My Date with Wilma

I haven't been blogging lately because I have been distracted by the travels of Hurricane Wilma. I became very interested in Wilma's path last weekend when the experts predicted that she would work her way acrosss Cuba, over the Yucatan Pensinsula in the Gulf of Mexico, then hook a hard right toward the gulf coast of Florida and keep going right across the state until she arrived at West Palm Beach.

I confess that my interest in Wilma has been selfish because my wife and I, who live in Detroit, also own two condos in West Palm Beach, and one was supposed to have been sold at a closing on Monday, Oct. 24. Before you think I'm in league with Donald Trump, I assure you that our condos are not million-dollar oceanfront skybox properties, but middle-income units in a modest retirement village.

For days I watched the Weather Channel and stayed glued to the Palm Beach Post online as Wilma crawled across the ocean, making her appointed rounds just like they said. Sure enough, yesterday morning, the old girl slammed into West Palm with a fury that that town hasn't seen in half a century. Within minutes the city was in shambles. Electricity, telephone, and cell phone connections were out of commission -- and jut like that the closing on the sale of our condo was kaput.

Trying to get in touch with anybody in West Palm last night was like trying to locate Osama Bin Laden. All last night and this morning, I worked every communication channel I could -- landline and cellular telephones, the newspaper blog, the condo website, to determine what, if anything, was left of our properties. No luck. Finally, in the middle of the afternoon I got through to our condo president, and then our realtor.

The president said that Wilma blew by our condo without lifting a shingle or cracking a single pane of glass. The place is as dry and safe as a cabin in northern Michigan. Of course, our realtor said that the closing is off until further notice, and he still doesn't know the condition of the sale property. But for now, I'm feeling very lucky. Sadly, millions of people in Cuba, Mexico and South Florida were not as fortunate as we were and our hearts and prayers go out to them. Count your blessings, eh?

Kinsel's Corner

Every big city had one. It's what I call the "hot corner." An intersection of streets, usually one was the main drag, but didn't have to be. The hot corner was almost always downtown. This was the corner where you could get everything -- a bet down, a check cashed, an out-of-town newspaper (before the Internet), a girl (or the info on where to get one), a cold six pack or bottle of hard liquor.

In Detroit, until some time in the mid eighties, that corner was known as Kinsel's corner -- the corner of Michigan Avenue and Griswold Street in the heart of downtown.

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First Job

My first real job out of high school was as a messenger boy for the Detroit News that I started in the fall of 1962. Everyday I caught the Cadillac Express bus at Harper and Coplin near our house on the east side for a five-mile ride downtown to work.

I couldn't wait to get to work, pick up my morning deliveries of advertising proofs, tearsheets and sealed envelopes and hurry back out to the streets to start my deliveries. The sidewalks were filled with people, all in a brisk walk. Bumper-to-bumper, cars inched along the narrow streets The huge buses would hiss to a stop and disgorge more people who scattered into the quickly-moving crowds. Everyone walked with determination, disappearing into the skyscrapers and department stores. Pretty girls were everywhere.

At the corners of Griswold and Fort streets and Woodward Avenue and Library, tall policemen in white caps stood in the middle of the intersections and blew their whistles everytime the traffic light changed, and directed a throng of pedestrians across the street. Most of the men wore suits and ties, and many still wore fedora hats that were still in style in the early sixties. The women wore business attire, too, with nylon stockings and heels, some even wore white dress gloves. I must have seen 5000 people every day.

And there I was, 18, and a part of it all. I knew then that no matter what I would do for a living I would always work downtown. And that's the way it turned out.

(photo of Woodward Avenue and Griswold St. in early '20s courtesy of Detroit Burton Historical Library. )

One Man's View of Detroit

Anyone over 30 years of age who has grown up in Detroit, or who in some way has become attached to the city, should be captivated by the story told by Paul Clemens in "Made in Detroit:A South of 8 Mile Memoir."

With a crisp, lean style and a dash of humor, Clemens writes a book-length autobiography of a Roman Catholic white kid born in Detroit in 1973 -- the same year Coleman A. Young was elected Mayor -- and who grows up in a blue-collar neighborhood on the city's northeast side. But his story is not just about the author, it's about the city and its economic decline and physical deterioration during his lifetime. And it's about race.

When Clemens was born, the city was 60 percent white, a percentage that had been dropping steadily after the 1967 riots. White flight accelerated with the election of Young until over time the city's population dropped from 1.2 million in 1973 to 875,000 today. It has also become 90 percent black.

Clemens' story is both personal -- what it was like to be a white kid growing up in a black city -- and observational -- his view of deteriorating race relations and heightening animosity between the blacks and whites during this period.

I too am a white guy who is the same age as Clemens' father, and was also raised a Roman Catholic on the city's northeast side. Much of what Clemens says in his book went down easy for me and he certainly stirred my memories of growing up on Detroit's east side.

As a devout Catholic, Clemens laments the rapid closing of Catholic churches and schools in the city caused by the dwindling Catholic population (at one time in the fiftties the city was 60 percent Catholic). But his pain over this loss seems to stem from the loss suffered by the churches and their white parishoners, rather than to what it has meant to the city's captive black population. It has indeed been sad for all us to watch these beautiful little European-inspired churches and their schools close. No more midnight Masses on Christmas Eve, no more school basketball and football teams playing each other.

Clemens misses an important point about the church and school closings. The Catholic Church had a golden opportunity in the sixties and seventies to live up to its mission by keeping those schools open and providing a solid education for at least some of the city's black youth. Instead it pulled up stakes and followed its white constituency to the suburbs. Whatever lingering attachment I had to the Church was severed when my Catholic high school, De La Salle Collegiate near the city airport, closed its doors and moved to the northern suburb of Warren. After that, the Catholic Church to me was just a business.

I enjoyed Clemens' story immensely because it enabled me to relive so many moments of the rich life I lived on the city's east side during the latter half of the 20th century. He does a magnificent job of capturing that life of working class white families and their ethnic neighborhoods. The story ultimately is a sad one because the portrayal of Detroit both physically and socially is so deservedly grim. Although at its conclusion I was unsure of Clemens' exact feelings about the city, its people, and their future, it's an engaging story and one that I'm glad I read.

For a radically different take on Clemens' writing see this review.