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www.mybaycity.com June 30, 2010
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One hundred year old Mabel Veenstra reminisces about childhood when noted bandit worked at her farm for room and board.

Centenarian Recalls Notorious Bandit Steve Madaj
Boarding at Family Farm

Mabel Veenstra, Retired Central High Counselor, Is In Her Second Century

June 30, 2010       1 Comments
By: Dave Rogers

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Mabel Veenstra will be 101 years old on Aug. 12, but she remembers the 1920s like it was yesterday.

One of her clearest memories is of the summer when Steve Madaj, later a notorious bandit who went to prison for murder, boarding at the farm of her father and mother, Charles and Hulda (Kriewall) Guinup, at Cass and Tuscola roads.

Her grandfather, also named Charles Guinup, had operated the toll gate on the corner of Cass and Tuscola, and there was another toll gate at Munger Corners, she mused. Her grandfather had come from New York for the chance to drive a team of horses for a lumbering company on the Saginaw River. he hauled lumber to repair a plank road from Bay City to Munger Corners and settled there.

Her father was supervisor of Portsmouth Township and ran a dairy farm and was a cattle trader. Her mother belonged to the "Portsmouth Jolly Sewing Circle" and a literary club and the couple played euchre often with friends, like the Meiselbachs, Heidens and Deans.

She recalls the saloon in the Tuscola Road Hotel, owned by Chris Pederson, at the corner where a murder occurred. Pederson was challenged by a big brute named Westbinder and the hotel owner grabbed his gun. Despite a warning shot, Westbinder kept coming and was killed by the second shot. Charles Guinup testified and Pederson was freed by a jury on a verdict of self defense.

The Guinup Farm circa 1920
Before the adoption of Prohibition in 1919, temperance gangs were on the rampage. One group attacked the saloon at the Tuscola Road Hotel, "smashing it up," she recalled. The saloon later burned down.

During Prohibition, a neighbor, a neighbor, Leo Adamski, was making booze and although he had hidden it in his ice house, it was found and he was arrested and sentenced to 90 days in the Detroit House of Correction (DeHoCo). Mre. Adamaski and their seven children were taken in by relatives until he was released.

Those days following World War I were not good times economically and many "bums" traveled around, catching on as farm hands for room and board.

One of the men who showed up at the Guinup farm was a charming young fellow named Steve Madaj, a hard-working and popular young man. He was a good baseball player and a smart dancer who was somewhat of a ladies' man.

However, Madaj later showed a nasty side: he was a criminal, first stealing cars, then stopping cars like an English highwayman, then holding up a gas station and then a bank.

Steve would sit in a window well at the farm reading the paper about the car thefts and laughing "those cops can't catch anybody." She recalled "Steve was the one taking the 'joy rides.'"


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"When mother tried to clean his room," she recalled in a 2007 memoir, " she found that he had a very heavy suitcase that she could not move. Evenings Steve would come down with a gun and shoot cans off fence posts. That suitcase was, apparently, loaded with guns."

Mabel recalled: "Pa said Steve was the best worker he had ever had. Mother said he was the most thoughtful person they had ever had living with them."

One of young Madaj's first violent crimes, a holdup of lumber baron Franklin Parker on Center Avenue in 1916 that turned into a fatal shooting, and got him sent to prison for 41 years.

Mabel wrote that Parker "had a lady friend down the block and was on his way to visit her when he was shot and killed." She posed the question: "Is so, was he paid to take care of the relationship?" adding another previously unconsidered element to the crime.

The entire story of the Parker murder and Madaj's subsequent criminal career is featured in a book, "Ghosts, Crimes and Urban Legends of Bay City, Michigan."

Mrs. Veenstra, a retired teacher and school administrator, was born on the farm in 1910. now she lives at Sheffield Bay on North Union Street near Euclid Avenue and remains active and interested in the world around her today, as well as sharply recalling events of decades ago.

Another hired man was Old Riley. "He got paid at supper time every Saturday night. As soon as he got his pay he started for Bublitz's saloon. Apparently, he would drink much of the $5 he had earned but with the remains he would play the punch board. Prizes on the board were boxes of candy.

"Near midnight Old Riley would come home singing and sounding very happy. The next morning down would come Riley with boxes of candy for us kids. Years later we heard that he was living at the 'poor farm,' a home for old people who worked the farm for their keep."

Mabel attended Immanuel Lutheran School and Eastern Junior High to the eighth grade and then graduated from Central High in 1926 and went to the Central Michigan Normal School in Mt. Pleasant. She taught at the Grigg School near Munger, then in Oxford, Michigan, for one year, and later at Grant, Michigan.

She was married to Les Taylor who taught at Handy Middle School. The couple had two sons, Gordon and Jack. Les died in 1963 and she became 11th grade counselor at Central High. There she met Math teacher John Veenstra who she married 12 years later.

On the wall of her apartment she displays proclamations from Mayor Charles Brunner and Senator Carl Levin, former President Jimmy Carter, State Rep. Jeff Mayes, Senator Debbie Stabenow and Congressman Dale F. Kildee received nearly a year ago on her 100th birthday.

"I rode in a horse and buggy and I have flown on a 747," she wrote. "I wrote with the pencil and I now send my notes on the computer. I have experienced months of illness and years of good health. I have experienced a minute of dying but months upon months of living. This has been a century of change; I have been granted the chance to witness so many of them."

The centennial event was the occasion for a large celebration that involved fellow residents and some of her many friends from the community like Jerry Jopke, retired Oldsmobile sales executive and former neighbor from Sixth Street.

She has a picture of one of Mr. Jopke's tractors on a table beside her chair; he is a collector of the farm vehicles, having caught the fever many years ago.

Mrs. Veenstra recalls that while Madaj lived on her family's farm, he was stealing cars in Bay City. One couple whose car had been stolen was visiting the Guinups when their car, presumably driven by Madaj, came up the road. The wife, recognizing the car, ran out and tried to stop the car and was nearly run down as the vehicle roared away.

Despite peccadilloes like car theft, Madaj had endeared himself to the family by little courtesies such as making sure the pail was always full for priming the water pump.

In addition to the Franklin Parker murder in 1916, Madaj was accused of killing Munger farmer Henry Nellett in 1924. When that question was raised recently at the nursing home, two old Polish ladies exclaimed "he didn't do it," and an elderly man claimed he had been at the scene and saw someone else shoot the farmer.

Whether Madaj had committed the murder or not will never be known, but there is little question he was the perpetrator of the robbery of the Bay County Savings Bank on Kosciuszko Avenue in Bay City on June 18, 1924.

Madaj, who had escaped from Marquette Prison, in 1923 and was at large for about a year and a half, fled with nearly $3,400 from the bank.


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Recently, a niece told MyBayCity.com that Madaj had revealed to her that after his release from prison in 1962, he returned to the Guinup farm where he had buried the money beneath a large oak tree.

In the intervening years, the tree was gone, and Madaj was unable to find the buried loot. Even if he had found the money, chances that it would not have rotted away were slim, according to knowledgeable sources.

Upon his release, Madaj married a woman, Violet Eichhorn, who ran a beauty shop on Columbus at Tuscola, and who had waited for him during his prison stay. She had been a teenager when the sheriff allowed several thousand people to file through the jail and have a look at the criminal behind bars. Love struck, the young girl carried the torch for the criminal for more than four decades, visiting and writing to him until his release.

The pair are buried next to each other in a secret grave in Elm Lawn Cemetery, one of the most poignant stops on the Ghostly Legends trolley tour from the Bay City Antique Center on the second and fourth Fridays of each month.

Mrs. Veenstra retains a lively curiosity about the criminal who lived in her farmhouse for a short time. "Why was he was discharged from the Army in France and sent home in 1918?" she asked.

That is a question that awaits further research. It is pertinent since after his discharge Madaj began to consort with a group of young unemployed fellows at a pool hall on Broadway, leading to formation of his gang and their string of crimes.

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Bst665 Says:       On August 03, 2019 at 04:24 PM
I met Mr. Madaj when he and his wife lived in college town around 1973. We knew nothing of his past. He lived across the street from my friends wifes family where we would spend time hanging out. He was always sitting on the porch, never doing anything or talking to anyone.

On the 4th of July we asked him if he would like to join us for a beer, he said he would love one but he couldn't make the walk across the street due to his health, so we brought him one over and sat with him a bit. He proceeded to tell us his history, much to our amazement.
He told us about the bank robbery and keeping a room at a farm out by munger and told us about a suitcase being buried on the site, full of cash with 2 Thompson machine guns wrapped in oilcloth. He said it was buried in a different location than this story states. He said he tried to find it but couldn't locate it and encouraged us to find the farm and look for the suitcase, as " we seemed to be the type of kids who would have fun with that stuff".
I have been researching the man and his story for 50 years, having forgotten his name, and this story is the most accurate story to what he told me. He mentioned the farm he was at is gone and now part of a large truck farm consisting of multiple bought out family farms.
Agree? or Disagree?


Dave Rogers

Dave Rogers is a former editorial writer for the Bay City Times and a widely read,
respected journalist/writer in and around Bay City.
(Contact Dave Via Email at carraroe@aol.com)

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