Reporting from the most beautiful newspaper delivery route in the world
What it’s like to launch, edit, and write your own small-town newspaper. This story was originally published in The Boardman Review.
By Jacob Wheeler
Sun editor
I’m sure plenty of newspaper delivery boys brag about their picturesque paper routes. For all I know, there’s a kid who pedals through villages up California’s Highway 1 and yells “hot off the press” over the cacophony of oyster fishermen coming into port. Or a Mayan Guatemalan who slings bundles over his shoulder and catches a Tuc-Tuc motorized three-wheel taxi to remote villages around a volcanic lake. There’s probably a yodeling Swiss kid who skis through the Alps chanting about the latest in his morning Zeitung.
But here’s what I’ve got on all of them: When I deliver the Glen Arbor Sun newspaper through Leelanau County (approximately once every two weeks during the summer, and once a month during the fall), I get to pull over to the side of M-22 and jump in Lake Michigan’s azure, revitalizing waters as often as I want. In June that’s typically once in the afternoon; in July, once in each village; in August, it’s literally every five minutes.
The businesses where my dad and I deliver the Sun expect this. They expect me to bound into their restaurant, gallery, retail store or office wearing swim shorts that are wet, sandals happily caked in beach sand, and a t-shirt thrown over my shoulders just a moment before. A stack of the latest Glen Arbor Sun lands on their counter, and like a fox, I’m gone—off to the next spot on the route … Once I was off my game and strolled into the Little Traverse Inn, a Scottish pub halfway between Glen Arbor and Leland, wearing shoes, pants and a collared shirt (you know, like normal people do). The waitress looked at me with a quizzical facial expression that said, “What the hell?”
My delivery route has other advantages. You see, I’m also the founder, editor, and publisher of the Glen Arbor Sun, so I use face-to-face interactions with my advertisers, readers, and sources to jot down the next story hook—usually in a notebook, sometimes on a cell phone app, or sometimes on a napkin or available hand. The notes scribbled on surfaces throughout the car are a goldmine of leads and contacts, and I transcribe them into my online “story budget” once I return to my home in Traverse City at the end of the day.
A summer day’s drive through the Leelanau peninsula has other advantages. Food and drinks come to mind. If I start my route in Empire, in the southwestern corner of the county, a hot chocolate at Grocers Daughter Chocolate replaces my need for a third cup of coffee. The drive northeast through Glen Arbor often yields a 9 Bean Row almond croissant at the Leelanau Coffee Roasters or a cherry chicken salad sandwich at Cherry Republic. By the time I hit Leland, I’m already thinking about what to bring home for dinner, so I pick up a pound of fresh lake trout and whitefish salmon pate from Fishtown—on ice, of course. Northport brings sweet relief with a mid-afternoon pint at The Mitten Brewing Company. The route south along West Grand Traverse Bay leads to Little Bee’s Italian Ice in Suttons Bay, and perhaps one more beer by the outdoor campfire at Hop Lot. Somewhere along the route I’ve stopped to pick up a WiFi signal and uploaded the day’s most important stories to my website, GlenArbor.com, and promoted them on Facebook. I’ve probably also taken a few phone calls yielding ad signups or story suggestions.
It’s a funny thing to start my own small-town newspaper when I was 18 years old (that was 1996) as a way to help pay for college, and then watch it grow and grow as my town balloons in size and summertime reputation. Tourists suddenly flocked here by the hundreds of thousands on their pilgrimage to the Sleeping Bear Dunes or to cozy up to the locals on swivel chairs at Art’s Tavern. That has brought a lot of money and attention to “my” peninsula, including a Good Morning America honor in 2011 as the nation’s “most beautiful place”.
Our economy relies on tourists—or “fudgies” as we playfully and respectfully call them here. We need them, we solicit them with our brand, we try to ensnare them. But we also secretly breathe a sigh of relief when they go home on Labor Day weekend, the traditional end of Glen Arbor’s high summer season—and our towns become quiet again. They define the stories we tell about our place, and ourselves.
Here I reference a story I published in September 2012 titled “Busiest. Summer. Ever” that declared the season a “summer on steroids” following the national spotlight cast on Leelanau County by the Good Morning America TV show a year earlier. The story mentions renowned, high-end Glen Arbor painter Greg Sobran, who was asked by a New Jersey man that summer where he could locate the local strip club. The tourist asked, “like, where do you have fun around here?” Meanwhile, a Leelanau Vacation Rentals client confided to LVR owner Ranae Ihme they were excited about renting a boat on Big Glen Lake and had brought glass bottles so they could “collect the different colors of water” in the inland lake. … Ihme remembers another customer called LVR’s office the morning after checking in to ask “if we could turn the nature CD down at night so they could sleep better.”
But poking fun at fudgies was never the bread and butter of the Glen Arbor Sun. The mission—though I’ve seldom defined it—is simply to tell stories about, and celebrate, the unique people, places, businesses, and events that happen on the Leelanau Peninsula. Events like the annual Empire Asparagus Festival (once dubbed one of the “world’s weirdest festivals”) where you can dress up like an asparagus spear, eat bratwursts and ice cream and drink beer that all taste like asparagus, then participate in the asparagus recipe and poetry contests. Characters like Cherry Republic CEO Bob Sutherland, the region’s biggest retailer, who rarely wears shoes when walking through town. Formality is to be left on the side of the freeway before you hit two-lane roads that bring you to the peninsula of delight. Up here, no one takes themselves too seriously.
I had a lot of help to keep the newspaper going during my college years in Ann Arbor and subsequent sojourns across an ocean (Denmark) and down south (Guatemala). My buddy Richard stepped up. Then our friend Mike took over layout and design duties until his sudden death two years ago. My dad was the editor for a time, during which the paper printed as much gorgeous poetry and prose as it did hard news. At one point I remember visiting Leelanau County from some far-flung place and realizing, somewhat dumbfounded, that tourists knew, and looked for, my once tiny newspaper but didn’t know me or my family personally.
The publication had taken on a life of its own. Gone were the days when a business in Glen Arbor would hand over $20 for a business card-sized ad in my cute, but fairly pathetic, little black-and-white photocopied tabloid. Instead, thanks to snazzy layout programs like PageMaker and Adobe InDesign, anybody with a mischievous instinct and extra time on their hands could design and print a newspaper that looked professional.
Once the Internet flowed down every stream and through every kitchen faucet, I no longer had to sit in the same hot and stuffy attic office as my designer. I could communicate with my layout guy, and advertisers and writers, from anywhere that had a high-speed connection. And I did. Layout nights, requiring a deluge of emails over a 6-hour period, between Mike and me happened from all over the globe, and some strange places, too: an Internet café next to a techno rave club in Berlin; a hostel on the Rio Dulce in Guatemala where loose parakeets threatened to divebomb my keyboard; a hookah lounge in a Middle Eastern city; and while sitting in the bleachers at a ballgame in Minneapolis.
Now, suddenly, the newspaper seems halfway professional. I have expanded the distribution and story coverage Leelanau County-wide. I’ve got a solid crop of half a dozen writers who regularly pen stories—some narrative and whimsical, some edgy and authoritatively breaking news. I work with a copy editor, a photo editor, and sometimes even a photographer who happens to be a Pulitzer Prize winner. He’s a saint to work for the small-town rates that I pay, but one day last summer the photographer, now retired, betrayed another reason for working for the Sun. “My wife wants me to clean the garage, and I don’t feel like it,” he told me in a voicemail message. “Don’t you have an assignment that I can shoot?”
The Glen Arbor Sun is many things to many people, it seems. It’s a handy guide for where you should eat, where you should shop, where you should hike and swim during your visit Up North. It’s a source of profiles of eclectic and wacky characters who found harbor on this far-flung, glacial peninsula. It’s newsprint that helps light a campfire on the beach. And yes, for 24 years now it’s also been a great way to avoid household chores.
Jacob Wheeler started the Glen Arbor Sun in 1996 when he was 18. He moved away, came home, kept moving (further distances) away, but always felt the magnetic pull of Sleeping Bear Bay (and also the Funky Grill Cheese Sandwiches at Art’s Tavern). He now lives in Traverse City with his young family, teaches journalism at Northwestern Michigan College (mostly during the colder months when the tourists aren’t around), and also works as part-time communications coordinator at the environmental non-profit FLOW (For Love of Water).
