Who We Were...

Our founder, Michael Jestila, opened up the Backroom Used Bookstore Exchange in L'Anse in the Back Room, a storage room that was accessible from the alleyway. There was no heat, there was no separate entrance, there was no plumbing, and no bathroom. We put an entrance into the back…for customers that were in the know...In the second summer, I took an axe to the front to cut out a doorway into the access between the buildings. And in the third, I put out an ad for partners wanted to run a Houghton/Hancock store. My mother sold her Sears Catalog store, due to changes in Sear's prior to their elminating their Catalog division. But in those three dusty, dry and hot summers before I graduated college, I operated a used bookstore exchange in L'Anse.

At one time there were used books at rummage sales… but I bought all of them. I went to the great big city of Marquette and bought all of the cool books from St. Vincent's and Salvation Army, I learned how to bottom feed. I bottom fed, I vacuumed up the entire bottom segment of the marketplace.

My store was meant for the readers.. those customers that read could bring their books in to trade for other books, and not have to pay new book prices, for their books, and didn't need to run to 10 rummage sales per week to find the used books, I inserted myself into the marketplace, between the St. Vincent's and the new.. for the secondary marketplace had not been properly exploited in Baraga or Houghton Counties.

I had to box up all those books and store them my mother's basement…but I had seen where my future lay.. It lay to the north.. there wasn't a used bookstore in the Houghton marketplace. I was getting customers from around Baraga County and from Houghton at my book exchange.

One of them even showed me this empty store front, run by these two kindly old gents, who owned a newsstand in Hancock…..the next year, I attempted to reopen the bookstore in Baraga, and Hancock.

The next year I bought out the newsstand next door, for $10,000 and thus I obtained my second mistress.. the first being, my used bookstore….the merger of my used bookstore and my newsstand yielded a child….an adult only section, my used magazines, used paperback books, on the one hand, new magazines, and video rentals on the other.

Well our county prosecutor, raided Payne's News Agency/ Backroom Bookstore and said this was against community morals.. yeah like right.. Payne's News had been in business since 1924… my family had been in the valley since the 1890's…

My fathers grandparents on both sides had fled Finland during the Russification campaigns, but they did not like the copper mines, but they did like the farmland opened up after the forests were cut down to timber the mines.

One of my grandfathers brothers opened a saloon in Hancock, Matt Jestila, times were great, the War to End All Wars, needed copper for wiring. But after the war was won, payback came… prohibitionists opposed to the carousing around army recruitment, training and installations, eliminated the red light districts, as wartime emergency health measures and standards… my grandfather who invested heavily was bankrupted, as was his saloon keeping brother who supposedly fled back to Finland, where he died fighting in the Finish Civil War….that erupted after the end of the Great War, when the Tsar of all the Russia's was no more, and the two Grand Duchies of Finland and Poland broke free, while newly formed Estonia, Lativia, Lithuania and Ukraine established themselves as free states, as did the Far Eastern Republic, and all the Central Asian Republics…. But the Reds of Russia they took Moscow, and the factories, and with round the clock production, got the weapons to defeat the whites…. Who could not unite, the democratic whites could not defeate the reds, because the white generals could not guarantee the freedom and independence of the republics. Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland…and thus the Red were able to hold on to St. Petersburg… for the Finns refused to fight the Russians in the Russian Civil war.

As a part of their convulsion, Finland fought a Civil War of her own, and in this my grandfathers brother supposedly lost his life….in the fight against the reds…that his nephew, my uncle would fight again in Korea.

      Who we are...

But the fight against control from above and from without was not to be fought only abroad…

It was to be fought within communities, within families, it is an eternal fight, it will not be over soon.

City Governments still seek to repress free will, seek to "manage" and "suppress" those that oppose their shenanigans.

This is a brief overview of who we are.

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