EY #18: Tell about times at the cabin in Corny

The "Big" Cabin
Summer, 1967

Happy 4th of July!!!  While I've had many wonderful experiences with my children on the 4th, none of them were more enjoyable than the years between 1967 and 1974 when every 4th was spent in our family cabins on Lake Siskiwit in Cornucopia, Wisconsin.

1967 didn't begin very well. It began with the sale of our farm in Watertown, Wisconsin and I cried for days.  It meant leaving my dogs, my friends and moving back to Illinois. By May, things were looking up. My parents were given the opportunity to buy the cabins in Wisconsin.  Edgar Pedersen, the man who lived upstairs from us in Aurora when I was little, had passed away and his widow, Peg decided to sell their beloved cabins.  They had moved to Cornucopia permanently a few years before and had built a nice home in town.  She no longer had need for the cabins, but wanted to sell them to someone she thought would enjoy them as much as they had.

I can't be certain, but this looks suspiciously
like the sign I wrote the first summer we
had the cabins....

My parents invited "Unc," (my Uncle Henry) and "Miem" to go in with them to buy the cabins.  We all took a trip over Memorial Day weekend to take a look at the cabins for the first time! (Well, the first time for me. My folks and brothers had gone there for a vacation once before I was born.)  The first view I had was something like this:

View of Lake Siskiwit & pier
From porch of "Little" Cabin

I was in heaven!!! I've always loved the water, even before I could swim, and the opportunity to spend summers at a lake, rustic as it was, was heavenly for me!  (Do all Pisces love being near water???)

Rustic indeed!
Here's the view coming back up the hill!
Garage and the "old" outhouse!

Rustic didn't matter to me in the least.  Our "running" water was all cold.  You had your choice.  The "hot" tap, was lake water (Yes; pumped straight from the lake); the "cold" tap was spring water, that was no more drinkable than the lake water, although we did use it for cooking.  The bathroom required planning and companionship after dark.  We had two of them; outhouses that is!  The old one, which I preferred because it had a screened window to provide some daylight and ventilation and a lock on the door.  The new one perhaps smelled a bit better but it had no lock on the door and you had to leave it open a bit if you wanted any light... not that I really needed any light to do my business, but I did prefer being able to tell if a chipmunk had followed me in the door or if there were any spiders or other creepy-crawlies in there with me!  And then, there was no heat in the cabins.  We heated with a cookstove in the "little" cabin and a "pot-belly" stove in the big cabin.  None of that bothered me though.  Traveling into town to fill water jugs from the Artesian well there for drinking water, taking along a "potty partner" after dark and learning to build a fire in the stove for heat was all part of the grand adventure of it all!

The little cabin was higher on the hill.  It had a combined living room/kitchen and then two bedrooms behind.  The front was almost all windows and looked down toward the lake, but the view was somewhat blocked by the big cabin.

The Little Cabin Kitchen

The big cabin sat directly up from the lake and had a gorgeous view of the lake as the whole front was windows.  It is a two-story cabin; the first floor is one large room with combined living room, dining room, kitchen and "wash" room!  The "dining room" was a dining room table that was placed in front of the windows that looked down over the lake!  I said that it had a "wash" room because there was installed a sink from an old train car in a side wall, mounted below a medicine cabinet with a mirror.

Sink from Burlington Northern Train Caboose!
Too bad it was never hooked up to work!

Two of my favorite memories of this part of the cabin are inside the medicine cabinet!

A "Doodle" Lanie made for me!
Hung in the cabinet June 13, 1972.
It's still there!!!

Lanie was and still is my best friend in the world.  It's that kind of friendship that endures time.  No matter how much time passes between visits or conversations, the love and friendship is still there.  It's impossible for me to separate memories of Corny from memories with Lanie, because other than that first summer when the Zielkes bought the cabins on Lake Siskiwit, I never went there without Lanie until the summer of 1974, when she had a job and couldn't get vacation time to go with me!  So, from 1968 to 1973, every Corny memory includes memories of my buddy! 

Not as artistically as Lanie, but with great love, happiness & enthusiasm, I made something for her and hung it in the cabinet the following year, after my cousin FINALLY decided to take her on a date!

"True Love" "4-Ever"
Prophetic in 1973, but they were so
obviously meant for each other, all it
took was the first date!

The second floor of the big cabin has two "bedrooms" separated by a curtain.

My folks used the bed in the foreground in the
"front" bedroom. Lanie and I shared the bed
on the other side of the curtain.

So many fun memories in the big cabin!  From "Bunkie" killing with a can of deodorant when my niece & nephew (Dan & Gail) wouldn't go to sleep upstairs one night while Al, Marcia, Lanie & I were trying to play cards downstairs, to chasing REAL bats with brooms with Lanie and other high school friends on our graduation trip... Playing cards was a nightly thing:

Lanie lost the last hand and
had to wear "the pig" for the next round!

Sometimes we joined "the old people" for card games in the Chatter Box next door!

Walt Westphall, Dad & Bob Bailey
playing "21" in the Chatter Box!

Sometimes we fed the raccoons and chipmunks!  The "chippies" will come take peanuts (in the shell) from your hand and scamper away to store them and then come back for more. They could usually fit three in their cheeks before they'd run away!  "Baby" was the favorite raccoon. She'd beg for cookies!

Sister-in-law Marcia
feeding Baby.

I remember one night running over to the little cabin from the Chatter Box to get something, I found an animal laying in front of the door to the cabin.  Assuming it was Baby, because the size and color were right, I began talking to her, trying to get her attention and wake her up.  When I got no response, I feared she was dead or hurt.  Knowing better than to actually touch her, I grabbed a long stick and nudged her a bit.  Imagine my surprise when she raised her fur and began to roll into a ball!!!! Nope! It wasn't Baby!  It was a porcupine and I took off running back to the Chatter Box before it started shooting spines at me!

When we were looking for some REAL excitement for an evening, we'd all get in the car and head for the dump!!!  If there weren't too many other cars there, and it was nice and quiet, about twilight the bears would come out!  Sometimes you'd see as many as three rummaging through all the new garbage looking for food.  This will all probably sound extremely boring to my children and grandchildren, but it was wonderful.  It was experiencing nature.  It was having good, clean fun.  We created our own entertainment. And we were happy!

Speaking of bears... I'll never forget the morning I was by the table in the big cabin and saw a flash outside the kitchen window as my dad came running down the stairs.  I'd never seen my dad run before that I could recall, but he ran in the door, FAST and closed it behind himself. I don't think I'd ever seen him look so pale either.  Turns out he'd made his morning trip "up the hill" as we called the trip to the outhouse and came face to face with a black bear!

Sometimes we just did goofy, teenager-type things....

Lanie taking a picture of me taking
a picture of her taking a picture!

As we got older, I had my driver's license and we were able to go to Corny by ourselves, we did some riskier, stupid teenage-type things, like driving over to Duluth-Superior to the Duluth Zoo and driving home with Lanie hanging out the window to grab some beer from some guys who were "dragging" with us, or picking up some guys who were walking along the road and making out with them.

While we did do some stupid things...most of our time was tame and just fun; thanks in big part to my cousin, Norm.

Norm: Ready to Water Ski!

It was so exciting when Norm bought his boat!!! I loved riding in the boat with him and it was even more exciting when he taught me how to drive it so that I could drive for him when he was water skiing!  It took him awhile to teach himself how to ski, but it took him even longer to teach Lanie and me! (Well, to be honest, Lanie and I both needed to learn how to SWIM first! We were the only 14-year-olds in our swimming class at the YWCA and all those little kids made us look bad!)  It took Lanie and I the better part of two summers to really get the hang of it, but even the failures were fun...well all except when we'd actually get out of the water on the skis and then fall and end up getting an enema! Ouch!  Oh, and it wasn't much fun when we'd fall hard enough to lose our skis and have them fly into the air and land on our heads either!  But it was an adventure!

Norm began getting brave enough to goof around a bit!

After he started doing scissor legs on the skis, but before he tried trick skis or slalom, he did some ski squats!

It was actually seeing Norm do these little tricks that gave me the courage to attempt to learn to ski at all!  I mean if he could goof around on the skis, I was sure I could at least stand up on them! Right?  Lanie and I became determined and eventually accomplished our goal...after many trials and bruises!  It was a morning, noon & night thing... day after day... trip after trip! Sometimes "the rope broke!"  Sometimes we'd test one another's skill levels and make sharp turns with the boat to see if the skier could stay up on the turns.  Sometimes we'd use the Zip Sled which you could sit, kneel or stand on, but actually, after learning how to ski, the Zip Sled was harder to use!

Lanie putting on her skis.
Ready to show Bill (my brother)
how it's done!

Obviously, some days were better than others for skiing.  Corny is in northern Wisconsin.  In fact they have Wisconsin's northernmost post office!  So, summer is rarely actually HOT.  And Lake Siskiwit is spring-fed, so the water never really gets warm.  Some days the water is down-right choppy. (I called it whitecaps until I moved near the ocean and learned what REAL whitecaps look like!), but sometimes, usually in the evening, the lake would become like glass---so smooth and PERFECT for skiing!

One dream I never managed to fulfill at the cabins was my dream of a "beach party!" A child of the 60s, I was obsessed with Annette Funicello, Frankie Avalon and sandy beaches.  It didn't matter to me that they were on California ocean beaches and I was at a lake in Wisconsin, I had dreams of a sandy beach, beach parties with campfires and convinced my dad to "build" us a  sandy beach by the lake. It took a lot of work of which I did none.  But, I believe I've mentioned before I was spoiled and my dad and uncle worked with others to try to make my beach a reality...

My "Sandy" Beach
as it exists today.

While they brought in sand and we did have a campfire circle, it never became the place to really lay out in the sun or play beach volleyball! But we did roast a few marshmallows and make some S'mores in my day.

So, back to the 4th of July... I had my first opportunity to see a fireworks show over water in Cornucopia one year as they shot theirs out over Lake Superior.  It was more common, however, to just watch some home fireworks on the end of the pier at the cabins.

While I can never have a 4th of July without thinking of the good old days at the cabins in Corny, as you can tell, the memories of Corny go far beyond the 8 July-s I spent there.  Writing this brings to mind so many other memories: The Bunkie Killing, the bats, the hippies with the Pot-tery shop, the General Store, the canoe and motor boat mishaps, swimming on the sandy beach across the lake, the pontoon boat.... Heavens!  There's enough material on Corny to write a novel... not a blog! There will never be another place more special to me with as many wonderful memories or good times.  So, in closing, to go along with good summer memories and wishes for a safe, happy 4th of July holiday, let's add some good summer music!!!

PS A special thank you to cousin Laura Zielke and all her updated pictures of the cabins that I borrowed for this post!