The Paths That Loom Before Us

On the Saturday morning after the recent election, as I delivered the newspaper to the residents of northwest Conway Township, I listened to a program on National Public Radio—On the Media. The show’s overarching theme was the outcome of the presidential vote, with much of the conversation dealing with the incorrect, off-the-mark prediction by many pundits that Hillary Clinton would win the election. It was among the many post-mortems being offered by one and all in the days.

   The polling, while tightening in the final days, had given her around a three percent lead. However, that was nationally. Of more importance were the battleground states, including Michigan, where the race was close but where she still seemed (according to the experts) to hold the advantage.

Some History of Hastings & Fowlerville United Methodist Churches

    On the Sunday morning before the recent election, we drove along Vermontville Highway on our way to a worship service in Hastings. The maples still held a fair number of leaves, mainly yellow ones. These softer hues, mixed in with the shades of green, brown, and occasional red, provided us with a still decent color tour.

   It would not last much longer, I realized as I enjoyed the visual feast. A hard frost or a wet and windy day and the remaining leaves (except those on the oak trees) will fall earthward in a steady drizzle, turning a picturesque countryside into a more somber, dreary landscape.

The Way Forward...for Our State's Auto Industry & Michigan

    During my younger years one of the familiar sights on the I-96 expressway, driving to or from metro Detroit, was the Ford Wixom plant. Opened on April 15, 1957, it would eventually encompass 4.7 million square feet and produce over 6.648 million automobiles—most of them Lincolns and Thunderbirds.

    In January 2006, Ford Motor Company—suffering from sagging sales, coupled with having too much manufacturing capacity and too many employees, and foreseeing problems in the future if it didn’t realign itself to become leaner and more efficient--announced its intention to close 14 North American plants by the year 2012. Of that total, seven of them were assembly plants and the rest were power train and stamping facilities. One of the sites on the list was Wixom. Ford’s overall work force, as a result of this downsizing, would be trimmed by 25,000 to 30,000.

     They called their plan ‘The Way Forward.’