Dorothea Logan
By James Donahue
Dorothea Logan was the first and always the best of the friends Doris and I made during our years in South Haven. And she was among the most unusual women we have ever known.
White-haired, slightly bent from early stages of osteoporosis, but still going strong, Dorothea lived in inherited wealth. Her father had been a noted brain surgeon in Chicago who kept a summer home on the bluff just south of South Haven, overlooking Lake Michigan. This is where Dorothea lived. It was a large white house located at the end of a long driveway on a large, fenced-in parcel of land. A smaller house on the property housed a black family that worked for her. I can only remember the first name of Henry who served as a butler while his wife cleaned and kept house. Dorothea lived alone in the big rambling house. I do not remember if she ever married.
My contact with Dorothea was through her news operations. She was a stringer for the television stations and newspapers in both Kalamazoo and Grand Rapids, so followed the police and fire departments to all major events. It was an odd sight to see her arrive at the scene of a severe traffic fatality. While I would be groping my way around the accident scene in the dark, usually somewhere along the deadly Red Arrow Highway that snaked north through Van Buren County, and as red emergency lights flashed all around me, she would drive up in her late model white Ford Thunderbird with its red leather seats, open the trunk and get out a picnic basket full of small box cameras.
Dorothea would busily snap pictures of the scene with all of the cameras in her basket, then drive off into the night, personally delivering film to the television stations and newspaper offices that bought them. Dorothea never did it for the money. She loved the excitement of being where the action was.
After making our police rounds every morning, it was common for Dorothea and me to meet at the Aldo Hotel in downtown South Haven to call our stories in and then share a coffee in the hotel dining area. She ran with the rich and powerful families in the area, so made sure I was quickly introduced to the lawyers, judges, the mayor and anybody else of importance. Dorothea was connected to the people who were making the news.
We still fondly remember the first time Dorothea invited us to her home for dinner. We all dressed for the occasion. The meal, a pork roast boiled with a number of fresh vegetables, was elegantly served by Henry, who dressed in the role of the butler that he was. We had the distinct feeling that we were dining in an old southern mansion with a black slave serving our every need. Dorothea owned a beautiful Saint Bernard dog that was overly friendly and demanded constant attention. I like dogs but that dog seemed far too large to be a house pet and far too large for a small woman like Dorothea to keep. But that was Dorothea. She was a perfect nonconformist and she could afford to be just as eccentric as she wanted to be.
One summer Dorothea hired me to paint that house. I had never painted a house before, but she offered me a thousand dollars and agreed to buy the paint. I always could use the money so took on the job. I had a pickup truck by then, so I bought ladders, paint brushes and all of the equipment I needed and went to work in my spare time. It took me all summer but I discovered I really loved the work. Dorothea was usually always gone so I was alone with my thoughts and my portable radio. She wanted the white house repainted white, so I missed the excitement of seeing the place slowly change colors. But when I was finished, I knew I had done a great job. And while I was painting her house, the word got around that I painted houses. Several other people approached me and asked if I could do theirs when I finished hers. Suddenly I had a house painting business going on the side.
About once a year all of the news staff in the area got invited to a public relations dinner and news conference. It always involved a free cocktail hour followed by a great dinner and then a speech by some high company official. We never had to take notes because we were all provided a press packet with a copy of the speech and other information. It usually always involved a report on company profits and plans for new service improvements for the next year. The point was, we just had to show up, have a good time, and worry about what to write the next day. One year the gathering was planned in Dowagiac, in Cass County. All of the media people from South Haven, including Dorothea and I, traveled with the publisher of the South Haven Tribune.
The drinks were flowing heavily that night and Dorothea apparently had one drink too many. I have often wondered if someone didn’t slip her a “Mickey.” In the midst of the speech we were all shocked when her head flopped over. She went into a stupor face down in an unfinished dish of green sherbet. I wasn’t sitting next to her and could do nothing about what had happened. The people around her pretended they did not see anything. When the meeting was over we were unable to bring her back to full consciousness. We held her up, cleaned her face, helped her stumble to the car and then drove her back to South Haven. She snored all of the way. Her Thunderbird was parked in my yard and Dorothea was in no condition to drive home. I remembered the time we drove my high school friend Ed Ramsey home in this condition and suggested that we do the same thing with Dorothea. The difference was that this involved taking a woman home and putting her to bed and we were a bunch of men. Nobody really wanted to do it. But we couldn’t just leave her as she was. The decision was made to drive her home and put her car in her garage. By the time we got there she was awake enough to go in the house on her own. Out of courtesy no one spoke of it again.
Dorothea traded her Thunderbird in for a new model about every three years. Just before she bought her next car, Doris and I were shopping for a “better” car, and decided to buy a used car from the Ford dealership in South Haven. I hadn’t driven the car more than a few days when it began spewing blue smoke from the exhaust pipe. That was a sure sign that the engine was burning oil mixed with the gasoline. I took the car into a mechanic who discovered that the car’s main bearing was damaged and it was going to cost me nearly the cash value of the car to get it replaced. The dealer had poured STP, a thick oil, into the crankcase to camouflage the trouble. I took the car back to the dealer and demanded a repair, at his expense. He stuck it to me and refused to fix the car, refund my money, or take back the car.
When Dorothea bought her car from the same dealer, she took delivery on the day that she and a friend were leaving for a trip to Florida. They drove the car to the Indiana border before noticing that the oil gauge was indicating a problem. Dorothea took the car into a Ford dealership and had it checked out. They discovered the car had been delivered with only the oil from the manufacturer in the crankcase. It must have been a good engine because it got ran for almost a hundred miles on just the natural grease and possibly a quart of oil from the factory before the problem was discovered.
Dorothea had oil put in the car and finished her trip. But the car burned oil. She went back to the South Haven dealership and could not get the business to make good on their blunder. She wanted the engine replaced or at least an overhaul.
That Ford dealer made a very serious mistake when he mistreated two news reporters in the area he served. We ganged up on the business. We didn’t write stories, just talked about it wherever we went. It took us very little time to get the word around town. Within a few months the dealership was closed. Also Dorothea filed a complaint with the Ford Motor Company. They showed up at her door one day with a brand new Thunderbird to replace the damaged one.
As for me, I took my car across the street to my old friend at the Chrysler-Pontiac dealership. I told him what had happened. He gave me the paid value of the car as a down payment on a new Plymouth Barracuda, then he took the broken car back to the Ford dealer and muscled him into fixing it. As I said earlier, he was a big guy and didn’t let anybody cross him. That little slant-six Plymouth was among the better cars we ever owned.
After all of the times we stood side-by-side shooting pictures of news events occurring around us, I don’t know why I never turned the camera lens on Dorothea. I do not have her picture in my files. Dorothea died at the age of 81.
By James Donahue
Dorothea Logan was the first and always the best of the friends Doris and I made during our years in South Haven. And she was among the most unusual women we have ever known.
White-haired, slightly bent from early stages of osteoporosis, but still going strong, Dorothea lived in inherited wealth. Her father had been a noted brain surgeon in Chicago who kept a summer home on the bluff just south of South Haven, overlooking Lake Michigan. This is where Dorothea lived. It was a large white house located at the end of a long driveway on a large, fenced-in parcel of land. A smaller house on the property housed a black family that worked for her. I can only remember the first name of Henry who served as a butler while his wife cleaned and kept house. Dorothea lived alone in the big rambling house. I do not remember if she ever married.
My contact with Dorothea was through her news operations. She was a stringer for the television stations and newspapers in both Kalamazoo and Grand Rapids, so followed the police and fire departments to all major events. It was an odd sight to see her arrive at the scene of a severe traffic fatality. While I would be groping my way around the accident scene in the dark, usually somewhere along the deadly Red Arrow Highway that snaked north through Van Buren County, and as red emergency lights flashed all around me, she would drive up in her late model white Ford Thunderbird with its red leather seats, open the trunk and get out a picnic basket full of small box cameras.
Dorothea would busily snap pictures of the scene with all of the cameras in her basket, then drive off into the night, personally delivering film to the television stations and newspaper offices that bought them. Dorothea never did it for the money. She loved the excitement of being where the action was.
After making our police rounds every morning, it was common for Dorothea and me to meet at the Aldo Hotel in downtown South Haven to call our stories in and then share a coffee in the hotel dining area. She ran with the rich and powerful families in the area, so made sure I was quickly introduced to the lawyers, judges, the mayor and anybody else of importance. Dorothea was connected to the people who were making the news.
We still fondly remember the first time Dorothea invited us to her home for dinner. We all dressed for the occasion. The meal, a pork roast boiled with a number of fresh vegetables, was elegantly served by Henry, who dressed in the role of the butler that he was. We had the distinct feeling that we were dining in an old southern mansion with a black slave serving our every need. Dorothea owned a beautiful Saint Bernard dog that was overly friendly and demanded constant attention. I like dogs but that dog seemed far too large to be a house pet and far too large for a small woman like Dorothea to keep. But that was Dorothea. She was a perfect nonconformist and she could afford to be just as eccentric as she wanted to be.
One summer Dorothea hired me to paint that house. I had never painted a house before, but she offered me a thousand dollars and agreed to buy the paint. I always could use the money so took on the job. I had a pickup truck by then, so I bought ladders, paint brushes and all of the equipment I needed and went to work in my spare time. It took me all summer but I discovered I really loved the work. Dorothea was usually always gone so I was alone with my thoughts and my portable radio. She wanted the white house repainted white, so I missed the excitement of seeing the place slowly change colors. But when I was finished, I knew I had done a great job. And while I was painting her house, the word got around that I painted houses. Several other people approached me and asked if I could do theirs when I finished hers. Suddenly I had a house painting business going on the side.
About once a year all of the news staff in the area got invited to a public relations dinner and news conference. It always involved a free cocktail hour followed by a great dinner and then a speech by some high company official. We never had to take notes because we were all provided a press packet with a copy of the speech and other information. It usually always involved a report on company profits and plans for new service improvements for the next year. The point was, we just had to show up, have a good time, and worry about what to write the next day. One year the gathering was planned in Dowagiac, in Cass County. All of the media people from South Haven, including Dorothea and I, traveled with the publisher of the South Haven Tribune.
The drinks were flowing heavily that night and Dorothea apparently had one drink too many. I have often wondered if someone didn’t slip her a “Mickey.” In the midst of the speech we were all shocked when her head flopped over. She went into a stupor face down in an unfinished dish of green sherbet. I wasn’t sitting next to her and could do nothing about what had happened. The people around her pretended they did not see anything. When the meeting was over we were unable to bring her back to full consciousness. We held her up, cleaned her face, helped her stumble to the car and then drove her back to South Haven. She snored all of the way. Her Thunderbird was parked in my yard and Dorothea was in no condition to drive home. I remembered the time we drove my high school friend Ed Ramsey home in this condition and suggested that we do the same thing with Dorothea. The difference was that this involved taking a woman home and putting her to bed and we were a bunch of men. Nobody really wanted to do it. But we couldn’t just leave her as she was. The decision was made to drive her home and put her car in her garage. By the time we got there she was awake enough to go in the house on her own. Out of courtesy no one spoke of it again.
Dorothea traded her Thunderbird in for a new model about every three years. Just before she bought her next car, Doris and I were shopping for a “better” car, and decided to buy a used car from the Ford dealership in South Haven. I hadn’t driven the car more than a few days when it began spewing blue smoke from the exhaust pipe. That was a sure sign that the engine was burning oil mixed with the gasoline. I took the car into a mechanic who discovered that the car’s main bearing was damaged and it was going to cost me nearly the cash value of the car to get it replaced. The dealer had poured STP, a thick oil, into the crankcase to camouflage the trouble. I took the car back to the dealer and demanded a repair, at his expense. He stuck it to me and refused to fix the car, refund my money, or take back the car.
When Dorothea bought her car from the same dealer, she took delivery on the day that she and a friend were leaving for a trip to Florida. They drove the car to the Indiana border before noticing that the oil gauge was indicating a problem. Dorothea took the car into a Ford dealership and had it checked out. They discovered the car had been delivered with only the oil from the manufacturer in the crankcase. It must have been a good engine because it got ran for almost a hundred miles on just the natural grease and possibly a quart of oil from the factory before the problem was discovered.
Dorothea had oil put in the car and finished her trip. But the car burned oil. She went back to the South Haven dealership and could not get the business to make good on their blunder. She wanted the engine replaced or at least an overhaul.
That Ford dealer made a very serious mistake when he mistreated two news reporters in the area he served. We ganged up on the business. We didn’t write stories, just talked about it wherever we went. It took us very little time to get the word around town. Within a few months the dealership was closed. Also Dorothea filed a complaint with the Ford Motor Company. They showed up at her door one day with a brand new Thunderbird to replace the damaged one.
As for me, I took my car across the street to my old friend at the Chrysler-Pontiac dealership. I told him what had happened. He gave me the paid value of the car as a down payment on a new Plymouth Barracuda, then he took the broken car back to the Ford dealer and muscled him into fixing it. As I said earlier, he was a big guy and didn’t let anybody cross him. That little slant-six Plymouth was among the better cars we ever owned.
After all of the times we stood side-by-side shooting pictures of news events occurring around us, I don’t know why I never turned the camera lens on Dorothea. I do not have her picture in my files. Dorothea died at the age of 81.