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.