Bloggin’ on the Edge

Posted by Scott Spielman at 3:00 AM | Comments (3)

There was an unusual scene last week at the Schrader-Howell Funeral home in Plymouth.

Mourners milled about, some in formal attire, others wearing ‘protest’ t-shirts or wearing buttons emblazoned with the logo: ‘No scab papers.’ Most, though, wore Hawaiian-print shirts. An electric palm tree gleamed by the poster boards jammed with pictures that bordered a hastily scrawled portion of a Jimmy Buffet song.

That pretty much summed up Mike Carne.

I was surprised at the news that he had passed on—as were many others. He went from healthy to the grave in about a month and a half, victimized by a stroke and a particularly vicious form of cancer.

There was a good crowd, too, considering that Mike was never the kind of person to seek the limelight. He worked behind the scenes but he was always passionate about what he did.

He was a graphic designer by trade, but his talents exceeded those areas. He was a writer and a poet and a dedicated Parrothead—he never missed a concert.

Without knowing it, he helped me gain a better understanding of what it meant to be a newspaper man.

I met him at a previous place of employment—the now-defunct Community Crier in Plymouth. Carne had worked off and on for the company and its graphic subsidiary and, at the time, was heavily involved in the Detroit Sunday Journal, the weekly publication put out by striking workers from the big Detroit dailies. He helped launch that and put it together back when it was produced from a grubby basement in downtown Plymouth.

I have a couple of distinct memories about him. One of them was work related. It was a hot day and we were all frantically working on the biggest issue of the year, our annual Fall Festival edition. We in the editorial department were stuck, trying to bring a new look to the annual thing when Mike walked by. He was busy with several other things at the time but he sat down with us and, in about 20 or 30 minutes, taught me more about graphic design than I ever learned in college. He had a way of making the unconventional look conventional; you wondered why things weren’t done that way all along.

The second was from a trip to his house off Haggerty Road. There was still enough of a child in me to gape in wonder at the entire room that had been transformed into a habitat for his full-grown iguanas. His landlord might not’ve been too happy about that, but I thought it was pretty cool.

That’s what I liked about him. He had found the perfect balance between adulthood and adolescence. He knew what to take seriously but he never let life’s many difficulties get in his way. He had a casual way of helping people that told you he didn’t think about it; he just did it. He was the kind of person we should all strive to be.

I didn’t see him much after we left The Crier. He went to Foursight in Plymouth and I came here. I’m sorry I didn’t get a chance to visit him during the illness that eventually claimed him—he remained a practical joker to the end.

I hope, now, he’s found his peace.

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