30 years ago

MARQUETTE — Marquette police are tapping a time-honored method to ward off warm-weather problems along North Third Street before they get started. For the first time In about 20 years, city police are walking an assigned beat each day. With the onset of unseasonably warm weather last week, the Village Business District along North Third Street was targeted because of past difficulties with youth, said Police Chief Sal Sarvello. “We’re looking for cooperation from everyone,” Sarvello said. “We’re not trying to lower the boom on anybody (but) when the weather gets warm, North Third Street gets busy. We want peaceful coexistence.” Of the city’s 33-member force, only two officers will be assigned each week to rotate the North Third Street patrol. The beat shift runs from 5 to 11 p.m., the period when most problems In the past have occurred.

60 years ago

NEWBERRY — Two civilians parachutists reached here safely Sunday after a 3,000-foot leap into the cold northern Michigan woods demonstrating feasibility of parachute rescue. The pair, Ronald Fortier, 31 and David Collis, 22, Muskegon members of the Lake Michigan Sky Divers Club, made the leap Saturday eight miles northeast of McMillian. “It was very cold,” said Fortier, father of six children, making a shiver in recollecting the 17 below zero. The Sky Divers Club sponsored the jump to show that parachutists can do a rescue job in bad weather while also being sure of their own survival. Fortier, a school electrician, and Collis, salesman and father of one cild, leaped from a plane piloted by Paul Davids of Grand Rapids. They were to have come down in the vicinity of Tahquamenon Falls but snow and poor visibility forced a further flight. Before they jumped, their survival equipment, including sleeping bags and snowshoes, was tossed from the plane at 500 feet. After their night in the woods, Fortier and Collis trudged five miles on their snowshoes to a filling station and from there came to town by station wagon.