Our founder, Paul Phenix, reflects: Sitting here thinking that Friday will be the day that the state officially approves the grant request of $275,000 to Rebuild Whites Covered Bridge God willing. Since there is a bit of a lull right now until that is done, I thought that I would take the time to let you know what drives me to see this bridge rebuilt and why I have put myself out on a limb to do it. When the bridge burnt, I did not even know about it until I seen a post on Facebook. I was working on restoring my 1971 Volkswagen Super Beetle’s brakes with my brother Howard Larsen and during our conversion about the bridge, I told him that I was thinking about starting a Facebook group to rebuild it, he agreed and here we are! As many of you know from my posts, my grandparents Charlotte and Grandville Phenix who raised my sisters and I used to take us kids out there to the bridge where we would drop a line and try to catch some fish. It was also almost a ritual for them to show us where generations of our family had wrote or scratched their names in the interior of the bridge, looking at those names I was able to connect with my great uncle Douglas S. Wiggins who on Christmas Eve 1944 lost his life in New Guinea during WWII, thus helping pave the way for me to make a career out of the military. I would later return and show my own children where their ancestors including their great grandparents, great uncles, myself and their mother had put their names in the bridge, they in turn did the same and talked about when they had children, they would do the same. No one thought about the bridge ever not being there, it was just taken for granted that it would be because wasn’t this little corner of Ionia County, Gods Country? Little did any of us know that a very malicious, vile person would shatter our vision, but not our will. I decided from the start that this project was not about me, it was about paying homage to my ancestors. One of those ancestors, and the only one alive of my grandparents children, is my uncle Donald Phenix. I can honestly say that I have only truly had one hero, uncle Don. You see Don was born with just one arm, his left arm came just down past his elbow joint and it was rounded with a little nub on it. I can’t remember when I realized that he was different from everyone else I knew, I just knew that I adored him because he never let not having that left arm and hand affect him. Uncle Don raced VW’s, played Golf, hunted with bow and arrow and everything else a “normal” person did and never let life get him down. He worked at Electrolux in Greenville and ended up getting that job after WZZM or WOOD TV ran a story about the difficulty he had getting a job because of his perceived “Handicap” in the 1970’s. Uncle Don excelled in his work moving up from being a line worker to engineering to management, never letting his “Handicap” hold him back. I could really take some life lessons from that man. I have learned from him that when something knocks you down, you get back up, dig in your heels, get organized and get right back into the project, something I did when I formed the board for what would become the Whites Bridge Historical Society. To be honest with you, for a while there I thought that the project of rebuilding the bridge was as they say “dead in the water”. As a community we got lucky, we found a group of people that were willing to carry myself and my goal on their shoulders, people who were willing to take precious time out of their busy schedule and do things like request a grant from the state to make Whites Bridge a reality again. When you think about it, we got blessed. Where were we to ever find an engineer who had actually rebuilt a covered bridge before, especially one that had been built over 140 years ago? One that only a very limited number of a certain design were ever built? Our engineer found us! Talk about a good omen. As we await the final word from the state, please ask yourself how much Whites Bridge meant to you and if you are willing to help either with a donation of time or money to raise the remaining $200,000 that we need.
Posted on: Wed, 29 Oct 2014 13:03:48 +0000
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