Dirt Farmer's Son. Terry A. Maurer
mount is extremely rare and valuable.
Grayling is also the birthplace of the famous Bear Archery Company. In 1961, I sat with Fred Bear watching his grandson Chris Kroll play basketball for Grayling High School. Going forward, Spike’s Keg of Nails bar, Old Au Sable Fly Shop, and the new Ray’s Grill, Lake Margrethe, Camp Grayling, Avita Water Black Bear Bike Tour (organized and managed by my good friends, Wayne Koppa and John Alef), fly fishing, hunting, snowmobiling, the Au Sable River Canoe Marathon, Hartwick Pines State Park, Wellington Farms Historic Theme Park, Fox Run Country Club, Forest Dunes premium golf resort featuring one of the first reversible courses in the country, the Loop, and the Kirtland Warbler and the new Kirtland College and Deerfield Estates and now the Arauco plant on four mile road draw folks to Grayling.
ARAUCO’s Grayling Particleboard operation officially opened its doors on April 16, 2019. Gathered for the grand opening and ribbon cutting were board members and executives from Chile and North America, state and local officials; ARAUCO employees, and project suppliers including Dieffenbacher. The Grayling facility is the most modern and productive mill of its kind—and marks the renewal of the composite panel industry in North America.
Dr. Martzowka delivered me. I met the doctor’s son who was treasurer for the NBD Bank in 1977 when I needed a loan to start my second company Maurer-Shumaker. My dad told me that he’d read something about a Mr. Martz in the Detroit Free Press and that his father had delivered me in 1942, and maybe the son would give me a loan. I did meet the doctor’s son in the bank’s headquarters at the top of the Renaissance Building, now the G. M. Building on the Detroit River downtown. I learned that Mr. Martz was the chief financial officer for the National Bank of Detroit, and he told me that he loans billions to foreign governments over the weekend. He was very considerate and bought my lunch at the NBD executive lunchroom on the top floor. He put me in touch with a branch manager in Livonia who would consider my request for $25,000. I think I did get the loan from his bank, or maybe it was a different bank.
About five years before my dad died in 1985. He told me that when it came time to take me (the newborn) and my mother home from the hospital, he was told by the administrative clerk that he had to pay $35 for the delivery fee. Well, my dad did not have $35, but he knew the hospital still owed him for the last two cases of eggs he had sold them. So my dad told the clerk, “Just keep the egg money and call it a day.”
The clerk must have been new to the job because she could not figure out how to make such a transfer. She said, “Mr. Maurer, I can’t do that, and you can’t take your wife and baby home until you pay the hospital. The delivery department and kitchen department are two different units of the hospital.”
So my dad, getting hot under the collar, said, “Okay then, you feed her and the baby all winter, I’m going home.”
The next day Bernard Maurer, my dad, was out in the field on the farm in Beaver Creek Township, starting his fall plowing. Sheriff Bill Golnick pulled up in the barnyard with lights flashing. My dad told me he knew the hospital had called the sheriff. Walking down the field where Dad had stopped the Allis-Chalmers with its single bottom plow, Sheriff Golnick was smiling. “The hospital called,” Mr. Golnick told my dad. “They figured out how to transfer the egg money they owe you over to the delivery department. So the bill is covered. The hospital wants you to come in and pick up your wife and kid.” So I know I was worth at least two cases of eggs.
I don’t remember much about that first winter of my life in 1942. I know now that I was born in the middle of World War II. The winters were long and cold in Crawford County, Michigan. More snow then than now (global warming, you know). So cold that our mother frequently heated flat rocks in the kitchen oven and placed them in our bed prior to Tony and me getting in. Mom gave us baths in front of the wood-fired kitchen oven in a metal tub. The outhouse and outdoor clothesline was accepted as normal, more challenging for sure in the winter.
A typical day in 1942 on the farm was sort of like this. My dad would be up around 6:00 a.m. to milk the four to five cows by hand, then carry the milk to the house basement from the barn about seventy-five yards away. He would run it through the hand-turned milk separator. We sold the cream to a butter maker in West Branch, the second town east of Roscommon on the New York Central Railway. Once a week, the seven-gallon cream can would be taken to the station and then shipped to West Branch. A week or so later, the five- to six-dollar check would be delivered to our house by my uncle Frank Cherven, our rural mailman. My uncle would also deliver the day-old Bay City Times, his own paper. I looked forward to the comics, especially Alley Oop and Joe Palooka.
We did not have electricity in 1942. I believe we got the Delco-Light Plant going around 1945; we could run low voltage appliances off that unit.
I always was aware, even as a little child, of the danger of taking a kerosene lantern into the hayloft when Dad threw the hay down for the cows. The salt we threw on the warm hay in the summer was to prevent spontaneous combustion at haying time. It would do nothing to stop a fire if the lantern fell off the nail hook in the rafters. The lantern hanging in the kitchen didn’t concern me. Normal electricity arrived at our farm sometime in the very early fifties when Tony and I were already going to the military school in Monroe.
In those days prior to my older brother, Tony, and I being sent to the Catholic military boarding school Hall of the Divine Child, I started first grade in Frederick, Michigan. Frederick was and still is a small village located nearly twenty-five miles north of our farm yet still in Crawford County. We were bused there because the closest town, Grayling, did not have room for the Beaver Creek kids when the one-room schoolhouses in the townships were closed down, probably in 1945 or 1946. I believe I rode the bus about seventy-five miles per day. Sometimes, with either Andy Nielson or Roy Millikin as our bus drivers, on the way home from school, I’d fall asleep on the shoulder of a cute fourth-grade girl from Harry Fiyan’s junkyard.
Once the cows were milked in the morning by my dad, he would then take care of the chickens. We had cows and chickens, probably three hundred chickens in two different coops: one coop for the laying hens and the second coop for the pullets. Both groups of chickens required feed and water. Dad would carry in five-gallon pails of water from the house during the winter. He would need to break through a thin layer of ice before adding more water. The next chore would likely be tending to the wood furnace. The wood we threw down the basement always seemed to be coated with ice and snow. The next morning the whole chore routine would be repeated again. What happened between morning and evening chores depended upon the time of the year.
In the late fall, there was wood to cut up using the tractor, and a long fast-moving belt hooked to an open buzz saw—not to OSHA standards, that’s for sure. Holding my end of the log two feet from the buzz saw while standing on uneven ground covered with ice and snow always got my attention. Remember Johnny Cash’s brother in Walk the Line. During the winter there was less to do between chore time.
In the spring, it was all about cleaning the barns and chicken coops (ahh, the sweet smell of fresh manure in May; chicken manure was the worst) and getting ready to plant. We enjoyed watching the new Holstein calves jumping and kicking their heels in the fresh spring air as they were let out for the first time. We were basically subsistent farmers living off venison and eggs, and all the vegetables we stored in our root cellar, and the berries we picked and canned during the summer. We did make some cash by planting extra potatoes, squash, cabbage (unfortunately, my dad did not know brussels sprouts, later my favorite vegetable), strawberries, tomatoes, green onions, and sweet corn to the local wholesaler, Mr. Warren Gill in Grayling. Planting all these vegetables (that’s what dirt farmers do) led to drilling for more water at the springs near the swamp. The wells turned out to be flowing wells, wells which we much later, in 1987, started bottling first under the franchised name de Maurier. Later we called this water Avita and Ecoviva.
Summertime was a fun time on the farm for Tony and me. It was finally warm enough to swim in the fish ponds, both the two “little ponds,” and then our favorite one, the “big pond.” Creative names, but what do you expect from four- and five-year-olds. Our cousins Sue and Sally would spend much of the summer at what we called Mose’s Cabin. Our uncle, their dad, was the famous Al “Mose” Leonard, who built his cabin on the northeast corner of our two-hundred-acre farm. The cabin was