Achievement Award

Short Term, Long Influence

2006 Lake Superior Magazine Achievement Award honors
Ray Clevenger and creation of Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore

by Bob Berg

Some 450,000 people visit Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore each year to marvel at the stunning, multicolored cliffs on Lake Superior’s Michigan shoreline.

Fewer than a handful of those visitors know the name of Raymond Clevenger, a one-term Upper Peninsula congressman who became one key to the establishment of Pictured Rocks as the country’s first national lakeshore. The legislation creating the lakeshore was signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson on October 15, 1966.

As the park celebrates its 40th year, this seems an appropriate time to acknowledge Ray’s contribution in pushing for creation of the park.

Courtesy Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore

Photo by Dean Pennala Raymond Clevenger, who played a key role in creation of Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore, and his wife, Kay, visited the park in October 2005. Pictured Rocks covers about 40 miles along Lake Superior in Michigan. The area became a park 40 years ago.

Today the 80-year-old remains modest about his role all those decades ago, but we are honored to name him the 2006 Lake Superior Magazine Achievement Award recipient.

The Achievement Award, established in 1994, recognizes an organization or an individual who has improved the well-being of Lake Superior and its residents.

“The benefits reaped by hundreds of thousands who visit Pictured Rocks certainly earn Raymond Clevenger this award,” says Lake Superior Magazine Editor Konnie LeMay.

“He was the key player in the House of Representatives,” says Jim Northup, superintendent at Pictured Rocks. Jim and other park staff members spent time with Ray and his wife, Kay, in October 2005 when the couple visited the park.

“You could tell that he was very, very proud,” Jim says of Ray seeing what he had helped to protect.

Ray Clevenger, who turned 80 on June 6, is the first to remind a reporter phoning his home in Ann Arbor that he didn’t get the ball rolling to create the park.

The late Philip Hart, who served as a Democratic senator for Michigan from 1959 to 1976, introduced the first bill to preserve the Pictured Rocks area in 1961. For the next five years, discussion of Pictured Rocks would be linked to efforts to save Sleeping Bear Dunes in the Grand Traverse area of lower Michigan.

Although Ray got involved in the project in its later stages, he is credited with playing a critical role in pushing the legislation to a speedier resolution.

Ray grew up in Chicago and decided to go into law after his service in World War II. He had served with the Army Medical Corps in Europe when he signed up after turning 18 on D-Day. In the final days of the war, his unit was sent into a concentration camp in Austria, where he witnessed the extent of the atrocities first hand.

“That camp was the principal reason I wanted to find my way into politics and government,” he says.

After law school in Ann Arbor, Ray practiced in Sault Ste. Marie and first visited Pictured Rocks in 1953 with law partner Paul Adams.

Photo by Paul L. Hayden The Pictured Rocks name is derived from nature’s stone sculpting and multicolored stains of mineral oxides leeching onto the park’s sandstone cliffs. Visitors to the national lakeshore also will find vast stretches of beach, sand dunes and waterfalls.

Ray saw the lakeshore idea not just as a way to preserve the land for future generations but as a way to improve the local economy through expanded tourism and development.

In 1964, he ran for Congress on the issue of creating Pictured Rocks park; his opponent was against it.

After the election, national Democratic Party leaders brought freshmen members of Congress, including Ray, to Washington, D.C., to meet White House officials and legislative aides with the Cabinet.

When each representative was asked his priority for his first term, Ray said that his was creation of Pictured Rocks park. And in June 1965, he introduced a House companion bill to Hart’s Senate bill. President Johnson would assure the freshman congressman: “We’ll give you every help that we can.”

The park proposal was not without controversy. Among concerns were how to compensate Cleveland-Cliffs Iron Company, the largest lakeshore landholder, and where to draw the boundary between the protected shoreline zone, off limits to logging, and the inland buffer zone, where sustained-yield logging would be allowed. Some saw the deal made as favoring the large corporation at the expense of independent loggers.

By 1966, the problem for the bill’s passage was time: it still wasn’t on the calendar and Congress was near recess. Ray, holding to the president’s promise of aid, worked with party leaders to get the bill on the “consent agenda” - possible when there’s no real opposition - to speed the process.

In touring the park last year, Ray marveled at the waterfalls and took a boat cruise from Munising. The sights, he told his wife, “were far more beautiful than I had imagined.

“I said, ‘I never realized how great I did,’” Ray reveals, but quickly and self-consciously adds, “It was a very self-centered statement.”

Then Ray again acknowledges the work of Senator Hart and key Interior Department people years before him.

“All I did was sponsor the legislation and held the president to his quote: ‘We’ll give you every help that we can.’”

There’s the cynical view, Ray says, that “the president was helping me so I could get re-elected, but certainly that didn’t work.”

Yes, the irony is that what may have gotten him elected - his support of the lakeshore - may have cost him re-election once he accomplished that goal. Ray lost his bid in 1966 and believes that the lakeshore’s creation swayed votes - in the wrong direction.

These days, while Ray deflects most credit, others praise his efforts.

“His role was critical in getting the national lakeshore park committed to passage by the Congress,” says Tom Baldini, former U.S. chairman of the International Joint Commission and now district director for U.S. Representative Bart Stupak, whose congressional district includes the U.P.

“It was truly a major piece of legislation,” Tom says.

As an engine for tourism, there can be little doubt today about the local financial worth of Pictured Rocks. Jim Northup says that the 450,000 visitors generate $19 million a year in economic benefit, while the lakeshore supports 461 local jobs.

Ray counts formation of the lakeshore high among his successes in the 89th Congress. He remains proud, too, of his votes for landmark legislation that created Medicare; Model Cities Act (urban aid program); Elementary and Secondary Education Act (first significant federal aid for schools, created Headstart) and the anti-discrimination Voting Rights Act.

As to the future, visitors may one day become more aware of Raymond Clevenger’s name while at Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore.

Tom Baldini - who worked for Ray’s 1964 election campaign - says Representative Stupak plans to introduce a bill soon to name the lakeshore’s visitor center after Ray.

Sculpted by Nature, Ever Changing

Marked by weather-sculpted and mineral-painted artworks on imposing sandstone cliffs, Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore in Michigan has a most appropriate name.

The area has been called Pictured Rocks since the first English-speaking people arrived in the area.

The name is derived from nature’s stone sculpting and multicolored stains of mineral oxides leeching onto the sandstone cliffs along the western 15 miles of the 73,000-acre park. Visitors to this park also find vast stretches of beach and sand dunes, waterfalls, inland lakes and abundant wildlife.

One of the earliest explorers to write about Pictured Rocks was Pierre Esprit Radisson, whose reminiscence of his early 1660s trip to Lake Superior with Sieur des Groseilliers was translated into 17th century English for the Hudson’s Bay Company. Radisson describes a bank of rock “like a great Portall, by reason of the beating of the waves. The lower part of that oppening is as bigg as a tower.”

It’s a description of Grand Portal, an enormous arched sea cave that he claimed was big enough to accommodate a 500-ton sailboat.

Even though it collapsed in 1900, the spot where the Grand Portal once towered still carries the name. Smaller caves and archways on the coastline still invite boaters to explore the underside of the national lakeshore.

More dramatic evidence of the ever-changing nature of Pictured Rocks - even at popular landmarks - came in April this year when one of the two sandstone turrets atop Miners Castle crumbled and fell into Lake Superior. Yet such changes are not unusual. Other major falls in the past dozen years included two portions of Grand Portal Point, below the viewing platform at Miners Falls and beneath the lip of Munising Falls.

Pictured Rocks offers four-season recreation, including hiking, camping, hunting, nature study and winter activities. There are cruise boat tours and airplane tours. At its widest point, the lakeshore is only about 5 miles wide, but it is much narrower in many places.

The Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore/Hiawatha National Forest Interagency Visitor Center in Munising is open year-round from 9 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. (with extended hours in the summer), but is closed Sundays and holidays from October to mid-May. Grand Sable Visitor Center is open late May through late September and Munising Falls Interpretive Center is open late May through early September. The Visitor Information Station at Miners Castle also is open during summer months.

Pictured Rocks is one of the four units of the national park system on Lake Superior - along with Apostle Islands National Lakeshore, Grand Portage National Monument and Isle Royale National Park - being supported by the National Parks of Lake Superior Foundation. That foundation is dedicated to fund raising for these four parks. See www.nationalparksoflakesuperior.org or contact 906-228-7914 or info@nplsf.org or write to P.O. Box 632, Houghton, MI 49931.

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