John Emerson spent decades showing up for Mount Clemens: city council meetings, Juneteenth celebrations (organized before the holiday existed), black history presentations at the Mount Clemens Public Library, contributions to a book on the city's history.
Ask him what kept him coming back year after year, and John will talk about his wife.
Loretta Jean Morlet Emerson died shortly after giving birth to their son Patrick. She had been told there were risks. She chose Patrick.
John pushed through, while also raising his three older sons.
"Every time I go out there," Emerson says, "I'm honoring her memory."
Emerson’s scholarship in her name carries that same logic: her life given forward, in perpetuity.
Emerson’s grandfather was enslaved. His father was born in the first generation after abolition. That didn’t hold him back: John became a Mount Clemens Local Treasure.
That arc belongs to our city.
John Cline makes a room feel better just by being in it. "I can get people laughing in a funeral home," he says.
Retirement hasn’t slowed John down. He stays involved in Mount Clemens Optimist Club, Friends of Mount Clemens, Soap Box Derby, and OATS, a therapeutic horsemanship organization where he helps autistic children bond with horses.
At OATS, John treats the kids like kids, He playfully chased one girl around the observation room, threatening to pull her ponytail— much to the discomfort to the other volunteers, But by session's end, this autistic little girl drew him a picture, signed her name… and hugged him on the way out.
A non-verbal autistic child was initially frightened by John’s loud voice. After several sessions, the little girl left her mom’s side to follow John. One afternoon she began talking, so much she ran out of things to say. “I had tears in my eyes,” John recalls.
No matter the challenge, Cline gets involved. First on the scene of a car accident, Cline saw a nineteen-year-old dying inside. He climbed in and held the young man while he passed, not letting go until the officers arrived.
What drives him to step in? "Because others won't," he says.
He grew up without much. Didn't know people kept food in the refrigerator until he was nine. "I know what it's like to have nothing," he says. That’s why one of John’s favorite events is Fueling the Kids: the Mount Clemens Optimist Club packs bags of food and snacks for kids, so they’ll have something to eat on weekends.
If you want to help your community, Cline says, “Start with your neighbor who never says hi. Open a door. Say hello.”
Mount Clemens Mayor Laura Kropp says the Local Treasures Awards boost everyone’s morale. "We feel like sometimes we're like a bank," she says, "with a lot of withdrawals and not a lot of deposits. Local Treasures is a deposit.”
City Manager Gregg Shipman agrees. “What people like these two gentlemen do," Shipman says, "is bridge the gap between the city and its residents.” Shipman’s executive assistant Elaine VanHuyse adds, “A lot of people work quietly here, anonymously. They don't want to be acknowledged. You wouldn't even know the things they've done unless you'd been touched by them yourself. These things are just done.”