Polka, bingo and fish fries are slowly saving VFW post in Michigan's U.P.

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ISHPEMING – They’ve been trying to attract younger members for years, he said, as the polka band got ready to play for the several dozen senior citizens waiting patiently in their seats.

Mike Kjellman, 68 years old, was standing behind the bar at VFW Post 4573. It was late summer 2017. He wore a crisp, brown hat with yellow lettering that said he was the commander here. For years, he refused to join this post out of spite over the way he was refused entry after coming home from Vietnam in the early ‘70s. Now he ran the place. And it was his job to help save it.

VFW Post 4573 was struggling. Its older members were dying off and they weren’t being replaced by younger recruits. It was the same problem facing service clubs throughout the country — the Lions Club, the Rotary Club, the Elks, the Moose — organizations that were once important centers of community life in towns like Ishpeming, but which have seen steep declines thanks to aging membership and disinterest among younger people.

If things couldn’t get turned around, the Ishpeming VFW would join a growing list of dead posts — in the past 10 years, 70 of the state’s 335 VFW posts have closed.

For Kjellman, it was a victory just to be hosting that polka dance on that warm Saturday afternoon. Only four years earlier, this post was on the edge of collapse, padlocked for back taxes that went unpaid, members say, by lazy drunks who’d turned this once-respected place into their personal watering hole and bankrupted it.

A group of longtime members who’d drifted away over the years heard what happened, took over and have worked hard ever since to pay off the post’s debts — one polka dance, one bingo night, one fish fry, at a time. Slowly, things were getting better.

But to truly thrive again, they needed veterans from more recent conflicts like Iraq and Afghanistan to take over for the old-timers. And nobody was sure what would get them to join.

“A lot of people say the young people don’t want to get involved,” said Stu Skauge, 67 years old, a longtime member and former commander. “I don’t buy that. I think you just have to get to them and give‘em a reason to get involved.”

The senior citizens slowly rose to their feet as the band began to play. The woman taking tickets at the door smiled as she began tapping her foot to the beat.

“The nice thing about this is we have it in the afternoon” said auxiliary member Annie Trudell, 76 years old. “Because the seniors don’t want to drive at night, because they don’t see so good.”

Kjellman was furious when the World War II and Korean War veterans turned him away from the post back in 1970. It was especially insulting because so many people in his family had been members.

“I used to stand here and argue with guys and say, ‘You can keep the place,’ and I never came back,” he said. “I don’t know what they had against Vietnam veterans, but I don’t care if they’re over there one or two days -- if they’re getting shot at, they deserve to come here.”

Other local vets who were refused entry formed their own chapter of Vietnam Veterans of America a few miles away. And that left this VFW post with an aging, dwindling membership that eventually ran the place into the ground.

“A lot of World War II guys that were really the backbone of this place were gone and died, or were in a nursing home, so there was a few people here running the place that were alcoholics,” said Skauge. “I was told they were drunk every day by noon, and they weren’t paying their taxes or anything. For two years, they never held a meeting.”

Skauge first joined after being pulled over by a local police sergeant for speeding back in the ‘70s. The cop was the new VFW post commander at the time, and he realized even back then that they had to start adding younger members. The cop saw the army field jacket Skauge was wearing, learned he was a veteran and made him an offer.

“He said, ‘Well, son, I’m gonna give you two choices: you can have the $100 speeding ticket or you can have a $10 application for the VFW,’” Skauge said, laughing.

The Veterans of Foreign Wars was founded in 1899 and offers veterans dozens of services, including assistance accessing government programs and services, helping the widows and orphans of vets, and covering rent, utilities and groceries for struggling veterans and their families.

The Ishpeming Post was founded in 1946. The vets had been meeting in a house, but the cop’s aggressive recruitment efforts quickly increased their ranks, and in 1972 they bought their current building. “We figured we needed more room,” said that local police sergeant, Irv Krellwitz, 82 years old. “We were getting new members. There was just no place to put them for a meeting. If we had dances, we had to have them outside. We laid plywood down out there.”

“They didn’t even have enough money to make the first payment,” Skauge said. “They had what was called a hard luck dance — you have to bring either a fifth of whiskey or a case of beer, that was your ticket to get in. And then they sold it back to you during the night and you’d drink it at the time, and they made enough money to make the first payment.”

But, over time, Skauge and many other vets drifted away after starting families and careers. By 2013, the post was a mess. The Department of Michigan VFW investigated their financial irregularities, shut them down, chained the doors and gave them 90 days to fix things or else the post would be shuttered permanently.

“The payments weren’t being made on anything,” Kjellman said. “Nobody paid utilities and the federal government, that kind of stuff. They were at the bottom of the ocean with the anchor.”

When some of the inactive members found out, they reunited and vowed to rescue their post. “I had laid off coming here for a while because there were some things happening that I didn’t care for,” Krellwitz said. “And when I heard about the problems they had, I came back here, started getting the thing back in shape.”

One of the first things he did was call on Kjellman, whose family ties to this place are marked in the photos of his relatives on the walls at the post: his aunts, uncles, his own mom. Even his wife joined years ago. But for all those years, he stayed away.

Kjellman reluctantly came to the first meeting after the crisis. The commander at the time suggested just getting rid of the building. That convinced him. “I said, ‘I’ll tell you right now — this building will never be sold as long as I can draw breath.’ My mother and my aunts and my uncles and everything were in here. They had 40, 50 years in here. You sit there and look at their pictures. I said, I suppose I gotta go do something. And I stayed here.” He joined and went from trustee to junior vice president to senior vice president to commander in a few years.

The vets conducted an audit and discovered the organization was $40,000 in debt for overdue taxes, plus penalties and interest. Despite pouring money into paying it all off, they still managed to fix the ceiling, rewire the electric, clean out the clutter in the basement, replace the aging roof and buy new fold-out tables and chairs to host events. In three years, they cut the debt in half.

“But you can imagine, we’re here trying to make money and keep the lights on, at the same time you’re trying to pay off this debt,” Skauge said. “It’s really gotten back on its feet. I think there’s a lot of people that are committed. We don’t want to see it fail. There’s too much blood, sweat and tears in this place to let it go down.”

But the problems go beyond any single post’s troubles.

For years, service clubs were the backbone of small-town community life in America. They hosted a town’s parades and festivals and fireworks, raised money for local schools, sponsored Little League teams, built parks, held fundraisers for charities. At their peak in the 1950s and ‘60s, political and business leaders eagerly joined so they could network while providing community service — not to mention drink and party at their usually well-stocked bars. Each club was local, but also was part of a broader national organization that tied them together into a greater cause.

“Back in the day, it used to be a prestige thing, you know; your best businessmen and best community leaders wanted so badly to be a member of a group like the Elks,” said Laura Swartz, 53 years old, the manager of the Gaylord Elks Lodge. “There was practically a waiting list, and all the guys used to wear tuxedos, and everything was very staid and serious. And now, it’s just different.”

In fact, studies show that participation in group activities is down in general, in everything from book clubs, to parent-teacher associations, to churches, to country clubs. In his book, “Bowling Alone,” political scientist Robert Putnam noted a paradox: Between 1980 and 1993 the number of bowlers in the U.S. grew by 10%. Yet, at the same time, participation with others in bowling leagues fell by 40%. The numbers suggest that people have become more solitary, atomized, disconnected from group activities.

Almost every civic organization and service club has seen a dramatic decline in membership in recent years. Since 1990, membership in Rotary International is down 20%. Jaycees, down 64%. Masons, down 76%. Elks, down by half. Shriners, same amount. Optimist Clubs, down by half too.

Last year, the VFW had a little over a million members nationwide, down almost half from its height in 1992. The Ishpeming Post suffered an even worse degree of decline: In 1990 the post had about 400 men, with 175 women in the auxiliary. By 2017, it was down to 140 men, 72 women.

“When the old guys were here from the Second World War, we had a good turnout all the time. They were always willing to do things,” Krellwitz said. “And it just seems that the younger guys coming out of the service now, they don’t have the same expectations, I guess, as the older ones did. There’s so many other things going on today everywhere, and I think that’s part of the problem. And a lot of people just don’t give a damn anymore. That just seems to be the case.”

It’s the same issue at the Gaylord Elks Lodge in the northern Lower Peninsula, where they’ve started a “Sunday Funday” event with food, football and beer, plus euchre tournaments to draw younger people. “It’s definitely more the early 50s to early 60s set,” Swartz said. “We have our sage, old members who are amazing, but we do depend on the younger members to be more active and organize things. That’s absolutely the hardest part.”

Same at the Skandia Lions Club near Marquette in the Upper Peninsula, where the club just sold its building for lack of use and now meets at Maple Lane Sports, the store owned by the club’s president, Ronald Stenfors, 75 years old. “We’ve been fortunate; our membership has kind of held now. It dropped significantly from the ‘70s, but we’re holding our own. But I’d say the future is not real bright for service clubs to gain a lot of members.”

Same at the Lewiston Moose Lodge in the northeastern Lower Peninsula. “A lot of our people have died off since I came here in 2005,” said administrator Pat Sieszputowski, 72 years old. “It’s unbelievable. Our age group up here is probably anywhere from 60 up to about 75, 80 years old. We do not have a lot of younger members. It’s a lot of retirees.” They’ve offered cornhole tournaments, shuffleboard and horseshoes to attract a younger generation, but there’s competition for people’s time and money, even in a small town like Lewiston.

“You’ve got your local bars, you have an American Legion, a VFW, and what they call the fun ones, like the snowmobile club. We’re just hanging on like everybody else.”

Same at the American Legion Post in Luzerne, in mid-Michigan. “I’m probably one of the younger guys,” said post commander Richard Landry, 75 years old. “We try to do a lot to keep the post going, but because you don’t have the number of younger people to help out, it sometimes gets difficult to handle all the programs, ‘cause you only have a core group, and sometimes you feel like you’re burning them out.”

His post hosts the town’s annual fireworks in the field behind their building, puts on an Easter egg hunt for kids, serves Christmas dinner and gives out presents for children in low-income families, drives veterans to medical appointments all over the state and provides an honor guard for local veterans’ funerals, though they had to enlist the help of the VFW and American Legion posts in nearby Mio just to get enough people to do it.

“We’re keeping alive, but sometimes you wish there were some younger people to take over some of the responsibility, and you’re just not getting them,” Landry said. “I think you’re going to find almost all the posts, they’re experiencing the same thing. And I don’t know how you address it.”

Two years passed. It was now 2019, late in the spring, and Kjellman was once again standing behind the bar at VFW Post 4573, again wearing the crisp brown hat with yellow lettering that identifies him as the commander. This time, there was no band. They had to cut the polka dances.

“Well, we raised the price from $7 to $9 and they figured it was too much,” explained Kjellman, now 70 years old. “They didn’t like that. I said, 'well, we can’t do much about it because we’re going backwards instead of forwards.' We were losing like $150 every time they came. Can’t go backwards. I don’t like going backwards. I’ll work 12 hours a day not to go backwards, you know? So they ended up, they went to another area.”

The hall was empty except for the ladies of the auxiliary, who were holding their regular meeting, and a few of the guys, who were hanging out in their remodeled hall with Kjellman. These were his last few days as commander. He wanted to step aside and let someone else take over. “I need a break,” he said.

Things had gotten much better for the post over the past couple years. They were on the verge of wiping out the massive debt they’d inherited. The most urgent repairs to the building had been done. And they’d had some success drawing new members, veterans from more recent wars, by hosting a dart league, beanbag toss tournaments, and Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts activities to draw people with young families. They were actually close to their membership goal, something unthinkable a few years back.

“Now we got everything squared away,” Kjellman said. “Now we can start working on what we should be working on.”

It would be the issue every leader of every service club has had to deal with for years —a shortage of new members.

“The biggest thing we got to start working on is how to draw the younger veterans in,” said Dennis Tonge, 66 years old, who would soon be taking over as commander. He was also a member of the local Kiwanis, where it’s also the same old story.

“I’m the youngest in the whole group and we’re down — we were 70, we’re down to 40 in 10 years. And most of them just been perishing, you know, dying off. It’s a shame, because you can’t get people. The next generation in their 40s and 50s, they do not want to join, they do not want to volunteer. It’s a different mentality. We’re still out there in the community, but the Lions, the Rotary, the Kiwanis — every one of them are going downhill, and I think 10 years from now you’re going to see a lot of organizations disappear.”

But VFW Post 4573 had one thing going for it that those other organizations didn’t have, one morbid sliver of hope. To be a member, you had to serve in battle. And of those, there’s never been a shortage.

“As long as people keep the wars going, we’ll have a good membership draw,” Skauge said. “It’d be nice to say that we have to close up shop. But so far, it looks pretty good for members.”

John Carlisle writes about people and places in Michigan. His stories can be found at freep.com/carlisle. Contact him: jcarlisle@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @_johncarlisle, Facebook at johncarlisle.freep or on Instagram at johncarlislefreep

Ryan Garza is an Emmy award-winning photojournalist. Contact him: rgarza@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @ryangarzafreep, or on Instagram at @ryangarza.

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