Driving to wonderful Grand Marais on the Uppper Peninsula of Michigan recently on Highway M-77, our family went through a forlorn looking place named Germfask.

How does a place get named Germfask? The question has been weighing heavily on my mind. Thanks to this new-fangled InterWeb thingmabob, I now have an answer, from ePodunk.

The community was named for the last initials of the eight founders: Grant, Edge, Robinson, Mead, French, Ackley, Shepard and Knaggs

I guess if the founders had been named Smith, Harper, Ingle, Thomas, Horton, O'Connor, Lewis and Elbert, the namers woulda had to come up with some other brilliant approach, huh?

Adding to my Knagging unease about Germfask, Germfask.com turns out to be a stealth address for a local Mormon church's site, despite a highly misleading teaser at the top of the page which says "Welcome To Germfask, Michigan, Heart Of Michigan's Upper Peninsula." More like spleen of the U.P., if you ask me. And - let's be clear - I LIKE the U.P., and the great locals I met, a.k.a. Yoopers.

But, that blatantly phony tourism come-on of your church newsletter Web site doesn't say much for your ethics or piety, Germfask Branch of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. A-hem.

Since you Germfask Mormons were pretending to have a tourism-related site, y'all could've at least provided a link to what may be the one truly redeeming thing very near to Germfask; Seney National Wildlife Refuge.

UPDATE: At one of my favorite blogs, Dustbury, the indomitable Charles G. Hill (a.k.a. Chaz) not only links to my Germfask post, but in his typically great fashion, provides some serious value-added bloggage. It turns out, as you'll see in this post of his, that Germfask was home to a very special camp of agnostic WW II conscientious objectors.

I'm sure they subsequently purchased many Art Tatum, Lennie Tristano and Lenny Bruce LPs, perhaps got married, had kids, and went workin' fo de Man, with perhaps a small percentage later getting right with themselves and their nation, and enlisting for Korea or 'Nam. Still, I must say I don't hold C.O.s from WW2 in especially high regard. I mean, of ALL wars, sheesh. Yet, love 'em or hate 'em, they ARE part of our nation's history, especially the godless Bolshies in Germfask, arguably the political progenitors of today's Doom And Gloom/Hide In A Cave Left, obsessed with appeasing vicious and deadly Islamicists.

Posted by Matt Rosenberg at July 30, 2005 06:30 PM

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