Bob and Ruth Elliott had been classmates at East Lansing High School, 50-some years before they began a late life friendship that would become a wonderful marriage. They had known each other, but only slightly, in high school. “Bob had been president of our student body his senior year,” Ruth says as the two of them sit talking at their cottage on Lake Michigan on a heady blue-and-gold September day.
Danish friends Anders and Birthe Munksgaard, almost 40 years later, finally came to visit this summer. It was a wonderful two-week reunion during which we swapped stories about the good old days in Vegger and about our happily grown children, and cruised around Leelanau County, even taking a trip up to our cabin in Canada near Sault Ste. Marie to visit Lake Superior Provincial Park and Tahquamenon Falls.
Debbie Ellis had no idea her life was about to change until a student at Glen Lake School, where she works in the kitchen, called out to her as he went through the lunch line this past May.
Kasson Township resident Debbie Ellis may lose her home of 25 years in a sale that occurred unbeknownst to her early this summer. The house of stone was built in 1930, according to Kasson Township assessor Susan Baatz, after the original home burned to the ground. Now it is in danger of being torn down to make way for an encroaching gravel operation.
Let’s dispel the rumor right away. Deering’s Market in Empire is not closing. It’s 11 a.m. on a Wednesday in July, and Deering’s Market owner Phil Deering is taking chicken out of the fryer, getting things ready for the lunch crowd. The man is working hard. “It’s the way it is,” he comments. “Ya gotta make it in 90 days.” He dumps the chicken into a large metal bin lined with red and white checked paper.
At the age of 18, musician Luke Woltanski has attained several significant accomplishments: Named one of Plainwell High School’s “Top 16 of 2016,” the Allegan County native and seasonal Glen Arbor resident graduated this spring with a 4.0 grade point average; was a National Honor Society member; Academic All-State varsity swimmer; and member of the internationally renowned Kalamazoo Children’s Chorus. He heads to Hillsdale College this fall, with plans to major in pre-med and possibly minor in musical theater. Oh, and in his theoretical spare time, he has created three albums of original alternative folk music, with a fourth in progress — on which he sings and plays a wide variety of instruments — that he recorded and mastered himself, and now sells through the Glen Lake Artists Gallery, iTunes, cdbaby.com, Amazon and Spotify.
Nature abhors a vacuum. The same can be said for creative writers without an outlet for publishing their work. And that, dear reader, is one way of explaining how The Dunes Review, a local literary journal, came to be.
Burdickville resident Jim Lively, a program director with the Traverse City-based Groundwork Center for Resilient Communities (formerly the Michigan Land Use Institute) is a key player in the Oil & Water Don’t Mix campaign, which calls on the state to shut down two aging oil pipelines under the Straits of Mackinac.
Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore officials and volunteers honored Leonard Thoreson at this year’s Port Oneida Fair by giving the nearly-90-year-old a ride in the tractor he had donated to the Park three years ago (it was not in running condition then). Volunteers and staff sang an early “Happy Birthday” to Thoreson, who celebrates his actual birthday this November. Thoreson, a descendant of settlers at Port Oneida’s Thoreson Farm, was the longtime custodian of the Glen Arbor Township Hall and retired in 2013.
“I’m up in Glen Arbor; it doesn’t get any better than that,” says the rich, energetic baritone voice of Tim Sutherland. “Be happy. Be kind. Be safe. Leave a message after the beep.” Anyone who has spent significant time in Glen Arbor recognizes this as quintessential “Sudsy”.