Found this Story Searchin the Web Had to POST It .......On a Short Trip to Michigan August 3-6, 2013 I’ve just come back from four days in Michigan where I grew up. I visited some of those old good time places from when I was in single digits. Standish, Tawas, East Tawas, the Lumberman’s Monument. Deer hunting with a 12 pound bow in early October some time in the late ‘50s when the wood cutters monumented had only been 50 years gone. In some places you could still smell their boots, see where they sinned, where they slept and how they used the dams they built to lake up some poor unsuspecting river. Such was the way with us back then. My uncles bought a lodge that had pictures of the lumberman who’d stayed there on the walls. Whole crews of them in 8 ½ by 11 black and whites laid horizontally in the frame they came in, which if they ever were glossy, they weren’t no more from the smoke and all. The guests, if guests they were, ate in the kitchen which had this long table, well probably two or three long tables combined and chairs to suit enough people to fill the 12 bedrooms up above. There was a bathroom up there as I recall. One bathroom for 12 bedrooms. I expect when the lumberman where here, the outhouse and the woods served for the hasty. We had the Bolles, the Goodriches, the O’Hara’s who owned Cloverleaf Pizza in East Detroit and the same as O’Hara’s now on Ten Mile and we Schlueter’s, poor cousins but good entertainment. We filled that table with perch and sunfish one summer day. Later my Uncle Clayton dug out an old stairway on the left side of the lodge off the long screened in front porch. When he came across his first gambling table my Uncle Freddie and the others would have jumped in with the shoveling. Imagine a gambling parlor under the bar in the lodge my uncles bought. I still do and it’s been 54 years since my dad died and we visited the lodge the last time. When Aunt Vera came in from California without Uncle Ande to be with her older sister, my ma and not talk about anything important but keep their feet in the lake water as much as possible from a sling chair that made her feel like a native papoose and she was. Born there in 1910. Yeah, I remember Michigan, but the one I knew is gone and gone. In Standish I picked up the trail of how we used to go Up North. When I was a guest of the Spinella family we’d stopped in Standish coming and going for ice cream. The place is gone now, gone, gone. I saw a few spots I remembered. A creepy old what not building that was probably dead when I was a kid. It’s still standing, but not the ice cream shop. There was nothing I knew in Tawas or East Tawas. I went to the state park at the end of Tawas Point but they wanted $8.50 for a day pass and I gave it a pass. That might have been a mistake considering how far I’d come to get there. But instead I turned into an enclave of cottages nearby and asked how much. One hundred thirty five dollars, I was told, before taxes and gratuities. I said it was too rich for my blood and went restaurant hunting. At the end of the point or the beginning depending on your point of origin there’s a Big Boy. They no longer say Elias Brothers Big Boy which was the franchise I grew up with when they finally got to Detroit. I entered with someone in front of me looking around helplessly. I joined her. There was a sign saying we should wait, but there didn’t seem to be anyone attending the sign. With my presence a mere shadow I returned to my car and decided Oscoda was my destination not Tawas Point. Oscoda is where the Au Sable River enters Lake Huron and John Caruso took me and his son Chip there ‘lo those so many years ago. A Saturday night it was and John wanted a few beers. He wasn’t the type to take a flip top case of Stroh’s back to the motel. My old man would have, but that’s a different story. I remembered the place as being on the Au Sable but when US 23 passed over the Au Sable in 2013 the place was gone. Turned out the memory was flawed. The place was the Au Sable Inn and it’s still there, just not on the river. In between the river and the old, Caruso visited Au Sable Inn, is presently a place called Mama’s Kitchen which we highly recommend. I tasted the cod fish I ordered for lunch the next day at the same time and wished I could have had some more. It was among the best fish and chips I’ve had in a lifetime of sampling. The best is still from Brockton, Ontario, but the setting was so good it might have influenced my decision. The Thousand Islands have their own magic seen from the Canadian side with deep fried cod fish in your mouth sitting on a green lawn watching the Seaway go by. I believe it was the owner’s son who waited on me. He was swift and a little too loose originally but snapped to quickly when he saw what I was about. The menu was one of those that make you cringe if you’re not into making too many decisions. There were so many things to order it hurt. They had an Italian section and a Greek section. I punked out and did not order the Spanakatirapita because it came on a menu under the Italian section. It wasn’t the being under, it was the lack of sincerity I have come to expect from watching too much Fox television of those menus that have so much on them. The truth is, Mama’s Kitchen would have delivered on the Spanakatirapita because the owner was Greek and not only Greek but from Detroit and not only from Detroit but from the Northeast side of Detroit, Seven Mile and Mack to be exact. He said back in the days when he came over from Greece and lived there it was a fine place to live, but now. He shook his head. I shook my head. I’m from Seven Mile and Schoenherr, not far from Mack, and I know first hand what he’s talking about. Greektown in Detroit is the one place I could recommend blindly that you go to. It is about two blocks on Monroe Street that was, is and seems to always be Greektown. New Helas is my favorite. Try the Retsina wine. Order one glass and everyone take a sip. It’s an acquired taste. I recommend it with the spinach cheese pie. A contented customer in Mama’s directed me to River Road where there’s a Dairy Queen on the right hand corner as you travel north on US 23. You make a left on River Road and enter the Huron National Forest where you’ll find many interesting overlooks of the Au Sable River. The best of them is Lumberman’s Monument. John Caruso took us there in the ‘50s. I think it was the trip we drove up to Mackinaw to see them starting to build the Mackinaw Bridge. We were all surprised, they started in the middle.
Posted on: Sun, 30 Mar 2014 03:32:16 +0000