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Event

Welke family completes Island Airways purchase, 1989

Also 1989 Island Airways ownership transition · Welke family Island Airways purchase

Draft — sources verified, prose evolving

Locator map: Beaver Island highlighted within the Beaver Island archipelago
Took place at Beaver IslandLocator plate © OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL 1.0); depths NOAA; names USGS GNIS. How the plates are drawn.
TypeEvent
Date1989-01
WithinBeaver Island
ErasModern era
On this page
Locator map: Beaver Island highlighted within the Beaver Island archipelago
Took place at Beaver IslandLocator plate © OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL 1.0); depths NOAA; names USGS GNIS. How the plates are drawn.
Event
Date
1989-01
Kind
Property transfer
Where
Beaver Island
Eras
Modern era
Concepts
transportationcommerceinfrastructurecommunitycommunication
Within
Beaver Island

Summary

In January 1989, the Welke family completed its purchase of the remaining half of Island Airways, making the air service a family business again. A later funeral-home obituary identifies Richard Marshall Hodgson as Eric Hodgson’s father and as a co-owner of the flight service from Charlevoix to Beaver Island; that evidence confirms the Hodgson family’s Beaver Island air-service connection but does not by itself reconcile the 1989 article’s two first names.

Evidence limits

The newspaper reports the ownership transition and operating plans, not the transaction instruments or aviation certificates.

Sources

  1. Reports Bill and Betty Welke and Paul and Ellen Welke completing the purchase of Eric Hodgson’s half, with the existing Beaver Island and Charlevoix operations continuing. 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 · 1989-01_Beaver-Beacon
  2. The held twenty-page January issue PDF is paired with the canonical OCR source.
    data1 · beaver-island-archive · scans · beaver_beacon · issues · 1989-01_Beaver-Beacon
  3. The obituary identifies Richard Marshall Hodgson as the father of Eric Hodgson and says he co-owned the flight service from Charlevoix to Beaver Island. This later independent source strengthens the identification of Richard as a Beaver Island air-service figure but does not resolve whether the January 1989 Beaver Beacon’s references to Richard and Eric describe a source error or an ownership change.

Added 4 August 2026 · revised 9 August 2026. Recent changes

Cite this article

Beaver Island Archive, “Welke family completes Island Airways purchase, 1989”, https://beaverislandarchive.org/events/beaver-island-island-airways-family-purchase-1989/, accessed [date], citing “Island Airways is again a family business,” Beaver Beacon, January 1989. (and 2 further sources listed on the page).

Last revised 2026-08-09. Fill in [date] with the date you read it — this page is static and cannot know that.

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