AN UNSTRUCTURED LIFE by Carol Bieneman

Reminiscing……….
I think “unstructured” is the word that best sums up my summers at Diamond Lake in the forties and fifties.
Aside from Red Cross swimming lessons, which were as social as they were instructional, we played. We had chores but dispatched with them quickly. Mostly we played cards and board games, we played in vacant lots (hollyhock dolls were a favorite along with hide and seek), we swam, we read, we rowed in a beat up rowboat and staked out houses among the willow trees down by the water.
In the early years – my parents bought the cottage in 1946 when I was four -- a cleaning woman would come up on the bus from South Bend every other week. We looked forward to her days because when my mother drove the woman into Cassopolis to catch the bus home, we would go to the dime store to buy paper dolls. My two sisters and I would play with these books of paper dolls until the next trip to Cassopolis when we got to buy more. Often, we would stop off at a little grocery store on the corner of and . Today an old house still stands there, and if you look closely you can see remnants of that old mom and pop store store. Back then, Cassopolis was a real town with a movie theatre, two drugstores, two hardware stores, a clothing store, coffee shop, and a library plus other businesses. I doubt the population was greater than it is now, but the downtown drew people from around the area for shopping and business, both commercial and government. The village of Cassopolis is the county seat.
As we grew older and our activities expanded to include the entire lake, our lives remained unstructured. And I think that is what made growing up on Diamond Lake so special. My sisters and I had a little fiberglass boat with a 10 horsepower motor, which gave us the freedom to go anywhere on the lake we chose. From the time we were eight and nine years old we were allowed to motor over to friends’ houses and when we were a little older –probably 10 and 11 -- we spent hours pulling each other and our friends on water skis. And then in our teen years some of us former nipper sailers would spend hours sailing out on the lake when the wind was right. We’d see some boats out – usually snipes at that stage of our lives – and out we’d go. My sisters perfected some wonderful water ballet routines – and both went on to join their college synchronized swimming teams.
And, of course, at the center of all this youthful activity was the Yacht Club. At that time the building was modest and apparently no one thought to lock it because it was always open. Every Monday night from Memorial Day until Labor Day teensagers gathered there. teenagers plus 12 year olds. We could join the Junior Yacht Club when we were twelve. The Yacht Club didn’t have a lot of amenities, but it had a working juke box that required no coins. We used to go down there in the evenings and dance. It was all very innocent and I don’t remember there ever being a problem.