June 21, 2000

Con Foster Museum mystery has 'Happy' ending

Newspaper clipping provides identity of diorama creator

By Garret Leiva
Herald editor
       Talk about your "Happy" endings.
      For years, visitors to the Con Foster Museum have gladly paid two bits to marvel at the mechanical workings of the museum's miniature lumber camp diorama. While the 9-foot long diorama painstakingly recreated daily life in a logging camp, one thing remained a mystery - its creator.
      "It is one of the most frequently asked questions, 'Who made this? It is so ingenious,'" noted Ann Hoopfer, director of the Traverse City museum. "All these years we simply had to say we didn't know."
      Earlier this month, however, the museum mystery was solved after nearly two decades. An Otsego, Mich. couple brought in a weathered newspaper clipping from the Kalamazoo Gazette about Dwight "Happy" Hewitt; the man who created the lumber camp with a pocket knife, bass wood and his imagination some 60 years ago. Hewitt had constructed the diorama in the late thirties and traveled with carnivals where he charged customers 25 cents to see his creation run.
      Tracing the diorama's local history, Hoopfer noted that Doc Aeschilman, who ran the city-owned zoo and museum, bought the unit in 1981 from an antique store in Leelanau county. The bill of sale for the diorama was $1,500. It is unknown if the quarter machine was part of the purchase price.
      Since that time, the diorama- with its system of wooden pulleys and leather sewing machine belts - has entertained thousands of museum visitors while taking in $100 a week in quarters during the busy summer season.
      The miniature lumber camp still runs on its original gear reduction cream separator motor, which animates 25 different "shantyboy" jobs. Six-inch lumberjacks chop trees, a camp cook stirs up dinner, horses strain against a sled load of logs and one poor soul makes a perpetual dash to the outhouse. Each step of actual lumbering is carried out by the hand-carved characters from felling trees to transporting logs to mills for sawing into cut lumber.
      While the workings of the minute lumber camp are fascinating, they pale in comparison to the life of their creator.
      "I've met a lot of people in my lifetime, but (Happy) was probably the nearest to a genius," said John Holcom, who brought the newspaper clipping to the Con Foster Museum after a historian in Allegan county visited Traverse City and alerted him about "Happy's" diorama. "I've never met someone who could do so much and do it all so well."
      Holcom and his wife, Margaret, befriended Hewitt in the 1950s and the divorced bachelor frequently stayed with the Otsego couple. Industrious and inquisitive, Hewitt could do what ever he put his mind and hands to, noted Holcom. During his younger days, Hewitt worked as a cook in a logging camp north of Marquette in the Upper Peninsula. He performed a sharp shooter vaudeville act in the late 1920s where he would shoot a cigarette out from his sister's clenched teeth or blast an oyster cracker precariously held between her fingers.
      Hewitt also joined the circus where he played clarinet, and although his band mates begged him to stay, he eventually quit. A few years later, these circus musicians became better known as the Guy Lombardo Band. Hewitt, however, never regretted what some would regard as a missed once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
      "He saw it as a chance to get off the straight road and onto the crooked road where things happen," said Holcom, who noted that "Happy's" other career paths included violin maker, bee keeper, tobacco grower and cigar manufacturer. "He was a happy, carefree type of person and nothing bothered him too much."
      After years of displaying his diorama at county fairs and carnivals in a hand-made traveling trailer, Hewitt sold his whittled wonder for $325 in the early 1960s to a small museum in Baldwin, Mich. A few years after Hewitt's death in 1967, Holcom discovered the museum had closed and diorama's whereabouts were unknown - that is until now.
      While Con Foster staff and visitors are undoubtedly pleased with the outcome of the diorama mystery, what would a man with the moniker "Happy" think about his handiwork being displayed in a museum?
      "He wouldn't be overly proud, he was not that kind of person. He would be satisfied with the knowledge that his creation was doing its job - making people extremely joyful," Holcom said.