Empire painter Craig Weisse exhibits independent and Impressionistic images of his shoreline community June 30-July 6 at Center Gallery, 6023 S. Lake St., Glen Arbor. A reception to open this Independence holiday exhibition is Friday, June 30, from 6-8 p.m.
By Jacob Wheeler Sun editor When Gary Cozette and Joe Lada climb the ladder to the roof of their “Tower House” in Burdickville, they behold a breathtaking view of the Glen Lakes, with the Sleeping Bear Dunes and Lake Michigan in the distance. In their immediate foreground is an array of recently installed, cutting-edge solar […]
The Leelanau School featured a special graduation speaker during its commencement ceremony on June 3. Alum Arya Khoshnegah, together with his sister Laila, left Iran as teenagers and enrolled at the private boarding school north of Glen Arbor, just before the 1979 revolution that changed the fortunes of their family and their country. Leelanau, which specializes in experiential learning and small class sizes in a beautiful setting, graduated 19 seniors who hail from 11 states. Distinguished alumni have included survivors of wars and natural disasters, children of statesmen and accomplished actors.
If you’ve ever wondered how the Cedar Polka Fest, a Cedar Chamber of Commerce event that attracts as many as 8,000 people over four days, is organized, look no further than the community — and to volunteers such as 82-year-old Larry Bruckner. “Mr. B,” as he is often called, a Cedar Chamber of Commerce member, has been volunteering with the Polka Fest for at least 15 years, by his estimate. “I haven’t worked since the beginning of the festival,” he said. “That was in 1975. The first few festivals were for the community to get together and raise a little hell,” he added. “But then we were getting so many people that it had to be more organized.”
When you greet Glen Arbor’s ubiquitous cottage remodeler, musician, and leader of the Cabin Fever Band, he holds out a polished rock. It is probably a Lake Superior agate with a brilliant center full of wispy clouds surrounded by concentric rings of layered complexity in a warm colorful glow. You soon realize that the character of Tom Fordyce is just the same.
About a block up the road from the old Cannery down on the shore in Glen Haven, Henry “Hank” Bailey gets out of a white Lexus in front of an abandoned, turn-of-the-century building that looks like it used to be a store. The whole village is deserted and sad. Glen Haven today is a bleak little shore-side ghost town in the bright sunlight. It’s the off-season, middle of May, the leaves on the trees are in delicate shades, fuzzy-looking and babyish in their newness.
“You’ve got to do what you dig, / Dig what you do / On this rock spinning through the sky …” So sings Patrick Niemisto in one of his original songs that you can hear on the summer sundeck at Boonedocks in Glen Arbor, or on the CD N3C by the local power folk trio New Third Coast. That’s just one of the bands and venues frequented by Niemisto, the busiest man in local show business. Besides gigging every day all summer (sometimes twice, for years), Patrick produces other’s CDs in the Holy Wah sound studio in his basement, provides gear and/or sound for countless gigs and musicians, arranges for the seven-nights-a-week summer of music on the Boonedocks deck, teaches private lessons, champions the next generation of up-and-coming musical stars, teaches audio tech at Northwestern Michigan College in Traverse City, and presides over the spiritual epicenter of the local folk music scene at his home in the woods in Leelanau County with his wife, Mary Kay.
Josephine Zara left acting as a young adult in New York and never looked back … until she moved to Glen Arbor nine years ago. When she was 12 in Detroit, her grandmother had hired the head of the speech and theater department at Wayne State University to give her speech lessons.
Those quirky posters you see every year promoting the Empire Asparagus Festival were illustrated by Tim Lewis, who passed away on Jan. 5 at age 79. A native of Midland, Lewis summered as a child in Empire, worked as an artist at the famous Push Pin Studios in New York City, then inherited and settled in his mother’s house on Lambkin Lane, circa 2001 (his mother was born in Empire in 1905). Lewis’ unique persona and art were symbolic of Empire, itself.
One of the first harbingers of spring in the veggie world is asparagus, a popular early farmers market pick. People are so enthusiastic about asparagus, said third generation farmer Harry Norconk — who along with wife Barbara owns Norconk Asparagus Farm between Empire and Honor — that they begin inquiring about availability as early as April. “When you get a sunny day about 50 degrees, people start calling to ask when the asparagus will be ready,” he said.