Rubin: A Mackinac Island 50th anniversary celebrates more than years

Her parents split up and she moved all the way across town, and there Michelle Farell stood outside a middle school classroom in Grosse Pointe Woods, 13 years old and scared, hoping the group of strangers inside would somehow make her feel less alone.

That was her introduction to Girl Scouts, which became her gateway to Mackinac Island, which ― thanks to a former Michigan first lady ― became her launching pad. Now she's 54, and there's a thousand dollars worth of food in her living room she'll be dragging to the island in a couple of weeks so that 49 girls can have a chance to grow and glow the way she did.

As a kid, Farell was part of the Mackinac Island Honor Guard ― marching, raising and lowering flags, greeting tourists, learning, dreaming. As an adult, she told her future husband, “Here’s the bottom line. You can stay or go, but I’m going to Mackinac for one week every year. Are you good with that?”

He was and is. As for the Honor Guard, it's been around long enough that former President Gerald Ford was in it, back when the program launched in 1929.

This is the 50th anniversary of Girl Scouts getting to participate, and that's a fine benchmark. Equal participation is important in and of itself. What makes the milestone worth noting, though, isn't only that common sense prevailed in 1974, the same year a new law allowed women to apply for credit cards in their own name.

It's people like Farell, who looks back at scouting and the Honor Guard and says, "I'm not going to say it saved my life. But it completely directed my life in a different place."

Good luck and magic

Good fortune and geography put Farell into Troop 327, led by a Grosse Pointer named Betsy Martin who watched Boy Scouts raise flags across the island when the Fort Mackinac cannon blasted at 9:40 a.m. and thought, what is it about this that my girls can’t do?

Martin somehow connected with Helen Milliken, wife of Gov. William Milliken, who agreed. Within a year, girls were alternating weeks with boys in a program that runs from Memorial Day to Labor Day and provides some 30,000 volunteer hours to the Mackinac State Historic Parks.

Martin’s oldest daughter, Cathy Leverenz, aged out of scouting a year too soon to serve on the island. But she knows her way around the scout barracks up the hill from the fort: she’s the senior adviser of Mackinac Troop 327, culled from 20 Girl Scout troops across southeast Michigan.

It’s unclear, says Leverenz, 68, whether her mom initially expected any benefits for her girls beyond joy. But she quickly came to recognize what she called the Mackinac Magic.

“As I write letters of recommendation for girls going on to college and jobs,” Leverenz says, she shares their pride in the skills they’ve assimilated while they marched and bonded and laughed. “Organization, responsibility, leadership, citizenship … It’s just amazing.”

Arriving young, and staying

Liz Burt, 54, didn’t invoke Mackinac Magic, but she did say the island “speaks to your soul.” She was able to listen, she says, because of the program.

She came to Mackinac Island every year she was eligible as a scout, then found summer jobs there during college that felt more like coming home than her own house in Grosse Pointe Woods did.

Her parents, not unreasonably, suggested that it was time to focus on a real job after she graduated from Michigan State with a teaching degree. She decided to spend one more summer as a historical interpreter at the fort, and she was wearing her period-authentic dress when she interviewed for an opening at Mackinac Island Public Schools.

She has been on the faculty now for 31 years. This year, she’s handling the fourth, fifth and sixth grades ― “but that’s nine students,” she notes, out of a K-12 enrollment of 75.

She met her husband on the island, where he has gone from summer archaeologist to director of public works. Raised two kids there. Bought cemetery plots.

“The whole trajectory of my life changed,” she says, because of Troop 327 and the Honor Guard. “And it’s been a wonderful life.”

Long drives and high seas

Farell also worked summers on the island and then became a teacher. She quit to raise three children with the engineer she didn’t scare off with her annual commitment to the Girl Scouts, but still found time to earn a master’s in library science and be elected a Canton library trustee.

Her younger kids just graduated from high school. Adam heads to the Mackinac barracks with his Boy Scout troop in August, and his twin, Eleanor, will be there with her mom June 15-22.

Eleanor is an Honor Guard bugler whose home troop has been No. 327 ― even though that means a 45-minute drive from Canton for every meeting and activity.

In heavy traffic, Farell can remind herself how her Mackinac years were a lifeboat when everything around her was choppy waters.

“Maybe it’s not as important to all of them as it was to me,” she says, but as she plans and orders seven days of meals for the girls and eight adults, “I know I’m doing a good thing.”

She is confident, too, that the girls will do good.

Some are obvious stars. Hannah Blakey, a Mercy High grad, was a track standout at West Point and is now a Rhodes Scholar.

But “I’m not necessarily talking about being president,” Farell says. It’s more that girls know they are valuable contributors to a larger whole.

In 1974, the barracks on Mackinac Island opened its doors to everyone.

Now girls can go and dazzle and be dazzled, she says, and realize that they count.

Neal Rubin was an indifferent Cub Scout who's suddenly wishing he'd tried harder. Reach him at NARubin@freepress.com.

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This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Girl Scouts value 50 years on Mackinac Honor Guard for more than tenure