TOM TABOR: Why Did He Say 'Bay City is the Center of the Known Universe'?

January 19, 2014
By: Dave Rogers

"Bay City is the Center of the Known Universe," the late Tom Tabor was fond of saying.

Mr. Tabor, who died last Tuesday in Florida at age 89, had good reason to make that expansive comment about his home town.

His "known universe" no doubt covered much of east central Michigan from which his beloved downtown Bay City drew customers. It included that area of about 18 counties covered by The Bay City Times in its heyday, stretching from Bay City east into the Thumb, west to Mt. Pleasant and north to the Straits of Mackinac.

After World War II, when Tom Tabor returned from the service to become a leader in the retail and civic community, Bay City was the hub of activity for the region.

No other place in the region had a federal court,

a regional Masonic headquarters,

a Wenonah Hotel conference center rivaling major cities,

a City Hall that rivaled Toronto's (even looked like it),

a world famous crane works (Industrial Brownhoist),

a world class shipyard (Defoe, where 170 warships were launched for World War II's ocean battles),

Michigan's first high school football stadium and marching band and,

Mr. Tabor's pride -- the Bay City Players, the state's oldest continuously operating community theatre.

This was the town that sent its innovative wood products like the barrel used by Anna Edson Taylor to conquer Niagara Falls and the walking dredges that opened Florida and California to agriculture. Bay City inventions impacted the world, like the giant cranes that helped build the Panama Canal and the Mackinac Bridge, and the welding machines that stamped out refrigerator bodies and car doors.

Bay City, with its history of foundries and skilled work force, was where Dow Chemical Company brought the Picard brothers to test its balloon gondolas at James Clements Airport, process its Dowmetal magnesium for military uses, and where the semiconductor industry got its purified graphite from Ultra Carbon and Met Bay.

The dome of Central High, rising above the town like a Persian minaret hailing the people to knowledge, presided over graduations from 1922 on, (including Tom Tabor in 1942) sending students to elite colleges and into careers as entrepreneurs like rent-a-car pioneer Warren Avis,

...the military like Gen. Bruce MacDonald, nuclear submarine engineer Bart Nixon, and Lt. Col. Amy Perry Stone,

...the music world like European opera singer Elaine Baker,

...educators like Dr. Janet Jopke, superintendent of the Troy Schools,

...pro football tackles Jim Kanicki of the Cleveland Browns and Dennis Wirgowski of the New England Patriots,

...sports like NCAA tennis champion Mark Jaffe,

...world-renowned linguist Sarah Gudschinsky,

...the literary world's Gershwin biographer Ed Jablonski,

...corporate executives like Curt Cormier of Standard Oil, and Oldsmobile sales executive Jerome Jopke,

...charitable foundation leadership like James F. Sams,

...politics like Members of Congress Elford Cederberg and Jim Barcia and John Calvin, cabinet secretary of South Dakota,

...architecture like historic preservation expert John T. Meyer,

...medicine like Dr. A. Frederick Youn, University of Michigan, and Dr. Thomas Kelly, Pennsylvania drug control expert,

...the law like Indiana Supreme Court Justice Myra Selby, and Judge Noel Anketell-Kramer of Washington, D.C.,

...civic leader and philanthropist, longtime Saginaw Valley State University board member Charles B. Curtiss,

...and the press like Bill Thomas, editor of The Los Angeles Times and investigative reporter/author Howard Kohn.

It goes unsaid that listing all the glittering successes who started in Bay City would fill volumes far beyond these pages.

This was the known universe of Tom Tabor and many others who knew Bay City and its progeny. It was all that needed to be known, it was the whirling focus of local life.

Tom Tabor himself left a towering legacy of hometown spirit, an unrelenting optimism that every hometown needs to succeed.

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