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JAY BRANDOW   Tells the Tale of Our Ancestors in His New Biography, 'The Captain's Chair'

By Robert E. Martin

     As a familiar face at WNEM-TV5, where he has worked as a reporter for over 20 years, Jay Brandow never expected that he would one day be able to add the vocation of 'author' to his impressive resume, which also includes sometimes adding guitar styling to The Robert Lee Band.  

But for the 50-year old Brandow, the recent publishing of his first non-fiction work, entitled  'The Captain's Chair' has in many ways become a life-changing experience, forging a crossroads between personal odyssey and external discovery that weaves together to tell the tale of Captain Walter Neal, sole survivor of the Great Lakes shipping steamer Myron, which sunk to the bottom of Lake Superior near Whitefish Point in November of 1919. 
     

Relayed through the misty memories of Neal's sole surviving niece, Alexandra 'Sis' Johnston, the story begins when Brandow discovers hidden treasures in a dilapidated old Victorian home he purchased in Bay City for renovation back in 1990, and evolves into a combination detective story/memoir that looks back on our ancestors and life in Bay City at the turn of the century. In the process the work reveals a closer look at who we are today through the prism of values and work from those ancestors that help to define us today.
      

The idea for Brandow's debut work began through an accidental & fateful discover. "I had bought this old historic Victorian home in Bay City and wanted to find a place from the basement to the attic where I could run phone cable without tearing all the walls apart," he recollects.

"So I took my crowbar and popped a section out to see what I had to work with only to discover these photos taken at the turn of the century with a man standing on the deck of a freighter, a little girl in front, and three guys standing around."
  

"I made a cup of tea and just sat on the floor looking at the picture asking myself, 'Who are these people'? And as I started stripping the house down to what it used to be, I couldn't help asking myself about the people in the photo. Were they happy? What did they smell like?"
 

Jay held onto the photo for almost a year before he was able to identify anybody. "For some reason there was something about it that was 'familiar'. I know that sounds weird, but one day when I went to vote a friend of mine was manning the table and said she knew somebody that used to live in the house. I was told not to waste my time because she was getting older, so I called the number and the woman on the phone was very short with me. I got the feeling that she wasn't very interested in talking. Honestly, I believe that's what made me decide that I had to go after this story, because she wasn't helping,"
 

What transpired over the next several years between Jay and 'Sis' is similar to the beginning of the film Titanic - an aged woman, opening up to recollections presented by witnessing an object, that spray into a canvas of vivid memory.
    

Though Jay bought his house in 1990, it wasn't until 1992 that Sis started to respond to his overtures. "I asked her if she had a photo of the house, so she sent me an old postcard with a short note stating 'Thought you would like this.' I thought I'd been given a treasure," continues Jay, "and thought I'd write a few paragraphs under the photo, frame it, and hang it the foyer."
  

After building up trust over several meetings, one day Sis started to come to life after Jay brought her a piece of polished scrap from the home he was renovating. "I gave it to her through a crack in the door, she thanked me, and then closed the door. Over the next three years I would bring her different stuff that I found in the house and we would talk."
 

Thanks to Sis's trusted friend & caretaker, Anna Mae, Jay was able to finally gain entry into her living quarters.

"It was like being allowed into the Queen's Chambers," he laughs. "And when I walked into that room I saw all these photos of her father, Captain Alexander Johnston, and her grandfather, Captain William Neal, and this entire legacy started to open.  Her grandfather, uncle, and father were all sea captains and I wanted to pursue her tale"
    

"I still didn't have an angle or idea," notes Jay, "but I thought I'd learn a bit more. She started talking about her Uncle Walter and then asked if I'd heard of Myron. I thought it was another Uncle and had absolutely no idea what the Myron was, but after looking in some Great Lakes books I found some information about how this vessel went down and lost 16 crew members, except for the Captain, which turned out to be the relative Sis kept referencing. He was the sole survivor."
     

Having finally found an 'angle' to his story, Jay soon discovered a panoply of characters evolving through his conversations with Sis. While her father was very stoic, Uncle Walter was a rule-bender, which made the tale even more fascinating, given the starch-laden morays of American Victorian society at the time.
    

"I grew to like Sis and I think she liked me as well,' notes Jay. "Once she figured out I wasn't trying to sell her something, she couldn't understand why anybody would want to know about her family.  And then one day she asked if I'd seen her china doll in the house. Filled with curiosity, I went up into the attic and pulled some old floorboards up that weren't nailed down and found this golden horseshoe wrapped in velvet. When I took it to her, she said, 'That's from my 4th Grade School play.  And again, her memories started to spin."
 

In reading The Captain's Chair one is drawn into the contrast between life in Bay City at the time compared to today, along with the conflicting notions of morality & propriety that came along with the era.  There exist passages about 'Hell's Half Mile' - the term used to describe the bars & brothels along Water Street, and extreme class divisions between rich & poor.
     

"Most respectable people stayed away from the 'river'," comments Jay. "Sis told me that if people had to do business along the river, fine; but it wasn't right to be seen by the water.  But the amazing thing is that Bay City was the third largest city in Michigan at the time. It was the only town between Detroit & Mackinac that had a dry dock big enough for handling repairs on these large vessels."
      

"I also found out about the myths that were created," continues Jay. "For example, Henry Sage who owned a lot of property in Bay City did not build the Sage library because he wanted to. He was in trouble and it was his way of appeasing the town folk. In fact, once when I was doing research at the library I asked one of the librarians about Sage. I said that I'd heard he wasn't a very nice guy and they all said,  'We don't talk about that.'  The popular myth is to portray him as a caring nurturing godfather, but he really wasn't."
       

According to Jay, by the early 1920's a lot of the mills were closing up in Bay City. Canada had slapped tariffs on lumber, which killed everything.  "Once the lumber started dying out that's when a lot of people started to leave," notes Jay.
"But what really stood out among all these characters was the strength of Walter.  He was a principled man who took his vocation seriously. He was an innovator. In these Victorian times everybody worried about what everybody else thought, but Walter was the kind of guy that would say, 'Hey, relax.'
  

"Walter was only home maybe 12 weeks out of the year, whereas Sis's father Alex was a 'Captain's Captain' and did a lot of oversight. When there was a strike he had to stay and keep an eye on things. He was sailing out of Cleveland a lot, so there were a couple years he didn't make it home because he had to make sure the striking seamen weren't causing any trouble."
       

"Walter, on the other hand, had a sea chest about the size to fit 3 cases of Canadian liquor. Michigan was a dry state in 1917, a couple years before the rest of the country, but Walter was never stopped by customs when he went through the Canadian ports.  Sis' father was a fuddy-duddy, but Walter was fascinating. I've often wished he was here today, not just to hear his cussing, but to experience the sense of humor that he had by not subscribing to the Victorian policies of the day."

The Captain's Chair is presently available online at jaybrandow.com and also available through the TV-5 website.  It can be found at the Bay County Historical Museum and will soon be available at inland museums and libraries in eight states and provinces that surround the Great Lakes. It will also be available shortly at Barnes & Noble. The cost of the book is $21.95 for a soft cover copy and $31.95 for hardcover, but the book is also $1.00 cheaper if you order it online or phone 1-888-795-4274.
   

"What I feel is significant about this work is that a lot of the books available on the topic of maritime life at that period in history all deal with shipwrecks," adds Jay. "Nothing is available that really touches on the people of the time and the way they led their lives, so I feel this fills an important niche."
  

Several professors are presently perusing the book and entertaining the idea of using it in Michigan history classes.
  

Does Jay envision writing another book in the future, given his busy schedule at work and college?
     

"Yes, I think so," he responds, "though I'm not sure what it will be about. I want to get some wings on this project and am learning so much, not just about writing but about editing. Now I'm learning about the promotional part. Frankly, the hardest part is discerning who will enjoy the book and "It's also ironic because once the book was done I thought all these weird circumstances would go away," concludes Jay. "But that isn't the case. Now I'm communicating with this woman in Canada on my family genealogy. My family lived in Canada and emigrated from Albany to central New York. I tracked them and the boat they traveled across the Atlantic on a couple of weeks ago."

"Then I received this unusual call from the woman helping me and she said, 'You're not going to believe what I discovered.'  We had lunch and it turns out that she found a Brandow that was an author. He never started to write a book, but came across information on a Colonial & Revolutionary period General named Bourgogne that was a British officer. The copyright on this book was 1901 and it's out of print and difficult to find. So I read the preface and to my amazement it mirrors my own. Here's this distant relative I never know about talking about how he didn't expect to write a book and didn't expect to find this stuff."

"Needless to say, that little coincidence blew me away!"

The Captain's Chair is a fascinating and flowing discourse that covers a period of history that radiates back into our own lives in many multifarious ways.

But more important, it shows how an excursion into the past can lead to new directions for the future, and a deeper understanding of whom we are by mapping the lexicon of where we've been.
 

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