Dale Rademaker

Dale Rademaker, 71, of Grant, died Saturday, May 9, 2026, at a hospital in Grand Rapids, after managing the grain elevator that fed the county's farms for the better part of forty years and umpiring its softball for just as long — a man, it was widely held, worth arguing with and impossible to distrust.

He was born May 4, 1955, in Grant, the son of Donald and Marie Rademaker, and he went to work at the grain elevator as a teenager and never left it, rising to manager and running the place through four decades of harvests, price collapses, dry years, and the one wet fall everyone still measures the others against. Farmers trusted him with their crop and their arithmetic, which in that business are the same thing, and he never once, that anyone could prove, put a thumb on the scale.

Summer evenings, he put on the mask. For forty seasons he umpired softball — men's league, church league, the high school, and more Little League than his knees forgave him for — and he brought to it the same square honesty he brought to the scale. He ejected coaches he loved, called strikes on his own nephews, and stood in the dust while grown men explained the rules to a man who had forgotten more of them than they had learned. They argued every call. They also asked for him by name, because a Rademaker game was a fair game, and everyone knew it.

He married Connie in 1977, and they raised three children within a mile of the elevator. He was a deacon at Grant Bible Church, a Lions Club man, and the fellow who turned up with a truck when you were moving and a chainsaw when the storm passed, with no expectation of thanks either time. He kept a scorebook for the fun of it, a garden for the tomatoes, and a standing feud with the Newaygo elevator that both sides enjoyed too much to ever settle.

He is remembered for a straight scale and a fair strike zone; for four decades of standing in the exact spot where the argument was loudest and being, aggravatingly, correct; and for a reputation rarer than it should be — a man you could shout at over a call and trust with your whole harvest in the same afternoon.

He is survived by his wife of forty-eight years, Connie; his children, Todd (Amy) Rademaker of Grant, Lisa (Brian) Damstra of Newaygo, and Scott Rademaker of Grand Rapids; eleven grandchildren, several of whom he called out at the plate and none of whom hold it against him; his brother, Gary Rademaker of Grant; and four decades of ballplayers who will keep arguing the calls without him.

He was preceded in death by his parents, Donald and Marie Rademaker; and his brother and longtime umpiring partner, Kenny, who worked the bases while Dale worked the plate for twenty summers.

Flowers are welcome and can be sent to either chapel — Maple Bend Floral ((231) 555-0121) times deliveries to the visitation. More on flowers and remembrances.