Baileys Harbor with Doug's family in the summers

In the late sixties and early seventies when Doug's folks had a very nice 3 bedroom cottage in Bailey's Harbor Wisconsin and Doug's mom ran an art store called the Red Geranium there, Doug used to spend a lot of the summer up there. I used to ride up on Thursday sometimes with Doug's Dad and we would stay the weekend.

The drive was rather long from Chicago so Mr. Armato used to play opera 8-track tapes so we could enjoy the music. He would give me a brief introduction to each opera, since I didn't know any Italian except for a few curses, and then we would enjoy the tapes. We would stop to eat somewhere along the way and the food was usually quite good because Mr. Armato knew the fast but good places to eat. I was appreciated as a passenger because I didn't drink very much so I rarely slowed things up by requiring a bathroom break.

Sometimes during heavy rain storms, rather than pull off the road, Mr. Armato would open the driver side door and drive by looking down at the divider line on the highway, to keep the car
headed in the right direction. He apparently learned of this technique from truckers who did this. Fortunately, no one was ever injured and it did save time to some small extent.

Fridays in Baileys Harbor meant eating at a local bar where they prepared fresh lake perch that was breaded and oven baked. This was served with rye bread, Cole slaw, french fries and for Doug and me sodas. To this day I have never eaten a better fish dinner than we had there.
Douglas's Uncle Al and his family would occasionally join us as did his brothers Keith and Phillip when they were in town. Phillip had his own place up there. Douglas's Uncle Lenny also showed up a couple of times, though he had ex-wife problems and was considered a sort of black sheep of the family. For a kid eating with a large group of mostly adults, I had never had more fun then dinner at Vi's.

Doug's folks had a motor boat that we could take out on the lake. By the time we got to high school his Dad upgraded and got a really nice fibreglass boat. We would take the boat out on Kangeroo Lake and even though it was a small lake we could easily spend an hour or two on the lake enjoying the cool breezes and some what reduced insect population. Occasionally we would fish. I was given the opportunity to learn how to clean fish, which mostly meant fighting off flies that would come in droves during the cleaning process. Doug's brother Keith enjoyed pan frying the fish though we usually had to supplement the catch.

Sometimes, to give us something to do, Doug's parents would take two cars to the local drive in movie in Sister Bay and leave us in one car to watch the movies even though we weren't old enough to drive. This was very popular with us. Doug even drove the car out to the side of the road one time, as he was learning to drive, while we waited for his folks to come and get us. We used to critique the movies in the car and spy on local teenagers who were making out. There were snacks available at a snack shack and a good time was had by all.

There was also a small movie theater in a converted metal building that looked like a airplane hangar in Bailey's Harbor. They showed mostly more arty films there and Douglas and I enjoyed going there. I recall watching several films there including the twelve chairs.

Another activity was to go to a local animal refuge/zoo/torture chamber. Here you could put 10 cents into a coin slot and a chicken would pound on a small fake piano to get some feed. You could also fish in a pond the size of small swimming pool and catch fish that you had to pay for whether you wanted to keep them or not. Best of all there were a few bears in cages that you could feed a soda like substance to. Two of the bears were cubs who we nicknamed the Slanick twins after Eddie Slanick who was a Wildwood student who was older than us, who a thick mane of unkempt dark hair and who was a major grump and quite mischievous. Rather tragically some years later, Eddie's car broke down out in the Chicago suburbs in a snowstorm. He wasn't too far from home and he was walking home. A driver didn't see him in the snow storm and his car struck and killed Eddie. Eddie left left behind a wife and children.

Another fun activity was playing a game Douglas and I invented in the yard that his parents had. We strung up a badminton net at about 6' and used shuttle cocks and aluminum tennis rackets. The object of the game was to keep the shuttle cock from touching the ground and to return it to your teammate on the other side of the net who then was to do the same. Instead of competing we trying to find a why to turn it into a team sport with no one to compete against. Credit was given for great running saves and steady play. When we needed to rest there was a hammock adjacent to the court. The only problem was we could hit that shuttle cock quite hard and we had a tendency to go through shuttle cocks at a rather rapid rate. It was great exercise.

In doors we played a naval game using WW-II ships whose facts we typed up on 3"x5" slips of paper including a weapons list, armor information, speed and range information etc... plus phony Captain and First Officer names (so we had someone to blame or give credit to). The ship information we got from volumes of Jane's Naval Ship guides that Douglas had collected.
Douglas came up with idea for this from some War games he had. We liked the less restrictive rules we came up with and the ability to select whatever ships we felt like using. We ended up with over 1,200 allied and axis ships though most of the time was spent creating the navy rather than actually having battles. The battles were a lot of fun until people got annoyed with us and told us to pick up all those little pieces of paper. To create the navy we spent many nights typing well into the night and listening to Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass records.

Another favorite was a fantasy baseball league that Douglas started again based on a major league baseball dice game that he had. We created our own factitious rosters with players and managers (again so we had someone to blame or give credit to) and teams. We played numerous games. The only change to the rules was that walks were treated as singles as we liked high batting averages and this way we had a few players batting in the low 0.400's.

Douglas also had a Bebe gun and we'd shoot that off in the yard once in a while, aiming at miscellaneous targets and chipmunks and squirrels. Happily we managed not to shoot each other or anyone else though I did injure a chipmunk, possibly fatally as he a tear in his fur. The guilt has weighed upon me to this day and I have never shot anything since.