The Resort

         I saw the place for the first time when I was five years old.  It would have been May 1948 and I’ll never forget my unbounded excitement as I got out of the car and ran through a veritable carpet of wild flowers—Yellow Bells, Trilliums, Blood Root, and Mayflowers.  There were no grassy lawns at Mooers’ Agate Lake Lodge yet, only a perfusion of woodland plants and flowers.  Trees with large canopies were everywhere and, in the distance, glistening sapphire blue through the bushes and branches, was Agate Lake.  I suppose that when we are children this impressionability is natural to us.  I think as we get older, we tend to lose it.  But if we are lucky, as I was, we retain those brief sensations—locked in time—that were given us in our youth.   We know such moments enter our bones and can change us forever.  For me, my first exuberant encounter with that land was such a moment.

         A year later we moved from town out to the resort, where I spent the whole summer wandering at will through its ten acres.  It was an idyllic place for a boy too old for close adult supervision and too young for meaningful chores.  To top it off, a dog came with the premises!  He was Grandpa Mooers’ old hunting dog, Bing.  Grandpa and Grandma lived next door but their dog tagged along with me when he wasn’t snoozing in the shade.  (Dogs ran free in those days; in fact, I don’t think I ever saw a dog on a leash before I went off to college.)  Bing was too elderly to hunt anymore or even chase the chipmunks, but he still knew one trick: he would lift his head and “sing” (howl) on command—hence his name for the most popular crooner of the day, Bing Crosby.

          I fished daily off the dock for sunfish using freshly dug worms and a bamboo pole, ran around with kids staying at the resort, caught hundreds of frogs and then let them go, chased dragonflies trying to sun themselves, fed my imagination with daydreams, and (weather permitting) splashed around at the beach.  They were simple pleasures.  Looking back, I now understand that what my backyard contained was—most of all—the infinite horizon of youthful possibility, and Agate Lake was my personal inland sea.  I learned how to operate a boat well before I learned how to drive.

           It will always be easy to imagine every time of year there.  The seasons gave a certain rhythm to my life.  Spring—warmth, the smell of earth, a profusion of woodland flowers, and the hectic pre-opening day rituals necessary to getting the place ready for another tourist season.  Summer—the high season, generous, warm and beautiful, a time when just being outside is its own reward.  Winter—long and often dreary, but who could rebuff the cold brilliance of a dazzling, clear winter’s day, the sky an intense blue, or the dimensionless harmony of silent, crystalline, sub-zero nights?  Autumn—mom loved every season here, but she loved autumn most of all with its crisp air, mist rising from the lake on frosty mornings, and trees ablaze in gold and russet.  The maples at the resort were radiant in the fall.  Every fall when the leaves were at peak color, she announced that we had the prettiest spot on the highway between Crosby and Deerwood, and that she felt blessed to live in such a beautiful place.  A stroll down the resort road by the cabins in mid-October, beneath canopies of brilliant color, was a trip through glory.   

         I will never, ever, forget walking in that glorious October gold as a kid, bathed in the glow of living color, magically becoming part of it.  In my mind’s eye I am perhaps seven or eight years old and rambling along as I did each morning down the resort road to Grandma and Grandpa Mooers’ driveway where the school bus will pick me up.  I remember the cool morning air sharp on my face and I am struck even at that young age at the sheer beauty of the colorful leaves surrounding me.  I’m going to catch the school bus there because, at the time, Grandma and Grandpa Mooers’ driveway marked the dividing line that governed whether you attended the elementary school in Crosby or the one in Deerwood.  Mom wanted me to go to the school in Crosby, which she thought was better, and because I had already gone there as a kindergartner and first grader when we lived in town.  Somehow, she convinced (badgered?) the school board to extend its boundary another 700 feet so that our house sat on the Crosby side of the dividing line.  But before the boundaries changed, I walked the resort road each day on my way to and from the school bus.  These days, my childhood memory of those resort road treks resurfaces in my brain every time I walk through a remotely similar autumn landscape.

II

After World War Two, sweeping economic expansion and cultural changes spawned a boom in outdoor recreation.  Families in America’s rapidly growing middle class flocked to parks, beaches, and summer resorts, propelled by rising incomes, good employment opportunities, improved highways, better cars, and greater leisure time.  Almost overnight, tourism became a major industry in Minnesota and my parent’s resort rode the wave. 

         Initially called Mooers’ Agate Lake Lodge, it opened in 1945 just as the war drew to a close.  It consisted of nine cabins (expanded to ten in the late 1970s) on ten acres between Agate and Serpent Lakes, roughly two miles east of Crosby.  Dad was a natural builder.  While in his 20s, and without formal training, he mastered the skills needed to build (with some help) all the cabins himself, as well as our house.  Unlike older “American Plan” resorts that included a main lodge where guests socialized and ate their meals, housekeeping resorts like ours were composed only of cabins where guests cooked and fended for themselves. The interiors of our cabins, paneled entirely in woodsy knotty pine, were the definition of simplicity: an open space served as kitchen, dining, and living room, with one or two small bedrooms and a tiny bathroom with shower. An oil stove offered heat when needed. And of course, every cabin came with its own rowboat for fishing.

         Our place offered sunshine, relaxation, reading, swimming, boating, good fishing, and the great outdoors, with easy trips to and from town and the surrounding area.  There was nothing especially fancy about it, but it easily competed with places boasting grander amenities because it was affordable for ordinary middle-class families.  In the mid-1950s, a one-bedroom cabin at Mooers’ Agate Lake Resort rented for the princely sum of about $35-$40 a week.  The grounds were well-tended, the cabins clean and reasonably well-equipped.  The beach stood as the centerpiece, with a series of docks at one end mooring two boats per dock, and the swimming area at the other end with sand, a diving raft, and giant inner tube to splash in the water with.  You could use the screened fish house to clean your fish.  Younger children enjoyed the playground and the older ones could play badminton, tetherball, and horseshoes.  Lawn chairs, picnic tables, and fire pits dotted the property.  Mom kept a small lending library next to the registration desk, and tourist kids had direct access to our home’s basement recreation room, containing a pool table and pin pong table.  Unlike some resorts, there were no scheduled activities, although in the 1960s we daily saddled up one of our horses so youngsters could have a ride.

         During the summer of 1950-1954—essentially the years we lived in the basement of our partially built house—we also had a small store that sold groceries, ice cream, candy, pop, cigarettes, souvenirs, and fishing tackle. I learned how to make change at a young age because a buzzer sounded in the basement when someone entered the store and whoever was home waited on the customer.  If there were lots of kids at the resort, we did a particularly brisk business in candy, pop, and ice cream.  I probably didn’t help the bottom line by helping myself daily to that sort of stuff.  It was a handy convenience for our tourists, but probably didn’t make sense financially and was discontinued once we moved out of the basement.  Dad partitioned the space and turned most of it into our laundry room; the entryway became the resort’s reception/registration area.

Most guests rose early, had breakfast, and—especially dad and the older kids—headed off to fish. If you walked down the resort road around supper time, you could usually smell the aroma of fresh fish frying in a skillet.  In the evening hours after supper, when the table had been cleared and the dishes done, families would gather around one of the fire pits or the kitchen table to play board games or cards.  Nights tended to end early, with screens open to the cool night air, the rustle of leaves in the trees, and a loon calling in the distance.  Pretty simple stuff.  No phones, internet, or other such gadgetry.  As for TV, housekeeping resorts seldom offered it in the cabins during the 1950s, 60s, or 70s, and our resort was no exception.  But tourists began to expect it by the 1980s.  Reluctantly, mom and dad gave in, and by 1990 small TV sets using rabbit ear antennas had been put in each cabin.  The closest TV stations were still quite a distance away, however, so the reception was never very good.  Other modernisms also took sway over the years.  Wooden ice boxes were replaced by refrigerators; simple countertop gas burners for cooking were replaced by kitchen ranges; wooden rowboats (which had to be sealed and repainted every spring) were replaced by fiberglass and aluminum boats; and the old free-standing oil stoves for heat were eventually replaced by wall-mounted propane-fueled heaters, although they never warmed up the cabins as well as the old-fashioned stoves.

         As for me, the resort became my place of employment starting the summer before seventh grade.  No more weekly allowance; I now earned weekly pay for which I was expected to “help around the resort.”  As I got older, the tasks and responsibilities grew with each season.  Among the never-ending core duties were mowing the grass (a once-a-week task that took most of the day using a temperamental self-propelled walk-behind mower); raking the beach daily; keeping the boats clean and bailing them after a rainfall (dad rigged up an ingenious boat-tipping contraption to facilitate this, but it was still a lot of work); cleaning the fish house daily; collecting all the garbage twice-weekly and hauling it to the dump (we had a dump truck for this purpose; before I got my drivers license, I used as many back roads as possible when driving to the town dump north of Crosby); handling the rental of outboard motors and keeping them running; lugging a five-gallon can of fuel oil around on cooler days in order to fill the tank for each cabin’s heating stove, and showing how to light and operate them. 

         Nonroutine stuff included scraping, painting, repairing, replacing, patching, digging, etc. as needed, and helping to care for our first horse, Lady.  The days were full.  Quite a lot fell on my shoulders because, often as not, dad was away for weeks at a time working on a construction project out of town. Of course, all work and no play would make Jack a dull boy.  I took plenty of time for personal activities and fun, but I sometimes felt overworked and got a little perturbed when cheerful tourists would tell me how lucky I was to live year-round at a beautiful resort while I was scrubbing out a dirty boat or making my rounds with that heavy fuel oil can!   

III

Time moves on, just like me.  The resort these days is full of ghosts: each remembered cabin inhabited by tourists now deceased.  During the years I lived there, I encountered thousands of alive ones, but I only got to know a few very well.  The ones who most stand out in my mind returned season after season and usually stayed in the same cabin, so I associate them with “their” cabin.  Let’s start with Cabin 1.  Cabin 1 was referred to in the resort’s early years as the “honeymoon cabin” because it was at the end of the road, more private and removed from the rest of the place.  For a few years in the late ‘40s mom would present each newlywed couple who stayed there with a loose-leaf “Mooers Lodge” remembrance book.  It had a faux-leather cover, which (as I recall) mom hand decorated using pen and ink, and a few blank pages inside suitable for photos and personal recollections. Years later as we were shutting down, I thought that somewhere in the house among mom’s things was one remaining copy, but when we cleared everything out, we failed to find it.

         I link cabin 1 with the Thompsons—Tommy, as he was called, and his wife Lucille.  Tommy loved to fish and would spend as much time on the lake as he could.  Lucille, who didn’t enjoy fishing, preferred a good book instead, and if he was within earshot, would call him in off the lake if she felt he had been out there too long.  I remember her pearly white complexion (she avoided the sun) and her refined ways.  She was a piano teacher back home—which was Quincy, Illinois—and mom said she had had a privileged and sheltered life growing up.  Lucille took an interest in me because I liked books, and when I graduated from high school, she and Tommy gave me a beautiful set of old leather-bound volumes containing the poems of Robert Browning.  They had once belonged to Tommy’s mother, to whom they were presented in 1910 “for perfect attendance at Miss Spence’s School” according to the inscription inside.  When I graduated from college, they gave me two more very nice books (these were new ones, but of excellent quality) containing poems by Robert Burns and essays and poems by Ralph Waldo Emerson.  Tommy was a quiet, courtly gentleman who wore old clothes and patiently abided his wife’s predilections.  Back home he was the respected county treasurer, many times re-elected.

        Cabin 2 was always thought of as our best cabin, at least among the original nine.  It was large—albeit the same size as Cabin 3—but mom seemed partial to 2 and usually put the better furnishings in it.  Two families immediately come to mind when I think of Cabin 2.  Dr. Marble was a dentist from the Twin Cities, a rather dour fellow who came with his tightly-wound wife and two teenage sons.  I suppose I remember this family because they were more demanding than most of our guests—and mom always tried to accommodate.  As I got older and did more chores and errands around the resort, these special accommodations often fell to me to perform.  Some of their requests were about as welcome as a fart in church: “Please replace our roll-away bed with a better one,” for example.  The Marbles were good customers.  They came back for two weeks every summer throughout the 1950s, but their expectations seemed to rise with each new season. You could tell they were used to getting their way.  One summer I sensed that we just weren’t living up to their standards and, sure enough, they never returned.

         I also associate Cabin 2 with the Cousins family from Clinton, Iowa.  Glen Cousins was a well-to-do real estate lawyer, taciturn, small in stature, balding, with watery eyes, big lips, and a perpetual cigar in his mouth.  His wife Alice personified the image of a perky 1950s housewife who didn’t work outside the home and wore house dresses with an apron, her hair always fixed. They had two adopted children, Emily and Conrad.  Emily, about five years younger than me, seemed a little spoiled.  Conrad, a year or two older than me, thought of himself as “cool” and a bit rebellious. By the time he reached his mid-teens he certainly looked the part with a duck-tail haircut and everyday dress that seldom varied: blue jeans, a white tee shirt with of a pack of Lucky Strikes rolled up into a sleeve and, if it was chilly, a jacket with the collar always turned up.  Conrad and I chummed around together every time his parents came to the resort, which was for two weeks each summer.  Because he was older and so cocksure of himself, I deferred to his wishes more than I should have and it got me in hot water more than once. The worst such instance was when I let Conrad drive our speedboat by himself—I had been told to not let him do that—and, sure enough, he flipped it, destroying a new 40 HP Scott-Atwater outboard motor.  Glen and Alice liked Agate Lake so much that in 1958 they talked my folks into building a summer retirement home for them near the resort’s eastern boundary, overlooking the beach.  It was leased back to them under terms allowing dad to retain ultimate control over the property.  The Cousins only used the place for a few years, however, because Glen died of a heart attack at the relatively young age of 59.  It was later leased under a similar arrangement to Harold and Mae Alenduff of Chicago. When dad reclaimed the cabin from the Alenduffs, it became Cabin 10, available for tourist rental year-round.

         Among the people I most associate with Cabin 3 are Bob and Lucy Majors from Peru, Nebraska, a small town tucked into that state’s southeast corner.  They came year after year and usually stayed in 3.  Bob was a teacher, a rather handsome man and avid fisherman who seemed to habitually wear a white tee-shirt and old pair of khaki army pants.  Lucy was outgoing and funny.  They had no children of their own and Bob often brought along a youthful nephew or two as fishing buddies.  But the real story—which is why I include the Majors among my memorable tourists—is what happened long after they stopped coming to Mooers’ Agate Lake Resort. 

         In 1966, Bob hooked an unusually big largemouth bass in Agate Lake while fishing with his nephew, Tom Majors.  He entered it in a contest, put it is a cooler, on ice, and had it mounted by a taxidermist upon returning home to Nebraska.  When he came back the following summer, he proudly presented it as a gift to mom and dad. They hung it above the door next to the registration desk where, for the next 37 years, it looked solemnly down with its beady glass eye upon every tourist who came and went. 

        After my parents died unexpectedly in the winter of 2004, my siblings and I wondered what to do next with the resort.  None of us were interested in managing it long term, but there were already quite a few advance reservations with down payment deposits for the upcoming summer.  It was finally decided that my sister Connie—aided by daughter Shannon and husband John—would run the resort for one final season before we closed it permanently.  Amid these discussions, the subject of Bob’s mounted bass somehow came up. 

         “What should we do with that fish?” Connie asked.  “Does anybody want it?”  Silence.  “Doesn’t anyone want it?”  More silence.  “Then I’d like to give it back to Bob Majors,” she stated emphatically. “It’s his fish . . . but he’s probably not even alive anymore, and I wouldn’t know how to get in touch with him after all these years anyway.” 

         In a sense, that old mounted fish had become emblematic of the resort itself because Agate Lake was known for its bass fishing.  My mom, who had been the beating heart and soul of the operation and was sentimental about such things, would not have been happy if we tossed it away.  Connie, intent on returning it to someone—anyone—in the Majors family, tried earnestly that summer to track such a person down, but without success.  Then the unthinkable happened.

         Late that summer, a couple of weeks before the resort was scheduled to shut down for the last time, a car drove up, very slowly circled around the grounds, and finally came to a stop.  Connie and Shannon, who had been cleaning a nearby cabin, walked over to the car.  Inside was a middle-aged couple. 

         “What can we do for you?” Shannon asked when the driver rolled down his window.  The man said that he had stayed at a fishing resort in this general area many years ago when he was younger.  He couldn’t remember the name of the resort or exactly where it was, but he had good memories of his time there and they were now trying to find it.  They had been checking out other resorts in the area and none of them looked at all like what he remembered. 

         “This place looks kind of familiar,” he said, “but it was so long ago . . . I don’t know.  I’m just not sure . . .”   

His wife chimed in.  “He’s been talking for years about what a great time he had at that resort.  He would come with his uncle and they caught lots of fish.  He retired not long ago and had time on his hands and I told him: let’s just drive to Minnesota and find that resort and maybe we can stay there for a few days if it’s still in business.”

         “We’re from Nebraska and this turned out to be a spur-of-the-moment thing,” he said. “We drove up yesterday and we’ve been driving around looking at resorts.  My uncle died quite a few years ago, and my aunt is so old she doesn’t remember anything anymore, so I couldn’t ask them.  I’m pretty sure it was somewhere around Deerwood, though.  I remember that name, Deerwood.”  

         “So, who was your uncle?” Connie asked.

         “My uncle? His name was Bob Majors.” 

         KAPOW! 

         “My God!” Connie shot back.  “I don’t believe it!  We’ve been looking for you!”

         He turned out to be one of the two youthful nephews who, season after season, came to the resort in the 1960s to fish with their uncle.  It was his cousin Tom who was present on the red-letter day—July 28, 1966, to be exact—when Uncle Bob hooked that big bass.  The event was duly recorded by the St. Paul Dispatch and Pioneer Press (sponsor of the fishing contest) and the Crosby-Ironton Courier. 

         Did he want the mounted bass?  “Absolutely!” he said.  “But I’ll give it to Tom.” And so it was, just as Connie hoped, that the old fish was reunited with the Majors family.

         The man and his wife stayed at the resort for a week, becoming one of the last couples to do so.  More than once during that week they enjoyed evenings with Connie, John, and Shannon, who served up hearty meals along with 1960s-style highballs and hors d’oevers for their unexpected but very special guests.

         A fairy tale collision of a magical world with the everyday one?  An unimaginably improbable coincidence?  So . . .  this fellow and his wife decided at the drop of a hat to drive over 550 miles to a place he couldn’t remember the name of, and hadn’t seen in nearly forty years, and wasn’t sure where it was, or if it even existed anymore?  And he found it—just in time?  What are the odds?  Divine intercession perhaps.  Or did my mother have something to do with it?  She had already revealed herself to both me and to Connie—her presence palpable, as if to say “I’m still with you”—in the months immediately following her death.  A cause for wonder.  You be the judge.

         Cabin 4 was taken for three weeks, summer after summer, by Justina Meyers.  Justina was the post-mistress of Fort Wayne, Indiana.  She knew President Harry Truman personally, who had appointed her to the job, and although she was a staunch Democrat, she somehow managed to hang on to her postal appointment throughout the Eisenhower years (in those days, top postal jobs were awarded as political patronage). She was unmarried and a devout Roman Catholic.  I remember her as tall and slender—a “stately” woman—with clear-blue eyes and permed white hair.  Like Truman, Justina, too, was plain spoken and had a mind of her own.  She smoked Herbert Tareyton cigarettes (an off-brand) and seldom fished in Agate or Serpent Lakes, preferring instead the crappies and bullheads found in the lethargic backwater channels of the Mississippi River between Ironton and Brainerd.  Perhaps those slow, sleepy channels reminded her of old fishing haunts in Indiana.  An ardent fisherman, she spent just about every afternoon on the water, rain or shine, renting her boat from a place in Riverton. 

         Justina liked company when she fished.  For years a tall, pleasant young guy named Mike Donovan came along with her to the resort. Mike was probably seven or eight years older than me, and back in Indiana he attended a Catholic boys’ boarding school.  Later he went to the University of Notre Dame and eventually became a priest.  He was related to Justina in some way (a distant nephew perhaps?) but she clearly looked after his welfare and, according to mom, she paid his way through school, college, and seminary.  As he got older, Mike no longer came for Justina’s full three-week stay, and I started to become her fishing companion.  I was happy to do it because, by then (age fifteen), I had my driver’s license.  Justina bought a big new Cadillac nearly every year, equipped with all the bells and whistles.  By American standards in the 1950s, her car was the ultimate in luxury and refinement and I not only got to drive it when I took her fishing, she asked me—saints be praised!—to “keep it serviced.”  Taking a circuitous route to the gas station, I’d cruise around shamelessly pretending “I own this car.” I thoroughly enjoyed Justina’s company—she was full of colorful stories about politics, people she knew, and her travels—but I admit (callow youth that I was) that slowly driving her conspicuously magnificent Cadillac through small-town Crosby was a compelling part of the package.

         Cabin 4 was also a favorite of Harold and Mae Alenduff.  The Alenduffs arrived as tourists but soon became close family friends—more so than any of the other tourists over the years.  Their first summer at the resort would have been in the early 1950s, and they really hit it off with mom.  They were old-school Republican Presbyterians from Berwyn, Illinois, a leafy first-ring suburb west of Chicago.  Harold was a genial, level-headed business executive who liked to fish.  For him, the resort offered a welcome escape from the high-stake stresses of Chicago corporate life.  He was the financial VP and treasurer of a big-time player in the manufacture and distribution of chemicals used in industrial cleaning products.  It traded on the New York Stock Exchange and Harold made frequent trips to New York to represent the firm.  He was a downtown Rotarian, tall and distinguished looking, well read, financially secure, successful—with ulcers to prove it.  Harold’s wife, Mae, was his perceptive, alert helpmate.  Her diminutive stature contradicted the intensity of her style, which was that of an opinionated straight shooter who knew her own mind.  She had a quick wit and dry sense of humor that could throw the uninitiated off balance, but she also had a warm heart and disarming smile.  Like her husband, she mixed easily with people of all types.  They were about ten to fifteen years older than my folks.

         The Alenduffs took a special interest in me.  I learned later that their only child, a son, had died as a young man and that their first trip to the resort came the year after his death. Whether it had anything to do with their attentions toward me, I do not know, but during the summer of 1954 when I was eleven, the Alenduffs brought me home with them for a week-long visit.

         “Chicago is the city that never sleeps,” said Mae, when I remarked about the busy highway traffic surrounding us as we were finally getting into town around 10:00 at night.  It had been a long, roughly thirteen-hour drive (this was before freeways) from Crosby.  Their house, like most of the others in their neighborhood, was a well-kept, sturdy American Foursquare (probably built between 1900-1920) with a big front porch. Stately old elms arched their branches over the street, giving it the look of a green tunnel. At night I slept in their son’s quiet room at the top of the stairs. The next five or six days were jam-packed with wondrous places and new experiences.  Mae (Harold was at the office) took me to the Field Museum of Natural History, Shedd Aquarium, Adler Planetarium, Museum of Science and Industry, Grant Park and Buckingham Fountain.  I rode on the “el” (the elevated commuter trains that wound their way through Chicago) and learned that downtown Chicago was called the Loop.  We visited Marshall Field’s, supposedly the world’s largest department store under one roof.  We had lunch at the Palmer House hotel restaurant (large, clattery, bustling), and went to a supermarket twenty times larger than any grocery store I had ever seen.  When it was all over, I was put on a train—my first train ride without an adult at my side—and sent on my way.  I was met by mom and dad when I got off in St. Paul.

         Two years later (now age thirteen) the five or six-day scenario largely repeated itself, except in lieu of fish at the aquarium and stars at the planetarium, Mae and I spent the better part of a day with animals at the Brookfield Zoo.  Harold joined us one afternoon for a trip to the observation deck of Chicago’s brand-new skyscraper, the Prudential Building.  Built in 1955 with 39 stories, it was then Chicago’s tallest.  Following that, they decided to show me “another side” of Chicago and drove me through a no-frills, low-income housing project south of downtown.   Look-alike two-story row houses stood side-by-side in a vast sea of boxy brown-brick buildings that had probably been built in the late 1930s.  Few trees or shrubs softened the cheerless landscape.  Trash littered the streets and many of the yards.  Torn screens hung from windows. 

         “Mostly Negros live here,” said Mae with a disparaging tone, “and look how they take care of it!” 

         Harold explained that the government built these apartments for poor people and was subsidizing the rent, “but they [the residents] don’t appreciate it.” 

         It was an unsettling sight and I fully realized, even then, that this side-trip was supposed to give me an object lesson in misguided government largess.  It laid bare their conservative, limited government principles, with some characteristic mid-century racism thrown in.

About 1960, after the death of Glen Cousins, dad agreed to lease the Cousins’ cabin to the Alenduffs under similar financial terms.  The timing was perfect for Harold, who had just retired, and so Mae and Harold happily became full-time summer residents at the resort.  Our two families remained very close until the late 1970s when dad decided to claim the cabin as a year-round rental for better-paying tourists.  I think mom preferred that the Alenduffs stay. The Alenduffs definitely wanted to stay.  But dad was adamant.  And so, amid hard feelings, twenty-five summers with the Alenduffs came to an end.  They had become like family to me and I teared up when I said my final goodbye to Mae.  That fall, their place became Cabin 10.

         Cabins 5 and 8 were our smallest, and although equipped much like the others, most of our tourists preferred something larger.  As a result, they were most often rented when nothing else was available.

         Cabins 6 and 7 were twins.  They stood right next to each other and, except for the paint job in later years, were identical.   Earl and Ina Cameron from Missouri (I don’t recall the city) stayed in Cabin 6 year after year.  Earl had a cherubic face and a folksy, self-effacing manner that belied the dead seriousness of his skill as a bass fisherman.  His interest was hardcore—only largemouth bass; if he hooked anything else, it was thrown back in the lake.  Smaller bass—one- or two-pounders that nearly everyone else would not hesitate to keep—were also thrown back.  He was, hands down, the best fisherman I remember from my years at the resort.  He fished every day, regardless of weather, and nearly every day came off the lake carrying his limit.  I should point out to younger readers that in those days the idea of “catch and release” didn’t exist.  If your fish was large enough to clean and eat, you kept it unless it was a species you didn’t want.  The Minnesota Department of Natural Resources did set a daily limit by species, though.

         Orville and Lillian Starr, from Kansas City, always stayed in Cabin 7.  Orville was a tall, wiry fellow with a particularly heavy “Mazuruh” accent.  Like so many of our guests, he seemed to spend most of his time on the lake.  His wife Lillian was high up in the executive ranks of the Russell Stover candy company, which headquartered in Kansas City.  Every Christmas our family would receive a humongous and beautifully wrapped gift box of Russell Stover candy and nuts, compliments of the company.  I’m sure those extravagant gift boxes were sent primarily to people of special importance to the corporation’s sweet success, but happily (thank you, Lillian Starr!) we made it onto their Juletide mailing list. 

         John and Ruth Hartwein were also from St. Louis.  They usually reserved both Cabin 6 and 7 so they could also invite members of their extended family, making it like a Hartwein family reunion.  Different people from the Hartwein clan—grandparents, adult siblings, and kids, kids, kids—came and went throughout John and Ruth’s typical two-week stays. 

         Grampa Merrick goes with Cabin 9.  I don’t think I ever knew his first name; he was simply Grampa Merrick—a rheumy-eyed friendly fellow, slightly bent, who was probably in his 70s or 80s.  He came to the resort each year for a week, staying by himself in Cabin 9 while his son, daughter-in-law and a couple of grandkids stayed in nearby Cabin 7.  Grampa enjoyed making or fixing things.  When he wasn’t out fishing, which he loved to do, I often saw him sitting next to his cabin door crafting or repairing something.  He liked to talk and, if I walked by, he would call me over to show me what he was working on.  My image of him is changeless: he sits in front of his cabin on his own homemade camping stool, an old straw hat on his otherwise shiny bald head.  Next to him is his large homemade tackle box with multiple compartments filled with an amazing assortment of mostly handmade lures of every description.  There also is an elaborate homemade toolbox, and a little homemade folding table, and a canister-style homemade insulating cooler with carrying handle (I don’t know what he kept in there, but he seemed to take it wherever he went).  Everything he made was finely crafted but he wasn’t choosy about the finishing touch.  All of it, except for the fishing lures, was painted in the same shade of glossy green paint.  Impractical he was not.

         Finally, when I think of Cabin 9, I can’t leave out Jim and Addie Walsh.  They were relatively young—in their mid- to late-twenties when I first met them—with no children.  Both had movie-star good looks: Jim, buoyant, with sandy hair, a winning smile, and the physique of a well-tuned athlete; and Addie (I never knew her formal name), who I thought was knock-down gorgeous, with foxy eyes and long blonde hair that seemed to shimmer in the sun. They were from Harrington Park, New Jersey, not the Midwest like most of our clientele.  So why come all the way to Minnesota?  Addie had close relatives in Duluth, where they always spent a day visiting during their one or two-week stay in Cabin 9.  Mom and I went along with them on one of their Duluth jaunts. They had a red Buick convertible and Jim pulled over and put the top down as we neared Duluth because I told him I had never ridden in a convertible before. 

         I liked them both from the minute I met them—Jim especially, whose charismatic personality drew me to him.  He and I had a shared interest in music.  Someone had given me a ukelele, but I didn’t know how to play it until Jim taught me some easy chord progressions that I could use when strumming along to quite a few different tunes, such as “Has Anybody Seen My Gal?” and “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.”  This in turn spiked an interest in the guitar, so I bought a used one for $15 (that’s about $150 in today’s money).  Quite a few years later, after mine cracked, my brother Howard gave me a new and much nicer one as a Christmas gift.  Jim also played the piano and taught me a cool-sounding alternative way to play the lower keys for “Heart and Soul.” I particularly liked the four-hand version that you could use when you had a partner to sit with on the bench.  It was Jim who goaded me to finally begin piano lessons in seventh grade, and although I didn’t stick with it (I quit when I was in ninth grade), those lessons provided a much-needed lyrical counterpoint to my first love, the drums.   

IV

As the twenty-first century dawned, the value of lakeshore property was skyrocketing, lifestyles were changing, and economic conditions were in flux.  A growing share of the middle class was struggling financially, and those who could afford it were shifting toward more upscale resorts, cruises, and theme parks.  Consequently, far fewer mom-and-pop housekeeping resorts remained in business.  Some were transformed into luxury resorts or time-share condos.  Most—as was soon true for us—were subdivided and sold off as lakefront home sites because the land was worth more than the resort per se.  In our case, half of the property was purchased by an anesthesiologist who replaced Cabins 1 – 6 with a spacious residence and oversized garage/storage building.  Fortunately, the other half stayed in the family.  There is solace and pleasure in that.  Howard took a fourth of the property that included Cabin 10.  Connie took the other fourth that included Cabins 7 – 9, the house, and the garage.  They built a new lakeside home for themselves where Cabin 7 once stood, fixed up Cabin 8 for use by guests, kept the garage, and tore down Cabin 9 and the house.

V

Among my memories are set pieces that live on and on: images in time that can’t be shaken.  One such image for me came as we drove away from my parents’ house, heading for home after our Christmas visit in 2003.  It was already dark and, as we pulled out of the driveway and onto the highway, I turned and looked up at the house where I grew up.  It was ablaze with light.  New icicle lights sparkled from the outline of every gable.  Warm amber light glowed from every window.  It was so lovely that I pulled over and took a couple of pictures, something I would normally never have done.  I didn’t know it then, but it was a bittersweet moment, the last flickering of splendor before something cherished was forever lost.  Within a month mom was gone, quickly followed by dad.

         Life has not been the same since they died.  You never get over the death of your parents, especially if you deeply loved and cared about them.  I miss being part of their lives and I miss them being part of mine.  Of course I am with them in memory.  So, too, with the resort.  The place and its people marked me, planting seeds during my upbringing that lasted a lifetime.  I may have been perturbed those many years ago when tourists would tell me—while I was working my tail off—how lucky I was to live there, but of course, they were right: I was lucky.  Beyond words.