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Event

Beaver Island Homecoming weekend announced, 1985

Also 1985 Beaver Island Homecoming

Draft — sources verified, prose evolving

TypeEvent
Dates1985-08-09 – 1985-08-11
WithinBeaver Island
ErasModern era
On this page
Event
Dates
1985-08-09 – 1985-08-11
Kind
Celebration
Followed by
Beaver Island Homecoming weekend, 1986
Eras
Modern era
Concepts
celebrationcommunityheritagereligion
Within
Beaver Island

Summary

The 1985 Beaver Island Homecoming was calendared for the weekend of August 9–11: a softball tournament beginning Friday, a Homecoming Dance Saturday, and a Homecoming Dinner Sunday. The Beaver Island Civic Association planned to draw its Memorial Project painting raffle — two steamboat paintings donated by Bud Cruikshank — during the weekend. No later 1985 issue in this corpus reports how the weekend went.

Program

Softball. A tournament beginning Friday, August 9, per the printed calendar; no further detail (teams, results) survives for 1985.

Dance. Saturday, August 10, per the calendar. No venue, musicians or admission price given.

Dinner. Sunday, August 11, per the calendar. No venue or menu given.

Memorial Project raffle. The Civic Association’s fundraising drive for a memorial to islanders lost on the water planned to draw its raffle of two Bud Cruikshank steamboat paintings (“Clifton” and “Vernon”) during Homecoming weekend, toward an installation goal of Labor Day 1985.

Evidence limits

This is a calendar entry and a fundraising notice, not an outcome report. No held Beaver Beacon issue after the August 1985 (filed as “1985-07”) number mentions Homecoming again for that year — the next surviving issue, October 1985, does not use the word. No venue is named for the dance or dinner, so spatial_status is approximate, and no organizing body is credited for either (the Civic Association is credited only with the Memorial Project raffle, a specific sub-activity, not the weekend as a whole). A separate anomaly is worth noting for anyone consulting these issues directly: the July 1982 Beacon issue’s OCR text duplicates 1985-dated material — including the Civic Association’s 30-year-anniversary dinner of “Monday, June 16, 1985” — which is also found, correctly, under the August 1985 issue’s own masthead. This article draws only on the correctly-dated 1985 issue; the duplicate text under the 1982 masthead was not used as evidence here.

Open questions

  • Did the 1985 Homecoming weekend run as calendared? No report survives.
  • Was the Memorial Project painting raffle drawn as planned that weekend? Not confirmed by any later 1985 issue held here.

See also

Sources

  1. A first-person anecdote recalls the post-war years: "Our August Homecoming is the biggest event of the year for the Island and the Island boys never failed in making it back for this event." This is general background color about the tradition's standing, not a report of the 1985 event, and is not treated as such. Read in the canonical remote OCR. The holding institution's portal restricts automated access; the archive holds a copy of this issue and can provide it on request.
    data1 · beaver-island-archive · beaver_beacon · 1985-03_Beaver-Beacon
  2. The held seventeen-page March issue PDF is paired with the canonical OCR source and confirms the Homecoming context.
    data1 · beaver-island-archive · scans · beaver_beacon · issues · 1985-03_Beaver-Beacon
  3. The masthead reads "AUGUST 1985." A printed calendar table marks "9 Softball Tourny Begins," "10 Homecoming Dance," and "11 Homecoming Dinner." A separate Civic Association Memorial Project update reports that raffle tickets for oil paintings of the steamboats "Clifton" and "Vernon," painted and donated by Bud Cruikshank, "are already out and being sold" and that "the drawing for the paintings will be held Homecoming weekend," toward a fieldstone memorial to islanders lost on the water. Read in the in-repo data/ tree. No venue is named for the dance or dinner. The holding institution's portal restricts automated access; the archive holds a copy of this issue and can provide it on request.
    data1 · beaver-island-archive · beaver_beacon · 1985-07_Beaver-Beacon
  4. The held twenty-six-page July/August combined issue PDF, filed canonically as July 1985, is paired with the remote OCR and confirms the Homecoming calendar and memorial-fund notice.
    data1 · beaver-island-archive · scans · beaver_beacon · issues · 1985-07_Beaver-Beacon

Added 3 August 2026 · revised 4 August 2026. Recent changes

Cite this article

Beaver Island Archive, “Beaver Island Homecoming weekend announced, 1985”, https://beaverislandarchive.org/events/beaver-island-homecoming-1985/, accessed [date], citing Beaver Beacon, March 1985, "Peter the Hound" reminiscence column. (and 3 further sources listed on the page).

Last revised 2026-08-04. Fill in [date] with the date you read it — this page is static and cannot know that.

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