Navigation

Category: Features

  • Winter on Washington Island

    Join me, if you will, on a winter’s day on Washington Island. It happens to be a Tuesday morning in mid-January. It is early, barely daylight, and the town’s plow just made its first pass on Main Road. Snow wasn’t heavy last night, only three or four inches, but the island plows will clear the […]

  • Even a Big Boat’s Small: Palmer Johnson Craftsman Rusty Lardinois

    Down on Shiloh Road, a few miles outside the city of Sturgeon Bay, there sits an old barn. Non-descript and a bit worse for wear, it’s built snug into a slope behind an old farmhouse, and nothing of its exterior hints that inside is the home workshop of one of the finest carpenters Door County […]

  • Cave Point Door County

    The Politics of 298 Miles of Shoreline

    For years folks have been proudly saying that Door County has more miles of shoreline than any other county in the United States. If you search through articles online you can track the shoreline’s apparent growth.

  • Door County’s Fading Farms

    George Evenson may know more about Door County’s farming past than anyone else. He sat down with the Pulse’s Patty Williamson to take a look at the peninsula’s agricultural history.

  • Know Your Farmer? Hill Orchard Honor-System Roadside Stand

    In these times of high unemployment and housing foreclosures, Tea Party rallies and an increasing number of militias, some people are hesitant to trust their own mothers.

  • The Harbor Barber

    “Some people think the colors of the barber pole are from our flag,” Willard Zak said. “But they come from the fact that early barbers were surgeons.” The color white indicated barbering, and red, surgery.

  • Dr. Rudolph Barta: Fish Creek’s Weed Guy

    Dr. Rudolph Barta, MD, neonatologist at the Baylor University Medical Center in Dallas, pulls weeds in public gardens around Fish Creek. Another once successful man now on the skids? Hardly!

  • Another Option for Door County Water Access

    In the last four years, Sister Bay has spent more than $10 million to expand public access to its waterfront. In 2007, the Village of Egg Harbor spent $1.

  • Gibraltar High School’s Steve Higginbotham

    In 1989 Steve Higginbotham worked as a carpenter on Dennis Laaksonen’s crew helping to build Jim Grasse’s condo project. Grasse, who was on the Gibraltar School Board at the time, told Higginbotham about an opening in the maintenance department at school and suggested that he apply.

  • Door County’s Golden Girl Mary Jane van Duyse Sorgel Dated Lambeau

    Betty White gets more fame, but the original Golden Girl calls Door County home. Mary Jane van Duyse Sorgel of Sturgeon Bay was the Green Bay Packer’s Golden Girl, a stint that is just one part of a remarkable life.

  • Door County’s Viking Grill Damaged by Fire

    “This is not something we needed.” Those were the words of Liberty Grove Town Chairman John Lowry as he watched firefighters fight a fire at the Viking Grill in Ellison Bay Wednesday afternoon, Sept.

  • Making An Old Southern Door School New Again

    Theresa Waniger taught only during the 1882-83 school year when School No. 6 in Nasewaupee first opened, but she must have made a big impression on the community.

  • Easy Riders

    After the passing of actor Dennis Hopper earlier this year, television news programs showed clips of the iconic film Easy Rider. For some of us, meeting a group of bikers on the highway conjures images of Hopper’s counter-culture character, and we flip the locks of our car doors. According to Door County biker Rol Grabenkort, […]

  • Time to Leave the Lakes Alone

    After a century and a half of trying to control the Great Lakes, is it time to concede to Mother Nature? Bryan Nelson stands on his wooden boardwalk over Lake Michigan, about 100 feet from shore. Well, 10 years ago he’d be standing over Lake Michigan water. Today, he’s surrounded by tall grasses growing from […]

  • Music in Their Blood

    “If it weren’t for the Eastman School of Music,” Walter Preucil said, “our family wouldn’t exist!” Careers have many times been built around a music school experience, but a family that grew out of one is less common.

  • A Monarch’s Maiden Flight

    There are several places where Charlotte and I have had the great pleasure of having butterflies land on us and the outstretched hands of children. The excellent butterfly house, an outdoor enclosure, at the Mosquito Hill Nature Center near New London, Wisconsin makes use of native butterflies and specializes in outstanding hands-on experiences and topnotch […]

  • A First Look At the Egg Harbor Marina

    The new Egg Harbor Marina impresses with its consideration of the non-boaters who will enjoy it.

  • Riding the Waves of the Sturgeon Bay Shipbuilding Industry

    Bay Shipbuilding Company has made it through tough economic times before, something it will have to do again to return to prominence.

  • Door County Hospital Unveils New Wing

    As Auxiliary Bishop Robert Morneau led a group of Door County dignitaries into the new wing of Ministry Door County Hospital to bless the new emergency wing, he was followed by a cascade of oohs, ahhs, and wows.

  • Miriam Erickson Named Philanthropist of the Year

    For Miriam Erickson of Egg Harbor, a difference made is far more important than a title earned. Ironically, that selflessness has earned her one more title – Door County Community Foundation Philanthropist of the Year.