by Sue Seeger Wiemer

When my aunt Suzanne Seeger Donnell was a student at the University of Toledo, she took an art class. One of her assignments was to paint what she did last summer. So, she painted a watercolor of her favorite things at Clark Lake from the viewpoint of the family cottage.

Aunt Susie loved to sail and was a good swimmer. She would walk down to the ruins of the burned down Gilbert cottage which was about at the end of F Lane. She must have danced at Pleasant View and the Ocean Beach Pier where they could dance out under the stars. She probably got sandwiches at the Burg at the Head-of-the-Lake and enjoyed sodas with friends at The Spot in Brooklyn. This was probably around 1940, give or take a couple of years.

The painting hung in the family cottage ever since.  Then when she inherited the cottage next door, she moved it to her cottage. This was mostly a rental except when her family came back to the lake from their home in California. When she could not travel back here, she sold her cottage to my sister and her husband, Andrea and Leo Dexter Steible. Aunt Susie asked them to ship the painting to her in California. Before they shipped it back, they made a few copies at Kinko’s. Andy has a full size copy in her cottage and I have a smaller one in my cottage. The original is in California at her daughter Kathy’s home. We all are glad that copies were made because we grew up with that painting in my grandparent’s cottage and we really liked it.

To read Sue Seeger Weimer’s Clark Lake Story, please click here

Sue is holding two replicas of the watercolor–a coffee mug and a placemat.  

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