Sport: Bangor Tigers

In the once buzzing sawmill town of Gladstone, on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, lumberjacks last week played at their favorite sport, birling. It was the first national birling championship in three years.

Birling is far harder than rolling off a log. It is the art of staying on while others tumble. In birling, two sure-footed log-rollers, standing on a peeled log floating in the water, try to spin it so as to roll each other off. With eyes glued to the other fellow’s calked shoes, they “cuff it” (roll the log), “snub it” (stop dead and reverse the rolling). First they roll a log 18 inches in diameter, then a 17-incher, finally a 16-incher (“the toothpick”). Two falls out of three wins a match.

Once, 40 years ago, two log cuffers named Tom Oliver and Jim Stewart birled for two days (six hours the first day, five the next) before one got a ducking. Nowadays, 15 minutes is a long time to keep dry. A cagey, cat-quick birler is called a Bangor Tiger, because of the legendary feats of Bangor-driving Maine loggers over 100 years ago.

Last week, after the field had birled down to the finalists, the survivors were a pair of Bangor Tigers, if ever there were: 28-year-old Joe Connor of Cloquet, Minn., an upstart college boy (University of Minnesota), who at the 1937 championship made the old loggers look like sissies; and 28-year-old Jimmy Herron, boom man for a Longview (Wash.) lumber mill, who was crowned “King of the White Water” at the last championship meet in 1938. Champion Herron, who once doubled for Cinemactor El Brendel in the log-driving scenes in God’s Country and the Woman, had a tough time defending his crown. He won the first fall in 9 min., 2 sec., but lost the second in 3:10. On the “toothpick,” with the count tied, the hardy old Tiger had to use every trick he had learned in ten years of river logging before his collegiate adversary hit the water with the seat of his plaid pants. It had taken 11 min., 8 sec., but Logger Herron saved the day for the lumberjacks.

To oldtimers’ annoyance, girls have become expert birlers too. The girl whom the lumberjills were out to wet last week was husky Mary Jean Malott, 21, of Cornell, Wis., defending Queen of the White Water. Queen Mary Jean, a lumberjack’s daughter, has been an exhibition birler since she was six, barnstorms with carnivals and sportsmen’s shows during vacations from Anderson Seminary, where she is studying to be a preacher.

Huff & cuff as they might last week, the girl-birlers failed to get rid of Miss Malott. In the final, hoofing like a jitterbug, she took petite Bette Berkley, an 18-year-old stenographer from the sawmill town of Longview, Wash., for two straight falls (12:58, 11:27).

In Gladstone’s taverns that night, loggers and their ladies drank toasts to King Jimmy and Queen Mary Jean before lapsing into the classic lumberjack’s nightcap: all 42 verses of the ballad, The Jam on Garry’s Rock.