This is Pastor Tim’s article which appeared in the Evening Leader on Tuesday, Jan 20m 2026.
I was wondering if any of you had $5,000,000 you could give me? Please notice, I did not say loan me, I said give me, because I have no intention of paying it back. But I need the 5 million because something just went up for sale and I want to buy it. Susan has told me that I am not allowed to spend our savings on it, which is why I asked for the full $5,000,000 rather than $4,995,000,
What do I want to do with the money? Well, Mouse Island is for sale and I want to buy it. Mouse Island is an island in lake Erie about a quarter mile off the Ohio coast between Catawba Island and Put-In-Bay. It is uninhabited and undeveloped. It is an introvert’s dream.
Many of you are probably wondering the same question my wife wondered when I asked her about this purchase: why do I need an island? After a long explanation of Fortress of Solitude and having a secret hideout, I have realized that there are two kinds of people in this world: People who understand why owning an island would be awesome and people who live to crush other people’s dreams. Unfortunately, Susan is not in the group I was hoping she was in and since everyone seems to be born into one of these two groups no amount of explanation seems to help.
Mouse Island has quite a history in that one very notable Ohioan has owned Mouse Island: Rutherford B. Hayes, the 19th president of our United States. He spent so much time on Mouse Island during his presidency that little Island became known as the “Summer White House.” The Hayes family bought it as a private retreat so I guess we know which group his wife was born into. What a lucky man.
Mouse Island is 7 acres and is undeveloped and uninhabited. You pass the little Island if you have ever ridden the ferry from Catawba Island across to Put-In-Bay. You can also go to Google Maps and look it up and sure enough, there it is. There is a Google viewpoint on Mouse Island, so I was able to do a street level view of it. It is like a private woods with a small shack and a stone outdoor fireplace. It is the very definition of a little fixer upper with plenty of space for secret hideout construction.
If any of you are actually considering funding my lifelong dream, you should probably know that if you give me the money to purchase this island, I will probably have to come back to you to beg for money for a boat, which I do not own. I could probably swim the quarter of a mile over to the shore, but it would make getting supplies there to construct my lair very difficult. Susan is already whining about how we would even get to the island. I am unclear why she thought she was invited. Under my ownership, Mouse Island would have a strict policy barring entry to anyone who is not in the “owning an island is awesome” group, thus solving her concerns about how she is going to get to the island. This did not help convince her.
You may be wondering why I wrote this article since it seems quite unlikely that someone is going to give me the 5 million dollars I need. Well, that probably isn’t the point of this article. I wrote this article because there is so much going on in the world today that is upsetting that I thought maybe I could get you to crack a smile with the thought of me taking over my own island even though my wife thinks it is a stupid idea. Because of all of the things on earth we disagree about, I think most of us can agree, she is probably right.