Times are tough here in Union City, but you wouldn’t know it on this warm morning, when the Michigan summer is gentle and soft.
Cars glide past on Adolph Road, crossing the bridge that spans the St. Joseph River. Shopkeepers open their doors and hang signs in the window, inviting you inside to have a look. The Chatter Box café is nearly full, with people having their local news and gossip over coffee with ham and eggs.
Three barefoot boys carrying fishing rods walk down the sidewalk, approaching the bridge. Chattering excitedly, they follow a footpath down toward the river. Watch that can there…look out for that poison ivy…step over that fallen log. Soon they are under the bridge, enveloped in the dark, cool air, where their voices echo off the curved ceiling.
Despite this idyllic scene, Union City is like every small town in America. Young people graduate high school and leave town, lured away by higher wages and the conveniences of the larger cities and suburbs. The declining population means less tax revenue, while the expenses of running and maintaining the town continue to rise.
The buildings and homes here are pretty, but they can’t compete with the fresh new construction circling Grand Rapids and Ann Arbor and Lansing, not to mention Battle Creek or Kalamazoo. So it’s easy for folks here to wonder if anything nice ever will ever again be built in a tired old town like Union City.
Marv Carman is out to change that. In his glory days as a racer — through the 1970s and ’80s — he just about owned this region, winning race after race and becoming a bona fide legend. He managed to escape the local level to win the Little 500 twice down in Indiana, and won USAC races at the national level and was Rookie of the Year in 1975.
Through it all Carman always came back to Union City. This is home, he figured, and at the end of the day that’s where a man goes. So he lived here and married here and put down roots so deep there’s just no chance he’s going anywhere else.
Some months ago Carman got a serious fever. Not the medical kind of fever, but rather a fever of conscience, of passion. There was a discussion that Union City ought to have a stand-alone library. Doggone it, why can’t we at least give our kids a place to go to find knowledge, to find adventure, to find something other than video games and television?
People laughed at the idea. A new library, in this old, tired, one-horse town? You might as well wish for Cinderella’s castle, right here by the river across the street from the Chatter Box café.
That kind of talk irritated Carman. Irritated him a lot. He wasn’t ready to accept that Union City was a hopeless town, even though the glitz of faraway suburbs have pushed these places to the margins and made them somehow irrelevant.
Carman, who recently retired at age 65, now had a mission. And everybody knows you can’t stop a racer on a mission.
The next thing you know, Carman began to lobby people in town. Why can’t we build a library? Everybody agreed that it would be nice, but…the money. Michigan law states that local communities are responsible for the construction of libraries, so the state could offer not one dime of help.
Undeterred, Carman recruited several others and a fundraising and planning committee was formed. Several people have pitched in, but Carman has remained the front man, doing the legwork and gentle persuasion that in the beginning allowed a few rays of hope to shine through the apathy.
It has truly been a grassroots effort, and it hasn’t been glamorous. The money has come from bake sales, breakfast buffets, and the like. Today, for example, Carman has organized a car show and cruise through Union City, and across the way a smattering of race cars, classic muscle cars, and antique rods sit shining under the sun. It’s been nickels and dimes and wrinkled up dollar bills, but the project has inched along.
In what has to be one of the feel-good surprise stories of the year, the group has now raised more than $200,000, which is two-thirds of the way toward their goal of $300,000.
It couldn’t be a more unlikely story, or a more unlikely leader. You see, Marv Carman isn’t a reader. In fact, he jokes that he’s still working on finishing his second book since high school; he means reading the books, not writing them.
All those years ago as a schoolboy, Carman found reading excruciatingly difficult. Today, he would be immediately diagnosed with a reading disability, and educators would know how to help him. But times were different then, so Carman slid through the system, cutting corners and making the best of it.
As an adult he enjoyed success not just in racing, but in the car business, and he later spent many years working for a leasing company. His people skills allowed him to enjoy a successful life and career, and he slowly overcame much of his reading disability. Still, he struggles to digest long blocks of text.
It’s sweetly ironic that a man for whom reading is an enormous challenge would work so hard to allow Union City kids to have access to books. But that’s his dream; he envisions a child reaching for the bookshelf in the official Union Township Library, opening a volume and feeling the bright rays of knowledge and enlightenment pouring over them.
This library is about more than bricks and mortar and books. It’s about pride, and purpose, and citizens who won’t allow their town to die. It’s about investing in people, and giving them a chance to make better human beings of themselves. When you learn, you grow; no amount of apathy can overcome that irrefutable fact.
One of these days when they have the official ceremony to open their new library — and there will be such a ceremony, there is simply no doubt — the people of Union City can look at themselves and realize that good things happen because good people make it so.
Marv Carman believes in Union City. Just like the racer he once was, he refuses to lose. This is his calling, his mission. And you know what? You just can’t stop a racer on a mission.