Township Trustee Aleksi Mota, the lead Finnish-American trustee, seconded the motion within a second. The motion carried unanimously.
The bar opened to the public for pasty service at 8:14 p.m. Cora had baked four trays; they were gone by 8:47.
Margaret Kilroy pleaded out in August to 7 of the 11 state counts. She drew 36 months in Michigan State Correctional, with 18 months suspended on conditions including full restitution and a permanent ban from any officer position in any Michigan HOA for the remainder of her life.
Daniel Kilroy pleaded out in federal court in October to two counts of wire fraud and one count of Clean Water Act felony violation. He drew 27 months in federal custody and was personally ordered to pay $147,000 to the EPA for the tank cleanup, in addition to $214,000 in restitution to the HOA reserve fund.
The EPA pumped, excavated, and decommissioned the tank between April 16th and June 14th. The soil remediation was certified complete on October 28th. The HOA paid the bill.
The Birch Harbor Estates HOA recalled Margaret by emergency vote on April 23rd and elected Joyce Larkin interim president. Joyce's first official act on April 24th was to drive to my gas station in her Subaru, walk past the bait cooler my father died on the steps of, and ask Cora and me if Birch Harbor Estates could co-host a Lake Superior cleanup day on Memorial Day weekend with Oakdale Township. Cora said yes before I had finished my coffee.
The Memorial Day cleanup brought 141 volunteers to the shoreline. 11 dump trucks of trash, tires, and old refrigerators were hauled out. Pella Laitinen brought his pickup, Bobby brought his snowplow trailer, Cora brought four trays of pasties, Officer Polansky brought his dog, and Joyce Larkin brought her Subaru and a 30-foot extension cord for the leaf blowers.
I converted the back lot of my gas station into a community fuel co-op in November. The co-op offers Oakdale residents at or below the township low-income threshold a 5-cent-per-gallon discount on home heating fuel between November 1st and March 31st each year, funded by a portion of the station's regular fuel margin and matched by an annual contribution from the new Birch Harbor Estates HOA at Joyce's request. The co-op served 61 households in its first winter. The cost to the station was approximately $12,000; the cost to the HOA was a matching $12,000. The benefit to Oakdale was, in the words of an elderly Finnish-American woman named Mrs. Heikkinen, "the difference between a warm house and a cold house this winter."
Bobby got the township snowplow contract starting in November. Cora rebuilt the pasty display case to hold eight trays instead of four. I bought a small framed photograph of my grandfather Esko Hollis standing in front of the station on opening day in May of 1962, and hung it above the register where my sister has stood since 1985.
I still work as Chief of the Oakdale Police Department. I work the occasional Friday night patrol shift. The cops I work with do not, mostly, mention the Margaret Kilroy case—they do not have to.
The fuel co-op discount is administered through a simple paper card Cora prints on cardstock at the station every October. The cardstock is the same color as the pasty box stamp she has been using since 1985. Each household gets a card with their name and a number. Cora rings the discount manually on the register. We do not check incomes after the first enrollment; we trust our neighbors. In the years since the co-op opened, we have not had a single household try to game the discount. We have had three households call in December and ask to be removed because they had received a raise and did not feel right keeping the card. We re-enrolled all three the following October, because raises in this part of the country are not, generally, raises that last.
Officer Daniel Polansky was promoted to sergeant in December 2024 on the strength of his handling of the January 14th incident. His mother Helena and grandmother Inkeri (who was my third-grade teacher in 1976) sat in the second row at his ceremony.
Bobby and Jenny had their third son in March of 2025: Theodore Esko Hollis. The boy has my mother's eyes and my father's hands.
Cora retired from the day-to-day at the gas station in May of 2025. Her oldest daughter Ainsley, 28, took over the register in June—the fourth generation of Hollis women at the front counter. Ainsley has a math degree from Northern Michigan and a tattoo of a raven on her wrist. She is, in the language of Upper Peninsula commerce, the most powerful private citizen of Oakdale, Michigan, in waiting.
I still own the station. I still keep my grandfather's photograph above the register. I still bring a thermos of coffee in on Tuesday mornings for the regulars. Sulo Kantelli still comes in at 7:14 a.m. on Saturdays for two pasties and a Vernors. Rita comes in on Sunday afternoons for gas and a chat. Jonas Salmela stops by during deer season. The bay outside the window still freezes solid for four months every winter and breaks up around April 22nd.
The flagpole at the gas station still flies my grandfather's 1962 48-star American flag on most days the weather allows—the same flag he hoisted on opening day, May 19th, 1962, three months before Alaska and Hawaii officially joined the Union. Esko had bought it in 1958 from a Sears catalog and refused, on principle, to ever replace it. We take it down on rough wind days, and put it up again the next morning. It has been on the same pole for 63 years.