Secrets of Cash’s Lakeside Inn revealed

by Peter Jakey–Managing Editor

Only a few have walked through the doorway of the former Cash’s Lakeside Inn since it closed around 1959. And not many more will ever get to go in the boarded-up building, as local businessman Preston Mertz, who purchased the building in 2019, will be razing it on a date to be determined.

Mertz has plans for the five lots, but none that he wants to make public. 

The structure at the corner of West Third and State streets was once owned by Cash and Jennie Gapczynski. 

Through the front door of the bar, it is dark inside, and as Mertz commented, “colder inside than outside.” There are only two lights on near the back wall, or lakeside of the building. 

The curtains are still up in some windows while others are torn and stained. Ceiling tiles have fallen or are about to fall.  The wooden floors creak with every step and are pushed up in different spots. 

In the middle of the bar, on the west wall there is square area cut out of the wall that once was a place of vibrant entertainment. 

“Cash would have entertainment there, big bands and such,” said Cash and Jennie’s grandson, Jeff Gapczynski. “He was well known for having this awesome entertainment. Back in those days, people loved to dance and go out. I know he told me stories that he hired bands as far away as Milwaukee and Chicago to come to Rogers City and play.”

There is a piano still sitting on the stage, and probably has been there since patrons ordered up one more before heading home for the night. 

On the other side of the stage is a sprawling living quarters with a living room on the Third Street side, where Jeff saw The Beatles for the first time on “The Ed Sullivan Show,” he fondly remembers. There was a kitchen/dining room and three bedrooms toward the back on the lakeside.

“That’s where my grandparents lived, along with their two sons,” said Jeff.

In a far back bedroom was an old Presque Isle County Advance from the spring of 1970 and a TV Guide with the Mod Squad on the cover. Cash and Jennie moved out in 1971 after building a home along West Third, up the hill from U.S.-23.

“When my grandfather went into the automobile business and selling farm machinery and implements, the bar was run by Tony Kowalski,” Jeff said. “I can remember as a little boy when my Dad Leo would bartend. I was 6 or 7. That would have been 1958 or 1959. It’s about the time the bar closed.”

When Cash went into business, he had been working at the Calcite plant, Jeff said.  Cash went into the windshield business in the mid- to late 1960s and the building served as a warehouse.

“One of the things that went on is we had a lot of breaking and enterings in the building,” said Jeff.