Fifty-Six Years Later, Lakeside's Ice Cream Still Costs Five Dollars

Rain moved the whole thing indoors this year. On August 1, the annual Lakeside Ice Cream Social was supposed to happen under a tent in Lakeside Park, the way it has for decades, but the forecast pushed more than 100 people into Lakeside United Methodist Church instead. Nobody seemed to mind. Scoops of Bridgman supplied the ice cream. The cake auction ran as scheduled, and Susan Szymanski's three-layer carrot cake, built with toasted walnuts, coconut, pineapple and cream cheese frosting, drew a winning bid of $425. Somebody in the room offered to double it if a second carrot cake got baked for them too, and the offer was taken. By the time auctioneer Pam Fiebig closed out the evening with a New York cheesecake finished in brandy blueberry sauce, that cake alone had pulled the day's top bid of $1,000.

The whole event raised more than $7,000. Entry was five dollars, same as it has been for years.

That gap between five-dollar admission and thousand-dollar cake bids is the whole story of how Lakeside works, and it is worth sitting with for a second before moving on to the parade and the cleanup days and everything else on the calendar. This is not a town where a chamber of commerce or a township office runs the summer. It is a volunteer association, older than most of the cottages it serves, and the money moves through it in exactly the shape you'd expect from neighbors funding neighbors: small entry fees, oversized generosity at auction, and a scholarship fund at the other end that turns cake money into tuition money for kids who grew up two streets over.

Where This Actually Started

The Lakeside Association didn't begin as a nonprofit with a mission statement. It began as a letter. In 1969, local postmaster Jim Budak wrote to his neighbors suggesting they form a group dedicated to improving the community, and that idea is still the operating structure behind everything Lakeside does publicly today. This year marks the Association's 56th, a number its current president, Susan Phelan, called out herself at the August social, noting that many people in the room had lived in Lakeside longer than she had, but that the group's age was still something worth remarking on.

What's notable is how little the format has drifted from Budak's original premise. The Association still runs on volunteers. It still funds itself through small, recurring community events rather than membership dues or grants. And it still ties its fundraising directly back to the town's own kids, specifically through scholarships awarded each year to graduating seniors from River Valley High School. This year's recipients were Macie Maerz, Devin Stankiewicz and Landon Rogers, named publicly at the same event where the carrot cake sold for $425.

The Calendar Is the Budget

If you've lived in Lakeside for any stretch of summers, you already know the shape of the year even if you've never thought about who's actually running it:

• Memorial Day Ceremony at Lakeside Cemetery, held jointly with the New Buffalo American Legion Post and the Chikaming Parks Department
• The July 4th Parade down Lakeside's main stretch, complete with a kazoo band that shows up every year without fail
• The Ice Cream Social and cake auction in August, funding the scholarship fund
• An Adopt-A-Road cleanup along the Association's stretch of Red Arrow Highway
• Mingle and Munch, an informal end-of-summer gathering at the Lakeside Inn

None of these are large events by any objective measure. The road cleanup takes about an hour with teams of two working assigned stretches. The parade is, by the Association's own description, "the biggest little parade" in the area, which is an honest way of saying it's modest and everyone shows up anyway. But taken together, they form something closer to a municipal budget than a social calendar. Every one of them either raises money for the scholarship fund, maintains public space the town actually uses, or marks a civic occasion that a bigger jurisdiction would otherwise absorb into something less personal.

That's the piece easy to miss if you're new here or just visiting for a season. Lakeside doesn't have its own city government running these functions. It has this one association, unbroken since 1969, doing the work that elsewhere gets split across a parks department, a veterans' affairs office, and a separate nonprofit fundraising arm. Here it's one group, one calendar, one fund.

The Geography That Holds It Together

The events happen in specific places, and those places do double duty as the everyday infrastructure of the town. Lakeside Park is where the Ice Cream Social normally sets up its tent and where the July 4th Parade effectively terminates. Lakeside Cemetery, tucked near Red Arrow Highway on Lakeside Road, is where the Memorial Day Ceremony happens every year, a working cemetery that also functions as the town's most visible civic gathering point twice a year. The Lakeside Inn, a National Register of Historic Places property with its 100-foot lake-facing porch, hosts Mingle and Munch as an informal cap to the summer season, the same porch where guests have been reading and rocking for over a century.

Red Arrow Highway itself is the connective tissue. It's the road the Adopt-A-Road volunteers clean, the road the antique shops and small galleries line, and the road that runs past both the cemetery and the park. If you want a quieter version of the same rhythm, Robinson Woods Preserve sits a short drive off East Road, an 80-acre forest of beech, maple and oak managed by Chikaming Open Lands, with loop trails that don't show up on any parade route but see plenty of dog walkers on the mornings after a busy holiday weekend.

None of this is manufactured charm. It's what's left when a town this size decides to run its own civic life through one long-running volunteer group instead of outsourcing pieces of it. The kazoo band isn't a marketing decision. Neither is the fact that a cake auction can still clear $7,000 in a room full of neighbors who all know each other's names.

What's Still Ahead This Year

The Ice Cream Social is behind us for 2026, but the Association's calendar doesn't stop there. Adopt-A-Road cleanups typically continue into the fall, and Mingle and Munch remains the informal way the community closes out the season before things quiet down for winter. If you've never made it to one of these, the ask is low and the payoff is mostly social: five dollars for cake and ice cream, an hour with a trash bag along a stretch of highway you drive every week anyway, or an evening on a historic porch with people who've been doing this since before most of us moved in.

What makes it worth paying attention to isn't nostalgia for its own sake. It's that the system still works exactly the way Jim Budak apparently hoped it would in 1969: small contributions, visible results, and a scholarship fund that turns a Tuesday night of cake bidding into real tuition dollars for three River Valley graduates every year. Fifty-six years is a long time for a volunteer structure to hold its shape without turning into something more bureaucratic or more corporate. Lakeside's hasn't.

If you're already living here, none of this needs to change how you spend your summer. It might just be worth knowing, the next time you drop five dollars at the door of an ice cream social, that the number on that carrot cake later in the evening is doing more work than it looks like.

If you're weighing a move to Lakeside or anywhere else along the Harbor Country coast and want the kind of local context that doesn't show up in a listing description, Choose Chad Team knows this stretch of Southwest Michigan block by block. Let's Connect.