Shirley Antrim

Shirley Antrim, 95, of Maple Bend, died Sunday, May 3, 2026, having spent her working life at the beginning of everyone else's — first as a country midwife and then as a labor-and-delivery nurse, catching, by the reckoning of a town that has tried to count, something near a thousand of this county's babies.

She was born March 17, 1931, in Maple Bend, the eldest of John and Gertrude Machiela's seven children, and she was helping with the younger ones almost before she could remember. She trained as a nurse in Grand Rapids in the early 1950s, came home, and in the years when the county was wide and the roads were bad, she went out to farmhouses in the dark to deliver babies the hospital was too far to reach.

It was fitting work for a Newaygo County woman: down the road in Fremont they made the food that fed the country's babies, and up in Maple Bend, Shirley brought a good share of them into the room. When the county hospital opened its maternity ward she went to work there and stayed thirty-eight years. She worked nights by preference, because that is when babies come, and she kept the particular calm of a woman who had seen the thing go right ten thousand times and wrong just often enough to respect it. There are more than a few women named Shirley in this county whose mothers will tell you exactly why.

She married Clarence Antrim in 1953; he worked at Gerber, and she kept their house on Second Street for a quarter century after she buried him. She was a fixture at Maple Bend Reformed, ran the church nursery for as long as anyone could remember, kept a garden into her nineties, and held onto — this astonished people — the names, the dates, and the weights. She would meet a grown stranger in the grocery, take a long look, and say, "Seven pounds, two ounces, and you were in no hurry then either."

She is remembered for steady hands in the oldest work there is; for a memory that held a half-century of first breaths; and for the fact that in a county this size, you cannot go far without meeting someone whose very first moment was in the care of Shirley Antrim.

She is survived by her children, Nancy (Ed) Reinders of Maple Bend, Barbara (the late Ken) Hoving of Fremont, and Larry (Sue) Antrim of Grand Rapids; fourteen grandchildren, twenty-nine great-grandchildren, and four great-great-grandchildren; and a county's worth of people whose mothers she coached through the hardest, best hour of their lives.

She was preceded in death by her husband of forty-eight years, Clarence; her parents; and her six brothers and sisters, the last of whom she outlived by eleven years.

Memorial contributions may be made to the NICU Family Fund at Corewell Health, for the families keeping vigil over the smallest of the county's new arrivals.