Detroit was where it was at for me

My brother Jim with the “Spirit of Detroit” in 2012, the last time the Tigers made it to the World Series.

“This is the town, this is where I want to be/This is my town, Detroit is where it’s at for me.” Song in Altes Beer commercial, WJR 760.

“It’s carbon and monoxide/The ole Detroit perfume/It hangs on the highways in the morning/And it lays you down by noon…Detroit, Detroit/Got a hell of a hockey team/Got a left-handed way of making a man sign up on that automotive dream…” Paul Simon, Papa Hobo

So here I come, late as usual, weighing in with 1200 more on my hometown. Growing up, one thing I hated about Detroit were the suburbs just north of 8 Mile Road. 8 Mile Road was the border; we lived between 6 and 7, and one thing I loved was that my parents refused to move out, like everyone else white did after the riots in ’67. Split to Oak Park or Southfield, Birmingham, Farmington, or all the way to Bloomfield Hills. “White flight,” it was called, one of the reasons Detroit’s population dropped from near 2 mill to 740 thousand.

Dulcie and Norman Rosenfeld believed in Detroit. So why wouldn’t their oldest son, who got to think he was urban tough. And cool —  I had a black blood brother, Mark Williams. (Well, he slashed his finger with the razor blade — I was too chicken.) Cool to be one of the four white kids in the 6th grade class at MacDowell Elementary. Cool to work summers on Livernois, the “Avenue of Fashion,” with black co-workers. I’d wanted to be black since I was 10, listening to my sisters’ Motown 45s  and twirling on my stool in Milton’s Drugs or Share (“Share treats you Fair:) Drugs, eating pork rinds and chocolate Cokes.  The more I played black friends like Gregory Freeman, Greta Sears, Frank Duncan and Saturnius Tackett (greatest schoomate name in Hampton Junior High  history; well, circa 1968 anyway), the more I resented those kids gone forever on the other side of Detroit’s wide Outer Drive, living in flat, mall-to-mall subdivision sectors of Burger Kings and what I assumed was boredom. I’d see them on Sundays for Sunday School at Temple Israel, the synagogue four-blocks from our house; so Reform, we’d drive there on the Sabbath.

I thought white suburbanites used Detroit. But didn’t give anything back. As a kid I resented how they drove down to see ballgames at Tiger Stadium, or to see the Pistons at Cobo Hall and Red Wings at the Olympia on Grand River. Plays at the Fisher on West Grand Boulevard, concerts at Ford Auditorium on Jefferson. (Did  they even know you had to go south to get to Canada? Google Map it!)

The point is: I just got back from a Michigan visit to the suburbs back there where my relatives live now, and guess what? I found the place practically idyllic, in its lush green hills, two-lane blacktop curves that lead to black water lakes in places like Wing Lake, Cass Lake, Walled Lake, Keego Harbor. What’s better than a home on a lake?  In the summer? Michigan is where it’s at, along with a jillion May fly/June bug splatters on the windshield, until firefly July. But to drive through the deeply-shaded neighborhoods of Huntington Woods and Grosse Pointe Farms/Grosse Pointe Woods/Grosse Pointe Shores with my friend Byron,  to a fish hut on gleaming blue-green Lake St. Clair — well, wow. It may not be a Great Lake, but like them big enough so you can’t see to the other side, which is Ontario. Stand here and begin to appreciate summer thunderstorms and humidity — forget about buying my way into one of these mansions of glory.

A suburb called East Detroit  (I drove an ice cream truck there one summer), changed its name to “Eastpointe” in an effort to come off less Detroity, real estate-wise And how did that work out for them? According to a real estate website, Eastpointe home prices have dropped by almost one-half between the turn of the millennium and today, from a median of just under $100,000 to $50,000.

At the age of 17 I was lucky to land an internship at WJR 760, the clear channel AM radio station known across the state as, “The Great Voice of the Great Lakes.” WJR had offices in “the Golden Tower of the Fisher Building,”  next to GM Headquarter in what was known as the New Center of Detroit. Now they call it Midtown. (“New Detroit” was the name of the organization formed after the 1967 riots. Here’s an idea: New New Detroit. Including the suburbs.)

On this trip back I met with Elaine Stritch, the 88-year-old Broadway diva. She’d just moved from NYC back to her hometown and was looking forward to being around her local nieces and nephews. She was also excited about Shoot Me, the new documentary (2013) about her, premiering that weekewnd at Michael Moore’s film festival in Traverse City. When I offered to drive Ms. Stritch “up north” for the screening, she said, “I’m quite sure Mr. Moore will be sending a car.” A friend of her caregiver had set up our meeting because she thought I could help Elaine Stritch with her memoir, but it never happened, and then she died the next summer. (She did say she had a title for it: How Drinking Saved My Life) Well, at there’s one woman who could go home again…

I find a lot of hope for my hometown in these words from the late activist Grace Lee Boggs: “One of the things that I learned from my father is that a crisis is both a danger and an opportunity. That’s in the Chinese characters. And how you take advantage of the opportunity of the crisis rather than become despairing because of the danger and fearful is something we’re facing all the time, particularly at this time. And it’s a philosophical approach I think that is very much needed and also alive here in the city of Detroit.”

I remember a poem that summed it all up for me as it blew my mind: From the Op-Ed Page of the New York Times in 1990:

Poem with one Fact, by Donald Hall

At pet stores in Detroit, you can buy

frozen rats

for seventy-five cents apiece, to feed

your pet boa constrictor

back home in Grosse Pointe,

or in Grosse Pointe Park,

while the free nation of rats

in Detroit emerges

from alleys behind pet shops, from cellars

and junked cars, and gathers

to flow at twilight

like a river the color of pavement,

 

and crawls over bedrooms and groceries

and through broken

school windows to eat the crayon

from drawings of rats—

and no one in Detroit understands

how rats are delicious in Dearborn.

 

If only we could communicate, if only

the boa constrictors of Southfield

would slither down I-94,

turn north on the Lodge Expressway,

and head for Eighth Street, to eat

out for a change. Instead, tomorrow,

 

a man from Birmingham enters

a pet shop in Detroit

to buy a frozen German shepherd

for six dollars and fifty cents

to feed his pet cheetah,

guarding the compound at home.

 

Oh, they arrive all day, in their

locked cars, buying

schoolyards, bridges, buses,

churches, and Ethnic Festivals;

they buy a frozen Texaco station

for eighty-four dollars and fifty cents

 

to feed to an imported London taxi

in Huntington Woods;

they buy Tiger Stadium,

frozen, to feed to the Little League

in Grosse Ile.

 

They bring everything

home, frozen solid

as pig iron, to the six-car garages

of Harper Woods, Grosse Pointe Woods,

Farmington, Grosse Pointe

Farms, Troy, and Grosse Arbor—

 

and they ingest

everything, and fall asleep, and lie

coiled in the sun, while the city

thaws in the stomach and slides

to the small intestine, where enzymes

break down molecules of protein

to amino acids, which enter

the cold bloodstream.

 

(For a version of this blog item on KPCC) http://www.scpr.org/blogs/offramp/2013/07/23/14333/another-native-son-explains-the-real-detroit/

 

Banner downtown, August 2013