Wendell Schuit

Wendell Schuit, 91, of White Cloud, died Sunday, April 19, 2026, at home, on the farm his grandfather cleared, where he milked cows for the first half of his life and grew Christmas trees for the second, and sold every one of those trees the only way he knew how — with a handshake.

He was born February 28, 1935, on the home place north of White Cloud, the fourth of Gerrit and Wilhelmina Schuit's seven children, into a dairy barn that was already old when he was young. He left school to work the farm full-time when his father's health failed, married Marilyn in 1957, and milked a herd of Holsteins morning and night for the better part of forty years, the two of them, without a single vacation either could recall.

When the dairy stopped paying in the seventies, he did what stubborn men do, which is change entirely and admit nothing. He put the back forty into spruce and fir, learned the long patience of a crop you plant for the man you will be in eight years, and opened the fields to families the weekend after Thanksgiving. For nearly forty Decembers he ran a cut-your-own lot with a wood stove, a thermos of cider, a bow saw for anyone who asked, and a price he would shake on and never itemize.

He wrote almost nothing down, and in all those years he was cheated so seldom he could name the times. He gave trees away to families having a hard year and called it a bookkeeping error if you tried to thank him. He served decades on the drainage board, sat the same pew at White Cloud Wesleyan for seventy years, and kept, into his ninetieth year, a handshake that could still make a grown man reconsider his grip.

He is remembered for that handshake; for a thousand front rooms across three counties that smelled of his spruce each December; and for a life that turned, without complaint, from one honest crop to another, and gave both of them everything he had.

He is survived by his wife of sixty-nine years, Marilyn; his children, Wayne (Deb) Schuit of White Cloud, Ruth (Jim) Bloem of Newaygo, and Carl Schuit of Grand Rapids; twelve grandchildren and twenty-two great-grandchildren; and the families across three counties who will go looking for his lot again come Thanksgiving.

He was preceded in death by his parents; his brothers, Peter and Gerald Schuit; and his sister, Wilma Timmer.

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.