A man who served as Chairman of the Recreational Vehicle Industry Association, was named Indiana Manufacturing Entrepreneur of the Year in 1994 and gained induction into the Recreational Vehicle/Motor Home Hall of Fame eight years later is making his mark next in Michigan’s Great Southwest.
Kelly Rose, who co-founded Automotive Sound & Accessories forty years ago, has gifted Southwestern Michigan College a quarter of a million dollars to fund the Karen E. Rose Simulation Lab at the college’s new $9.6-million Nursing & Health Education Building currently under construction on the school’s Dowagiac campus.
SMC President Dr. David Mathews revealed the $250,000 gift at this week’s board meeting, with Board Chair Thomas Jerdon noting, “It’s our biggest gift so far and will have a huge impact. Being that Karen is an SMC nursing graduate, it has special meaning to both of them. We could see their connection to SMC at Commencement. He was a great Commencement speaker, he’s making the world a better place by giving back to the community and was a pioneer in his own industry.”
Jerdon said an article in The Southwester about Rose’s remarks two years ago, (when business students lined up afterward to meet him), gave him the idea to invite Rose to speak.
When he met Rose, Jerdon says, “He knew more about me than I knew about him because Karen went to nursing school with my oldest sister. They used to study together.”
Both Kelly and Karen are SMC alums. They met in the commons through a mutual friend, him the aspiring teacher/coach and Edwardsburg farm boy, and her, the Dowagiac city girl who worked for a year after high school to afford the $900 Dodge Dart she would drive to clinicals at Lee Memorial Hospital in Dowagiac, Lake View Hospital in Paw Paw and Cass County Medical Care Facility near Cassopolis.
“I saw her for the very first time in this building,” Kelly recalled as speaker for SMC’s 387-member Class of 2016. “I saw her across the room and told my buddies, ‘I’m going to marry that woman.’”
“When we got married,” he also informed SMC students, “I told Karen that within 10 years I was going to buy a Corvette and take her to Hawaii. We did. I learned as I went. If we make sure mistakes don’t bury us, we learn more from dry holes than gushers.”
The couple talked about donating to the college after attending its 49th graduation. They told school officials, “The campus looks so different. We need to do that. We love the school.” They talked about it, but left it there for the time being.
Then Kelly surprised Karen for her birthday on October 24th with the once-in-a-lifetime gift.
On her 65th birthday, driving back from a restaurant in Naples, Florida, Kelly insisted Karen load a video depicting golf course damage.
He cryptically told her, “I want to see it tonight.” She says, “He was getting so nervous,” which perplexed her since she expected to be viewing trees toppled across an emerald expanse.
Instead, the virtual reality “fly-through” tour of the state-of-the-art facility that is the largest project undertaken in SMC’s more than 50-year history popped up.
Karen says, “I was so thrilled and in shock, I just started crying,” adding, “I had read different articles over the last five years about simulators and how wonderful they are for teaching. I thought that would have been nice” to have when she studied nursing at SMC in what was then a new building. She concludes, “He couldn’t have given me a better gift!”
The former Karen Mead finished nursing school in 1972 while planning their small August wedding and whirlwind Wisconsin Dells honeymoon. A 1970 Union High School graduate, she grew up on First Avenue with brothers Dale and Lyle Jr., attended McKinley Elementary School, Central Junior High and DUHS.
She had thought about becoming a hairdresser and toured Vogue Beauty School in Indiana, but had also started at Lee Memorial as a teen-age candy-striper. After graduation, she found a nursing job at Elkhart General Hospital. She was a nurse for more than 10 years, and “paid the bills for a while” as her husband built several RV businesses.
Now, their legacy will live on in the new simulation center coming to the Dowagiac campus thanks to their generous gift to the project.
