Our month in Muskegon was not
all work and no play. There was plenty
going on to keep us entertained – from the Irish Music Festival to the season launch
party at Frauenthal Center for the Performing Arts.
The Irish Music Festival, a
four-day long party celebrating Irish heritage and music, took place at
Muskegon’s Heritage Landing. With six
large stages throughout the park, there was plenty of foot-stomping, high
energy entertainment everywhere on Friday evening. And at the Dingle Peninsula there was a
preview of the Highland Games that would take place all day Saturday.
Highland Games competitors, both
male and female, take part in stone throw, hammer toss, sheaf toss, and the
ever-popular caber toss. The caber toss is
said to have begun long ago as a friendly competition between lumberjacks
tossing logs across narrow creeks. The
caber is a 19-foot long pole weighing about 175 pounds. The tosser lifts the caber vertically,
balances it on his shoulder, and attempts to toss the pole end-over-end so that
it falls directly across from him in a straight line. Distance is not important – the straightness
of the caber’s fall is. We watched many
attempts at the toss but saw few straight tosses, although one of the
slightly-built woman competitors (using a shorter and lighter caber) had some
success.
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| Cyber toss |
If the caber toss wasn’t tough
enough, there was the sheaf toss where the competitor uses a pitchfork to hurl
a heavy burlap bag over a horizontal bar above and slightly behind his
head. I would be concerned that the
heavy sheaf would come right down and conk me on the head, so I refrained from
that competition too!
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| Great Lakes Marina |
The Frauenthal Center, formerly
known as the Michigan Theater, was built in 1929 as a theater for “100% all
talking motion pictures” by Muskegon’s own movie mogul, Paul Shlossman. On opening day, it received rave reviews
touting it as the best Michigan theater outside of Detroit. But unfortunately, like many of the theaters
of this time period, it fell into disrepair and almost met the wrecking ball in
the 1970’s. Enter Mr. Frauenthal, a
local industrialist, whose gift to the Community Foundation was used to
purchase and revamp the entire block of West Western Avenue where the theater
was located. The Frauenthal Center for
the Performing Arts was born!
On Wednesday, September 20th,
the Frauenthal Center for the Performing Arts threw open its doors for a big
Season Launch party to which the entire community was invited. We sampled the free appetizers provided by
many local restaurants and the cash bar at Smash Bistro while enjoying a sneak
preview of My Way (the Frank Sinatra
musical tribute), a short performance by the a Capella group B Sharp, a behind the scenes tour of the
theater complex and much more entertainment both inside and outside this
gorgeous venue.
Outside the Frauenthal Center
for the Performing Arts is a life-size bronze sculpture of silent film comedian
Buster Keaton. The sculpture which originally sat outside the Hollywood
Entertainment Museum in Los Angeles was purchased and moved to its current
location in 2010. So what is the Buster Keaton
– Muskegon connection? Keaton’s father
was a vaudeville entertainer who established a show biz enclave, The Actor’s
Colony, in the Bluffton section of Muskegon in the early 1900’s and Buster
spent many summers there as a child.
The calendar may say Fall, but
the temperatures here in Muskegon are far from Fall-like. In fact, we are experiencing the warmest
weather of our cruise!?!? Local
meteorologists are saying that over the next few days, these temperatures will
be 15⁰ above normal! We have resorted to running the air
conditioners – probably only the second or third time this summer that we have
had to do so.
Another highlight of our stop in
Muskegon was a road trip to Midland where we had the pleasure of living from January
of 1981 through February of 1985. We
made contact with our old next-door neighbors, the Pecks, and met up with Bruce
and Carol for delightful reminiscing about the good old days and our ‘little’ kids
who are now between 35 and 50 years old!
Midland has changed a lot over the past 30+ years and we barely recognized
much of it but the old neighborhood was still looking good.
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| The old homestead at 717 Columbia Road, Midland |
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| And a short term stay here at 4402 Castle Drive, Midland |
The morning of October 1st
generated a bit of excitement in the marina. Just down Lakeshore Drive from Great
Lakes Marina is the 120-acre site of the abandoned Sappi Fine Paper Mill. Opened in 1900 on the southern shore of
Muskegon Lake, the paper mill ceased operations in 2009. The factory itself was imploded in 2013 and
the 200-foot ‘power stack number 1’ came down in July of this year. The recovery
boiler chimney came down as scheduled at 9AM!
Now that the last vestiges of the paper mill have been demolished, the
site will undergo sweeping redevelopment as Windward Pointe with, as you can
probably guess, condos! restaurants! retail shops! and maybe another marina!
Rounding out our stay in Muskegon, we enjoyed dinner at Smash Bistro with John and Karen, friends from Great Loop 2002; we had a delicious lunch prepared by the students at the Culinary Institute of Michigan at Baker College; we spent a beautiful fall Sunday afternoon strolling through Grand Haven's ArtWalk.
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| Grand Haven ArtWalk entertainment |
But all good things must come to
an end. So on October 3rd, Lazy W and crew ended another great
cruising season. Lazy W was pulled out of the water and trucked into her winter
storage spot – this time with a FOR SALE
sign on her bow. Who knows what will
happen next??
