Wilbo Learns That Byron, Michigan Has A Shot at a Makeover from Home and Garden Television and Walks the Streets of Memory

February 7, 2020 @ 9:55 AM
Starbucks at Girod Street & O’Keefe Avenue
Warehouse District, New Orleans, Louisiana

My writing energy runs at different temperatures. Most of the morning, my writing has run hot, but in small spurts. It’s been like a military shower and I’ve had to keep hitting the hot water button.

I discovered a video made of the town where I lived from six until seventeen. All of my friends who had stayed local shared the link on Facebook. Lauren Stanton, a woman who had made her mark in broadcast news produced the video to attract the attention of Home and Gardens Television. HGTV has plans to visit towns and make them over. Think of Restaurant: Impossible or Bar Rescue, but conducted on a municipal scale.

I didn’t know Stanton was related to town icon, Bob Skinner, a man my mother knew through her job driving buses. The major bridge over the Shiawassee River was named after Skinner. He brought the town to its peak, around the year I graduated from high school. I even went so far as to look up Skinner’s obituary. I soon found myself geeking out over my command of Byron history because once I was very proud of the town. I marched in its streets, first as a boy scout and then as a member of the Byron Marching Eagles.

Towns can vanish into the black hole that has taken so many towns in Texas and Virginia, towns with a marker that keeps the name alive but where one cannot buy a bag of potato chips. On my father’s request, I visited the town of Aurora Texas to look for signs of the alien who survived the crash of a spaceship for a few days, a story from 1897. I found a place a mile outside of Aurora to stop for a beveridge. The lady who helped me said, “You’re going to the cemetery to look for the alien’s grave? I better give you the extra large sweet tea”.

I found the ruins of a shack that once sold Aurora alien tee shirts. I found the cemetery. I found the historical marker that told the story. I met the groundskeeper, cleaning up the dried, withered flowers off of graves. We talked. He laughed at me in a good natured way. He had met many visitors drawn to the story, like me, before that day. I stood in the cemetery and stared down the slope to the Trinity River hundreds of feet below, staring at the beginning of the famous Texas Grasslands, an inland sea of grass, infested with wild boars. I called dad and reported my findings. He tried to sound upbeat, but I’m sure I had let him down.

I hadn’t known that a few vital businesses had shuttered since my last visit to downtown Byron. I remembered hearing news of a fire that took out six brownstone shops from the horse and buggy era. The fire started above a restaurant my parent’s loved, Janelle’s. When my father died in 2011, I took the entire family to Janelle’s for an order-what-you-want dinner off the menu.

After that, the grocery store closed, a place where my mother loved to shop. The town raised money by putting penny polls to select the most admirable senior citizens on the butcher counter at Yott’s. Then Beard’s. Then Fairway. Then nothing.

Through the internet, I’ve tapped on what I could learn about the town where I became an adult. The branch of Citizens Bank closed. Dad and I once stood and talked to the manager for an hour the last time we had dinner at Janelle’s.

When it was called Genesee Bank, I exhibited a collection of fire prevention posters children drew for a contest I organized. I had gone to all the elementary classrooms, walking over from the middle school, to talk about fire prevention. A walk to a mansion on Main Street with a handwritten press release got me a mention in the Owosso Argus Press. Scored my first ink at age eleven! I left the tip in the screen door, as the local reporter requested when I called her. I have done just that hundreds of times ever since then, promoting the stories and the causes that I loved.

The phone number at the Byron Michigan Ambulance Service doesn’t pick up, suggesting to me that Powers Ambulance Service now handles the calls. Before Shirley Mack made the ambulance service a reality, Small and Streeter took people to the hospital in the hearse. A friend of mine who was hurt sliding into home plate was taken to a Flint hospital by the hearse. The umpire called it a run, by the way. We played Pony League hard in those days. I discovered the Small and Streeter Funeral Home fell victim to fire in 2011. Neighbors called 911 and then entered the building, removing caskets, including one casket that had an occupant.

Will Byron vanish, becoming little more than a collection of homes with no public buildings? The Methodist Church stands near the elementary, a  wonder of hand cut fieldstone that honors the faith of local farmers, including the family of Florence and Richard Bixby. Surely nothing could take down such a bold fortress of faith? I’ve attended services at Episcopal Churches all over Upstate New York built to be cathedrals and found barely enough people to staff the vestry. The public schools have kept the educational level high for over a century. What if everyone switches to online schooling or Durand and Byron consolidate?

Can one really lose a village that stands at the confluence of two great branches of a magnificent river called the Shiawassee? I once helped build a duck blind on that pond. As a first grader, I wondered aloud what the mill pond would become if we could properly dredge it? We stared down at its waters from the playground, catching our breaths from running. I was surprised to see a Dollar General on the map on the north boundaries of town, ensuring some degree of grocery shopping because nothing closes one of those units down.

I went through the list of Byron churches. Methodist. Check. Baptist. Check. And then I found the Village Church. Followed a link out to a promising web page. Called the phone number, but the phone number turned out to be a Google Voice number, free to anybody with an email address. But still, I found a church struggling to set up operations in a town with a long tradition of faith. I found the preacher teaching, recording his sermons on Facebook, one from last Sunday. The man must have earned a perfect grade in sermons because I’ve been listening for a half hour. He must be gathering his flock in a room rented from the school. I’ll try the email next.

A pop up message for Byron Schools declares today, Friday, February 7, 2020, a snow day. I go to the Facebook page. Who wrote that lovely message suggesting young people offer neighbors help digging out? It sounds like a message that Mrs. Vickroy  would have written during her time teaching social studies at the middle school. Mrs. Vickroy, who gave all of her students the gift of chess, always had a story telling us the way to good behavior. But the appeal was written by the person who answers this email address: brewer@byron.k12.mi.us. Pictures of snow day shoveling should show up on the Facebook page tomorrow.

That’s the spirit of a village that looks toward its next century.


Lauren Stanton’s Video Pitching Byron Michigan for a Home Town Makeover from HGTV
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fy5BilNaDHI