Glen Arbor’s modern-day cowboy, staunch National Park opponent Rich Quick dies
By Linda Dewey and Jacob Wheeler
Sun contributors
A modern-day cowboy whose life story is tightly interwoven with that of modern-day Glen Arbor—and one of the most vocal and passionate opponents of Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore—Rich Quick died on Wednesday, December 2. He was 85 years old, and spent most of his final seven years at Maple Valley Nursing Home, where he suffered from dementia.
His step-grandson, Joshua Humphrey, confirmed the news on Facebook, writing that Quick “is now with his sweetie Bonnie Quick in heaven. He loved Glen Arbor and this area more than anybody I have ever known or known of. He had an undying respect for this land and for those around him.”
Humphrey lives in Quick’s home on Alligator Hill in the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore — land that offers mesmerizing views of Sleeping Bear Bay and the Glen Haven historic district. Now that the patriarch of the home has passed, the National Park will reportedly take the property. Humphrey, who will have to move out, lived there for the past four years, together with his grandmother, longtime Glen Arbor Township clerk Bonnie Quick, until she passed away on May 6 of this year, one week before he turned 18.
“Rich was a modern-day cowboy,” Humphrey told the Glen Arbor Sun. “He was a hard worker; he was a good ol’ boy, an old-fashioned manly man. He was immaculately clean. So many people have told me they could walk into Rich’s shop and could eat off the floor.
“He didn’t want help from anyone in his older years. He wanted to do things on his own. If you tried to help him up the stairs, he’d say ‘Get your hands off me!’”
Quick was a mechanic. His working man hands left their mark on Glen Arbor. Quick helped rebuild Art’s Tavern; for years he snow plowed roads and driveways; he did a bit of everything, said Humphrey.
Tim Sutherland remembered that Quick came into Art’s one winter night at last-call with a blizzard raging outside and “asked me if I would go on a plow run with him.
“He had been plowing people out for 20 straight hours,” said Sutherland. “He just needed the company to keep him awake. A year later on my way back from Traverse City at 2:30 a.m., I ended up in a snowdrift on M-72. I went to a nearby house and called … who else … Rich! … He was there to pull me out in 15 minutes. Called me a ‘peckerhead’, his term of endearment, and would not take any money!”
“I remember Rich as far back as I can remember coming to Glen Arbor,” said Linda Dewey, a frequent contributor to this newspaper. “The two were tied together: he went with it up here, was part of the package.
“Back in the Fifties, you’d see a blond, curly-haired Rich in his Standard Oil shirt, pumping gas at the Standard station he would one day own. While I sat in the back seat of my grandparents’ big Buick, he filled the tank, ran around and cleaned the windows and checked the oil. More than once, my grandfather commented that he was a good kid.”
Quick bought the gas station when he was in his mid-20s after he got out of the army.
Dewey remembered surviving a bad roll-over car accident in a Volkswagen in 1969.
“He was very comforting when I was dropped off at the gas station for my grandfather to come and pick me up. I was 21 and pretty roughed up,” said Dewey. “Rich said I looked like I needed a drink, and I managed to smile.”
Another gas station client would become Quick’s sweetheart.
Bonnie’s family began visiting Glen Arbor in 1937, and eventually had their cars serviced at Rich Quick’s Standard station next to Art’s Tavern. Bonnie remembered meeting Rich when she was 10, and said her mother was just enamored with him. So, too, was Bonnie, and they were married in August of 1983. “I’ve just known Rich forever!” she told the Sun in 2018.
Dewey remembers, in 1975 over Fourth of July weekend, seeing Rich engrossed in conversation over breakfast at the Red Pine restaurant (now the Good Harbor Grill) with a woman about his age, and she thought how interesting it was that he had found someone. Rich had been married before, and it had ended unhappily.
National Park opponent
A modern-day Hank Stamper—the hard-scrabble character in Ken Kesey’s classic novel Sometimes a Great Notion (played in the movie by Paul Newman)—Rich Quick was a staunch fighter against the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore, which President Richard Nixon signed into law on October 3, 1970, and which others saw as a harbinger of momentous progress. Quick faced an uphill battle to keep the 55 ridgeline acres on Alligator Hill that he reportedly purchased when he was 18. “He used to go up to that property as a kid,” said Humphrey. “He loved it from the first day he saw it.”
“He hated the National Park with a passion,” said his step-grandson. “He made them [get] a court order in the 1970s just to appraise his property.”
Quick finished building his house in 1972. That was two years after the National Lakeshore, which included his land, was signed into law. Homes built within Park boundaries after December 31, 1964, were to be sold and transferred to the Lakeshore after the resident passed away, according to Sleeping Bear deputy superintendent Tom Ulrich. Quick missed that deadline by eight years.
Dewey says Quick told her that he would sit on his porch with a gun before he would let the Park take his home overlooking Sleeping Bear Bay away from him.
Humphrey said his grandfather fought the Park in court for years, opining that he was grossly underpaid for the land. Quick received $600,000 for his 55 acres of ridgeline on Alligator Hill in 1984.
When Sleeping Bear Dunes celebrated its 50th anniversary on October 3—remotely, due to the COVID-19 pandemic—National Lakeshore superintendent Scott Tucker wrote a time capsule letter intended for his successor 25 years from now. Tucker’s letter included an homage to those, including the Quicks, who sacrificed for the good of the Park: “One key piece of the celebration is acknowledging how we have gotten to where we are today. These ventures would not have been possible without the passion and commitment from innumerable employees and partners throughout the years, not to mention the sacrifices of former landowners within the current boundaries of the park.”
“I’ve had Sleeping Bear Dunes park rangers tell me they saw (Quick) at Art’s and he’d try to pick fights with them,” said Humphrey.
Despite his hard luck with—and animosity toward—the Park, Quick remained a colorful storyteller who offered a window into Glen Arbor’s past.
“When I moved here year-round in 1999, he plowed my drive for me and would come up, and we would talk,” said Dewey. “I told him what my grandfather said about him 40 years or more before (that he was a good kid). One time, he told me how someone had pulled him aside and told him he’d better straighten up; evidently he had a drinking problem a while before, and he was mighty grateful to this man.”
“One time, standing outside on a winter day after he had plowed, he told me about the Indian trails that parallel M-109 either side of the highway from Glen Haven to Glen Arbor, and he said the Indians used to run messages between the two villages. He knew so much about this place. I believe the Heritage Trail connects with one of those paths.”
“In his later years, you’d see him inside the post office leaning on the counter, talking to Drew or Kathy or Cindy or whoever was the current postmaster and whoever came in,” said Dewey.
What’s next for the grandson?
Josh Humphrey, whose grandmother Bonnie was Rich Quick’s longtime sweetheart, currently lives in the house on Alligator Hill with his girlfriend, Madison Steinhaus. They’ve been going steady since they met four years ago as middle school students at Glen Lake Schools. “I got Gramm’s approval (before she died in May),” said the 18-year-old, who will soon have to vacate the house.
Humphrey was instrumental in caring for Bonnie, as she battled Multiple Sclerosis in recent years. He concedes that his own life story hasn’t been the easiest. Humphrey’s father kicked him out of the house when he was 14.
“I’m proud to take care of my teenage grandson,” Bonnie told the Sun two years ago. “I help him out, and he helps me out even more. It’s really wonderful.”
Humphrey doesn’t know where he’ll go yet. He has family in nearby Lake Ann, where he’d like to buy property some day. For work, he hopes to become an electrician’s apprentice and get a license.
As for the Alligator Hill property and what it means to him, “More than anything I want to have my wedding up here some day,” he said.
Contact Josh Humphrey with electrician opportunities at 231-835-0580 or email him at humphreyjos42@gmail.com.
An earlier version of this story incorrectly reported that Rich Quick was 92 when he died. In fact, he was 85. We regret the error.
