From the headlines of The Bay City Times

Thinking fudge? Think Tawas
EAST TAWAS – A hot summer day. A chunk of creamy chocolate fudge. The Tawas Bay Fudge Co. is bringing them together without that long trip north to Mackinac Island.
Using a big copper pot and some cool marble tables, Darrell Lomas and Lynn Phillips are cooking up their own brand of fudge to sell in Northeast Michigan.
Lomas, a former advertising executive, teamed up with Phillips, a one-time psychology teacher at Saginaw Valley State University, in 2001 to form the Tawas Bay Fudge Co.
The pair began with a few fudge recipes supplied by friends and taught themselves the technique of cooking batches of the sugary mixture just right, then forming it into bars on a marble table.
The two spend most Thursdays, and an occasional Friday making nine kinds of fudge at their business inside the Newman Court Mall, at 211 Newman St., in East Tawas. People drawn to the smell are welcome to watch the two as they work with their shaping paddles.
The business is using the Tawas Point Lighthouse as its symbol so people will associate fudge with Tawas Bay instead of just Mackinac Island, where fudge has long been sold to summer tourists.

Landlords now can stamp out smoking
WEST BRANCH – With smoking bans advancing in the marketplace and workplace, smokers say home is their last bastion of smoking freedom.
Perhaps not.
For the 2.2 million Michigan residents who rent, a new initiative is empowering landlords statewide to ban smoking from their domiciles. In Ogemaw County, Northeast Michigan’s first county to pursue the campaign, a growing number of landlords are joining the smoke-free ranks.
This summer, Ogemaw health educators planned to run radio ads region-wide to promote smoke-free apartment living.
“A surprising number of landlords and tenants think it’s illegal to insist on smoke-free living – that it’s discrimination,” said Donna Norkoli, the West Branch health educator coordinating Ogemaw’s smoke-free living campaign.
It’s not discriminatory, Norkoli adds. Smokers aren’t a protected class.
Norkoli hopes to expand Ogemaw’s campaign next year to Iosco, Alcona and Oscoda counties, depending on state tobacco funding, she said. For now, Ogemaw’s initiative is part of a statewide campaign launched this year by the Smoke-Free Environments Law Project, based in Ann Arbor

National forest fees to be felled
Here’s something you can’t argue with: The Huron-Manistee National Forest is eliminating some of its recreation fees.
It has something to do with the Recreation Enhancement Act, a federal law signed by President Bush in 2004.
The bottom line is, fees won’t be charged this year at a number of sites on the Huron side, in Northeast Michigan.
Those include, in Oscoda County, the Bear Island, Buttercup, Meadow Springs and River Dune camping areas. Folks can camp there without a recreation pass, which costs $3 a day, $5 a week or $25 annually.
The sites don’t meet “amenity requirements” under the act, because they don’t have things like permanent toilets and trash cans, a Forest Service spokesman says.
For more info, see www.fs.fed.us/recreation/
programs/recfee/index.shtml.

Funds sought to help refurbish Grayling Fish Hatchery
GRAYLING – Organizers of a project to return the native grayling to Michigan are fishing for more money.
In about a year, the Grayling Fish Hatchery Steering Committee had raised about $125,000 in pledges toward a $1.2 million project to renovate an old hatchery building on the Au Sable River in Grayling into a museum and educational center, organizers say.
Grayling fish have been extinct in their home state since the 1930s, but can still be found in Canada and the western United States. The plan is to acquire eggs from a hatchery or the wild, and raise and display grayling in the building, which has been shuttered for about 15 years.
The county owns the hatchery building, and a government agency called the Grayling Recreation Authority manages a park there. The park includes a pay-by-the-inch trout pond and a free bass fishing pond, and raceways where trout fingerlings are raised and fed by visitors.
The park, on North Down River Road off the Interstate 75 business loop, operates from Memorial Day through Labor Day. Admission is $1.50 for adults and $1 for children, said Leigh McDougall, the authority’s assistant director.
For more information on the project, or to donate, call (989) 348-9005.

Long-time vacationer opens own campground
TAWAS CITY – Twenty years of vacationing in the Tawas area convinced Chae-Wha Jung that Iosco County would be a great place to retire.
So the 70-year-old native of South Korea decided to live out his retirement dream by building an RV campground on an old hunting camp in central Iosco County.
Jung’s East Branch River RV Park opened for business this month on highway M-55, about 10 miles west of Tawas City. The 58-acre campground is carved into a mature forest of trees and borders 800 feet of the East Branch of the Au Gres River.
The campground features a large bath house and restroom facility, as well as a laundry room.
The RV park has been a two-year labor of love for Jung, who moved to the United States in 1977 and who previously owned a bedding and linen factory in Troy.
Camping at the RV park starts at $20 a day for primitive sites and $26 a day for those with utility hookups. Monthly and seasonal rates are also available. The park will be open year-round.
For more information about the East Branch River RV Park, call
(989) 362-8000.

To the Editor:

We want you to know how much we appreciate our subscription to True North Magazine. The articles are wonderful and the photography is outstanding. We have already shown it to many of our friends. We look forward to the next issue.

Roy and Ruth Elie
Alger

Send your Letters to Keith Gave
Editor

True North Magazine
311 Fifth St.
Bay City, MI 48708-5853
kgave@bc-times.com

Sidebar
Like a lot of folks cruising through Northeast Michigan, George and Theresa Sutherland figured the UAW’s Black Lake Golf Club was for union members only.
But just for the heck of it, the Detroit-area couple, who own a cabin between Rogers City and Cheboygan, decided to take a chance and stop in one recent summer weekday.
“I thought since I’m a teacher and belong to the Michigan Education Association, that maybe they’d let us play,” Theresa Sutherland said.
To their delight, the Sutherlands learned that anyone can play the course.
She hit off the green tees, he from the white, and 18 holes later, they were raving about the serenity and scenery.
“That’s the biggest misconception out there,” Pam Phipps, Black Lake’s director of golf, said of the assumption that the course is for union members only. “We’re open to everyone.”
About 40 percent of golfers at Black Lake are UAW members – who do have privileges, Phipps said. Members get a 20 percent discount, and retirees get 30 percent off.
The UAW owns the 5-year-old golf club as well as the larger resort the course sits upon: The Walter and May Reuther Family Education Center, which opened in 1970.
The recreational education center was the dream of Walter Reuther, the renowned union organizer and civil rights leader. Reuther, son of German immigrants, was instrumental in unionizing the workers at Ford Motor Co. He became president of the UAW in 1946.
Reuther believed strongly in worker education, and work began on a UAW education center near Black Lake in the late 1960s. The Reuthers died in a plane crash on the way to the center in 1970, and Walter Reuther’s colleagues paid them tribute by naming the facility in their honor.
The lodge is now a full-service resort and conference center featuring the Old Lodge (where Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball are said to have honeymooned), as well as more modern, hotel-style accommodations, family suites and condos. Guests play basketball in a gymnasium with arched wood ceilings, shoot pool or play pingpong at the recreation center; take a dip in the Olympic-sized pool; or play tennis or bocce ball. The modern golf clubhouse, with redwood, cedar and Wisconsin stone interior and windows overlooking the course, features a restaurant, bar and pro shop.
Phipps, who’s in charge of making all the purchases for the golf course, adheres to resort policy of buying products made in the USA if possible.
“My supplier list gets slimmer and slimmer every year,” Phipps lamented. Take golf gloves, for example. “Nobody in the United States makes them anymore,” she said. “I have to get them from Indochina.”
As for the Sutherlands, they were glad they finally experienced the Black Lake Golf Club, especially when they learned that on Tuesdays, the greens fee is just $50.
“It was very fair and challenging,” Theresa said. “Even if you’re golfing bad, the scenery puts you in a serene mood.”
George agreed.
“All skill levels can play here,” he said. “It’s just a great course.”