I was raised in Shelby by Republicans. In the 1960s my father, Robert R. Wheeler, was the Republican chairman of Michigan’s Ninth Congressional District, stretching from Grand Haven to Traverse City up the shore of Lake Michigan. Republican activism ran in the family: my grandfather Neil Wheeler had been elected state representative in Lansing for one term (two years) in the 1930s.
Dean Robb, an iconic civil rights lawyer and longtime Suttons Bay resident, passed away Sunday, Dec. 2, at age 94. Robb, who grew up on a farm in southern Illinois, helped coordinate legal support for civil rights demonstrators and activists in the early 1960s in the Deep South and met Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., following the civil rights leader’s release in 1963 from Birmingham jail.