About Us

We are a family of commercial airline pilots hence the name of the cottage, “Flight Deck”.  I also have two younger children currently in Law School.  My ancestors moved to Bellaire in the 1880’s and had a large farm northeast of Bellaire where the Centennial Golf Club currently is.  My grandparents both taught at the little schoolhouse on the corner of Derenzy and Intermediate Roads in the 1920’s.  All of my aunts and uncles were born in Bellaire or Central Lake and lived there (and then in Grand Rapids where my father was born) until the 1940’s where they all moved to the Memphis, TN area.  We continued to spend the summers on Torch Lake through most of my life of 59 years.  A long drive, but worth it! 

 

In 2019 I purchased this cottage, which is in the area where we usually rented for the decades before.  I used Paradise Property to manage the rental during the summer weeks and all went very well.  However, I didn’t rent it last summer as I was “practicing retiring”, which also went very well.  I thought I would try to rent it this coming summer (for 2 weeks only) and then enjoy the rest of the summer there to escape the heat of the Deep South.  

 

The cottage on Torch is my only weekly rental, but I have a few annual rentals in Tennessee and have been in the Real Estate business for over 30 years, as a broker, investor, house flipper and developer, which my flying career has allowed the time to do those things. As I said, I used a property management company up there for 4 years, but have always managed my own properties down south.  So, I decided to try the management thing on my own up north as well this year.

 

In addition to my immediate family, several other Southerners from my extended family come up for 1-3 weeks.  There are usually 30-40 of us in total, so if you here some accents around town it might be one of us…