Downtown car dealership fire remembered 50 years later

by Peter Jakey–Managing Editor

One of the biggest news events of 2013 took place when the landmark Fisch Brewery building was destroyed by fire on North Third Street.

It was yet another old building added to the list of major fires in downtown Rogers City over the years.

One of the fires on that long list occurred 50 years ago at a building located once at 153 South Third Street, where the Citgo gas station is today.

Jerry Lynch Motor Sales was gutted by a fire and explosion in the early morning hours of Dec. 23, 1963.

Robert Zinke, who was removing snow from city streets, was the first to notice the blaze.

The explosion knocked out the front windows of the showroom and the building quickly filled with flames.

Jerry Lynch received a call from police chief Leo Hilla about the fire at his home along South Seventh Street.

It was Jerry’s 13-year-old son, Mike, who took the call. Jerry, who ran a wrecker in town, thought it was a call to pull an overzealous Christmas partier out the ditch.

Mike told the operator that his father would call back.

When Jerry called back, he told the operator to connect him to the chief and she said,  “ ‘He can’t call you right now, he is down at the fire at the Ford garage,’ ” said Mike, re-telling the story from five decades ago.

The Lynch family lived near the water tower, and once they stepped outside, “the sky was glowing red,” said Mike.

“You could see the flames over the top of the trees,” said Pat Lynch, who co-owns a Ford dealership in Durant, Oklahoma.

Jerry, who purchased the dealership a few years before, was watching his livelihood, go up in flames.

“By the time we got down there, the whole front end was burned,” said Mike.

“There was not much that could be done at that point,” said Pat, Mike’s older brother.

“Of all the crazy things, I remember my Dad throwing snowballs on the fire. Why I would remember that, I have no idea.”

Most of the damage was limited to the front showroom and office area.

The structure, which stood for 50 years, was originally known as Northern Auto Company. Three new vehicles and seven other automobiles in the building were lost.

It went into the history books as “undetermined,” but “it had old wiring,” said Mike.

Pat believes the city condemned it the next day.

The front of the building was razed immediately, because of the danger to the public, and pushed toward the pile of debris away from South Third.

“Dad went out and bought a tractor with a bucket on the front and we proceeded to demolish the rest,” said Pat. “Dad, Mike and I, pretty much tore that building down.”

The fire forced Jerry to move the Ford dealership to its present home, and in 2014, the family will mark a positive milestone – 50 years at the same locatio

n. “He was into that building in eight months,” said Mike. “We moved in in the first part of August.” They were at the former nail factory, site of the current city garage, until the present building was completed.

With Mike’s son Brian, already part of the business and soon to take over ownership, it marks four generations of the Lynch family who have been selling vehicles in Rogers City. Jerry’s father, Jay came to Rogers City in the 1920s from Petoskey.

Jerry managed a Ford dealership in Gaylord before moving back to Rogers City in 1953. He purchased the Rogers City franchise in 1961.

Mike took over in 1974.