The Bay View Literary Magazine and to You Who Abide in Our Shared Sojourn

y View Literary M he Ba agazin T Chronicles e Summer 2018 Volume 13 Your financial donation supports the Bay View Association Brothers Skipping Stones Photograph by Sue G. Collins EDITORS’ NOTE Bay View friends and neighbors have once again shared tender memories, chronicling lived experiences and impressions through writing and artwork. Chronicles captures moments that live within the contributors—and now within you. This is a record of that history and a testimony to the rays of hope for tomorrow. We honor Jean Liberty Pickett for her faithful contributions including this year’s apropos poem “The Last of Sunset’s Glow.” We express our gratitude to all those who contributed to the 2018 edition of The Bay View Literary Magazine and to you who abide in our shared sojourn. To submit your writing for the 2019 edition, please see The Back Page. Scott Drinkall Marjorie Andress Bayes Sue Collins 1 TABLE OF CONTENTS Peter Sparling The Bay View Chronicles 3 Debbie Hindle Letter to Anyone Thinking About Bay View 9 Lilly Geer To the Moon and Back 14 Don Duquette We Went to High School 400 Years Ago 19 Mary Jane Doerr Circles and Squares 25 Lisa Burris Selected Writings 28 Emily Smith The People on Little Traverse Bay 30 Jack Giguere Selected Artwork 32 Brian Alvarado Selected Writings and Artwork 33 William (Bill) Ostler Selected Writings and Artwork 36 Macy McLeod What Might Have Been 41 Doug Bowden George Arthur Buttrick: Preacher in Bay View, 1935-1977 51 Hannah Rees The News 55 Gerald Faulkner How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the War! 56 David Doyle Selected Writings 58 Tim Martsolf In Memoriam 62 Sophie McGee Celebrating Lenny 63 Evelyn Schloff Up in the Sky 66 Shirley Snyder The Jean I Knew 68 Jean Liberty Pickett The Last of Sunset’s Glow 70 The Back Page 2 THE BAY VIEW CHRONICLES EXCERPTS FROM CONFESSIONS OF A DANCING MAN: A MEMOIR By Peter Sparling After the long winter, spring came out from under a canopy of elms in our neighborhood in northwest Detroit. The lilacs spilled over the sidewalks, and I snapped a stem and held the cluster of blossoms close to my nose, swooning and imagining myself already in Bay View. My little life’s sound score shifted like an ascending chordal progression the moment Mom began packing our summer clothes and piles of cotton baby diapers into the footlockers for Bay View. Dad strapped them under the fiberglass canoe onto the top of the ‘58 Plymouth station wagon and we began the long drive up Old 27. Crossing the Zilwaukee Bridge over the Saginaw River, we felt the thrum of the wheels on the metal grid vibrate up through the back seat. It was the hinge that catapulted us northwards, proof that our summer awaited us. Perched together in the back seat or sprawled out on sleeping bags further back, we suffered the waiting with songs, teasing and silly games. I sat looking out the window, imagining the unseen lives behind the porches of the worn-out farmhouses with their battered barns, or what it would be like to live as a kid in a small town so far from the city. We often stopped along the way—in Cadillac or Mt. Pleasant—for Dad to do his sales pitch at some plastics company, and we sat with Mom at a picnic table outside the factory and ate our peanut butter and jelly sandwiches she had wrapped so carefully and placed in the big red cooler. She held baby Danny on her lap and brushed a strand of auburn hair off her face, then reached for the yellow Frito-Lay’s potato chip can. Back on the road, we passed the faux log cabin facades at Grayling, the billboard for Mystery Spot, then the concrete block enigma, Sea Shell City, just south of Petoskey. What was that doing in Michigan? We repeated the tongue-twister name as fast as we could, giggling as we repeated “sea shell shitty” under our breaths, hoping mom wouldn’t hear or at least indulge us the annual ritual. Rising over the crest of 131, past the radio station on the right, we saw the blue of Little Traverse Bay and yelped with glee. The Petoskey we knew then was merely a town that 3 happened to serve the summer cottage owners with a hardware store and plumber’s, Kilwin’s Bakery, Murdoch’s Fudge, Shorter’s Gifts (with its beaded Indian moccasins and belts) and the resort shops owned by Mr. Gattle and Mr. Grant, whose big cottages had lake views or perched high above myrtle-covered slopes, and whose kids came up from Ft. Lauderdale to romp with us all summer. Bay View was a storybook fantasy of Victorian gingerbread cottages built along terraced avenues ascending up gentle slopes from the bay. Originally a summer “Chautauqua” or Methodist retreat cleared from the remains of decimated forest land and old Indian meeting grounds in the 1870’s, it had filled in with beeches and maples, its yards blanketed in myrtle and ferns. Each cottage, usually in the family for generations, had its name painted artfully on a sign over the front porch. There were major and minor dynasties of families that went back generations, and we played with their latest offspring at the Boys and Girls Club and braved the cold waters of Lake Michigan down at the dock on hot afternoons. I eventually learned that Mom and Dad had met and swum at that very dock while at the summer school run by Albion College just after the war. A snapshot from the summer of 1947 shows a handsome, wavy-haired, big-chinned Bob Sparling at the waterfront, sitting proudly in the convertible his parents had bought him after the war. Mom fell for him as she waited tables and he washed dishes at the Russet Inn to earn their keep while both struggled to apply themselves to their summer studies. Mom was a voice major, a mezzo-soprano in the music school, and already engaged to her Royal Oak High School sweetheart. Dad and all the other young vets were catching up on lost time, eager to get their degrees and create lives in the dream of an America they’d bravely served. Dad had been stationed on a hospital ship in the Pacific; his skills at the piano and as front man in the jazz combo on board must have had its own seductive kick for Mom, the youngest of five children and raised during the worst of the Depression in a little wood-framed house in Royal Oak. After they were married at Central Methodist Church in downtown Detroit (the church in which Dad and his younger sister Helen were raised and where Grandpa was chief custodian), my parents began to produce their restless brood of boys. To get us out of the hot city, Mom and Dad rented cottages in Bay View for a few weeks every summer. In 1958, they purchased an old cottage overlooking Terrace Avenue, perched at the top of a long flight of worn concrete stairs—for less than $2,000. We saw it first on a Memorial Day weekend; it had been left exactly as it had been found the day the previous owner had dropped dead while cooking breakfast over the stove. As we trooped up the rickety steps through the back door, we discovered the table still set as 4 it had been that morning, an old toaster with its sides splayed open, crusted oatmeal in the bottom of a pan in the sink, and a calendar on the wall dated 1911. Mom immediately began the internal transformation while Dad tried to organize painting detail. Timmy mistook an old package of Ex-Lax for chocolate and remained sitting on the toilet in the small bathroom on the back porch most of the morning. The rest of us spattered green paint all over our jeans then abandoned Dad and snuck off to explore our favorite haunts. I usually went off on my own. Around every corner, along every path, I marked how objects and sites familiar from previous summers had endured the passing of another year. I had become practiced at time traveling. I could transpose myself bodily to Bay View from the streets of Detroit. As soon as the sun began to warm the concrete of the Longacre sidewalks in April, I would walk with my eyes cast down, picturing for myself a filmstrip of scenes along my path along Terrace Avenue to the cottage. Once we bought the cottage, two weeks in Bay View stretched to eight, and I began to earnestly cultivate a means to capture those precious weeks and preserve them over the long winter months until my return the following summer. It bred in me a deep, almost desperate nostalgia and longing, the possibility of an idyllic existence, and the boundless, intersecting landscapes of place, memory, and the imagination. My Bay View buddies were a tightly knit group of six summer friends whose families all owned cottages. I adored them, yes, they were the first group of guys who had deemed me worthy of membership in their brotherhood. We spent hours building forts in the woods, playing cards on someone’s sprawling gingerbread-trimmed porch, or taking dance lessons on Thursday night from Jimmy Pagonis. Mr. Pagonis wore tight pants and a sport coat, his jet-black hair slicked back, and he marshaled 30 or so youngsters into pairs then lines for the grand promenade down the center of the Rec Club’s hall.

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