Blue Horizon = Good Times

1989, Owen & Spaak's Cottage
Left to right: Matt Reid, Lies Rosema Kelder, Valerie Reid, Drew Rosema, Grace Van't Hof

How to describe the Blue Horizon? Hmmmmm......maybe part general store, part laundromat, part candy counter, part bait shop, part front porch, part information central (including newspapers and a payphone and a bulletin board), but DEFINITELY, it was all about the ice cream. In our family, Blue Moon was the perennial favorite. (Trivial Pursuit Question/ BSL Version: What is the flavor of Blue Moon ice cream?). Usually the Van't Hof day was capped off by pulling on any old thing over a still-wet swimsuit, skin chafing from the sun and sand, and walking the mile or so to the Blue Horizon to agonize over the ice cream selections. Shoes were never a consideration so the walk involved an extensive stretch of hotfootin' it down the broiling tar of BSL Road, ice cream cones dripping profusely, until we reached the luxurious squishy-cool sand of Chapel Road. Once we had to make a wide detour around a Blue Racer Snake that was partially run over by a car and had its midsection permanently melded to the asphalt. It was so long it stretched across one entire lane. Yuk Yuk and TRIPLE YUK! The Blue Horizon eventually evolved into Bozo's, and now its called Mel's, but in our Hofman psyche, it will forever be known as the Blue Horizon.

Below I have lifted verbatim some thoughts that Deborah Hoogstrate Cooney posted on the bigstarlakehistory.com website (A must read, btw. Be sure to click on everything because there are all kinds of hidden gems).

I've been at Big Star Lake every summer of my life. It has played a big role in my family's history. My mother, Claire Hofman (who was born in 1919) vacationed at Big Star before she was married in 1941. She and my father, Rev. Arther Hoogstrate, then vacationed there every year of their marriage of 50+. I came on the scene in 1955 when my father was the minister of Alpine Ave. Christian Reformed church in Grand Rapids. At that time we rented a small cottage from the D'Archangels, just down from Munising Point. I believe that they owned a bigger and grander cottage on the point at that time. We then moved west and were in the Owen and Spaak and Stroven cottages. Marv Huizingh used to pull us on skiis, as well as entertain all of us with his water antics such as being pulled by a boat while sitting or standing on a chair on a disk. It was great!

We called the western swamp area "Mucky Harbor," but that is probably only a Hofman-Hoogstrate term. We'd take a canoe into Mucky Harbor and, yes, we would pick the white and yellow water lilies before it was illegal to do so.

The Blue Horizon, the Bowery, the Nook-in-the-Woods, and the Bait Shop also played an important role in our vacations. My mom and aunts would do the laundry at the Blue Horizon, and we kids would walk to the Blue Horizon to get candy or the GR Press, or to ride the coin operated horse out front.

Speaking of the horse. We knew we had arrived at the lake each year when the first person in the car spotted the horse!

Big Star Lake was quite primitive back in the '50s and '60s and I remember having huge kettles of water heated on the stove to be poured into the big kitchen sinks for our Saturday night baths. Of course, there were no telephones in the cottages back then, and with my father being a minister, he would have to leave his name at the Blue Horizon in case someone in his church/parish happened to die or be in need of immediate pastoral care. The Blue Horizon personnel would then drive down Chapel Road and alert my dad that he had a telephone call. This didn't happen often, but there were a few times that this scenario played out.

One last memory was that of July of 1969. Only a few people had TVs in their cottages, and so many people crowded into the Klassen cottage to watch Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin take the first steps on the moon. Each summer, Gerry Klassen, always interested in space, often had a telescope pointing into the heavens. It was through his telescope that I first saw Jupiter's moons. He also meticulously built a beautiful wooden canoe, which was passed on the Marv Huizingh, which was further passed along to my brother Bill Hoogstrate. We now have this relic at our own cottage in the north bay, near the current MELs.

Thank you for this opportunity to reminisce. Deborah Hoogstrate-Cooney