Clark Lambros knew how to live, and he knew how to die.

To the end, he was in charge.

He never cared much about what others thought.

When he was 39, a divorced man, he met Michele Butler. She was a senior in high school at the time.

Looking back at it now, as a 58-year-old woman, she knows how unlikely it was that anything would come of it.

But life surprises, as does love, and the two ended up together for 40 years, settling in Marquette, a city of 21,000 by Lake Superior, on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.

He owned Vango’s, a restaurant he named after his father, which still features pizza and food from his homeland of Greece. He also managed a golf course.