County pioneer’s descendant offers jewels at upcoming Leelanau Women Artists show
By Linda Alice Dewey
Sun contributor
Local jeweler Pam Meteer Peplinski, who will be showing and selling her work at the Glen Arbor Arts Center in August with the Leelanau Women artists, has just about the deepest Leelanau County roots a non-native can have.
Pam grew up on her grandparents’ (Ralph Meteer and Myrtle Freeman Meteer) farm on Newman Road. Though she remembers the horses and cows they raised on the farm, her Leelanau roots go back even further, to another farm located by a spring just off what is now Cold Spring Road near Burdickville Road. That farm was settled in 1862 by her great-great-grandfather, Kasson Freeman, the second settler in what would become Kasson Township.
Pam recalls going to the two-room, red-brick Cedar School, then attending the three-room Maple City School through the fifth grade (Mrs. Manning was her teacher), then Glen Arbor School (a classmate was Jan Price) for sixth grade, another two-room schoolhouse.
It was a quite a change in 1957 when she was in seventh grade and the area schools consolidated, and she and her classmates were transferred to the brand new Glen Lake School. To have her own locker and so many classrooms, well, it was just different! She graduated in 1970 in a class of 60, with the likes of Fred O’Brien (now retired Glen Lake shop teacher) and Tim Barr, owner of Glen Arbor’s Art’s Tavern.
In 1971, Pam began working for Michigan “Ma” Bell, where she worked 32 ½ years, beginning as a telephone operator. This was the day of “collect” and 4-1-1 information calls, which she performed. Pam got a lot of interesting calls, especially when she worked the peg board for short evenings—lots of calls from drunks and from migrant workers trying to call home, connecting them through stepped trunk lines from one city to another, until they reached down through other lines to Mexico. She began in Traverse City as an operator, then a clerk, manager, switch room helper, then a telephone communications specialist and retired after 32 ½ years. Along the way, she married and had a son, who is now grown.
Although she didn’t begin making jewelry until she near retirement, she always liked rocks and would drag her son to rock shops and to the beach to collect rocks, especially Petoskeys. “Wherever I go, I collect a few rocks,” she says. “I didn’t know about Leland Blue at the time.” That’s become a “thing” just in the last ten years, she says.
She joined the Traverse City Rock and Mineral Club that meets the third Tuesday of the month in the old library on Sixth Street. There, she took classes on lapidary work and silver-smithing. She found that she leaned more toward designing, beading, and working with silver—wrapping, and something called the “Viking Knit.” The beads she uses are handmade by friends, called “lamp workers.”
Together, these silversmiths, bead makers, and jewelry designers—there are six or seven of them now—call themselves the “Sisters of Adornment.”
As she learned her craft, she began making presents for friends and family. In 2003, she began selling, and five years ago or so joined the Leelanau Women Artists (LWA), a juried group of 15 artists. Now she’s the treasurer and on the board. Pam enjoys being associated with these “down-to-earth” Leelanau women—three jewelers, a basket maker, a fiber artist who makes clothing, a fused glass worker, and several painters who work in different mediums.
Pam will be selling her work on August 10-11, along with nine other LWA artists, at their second show of the season. It will be held at the Glen Arbor Arts Center on Friday from 1-7 and on Saturday from 10-5, with a reception from 5-7 on Friday. A third and final show for 2018 will occur in Leland this fall.
