While Aurora was home during the week, Bass Lake became home nearly every weekend. If Sunset Acres was where we learned friendship, the cabin was where we learned family.
Some of the most important places in our lives never show up on a résumé or a map that outsiders recognize. They don’t announce themselves as formative or life-shaping at the time. For me, one of those places was a cabin on Bass Lake, near Biwabik, just a short 15-minute drive from Aurora, Minnesota.
By the early 60s, my parents were raising five boys in a brand-new house in Aurora. But not long after that, my dad did something that, in hindsight, says a lot about who he was: he bought several acres of lake property that most people couldn’t even figure out how to reach by automobile.
Between the main road and the lake sat a swamp—wide, messy, and impassable. It was the kind of land most folks would look at once and walk away from. My dad didn’t. He saw an opportunity for his family.
Instead, he figured out a way. Over time, he arranged to have concrete rubble—broken slabs, chunks of pavement, discarded material from school projects—dumped into the swamp. Load after load. Week after week. It wasn’t elegant, and it certainly wasn’t something you’d get approved today, but slowly, steadily, the swamp began to fill. Eventually, there was something solid enough to drive on. Railroad ties came next, laid down to give the road some structure. Dirt followed. And just like that, land that had once been unreachable became ours. I remember it felt a little “spongey,” but overall it held the weight of a car very well.
That alone tells you something about my dad: if there was no path, he built one.
The first structure on the property wasn’t the cabin. It was a shed—hauled in to store tools, equipment, and whatever else might be needed for what was coming next. That shed, remarkably, is still there today. More than 65 years later, it remains a timeless witness to everything that followed.
Then came the cabin. I don’t know exactly how much help my dad had, but in my memory, it feels like he built most of it himself. It wasn’t fancy, but it was solid and thoughtfully designed. Three bedrooms. One bathroom. A kitchen and a small dining area. A living room with a fireplace in the front with large windows looking out to the lake. A porch to store our supplies. Warm pine scalloped siding inside that made it feel like a place meant to be lived in, not just visited. The water was pumped and filtered from the lake. We cleaned and bathed in that water. Drinking water was brought from home. The septic at that time was a large hole in the ground just to the rear of the house, but covered by tall weeds.
There was a bedroom for my mom and dad. One for my brothers John and Dave. And another that I shared with Chuck and Tom. It wasn’t spacious, but it was ours. There was a shared wall between the two closets for the boys' bedrooms, and for some reason that stud wall was never finished, meaning there was an opening to travel from one bedroom to the other via the closet. I only bring this up because Tom, always the prankster, went into Dave and John's room late one night when everyone else was sleeping. The phrase that I recall is "Surprise, Surprise, Surprise," like Jim Nabors in Gomer Pyle, USMC. Dave was NOT happy. The bathroom had one special feature that I have never seen anywhere before or anytime in the future, for that matter. It was an electric wall heater with a metal grill about 3 feet off the ground. What I remember the most about it is the “branding” of my tush when I accidentally brushed against it.
That cabin became the backdrop of my earliest summers. We didn’t live there full-time. My dad had work, and responsibilities didn’t disappear just because there was a lake involved. So we went on weekends—almost every weekend in the summer. We owned a light blue station wagon with the fold-down seat in the back. Our whole family could fit in this car, and for the 15-minute journey we were like monkeys constantly moving around that car. Seat belt usage was low back then. Typically we would leave on Friday nights and arrive just in time to unpack and watch the latest episode of “Wild, Wild, West” on the black-and-white TV in the living room. We watched that show religiously from 1965 to 1969 at 7:00 PM. I remember having my mom sew in a secret “knife holder” on the back of my jacket just like Jim West, played by Robert Conrad. The theme song still plays in my head to this day. Great TV series. Sundays, we’d return, sunburned, tired, and content.
Bass Lake felt enormous when you were a kid. We had a dock and a boat, and my dad went one step further by bringing in sand to create a beach. A real beach. Not just shoreline, but a place where kids could dig, run, and play. I learned how to swim and dive there. I also learned how water feels when you spend hours in it instead of minutes. Amazing. Like most kids in that era, we were told the old wives' tale, "Wait 30 minutes after lunch before you go back in the water!" Otherwise we lived IN the lake.
My brother Dave was the only one who really took to water skiing, but the rest of us got our own version of adventure. One summer, my dad had the brilliant—or perhaps questionable—idea to take one of those round metal snow saucers we used in winter, strap a life jacket onto it, tie it to the boat, and pull us behind it. Once the boat got moving and swung wide, you’d skip across the water like a flat stone. It was fast. It was wild. It was probably unsafe by any modern standard. Metal discs, high speed, no helmets—safety wasn’t the lens through which childhood was viewed back then.
The dock was our launching point for countless adventures. Along with the motorboat, we also had two little blue plastic boats that became favorites of us kids. They came as a promotion from Potocnik’s grocery store, complete with small sails, although we rarely bothered to use them. Instead, we sat low in the boats and paddled with our hands, exploring nearly every corner of the lake at our own pace. Those little boats gave us a wonderful sense of freedom and independence, and somehow we always felt safe venturing far from shore. I still laugh when I think about the day John tried sailing one of them and managed to drift into a marshy corner of the lake, where he became hopelessly stuck until the rest of us came to his rescue.
There were animals too. Guinea pigs, in particular. We had a lot of them, and when summer came, they came with us. Transporting these furry little pets to the cabin was a production in itself, and we have more photos of guinea pigs than any family probably should. There was Whitey, Peter, LBJ (Little Black Joe), and so many more.
The land around the cabin included woods and open areas, which meant freedom. We explored endlessly. We climbed trees—especially one big tree that seemed enormous at the time. We picked raspberries right off the bushes and ate them fresh. No store. No packaging. Just warm berries in your hand.
We learned how to shoot a .22 rifle, aiming at targets in a safe open area. BB guns were part of life too—and somehow, BB gun fights were allowed. That alone dates the era. We shot firecrackers. We made noise. We got dirty.
Swimming came with hazards as well. One side of the lake had leeches, and I remember the unsettling experience of finding several of them attached to me and having to peel them off. It was gross. It was memorable. It was part of lake life. Ticks were common too. Each night we were checked to make sure none had attached themselves to our scalps.
On warm summer evenings, as darkness settled over the yard, the fireflies would begin their silent performance, their tiny lights flickering on and off like little lanterns scattered across the night. My brothers and I would run through the grass, laughing as we chased them, carefully catching a few and placing them in a glass jar just long enough to admire their gentle glow. Before the night was over, we always opened the lid and watched them drift back into the darkness, returning to the world where they belonged.
That old shed became more than storage. It held magazines—Popular Mechanics among them—and a record player. Albums from the Ventures, Johnny Rivers, and Herb Alpert were sitting in a rack. It was a quiet retreat, a place to sit and read or listen. I remember paging through Popular Mechanics when I was seven or eight years old, fascinated by diagrams and ideas I didn’t fully understand yet. Looking back now, it’s not hard to draw a line from those afternoons to my eventual path into engineering. Seeds get planted long before we know they matter.
Not every memory is perfect. One stands out clearly. I had left a garden rake on the ground, tongs facing up. My dad accidentally ran over it with the car and punctured the tire. He was angry—really angry—and said things that cut deeper than he probably intended. I ran off crying and hid. It didn’t last long. My mom found me within minutes. The moment passed. Life continued. But even that memory belongs there, tucked among the good ones, because real places hold real moments—not just postcard versions.
Mostly, though, what I remember is joy. Weekends that felt long. Summers that stretched. Days defined by water, woods, and imagination instead of clocks and screens. We didn’t bring friends often. It was family time. Occasionally cousins joined us, but mostly it was just us—learning, growing, and being shaped by a place that asked nothing more than that we show up.
That cabin didn’t just give us a lake. It gave us a rhythm. A sense of simplicity. A place where things were built by hand, figured out as you went, and enjoyed fully.
Bass Lake wasn't simply where we spent our summers. It shaped the way I would see nature, family, engineering, and even problem-solving for the rest of my life. But somewhere around age nine, another influence entered my world—not through the woods or the lake, but through the colorful pages of twelve-cent comic books.
