Thursday, October 29, 2009

The Carmel of Lake Michigan

Notes from Lynn:

When I knew him in Illinois many years ago, young Art Lane was a mild-mannered newspaperman given to understatement and laughter. He never struck me as a serious art lover, zealous historian, talented harmony singer or the future editor, publisher and co-owner of a weekly newspaper in one of the most attractive towns in the Midwest. He was a dedicated bachelor. And he looked like a typical copy editor – far more comfortable wielding a No. 2 pencil than, say, a golf club.

I was wrong on every count.

When we visited my old friend the other day in Saugatuck, western Michigan’s answer to Carmel, Art was preparing a talk for the local historical society: “Golf and Other Passions – The History of Golf in Saugatuck.”

It had been more than half a century since we worked together at the late, very lamented Champaign-Urbana Courier, but the news and gossip could wait. He took us on a guided tour of his personal art gallery. The walls of his home are covered with paintings, watercolors and line drawings, mostly by local artists, and each with a vision of Art’s adopted town.

He’s been busy, he said, with the Barbershop Harmony Society (it’s still the Society for the Preservation and Encouragement of Barbershop Quartet Singing in America). He was honored by the society in 1999 with an international award for his public relations work, and he sings bass at least once a week to practice with a 35-man chorus for competitions and local performances. Who knew?

Art’s days of singlehood ended when he left the Courier for Carbondale in the 1960s to become news editor at another daily in the Lindsey-Schaub chain, the Southern Illinoisian. There he met and fell in love with one of the writers, a refugee (like him) from the Detroit area.

For Art and Kit Lane, the happy results included a family of four sons and a risky decision to leave the paycheck life and become their own bosses. They managed to buy the Commercial Record, a weekly newspaper since 1869 for Saugatuck and its next-door neighbor, Douglas. Although the year-round population of the two villages and the nearby countryside is only about 5,000, the number is multiplied in summertime by thousands of tourists and vacationers. Art and Kit pasted up the weekly themselves and instituted something new – regular coverage of local government sessions. In the meantime, Kit wrote and published more than a dozen books of local and regional history. (We missed seeing her by a day as she winged her way back from a birdwatching trip in Brazil.)

The newspaper prospered over the next three decades until Art and Kit decided to sell to Kaechele Publications, leave the news to somebody else and work on their own projects in their home next to the local golf course. From time to time, Art drives down to Champaign-Urbana for reunions with that dwindling group of newspapermen from that magic era of the Courier’s face-to-face competition with the News-Gazette. They gather to tell stories about their late editor, the unforgettable Robert W. Sink Jr. Included are Bob Gold, Stan Slusher, George Wilhite and Bob and Jeannine Schaub (A report on our visit with the Schaubs in Boone, Iowa, is in the blog entry “Brownville”.)

For Art, it’s back to Saugatuck and a round of golf, a new arrangement for a song in four-part harmony, another exploration into the resort town’s history, more searches for art work and continuous proof that assumptions can be dead wrong.

Postscript: Art is still given to understatement and laughter, lots of it.

Notable: We had heard all our lives about the beauty of autumn leaves in New England and the Midwest, but nothing prepared me for the foliage fireworks of dark crimson, bright scarlet, burnt orange and yellow hues of impossible brilliance. Just as the flames of a campfire can’t be described, I can’t find the right words for the explosions of color that turned our October highways into a kaleidoscope of burning embers. I would like to say that such-and-such a roadside grove is painted in, say, old gold. But I have never seen old gold. If I did, I would say that it looks like a Michigan maple tree in October.

Mileage from Oberlin, Ohio, to Niagara Falls, New York: 247 miles

Total mileage so far: 6,517

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