Timothy Nichols

From the ovens to the outside cooler at Riverfront Pizza in Glen Arbor was about 80 feet, through the kitchen and across the gravel driveway. Over a typical summer, Tim Nichols wore through five pair of tennis shoes running those countless back and forth trips each day. Forty years. Thousands of pizzas. Thousands of burgers. Tens of thousands of hungry mouths filled by a fast-moving guy in a t-shirt who charged less than the other places because “people with families need a place to eat they can afford.”

That’s the way Tim Nichols (born Timothy James Nichols, June 21,1950) lived his life, running to help others and wanting less in return— until May 6, 2026 when his heart gave out before his last pair of shoes. For many people in the 1980s, Tim was the owner of The Hot Spot in Lake Leelanau, a kids hangout where townsfolk just called the restaurant if they needed a babysitter for Friday night because some teenager there was sure to say, “I’ll do it!” Then in 1983, he transitioned to an old building alongside the Crystal River in Glen Arbor and opened half of it as Johnny Salami’s Riverfront Pizza, held together with nails, wire, and the Boy Scout ingenuity Tim acquired as an Eagle Scout growing up in Battle Creek. Those nails and wires lasted two generations of making Riverfront Pizza and Deli one of Glen Arbor’s landmarks.

Early on, when Tim’s girlfriend, Sue (Hanna) Nichols, and he weren’t working, they pursued Tim’s dream: to build a custom home on the wooded side of Miller Hill southeast of Glen Arbor. True, Tim didn’t have a truck— or equipment— or extra money— or even a full road into his chosen location. But he did have those Merit Badges and he’d crewed on several of the houses built at Sugar Loaf in prior summers. So after work each day, Sue and he would drive Tim’s overloaded car up a seasonal road, turn the headlights on, and carry sheets of drywall across the wind-blown, third floor open rafters or whatever death-defying task needed doing. Eventually, they had built an incredible red oak, post and beam home overlooking Glen Lake. And though he loved the mountains of North Carolina and the oceans of St. John USVI, home on Miller Hill was the only place Tim ever wanted to be for very long and where he and Sue celebrated their thirty-five years of marriage the day before Tim died.

In the Glen Arbor area, Tim was a fixture. His volunteering as a fire and EMT spanned forty years. As luck had it, Tim’s tenure began when most of the other volunteers were getting up in age. That meant he was the obvious pick for the heavy lifting, in spite of his slight stature. He’d laughingly tell of how he’d have to drag a gurney by himself up the Sleeping Bear Dune Climb, hope for help in loading whatever tourist with heart palpitations from underestimating the difficulty of the climb onto the stretcher, and then carry that tourist back down the Dune to the ambulance in the parking lot. But in ways, Tim was a natural. He loved the learning and the training of public safety, he was fearless and calm under pressure, and heights or danger didn’t faze him. Lake Michigan he respected but was comfortable in rescue situations. Fires and accidents he managed with relative ease.

Much of that likely came from his childhood. When he was very young, Tim’s mother became ill and eventually died when he was ten, leaving him and his older brother Bill to be raised by his father and his mother’s sister. After a time, his aunt and his father married and Tim came to view and call them both his parents. Summer childhood weekends were spent near Lake Michigan in Glenn and Tim began his life work in food service at Coral Gables in Saugatuck when he was 14. After graduating from Battle Creek High, Tim attended Michigan State University and on a vacation break visited Leelanau county. That soon led him to attending classes in East Lansing and driving back to Cedar on weekends to work at Sugar Loaf and then later The Homestead Resort.

Tim never stopped loving kids or remembering their struggles. One of the mysteries of Riverfront Pizza was why it stayed open in the quietest months of winter, when the other restaurants had wisely closed for the season. The utility bills alone were obviously more than the sales each night. Tim didn’t talk about that until asked directly after a long time. He finally said that the kids at The Leelanau School— probably six or seven of them— just outside of Glen Arbor were boarding students and a long way from home. And after their evening meal, since the school’s kitchen was closed, there was no way for those kids to get a snack later in the evening when he knew kids got hungry. So each night, the kids would call Riverfront and tell Tim what they wanted to eat, he would cook it for them, and then he’d drive it out to the school just before he closed the restaurant for the night. To do that for years when few people knew was an example of Tim running to help others and wanting less in return. What even fewer knew was that each year, on his day off, Tim would attend the Graduation Ceremony of those kids at The Leelanau School, so that the international students would have someone there to cheer for them and the other kids would feel appreciated.

On the other end of the age spectrum was the care Tim (and Sue) extended to the aging. Their home seemed to be the place where ailing family members ended up, and their Riverfront restaurant quietly became a community meals service for those who were sick or alone or needed help. To say it was common for a week’s worth of meals to be dropped off unannounced at someone’s home would be an understatement. Tim was constantly delivering food to locals he and Sue had heard faced some complication. If food was Tim’s love language, he was multi-lingual because the variety of foods he brought others was enormous. Meanwhile, he much preferred to stick to his four chosen food groups of pizza, burgers, Miller Lite, and cherry pie.

As much as Tim loved people, he may have loved dogs as much. Inexpensive burgers at Riverfront didn’t mean inexpensive meats and that translated to scraps and even whole specially prepared burgers from Maxbauer’s in Traverse City for all the family dogs. But Tim knew for a dog a good burger tasted even better if served with a warm towel to sit on while chewing and licking. Firing up the family clothes dryer for warm towels for the dogs was a regular occurrence. Which may have been the reason his dogs all lived so long, as they realized heaven couldn’t be much better than the life he already gave them.

Tim’s spirituality was a simple Christian faith of living the Greatest Command, except he took it one step further: Tim truly did not love his neighbor as himself, he loved his neighbors more than himself. He constantly gave his time, his money, his skills, his things, to those he saw could use them, and stuck with people in their needs whether for hours or years, yet was overly-appreciative for the smallest of kindnesses in return. Tim loved his God— and his wife, and his friends and his dogs and his community to the cellular level.

Still, Tim was not perfect. He believed that reading the Instruction Manual was a waste of time. He concluded that if when putting something together you had a few parts left over, you probably didn’t need them anyway. He was convinced the more times you pushed the buttons on your cellphone, the more likely you were to find the photo you sought. But in hindsight, as compared to his 75 years of running to help others and wanting less in return, it’s pretty obvious God gave Tim those few quirks just so the rest of us didn’t seem so hopelessly inferior.

Tim Nichols was a humble icon in Glen Arbor. His loss is already being quietly yet widely felt. But the difference he made, the good he did, the person he was, will continue to strengthen so many for decades to come. Tim is survived by his wife, Sue (Hanna) Nichols, his nephew Ben Nichols, his niece Lisa Nichols Reinke, brother-in-law Steve Hanna, cousins Cindy Wilcox and Pam Barney, several grand-nieces and grand-nephews, and of course his beloved dogs and family members Henry and Mush.

A Memorial Service will be held for Tim on Saturday, October 10, 2026 from 2:00 pm - 4:00 pm at the Glen Lake Public Safety (Fire Hall) Building in Glen Arbor. Donations in Tim’s name can be sent to the Glen Lake Fire Department, 6401 State Street, Glen Arbor, Michigan 49636.

Please visit Life Story Funeral Home’s webpage at www.lifestorytc.com to share your thoughts and more.