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Category: Features

  • Winter Weekend

    Last Saturday dawned clear and cold in our neck of the woods. The temperature was a chilly -9 degrees when I left Clintonville at about 6 am, bound for a Friends of Plum and Pilot Islands (FOPPI) board meeting scheduled to begin five hours later on Washington Island.

  • Keeping Love Strong

    In 1944, Wayne and Dorothy Ault were celebrating their wedding in Oklahoma over glasses of punch from a hand-carved ice bowl. They’re still celebrating that day, but this time in Sister Bay with bowls of soup across a table filled with cards congratulating them on 70 years together.

  • Mother Nature Comes Through

    After the area labored through a string of gray and anemic winters with little snow, Baileys Harbor Community Association Marketing Coordinator Brynn Swanson felt put to the test last October when she had to submit copy about the town’s first Winter Carnivale for inclusion in the Door County Visitor Bureau’s glossy 2014 visitor guide.

  • Basketball As Usual

    While “away” games are standard procedure for all student athletes, away games for island students always begin with a boat ride – anything but standard for the majority of student athletes across the United States.

  • Volunteers Get Door County Trails Ready for Winter

    It wasn’t a good day for skiing, but that didn’t stop Fuzzy Sunstrom from firing up the trail groomer at Peninsula State Park. The trails were covered with a thin layer of crunchy snow, and dirt showed through where the trail was thick with hemlock trees.

  • Door County Visitor Bureau to install electric car charging stations

    2014 will be a year of sustainability for the Door County Visitor Bureau (DCVB), as the organization focuses on boosting tourism for the long term while protecting the environment.

  • A Garage Aviator

    Ken Boyd of Baileys Harbor says that for every guy who is successful in completing an airplane in his garage, there are 10 others whose garages hold dusty stacks of half-assembled wings, fuselages and canopies.

  • At Age 95, This Piano Man Can

    Les and Lucille Berns had been married almost 64 years when Lucille passed away on Feb. 11, 2011. Devastated and lonely, Les turned to his piano as a distraction, spending hours at the keyboard to help take his mind off his loss.

  • Turkey By the Numbers

    45 million Number of turkeys cooked and eaten in the U.S. at Thanksgiving. That’s one sixth of all turkeys sold in the U.S. each year. 88 Percent of American households that eat turkey on Thanksgiving.

  • Wild Turkeys: A Management Success Story

    Turkeys were first reported in the area now known as Wisconsin by Jesuit missionary Claude Jean Allouez when he was in the Lake Winnebago area in 1670.

  • Moonlighting in Door County

    Last summer, Juli Zakula wasn’t planning to work two long shifts at Kick Coffee the weekend of Steel Bridge Songfest, but she did. The annual music festival in Sturgeon Bay brought thousands of visitors to town, and the lines out the door kept growing.
    “They needed me,” she says, “and I was happy to do it.”
    Zakula, like many Door County residents, works several jobs and many hours during the busy tourist season because, as she says, “it’s necessary.”

  • Tofurky, the Thanksgiving Peacemaker

    Thanksgiving was always an awkward time for Seth Tibbott, who became a vegetarian due to ethical/environmental concerns in 1972.

    “Thanksgiving is the food holiday and everybody wants to sit down and share,” Tibbott said.

  • Talking Turkey

    How roasted turkey came to be the centerpiece of the Thanksgiving Day meal is lost to history, but it probably was not on the menu of the first Thanksgiving in 1621.

  • Len Villano

    A Day in the Life of a Snowstorm From the Seat of the Plow

    When the snow falls and most of us hunker down, the county’s snowplow drivers hit the road in the dark to clear our paths.

  • The Nature of Roy Lukes

    When people in Door County want to know more about what’s growing in the woods behind their home or about the birds that chirp so early in the morning, they don’t always turn to a book.

  • An Anti-thrill Seeker Goes to the Southern Door Haunted Mansion

    I’m not one of those people who like to be afraid – my scary movie threshold stops somewhere between The Sixth Sense and Gremlins – but curiosity got the best of me last weekend.

  • Southern Door Haunted Mansion Raises Money for School Programs

    Every October since 2005, Brussels has gotten a little scarier. That’s thanks to a group of dedicated community members who have turned Quietwoods South Campground into the Southern Door Haunted Mansion, an event that raises money for Southern Door Schools.

  • Barb Chisholm Retires with her ‘Dignity’ Intact

    By Katie Lott Schnorr

    “The cap of a nurse is often spoken of as her dignity, and the wearing of that bit of linen does add poise and dignity and commands added respect for even a very young nurse,” American Journal of Nursing, 1935.

  • It All Started with Asparagus

    Daniel Barnard grew up in Door County and follows several generations of fruit growers. Despite having gone to college for business and economics and then selling insurance for 14 years, Barnard wanted something different, something that brought him back to his childhood.

  • Albert Zahn: Great-Grandson Randy Zahn Brings Famous Folk Artist to Life

    More than 100 people attended the final 2013 meeting of the Baileys Harbor Historical Society on Sept. 12, and it’s unlikely that any of them will ever again pass the funny old blue-and-white house north of town without feeling closer to the German farmer who built it 89 years ago and named it Birds Park.