Jere Hutchins - DUR Maverick and Pedro Enthusiast

I did a casual eBay search for Jere Hutchins after reading an article about his self-published book from 1939, A Personal Story, which bemoaned that he never knew Detroit except how it reflected by the company he kept at the Yondotega Club and decided that I was on the right track.

Detroit News, September 19, 1938

A further column by Malcolm Bingay commemorating his life shortly after his death cemented my purchase of the $11 book. Whereby he recalls Jere's press conferences in which he mocked the reporters by stating:

"Good morning, gentleman. I have some good news for you today. My arson squad burned two orphan asylums last night. And this morning - I have just learned - my dynamiters were successful in blowing up three excursion boats, just packed in the rolls with happy little children."

Detroit Free Press, February 26, 1943

He finished the story by saying that he also robbed a blind man of his cup full of begging money. All in jest, of course, to highlight the ongoing fight that claimed private ownership of the DUR was a disservice to the common man and only public ownership would make everything fair. Fair indeed would be the dissolution of the prized system when the city took over the enterprise and Hutchins and his cohorts got a golden parachute in the form of a $20,000,000 buyout.

Though retired and in his early 90s in the last year of his life, he still made it to his office in Detroit or the Yondotega Club most days to play his beloved Pedro. He died in February of 1943.

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P. O. Surveying Detroit Needs

Detroit News , October 8, 1929 This is a long article about the Postal Service but our concern is with Arch Coleman, the first Assistant Postmaster-General, who recalled in his visit back to the town that he grew up in, that he was born in the house which was the first Yondotega Club at 302/518 East Jefferson. An article by the Free Press seemed to suggest that he was born nearby.

Yondotega Club Beginnings Told

Detroit Times , March 12, 1939 I will start this blog at the same point of introduction that I had to the Yondotega Club: this short snippet in the Detroit Times from March 12, 1939 that I dug up while researching the Sign of the Mermaid bookstore which opened in 1925 and was owned by Doris McMillan Pittman (later Hoover), daughter of William McMillan and granddaughter of Senator James McMillan. Not only had she reclaimed the home that she grew up in from obscurity but she revitalized and made it a profitable venture. Unfortunately for Doris, her eleven years of ownership came with widowhood, the accidental shooting death of her teenage son, a second marriage to her store manager Clayton Morse, Jr. that failed and ultimately her own untimely death in 1936. The Yondotega Club would have been afterthought to that very research had it not been for the fact that her father founded the club in that very house and her first husband, grandfather, uncle and business partner - Phelps Newberry...

The Ex-Libris Bookplates of James Frederic Joy and His Son Henry Bourne Joy

These are the ex-libris platesreally things found in volume (IV.) of Turner's History of England from 1830 featuring at least one Yondotega Club member: Henry Bourne Joy, who was the first president of the Lincoln Highway - which built roads from New York to San Francisco - and later became president of the Packard Motor Company. His father James Frederic Joy was a railroad magnate, friend of Abraham Lincoln and congressman from Michigan. To boot, there is a main road in Detroit and the western suburbs named after him (Joy Rd.). Besides the plates, the most interesting thing in the book is the marginalia, which I've yet to determine exactly whose it is. It would be great if it were one of the Joys but nearly a hundred years has passed between the latter's death so the likelihood is probably 50/50. Maybe not so ironically, I found this book at an estate sale just off of Joy Road (8634 Hazleton) in Dearborn Heights five years ago or so.

The Yondotega Club

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