Mason First Presbyterian Church
Mason First Presbyterian Church
Mason First Presbyterian Church | Staff

Getting to Know Donna Archer

by Margaret Doolittle
December 2008




You’ve heard of the adage: “Still waters run deep.”  There’s  no person any more representative of that saying than Donna Archer, the director of Mason Presbyterian’s Cherub Choir!

For the last five years, Donna, in her smiling, serene and unassuming way, has picked up her guitar for thirty minutes almost every Wednesday afternoon during each school year and gathered a group of three-to-six-year-olds around her to make lots of “joyful noise”! Donna continues to smile when she talks about her philosophy for teaching our young church children: “My goal is to make our time together fun and to share my love of music with them so that they will go on to enjoy music all of their lives.” 

Donna has enjoyed music in many different forms all of her life. As a child growing up in the Mackinaw City area, she taught herself to play the guitar and took piano lessons from an aunt, (who had once played the organ for silent movies shown in the Mackinaw City theater!) Donna also took up clarinet playing with the Mackinaw City high school band, and gave clarinet lessons one summer to a girl from “down below” who was visiting her grandparents; that student returned to Detroit in the fall and won a first chair position in her band. And Donna was the director when our Praise Band was first formed several years ago. 

For the last three years, Donna’s spent happy hours in the Archers’ living room with the player piano she inherited from her mother. The piano, built between 1910 and 1920, came with seventy-six rolls of music that range from hymns to honky-tonk. She welcomes interested piano players, and if your legs get tired with the pump action required, Donna will plug the piano into an electrical outlet for you!

In addition to her work with the Cherub Choir, Donna has been, and continues to be, active in our church in other ways since she became a member in 1984; she was ordained a Deacon in 1989 and served for four years; she was part of the first mission trip to Wounded Knee, South Dakota; she is active in a morning Bible Study group; and she chairs the Memorial Gifts committee. You can also hear the strings of her guitar around Camp Greenwood campfire circles!

We’re so glad that two of Donna’s sisters each married one of husband Bruce’s uncles, because it was at one of those weddings, when Donna was a nine-year-old, that the groundwork was laid for her eventual move from the top of the lower peninsula to Mason! Donna first met Bruce at that wedding, and then didn’t see him again for thirteen years. In 1982, not long after their second meeting, Bruce and Donna married. They became the parents of Travis, born in 1984, and Dean, who joined the family in 1986. Donna also has a stepdaughter, Jenny, who lives in Oklahoma City and teaches computer skills to elementary students. Travis, a Michigan Tech grad, is a mechanical engineer employed at Lansing’s Board of Water and Light; Dean attends Baker College and works at Menards, The Archers will welcome a daughter-in-law, Emily, into their family when she and Dean marry in March of 2009.

Did you know that . . . Donna is the youngest of thirteen children (three boys and ten girls) . . . all of them were born at home, and that a fifth generation of her family still lives in that house . . . she has forty-two nieces and nephews . . . she attended North Central Michigan College in Petoskey and earned an associate’s degree in commerce before working in a Mackinaw City pharmacy and for the State of Michigan in the Tourist Information Center near there . . . she is a talented artist, the treasurer of the Mason Art Guild, likes to work with graphite pencil, and produces art that can be seen at the yearly Ingham County Fair and Friends of the Library art exhibitions (landscapes and animals are her specialty) . . . she played on the first-ever Mason Presbyterian Women’s softball team (coached by husband Bruce and Peter D.) and was on first base the day she and Mary Robinson, at shortstop, made a triple play . . . she enjoys reading westerns, history and romances and doing jigsaw, crossword and Sudoku puzzles . . . and . . . did you know that wonderful stories emerge from the deep and still waters within Donna Archer when you sit at her kitchen table and share warm cinnamon applesauce, a few cookies, and a cup of hot tea?
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