Looking Back: Antrim County embezzlement scandal unfolds
CHARLEVOIX — One hundred years ago, the April 24, 1924 Charlevoix Sentinel reported that a major scandal had erupted to our south in Antrim County.
The paper named no names before requested grand jury investigative proceedings began, but those acquainted with the issue would have recognized the head of the county “home” facility as the party involved.
“SHADY DEALS IN ANTRIM COUNTY. Our neighboring county on the south, Antrim, is in the grip of a scandal that may assume more than ordinary proportions for so small a territory if an investigation now underway is fully, carefully, and systematically carried out.
“One of the institutions, the county home, a place of which the county for years has been justly proud, looms prominently in the proposed investigation, or more correctly the manager of late, of that institution, as the charge is made that a vast amount of revenue to the county that should be credited to the home has been dissipated and that too by methods irregular and by a process reprehensible, some say illegal, for which someone will be required to make complete restitution, else prosecution will follow and the statement is made that regardless as to whether or not complete restitution is made that a criminal action will be taken against the guilty." Whew! Editor Ira Adams, son-in-law of Sentinel founder, editor and excellent wordsmith Willard A. Smith, never met a paragraph he couldn’t fill up with one complete sentence.
Apparently the guilty party, assumedly an embezzler, tried to coerce another party into helping to cover up his scheme. But that person turned whistleblower and notified “the board of supervisors with a request for immediate action.”
Adams summed it all up with another epic sentence. “In case this is carried out, the people of Antrim county will be treated to a series of disclosures little anticipated until within the past few days, a series of upheavals and disruptions such as the county has not heretofore experienced, all of which will have a tendency to clarify existing and past unsavory conditions making for a betterment throughout the county.”
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In the same issue, Adams reported that the classy Beach Hotel, located at the far end of West Dixon Avenue where the LaCroft condominium now stands, would open around June 15. It had been taken over by Doris Baker van Dolcke, daughter of the hotel’s original owner Martha Baker, who had died two years previous. Martha Baker was a born hotelier, a brilliant and daring businesswoman “whose ability and wonderful efficiency and adaptability as a hotel woman established the Beach Hotel as one of the finest resort hotels in the north, and one of the best in the country, and the new manager expects to follow in her mother’s footsteps, carrying out the policies which have made for the phenomenal success which has attended the business since the beginning.”
It didn’t happen. Already the seeds of destruction had been planted. Doris van Dolcke was a flighty party girl married to a man with shady connections. Gradually the two of them milked the hotel until by the mid-30s they could not afford fire insurance, badly needed maintenance went ignored, fires did do their damage, and the business went into receivership by the end of the decade. The van Dolckes left Charlevoix under a cloud of incompetence. The Beach never fully regained the incredible nationwide reputation it had once enjoyed before it burned during demolition in 1967.
That same week, the Charlevoix Courier of April 23, 1924 reported several building projects about to commence. On Bridge Street near the bridge, several yards south of today’s bridgetender’s control room, a tiny shoeshine shop would soon be torn down to make way for professional diver Sam Rose’s new venture, a 16’ x 34’ wood barbershop on the street level, while the lower would be concrete and tiled public baths of tubs and shower stalls. Imagine once being able to take a shower right on Bridge Street. Occupancy expected by June 1. A very popular Sam Rose would go on to serve as Charlevoix’s mayor. The building would last until the construction of Charlevoix’s current Memorial Bridge in 1947.
And the 250-room Inn Hotel at the far end of East Dixon Avenue announced two projects. Severely plagued by lack of parking spaces once the automobile gained popularity, a new $25,000, 56’ x 156’ garage of steel frame construction was announced that would hold 30 cars, a drop in the bucket vis-à-vis the hotel’s actual need. It stood on Cherry Street just off East Dixon, the site now turned into townhouses. Plus, on Depot Beach below the hotel, in place of The Inn’s old boat dock, a new “bathing pavilion” would go up for the hotel’s clientele, in its heyday the place to see and be seen amongst the summer crowd.
This article originally appeared on The Petoskey News-Review: Looking Back: Antrim County embezzlement scandal unfolds
