Seventy-One Years, Countless Wells: Jack and Mary Jane Clark’s Story

By Chuck Colby

They’ve been married seventy-one years.

Think about that. Seven decades of mornings, of holidays, of family dinners and grandchildren’s laughter. Seven decades of hard work, shared burdens, and small blessings. Jack and Mary Jane Clark have lived almost their entire lives in Dexter, Michigan, and the wells their family drills today are as much a part of the town’s story as they are.

“We got married in 11 days,” Jack says, smiling as if he still can’t quite believe it. “I had to ship out for Europe. I was in the service.”

The Korean War loomed. Life felt urgent. And in those uncertain days, two young people decided to build a life together, one deep breath, one promise at a time.

Mary Jane laughs when she adds, “We’ve shared everything ever since, hearing aids included.” (They actually each had one of Mary Jane’s hearing aids in during the interview, Jack’s were being fixed.)

Where It Began

Their first chapter wasn’t glamorous. It began at the Ann Arbor Dairy, on the corner of Catherine and Fourth. Jack was 19, a kid with grease on his hands and the world ahead of him. Mary Jane worked at the University of Michigan writing checks, “some of them to Cribley,” she recalls.

The dairy would close. The world would change. But they’d find their way into something bigger — and lasting.

A Humble Job, A Lifetime of Work

In 1955, Jack took a job at Cribley Drilling for two dollars an hour. He and Ernest “Bud” Cribley worked side by side on one cable tool rig while Howard Cribley and Clare Hawker worked on the other cable tool rig.

“Bud and I were a team,” Jack says. “We had two rigs and both crews worked hard every day.”

When Bud passed away, Jack stayed with the company, eventually buying it from Howard Cribley in 1963. “We started out with five employees,” he says. “Now? Thirty-five.”

The first shop measured forty feet by sixty Jack shakes his head thinking about it. “I thought we’d never outgrow it,” he says. “But we did, again and again.”

The Shift

The company grew with Dexter. Cable rigs gave way to rotary rigs. New technology brought bigger jobs, and even geothermal work that was ahead of its time.

Jack remembers the moment that changed things: “We used to badmouth rotary rigs,” he admits with a laugh. “But once we got the right one, an Ingersoll TH-55, it was a step up for the business.”

From drilling wells for single-family homes to hundreds of holes at Washtenaw Community College for geothermal systems, Cribley became more than a name on a truck, it became a staple of the county.

A Family Business

The work was hard. The hours long. But the values stayed simple. “Treat employees like you’d like to be treated,” Jack says. It’s a sentence that could hang on the shop wall. It guided paychecks, bonuses, and the quiet way he praised a good day’s work, or pointed out when someone fell short.

“It’s not always easy working with family,” Mary Jane says, “but it’s worth it.” And family has always been at the center. Their children, Sarah, Larry, Cindy, and Tim have all been a big part of the business, and some of the grandchildren grew up around the rigs, answering phones, running water out to crews, learning the language of the business as much as they learned the love behind it.

Legacy on the Roads

If you drive Dexter’s backroads, you’ve seen the Cribley trucks. Their rigs have become part of the scenery, just as Jack and Mary Jane’s quiet presence has been part of the community’s heartbeat. Jack retired in 1999, though “retired” is a funny word. He still knows the wells by heart. Driving past them, he can tell you their depth, the year they were drilled and in many cases where on the property they were drilled.

“I can’t believe how it’s taken off,” Jack says softly. “When we started, I just wanted to make a decent living and raise a family. We’ve been blessed.”

Still Together

Now in their nineties, Jack and Mary Jane talk more about their great-grandchildren than about rigs or drill sites, thirteen of them, all arms and smiles. They still love lunch at Metzger’s, they still show up at local festivals and they still share everything, just as they did from the start.

Maybe that’s the lesson, tucked inside this family business story: that life, like drilling a good well, takes patience, grit, and faith that what you’re doing will last.