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This is Living West Michigan.

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("The Legend 97" plays) (Music) telescopes are time machines.

When we look at a faraway galaxy, we are looking into the past millions of years, and that’s just fun to know, to have that moment like what Galileo must have felt like when he saw that those things weren’t just points of light.

I remember getting my first telescope unpacking it and just being all excited, and then seeing rings of Saturn for the first time.

I was hooked.

looking up and seeing wow, what’s all that going on?

Those were the planets.

It just happened to be one of the years that they were in alignment.

Whoa, really?

For me, it began on a hilltop in Pennsylvania in the summer of 1967.

I was a Boy Scout, I was that Boy Scout camp with all my buddies, and at Boy Scout Camp, you tried to get a few merit badges.

One of the merit badges offered was astronomy.

That was my introduction.

And I just got in the habit of looking up.

The Grand Rapids Amateur Astronomical Association and its members have been looking up for the past 70 years.

The GRAAA and those who are simply curious about the universe come to Kissing Rock Hill in Lowell, Michigan, to experience the cosmos.

(Music) This beautiful place that we’re sitting near in such a beautiful natural setting out in the country, is the site of the James C. Veen Observatory and it didn’t just happen.

(Music) In the mid 1950s, co-founder and first president of the GRAAA, James C. Veen, helped create the first Planetarium at the original Grand Rapids Public Museum.

Later, with support from the Public Museum, planning began on an observatory which would break ground in 1965.

What followed was five years of construction done almost entirely by association members.

And that’s where I met all of these really emotivated individuals.

And then, this great group of young people, mostly high school kids who were joining the group, and then became the workhorses for the construction of this observatory.

Block companies would donate us blocks, but we had to come and haul them.

I was actually one of the block layers.

I learned a lot about block laying, and I can point to parts of the building where I was just learning that I’m not very proud of but I can point to parts of the building that look pretty good because I’d had about four years’ experience at it.

One of the first personalities I became acquainted with and came to admire greatly when I came here, I think, manual arts teacher by the name of Percy Hawkins.

And he was a people person.

Being one of the leaders in the group, he was very inspirational to the young people in the work crews.

They learned a lot about life from working on a scaffold with Percy Hawkins.

We created a telescope here in his honor, which is our largest instrument here at the observatory.

It is also very much in keeping with Percy, easy to use accessible to everybody and primarily a visual scope.

You move it around by hand, it doesn’t have a lot of bells and whistles, but it’s incredibly effective.

On June 21st, 1970, the observatory was completed and dedicated to the association’s co founder and first President, James C. Veen, who sadly passed before construction began.

Over the next 55 years, the Veen Observatory has become more than just a place to look at the stars.

(Music) In building up, I mean, our organization, our association, and the situation that we find ourselves in is that it can satisfy a wide range of interests And those who have an interest in just being outdoors, we can help with that, those who like, you, participating as a group and doing something, you know, we can offer opportunities for that.

So the thing that has been, you, good about the observatory is that, you, we have the ability to use a lot of different talents that people bring.

You know, because of the special place that we’re at, you know, with the 12 acres of woods you know, it involves a lot of property maintenance.

Someone later has the idea, let’s put some walkways into our woods.

So we did that project, clearing the space up here, provided for more parking, provided at green space, where we have a fire pit, and we had the open space, and someone else said, Well, I’d be willing to donate a pavilion Have a spot for that.

Let’s do some outdoor activities that are not just nighttime based, but can also be daytime based The first job of a telescope is to gather light, and the aperture tells us the more aperture, the more light it’s going to start to work with.

This one is a 16 inch telescope that is the aperture.

It’s a Schmidt Casa Grain scope which means that the light does a bounce.

It comes in, there is a con cave mirror, kind of a donut, because there’s a hole in the middle of it that that reflects the light to a central mirror in the center of the collector plate that shoots it back down.

So the light doesn’t bounce.

And then we put various eye pieces to give us different degrees of magnification and that’s where people bring their eye, and that’s where all of that light that has been gathered and focused gives way to an experience of a direct observation of some marvelous object in the sky.

In 2024, the Thomas Strikwerda Annex was completed, which expanded the capabilities of the association, allowing users of all experience levels an opportunity to view and capture a wide range of objects.

We’re currently in what we call it the Strikwerda Annex, but what it is, essentially, is if you were to take a two and a half car garage and then saw the sides of the roof, and then put it on tracks so that we have essentially the size of a garage, but the roof rolls off And so this becomes what we call a roll off observatory.

And it address addresses one of the issues that we always have.

If you have an observatory, you have a dome.

Problem is, with a dome, you can only have one instrument.

When we do something like a roll off, we can have four instrumruments, you can actually probably wedge in a fifth.

And as you can see by the styles and types of equipment, that’s another thing that we want to do is to be able to show people all the kinds of things that astronomy can offer.

What you discover when you get into astronomy, and especially into the equipment, is that every piece of equipment has its sweet spot.

There are scopes like this large one here that are best for the dim objects out there.

And big, in telescope terms, by the way, is the diameter, not the length But then we have some, speaking of, the ones that, you know, are long and small, they’re best for viewing planets and some of the bright objects, because they bring it in very crisp.

Then we have things like the one behind me.

It’s a smaller scope.

It is actually designed to look at the sun It has a special filter on it to filter out 99.9% of the light.

And the 0.1% that comes through, you know, allows you to see sunspots and flares on the surface of the sun.

Each telescope has its appropriate use, and there are those that have lots of automation and some that are very much manual, very much old school One of the advantages of being a member of this association, every time I come out here, I always learn something.

There are some very knowledgeable people with deep experience in this field, and people are so generous with sharing their knowledge.

Hobby is almost not a good enough word for it.

It’s a passion.

Using that passion and dedication, many members went onto successful careers, including Tom Strikwerda, whom the Rolloff Observatory is named after.

The thing that sets Tom apart is that he was a key person in the space program He became a physicist at the Applied Physics Laboratory at John Hopkins University.

We always knew he was a very talented guy and he was going to go places But we didn’t quite realize that his work was going to go all the way to Pluto.

(Music) He turned out to be the lead guidance engineer for a team which had had to plan and execute the trajectory for that very successful probe to Pluto in 2015, I believe.

And he always used to say, the GRAAA had a lot to do with what I accomplished.

These things build on themselves, the more the people participate the more that that creates an inviting and welcoming atmosphere for those who are on the edges to come in to this.

So for that reason, it’s been very invigorating to have that.

As soon as I was 16 years old, I was a regular observatory user.

And it is such an amazing privilege and what an amazing resource for for a kid who’s 16 to not just be able to go and look through telescopes, but to get a key and have permission to go there and use these things that I would take pictures and their early morning before school.

There’s something very magical about having the privilege of showing somebody Jupiter or Saturn for the first time and watching their face come off come down from the telescope and the kind of excitement.

The most fun that I have is being there when somebody maybe looks at the moon or Jupiter or Saturn, those are what I call the OMG objects.

When somebody looks at the moon for the first time through a telescope and they see along the terminator, the line between light and dark, between day and night on the moon, that illuminates all of those craters.

They often say, oh, my God.

And just to be present for that, moment is a privilege.

And I know that they’ll never look at the moon the same way again.

Saturn’s ring and the craters on the moon make clear that these are three dimensional Real objects in the sky.

And it’s just a privilege to be there when people have that moment It never gets old for me.

As soon as you are willing to, raise your hand and sign up, you can help run the visitors’ nights and get to learn how to use the scopes and you can use them on your own.

And I don’t know of another amateur association with that kind of resources that such a great community, such a great observatory.

A personal project of mine is that I love it when people can walk away with a sense of the the sky in three dimensions.

Instead of looking at the sky as the ancients did, like a dome with stars and planets and mysterious objects stuck on this dome, to be able to see it as an array of objects near and far.

(Music) If it weren’t for Jim and Evelyn Marron, who owned all of this property that we’re sitting on right now, and permitting a group upstart group of astronomers to literally take over a section of their property and build the observatory was really a step of faith on their part.

Their mark cannot be underestimated.

It was giving us this opportunity that may never have come if it weren’t for their generous offer.

This is a natural beauty center.

It is a place where you can come and receiveive spiritual fulfillment just by being here, and looking up into the sky and contemplating the vastness of it all, whether with the naked eye or with one of these big telescopes.

Being out in the woods, out here, and especially out here at night, out here during the day and listening to all the, the wildlife, I do take joy in just being out in this area, and my dog does too.

So so both of us take a lot out of it.

I will forever be grateful to my friend Mike Murphy, who’s a member of the club.

I ran into Mike, and I was just walking home one night, and I bumped into this guy who had the exact same telescope that I was thinking of buying.

It was good old Mike Murphy.

And he encouraged me.

Not only did he encourage me, he invited me to join and brought me out one night.

That was my entry point.

The message I would send out to people is, "Don’t wait for your Mike Murphy.

Bring yourselves out here on a public night, get an eye full of what’s up there, and maybe you’ll get the bug."

You know, honestly, I think it’s a wow.

I’m reminded of you know, when I’m looking out at the sky, it’s so just awe inspiring.

I’m reminded of flying home once, and I was sitting there looking out the window.

The person sitting next to me asked what I was looking at, and I said, "Oh, there’s Mars, there.

And he was so excited because he was going to get off the plane and see his son and going to say, that, that, that’s Mars.

And that’s just fun to know.

I wish I could say my interest was more scientific, but sure do appreciate looking up.

(Music) So the officer and I went out there to take a look at it.

And it just tried to chew in around the doors.

and you could see a dog print, you know, outside the window there.

So it was, you know, obviously a dog.

(The Legend ’97 by Steve Cook plays) scares the crap out of me, even thinking about it.

It wasn’t a thing to my imagination.

It was real.

Something was there.

Oh, my God!

I’d never been so scared in my life.. A cool summer morning in early June is when the legend began.

It was possible that it was some kind of animal I felt this hot breath on the back of my neck.

Go back to the car.

Yeah, man.

Go to the car.

We just bolted out of there.

There was a dog man looking in and grinning.

(Music) Well, the morning man at the radio station and I had kind of built a reputation of doing some pretty crazy April Fools pranks.

I said, "Well, I’ve kind of had this idea rolling around in my head for a while to create this mythical beast for Northern Michigan, which is sort of comparable to the Bigfoot or a blend of all of those creatures that we hear about.

And I sat down in the studio with a little $99 Casio keyboard and rattled out this rhythm and started to speak a poem to it.

Then the thing led out an unearthly scream and came out.

and stood upright.

The verses kind of came together, and I built this song where each verse represents another decade going back 100 years, and it’s always in the seventh year of that decade that something occurs with this creature.

The seventh year is here.

The whole song took probably 20, 30 minutes to put together, and I said, well, when you play it, don’t say anything about it.

Just sandwich it in between two songs.

So that’s what he did, and there was absolutely no reaction whatsoever.

Nothing But right after he got off the air, a man called, by the name of Robert Fortney, and he said, "I was listening to that song, and I had to pull off the road, because I’ve seen that."

He said, it was 50 years ago.

In 1937 and he had never talked about it to anyone.

And that set off sort of a cascade of calls from people saying, you know, that’s no joke what you did this morning, that was.. That’s a real thing.

In terms of compelling stories, probably the most interesting one involved a local photographer and his wife They had one of those little pedal boats that you go out in the lake and pedal around in.

We heard a noise in the water.

I thought it was like a muskrat pulling a big branch or something.

and Dan said, "No, I don’t think so."

And it swam across the lake.

Pretty quickly, it emerged from the water on two legs.

And then it just took off running into the woods.

And they said it was a long haired creature with a head that looked like a dog.

And what makes that story so compelling is is that that most of the time, sightings are solo.

So it’s really unique to find one where two people see the same thing at the same time, and they describe it exactly the same way.

When I wrote the song, I was just creating something fun, and it just took off from there and exploded.

It almost went global at that point.

And the song went to Armed Forces Radio, and it still is played on Armed Forces Radio at Halloween in Japan and Germany all these years later.

So that was really the launch pad that took the dogman from just being a local folklore into sort of this global phenomenon, if you will.

When Steve created that song in 1987, the town buzzged.

That song scared the crap out of people.

Rich and I have been friends for, oh gosh, 40 years, maybe.

I think it was around 2,000 ish.

I heard that blasted song on his again for the umpteenth time, and then I thought, wait a minute, Dogman, that might be a There’s a lot of interest in that already."

He came to me one time and said, This crazy Dogman thing is just nuts.

I’d love to do a film about it."

And I said, "Heck, yeah, let’s do it."

The fun part about it is that that song of his, by that point, had scared the hell out of probably two generations of people.

So I thought, "This is a home run."

What was that?

They’re a lot of fun.

They have a real Hitchcock feel to them, and they’re just really well executed.

Steve plays a cameo in my first..

He plays a cameo in all three of these movies.

I’m just thrilled to be a part of this, you know.

And we decided early on that if the song was going to make any money, we would donate that money to charity.

And my personal favorite charity is Animal Rescue.

When he sells DVDs of our movies, all that money goes to his animal rescue charity, he really is passionate about that.

I know how hard those people work, and I know what a painful job it can be at that time.

And I’m just a huge animal lover.

That was really the most important aspect of it to me.

The creativity part of it was a lot of fun and all of that, but in terms of just for the personal satisfaction, that meant a lot to me.

I think it’s pretty just ironic that it’s a dog man, the giant, scary dog man that’s actually rescuing and helping little puppies.

In terms of the popularity of the song and its longevity, I think it just, somewhere, it hit a chord with people, and a lot of people heard it first as a child, and then they play it for their children And it becomes one of those sort of urban legend campfire stories that we can tell that’s not generic, it’s specific to this area, and that is gives it a real sort of a hometown feel that lets you tell a story about something that you can relate to.

So in that respect, I’m glad.

I love the fact that people are still enjoying the song and I love the fact that it’s had that much influence over that much time.

Jack O’Malley, the morning man, who sort of started the whole thing with me, said, "It’s going to live a lot longer than we will."

And I tend to agree with that.

And somewhere in the Northwoods darkness, a creature walks upright.

and the best advice she may ever get.

is don’t go out at night.

Have a good day!