Bahle’s at 140

As the ever-evolving retailer has gone, so has Suttons Bay

By Patrick Sullivan | Nov. 30, 2016

When Bahle’s of Suttons Bay celebrated its centennial in 1976, Owen Bahle’s five children had moved away, and the business was struggling in a village filled with shuttered storefronts. Bahle decided his store needed to be reinvented. And maybe if he turned around his store, Suttons Bay would turn around with it.

It wasn’t a sure thing 40 years ago that Suttons Bay would turn from hardscrabble farm town to quaint tourist resort.

“In the ’60s, the economy of Leelanau County was agriculture. Glen Arbor, Northport Point, they were old resort money. But Suttons Bay was an ag community and driven a lot by the migrants and the farming community. … I’ve got pictures,” said Owen’s son, Karl, referring to his family’s store. “I mean, the outside of this place looked like a dump.”

SUTTONS BAY TRANSFORMED
Bahle’s is no dump today. The clothing store, which turns 140 this year and is among the oldest businesses in Michigan to have stayed in the same family, is at the heart of a thriving village filled with art galleries, specialty shops and restaurants.

When the look of the store was transformed in the 1970s, so was its identity.

The store had gone through many evolutions over the years. It started out as a general store that sold everything in an age when there wasn’t much to sell. Over the decades, Bahle’s sold clothing, dry goods, sundries, lawn and garden supplies, appliances, and radios.

Owen Bahle said that in 1976 he wanted to make the store look like it might have looked a hundred years earlier, even though the store had never looked like that.

“We remodeled our store, which made an impression on the town,” he told an interviewer in 2000 for Leelanau Voices: Witness to the Century, an oral history project organized by the Leelanau Historical Society. (Owen died in 2012 at the age of 92.) “Then we started to have more upscale clothing. We started to move toward more sophisticated merchandise.”

Karl said the renovation of the store was his dad’s way of gambling on a new vision for Suttons Bay. Owen understood that the store was either going to anchor the downtown and reinvent Suttons Bay, or it was going to die with the town.

“My father made kind of a commitment to say, ‘OK, we’re going to be here, so let’s commit some energy and some capital,” Karl said. “It was either lift it up or walk away from it.”

Karl and his sister, Lois Bahle, who run the store today, said it’s funny to hear people say how a visit to the store is like stepping back into time. The new facade is an idealized version of a past that never existed.

“It’s funny when you hear people say, ‘Oh gosh, it’s so great. It hasn’t changed,’” Karl said. It’s changed so much.

The renovation of Bahle’s 40 years ago was less a restoration than a reimagining of history.

The Bahle’s of a hundred years earlier was, like the rest of Suttons Bay, a working-class, no-frills place. What Owen created with his mid-1970s renovation was an idealized version of a pristine small town that didn’t exist a century earlier.

Since Bahle’s was renovated, much of the rest of the town has followed suit. Karl pointed out how other places in Suttons Bay have changed. “There was a gas station and little car dealership across the street, there used to be a tank farm full for Leelanau Fuel where the condos are.”

“People think, ‘Oh, Bahle’s is (a) historic site,’” Lois said. “The building itself is not a historic preservation at all.”

ANCIENT HISTORY
The Bahle family goes back almost to the beginning of Suttons Bay.

The village was founded in 1854 upon the arrival of Harry Chittenden Sutton. Suttons Bay was platted in 1865 and named Suttonsburg, but Sutton was a restless fellow, and he packed up and moved to Kansas in 1871, leaving behind little but his name.

Lars Bahle moved from Norway via Northport to Suttons Bay (which was then, apparently, called Pleasantville) in 1870. Bahle was a teenager when he crossed the Atlantic with his sister Maria.

Bahle earned money cutting cordwood in Northport and saved enough to buy an 80-acre farm. In 1876 he married and started Bahle’s on St. Joseph Street. Lars was an industrious man — in 1882 he built a schooner to make trips back and forth to Chicago.

Lars had a son, Otto, who bought the business from him in 1920. That was a big year for Otto: he also had a son, Owen.

In his oral history, Owen recalled his childhood during the Great Depression and remembered that he was luckier than other people. While a lot of people suffered, people who lived on farms didn’t suffer as badly.

“People could exist on a farm with zero cash,” Owen said.

Owen might have grown up working at the store and on the family farm, but he didn’t plan to do that his whole life. When he left town, first to attend Michigan State and then to serve in the Navy during World War II, he didn’t plan to return.

“I know when I graduated from school, the attitude for the graduating class was how to get out of here so we can enjoy greater opportunities someplace else,” he said.

That’s not what happened. Owen found himself home mainly because he was tired of being at sea, and his father expected him home. He stayed because he met the woman who would become his wife, Leila Brehmer.

Owen and Leila married in 1947 and had five children: Lois, Robert, Richard, Karl and Chris. The kids grew up working in the store and on the farm. Soon, each one left.

LONG JOURNEY BACK HOME
One by one, after that 1976 renovation, the five children returned home.

Karl was a scruffy hippy in his early 20s in the 1970s (he’s got photos to prove it). Like his father, when Karl left, he thought he’d left for good.

He was studying comparative literature in grad school at the University of Michigan when he had an epiphany.

“My dissertation chairman was getting divorced and moved into the apartment across the street from me. He came over with a fifth of whiskey and said, ‘We’re going to get drunk.’ He said, ‘I’m getting out of academics.’ And he said, ‘You should, too. Because it’s just a job, and I am going to move to California and open a winery,’” Karl recalled. “He said, ‘Go back up there. You’ve got what all of us are striving to have. A lifestyle in an area like this on the water, with a lot less baggage.’”

(Karl said his graduate adviser today runs a successful southern Californian winery with his two sons.)

Lois Bahle always knew she wanted to work at her family’s store, but she thought she would be better off if she went to work for another store first.

Lois attended retail training at Marshall Field’s in Chicago and ended up in Grand Rapids. She interviewed at three stores that are no longer in business: Jacobson’s, Herpolsheimer’s and Steketee’s. She got a job at Steketee’s.

“You know, your dad always tells you you do a good job, but until you work for somebody else, you don’t know if you do a good job or not,” Lois said.

She brought experience not just from the family store to Grand Rapids — she also brought experience from the family farm.

“I remember … there was a sign holder that needed a hole in this wooden piece on the top, and there was a wood shop on the second floor in Stekedee’s, so rather than try to find the maintenance guy, I just went up and set it up and drilled a hole,” Lois said. “He showed up and I’m standing there, looking very ‘buyerish’ in my high-heeled shoes. He was a little surprised.”

Lois always planned to come back. She hadn’t planned to stay away for 10 years.

“I was committed to retailing, and I knew I wanted to be in the store I grew up in and had my name on the front door,” she said.

Lois left home in 1971 and Karl left in 1974. They both returned in 1981.

SOFT-CORE RUMORS
When Owen renovated the store in 1976, it was a gamble that paid off.

“It was his nickel, and he didn’t have any commitment at all from the kids that we were going to come back at that point. Dad would have been 52, so he was still looking at 10 to 15 years of things, and I think he also thought, ‘If I fix it up and if it flies, I’ve got something to sell,’” Karl said.

It was just Owen’s first move to reinvent Suttons Bay, however. The family next turned their attention to the rest of the block and the Bay Theatre.

The theater was founded in 1949, and the family bought it in 1972.

“He bought the theater to protect his investment,” Karl said of his father. “There was a rumor floating around, I don’t know if it was true or not, but there was a guy that had bought some of these small-town theaters, I think he was out of Bear Lake, doing sort of adult-oriented soft-core.”

That was enough to get Owen to buy the theater and restore that too. It turned out to be another attraction, another thing that would draw people to Suttons Bay.

The Bay turned into an art house destination because Robert Bahle had an interest in film and his roommate at Michigan State was involved in the film program and helped him bring independent and foreign films to Suttons Bay.

Nowadays, the five children run the family business, including the store, other real estate, the Bay and the Leelanau Club of Bahle Farms, which opened in 1999.

The family used to run cherry and apple farms but have gotten out of that; they sold their equipment and leased the land to others to farm in 1996.

“When we got out of the farming business, and we auctioned the stuff off, I think for this current generation, it was a little emotionally difficult. And my wife (Rabbi Chava Bahle) ran into my dad at the auction and she said, ‘Oh, this has got to be hard.’ And he said, ‘Nope. Things change. You’d better adapt to it and accept it and say it’s OK,’” Karl said.

‘IT JUST SET A TONE’
Long-time village resident John Bumgardner agrees that Bahle’s is an anchor that’s made the modern version of the town come alive.

Bumgardner said he went away to fight in Korea and then Vietnam, and when he got back, the village had completely changed.

“Everything was turned around in the village,” said Bumgardner, who after the war opened a gas station at the site of the shopping plaza at St. Joseph and Adams streets. “It was just a different thing altogether.”

He said he doesn’t recall the remodeling of the Bahle’s storefront, but he remembers when there was a hitching post out front of the store long ago. He remembers when there was a blacksmith shop down the street.

Bumgardner agreed that Suttons Bay transformed from a working-class village to the tourist destination that it is today and agrees that Bahle’s was a big part of that.

“There’s got to be a hub in every village, to make it go, no matter where you go,” Bumgardner said. “Bahle’s is part of the hub of Suttons Bay.”

Traverse City attorney Grant Parsons said what the Bahle’s did with their store and their theater led to the rebirth of Suttons Bay.

“Suttons Bay experienced a real rebirth because of the Bahle family anchoring it in such a positive way,” Parsons said. “The way they did it, the way they renovated that storefront and the theater, it just set a tone.”

NEW GENERATION
There are six kids in the fifth generation, but only two of them, Erik, 33, and Peter, 24, appear to be interested in going into the family business. Three others are in college, and another has followed interests to Montana.

“The world has obviously changed, but I think also part of it is that their worldview has expanded,” Karl said. “They’re seeing opportunities to do other things that intrigue them.”

With Owen’s five children getting older and only two among the fifth generation currently interested, Karl and Lois said they are taking stock of the family businesses.

“Now we’re trying to figure out what’s the succession for that generation to come in,” Karl said. “I mean the youngster in the family, Chris, is 58, so we’re all realistically looking at our futures and where do we want to go, what do we want to do, and how do we turn this over to the next generation so that it’s sustainable. And do they want to do it? You don’t want to force anybody into it.”