A Glen Lake Honeymoon, 1942
By F. Josephine Arrowood
Sun contributor
A couple planning to wed these days has a huge and bewildering variety of decisions to make, from the color of the bridesmaids’ gowns to the reception location to the wording of their marriage vows. Last but not least in the wedding sequence comes the honeymoon: to the modern mind’s eye a flawlessly beautiful and luxurious idyll, attended by waiters, concierges and the ubiquitous credit card.
In 1942, life offered very different choices for a young couple in love, about to embark on their great journey of discovery, as November swept to a wintry close against the darkness of World War Two. Their honeymoon — rustic, hand-to-mouth, and nearly buried in the snowdrifts of an isolated cabin — set the tone for a long and fruitful marriage that continues today between two energetic, creative individuals.
Ben Bricker, 84, grew up in the same comfortable Illinois town of Winnetka as his future wife Ananda. His father owned a bakery, and she was the daughter of two artists and illustrators in the leafy suburb north of Chicago. The children often gathered with a group of schoolmates and siblings at the local skating rink, and had been friends since meeting in fourth grade at Horace Mann Elementary School.
When the pair married in November of 1942, Ananda was studying landscape architecture at Groton, Mass.; Ben had recently joined the Air Force, but had not yet been called to active duty. After a brief ceremony in Boston, bursting with college football revelers (Boston vs. Brown), the couple barely managed to book a room for the night at a nearby hotel.
“The clerk never even looked up,” Ben remembers with a laugh. “He just said all the rooms were taken. Then he did look up, said, ‘Oh, just married, huh?’ and somehow found us a room for the night.”
Several weeks later, Ananda’s college semester ended, and they decided to honeymoon in northern Michigan, where her parents, Frank and Alice Dillon, had built a cottage on Little Glen Lake. From Groton, they took trains to Chicago and Manitowoc, Wisc., where the ferry to Elberta, Mich. awaited.
“When we landed, it was snowing heavily,” Ben recalls. “It was early, early in the morning, barely light, and we had to walk clear around Betsie Bay into Frankfort. Then we started up old M-22 [the state highway]. There were no cars on the road — remember, there was gas rationing because of the war. Finally, a mail truck went by. It stopped and we ran up. The driver offered to take us nearly to Empire.”
From Empire, Ben and Ananda continued their trek to the north shore of Little Glen along M-109 (Dune Highway), which had been built in the early 1930s. They arrived at the tiny, uninsulated brown cabin that was to be their honeymoon nest for the next two weeks, and the intrepid pair got to work. They decided to close off most the small dwelling to conserve heat, and sleep on a cot in the living room.
“We brought the woodstove in and hooked it up to the chimney. It was made of sheet iron, and didn’t hold the heat in very well. Every night, we loaded it up, and even if I got up in the night to add wood, our boots would be frozen to the floor in the morning.”
The cottage had electricity, a pitcher pump for water on the kitchen counter, and a simple, wood-fired little cook stove that fit into the chimney, “but we only used it once, because it burned everything black,” Ben laughs. “We had an outhouse, too. Once one of us left the door open all night, and the next morning it was full of snow.
“It was snowing all the time,” he remembers, “ but it was so, so beautiful — deep and fluffy, like a storybook picture, and it went all the way up to the windows. We had a toboggan, and dragged it to Steffen’s in Glen Arbor for groceries,” a distance of four miles each way by road.
“The first time, we decided to go straight across Little Glen, which was very shallow and had frozen, and up over the Alligator. This was not a good idea,” he exclaims, as the two then struggled through steep glacial terrain, thick woods, and heavy underbrush hidden by drifts with their loaded sled.
He reflects with amazement on “the energy it took just to survive! But it was jolly — all the way through, we never took ourselves too seriously. We had a good time; it was a party. We did a lot of hiking, and took the toboggan over to the Bear,” the huge Dune Climb that lies across the highway from the cottage that still rests on Little Glen’s shore.
Eventually, the real world recalled Ben and Ananda, and they set off early one snow-laden morning to catch the ferry, about 25 miles away, which would carry them back to establish their married life together.
As before, the highway was virtually empty of traffic. “At one point, a snowplow went by, and we had to run into the ditch to avoid it,” Ben recounts. “We got into Frankfort early in the afternoon, hours before the ferry was to leave, so we went to a movie.
“When we came out of the movie, we realized how late it was; the ferry was leaving in about 10 minutes, on the other side of the bay. We got down onto the ice and walked across Betsie Bay to the shore near the dock, and got our ride,” back to Manitowoc and Chicago.
In the 65 years since Ben and Ananda’s winter honeymoon, their lively can-do spirit and many adventures together have included raising four children; careers in the arts and arts education; studying eastern spirituality; rallying around social justice issues; living in far-flung places like Arizona, Mexico, Kalamazoo and Tanzania; and co-founding the Glen Arbor Arts Association with several other area artists. About 20 years ago, they moved permanently to the small brown cottage on Little Glen, where they continue to build strong family and community ties.
Ben’s labors of love include teaching art as a volunteer at Glen Lake High School, demonstrating his blacksmithing prowess at the Port Oneida Fair each August, and creating original jewelry pieces in silver and semi-precious stones, which he sells at the Forest Gallery in Glen Arbor. Ananda’s poignant journey through the shadowy, trackless world of Alzheimer’s disease has not diminished her intense love of nature, and the couple continues to share long walks through Glen Lake’s four seasons of woods, fields, and shores.