First The Introductions

We are:
BRUCE & MELODY DAVEY
and of course Bandit
of Wakefield, MI

Background: Melody & I live in the beautiful North woods of Upper Michigan. The land of Snow, Deer, Trees, countless Lakes, More Deer & Kerosene powered PCs. We currently share our home with our dog - a fairly mellow companion who doesn't know he's a dog and is of the impression he runs the house. So please don't tell him otherwise..


WINTER AT OUR HOUSE

Until recently I made my living as a Deputy Sheriff with the Gogebic County Sheriff Dept. in Bessemer MI. where I had been since 1977. My duties included working as a Desk / Corrections Officer and have also worked as part time Animal Control Officer. I was also responsible for our TTY system which connects us with State and Federal computer systems nationwide and for our in house computer systems we use for writing our incident reports. As of April 2003 after 25 years on the job, I finally had to retire - albeit a few years early due to health reasons. But with all this time on my hands now, perhaps I can spend some time updating our departments web site which has been a labor of love for me since 1996 but is in need of lots of updating. Although now officially retired, I intend to keep in touch with my friends and co-workers at the department and to carry on maintaining the web site that I created for our dept. Maybe now that I am retired, I can also get back into my photography - something I did for many years and at one time did freelance work including as a press photographer in my younger years.


Nowadays I settle primarily for doing photos of the dog, grandchildren and local scenics. Although in addition to "Normal Photos" I also enjoy creating unusual images that frequently are photos I manipulate with computer graphics programs. For samples of some of my photos and graphic creations, go to the following page: My Photos and Design Page


While you're here, please check out the Departments home page at the Gogebic Co So Home Page that I put together for our Dept. I had originally intended on putting quite a few links on my family home page, but now spend most of my WEB page design time on the Departments pages so you can find quite a few links there...

Prior to my playing cops and robbers for a living, I had served in the U.S. Army and my primary duty station was the photo section of HHC 57th Signal Battallion ( mid 1973 - January 1976) which at the time was located on West Fort Hood Texas. (Having lack of much photo work - toward the end of my stint there, I ended up working for the HHC Orderly Room and played company mail clerk, CO's and First Sgt.'s driver, Prisoner Escort for AWOL personnel, etc.) For those who are trying to track down old Army buddies, etc. make sure you check out the web site Classmates.com

Speaking of the Army, one of our sons is currently stationed in Korea with the Army. He has been to Korea before working the DMZ and then came home and was living in Virginia with his wife and 2 children. While in Virginia stationed at the War College there, he worked in Headquarters working on computers. Now back in Korea he has a similar job there and his wife and kids back in this area. Speaking of kids, we now have 13th grandchild on the way in about a month. Several of the grandkids live in the area so we get to spend lots of quality time with them. ( Can you spell SPOILED ) - Thats what grandparents are for...

MELS STORY: Melody has worked in sales for many years, first as Classified Ad Manager for the Ironwood Daily Globe and until a few years ago as Area Sales Representative for U.P. Wide Landmark Publishing . She has also worked as a part time Home Health Care worker. Her latest full time position was as an Assistant Manager at the local Dollar Tree® Store located in Ironwood Michigan, but recently had to leave due to a family member's and my own health problems. Make sure if ever in the Gogebic County area to check out the new Dollar Tree® super store that just opened on August 11th 2003. In this area with our depressed economy, this store has been very popular with the local residents. They have a great selection of products for the low price of a $1.00 or less. I had originally planned on including a link on this page to a web site I created to promote the new Dollar Tree® store, but at the request of the main office I removed the site due to liability concerns since they are regulated by the SEC.

(By the way - before I forget - Nobody calls my wife Melody - she goes by Mel - those who call her Melody will get one of those raised eyebrows that make grown men hide in the den)

OF LOCAL INTEREST:

Gogebic County Suffered quite a bit of damage this April (2002) from massive flooding which mostly affected the Cities of Ironwood and Wakefield. This was something we had not had to deal with before, but some late heavy snowfalls and a rapid thaw brought the wrath of Mother Nature upon our communities. During the disaster, I was assigned as the Public Information Officer for the Emergency Operations Center (EOC) and was responsible for the daily press releases that went out and also did quite a bit of photo work documenting the flooding in the area. Although now retired from law enforcement, I still hold this volunteer position with county Emergency Management. For those of you who were out of the area during the Flood of 2002, you can get an idea from these photos how things were here: Gogebic County Flood 2002

For those of you prior residents who have not been home in awhile, we had been suffering through unusually hot and muggy weather this past summer (2002), but thankfully the weather let up for a few days around the 4th of July which is a major event in our area annually. As usual, those of us with the Sheriff Dept. all work on the 4th. (As of July 4th 2003 now that I am retired as such it was quite unusual not to be working parade duty for the first time in many years)

I did have the pleasure tho of being able to attend my 30 year class reunion on July 6th 2002 which we held at the new Sunday Lake Park Pavillion. It was great being able to see a lot of my "Old" classmates and I set up a small web page showing some photos from the reunion. Note to Classmates - Anyone who does not want to appear on this, please e-mail me and I will be happy to remove your image from the page since I do not want to invade anyone's privacy by posting these photos. Class Reunion 2002 page.

SITES OF INTEREST:

The following sites are links to WEB Sites within Gogebic County such as local Government, Chamber of Commerce sites, businesses, etc. I hope you find some of these of interest or assistance... Some of these sites I transposed from our Department web site.

Ironwood Chamber of Commerce Is a local chamber site for the largest community in Gogebic County. It is located on the Western edge of the county along the Michigan / Wisconsin border.

Info page on City of Wakefield Is a site with some information on our hometown. Wakefield until recently had their own web site promoting the town from the Forward Wakefield organization, but this web site is apparently down or been changed. It is interesting to note that Wakefield Twp is part of some of the TAX-Free zones set up to promote business to come to the area to set up shop

Info page on City of Bessemer Is another site with information on the local area. Bessemer which is just a few miles West of Wakefield on US-2 is quite a progressive community and known for it's giant 4th of July celebration each year.

It should also be noted that these 3 communities have much to offer the visitor in summer and winter months. The scenic beauty of the area with it's rivers, waterfalls, Lake Superior and in the winter months the area is quite popular with skiers and snowmobilers.

Gogebic Range Directories is a neat site I stumbled upon doing some research into my own family history. It has some interesting links to old records and city directories from days gone by in case you wish to look up some past family history. It was interesting to note they even use our Dept web site maps for some of the local street maps listed on the site.. It is a fun and educational site to visit and truly a labor of love for whoever is doing all of the research and transposing the information to this site.

RING!OnLine | Michigan's Internet SuperStation Is a great WEB page for accessing lots of info in the State of Michigan - Even has those hard to find Lotto Numbers

NEED PHONE NUMBERS FOR OLD FRIENDS?

Check out these WEB Sites for help in tracking down old friends, checking a phone number, etc.

Switchboard Home Page Is one of my favorite sites for looking up nationwide phone numbers for people or businesses nation wide and if you sign up with them (For Free) they allow you to add info to your own entry such as your E-Mail address and home page information.

Who Where Nationwide Phone listings which even allow you to do reverse searches by phone number. Another great site to check out.

Gazetter Map Locator Is a great WEB Site for finding street addresses throughout the U.S. You enter an address and it will display a fairly close map to the address you need. Great for going out of town and needing a small map of a particular area.

FAVORITE SEARCH ENGINE:

Although Melody is partial to Ask Jeeves as her search engine, I find it quite difficult to find much on that particular search engine. For my favorite, one that is also getting raves from the computer industry including the hosts of Screen Savers on ZDTV, check out Google.com. If you can't find what you need on Google, it probably isn't on the web...

FOR YOU COMBINATION COMPUTER & PHOTO BUFFS:

Many of us can't afford the price of a new digital camera or a decent scanner to transfer some of our favorite scenes or friends into a computer. But there is a company that can help - Check out the WEB site at Seattle Film Works where you can have your film processed and in addition to quality prints, you can have the images transferred to disk so you can load your photos into your computer or using your account number you can even download your photos from their site which is handier than Snail Mail.. Since I wrote this original praise of SFW, Kodak has now started making their photos available as well on disk and CD - Another great way to go for digital images although due to how much memory a high resolution photo takes up, don't expect the greatest quality off a floppy disk. For those important must have great digital images, I would suggest you go with CD. It may cost more but it's worth it...

For those of you who may take lots of photos and have some images you might want to show off to other photographers, check out the following web site which holds ongoing photo contests. The site promotes photographers work from around the world and awards monthly and annual prizes. In addition to the site judges, visitors and other photographers also judge the photos that are submitted to this site. (I have submitted about 10 photos and will share them with our visitors soon on a photo page and keep you up to date if I have any luck with this contest. If you want to try it out, go to the following link - it doesn't cost a thing to try... Photography Unlimited

CLOSING COMMENTS:

This web site per se is new for our family. Much of what you see here was transposed from our old AOL family page but as a family we have now switched to a new ISP (MyVine.com - Great people to work with too if you have technical problems like I first did getting this new web site up and running) Being that I now have much more room to play with for my family web site, please check back frequently as we hope to add photos of the area, etc. as time goes on.

If any comments, or links you think I might find of interest, please feel free to E-Mail me at goshtac-SEE BELOW-@yahoo.com or Mel at meldavey-SEE BELOW-@myvine.com

E-MAIL NOTICE: DUE TO CONSTANT SPAM PROBLEMS - PLEASE REMOVE ( -REMOVE THIS- )FROM THE "TO" FIELD IN YOUR E-MAIL BEFORE SENDING. THANKS.

Speaking of SPAM (Junk E-Mail) If you get as much as I do daily, (Over 100) you are in need of a good SPAM filter program - If you don't already have one, check out MAILWASHER PRO at FireTrust's web site. It allows you to pre-scan your mail still on the server and mark e-mail as junk or friends for future mailing. The junk you can delete or even bounce back at the sender so they think they sent the mail to a non-working e-mail address...FireTrust - MailwasherPro Web Site