Carter on West Bay near his Old Mission Peninsula Home
By MIKE NORTON
Most of us have known about the upcoming Carter Oosterhouse holiday special, “Carter Comes Home,” since last winter, when Traverse City’s favorite son came back to town to spend several days filming a hometown version of his popular HGTV show.
Last week, I found out when the new program will be airing: this coming Friday at 5 p.m. with an encore performance (didn’t they used to call them reruns?) on Dec. 24 at 2 p.m. and Dec. 25 at 9 a.m. Carter, whose regular gigs on series on HGTV include “Red Hot & Green” and “Carter Can,” will be fixing up a family home and the living quarters at one of our city fire stations.
I remember interviewing him several years ago when he was home for vacation. What a really nice down-to-earth guy! Here’s some of what was in that interview:
When it comes to singing the praises of his hometown, Carter is absolutely tireless. During an appearance on “Oprah,” when most up-and-coming actors can’t resist promoting their next movie, TV special or personal diet program, Carter talked about Traverse City. He even persuaded the producers of his former show — “Trading Spaces” — to film several episodes in Traverse City just so he could show off the place where he grew up.
“Anybody who’s around me for very long can’t escape hearing about Traverse City, because I talk about it as if it were made of gold,” he says. “You can see them shaking their heads when I get going. It’s like, ‘Oh, great! Carter is going to talk about TC again.’”
The youngest son of Roland and Mary Oosterhouse (it’s pronounced OH-sterhouse) young Carter grew up on the Old Mission Peninsula, where a boy could have lots of outdoor adventures, and even the occasional misadventure, without getting into too much trouble. He and his friends spent their summer days running around the cherry orchards, jumping off bridges into the Boardman River, climbing to the top of Wayne Hill to look out over the city, and “pretty much just messing around on the beach and in the water.”
“It was a blast,” he says. “What a great place to grow up! To this day, I love that place.”
Carter attended Traverse City’s St. Francis High School. An enthusiastic athlete, he’s still proud of the championship football and basketball teams the school fielded during his years there, and he enjoys “freaking out” his California friends by telling them that there were only 58 students in his graduating class.
“We were a small school, but it was a great place to get an education,” he says. “I’m glad I had that kind of upbringing.”
It wasn’t all fun and games at the Oosterhouse home, however. Carter got his first paying job, sorting bottles at Deering’s Market, when he was only 11 or 12. And since he couldn’t always depend on getting a ride from his parents, he usually went to work by boat. He’d crank up the family’s old powerboat and take it into town, tying it up along the river and walking the rest of the way to the store.
That same year, he got his first experience as a builder, doing odd jobs for a neighbor, who happened to be a master carpenter. Carter kept working in the carpentry and construction business throughout his high school years and during college at Central Michigan University, where he graduated in 1998 with degrees in communications and nutrition.
“There was always a lot of construction going on in Traverse City, and the pay was pretty good,” he says. “Besides, being a carpenter looked so fun, getting to wear the tool belt and the hammer and pounding nails, I was just enthralled.”
Little did he know how valuable those skills would be when he headed to California in 2000 to look for a job in show business. Despite some initial success as an actor and model (he landed parts in some independent films and appearing in ads for Nivea, Lincoln/Mercury, Hewlett-Packard and Miller Lite) Carter soon discovered that he wasn’t making enough money to meet his expenses, and it wasn’t long before he was back in the building business.
That’s how he caught the eye of the TLC executives who were preparing a spin-off version of “Trading Spaces” called “Trading Spaces: Family.” The show’s basic premise is simple: two neighbors are challenged to remodel a room in each other’s houses in just two days without spending more than $1,000. Carter had the right combination of good looks, personality and carpentry skills for the role. He joined the cast in 2003, and became an instant hit. (People Magazine even included him in its “Sexiest Man Alive” issue.)
But Carter still considers himself a small-town guy. He stays in close touch with the folks back home, and when he comes to visit his family and friends he still prefers to hang out in the simple places he enjoyed when he was growing up here, lingering over coffee and dessert in favorite haunts like Poppycock’s and the Omelette Shop. Some of his best fans are the construction crew members he once worked with as a teenager, although he admits that half of them have probably never seen the show because they don’t have cable TV.
“That’s one of the things that makes it good to go back,” he says. “People are genuinely happy for me, and they mean it – even if they’ve never seen me on TV.”
But it’s the beauty, the open spaces and the relaxed pace of life that keep bringing Carter back to Traverse City every few months. He’s seen a good deal of the world since he left, but says most places simply don’t measure up to his hometown.
“I feel like I’ve seen every city in the U.S., and they all have something going for them,” he says. “There are beautiful places on the water, and there are places where the people are really nice. But it’s really hard to compare any of them to Traverse City. This place really has the best of all the worlds combined. You’ve got the Sleeping Bear Dunes, the cute little towns like Northport, and our own downtown. We were in Cape Cod, and there were a lot of little things that reminded me of Traverse City. But it really wasn’t the same.”
Kayak paddle in one hand, toolbelt in the other
