Longtime resident and businessman ties life story to his hometown
John Rivers is an innovator. Traditionally, innovation occurs when an existing technology is applied to a new use. Rivers has made innovations which have brought him fortune, occasional notoriety, and opportunities to see the world. In the last four years, he has brought his capacity for adapting existing things to new ideas into downtown Three Rivers. There, he and his wife, Sherri, have turned a historic storefront into a fine dining restaurant called Venue 45.
The restaurant is a product of Rivers’ affinity for his community. Although he lived in Detroit as a young child, Rivers moved with his family to Three Rivers around the fourth or fifth grade. “My father was involved in insurance sales,” Rivers said, “and he bought Hackenberg and Schreiber insurance,” which was located in the space now occupied by the Riviera Theatre Bar.
Rivers graduated from Three Rivers High School in 1982. He has mostly lived in the area ever since. There have been a few brief departures, the first being a stint at Ferris State University in Big Rapids. Having been a drummer in high school, Rivers spent a year and a half studying business administration on three music scholarships before quitting college to come back to Three Rivers.
“I had gotten a contract to race cars, sponsored by Miller High Life and a local distributor, at small local tracks,” Rivers said. “my dad wasn’t real thrilled with that decision.” Nevertheless, Rivers said, his father “hardly ever missed a race. I mean, he was right there.”
Once, Rivers broke his hand in an accident. Meeting his sponsorship contract meant finding someone else to drive his car. “I put my, at the time,very plump father into my fire suit. And we zipped him up in it, strapped him up, and sent him on his way. And he filled in for me racing the car.” Rivers’ father had never been in a race car, but “he hammered it, too. Boy he had his foot down.
During his racing period, Rivers began seeing Sherri, and the two were married. They had known each other since junior high school, primarily through the Presbyterian Church, but were also in the same class in school. “We both skied a lot, snow skied,” Rivers said. “During the Christmas break, I saw her at Swiss Valley, and we started talking and started dating from that moment on.”
However, Sherri had asthma, and the environment at the racetrack was difficult for her, which impacted Rivers’ desire to race. “When she stopped going to the track, that was it for me. I lasted two weeks without her and said, ‘nope, I’m not interested.’”
Rivers was working on the assembly line at the General Motors Hydramatic Plant in Three Rivers at the time, which now belongs to American Axle and Manufacturing. “They were really accommodating, letting me get out to race. They recognized that I had a contract and I was trying to make something of myself,” he said. “It was a good company to work for.”
However, Rivers flipped between daytime and second shift, and there were periodic layoffs. That pattern “looked like it was kind of a way of life for some of the old auto workers back then,” he said, which didn’t interest him. Instead, Rivers went to work in sales. He sold copy and fax machines for a while, then sold cars for several different companies, including Vetter Chevrolet. When he had had enough of that, he decided to start his own business.
Rivers began Destiny Powered Parachute in the late 1990s, making small-two person aircraft consisting of a two-seat cart that used a parachute for a wing. “We were growing at over 400 percent a year for like four years in a row. I think we had over 700 aircraft out in the field. And I think just before 9/11, we were one of the largest, by volume, manufacturers in the world of aircraft,” he said.
The 9/11 attack impacted the business significantly. “We lost 90 percent of our sales the day after, and that loss continued for the next year,” Rivers said. “Any money we had saved up went into payroll. And I waited as long as I could before trying to lay anybody off, but it was inevitable. So, we closed the business and then sold the assets and name to another company.”
While the company was still growing, however, Rivers had adapted parachute design for another product. Not long prior to the 9/11 attacks, office building insurer Lloyds of London was looking for evacuation alternatives for tall buildings in the event of emergency.
“The big fire fire truck ladders only go up to eight floors,” Rivers said, so he developed the “Executive Chute,” a self-deploying, rapid-deceleration parachute that increased the likelihood that a person could jump from a building safely. A Michael Moore film that featured the device as part of the 9/11 response brought what Rivers described as “unwelcome notoriety,” but he retains the rights to the patent, and still occasionally sells the devices.
Meanwhile, his involvement in the aviation industry and ownership of other patents brought Rivers further work. He caught the eye of the Federal Aviation Administration and became an advisor on aviation industry issues to the U.S. Office of Management and Budget under President George W. Bush. That work led to an invitation to oversee search and recovery efforts in the space shuttle Columbia disaster’s debris field in Texas.
Once that was over, Rivers came back to Three Rivers and went to work for Armstrong International. At that time, the company had a large, high-efficiency, industrial water heater. Sales for the heater were slow, and Rivers was tasked with finding a market.
The Bakken shale petroleum fracking boom was just taking off, so Rivers traveled to North Dakota. “They were heating all the water at the time to frack with, but they were doing it in an extremely dirty and inefficient way. And so, we knew we had the solution, we just had to figure out how to apply it,” Rivers said.
Rivers and a coworker developed hot water depots that worked similarly to gas stations, where trucks could fill up with hot water produced rapidly and efficiently by the heaters. The innovation caught the attention of the Hess Corporation. “We were sold out before we built any of them. I had contracts in my hand, before we’d ever completed even the first project, to buy percent of our capabilities,” Rivers said.
He turned that success into a new business opportunity. Through connections he made in the petroleum industry, Rivers went on to start three more companies in the pipeline industry based on additional innovations. “This last one that I started, Hillstone Environmental, I was a stakeholder in, and I started it in 2014. We sold it in 2019. We started it with zero, and then sold it to a publicly held company for over $600 million.” Its largest contract, with Exxon, generated over $1.4 billion in revenues.
In all, Rivers has started 11 companies. Some he owned, and some he helped others start while remaining a stakeholder. Although he considers himself retired, his latest effort is a finance company that is involved in ownership and leasing of oil refineries.
Recently, Rivers has turned his professional attention back toward Three Rivers lately. In early 2017, he and Sherri approached the Three Rivers Downtown Development Authority and Main Street Program. They were interested in the storefront at 45 North Main Street, which had last held a tattoo shop and needed repair. Rivers saw an opportunity to build a new kind of restaurant for Three Rivers, based on his experience in sales.
“Because I’m entertaining people in the oil industry as part of my job, I get the opportunity to eat at a lot of really nice places throughout the country. And I just saw the downtown each time I came back looking worse and worse over time,” Rivers said. “I wanted to take my money and invest it in fixing up something downtown to try to make it look better.”
Rivers knew that just buying a building and fixing it up wouldn’t be enough, he said, based on others’ past renovations in the downtown. He had to have a business to make active use of the space, either by funding it, recruiting it, or creating it himself. “The other thing is I wanted to have a way to treat people in this area to a little nicer eating experience. I could give them a plate that I pay $100 for and give it to them for $30, and bring the same quality to our hometown.”
Venue 45 opened in 2019. Although he and Sherri have temporarily closed the restaurant to minimize losses until the pandemic is over, it has been a success. “We have a winner,” Rivers said. “The reviews are great.” Since it has been able to draw at least half its customer base from out of town, the restaurant has a steady revenue stream and a growing reputation. Locally, Rivers said, “I think the community that got the opportunity to go in there before COVID really appreciated what we were trying to do. And I think the building turned out beautiful.”
The restaurant endeavor is a labor of love. “I don’t own a restaurant to earn a living, obviously,” Rivers said. “But the idea was to try to give something back to the community and better the downtown Historic District.”
The restaurant’s best asset, Rivers said, is its chef, Three Rivers native Ralph Humes. Rivers began planning the restaurant as an event space and incubator kitchen where guest chefs could operate popup restaurants. However, as the project got under way, Humes “was just coming back to town, looking for a place to set shop,” Rivers said. Just a couple of grades behind Humes, Rivers remembered him from high school, since both were musicians. Humes had recently been working as a chef for touring music superstars.
“There’s some natural talent that some people have. Some people have it in music, and some people have it in food, but he can put things together that are pretty phenomenal,” Rivers said of Humes. “It was uncanny timing that I’m trying to open up a place just as he’s trying to move back.” It is Humes’ cooking, Rivers said, that makes Venue 45 a true success, and an asset rooted in Three Rivers.
Connections like the one he was able to make with Humes are the reason Rivers said he still lives in Three Rivers. Having grown up in Detroit and having been able to travel all over the world, Rivers said, he truly appreciates the community’s small-town characteristics.
“I talk to these guys in the oil companies, and I tell them where I’m from, you know, John Rivers from Three Rivers. And that’s a pretty good laugh. But, because of my patents and the design work that I do and the knowledge that you need to do what I’ve done,” Rivers said, “they’ll think I have an engineering degree. Everybody says, ‘well, where’d you go to school?’ And I say, ‘Three Rivers High School.’ They look at me like, ‘wow, man,’ but that was the last accomplishment in education I had.”
“I could have gone anywhere and moved anywhere,” Rivers said. His offices in the oil businesses were in Denver, Texas, and North Dakota. “So, it probably would have been easier for me to leave, but you can’t replace the feeling that a small town has and the affection that you have for everyone in the town when you know everybody, and everybody knows you.” There are people here whose children he babysat, and who helped dress him for his first junior high school dance. “You just can’t replace the history that you have,” he said.
Dave Vago is a writer and columnist for Watershed Voice. A Philadelphia native with roots in Three Rivers, Vago is a planning consultant to history and community development organizations and is the former Executive Director of the Three Rivers DDA/Main Street program.
