Obituary
In the care of Solemn OaksRoy Tabbert, 61, of White Cloud, died Thursday, September 10, 2026, at Corewell Health Butterworth Hospital in Grand Rapids, after a short illness that none of us were ready for and he refused to discuss at length.
Roy was born April 22, 1965, in White Cloud, to Kenneth and Darla Tabbert, and he was welding by seventeen — first for his uncle, then for the shop on Wilcox, then for thirty-one years at the fabrication plant, where he trained more apprentices than anyone cared to count and had a low, flat way of saying "do it again" that people still hear in their heads years later.
He rode. A 1998 Road King, mostly to Baldwin and back, occasionally to the Upper Peninsula, once to South Dakota with three friends and a spectacular disregard for the forecast. He held the group together for twenty years — the rides, the toy run every December, the fund for whoever needed it — and did the organizing quietly enough that people thought it organized itself.
He kept a shop behind the house where the light was on most evenings, and where half of White Cloud has, at one time or another, brought a cracked bracket, a snapped trailer hitch, or a lawn mower deck rusted through. He never charged. He would take a beer, and only if you brought it.
The family asks that you come Sunday afternoon as you are. If you ride, ride.
He is survived by his wife, Cindy; his sons, Kyle (Bree) Tabbert of White Cloud and Nathan Tabbert of Big Rapids; his daughter, Alissa Tabbert of Grand Rapids; four grandchildren; his mother, Darla Tabbert of White Cloud; and his sister, Renae (Tom) Vogel of Newaygo.
He was preceded in death by his father, Kenneth.