![]() The pandemic brought a new breed: younger tech-savvy entrepreneurs from as far away as California who could work from home. Residents who survive off the short summer tourist season call visitors “fudgies” because they frequent the fudge shops, and the retirees “permie-fudgies.” ![]() The auto executives, assembly workers, teachers and others who eventually retire to their second homes from downstate Michigan remain outsiders. “I am not the one counting dead people from COVID, but still.”Īntrim County is the kind of place where it takes decades to be considered a local. “It just seemed pretty unwarranted,” said Chris Coseo, 63. They liked Friske’s for being more relaxed about the pandemic rules, and decried the fact that so many local restaurants took a hard financial hit because of lockdowns. “We got fat,” joked Brenda Coseo, 62, after she and her husband, Chris, moved into their summer home in January and for part of the spring to escape the high coronavirus numbers in San Diego, where they usually live. “Why would you not follow the science?”Īt Friske’s, plenty of pickup trucks in the parking lot still sport Trump-Pence bumper stickers, and the doughnuts lure regulars for breakfast. “Our core values were not aligning at all,” said Brodsky, who stopped the bike rides at that point. He would never get vaccinated, he told her, suggesting that she had no right to ask. They took regular bike rides together until he returned from a trip to Florida, when she asked whether he had been vaccinated. When her neighbor attempted to rattle her by talking about politics, she steered the conversations to his photo collages or other subjects, and she felt like the two of them were secure inside their COVID-free bubble. She tried to not let it irk her, telling herself that many Trump banners on barns in the area were even larger. Joyce Brodsky, 69, a painter and retired art teacher, spent the pandemic at home, occasionally passing time with a neighbor, a former auto salesperson, who also stayed isolated in his lakeside house, festooned with a large Trump sign. While court proceedings unrolled in the background, vaccines became the next yardstick for measuring which friends to keep and which businesses to frequent as daily life inched away from the pandemic. A human error in programming some of the Dominion voting machines in the county resulted in several thousand votes for Donald Trump being attributed to Joe Biden.Īlthough the mistake was caught immediately and corrected, it prompted one of the longest-running lawsuits over the results, with Trump cheering from the sideline. Vocal residents had also taken sides in a nagging battle over the results of the presidential vote in Antrim County. Last month, King Orchards dropped its mandatory mask policy after the state did. Both fruit stands claimed that they gained customers, even if some stormed away, while the need to eat at home drove a sales boom. Still, the Republican-controlled state Senate took the unusual step in April of blocking her appointment to the Michigan Cherry Committee.Īrea regulars chose sides, arguing endlessly over freedom versus public health. ![]() “For us it wasn’t about the party line or our personal politics, it was about being an advocate for mitigating climate change,” said Juliette King McAvoy, King’s daughter. The farm stand constructed a hand sanitizer station in the gravel parking lot and distributed free masks. “They come after us in the comments and call us ‘Grandma killers.’ Whatever they want to throw at us frankly leaves no room for personal responsibility and personal accountability, and that is not what America is all about.”īy comparison, King Orchards made masks obligatory after Whitmer issued her executive order in July. “It is cancel culture, that is all it is - they did not agree with what we were doing so they desperately tried to muddy our reputation and discredit us,” he said. More online warriors fired nasty broadsides than regular customers, he insisted. Friske, 23, a member of the third generation to run the farm, said the family anticipated being attacked for making masks voluntary. An area newspaper profiling the ruckus dredged up the archconservative political past of Richard Friske, who died in 2002 he bought the family orchards some 60 years ago after serving in Nazi Germany’s Luftwaffe. The Friskes turned to Facebook to explain their position in videos that attracted both zealous supporters and harsh critics. Michigan’s health department issued a mask directive, which the Friske Farm Market defied until the state threatened to revoke its business license. When the state Supreme Court nullified a series of the governor’s COVID-related executive orders in October, it effectively tossed out her mask mandate and made the lawsuit moot. Branded apparel at Friske Farm Market in Ellsworth, Mich., on May 13, 2021.
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