My Family Goes To Duluth

After our semi-successful family vacation in Leech Lake, my mother wanted us to go somewhere else the next year. I don’t know how she found our cabin in Duluth. It was a pretty, knotty pine cabin, high on a cliff above Lake Superior. We had all the comforts of home, including an indoor toilet, and a working kitchen with running water and electricity. The cabin was remote, hidden away from other cabins in the woods. We heard sounds from the forest as we fell asleep at night. I was eleven years old.

After we unpacked our car and hauled supplies into our cabin, we were eager to check out Lake Superior, a lake so big we couldn’t see the opposite shore. We climbed down a steep path to the water below. The shore was rocky and muddy, not like the flat, sandy shore of Silver Lake, where we swam every day.

I jumped in the water and jumped right back out. The water was cold. Bitterly cold! Cold enough to turn your skin blue. I was happy to watch from the shore, but no amount of coaxing could convince me to go back in that icy water.

The highlight of our Duluth vacation was a trip to see my father’s uncle, Frank Fay, in Brainard, Minnesota. Frank ran illegal gambling operations in Florida during the winter. In the summer he moved to Brainard and ran a restaurant, The Bar Harbor, on Gull Lake and a bait store in the same location.

My dad said we were going to buy bait at Uncle Frank’s store. After we bought our worms, Frank said, “Bob, I want to show you something.” He opened a hatch in the floor and we all trooped down to the cellar, where Frank proudly showed off his casino in the basement of the bait shop.

It was about 11:00 in the morning and no one else was there. We went back upstairs and Frank took us kids behind the counter and filled our pockets with candy bars. He let us have all the coca-cola we could drink. We thought he was the coolest person we’d ever met.

Frank’s Bar Harbor restaurant was infamous. Brainard was far from the Twin Cities in the days after WWII, and the Bar Harbor was a destination for serious gamblers. Rich people with summer cabins on Gull Lake, docked their big, fancy boats and went inside for dinner and a night of gambling. Frank paid off the local authorities and ran a casino in the back room of the restaurant with slot machines, Black Jack, and Poker.

We went back to Duluth and spent the rest of the week, full of questions about Uncle Frank. I think my brother, especially, wanted to grow up to be just like him. We didn’t think of Uncle Frank as a crook and a gambler, although surely he was that. We thought of him as a generous man with a quick laugh and a love for children.

As I look back on our week in Duluth, I smile when I think of the connection between my brother and my Dad’s uncle. Both men are generous, gregarious and kind.

The gambling gene runs deep in my family. Uncle Frank enjoyed running casinos, albeit outside the law. For years Bob was part of a group of men who owned race horses. Every summer we went to Canterbury Park to bet on the horses. But Uncle Frank’s true legacy is that he knew how to have fun and how to spread happiness to everyone around him. Bob is just like him.