News

Dec 05, 2023

Post Card From the Pines: Time to Celebrate Us

It’s here at last! Marion, Michigan’s Old Fashioned Days weekend has arrived. It’s that one weekend each year that every Marionite by birth or at heart, considers a personal holiday of the highest

It’s here at last! Marion, Michigan’s Old Fashioned Days weekend has arrived. It’s that one weekend each year that every Marionite by birth or at heart, considers a personal holiday of the highest order. It’s time to celebrate us and where we call home. After all, we’ve been throwing ourselves a yearly party for a long time, and we’re pretty good at it.This week’s Postcard is a brief story about D.C. Sischo, whose little house in Winterfield is featured elsewhere in the Press this week. Don Sischo had a long association with Marion. He was born in Osceola County’s Hartwick Twp., in 1886. The family moved to the Marion area when he was a teen. As a young man, Mr. Sischo dabbled in photography, traveling about Michigan and taking glass plate photos of people as well as places. He made his photographs into postcards, for sale, of course.Don Sischo married Ethel VanWegen of Evart, in Detroit in 1911. They spent much of their married life living downstate, where their two children, son Clare and daughter Bessie (Betty) were born.Mr. Sischo was somewhat of a jack of all trades, going from photography and publishing to being a machinist and later a building manager. Mrs. Sischo died in 1937, and Don and his children returned to the Marion area, where Betty remained with her aunt. She graduated from Marion High School. Mr. Sischo eventually returned downstate and worked at one thing and another. According to the 1950 census he had remarried and was living in Alabama. He reappears at his daughter’s in Marion in the early 1960’s and set his little house in Winterfield.It is at this point that I met Mr. Sischo. He was a customer at my aunt’s IGA, where I could be found after school and on most Saturday’s. I remember him well. He was in his mid 70’s by then and was thin and a bit stooped. He wore glasses; wire rimmed and perched lower on his nose. He always wore a hat to shade his eyes, be it summer straw or a beat fedora. In the summer he work plaid shirts and work pants.When he shopped at the IGA, sometimes accompanied by some of the Dunn grandchildren, he shopped from a list he pulled from his shirt pocket. He likely followed that list to the letter, too. He chose his groceries carefully, according to price, and always looked for the cheaper dark bananas or marked-down, dented cans.Those were the days of very cheap canned foods sales. Everyone loved a good 10c a can, Royal Guest brand, canned foods sale. For a few dollars, folks could purchase a big variety of food in a can, from apricots to spaghetti with hominy and mustard greens in between. Those canned foods left the store by the case load. Royal Guest fed many Marion families in the winter.When Mr. Sischo arrived at the check out, list still in hand, he would put his items on the counter, and then tuck his list into his pocket. He always asked if we would take less than the stated amount, sometimes making an offer. Sometimes he chose to debate certain prices with us. We were told that was just his sense of humor, but sometimes his dickering felt very real. It was an uncomfortable place to put the check out girl and the high school help. We were never sure how to take his ‘sense of humor’.When he finally agreed to the cash register price, he would pull out his change purse, you know, with a clasp like your grandma had, and begin to count out his money. No matter how many folks were behind him, his process was always the same.My grandmother knew Mr. Sischo from way back when. He came from the same part of Osceola County as Fern, in fact, not far from her childhood home in Highland. He was a couple of years older than she and they knew a lot of the same folks. He was always good for a long chat. It was she who told of how he took photos of the area, one being an excellent photograph of the Kent Elevator in Marion, Michigan. You’ve seen it here before and we’ll show it again this week.This photo of the elevator when it was new is a good one for Old Fashioned Days 2023. We hope you take in all the festivities. Be sure to attend the car show on Main Street Friday night. Saturday will get you a great VFW chicken dinner and rummage sale, bake sale goods on the street, the beer tents and the Parade to mention but a few events. Look for those long lost friends everywhere, and above all, have a good, Old Fashioned time!!