Unless you have an eagle eye, you
wouldn't have noticed it. But Phil was on a national TV show.
Phil, of course, is the late Marquette
legend Phil Niemisto, who passed away almost two years ago. (And, as
a side note, I really can't believe it's been two years. But that
has nothing to do with this story, so...) The TV show is “Joe Pera
Talks With You” on Adult Swim. The show is set in Marquette, and
one of the cool things about it is that every episode that's not shot
here has a shout-out to Marquette in one way or another. Sometimes,
you have to look hard to find them, but they're there.
I've had five or six episodes of the
new season on my DVR, and I finally got around to watching the one
from last month where Joe spends the 10 minutes of the show waiting
for his grandmother at the hair salon so they can go to a fish fry.
Yes, that's the actual plot of the show. Don't knock it until you
watch it.
Anyway, the little shout-out to
Marquette came early in the episode, when you could see a copy of a
Mining Journal in the salon--
It's there in lower right hand corner.
And I actually knew which edition of the Mining Journal it was, if
only because of the color blue, which you can (hopefully) see in this
zoomed in image--
That color, which has someone dressed
in the color we jokingly refer to as “Phil Blue”, was taken the
day they unveiled his statue in the downtown Pocket Park. This day, in fact, captured in almost the exact same picture by me--
That's why I'm thinking the newspaper
may have been placed there on purpose. They shot the episode last
year, in the summer of 2019. The statue unveiling (and the newspaper
article commemorating it) were from October of 2017. It may have
been totally coincidental, but why would you have a Marquette
newspaper (from 18 months prior) lying around to use on a TV
production shot in another state?
You probably wouldn't, unless you
wanted to use it, right?
I mean, I have no idea if that's what
happened, or if it was just the most random of coincidences. Either
way, I'm just glad Phil was able to make it onto the national stage,
if only for the most fleeting of seconds and if only even just a few
people noticed it.
He deserved it.
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