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May 22, 2003
‘Dude’ on two wheels passes you on the right
By Jacob R. Wheeler
Sun Editor
Go ahead man, punch that alarm. Snooze another half hour. ‘Cause even if you jumped out of the sleeping bag now and took off pedaling down the road as fast as you could, you wouldn’t catch him.
Nope. Not until Derek Prechtl decides to pull over on the side of the road for a gulp of water and one of those multigrain granola bars that’s as hard as brick are you gonna catch a glimpse of him.
He may tell you he’s winded. He may even have sweat running down his face and drowning those goggles. But that’s because he just finished biking 60 miles. And the alarm clock only reads 8:30 a.m.!
Time to wake up, dude.
Prechtl’s day is just beginning. He will open Cherry Republic’s warehouse in Empire in half an hour, and pace the floors until 5 p.m. when he can go out and bike some more. Actually Prechtl is a busy man at work. The cherry empire that a local tyke named Bob Sutherland built from the ground up and turned into one of Northern Michigan’s most visible enterprises trusts this bikermensch to keep the shelves stocked though the merchandise is carried out, one truckload after another.
Chocolate covered cherry 12 ounce bags are getting low in aisle four; a heathen’s supply of Boom Chunka cookies were misplaced yesterday, and some Fortune 500 company on the West Coast spontaneously ordered hundreds of jars of cherry jam to be delivered to their shareholders to bail them out of an economic crisis.
Prechtl springs off the bike, tears off his helmet, and sprints around the warehouse with his cordless phone, trying to catch up. (Editor’s note: these situations didn’t actually happen. Derek keeps things here running as smooth as a German automobile engine).
And, are you ready for this? This is actually Prechtl’s chill time of the year. Yep, Northern Michigan is a backwater part of the country for competitive mountain bikers, so he’s in taper mode during the spring and summer, biking only 20 hours a week, which amounts to 400 miles of pavement in the proverbial rearview mirror. And, once again, all before you’ve had your first cup of coffee.
Prechtl spends his winters in Tucson, Arizona living with several other ardent bikers. There in the dry desert they indulge in their base training at least 30 hours a week. He told me about one training day in the Southwest last winter, albeit an aberration since it was so grueling:
“The craziest ride this year was when we biked Mount Lemmon, a 6,500 foot high climb near Tucson. We biked 10 miles from our home to the base and then ascended 25 miles up to the top, rode down, and then up again. That was 50 miles of climbing, 120 miles in all. Dude, I did NOT feel good!” Prechtl recalls. “
But two weeks later, on April 15, he finished a whopping third among all Americans present at the Sea Otter Classic – the largest mountain biking race in the United States, in front of some 70,000 spectators. “That was definitely the pinnacle of my career,” says the unassuming warehouse manager, who beat U.S. national champion Travis Brown and several national champions on that day.
It’s fair to say Prechtl came out of nowhere. He had finished 37th last year and 49th two years ago in the Sea Otter. Since then he has been ranked as high as 12th in the nation according to a point system that deems it necessary to participate in as many races as possible. “I couldn’t travel to California or Colorado (the meccas of mountain biking in this country) every other week because I’ve got a day job,” Prechtl says. “Still, I’m stoked to be ranked so high.”
Derek Prechtl admits the biker in him sacrifices quite a bit by remaining here in Leelanau County, where the slow pace of life defines us over all else. He’ll never become one of the select five guys in this country who make six-figure salaries as fulltime bikers because of the advertisements on their backs. “All five of those guys live out west, and I’m just a local boy who caught onto biking from the guys working at Brick Wheels in Traverse City,” he says.
Until the Sea Otter Classic last month, Prechtl would never have mentioned his name in the same breath with the top racers in the country. He biked a world cup, called the TISSOT UCI (basically the creme de la creme of the cycling world) in Napa Valley in 2001, and admittedly got his rear end kicked by a competition that drew every top mountain biker in the world.
Plus, the popularity of off-road biking appears to have come and gone here in the United States. Canada and Australia and the European nations have invested much more in their athletes since the days of U.S. dominance in the sport in the mid-1990s, Prechtl explains, and several famous American mountain bikers switched over to road biking as soon as the scene began to wane. Now they’re racing in the glamorous Tour de France.
“I’ve thought about that,” says our local biking bodynazi. “But it would be a great commitment. I’d have to give up living in Leelanau County and move away to join one of those teams. This may not be the hot spot for mountain biking, but the cool thing about living here is being able to bike the scenic roads and look down on the Glen Lakes,” Prechtl says.
Yet even this dude is able to find challenges in Northern Michigan. On the morning we decided to meet for a photo shoot in Glen Arbor, a wind of biblical proportions was turning things upside down all over the Midwest. Rumor has it that a hen in Indiana even laid the same egg twice. But that didn’t stop Derek Prechtl from braving M-22 and crossing the Glen Lakes to meet me at 7 a.m., his goggles nearly tattooed onto his face courtesy of a strong headwind.
“Dude, this is nothing,” he told me. “I was part of a night biking event once at Boyne Mountain where our team rode for 24 hours of straight pain. My shift was at 3 in the morning. That’s the last thing you wanna be doing at 3 in the morning!”
Amen to that, Derek.
Posted by editor at 11:23 PM | Comments (0)
Former Le Bear restaurant owners migrate south to Narrows
By Jacob R. Wheeler
Sun Editor
Nancy Wright and Janet Niewold are not finished. In fact, they have just begun another project that will keep their names embedded in the local Who’s Who list.
The jovial ladies who ran Le Bear Restaurant on beautiful Sleeping Bear Bay for 12 years decided not to slip off quietly into the night after selling the enterprise to downstate developer Dominic Moceri, who is in the process of building an enormous, multi-million dollar resort where the restaurant once sat at the end of Lake Street. In fact, Wright has taken the first steps toward fulfilling a dream that she has carried since she vacationed on the Glen Lakes as a little girl.
Wright and Niewold are renovating the grandiose old manor on Little Glen Lake, one quarter of a mile west of the Narrows Bridge on M-22. The building, approximated at 100 years old by the ladies, is in rough enough shape that it will demand extensive work done to the foundation, new floors and new windows – expenses that will cost between a half- to one million dollars when all is said and done. “Some people told us just to tear it down, but I wanted to preserve the old building,” says Wright, whose parents and grandparents purchased the manor, then known as Ockers Inn, in 1954 and renamed it Glen Lake Manor. They envision the renovated manor seating 96 guests when it opens for business again next spring.
Meanwhile, Wright and Niewold have also taken the nearby deli/ice cream parlor/lunch counter located directly on the Narrows under their wings. They have not decided what to do with the establishment, now called “Little Bear”, once the manor opens.
“By selling Le Bear, I’ve preserved two historic landmarks in the area,” Wright says. “Some people thought I’d just take the money and run, but we will continue to invest in the community. When I learned that the (Le Bear) sale would go through and realized that the manor would take a long time to renovate, I decided to take on this project too.”
That deli’s dizzying history in recent years has prompted the Glen Arbor Sun to write a story on its new owners nearly every other summer of our existence. (We kick off our eighth year with this issue, according to the masthead). Wright and Niewold initially leased the establishment from Bayberry Properties, which owns The Homestead resort, when they sold Le Bear restaurant to Moceri on November 12 of last year, before purchasing it for approximately $300,000 and completely redressing its outside.
Last summer, Maple City residents Dave and Shirley Miller leased what they called the “Narrows Deli”, serving Pleva Lean hot dogs and ice cream over the counter. Bayberry had purchased the Narrows Deli from award-winning Greek chef Greg Nicolaou to lure him over to run food and beverage affairs at The Homestead before it sat empty through the summer of 2001. Before Nicolaou, Dottie and Bill Thompson ran the “Dairy Bar” from 1993-1998, decorating it with Chicago sports and Elvis memorabilia.
Once again, in chronological order: Dairy Bar-Narrows Deli-Little Bear, and possibly a new proprietor next summer. In keeping Little Bear open, the ladies are able to keep their prized chef, Kerry, busy in the kitchen. He was the zest behind the meals, the weddings and the Sunday brunches at Le Bear restaurant for years, and this summer he will serve up the same chicken salad as he did on the shores of Sleeping Bear Bay, along with some specialty recipes Nancy brought back recently from San Francisco. Furthermore, Wright and Niewold can keep their clientele happy for a year until they move into the manor, for which a name has not yet been decided.
“Our customers from Le Bear have been fussing me because they have nowhere to hold their luncheons now,” says Wright. “They started a petition with 200 signatures, asking me to do this.”
And why not? The ladies remember how as many as six inns once dotted the area around the Glen Lakes. At the moment, the only other non bar-restaurants in Empire Township are LaBecasse and Funistrada, and both of those are located in an area known more commonly as Burdickville.
“It will be a mini-Grand Hotel when it’s all finished,” marvels Niewold, referring to the mother of all establishments on Mackinac Island. “Ladies can go there to have fancy luncheons and drink tea while they look out at the lake and the sand dunes through a 10-foot picture window. This will be one of the fanciest restaurants in the area.”
Posted by editor at 10:33 PM | Comments (0)
Spring Walkabout
By Jane Greiner
Sun staff writer
There’s nothing like a couple of 50 degree days in a row to give you the urge to get outside for a Spring Walkabout. I use the term broadly to include anything from putting on hiking shoes and taking a real walk to grabbing a rake and clearing some leaves from the yard. I even include piling in the car for an old fashioned Sunday drive.
Recently Lyn and I were both infected with the spring bug. It came on gradually. It started two weeks ago when Lyn announced that “the light is changing.” Lyn is an artist and notices things like the way the light has a different quality during each season of the year; it has a sharp edge in the winter, there is more light in the spring and it has a warm feel to it, the air is softer and rounder in the summer, blurring the hard edges, and it has an incandescent, almost glowing effect in the fall.
For me spring became real when I saw a ring-necked pheasant crossing the road north of Lake Ann. It was a male who looked handsome with his bright green head and white collar. For some reason the sight of a pheasant was a harbinger of good things to come, perhaps because pheasants used to be so plentiful downstate and have now mysteriously disappeared. Until this sighting, I had not seen a single pheasant since I moved her three years ago.
Another sign that spring is on its way was our first motorcycle sighting, followed shortly thereafter by the first bicycle sighting. Human beings change with the seasons just like the rest of nature. The urge to ride in the open air is a sure sign of spring in Leelanau County. One day we even saw several canoers and kayakers on the Crystal River. I could hear spring in their laughter as they paddled the sparkling water.
One weekend we felt the need to get outside. We put on our walking shoes and headed for Alligator Hill. It felt so good to leave the heavy boots behind. This was our first time on Alligator Hill this season. On the way we saw the ice melting back from the shores on both Big and Little Glen Lakes. From the top of Alligator Hill Lake Michigan looked green and blue again, like it does in summer.
Two days later we hiked the Bay View trail. It was cool but sunny up there looking out over the lake and hearing the fog horn blowing in the distance The lake was almost completely free of ice. There was only one narrow shelf of ice along the shoreline below Pyramid Point.
On our way home we went for a drive on firming gravel roads. We drove to the end of Thorson Road and later over to Port Oneida Road. At one spot we saw a small flock of robins in the weeds and trees beside the road - a whole gang of springtime messengers.
In another place we saw a falcon-like bird on a fence. It was probably an American Kestrel, a small falcon with a lot of white on its head. They flash considerable red in flight. My bird book tells me that they range into our area in the summer. Maybe this one was a little early.
The drive did not completely cure our Spring fever. When we got home Lyn and I took a stroll around the house so she could show me the first crocuses she had seen pushing up their green tips.
The weather made backyard work look attractive. We both got out rakes and went to work. Lyn started cleaning out her flower beds. I began to uncover the various trails I have laid out through the woodsy part of our back yard.
Just being in the woods felt good. The sun came through the un-leaved trees bright and sharp. I left my jacket inside and let the sun warm my back through my sweatshirt.
We let the dogs out to play in the yard as we worked. They grew bored with the raking and ran off to chase squirrels and chipmunks. They never catch the little critters, thank goodness, but they get a great deal of pleasure chasing them up trees. The dogs spend a lot of time camped out at the base of a tree staring up into the branches where a squirrel was last seen. Of course the squirrels are long-gone, but the dogs never seem to figure that out.
I played at leaf raking until the sun dropped a little lower and lost its magic touch. We brought the dogs inside and kindled up the fire in the woodstove. What a fine day it had been!
Spring has that kind of effect. It gets us up out and urges us to get busy with old activities “put away” since the previous summer. We look for the first crocuses, the first robins, the first buds on the trees. We remember how good it feels to be outside and realize how long the winter has been. It’s absolutely the best time of the year for that walkabout in the back yard.
Posted by editor at 09:35 PM | Comments (0)
Glen Haven General Store takes us back to ‘Roaring 20’s’
By Jacob Wheeler
Sun Editor
No, you can’t buy the pouches of Bugler roll-it-yourself tobacco. And no, the Coca Cola in the big red cooler behind you does not include cocaine as an ingredient. But nearly everything else at the refurnished General Store in Glen Haven is accurately reminiscent of the 1920s.
The store’s grand opening will take place on Saturday, May 31, at 10 a.m. though visitors may have a peek inside as early as Friday, May 23. The local branch of the National Park’s most recent turn-back-the-clock enterprise will be open to the public from 10-5, every day until Labor Day weekend.
“The idea is to make everything look like it did in the 20’s,” says NP spokesperson Bill Herd, who has been busy stocking shelves and getting the General Store ready for visitors. Kerosene lanterns line the back wall, reminiscent of a time when electricity was not a given. Frying pans are stacked across the aisle, to ensure that fish caught in Sleeping Bear Bay receive their proper burial. Visitors who want a memento to take home with them may purchase these items for $29.95 and $19.95, respectively. Books and postcards chronicling Glen Haven’s early days as a company owned town that supplied cordwood to fuel the steamships that passed by, as well as wooden toys, ship models and big jars full of rock candy will also be available.
“We’d like to carry a little bit of everything here, just as the General Store did,” says Herd. “Glen Haven was a company town owned by (local founding father) David Henry Day, so people were paid in credit. They could redeem that credit at the store, so you wanted a little bit of everything in stock to avoid sending people to far-off Glen Arbor or Empire.
Herd says the General Store was built sometime in the 1860s. D.H. Day acquired it in the mid-1880s along with the rest of Glen Haven and 5,000 acres of adjacent timberland that included Alligator Hill and stretched all the way to the shores of Little Glen Lake.
The National Park has made every effort to highlight Glen Haven’s link to the shipping industry, which was booming at the time. In the back of the General Store is a genuine ticket window where locals could secure passage on one of the steamers cruising by for Chicago or the other Great Lakes. The ticket window was also a Western Union office.
Posted by editor at 08:39 PM | Comments (0)
The kings in the palace
By Tim Sutherland
Sun feature writer
Imagine Billy Joel and Elton John together in concert, with over 100 million records sold between them – number 1 hits too numerous to mention and two of the greatest piano players of our time. Legends, icons, megastars, and there they were on stage together at The Palace of Auburn Hills, and I was there to see them.
I was in the presence of greatness. I knew it, recognized it and felt the excitement and emotion washing over me as they opened the concert with a duet to Billy’s famous hit, “Scenes from an Italian Restaurant”.
Over 22,000 concert-goers who felt highly privileged to be in The Palace that night were treated to three-and-a-half hours of rock and Rock and Roll bliss and Hall of Fame songs.
This night was actually four concerts in one. The audience warmed up first to half a dozen ballads done duet style, including “Tiny Dancer” and “New York State of Mind”. Each entertainer interspersed them with a few great piano solos. Billy’s and Elton’s fantastic skills were showcased as numerous, well-placed overhead movie screens focused solely on their hands floating effortlessly, yet powerfully across the keyboards.
Billy Joel’s exit gave Elton John the opportunity to move to center stage for concert number 2, an 80-minute show that highlighted the polished, professional 56 year-old British pop-rocker who unfortunately performed at less than his best because he had a bad cold. But Elton still managed to mesmerize us with “Daniel”, “Rocket Man” and a bring-the-house-down rendition of “Saturday Night’s Alright for Fighting” that brought the crowd up, dancing on their seats.
During the third part of this magical night Billy Joel and his band returned, not just to the stage but into our hearts and souls. Whether shaking us up with soulful, heart-wrenching songs from past marriages such as “Innocent Man” and “She’s Always a Woman”, to shaking us down as a classical rocker with songs like “You May be Right”, to rattling the walls with “It’s Still Rock and Roll to Me”, he put the crowd in a frenzied mood. Billy Joel reminisced about Detroit still being the Rock and Roll capital of the world by telling the story of his groundbreaking concert in Leningrad, (now St. Petersburg) Russia in 1974, where the crowd was so wild and crazy that he turned to the other band members and asked, “Is this Detroit?”
After regaling us with another 10 or 20 his intertwined with tribute short-takes to Detroit’s finest, including The Supremes, Mitch Ryder and Bob Seger, his stage exit induced a tumultuous roar, only to return immediately with Elton for a six-song encore.
This fourth segment of the concert left the audience gasping for breath, sobbing with joy and emotionally, and physically spent. Imagine “Benny and the Jets” followed by “Only the Good Die Young”, and just when we could not take anymore, they hit us with “The Bitch is Back” followed by the grand finale that brought 22,000 people screaming along with every word to “Piano Man”.
Lord help me, ‘cause I just died and went to heaven!
Posted by editor at 08:38 PM | Comments (0)
Presence of old friend emerges from Sikh family
By Linda Jo Scott
Sun contributor
It was 8:00 on a Monday morning just south of Cleveland, and I had two hours to wait until getting together with a college friend and then driving back to Michigan. My son and daughter-in-law were off to work; I'd already spent nine days with the "grand dogs" and didn't feel we needed any more quality time together for the moment.
So I gathered my things, locked the dogs inside their home, and drove south toward Richfield, to a rather exotic building which had intrigued me every time I passed it. The sign out front had told me that it was a Sikh Temple. Would anyone be there at 8:00 on a Monday morning? Would they welcome me?
Encouraged when I saw several cars in the parking lot, I proceeded to knock on the door. A beautiful young Indian boy with long hair came to the door and said, haltingly, "Come in."
Soon his father, Bhai Sahib Suba Singh, 47, a wise-looking gentleman with a long beard and turban, greeted me and asked me to sit and have a cup of sweet, milky tea. Then his wife, two daughters, and a second son all came out to greet me, each of us no doubt full of curiosity about the others.
For close to two hours, we got acquainted. We played music, Bhai Sahib Suba Singh on an instrument something like an accordion, and his older son on a drum. Suba Singh also sang in a kind of chanting style. I played "Edelweiss" on his keyboard instrument, and they smiled. When I told Suba Singh that I also played the violin, he said he would love to hear me play.
Suba Singh, the priest of the temple, has lived there with his family for four years. Both of the sons whom I met are studying with their father to become priests and will eventually go to India for more training.
During the course of our visit, Suba Singh showed me the sanctuary and actually opened the holy book, housed under elaborate velvet wrappings on the altar. Worshipers sit on the carpeted floor.
Similarly, in the large dining room, the 200-400 Sikh members and guests sit on the floor each Sunday, after the services, to enjoy an Indian meal together.
Suba Singh's English is rather limited, but we nevertheless talked about many aspects of the Sikh religion--and, upon his questioning, many aspects of my life. He was sad to know that I had been divorced twice, for Sikhs marry only once--for life. His own mother had been widowed when he was just a few weeks old, he explained, but she never remarried.
I asked whether the priest's family had made good friends in their new community. "Only one," Suba Singh said a bit sadly. "There is a very nice woman named Susan Canaday who helped me learn to drive in America and who helps me with my English. She is writing a book about India. But there is no one else."
One of my dearest American friends had died in India several months before, during the last of many pilgrimages, and, as I told Suba Singh, visiting his temple had brought me great peace of mind. It was as though I had met the gentle, kind people who had cared for my friend in his illness--and had cared for his body after his death.
I reluctantly left after two hours, promising to return in May with my violin--and my camera. (Suba Singh and his family were not eager to be photographed in their everyday clothes.) I look forward eagerly to attending their service and to eating Indian food with them afterwards.
But most of all, I look forward to seeing my new friends, somehow feeling the presence of my departed friend in their eyes.
Posted by editor at 07:41 PM | Comments (0)