Bridgman, MI—Many of us have a childhood home where we grew up and where fond memories have stayed with us throughout our adult life.
I grew up in Holly, Michigan at 907 Academy Road. My parents moved there from Flint, Michigan in the summer before my first grade in the Holly SDA Elementary School. This was my home through my four years of high school at Adelphian Academy, a four-year parochial high school that was also a boarding school for the Seventh-Day Adventist Church in Michigan.
I have always remembered my 12 years in Holly as the most idyllic time of my life. Here, I learned the principles of life taught by my parents and great-
grandmother Lewis, along with the wonderful teachers I had at Holly Elementary and Adelphian Academy.
After my parents moved to Madison, Tennessee, while I was in my undergraduate program at Andrews University, I started missing my childhood home. Throughout the decades since, the remembrance of 907 only grew with fondness.
This was the place where my love of sports developed. I can remember the countless times when my neighbor next door, Norman Wright, and I would play football, pretending we were trying out for the Detroit Lions, and my father playing would play baseball catch with me, showing me how to throw a curve and knuckleball.
In the vast wooded hills, just down the road from my house, is where I first learned of World War II when I was invited to play army with fellow school members schoolmates. We were the Allied Armed Forces fighting the Nazis.
At 907, I played tricks on my two older sisters. When they brought their boyfriends home to socialize, I would secretly record their conversations with a hidden tape recorder and microphone placed behind and underneath the living room sofa.
Here was where I played in my sandbox and created vast highways that my toy cars and trucks would traverse.
At our family worship in the evening, I first heard the wonderful stories my great-grandmother Lewis told us, many of which had been published in SDA publications such as "My Little Friend."
She was a prolific writer/ and storyteller and was able to captivate readers as well as audiences with her stories that always had a good moral to them.
In June of this year, I had the opportunity to get together with four of my Adelphian classmates, Roger Tompkins, Gary Richardson, Wes Bush, and Renee (Kempf), at Coffee in Cedar Lake, Michigan. During this wonderful get-together, I learned of about an Adelphian Academy Alumni meeting in Holly, Michigan, on June 29, where the Classes of 1959, 1984 and 1987 were being honored.
The Adelphian Academy closed in 1987, so the get-together was being held at the Holly SDA Church on Fish Lake Road. My sister Madlyn, a member of the Class of 1959, was planning on attending. I decided this would be a chance for me to see her and, at the same time, revisit my old stomping grounds, especially 907. It had been 50 years since I last visited Holly.
Because of the three-hour drive from where I live my home in Bridgman to Holly, I decided to travel the night before and stay at Hilton Hotel property in Oakland County's West Bloomfield Hills where I could use some accumulated points for the overnight stay. It would only be about a 25-mile drive to Holly the next morning, and I figured I could traverse that distance in 40 minutes or so with ease, as I knew Oakland County well.
Arriving in West Bloomfield Hills on the 28th, I discovered Oakland County had changed a lot. The next morning, I decided to use GPS for the final leg of my journey to Holly, and I'm glad that I did. The drive took me over roads and through communities whose existence I had forgotten.
Approaching Holly, I turned onto Davisburg Road and remembered the first round of golf I ever played with my father at the 9-hole Davisburg Golf Course where I pared the first hole (a short par 3). I tried to find the golf course, but apparently, it has been replaced by a housing subdivision.
After turning from Fenton Road onto Fish Lake Road, I was only a mile or so from the church where the meetings were being held. Being on Fish Lake Road brought back the vivid memory of when I nearly wrecked my brother-in-law's car (as well as myself).
Gerald, my sister Dianne's husband, was showing off his new red Pontiac GTO.
He let me take it out for a spin on my own. I turned left from Academy Road onto southbound Fish Lake Road. I had never been behind the wheel of such a powerful car, and I wanted to feel what it was like to open its engine.
Shortly after shifting into third gear, I was already going over 60 mph, as the horsepower of this iconic automobile had me entranced. Then, I realized the pavement was coming to an end and a stop sign at the intersection with Fenton Road was fast approaching. I applied a heavy foot on the brakes, but I was going way too fast. The car skidded through the intersection and well onto the dirt road on the other side of Fenton Road.
Fortunately, no other cars had been near that intersection. After turning around on the dirt road and heading back through the intersection and pavement of Fish Lake Road, I saw the black skid marks left by my long panic stop. I was one lucky kid.
Now, as I neared the Holly Church, I realized I was running late, so my visit to 907 would have to wait until after the lunch meeting,
After the potluck lunch, where I went to visit my sister Madlyn and nephew Michael, I headed directly to 907 Academy Road.
When I parked on the shoulder, I noticed that 905 Academy Road— where our neighbors the Wrights had lived— was no longer there. Mrs. Wright was my 5th and 6th grade teacher and Mr. Wright was the academy farm manager.
Then I spotted a young man, presumably the resident of 907, mowing the lawn. He gave me the evil eye when I got out of my car to take some pictures. By the time I had snapped my fourth picture, I knew it was time for me to move on, literally and figuratively.
Driving the 200 miles back to Bridgman, I realized I didn't need to make the journey to see Holly and Academy Road again.
Home is where the heart is, and my heart is forever blessed with the wonderful memories I have from a place I; ll always remember as “The 907.”
Theodore Lewis is the former CEO of Guam Memorial Hospital and has a healthcare consulting business in Bridgman, MI. He is collecting stories about lessons learned.
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