showing a change in terminology that put more definite obligation on permittees.

Used for Fertilizer

Meat value of the animals was the basis for damages claimed. The state sought to impress the court with the point that deer meat is edible at all times of year and that, had terms of the permit been complied with, the meat could have been put to good use. The defense clung to the point that most of the deer were killed in early June, that they were not in good condition and that the meat had spoiled in the time it would have taken officers to pick it up. Maurer testified deer were plowed under for fertilizer. He was then confronted with testimony he had given at the criminal trial in which he was acquitted of illegal possession of deer after Dr. Godfroy took full responsibility for the killings. He and Maurer denied any of the deer being utilized as food, and both insisted throughout long questioning that the bulk of the deer involved had been killed in June. The state displayed numerous scalps from its exhibit, and expert witnesses said that deer with antlers and hair like these were not June condition deer.

Admitted slaughter

Supporting his contentions of “studied intent” not to comply, Olds presented testimony that Dr. Godfroy and Maurer had gone to conservation headquarters in June 1947, after several nights in which many deer were killed, and that Godfroy there told a conservation official not to bother about the deer at his place because “I have killed them all off.” What happened under a permit issued in 1949 also went into the trial record. The plaintiff presented a series of handwritten demands for damages from the conservation department, each stating that a certain deer which had been killed under the permit would be held until settlement had been made of $100 damages, and in one case $200. Each such notice, some signed by Maurer and by Dr. Godfroy, specified that no physical resistance would be offered an officer removing the deer, but that if the deer was removed it was done under protest. The defense introduced a witness, Elroy Milliken, Crawford County farmer, who also has killed deer under permit. He testified he did not believe deer killed by him left in the field overnight would be fit for human use next day.

State Wins 6-cent damages

in Crawford Deer-Kill trial

by Jim McKenna

Grayling—A six cent judgment was awarded to the conservation against Dr. Bernard M. Godfroy of Traverse City in the deer-killing civil trial which ended Friday. Judge John C. Shaffer excluded the codefendant, Bernard Maurer. It is the first case in which the state has ever sued for recovery of damages on game animals. Two full days of testimony had been taken in the department’s suit against Dr. Godfroy and Maurer, tenant of Godfroy’s Crawford county farm where, in the spring of 1947, Dr. Godfroy admittedly made a mass killing of deer which he contended were ruining the crops.

Tony Maurer with ten-point mount in 1999.

The Laurence Maurer family in 1946, Bernard Maurer, center fifth from right, and Pauline Maurer holding Terry Maurer, front far left.

Bernard Maurer, Dr. Bernard Godfroy and Mac Godfroy: 1942

Mary Ann with her parents and grandparents: 1942

Me with Saxophone