A little bit about Gerry ...

For many years, Gerry Volgenau was the best-known travel writer and photographer in the state of Michigan. For nearly eight years, he was the travel writer for the stateʼs largest newspaper, The Detroit Free Press.

During those years, Gerry wrote about and photographed places all over the world. But in particular, he concentrated on the Great Lakes and its islands.

Building on his newspaper work, Gerry authored “Islands: Great Lakes Stories” (Ann Arbor Media Group). The book is a collection of word-and-picture portraits of some 21 islands or island groups. In it are the stories that form each island’s character – heroic tales of lighthouse keepers, Indian legends and stories of ghosts, pirates, brave and clever soldiers, dauntless voyageurs and even a Loch Ness-type monster.

His second and most recent book also had a Great Lakes connection. It is “Shipwreck Hunter: Deep, Dark and Deadly in the Great Lakes.” A slim, ill-defined line exists between adventure and something that seems, well, suicidal. This book tells of crack scuba diver Danny Fader, who for years, swam along that line – until he slipped.

A third book is presently in the works — an historical novel set during the Civil War.

While Gerry is known for his travel years during the late 1990s and early 2000s, in fact this period was just one incarnation of a Free Press career that spanned more than 27 years.

Starting as a local street reporter in 1976, Gerry went on to write about the 1980 national political conventions, then moved north to Toronto as the Canada correspondent for the Free Press and Knight-Ridder Newspapers. There, he covered the fast-breaking news and such fascinations as narwhal hunting with the Inuits and the Calgary Olympics. On one adventure, he retraced the 1890s Yukon Gold Rush trail, first by boat up the Inside Passage from Seattle, then on foot hiking over the Chilcoot Pass and finally paddling a canoe alone in 250 miles down the Yukon River to Dawson City. Leaving Canada, Gerry continued his wandering ways as the newspaper’s roving national correspondent covering the country’s biggest stories – everything from politics and plane crashes to Yellowstone forest fires and California earthquakes.

At various times during his Free Press years, he stopped to catch his breath by taking editing jobs. In the early 1980s, he designed and edited the newspaper’s first science section. Later in the early 1990s, he served as an editor of national and foreign news.

What was less obvious during Gerry’s newspaper years was his parallel career as a photographer.

Gerry took up photography seriously well before joining the Free Press. Starting with a Pentax Spotmatic, he shot photos as the public information officer of the Colorado-based Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education. At the same time, he launched into free-lance photography making photos for newspapers, magazines, books, plus shooting pictures for a medium that is now almost lost to history — record album covers.

But after joining the Free Press, his professional photography was put on hold – at least for a time. Editors advised him that “At this newspaper, writers write and photographers take pictures. You are a writer.” But in the later years while he was in Canada and especially as the travel writer, the newspaper soon began demanding his photographs. Many of the fine art photos in this collection were shot while Gerry was on assignment for the Free Press. Also Gerry stepped up from his original Pentax. For years he has been making pictures with professional-quality Nikon cameras and lenses, which on some trips ended up weighing more than the rest of his luggage combined.

Gerry always has been a traveler, moving from place to place. At one point, he figured that he had lived at 34 different addresses from the time he started college until he moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan in 1988. After 22 years, it seemed he had settled there for good. But no.
The old yearning for Coloradoʼs had never quite left him. In the back of his mind — and very often in the front — he always wanted to go back to the mountains. Then in early 2010, he did.
He now lives in Evergreen, Colorado amid ponderosa pines with a view of the towering Mountain Evans across the valley and the never lessening joy of getting frequent visits by mule deer and elk.

He grew up in Scarsdale, New York and Colorado Springs, Colorado. After earning B.A. and B.S. degrees from the University of Kansas; he spent two years in Colombia, South America as a Peace Corps volunteer. He returned to launch into a bit more schooling, earning M.S. degree at Syracuse University and then seven years into his Free Press career he stopped out for a year of post graduate work at Stanford University. He has two grown children. Teresa is a dancer and actress in Los Angeles and Christopher, a former world-class shot putter, is in business in Denver.