Obituary
In the care of Solemn OaksElmer Frazee, 82, of Newaygo, died Wednesday, July 1, 2026, at home, with the window open and the county he had spent his life clearing lying green and passable outside it. For forty winters he ran a grader and a plow truck for the Newaygo County Road Commission, and there are people alive in this county because Elmer Frazee had M-37 down to bare pavement before they ever came around the curve.
He was born October 11, 1943, in Newaygo, the son of Clarence and Vera Frazee, into a family that understood work as the natural condition of being awake. He left school to help on the farm, married Sharon Deel in 1963, and hired on with the road commission in 1966, where he found the work he was built for: long hours, hard weather, a big machine, and a clear measure at the end of it of exactly what he had done.
For forty years, when the snow came, Elmer went out into it. He knew every rise and blind drive and buried culvert on his routes by feel, in the dark, through a windshield full of white. He plowed the school-bus roads first and his own street last but never not at all, and more than one widow on his route woke to a cleared driveway and never knew who to thank. He took a hard, quiet pride in a well-cut road, and an unbudgeable private position that the state's salt trucks did not know what they were doing. In forty winters he was late to his own kitchen table more nights than anyone could count, and never once late to the road.
Off the truck he was a man of few and well-chosen words, a devoted grandfather who came alive in a deer blind or a fishing boat, and the keeper of a workshop, a burn barrel, and a firm sense of when each was called for. He could fix anything with a motor and most things without one. He and Sharon raised three children in the house on Croton Drive, where the garden was his summer and the plow was his winter, and the shoulder seasons were for getting both ready.
He retired in 2006 but never really came in out of the weather. He watched the forecasts out of habit for the rest of his life, and on the worst nights he would stand at the window with a cup of coffee and quietly grade the work of whoever had his route now. He was, by every account, a tough audience.
He is survived by his wife of sixty-two years, Sharon; his children, Rick (Deb) Frazee of Newaygo, Cheryl (Dan) Overweg of Grand Rapids, and Doug Frazee of Croton; eight grandchildren; five great-grandchildren; and every mile of M-37 between Newaygo and White Cloud, which he plowed so many times it ought to carry his name.
He was preceded in death by his parents and his brother, Wayne Frazee.