Cottage 201 - Stella Alexander - Back to Book 3

I’ve been coming here all my life starting when I was six months old. My father was Dick Moss.  He came up before he was married with a friend to play golf and fell in love with the Belvedere golf course. He and mother were married the following fall . I was born couple of years later and that first year we came up and stayed in the Belvedere Hotel. Next year we stayed in what is now Darcy Witherspoon’s cottage and the year after that we rented what is now the McDougall cottage.
 
Then in the summer of 1935 my father and a friend of his thought cottage 201 which is now my cottage. They bought the cottage on the courthouse steps for $1800.  During that summer my father decided he liked cottage so much that he bought his friend out. The following year my sister, Susan Moss Reese was born. That was the only summer in my life that I was not here.  
 
Like almost all of the children on Belvedere I went to gang. Gang was originally an offshoot of the children’s dancing school given on the resort.  Calla Travis came up here from Grand Rapids for years and brought an assistant with her to help run the dancing school. She owned the cottage that now belongs to the Reardon’s who bought it from Houston Witherspoon.  Both boys and girls went to dancing school for about an hour in the morning. Then in the afternoon Calla’s assistant teacher ran girls gang and the lifeguard at the beach ran the boys gang.  There was a children’s dance at the casino once a week that always started with a Grand March. It was a much sought after privilege to lead the Grand March at the children’s dance.
 
Gang activities in the afternoon involved the usual activities. There was a lot of swimming and hide and go seek and other games.  There were tennis and sailing lessons but no golf lessons at  that time.  While I was never a gang leader I was for a while an assistant dancing teacher.
 
When I first started coming up here we would always go to fabulous buffets at the hotel on Thursday and Sunday (the servants days off). The hotel at that time even had a children’s dining room and the candy counter in the front lobby was always a draw for the children. The year we came up here when my son Tommy Alexander was four years old, he was finally old enough to ride his tricycle to the hotel to buy candy. When we arrived that summer and Tommy discovered that the hotel had been torn down over the winter he almost didn’t recover.
 
Bud Alexander my husband was originally from Oklahoma City but had moved to St. Louis as a child. He came up here to visit me the summer before we were married. He passed the Belvedere test and fell in love with the place and we were married in September 1953. By 1956 when I was expecting my second child,  my father and mother decided the cottage was too crowded and  bought cottage 411 from Mrs. Fristoe who had previously been married to TJ Moss who even though he was from St. Louis was no relation.
 
After my sister Susan married Carlos Reese in 1958 we shared the cottage until 1961 when they bought number 6.
 
Most of the early days I came to Charlevoix by train from St. Louis. There were two different ways to get here by train.
 
The first was an afternoon train from St. Louis to Chicago. Once in Chicago we not only had to change trains but also had to change train stations. We would go to a restaurant called Cape Cod Room in Chicago for dinner and then go to the other train station and get on the Pere Marquette train that would take us directly to Charlevoix. In the early days the train would stop at the Belvedere station. The bell boys from the hotel would be there to collect hotel guests and their luggage and would also help us bring our luggage to the cottage.
 
The second way was to take a train from St. Louis to Terre Haute Indiana. The train reached Terre Haute in the middle of the night and the cars destined for Michigan would be removed from the train and switched to a different engine. While I’m sure this woke up our parents with all of the jostling of train cars, the children generally slept through it. The next morning that train would arrive in Petoskey where someone would have to meet us and transport us with our luggage back to Charlevoix.
 
As a child I always stayed in Charlevoix until the middle of September. Schools in St. Louis would open the day after Labor Day but since I suffered from fall allergies my parents decided that I was going to miss school in St. Louis anyway so we might as well stay in Charlevoix.
 
We had Cecile and Milton, a married couple, as servants up here and they were part of the large group here at the time.  Milton was a barber and cut his friend’s hair on the back porch. He also played the trumpet and was part of the band made up of servants from around northern Michigan.  The group had a club on Antrim Street near the hotel that used occupy the space where Olesons is now.  This club was so popular it drew servants from all over the area including as far away as Harbor Springs.
 
I remember that the tennis courts across from our cottage started with a single court and then over the next few years as the resort could come up with the money, they were expanded to the present five courts. In season the courts were always very busy in the morning and seniority seem to determine who got court one. Houston Witherspoon and Dick Shelton were there almost every morning. The porch of our cottage (201) became the informal waiting room for an open tennis court. For many of those waiting gin was involved - both drinking and playing the card game.
 
Houston Witherspoon was also very famous for his dinner parties but being invited to one of them was a bit of a mixed blessing. Houston did not drink and had no alcohol in his cottage. The discussion on the beach in the morning often involved what time invitees were going to start drinking before they went to Houston’s. Houston himself was the cook and he was known for his popovers and his chocolate sundaes.  Most dinners started with a pear and cottage cheese salad and ended with a chocolate sundae.
 
The Belvedere golf course was always a strong attraction for the husbands on the resort and on rainy days is almost always a bridge game or two going on. The bridge game always seem to attract one of the great characters of the resort – Lewis (Loogie) Morrow. One of his eccentricities was an inability to sit still for very long. He would often get up from the table and walk around the room during the game coming back to the table to play is next card when required. All of his opponents were very careful to breast their cards.
 
Wives were equally happy with the arrangements in Charlevoix. For years very few of the cottages at any facility for laundering close so they all went out to the cleaners. Children went to dancing school and then to gang so they were not underfoot.
 
In addition to going to the hotel for dinner a couple of nights a week, the hotel also served lunch on the beach one day a week. The staff transported and assembled lunch and people would go and get their plate and then retire to their cabana to eat. Despite the setting, everyone was fully dressed in regular clothes for these lunches.
 
The hotel provided evening entertainment for its guests that were also frequented by Belvedere residents.  A couple of nights a week there was a bingo game in the lobby.  Cards cost 25 cents and winners got small cash prizes.  There was also a perennial hotel guest named Mr. Campbell.  He would show his home movies at the hotel.  While this does not seem much of an attraction, many people would come to see they were in his movies from the previous year.
 
The Grey Gables, the Argonne and the Red Fox Inn were other options for dinner. Most people from Belvedere who were going to the Red Fox would go by boat to Horton’s Bay. The Red Fox staff would meet people at the dock and transport them up the hill to the restaurant. One night we decided to take the children with us to Red Fox but by the time we were ready to go back it started to rain. We called our parents who came in a caravan of cars to transport the women children back to the cottages. We left the men in charge of getting the boats back through the rain.
 
The day-to-day needs of running the cottages were mostly supplied by local delivery people.
·         The vegetable man came by in his truck every day. I remember that my mother would take advantage of the scale in the vegetable man’s truck to weigh small children.
·         The milkman made his usual deliveries.
·         The Ice man came a couple of times a week to deliver the big blocks of ice used to keep the food cool and put in the drinks.
·         Neff’s and Edwards IGA both delivered the food that was ordered over the phone.
·         Every morning the pony man would come through the resort offering pony rides for the kids for $0.25.
 
In addition to the children’s dances, they were dances for adults on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday evenings. The orchestra from the hotel would move down to play at the casino for the evening. The bar at the casino was then in the back room where has recently been moved. The other end of the casino had a stage where the board room is now.