Creative History

            Explosions shake the earth.  A fiery object falls from the sky and crashes through the roof of a farmhouse.  Flames leap skyward as a small New Jersey town burns. On the radio a newsflash interrupts a broadcast of popular dance music with an urgent bulletin.  It is 8 pm on October 30, 1938--the night before Halloween. The news bulletin reports, “Professor Farrell of Mount Jenning Observatory has detected explosions on the surface of Mars,” and then abruptly switches back to playing orchestral dance tunes.   But within moments, listeners to WCBS Radio, the northeast’s largest and most powerful station at the time, are informed that a large meteor has crashed into the small town of Grover’s Mill, New Jersey. Around 9 pm the radio broadcast cuts to a reporter live on the scene in Grover’s Mill who frantically retracts his previous statement and says that it was not a meteor which crashed in town, but rather it had been several large cylindrical metal objects from the

            By 1890 the town of Pere Cheney, Michigan was home to several prosperous sawmills, a post office, a general store, a doctor’s office, a school and a bustling railroad station located along the Central Michigan line. Pere Cheney had approximately 1,500 residents all of whom had their livelihoods tied, in one way or another, to Michigan’s burgeoning lumber industry which supplied countless tons of lumber to building projects all across the United States during the last half of the nineteenth century. Established in 1874, Pere Cheney was named after the nearby sawmill of local landowner George Cheney and was settled by lumberjacks and their families who had come to northern Michigan attracted by the region’s abundant woodlands.  For a brief few years, sometime in the 1870’s and 1880’s this lumber boomtown of Pere Cheney was even the county seat of Crawford County and was a frequent stop by many travellers on the Central Michigan Railroad. But by 1917 only 25 hearty souls w

            Captain Henrick Van der Decken is in the grips of a drunken rage.  Again. It is the year 1641 and Van der Decken is at the helm of The Flying Dutchman, a ship in the employ of the Dutch East India Company.  He is desperate to get back home to Amsterdam as quickly as possible and to cash in his lucrative cargo of exotic spices from the far east. Some say he is driven by greed; some by his love for a woman back home and some say he is fueled solely by a combination of alcohol and madness.  Whether driven by his love for a woman, money or for the bottle, what Van der Decken doesn’t know at that moment is that because of his rash actions both he and the members of the crew of The Flying Dutchman are destined to never return home again.   The Flying Dutchman is about to spend all eternity as a ghost ship manned by a crew of spirits condemned to sail the high seas forever and ever. Disregarding all thoughts of safety, Van der Decken decides to order his crew to immedi

            On October 28, 1776 General George Washington’s Continental Army is heading northward in retreat. The American army has been forced to flee into Westchester County after having been routed by William Howe’s combined British and Hessian forces in a disastrous attempt to defend New York City. Now, encamped around the small village of White Plains, the Continental Army literally has its back to the wall and the fate of the American Revolution itself is hanging in the balance. General Howe has sailed a formidable force up the Hudson River from his base in New York City and he has landed several thousand troops behind Washington’s retreating army.  Howe plans to cut off the American retreat route, smash the Continental Army and end the rebellion once and for all. On the morning of October 28, 1776 General Howe, headquartered just north of White Plains in the town of Scarsdale, orders a large British force under General Henry Clinton and an equally large force of Hessia