For Upper Peninsula restaurant owner, hard work is a distraction from pain

GWINN – It was early in the morning. Still dark outside. Shannon Greathouse was all alone, and she had a lot on her mind.

She picked up a sharp knife.

There were the everyday things, like tasks to do, places to be, the stress of being a small restaurant owner during a never-ending pandemic. And, of course, her children.

But as always, in the background, was a past that followed like a shadow.

There was the memory of her stepfather quietly sneaking into her bedroom at night when she was a little girl, over and over, and doing things to her. The memory of her estranged husband repeatedly breaking into her home to rape her. The memory of being homeless with three kids not long ago. And the memory of what just happened to her little brother, which still makes her cry.

She took the knife and began chopping a pile of potatoes, making big pieces into little, manageable ones.

“This is like a coping mechanism,” the 38-year-old said. “It’s something to do to basically calm my head down. I’m unmedicated, so this is my medication. I’ll even tell people, ‘You can ask me questions, but I’m not going to make eye contact or put a lot of thought into my answers.’ Because this is my quiet time.”

Greathouse is the owner and chef at Shannon’s Home Cooking, a little family style restaurant in the small, Upper Peninsula town of Gwinn. When she opened it two summers ago, she had no formal culinary training, no experience running a business, and she opened a restaurant in a part of the Upper Peninsula where people usually close businesses, not start new ones.

She’s also the owner of Dis n’ Dat, an indoor flea market. She also owns Model Tots, a kids’ resale clothing store. She also runs a catering business. She also cooks at the local VFW once a week. And she was also looking into partnering on yet another resale business at an abandoned Air Force base nearby. She’s constantly, frantically busy.

All her life, whenever things became too stressful, she worked. When she was little, she picked wild apples and sold them to deer hunters for a few bucks to use as bait. When her husband demanded that she stay at home day and night to raise their kids, she started a home resale business with leftovers from people’s garage sales. When she was trying to get out of a domestic violence shelter after leaving him, she worked 16-hour days as a dishwasher. And while her kids remained thousands of miles away thanks to a miserable custody arrangement, she opened one small business after another to keep herself too busy to think about it all anymore.

Greathouse has known lots of people who developed addictions to alcohol or drugs to numb traumatic pasts like hers. But her escape — her addiction, she admits — is work.

“I’m hard on myself, but after everything I’ve been through, I’m not doing drugs on the side of the road. I mean, obviously, I choose other things to be addicted to, like sacrifice, or working until I don’t have to think. That’s how I cope.”

She looked down again and went back to quiet time with her knife.

* * *

Greathouse grew up nearby in a place called Northland, a rural outpost founded by a lumber company a century ago in the western Upper Peninsula, not far from Gwinn.

Life was rough from the start.

“I remember being like 3 or 4 years old and my stepdad asking if I wanted to make a dollar,” she said. “In my head, as a child, I was excited because I thought we were physically going to create a dollar bill. So I willingly went with him, excited. And I blacked out the rest of it, so I know it obviously wasn’t good.”

The abuse went on for years, she said, and she would try, in a little kid way, to stop it. “I would be sleeping under my brother’s bed to hide. I would hide under the clothes. I would set up things in the way of my bedroom door so it would be dark, and he would trip on ‘em or something.”

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It didn’t work. At one point, she gathered the courage to speak up and try to get help. “When I told my mom what happened to me she wanted to give me away,” Greathouse said. “She was like, ‘You’re going to go live with your aunt if you’re going to tell lies like that.’ ” Her stepfather was never reported for his actions with her. But he was later convicted for criminal sexual conduct with someone else very young — the very same behavior Greathouse described.

After college she moved to Texas to escape. One day, while working at a hardware store, she met a guy. “He just came in and he was all dressed up in his cowboy gear, and I was like 'Hmmm, this is interesting,' ” she said, smiling. “And he just kept coming back.”

They were married for 10 years and had three kids. But their relationship, she said, grew violent.

“But he never hit me in the face to leave bruises,” she said. “So that was always my thing — ‘I don’t have a bruise, so it’s not real abuse.’ I grew up in a very violent environment, with alcohol and domestic violence and fighting, so in my head it’s like, 'well this happens and it works itself out,' ‘cause as a kid I saw it all the time. I thought that was part of marriage.”

When she finally left her husband six years ago, she and the kids languished in a domestic violence shelter until a friend took pity and started a GoFundMe campaign to get her enough money to move back home to Michigan for a fresh start.

“I mentally couldn’t be around someone that raped me,” she said. “I couldn’t function and I didn’t want to be on welfare my whole life and watch my kids watching me with my tail between my legs, scared all the time. So I came home.”

* * *

The morning cook and the day’s waitress arrived as the restaurant opened for breakfast, giving Greathouse some time to check in at her other businesses.

She pulled her truck into the parking lot of Dis n’ Dat, her flea market. Inside, near the front, was a selection of works by local artists. Down another aisle, some Michigan souvenirs for visitors to take home. In the rest of the store, every kind of household thing; much of it vintage, all of it cheap.

“There’s not a lot of stuff in town, and a lot of the people are low income and don’t have vehicles,” she said. “They only can get to Marquette, to town, like once a week if they’re lucky. So this is somewhere local where they can get most of their stuff beyond Family Dollar and Dollar General. That’s what I was trying to aim for.”

Gwinn was created in 1907 as a ‘model town’ that was planned and platted for the families of the men working in the new local iron mine. It was named after the mine owner’s mother. The street layout was designed by a famed East Coast landscape architect, and featured rows of leafy trees on quaint boulevards. But the mine ran out of ore, shut down in 1946 and sold the last of its land to local homeowners, whose numbers have dwindled ever since to about 2,000 now. But to this day, the middle school and high school sports teams are still called the Modeltowners.

Greathouse worked almost constantly after coming home, holding five jobs at one point, including at two pizza places, at a deli inside a gas station and at the local VFW, where she bartended solely for tips. Slowly she saved $1,500, which she used to rent the building that became her resale shop.

One day, she brought homemade brownies to the VFW to sell for a few extra dollars. “It generated a buzz, and people would be like, ‘Do you still have those brownies?’ and ‘Can you make those? I have an event coming up.’ ” Soon she was renting the VFW kitchen every Wednesday, making authentic Mexican meals using recipes she learned in Texas from spending years cooking with her husband’s Mexican family. “I would sell like 85 plates in three hours,” she said. “It was pretty great.”

Her catering helped her save just enough money for a month’s rent of a defunct local pizza place, and she opened her own restaurant for a few hours of home-cooked breakfast every day. Before that, the only food in the area was two pizza places and a couple of bars serving bar food.

“I opened it to be a dining room and a place for families to eat, even though that part of it isn’t profitable yet; to service an area in this community that people felt they didn’t have sit-down dining with no alcohol; where people come in and say, ‘It tastes just like my grandma’s.’”

She put together a menu offering omelets and sandwiches and breakfast platters and burgers. The ingredients were bought at the family owned grocery store just up the road. The meals were prepared and cooked on the spot after being ordered. But in reality, the menu has always been anything people request.

“Someone might come in the restaurant and say, ‘I’m a really picky eater. I’m on this diet. I’d like to do this but you don’t have it on your menu,’ and I’m like, ‘It’s all homemade, tell me what you want,’ ” said Laurie Van Damme, 60, a waitress at the restaurant. “Just yesterday we had a lady say, ‘I can’t believe this. I live in Illinois and this does not happen there. You don’t come in and ask for this, this and this and it comes out on a sizzling plate,’ and I said, ‘Here you do.’ ”

It was tough for a long time. “We used to have to wait until a customer finished paying for their meal to do a payout to run to the local grocer and buy more inventory to get us through the day,” Greathouse said. “We did this for months.”

At first, the restaurant was open only a few hours a day for breakfast. “But people were like, ‘There’s nowhere in town to eat for dinner.’ ” So she expanded her hours. And what started just so local people had a place for family meals started drawing attention outside the region, where fresh food restaurants are scarce. People began coming out of their way to eat here, raving online about this charming little surprise in an unexpected place.

“I didn’t think when I started it that people would come to Gwinn to eat, and so I didn’t see it as being a destination place,” Greathouse said. “But most of my loyal customers, they’re driving an hour to get here. I have people that drive from Calumet and Houghton to eat. So it’s become something completely different now.”

* * *

Just weeks after she opened, a power outage in the area on Thanksgiving had locals filling her restaurant for food. Greathouse served 135 meals for free, then let customers stay inside afterward to keep warm. Their grateful reaction inspired her to give free meals to everyone on Christmas and Easter — and next Thanksgiving, too.

And once she started giving things away, she couldn’t stop. It became another addiction.

“People say, ‘You shouldn’t give so much to the community,’ " she said. “They say I need to be more profitable. But I guess that’s been part of my therapy, too. It’s like being a very broke philanthropist. If I could do more, I would do more. It just feels good, you know?”

When the pandemic hit, she offered free lunches for kids and free meals for seniors and veterans in town. She hosted a fundraiser for people left homeless when a small apartment building nearby caught fire. She sold gift baskets to finance the high school prom. She held fundraisers for the local VFW. She raised money for people stricken with serious illness and medical bills and bikers who had accidents. And sometimes she cooks and delivers meals as a surprise to elderly or homebound people in town without asking first.

“She had kind of a rough upbringing, so she’s very giving, to the point of maybe too much,” said VanDamme, 60, a retired Marquette transit bus driver who always wanted to be a waitress, just for the socializing aspect of it, so Greathouse created the job for her. “She’s always giving, giving, giving. She’s got three businesses going, possibly four. She’s stretched very thin. But she’s filling a void. She doesn’t have her children, so she’s busy all the time.”

A group of old friends from town had nowhere to gather, so she gave them the door codes so they could let themselves into the restaurant, make themselves coffee and spend time together before she even arrives in the morning. “She’s a good gal,” said Guy Chaput, 68, one of those regulars. “She donates a lot of stuff to whoever asks her. She was giving free Thanksgiving dinners. I don’t know how many turkeys she cooked, 20 maybe? I don’t even know half the things she does.”

Among those things she sometimes did was hire former drug addicts — partly out of desperation, largely out of sympathy. It wasn’t always a good idea.

“I learned, like, don’t put seven of them together on a day you’re going to go out to work a job,” she said. “They have a lot of paranoia and it feeds off each other, so there might be several hours of getting nothing done. I didn’t have any experience in any of that until my brother came and said, ‘Oh Shan, you can’t do that.’ My brother knew because he battled addiction.”

Her younger brother escaped the worst of her childhood. But he didn’t emerge unscathed. He dropped out of high school, often got into trouble, never had much money, drank too much and got addicted to drugs, Greathouse said. She often tried to help; giving him a job, letting him stay with her. For a time he was clean. Then, he wasn’t again.

One day last June, the local sheriff called Greathouse and asked her to come in. When she got there, he broke the news that her little brother had bought back a rifle he’d sold years ago for some quick cash, and used it on himself the night before. The childhood which they’d both been trying to outrun finally caught up to him, and this was his way of dealing with it. He was 33.

“He was suicidal most of his life,” she said, crying. “I’ve also talked like that and tried, and I know what that feels like, driving into a tree, or taking pills.”

Greathouse vowed that she wouldn’t let the past destroy her life in the same way; to finally confront it in the belief that the best way to chase away shadows is to throw light on them.

“I didn’t tell anybody at all when I was younger about my upbringing,” she said. “Everybody just hushes everything in the family. So I came back here with a vengeance, like I’m gonna be open. You’re not going to quiet me anymore. I talk about it until I don’t cry about it. So I talk about it all the time.”

That choice, though, has left her estranged from some family members, and it’s made her the target of criticism from people in the area for her frank, public accusations. In a small town, even a model town, people take sides.

“But every time I speak up, someone else here that I’ve known my whole life goes, ‘Thank you, the same thing happened to me. I’m not ready to talk about it, but thank you.’ ”

* * *

She left Dis N’ Dat and drove across town to Model Tots, the resale clothing and toy store for kids that she spun off from the flea market, where she unloaded from her truck boxes of used items that she spent the evening before taking out of her storage unit by herself.

She stopped at the town’s little local grocery store and bought a large sirloin to make pasties for a special-order request from some out-of-towners who keep coming back just for these orders, then dropped the meat off at the restaurant.

She drove back to the flea market, where an employee she’d let go came marching up and demanded thousands of dollars in alleged back pay, then talked someone else there into quitting with him as well. With a small talent pool in the area, and her penchant for hiring hard-luck cases, none of this was surprising. But it was more stress. And there was one cure for that.

She drove back to the restaurant, walked into the kitchen, put on her apron, picked up her knife and started cutting potatoes again, calming her mind with more work. Quiet time.

“This is where I have a day like, 'Do I still want to do this?' ” she said. “'Can I go work at Walmart and make eight times what my take-home pay is now? Is this as important as I thought it was?' I’ll have this feeling of dread and regret for a little while, and then something will happen and then I’m like 'Yeah, I’m on the right path.' Hopefully, it happens soon.”

Outside, the sun was setting on the model town at the end of another long, busy day. Her phone rang. It was the night cook, who wasn’t feeling good and wouldn’t be in that evening. That left only Greathouse to cover the shift. She would have to work even more today. She would be able to work even more.

John Carlisle writes about people and places in Michigan. His stories can be found at freep.com/carlisle. Contact him: jcarlisle@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @_johncarlisle, Facebook at johncarlisle.freep or on Instagram at johncarlislefreep.

This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Upper Peninsula restaurant owner's past makes her keep busy