Michigan, The Promised Land

by Linda Jo Scott
Sun staff writer

Growing up in the Chicago area, I always had the idea that Michigan was a kind of promised land, a place you got to go on vacation rather than a place where you actually lived.
I had always heard a lot of stories about Michigan from my father, for when he was a teenager and college student, living on the fringes of Hyde Park, on the south side of Chicago, he and some of his friends had jobs taking care of boys after school and Saturdays. They would each meet their own group of boys at their school at 3:00 and occupy them for the rest of the afternoon, playing ball, ice skating, swimming, running races, and other such activities. The groups were approximately the same size and would compete at various ball games and track events. Then on Saturdays they would do factory tours and other outings, carrying elaborate lunches cooked by the various Hyde Park families’ servants.
The best part of this job, however, was the summers. Each June, the young people would be hired to come up to such places as Charlevoix, Cheboygan, and Petoskey with these same wealthy families to care for their kids. They would organize track meets, treasure hunts, beach picnics, and such, thus allowing the parents to have a child-free summer. Of course many of the fathers had to stay back in Chicago and work, so the young people were mostly supervised by mothers.
“We had fun with the kids, and then, when we got time off, we’d organize dances, beach parties, and dune hikes for ourselves,” he explained. “One of the best parts was the food. The families would bring their cooks as well as child workers, and we’d get to know in no time which cooks made the best sandwiches, pies and cakes.” My father came from a family who never got to take vacations, so his summers in Michigan seemed like paradise to him.
Later, I began to create my own myths about Michigan, the promised land, through coming here in the summers. The trip itself was a kind of divine comedy, for first we had to endure the infernos of the stockyards of the south side of Chicago and the steel mills of Hammond and Gary before we could reach the paradise of the beautiful dunes of northern Indiana and western Michigan.
For three or four summers, I came to Tower Hill Camp, near Sawyer, first for family camp, then high school youth group camp. Owned by the Illinois Congregational Churches, the camp was situated on the border of Warren Dunes, home of “Old Baldy.” I can still get inspired just remembering lying in the grass looking up into enormous Michigan pines and contemplating the majesty of creation. I can still get misty eyed when I hear the harmonies of such dear old camp songs as “Tell Me Why the Stars Do
Shine.”
Our family had friends who had a cottage north of Holland, and we were thrilled when they would invite us up for a week or two in the summers. Their cottage was a simple one, poised high on a bluff over the lake. Masters of inexpensive interior design, they had hung National Geographic maps over all of the old wooden walls and ceilings of the cottage, and I can still remember lying on those moldy cabin beds studying the depths of various parts of the ocean, the locations of various exotic islands.
How fortunate I felt in 1978 when I found a teaching job at Olivet College. “You mean I could actually live in Michigan all year long?” I asked myself. I’ve been here 23 years now, and the wonder of Michigan’s beautiful dunes and lakes, her vineyards and cherry orchards, her one-of-a-kind lighthouses, her unique old wooden barns–all of her various marvels are still magical for me. We Michiganders truly see a beautiful peninsula every day simply by looking around us.