Press: Maggie of the North Woods

Michigan’s north country is a no woman’s land of jack pine and lost lakes, of trout streams and trap lines, where the black flies swarm in the summertime, and in winter the white rabbits leap up snowdrifts ten feet high. This hunter’s and angler’s realm has a voice as virile as its vistas: the North Woods Call, a weekly chronicle of all outdoors.

PINKEYE HITS CATTLE AT RANCH VISITED BY ELK, headlined the Call last week above a front-page story. Inside were items of the sort to be read by campfire light: “Game Boss Gene Gazlay reports an osprey nest on the Molasses River.” “Fritz Weber, of Lewiston, reports seeing a bear on Valley Road.” “Lake trout are starting to bite at Higgins Lake.”

From Police to Pines. The author of these lines, and the voice of Michigan’s northern wilderness, is trim (5 ft. 4 in., 116 Ibs.), blue-eyed Marguerite Mary Gahagan, a middle-aged (52), self-styled “Irish old maid” who scarcely knew a brown trout from a black bass when she swapped city life for the backwoods six years ago. Daughter of a harness racer and niece of turf writers, Maggie early decided to invade the male provinces of journalism, eventually became a frontpage byliner for the Detroit News. A woman of strong causes, Maggie led a Guild organizing move at the News, for her pains was stripped of her byline and assigned to the police run. “I guess they thought a convent girl wouldn’t last there very long,” she says. “I stayed on that damned beat twelve years.”

When her mother died in 1953, Maggie found city life suddenly stale. She quitthe News, went 180 miles north of Detroit to a summer’s solitude in an Otsego County cabin five miles from the nearest settlement, Johannesburg (pop. 120). “I put a lot of second-hand furniture in there,” she said, “and decided this would be my life.”

By fall, Maggie’s restless, reportorial eye had settled on a new beat. With a $2,000 stake, she began publishing the North Woods Call—”a paper for all who enjoy the north country”—dropping in on wildlife stations and private resorts, combing the memories of oldtimers for stories, crusading for sound conservation practices. In her column, “Pine Whispers,” she evoked for kindred spirits the mood of the wild wood: “There was the soft patter of rain on the dusty trail, the drip of drop from oak leaf hanging, the moist smell of woods floor, pine needles still sun-warm, blueberry swelling with sweetness, the flick of firefly dancing.”

A Mite for the Creatures. It is man-killing work. Maggie puts in a 14-hour day, runs down ad accounts as well as stories, helps set type in the job shop at Roscommon (pop. 877), where the paper is printed, bundles the papers for mailing. This gives her no time and little appetite for frills: she denies herself a daily paper, has not bought a dress or hat in three years.

The editor’s love of the north woods shines clearly through to the 3,000 readers of the North Woods Call. In the Otsego area sportsmen crowned her with moose antlers as their “Hunters’ King”; hardly a day goes by without bringing in the mail a subscriber’s mite for the forest creatures Maggie feeds through the winter months: “Enclosed is a check for $5—$4 for the subscription and $1 for the little people.” Says Michigan Supreme Court Justice George Edward’s, a faithful Call reader: “You can smell the pine woods in her paper.”

At the end of a long day, Maggie sometimes wryly recalls her days as a Guild crusader. “I feel I should go on strike against myself,” she says. “I’m the worst person I ever worked for.”