“You can’t go home again,” according to author Thomas Wolfe. I say Oh! Yes! You can … If you lived in Glen Arbor for 21 happy years! So we return each summer for two months of tender loving care from so many friends. This happy reunion in this happy place is an annual reminder of lives well-lived in a naturally beautiful environment.
The 18th annual Sleeping Bear Dune Climb concert will take place Sunday, July 10, at 7 p.m. Imagine a beautiful summer’s evening at the foot of the Dune Climb in the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore, hundreds of families enjoying their pre-concert picnics and then a musical program provided by artists of national stature: this is the magical mixture which has filled audiences with warm memories every year since the first Dune Climb concert in 1998. The setting is magnificent and the music is even better. The concert at the Dune Climb is presented annually by the Glen Arbor Art Association and is free to the public. Because of the unique venue and incomparable music it routinely draws a large audience.
Singer-songwriter-instrumentalist John Kumjian’s new CD, “Vulnerable,” is particularly poignant in light of his recent health scare. The popular “Mr. K,” as he’s known to hundreds of kids he taught at Glen Lake School, nearly died on the operating table two years ago.
His work is washing windows, but his passion is mushrooms. His dream is to grow them commercially. Cluckey meets me at Art’s Bar on Lake Street in Glen Arbor on a muggy May morning. He’s just come from washing the windows at the Bethlehem Lutheran Church across the street. By reputation and in person, he’s the Glen Arbor version of legendary Johnny Appleseed, a quintessential backwoodsman with good skills, good stories, and palpable integrity, a great window washer and a gifted mushroom finder.
Since the Lanphier Observatory was built 40 years ago during the bicentennial year of 1976, visitors to the Glen Lake area and the Leelanau School have oohed and aahed at the wonders of the universe they can see through a 14-inch Celestron Schmidt-Cassegranian telescope.
Benzie County natives Ethan Przekaza and Meg Doby — the latest in our occasional series on northern Michigan boomerangs — are exceptions to Michigan’s brain drain. Earlier this year they moved back from Colorado, bought a house in nearby Beulah and landed work in March at Matt and Katy Wiesen’s Crystal River Outfitters in Glen Arbor.
Bay Wear celebrates three generations and 25 years By Sue Mabee Jameson Sun contributor The rule was that your chin had to reach above the counter before you could start working. When I was a child, my dad and his brother, Richard, had 13 “Jumpin Jeans” stores north of Detroit. In 1975, when I was […]
It looks like your standard-issue National Park sign, a chocolate brown square with white type affixed to a wooden post. Upon closer inspection one discovers that this isn’t your Uncle Sam’s signage. This summer, nature poems masquerading as official park signs can be found in Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore and the four other Great Lakes national parks at trails, vistas and beaches as part of the National Park Service centennial celebration.
On Sunday, July 10, from 1-3 p.m., the Cottage Book Shop on Lake St. in Glen Arbor will host signings by the authors of three notable books: Leelanau Trek by Ken Scott and Kaye Kraphohl; Painting the Joy of Sleeping Bear Country by Hank Feeley, and Historic Cottages of Glen Lake with Barbara Siepker and Dietrich Floeter.
Even if Carl Donakowski wasn’t scheduled to perform as a cellist for the Leelanau Summer Music Festival, his thinking fingers would hint that he’s a musician. His faintly summer-tan hands curve around his coffee cup, tap the table in syncopation, and pause above the tabletop, like a conductor about to lead his orchestra into a piece. Donakowski plays chamber music, though. Chamber music has no conductors. The genre is an elegant deviant in the musical world, and it will soon be heard in Leelanau.