Last July 4th, Ned Fenlon led a parade. It went down Mitchell
Street, right past his house draped with red-white-and-blue, and
on to Pennsylvania Park. As grand marshal, he rode in a 1941 Buick
convertible ahead of the floats and the bands and the cheerleaders
and, at the very end, the Petoskey High School Steel Drum Band,
which stayed on to perform at the waterfront until it was too
dark for face painting any more and just dark enough for the fireworks
to begin.
It was the first time the Michigan town of Petoskey had asked
Ned Fenlon to lead the Independence Day parade, and he had to
wait 99 years for the invitation. He considered the parade a warm-up
for the open house on August 10 in celebration of his approaching
100th birthday, an event that drew 400 friends, admirers and political
chums and featured a drum chant by a group of Odawa Native Americans,
the release of 100 doves, and a Yooper procession (Yooper:
noun, a resident of Michigan's UP, or Upper Peninsula).All
told, it was quite a summer for the Honorable Edward H. Fenlon,
retired judge of Michigan's 33rd Circuit Court and one of Notre
Dame's oldest alumni. For that matter, it was quite a century.
A Yooper himself, Fenlon was born in Saint Ignace and grew up
in nearby Hessel, where his father and uncle operated a grocery
store. He received a bachelor of law degree from Notre Dame in
1927 and went on to read law in Saint Ignace at the Prentiss Brown
law firm, in which he later became a partner. While attending
Notre Dame, he lived over a garage belonging to a Mishawaka family
and earned his keep as one of two family chauffeurs. The job provided
him with the distinctive gauntlets that automobile drivers wore
in those days, and when he flamboyantly stripped them from his
arms at dances, girls would take notice.
Despite pulling a 79 in his politics course at Notre Dame, Fenlon
made a run for the Michigan legislature in 1933 and won, making
him one of only two Democrats in the 100-member House of Representatives.
He endeared himself to a lot of Yoopers by sponsoring the legislation
that led to the construction of the Mackinac Bridge, although
it took nearly two decades before the bridge opened and cars could
finally cross the Straits without a 30-minute ferry ride.
After leaving the legislature in 1939, he served three terms
as prosecuting attorney of Mackinac County, then devoted his energies
to expanding the Saint Ignace law firm of Brown, Fenlon, Murray,
Lund and Babcock, opening offices in Detroit and Washington. When
a young attorney named G. Mennen "Soapy" Williams applied to join
the firm, Fenlon turned him down -- he didn't think it was a good
idea to have too many Democrats on the firm's letterhead. Williams
was not one to hold a grudge: In 1951, Governor Williams appointed
Fenlon to the Circuit Court bench, where he presided until 1974.
Music and boats have been the chief passions of Fenlon's life,
not counting his wife Jane, whom he married in 1939 and who died
in 2001. The couple had one son, two granddaughters and six great-grandchildren.
Fenlon has been a banjo player since childhood, when his grandmother
started funneling him $10 out of her $30-a-month Civil War pension
so he could take lessons. His son Michael, a physician in Long
Beach, California, remembers the jazz sessions in the Fenlon home
-- his father on banjo, his mother playing piano, and two musical
friends adding trumpet and saxophone. "It would be snowing outside
and we'd have all this music in the living room," he recalls,
still warmed by the memory.
The banjo continues to be part of the retired judge's life. He
sits in occasionally with a group called Bait Shop Boys, based
in Cedarville across the Straits, and he recently ripped off a
spirited rendition of "Dueling Banjos" with his friend and fellow
banjo player, Don Oedekerk.
Boats, too, were always part of his life. As a young man he had
a job of daily running the Chicago papers out to the Grand Hotel
on Mackinac Island by speedboat. Later he served as commodore
of the Mackinac Island Yacht Club. Son Michael remembers one stormy
night when his father spotted a cruiser from Mackinac Island heading
for the Saint Ignace dock on a dangerous trajectory. Judge Fenlon
signaled the boat to stand into the wind, hopped in his speedboat
and raced out to board the cruiser and bring it in. "All that,"
says Michael, "after a full day on the bench."
The centenarian comes by his longevity honestly. Although his
father died when Ned was only 7, the culprit was tuberculosis.
His grandfather lived to 98; his sister is going strong at 97.
The August birthday celebration in Petoskey was a few weeks
premature. Fenlon wouldn't cross the century mark until October
7. By then he would be far away from the chill of a northern Michigan
fall on a visit with his son and daughter-in-law in Long Beach,
where he would be the toast of still another birthday party.
* * *
Walt Collins, editor emeritus of this magazine, teaches in
the American studies department at Notre Dame.
(October 2003)
