From the Farm
Columnist Philip Potempa and his family will celebrate his dad’s 91st birthday Sunday.
My original “From the Farm” cookbook published in 2004 includes a recipe for creamed spinach and a mention that Popeye the Sailor and my own father Chester share the same 1929 birthday year.
Dad, who celebrates his 91st birthday today — Sunday, July 12, grew up reading about Popeye’s adventures in the Sunday paper’s comics pages. Other famous faces such as Buck Rogers and Tarzan also debuted in the Sunday “Funnies” pages that same year in 1929.
The year 1929, which included the March inauguration of President Herbert Hoover, was an event packed year, much of it reported via the radio airwaves, after New York newspaper gossip columnist Walter Winchell debuted his nationally broadcast radio show this same year. Ruling king of organized crime Al Capone orchestrated the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre in Chicago, and by October, the stock market plummeted, signaling the start of the Great Depression. On a lighter note, in November 1929, toymaker Edwin Lowe invented and popularized today’s Americanized version of the game BINGO.
For 2020, we are celebrating my dad’s birthday with an intimate family dinner gathering at the family farm, where social distancing is easy to accomplish.
During most of my youth, our family celebrated many of Dad’s birthdays during our annual summer fishing vacation in Northern Minnesota at Richardson’s ShangriLa Resort, a tradition our family began shortly after 1960. In 1949, Ralph and Jan Richardson from our small town of San Pierre began building their dream of a quiet Minnesota fishing resort on the shores of Pelican Lake.
Today, this classic Northwoods retreat of nine quaint and rustic cabins in tiny Orr, Minnesota, not far from the border of Canada, is owned and operated by third generation of the Richardson family. It’s the Richardson children — the same kids I grew up spending summers on Pelican Lake, as did my older siblings — who maintain and operate this beautiful secluded destination which places an emphasis on family,
friends and fishing. A website at www.rs-l.com allows a virtual tour of the recently renovated cabins and landscape of birch trees and white pines.
Located in the heart of Kabetogama State Forest and sharing the same topography as nearby Voyageurs National Park and the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, Shangri-La resort has a private bay with 180 acres of wilderness within feet of the water’s lakefront and over a mile of shoreline. With only a small electric radio and no TV, but stocked-up with plenty of books, magazines and comics, our family played cards at night and fished all day passing the time. The anticipation of dad’s birthday was always a highlight, especially since Mom would bake and decorate a homemade birthday cake.
The name “Shangri-La” is a term that means “paradise.” All eight of the cabins boasted their own names, some with monikers taken from Native American terms. The first cabin built was named in homage of the resort’s founder, therefore simply dubbed “Ralph’s Cabin.” Cabin No. 2, which is located close to the water, is aptly named “Lakeside.” “Ishnala,” “Micha” and “Boo Shoo” are the next three cabins before the boat dock, fish house, sauna house and pier. “Bayview,” “Bay Haven” and “Waukigen” and the final three cabins at the edge of the woods. There is also the Richardsons’ family cabin, which is now also rented by the week and simply referred to as the “Main Cabin.”
Throughout the decades, our vacation weeks were often shared with many of our friends and neighbors from our same town, who also booked the same weeks living in the same few cabins.
Our longtime family friend Beverly Paulsen Santicola best describes the shared memory: “The Richardsons were also our town’s principal and first grade teacher, and so everyone in town knew them. As crazy as it must sound, we drove from our rural small town in Indiana more than 14 hours to book our family fishing vacations in another small rural town near the Canadian border near International Falls, just to spend a week with the same people from our own small town, just to see who could catch the biggest fish and bring home the most frozen fish, like northerns, bluegill, perch, catfish and crappies!”
In addition to the Paulsen family, the Eckert family from our town were also familiar faces at ShangriLa. The late Ken Eckert and his wife, Anne, loved the simple beer-based batter used to coat the delicate fish fillets, perfectly fried in the deep cast-iron skillets that were included in the kitchens of the resort cabins. I’m pleased they shared it with me to showcase with others.