Gerald Tanis

Gerald Tanis, 78, of Maple Bend, died Wednesday, June 10, 2026, at Corewell Health Gerber Memorial in Fremont, in the same county where he was born and, it is fair to say, where he had personally kept a great many machines running. For thirty-six years he was a millwright at the Gerber plant — the man they called when a line went down at three in the morning, and the man, more often than not, who had it moving again before the next shift clocked in.

He was born December 8, 1947, in Fremont, the son of Gerrit and Fern Tanis, and he was the kind of boy who took the toaster apart to find out how it worked and — the rarer gift — put it back together working. He graduated from Fremont High in 1966, married his sweetheart Carol Nyhof two summers later, and hired on at the Gerber plant as a millwright's apprentice in 1968, a trade he would practice for thirty-six years and, unofficially, for the rest of his life in the garages of anyone who called.

He could listen to a bearing and tell you how many days it had left. He kept every receipt he was ever handed, filed by year in shoeboxes that eventually filled a closet, then a cabinet, then a corner of the basement — and he won three separate warranty disputes and one property-tax appeal by producing, without hesitation, a slip of paper everyone else had thrown away decades before. His workshop was a place of profound and personal order in which no one else could find a thing, and he liked it exactly that way.

But the truest version of Gerald appeared each November at deer camp, a leaning cabin off a two-track north of Baldwin that he had presided over for fifty years. He kept the log, cooked the Saturday breakfast, told the same three stories with small annual improvements, and enforced a set of camp rules that went unwritten only because they lived, entire, in his head. Three generations learned to sit still in the cold from him, and learned too that the point of camp was never really the deer.

He and Carol raised two children in the house on Oak Street, where the lawn was cut in straight stripes and the snowblower started on the first pull because Gerald had been out in October making sure it would. He coached Little League, cleared his widowed neighbors' driveways before they woke, and was constitutionally incapable of walking past a broken thing without offering to have a look at it.

He is survived by his wife of fifty-seven years, Carol; his children, Todd (Michelle) Tanis of Maple Bend and Kristin (Doug) Veldkamp of Wyoming; six grandchildren; his brother, Larry (Sue) Tanis of Newaygo; the deer camp, which will have to keep its own log now; and a great many furnaces and outboard motors around the county that are still running only because Gerald refused to let them quit.

He was preceded in death by his parents; his sister, Marilyn Boven; and his grandson, Ethan, in 2019.

In lieu of flowers, memorial contributions may be made to the Maple Bend food pantry, which Gerald kept stocked and whose failing walk-in cooler he kept alive with parts he was fairly sure no longer existed.