The Mid Michigan Tustins

By JULIE BERRY TRAYNOR

Cleaver Guest Writer

When I graduated from Marion High School I knew what my immediate future held. After a summer job at my aunt’s IGA, I would go to the new Mid Michigan Community College in Harrison. I looked forward to this next step in my grown-up life.

After several years of talk and planning, Mid Michigan Community College was set to open its doors. Curtis Merton, the first Dean of Academic Instruction at Mid Michigan, visited area schools, speaking with college bound seniors. He visited MHS in March. A number of MHS seniors found the offerings and advantages of Mid the perfect solution for them. When classes started for the first freshman class in September 1968, I was happily among them. 

The premier year of classes for the first freshman at Mid’s Harrison campus were held in the lower level of the then very new Clare County Court House in Harrison. Mid Nursing School and Vocational Arts classes were held in Mt. Pleasant.) Some science classes were held at night and utilized the facilities at the Harrison High School, just across the street. Meanwhile, construction was underway at the Mid Michigan Campus site on Old 27. The President’s (Eugene Gillespie) home was completed first and work was moving along on the first building. 

So, where do a bunch of newly minted, broke college freshmen hang out in between classes? The county building had a large meeting room on the lower level. The solution was to set up a lot of tables and bring in vending machines. A lot of card playing happened there. Almost everyone participated in Euchre 101.  The alternatives were few. We could sit in our cars in the parking lot, because then as now, everyone drove to Mid. I listened to the Tigers win the 1968 World Series on my car radio, parked in the courthouse parking lot. A lot of students brought brown bag lunches. The parking lot was a big lunch room on good days.  

We spent our food money at the various eating places in Harrison. At that time the former stone bank building, two blocks from the courthouse, was a restaurant known as the Golden Horseshoe. It was a great place for a burger and fries, to have coffee and read before the next class, and hang with friends. The owners, and particularly the waitress Rita, were very good us. This former bank was still complete with white marble countertops, windowsills and floor. The building was demolished quite some time ago and is now part of the splash pad site. 

There are a few things that the charter class at Mid Michigan Community College founded, if that is the right word, which are still going strong. It was that first student body that chose the school colors of green and blue, the name Laker and the name Lakers for any of Mid’s athletic teams. It was members of that freshman class who built Mid Michigan’s basketball team, the first Lakers. The team was comprised of players from surrounding communities; some had known high school competitions.

In a capsulated version, the team began as talk among the former members of high school teams. They could see no reason why there shouldn’t be athletics, and got up a team with Marion’s Dave Pobanz, a student and coach. They found places to practice and plunged ahead. And as their season approached, they even managed to find regulation uniforms, although not exactly homegrown. Here is where we come to a bit of MMCC First’s Trivia. The question is this: 

What first MMCC Lakers basketball team wore uniforms not displaying the school colors and declaring that they were who?

Answer: The first Lakers Basketball Team ever took the floor for their first season in regulation uniforms with TUSTIN in bold red letters on the white shirts.

I will explain. Since this new and unproven team raised little money toward uniforms, and wanting to appear united, they gladly took an offer from the former Tustin High School of their old uniforms. Tustin was part of the then recently consolidated school district making up the Pine River School District in Osceola County. Hence, we jokingly called them the Tustins. The Tustin’s were winners and held their own. By the second season, the boys proudly sported Lakers on shirts in the right colors. Go! Lakers!

We were often reminded of the ‘firsts’ for the college of which we were a part. It was a first for us all, this college thing. I am not sure that we all understood how important this was. No matter how grown we thought we were, we were really just kids learning to navigate life, one Tustin event at a time.