Most gods are old. Ancient, even, handed down over centuries. The Upper Peninsula’s snow god was born in 1970. His name is Heikki Lunta, he lives somewhere in the backwoods south of Houghton, and when the snow will not come, Yoopers still call on him to dance it down out of the sky. Here is the part they do not always tell you: he was invented in about twenty minutes by a radio ad salesman who needed it to snow for a race.
The winter of 1970 was going wrong in the Copper Country. The Range Snowmobile Club up in Atlantic Mine had a big race set for early December, and the Keweenaw, a place that normally drowns in a couple hundred inches of snow a year, was bare. The local radio station, WMPL in Hancock, was sponsoring the race and getting nervous. So one of its salesmen, a Finnish-American named Dave Riutta, sat down and wrote a song. He called it the Heikki Lunta Snow Dance Song, invented a backwoods Finnish snow god to sing about, and put it on the air. Then he waited.
The snow god named after a country singer
The name is the best part. Riutta was a fan of the country legend Hank Snow, so he simply translated the name into Finnish. Heikki is Henry, or Hank. Lunta is snow. The Upper Peninsula’s mythical snow deity is, quite literally, Hank Snow. It is exactly the kind of joke a Yooper would build a whole legend around, and it stuck. People started swearing that if you played the song three times in a row, the snow would come. One woman who worked on the Mackinac Bridge reportedly kept requesting it on the radio, hoping the bridge would close and she could take the day off.
It worked a little too well
The song hit the airwaves and became an instant local hit. And then it started to snow. It snowed, and it snowed, and it kept snowing, until there was so much of it that the snowmobile race, the whole reason Heikki was born, had to be postponed. Riutta got the blame for burying the Copper Country. So he did the only reasonable thing and wrote a sequel, Heikki Lunta, Go Away, begging his own creation to knock it off. The two songs went out on a 45, one on each side, a prayer for snow backed with a plea to make it stop. The story got picked up across the country and even made The Today Show and The Tonight Show.
He never left
More than fifty years later, Heikki Lunta is woven right into Yooper culture. The comedy band Da Yoopers cut their own Heikki song. The Finnish reggae group Conga Se Menne worked him into a track about the sauna. The U.P.’s big winter blowout in Negaunee is named the Heikki Lunta Winterfest, and Hancock throws a Finnish-American celebration called Heikinpäivä every January where he is a guest of honor. Dave Riutta, for the record, still lives in the Copper Country and still plays music. Nobody can quite agree on what Heikki looks like, though the going theory is a bearded backwoodsman in a plaid shirt and wool pants, which is to say, he looks like half the guys at any U.P. gas station in January.
It is a very Yooper kind of miracle: a homemade god, named as a joke, who answered a prayer so hard he had to be begged to stop. More than half a century on, when the flakes are slow to fall up north, somebody is always ready to play the song one more time. Just maybe not three times in a row.
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Sources: Wikipedia ‘Heikki Lunta’; Atlas Obscura; Keweenaw Convention and Visitors Bureau; Center for the Study of Upper Midwestern Cultures.
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