Economic recession? Not necessarily

Glen Arbor Sun

Thanks to Pure Michigan, Bed & Breakfast and others report healthy summers

Chat with guests at the Glen Arbor Bed & Breakfast on a given weekend, and you’ll take a virtual cross-country tour, and perhaps even a global one. Nearly half of those staying at the popular B&B in the heart of Glen Arbor are from out of state, and the guest book also boasts messages of “Thanks for a great vacation!” from Brits, Germans, Chinese, Venezuelans, Belgians, French, Scots, Israelis, Ghanaians, to name a few.

On account of the global economic recession, and stormy waters for Michigan in particular, owners Patricia and Larry Widmayer had forecasted a 20-percent drop in the number of guests this year. But that didn’t happen. Their numbers, and profits, have been as steady as a trusty skipper at sea. In fact, their tally has increased.

The National Park, the beaches, the inland lakes, the rolling hills and the wineries have a lot to do with that, of course, but the Widmayers also cite the state-funded Pure Michigan advertising campaign as keeping the local tourism industry afloat.

“Many people have commented to us that they’ve seen the Pure Michigan campaign. It makes you want to come here,” said Patricia, who spends most of the year in Evanston, Ill. and sees the ad campaign on Illinois television. “The ads have a great look and feel, whether you want to go out on the golf course or to the beach,” Larry chimed in.

Actor and comedian, and a summer resident of nearby Northport, Tim Allen provides the voiceover, with poetic and compelling messages like this one: “Fall colors begin with a slow dance of turning leaves, and crescendo in a trillion trees aflame. Experience the entire state of Michigan in its annual blaze of glory. Find out what Pure Michigan fall colors feel like. Your trip begins at Michigan.org.”

Pure Michigan was launched in 2006, and Governor Jennifer Granholm approved $45 million in additional funding in 2008 — an unprecedented tourism budget for the state, which allowed the campaign to be broadcast on a national level beginning this March.

Patricia and Larry Widmayer certainly hope those funds continue to be allocated and that Pure Michigan continues to bring tourists up north.

Stories over breakfast

The Glen Arbor Bed & Breakfast was built in the 1870s, served as a single-family home and a “kum-an-dyne” restaurant during the 1930s and 40s. The old Victorian house has since added a new porch, and the Widmayers brought a crew of workers from Evanston to renovate the house and give it a French countryside aura after buying it from Mike and Becky Sutherland in March of 2001. The B&B currently boasts six rooms and suites, two cottages out back, a cozy living room and large fireplace (from where guests can look out and see the heart of Glen Arbor at the corner of M-22 and M-109).

When I joined the Widmayers for a communal breakfast on a Sunday morning in early September, there were guests around the table from Oakland, Calif., Denver, Col., Milwaukee, Wis., and all over southern Michigan. Innkeepers Brian and Jody treated us to a scrumptious, and not atypical, meal of Granny Smith apples with whip cream, hashbrown casserole, homestyle biscuits, Patricia’s own honey-vanilla granola (she brings a bag of it to her daughter-in-law whenever they visit North Carolina: view the recipe on the B&B’s website) and topped off with coffee from the Leelanau Coffee Roasters.

The Widmayers had plenty of favorite yarns about guests and how they fond their ways to Glen Arbor. There was the 10-year-old grandson of a schoolteacher from Patricia’s youth who, when asked of his favorite vacation destination, chose Glen Arbor over Disneyworld and California because he loved going fishing up north with his grandfather. Last fall the B&B hosted a United States Postal Service team, which was in town to unveil the Sleeping Bear Dunes stamp. The federal employees all had interesting tales about how they found their ways to Washington and which politicians they had befriended, among them Sens., and Vietnam war heroes, John Kerry and Max Cleland. There was also a woman last year who dressed up in a clown outfit and surprised her sister on her birthday.

And one morning innkeeper Brian was chatting with a couple guests from his native Wauwatosa, a neighborhood in Milwaukee across the lake, when he discovered that they lived in the exact house where he had grown up!

State of the economy around town

Here’s what local retail businesses and restaurants had to say about how they fared this summer, despite the global economic recession, despite the closing of the Narrows Bridge, and despite, or on account of, the lousy weather. (We didn’t quote any real estate or building companies: obviously, their business has suffered more.):

• Holly Reay, Trattoria Funistrada: “We were up. Adding tables in the bar did increase our capacity and therefore our sales, but it appears that we were up anyway. We noticed a different trend in spending, and our fine wine sales were down just a little, but otherwise a successful summer.”

• Bonnie Nescot, Art’s Tavern: “Arts’ summer was up. We attribute it to the cooler weather, keeping people off the beach and water. (Husband) Tim Barr’s logic is that while 10 percent of U.S. citizens might be unemployed, 90 percent still are, and a lot of them chose to come to our area.”

• Marion DeVinney, Synchronicity Gallery: “Synchronicity has been up this summer. Our sales are about 17 percent above last year’s figures. Last year, sales started dropping in August when people were very uneasy about what was happening to the economy. They are more settled this year, so we hope that sales will continue to be strong through the end of October.”

• Tom Ingold, Devette & Ford Insurance: “We have seen steady growth in the insurance business, through referrals and existing customers that want to combine everything with a local agency. We have seen a trend of customers wanting to work with a smaller agency and know who they are talking to, not the larger agencies where the person who services the policy is not the same as the one who sold it.”

• Margaret Hodge, Anchor Hardware: “I am very pleased. My business is steadily growing, year round.”

• Randy Chamberlain, blu restaurant: “I was extremely cautious with the state of the economy, the Detroit auto mess, and for business in the ‘luxury’ market. I was convinced that we’d have to work harder for less. But we have exceeded my forecast every single week: it’s a mystery as to why. July and August were both over 50 percent above last year, and I see our fall reservations following suit.”

• Mike Sutherland, The River at Crystal Bend: “We were up by 50 percent. I attribute this to adding the eco tours and the kayak livery business, but also the Pure Michigan campaign. With National Park attendance up 10 percent, that’s over 100,000 more people in and around Glen Arbor. If we get even 1 percent of those, it makes a huge difference on our bottom line. Also, I think the bad weather helped us, as people were looking for things to do instead of beaching it.”

• Sue Nichols, Riverfront Pizza & Deli: “Thankfully we were busier this summer than last year. We are lucky to be in an area fueled by tourism, where people on vacation like to eat out. I know when I go on vacation that cooking is not something I look forward to. We also have a pretty loyal local base.”

• Matt Wiesen, Crystal River Outfitters: “With the current weather it appears Mother Nature may be confused on her seasons. The weather was exceptionally challenging this year due to the rain and overcast skies, but business was still quite good. Midwesterners are resilient people and a little cool weather rarely keeps them inside for very long. Crystal River Outfitters has been on the river for 15 years now and we have developed a loyal following, for whom canoeing and kayaking the Crystal River is a summer tradition. When it was sunny we were very busy, hitting our numbers from previous years and in some cases even beating them.”

• Cammie Buehler, Epicure Catering (nearby Omena): “We are up significantly from last year (the worst in our seven-year history) but still down from our high mark of two years ago.”

• Cherrie Stege, Forest Gallery and Lake Street Studios: “We enjoyed a wonderful season. Last year was our best ever, and this year has almost matched that. Like everyone else, Beth (Bricker) and I were crossing our fingers and hoping for at least a good ‘no bridge’ and ‘low economy’ season when we opened our doors in the spring. As it turned out, those two influences weren’t the driving factors. The cool weather kept people off the beaches and in our galleries, much to our delight.”

• David Marshall, Glen Lake Chamber of Commerce President: “My impressions (from a recent Chamber meeting) are that, for most of us, business was either down some or about the same. I’ve heard everything from ‘things have been off 20 percent’ to ‘we are even with previous years.’ Now, if you think about it, ‘being even with previous years’ is darn good in this kind of economy. It’s almost like being up. Other than the businesses south of Glen Arbor on M-22, or north of Empire beyond the M-109 cutoff, I don’t think people were nearly as impacted by the bridge closing as they were by the economy, in general. I’ve heard many merchants say that they had as many people as in previous years, but people were scaling back their buying.”

Bob Byerly’s beautiful mind

Glen Arbor Sun

“This would be a great place for a party,” Bob Byerly once wrote to University of Michigan fraternity brother Harold Jackson about Newfoundland while on a trans-Atlantic journey. “It’s strictly off-campus … and there’s plenty of ice!”

Later on that trip he followed up with a postcard from Paris. “You see the most wonderful things walking around this town leashed onto poodles,” wrote the eccentric and brilliant millionaire who passed away in July after living for decades on the east side of Big Glen Lake.

Byerly was a writer and craftsman, a musician and artist, known around town as much for the spontaneous and wild parties he hosted as he was for his secrecy. When his nephew Bruce showed up to collect Bob’s possessions, arrange a memorial service for August 8 and put the lucrative property on the real estate market, he discovered the true mystery and mystique that surrounded his uncle.

“I knew him pretty well, but he was even more eccentric than I thought,” says Bruce, a contractor who works in Idaho and California. “He had his two lives — his social life and private life, and never the two shall meet.”

“His unfinished projects were his soul — his disheveled, beautiful mind.”

The Byerly properties represent the largest chunk of real estate on the Glen Lakes ever to appear on the market at one time, says Ranae Ihme of LVR Realty, which is teaming up with Serbin Real Estate to sell the land. Two acres on nearby Fisher Lake and an acre on Glen Eden Drive have sold. Still available are the Christian House, the Byerly House and Bob’s Project House, whose listings total nearly $11 million.

The Christian House is a southern plantation-style cottage with pillars on the porch, overlooking 533 feet of Big Glen Lake waterfront, and one of the oldest standing houses on the lakes. The Christian House, built by Lee Christian, Bob’s father’s best friend, was where the famous, lavish parties were held.

“Every time he wanted to play his cornet he’d hire a band and throw a party,” says Bruce. “They were in the Christian House because he kept that house pristine. Nothing ever came out of that house (and into the Byerly House), or vice versa.”

Bruce recalls decades-old stories his parents told of immaculately dressed guests, tables adorned in linen doilies, African-American servants (whose uniforms he found hanging in the closet when he cleaned out the house), and photos of the guests sitting on the deck drinking Mint Juleps.

“The parties he used to throw were epic. He was so tunnel-visioned that he’d do anything for a huge party. He’d go out and hire the band, get it catered or cook, himself. A couple times he told people just to show up, the whole bar was all set up, and he wouldn’t even show. He’d get lost in Traverse City trying to pick up the band, and wouldn’t make it until midnight.”

“I remember one story about the leg of lamb he forgot to put in the oven. A couple gals were getting hungry because it was supposed to be a dinner party. At 10 p.m. someone walked into the kitchen and saw the leg of lamb, ready to go, but hadn’t even been put in the oven. Needless to say, it became a great midnight snack.”

Not all of Bob’s parties took place at the Christian House, though. Bruce remembers his uncle would call friends and spontaneously invite them up to Miller Hill, where he’d have swings built in the trees and a string quartet playing. To “Strings and Swings” the guests would enjoy bread, cheese and wine. “People would sit and listen to violin and cello and have these wonderful, therapeutic respites for hours on end,” says Bruce.

Or if you came to visit on a special occasion, Bob might throw you a party.

Bruce remembers a vintage 1929 American-La France fire truck that Bob used to drive. When Bruce’s brother arrived to spend a week of his honeymoon at the Christian House, Bob came whistling down the road in the fire engine with the sirens running and an entire band strapped to the side of it. “These wide-eyed musicians were playing trumpets and trombones, and hanging on for dear life,” laughs Bruce. Bob picked up the newlyweds and took them to the Burdickville Inn (now Funistrada) for a raucous party.

His passions

But as public as Bob Byerly could be during his lavish, save-no-expenses parties, his private side was even more fascinating. Next to the Christian House is the Byerly House, a four-bedroom Tudor-style chalet with 250 feet of lake frontage that was built during the Great Depression. Here, and in Bob’s Project House at nearby Tamarack Cove, the walls are covered from floor to ceiling with writing — projects that Bob envisioned at the spur of a moment, and most of which he never finished.

Very few people saw the inside of the Byerly House during Bob’s lifetime — not Barbara Siepker, who owns the Cottage Bookshop and wanted to feature it in her book, Historic Cottages of Glen Lake (Leelanau Press, 2008), and not guests who were invited to parties at the Christian House.

“He wrote on the walls, he wrote everywhere,” says Bruce. “He wrote tons of prose and poetry, and he was in the process of writing his autobiography. When I cleaned up the place there were annals and annals of his work.”

Born in Owosso, Michigan in 1925, Bob attended both Michigan State and the University of Michigan before receiving a Master’s degree in literature from Cambridge University in England and a Minor in advertising. For a time he worked for the New York City-based Omnicom Group’s BBDO, one of the top creative agencies for 30-second TV commercials. Bob and his older brother, Bud, inherited the family business of 42 discount grocery stores throughout the state.

Their father, James Arthur Byerly, had been a self-made man who left home when he was 13 and started as a bagboy in a store. He came up with the idea for a shopping cart. Rather than have the clerk get your groceries, why not give people baskets or carts to get their own groceries? You could give customers a discount. In fact, you could open discount stories. The idea was a hit, and made James Arthur Byerly a rich man. With his earnings he bought the land on Big Glen Lake, where he befriended neighbor Lee Christian.

After their father died, Bob, and Bruce’s father Bud, sold the business in 1959. The older brother headed for California while Bob settled here, though he traveled extensively and often wintered on Harbor Island in the Bahamas.

Bob’s love for music fueled his wanderlust. He played the cornet, and nephew Bruce played the harmonica. Once, they met in New York, stayed for a week at the Chelsea Hotel, and visited every jazz joint in Greenwhich Village. “He was just unstoppable,” remembers Bruce. “So much energy, always on the go, a maniac.”

On another trip to the Big Apple, Bob lost his luggage and was without his cornet, which bothered him to great lengths. He and Bruce were walking through Central Park when they came across a couple African-Americans musicians, one playing with a Pignose amplifier and the other keeping time on a trash can lid. Bruce pulled out his harmonica, and Bob found the core of a paper towel roll and turned it into an instrument. “You wouldn’t believe the sound he got out of that,” says Bruce. “We played for hours with these guys, with a little hat to collect change. Afterwards we divided the money four ways.”

He also loved the Detroit Tigers baseball team. Bob would drive downstate at the spur of a moment, pick up friends and order them along to a Tigers’ game — rarely arriving on time. During the 1984 World Series, when the Tigers beat the San Diego Padres, Bob told his workers around the house to drop their things and come watch the games. “You never know when you’ll see the Tigers in the World Series again!” he told them. (Not until 2006 would they reappear in the Fall Classic.)

When Bruce arrived this summer to clean out his belongings, he found baseballs covered in autographs from the entire Tigers’ team and a freezer full of baseball articles from old newspapers and film rolls, covered in plates of baking soda to keep them fresh. Bruce wondered whether his uncle planned to go back and read those stories for his muse.

As for his writing, Bob didn’t use desks or filing cabinets. He strung clotheslines around the Byerly House with notes and missives attached to the line with clothespins. If something had only one clothespin on it, he hadn’t yet gotten to it — it was just an idea. Two, it was growing in his mind. Three, it was due yesterday.

He sometimes taught Shakespeare classics at a local tavern in Traverse City, he wrote constantly, he owned as many as 10 typewriters, and he became obsessed with assignments. At one point, remembers Bruce, Bob became enamored with a secretive cult of people down in rural Georgia. He had trouble reaching them and even hired a helicopter to take him there before they ran him off the grounds. “It was almost illegal how he was pursuing them,” laughs Bruce. “He was more obsessed than they were.”

He wrote fantastic letters, often penned in the style of poet e.e. cummings (who wrote in lowercase). “They’d go from a stanza to down angles, backwards, using different colors, with cartoon characters and embellishments in the margins,” says Bruce. “When you got a letter from Bob, you had to sit down, open a beer and go through it.”

Bob was a poetic naturalist in the Walt Whitman style. He wouldn’t cut a tree unless it fell on his house. He was an environmentalist and a tireless advocate for preserving the Crystal River. Bob once sat in his bathtub and tape-recorded a two-hour-long tirade about the merganser duck on Big Glen Lake. He splashed around the tub while reciting all the information he’d read, then sent the tape to his nephew Tom.

His craftsmanship was just as spontaneous, eccentric and complex. Bob’s Project House is 45-years worth of unfinished, creative projects, and the home’s future owner better bring their tools, and their patience. His cedar shingles are not really shingles at all, but carved cedar routes that were hand-knot to each other. He interspersed cedar shakes to make a wavy, Hobbit-like pattern. Each piece was carved to match the next one and took probably a week to make.

Bruce says that two old Polish men worked for Bob for two decades, and he must have been the most difficult contractor they ever met. “You’d have to find a certain kind of nail or window trim. It would have to be just so,” explains Bruce. “You’d spend all day looking for it, and suddenly it’s lunch time. By the time lunch is over he’d have you off on another tangent. The next thing you know it was time to cover everything for the winter.”

Brilliant, but impractical

Bob Byerly tried married life for a time, but his eccentricity and spontaneity ultimately got in the way. In 1971 at Longboat Key resort near Sarasota, Fla., he met Ruth Conklin, then a teacher in Chicago Public Schools, who was there with her two children, Russell and Casey. He asked her to dance, and six months later they where married in Sun Valley, Idaho.

Shortly thereafter Ruth and the kids moved into the Byerly House. Now a staple in the Glen Arbor art community, this was the first time she’d ever seen northern Michigan. Bob showered the kids with adoration. He spent days designing intricate gifts and costumes for them, like the wooden turtle shell he carved for Casey. She won a competition, Ruth remembers, but she couldn’t stand up in the costume.

“He was very excited, both about me and the children,” remembers Ruth, who speaks fondly of their nearly three-year marriage. “He had so many lofty, exciting ideas, but they were very impractical. He had absolutely no sense of time. If I said it was time for dinner, he’d ask ‘what do you mean?’”

Ruth remembers that for years Bob was curious about visiting a church in nearby Northport where Marshall Collins, an African-American minister, held court. On Sundays he’d ask Ruth to prepare the children for church, and by the time they were ready, he’d moved on to some other project. “We never got there before everyone else had left,” Ruth laughs.

Similarly, the family would often take trips to Chicago. But Bob would never arrive at the airport on time. More than once, Ruth remembers she and the children sitting in the plane, looking out the windows for Bob. As the plane taxied away, she’d see him running down the tarmac chasing the plane (in the days before airport security). He’d usually come on the next flight.

“He was brilliant, but so incredibly off the wall,” she says. “You couldn’t imagine what it was like to live with him. Fascinating, but very difficult. Today he’d be diagnosed as bipolar.”

“Everything he did was the most creative thing I’d ever seen in my life. I called him a cathedral, and his ideas were the spires. He liked that.”

Nearly three years after the wedding, the kids arrived in Michigan from their father’s house, but Bob said he couldn’t handle them. They had to go. And so Ruth left, and the marriage ended.

Ruth has few regrets today. If she hadn’t met Bob, she never would have known Glen Arbor. She had been a schoolteacher when she married Bob, and she never imagined she’d do anything else. But he turned her on to pottery, down in the basement of the Byerly House. Nearly 40 years later, she’s still selling beautiful pots at Ruth Conklin Gallery on M-109.

The beginning of the end for Bob came in the winter of 2002-03 when a pipe burst in the Byerly House and a flood destroyed some of his work. He was in the Bahamas at the time, and the following spring he turned the yard into a tent city where he set up fans to dry out everything that had been damaged. Shortly thereafter, says Bruce, he fell and hurt his face. Bob spent his final days in the Maple Valley Nursing Home near Maple City.

Despite the challenges that Bob Byerly’s brilliant mind posed him, Bruce says he never dwelled on things. “He’d forget about the misfortunes and failures. The things he didn’t do were easily forgotten.”

Have stories about Bob Byerly that you’d like to share? Write to us at editorial@glenarborsun.com or mail correspondence to Glen Arbor Sun / P.O. Box 615 / Glen Arbor, MI 49636.

American-made Streetcars: Portland Company Rebuilds Lost Industry

Apollo News Service

United Streetcar, a union company in Portland, Ore., and wholly owned subsidiary of Oregon Iron Works, has built the first American-made streetcar in over half a century, with the help of funds from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. United Streetcar has a deal in place to build six streetcars for the city and is on the verge of signing a $26 million contract to build seven more for Tucson, Ariz.

The initial streetcar was unveiled on July 1 in a ceremony attended by Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, who called Portland the transportation, streetcar and livable community capital of the United States. Union workers from Oregon Iron Works flanked LaHood as he lauded the successful partnership between the city and the transit operator, calling it “exactly the kind of synergy we need in the United States of America today.”

“I believe this is the dawn of a new era for public transportation in the United States,” said LaHood. “A new opportunity to claim ‘Made in America.’ It’s a chance to generate good-paying union jobs right here in the region.”

LaHood also announced the allocation of $360,000 in federal money to boost the East Side Loop extension of the Portland streetcar project, which supplements the initial $75 million in federal project funds.

United Streetcar, LLC was formed in 2005 after Chandra Brown, the company’s president and a vice president at parent company Oregon Iron Works, made the startling discovery while talking to friends that modern streetcars were not manufactured in the United States – or at least not by American companies – and hadn’t been for 58 years. Given the variety of complex products that Oregon Iron Works has manufactured since 1944, Brown was sure that the company could handle streetcars as well.

For 65 years Oregon Iron Works has manufactured metals and complex machines, including hydropower equipment, plate fabrications, bridges, aerospace ground equipment, nuclear containment work, specialized boats, and wave energy.

United Streetcar’s ultimate goal is to provide modern streetcars to cities nationwide. Portland and Tucson are just the start.

“Knowing the huge success of the Portland streetcar line, we were positive that streetcars were on the brink of exploding into a large and extremely viable market,” said Brown, a 15-year veteran of Oregon Iron Works. “We thought that a separate website and company specific to streetcars would be the best way of reaching out around the country in this new marketplace.”

Brown added that more than 65 U.S. cities are currently looking into implementing streetcars. Portland, though, is leading the way in public transportation.

The streetcar that United Steetcar recently unveiled — and hopes to put into operation this fall — is truly an American-made product. To meet “Buy America” requirements, at least 60 percent of the components had to be domestically produced by American companies. Brown claims that United Streetcar’s product is approximately 70-percent U.S.-made, with components coming from vendors in more than 20 states. The steel streetcar shell was fabricated in Portland; a company in Pennsylvania finished the trucks; a company just down the freeway from Portland provided the fiberglass; and the seats came from Michigan.

“We truly consider the streetcar project the creation of an industry,” said Brown. “It has opened doors for vendors across the nation. Specialized companies who have never had the opportunity to work in the streetcar arena now find themselves with new work in their shops.”

The propulsion system, one of the few foreign-made parts, comes from Skoda in the Czech Republic, with which Oregon Iron Works has an exclusive license agreement. While United Streetcar wanted to manufacture its own vehicles, it didn’t want to reinvent the wheel, explained Brown. So the Portland company evaluated European companies that had experience and credibility in the streetcar fabrication industry, and settled on Skoda.

Portland currently has 10 streetcars in operation, not including United Streetcar’s new prototype. The six new cars will service the Portland East Side Loop extension. Brown said that the city’s next expansion will likely be a seven-mile extension to Lake Oswego, which will necessitate 10 additional cars. Portland’s streetcar plan envisions many extensions of service throughout the city. In a decade, Brown believes, there could be as many as 30-40 cars.

The last streetcar made by an American company and assembled on U.S. soil was completed in 1952 by the St. Louis Car Company, which specialized in PCC (Presidents’ Conference Committee) streetcars — vehicles that were popular in the 1930s but faded after the Second World War when the U.S. stopped expanding its transit networks, says Rick Gustafson, director of Portland Streetcar, Inc. Unlike the PCC cars, United Streetcar’s new models are low-floor vehicles that make it easy for wheelchairs, senior citizens and baby strollers to enter and exit, thus complying with the Americans with Disabilities Act. United Streetcar also provides air conditioning and a heating system, energy efficient lighting, and regenerative braking.

Brown added that Portland residents have wholeheartedly embraced this unique public-private venture. The streetcars boost the city’s reputation as a public transportation pioneer, and they provide good-paying union jobs. Oregon Iron Works employs a total of 400 workers. The shop workers are represented by Ironworkers Local 516, and the electric workers who perform the streetcar’s electrical outfitting are under IBEW Local 48. Those working on streetcars perform dual roles: they may build streetcars one day and then move to another of the parent company’s activities the next day.

“Instead of outsourcing jobs, we are ‘insourcing’ jobs, bringing them back to the States,” Brown said. “This is key to keeping Portland’s manufacturing industry thriving, as well as promoting American-made products.”