LOCAL WOMAN RE-INVENTS HERSELF THE GLEN ARBOR WAY

By Jane Greiner
Sun contributor

“There’s something about being here…it’s in the air,” Joanne Rettke says in trying to put into words how life in Glen Arbor has encouraged her to “open new doors and keep on opening them. I’m just another one of those Glen Arbor people who walked out on a limb,” she said. “Glen Arbor gives you permission to re-invent yourself”. Joanne has wandered over the last year into an exciting new business of creating web pages for various local businesses. It’s been an interesting journey for this retired Dean from New York.
Joanne moved to Glen Arbor in 1989 after making many visits with her partner Marge Ives. Ives had an even longer association with Glen Arbor through her friendship with her longtime friend, Mary Sutherland. In fact Marge and Joanne ended up buying Sutherland’s house in 1987, with the plan to retire here in the future.
Finally they “couldn’t wait.” They took early retirement, packed up their belongings, sold their house in upstate New York, and “following their dreams,” according to Marge.
In Glen Arbor Joanne continued doing motivational presentations on business and self development for Northwest Michigan College — similar to her work in Utica where as Dr. Rettke, Dean of Continuing Education at Mohawk Valley Community College, she was actually “selling education.”
“All of a sudden, I decided I didn’t want to do that sort of thing anymore and I started doing folk art instead.” She has a woodshop set up in her garage where she experimented with cutting out wooden fish and birds with band saw and jig saw. She
carried on into wood sign sales made with her router.
“That was a switch from left brain to right brain and I began to develop more and more artistic endeavors. Each day I found I could do some things I never thought I could do.”
“It awakened the artist in me for the first time in years, maybe since I was a kid.” She loved woodworking, “and people even paid me for it!” Her small successes and the validation she received from local sales “encourage me to keep on trying the next door”.
Meanwhile, another early interest was reasserting itself from Marge’s days as a Systems Analyst at Hamilton College in Clinton, New York, where Joanne had visited her at work and discovered an interest in computers. “A whole new world opened up to me that day,” Joanne said.
Classes to learn word processing followed. She was “scared to death of computers,” according to Marge. “She was so sure she could survive on her old IBM electric typewriter. Now she’s better at word processing than I ever was.”
“That computer opened up all kinds of new doors,” Joanne says. “I used to write all my speeches and presentations on it.”
In the past four or five years that early interest in computers has resurfaced with a vengeance. Joanne is on her fourth computer, she has high speed digital access to the web, she constructed her own website, and she has recently purchased a new digital camera to facilitate her graphics work on her computer.
“I got started on web page design because I wanted a web page for my business,” she said (She and Marge own Duneswood). “My daughter kept encouraging me to do it myself so I bought the software and learned it.” It was a steep learning curve, but she stuck with it, and now has a facility with all aspects of web page construction.
“It combined the artist and the communicator in me,” she said.“
Joanne found that she loved the challenge of web page construction and began to help others with their web pages, such as The Narrows Marina and Suzanne Wilson, whose artwork she documented by photographing pieces and putting them onto a CD.
Other businesses began to contact her to build web sights for them: first the Yarn Shop, and then The Black Swan and Leelanau Interiors.
Joanne’s first goal is to personalize her web sites so they reflect the spirit of the business and create customer interest.
“Especially out here in Glen Arbor, we have some very unique individualized kinds of businesses and I’m trying to show that our Glen Arbor businesses are special.
“I enjoy the different personalities of the owners, I like talking and working with them. One of the big plusses of my web page activity has been the people that I get to know, the business owners.”
She listens to the clients and tries to get a picture of the personality of their business. Sometimes she has ideas or suggestions for the owners based on her merchandising background or web experience.
For example she has learned about what photographs do and don’t work well for the web. But her whole effort is to make the web site reflect the business instead of fitting into some convenient mold or format.
To deal with technicalities, Joanne has a new high-quality digital camera and computer software which allow her to take tailor-made pictures for her web sites and manipulate the images for the best possible effect.
Before they moved up here, Marge and Joanne used to take photographs of the area , and sell them though local businesses including the Totem Shop. This old interest in photography and the skills learned then is another skill that the new web site business has tapped into.
“The web site is using the artist and the logical communicator in me,” Joanne said. “It also requires me to be highly organized. “ That combination of creativeness and meticulous organization fits Joanne to a “T.”