Rubin: As a Mackinac Island fudge-maker passes on, a golden era shines brighter
It's only fitting that even before he was in the candy business on Mackinac Island, the story of Bob Benser Sr. involved a fudge paddle.
The story also includes handshakes as contracts, elaborate breakfasts at a hunting lodge and a long devotion to high school sports and popcorn. But the paddle awakened it all.
Benser, known around the Original Murdick's Fudge shops as Mr. B, died Saturday at 95 in Naples, Florida. He lived to see an era where corporations and hedge funds are dipping a toe on Mackinac, but he was a reminder of the days when nerve and perspiration could jump-start a life in a town without cars.
You don't want to call him the last of an era, because that might leave some people out, and the eras overlap like shingles at a place that's been attracting tourists since the 1850s.
He was part of a generation of entrepreneurs, though, who had a vision for what Mackinac Island might become, or at least what they might become on the island.
"He was born to hard work, common sense and treating people right," said Robert "Bobby" Benser Jr., 60. "He had nothing to lose, and he just went for it."
"These guys personified the '60s," said Tim Hygh, executive director of the island's tourism and convention bureaus, and then he started going through a mental checklist.
Doc Chambers of the carriage company, still with us. Dan Musser Jr. of the Grand Hotel, died in 2013. Frank Nephew, Bob's frequent partner, six years gone, with his daughter, Nancy Porter, overseeing that family's operation the way Bobby largely handles things for the Bensers.
“I’m a newcomer here. Only 14 years,” Hygh said, but he knew Benser for 40, from when he ran a charity golf outing for Special Olympics at Shanty Creek Resort in Bellaire.
The fudge patriarch and his friends would spring free from the island for a day, have a great time, “and if we were short of a goal, say we had $7,000 when we needed $10,000, they’d throw the cash in,” Hygh said.
“If you needed to get something accomplished, they’d get it done.”
From the ground up
Benser's road to Mackinac and beyond started in Gaylord in 1929, not quite six months before Wall Street imploded. He grew up there as an all-around athlete and then became an all-around hustler, in the best sense, with time out for the Army and the Korean War.
He did maintenance work, sold linens across northern Michigan, and moved the metal at a Chevy dealership in Grand Rapids. Then, at 26, he decided to sell soft-serve ice cream on Mackinac Island — which meant borrowing the money from a doctor friend, and then building the shop by hand.
His high school buddy, Frank Nephew, had some construction experience. Together, they put up a 400-square-foot cinder block Tastee-Freez, with room in the back for a bed and a shower.
Next door, Jerome and Grace Murdick ran a fudge shop. The Murdicks had a long and riveting history of their own, dating to sailmakers who came to Mackinac in the 1880s to stitch canvas awnings for the Grand Hotel.
What's important to modern-day Mackinac is that they became friends with Benser Sr., a heavy sleeper who Jerome would rattle out of bed by smacking a fudge paddle against his window.
The Murdicks came to see him as a surrogate son, then a valued pinch-hitter when Jerome took ill, and finally as the heir to the Original Murdick's name when he bought the business in 1969.
As a boss, Bobby said, he could bark, oh yes. But "he never fired anybody," Bobby said. "He'd just say, 'We're going to teach 'em the right way to do things.' "
Sharing the bounty
Benser considered Gaylord home and was a fixture at high school sporting events there, long after Bobby and his three sisters had graduated, always cheering and always with popcorn in hand.
He kept houses there, on Mackinac and in Naples, a reward for courage, acumen and trust.
Early on, he and Nephew begged and borrowed to buy the Chatterbox diner across the street, now the site of the Lilac Tree Suites, working on simple faith and an understanding they'd be fair with one another.
Other ventures followed. In 1984, he and Nephew and a few other old-line names bought the Chippewa Hotel and Pink Pony bar, a significant and wise purchase.
That was a decade after he, his wife, Gigi, and some of the others helped fund the restoration of the Round Island lighthouse. Prosperity, he had quickly realized, is like fudge — more enjoyable when it's shared.
"He used to make the best breakfast ever at deer camp," Bobby said, even if he had to pump his own water at the deliberately rustic spot called the Spike Horn Club. "He'd have three or four different meats. The only problem is, it took three hours."
His dad was quietly funny, Bobby said. He loved big family dinners on the island, and he'd always take the seat with his back to the view. He loved golf, traveled widely to play it and dispensed advice not because he was good, he'd say, but because he listened to people who were.
His funeral will be 11 a.m. June 28 at St. Anne’s Catholic Church on the island. A celebration of life will follow at the logical spot, the Pink Pony. Survivors and memorials and such can be found at dignitymemorial.com.
Meantime, it's summer on Mackinac Island, home to three of what has grown to eight Original Murdick's Fudge shops. The next two generations of Bensers are at work, with more coming.
"We still think of ourselves as a small business," Bobby said, and if that's underselling things a bit, forgive him. It comes from his foundation, the one laid by hand.
Reach Neal Rubin at NARubin@freepress.com.
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This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Death of Murdick's Fudge owner Benser a reminder of simpler Mackinac
