Treading on thin ice: Iron Mike and an ice-out contest helps White Lake beckon spring

WHITE LAKE - Every year about this time, he's out there out on the ice, wearing a high-visibility vest, a wide smile and a hat, giving passersby a friendly little wave.

The White Lake locals are used to Iron Mike being on the lake in the late winter and early spring. But newcomers and those just driving through often spot Iron Mike and get a little worried, especially when the days warm up and the ice thins.

"Every single year we have people spot him and come in to the Village Hall and tell us that there is someone standing out there. They're afraid that he's going to fall through the ice," said Carol Blawat, the clerk/treasurer of the village of White Lake, located about 20 miles east of Antigo in Langlade County. "We tell them, yeah, we want him out there and we want him to fall through the ice. It sounds cruel."

Then Blawat, or whoever is talking to the concerned visitor, will explain that Iron Mike is made of metal and wood. He is the focal point of the town's ice-out contest, in which people guess when Iron Mike will go under.

The White Lakers then will hit up the visitor for $5 to make their own guesses. A winner can get up to $500, depending on how many people guess, and the entire enterprise is designed to raise money for the firework show the little town puts on during its Fourth of July celebration.

RELATED: A winter lover's lament: No snow or cold, now what do I do?

White Lake's ice-out contest is one of dozens of similar grassroots affairs held each winter across Wisconsin, or really anywhere people get antsy for spring after a long, dark, cold season. Sometimes people put mannequins or other human forms on the ice. Sometimes people put cars or trucks out there. Some places even have one trusted, detail-oriented person with time on his hands out by a lake with binoculars, watching for the moment when all the ice is gone. (This happened in White Bear Lake, Minnesota, for years.)

The New London Fish and Game Club organizes an ice-out system that's somewhat similar to White Lake's Iron Mike. The club puts a couple mannequins named Pete and Joe in a 14-foot aluminum boat on the ice of the Wolf River, and when the boat floats downstream, it trips a clock. This year Pete and Joe were freed at 1:54 p.m. on Feb. 9.

Meanwhile, Iron Mike is standing tall (as of this writing, on the afternoon of Feb. 14).

Iron Mike tradition in White Lake dates back 50 years

White Lakers started putting Iron Mike out on the ice 50 or 60 years ago, Blawat said. The original idea is credited to resident Norman "Mike" Berg, who designed, built and named the first Iron Mike, and, according to the White Lake Area Historical Society, the ice-out contest "spanned decades."

Berg was a White Lake native who had a deep impact on the community at the time, according to the historical group: "After serving as a Marine in WWII and the Korean conflict, he became a strong civic leader for local vets, the school, the village, the county and his church."

Blawat doesn't know exactly when or why the original Iron Mike tradition ended. But she has vague recollections of when it was reborn back in 2015.

Village officials were in a meeting talking about the Fourth of July and how expensive fireworks are. White Lake is proud of its fireworks display, Blawat said. During a brainstorming session, someone remembered the original Iron Mike fundraiser and suggested it be started again.

A local craftsman built a new Iron Mike, and Blawat was recruited to oversee the project. It all is very low tech and quite low key, Blawat said. But a list of rules was created. Because no one really wanted to watch over Iron Mike during all hours of the day, the group came up with a clever way to determine when he sinks into the drink.

"We get some cheap little clocks, the kind you get at Wal-Mart, and we put them in Mike," Blawat said. "They run on batteries, and they stop when they get wet."

As soon as is reasonably possible, some workers from the village's public works department fish Iron Mike off the bottom of White Lake and check the clocks, and thus find the official winning time.

The system has worked well for eight years. "We've had no brawls, no fights. Everybody has a good time with it," Blawat said.

More: Smith: They may be dummies but New London mannequins are in step with modern ice science

Close Iron Mike observers will notice he looks a little different this year than he has in the past. That's because last year, Mike's head, which is carved from wood, came off when he got dunked. There was a search for it, Blawat said, because no one wanted the head to be found by kids or anyone who might be freaked out. They found the head on the shore.

To keep things fair, the village board will put an end to the guessing about two weeks before they reckon the ice will go out. For the record, the earliest Iron Mike fell through the ice in the modern version of the contest was March 25, 2021. The latest was May 3, 2018. Last year, he fell on April 15.

Keith Uhlig is a regional features reporter for USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin based in Wausau. Contact him at 715-845-0651 or kuhlig@gannett.com. Follow him at @UhligK on X, formerly Twitter, and Instagram or on Facebook.

This article originally appeared on Green Bay Press-Gazette: White Lake, Wisconsin, beckons spring with Iron Mike ice-out contest