Barrel Home For Teenie Weenies At Grand Marais By

Barrel Home for Teenie Weenies at Grand Marais By Manthei Howe Reprinted from Daily Mining Journal, Marquette, Michigan

How do you get to that new summer home that is being built near here?” we asked a resident of Grand Marais.

to Lake Sable, turn to your right and follow the lake shore a little ways. You can’t miss the house.”

“Drive past the park and follow the right hand road out three miles until you come

We drove through three miles of lovely orchard and then came smack up against the lake. The road went right into the water. “Is this the way to the bungalow?” we inquired of a workman building a shack near by. On the Way “Drive right in the lake and around the corner of that sand dune, but keep on going. If you stop you’ll get stuck in the lake sand.” We kept on going and drove a short distance with the lake on one side of us and the wall of sand dunes on the other. We felt just like the Israelites going through the Red Sea.

“A heavily wooded shore line—hard wood, with tall spruce pushing like slim spires of darkest green.”

The road soon wound onto dry land and

debouched into a clearing. And there stood the queerest little home in all the world, we do believe. One had to take a sly pinch to see if that house was just a dream of a page from a fairy book. It was real, though, —real as the lake and the sky and the lovely birch, maple and evergreen trees standing all around it. The little summer home is a barrel, 12 feet in diameter, top and bottom, 16 feet high, and 16 feet wide at the bulge. (We called it bulge but the man told us bulge was all right for a big waist line, but when one spoke of barrels, one said bilge.) Another One Just back of it, connected with a small entry, is a smaller barrel. It is 8 feet in diameter and 8 feet high. Both barrelhouses are set on concrete foundations. Oh-ing and ah-ing we walked all around the little house, touching it to make sure it was real. The front barrel has the duckiest little

front door with a tiny porch roof upheld with short birch uprights. At either side is a porch lantern made of a Teenie Weenie pickle barrel. Just above the door are letters cut from birch bark, spelling Monarch Teenie Weenies. On the very tip-top of the house is a colored picture of two Teenie Weenies. Around at the side is the same lettering as that carried by the real Teenie Weenie pickle keg and on the wall of the entry is a big colored picture of the Clown, the Dunce and the Baby of the Teenie Weenie stories. Strange Room We entered that odd little front door and found ourselves in a living room, the queerest imaginable, for it had curving sides, and when the door swung open against the wall the edges were not straight, as house doors usually are, but were curved as the story book doors (come true) should be. Tiny windows, four of them, opened and swung inward so Teenie Weenies could look outdoors on a fine morning. Tan curtains with blue and brown polka dots

covered the screened windows and a big round table, with legs built of birch logs, sat in the middle of the room. Brown and tan rugs on the floors and comfortable chairs with woodsy brown covers, completed the furnishing of the room. A curving stairway up the side of the “barrel” living room led upstairs to the bedroom where there were three Teenie Weenie brown beds, a birch-wood bedside table and wide open windows from which the Teenie Weenies could talk to the birds or look at the lake.

a hospitable cup of tea. Through the entry one went to the barrel kitchen, fitted with a 3-burner oil stove and a drop leaf table, and stacked with the skillets, pans and kettles needed for housekeeping. On a shelf stood three Teenie Weenie pickle barrels in a row, to be used as containers for sugar, flour, spice and other things nice.

All the lighting fixtures in the house were composed of small pickle barrels with the sides removed and fitted with squatty yellow candles. They made “A wonderful and beautiful country in the North peninsula of Michigan.”

Everything Ready And then downstairs we wandered and out into the entry on one side of which was the kitchen door and on the other were shelves stacked with pretty dishes with a gay flower pattern. On the top shelf was a black teapot already to steep

the finest lanterns imaginable. Mr. Donahey, creator of the Teenie Weenie characters, whose adventures the children have followed in the Teenie Weenie books and in newspapers, had been invited to bring his wife to Grand Marais ostensibly for a fishing trip, but

“The Teenie Weenie home is most interesting, for it shows the achievement of a real problem in building.”

really for a very different purpose. She Was Surprised When Mr. and Mrs. Donahey arrived they were taken to Lake Sable where one of the Grand Marais children, dressed as the little General, came down the pebbly path from the Teenie Weenie house and presented to Mrs. Donahey a big golden key to the summer home which had been prepared for her as a surprise gift by Reid, Murdoch & Co., in appreciation of the Teenie Weenie drawings which Mr. Donahey had made for the Company’s advertisements. Back of the General, from behind the shadowy shelter of the trees, stepped other children of Grand Marais costumed as the Policeman, Sailor, Soldier, Dunce, Cook, Scotchman, and the Lady of Fashion. All the beloved Teenie Weenie characters came trooping down to welcome the Teenie Weenie lady to her new home. As one breathless youngster said: “We bet Mrs. Donahey is the surprisedest lady in the world.”

A fishing rod with a stiff joint.

We bet she was! S. P. Stevens, vice-president of Reid, Murdoch & Co., and Mrs. Stevens accompanied the Donaheys to Grand Marais for the presentation. The Teenie Weenie home is most interesting, for it shows the achievement of a real problem in building. When Mr. Stevens first broached the subject,

experts said it would be impossible to construct a keg of that size to be used for housing purposes, but the Pioneer Cooperage Company of Chicago succeeded in accomplishing the feat. Most delightful of all, though, is the joy that will come to the youngsters who may have an opportunity to visit Lake Sable and see the home of their beloved Teenie Weenies. They will get a thrill out of knowing that the Teenie Weenie man and his wife live in such a duck of a Teenie Weenie house.

“I’ll welcome anyone to its quaint little door yard.”

“Behind us to the North, lie sand dunes—great, tall, cliff-like dunes and softly rolling ones.”