Cooler By the Lake
I am an urban child. During the summer, I rode my bike everywhere and took in a matinee at least once a week. I went to Tigers baseball games, enjoyed bittersweet hot fudge sundaes at Sanders, and watched the Scott Fountain change colors on Belle Isle. It was a great childhood, yet I envied people who owned cottages and boats. It did not matter that I could not swim. Each summer I desired a vacation near a lake with a boat in the dock. Boats in the water or being towed on the road equal summer.
Gull Lake, Michigan, Circa 1930
This first image comes from the Charles R. Childs Collection of photograph prints and negatives dating 1922-1951. (Childs was a photographer from Illinois who specialized in tourist shots.) Taken at Gull Lake, this photograph (c. 1930) centers on Chris-Craft boats filling up at Dixie Gas and Oil. Builders of the standard “runabout,” the company marketed to the middle class by introducing payment plans in the mid-1920s. Boats were no longer just for the wealthy.
Most likely, the Michigan Tourist Council used the second image (above) for a tourist campaign, c.1950. While not identified, the content is pretty universal to all those who live in the Great Lakes State. It exhorts all lake lovers to, “gather the family, hitch up the boat and take to the road, it’s summer.” If you take to the road in a reliable vehicle like the Willys Jeepster, life is good. At the end of World War II, the Willys-Overland Motors, Inc. targeted the civilian market of returning servicemen. The company realized that the soldiers’ reliance on the dependable Jeep would transfer to the homefront. Zeroing in on the car, we must appreciate yet another evocation of a Michigan summer, the convertible automobile and the women who wear scarves so as not to be too wind-blown.
Yamasaki remains an important part of our international architectural heritage. This is part one of a two part blog on Yamasaki and his life as written by guest blogger Dale Allen Gyure, Ph.D.
