I was out in Independence Township the other day, close to Clarkston on Dixie Highway, looking at a house that I might list. While I was there I got to thinking nostalgically about the long gone World Famous Whoopee Bowl. When I first move to Michigan in 1978 a neighbor turned me on to the Whoopee Bowl, a great junk store. I'm relatively sure that they called themselves a salvage store or a discount surplus store, but they were a classic junk store in the good sense of that name.
If you needed something really obscure - a nut or bolt, a spring, a piece of upholstery leather, whatever; you might be able to find it at the Whoopee Bowl out on Dixie Highway, just beyond I-75. You never knew exactly what would be there, but half of the fun was searching through the aisles of piled up stuff, in hopes of finding whatever it was that you needed. My wife never really got in to going to the Whoopee Bowl, but my daughter and I spent many a fun weekend day there, searching for the stuff that she used at the time to make unique jewelery - leather bits, springs, beads whatever.
When the City of Pontiac replaced all of their old street lights, the Whoopee Bowl bought all of the old lights and put them on sale. Of course, both of my kids had one in their rooms. An when I needed a place to buy the switches that I used to make them operational, where do you think I turned - the Whoopee Bowl. when I decided to make small crafts items that featured a mirror as a part of the item, where did I find bins of old car mirrors that fit the bill - the Whoopee Bowl. And who else locally featured the mounted heads of the Jackalope - a cross between a Jack Rabbit and an Antelope - of course it was the Whoopee Bowl.
The Whoopee Bowl closed in 2005; the owners content to sell off the 23 acres of land that they had to developers, after three decades of operation. I miss the place. I'm sure that you can probably find everything that was there on the Internet somewhere, but that doesn't take the place of dusty aisles and bins of physical stuff to sort through. We've lost too many Whoopee Bowls in life - victims of a faster pace and shorter attention spans, I suspect. That's a pity. Now my grand daughter and grandsons will never have the experience of wandering through mounds of stuff or the excitement of finding a treasure amidst the junk. I miss the World Famous Whoopee Bowl. So should we all.
If you needed something really obscure - a nut or bolt, a spring, a piece of upholstery leather, whatever; you might be able to find it at the Whoopee Bowl out on Dixie Highway, just beyond I-75. You never knew exactly what would be there, but half of the fun was searching through the aisles of piled up stuff, in hopes of finding whatever it was that you needed. My wife never really got in to going to the Whoopee Bowl, but my daughter and I spent many a fun weekend day there, searching for the stuff that she used at the time to make unique jewelery - leather bits, springs, beads whatever.
When the City of Pontiac replaced all of their old street lights, the Whoopee Bowl bought all of the old lights and put them on sale. Of course, both of my kids had one in their rooms. An when I needed a place to buy the switches that I used to make them operational, where do you think I turned - the Whoopee Bowl. when I decided to make small crafts items that featured a mirror as a part of the item, where did I find bins of old car mirrors that fit the bill - the Whoopee Bowl. And who else locally featured the mounted heads of the Jackalope - a cross between a Jack Rabbit and an Antelope - of course it was the Whoopee Bowl.
The Whoopee Bowl closed in 2005; the owners content to sell off the 23 acres of land that they had to developers, after three decades of operation. I miss the place. I'm sure that you can probably find everything that was there on the Internet somewhere, but that doesn't take the place of dusty aisles and bins of physical stuff to sort through. We've lost too many Whoopee Bowls in life - victims of a faster pace and shorter attention spans, I suspect. That's a pity. Now my grand daughter and grandsons will never have the experience of wandering through mounds of stuff or the excitement of finding a treasure amidst the junk. I miss the World Famous Whoopee Bowl. So should we all.
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