Living Legacies : Jan Lathers

By Amanda Dodge The Oceana Echo Community Contributor

“There’s always a project,” Jan Lathers said, reflecting on all of the many adventures that she and her late husband, Dale, embarked upon over their 61-year marriage.

Yet, as with all great stories that need to be told, it is best to start at the beginning. “I am from Hart, Mich,” Jan said. “I grew up right on East Main Street. My dad had Vern’s Garage right there.”

Jan is the daughter of Lavern and Allena Greiner and grew up with two brothers and two sisters.

“It was a family business. Dad did all of the mechanical work, mom did the books and my brothers worked in the garage,” she recalled. “My brother, Nick, took the garage over when my dad retired.

“My dad was raised on a farm out in Weare. He was the oldest of 10 children, and he did not want to continue farming so he went to Flint and learned how to become a mechanic from my uncle and then they moved back and he built his garage.”

Jan said that the business changed names several times over the years. “It was Vern’s Garage. And then it was Greiner and Son’s Garage. And then it was Sunoco. We even had a small gas station at Silver Lake.

“But mostly my dad did a lot of welding and my brother’s did the other kind of work on the cars. And a lot of teenage boys worked for my dad part-time. I hear stories from some of them sometimes,” she recounted with a chuckle.

She added that her brother, David, was an industrial arts teacher in Holton, Mich. east of Muskegon for 30 years, until he retired.

After sharing about her family, the conversation turned towards how she and her husband met.

“Well, actually, we were in high school together, but we never connected,” Jan said. “He was a junior when I was a freshman. I remember seeing him in art class once, or standing by the drinking fountain in the old Hart High School.

“After I graduated, I went to Grand Rapids with three of my girlfriends and we all got jobs and we lived down there together. I was a rate clerk at Hardware Mutuals in Grand Rapids, right downtown on Division and we would come home some weekends.

“And then one August, I think it was 1960, we decided we’d rent a camper at Silver Lake for a week, all of us girls, to have a vacation. Well, we were camping out there and somehow Dale and his friend, Dave, found out that there were Hart girls camping at Silver Lake, so he came by on his flying saucer and stopped and asked if any of us girls wanted to go for a ride. My friend Sally and I got on, and we went for a wild dune ride.”

At this point, Jan paused and smiled, adding “and then he kept stopping by our trailer for several nights. One of those nights, he said, ‘Hey, we’re gonna have a beach party at the lighthouse on Saturday night. You girls want to go?’ So we did and then I went back to Grand Rapids to work, and a few days later, I got a letter from him.”

To this day, Jan emphatically said she “never found out how he got my address.”

In his letters, Jan remembered that Dale asked her if the next time she came home, if he could see her. And she said “yes.”

A week later they began to date, with Jan saying that she could only see him on the weekends due to her job. “He would never show up until 9:30 at night because he drove dune buggies for his brother Bill from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m, so after that we’d go to Ludington for a pizza and come back and that was our date.”

Jan said that their courtship was mostly letters, and they just kept writing to each other, almost every single day. She added that Dale was very active at Western Michigan University where he was attending college, acting in plays and he was in University Singers. She was able to visit him a few times, but they mostly saw each other in the summertime.

In the fall of 1961, Dale began student teaching at Godwin Heights in Grand Rapids, and he was living with his sister and her family. Jan said that they babysat for those kids sometimes together, and they saw each other more. “He never really had a car of his own at that time. He would borrow his sister’s car to visit me. In the summer, he would borrow whatever car Bill had available, so when he picked me up for a date in the summer, I never knew what his car was going to look like,” she said with a laugh.

Their relationship continued to grow, and around November of 1961 Dale proposed to Jan. “He graduated on Jan. 20 of 1962 and we got married on Jan. 27, one week after he graduated.”

They were married at St. Gregory’s Catholic Church in Hart. Together they had four sons, Jesse, Gregory, Jeffrey and Jonathon. Jan said that both she and Dale prioritized education and both made great strides in their careers.

After they were married, Jan said they lived in Grand Rapids. “He got his first teaching job at Peach Grove, which was an elementary school. He only taught fifth grade for just one semester and he had to catch them up in every subject. So we spent all of our nights correcting papers when we were first married,” Jan noted. “That fall Northview High School was built, and he was one of the first teachers hired there. He taught speech, debate and drama.”

Jan said that they moved to Rockford during this time and welcomed their first son. Summers while Dale wasn’t teaching, she said, were spent back in Silver Lake, where he continued to drive dune buggies for his brother.

In 1965, Dale’s mother, Celia died, and so he wanted to move back to Mears to be closer to his father, Swift, which is exactly what they did. “He became the principal and eighth grade teacher at Mears School,” she said. “He spent one year there as the principal and teacher and then in the fall of 1967, after obtaining his master’s degree in education, he found a job in Grant, Mich. as principal of the junior high school. We moved to Grant, and we were there for five years.”

She added that while there, he was assistant superintendent, special projects director and he created Camp Success for underprivileged kids. Dale also served as State Vice President of the Jaycees, and obtained an Educational Specialist degree, which is like a second master’s degree.

From Grant, the Lathers moved to Saginaw, with Dale becoming executive director of the Saginaw Education Association. “He just kept moving up,” Jan said. “There, he represented 1,000 teachers or more in Saginaw. He bargained their contracts and all that stuff because that’s what they do.

I was mostly a housewife, except in Saginaw I did start going back to college and took a couple of classes.”

In 1974, the Lathers moved to Holland, Mich., when Dale took the position of executive director of the Holland Education Association, representing 1,500 teachers in all of Ottawa County.

“We stayed there for 23 years, so we mostly raised our family there,” she said. “In Holland, Dale and three other people decided they wanted to go to law school, and so they drove back and forth to Cooley for a couple of years and he graduated cum laude. So now he had his fourth degree, a juris doctorate.”

Jan said that she worked part-time at an insurance agency while Dale was in law school, and she continued her education by taking some classes at Grand Valley State University in interior design, but they only had a two-year degree.

“When Dale graduated from Cooley Law School, I said, ‘now it’s my turn.’ So then I went to Kendall in Grand Rapids and graduated with a degree in interior design. One of my former teachers decided to go to Florida, so I bought her design business.

“We bought a building in Grand Haven. And one-half was my design business, and in the other half, he opened a small law practice. He was still working for the Michigan Education Association. He did a few things like wills and trusts and stuff like that.

“And then he got an offer from the MEA to move to Lansing to be an attorney for them. So he went from executive director to attorney, and he spent five years in Lansing. He also bought a small house down there, and he was commuting back and forth for five years. I was running my design business and also teaching interior design part-time at Baker College at night.”

After a few years, the Lathers both decided another change was due. Jan stopped teaching and started working for Grand Design and Workshop, which focused on the interior of restaurants. Dale left his job in Lansing, and a position opened up for him in Grand Haven.

Once Dale turned 55 and he could retire, Jan said they decided to come back home. “We were camping up at Silver Lake one weekend and we were just riding our bicycles around and saw a house there that we just loved.

“Oh, and of course he was in heaven up there and we ran a bed and breakfast for seven years. It was called the Dunes Bed and Breakfast. We really had quite a good clientele. We had people from other countries and all over,” Jan recalled. “But after seven years, I found out it was so much work between the house and the grocery shopping, and the gardens, and the lawn, and the laundry. We decided not to do it anymore.

“We lived at Silver Lake for about 20 years, I think. It was a wonderful place to live. He could go up on his dune buggy anytime he wanted to. In fact, one year, we gave a birthday party for our dune buggy, a 1959 Ford, that was part of Bill’s Dune Rides.

“I love Silver Like, and I love the views. But the winters got pretty rough because you’re so isolated out there. Once Dale’s brother, Bill, died, Dale wanted to live in Mears again. So we wrote down on a piece of paper, all the pros and cons, you know, of Silver Lake versus Mears and I guess he won out.

So we bought his brother’s house.”

And that is where Jan still lives today. During their time in that house, the Lathers were very active in the community, with Dale serving on many boards. They were, and she still is, involved in the Oceana County Historical & Genealogical Society. “He never stopped getting involved. When you are married to Dale, projects never end. We were always involved in each other’s projects. We just helped each other do these different things.

“I’ve done some design work up here. I’ve done a lot of drafting and I’ve drawn up plans for quite a few things that Dale was involved in,” she said.

In Mears, Jan had an antique store for five years and an ice cream store, and together the Lathers had a passion for many things during their years together. Jan said that they loved to travel, but their greatest love was theater and they greatly enjoyed going to Stratford, Ontario to the Shakespearean Festival there. She added that they have also been to Paris, Italy, twice to London and spent a week in Ireland. Dale was also a gifted public speaker, and that gave the Lathers the opportunity to spend four days in Hawaii.

Jan said that they never recorded Dale’s voice very much, but she did find a 39-minute video of Dale talking about the history of dune buggies which will now be played at the Transportation Museum that is named for Bill, and is part of the Mears Historical Park complex that the Lathers helped put together and celebrates Swift’s legacy. “Family was so important to Dale,” she said. “He really loved his family and his community.”

Dale passed away on Valentine’s Day this year, just three days after his 84th birthday, with Jan holding his hands. “He’s the kind of person that the things he wants to do in life never end. In fact, even at the very end if he had a legal pad and a pen he was happy because he could scribble all the things that he said he still needed to do.”

Jan continues to do many of the things that her husband did, and she said she enjoys spending time in her garden, riding her bike, volunteering and taking classes on subjects she is interested in. She added that her sister lives close by and she gets to see her children a lot. She also said that she plans to do some traveling.

And though she said that the projects she is working on now are small, they will continue to have a lasting impact on this area just as she and Dale have always wanted.