 I believe when you come to a town, you’re not called to necessarily pastor just a given church, but to be a pastor within a community and help out in the community. We believe very much in outreach and community involvement. Sometimes maybe that is to a fault, because there are so many needs and things to do, but what I love is that this community is so open to involvement. Myself and my family have found different ways to get involved and make a difference, because what we want to do, when I say “pastoring the community”, is we are here for a purpose and that’s to offer hope through Jesus. How can you do that inside the walls of a building? We are the church. As Jesus did, He got out and made disciples and modeled what it is we are supposed to do.
--Rev. Mark Karwowski pastors Living Word Worship Center (Photo courtesy of Lisa Karwowski)
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 I came to Cass City in 1985. That’s when things started. It’s progressed quite nicely. I can remember working twice as many hours as I do now, and now I feel that I couldn’t work that schedule. When I first started, I used to work 8 to 8, three days a week and all day Saturday. There’s no way, at my age, that I could do that now, but I had to to get the practice going. I enjoy the people, the community. I’m seeing grandkids of people that I started seeing when I first started here. There’s continuity and camaraderie. Everybody looks out for each other.
 I had thought about [becoming Elkland Township Cemetery sexton] for awhile, only because I kind of thought that it might be a good retirement job for me. When Don Erla decided to retire, then I really got interested in it. Then I started chasing around to get information and then I applied for it and got the job. That was in February 2010.
When I first started here, I had worked here probably about 3 or 4 weeks, I told my wife, “I’m not going to do this. This is too sad for me. I don’t want to do this”. Well, then, I kind of started realizing it’s not always so sad. It’s sad the day of the funeral and as people are mourning for a little bit, but then, as you start noticing more and more people that you knew or people you went to high school with, then you start celebrating their life instead of mourning the death. That’s when things started turning around for me. Then I felt much better about it.  I pastored a rural church, before, outside of Rochester, Minnesota. We really enjoyed working with the farming community. They responded well to the ministry. We were kind of asking the Lord, if we had the opportunity to pastor one more church before we retired, that a rural church would be a blessing, and it is that. We really enjoy our time here with the people.
Obviously, preaching and teaching the Word of God to people who are in love with Christ and who are accepting of the Word, leading others to Christ is a joy. Just being with the people when they’re hurting is a blessing. The church has been committed to this community for 135 years. It’s a very stable ministry. You can count on it. It teaches the Word of God as it is for people as they are. It’s non-judgmental. Very accepting of anyone who comes to visit. We try to live by the Word of God that we preach. We don’t do that perfectly, but we still seek to live what we preach. Anyone is welcome here. --Rev. Hill pastors First Baptist Church  I went to a little country school, where there were eight grades in one room with one teacher. There were too many students for the one teacher and she kind of missed me. I did flunk one grade. She should’ve flunked me for a lot more. Mechanically, I can do a lot of stuff on my own, but give me a book and I’d throw it away.
I got in high school, a Catholic school, and there was a nun there. I didn’t have my assignment done and she gave me orders that I had to have it back in by the following week. I got up and told her that when I went home that night I would not be back, and I didn’t go back. The reason I didn’t have my assignments done is that I was out working on the farm, helping Dad, helping get crops in and stuff like that. It was the fall of the year. I just got left behind. I can read small stuff, but when it gets to big words, I can’t figure out the words. I didn’t know how to spell. I was up to the library one day getting copies, and this young lady was teaching a young man and she needed one copy and I had a lot of copies to get. I stepped back and let her make her copy. While her copy was being made, I asked her if she could teach older people how to read and write. She looked at me kind of funny and says, “Why?” I told her that, legally, I cannot read or write. She told me to wait a few minutes and she was going to finish with the young man. She came out and we talked and I got into school and the woman, Miss Lisa, actually opened a brand new world for me. She’s my angel from Heaven. Between her and my wife, which now helps me out with a whole lot, I now have two teachers. I’ve been going for over a year now. I’ll be 82 January 2nd. I’m learning to read. It’s a whole new world.  I was appointed to Cass City United Methodist Church July 1, 2010. [One of my favorite things about serving in a small town is] getting to know people in the congregation and, in a small town, having the ability to work with other churches and other pastors, to get to know people outside of the congregation. [A challenge is] remembering names. That everybody knows everybody is a joy, but it can also be a challenge, especially when people recognize you but you don’t recognize them.
 Shelley: I grew up in Caro. When I was in school–I graduated in 1980–there was a huge rivalry between the ball teams of Cass City and Caro. It was huge. It was fun, too. You really got to know a lot of the people over here. Coming to the ball games, it was a great turn out.
Blaine: When I was in high school, you did not date girls from Caro. That was not a good plan! Shelley: He graduated in ’77. We didn’t meet til ’82. Blaine: The year I graduated, I wouldn’t even think of it. You just didn’t do that. My grandfather was E.B. Schwaderer. A couple years ago, Donny Ball brought over a file from the days of old, from my grandfather’s time when he owned the road construction, which was C.R. Hunt Road Construction. It used to be E.B. Schwaderer Road Construction. Grandpa built M-81 from Cass City to Caro and lots of other things. One time, virtually everyone in Cass City worked for Grandpa. Shelley: He put people to work. He did a lot. He built the hospital. He was clerk of works, where he took a pay of one dollar to build it. We wouldn’t have a hospital without him doing all that he did. And the pool. The way we’ve heard the story is that they were debating about needing a new pool. The old pool was in horrible disrepair. His grandfather, owning all the construction equipment around town, just went up there and dug them a new hole and said, “There”. Blaine: Yeah, we go back in town a long way. We’re living on a family farm here. My grandfather’s parents used to buy houses around town, renovate them, sell them, then go on to a new project. What makes Cass City special for you? Blaine: The history. The people in Cass City are generally friendly. It’s a really safe place to be. Realistically, we’re very sheltered here, and I like that.  When I retired from school, I still felt like I had so much to offer. I missed the children there so much, so when this little opportunity came about it was easy for me to see that the heart of these ladies was their home. There’s this little kitchen here that doesn’t get used very much, but we use it! We meet every Tuesday at 2:00. We do a lot of reminiscing and sometimes it’s so good for the soul just to remember things about home. We talk about recipes and families and traditions, don’t we? We’ve had tears, but we’ve had lots of good laughs, too. They think that I’m blessing them, but really they’re blessing me.
 In 1954, in September, I was discharged from the army. At that time, [my wife Holly’s] father, Walter Walpole, had started Walbro. He’d actually started Walbro in 1950. The family lived in Fenton, down by Flint. In early 1954, he got the first contract to make the small carburetors that had been invented by the company, and he needed more space. The company was, at that time, headquartered in an old Quonset hut down in Fenton and not suitable for manufacturing. So, long story short, someone in Cass City had a friend in Fenton and the two of them happened to mention to each other that Wally Walpole was looking for a factory building, and contact was made. He came up and made a presentation to what was then the Industrial Development Corporation here in Cass City.
The company had been going since 1950 primarily on [Walpole’s] own money and the investment of two or three friends, so it was not plush by any means. The time was spent inventing the carburetor that they sold. He came up to make a presentation to this industrial development group, which included the two main bankers, Mr. Pinney and Mr. Auten. Being totally honest, he showed a balance sheet which was very much in the red, and at the end of his presentation, Meredith Auten stood up and said to the rest of the group, “This man is bankrupt and doesn’t even know it” and walked out. The other banker stood up and followed him out. The other members of the group of maybe 15 or 20 were angry at Meredith for that reaction, and it spurred them to greater efforts. They finally found an insurance company that would loan them money to build the original building. So that’s how we came to be in Cass City. Wally actually moved the factory into Cass City in late August of ’54 and, as I came out of the army on September 8, he offered me a job as a bookkeeper. My college degree was in economics and a very little bit of accounting. I stressed that I was a bookkeeper, not even an accountant. Of course, it was a very lean organization. We had an engineer, me as the bookkeeper, and Wally as the president. We hired mostly women to build the project. The company succeeded. The first contract was succeeded by others and within a year there were 150 people working at Walbro building carburetors, primarily for Clinton Manufacturing, which was a manufacturer of lawn mowers and lawn mower engines. That was my introduction to Cass City. Neither Holly nor I expected to stay. I wanted to go back to school and get a master’s degree and that’s what she wanted me to do as well. But one thing led to another and I found the work interesting and then our first child came along within a little more than a year, so we stayed. And we’re still here, from 1954 to today. Mr. Walpole, among other tenets of his existence, wanted to hire the very best engineers and managers that he could. Knowing that he would ask them to come live in Cass City, which was a pretty small town and still is, he felt a responsibility to participate and have his staff participate in the community and help to build it up, help to improve the community, to be active in the schools. His wife, after she came in the middle of ’55, was elected to the school board. While he never held any specific activity, he was always interested in what was going on and encouraged us to get involved. So, when somebody asked me, in ’63, to run for the [village] council, I decided that would be something of interest. In 1963, I think Fred Auten, suggested that I run for an empty seat [on the village council] that was there. I did and got elected. At that time, I walked in full of Roberts Rules of Order and the way you do things. I found around the table, for the most part, the seven people—the president and the six councilpeople, who were sort of a “good ol’ boys’ club”. They didn’t really follow any particular procedure. They sort of did things informally. As I recall, there wasn’t a clear budget. I started making motions and the village president at the time didn’t know what to do with a motion. I found myself at odds with the way things were going. And two years later, the village president chose not to run again, so I ran for village president and was elected in 1965, after just two years on the council. I went through, for the first four or five years, a number of village managers. In fact, we really didn’t have a manager at that time. We had various department heads, and they had various levels of ability and training. I felt we needed more organization and more formality to the way things were done, so that process took a few years. Then, we did decide to formally create the position of village manager. I ultimately hired Lou LaPonsie for that job. Lou and I had a great relationship for 25 years. For most of our time together, which was 25 years, he and I met every morning at 7:00. I’d go down to his office, we’d have a cup of coffee, and we’d discuss the events of yesterday and the upcoming events of today or tomorrow. I thought we worked very well together. I think one of our greatest achievements was the development and construction of the water treatment plant, which was completed and opened in 1980. Not only the plant itself, but the financing of it, which was done through the Department of Agriculture in a loan similar to the one we’re working with them on for the hospital expansion right now. We also formalized the police activities and lent structure to that organization. During that period of time, we still had a fair number of gravel streets at the beginning of that time in the mid-‘60s, and within the next 25 years we pretty much got all the streets paved. There was a period of time when a couple people in town were very unhappy with me. They ran someone against me and I lost. I had been in the seat 19 years at that point, and the person that they elected found out that it wasn’t all what he thought it was. He only stayed the two-year term and didn’t run again. The council appointed someone to fill his vacancy and that person was a General Cable person, and he got shipped to California with his job about six months into his term, so the council came to me and appointed me. So I ran and finished out the next 14 years or so, then in 2000 I figured it was time to retire. I was out of Walbro and really ready to do some other things, so I stepped down. I was out about 3 years, and again there was a vacancy. And I came back for another 3 or 4 years. So it adds up to 35 years all-together. It’s very disappointing to me that, as hard as I worked and others worked to improve the community, that we’ve come to the point where people are not as willing to become involved, or not as interested. I blame that, in part, on our general life today, the distractions that are present.  I guess it started with my parents and my grandma. They, all three, were pretty artsy in their own ways and creative. It just got instilled in me, and this is just the way that it all came out. It all started very young.
When I was 10 years old or so, I was drawing Woody Wood Pecker and trying my hand at sketching. I can remember when I was 11, maybe 12, if I was a good boy during the week and took the garbage out and didn’t fight with my sisters too much, my mom would let me have a bar of ivory soap on Sunday afternoon. She’d set me down at the dinner table, and I’d get a bar of ivory soap and a paring knife, and I could carve a seal or a polar bear or whatever. My dad did custom gunstock work and my mom was into painting and fabric, crocheting and knitting. My dad worked two jobs and he wasn’t always around a lot, and I didn’t have any brothers, so I just had to learn to entertain myself. I spent a lot of time in nature. My mom got me watching birds and identifying birds when I was probably 6 years old. I just grew to love the natural world and always wanted to have it around me to some degree. But realized, at a young age, that I couldn’t always have a critter alive, and so I just had to come up with a means to preserve them. A friend of mine had an old correspondence course on taxidermy. It was missing a couple of chapters, but it was one of the initial texts that I had read. Back then, information on taxidermy was extremely difficult to find and nobody wanted to teach it. It was a really obscure thing. But I happened to find a book in the library by John Moyer, called “Practical Taxidermy”. I can still visualize the cover on that as if I had seen it yesterday. Those two sources carried me through a lot of trial and error and a lot of years. It wasn’t til the advent of VCRs and all that I was able to see other information. But a lot of this is just learning from my mistakes. |
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