Biography | Gloria Steinem — The Clark Lake Shore Her Father Named Ocean Beach

Leo Steinem bought the east end of Clark Lake in the 1920s, hauled in sand, and called the beach Ocean Beach.

On Memorial Day 1928 he opened a dance pavilion on a hundred-foot pier: a checkerboard floor over the water, big-band nights, a sixty-mile draw.

Gloria was born in Toledo in 1934. The birth notice listed the family as of Ocean Beach, Clark Lake, Michigan.

Summers were here. Winters were the trailer and the road.

The pavilion was gone by 1944, the year her parents' marriage ended. The Collins family bought the ground and, on 27 July 1946, opened the Beach Bar across the road from where the pier had stood.

That restaurant still serves at 3505 Ocean Beach Road.

This pin is the public shore next to it: Clark Lake County Park, 3500 Ocean Beach Road, the east-end boat ramp a visitor can stand on without knocking on a cottage door.

The Steinem house across the street was private then and is private now.

What remains is the water and the name Ocean Beach on the road.

After the divorce, Gloria and her mother spent harder seasons in East Toledo. The lake is the other half of the childhood the Waite High School pin cannot hold.

Photo: Clark Lake, Columbia Township, Jackson County, Dwight Burdette, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.