Remarkable people rarely dash for center stage. It is not due to absence of personality, but rather the value they place upon their goals and the means through which those goals are achieved.

Verna Grahek Mize grew up in Houghton County on the shores of Lake Superior. Born in 1913, she graduated from Calumet High School in 1940.

She married a Marine and moved to a Maryland suburb. She worked for government agencies as a secretary, including the Navy Bureau of Aeronautics and the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Association in Washington, D.C.

Over the course of 15 years, Mize would tirelessly advocate for the health of Lake Superior.

“It’s a national treasure…it’s the purest, most beautiful body of water in the world. It’s regal. It’s beautiful. It has moods like a person. It’s majestic and pure and immense. To me, it’s like a mirror held to God,” Mize told the Detroit Free Press in August 1981.

Through her efforts to eradicate harmful pollution from the lake, she would visit the highest halls of government and earn the title “First Lady of Lake Superior.”

In the late 1960s on vacation to the Upper Peninsula she was made aware of changes taking place on Lake Superior. It had, like all the Great Lakes, been impacted by industrialization on its shores.

The complexion of the lake was altered. This was not the clear blue waters of Mize’s childhood.

The sight of the lake she noted in one interview made her cry for beauty as a child, and in her older age “when we drive around that bend where you can see the lake for the first time, I still get goose flesh.”

Friends alerted her to the gray plumes of mine tailings from an operation in Silver Bay, Minnesota, run by the Reserve Mining Company.

Iron mining processes required pulverizing the extracted minerals. Once the iron was recovered the excess dust left from the process was no longer needed.

Over 67,000 tons of mining refuse were dumped daily into the lake.

The plumes stretched for miles at times and impacted the fisheries and communities that relied on the lake’s resources.

For two years, Mize dutifully wrote letters to city officials, congressional representatives, chambers of commerce, conservation groups and anyone who could help her combat and put an end to this harmful practice.

Her deliberate efforts were probably seen as pesky. They gained little traction and netted polite replies of disinterest.

The mining company was not interested in altering their practices and refuted Mize’s claims. Despite the lack of interest from others in her pet project, she persevered.

“Sometimes I wonder how in the world I have the courage to do what I have done. I really think that if someone said, ‘Verna, you’ll have to sacrifice your life for the lake,’ I’d do it. What’s my life compared with the lake?” she told the Detroit Free Press.

In 1970, as Mize prepared a petition to send to President Nixon, she amassed more than 5,000 signatures over 10 days, a Minneapolis Star Tribune article from August 1973 reported.

In her spare time, vacations, evenings and weekends, Mize would set her sights on saving Lake Superior.

She garnered national media attention and the support of Great Lakes lawmakers.

Reserve officials began to lobby their representatives and government buddies, ensuring them that their practice had no effect on the world’s largest freshwater body. They even brought samples of clear water. Mize followed in their footsteps and brought samples of water that contained taconite tailings.

One article from March 15,1971, in the Free Press regarded her sample as “dirty milk.”

The difference was clear. The water was not.

Mize’s mission gained traction as Great Lakes state politicians pushed the EPA to file a lawsuit against Reserve. By 1972, the Justice department had filed suit against Reserve’s polluting practices.

During the trial, experts researching the minerals discovered asbestos particles contained in the taconite tailings. These asbestos particles would find their way into community drinking supplies and eventually a court order would put the pollution practices of the Reserve Mining Company to an end in 1980.

That same year, the City of Houghton dedicated a roadside park in Mize’s honor. It was initially located across the street from the home in which Mize was born, but has since been moved onto the shore of Portage Lake just East of Kestner Waterfront Park on Lakeshore Drive. The park features a plaque dedicated to the “First Lady of Lake Superior” and a specimen of native float copper and mining debris. Mize was inducted into the Michigan Women’s Hall of Fame in 2017. And she is the namesake of the annual Verna Mize triathalon in Houghton.

The Michigan Tech archives house a robust collection of Mize’s Save Lake Superior Campaign which features correspondence, testimony and other materials that played a part in her efforts.

Mize’s commitment to Lake Superior made changes in the governance of one of the world’s most vital freshwater resources.

Mize passed away in 2013, but is remembered locally through her park, the triathlon and in the deep clean blue of Lake Superior.