Doe, a deer

a female deer

and here she is....

she lives right here....
on Chapel Road


alongside Mr. Fox


and she's not very interested
in getting out of anyone's way

or any car's way

for precisely these two reasons:

and
they are....

.... yet, all is so peaceful
on the sandy byways
and in the wooded glen
and by the shores
of Gitchee Gumee
where sunbeams filter down
in dappled patterns
through lacy tree boughs
and......

then

suddenly
loudly

four kids
on a golf cart
coming careening down the road
and Doe-a-Deer says
(in deer language)
"I am so outta here!"

Eight Eight Two Thousand

EIGHT!

The magical day has finally arrived.
8-8-2008.
The day of our BSL arrival.

For 2 weeks there will be a total suspension of:
1. ticketing drunken sailors
2. scrubbing toilets at Fox Motors
3. turning rhythmically challenged Dutch people into dancers
4. unraveling the mysteries of DHS
5. guiding Calvin students back onto the straight and narrow
6. untangling computer glitches
7. scooping bulk supplies of organic food
8. battening down hatches that keep unbattening
9. nurturing our covenant youth
10. extracting raccoons from chimneys

Hey. It's a New Olympic Event.
You get to guess who does what.

In the meantime, we watched
(until 2 or 3 am)
this particular guyacquire A LOT of gold
but ....
... still
we kinda liked him best when he did this...

That's right, Michael!
You better give your mother her propers
or we won't buy
even one poster of you
or your Greatest Olympic Moments DVD.

Additionally, we were perplexed by this "display"
during the opening ceremonies.
Admit it, didn't these "drums" look suspiciously
like COPY MACHINES
each with their respective office drone
prostrate before them,
pleading, stroking, and then
beating them to within an inch
of their electrical lives?Another area we were continually educated in
was that of the
Field of Mathematics,
never to be confused with Track and Field.

For instance:
16.725 and 16.725
is NOT the same number

and 13 is really 16 in Chinese.

Okay Okay
Sour grapes
and believe you me ALL of Big Star Lake
heard our vocal outrage
but we will let you be the judge:

Yup.
Definitely 16.
Not that these girls didn't deserve it.
We're just sayin'....

Our necks got a little sore from
all of that beach volleyball
and the swivelling back and forth
which is exhausting for
die-hard couch potatoes.

But Dathan Ritzenhein from Grand Rapids
(Technically he's from Rockford, a suburb or exurb)
Mr. Number Nine in the Marathon

made us eager to get
back on our treadmills
or a least walk to Mel's for an ice-cream sundae.

And in case you're thinking
that we've totally forgotten that
this is a Big Star Lake blog,
here's one last photo to pacify all 3 readers
until we come back with more....We call this "Moonrise Over Blue Horizon Bay"

....When the moon
hits your eye
like a big
pizza pie (from Mel's)
that's amore'....

A preview you won't want to miss!

Van't Hof Olympicfest 2008 Promo from Lies Rosema on Vimeo.

Are we there yet?

Here they are, Don & Mickie,
or, as we lovingly referred to our parents:
Donald Duck and Mickie Mouse....

Mickie Hofman & Don Van't Hof
about a year before they were married.
The back of the photo says:
Decoration Day (now called Memorial Day)
Big Star Lake 1948, South Shore


Well. Where to begin?

My mom has always been a "glass is half full" kind of person
which meshes rather nicely with my dad's
"glass is half empty" personality.
(Notice Mickie's smiley enthusiam and Don's
pensiveness in the photo above. Typisch.)

In respect to BSL this manifested itself firstly in
The Ritual of Packing.

This ritual began weeks in advance of our BSL holiday,
it was steeped with ever heightening heights of anticipation,
usually lasted longer than the vacation itself,
and perfectly reflected the difference in my parent's temperaments.

Mom would instruct us kids to begin making
tidy piles of our clothing
(which took seconds since everything we owned
were a few cast-offs, [thank you Hoogstrates,
now you know why God put you on the earth]),
beachtowels and other beach paraphanelia,
bird, flower, fish, and insect guides,
board games, books and fishing equipment.

That's right. That's it.

We did not own any:
dirt bikes
quads
speedboats
jet skis
water skis
or downhill skis for that matter.

Or an EasyBake Oven.

Or a Creeple People Maker.

Yet....we still had fun.

As you can see below,
we had oars, but no canoe.

Calvin (the dog) and Mickie
This is 31 years later, summer of 1979
and it looks like it was taken at Owen & Spaak's


anyhoodle......

The Ritual of Packing was a very important ritual
in our life because,
a) it took up the half of the summer we were not at BSL, and,
b) did I mention before that we lived in the ghetto?

Getting out of the ghetto, or even packing to get out of the ghetto
was the best imaginary play ever.

Then .... the Day We (finally) Left
we began

The Ritual of Loading the Car
also known as
The Ritual of Dad saying
"Mick, we're not gonna make it."
(a close-cousin to Dad saying
"Mick, this Christmas Tree is not going to stay up"
but, obviously, in a different season).

Into our Country Squire station wagon
we did jam:

6 children
2 adults
a lot of food (since buying up north was too expensive)
gas for the motor, ie, the eggbeater,
the eggbeater,
several deflated tractor tires,
ancient beach chairs in various stages of incredible disrepair,
a whole separate wardrobe for the chapel (unbelievable)
cleaning supplies for scouring rental cottages (WHY?)
(this will definitely be another post since,
to this day it still makes my blood boil),
and, well,
you get the picture.

See picture and multiply by 2
plus insert to-the-ceiling junkAs you can see,
Dutch people excel in making every possible area of life
unbelievably labor-intensive.
Even vacations.

During both of these rituals please envision
Mickie flitting about in her state of undiluted euphoria,
possibly with a baby on her hip,
and Don lurching about in his state of undiluted exasperation
always with a cigarette jutting from his mouth.

Are we on the road yet?
Praise the Lord and Sound the Timbrels,
Yes Yes Yes.

At this point my Mom is purring,
"Isn't this nice?", or,
"Aren't we having fun?", or,
"Let's all play the Alphabet Game!"

In counterpoint to these cheery observations Dad is totally,
"I hope we don't run outta gas", or,
"Does the car feel like it's pulling to the right?", or,
"Better pray we don't hit a deer!"

And of course we're all piled in the back,
like cord-wood, car-sicker than a dog,
in a miasma of blue cigarette smoke.

Are we having fun yet?
Mmmmmm .... no.

Because US 131 was just an iddy-biddy,
going-nowhere highway at the time,
we always headed north on M37.
This brings us to our next ritual
which occurred somewhere south of White Cloud.

The Ritual of Being The First To Spot The Man (fake)
Asleep in His Red Dog House (real).
Ok, I know this is not a man but a boy,
and he's not sleeping but very much awake,
yet it was the closest photo I could find
even though I can't believe Newaygo County
didn't save a picture of
this valuable National Landmark
for all posterity to google whenever a certain
somebody might need it.

A red dog house in front of a white people house
on the left side of M37
and a pair of blue jean pant legs
tucked into work boots
protruding out the "front door".
Somebody must have a photo
of this somewhere!

We're getting closer, Tonto!

In rapid succession come the:
roadside BBQs in dilapidated, weather-worn stands,



a bazillion Mad Jon Escape signs
(kind of a 1960s Burma Shave thing),
and, Yes!, the first of many
Johnny's Bandstand signs.

Now the Country Squire
driven by the urban blue-collar worker,
like a trusty steed
is steadily honing in on
Big Star Lake Road and all its niceties:

Horse Farm where horse tried to kill me, check
Marquette Golf Trails, check
Trail leg to the PM, check
Access to Oddfellow and Rebekah, check
Road spur to Evergreen Chapel, check
The Bowery, check
The Blue Horizon, check
BSL Chapel, check
Chapel Road, check check check.

Night has descended,
the boat motor oil has been decanted from the
gigantic tupperware tub of bran-muffin batter (it happened!),
the treats for the next several weeks
have all been surreptitiously eaten,
everyone is sufficiently gag sick,
and out of the gloaming
our giant Van't Hofmobile
floats and dips and rises over all the
twists and turns and hills and dales
that describe lovely, sandy Chapel Road
until we pony up to the cottage
amid frantic whispers from both parents
that we must "Be Quiet" and
"Zip our Lips" because even though
this is a funfilled, sunsoaked resort,
it's a Dutch resort (for the most part)
and therefore it's Like Church,
and the biggest transgression EVER
in the Dutch diaspora
is to Make A Scene.

So Don tiptoes up to the back of the cottage,
followed in close succession by
Mickie Dave Judy Steve Joanie Karen Janie,
inserts the key taken from under the doormat,
gingerly opens the warped old door
so as to not cause it to squeeeeeeeek,
and suddenly, maddeningly, surprisingly
the door explodes outward and
all manner of furniture and beach equipment
and fishing poles rain down on Don
and Uncle John can be heard
maniacally cackling and gasping
and now the whole South Shore is wide awake!!Uncle John maniacally laughing even as a toddler,
with his sister Mickie at Getz Park in Holland, MI.

Happy 81st Birthday, Mickie!

Marguerite Hofman = June 29

Daughter of Jan & Jennie Hofman

Wife of Ade Vermeer
Mother of Judy, Sandy, Dan, Carol & Bob
Grandmother of Scott, Steve,
Danielle, Gina, Andrea,
Lynda, Jeff, Matt,
Megan, Chris, Josh, Ben,
Nimbe & Noelia
Beloved Big Sister of Wally, Claire, Ellie, Mickie & John Junior
Unparalleled in the gift of hospitality
Unrivaled in selfless giving
Possessor of incredible sense of humor
Storyteller extraordinaire
Devout Christian
Really really missed
6/29/1913 -- 5/9/2006


Aunt Marge in her typical Big Star mode,
surrounded by the kiddies, 1973.
(l to r: Danielle Ricucci Morton, Matt [Buck] Hofman,
Boo Phelps, Jeffrey Vermeer)

OOPS! And this one kinda
floated away...

Lynda Vermeer Schab!

The PM

Art Hoogstrate fishing the PM.

In the Van't Hof family, and probably in

many other Hofman families as well,
"The PM" doesn't refer to the afternoon
or the evening
or to an autopsy-type exam
or to the leader of some European country.....
Nope.
It refers to the Pere Marquette River, a stone's throw
(okay, an Olympian discuss thrower's throw away)
from BSL where a whole lot of this activity is going on.....

The Pere Marquette is a pretty great trout stream
and people come from all over to fish it.
Hence, the Orvis Lodge on M37.
If you wondered what in the world drew this
monied, pseudo-sportsmen's crowd to lowly little Baldwin,
Now You Know.
The PM.


This is Part One of the PM.
The pinkish square is Baldwin.

And this is Part Two of the PM.
See, it empties out into Lake Michigan at Ludington
after passing alongside of Scottville.

Remember Scottville?
You don't want no mushrooms, do you?
Or don't you?

Okay, enough about mushrooms.

Moving on we come to this guy pictured below.
His name was Father Marquette and because he was French
he went by Pere Marquette.
Here he is saying to an Indian,
"Getteth thee to the PM to be baptized,
or lo these many calamaties shall mayhaps befall ye".

Or something like that.

He's helpfully pointing the way.


Pere Marquette did a lot of exploring in his heyday
and he was all over the Great Lakes region doing things like
proselytizing and learning new languages and
guiding and trapping and founding towns like
Sault Ste. Marie and Saint Ignace.
But what he really really really wanted to do
was find that big honking river called
The Mississippi.
Eventually he hooked up with another Frenchman named
Louis Joliet, and in Praire du Chien, Wisconsin
(which is just their fancy way of saying gopher)
they entered the Mighty Mississip'
and travelled down it to within
435 miles of the Gulf of Mexico.
Whoa! That's some canoe trip!

And you know what? They could have gone on,
but they turned back because they kept bumping into
Indians with European Trinkets, yes TRINKETS,
that were Not From Them.
This meant some other Europeans were tramping around
below the Mason Dixon Line and this did not
bode well for Pere and Louie.

So this fearless twosome hightailed it back to Michigan
where Marquette promptly died of dysentery in Ludington.

And now, on the river that bears his name,
we do a lot of this...........This is Abe Hoekwater and Drew Rosema
workin' the river.

Fish On!

Yeah, he's hiding in that hole.

Come to Papa......

Bingo!

YES!

Another satisfying day on the PM.
Merci, Father Marquette.

BSL Mystery #5: The Mystery of the Triple Negative

Leaving the environs of Big Star Lake, if you drive north for a ways
and then drive west for a longer ways,
you will eventually come to the town of Ludington.
You can't go any farther than Ludington because it's situated
ever so picturesquely on the shore of Lake Michigan.

When the weather at BSL was unbeach-like
we often went to Ludington for the day
and with gas costing $.39 a gallon,
who could blame us. On the way you passed through (and still do)
several very small towns such as Walhalla, Custer and Scottville.

On this particular day our mystery unfolds in the town of Custer.

When I was little (the 1960s)
Custer was the home of
Johnny's Bandstand.
This was the place that all of the
bored, restless teens from BSL went to on a weekend night.
It offered live music, usually of this garage-band caliber....

.... the "Starlit Room featuring Steaks, Chops, Shrimp and Chicken"
and "Rollerskating every Wed. & Fri. nights."
In case you were wondering, Johnny's Bandstand was
"Michigan's No. 1 Teen Spot" and their motto was
"Bridgeing (sic) the Generation Gap".
(All of this info was gleaned from a full page ad
in the Big Star Lake Association Directory of 1971).

For me, it was exciting to cruise by Johnny's and imagine
what my older siblings and cousins and their friends were dancing or skating to
on a Friday or Saturday night.
Like most kids, I suffered from the delusion that
everyone else was having a lot more fun than me.

In addition to Johnny's, Custer had a drive in restaurant
of the Dog-n-Suds variety
where a carhop skated (or sashayed) up to your car,
took your order, then returned
with your food on a tray and hooked it to your car window.
This is what a carhop looked like, minus the good-looks
(at least in Custer).

Now on this particular day, Judy VH, me, Eunice H., Debbie H.
and probably others, were on our way to Ludington
and we decided to stop in Custer to get a bite to eat.

Sure enough, here came the carhop all carhoppy up to the car and
she took our order. When we finished indicating what we wanted,
she scribbled it down in her genuine clip-on carhop notebook
and then looked up and said,
"Don't nobody want no mushrooms?"

To a person, we all gazed back at her with what can
only be described as
the typical deer-in-the-headlights stare (ie, stunned)
and struggled to respond in some coherent manner
to this impossible query.

"I said," she said, "Don't nobody want no mushrooms?!?"
She then jabbed the laminated menu in frustration in case
we didn't know what a Custer deepfried mushroom looked like.

It looked like this.....

Well!
We were very aware of what a deepfried mushroom looked like.
What we couldn't comprehend was how to respond to
the Dreaded Triple Negative.

"Yes, nobody don't want no mushrooms",
or
"No, nobody don't want no mushrooms."

????

So there we sat like Lot's wife who had turned into a pillar of salt,
except that we were four pillars of speechless salt.

Or,
I know, I know
we were kinda like the cow of Bashan
that was struck dumb,
or wait, it was the ass of Balaam
and Balaam was struck dumb.

Whatever.
You get the picture.
We were speechless.

Now, to be fair,
there is an argument for our carhop.
Read what Wikipedia has to say on the subject...

"Today, the double negative is often considered
the mark of an uneducated speaker,
but it used to be quite common in English
... Chaucer made extensive use of double negatives in his poetry,
sometimes even using triple negatives."

blah blah blah
and, then, I love Wiki's anecdotal references:

"In the film, Mary Poppins, Dick Van Dyke uses a double negative
when he says, If you don't want to go nowhere.
A double negative is also famously used
in the first two lines of the song
'Another Brick In The Wall' by Pink Floyd, sung by children
we don't need no education
we don't need no thought control..."

Well, in that case, Wiki,
WE don't need no mushrooms,
thanks all the same!

Taking lots of little baby steps ....

.... so I can get back to blogging.

Life suddenly got very busy.

In the meantime,
I'm needing some more photos
from people other than Van't Hofs!

I'm thinking:
Vermeers
Hofmans
Hoogstrates
the other Hofmans
and various "covenant spawn"
as my brother would say.

The older, the better.

Have your kids show you how to do it.

Aunt Jemima Pancakes ....

.... without her syrup

is like the spring
without the fall.

There's only
one thing worse
in the universe,
And that's
no Aunt Jemima's
at all!

Alrighty then....
That's just about enough of that.
And what,
you may ask,
does this homily have to do with BSL?

Are we supposed to sit around a campfire and
sing it to the tune of
KUMBAYA?

Are we supposed to have a
pancake eating contest on Sundays
when we can't go swimming?

No no no.
Quite simply, on a more culinary level
it put me in mind of this:


That's right, Nibblemix,
or in certain pockets of linguistic corruption,
Chex Mix.

When we go to Big Star Lake
and get all in that Blue Horizony kinda mood,
we find it's impossible to be done
without ample amounts
of Nibblemix.

(I'm capitalizing this appetizer because it's almost
a sacred thing in our family.
If we had an Ark of the Covenant
in our Holy of Holies
Nibblemix would be in it.)


There is a certain person in our family
who is in charge of making
all the Nibblemix
and she doesn't mess around.

Notice the half menorah in the picture.
Instead of the traditional 8 candles
we use only 4 on the Nibblemix Altar
because that's about how many days it takes
to convert all these boxes of cereal
into Nibblemix.

If you want to be an honorary Hofman
please leave behind your frankincense and myrrh.
Just bring us Nibblemix and preferrably made
with NO nuts, hardly any wheat chex,
very few cheerios, and lots of corn chex.

BSL Mystery #4: The Mystery of the ....

.... Missing Town of Marlborough

**Click right on the map to make it bigger**
(Map is from Farm Ownership Plat Book, circa 1930s)


Yes indeedy!!
Lake County has its own ghost town
and it is quite a mysterious place indeed.

The story goes like this:
Many moons ago when Potawatomis
still roamed the lush Manistee woods,
when Aishcum County had just recently
been renamed Lake County,
and lumber barons were busy harvesting
the immense pine forests
(but before Al Capone laid-low like the low-life he was
somewhere on Big Star Lake),
a village literally sprang-up overnight,
a village that was dedicated to the manufacturing of

ta da

cement.

Yes, cement. Possibly used in the death of Jimmy Hoffa.

Read what Bob Sculley a reporter from the
Grand Rapids Press had to say on September 12, 1971:

"Swallowed amid the scrub oak and sassafras
of the Lake County hinterlands
are the massive remains of a huge ghost factory,
its crumbling concrete buildings, some of them
larger than two football fields,
are all that's left of
the Great Northern Portland Cement Company,
an industrial dream that turned into a nightmare..."


(Okay, it doesn't quite rival the Coliseum,
but this is Baldwin, people!)
These photos were taken in October 0f 1978.


Sculley continues: "The town, the lakes
and surrounding property of the company
covered 8000 acres in Lake and Newaygo counties.
Workmen were brought into Lake County in 1902 to construct
the cement plant and Marlborough.
The town's initial construction included
an 88 room hotel, 72 homes, a large general store,
opera house, school,
a mile-long railway connecting to the Pere Marquette Railroad,
an electric plant and a municipal water company...
time has dimmed local knowledge of the plant.
Nowadays, many area residents know little or nothing
of the old factory.
Some will tell you the name of the
ghost town is 'Mulberry'...

The factory holds a fascination for visitors...
but in its present state, the plant's
gaping crevices and crumbling walls,
unmarked by any warning signs, constitute what
attorneys call an 'attractive nuisance',
sort of an accident waiting to happen."

This photo is titled,
"Accident waiting to happen", 1978


According to Sculley: "The idea for the cement plant
was born in 1901 when a group of Eastern investors
created the GNPCC with an initial capital of $4 million...
the area south of Baldwin was chosen for the cement plant
because that region is rich in a substance called 'marl',
then used in making cement.
Farmers, some of them from as far away as Indiana,
swapped their lands for stock in the cement company,
and took jobs building the plant.

A boom-town atmosphere gripped Marlborough.
In one Marlborough home, 30 workmen labored on
three shifts, using the beds in three shifts.
The cement plant, which opened in 1903,
consisted of 14 grinding mills, 9 kilns,
a warehouse, machine shop, boiler plant, blacksmith shop,
pattern shop and utility buildings.

The plant produced 1200 barrels of cement a day.
In 1904, the company was a prominent industrial exhibitor
at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis.


Deb Hoogstrate atop one the "crumbling walls".


Eunice Hoogstrate and Lois Mulder walking the walls.
Both photos are dated 1970


Bloggers, please read on: "But the nation's cement industry
was then undergoing rapid technological change.
And in the midst of Marlborough's boom,
someone somewhere else had perfected a cheaper way of making cement...

By late 1906, the Michigan Trust Co.
of Grand Rapids was appointed receiver of the firm...
On May 5, 1908, the property was sold
on Lake County courthouse steps at Baldwin
for the giveaway price of $85,000...
So there in the Lake County wilderness,
stood a newly-built but totally obsolete
multi-million dollar factory and its
handsome model city of Marlborough.

Eunice Hoogstrate says, "The End"

Amazing Marv

Over the course of many BSL years

the VHs, a family of six kids,
and the Huizinghs, a family of five kids
spent several happy summer days together.
Our ages were roughly the same
and if you threw in random Hoogstrates (seven kids!),
it all worked out pretty well.

Pretty well for us, that is.

You see, the Huizinghs had quite a few things we had
a hankering for.

A cottage, for one thing. Not a cottage they rented.
A cottage they owned.
It was white and clapboardy and looked
exactly like what a cottage in Northern Michigan should look like
and it was perfect.

If that wasn't idyllic enough, consider the fact that
their cottage had a little wishing well in the back yard
all cozily nestled in a quaint piney-wood.
Underfoot was a cushion of springy pine needles
and the air was riddled with pine-scent
and you could wander over there and just drift away,
kinda like the Calgon commercial,
and it felt like you were in the
Disney Snow White and the Seven Dwarves movie.
(The little well was nonfunctioning, but still.)

This is Luanne H. and me in 1966 in front of Strovens cottage.
Luanne was a year younger than me
and tall like her Dad.
She's the one missing some teeth.

And I know I'm getting a little side-tracked,
but below are our daughters, Audra and Laina,
30 years later.

They just loved them some Barbies.
Laina's Barbie is modeled after
Lady Luck at the Bowery.


Okay, back to the main story....
Another thing Huizinghs had was
a sleek shiny speed boat with lots of horsepower.
We had a rowboat with "the eggbeater".
And, fortunately for us Hofmans,
Mr. Huizingh was very generous with his boat.

I don't know how many BSLers Marv Huizingh
taught to ski but there are probably quite a few
adults out there who owe their mastery of water sports to Marv.
I do know that he spent many pains-taking hours
with our ghetto family, and probably gallons of gas.
I remember our parents admonishing us:
"Only go once around the bay, otherwise
you'll use up all of Mr. Huizingh's gas."

Marv truly had the gift of hospitality and there
was hardly a weekend that went by when he didn't
have some group or club or individuals up at his cottage
being fed and entertained and the day always
drew to a close
with his pontoon boat tour of Big Star Lake.

But........
this is another gift Marv Huizingh has:

Marv is an amazing skier.
He had a little routine he'd do every once in a while.
First he'd get up on a disc, which is no mean feat in itself.


He'd take a little spin around the bay, doing flashy stuff
on the disc, and then, while passing the dock,
someone would hand him this......


..... a stepladder!!


Amazing!!
And the best part of all....
Marv is 75 years old when he's doing this!