This letter to the editor was originally published in The Cass City Chronicle (7/22/2020) in response to a letter calling for the renaming of Cass City, published on 7/15/2020.

Dear Editor,

I read with interest and a measure of empathy the letter written by Mr. Kranz in last week’s edition of the paper. Mr. Kranz argued that it might be a step in the right direction to change the name of Cass City, since Lewis Cass advocated for and participated in “Indian removal.” At the very least, he argued, the name change might spur on “more serious conversations.”

In some ways, I agree with Mr. Kranz. We ought to remember the atrocities perpetrated in the past. We ought to be careful about who we hold up as role models and heroes. We ought to be cautious of our acceptance of the victor’s version of history alone. We ought not brush over those parts of the past which inconveniently disrupt our ideals. But I would like to make a couple of points that I think deserve some thought.

As a local historian, I will point out one, minor technicality--Cass City was not named to celebrate Lewis Cass or to commemorate his actions; rather, the town was named thus in reference to its proximity to the Cass River. While this does not negate the fact that the village’s name derives from the man himself, it is necessary to understand the origins of the town name and the intent of the founders, who were actually remarkably uncreative in their choice of a town name.

More importantly, and more to my point, is the fact that Mr. Kranz’s arguments beget other questions, chief among them--Where do we stop? Should we scrub the United States of any reference to Abraham Lincoln, who suspended habeas corpus? Do we ban the Communist Manifesto from library shelves and bar Marxist groups from organizing (it was, afterall, Karl Marx whose ideas led to the murder of one hundred million and whose antisemitism is well-documented)? Do we shut down Planned Parenthood, an organization founded by noted eugenicist Margaret Sanger? (Incidentally, this is one organization whose closure I would applaud loudly, not because of its founder’s actions, but because of its scandalous devaluation of human life, its targeting of minority women, and its savage murder of unborn children; but I digress). Do we change the name of every street and building in the Union named in honor of John F. Kennedy, a known womanizer, and Martin Luther King, Jr., whose womanization and acquiescence of rape have been well-documented?

My point, of course, is that our current cultural moment, this obsession with erasing references to those individuals and ideas we find abhorrent, is unsustainable and unprofitable. Unsustainable because there is no end to it. Unprofitable because it does not get to the heart of the matter, summed up in one word that is most certainly not in vogue today: sin.

Those Christian missionaries Mr. Kranz referenced in his well-written letter, who “opposed most strongly” the Indian Removal Act did so because they had a right understanding of human nature. They understood what we moderns would do well to relearn ourselves, namely that the heart of every person is unfathomably evil in its intents and actions.

C.S. Lewis, lauded Oxford don and popular writer of The Chronicles of Narnia, voiced succinctly what we are seeing in our own day. He wrote of “the uncritical acceptance of the intellectual climate of our own age and the assumption that whatever has gone out of date is on that count discredited,” a concept he dubbed, in a way only an Englishman can, chronological snobbery. 

Lewis’ point is that every generation sees itself as the arbiter of truth, the gold standard for morality and righteousness. We celebrate our own debauchery as contemporary “liberation,” yet condemn the sins of our fathers’ pasts with a roll of the eyes and a tisk of the tongue. We fail to see that there will come a day when our grandchildren will ask in bewilderment how we could hold up as heroes many of the social justice advocates we laud today. And the answer is that we have the same sin nature that those who came before us had. None of us is righteous, no not one.

No campaign to tear down monuments, no movement to expunge names from the pages of history, and, indeed, no call to change the name of a little village in Michigan’s Thumb, no matter how well-intentioned, will ultimately change anything at all, because such actions are futile attempts to deal with symptoms of sin, not sin itself. 

If we were honest in our historical research, and our own anecdotal experience with human beings, we would admit that no public figure is truly worthy of unqualified celebration; indeed, if we were even more painfully honest, we would admit that our own secret thoughts and actions are often not only cringeworthy, but damnable.
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Yes, let’s have conversations about the heroic and the heinous of our past. Let’s grapple with the messiness of human action. But if we are content with cultural revolution instead of personal repentance, we are wasting our time.

Respectfully,

Tyler Perry
Las Vegas, NV (formerly of Cass City)

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Originally published in The Cass City Chronicle (July 15, 2020).
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Some know him as the smiling teller who used to wait on them at the Pinney State Bank. To others, he is known as an excellent baker and a grower of flowers.

But Cass City’s Don Greenleaf is best known for what he readily admits is a gift given to him by God — his music.

From playing at weddings and funerals to using his talents at church, Greenleaf has had a profound musical presence in his community, one born out of a love of music that began at a very early age.

“We always had a piano in the house. My mother played and my grandmother played, but I always pretended all the time I was growing up that it was an organ,” he recalled.

That love of organ music was deepened during a visit to an evangelistic meeting in Saginaw in the 1950s.

“It was in the old auditorium in downtown Saginaw, which is no longer there. I saw my first organ there, and...that just did it. I remember running away from my parents and sitting on the front row so I could watch the man (playing).”

Greenleaf’s parents encouraged their son’s musical interests, purchasing record albums of the same organist he watched so attentively in Saginaw.

“I listened to those by the hour, I never got tired of them,” he said.

In addition to record albums, Greenleaf’s parents ensured he had piano lessons.

“I took lessons first from Ruth Esau,” he said. “But I could play the lesson by ear, so I wouldn’t
read the music. I was in first grade.”

As a boy, the Cass City native’s musical appetite and style was influenced by musicians near and far. Gospel musicians Helen Barth and Al Smith were particularly influential.

“As I got a little older, my aunt brought home a player and radio combination type thing, it played
45s,” he said. “Well, then I would play from the piano. I would hear the songs...on there that Helen
Barth and Al Smith were singing, and then I would play with it on the piano, one finger at a time.”

Locally, it was Emmaline Bullis, the pianist at the First Baptist Church, who influenced the aspiring musician.

“I used to try to emulate her,” Greenleaf said. “I used to see her every Sunday morning, every Sunday night. I just loved Emmaline and the way she played.”

When Myrtle McColl donated a Hammond organ to the Baptist church in memory of her son in 1960, Greenleaf, then a sixth-grader, knew the Hammond was for him.

“I had to learn that,” he said. “I can’t explain it. It was just a fascination. It was the sound, everything about it was fascinating to me.”

Local organist June Deering instructed Greenleaf on the organ for a year, but she soon learned what Ruth Esau and other instructors had learned about her student— he could play by ear.

“I wouldn’t study,” said Greenleaf, who progressed under the direction of his teachers, but as a young man longed for more instruction. “I didn’t read (music) well,” he explained, “and I didn’t know much about music, so I worked with a man who was a piano major at Northwestern University one summer in Bad Axe. And then I went to Gull Lake.”

The Gull Lake Bible and Missionary Conference, held at Gull Lake Ministries in Hickory Corners, brought in well-known Christian preachers, evangelists and musicians each summer. Two of the musicians featured at Gull Lake, John Innes and Merrill Dunlop, had a profound impact on Greenleaf. After hearing them play, he realized that if he was going to be a better musician, he needed an intensive musical education.

“I knew I couldn’t carry off the things that I heard anymore (by ear),” he said. “So, I went to Bad
Axe and studied with Hazel Krueger for 12 years, classic music. That was when I was 25.”

Greenleaf took his studies with Krueger seriously.

“Mrs. Kruger had to take me right from the very bottom, right from the C-scale on. I learned scales and arpeggios — all those things, all technique, because I had never had any of that,” he said. “I knew I had to do it now or never.

“I would get up early in the morning and practice before I went to work, and then I would
take my lesson either in the evening or on Saturday afternoon,” Greenleaf added. “She would have me in recitals, and I would learn things by Bach and Mozart. I would memorize those
things and then do them.”

Since those early days, the Hammond organ has been Greenleaf’s instrument of choice.

“The Hammond was invented by a clockmaker back in 1935,” Greenleaf said. “His clocks
weren’t selling so well, so he was getting to the point where he needed a new invention. He was a marvelous inventor. So, he invented the Hammond organ with the tone wheel generator and with
the drawbar system, whereby you could control every aspect of the harmonics you were using.”

For Greenleaf, and many Hammond enthusiasts like him, a Hammond organ is nothing without a Leslie speaker, a unique invention of radio service engineer Don Leslie in the late 1930s.

“Don Leslie used a rotating device in both the treble and the bass, and when you played the Hammond through it, it gave it a totally different sound,” Greenleaf said. “[It is] much warmer and much richer and just very, very different from what the Hammond sound (by itself) was. It was not produced as a substitute for the pipe organ, which it will never be, but with the proper equipment on it, you can produce pipe sounds.”

Whether playing the organ or the piano, Greenleaf has had a prolific career as a local musician since
the 1960s.

“As time went on, I became church organist,” he said. “And then I played for several years at
the Little Funeral Home. I played an hour before the service and two hours on the evening before. They had a full-sized Hammond, which was a real delight to me, because the church at that time did not have a full-sized Hammond.”

In addition to playing at his church and at the funeral home, Greenleaf has played a variety of venues, including numerous weddings and evangelistic crusades in Bad Axe and Akron.

“I love to accompany. That’s my favorite thing to do,” he said.

Today, Greenleaf continues to play at funerals and community events. He also plays the organ
and, occasionally, the piano, at First Baptist Church each Sunday. But as much as he enjoys playing for the benefit of others, Greenleaf says his music is ultimately an offering back to God.

“Everyone isn’t given a gift in music; they’re given a gift of some sort, but I realize that God just gave you that. I was able to develop it to a degree — not to the degree that I would like, because I would like to be a classical musician if I could carry it off.

“But probably that would never be the heart of what I wanted to do. The purpose of the music is to give back to God what He’s given to you and to glorify Him."