December 4-5, 1971: A Visit With Uncle Bud in Detroit
	October 16-17, 1971: A Visit to Chicago
	Return to the Index for 1971

I took another weekend trip in October, this one back to my birthplace- Muskegon, Michigan- to visit my last surviving relative who still lives there- my Aunt Marguerite.

The Trip Up to Muskegon

Getting up to Muskegon from Indianapolis was a trip I'd never made before; when we drove up there in the summers when I was small, it was from North Carolina, and we went through Ohio, not Indiana.

But the route was well-marked and the roads quite good; even though they weren't Interstate highways, I could make very good time, up through South Bend and then straight north along Michigan's west lakeshore to Muskegon.

When I get to Muskegon, I have a few options, but to me the easiest is to turn west on either Apple Avenue or Marquette Avenue and go two miles into town and then onto Seaway Boulevard. I'd never driven myself here in Muskegon; the last times I'd been here my Dad was doing the driving. So this was the first time I would have to suss out the best way to get into town. But I had a map and so had no difficulty at all getting first to the downtown area and then north to a route that we had always called the Causeway around the north end of Muskegon Harbor.

The causeway goes through Veterans Park where we often stopped when we came back here in the summer from North Carolina. When I get to North Muskegon, there's a little shortcut that takes me through a small business district and then onto Ruddiman Drive. This beautiful two-lane road goes along the north shore of the harbor, and is somewhat elevated, so there are nice views of the city of Muskegon across the harbor.

At right is an aerial view that shows where my Aunt's house is relative to Ruddiman Drive. I have been to my Aunt's house more times than I can count, and from an early age I could find my way to it easily. Before we moved from Muskegon to Charlotte, my Dad and Mom and sister and I would go out there frequently. Then, when we came back here in the summers, we would also spend a great deal of time there- particularly after my grandmother died and we no longer spent any time in the house on Houston Avenue.

When we stopped coming so often in the summer, I was in junior high and high school, and then in college at Davidson, so trips as a family slacked off, and I don't think that I came to Muskegon since our last family trip. When I entered the Army in 1968 and did my training at Fort Harrison, I did not have the time to drive up there; but I recall that Aunt Marguerite came down to visit me once, and I took her to the Officer's Club for dinner (an event that sticks in my memory as being the first time, on my Aunt's recommendation, that I had Cherries Jubileee). So this is my first trip here in well over 10 years, and I have to admit that I was surprised that so little had changed.

So coming down Ruddiman Drive, I know right where to turn right onto Plymouth Road. The road goes only a hundred feet or so before Mills Avenue branches off to the right while Plymouth Road continues to the left. My aunt's house is pretty much right at that intersection. It's nice, because from her living room window, she can look right down that short bit of Plymouth Road and across Ruddiman to the harbor and the city on the other side.

My aunt had told me she was playing bridge on Saturday morning, and might not be home when I arrived, but she said that the front door would be unlocked. (You might find that unusual, that my widowed Aunt would even consider leaving a door unlocked, but 1971 was a lot different than today; my aunt knew all her neighbors and all of them watched out for each other. Also, North Muskegon was always considered one of the nicest areas of Muskegon, and was very, very safe. Finally, Muskegon was itself a relatively small town, with all that this implies. So, while my aunt would of course lock the door normally, she thought nothing of leaving it unlocked for an hour or two.)

On this, my first trip to Muskegon in fifteen years or so, I didn't take an actual picture of my aunt's house. Perhaps this is because I was so familiar with the house that I just didn't see the need. (Of course, I had no way of knowing that a quarter century hence I would be considering the creation of this online photo album.

Note from 2022:
However, all is not lost. I can show you the house- at least the way it looked in the mid-2010s. This picture is courtesy of Google, who have undertaken a project in conjunction with their Google Maps website and application to photograph each side of just about every populated road in the country. I have no idea exactly when this picture was taken; it could have been as early as the late 1990s. But I can tell you that were I to put a picture of the house from my visit this weekend (had I taken one) right beside this picture, the only difference you would note would be that the trees have grown higher. My Aunt's house hasn't changed at all; even the furnishings are all the same as I remember them from visits when I was a kid. That makes it very comforting and restful. My aunt likes to play Cribbage and Bridge; I learned the second game just before going to Davidson, so I can play well enough now to join her and some of her friends in a game sometime.

But that will probably be on a future visit, as my aunt and I have not seen each other in so long that we will be spending almost all of our time catching up. We will also be making some trips to old childhood haunts like Lake Michigan and the Blockhouse, the Muskegon Ship Channel, my childhood home over in town and, as it would turn out, a visit to old family friends Harold and Irma Charter.

At Muskegon State Park

My aunt and I visited for a while as she was home when I got there, and then we had a bit of lunch before driving out to Muskegon State Park. I wanted to go see the ship channel again, as we'd spent so much time there in the summers, and I also wanted to see The Blockhouse again.

I wanted to make a trip out to Muskegon State Park, where we had spent so much time as kids. So I left Aunt Marguerite for a while to head out Ruddiman Avenue to its intersection with the road to the park- which is, of course, on the shore of Lake Michigan.

The park covers 1,233-acre along Lake Michigan and Muskegon Lake about four miles west of where my Aunt lives. The park has two miles of sand beach on Lake Michigan and one mile on Muskegon Lake. To get to the park, I drove west on Ruddiman Avenue; it eventually turns into Memorial Drive which dead-ends into the road that runs through the park along the lakeshore. I first turned sorth to visit the Muskegon Ship Channel.

The channel connects Muskegon Lake with lake Michigan. Before the arrival of humans, there was an outlet between the 4,150-acre fresh-water Lake Muskegon and the much, much larger Lake Michigan (which is, of course, one of the Great Lakes).

The Muskegon River, Michigan's second-longest river, originating at Houghton Lake and flowing southwest for 227 miles, empties into Muskegon Lake at the eastern end before entering Lake Michigan. On the north, Bear Creek/Lake empties into the lake via the Bear Lake Channel and on the south, Ryerson Creek and Ruddiman Creek flow into Muskegon Lake. The ship channel was dredged and created over a century ago to turn Muskegon Lake into Muskegon Harbor.

I first drove south to the north side of the Ship Channel, just opposite the Muskegon Lighthouse. That's where I took the four pictures below (and I apologize for the darkness of the second two).

Then I got back in my car and headed back north on the Park Road as it climbed into the dunes north of Memorial Drive. The Muskegon Blockhouse is just a mile or so up the road. In military science, a blockhouse is a small fortification, usually consisting of one or more rooms with loopholes, allowing its defenders to fire in various directions. It usually refers to an isolated fort in the form of a single building, serving as a defensive strong point against any enemy that does not possess siege equipment or, in modern times, artillery.

The Blockhouse in Muskegon State Park was conceived as a make-work project in the depths of the Great Depression. The idea to build a replica of Fort Dearborn on the highest dune in the park dated to 1931; the project was approved for the CCC and CWA in 1933, and construction began in 1934 when weather-beaten timbers salvaged from the old Muskegon piers were hewed into shape and framed on a temporary site preparatory to being used in building the Blockhouse. On February 15, 1934, the Muskegon Chronicle said:

"It will be several weeks, before the concrete and stone foundation for the blockhouse can be laid; in the meantime the logs will have been matched and made ready for erection. Stone for the foundation was salvaged from the breakwater operations of several years ago. The stone will also be used to build a new bathhouse on the beach and a new permanent park building on the Scenic Highway. About 300 men are working under Supt. Kingscott, grading the right-of-way for a concrete extension of the Scenic Highway to the Muskegon channel, clearing and improving foot paths and bridle trails, and doing landscaping and planting along the highway. Appropriations aggregating nearly $80,000 have been approved by the local and state CWA boards. In addition, a large appropriation is anticipated through the highway department for paving the extension to the channel, thereby opening the state park beach to the public in a manner expected to make it as popular as other nearby Lake Michigan state parks."

The completed blockhouse stood at an elevation of more than 250 feet above Lake Michigan and appeared very old. I remember visiting the Blockhouse many, many times in the summer trips that we made back to Muskegon in the 1950s. But this blockhouse is not that blockhouse. On Tuesday night, Sept. 4, 1962, a group of local youths set fire to the Blockhouse which burned to the ground. The only reason they gave for the arson was that they happened to be driving past and were bored. The six young men were convicted of arson in municipal court 11 days after the fire.

Here are a couple of (dark) views from the second floor of the blockhouse:

Just how deeply the blockhouse had imbedded itself in Muskegon’s psyche became very clear by the loud outcry when plans to rebuild the burned structure stalled in Lansing. Then Muskegon State Park manager Jack Butterfield led the campaign to find financing for the project and personally supervised the six convicted arsonists who helped rebuild the structure as part of their 5-year probation; work on rebuilding the burned blockhouse was well-underway by April 7, 1964 and by late spring, workers were putting the finishing touches to the new-new-old blockhouse, which would greet its first visitors that summer.

445 Houston Avenue National Historic Site (application pending)

My aunt was volunteering at the Library for a while, so when I drove there with her and dropped her off, I went to my boyhood home a few blocks away.

445 Houston Avenue

The address of this house is 445 Houston Avenue, and it is four blocks from the center of Muskegon. This is the house that I came home to when Mom brought me home from the hospital. The house belonged to Grandmother Dougherty until she died about 1960, and until our family moved to Charlotte in 1951, it is where we lived. We had the upstairs and Grandma the downstairs; my grandfather died before I was born.

I could see that the house has been kept up right well, though most of the neighborhood seems now to be in transition. A lot of growing up and Summer vacation memories live here.

Since I am creating this page in 2022, I thought I would go out and get an aerial view of the site just to show you what it looks like. I wasn't quite prepared for what I found, as you may deduce by looking at the aerial view at right.

As you can see, 445 Houston Avenue is helpfully marked on the Google Maps aerial view. But, also as you can see, the site is now, apparently, a vacant lot. Working around on street view, I can find a familiar house that used to be next door, but not the house I grew up in. When I discussed this with my sister Judy, she did some investigation, including emailing someone at the Muskegon City Hall to find out about our address. She reported to me that the city confirmed that the house had been demolished; apparently there will was a fire somewhere around 2005 that damaged the house beyond repair. Many other houses we remember are gone as well; we assume they simply got too old to maintain.

Back here in Muskegon for the first time in well over ten years, I found that little had changed, but then it seemed as if everything had changed. Physically, the town was the same as I remembered, and so was my childhood home. But everything was subtly different, too. Take my house and the Hume's next door. The houses were just as I remembered them, but they seem "washed out" somehow. It's hard to explain.

At left is a picture that I took of the walkway around the side of 445 Houston Avenue. I remember vividly as a kid, playing along this sidewalk, which ran around to the back door to the house (which came up some steps and into Grandmother Dougherty's kitchen) and then continued back to the ramshackle garage and the alley.

443 Houston Avenue: The Hume House

Next door (to the left as you look at the aerial view) is the Hume residence; the Humes and my family were quite good friends, and I used to see them every summer when we came back to Muskegon. I actually walked over to their house and knocked on the door, intending to surprise them, but I got no answer.

Later, when I talked to my Aunt, I found that the couple had moved away some years ago, and my Aunt thought that at least one of them had since died.

Seeing both these house again, still sitting on the still familiar street made an impression on me. But knowing that neither house still sheltered the people they had when I was last here made the visit more of a bittersweet coda to a long series of memories- the huge jar of multicolored M&Ms that was always sitting on Grandmother's kitchen table, the time I got my tongue frozen to the iron railing by the front steps, roaming the neighborhood with the other kids my age, the way the beveled glass windows in Grandmother's living room cast hundreds of little prisms on the walls in the late afternoon. It was interesting, but not just a little bit surreal.

I have fond memories of the house we lived in from the end of World War II until we moved to Charlotte, North Carolina, in 1951, and I would have liked to look inside. Polite knocking on the door did not elicit a response, however, so I had to settle for pictures outside.

Historic Muskegon

I was going to return to pick up my Aunt at the Library a bit later, and so since I still had a bit of time, I thought I would head down to Western Avenue to the square and just walk around for a while. Muskegon has quite a few old structures, many of the donated by the Hackley family (who also donated the hospital in which I was born).

Hackley Park is dedicated to the memory of Civil War veterans, and was presented to the City in 1890 by Charles Hackley, lumber baron and philanthropist. He donated most of the money for Hackley Memorial Hospital where I was born. Hackley Park's focal point is an eighty-foot tall soldier’s monument in the center of the park. Statues of Farragut, Sherman, Grant and Lincoln grace the corners of the park. The park creates a strong visual image upon entering the downtown area and provides visual and physical relief from the urban environment.

This is the Muskegon Public Schools Admistration Building- another building donated by Charles Hackley. It's distinctive clock tower is almost the city symbol. Hackley channeled most of his life’s fortune into Muskegon, resulting in the Hackley Library, Hackley Art Gallery (now the Muskegon Museum of Art), and more. Opened in 1897 to replace a school that burned down, the structure that is now the administration building originally served as the Hackley Manual Training School—the first vocational high school in the entire state of Michigan.

Walking around Muskegon as an adult allowed me to appreciate the history of the place- as one of the major ports on Lake Michigan and one of Western Michigan's most important commercial centers.

Along about three-thirty, I stopped by the Muskegon Public Library to pick up my Aunt. The Library was yet another public building to which Charles Hackley donated a significant amount of what it took to build it. It has served the town for three-quarters of a century, and my Aunt not only volunteers there, but she (and a number of her friends) are on the Library Board.

Before we headed back to North Muskegon, my Aunt took me to visit Harold and Irma Charter, who had a house that we visited numerous times when I was a kid. They were older, but still recognizable, and we had a nice visit that afternoon.

Harold and Irma Charter

At My Aunt's House

I and my sister have many fond memories of visiting my Aunt's house on our many summer trips up to Muskegon, and for the rest of our visit my Aunt and I stuck pretty close to home (although she did have a few of her friends over on Sunday so I could meet some of them.

My Aunt in her kitchen as we prepare dinner on Saturday.

A late-afternoon view of my Aunt's house in North Muskegon.

On Sunday afternoon, shortly before I left to head back to Indianapolis, my Aunt and I walked across Ruddiman Avenue so she could show me the effects that currently-high lake levels have had on Muskegon Harbor and its shoreline.

It was a special treat for me to return to Muskegon after so long. I don't know what the future holds for where I will be living, but as long as I am so close, I hope to return to visit my Aunt and my hometown as often as I can.

You can use the links below to continue to another photo album page.

	December 4-5, 1971: A Visit With Uncle Bud in Detroit
	October 16-17, 1971: A Visit to Chicago
	Return to the Index for 1971