Detroit, situated on the Great Lakes and close by hundreds of small lakes, appealed to every Detroiter who loved the water: swimmers, fishermen, duck hunters, speed boat cranks, regular sailors, ice skaters and ice boat sailors and those who liked to fish through a hole in the ice. There's no place in the world that has as many interesting water trips in boats that have wonderful sleeping quarters, wonderful meals and find congenial fellow travelers. Boat travel is very calming, very few warning signs, no railroad crossings, no drunken drivers to watch and I never knew of a reckless sea captain.

During this period this traveling was cheap but in later years with its union rules and regulations it became a little more expensive. With the advent of autos, people quit traveling in comfort and took to the road and got ulcers.

Once upon a time we could catch a boat at West Grand Boulevard or at Woodward Avenue or Joseph Campau dock and ride to Belle Isle, or stay on the boat all day, for five cents and it's hard to believe as there isn't anything you can get for a nickel today.

You could go abroad to Canada or ride that boat all day for a nickel. On a hot night it was a very cool interesting ride with the freighters and pleasure boats coming down the river, the car ferries carrying their load of railroad cars across the river, the tugs bellowing smoke pushing large barges of lumber and freight and there were real sea gulls to decorate the picture.

You could boat up to the Flats and listen to Joe Bedore, or eat one of his wonderful fish dinners or hear the old gag about Joe having his hotel painted any color as long as it was red. You could get to Tashmoo with its dance floor, bowling alley, restaurant, roller skating rink and ball field - in fact everything to help you enjoy yourself with the cool breezes coming down the lake and making life worth living.

The auto is here to stay but I wish people would try the water for its restful soothing quality.

One thing I hate to see and there's no way to stop it is the idea of speed and more speed in boats - making for a lot of danger, maybe exciting, but I think it was better the old way.

The Bois Blanc trip was a wonderful trip for the family. The moonlight and starlight trips were wonderful with dancing on week days and a concert on Sunday and many happy marriages were a result of these peaceful boat trips.

You could travel by water to Chicago, Duluth and stop at the Indian villages in Georgian Bay with their find meals, good sleeping quarters and a hostess to see that everybody had a good time.

In fall it was quite a sight to see the hunters and their dogs and their game come back from the hunting grounds of Canada on the Huronic, a very sea worthy vessel, as Georgian Bay could raise some pretty rough seas, when the storms hit in late in the fall.

On all boat trips you could find the fair sex and they never looked lovelier that when walking the deck or standing in the bow with the wind doing tricks with their dresses - this was before shorts were worn so the wind was a great help. Formality was forgotten and I would rather sit with my arms around a girl in some secluded place on a boat, with the cool breezes blowing, than in the back seat of a Chevrolet.

I bought a share of stock in the Old Yacht Club for sixty-five dollars which made you a member with all its privileges. Your dues were twenty-five dollars a year and at this time it was a sailor's club with a lot of cat boat sailing. You could act as a crew member on many of the larger sailing boats in the races but you had to know your sailing and obey orders.

When they built the new club house your stock was exchanged for a membership. The dues kept jumping up and it became a social club but still kept its sailing atmosphere. This was a sailor's club with real sailors to teach you sailing and as a graduation course you could become one of the crew on a larger ship with plenty of adventure and hard work. You would soon learn that water is very unreliable with winds, rains and calm weather making it a constantly changing and challenging sport. I loved it and lots of old Detroiters loved the river and lakes for the thrills that it gave them - sailing is a participating sport which I consider a good thing in sports.

There are less real sailors now and in their place we have speed boats with motors of 8 to 75 horse power. That takes a lot of fun out of sailing both for the guy who runs the speed boat to the other guy who just loves to sail a boat with good sailing knowledge, their own skill and they don't have to depend on a noisy motor. I admit things do change but anybody has to admit it's not always for the best.

My father was an athletic member of a boat club at the foot of Joseph Campau. We still have a beautiful medal, with crossed oars and a diamond, to prove he helped row in at least one winning race. I remember only one name of the crew besides my father and that was a Mr. Lang but I still have the photo of the four winning members.

Moonlight boat trips, with music for dancing, left Detroit three or four times a week. We had lake rides on Sunday with real music on Sundays but no dancing. I think it was Henry Ewald who named these trips, "Starlight Trips" when the moon showed its dark side. That name always fascinated me as that was a good night to take your favorite gal on a trip as the stars throw very little light.

The streams through Belle Isle, and the river around it, were a wonderful place for canoeing or rowing. You could rent a boat on Belle Isle at a very reasonable price. Girls loved this and it made a pleasant sight to see a beautiful girl resting in a nest of colorful pillows and a healthy, sweating boy paddling along keeping out of the way of other canoes and enjoying the view in front of him. The girl was perfectly safe in a canoe especially if they stayed in the canals, and stayed in the canoe, as canoeing required two hands to do a good job.

Some of the boys built their own canoes from plans bought from a firm named Brooks, but due to poor workmanship or maybe poor lumber they were not very dependable crafts. Some of them learned or were sway backed while others wouldn't go deep enough in the water and others rode too deep. Lots of men built sail boats and find ones at that. There are lots of men today building their own sail boats and even yachts with a motor as auxiliary power.

The concerts at Belle Isle, on a band stand built over a canal, with people resting around the shores and the canal filled with colorful canoes, good looking girls and the usual type of boys was a very restful sight on a hot summer night. They usually played good music and I can still see the cornet player sneaking away into the woods to play the echo part of the Hunter's song. I'll admit this was before the "Purple People Eater" but we never missed it and the age of off beat music didn't arrive until later.

Most of the singers were gifted with strong voices and a whispering tenor was of little use. I remember one singer breaking some record by being heard a longer distance than the rest. I don't know whether he got a medal but he has steady employment.

Around 1912, Put-In-Bay was quite a place to spend a vacation. The Sailing Club held their regattas there and boy, that was some affair. It was a great place with plenty of hotels, good places for yacht races and a wonderful dance floor and they said their bar was the longest in the world. There were plenty of small bars and bottled beer was five cents.

This is great grape country and their wines were good and very cheap. They shipped grape juice all over the country and during prohibition days it was a great help. It was a simple matter to turn it into real wine (dry or sweet) and all you had to do is add some melted sugar, plug it up, run hose from it into a glass of water to keep the flies out and leave it work - eventually you had a good grade of wine. Red grapes made red wine, while green grapes made a white wine, that's how simple it was.

I had good luck with it, with one exception, and that seems funny now. It worried my wife as she had a hired man from the Goodwill Society remove some ashes from the basement, a job I always fell behind on, and after an hour she called and said the man had finished the job and acted very queer, refusing to accept any money and had left our home in a wobbly sort of fashion. It didn't take me long to fathom that one - with twenty gallons of wine in by basement. She wanted to turn the kegs over and leave my good wine run down the drain to which I objected, told her to remain calm and report any further news. In about fifteen minutes she called back and told me the man had walked half a block, must have gotten sleepy, took off his overcoat and buttoned it around a tree and went to sleep. Some good Samaritans called the police who took him away and she asked what she should do. She did what I told her and that was the last I heard of it - everything turned out all right and I only lost about a quart of wine which left me on the right side of the ledger.

I spent quite a few vacations on Put-In-Bay. A bunch of fellows and gals went down there around the same time each year and stayed at the Smith Hotel. The hotel was a two building affair - one for married folks and kids and another tin-roofed building which looked like an army barracks for the single folks and it was a place where noise didn't count. During a rain, sleep was impossible as that tin roof played a Nature's Symphony as long as the rain lasted.

I often acted as night clerk to help Mr. Smith out. I remember his few rules - the main one was all extra guests, no matter how they got in or who invited them, paid a dollar at the desk and put somebody's name on the register.

There were quite a few islands with hotels and others were used as camping grounds for conventions and union get-togethers. One I never will forget was the Saloonkeepers' Association camp with free drinks, food and lots of fun. Boy, could they show you a good time, lots of entertainers and their won music with as little sleep as you could stand.

Another affair was a private affair on one of the islands. About fifty good friends, lots of drinks and eats. Two girls happened to like the same guy and one girl hit the other over the head with a shupper (which is a very heavy beer glass) and that started a general fight. I never say so many bouncing shuppers in all my life. The sad part was that the boat captain that took us over refused to take more than three people back in one trip. When he took more, there was another fight. The last returnee from that party got home about ten the next morning.

One thing you had to be careful about was the law as these islands belonged to Canada. They have an idea that laws should be obeyed and that was hard for us Yankees to understand. There was a monument they had built to honor somebody and it was made up of fifty heavy old cannon balls piled up. It was great fun to take the monument down and roll the cannon balls all over the grounds. It usually ended in the same way with the police locating the guilty ones and making them rebuild the monument and that was heavy work. The police got tired of that game and soldered the whole thing together and destroyed one of the pleasant affairs of this island. There were lots of wine cellars or caverns on the island and they were nice cool places. On the other side of the island was a deserted hotel, about the size of the hotel on Mackinaw and must have looked like it too, but it never was a success and the remains burned down.

Across the river, on the American Side, was Cedar Point a summer resort with a lot of Coney Island in it.

Bois Blanc, a short trip, was a nice trip for a good many years. A great place for society picnics, school groups, Sunday school events and also a great place for family picnics as it had every thing: a bathing beach, dance floor, roller skating rink, ball grounds, tennis courts, bowling alleys besides all the features of an electric park with its fortune tellers and all kinds of crazy rides. There was a fine restaurant but most everybody carried their lunch with them. It's a pleasant trip of about one hour, with three trips a day in season, with dancing on the first and last trip of the day.

One trip we took often was down to Buffalo and on to the Niagara Falls, the best known falls in the world and the Mecca for all honeymooners. I would like to have seen the falls when Chief Pontiac took his bride there, on their honeymoon, when it was still in its natural state.

The trip down there was a night trip and with a good sleep behind you, left you in good condition to see all the sights and there are plenty. A ride on the Maid of the Mist up to the falls and the trolley ride around the river rapids, the walk under the falls with raincoat and hat, or the cable car over the falls and the view of the falls at night - lit up like a Christmas tree in hundreds of colors.

This is historical grounds and although it has been commercialized the parks and grounds around the falls are kept in fine condition it is still a spectacular sight. In winter it is just as beautiful but in a different way - with the ice piled up and the river frozen over but still spilling its water over the falls - with mist that turns into snow and makes it seem like a fairy land picture. I have walked out on the ice in January and got a great kick out of it. After reading about the bride and groom that floated down the river on a large cake of ice that broke off and now the police and life savers tried to save them but they disappeared into the gorge.

Men have walked over it on a tight rope, some went over the falls in barrels and rubber balls and some have tried to swim the rapids with quite a few failures. The only stunt I saw down there was a tramp that sat on the edge of the falls and washed his feet in the water going over. I always thought he just didn't know where he was and his feet hurt him.

One thing I remember about Buffalo - on a foggy night the fog horn that blows in the Buffalo harbor has the most gruesome sound I have ever heard. It sounds like some great sea monster blowing his nose right on top of the water at regular intervals, and is supposed to warn boats but raised hell with my sleep. I guess Buffaloes, or whatever you call people who live in Buffalo, are used to it or they take sleeping pills. I haven't tried to sleep in Buffalo in late years but I hope some inventive genius has done something about it - I hope!

The Welland Canal, even in those days, makes it possible to go any place in the world by water. There is a world of romance in the trips through the lakes, down the Mighty St. Lawrence river right out to the Atlantic coast.

Detroit, might be called dynamic, but I think it is just lucky being situated, as it is, on a stream of water that flows slowly but surly to all places in the world that are built close to the sea.

One wonderful trip was down to Quebec and across the lake and a short railroad trip to Lake George, down Lake George to Lake Champlain. This is beautiful country with the mountains on one side and beautiful rolling country on the other. Then a short railroad trip to Albany and the Hudson River for a day trip through rolling country; past West Point where we raise generals, through farm districts, manufacturing districts right down to New York with its wonderful bridges, ocean boats, Palisades, hundreds of tugs and ships with its continuous signaling between boats. This is a continuous changing picture and although I traveled many miles by auto in this country, I never had a trip that was so restful or as exciting as that one.

I have also traveled to New York from Quebec on an ocean liner, down the St. Lawrence and down the Atlantic in an English boat - breakfast in bed, tea at all hours, good liquor, wonderful service and wonderful fellow passengers. The ocean was as calm as a duck pond. Then I tried to sleep in New York with a thousand taxies running up and down the street, tooting their horns, and I think I would trade the whole city of New York for a good duck boat.

The Saguenay is another wonderful river all the way up to Tadoussac and Cape Trinidad through a country that is foreign in color and speech. There are good restaurants and quaint towns (wonderful places for an artist), some of the biggest ornate churches I ever saw, good fishing streams with real fish ready to grab your bait.

I got a kick out of St. Anne De Beaupre, a house of miracles with crutches and canes all over the place. Sick people coming and going some with bands playing both Holy and Jazz music, side shows of all kinds and small places of business that sell a lot of junk. I am sorry to say I received no religious feeling at this place. Religion, small businesses, fortune tellers and noise don't seem to mix and it's too bad that some people can smell profits in any religious atmosphere but I guess people are built that way. I never regretted seeing this place as it was a picture almost modern in its conflicting colors and noses with pagan angles running around the edges and sliding up through the picture.

Traveling on water has a lot of advantages. First you can get lots of sleep, you meet a lot of nice people in their best humor, you can walk and move around and get good exercise, you can play cards, get a drink when you want it, read, doze, play deck games, argue politics and it reminds me of that good old song, "Don't Fence Me In". It is a little slower but really there are very few things worth hurrying for and also nothing makes ulcers grow faster.

Without water - no fishing, no boating, son swimming, no skiing, no skin diving. It is one of natures cooling systems. It makes plants grow, keeps nature clean and often gives a city a badly needed bath. When it turns to ice, just think of the possibilities - in fact it is really one of nature's best products - and we thank the Lord for it.