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(Editor’s Note: Jill (Virginia) Weisell Dike shares lovely memories of spending summers at Neahtawanta, singing songs around a beach campfire, and eventually buying the Bowers Harbor schoolhouse. If you have an OMP story you’d like to share, send it to me, [email protected], with a photo or two. Some ideas: memories of growing up here or spending summers here, the story behind a photo from your photo album, why you moved here last week, why the OMP is special for you, or whatever else strikes your fancy. -jb)
Old Mission Peninsula has been part of my life from the beginning. My memories go back to early childhood, when my family made the Edwards’ cottage on Neahtawanta Road our last summer stop over Labor Day Weekend, before heading back to Indianapolis and school.
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However, our link began even before I was born. In 1939, Jane and Rob Edwards came up from Texas to a farm bought some years before by her aunt and uncle. They wanted to re-open their cottage, an old farmhouse known as “The Links.”
Their good friends from Denton, my grandmother Willa Craig and mother Mary, came with them. That year, my father Bill Weisell also came up to court my mother. Once they married and my brother and I arrived, Old Mission Peninsula ever formed an integral part of our lives.
I still remember our early drives through what we considered the deep, dark woods up the “Low Road” (Peninsula Drive) in the late 1940s and early ’50s. Our destination, the Edwards’ cottage, was a log farmhouse covered with white frame clapboard. It was old, cold and creaky, made warm only by the people inside — and we loved it.
The wide open porch was the setting for many leisurely chats. More recently (until her passing last summer), granddaughter Ann held court there on summer evenings, offering a glass of white wine and friendly conversation to any passing visitors. The living room was cozy, made so by the graciousness of Aunt Jane, as well as the comfy chairs and crackling log fire.
Our grandmothers were forever knitting, and all the adults enjoyed a cocktail or game of bridge, with lively conversations continuing round the dining table. The kitchen was quaint, with an iron wood-burning stove like in the children’s book Blueberries for Sal, though by then it was just for fancy. Up the creaky stairs, we children had the large front bedroom, freezing cold even in summer, where we were delighted to discover we could listen to adult conversations below through an open vent.
Across the road and down a steep winding path was the sheltered beach. The lake was shallow and clear till very far out, and rippled sand once one got past the rocks, a perfect place for children to play. We were fascinated by the minnows and crayfish, shells and Petoskey stones, and our own “shipwreck,” a fruit barge that had sunk off Neahtawanta Resort years before.
We also played in the old barn behind the house, defying death by balancing across shaky beams like trapeze artists, all to make a small house under the rafters. Every year the roof sagged a bit more, until finally it collapsed. As the pines — planted as a government erosion measure — grew tall, we had free run, making our way through rows of trees to play in the sandy dunes behind. This was our Michigan until we bought the Schoolhouse in 1955.
Next to the Edwards place, at the corner of Neahtawanta and Kroupa Roads, sat a one-room schoolhouse, one of seven serving Peninsula children (although this particular one had been out of use for some years). When word came in 1955 that the Township planned to auction off the seven and build a modern consolidated school, my parents became interested in the prospect of buying the old Bowers Harbor School and renovating it as a cottage. With the help of Uncle Rob Edwards, who attended the auction that fall, we succeeded!
By the next summer, the Edwards’ daughter Mary Jane, an architect and my mother’s bosom friend, had transformed the one-room structure into an L-shaped living area with three bedrooms, two of them in a loft, and enclosed the open front porch to provide our kitchen and dining room. Excitement ran high the next year as we kids — my brother Bob and I, and our younger cousins Craig and Shelley — camped out on the living room floor in our sleeping bags.
A few years later, we built a large L-shaped screen porch to spread out in, a wonderful all-purpose family room. Our main playmates in those days were Bud and Naomi Kroupa’s kids next door: Joan was my friend and companion, while Bob played with his agemates Lorey and Kenny.
For a few summers, we joined them on the Kroupa cherry-picking crew, working hot and sweaty all day, a heavy bucket of cherries hanging from our necks, then jumping into the lake to cool off at dusk.
I took endless walks, often alone, letting my thoughts wander as I reveled in the beauty around me, or in the company of my brother, our parents and neighbors. As a child, I was especially excited by family walks through the woods. I would try to walk noiselessly, leaving no trace, as I imagined an Indian would.
We might trek through the pines and cross the forest to West Bay — no Meier or Dunn Road by then, no “Private Property” and “No Trespassing” signs, just open woods, meadows and beach, with an occasional house. We might walk along on the beach all the way around the Point, perhaps going barefoot on the sand. Especially in the evening after dinner, we walked around the bay on Neahtawanta Road, admiring the silver moon shining on the water and looking for falling stars.
Evenings, the Edwards and Weisell households often gathered for campfires on their beach, roasting hotdogs and hamburgers and s’mores while we sang the old songs. Accompanied by Ann and I on our baritone ukes, we sang old favorites like “In the Still of the Night (Shu-do-be-do-be-do),” “With Someone Like You,” “Side by Side,” and the slightly irreverent “Big Daddy” and “Lord, Build Me Just a Cabin.”
By the late 1950s, I was entering adolescence, and my lifestyle changed. Enter boys and teenage tomfoolery. When I was 14, Ann, six years my senior, took me under her wing to socialize with older kids in the Neahtawanta Resort crowd. I had adventures like parties around the campfire, where some might be drinking beer, nocturnal treasure hunts (where the intrepid had to swim out to retrieve the treasure stuck under a raft), and wild canoe trips down the Jordan River (with the bad boys madly tipping the girls’ canoes over).
However, soon Ann married and my attention turned to my friend Joan and her Peninsula crowd: Don and Ron Brown, Tom Kroupa, Tom Woods and Denny White. Sometimes kids from the Resort or waiters at Bowers Harbor Inn joined us on the beach for singing (again, with our baritone ukes), joking, flirting, and foolishness; or on more solitary occasions, gazing at the stars, anxious our world might end in nuclear catastrophe.
And did we ride around in cars! One night I even dared ask to see the notorious local lovers’ lane, the “Fire Trail” up near the Lighthouse. The most notable event was the evening four of us went into town for a performance of the Blue Echoes, a teenage quartet from Detroit that was all the rage.
Those days were indeed sweet; but soon we all moved on, for better or worse. Those summers always remind me of Tony Bennett’s song: “Once upon a time, the world was sweeter than we knew.”
I went away to college and the world of work, married and had a family, moved to Nigeria and a new life there. I still came back summers with my children, so this beautiful place could also be theirs.
Now that our parents have passed and it is my brother and I, the Schoolhouse has become our family home, our only home in America, and we receive children and grandchildren — new generations continuing the tradition and enjoying the magic of our beautiful Peninsula. So may it ever remain!
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