Gazetteer sparks trip to Clear Lake

When you reach a certain age — hang on, kids, it’s going to be another one of those columns, seems the geezer is at it again — you never know when you’re going to fall into a memory hole.
You’ll see something. You’ll hear a voice. A tune will be played on the radio. And you are gone, suddenly decades back, remembering things you didn’t even know you were capable of remembering.
It happened again on Saturday.
Sunday’s weather looked great for a hike, a chance to get outdoors before the effluvia of the Super Bowl washed over us. So I got out our ACRES Land Trust guidebook, Phil Bloom’s Hiking Indiana and our Ohio Gazetteer, which had a listing of nature preserves in the Buckeye state.
It was while I was looking at the gazetteer, a very cool document for those of us who don’t entirely trust GPS systems, that something clicked.
I had forgotten that Michigan Ohio, and Indiana don’t meet precisely evenly in the upper northeast corner. There’s a bit of a jog. (We have an Indiana Gazetteer, and it shows up there as well.)
In that jog, in the corner of northeast Steuben County, the map showed Clear Lake.
And I was plunging down a rabbit hole.
Some of my earliest memories (at least those I still retain at my ripening old age) are of Clear Lake.
For a period of time — I have no idea how long — it was the site of our family vacation.
I’m guessing I was 5 or 6 or 7 when we made the trek up there, two hours plus on a two-lane highway and a struggle to get through Fort Wayne traffic.
Many of my parents’ friends had lake cottages, but they weren’t ready — or couldn’t afford — to make that commitment. A stay at a place called the Mirador Hotel on Clear Lake allowed them to combine an affordable family vacation with a chance to visit their Jay County friends with cottages.
The Mirador, in my memory, was a big, shambling frame structure, more like an overgrown house than a hotel. There was a pier where folks tied up their boats. There was swimming, of course. And there was shade, the hotel sitting up from the lake on a bit of a knoll.
Meals were family-style. A bell was rung, and everyone who wanted to eat went to the dining room and had whatever the hotel had decided to serve.
Rooms had a nautical feel, at least the one my brother Steve and I shared felt that way. The base of the lamp was shaped like a ship’s wheel. The bedspreads had images of lighthouses or boats or something else appropriate.
In many ways, the rooms were more like a dormitory than a hotel. Spartan and basic, they offered no amenities you’d look for today.
The first television set I ever saw in my life stood in a corner of the Mirador Hotel common room, an area the guests shared. I have a distinct memory of a fuzzy black and white TV image of Tom Corbett, noted space cadet, on a Saturday morning broadcast.
Other fragments of memory remain:
•A ride in a sailboat someone on the lake owned.
•Another ride in a Chris Craft inboard motorboat owned by someone who could afford better accommodations than the Mirador.
•Floating out too far from shore in an inner-tube and being scolded.
•Being pitched off the end of the pier by my older brother after pestering him for hours.
The Mirador is long gone now, I’ve learned thanks to an Internet search. I’ve also learned it was built by a family that hoped it would provide for their children’s higher education. When the hotel was opened in the 1920s, all of the family worked there during the summer months at no pay so that any income could go into the educational fund.
I’d love to go back there for a weekend or a week or even an afternoon.
But, then again, I guess I already have.