The Hunky Dory resort sits atop a small knoll overlooking Lake Clare, in Balsam Lake, Wisconsin. It’s changed little since 1902, when it first operated as a working farm called the Hunky Dory Farm Resort. Brochures advertising the place look exactly the same as they did in the 60s. Nor have the kooky cabin names been updated: “Rest a While,” “BonEcho,” and the favorite “Kozy Knook.”
Matriarch Marvel Nielsen runs the resort with her daughters, Marly, Julie, Lori, and Joy, and an assortment of grandchildren and in-laws. Her husband Al died in ’88, leaving the silver-haired and aptly named Marvel to command this tight ship. While similar hand-hewn Midwestern resorts have gone under, Marvel says Hunky Dory remains vital due to her family’s home cooking. “What brings them back are the good swimming and the food,” she said of her guests. “You don’t have to have a fancy place, just have it clean. Cook good food and you’ll have a full house.”
“When I first married Al in ’55,” recalled Marvel, “there was a full-time cook here, and I only cooked one day a week. She died in ’84 and I’ve been cooking ever since.” Growing up in North Dakota, she learned to fry and bake from her mother, who perfected the art in order to feed and inspire the farmhands.
For ten weeks in summer, three square meals are served each day. All are made from scratch. “We don’t use anything from a box, no microwaves here,” Marvel said, carrying a bowl of flour-dusted chicken to a stove. Her two Vulcans, a six-burner oven and a grill oven, are vintage 50s, and they’ve typically got chicken frying on their stovetops, hams and turkeys in their ovens.
The day for Marvel and family begins at 6:00 a.m. They’re in the kitchen by 6:30, when they turn on the grill, brew coffee, mix pancake batter, and fry bacon. Breakfast is served at 7:30. When the lodge bell rings, as it does three times each day, guests come running or walking at a brisk pace.
It’s difficult to reserve a Hunky Dory cabin. Some of those guests are from families that have been coming to Hunky Dory for four generations; many have never missed a year. “Mom has a running list of people in her head who say ‘If someone cancels, call me up,’ ” said daughter Julie Grimsley. Otherwise, tough luck. There’s a great deal of jockeying for position, behind-the-scene intrigue over who gets which cabin, or which families may be forfeiting their cabin.
My three brothers, now with their wives and children, have been Hunky Dory regulars for years. Each July, they succumb to the lake’s velveteen waters, which have the ability to soften hair, skin, and soul. The affinity for the resort runs deep. When we were kids, our family didn’t stay at a Hunky Dory cabin; we used to rent an old hunting shack across the lake. From there we’d row over to Hunky Dory to get gas for the boat. On hot nights, there would be ice cream, and back then there were horses for rent, too. And when my mother, exhausted by bats, ticks, and children, had had enough of life in the woods, my father would treat us all to Marvel Nielsen’s famous fried-chicken dinner.
A few weeks ago, on a stifling Sunday morning, I watched the fried-chicken ritual that’s taken place every week since 1902. As soon as breakfast was finished at 9:00, Marvel and her daughters began working on the lunch. “I don’t want to know how hot it is, that’s why there’s no thermometer in here,” explained Marvel, tending four cast-iron skillets filled with chicken pieces that spat grease into the air.
Typically, the system works like this: Marly flours the chicken, Julie cuts and cleans it, and Lori oversees the baking-powder-biscuit operation. But on this day, Julie shouted across the kitchen, “Mom, I think I’m going to start the biscuits.” She’d taken over for Lori, who was in the Twin Cities that day. But Lori later called her sister. She was so worried about the biscuit-making that she hopped in the car and drove the two hours back to Hunky Dory.
It’s that kind of commitment, to the rituals of cooking, and the rituals of summer, that is vanishing. I’ve watched helplessly as the fixtures of my childhood from the 50s and 60s have been sold off and remade by big-box retailers. But Hunky Dory remains suspended in time, a little like an insect in amber. Still, Marvel can’t cook and work forever; like me, she worries about Hunky Dory’s future. “It’s not easy to answer,” she said, when asked about it. “This is 2006, and people automatically sign up for 2007; they don’t question it.” She knows that someday it will have to end. “And I’ll know when it will have to end.”
“But,” she added, “the lake will still be here.”
So will Marvel’s daughters, and in-laws, and grandchildren who want to protect Hunky Dory’s legacy. And the generations of families willing to fight for a week in the run-down “Kozy Knook.”
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