Even growing up in England, Peter Noone dreamed of a day he would surpass the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and Dave Clark Five by playing Dowagiac.

It showed May 15 when he could finally cross that long-awaited concert off his British re-Invasion bucket list.

A consummate entertainer, “Herman” performed Hermits hits, Monkees, Rolling Stones, Hollies and Dave Clark Five, dancing and even impersonating such diverse artists as Johnny Cash, Tom Jones and Mick Jagger.

Dowagiac Middle School Chieftains of the Year include David Brogan, Gabriel Kasper, Nicholas Bogen, Madison Proshwitz, Cassidy Evans and Elizabeth Stockwell.

They’re usually black birds, but Dowagiac gets a Red Raven — “where home and fashion come together” — in the former theater, Woolworth’s and Suite Dreams building. Red is Cheryl Sherman’s favorite color.

The Michigan Legislature honors Tommy James May 25.

Dowagiac’s 2010-2011 fiscal year budget starting Oct. 1 eliminates 2 1/2 more jobs and addresses crumbling neighborhood streets with the Lyons administration’s attempt to “size our city government so that we live within our means” while Michigan recovery lags.

JUNE

Dowagiac Board of Education completes the first round of six superintendent interviews over three nights June 3 in the middle school media center.

One of three offered a second interview is Dr. Mark Daniel, principal of Leo, Ind., Junior/Senior High School in the Fort Wayne area.

“Your city excites me,” the community partnership builder says. “I see opportunity and potential.”

The school board June 21 offers the 13-year principal of a Blue Ribbon school the opportunity to lead Dowagiac to the “next level” in his first superintendency.

Dowagiac’s 146th graduation June 6 coincides with tornado damage in Cass and Berrien counties confirmed by the National Weather Service.

Damage was concentrated outside Dowagiac along M-62 between Dead Man’s Hollow and Lindy’s going toward Cassopolis.

There were also pockets of damage on M-51 South in the vicinity of Imperial Furniture and along Cherry Grove Road near Southwestern Michigan College and on Peavine Street.

NWS released a statement saying an EF1 tornado began a half-mile southwest of SMC and traveled three miles east-southeast, ending near M-62.

Larry Schmidt for a decade guided the Pathfinders Alternative and Adult Education Program which graduates 50 June 7 at SMC’s Mathews Center East.

SMC summer enrollment is up 37 percent.

Union High School’s Class of 2010 celebrates graduation at an Ohio water park.

Patrick Hamilton second grader DaShawn Brooks is shocked when a “big, slimy, slippery” fish falls from the sky onto the playground.

Kelly (Scherer) and Jerry Casey start their 10th season operating Wicks’ Apple House, which itself observes its 60th anniversary.

Dowagiac Rotary Club 2009-2010 President Cathy Merrill wraps up her reign by being selected a Paul Harris Fellow for community service.

Cody Carpenter, 18, had just finished his junior year at DUHS immersed in vocal music and volunteer work with Fine Arts Boosters when, at a Sister Lakes cookout, he saved a 43-year-old Portage man’s life with the Heimlich maneuver he learned in Linda O’Keefe’s class.

Cass County Road Commission’s 2010 paving season is underway, with 85 projects totaling $2.8 million to be completed by the third week of September.

Arden Withers, Michigan’s top transportation supervisor in 2001, retires June 30 after 24 years with Lewis Cass Intermediate School District and 22 years with Cassopolis before that. Dowagiac’s Kevin Kelm divides his time to take on bus duties.

Vietnam veteran Gregg Greenwood June 22 wins Town and Country Garden Club’s Dowagiac Beautification Contest. Jo Lyn Smiley is second, Elaine Grady third.

Thanks to the generosity of Norman and Rose (Rezeau) Webster, Decatur’s Webster Memorial Library, 200 N. Phelps St., opened its doors to the public 50 years ago on June 29, 1960. Today it’s the headquarters of Van Buren District Library.

Barbara Laing’s family June 22 sold Arnold Transit Co. at Mackinac Island, a business the Browns owned since 1921.

Five of the six participants in SMC Educational Talent Search Fire Science Academy are female.

A stormy June cost Cass County Road Commission $74,885.

June 18 it responds to 40 calls for trees down across roads.

JULY

Garry Marko, general foreman, marks 30 years with auto supplier Creative Foam.

Co-workers joke he came with the Cupples building on Rudy Road. Almost. Creative Foam moved here from Illinois in July 1979. Marko, of Decatur, hired in June 1980.

Don Woodhouse, a Rotarian since 1996 and president in 2003-2004, July 1 becomes 2010-2011 president.

Former Dowagiac resident Shannon (Higginbotham) Pokrandt, who attended Union High School with the Class of 1983, has lived in Pensacola, Fla., since the summer of 1997, after she left the Navy.

She’s a deckhand on a 23-foot boat skimming oil slick washing up on the beaches half a block from her home in the Panhandle from BP crude gushing into the Gulf of Mexico. She lives just 10 miles from Alabama. “This stuff is so thick, it’s in the air. It smells horrible … I can feel it on my skin. You know it’s there.”

Rick “Pellet Gun” Krause, 56, talks of retiring and giving other cherry pit spit competitors a shot at his throne after winning his 16th international title on his knees.

Cass County Sheriff Joe Underwood hasn’t taken to wearing bib overalls with a four-acre garden to cultivate. Of course, he’s not personally pulling weeds, planting or watering the corn, green beans and other vegetables growing in his name in Jefferson Township. There are three jail inmates who take care of that about three times a week, overseen by Larry Malsch, former Dowagiac councilman, county commissioner and Porter Township supervisor.

Dr. Mark Daniel dons orange for his July 6 debut as Dowagiac school superintendent. He will no longer need his purple and white clothes from Indiana.

July 7, Cass County’s hottest day of the year, proved its saddest, with four killed in two crashes. A car collides with two motorcycles on Baron Lake Road near Korn Street in Howard Township in the first double fatality.

Then two men, the driver and rear passenger, died in a Volkswagen struck almost in front of the Newberg Township fire station in Jones.

Dustin Downey is easy to identify at Dowagiac Rotary Club July 8 being the only one at Elks Lodge 889 wearing a sword. A blacksmith, Downey makes chain mail, the mesh worn in the 1500s as defensive armor. Father Rick Swanson of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church tries on chain mail before departing Dowagiac for Stowe, Vermont.

Beckwith Theatre presents “The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee” to rave reviews.

Fun Fest/Summer in the City, Dowagiac’s oldest festival, turns 25 — or as long as Kay Gray has worked at what is now the district library.

Purple bows blanket the town for the July 17-18 Relay for Life at APEX behind DUHS.

Former Dowagiac resident Dillon “Matt” Dalton and his brother, Dusty, knew a softer side of mercurial New York Yankees owner George Steinbrenner, who died at 80, nine days after his July 4 birthday.

So might Dowagiac, had their father, former major league pitcher Tom Dalton, persuaded Steinbrenner to attend a Rotary Club luncheon.

To the Dalton brothers, the shipbuilder from Cleveland who became a “Seinfeld” character was the humble father of their Culver Military Academy baseball teammate.

“I think Culver was his refuge,” Matt said.

Peace Temple celebrates Versie Flake’s 50th anniversary as pastor.

He and Birdie are both from Tennessee, but met in Benton Harbor.

Retired school superintendent Larry Crandall celebrates the 150th British Open by recalling for Dowagiac Rotarians when he played St. Andrews in Scotland for his 60th birthday in 2009. His “love affair with golf” began in Bangor in Van Buren County, tagging along behind his grandpa at 8.

Behnke’s Paint and Floor Covering, 202 W. Railroad St. since a 1972 move into a former Lindsley Lumber Co. building, closes after operating since May 1961.

Sgt. Mike Heidenreich worked at Behnke’s for 30 years, following his father, Don, who had been a Chicago firefighter. The only place Heidenreich has been longer is Dowagiac Police Department, 32 years.

The 49-year-old business started on Commercial Street with a $2,000 lon from an aunt and uncle. Founder Bill Behnke tripled its size with the move.

A huge turnout on a hot day July 16 was indicative of the inclusive approach Atrium Centers of Columbus, Ohio, took in rebuilding the former Dowagiac Nursing Home, which shocked the community when it closed abruptly three years ago.

With a large advisory board and former employees back in uniform, many already feel ownership in The Timbers of Cass County.

Mayor Don Lyons is joined at 4 o’clock by politicians and civic leaders for a blue ribbon-cutting in the courtyard of the 108-bed skilled nursing care and rehabilitation facility during a five-hour grand opening.

Visitors park at such a distance that they are ferried to festivities in golf carts and shuttle buses while police direct traffic.

Larry Seurynck, a former teacher who operates Wood Fire Italian Trattoria, July 19 is elected president of the Dowagiac Board of Education, with Michelle Helmuth as vice president, Stacy Leversen as secretary and Mark Dobberstein as treasurer.

Also joining the board from the May 4 election is Cassopolis graduate Julia Smith, who succeeds 12-year board member Bill Lawrence.

Sister Lakes Streetscape, similar in tax-capturing concept to the Downtown Development Authority (DDA) which revitalized Dowagiac in the early 1990s and Edwardsburg’s Uptown effort, crafts a 20-year economic development plan.

Rick Snyder brings his campaign for governor to SMC July 26.

Rev. R. Paul Doherty, pastor of Dowagiac’s First United Methodist Church from 1987 until he retired in 2004, dies July 26 due to complications from cancer treatment. He was 72.

Kyle Miller, a Niles graduate attending Michigan State University who garnered state and national accolades as a Cassopolis FFA member, tells Cass County Planning Commission July 28, days before the 159th fair, that agri-terrorism should be a rural concern because production is “spread out, yet intertwined.”

Lynnea (Walker) Ferrier, a 2005 DUHS graduate who has been teaching for nine years, opens Let’s Dance and Company studio at 113 Pennsylvania Ave., the former Curtis TV.

AUGUST

Fourteen Cass lakes are infested with zebra mussels — third worst in Michigan behind Oakland and Livingston counties.

Victoria Toney, 15, of Niles, exhibits the grand champion market hog in Cassopolis Aug. 4.

Beckwith Theatre Director Rich Frantz reprises the 2006 DUHS comedy “Over the River and Through the Woods” with adults.

Lt. Brent Peterson, Dowagiac’s 1999 salutatorian, who returned home from Afghanistan in April, is awarded the Bronze Star medal Aug. 6.

He and his wife, Sarah (Fox), Miss Dowagiac 1999, live in California.

Niles’ most famous rocker returns home Aug. 17 for Tommy James Day and receives the key to the city.

Chamber of Commerce’s car show, Rod and Roll, turns 20 Aug. 21.

Andy Badner of Cassopolis wins Best of Show from 127 vehicles with his red 1967 Ford Fairlane.

Miss Dowagiac Katie Haneberg bestows the first Queen’s Choice award on a 1967 Volkswagen deluxe station wagon owned by Susie Lucas from Allegan.

After 16 years, 2008 DUHS graduate Brooke Lamb bows out of showing dogs at the Cass County Fair in a big way — by being the first to receive a towering travel trophy sponsored by East Shore Animal Hospital, where 15-year dog superintendent Carrie Wagley works.

Not only does Arminda Hershberger, 17, of Cassopolis. share a name with the Arminda M. Mesko Memorial Award for grand champion cake exhibitor at the Cass County Fair, she lives in her house on Kelsey Lake Street. That’s because Arminda Mesko was her great-grandmother. Before the cake award was named for her, Mrs. Mesko’s claim to fame was being the fair’s first grand marshal in 1981. She died in January 1992.

Royalty reigning over the fair include: Steven Butler, king; Kayla Green, queen; Kyle Dufour, first runner-up; and Rachael Kidman, first runner-up.

Tiffany Rogers of Niles, the beef representative, wins the Showmanship Sweepstakes. In 2009, when he was state FFA president, she qualified with sheep, then added two more showmanship titles in beef and draft horses, but lost to goat representative Brooke Ruggles, 20, who also won at 13 and qualified in 2007, the year she graduated from Three Rivers High School.

Larry Cole won the fifth annual bragging rights as Cass County’s best Backyard Chef, with Vicki Kocsis reserve champion.

There is a pilot project for beef feeder steers at the fair.

Miss Cass/St. Joseph County 2011 is Lindsey Stoeckinger of Edwardsburg, with Jennifer Frayer of Edwardsburg as first runner-up and 2009 DUHS graduate Olivia File of Cassopolis as second runner-up.

Supreme Court Justice Bob Young visits Cassopolis Aug. 13 to meet with local Republicans at a Diamond Lake picnic at Darlene Lowe’s Emerald House.

Dowagiac Board of Education Aug. 16 hires Gretchen Hart of Eau Claire as Sister Lakes Elementary School principal. She has eight years of Michigan administrative experience in Niles and taught in England and in Spain.

A former Baptist church, Pokagon United Methodist Church between Dowagiac and Niles gets new siding.

Jonathan Franzen, who will be speaking in Dowagiac May 14, is the first living author to appear on Time magazine’s cover since Stephen King in 2000.

Time names his fourth novel, “Freedom,” the No. 1 fiction work of 2010.

The author of “The Corrections” also won the 2001 National Book Award.

Chieftain Marching Band unveils its theme song Aug. 12 for new Superintendent Dr. Mark Daniel during band camp.

Director C.J. Brooks arranges a majestic version of the Chieftain fight song, “On Dowagiac,” to go with the Styx fall field show.

The band’s new marching home is at APEX.

Groner Funeral Home on Main Street is becoming a community center under ACTION (All Churches Together in One Network), where volunteers meet three times a week to work.

Thirty-three business owners sign an Aug. 3 letter City Council acts on Aug. 9 to extend parking and vehicle ordinance allowable hours to park in the central district from two hours to three. City Manager Kevin Anderson says a recent survey by police shows the number of parking spaces downtown “appears to be sufficient.”

Council’s First Ward representatives, Lori Hunt and Junior Oliver, vote against proposed water/sewer rate ordinance amendments that would cost an average customer $7 a month. Coupled with the absence of Third Ward Councilman Dr. Charles Burling, the 3-2 margin means a loss for the time being of the first such rate hike in two years.

City Clerk Jim Snow welcomes “Sailing Faith” author Gregg Granger to Rotary Club Aug. 5. The former hardware store owner spent 4 1/2 years, from November 2003 to May 2008, circumnavigating the globe on a 56-foot boat with his wife and three children.

Grangers stayed in Sydney, Australia, long enough to receive “souvenir” library cards, but their two favorite places proved to be Indonesia and Yemen among 38 nations, including such “Survivor” locales as Vanuatu, Borneo and The Marquesas.

Gov. Jennifer Granholm Aug. 17 announces that Premier Tool and Die Cast Corp.’s Dowagiac plant is one of nine companies being helped to grow by the Michigan Economic Development Corp. (MEDC).

Premier, based in Berrien Springs, plans to invest $3.2 million to establish a new zinc and aluminum die cast and assembly operation in Dowagiac. The project is expected to create up to 179 total jobs, including 100 directly at the company.

Crystal Springs United Methodist Camp celebrates its 150 anniversary with concerts by ApologetiX (That Christian Parody Band) Aug.20, singer/songwriter Ken Medema Aug. 21 and a church family picnic and revival service Aug. 22, all in the 1890 Tabernacle.

The first band reunion Aug. 21 at Wounded Minnow Saloon is a hit, with Norman Vance coming over from Coldwater. He’s one of six directors in attendance, along with R.E. Bowling, Byron Anderson, Richard Bressler, Tom Stansifer and current Band Director C.J. Brooks. The reunion aimed at classes 1960-1973.

A $3.2 million renovation and expansion of the 1968 A.C. Kairis Building is unveiled with ideal weather Aug. 22. “Al” Kairis’s widow, Jan, 90, of Edwardsburg, was appointed to his seat in 1985 and has now served on the Board of Trustees for 25 years, including secretary since 1991, attending an estimated 850 meetings without pay.

City Council Aug. 23 accepts the Council on Aging’s $30,000 offer for a senior center in the former KFC building.

Carl L. Whitt, M.D., is officially welcomed to Dowagiac with Borgess Lee Medical Group Aug. 24 with a reception at Wood Fire. The former Second Baptist Church pastor practiced medicine in Niles for 25 years and is originally from Fort Wayne, Ind.

Jellyfish are found in Dewey Lake.

Five municipalities, the City of Dowagiac and Wayne, Keeler, Silver Creek and Pokagon townships, and eight fire departments, attend a workshop at Southwestern Michigan College Aug. 28 with Phil Kouwe of North Carolina to explore ways they can cooperate.

A choir of 90 children fills SMC’s stage in the Dale A. Lyons Building Aug. 28 for gospel singing, raps and acrobatic break dancing against guns and violence and for girls saving themselves for marriage.

“We’re trying to instill family back into our community,” said Bonita Mitchell, whose husband, Kevin, pastors Mt. Zion Missionary Baptist Church. “Today is the day we start making a difference in our community.” Second Baptist Church and the Rev. Tyrone Pace, pastor, sponsor the “Cherish Your Life” musical.

Former Dowagiac resident (Class of 1955) Ron Weaver, senior producer of “The Bold and The Beautiful,” the world’s most-watched daily drama seen in more than 100 countries by 37 million people, becomes an author with publication of “Soul Mate.”