By Scott Sullivan
Editor
The long road home for Auston Marineau leads through four colleges, three army deployments to the Middle East over seven years, an impending legal clerkship for Michigan Supreme Court Chief Justice Elizabeth Clement and back to Saugatuck, this time with his optometrist wife, again.
“I found my grandpa’s World War II memorabilia in a trunk,” recalls Marineau, a 2010 Saugatuck High School graduate, “and became caught up in the citizen-soldier-back-to-citizen spirit of ‘the Greatest Generation,’ as people called it.”
After studying history at Lake Forest College and DePaul University, both near Chicago, then graduating from Indiana University, “I decided to do something different,” Marineau says.
He signed up for officer candidates’ school, went through infantry training, was deployed to patrol in Afghanistan, then served two stints running logistics for a multi-national team fighting ISIS in Iraq and Syria.
“I served as aide-de-camp to a two-star British general on my last deployment,” says Marineau. “It was quite an education.
“I’m not sure my two summers spent as a Saugatuck Dune Rides buggy driver sharing local history and telling corny jokes made it all possible, but it couldn’t have hurt,” he says.
Up next? A return to civilian life, if studying law at the University of Michigan counts as that. Alongside came a summer working for the Miller, Canfield, Paddock & Stone law firm in Detroit, as senior law clerk for Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s office, then as a litigation associate for Cooley LLP in Boston.
By then he had married Olivia, a Brazil, Ind. girl working on her residency in optometry. “We visited my family in Saugatuck,” says Marineau. “She couldn’t help but love it here.
“We’ve enjoyed living in and exploring different places,” he goes on. “The Chicago area, Lansing, Ann Arbor, Boston. It was like looking for Saugatuck everywhere else.
“Now she has finished her residency and I’m on track to receive my juris doctor degree in May, we agreed we should settle here.”
After taking Michigan bar exams this July (“It means lots of study,” says Marineau, “but I think I have a good chance of passing), he plans to start with Clement’s office.
“Olivia and I plan to rent here while I commute between Lansing and Saugatuck,” he says. “She is lining up work with an area optometrist.
“If all goes well, we will look to buy a home and settle here.”
Saturday, October 05, 2024
