At 7:10 in the morning, Jim Magyar sits at the counter at the Dexter Riverview Café. As the staff trickle in, they greet him by name. Asked if he’s a member of any community groups, he grins and shakes his head.
“I’m a free spirit,” he chuckles, adding, “I’m a regular here.”
“He’s our other employee,” quips our server, Andrea.
Sure enough, if the café is busy, Magyar will roll up his sleeves and wash dishes or peel potatoes.
Later in the day, you might find him in his garage-turned-workshop across from Dexter-Huron Metropark, where he gives new life to found wood. He sells his rustic creations, from handcrafted turkeys and smoothly polished wooden fish to his signature walking sticks, at the Dexter Mill and at the occasional art fair, but he’s happy to give a walking stick to anyone who needs a little help with mobility.
“If you walk into the store with a typical cane, you’re just somebody with a cane,” he explains. “But you walk in with something and it’s nicely finished and it’s a little bit different, it gives people an opportunity to say, ‘Hello. I like your walking stick,’ or ‘I like your cane.’ And so you are no longer invisible. You have a conversation. A little thing like that changes things.”
Helping people with disabilities has been Magyar’s lifelong passion. For thirty-two years, he was the director of the Ann Arbor Center for Independent Living (now Disability Network Washtenaw Monroe Livingston), an organization that helps the disabled community live fulfilling, self-directed lives. He also uses a walking stick himself—in 2012, his leg was run over by a trailer, leaving him with a limp.
Magyar moved to Dexter with his then-wife in 1984. They liked that it was close to the amenities of the city but far enough out for peace and quiet. It proved an ideal place to set down roots and raise their two children.
“I think Dexter is a community in the truest sense of the word. On a regular basis, people go out of their way to help each other,” Magyar muses. “Everyone is your neighbor.”
Magyar’s house—which he designed himself and built with the help of his then-sixty-five-year-old father—sits on two acres on Pineview Dr. On a still night, he says, he can hear the Dexter High School band playing on the football field. Magyar attributes Dexter’s tight-knit sense of community to many things: the proximity of the school campuses, leadership that “really put their heart into it,” and beloved annual events.
“I think if there is something left today in our culture that is really good and wholesome, it’s those things that happen each year that become part of people’s lives,” he says. “Parades, the high school band marching down the street. Everybody gets excited when the Dairy Queen opens up.”
Asked where he finds the materials he transforms into folk art, Magyar’s eyes glint mischievously.
“Here and there. People throw a lot of stuff out,” he chuckles. “You look for something that’s got some character. There’s so much of them around us that you miss it if you’re not looking for it.”
