I was born in 1950, in the absolute middle of the 20th century, and went off to college in 1968. In 1974, when I was out of college and out of graduate school, I had a job offer in Massachusetts, moved to New England thinking I would stay 2 or 3 years, and 42 years later, I’m still in New England. But Cass City is a very, very big part of who I am.
[My parents] were very well known. They both grew up there, although my father was born in Detroit. As a very young boy of 2, his family moved to Greenleaf, and he grew up there. My mother, of course, lived in Cass City almost her entire life. Both graduates of Cass City High School. When they married in 1948, they built our family home on Schenck family land, and they spent the rest of their lives in that very house. When I was a young child, we were very much involved in what in those days was called the Salem Evangelical United Brethren Church. The building is still there. The church is long gone. It merged with the Methodist church to become the United Methodist Church. But if you go back far enough, my Striffler great-great grandparents probably in the 1860s or ‘70s were founders of what, in there time, was just known as the Evangelical Church. That was a big, big part of my childhood. We literally went every Sunday, never missed. We went to Sunday School there. So church was an important part of my background, as it was for almost everyone then. And when I look at our culture and society now, and compare it to the 1950s, I would have to say that that is one of the fundamental changes from then until now. By the time I was in high school, I had been involved in a lot of extracurricular activities, but at the age of 14, I began a part-time job at what was Woods’ Rexall Drugstore right on the corner. As much as I learned at Cass City High School, I think I learned more from working at Wood’s Rexall Drugstore in terms of relating to other people, interacting with other people. My childhood was very, very sheltered by today’s standards. And I’ve always been grateful that I had that new experience, for me, of having to go out into the community and interact with a lot of people before I went off to college. That was a very, very important part of my young years. And I would even go so far as to say as that job at Woods’ Drugstore was probably my favorite job of my life. I worked with Warren Wood, who no longer owned the business at that time, but was a distant relative. But worked with lots and lots of other people. Tom Proctor owned the business when I worked there. I have very, very happy memories of being part of Cass City’s commercial life in those years.
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