My Grandmother Came with Her Grandmother  - Back to Book 3
By Mary Carr Deane
 
 
My grandchildren come with me. My grandmother’s grandmother was Irene McNeil Bond. Her grand was Kate Bond Morrow and my grand was Irene Morrow Leatherman. I am Mary Leatherman Carr Deane.
 
My father was Richard Leatherman. My grandson Richard Brinner likes to say he has been coming to the Belvedere every year since before he was born.
 
Everyone knows we have lots of cousins around here. My family loves history and loves “to spin a yarn”. The porches on the resort have kept that tradition going.
 
At the dawn of the twentieth century there were over two thousand hotel rooms in Charlevoix. The Belvedere Hotel was where many family members stayed. My father said as a child his mother rented many Belvedere cottages before buying 519 in the early 1940’s. Many of the family were here on V.J. Day, August 14, 1945, and signed a paper with their names along with others they had gathered to celebrate the day.
 
My parents, Carroll and Richard Leatherman, owned two different cottages at various times. My late husband, Bo Carr, and I started renting in the late 1990’s. I married John Deane in 2019. John came to the hotel as a young child with his parents, and was at Camp Charlevoix for nearly eighteen years. He owned the former 111 (Woodbine) with his late wife Andy, now owned by cousin McNeal McDonnell. John was Belvedere president from 2009 – 2011.
 
In my mother’s book, Goodbye Ole Miss, she tells of her first visit to the Leatherman cottage. She and my father had a secret engagement. She says: “If all went well in the visit to the Leatherman summer home, where the whole family spent busy days and nights together, our romance would have passed the acid test and we would announce our engagement.
 
When I arrived in Charlevoix, I found myself in a magnificent resort town. This was Hemingway country, and I was often reminded of the Hemingway stories, particularly the Nick (Adams) stories written after World War II. There are three lakes around the resort; Round Lake, Lake Charlevoix and Lake Michigan. The Leatherman (cottage) sat on Round Lake. The Great Lakes looked awesome to an inland girl.
 
Each morning at the Leatherman cottage, we were allowed to sleep as long as we liked, unlike some resort cottages where breakfast is served at eight sharp. At the Leatherman’s, you could eat breakfast until noon. The maid brought up from the old plantation made a hundred biscuits every morning, and people cam in from all over the resort to the Leatherman dining room to have homemade biscuits, Michigan berry preserves, and a second cup of coffee.
 
The dining room was very long with a fireplace at one end. Even though it was summer, Charlevoix could be cold and we had many fires, particularly at night. My first mistake with Mrs. Leatherman was saying I was cold one night there. For the rest of my marriage I was seated in front of the fireplace and Woodie, the houseman, was instructed to put another log on the fire because ‘Miss Sugsie is cold-natured’.
 
The food and company were absolutely superb, but the activities were not for the faint of heart. Arriving with a cast on my arm, I was secretly pleased, because I didn’t have to play all the sports with those excellent athletes.
 
First , the whole cottage played tennis in the morning. Then after lunch at the golf club and 18 holes of golf, we rushed back to the cottage, dressed for water skiing and boarded the family’s 1947 Chris Craft, “The Rebels,” exactly like the one in On Golden Pond. We would have an enormous evening meal: plank white fish with whipped potatoes, broiled tomatoes, two or three kinds of vegetables and beautiful berries and cherries in season. The only food lacking in northern Michigan was a good vine-ripe Mississippi tomato. Several times a summer Mr. Leatherman would go back home to the plantation, and when he returned, he would always bring back two or three large boxes of homegrown tomatoes.
 
Tomatoes hold an esteemed rank in our family to this day. Once I heard a son-in-law tell a friend, ‘I married into a most unusual family. While other people talk politics and the stock market at dinner each night we had long, graphic discussions about tomatoes.’ It became such a joke that years later when other well-groomed ladies of the resort wore heir-loom pendants and pearls, Mrs. Leatherman wore a painted wooden tomato necklace. Even the soap in the powder room was shaped like a tomato.
 
Occasionally we went to the movies in Charlevoix or nearby towns. Naturally there was no television in those days. Other nights, as if we hadn’t enough togetherness, we played parlor games. The Leathermans loved games. Their favorite trick was to work on a new game and perfect it, then invite some defenseless soul over to the house and beat the socks off them. Such competitiveness I had never seen. As the old comedian said, ‘ I thought about taking exercise once, but I lay down until the thought passed.’ I shared his feelings after a Leatherman day at Charlevoix.
 
Other nights we went out on a friend’s sailboat that also had a motor on it. I tried with the cast on my arm to ski on a surf board, and I hung on for dear life. The suction of the water pulled my bathing suit down to my waist. I didn’t care; I was just trying to stay alive.”
 
Some things have changed at the Belvedere, but not everything! With that spirit in mind, John and I have just bought cottage 145, built c 1900, one of many cottages using cedar stumps as the foundation. We are embarking on a restoration and aiming to save as much of the original as possible! We feel quite courageous as we are old and the cottage dear, but old!!
 
Needless to say, the Belvedere is “sacred ground” to us. God has blessed our families by giving us so much time here.