Organizing grocery coupons, eating as much ice cream as she could before it melted and spending hours in the lake are just a few of the fond memories Sheri Brady Heidrich has of her many years on Barron Lake.
Sheri and her family lived in the Barron Lake area from the time she was just five years old until she turned 16. “We lived on Huntly Road during the school year but stayed on Barron Lake all summer underneath the grocery store (it was on a hill) with all the comforts of home,” she said.
Sheri’s grandparents, Leo and Dorothy Brady, owned Brady’s Avalon Market, which was located on Lake Shore Drive from 1960 to 1971. The family-run business was started by her grandfather and father (David Brady) who were butchers. “They wanted to own their own store. Plus, they had a love of being near water,” Sheri said. Her grandfather owned the whole building where the store was located and rented out space to a tavern to the left of the store, a boat marina to the right and a beauty shop next to the marina. “They were all under one roof, just different areas,” she said.
Everyone in the area knew Brady’s Avalon Market quite well. “The store carried basic groceries and of course, the best fresh meat around,” she said, noting her grandfather and father also dressed deer during hunting season. Brady’s was a popular place to shop. “They had a long list of regulars. You couldn’t go into Brady’s without getting Polish sausage. They ground the meat and stuffed the casings. It was a big seller.”
Her grandfather also donated a portion of the land where the Howard Township Fire Department station sits. “There was a fire department there. They just needed to expand,” she said, noting that her father was a volunteer firefighter for Howard Township.
(Left to Right: Then township attorney Edwin Donahue, Leo Brady and then township supervisor Don Marlin. Brady donated land alongside the fire station to the township to accommodate an addition to the fire station. Photo was taken by Lance Lagoni.)
Sheri worked at the grocery store, too. “My first job there was as a stocker. I also helped with inventory and would help my grandmother with all the coupons,” she said. “You used to have to separate the coupons by company, mail them in and get reimbursed the face value plus two cents per coupon.” The store also ran a post office branch, something her grandmother maintained from the front office.
She recalls a very popular employee —Belva Carnes, who worked as a checker for as long as her grandparents owned the store. (Mrs. Carnes worked for Simplicity Patterns and then at the grocery store for many years. She passed away in 2016.)
Summer fun for Sheri and her family and friends meant a lot of time in the lake. “I think we put on our bathing suits on day one and stayed in the lake all day,” she said. “We even took Ivory soap because it floated and took baths in our suits in the lake. I never fully understood my mom’s fear until I grew up and had kids, but my mom never learned to swim, and she stayed worried all the time because we were always in the lake.”
Her grandfather bought a small motorboat for the boys and a rowboat for Sheri and her sister. “We had an aluminum canoe, and my dad had an Invader with a 115-Johnson motor, so we had lots of toys to play with.”
In the 1960s, Sheri’s uncle, Fred Stalder, is believed to be the first person to land a water plane on the lake. “He sold, bought and traded small planes all the time. He was a showboat,” she said.
A family from South Bend with 12 children rented a trailer house next door during the summers and had two of the girls who were close to Sheri’s age. “Since I had the rowboat, every Saturday us girls would plan a fishing trip out to the middle of lake. Of course, we were all about packing a picnic basket full of snacks I got from the store. We would load up the rowboat with our fishing poles, chopped liver we got from the store for bait, our life jackets and the picnic basket, and row out to the middle of the lake and eat all the snacks. We would get bored and want to row back. More times than not, for some reason, we couldn’t get back to shore so my brother would swim out and pull us in. All of my siblings and myself were excellent swimmers.”
While bad storms could have been a bad memory for most people, for Sheri and her siblings and friends, they were a good memory—especially when there was no power. “We were told to get all the ice cream bars we wanted because they were melting,” she said.
Sheri and her husband, Randy Heidrich and their family now reside in Texas.
As told by Sheri Brady Heidrich.
Written by Jodi Marneris. January 2022. Barron Lake Association
