When we got to the old water tower at Edgewater, we had hiked all the way to Miller, as far as I was concerned. That seemed quite a big deal. Our names were written in the sand. Then we turned around and walked back. I have not found anyone else who specifically remembers that water tower, even amongst Edgewaterites. It was on what the NPS now calls Smoking Dune. The concrete footings were still there until the '70s. It appeared as an unspecified structure on old USGS topo maps.^*

My friends and I hung around the tennis courts woods, as we called them. Juniper Grove, as it was named 70 years ago, hasn't changed all that much. The paths have migrated a bit, the bushes for forts have come and gone. In my day the undergrowth was kept in check by little periodic natural fires throughout town rather than landscaping though. Eventually we discovered the fun of exploring the dunes east of town.

I only remember seeing the row of cottages between Ogden Dunes and Burns Ditch once. I walked along the beach to the (since removed) pilings at the mouth after the shacks had already been abandoned. Our days of really haunting that area were a bit later, after Midwest Steel had torn them all down. I wish I had memories of the tract just west of Burns Ditch in its natural state but, by the time we made it that far east in our wanderings, the valleys were already being used to settle out Midwest's mill wastes in what we called scum-ponds.

In high school and college my friends would want to simply light driftwood on the beach and maybe roast a hotdog but I would occasionally convince them that having a cook-out up in the dunes would be fun for a change. I never heard that area called Rupert's Subdivision (or anything else) until I was an adult. Mr. Gent used the term during a walk that George Svihla led over there. Nor did I ever hear the valley stretching east from Aspen Road and on into Portage called "Horsethieves Hollow" as a kid. We weren't hip to the old names.

Jack Ahrens led a bunch of us cub scouts on a couple hikes through what is now the national park's west beach. He presumably was working on a boy scout badge. We investigated the pumphouse at the beach, old junk cars and a truck, and remains of the old sand-mining spurs. We ate sandwiches around a bonfire. It was the first time my mom made me two sandwiches for lunch. One of the kids said he knew somebody who lived in the Fulton Road resubdivision of Fairview (the south end of Edgewater to you) in what is now one of the last two homes there so we drank out of their hose. I do not miss the flavoring that rubber adds to water. Plastic hoses are a definite improvement.

Although I hung out in the east dunes more, my favorite place in the dunes was to the west. There was a little bowl, scoured by the winds, at the top of the cliff which used to exist north of what is now the national park's boundary. It was just deep enough that you could hide from anyone below, who wouldn't even imagine that there could be someone up there. (You don't usually expect a depression at the top of a hill.) It was obliterated when Chrismar Road was cut through the dune.

On a visit to the old hardware store on Shelby Street in Miller Beach with my dad, I noticed that they sold Matchbox cars. Richard Gent and I thought it would be a nice diversion to walk over there. We headed out from Cedar Court and followed more-or-less the route I took as a pre-schooler through the dunes. As we were walking along Indiana Avenue in Edgewater, a friend of mine from Crisman School was surprised to see me and to hear that we were walking from Ogden Dunes to Miller. I was surprised to see Ray Tecsi. I had never given any thought to where the kids at school lived. Nor did I imagine that I might meet someone I knew on our walk.

After our hike over, Richard and I refreshed ourselves with soda-pops. Pop did come in cans by then (15¢ or sometimes 20¢) but this hardware store still had an old bottle machine. Pop bottles in those days ranged from 7 to 16 ounces. That's the only pop machine that I knew of stocked with the large sixteen-ouncers. What's more, the machine was still priced at only 10¢, the best deal anywhere!

That guy was pretty nice. I used to buy Matchbox cars in the boxes. They were also available in blister packs (That's the first time I ever heard that term.) but those cost more because of the additional layer of packaging. One time the model I wanted was only there in a blister pack. The owner popped it open and gave it to me for the lower price.

Richard wanted to bike over on our last trip or two. I think I was in junior high by then. We rode along the New York Central's service road to County Line and then north. We met Craig Forwalter on the way, and he joined us. As an adult, I've occasionally walked over to Lake Street in downtown Miller. I generally take the sandtracks (now the Marquette Trail for part of the way) west and the beach back home. It has changed plenty but is still a very pleasant hike.

[This is slightly different from the version appearing in the March, 1999, Hour Glass (vol. 7, #3) mainly due to my mom correcting a couple assumptions of mine and web-pages not having to fit material into 8½ X 11 inch chunks.]

^*Several years ago the remains of an old water tower, which had served the sand mining operation, was uncovered (by wind erosion) up the face of the blowout east of the national park's bathhouse. It had been buried (also by the wind) for years. Could that have been the water tower I saw as a little kid (without a good sense of where I was)? I later simply assumed that the concrete pylons on Smoking Dune and the structure on the map had been the water tower. Was the old sandmining water tower clearly visible in the mid-'50s, then completely buried for years, and then uncovered again? The wind does sometimes change that area rapidly. The sand-mining water tower has been removed, by the way.

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Posted 15th March, 1999. Last updated and reposted 21st February, 2003.