When Patty was 11, her grandfather built her a treehouse ten feet off the ground. Because he loved her very much, he put tall chicken wire fencing around the outside of it so even if she or her brother got to tussling, they would not fall out. Patty had a brother, and just so he would not feel left out, her grandfather made it a two-room treehouse.
Now this was in 1934, in the heart of the depression. Money and materials were scarce. Can you picture what this tree house must have looked like? Probably made from scrap wood, with those chicken wire sides for safety. Pat remembered the ladder steps went up between the two trunks of a V-shaped tree, and the treehouse was held up by three other nearby trees. “Getting the mattress up the ladder and into the entrance hole was a real job!” she said. But some of Pat Taylor Kulick’s most pleasant summer memories came from nights spent up in the tree house.
Treehouse Sleepovers
Sleeping in the treehouse was a much-desired privilege. “My brother Charles and I took turns having friends stay overnight in the treehouse, provided we had done our chores,” said Pat. “My guests were usually Martha Fisher, Jeanne Matscheck, Joan DeVore and Janny Graf.”
Up there she and her friends had a chance to listen to the sounds of the woods and the water, to sink into the sense of summer in ways even the simple Ingalls Bay cottages did not allow. “You could see the moon as if it were right over your head, and you had the sun to wake you up as it shone through the trees from the East Beach at about six o’clock in the morning.” Martha Fisher Klitgaard says she remembers identifying a loon call for the first time in Pat’s treehouse, and learning to sing, “It’s a Sin To Tell a Lie.” And all the while the treehouse swayed back and forth like a cradle when the wind blew.
The treehouse was the perfect place to retreat from all forms of summer enemies. “It was too high for mosquitoes, and high enough that if boys tried to climb the ladder, it was easy to defend from above.” The little boys were actually supposed to be in bed by the time Patty and her friends went up in the treehouse for the night. The big boys knew that retaliation would be fast and furious the next time they had a turn, so after a few half-hearted attacks, it was pretty much peace and quiet. “There’s really nothing finer than a treehouse,” according to Pat.
Camping at Kalchik’s Hill
The boys, in the meantime, were trying their hand at camping. Bill Graf recalled, “I’ve been coming up here 70 odd years and I’ve never seen a campout that was a successful one.” Bill and 3 or 4 friends would camp out on Kalchik’s hill, which had a commanding view of Ingall’s Bay and even across to Omena Bay but was quite a long walk from home when you were lugging a tent, lots of blankets and probably pillows, and of course, food for a cookout.
Sounds wonderful, but Bill says the campouts were “fraught with multiple, multiple problems that usually involved several kids coming in in the middle of the night covered with sand and wanting to sleep. Then, because they had camped on top of that hill which faced east, the morning sun would come up usually around 4:00 to 4:30am, and everybody would get up, clamber out of their tents, and cook something for breakfast, all the while dead tired. Then they would go home and go to bed.”
Not all Omena Kids got to experience sleeping outdoors. Little Gertrude Goebel stayed in Omena as a child in her grandfather’s cottage in the early 1900’s. Her grandfather, Lewis Voight, along with several of his friends, had purchased the former Mission School up on the hill in 1884, converted the school into the Hotel Leelanau, and built himself a cottage on the land. Gertrude had fond memories of her childhood in her grandfather’s cottage and wrote a memoir about it later.
Here is what she remembers about a particular morning in the summer of 1912:
This photo of the Hotel Leelanau was on a postcard, and you can see the post mark in the upper right corner. Gertrude Gobble spent her childhood summers in her grandfather’s cottage nearby. Courtesy Omena Historical Society
“That day, the sun rose splendidly over Grand Traverse Bay, awakening me in my little room in the front of my grandfather’s cottage. Hurriedly, I slipped into my short trousers and blouse. I tiptoed down the stairs and out into the grove of trees, which grew to the very brink of the cliff, below which the waters of the bay sparkled like jewels. A scamper up the well-beaten path brought me to the hotel dining room, where we all took our meals.
Plump, middle-aged Nellie, in her high-necked shirtwaist, black skirt and starched white apron, lifted me into my chair and pushed me to the table. She retreated to the kitchen for my boiled eggs, toast, and cocoa, and in addition brought the sweet-grass Indian basket which contained my mother’s breakfast. Carrying this back to the cottage was one of my daily duties.
Outdoors, on the large verandah, some of the gentlemen were discussing politics. The election of 1912 was fast approaching and friendly battles were raging over the three candidates, Taft, Roosevelt, and Wilson. They were always nice to children and would give us the red and gold rings from their cigars, and the nice cigar boxes were just the thing for holding collections of pretty stones.
But I knew my mother would be waiting for her breakfast, so I walked sedately down the path, holding my basket carefully, pretending that I was Red Riding Hood going to visit her grandmother. My mission accomplished, I was now free to enjoy my day.”
Quite a different childhood from the children in the cottages below. But at the end of the day, the same stars and moon appeared to children in treehouses, boys on the Kalchik hill in their tents, and to little Gertrude in her grandfather’s cottage on the hill. “Outside, beyond the foot of the cliff, the water laps gently against the shore, the breeze rustles the branches of the pine trees, and one by one, the faithful stars appear.”