Letter by Phyllis Sbonek Carnahan, Sept 5, 2000 an excerpt from “Remembering Solon: A community and family history of Solon Township.”
Cedar has, of course, in the passage of time, changed a great deal. When I was little there was a hotel uptown, where the gas station is now. It was run by Frank Schramski, who was also the town’s barber. His handy man’s name was Walter and he only had one arm.
Cedar had a doctor, a druggist, a drugstore, a blacksmith shop, a railroad and depot, pickle warehouses, a big store owned by my father which burned in 1925; a bank, and best of all, a wonderful school which was the center of town life.
When I started going there my first teachers were Rozalia Svoboda and Agnes Good. Agnes, I believe is still living and is at the Maple Valley facility. It was a 2-room school — kindergarten (or primary as it was called then) through fifth grade in one room, sixth grade through tenth grades in the other room. We had a library about the size of a small closet, but filled with books, every one of which I read and when I ran out of books to read, I read every volume of our two sets of encyclopedia. We learned a lot because we had wonderful teachers, strict discipline, and the students listened to every grade besides their own as the other students recited up front.
We had our own share of scandal and tragedy. The town druggist kept a mistress in the house next to his own big and beautiful house which he and his long-suffering wife lived. Ole Grindstuen committed suicide in one of the pickle warehouse. There was always talk about the nun who was murdered in Isadore, way before I was born, and it happened in another township. Fire was always much feared because we were dependent on Traverse City’s fire department and by the time they arrived, it was always too late, as in the case of my father’s store and bank which were in the same building and were completely destroyed by the fire.
Catholic kids who didn’t go to Holy Rosary school had to walk from Cedar to Isadore to go to catechism in the summer, or one summer to Maple City where catechism lessons were held at St. Rita’s church. There was a dance hall uptown, over the beer garden — pool hall. Dances were held every Saturday night and the parents would go and take their kids. The girls would dance with their fathers and then with the village or country boys. We went home with our parents.
We had no movie theater, library or even a church, In the winter, after support chores were done, we used to bobsled from the house at the top of the hill coming into Cedar from the south. We would ride the bobsleds down the hill, through town, and then down Maple City Road.
There was always something going on at the school. We had Maypole celebrations in the spring, box socials, Christmas plays. On May 1, when the trout season began, all the kids would go fishing (before school started in the morning.) We would dig worms the day before, and get up at 3 a.m. on the big day. Because the girls didn’t want to touch the worms, we would gather under a street light, lay the worms on a small rock, and squeeze the worms onto the hooks. We fished No. 1-2-3 creeks down the Maple City road. Tony Mikowski was one of the best kid fishermen. He used to wear knee high rubber boots and would drop the fish he caught down into his boots. The fish were all under-size but Tony or no one else was ever hauled to jail for under-size fish.
Another big deal for the kids was picking flowers in the swamp in the spring. Mat flowers, tiger lilies, Dutchman’s britches, trillium, and most wonderful of all, trailing arbutus. Also in the spring, almost every family in Cedar would go picking mushrooms, morels. My dad would work all day at his creamery, come home for supper, and then we would all pile into our Model-A Ford and go mushrooming. We would repeat this in the fall when the fall mushrooms were to be found.
One of the big things in Cedar was baseball. Cedar belonged to the Tri-County League and every Sunday, everyone in town was at the ball field, in the big ravine below Vlack’s house at the top of the hill coming into Cedar.
There was even small bleachers built down there,and since it was used during the week as a cow pasture, the outfields had to watch where they were stepping. If the games were out of town we’d go, for example, to Bower’s Harbor on the peninsula where the Old Mission team played, and where kids could get a treasure to eat — Home Run Bundy’s, named after a good baseball player named Bundy from Traverse City, I think. It was a ball of vanilla ice cream on a stick dipped into chocolate. The league was made up for baseball players from Leelanau, Benzie and Grand Traverse counties.
To be continued…
