Gottlieb Martin Geschwend

June 9, 1916 - April 12, 1973

Marty is seated on lower left, performing with the "Baker Twins" at Devils Lake, Manitou Beach, Michigan

I am not sure where these two pictures were taken. It looks like California Architecture.

The two pictures below show how the old dance hall appeared during the time the Baker Twins would have performed there during the 1930's and 1940's. It was a wooden structure surrounded by a grove of trees. It burned Labor Day morning 1963. The fire was traced to faulty wiring under the band shell. A performance was held just hours before and there were still several teens in a side game room when the wiring in the hall ignited. Everybody got out fine, but the all-wood building was a total loss.

The replacement building opened in 1964 (I only have one small picture of this but cannot reproduce it) and operated less than a year before being destroyed at about 7:45 p.m. in the Palm Sunday Tornado event of April 11, 1965. The building was empty that night, as it was one week before the hall officially opened for the season. However, there were 2,500 teens there the night of April 10, twisting to the music of 'Joey Dee and the Stepups'.

Owner O.E. Green rebuilt the hall again and named it Green's Pavilion. Note the grove of trees evident in the original dance hall picture is gone - all were flattened by the tornado.

The dance hall's popularity died out in the early 1970s; the building was then sold and converted into a store. The name "Green" was removed and an IGA sign put in its place, but the "Pavilion" lettering remained on the storefront until just recently. The store was re-painted and re-sided and the lettering was taken down. The locals still call it the "Pavilion". It still has the expansive parking lot designed to hold enough cars for 2000 kids, and sits just west of the Lake View Condominiums overlooking Devils Lake at Manitou Beach, MI

The former pavilion/current store ("Tibbs IGA") is located on Elm Street on the south side of Devils Lake, and is officially located in Manitou Beach. Adrian is the closest city (about 20 minutes away) and many postcards from the 1930s-50s made reference to Adrian for location purposes.

As far as the name Lake View, many locals refer to that area as Lake View, a holdover from the days when certain parts of the lake were 'sub-named', for lack of a better term. The pavilion area was Lake View, and surrounding locations around the lake were Cottage Grove, Pleasant Grove, Cedar Point, etc. Being more informal references these days, the names do not usually appear on current maps.

The information about the Pavilion was graciously given to my by Dan Cherry, Graphic Designer of The Exponent Attic of Michigan.