Category: Features

It’s a short distance across the stony causeway to the Cana Island Lighthouse, but a memorable journey in time.

“You are walking across the bottom of Lake Michigan,” said Trudy Herbst, development director for the Door County Maritime Museum (DCMM).

“And gladly would he learn, and gladly teach,” wrote Chaucer of the Oxford Cleric in his prologue to Canterbury Tales.

Independent producer Eileen Littig has produced documentaries on social issues such as Teens, Grief and Death for Wisconsin Public Television, but said making the documentary Emma Toft:  One with Nature“was a labor of love” for her because of her own connections to Door County.

Poet Nancy Rafal, the force behind the Baileys Harbor mural and a resident of Moonlight Bay for more than 20 years, presented the history of that area at the July meeting of the Baileys Harbor Historical Society.

While Labor Day weekend has come to represent the last hurrah of summer, the concept of Labor Day was born more than 100 years ago to celebrate the achievements of the American labor movement.

When Roy Oshkosh was a child, he was fascinated with the stories his grandmother told about his ancestors who had a campsite in what would later become Door County.

Chocked full of keeper lore, the little yellow lighthouse on Eagle bluff is beautifully furnished and resplendent in its interior and exterior restoration.

Music at this year’s Death’s Door Barbeque is courtesy of Ted Yoder of Goshen, Indiana, who in 2010 was named the national Hammered Dulcimer champion.

There is something about the smell of barbecued meat that stimulates the senses and draws people from far and wide to follow their noses to the source of the smell.

Jim Reeve of Ephraim and Muskego was pleased that his Regina coin-operated music box manufactured in Chicago about 1900, one reportedly used in a saloon in Hurley, was appraised between $12,000 and $14,000.

Baileys Harbor will hold two events in the next few weeks to honor the baseball teams that have represented the town since 1874.

On Sunday, July 28, six members of the team that won the Door County Baseball League Playoff Championship in 1953 will be honored at their 60-year reunion at 1 pm before the 1:30 pm game between Baileys Harbor and West Jacksonport at the Baileys Harbor Athletic Complex.

It seems a shame to start a story about a competition of strength and endurance with its saddest element, but the figures are fact:  Of the 45 triathlon deaths between 2003 and 2011, 31 occurred from cardiac failure during the swimming segment of the competition (you can see the full USA Triathlon Fatality Incidents Study at usatriathalon.

The 2013 Door County Half Iron Triathlon set a new record when it reached its 1,000 participant capacity on Jan. 28, less than one month after opening for registration.

SATURDAY, JULY 20

• Bay Shore Drive/Cty. B from Murphy Park to Old Stone Quarry Park:  8 – 11 am: Road closed to motorists.

It was January of 2011 and I had just registered for my first triathlon, the Door County Half Iron. Most newbies in the sport start with a sprint distance but I was going all in with a characteristic immoderation I have come to embrace.

You might not expect visiting Southern Door County to be much like taking a European vacation. But if you get off of the big highway between Green Bay and Sturgeon Bay, you’ll pass Brussels, Namur and Luxemburg, businesses selling Belgian breakfasts, chocolate and beer and a countryside dotted with brick, Belgian-style homes.

On Nov. 26, 1963, 20-year-old Gretchen Lundstrom, a history major at St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minn., threw a tiny pebble into a raging river. “And 50 years later, up it comes again,” she said recently.