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NORM WHEELER is the co-creator and host of Beach Bards Bonfire (by heart storytelling around a bonfire), a retired Astronomy and English teacher at the Leelanau School after 32 years, and a trumpet/flugelhorn player for Jazz North, The Wild Sullys, Goodboy!, and Luunappi around the area for 20 years. While hitchhiking around Europe in the 1970s, he met Mimi (founder of Grocer’s Daughter Chocolate) in Copenhagen, and they brought their family (Jacob & Julia) to Leelanau County in 1984.

My college English professor could recite poetry from in Old English, challenging me to not just read but to memorize, to perform, to keep the Oral Tradition of out loud poetry alive, and then he died of too many boilermakers and cigarettes a week after I graduated from Olivet. I have been reciting poems ever since.