St. Joseph River

Riverfront Park in Buchanan will soon be getting some major improvements as city commissioners authorized a $619,000 project this week.

Speaking to commissioners Monday, city manager Tony McGee said with grants now awarded, the city can move forward with phases one and two of the project that seeks to address several basic needs that have limited the public's ability to fully use the park and access the St. Joseph River.

That will include a new boat launch, a refurbished skid pier.

It will also include a fully accessible ADA canoe and kayak launch, a boardwalk to get down with that, and some minor parking lot improvements as well as some other site improvements.

And so by the 1950 Milwaukee convention of our church body, they gave approval to pursue what it turns out is the largest construction project that our church has ever carried out.

And by 1953, they approved the site here in Fort Wayne, which was 191 acres along the St. Joseph River.

And they went about the process then of advertising for architects who would be interested in taking on such a project like this, and they had 18 firms that brought forth their credentials.

And out of that grouping, Eero Saarinen & Associates was selected.

Uh, you know, I remember just sitting...

Again, some of my earliest memories sitting in a deer blind with my dad, uh, along the St. Joseph River in southern Michigan, and so it's, it's been a passion, uh, that I've, I've followed.

You know, where we grew up, there really wasn't much for public lands, uh, just again, rural farm country in Michigan.

But then I went to college up in northern Wis- uh, there in college for ... wanting to seek out these wild places and I came to find that's where the best hunting and fishing was, you know, that you're getting away from where, uh, you know, where, where people are kind of driving and hunting just off the roads or just fishing off the roads, that when you hike a little bit further, the hunting and the fishing's a little bit better.

Twenty years before that bloody fingerprint ended up on a bedroom phone in Three Rivers, Kathy Sue Swartz was born on May 24, 1969, in Mendon, Michigan.

Mendon sits on a bend of the St. Joseph River in the southwest corner of the state, about 20 miles south of Kalamazoo.

and a short drive from the Indiana border.

It is the kind of place where everybody knows everybody.

She just did it.

Before Kathy's senior year, her family moved to Three Rivers, a slightly larger town just up the road with a population of around 8,000 people.

Three Rivers sits where the St. Joseph River meets the Rocky and Portage Rivers.

It was founded in the 1830s and grew up around paper mills and small factories.

And the boy was able to get a hold of the gun.

Meanwhile, in Niles, where we're heard in the great southwest of Michigan and WSJM, the bodies of two women have been found in a submerged vehicle in the St. Joseph River.

Their clothing matches the description of two South Bend mothers.

Vanessa Bautista and Alexa Navarro were reported missing on Sunday.