Landscapes of Community

Salvaged white pressed brick from the former Stage Milliken Building are being used in the Building 50 renovations, thanks to Mark Nixon.

By: Peter Payette

When I first started managing Interlochen Public Radio's news service, I had some vague pie-in-the-sky notions of partnerships IPR could form with other cultural organizations in the region. This was 2001. Independent producer Jay Allison had just launched a new NPR-affiliate to serve Cape Cod, Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket. Jay had solicited advice from a number of broadcasters as well as writers and other artists about how to design the service. Somewhere in the responses he published, I picked up the idea of a local public radio station as an institution that draws together organizations and individuals with similar purposes. I didn't bother to think through exactly what we might offer each other. Instead, I started scheduling meetings to make obscure proposals about how we might work together. Imagine offering to help someone produce radio without a training program or any clear guidelines about what you are looking for and you have the sense.

Needless to say this didn't produce much fruit. But it did spawn one series of radio pieces that has been a major highlight of my work at Interlochen Public Radio: Landscapes of Community. That's because the one productive meeting I had was with Joe VanderMeulen at the Land Information Access Association. LIAA publishes this journal and regularly joins organizations into partnerships for various projects-they understand it takes grant funding and, sometimes, years. At that time, LIAA was hosting a symposium called Landscapes of Community. The conference was a chance for historians, preservationists and artists to convene and discuss shared interests, especially the landscape.

That year we put together a series of short radio spots by the same name with a similar theme. The first piece featured the late painter Suzanne Wilson at the base of Alligator Hill in Glen Arbor, telling what history she knew of the stone gates that mark the entrance to a defunct golf course. She praised the stone work and gave some sense of how her nostalgia inspired her brush. Also in that original series, Emmy Lou Cholak told of leading walks on the front lawn of Building 50 and how former patients of the asylum would take her aside and express their delight in seeing Dr. Munson's arboretum again in full vigor. I recall producing that shortly after 9/11 and found it soothed the knots in me.

Hamilton and Milliken opened a merchantile business at this location on corner of Front and Cass in 1889 (Photo: GTHC).

The series eventually broadened to feature the voice of anyone who had something interesting to say including a horse trainer, a bus driver, a Sears portrait photographer and a bingo player. But I always felt it remained an exercise in documenting the landscape since all these people are somewhere: the bingo hall, the department store, the ranch or the bus station. I always wished we had a map to organize our eclectic sampling of folk-life. So when I saw the Great Places page on YourPlace-the interactive page that allows you to post photographs and say a few words about why a particular place is special-I lobbied for a sound layer. And this month, we've posted there a few vintage Landscapes of Community Radio spots, including one of my personal favorites about the Dairy Lodge in Traverse City. We'll post more in the months to come and hope other people, with the tools, will post their audio recordings. 

This is a natural collaboration since sound is an important medium for any community trying to express what it values. The obvious reason is the intimate qualities of voice are beyond the reach of even the best writing. But more important is the fact that many of these stories would probably never be written.  To bring my little essay full circle, I am glad to see that five years later, IPR is now a partner in a web-based, grass roots documentary project that allows anyone to post audio from their favorite place in this region. I'll resist making predictions about what kind of programming we might be able to build off this foundation but it's just the sort of thing I saw dimly a few years ago. 

Peter Payette is the News Director at Interlochen Public Radio. He lives in Traverse City with his wife Sarah and three children.