A hundred years ago, in the nineteen sixties, I used to spend summers in Door County, Wisconsin. It is perched rather tenuously at the tip of Wisconsin's thumb, and, from my chair, is still one of the prettiest places on earth. Pine needles and cherry blossoms litter the peninsula and all is framed by a rock strewn shore line and blue waters. It's a wonderful place, at once rural while also being a retreat for Chicago's suburban oppressed. It was one of those vacation destinations for the nouveau riche, or for that matter, just the riche. It had a genteel air about it, with summer stock theater, artist colonies and antique dealers scattered throughout like raisins in a muffin. It wasn't all plastic and panache like Wisconsin Dells. Stress did not reside there. It was a nice mix of adult and kid and, if your parents were like mine, a wonderful place to goof off.
Pause for forty years to roll by.
It wasn't too many summers ago that I finally returned to the "top-o-the-thumb" as some local ad man must have once coined. It was one of those odd moments, surreal and idyllic, that one anticipates with the kind of ambivalence usually reserved for meeting old friends. How could the modern world have screwed this place up?
It hadn't. More than could be reasonably hoped for had gone untouched. A few towns had boomed, but who can begrudge them that. I don't know how many locals still bought their newspapers there. Many that I spoke to on that trip were mid-life angst filled suburbanites doing their best Oliver Wendell Douglas routines. And, I understand that.
But, of all the joys I rediscovered there that summer, the most surprising was the sight of an old, familiar roadside landmark, Gus Klenke Garage situated in downtown Ellison Bay. In my youth I had assumed it to be a local eyesore: an abandoned white clapboard building standing idly at the divergence of Route 42 and Garrett Bay Road. My father had occasionally joked about its longevity. Once, we even looked up Gus in the local phone book and, to our delight, there we found him, apparently possessing all the attributes any living soul might be party to.
Little did I realize that the citizenry of Ellison Bay would prove savvy enough to recognize a good thing when they had it. Rather than the eyesore of my assumptions, the local population saw in Gus Klenke everything I had learned to associate with it: Timelessness, perseverance, and that comforting eternal quality one feels when spotting a Peanuts cartoon in the paper or realizing the Cubs just won't go all the way this year. It's nice to know that some things will outlive us. Charles Shultz, I think, would agree. So might Leo Durocher. Hopefully the lovely people of Ellison Bay, Wisconsin do, too.
