How does a Kalamazoo reporter end up at Torch Lake in Antrim County, chatting on the beach with a family I just met? Through fortunate happenstance, and a “Why’s That?” question.
Emily Rendell of Kalamazoo asked, “What is with the green frog painted stone on Lovers Lane near Milwood Elementary? Older people in the area say it’s been there decades.”
The green frog with the yellow belly is in Kalamazoo. But I found answers more than three hours north in the village of Eastport, in a part of the state called the “Tip of the Mitt.”
As luck would have it, I was driving through the area on vacation, on the same day Jane Beeby Suwalsky arrived for the summer from her home in New Jersey.
Suwalsky stands outside a Victorian home. A sign by the door notes that it once belonged to artist Betty Beeby.
Betty was Suwalsky’s mother, and the woman who painted “Mr. Froggy” as neighborhood kids call it. It turns out Betty Beeby was a prolific artist, whose portfolio includes much more than rock art.
As her daughter notes, “She painted on everything and of everything.”
The house is filled with Betty Beeby’s work. Landscapes, nature, still lifes, and book illustrations in watercolors and acrylics hang on the walls. Suwalsky said her mother liked to work familiar objects into her paintings.
“The furniture in the house appears in almost all of her artwork.”
She painted on more than just a canvas. She painted on chairs, cloth, kitchen walls, stairway floors, and added drawings on her personal letters. And she illustrated 34 books, authoring some of them.
There’s also a framed sketch of her largest commission, a mural at the Colonial Michilimackinac Visitor's Center. The 50-by-10-foot mural was completed in the summer of ’74.
Suwalsky pointed to the clouds in the mural. On close inspection, some of the clouds form the shapes of figures canoeing.
“There's always a little trick to her artwork,” Suwalsky said.
Betty Beeby was born Betty Pearl in Detroit in 1923. Growing up, she spent summers up north in Eastport. She won a scholarship to study art at New York’s Pratt Institute and was hired as a staff artist at Time-Life Magazine in 1940.
She met another Michigan native, James Beeby, in New York. They were married in 1944 and his job as a pharmacist brought them to Kalamazoo around 1950.
By 1953, Betty was living with her young family on Lovers Lane and spending summers with the family on Torch Lake.
With Suwalsky as my guide, I learn the family history as I tour the compound of summer cottages and cabins left to Pearl family descendants.
She leads me through the rustic summer home Betty’s father built. Outside, on the beach, several family members, including Suwalsky’s brother and sister, are waiting to fill me in on the frog rock.
The frog is actually three rocks. The center one is at least three feet tall. Two smaller rocks on either side make up the frog’s legs.
Suwalsky said when the family bought the house, the large rock was painted white with the home address on it.
“She just thought that it was silly to have a rock painted with a plain paint on the front with the house number on it.”
Suwalsky’s brother John Beeby remembers that their mom considered a whale and painted the rocks black, but quickly changed her mind.
“I think it immediately was changed into a frog. And it’s been many types of frog too. It was almost psychedelic once.”
The siblings agree that Beeby painted the frog in 1954. The Kalamazoo Gazette published a story about it in 1961; a story from a few years earlier does not mention the frog rock. Instead, it’s about the small natural history museum the Beeby children and their friends ran in a small building behind the house.
Betty served as mentor. The paper reported nearly 200 visitors in the first two months. The frog made the museum easy to find.
“You can just say it’s near the frog, and people know,” said Betty’s son, John Beeby, who raised his own kids in the house on Lovers Lane in Kalamazoo after his parents retired to Eastport.
Beeby said his daughter painted it periodically until he sold the house eight years ago. Betty died the year before the house was sold, in 2015. Since then the frog rock has faded and chipped.
I tried to reach the current homeowner — knocking on the door and leaving a letter with my card attached — but they haven't responded.
John Benjamin Beeby, Betty’s grandson, is named after his father. He grew up in the house and makes everyone laugh when he recounts the story of a much-anticipated field trip his third-grade class took when he was at Milwood Elementary.
“The day came and we finally walked out of the school and we walked across this big field and she set us down on this grassy knoll and told the story of the frog,” he laughed.
“So, it was a class trip to my own house.”
