OMENA -- Harold and Wyn Landis performed together as though they'd done it before.
In fact, they had. The married couple met 56 years ago singing and performing plays for the guests at Omena Inn.
"It was so marvelous to be in Omena," Wyn said after they sang and told jokes for more than 30 people at the Omena Historical Society museum. Omena residents Jim and Kathy Miller, along with Nancy Enyart, who had watched their plays in the '50s, helped engineer the return engagement.
Landis' family had been coming to the area since the early 1930s and bought the inn in 1945. They hired Wyn Newman as a singer in 1952.
"My mother heard her sing and she loved her voice," Harold said.
Initially, they declined to hire her because they didn't want to house both her and her son Lenny, who was 4 at the time. They usually had singers room together.
So the innkeepers signed another singer without hearing her. When Harold, who had been in World War II and was spending his first few postwar years working for his parents, heard the singer, he realized she couldn't sing.
Or as Wyn now puts it, "They thought she had a three-octave range, but she had a three-note range."
Harold attended Juilliard School of Music and Wyn sang classical music and performed before John F. Kennedy while Kennedy was a U.S. Senator. Wyn had also performed for Lyndon Johnson when he was vice president.
The Landises needed a singer, so they changed their tune regarding her bringing her son to stay with her and she moved in for the summer.
At the inn, they helped stage weekly plays, often musicals like "South Pacific." They enlisted the help of guests and invited people in the town to join them.
At the time, Wyn had just divorced her first husband. She started working at the Omena Inn over the weekend of July 4 and the split had been finalized in June. Being so freshly separated from another marriage, romance was the furthest thing from her mind.
Often after a performance, the cast would go into Traverse City. Once, nobody else was going so Harold took Wyn. They married that November.
They continued to help at the Omena Inn in the summer for three more years before deciding they needed to find more regular work.
They ended up opening Wyn and Harold Catering in Detroit, which they ran for 40 years. For eight of those years in the 1950s and '60s, they also owned and operated the Harbor Bar on Detroit's east side, but decided that was too much work. In the 1980s, they wrote a book about throwing parties.
Their Omena encore this past week came about after Enyart called and asked them to do the show. The Millers helped make arrangements for the appearance. Their interest was piqued because they built their new house on property once owned by the inn. The dilapidated building they were reviving as a garage and workshop was the old Omena Playhouse where the plays were staged.
Harold and Wyn, who now live in Florida, were in Detroit for Lenny's 60th birthday, as was their other son David, who lives in New York City. They all drove up for the performance.
Audience members were contacted by word of mouth and packed into the museum for the performance of classics like "Que Será Será," "My Darling Clementine" and "Brush Up Your Shakespeare." Wyn, 84, and Harold, 83, also acted out the words of the songs at times, as well as readings by Neil Simon and Roald Dahl and some slightly bawdy jokes. It all had the appreciative crowd laughing and singing along.
Bea Kimmerly, 95, who attended their performance this week, remembers when they had the shows, though she was never able to attend.
"I didn't go down to see them because I had to work at the store," she said, referring to Kimmerly's General Store, which she ran with her husband Myles Kimmerly and their children. "But I remember Harold and Wyn and I wanted to see them after 50 years."
"They used to call and say, 'You got any kosher bacon?'" she said. They were joking, since the Landises are Jewish and bacon is forbidden under kosher rules.
The Landises said they were delighted with the turnout and enjoyed entertaining in a place that is special to them.
"We had the best time we've ever had in our lives," Wyn said. "Everyone just welcomed us with open arms and we went to their houses afterwards."
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