Skip Dyes is a Cass County commissioner. He serves district three.

Last week, we talked about my grandfather, my mother’s father, who came to Cass County from Aiken, South Carolina. Today’s story starts with my dad, who came up from Mississippi.

Boston Dyes, my father, was born in Clark County, Mississippi, on Aug. 27, 1913, in a little town called Pachuta. He attended school, could read and write, and knew a few trades — he could weld. He loved Mississippi. He would often tell me about the red clay, the hot summers. Every winter here, he would wonder how he would deal with the cold, but this was better.

Here, he didn’t have to worry about the double standard of life that existed in the south. So, in his mid-twenties, he told his family that he was going north to Chicago for better opportunities.

Once in Chicago, he worked many odd jobs, and he once told me he had never seen so many people before. One day, he was walking down the street, and he heard this woman singing, and he thought, “Woah, that is such a beautiful voice.” He had to meet the woman behind the voice. That was my mother. He met my mother, Nancy Vorters, in Chicago. They got married in 1939.

My mother, born Nov. 23, 1914, came north from Aiken, South Carolina. She went to grammar school and could read and write, so she and my father were a very good couple. She was employed by the arts and cultural projects that were proposed by the New Deal. After they got married, my mother had a sister who lived in Philadelphia, who told them that there were jobs there. They went moved there and stayed into the early parts of the 1940s, and my dad got a job welding holes on the ships in the shipyard.

After the Second World War, work in the shipyards slowed down a bit, and my grandfather called my parents and told them they could come here, to Cass County, because he had a farm here. That’s how they got to Cass County.

The family attended Chain Lake Church in Cassopolis, which has a history rich in heritage as it was founded in 1838 by ex-slaves. My father became a deacon there, and when the minister left, he became a minister at the church in April of 1952. With my mother’s singing and my father’s messaging, membership grew and grew. He was an inclusive person, and he wanted to know as many people as he could know, and he infected me with that.

He knew the church was fine on its own, but we needed to extend our outreach. Through a bold move, he and other ministers, at area white churches, had decided to switch pulpits one Sunday. When people arrived, there was a new minister — Rev. Lombard from the Union Baptist Church was at Chain Lake, and my dad was at Union. Later, he would exchange pulpits with the minister from Mason Baptist Church, and this went on for years. This was the early 1960s, so he was kind of ahead of his time. He could do things here he never could have done in Clark County — he could be inclusive. He would say, as I say now, “you need to know all your neighbors.”

He passed that along to me. In 1963, after meeting the new director of Camp Friedenwald, a Mennonite camp, my father and mother asked me if I wanted to go to summer camp. I did, and a whole new life was opened to me, and I made friendships that continue to this day.

Those are some of the things that led my dad to Cass County. So, what does Destination Cass County mean? I guess, when I think of Destination Cass County, I think of my grandfather, who told me, “I came here to change my life, but I recognize that I changed yours.”

We still have our problems in Cass County. We still focus on our differences. We still don’t talk to each other enough. We still have self-imposed barriers, but Cass County is a place where my father and my grandfather came to get to a starting point for a better life, a better world.

We all have an obligation to make the world a better place, but if you want to change the world, you have to change Cass County first. If you are in a room and everyone looks like you – get out there and find out what you don’t know and talk to someone you don’t know.

Let’s all work to improve Cass County.