By John Herdan
The Big Lake- The West Side
The west side of Lake Latoka was hard to get to when I was growing up. When you
went up the hill past the beach and went around the corner the cabins ended
where West Latoka Drive starts today. The cabin that belongs to the
Hollingsworth family was pretty much the end of life for quite some time. You
actually had to continue west and turn down Town Hall Road to get to the west
side. West Latoka Lane provided the only access to the lake on that end. That
was the area first developed. One of the first families to move out there that
I knew were Mickey and Dorothy Quist and their three kids, Mike, Peggy, and
Terry. They lived next to my cousins when they were in town so I grew up
playing with them. There were a few driveways along Town Hall Road that had
apparently thrown Dorothy off track a few times on her way home so Mickey
installed a giant sign high up on a telephone pole that said “Dorothy Quist turn
here!” It became a fairly famous sign. Mike and Terry live across the lake on
Bradford Bay today.
The west side was also the location of a few abandon farm sites that we always
referred to as “haunted houses.” We actually had a pretty large selection of
these houses all over Douglas County that we visited on a regular basis. We
would find a few cute girls and convince them that they weren’t cool unless they
had been to a haunted house and survived the visit. Of course all visits to
these houses were conducted by candle light as a flashlight would be out of
character. If you knew the house well enough and if the wind was strong enough
from the right direction you could approach an open window and reach out with
the candle in front of the window. When the wind blew the candle out the girls
would scream and grab on to you so tight you could hardly breathe which was the
point of the whole exercise. We did have a few scary run ins but that would be
a whole other story.
Most everything I did as a kid on the west side was away from the lake. There
were some great hills out in the country in an area we called “Little
Switzerland.” Usually we took toboggans out there but one time we took one of
the great sleds of all time. If you remember my description of the 1947 Buick I
learned to drive in you will remember I said “the hood was as long as the rest
of the car.” Well that hood opened from the sides and if you opened both
latches you could remove the hood completely from the rest of the car. We had
purchased another “Woodie” just like the first one which really didn’t run that
we used for parts. We would take the hood out to the beach in the winter and
tie it on behind the car with a long rope, fill it up with kids, and then drag
it around the ice at a high rate of speed. If we had ever hit a fish house we
would have gone right through it. Which brings me back to “Little
Switzerland.” One time we took the hood out there and dragged it to the top of
the highest hill. Since hoods are hard to steer gravity took over and we went
were the hood wanted to go. We left quite a collection of fallen trees behind
us by the time we stopped. As usual we laughed ourselves silly.