January 18, 2026

By Arthur H. Gunther III

thecolumnrule.com

When there were community newspapers, the first thing many people did after they quickly scanned the front-page headlines and/or those in the sports section was to turn to the obituaries, or obits. Readers, particularly as they aged, were drawn to the life stories, in capsule form, of friends, neighbors, unknown people. The pull of curiosity, sympathy, even surprise made for interesting reading. The writing could be the best of the paper’s lot on a given day, for obits are slices of life. They are the telling of one’s story. And most of us relate. Obit writing is an art, and those at the typewriter wade into existence itself. We are all temporary, and reading one’s story bonds us as we take our own ride.

As newspapers fold for lack of advertising, the Internet’s takeover of information delivery, disinterest and the influence of social media, it is one of the great losses to human understanding and relationships that obits, stories of individuals, are not told in newspaper circulation though they may be shared to limited audience online. We lose some touch with life themes when we don’t reflect a bit on someone’s passing.

And so I would like to share in brief the history of a fellow, a childhood friend from my Rockland County, N.Y., neighborhood who recently left us. He was Theodore L. Schultz, son of the first Theodore who in 1946 began what is now the longest-operating Ford automobile/truck dealership in the area. The son spent 60 years working from the ground up – first in the parts department, then on the service desk, etc., until he took over from his father. A community business can last when the owner knows the shop and stays involved.

Ted, a former Illinois Wesleyan football player who met his future wife Carol Sweasy at the university, was not the outgoing, fully involved-in-community, even in politics that his father was, choosing to make his mark as a man who did not relish being in the spotlight. The world, villages, towns and counties need both types of people, and those in between as well.

Margaret, Ted’s mother, was a Concklin of the 1700s-to-today fruit farming family in Pomona, N.Y. She knew both the rewards and hard life of the land, and that was not missed by Ted. An Eagle Scout, a fellow who heard the roosters crow each morning off the South Mountain Road homestead, he was never far from the basics of life.

The Ford agency, now in Nanuet, has grown since 1946 through two Teds, son Craig and daughter Traci and should continue to do so as grandchildren come aboard. The first Ted gave it its personalized salesman-to-buyer mojo, and his son brought sophisticated management but also kept an expanding business grounded. That was the ancestral farmer’s trait, part of Ted’s DNA. You keep close to the land; you watch your business.

So there you have it, an obit of a man, another being gone to rest. His story. We all leave a story, don’t we?

The writer is a retired newspaperman.

-30-