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“The seas were 25, maybe 35 feet high, 70 feet wide. When the waves hit the deck over the crib, the structure would shake, utensils would fall off the stove, and water would leak all over. After the three-day blow, I figured we must have had 500 ton of ice on that structure,” so said George Keller recalling the Armistice Day storm of 1940 at Michigan’s White Shoal Lighthouse.
It took a few days for lighthouse keeper George Keller and the only other crewman there to chip off enough ice to be able to launch a boat and get back to civilization after the tempest. “I never figured on being back to shore. No, it didn’t scare me. I don’t know why it was.”
When they finally freed the boat from the ice, the men made a run to a barge that was beached on St. Helena Island. Needing no supplies of mail to be delivered, the barge patiently lay there, “like a duck on the water,” and George Keller and the other man then proceeded on to Mackinaw.
“I tell you that nothing looked better than when I got away from that light, and could look back and see that light flashin’ and everything was all right. And there was not that much damage to the station. We didn’t lose a thing.”
George Keller must have gotten the idea of being a lighthouse keeper from his father, August Keller, who started his lighthouse career as a 2nd assistant keeper at Michigan’s Beaver Island Lighthouse for a few months in 1918 before serving until 1924 as assistant keeper at Skillagalee Lighthouse, which is also known as the Isle Aux Galets Lighthouse, an island light station in Lake Michigan. George’s brother, William A. Keller, also joined the U.S. Lighthouse Service and served as a lightkeeper at the Chicago Harbor Breakwater Lighthouse, Lansing Shoal Lighthouse, and the Manistique East Breakwater Lighthouse.
Like his father, George Keller also started his lighthouse career in 1918 as a 2nd assistant keeper, though he was at Wisconsin’s Racine Reef Lighthouse. In 1920, he was transferred to Michigan’s Squaw Island where he also served as the 2nd assistant keeper, until being transferred to White Shoal Lighthouse where he served for close to 25 years, retiring as head keeper in 1946.
On October 24, 2020 three generations of the George Keller family gathered at a memorial service sponsored by the White Shoal Light Preservation Society when a United States Lighthouse Service Memorial Marker was dedicated at his gravesite at the Harbor Springs Lakeview Cemetery in Harbor Springs, Michigan.
This story appeared in the
Jan/Feb 2021 edition of Lighthouse Digest Magazine. The print edition contains more stories than our internet edition, and each story generally contains more photographs - often many more - in the print edition. For subscription information about the print edition, click here.
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