You're at Clinch Park, right on the edge of West Grand Traverse Bay. That building behind you showing movies — the Bijou by the Bay — has one of the best origin stories in town, and it belongs to a man named Con Foster.
Con Foster got his start in show business at the age of thirteen, working as an usher at a theater in Boston. He came to Traverse City to run a movie house, became the guy who ran movie houses, and then, somewhere along the way, became the mayor. A theater usher who grew up to run the town. That already sounds made up, and we're just getting started.
Because here's what Foster did with his spare time. In the middle of the Depression, he decided Traverse City needed a museum. Not a fancy one. Just a place to keep the things that were disappearing — the Native American artifacts, the pioneer tools, the pieces of a region that was already forgetting itself. So he got in a car and drove. More than fifteen thousand miles, all over the Midwest, buying it up piece by piece,
town by town. In his theater office he kept a map of the Midwest with a pin stuck in every place he'd bought something, and by the end there were so many pins you couldn't read the names of the states underneath.
They put the collection in a building the WPA threw up right here in the mid-thirties. Over the next seventy years it grew to more than ten thousand objects — about thirty-five hundred o
