Kendall Stanley: Changes in the neighborhood

I was checking out the progress of our street project and the home addition across the way the other evening when fellow News-Review columnist Jerry Donnelly strolled up with his wife as they were checking on the old neighborhood. 

My how things have changed!

Only two other homes in our block have had the same owners over the 39 years we’ve been here. Assuredly we are now the old timers.

If you want to go back and find past owners one step might be to find an old Polk City Directory for Petoskey.

Jerry did yeoman’s work coming up with several stories for the News-Review on the businesses that flourished in Petoskey’s past using the Polk directory to trace the ownership of businesses.

The directories were a godsend when I edited two picture books for the News-Review after people brought in their pictures of businesses long gone. You could find the business and its street address with the owner listed.

That was true throughout the city, right out to the city limits.

Streets were listed with the business or homeowner as you went down the block.

If I recall right, the directories listed the people living in the homes, something that in this day and age you’d never find because of privacy issues.

The directories are a gold mine of information and you can find many years’ worth at the Petoskey District Library.

They are especially useful for newcomers who probably don’t know their house was the Hankey house or the Behan house or Ned Fenlon’s house. Gotta keep up with the history of Petoskey!

Unless it rains

Just as our street work is being completed, the final coat of asphalt was supposed to be laid down on Tuesday – unless it was raining. And of course it was. A lot.

So Wednesday it was for paving. The last item on the street — getting the wired utilities underground. That’s a twofer — aesthetically it is a much nicer look and being underground storms can’t take the wiring down. The city has a goal of all utilities underground and little by little they will get there.

The delay in paving shouldn’t come as a surprise as this is the time of year when rain is more prevalent as the seasons change. It beats having to contend with snow however.

Poor Putin

Russian president Vladimir Putin doesn’t strike you as a man who admits to wanting to change his mind. Once on a path to violently overthrow the government of Ukraine and reclaim it as Russian territory, it must have come as a shock to him that the Ukrainians had other ideas about rejoining Russia.

Despite the shelling of residential areas and other non-military sites, the Ukrainians stepped up their offensive against Russian troops, reclaiming thousands of square miles of territory from the invaders.

Russian casualties were so high that Putin instituted a callup of reservists across the country to meet his needs at the front.

Woe to Vlad. His reservists were less than thrilled with the idea of going off to war on a mission they don’t agree with in a country they don’t want to fight against.

Thus, just as Russian troops did with the Ukrainian advance, the reservists ran for the border.

At one point earlier this weekS there was a 10-mile-long line of cars trying to get into Georgia from Russia. Similar scenes were reported at the borders with Finland, Mongolia and Kazakhstan.

For some not headed for the borders, protests popped up in many cities and hundreds have been arrested.

Putin was expected to declare Friday that four provinces of Ukraine had voted positively to join Russia – even though that is against international and Ukrainian law. No one, except Putin, believes the people of those provinces freely voted to rejoin Russia.

Putin has long claimed the breakup of the Soviet Union “was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century,” and has long wanted to rebuild it.

Which all goes to show you that one man’s fever dream can have real life consequences – ones that can back you into a corner, carrying your country with it.

For the Russian soldiers and conscripts running to the border – keep letting Putin know you’re done with his personal and petty war.

— Kendall P. Stanley is retired editor of the News-Review. He can be contacted at kendallstanley@charter.net. The opinions expressed in this column are those of the writer and not necessarily of the Petoskey News-Review or its employees.