A Lighthouse Keeper’s Dutiful Daughter
Ever wonder what life was like for the children of
the Lake Superior lighthouse keepers?
 Fran
Platske never does.
This adopted daughter of a man who watched over about half a dozen lighthouses
knows that life quite well.
She delights in telling stories about lighthouse life and bristles at two
things: misconceptions about keepers and the apparent loss - perhaps even
deliberate disposal in the lake - of the Fresnel lens from her beloved
Outer Island Lighthouse in Wisconsin’s Apostle Islands.
Some people believe that lighthouse keepers were a bunch of drunks, but
Fran growls at the thought. “These lighthouse keepers were dedicated. They
gave up their lives if need be.”
Like most members of the U.S. Lighthouse Service, she says, her father,
Alva Carpenter, remained diligent in all of his duties and attended scrupulously
to display of the American flag. “I can still see Dad in the sunset, lowering
that flag.”
Fran’s adopted parents, Alva and Marie Carpenter, worked in lighthouses
after Alva’s military service in World War I. Married in Marquette, Michigan,
they served on Granite Island and then Forty Mile Point, both in Michigan.
Fran came to their family and to the lighthouse at Two Harbors, Minnesota,
in 1925 at the age of 15 months. Fran’s birth father, a lumberjack, died
after a terrible accident at the sawmill. Her mother died giving birth
to her youngest sister, who was adopted elsewhere. It would be years before
Fran reconnected with any of her six siblings.
Before striking out on her own at age 18, Fran lived at lighthouses in
Two Harbors and on Outer and Raspberry islands in the Apostles.
Since leaving those islands, Fran has become an active and vocal proponent
of preserving the true stories of lightkeepers’ families. She’s written
poems and prose about her lighthouse life. She’s spoken to groups and helped
to organize a reunion, and then an association, of keepers’ children. She
donates both her research and her family photos for archives, like that
at the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore.
“Fran has been an invaluable source of information about the lives of the
lighthouse keepers and their families,” says Robert W. Mackreth, cultural
resource management specialist at the lakeshore. “She’s been very generous
in sharing her memories of her time on Outer and Raspberry islands, not
only in her writings, but also any time I've called her with a question.”
One of Fran’s earliest memories came from being “scolded,” one might say,
by the Two Harbors lighthouse. The toddler, forbidden to venture beyond
the keeper’s dwelling, once tested those limits.
“I took my tricycle, and I rode beyond the keeper’s house, headed for the
fog signal. The foghorn blasted, and I lost control of my little tricycle.
It knocked the breath out of me. I never forgot that.”
Lake Superior taught lessons large and small. On her first trip to Outer
Island, she got too much lake.
“Here were these enormous waves in the northwest channel, 10 to 12 feet.
I had to lay on the locker in the boat. I got very, very sick. Dad wanted
me to look up at the tower, but I was far too sick.”
The storm forced the boat to anchor at the south end of Outer Island. From
there, without benefit of a path, the family walked to the lighthouse on
the northern point.
“It was about 10 miles along the shoreline. We got there at sunset. We
are the only ones who have ever walked the length of Outer Island following
the shoreline. To me, that was kind of a special adventure.”
She recalls another adventure returning to the mainland. Families usually
remained on the islands from April until early November, when women and
children were ordered to leave. Keepers remained for another month. Fran
says her dad usually returned by Dec. 6, her birthday.
On one late-season crossing to Bayfield, a storm coated keepers in ice.
Fishermen pulled her nearly frozen father out at the dock.
“His ice-covered Mackinaw stood (by itself) on the floor,” says Fran. He
told the family, “I thought I was a goner.”
Sometimes, Lake Superior became Fran’s playmate.
As a bobby-socked teen, she belted out Sinatra tunes from the shores of
Raspberry Island.
“Singing to all the waves, they were my vast and endless audience.”
Also as a dreamy teen, Fran knew she would marry some dark-eyed, black-haired
sailor named Jim.
“I wound up marrying a blonde, blue-eyed engineer whose name is Emil,”
she says from her home in Kalamazoo, Michigan.
Life could be fun for lighthouse kids. Here at Outer Island
Light station in 1938, Fran Carpenter, third from left with pup, takes
time from play with cousin Ruth Sundquist, who holds Fran’s sister, Lucy,
and two Devil’s Island keepers’ children, Dick Seseman and Adoree Evans.
APOSTLE
ISLANDS NATIONAL LAKESHORE
One of Fran’s earliest memories came from being “scolded,” one might say,
by the Two Harbors lighthouse. The toddler, forbidden to venture beyond
the keeper’s dwelling, once tested those limits.
“I took my tricycle, and I rode beyond the keeper’s house, headed for the
fog signal. The foghorn blasted, and I lost control of my little tricycle.
It knocked the breath out of me. I never forgot that.”
Lake Superior taught lessons large and small. On her first trip to Outer
Island, she got too much lake.
“Here were these enormous waves in the northwest channel, 10 to 12 feet.
I had to lay on the locker in the boat. I got very, very sick. Dad wanted
me to look up at the tower, but I was far too sick.”
The storm forced the boat to anchor at the south end of Outer Island. From
there, without benefit of a path, the family walked to the lighthouse on
the northern point.
“It was about 10 miles along the shoreline. We got there at sunset. We
are the only ones who have ever walked the length of Outer Island following
the shoreline. To me, that was kind of a special adventure.”
She recalls another adventure returning to the mainland. Families usually
remained on the islands from April until early November, when women and
children were ordered to leave. Keepers remained for another month. Fran
says her dad usually returned by Dec. 6, her birthday.
On one late-season crossing to Bayfield, a storm coated keepers in ice.
Fishermen pulled her nearly frozen father out at the dock.
“His ice-covered Mackinaw stood (by itself) on the floor,” says Fran. He
told the family, “I thought I was a goner.”
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