Anderson: Resort owner who loved life up north among tall pines and blue waters dies at 83

Whether a person shapes their environment or the environment shapes the person has been debated since at least the time of Plato and his student Aristotle.

But anyone who attends this weekend’s celebration of life at the Cook Community Center will know that the northland’s tall pines and blue waters molded the life of Grant Hughes Jr.

The longtime proprietor of Muskego Point resort died July 22 at age 83.

Born in Edina, Grant played hockey; was educated at St. Thomas, where he honed his slap shot; and upon graduation signed on as a management trainee with the old Dayton’s department store at Southdale.

Peddling dry goods, a tie around his neck, Grant surely would have been a fish out of water, and one can imagine him punching a time clock while tapping a foot, or both feet, itching to get up north.

Throughout his childhood, Grant had vacationed with his family on Lake Vermilion, and in time his parents bought a small island on the western end of that 41,000-acre watery gem. This was where Grant learned to tie a boat to a dock, jig for walleyes, cast for smallmouth bass and cross the short portage into Trout Lake, where he enjoyed the same freedoms the Ojibwe did centuries before, and the region’s early settlers did after that.

“When he was a boy he came up to Lake Vermilion every chance he could,” said Jenny Stanaway, the younger daughter of Grant and his wife Judy.

Some of the visitors were long-timers from the Twin Cities who always booked the same cabins. Others drove to Muskego Point from Indiana, Illinois or other faraway places, their station wagons crammed to the gills with duffel bags and coolers, and Berkley rods and Zebco reels pointing in all directions.

“When mom and dad bought the resort, it wasn’t in great shape, and there was a lot of work to do,” said Stanaway, who with her husband Joe now runs Muskego Point. “Plus, they had one young child, my sister Stephanie, and me on the way.”

But it wasn’t all work, because when he could, Grant clambered into one of the resort’s Lunds and pointed the bow of the aluminum boat across Vermilion to a favorite fishing hole. An elbow bent at the boat’s stern, hand gripping the throttle of the outboard, Grant just knew he could make a few walleyes bite, and if not those, smallmouth bass.

He was that good.

So good that he had taken to chumming with Al Lindner, the legendary Brainerd angler who beginning in the mid-1970s with his brother Ron turned In-Fisherman magazine into a sort of angler’s bible. Walleyes were Al and Ron’s bread and butter, and the sliding sinker rigs and long snells they perfected soon played havoc with these fish throughout Minnesota and, ultimately, throughout North America.

But decades ago, when Al first came to Lake Vermilion to share a boat with Grant, joined there sometimes by an equally talented angler from Park Rapids named Lee Rudsenske, smallmouth bass were their quarry — jumping fish that could be surface-hooked with Bass-Orenos or fooled underwater with crankbaits.

So productive were these forays that one of the first covers of In-Fisherman magazine featured Grant and Al holding a stringer full of smallies, and big ones.

“That was a different time,” Stanaway said. “Dad was embarrassed by some of the old photos of him and Al and the others holding so many fish. Everyone kept fish back then. But then everyone stopped. As I say, it was a different time.”

Chilly mornings, leaves burnished red and gold, and skeins of honking geese flying south signaled the end of summer. Cabin windows that a month earlier were aglow late into the night went dark, as Lake Vermilion’s summer residents returned to the city life Grant had fled so many years before.

With winter nigh, Judy drove a school bus to make ends meet, and Grant sold fishing tackle. For a number of years, Grant also channeled lessons he had learned playing hockey and coached the Cook High School girls volleyball team, leading the squad in Stanaway’s senior year to a state championship, a source of great pride around the Hughes’s kitchen table, and around Lake Vermilion.

He and Judy had a good long life, a great life, and some of the people who years ago piled into station wagons in Indiana, Illinois and other faraway places for the long drive to Lake Vermilion will make similar pilgrimages to pay their respects.

In the end, cancer took Grant.

But not before he relished for one last summer the flowers that blossomed on the island he had known since boyhood, and heard there the wind that rustled the tall pines, the place that made him who he was.