Memories of Potter Orr - June 2017

My great-grandparents Mr. and Mrs. Frank H Simpson first came to Charlevoix in the early 1900s. While I do not know exactly what year they started coming, but the Belvedere Hotel register from the summer of 1913 survives and I found their names on the page for August 13. As was customary in those days everyone who was staying in the room was listed on the register. That included both my great-grandparents and their four daughters, one of whom was Eleanor Simpson, later Eleanor Orr.

I’m sure they left Cincinnati to avoid its lovely summer weather in those days before air conditioning existed. The Belvedere hotel had been designed specifically to entice visitors to Charlevoix in the hopes that they would buy cottages on the resort. It worked. In 1920 the Simpsons bought cottage 511.

I’ve not been able to trace the exact construction date of 511 but a hand-painted postcard from 1906 shows it in the stucco and beam configuration that I have known all my life. There are, however, pictures of the cottage from an earlier time when the outside was plain wooden siding painted a lovely olive drab color. When we made changes to the cottage in 2002 and had to remove part of the stucco, those olive color boards were found underneath.  In 1920 the cottage had three family bedrooms, two servants rooms and one more small bedroom. In addition, it had one bathroom upstairs at the end of the hall and a half bathroom on the semi-enclosed back porch.

The Simpsons (my great-grandparents ) had one son, Harold, in addition to the four sisters. Although he was not with the family in the hotel in 1913, he must of been a regular visitor at 511. The story goes that the owner of the cottage next-door, number 509, was an avid fisherman. As such, he liked to rise early in the morning for the prime early fishing. One day he came over to 511 and asked if anyone there would like to buy his cottage. He said that the Simpson clan was so loud and partied so late that he could not get to sleep early enough for his planned hour of awakening. He asked the Simpsons first about buying the cottage since he could not imagine that anyone else would be interested. Harold must have decided that he was either not going to inherit the cottage or did not want to wait that long so he bought 509. His grandchildren, the Bemises  and Parrishes own that cottage today.

 I don’t know exactly how it came about but my grandmother Eleanor Simpson Orr inherited 511 from her mother the first thing she did was tackle the bathroom situation. One small bedroom at the head of the stairs was split into two full bathrooms (showers only) which doubled the plumbing in the house.

This change did reduce the cottage to two bedrooms for the family since in common with many of her generation, she would never have considered going to Charlevoix without Emma, Catherine and Lafayette, the maid, cook and butler/chauffeur respectively.

In addition to brother Harold in the cottage next-door, one of my grandmothers sisters, Fran Simpson Cartwright, owned cottage 515. This was a typical old frame cottage on the site now occupied by the more modern Trulaske (formerly Connett) cottage. Her husband Bill Cartwright love to sit in his rocking chair on the porch looking across the mouth of the channel directly at what is now the Coast Guard station. He also considered it his mission in life to control speeding in the channel. He was possessed of a wonderful bellowing voice and when he thought someone was going too fast in the channel he would yell for them to slow down. If they failed to comply, he kept a small brass carbide cannon next to his chair and he would pull the lanyard. This cannon fired blanks but was incredibly loud and the sound echoed very nicely back and forth across the channel. It was astonishing how quickly the boats would slow down in response to this treatment.

My Orr grandparents in 511, of course, spent their summers on the Belvedere even during prohibition. The proximity of Charlevoix to Canada (who had nothing to do with the prohibition silliness) was an additional incentive. There were a number of bootleggers who would take off in fast speed boat from Charlevoix and make a run to Canada. Full to the brim with Canadian liquor they would make the nighttime run back to Charlevoix. My grandmother Orr was a very good customer of one of the local bootleggers and was often regaled with his tales of avoiding the Feds. One night on his return he pulled into a Belvedere boathouse only to find a federal revenue agent waiting for him. Seeming to have no choice, even before tying up he invited the agent aboard. As the Revenuer stepped from the dock to the boat, the boat was slammed into reverse and the engine gunned. This left a very wet federal agent floating in the boathouse and provided time to dock elsewhere and unload all the evidence.

Libby and Wally Rowe from Cincinnati were very good friends of the Orrs in 511. One summer during prohibition they were invited to visit. At the time there was actually air service between Cincinnati and Charlevoix using the venerable DC-3 planes. The only problem with this was the weather between Cincinnati and Charlevoix. Not being able to fly above most weather as jets are these days, the DC-3s had to pick their way between thunderstorms that like to inhabit the Ohio Indiana border. Since it was prohibition the Rowes were bringing a particularly fine bottle of scotch as a house present. Their plane was severely bounced for most of the flight and they needed something to calm them. By the time the plane touched down in Charlevoix, the house present had been completely drained. They had a nice visit Charlevoix anyway little suspecting that their granddaughter, Sandy, would marry into this very cottage 30 or so years later.

In the early 1940s Irene and Dick Leatherman from Robinsonville Mississippi bought cottage 519 which was just across the small driveway circle from 511. They were almost exactly the same age as the Orrs and shared the same interests - golfing and partying. Irene Leatherman had a first cousin named Irene Bond whose parents died when she was a teenager. She went to live with her aunt and uncle and first cousin Irene Morrow (Leatherman). That meant that there were two girls only a year apart both with the first name of Irene living in the same house. It made for great confusion but also for these two cousins feeling like sisters. Irene Bond later married Walter McDonnell and at about the same time that Irene Leatherman and bought a cottage in Belvedere, Irene McDonell did as well. The McDonnell-Hill part of the family has also become a large presence on the resort.

My father, Jim Orr, spent many of his early summers at 511 and was often thrown together with Kate Leatherman since their respective parents were such good friends. Kate was four years younger than Jim and treated by him with the usual disdain of somebody that much younger.

 After a few years of staying home to work in the summers, Jim came back Charlevoix at age 20 and was greatly surprised to see what had become of the little girl from next-door. Kate was now 16. They were married three years later.  This Belvedere marriage, or merger, while not unique, was one of the larger ones for Belvedere. My family on both sides had a lot of members of the club.

 My birthday is in October and I always add an extra year to the amount of time I have spent in Charlevoix since I know for sure that I was there in utero during the summer of 1947. I’ve had the wonderful good fortune to have been in Charlevoix at least a portion of every summer since then.

 My childhood summer routine was fairly simple. I would come to Charlevoix around July 1 and spend the month of July with one grandmother. At the end of the month I would pack my worldly belongings and trudge across the back circle to spend August with the other grandmother. Even as a child I recognized that this was a pretty sweet deal. What did not dawn on me until I had children of my own was that this left my parents childless all summer.

When I was young the trip from Cincinnati to Charlevoix was always a trial. Going north in the early 1950s made for a very long day as no interstate highways had yet been built. In addition to driving my parents crazy with the typical childhood question of “are we there yet”, the hilly two lane roads provoked multiple bouts of car sickness.

 There was an alternative that I got to use a couple of times, an overnight train from Cincinnati to Petoskey. The best of those rides was the summer when I was eight years old. Mother drove my brother Ted and I to Union terminal just outside downtown Cincinnati. We waited on the platform as the overnight train from Memphis pulled in. Mother got on the train only long enough to deliver us to one of grandmother Leatherman’s child handlers. She was already ensconced in a large bedroom on the train with three of my Leatherman first cousins - Dick, Mary and Irene. Adding my brother and I meant the poor nurse had to cope with five children ranging in age from 4 to 8 during that overnight train ride. Our nurse did have one advantage not available today. Proverbs 13:24 “Whoever spares the rod hates their children, but the one who loves their children is careful to discipline them”. Every nurse I can remember as a child was a staunch believer in that passage. Although I cannot remember ever being spanked by either of my parents, they did hire professionals to do it for them. Being the oldest I’m sure that I got more than my fair share of the spankings but I loved all my nurses just the same. Only once did I get what I believe was an unjustified spanking.

 My grandmother Leatherman had the same theory about servants in Michigan as my grandmother Orr. She actually would have four in residence most of the summer. In addition to a cook, a maid and a chauffeur, she would bring a nurse to take charge of all the grandchildren. Cottage 519 had two bedrooms and a bathroom added onto the back of the first floor of the cottage to house grandchildren and their nurse. The only downside of this arrangement was that these rooms were reached by a door at the end of the dining room. Family alone would fill at least half fill the dining room every evening and many nights friends or other relatives filled the table completely.

 Dinner was usually served late and the well lubricated group did not exactly whisper at the table. This would often wake me up and I naturally wanted to join the fun. Since the door to the dining room was right next to the door to my room I soon learned to operate the doorknob and became a problem. Not long after a latch was installed in that door about 5 feet up and ended my adventuring.

Following southern tradition, children at the Leatherman cottage ate their meals in the kitchen and of course much earlier than the adults. We learned early that if we planned to enjoy the wonderful southern biscuits produced for almost every meal we had to guard them carefully. Many adult relatives, especially Bobby Morrow, would come through the kitchen while we were eating dinner and biscuits of the unwary have a habit of disappearing.

 By the time I was aware of appliances, it was 1952 and like most houses at that time both our house in Cincinnati and 519 had an electric refrigerator. The back porch at 519, however, was absolute magic to young child. In addition to the electric refrigerator there was a genuine icebox. It had no plug but two or three times a week the ice truck would pull up the back door and a man would come in with a particularly evil set of looking set of metal tongs carrying a cube of ice about a foot square to the icebox. Soft drinks and beer were kept in the icebox and every evening at cocktail hour the ice bucket was filled by using an ice pick to chip off of those blocks. We would beg for chips of that ice to suck. I always thought that ice tasted special but at the time I had no idea why. Later I found out that the blocks that came to our house had started life as huge blocks sawn from the frozen lake Charlevoix each winter. Since it came out of the lake frozen and remained that way until consumed there was no filtering or purification involved. I’m sure that in wintertime the lake water was pretty pure but it may also have served to bolster our young immune systems.

Up until 1960 when it was torn down, the Belvedere Hotel was an ongoing attraction for children living on the resort. The counter in the lobby of the hotel stocked a huge selection of candy. In those days the proverbial “two nickels to rub together” was a fortune that merited a trip across Belvedere Avenue to buy candy. Loose change left on countertops made its way to the hotel. In addition, a couple times a week a huge bingo game was held in the main part of the hotel. On some occasions we would be allowed to attend the bingo game in hopes of winning a fortune to spend the candy counter. These were the good old days and no child was allowed in the hotel parlor in the evening for bingo unless they were dressed in their Sunday finest. It is now an awful lot of years later, but I swear I never one a bingo game in my entire young life.

 All through the 1950s and 60s (and perhaps a little later) many of the residents of Belvedere brought household servants with them to Charlevoix. The tradition of the time was that servants had Thursday and Sunday off. In addition, at least half of the cottages with servants would contribute the loan of a car for the days off. While I never got to hear all of the details I often wondered who had the most interesting social lives during the summer the resort members or their help. Caravans from the Belvedere saw all of the sites of northern Michigan on those Thursdays and Sundays. Parties on Sunday nights resulted in many bleary eyes on Monday mornings.

One of the cardinal sins for any Belvedere member was “poaching” the servant of another member. For many years my grandfather Dick Leatherman brought his chauffeur/butler and right hand man, Woody B, to Charlevoix. Over the course of several summers Woody developed a romantic interest in the young lady who worked for Dick Moss. Either as a result of that interest or an offer from Dick Moss (I still have no desire to take sides), Woody B moved to St. Louis and went to work for Mr. Moss. Prior to this incident Dick Moss and Dick Leatherman had been best friends but afterwards they were estranged for several years.

The merchants of Charleroi all figured out in short order how the system worked for most Belvedere residents. The Neff Brothers grocery store had it down to a science. They established a charge account for any Belvedere cottage owner who wished to have one. They would take orders by phone from each cottage’s cook and would then deliver the groceries. While we never knew for sure, it seemed clear that this was a profitable enough business in the summer months to carry the store on your round. This was confirmed for me one year when my mother and father came back from a skiing trip in Vail Colorado and told me that in the chairlift line they had run into Mr. Neff from Charlevoix.

Perhaps one of the biggest changes I’ve seen in the resort during my lifetime is the almost total disappearance of live-in help. As mentioned above, when I was a child there was a huge population of help on the resort and there almost none left. It is by and large representative of the change in lifestyle over the years that has left most cottage owners with a number of very small bedrooms. For most of us this is not a problem, we just stick small children in the in those rooms.

 I need to do some research to find out exactly when gang was started. It seems odd to me that I don’t know the answer to that question but certainly he was going strong by 1952. No adult in any part of my family would countenance the concept of a gang age child not going to gang, but I couldn’t wait to leave the house in the morning. Friends that you see for only a portion of the year and that under the best conditions imaginable for children are the best and most long-lasting of friends. A couple of years ago playing golf on the Belvedere I looked around at the foursome and realized that I had been playing games with the same guys for over 60 years.

 Gang activities have changed over the years. When I was a gangster, in addition to tennis, golf and swimming, someone thought sailing was very important. The club’s fleet of sailboats at the time were called Rockets and they were all wooden boats of about 15 feet. We had sailing lessons at least two half-days each week and two full-scale sailboat races each week in addition. The lessons included classroom time learning to tie a variety of sailing knots and learning the precise name of each component of the boat and each part of the sail. In the races each boat was skippered by a gangster with an adult advisor on board. Careful tally was kept during the summer of the number of victories for each skipper and a trophy was awarded at Cabaret at the end of the year.

 During the 50’s and 60’s the resort was able to attract college graduate students as gang leaders. Bobby Schrock was a gang leader of mine he was in medical school. One year big gang leader was a gentleman named Dave Sime. During that summer he did an awful lot of running, some of it wearing small belts of lead weights around his ankles. One day he challenged me to a race along the flat stretch of Ferry Avenue from the casino down towards the sidewalk to the beach. He would run and I got to ride my bicycle. I lost, badly. Not long after that I found out why. Dave was training for the Olympics and he would very shortly become the co-holder of the world’s record for the 100 yard dash -  9.3 seconds.  This also gave him the title of “World’s fastest man”.

 Another big change in gang has been overnights. The 1950s and 60s were both a safer time and far less litigious. Our gang overnights were always well away from the resort, sometimes a long way away and at least once a year while I was in big gang we did two night overnights.  The 2 nighter I remember best was in the campground at Waugoshance Point State Park.  This point juts far west into Lake Michigan to form the southwest edge of the straits of Mackinack.  The big Mac bridge is visible from almost everywhere in the park.

 I believe in gang is the most important facet of life on the Belvedere. Each succeeding generation of children are taught the important skills required for enjoying the northern Michigan summer. But there to even more important factors. First, the friendships developed among gang members last a lifetime. Knowing that returning to Belvedere will give you an opportunity to again see lifetime friends is a real incentive to come north of the summer. Second, gang allows young parents to actually have a vacation. Many newly married young adults would often like to go somewhere for vacation other than where their parents have always taken them, but they realize that if they go back to Belvedere the kids can go to gang. Finally, Belvedere is one of the few places left in the world where relatively young children can be allowed to go free range. Almost as soon as they are old enough to know how to swim, kids can be safely set free within the confines of the resort. We really are a family in the sense that almost all adults would happily discipline someone else’s children if they thought they needed.

 1960 at Belvedere was shaping up to be a very perilous year resort. Gang up until then had ended for children once they passed age 12. That year there were nearly 20 of us baby boomers would turn 13. The powers that be were justifiably frightened of that many children that age running unsupervised on the resort. The answer was simple, teenage gang. Butch Mullen had just been married and was in graduate school. He and his wife Ann were quite happy to have the job as team gang leaders for the summer. There was some initial reluctance among the kids but all the parents were able to maintain a united front and we went off to teen gang. Truth be told, it was an awful lot of fun. Butch had been a gangster himself and he knew the drill.  Teen gang was an extension of the activities we all enjoyed all our lives with some slightly more adult activities thrown in. I remember a group of us complaining bitterly that we did not want to have bridge lessons as that was an activity for old people. Butch’s reply was very straightforward:  “As an activity with your friends necking won’t last but bridge will”.

 As our group reached 16 and mostly had summer jobs, teen gang faded away. It has been revived from time to time whenever a dangerously large number of 13-year-olds might be coming to Belvedere.

 Even when we were 16 and 17 there would often be a lot of us on the resort at the same time during the summer and while we couldn’t quite be corralled for teen gang, perhaps we should have been. I’m sure that for the entire history of the resort 16 and 17-year-olds have done plenty of stupid things and we were no exception.

 One year the Retherfords bought a new Century speedboat mostly for the use of daughters Lee and Lynn. The water skiers among us were awed by the amazing power of this new boat and decided that it could probably pull a lot of water skiers at once. After scavenging equipment from practically every boathouse and an hour or so of logistics we found that it was possible to arrange 10 skiers behind a single boat. It turns out that there really isn’t room for 10 skiers behind a single boat but only two of them fell off and for about a half a mile we actually had eight people pulled out of the water skiing behind a single boat with no drowning.

 In response to someone’s dare a group of us decided that we could swim from Two Mile point back to the Belvedere Beach. Those not directly involved in this insanity did at least come up with two or three boats to motor slowly alongside the swimmers to make sure we didn’t lose anybody. This would actually have worked out quite well except that this was during the period when the lakes were infested with lamprey eels. Now lampreys actually have no interest in warm-blooded creatures however they don’t know we are warm-blooded until after the attempt to attach themselves. Being attacked in mid-lake is not conducive to successful swimming so it was good that we had the safety boats alongside.

 Another day while swimming from  anchored boats in Loeb’s Cove, we noticed that on the bottom just at the edge of the drop off were hundreds of clams. This was in the days before the zebra mussels and these were big clams typically 3 to 4 inch long shells. They certainly looked like they ought to be edible so we spent a good part of an afternoon harvesting about four dozen of them. Chipper Ransom’s family had a cottage outside Belvedere on a hilltop just off the Boyne City Road. This was a favorite party spot since no one could see or hear us and we adjourned there with our clams. Over the next several hours we established to everyone’s satisfaction that while these clams were fortunately not poisonous, they were in no way edible. We boiled, we steamed and we fried. None of it helped.

 We were very close knit group and almost never would we embark on an adventure if everyone in the group couldn’t come along. Sudi Ware (Alexander) had a little better sense than most of us and on several occasions she was able to sidetrack a particularly stupid venture. She was from San Antonio and her mother always brought a nice lady along from Texas to supervise the children - still including Sudi.  When she thought we were really going off the rails, Sudi would announce that she needed to call home and check for permission. Asking for permission always took place in Spanish which none of the rest of us could understand. After a prolonged conversation Sudi would turn to us and say with a terribly disappointed look on her face that she wasn’t allowed to go. We didn’t want to leave her behind so we would abandon the project. I found out much later that in most cases that Spanish conversation consisted of Sudi saying “these guys want to do something really dumb, would you please be so good as to forbid me?”

When I was 16 I managed to arrange for my girlfriend to come and visit me in Charlevoix. Sandy Rowe came and stayed in 511 subject to the fairly lax chaperonage of my grandmother Orr. Being an athlete and adventurer Sandy fit quite nicely into my group of friends on the resort. As of this writing she has been coming to the Belvedere for 54 years. By the standards of my most diehard friends, this still qualifies as a “short timer” but I never mention that to her.. She did tell me later that after spending time in Charlevoix she decided that she really ought to try and hang on to me so that she could return. In addition to my huge crowd of relatives on the resort, it turned out that Sandy had a relative there as well. Betty Forker was Sandy’s father’s first cousin.

 At age 16 I was clearly not thinking long term but Sandy’s visit may well have amounted to the well-known resort institution called the “Belvedere test”. Over the years I have seen many long-term denizens of the resort in their early 20s bring a serious significant other for a visit. I’m sure that almost none of the guests realized that they were being tested but not fitting in on the resort is often a disqualification for further consideration as a mate.  The test can be a major challenge as breaking in to a group that has known each other their entire lives if not easy.

 In the 1960s most people stayed in Charlevoix until Labor Day and at the end of the season when all tournaments have been concluded, the resort staged a huge party at the casino- Cabaret.  This was a homegrown musical show in the platform for the distribution of innumerable trophies. Cabaret in the summer of 1964 was a musical about the upcoming presidential election. Two different groups of cavemen were lobbying for either Goldrock or Johnstone.  My first and only musical adventure was in this cabaret. Everyone who heard me agreed that singing out loud in public was something I should avoid the rest of my life. We did have a great time with the cabaret including building a 16 foot long dinosaur of papier-mâché made from newspapers over chicken wire over a wooden frame. Just because we thought it would be fun (albeit not realistic) we decided that this needed to be a fire breathing dinosaur. A plumber’s propane torch in the dinosaurs mouth seemed like a really good idea until the dinosaur caught fire.

 I count myself very lucky that even after my teenage years were over I still have the opportunity to come to Charleroi every summer. As soon as my children were old enough they went off to gain every single day. Daughter Mimi spent a couple of summers as a gang leader and son Jimmy was a teen gang leader for two summers. Now I’m able to send my grandchildren off to gang. They are the six generation of the family to stay in 511 and they have the rare privilege of getting to play with some of their fourth cousins.

 With these young ones in gang I spent a little more time at the Belvedere Beach that I have for quite a few years.  I have noticed that much of the equipment in use today for the gang at the beach is exactly the same as what I used in gang. I remember as a very young gangster taking trips in the Grumman aluminum canoes. 60 years later they look none the worse for wear. As I’ve recently been going through old photographs in an effort to organize and conserve, I found a picture of myself on the beach merry-go-round when I was two years old. The big slide on the beach has been there just as long. Each of the resort spared no expense in both the very best or more likely manufacturing standards for practically everything were just a bit higher 65 years ago.

 Like most native Belvederians I have very different standards as to what constitutes swimmable water than most of the world. Anything at 65° or higher seems just fine to me. I count is lost in the day that I’m unable to spend time either in or on one of the lakes. I’ve been paying careful attention to the lakes long enough to have seen their natural cycles and a lot of changes-both good and bad.

 The Great Lakes as a whole a remarkable for the volume of water that they hold practically since their drainage basin is relatively small. The cottage at 519 had a wonderful card table the top of which was a map of the Great Lakes. A thin dotted line surrounding the entire system showed the limits of the drainage basin, the area whose rainfall drains into the Great Lakes. That line extends only about a third of the way down the state of Ohio, anything soft about line ending up in the Ohio River. In Illinois, the line is also surprisingly close to Lake Michigan with any water falling in the Western portion of the state draining to the Mississippi River instead. One of the attractions Charlevoix in the summer is both the cool weather and the lack of extended periods of rain that might spoil our outdoor activities. To keep up the lake levels, we depend on winter storms which we fortunately do not have to personally endure. Even so, the level of the Great Lakes (and Lake Charlevoix which is attached) vary wildly.

 There is a rough 20 year cycle between the highest and lowest water levels but that cycle is so long that many forget. I remember prognostications of doom in the middle 1960s when the lake was at historic lows. In those years if you walked to the end of the waterskiing dock placed south of the Belvedere Beach and jumped into the water you would find it only 6 inches deep. Dredging was required in all of the boathouses to make them usable and it was a very long step down into every boat. Many people assured me that the days the Great Lakes were over and they were on the path to dry up completely.  Fast forward about 20 years to 1985 and we find Lake Charlevoix within an inch or two of covering the road behind the casino that leads to the beach. Now we were building add-ons to sit on top of the existing docks in each boathouse because the normal ones were underwater and building sandbag barriers behind the Casino. More tales of gloom and doom were bandied about some people were certain that within another two years we would have no beach left at all. Since then the lake levels have wandered up and down within the boundaries of normal. A couple of years ago we were very low when the Detroit River was dredged increasing the outflow into Lake Erie at the same time the Chicago River was reversed to provide extra water to support barge traffic on the Mississippi. This double whammy took our lakes way down but now they have recovered to the point where we needed to dump additional rock along the shoreline between the casino and the channel. I expect further changes.

It is been interesting over the years to observe not just the level of water in the lakes but also the content. As the St. Lawrence River in the lower Great Lakes have been opened to oceangoing ships, a variety of unwelcome visitors joined us. Sometime about the middle 1960s a creature called the lamprey eel found its way into the Great Lakes. The lamprey is a very primitive parasitic fish, although it is technically not considered a fish since it has a cartilage cord instead of an actual backbone. The eel feeds by attaching itself using a suction cup type of mouth to the side of a regular fish. Once attached it slowly sucks all of the blood out of the fish killing it. Once the host is gone, the eel looks for another one. These eels have no natural enemies in the Great Lakes and they nearly drove our largest fish, Lake Trout and lake whitefish to extinction. When those populations were nearly gone, the eels moved on to smallmouth Bass and even lake perch. Having caused the problem in the first place human beings have tried to fix it. Eels like many other creatures surviving in the lakes and oceans prefer to spawn in smaller streams. The first approach was to install electric fences across the mouths of the primary breeding streams and rivers. These fences always had an opening at one end and most fish were able to sense the electric current and find the opening. The lampreys with their very primitive nervous systems were unable to detect the electrical field before swimming in it and being killed. While the system was a help it was too expensive to put on every little stream. Fortunately someone was able to develop a powdered poison to be dropped into smaller streams that would suffocate eel larvae in the streambed without adversely affecting other fish.

Once the population was reduced to a manageable level it was time to attempt to rebuild the population of Lake trout and whitefish. Unfortunately about that time the next unwelcome visitor arrived - the alewife. This is a nasty little 5 inch long fish from the ocean who seems quite able to live in freshwater. By all accounts they are nearly worthless. Not only are they considered inedible by people but they don’t even make satisfactory cat food. They arrived at a time when the only fish large enough to be predators, the lake trout, were almost gone. Alewives multiplied beyond reason and were very hard on a number of other native species, like perch, because they ate the same food. Many of you will remember summers when the population of alewives had outgrown the food supply and they died by the billions only to wash up on our beaches and rot and stink. Luckily for all of us the Michigan state department of fisheries was able to pull a rabbit out of the hat. Turns out that in the ocean the major predators of alewives are salmon. Salmon are all born and then spawn in freshwater but spend the rest of their lives in saltwater. After years of effort three species of salmon -  Coho, King and Chinook were adapted to spend their entire lives in freshwater. These fish were aggressively stocked in the Great Lakes and soon brought the population of alewives down to a very manageable level. This was a double win for the state of Michigan since people anxious to catch salmon contribute millions of dollars to the state economy every year.

 Just when it looked like the Great Lakes were back in balance zebra mussels arrived. These fingernail-sized shellfish arrived in ballast water of oceangoing ships and went crazy in our lakes. They spawn like crazy and attach themselves in clusters to anything in the lake that is not moving. Like all shellfish the feed by straining microscopic food from the water. They been very damaging to the native population of shellfish because they steal all the food. They have another effect that has been the good news/bad news result for the lakes. There so many of them that their feeding has made the water of the lakes noticeably clearer than it has been in a long time. In Lake Michigan Lake Charlevoix boy this is generally a good thing. In the smaller inland lakes this extra clarity of water is been a real problem. Since these lakes are much shallower the clarity of the water now allows weeds to grow up from the bottom of the lake. This clogs the lake and boat propellers during the growing months then creates an even worse problem in the winter. When it gets cold all of these plants die and then sink to the bottom of the lake where they rot. The rotting process uses up much of the dissolved oxygen in the water and many of the fish in the small lakes then suffocate. No miracle cures yet been found zebra mussels.

The year I was born my grandfather Leatherman, his brother-in-law and a cousin decided that the family needed a boat. They bought a 1948 22 foot Chris-Craft mahogany speedboat and named it “Rebels”. The boat was shared among three or four related families. This made for a hard life for Rebels. Everybody who reached teenage years wanted to drive the boat and it had to suffer through the learning curve for every one of them. Despite being a bit underpowered it would pull water skiers. It can hold about a dozen people in a pinch and was perfect for general sightseeing and beachside picnics. The fact that it still in one piece is testimony to its durability. Before the bottom of the boat was replaced about 10 years ago it sank several times tied to the docks in the boathouse and it was subject to one rather spectacular sinking in Lake Michigan off of North point. A relative of mine, who shall remain nameless, was out touring in one of the years with relatively low lake levels. He was not aware that shallow water extends way out from the points in Lake Michigan.  Around North Point just underwater are boulders about the size of a cottage. He hit one of those at cruising speed sending the propeller and the rudder up through the bottom of the boat. Despite being made of wood, the steel block of the six-cylinder engine was enough weight to send the boat straight to the bottom. Luckily the bottom there was only about 20 feet and the folks from Bellinger Marine pulled it up, towed it in and put it back together.

Eventually Dick Leatherman and the original owners got tired of paying the bills and passed ownership of the boat down to the next generation including my father Jim Orr, my uncle Richard Leatherman and at least one of the relative. Finally over a number of years the other owners got tired of paying and my father ended up with the whole boat. His third wife was not a fan of Belvedere and he came to me one day and asked if my siblings and I would like to buy the cottage since he was planning on selling it. I exercised admirable restraint and didn’t tell him that I was planning on inheriting the cottage the way he did. We negotiated a reasonable deal for the cottage. When I thought everything was settled my father said to me “Oh by the way, if you want to buy the cottage you have to take the boat too”. He didn’t ask for any extra money for the boat, but just wanted out from underneath the bills.