Sally Rae Parks

Sally Parks’s 71-year life as a daughter, sister, wife, mother, dog and cat mom, seamstress, pharmacist, knitter, reader, Lego builder, and inquisitive intellect ended November 18 at Butterworth Hospital in Grand Rapids, Michigan. She had been fighting stage IV uterine cancer for more than two years.

A lifelong resident of Michigan, Sally had been enjoying retirement in Grand Rapids with her husband Huck (Paul Jr.) and sons Macrae and Frank who live nearby. She loved spending time at home but also had been active most recently walking and kayaking and took great pleasure in visiting the beaches, lakes, woods, and yarn shops of Michigan and Ontario. She was fond of movies as well as the theater, especially productions of the University of Michigan Gilbert and Sullivan Society in Ann Arbor and the Shakespeare Festival in Stratford.

Her skillful knitting was both prolific and wide ranging, from socks, slippers, hats, mittens, sweaters, scarves, shawls, and blankets, to dishcloths and towels, animal figures, pillows, rugs, and decorations. She sought out the challenge of complicated design patterns, taking on and mastering them with near limitless patience and determination. If a project was not turning out to her satisfaction, she would undo hours of work and start over until she made it come out right. Her multiple entries in the Upper Peninsula State Fair over the years won First or Second Place ribbons each time. Her innumerable creations are a lasting legacy of warmth and beauty for family, friends, and co-workers while her many donated items provide the same to countless people she never met.

Although knitting increasingly became her primary activity over the years, her handcrafting talents also included beaded artwork and jewelry, embroidery, crochet, and macrame. She built complex Lego kits, most recently a two-and-one-half-foot-long model of Ernest Shackleton’s Antarctic expedition ship the Endurance, a Christmas gift from her sons and husband which she completed earlier this year. She worked as a seamstress early in her career and also pursued it as a hobby, creating shirts, pants, dresses other clothing for herself and others. She made her homes welcoming and beautiful with many ingenious decorations of her own making and selection celebrating the holidays and seasons, especially her favorite, autumn. She put particular care into elaborate winter solstice/Christmas scenes and her festive cookie baking was eagerly anticipated by family, friends, and neighbors.

Sally’s extensive literary interests ranged from the entire works of Charles Dickens and Jane Austin to seafaring yarns such as Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin and C.S. Forester’s Horatio Hornblower tales, to series such as Philip Pullman’s “His Dark Materials,” J.K. Rowling’s “Harry Potter,” C.S. Lewis’s “Chronicles of Narnia,” J.R.R. Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings,” Arthur Ransome’s “Swallows and Amazons,” and Mark Harris’s baseball novels “In the Henry Wiggen Manner,” to the works of Walter Scott, Robert Louis Stevenson, Louise Erdrich, Barbara Kingsolver, Hilary Mantel, Angeline Boulley, and countless other classic and contemporary authors. The broad base of her reading and education along with her natural intelligence and curiosity contributed to an impressive vocabulary which she enjoyed exercising by working crossword puzzles and by dominating opponents in Scrabble and Words With Friends.

A knowledgeable and insightful baseball fan, Sally rooted for the Detroit Tigers throughout her life, with years-long attachments to the Chicago Cubs and Milwaukee Brewers as well. She also enjoyed watching football, hockey, curling, and tennis, and had been an active tennis player, skier, skater, curler, bowler, and softball player. She took up the piano for several years and was a clever and formidable card player.

Born Sally Rae Parcheta on July 31, 1954 in Grand Haven, she was the youngest of the five children of Frank and Lucille Parcheta of Robinson Township. She attended Robinson Elementary School and Grand Haven Junior High School, graduating from Grand Haven Senior High School in 1972. She attended the University of Michigan her freshman year then returned home and attended Grand Valley State Colleges (now Grand Valley State University), from which she earned a bachelor’s degree with an emphasis in medical technology in June 1978.

Sally and Huck met as part of a group of mutual friends, realized their undoubted affinity, and were together for five years before marrying on November 24, 1979. She made her wedding gown: a creme polyester belted floor length dress with a pleated bodice and double round collar. The couple and their dog Bonzo briefly lived in St. Ignace and then Hart, where Huck had jobs as a newspaper reporter, before moving back to Grand Haven in 1982. In Hart, Sally also worked for the newspaper, the Hart Journal, as a copy proofreader and advertisement and page compositor, while in Grand Haven she worked in the tailoring department of the Baas clothing store (formerly the Big Store).

Not satisfied with her professional prospects, she decided to pursue a career as a pharmacist (as her brother Terry was doing). When she set her mind to something it was as good as done, so she gained admission to the Ferris State College School of Pharmacy (now Ferris State University) and the couple moved to Big Rapids in 1985. She earned her pharmacy baccalaureate and passed the state board exam as a registered pharmacist in 1987, initially working as an instructor in Ferris’s pharmaceutics laboratory class before taking a position as a staff pharmacist at Reed City Hospital.

In 1989, Sally was working part-time as a pharmacist at Southland Pharmacy in Big Rapids when the couple’s first son, Macrae, was born. Their second son, Frank, arrived in 1991 and the family moved the following year to Escanaba in the Upper Peninsula where Sally joined the pharmacy department at K Mart. In 2005 she became a staff pharmacist for Eldercare Pharmacy. With both boys in college by 2013, Sally and Huck decided to return to the Lower Peninsula and Sally transferred within Eldercare to the company’s Grand Rapids office. She remained there until her retirement in 2020. During her time in Escanaba, she took particular professional satisfaction in her work with the Indian Health Service.

Sally maintained a nurturing and loving home for her husband and sons, for whom she was a constant source of cheerful, witty, positive, sensible, and knowledgeable companionship, support, and guidance.

Sally lives in the memories of her husband; sons; sister Sharon and husband Rob DeWreede of Vancouver, British Columbia; sister Susan Champion and husband Bill Novak of Hendersonville, North Carolina; brother Terry Parcheta of Tarpon Springs, Florida; brother-in-law Rick Parks of Grand Haven; sister-in-law Mary Katherine Parks and her husband Ken Workinger of Ferrysburg, Michigan; sister-in-law, Judith Ruskin of Washington, D.C.; and 13 nieces and nephews. She was preceded in death by brother Douglas of Grand Haven; sister-in-law Susan (Terry) Parcheta of Tarpon Springs; brother-in-law Christopher (Judith Ruskin) Parks of Detroit; her parents; and her parents-in-law, Paul Sr. and Jane Parks of Grand Haven.

I think of what we are losing from this world and of what we will leave behind when we ourselves are lost. The trees. The stories. The people who love us and who know we love them, who will carry our love into the world after we are gone.
 - Margaret Renkl