Later this summer I’ll return to my hometown. It will be the first time I’ve been back home in more than ten years, when there wasn’t a funeral involved. I come from a small town smack-dab in the middle of the U.P. that, in many ways, hasn’t changed from when I was a child in the 1960s. I’ll be going back for a pair of events: an all-school reunion and Rock’s 150th birthday.

I was eight when we celebrated our Centennial in 1965 and it was one of the best times of my life -and one of the worst.

At the time, Rock was known for its annual Labor Day Festival and Parade, sponsored by the local Lions Club. Thousands of people (I’m not kidding) would line the main drag in our town for the biggest parade in the Central U.P.

Following the parade, the crowds would migrate to the “grounds” near the high school for food, games, rides and a lot of fun. It was the biggest day of the year in my little town. And on Labor Day Weekend 1965 it was bigger than ever. The event lasted three days, with the festivities starting on Saturday and ending with the big fireworks on Monday night.

Most folks, including us kids, were dressed in “centennial costumes.” We all looked like extras from “Little House on the Praire.” Men in my life who had always been clean shaven sported full beards. My dad won the ribbon for most colorful beard – they didn’t call him “Red” for nothing. Even my beloved Papa (my mother’s father, Frank Salmi) had facial hair. A perfectly trimmed goatee that my mother the beautician died blue.

I remember shaking hands with Governor Romney during the centennial. I didn’t think he even knew where Rock was, but there he was, walking in the parade, stopping right in front of our house to shake our hands and hand out wooden yard sticks with his name on them. (To this day I think Romney was the only Republican my dad ever liked).

That Centennial weekend was the biggest event our town has ever seen, with TV and radio coverage and pictures in the Escanaba Daily Press and the Delta Reporter. And it was all capped off by a gigantic fireworks display over the football field. Everything was so wonderful that I didn’t even mind the prospect of going back to school the next day.

What I didn’t know when I climbed into bed that night, was that I wouldn’t be going to school the next day. And that I would never see my Papa again.

Whether it was the stress and excitement of the weekend or ironically bad timing, Papa went to bed after the festivities had ended and never woke up. A massive heart attack had claimed him while he slept.

My dad woke me and knelt by the side of my bed and told me the news and how as the oldest grandchild I had to be strong for my mom and grandma. My first thought was “who’s going to be strong for me? My Papa’s gone.”

It’s interesting that in the half century since that September morning, I have thought about my grandfather often. But nearly always in terms of his death and how it impacted me and my family (and how it tainted Labor Day celebrations for us for quite a few years). I rarely reflect on his life and the impact that him being my grandfather had on me. This was brought home to me a couple of weeks ago at church. After service at the coffee social, I watched a youngster climb up on his grandpa’s lap and dunk his cookie in the gentleman’s coffee. I was instantly transported to that round kitchen table with the chrome legs and red laminate top in my grandparent’s home. I can hear my Papa in that thick Finnish accent urging me to “put a soak” on my Trenary toast in his coffee cup.

I can hear his deep voice singing a song, half in English and half in Finnish about a porcupine “piikkisika, piikkisika, porcupine, I can see you hiding in the northern pine.” Memories that I had all but forgotten, hidden in five decades of grief.

For years I’ve been so focused on what his death did to me, I’ve forgotten what his life did. How in those short 8 and a half years he helped mold me into the person I became.

And of course it is the perfect analogy for growing up in my little town. It’s so easy to look at life in small U.P. towns in terms of what we didn’t have malls, movie theatres, fast food, cable etc. But what we gained, that sense of community, of belonging that rarely exists in larger communities far outweighs anything we grew up without.

When I go back home in September, I’ll be sure to remember them – and Papa.

Editor’s note: Mark Wilcox is a news writer for Michigan Technological University Marketing and Communications.