If my family has a spiritual home, it must be in Sister Lakes, Michigan, for that was the site of our many annual pilgrimages each summer, usually for two or sometimes three weeks. The tales from these vacations have been retold so many times that you can often hear a groan in the room (usually from a long suffering in-law) when someone decides to pop one open again. Some of those memories actually happened, though they have put on some weight in the retelling. Some sort of happened and have been happily distorted by the re-teller of the tale. And some probably never happened, having been reengineered in the minds of various family members about what should have happened or what they wish had happened. Although I have, at times, been in all three of those camps, I’ll try to keep my telling of this tale as accurate as I can.

Chicago is surrounded by many popular vacation lakes: Lake Geneva in Wisconsin, Cedar Lake in Indiana, the Chain of Lakes near the Wisconsin border, Michiana’s shoreline and the Michigan side of the Great Lake itself, to name only a few. Every family probably has its favorite and thousands of Chicagoans filled all of those cottages each summer, so I am sure that each of those families could tell their own version of a vacation story. The late, great PBS storyteller Jean Shepherd, author of the classic Christmas Story, wrote an unforgettable and seldom seen sequel entitled “Ollie Hopnoodle’s Haven of Bliss” and it touches many of the same summer vacation memories.

Our story was mostly Sister Lakes in Southwest Michigan, about 110 miles from the West Side of Chicago. Six small lakes surrounded by little frame cottages, many built in the thirties and forties. Their names were Little Crooked, Big Crooked, Dewey, Magician, Cable and Round Lake, all within a circle of no more than a few miles. Most of my memories are from Round Lake, where we rented from the Clancy family and a few from Little Crooked Lake, where we rented from the Hayes family. The vacation I am describing here was from about 1957, 1958, or 1959.

Mighty preparations.

Today most people would think nothing of driving 110 miles there and back on the same day, if necessary. I know I’ve done it a few times. But in the 50’s and 60’s the Interstate system of highways we take for granted today was in its infancy. 110 miles took about five hours, not the hour and forty give minutes it would take in an off-traffic period today.  Then, your car was “flying” at a whopping sixty miles per hour, where today eighty-two is the unofficial legal speed limit on the open road.

My mother and father prepared for those five hours as if we were embarking on a trans-oceanic voyage. My dad would have the 1955 Chevy wagon car tuned up, tires looked at, oil changed. That year, he had some friend of his hook up a do-it-yourself window washer, which consisted of a water bag that rode on an inside fender and a metal lever the driver could pull to wash the windshield. When fired, it shot over our windshield entirely and watered the window of the car behind us. We tried to keep from laughing.

My mother began planning meals for ten people as if there was no food for sale east of the Indiana State Line. Do the math for three weeks times three meals a day, factor in the limited refrigeration of the time, and you’ll see her challenge. Our mobile refrigeration consisted of a red metal Coca Cola cooler, and it amazed me how much she managed to fit in there.  And then there was clothing. We had one or two cloth suitcases, but everything else was in duffle bags, boxes, or gym bags.

All of this had to fit in one nine passenger wagon, augmented by the “carrier”, an aluminum deck with suction cups that rode on the roof and which no one really trusted to stay on the roof, but it did for years. Of course, it wouldn’t all fit. My father would enlist someone with a car, that year Frank and Mary O’Brien. Frank was a former fireman pensioned off from having fallen off a fire truck years earlier, and their two children were older than us, so they had the time and they were just giving, warm people by nature. The O’Brien’s were given some of the cargo load, plus one or two kids.

Launching the Mission

The Saturday morning when we left for vacation was the best morning this side of Christmas. Our own personal Wogan Family “Great Getting’ Up Morning”, as it might be called in the Old Testament (Book of Exodus, to be exact). We woke up on our own, early, got dressed, had a sweet roll from Schneider’s Bakery, a rare treat which my father had picked up that morning to mark this great day; it was also to hold us over until we arrived at a real breakfast, still several hours away. Our cousin, Billy, having been given a parole by his parents so that he could escape from his seven sisters, had been dropped off and was eager to put 100 miles between him and them.

My mother would grow more and more frustrated with the lack of cooperation she was getting. Finally, when we heard her say, “We’re Not Going!” we knew we were getting close to launch.

Luggage, boxes of food, bags of clothing, fishing poles, tackle box, golf clubs, dolls, beach toys, blankets and bedding, towels, comic books, and seven or eight children plus one cousin ready to board. My father had no intention of second guessing all these little bladders, so a mandatory bathroom stop was ordered before being assigned a seat.

In the Time Before Safety

It should be noted here that by current safety standards, my entire family should have been wiped out several times over on these trips. There were no seats belts installed in the car, my dad chain smoked his Salem’s out the window the whole way, various kids would stick heads and hands out windows until scolded back in, my mother would usually be holding one of the babies in her lap, and three of us rode in what we called the “poop deck”. This was a plywood bench my father had made by some fireman that could be inserted into the flat bed at the rear of the station wagon. It was attached to absolutely nothing and held in place by gravity and, well, us.

Because air conditioning for cars was still on the horizon, we would open the tailgate window and lock it in the “up” position. Three of us actually fought for the honor of traveling on this suicide bench, spending the entire trip making faces at the people in the car behind us (if it was the O’Brien’s, we behaved) and wondering what it said on the printed side of road signs we passed while looking backwards.

Once at the lake, I can’t recall that we ever owned even a single life jacket, except for a small red and yellow striped one in which a toddler could bob around. My brothers and I would sometimes row across the lake at night to catch frogs, with neither parent aware of our absence, our lack of flotation devices, or our lack of sanity. As long as you were in the rack by the time they got to bed, life was good.

Points of Interest along the route.

It was very important to my father that our little caravan go by his firehouse on Crawford (now Pulaski), Engine 95, or later Harrison St, Engine 113. Dad would slow down, honk a few times and wave, a big grin on his face. The other fireman came out from the apparatus floor to wave back and smile. I think some of them were happy for us, but most of them looked relieved that it was us and not them on this little journey. All they had to do was continue going about running into burning, exploding, or collapsing buildings now and again, a relatively easy choice by comparison.

On to the Singing Bridge. The Congress Street Bridge over the Chicago River sits just east of the old post office. As your tires meet the rippled steel that makes up the part of the bridge that can be opened for boat traffic, they change their noise to a sort of high pitched whine. We would wait for it, and then break into uneven sing-songy nonsense to mimic the tire noise. Great fun. My parents would look at each other, roll their eyes and smile at each other, as if to say “What a collection of idiots we’ve produced.”  A few years ago, the bridge was replaced, and lost its voice to some new kind of construction material. Nothing lasts forever, I guess.

You travelled by way of the soaring Skyway, then the Indiana Toll Road through the steel mills, then off to back roads for a few miles. After a few more miles, you could pick up the Michigan Freeway, the massive super highway under construction from the East Coast toward Chicago, growing closer each year, and now known as I- 90. When the bridges turned blue in color, you knew you were in Michigan.

Finally, near Stevensville, Michigan, we turned off into Ritter’s Restaurant. There we would unload and pile into the long table which awaited us, via my mother’s phone calls days before. Today I have grandsons, the youngest seven, who can sit in a restaurant, scan a menu, and order a meal with the practiced ease of a travelling salesman. Not so with us. We got two restaurant breakfasts per year, one at Easter and this one. My mother, always organized, had learned from our first trip here that it took us longer to order the food than it did for the restaurant to cook it. We would gaze at the menu and ponder its meaning, as if it were written in ancient Hebrew.  So she borrowed the menu from that first trip and the week before leaving, we placed our order with her. She would pull out the list of food selections for the whole group, neatly typed on her trusty Underwood manual typewriter, and hand it to the astonished waitress.

Exit 12 was Napier Avenue, and we began to get excited. You passed little crossings and hamlets like Spinks Corner and Coon’s Curve and migrant worker’s shacks until finally you crested a hill and Round Lake at last came into sight. Nerds that we were, we would cheer and break into applause. It still makes me smile when I crest that hill even today.

The cottage

Clancy’s Camp Geraldine was on the side of a hill facing the lake. It consisted of two buildings, each hosting two cottages, one up and one down. Marshall and Eleanor Clancy and their four sons spent the entire summer in one upper cottage. We thought they were the luckiest guys in the world. P.J. Clancy, the old undertaker from the west side, and his wife Minnie Bell, a true Southern Lady in voice and style and grace, occupied the other upper cottage. We rented the cottage below them.

The main lake road ran right past the doors of the upper cottages and the elder residents sat most of the time at street level on outdoor chairs, chatting, smoking, sometimes cooking, and after four o’clock or so, drinking. Upon our arrival, they would flock over to greet us, my Dad saying his hellos and my mother anxious to survey the inside of the cottage. As we all piled out, we were given standing orders not to go down the stairs empty handed, and also to drop our loads at the door, until my mother could figure out where every item was to be stowed. If the weather was warm, it was hard not to try to get a bathing suit on and hit the lake. Not before your stuff was stowed and not before the car was emptied.

Round Lake

The true heart of the vacation was the water. The water you splashed in, swam in, raced in, rowed over, skied over, fished in, and bathed in. Two hundred acres of water, only sixty feet at the deepest, usually weed choked beyond the beaches, and full of fish and turtles to catch. To look across that lake was always liberating for city kids, for the opposite shore seemed so far away. It did a visual number on you. Your big city life afforded you only a look into the window across the gangway or the house across the street or alley. The only obstructions breaking the water’s surface were the piers, the rowboats, and the white wooden rafts, floating on 55 gallon drums and anchored about twenty feet out from the shore; an early rung on the ladder to maturity was achieved when you could swim to the raft by yourself. And always the surface of the lake itself, still as glass in the early morning, so bright you adverted your eyes in the noonday sun, sometimes wild and surly during a storm.

Round Lake was surrounded by cottages, in some ways as tightly packed as the block of two flats we called home in Chicago, but different. There were wooden piers every twenty yards or so, countless rowboats, motorboats, pontoon boats, and little sailboats tied up to those piers. Almost every cottage had a floating raft, too, something kids could swim out to and play “king of the mountain” as a child and for moonlit romance when you were older.

Round Lake was also the death of sanitation for a few weeks. Our cottage contained only one bathroom with a single toilet and a washstand. No tub or shower. Bathing consisted of taking a bar of soap with you into the water, maybe some shampoo for the ladies, and cleaning up alongside the white wooden pier. My mother believed that kids who spent six to eight hours a day swimming, which was a typical warm weather day for us, had to be clean enough by default. I think she was right.

In Search of the Largemouth Bass

I had no idea what my sisters did for those weeks, but my brothers, cousin and I fished constantly, usually clad only in our bathing suits. The lake coughed up bluegill, sunfish, and perch and bullheads. The fish worked in shifts: daytime for the panfish and perch, then exclusively bullheads after dusk. Almost at any time of day and anywhere you dropped a line you could find fish, but our prize was the largemouth bass, the king of freshwater gamefish. We had a tackle box full of guaranteed bass killers, but invariably we grew too impatient and went back to the trusty gas-station- purchased night crawlers and a bobber. We caught some little bass here and there, the most notable of which might have been the one my brother Bill caught on an improbable rubber frog.  He had bought this pale green rubber abomination earlier that summer via mail order and we needled him and laughed at him for weeks. On the first cast, he caught a largemouth that weighed about two pounds, then a record for us. He became an insufferable “expert” for the rest of the summer.

How inexperienced we were as fishermen was pointed out to me one morning when Old Joe Hayes came off the lake as we got ready for church one Sunday. A relative of the Hayes family we knew from Crooked Lake, Joe went fishing only on certain days when the weather conditions were right. He started out before first light and was done by 8 a.m., using a method he called “spatting” which consisted of dangling an unlucky live white baby frog from the end of a twelve foot bamboo pole. He only fished in front of our cottage and maybe twenty or thirty yards in either direction, an area he called “bass lane”. He got out of his boat carrying a stringer full of five to six pound monster bass that I could only dream about catching.

Cold Weather Plans: Deer Forest, Driftwood, the Roller Rink, and the Bowling Alley.

There may be no greater challenge to parents than what to do when the weather turns too-cold in a too-small cottage full of too-bored children. One answer lay in nearby Coloma, Michigan. Deer Forest was a sort of demented amusement park built especially for those “too cold to swim” days. Its main attraction was a lightly wooded forest inside of a fenced-in enclosure full of small deer, ranging from fawns to yearlings. For five cents you could buy some dried corn in a Safe-T-Cone (a popular ice cream cone then) and walk into the enclosure. The deer would immediately swarm in and mob you, knowing you had food. If you held your cup of corn behind you, you would find out the deer already knew this trick and send one or more of their number behind you. Your cup of corn would disappear in one toothy deer gulp. Preschoolers would scream and grade schoolers giggled and laughed, as did parents watching their kids alternately laughing, crying, or shrieking. The deer didn’t care; they only understood free food.

Deer Forest had also never heard of the ASPCA. It featured caged displays such as the Dancing Chicken and the Piano Playing Duck, both live, both standing on metal plates that passed low voltage through their feet if they didn’t dance or play for you. They had all sorts of tired, tied up animals like ponies, lambs, and one honest to god ancient reindeer. They had a Santa’s Workshop in which you could meet with a perspiring Santa and add your Christmas wish to his book. One lady ahead of me in line had written that she hoped the owners would be jailed for creating this awful place.

Driftwood was within walking distance of our cottage, and hence a daily visit. It was a two story structure on the lake consisting of the owner’s apartment on top and one of the cheesiest gift shop-pinball hall-soda fountain-vacation sundries places you could ever hope to see. For me it represented illegal fireworks and comic books. It stands there today, having passed from owner to owner, but somehow always the same. It was always noisy with the sound of pinball machines, teenage music, and kids. I can still taste the ice cream.

The bowling alley and the roller rink were across the street from our cottage. The bowling alley was a late comer; the Ramona Roller Rink appeared to have been built before time existed, an old dried wooden construction, painted green and white. The roller rink was all about being a teenager, so we had no business there. Besides, only girls roller skated in our world.

There was another and sadder world intermingled, yet separate from all of this. We were too young to know or care much about the people we called “berry pickers”, but they were there. These were the migrant workers from Mexico who followed the crops; July and August found them in strawberry and blueberry country. We passed their low tarpapered shacks on the way in from the city, and we might see them washing clothes at the Laundromat, but beyond that, they stayed invisible. While we were families of blue collar workers, perhaps without a lot of material wealth to show for it, they were the true working poor.

We didn’t know that they couldn’t use the lake, nor were they welcome in the Silver Creek Catholic Church we attended, nor were they allowed in the bars or stores. Their children did not attend schools. You can find them toiling there still today, but the living conditions are a little better and the social barriers are mostly gone, reduced but not eliminated in the long struggle for equality and civil rights of the sixties, seventies, eighties and beyond.

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Tolstoy once wrote that “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” We were and still are a happy family, like most families, I suppose. Our individual and collective memories of those family times bind us together and give meaning to that happiness. My kids have their own memories from the same lakes in later years, but those memories belong mostly to them, as mine do to my brothers and sisters.

Round Lake, indeed the whole area of Sister Lakes seems to change more slowly than the rest of the world, certainly slower than bustling Chicago. The old red hay barn across the lake that framed so many long ago sunsets is finally itself gone now. Some of the humble pre-war cottages have been replaced by 6,000 square foot year-around “McMansions”. Some of the new powerboats are too big for the lake they are on.

But it does slowly change, and, I suppose, will someday go the way of the Singing Bridge. Still, the memories can make you smile and keep you young.