This continues a series adapted from the book, “A Sleeping Bear Collection,” Volume 2 of the two-part set, “Oral History, Photographs, and Maps from the Sleeping Bear Region,” produced by Tom Van Zoeren in partnership with Sleeping Bear Forever. Here we continue with Nan Helm, introduced in last month’s article:
Nan Helm was a self-styled writer/historian who lived alone in a small house atop a hill overlooking Burdickville. Being a romantic and a wordsmith, Nan loved to name places, and called her home “Terri Larc”. Her younger friend Dottie Lanham remembered, “She was a very romantic person, and a very dear lady. She loved our kids. She used to come down and visit us and we’d go up to visit her.
“She was uninhibited. Whatever Nan felt like, that was what she did. One time she came down to our gas station — she was on her way down to Faulman’s to the grocery store — and she had on a pair of batiste pajamas (Batiste is a material that’s very thin), and nothing on under them. And she just went strutting down the road like she had a fur coat on. And that was the way Nan was. She was comfortable, so that’s the way she went.
