Demolition of Lighthouse Inn marks end of era
Fifty years after his father told him to take a ride out to Lighthouse Cove and check out his new place of employment — the Lighthouse Inn — owner Jim Cooke reflected on its history as the building ’s demolition began. “There’s a lot of stories in that old building,” Cooke said. “We had generations of families working there and generations of families coming there celebrating milestones: birthdays, confirmations, graduations, anniversaries, weddings, baptism. We might have the same kid’s graduation party and then later their wedding party.” Cooke also remembers all of the teens his family employed. “I thought for years that the Lighthouse Inn was a perfect example of what small business can do for a community,” he said. “Basically, except for the few adults who worked there, nobody ever saved a dime of the money they made there. It bought used cars, it paid tuition, it bought textbooks. When the kids were buying records, it bought records. It was all re-invested.” Built by Armand and Vera Jacobs in 1946 as a place for duck hunters and fishermen to stay, Lighthouse Cove opened in 1947 with 16 rooms upstairs, 42 seats in the dining room and 47 seats in a small lounge. “It was off the beaten path, out in the middle of nowhere,” Cooke said. “I can’t tell you the number of times we picked up the phone to answer the question: ‘How do you get there?’ ”
Cooke said he really wanted to say thanks to clients for their support over the 50 years his family ran the operation and to all the people who worked for them.
“I was so impressed. One of the kids who worked for me put it on Facebook, and so many of her friends were commenting on working there,” he said.
“There were so many stories.” He recalled the fact that Tilbury barber Jerry Olstorn had 10 children, and during one summer, seven were working at the restaurant. “Mrs. Olstorn, right around Labour Day weekend, came out and thanked my mother so much. She said, ‘Mrs. Cooke, my grocery bill dropped $100 a week.’ When you think back to the ’70s, that was a lot of grocery money.”
Then there were the Archibalds. Four generations of that family worked for the Cookes, with one member of the family or another working at the Lighthouse Inn almost the entire time the Cookes owned it.
The Lighthouse Inn changed hands several times and was eventually purchased by a man from Jeannette’s Creek named Ernie Duquette. He operated it for about four years. The Cookes bought it in the summer of 1968.
The Lighthouse Inn under- went numerous changes over the 50 years the Cookes owned it. The upstairs rooms were removed in the ’80s.
“Nobody wanted to rent any more,” Cooke said. “Each room had a basin to brush your teeth and wash your face, but there was a central washroom, showers and tub. By the 1970s, nobody wanted to walk down the hall in the middle of the night to go and use the bathroom. “If you look at the size of the place, it evolved over the years,” he continued. “We put a couple of additions on there, and the outdoor patio. Back in those days, around 1974, in summer evenings we’d have 80 or 90 people inside for perch dinners, and the door would be opening and closing so you’d get flies and by 8:30 mosquitoes in the dining room bothering everybody. It didn’t work.
“So my dad screened what would eventually become the pub. He put a simple roof over it — it still had patio stones as a floor — and screened it in, just to try and keep the flies and mosquitoes to a minimum.” Though he can’t remember the year it happened, eventually Cooke’s father suggested they try to stay open for the winter. “Back in the ’70s there were days when I would go outside and there would not be a single car in the parking lot, but the dining room was almost full inside,” he said. “We might have 100 guests in there, and even the people working there, who came by snowmobile. It was amazing.”
But exactly when winter would come to the region was always guesswork.
“You can’t count on when you’re going to have winter,” Cooke said. “You’d get winter for six weeks. You just didn’t know what six weeks they were going to be. You might be having a great winter and then you’d get three or four days of rain — just enough to screw up the ice. Cooke said the restaurant’s glory days were from the late 1980s through 2001, when the Sept. 11 attack on New York City changed the way people travelled back and forth across the Ontario-Michigan border, even on the water. “Certainly all through the ’90s, the U.S. boaters, coming to the two big marinas out there, that was for us at the Lighthouse Inn on Friday nights and Saturday nights, a complete extra turnover of customers. The guys running the marinas were great promoters. They were packing those places so the boaters would come walking down for something to do.
“We were full from Memorial Day weekend to Labour Day, as long as the weather was nice we were full.
“There were 14 or 15 weeks where we absolutely couldn’t have been any busier.”
After being closed for the winter of 2015-16, Cooke decided not to reopen in the summer of 2016. “I still talk to my mom and dad about it mentally. We were there a long time, so your heart and soul’s in it. It’s not just a job,” he said. “Anybody who runs a small business, I think, especially if they do it over a long period of time, it’s not simply just a job, it’s their life.”