When Bob and Marge Setzer built their small ranch-style home on the shore of Bear Lake in northwest Michigan, the two police officers planned to split their retirement years by spending summers along the quiet all-sports lake and winters in sunny Florida.

But Bob unexpectedly died in 1990, leaving Marge with two homes and a motorhome that the couple had planned to use for traveling throughout the country.

Bob retired in 1973 after 25 years with the Detroit Police Department, and began spending more and more time putting the finishing touches on the lake home that he began to build seven years earlier with the help of the couple's only child, then teenaged Richard.

"Rick was very enthused about it," Marge said. "He's now doing construction work."

When Marge retired in 1980 from a suburban Detroit police department's detective bureau, the Setzers bought a winter home in Port Orange, Fla. They owned three houses for a few years before finally selling their Detroit area residence.

"It sounds ideal having a place in Florida and here (northern Michigan), but I never felt settled, packing and unpacking all the time," she said. "I was never really gung-ho about Florida."

So Marge sold the RV and Florida home the next year and took up full-time residency at Bear Lake.

"I like the change of seasons here and it's my home," she said, looking out the big glass patio doors facing her 50-foot lake frontage. "I've lived in Michigan all my life and I love the lake. Isn't it beautiful?"

Richard Setzer moved his young family back from Houston, Texas, in 1991 and bought an old farmhouse just a couple miles from his mother's home. He had been planning to move to Bear Lake before his father died, with the intentions of starting up a small residential construction and remodeling business with his dad.

The Setzers bought their 50-foot by 250-foot lakefront lot, then a small fruit orchard, in 1961. A retired couple who lived next door sold it to them by spinning off a third of their waterfront parcel.

Marge remembers the weeds rising "higher than I was."

"We had been visiting and camping in this area in the late 1940s and '50s," Marge said. "We paid $10 down and $10 a month - $3,500. Now it's worth more than that a (frontage) foot."

In fact, a cottage with a 50-foot Bear Lake frontage was listed for sale this fall at $325,000.

A few of the Manistee County lake's parttime residents - many of whom otherwise live in the Detroit, Chicago, Grand Rapids and Indianapolis areas - use their summer homes as a base for winter fun.

Still, the busy buzz of boats and personal watercraft on Bear Lake silences after Labor Day, and the boarded-up homes from September through May turn the lakefront into a ghost town for most of the year.

The population of Bear Lake Township, which surrounds most of the lake and numbers in the thousands in the summer, shrinks to around 1,600 people in the winter.

The number of mostly summer-only residences has grown around the 1,800- acre lake, and until recently almost all of the lodges and cabins being built were no larger than the Setzers' home - but that's rapidly changing.

"Every house being built on the lake now is bigger than the last," Marge Setzer said. "You look around and all these new houses are just huge."

In 1992, the little block cottage next to Marge Setzer's place was removed and replaced with a large vacation home. The new house rises more than 20 feet above Marge's roof.

Two doors down the other way from Marge is a three-story year-round home with eight bedrooms. It replaced a 60-year-old small summer cabin.

The trend the past few years for Bear Lake, nearby Portage Lake and along the Lake Michigan shore, has been to build huge retirement and vacation homes, said Bill Ringel of Ringel Real Estate & Auctions of Manistee.

"The economy in general may have some influence in the future, but at this present time they are still building bigger, just not at the same rate as it had been in recent years," Ringel added. "I'm not sure if the trend of building bigger homes will continue or not, but it would be my guess that they will probably keep getting bigger."

Bear Lake and Portage Lake are the two most desirable lakes in and around Manistee County, according to Ringel.

"The smaller lakes still are mostly cottages, but they too are starting to turn into retirement cottages or homes," the real estate broker said.

Looking out at the lake from her living room, Marge only sees the water - as well as the change of seasons from the warm aqua of summer to the colorful hues of autumn, and the eventual white snow that blankets the scene from December to March. Her constant companion is her dog, Baron.

"It's beautiful; even the snow storms," Marge said. "We don't go out then, but we get plowed out if we want to go somewhere.

"We used to snowmobile all the time," she recalls the winters spent at the lake home with her late husband. "We used to ice fish, but I don't do that anymore. We live a short ways from Crystal Mountain and my grandkids go over there and have a ball in the wintertime. They started skiing, but then they got into snowboarding. There's lots of facilities around here in the winter, like cross-country skiing - just bundle up."

Marge heats her home with fuel oil, but that cost $700 in late September for what she fears will have to be filled again before January. "It's up a dollar a gallon from last year," she said. There is a natural gas line back along the street, and Marge is considering hooking up to it, which would mean converting her old furnace or buying a new one.

"That little wood stove there, if I wanted to bother with it, it would heat the whole house," she said, pointing to a Ben Franklin stove in her living room. "And I might at the price of oil."

By Mark Brooky