* Art Tebo, Past COO Boyne USA

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:21):
Tony Cupboard. Is this song by Ted Nugent? It sure is.

Speaker 2 (00:25):
Yes, back in the wall again.

Speaker 1 (00:30):
It's an appropriate song to bring on Ar Tibou, one
of the most interesting people you will ever meet, because
he's a great outdoorsman and that could be fishing, hunting, golf,
you name it, just taking a boat rider, just looking
off his deck on Walloon Lake. And as we are
here once again twenty twenty five rifle season, the harbinger

(00:52):
of the holiday. He was the cooo at Boyn USA
for decades and help Everett Kircher and then Stephen Kircher
created the empire that stretches all across the United States.
And a veteran too and a good friend to many.
He was also on the board at Farah State University
and a member of the Michigan Travel Commission. And he's

(01:13):
with us right now on our radio stage, our at
and T Line Art t BA. Welcome back to the airwaves.
The inventor too of the snow melt contest. And I
don't think at Walloon there's snow on the ground just yet,
is there? Or is there?

Speaker 3 (01:26):
Well? Actually, I'm over at hunting camp a couple of
days early, just to sit by the fire and chill
out and look at the wonderful wildness that we have here. Deer, beer, turkeys,
and you know what, there's an eaglesniff that I go
just sit in wonder about how thankful we are to

(01:47):
live where we live in Michigan.

Speaker 1 (01:50):
Just can you love the nature as you mentioned and
the creatures that you mentioned and still harvest them, because
you know, hundreds of thighs thousands of deer will be
taken in the next two weeks harvested if you will.

Speaker 3 (02:04):
Yeah, I think it was about one hundred and eighty
thousand last year, Michael. But you know what, I also
yesterday had to go back all about one hundred miles
to my home because I forgot the Polish sausage for
our luncheons, and I counted seven dead deer along the highway.
And when I went down to Plymouth two weeks ago

(02:25):
to see my daughter, I think I counted ten on
us seventy five. So the reality is is that we
are not killing enough deer or harvesting enough deer, and
we have good need as you know right now, there
are so many people that are hungry, and I've been

(02:47):
able to get my guys in my club help take
a dozen deer or so to the man of food bank,
in which the Rotary Club of Potoski in this case
pays for the processing, and those hundreds of pounds of
meat go out within three days, so those who really
need food should not feel bad about harvesting deer.

Speaker 1 (03:13):
Somebody asked me the other day, and I was ignorant
to the answer, like I am for most things. What
is the best way to consume venison?

Speaker 3 (03:21):
Well, I have a trick of venison chili. But the
roast you can cook just like any roast and with
potatoes and carrots, and it's fantastic. But if you're a
little schemeishe about the taste? But they shouldn't be, because
if you trim the fat and all the tallow off

(03:45):
the meat, it's exquisite. The elk is even even better.

Speaker 1 (03:53):
Did you say you drove a hundred miles round trip
back and forth to get Polish sausage?

Speaker 3 (03:58):
Yep, it was a the Chevrolet. You know. There is
a friend of mine down at hamp in Highland Park
owns the Chevy Cadillac dealership, is a connoisseur of sausage,
and he cannot come up this year they went out

(04:19):
elk hunting. So he brought up to me in Walloon
ten or fifteen pounds of Polish sausage. That's very well done.
And Stanford Chevrolet, by the way, put to plug it
for him. Good people, but they are they're just good
people and they know that. We always have a good camaraderie.

(04:42):
And there's about fourteen of us that get together for
lunch and maybe the deer go by and we don't
see one, but that's all right.

Speaker 1 (04:53):
Do you speaking of that, do you think you have
more pictures of wildlife that you've taken from your luxury
blind or more deer that you've taken.

Speaker 3 (05:02):
Well, I went thirty four years with an eight point
or better. In the last five years, all I've been
shooting our doze and yeah, I used to be able
to shoot three hundred yards. Now I'm lucky to see thirty.

Speaker 1 (05:17):
But are you a good shot? Though?

Speaker 3 (05:20):
Yes, yes, I was trained by special forces in Vietnam
and a couple of LURPS teams and they got me
out there about five six hundred yards. But the last
few years I just don't do it. I've done that,
I've been there, and I just love, the peace and

(05:43):
tranquility of sitting in the woods. You really do get
a chance to self reflect. And as you know, my
bride died a few weeks ago, and I'm ready for
it now. You know. There's no anger, no frustration, no sorrow.
All you see is that smile that Joanie had. And

(06:03):
the people that are my camp all wanted to come
up and have condolences, and I said it was her turn.
It was her turn. It was not good and it
was a long three months. But you know what, your audience,
I'm sure many people have had those same feelings, and
you just come to peace with it.

Speaker 1 (06:25):
How many years were you married to Jonie?

Speaker 3 (06:28):
Well that's part of the problem because they're kind of saying,
not only was she sweet, but she's Saint Joan because
she's married to me for fifty five years. Fifty five
years there had been together, and she tolerated me coming
over here for a week or ten days to hunt.
But I guess I think it cost me some holidays,

(06:49):
all the Montana, Big Sky and weeks with her girlfriends
in Hawaii. So I think she got even.

Speaker 1 (06:57):
And she was an artist. It's fairness, isn't it.

Speaker 3 (07:01):
Yeah? And I guess I can tell you this, but
she got a four point in her Master's of Fine
Arts and Ceramics, and she has three bowls that are
just absolutely pristine. And so I have her ashes in
one of those bowls, and she's going to have to
wait for me, and we'll be spread out together somewhere

(07:24):
in northern Michigan. But you're right, you've had some of
her Christmas cards. I mean, every year she would take
six or seven caricatures of animals around a Christmas tree
and call it a circle of friends or peace this winter.
The most notable, Michael was, she made one after nine

(07:45):
to eleven with all the people that died from all
the countries. She made a bear, she made a deer,
she made a sheep, what else, squirrels, And they were
all different colors that to her represented the people in
the world that had to get together and share the

(08:06):
sorrow of nine to eleven. So she had some great
thoughts too.

Speaker 1 (08:12):
What a beautiful woman and a beautiful smile. You're right.
And I was blessed to be at your home a
number of times, and you know, we'd come trooping in
there after golf or whatever it might be. And you know,
I could imagine where a wife would be like, oh God,
I've got to entertain these fools again. But never it
was always the biggest, warmest welcome.

Speaker 3 (08:30):
Yeah, she had the best temperament because she had to
put up with me and and all my crazy friends.
But it was a good, good marriage, and that she
supplemented all the bad things in my life and all
the bad things that I went through, and now all

(08:51):
the good things too.

Speaker 1 (08:52):
So Saint Joan of Tebow will continue with our tea Bow.
He's in his deer blind right now, the dear man
and his dear late wife.

Speaker 4 (09:06):
Oh, hunting we will go, and the hunting we will go.

Speaker 1 (09:13):
You've got your box and putting in a box and
a tradition to speak to Art Tiba from his luxury
dear blind somewhere in the Gaillard area. Of course. He
lives on Walloon Lake and was the longtime COO of Boying, USA,
very creative a fellow and his wife Joni just passed

(09:36):
away a couple of weeks ago. And Art, did you
know Joni before you went to Vietnam? Or when did
you meet her? And how did you meet her?

Speaker 3 (09:45):
Well, at Boyne Mountain, I was waiting for security clearance
to go into the cover espionage business in the army,
and it was going to take about four or five
months to get your security clearance. And I'm from Gaillard
and I want to to Boyne Mountain to see a
friend of mine who was working, as they called them,
a riot squatter, which means they would do any job

(10:08):
Kircher would ever. Kircher would have you go in ticket sales,
ski rental, go out and wash pots and pans, or
clearing dishes, or go to the ski shop, or sell
lift tickets and anyway. He looked at me and he says,
your name is Tibou. Do you have anything to do now?
And I said no, I'm just sitting around, and so

(10:28):
he put me to work. And that was in sixty
six December. In sixty seven, I went off and went
into training and went to war and then Washington, d C.
And I came back in nineteen seventy and I made
the mistake of stopping at Boyne Mountain and mister Kircher,
there's no staff here. Would you go to work at

(10:49):
the desk for me? And I said, well, I'm going
back to college. And he said, well, I only need
you for thirty days. And so I'm sitting there at
the desk at eight o'clock at night watching Flip Wilson
on black and white TV in the lobby, and incomes
these two hot women and they stand right in front

(11:10):
of the TV, and I wanted her to the desk.
Went over and picked up Joy and put her on
the desk, and I said, you're beautiful, but I was
watching Flip Wilson.

Speaker 1 (11:22):
That's a pretty good open line.

Speaker 3 (11:24):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (11:25):
She was.

Speaker 3 (11:26):
Four years later when we were married, she said, I said,
I'm going to marry that guy. So those women they
had an agenda back in those days, and she was
strong enough to outweait me or make sure that I
understood that I was the one. And that's the truth
that was. I tell people that I found her passed

(11:48):
out in the pool table in the bar at two
thirty in the morning. But that didn't work very well.

Speaker 1 (11:55):
So you went from the front desk to COO Boy
in USA.

Speaker 3 (12:02):
That's correct. I was twenty when I got out of college,
which was in seventy one or seventy two. I'm getting
older now, you know. Seventy two he sent me up
to be the manager of Boy in Highlands and I
was twenty four years old, I think, and I was
there fourteen years and we did a pretty good job

(12:23):
up there. And then Chuck Ball, the longtime COO, the
only non owner in the company running the company, I
took his place and I stayed there for twenty years. So, yes,
right place at the wrong time. I tell people when
I do a little speeches somewhere, and you know, well,

(12:44):
look at the people we met. I met you John McMurray,
the great weather man, JP McCarthy, Jim Saban, Jim Flick,
the golfer in his Jack, a little guy named Jack Nicholas,
and people like that. The issue, though, is it didn't

(13:07):
matter if you were the president or peon, and I
met President Gerald Ford's you just treat people like human beings.
After you spend time blowing up things and doing the opposite,
I said, I want to do something for somebody if
I get out of here, and it just happened I

(13:28):
was able to do.

Speaker 1 (13:29):
That was your wedding at Boyne.

Speaker 3 (13:34):
Yes, and that's where we're going to have for a
celebration of life. We took a chair lift up the
top of Boyne Highlands to a chapel, had a service,
came back down and had a beautiful meal in the lodge,
and then went to Japan, Hong Kong and Thailand for

(13:54):
our honeymoon. And that's where I met a guy that
we can talk about maybe on Monday. Is the pure
Michigan and how that the basic loops of how pure
Michigan started and I was part of that. I just
I'm real proud of that.

Speaker 1 (14:15):
Thank you for that, by the way, and for sharing
the stories of your honeymoon and your wedding and your
marriage and the love that you had for over fifty
years and will live on forever because it's the strongest
force in the universe. Before you go with the two
minutes left, I wish you a good opening day tomorrow.
And were there times in Vietnam when you were out
in the jungle that you thought about Northern Michigan's forests

(14:39):
And are there time in Northern Michigan's forests that remind
you of being alone maybe in the jungle.

Speaker 3 (14:46):
No, in the jungle it was so hot and that
you were so afraid. But what it did, though is
make you appreciate what we have here in Northern Michigan.
At our hunting camp, for instance, we took one hundred
acres of oak and harvested because it was going to die,
and we tipped the money and fenced it. In ten

(15:08):
years ago we took the fence down, and now the
flora and the fauna can't eat up all the food
in the understudy is beautiful. The oak trees are coming up,
and that's going to be one of the landmarks eighty
or one hundred years from now that we reforested and

(15:29):
made the ground beautiful here in northern Michigan.

Speaker 1 (15:35):
There was a TV show that came after Happy Days
called Jonie Loves Chachi, and Joni loved Already and already
loved her, and he loved Flip Wilson and he loves
Michigan and the great outdoors and Boyne and we love you.
Have a beautiful weekend, whatever that means, and enjoy that
Polish sausage. You sure put in the miles to get it.

(15:57):
From Michigan Monday, Vietnam to galored Artbo will touch base
on Monday. What a man a legend in Northern Michigan
with MPs. That's where we're heard on WMKT and radio
stations across the state worldwide atmibig show dot com. Here's

(16:20):
Flip Wilson's theme song, thanks to Tony Cuppard and the
orchestras show.

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