Maybe Detroit Wasn't So Bad

 The Henry Ford Museum

By the middle of July we had reached the end of Ford paying for two rooms at the Holiday Inn.  One small room with two adults, two boys, two cats, piles of toys, my bicycle and clothes  was suddenly not so much fun. The house construction may have been going faster than under normal circumstances but not fast enough. It was beginning to get a little more difficult to keep up a happy face and a calm disposition.

It became more important to keep up the exploration of the Detroit area so as not to spend much time in our little room.  We spent a lot of time at the Detroit Zoo and were some of the few people to visit Six Flags Over AutoWorld.  AutoWorld opened on July 4th of 1984 as a way to attract tourists to the slowly dying town of Flint. Billed as the largest indoor theme park in the world the attendance was good for the first month but in six months financiers moved to close the park down. There were several attempts through the years to reopen it but itwas never successful. It had a lot of history of the automobile and a few rides but the only thing I can remember about it was a huge engine block hanging from the ceiling.

When we could not think of any other place to visit a trip to Greenfield Village and the Henry Ford Museum was always a good bet.  Dennis had purchased a year long pass for the family the first time we went there and it was the best $70.00 ever spent. Built in 1939 it is the largest indoor-outdoor museum in the world.  Henry Ford, being the founder, built it to preserve historical items and portray the Industrial Revolution. Reading descriptions of the Museum it says Ford wanted to save all the historical things.  Not written in bios of the Museum is that it all started with Ford being mad because Philadelphia would not sell Independence Hall, Old City Hall or Congress Hall to him.  So he built exact replicas of the three buildings in Dearborn as the beginning of Greenfield Village and the Museum.

 The Henry Ford Museum

The Museum has planes, trains and automobiles such as Rosa Parks' Bus, Presidential Limos, the first production Mustang, the 1926 Fokker flown over the North Pole by Byrd and Charles Lindbergh's camping trailer.  You can look at the complete evolution of every household item such as waffle irons, stoves, typewriters and on and on. There is a lot to see in the twelve acre building which also houses the Edison Museum to honor Thomas Edison who was Ford's longtime friend.

If it is a nice day you can step outside the Museum to the ninety acre Greenfield Village. The Village was Ford's idea of a living history museum.  Nearly one hundred buildings were moved to the property and arranged in a village like setting to show how Americans worked and lived.  The Village contains Thomas Edison's Menlo Park Laboratory, the Wright Brother's home and bicycle shop, Noah Webster's home where he complied the dictionary, Harvey Firestone's farm, a 1633 Cape Cod Windmill, a covered bridge, a printing shop, buildings such as a grist mill, a saw mill and a train station for the steam engine train that circles the Village. There is no way you can see all the displays even if you went everyday for a week.  They also set up special displays.  One time they honored each decade for a month and the Museum was filled with items and music from each decade. There are sleigh rides at Christmas and the steam engine train was a favorite of Wes and Wally's.

The second week of being squished in the motel room that grew smaller by the moment and the fact that Dennis had taken a week off thinking it would be time to move into the house it was necessary to do something different.  Murder was foremost in the picture if we did not do something.  Since we really did not take family vacations and living in a motel for five months and sight seeing everyday made it sound like a vacation just what do you do?  Naturally the only thing we could think of was to load two boys, two cats, many toys and clothes and head to the old home place in Oklahoma. At least the boys could play outside, Dennis's Mom could make grilled cheese sandwiches and tomato soup and we could all have a little much needed space.

Unlike some of our other trips to Warner, Oklahoma, the capital of nothing to do but to go fishing or play cards, no one seemed to mind when I went off on my own to visit the only two high school friends I had kept in contact with.  Robert was always easy to find at his drugstore.  I think it was one of the stops all my classmates did when they came back to Muskogee to visit.  He was always up to date on how everyone was doing and the big topic of conversation was the up coming twentieth reunion. I assured him I would be coming as I had already sent in the money for the reservation.

Next stop would be to see  Lisa.  On one of our trips home Robert had told me she was working at her husband's loan company in Checotah which was only a few miles from Warner and I had been going by to see her when we were in Oklahoma and there were lots of letters back and forth through the last few years.  Spending time with her could lift anyone's spirit as she was one of those people who would do or say anything.  There was no way you could do anything but laugh when you were around her.  Of course the big topic of conversation was the reunion.  Even though I had made a reservation I was terrified that Dennis would refuse to go.  I had tried to go to the tenth reunion but he refused and I was not hopeful I could pull off the twentieth.  I will never forget the words Lisa used that I cannot repeat here when I told her how uncertain I was that Dennis would not let me come. You can not imagine the immense amount of laughter but I was not sure I could repeat what she told me to tell him.

Towards the end of the week Mr. Rossi, our builder, called and said it was time for us to pick out all those options like the flooring, paint, appliances and everything else that were add-ons to the basic house. That sounded hopeful! Time to loaded em up and head em out.  

Arriving back in Michigan and looking at the almost completed exterior I noticed that when Dennis added a third garage onto the plan and demanded that the garage be three or four feet longer than normal it looked a little like a garage with a house attached to it. Unlike other houses in the neighborhood the garage stuck out from the front of the house and gave it the look of just a garage with a house attached to it. Wasn't that the opposite of what is usual?

The other news on our arrival back is that a family we knew from our days in Dallas who also worked for Ford had arrived at the motel and were building a house in the same neighborhood. They had a little boy somewhere in age between Wes and Wally.  Maybe being homeless with someone else would make the days a little easier.....maybe. Would anything help ease the uncertainty of not hearing anything fro Barney for six weeks?

Heart of Rock and Roll

Reflecting back on being in residence at the Holiday Inn in Farmington Hills did have some pretty cool aspects. The move to Michigan does not seem as bad as I thought it was at the time. There is some saying about how people only remember the good parts of some aspects of their lives. 

That first month it was a very pleasant break not to have to cook, clean, grocery shop and do yard work. I did get to do laundry and ironing.  It is hard to break the habit of ironing Dennis's shirts as sending them out always seemed an incredible waste of money.  Perhaps it might have been nice to have a microwave or a refrigerator in the rooms as eating out all the time grew tiresome pretty fast.  It was always difficult to get four people to agree on what to eat.  The boys and I wished we could find a place that sold grilled cheese sandwiches and bowls of tomato soup for lunch. Best yet would be a restaurant that had no kitchen but served every kind of food you could want.  All you did was to order something like tacos, hamburgers, fried chicken or pizza and runners from the restaurant would go fetch it from places that sold it. We also wondered if a place advertised "Home Cooking" did they cook it at home as rush it to the restaurant?

By the time Dennis got home from work everyday and we went to check on the progress of the house and found someplace to eat the evening was gone.  Weekends Dennis could not stand to stay in the motel so we explored everything that the Detroit area had to offer.  It was a really fascinating area with a history pretty well centered around the automobile.  The twenty-four hour a day traffic was due to the auto plants working twenty-four hour shifts with people coming and going at all hours.  The plethora of bowling alleys, skating rinks and all night venues were due not only to the work schedules but also to offer indoor entertainment during the long winters.

There was never a place where we lived that there was no drag racing.  Of course we were still dragging a trailer around with an unfinished race car on it when we made the move to Michigan.  One of the first weekends we lived in Michigan there was to be a national event drag race in Milan, Michigan.  At that time Ford was sponsoring race cars and on the Thursday morning before the event all the Ford sponsored cars were on display on the Ford Rotunda (there is that word Rotunda again). Taking the boys down to see them we heard an interesting ad on the radio.  It seemed like Huey Lewis and the News were going to play a baseball game that afternoon against the radio disc jockeys.  It was at the Fairgrounds, free to attend and free pizza and drinks. Hmm.

The strange paved circle in front of the Ford World Headquarters was filled with seven or eight race cars including Bob Glidden, Ricky Smith, Billy Meyers and of course, Kenny Bernstein. Most of them we knew from our racing days in Texas so it was fun to walk around, look at the cars and talk to the drivers. When we were done I told Dennis that I thought I would take the boys to the Fairgrounds to see Huey Lewis.  That was not well received.  I remember him telling me I could not go to the Fairgrounds as it was in a bad part of town. Off we went to the Fairgrounds.

Wow!  That was an afternoon the boys...and I...have never forgotten.  There were not a lot of people there but it was so much fun as we could almost just reach out and touch the band when we stood at the fence.  That was just after they had released the "Sport" album and were the hottest band in the country. The baseball game was just pure fun with both the band and the disc jockeys just having a great time.  To add to the fun they were selling tickets to a concert that night at some place called Pine Knob. I could not whip out sixty dollars for three tickets fast enough. It was just one of those impulses to only buy three tickets and not one for Dennis.  He didn't even know who Huey Lewis was and had not been to a concert since Willy Nelson's wild night at Love Field in Dallas. Needless to say my announcement to him that evening was not met with enthusiasm for the boys and I.  Not that he wanted to go, he just didn't want us to go.  Oh well.

Searching all my tourist information when we got back to the motel I found out where Pine Knob was located.  Interesting place!  In 1927 Colonel Stanley Walden, an executive with Packard Motor Company, bought 840 acres in Independence Township and built a nineteen room mansion on the highest peak (1,201 feet) in Southeast Michigan.  In 1972 the Pine Knob Music Theater with 7,000 seats in a pavilion and 8,000 on the lawn opened.  Pine Knob transformed each winter into a ski resort.  Only forty miles from downtown Detroit made it a great place to spend a day skiing.

What an amazing evening that night at Pine Knob was.  Not just for me but for Wes and Wally.  Most nine and thirteen year old kiddos don't get dragged to rock and roll concerts but I learned early on that the boys were a good buffer for me to get to go places Dennis did not want me to go.  But more than that the boys got to experience a lot of things other kids their age did not.  Wes probably felt like a "rock concert pro" since he had gotten to see Billy Joel at the age of ten.  For Wally there was a look of sheer wonder in his little eyes as he realized those guys he had watched playing baseball a few hours before were now wowing an audience of thousands with music you could not sit still to. Was that the night his heart started beating to the beat of rock and roll?

The rest of that weekend went better than I expected at the drag races.
Under normal circumstances Dennis would have been in one of his not talking to me modes since I had broken the rules and done an unapproved thing.  But living in two small rooms and seeing a lot of old racing friends made that a little too difficult. He actually never mentioned the baseball game or the concert only how dangerous the streets of Detroit were. 

I had made sure my bicycle made the trip to Detroit with us as I had gotten into the habit of going for a ride in the mornings before the kids got up.  In the motel I would leave on my bike shortly after Dennis went to worked in the morning and ride a couple of miles.  It was good exercise which I needed due to all the eating out and it gave me a chance to spend some "alone time" which I was in the habit of having every morning.  Some mornings I would get a box of donuts or sweets of some kind and take them to the guys working on our house.  It was a good way to try and bribe them to work a little faster, do a better job and maybe not put obscene things into the walls. The worst thing a person building a house can do is to complain about their speed or the two by fours not being perfectly straight.  Thankfully Dennis never saw any of the construction workers and only complained to Mr. Rossi, the builder.

The weeks seemed to pass pretty slowly even with all the places we went and visited.  The first mail did not arrive to our General Delivery address until three weeks after moving into the motel and then they were only final bills from the power companies in New Jersey.  I had written a note to Barney telling him where we were but just like letters to friends nothing arrived.  Long distance phone calls could not appear on the motel bill so it was rather difficult not being in contact with the rest of the world.

The house was not anywhere near being done as we approached our fourth week in the motel.  What was the excuse Dennis used to get us to Michigan so fast......I needed to pick out flooring and all that? I guess I could have done that but it might be a little easier if the drywall was up.  Things got a little more testy at the end of the first month.  Ford would no longer pay for two rooms at the Holiday Inn so now two adults, two boys, two cats and all of our belongings were stuff into one room.
Now I remember why when looking back on that summer the memories were not all that wonderful.

Hello Michigan

The House On Our Arrival

It was a fact of life that if you worked for Ford Motor Company that at some time in your career you would spend some time in the home office in Dearborn, Michigan.  Dennis had gotten by for over fifteen years before he got the call to go to the Motor City.  Truthfully I knew very little about Dearborn, Detroit or Michigan itself except maybe that I did not want to be there.  Of course, Dennis did not want to be there either so that made for an interesting situation.

The hardest part about moving around the country were the two little faces of Wes and Wally.  I had managed to sound happy about the move to them for several months.  Wes was "Car Crazy" due to all the years of hanging out with drag racing and car talk and being quite the artist when it came to drawing cars and designing drag strips it made the move very exciting to him.  Wally looked at the move as an adventure since in his nine years he had moved twice and actually just thought that everyone did the same thing. Keeping the boys happy and positive was part of my possible Oscar winning performance.

We arrived in Farmington Hills, Michigan well after dark and everyone was really ready to check into to the Holiday Inn.  Farmington Hills was a fairly new suburb located due north of Dearborn and northwest of Detroit itself.  It was the corporate mentality in moving around to build a new house in the suburbs so that when your time was up in Dearborn you could get the maximum appreciation on the house. There were quite a few Ford families in the neighborhood and the boys would go to school in Farmington itself. The Holiday Inn was fairly new with both indoor and outdoor swimming pools, a video game room and a laundry.  Fast food restaurants lined the highway.

Ford would pay for two adjoining rooms at the motel and all of our living expenses for a month.  Had we been on vacation that would have been heaven.  What more could you ask for?  We had time to explore our new surroundings, see all the sights and eat out three times a day on Ford's dime. So we unloaded the boys, the cats, my bicycle, the ironing board and iron and settled in to have some tourist fun for the next month.  The only rather bad part is that since the house did not have a mailbox our mail was forwarded to General Delivery. That little aspect sort of took the vacation part out of the equation and made it sound more like homeless.  Oh well, it should only be a month or so.

It was a Friday when we arrived in Michigan so the next morning Dennis took us over to see the house. Somehow I thought it was a little further along than just studs.  Mr. Rossi, our very Italian builder, was always easy to find as he spent most of his time on a bulldozer moving dirt around.  All that dirt from digging basements has to go somewhere.
Since we had purchased one of the cheaper lots that backed up to a business parking lot he was building a berm on the back of the lot to hide the lot behind us.

Building a house in Michigan was like ordering an automobile. Not sure Dennis understood this from the get go and needless to say  I was not paying attention when we signed the contract on a house I did not want. The basic price of the house included the basement, the walls themselves and some paint.  Options included all the flooring, lights, appliances, wallpaper, air conditioning and landscaping. Seems like in the contract the only option we had added was air conditioning. Mr. Rossi was glad to see me as it would soon be time for me to pick out all the options so they could finish the house.  He was a little vague on the timing but did his best to make it sound like it would be done in a few weeks.  I was not too sure that much would happen in a month but I tried to remain positive.

Part of the reason I was so distressed about the thought of living in a motel came from our previous move six years before to Kansas City.  That was not a pleasant memory as the boys were six years younger with not much interest in exploring the new city unless we went to the zoo everyday.  Jumping on the beds and fighting with each other loomed large in my memories.  The six years, especially living close to Philadelphia with all it's history, had given them a new level of maturity and inquisitiveness about their new home.  Plus with two rooms they slept much later than six in the morning. They also were big enough to just walk out the door of their room and jump in the pool or wander to the video room to play on the machines by themselves.

In our short house hunting trip months before the boys and I spent most of our time riding around with a realtor to various suburbs or spending a whole day deciding on a floor plan and lot for the house we ended up buying. There had not been any spare time to explore the city of Detroit that I knew very little about except that they made cars. Even though Dennis had been in Detroit for three months he knew less about the city than I did.  

That first weekend we had explored Farmington Hills and Farmington on Saturday.  Somehow we managed to find the schools where the boys would go, places to eat, grocery stores and was there really a rather new looking skating rink only blocks from the house?  We drove to Dearborn to see where Dennis worked which was a huge rather nondescript building.  The building sat on a large area of vacant land with a huge circle of pavement in front of it that looked really out of place.  Why was the Ford office often referred to as the Rotunda?  Then there was a place called Greenfield Village with the main building that looked an awful lot like Independence Hall in Philadelphia and Henry Ford's home. Driving around Dearborn there appeared to be some interesting places for the boys and I to explore.

On Sunday we did the drive tour into Detroit.  I love big cities and have since I was quite small and wanted to grow up and live in New York City.  Through the years I never lost my love of large cities so getting to drive into Detroit from the burbs was exciting. That first look at downtown Detroit was fascinating with all the old buildings even though most were empty.  There was, of course, the new GM Renaissance Center right on the river, the empty and forlorn looking Fox Theater which was known as the home of Motown, the Fisher Building, the second Ford Motor Company Highland Park Plant, the Art Museum and on and on. Driving across the bridge in downtown Detroit was the entrance into Windsor, Canada. 

In the Dennis usual fashion there was no stopping so my eyes had to behold all the sights and my mind had to make mental notes of all there was to see and do.  I discovered that the Detroit Zoo was at 10 Mile and Woodward Avenue.  10 Mile Road meant that it was 10 miles from downtown and the Detroit River.  The grid for Detroit itself looked pretty simple as all east-west main roads were mile roads  and the main north-south roads had names like Woodward Avenue. So directions to the zoo from a Detroit person went something like it was on the northwest corner of Woodward and 10 Mile.  All directions to something were given on mile square quadrants.  That made getting around really easy.

Stopping to eat lunch that day was our first introduction to different food.  We stopped at a Coney Island.  You can't go wrong with hot dogs which is what people from the south call them.  I noticed on the menu that they had something called a loose dog. My tendency is to usually order something different than the norm on a menu so I asked what a loose dog was.  I would never have guessed that it was actually hamburger meat just fried up loose and put in a hot dog bun with onions and cheese.  Wow! That was good so from then on Coney Islands became more fun to stop at. In the weeks to come there were stops at Jewish Deli's, Greek Town and something very different, Pasties.

On the first few days when Dennis went back to work, other than to go eat someplace three times a day, the boys did not want to get into the car for any other reason. That was alright with me as I was a little tired of being locked up in the car myself. They swam, played in the arcade, watched television and did much the same thing kids would do at home. I gathered all the brochures from the rack in the hotel and every tourist guide I could find to see what I could learn about this place I was to live in. The phone book always gives a wealth on information you can't find from the tourist info.  How can a city have thirty bowling alleys, twelve roller skating rinks, an ice rink in every little burb and even in a bowling alley open twenty-four hours a day with an ice skating rink inside? 

The sadness of having to move from wonderful little Riverton or the ability to dash into Philadelphia or hop on the turnpike to New York, the beauty of the shore or the loss of all my friends on the East Coast did not just disappear. I felt the loss everyday and the wish to go back never went away.  But there was something very different and very intriguing about this new city. 

Happy Birthday?

I have always believed that Birthdays are really special.  Maybe better than Christmas since your birthday is centered around just you.  Growing up Mother and Dad always went out of their way to make that day very special for my two brothers and I.  When we were little there were always parties in the backyard with all our friends in attendance and as we got older Mom planned some place special for dinner.  Dad's favorite pastime was shopping for gifts which he was really fantastic at.

I can remember a lot of birthdays like when I was eleven and Mom had a special dinner planned and a beautiful cake baked.  She was working at Brockway Glass, shift work and going to business college.  That day a monsoon rain hit Muskogee and all the streets were flooded by the time she got off at 4:00. It was well after dark before she made it home.  Dad had finished fixing the dinner she had started before she went to work and I had to stare at my presents wondering if I would ever get to open them. It turned out well in the end as I got a Kodak Hawkeye camera that year complete with the flash attachment.

The year I turned twelve we were on vacation in Colorado way up in the mountains at a place with cabins along the Platte River. On my birthday Dad took me to Denver to go shop for a present.  At that time I was an avid reader of Seventeen magazine and noticed that May D & F had a store in Denver so that is where we went so I could be like those girls in Seventeen magazine.  I think I got a bathing suit but that was only half the story of the day.  The couple who owned the cabins were vegan and they cooked us dinner complete with a cake.  Their son, who was close to my age, gave me a necklace which I still have.

At fourteen I felt so grown up that I decided I wanted my birthday party to be on television.  Tulsa had a dance party on every Saturday afternoon.  Mom made the arrangements and I invited friends.  To me it was almost as great as being on American Bandstand. Of course I was so mature I asked one of my brother Paul's friends, two years older to go as my "date".  The very cute guy actually said yes until the morning of the event at which time he called with some feeble excuse about hurting his foot.  Oh, the buckets of tears that flowed and the swollen eyes.  I thought my life was ruined until all of a sudden he showed up to go.  Did my brother Paul and his friend George Highfill actually threaten to break his leg if he did not show up? It was fun even though my eyes were so swollen from crying I could hardly see and on my very first date when we got to my house he told me I was a girl every boy would want for a sister. Not quite what I wanted to hear!

On my sixteenth birthday everyone went to work leaving no trace of a cake or presents.  I felt so sorry for myself I rode my bike to the store and made my own cake.  About the time the cake was done Pat Mackey next door showed up with a cake for me and Mom arrived home with one from the bakery.  Wow! Three birthday cakes.  Dad arrived home driving a 1954 red Chevy convertible for me.  The day that started out as the worst birthday ever turned into the best.

At seventeen there was the presentation of the guitar I had been dreaming about and at eighteen new luggage to take to college. So why all the discussion about great birthdays? Probably because I was so "birthday spoiled" by my parents it was always hard getting married to find out other people, Dennis, believed it was just another day.  Presents were not important. Did no one realize that I thought I should really be allowed to celebrate the entire month of June for my birthday and not hear someone say they did not have time to get a card?

Fast forward to June 15, 1984. My thirty-eighth birthday.  The moving truck came early and I cleaned as they emptied the house that I never wanted to leave.  Neighbors dropped by to say goodbye and somehow I held back the tears so my eyes did not swell up the way they did at fourteen. The Ford van we had was loaded with the two cats in their cage and all the things I thought we would need for a few weeks in the hotel.  Did anyone pay attention to the fact that it was my birthday?  No, it was just moving day again.  Funny that moving from Kansas City to New Jersey was on Halloween night with two kids crying because they could not go trick or treating. I figured that the next time we moved Dennis would pick Christmas Day.

Driving along the endless Pennsylvania turnpike the subject up my birthday came up.  Somewhere we pulled off for my birthday dinner at a Red Lobster.  The reason I remember that so well is because when I was eating my baked potato I found a huge clot of dirt right in the middle of it. I must say that that was rather interesting as to how the dirt managed to be in the middle of the potato.  Perhaps it was a sign.
Perhaps it just added to the worst birthday ever.....or would that really be the worst birthday ever?

We arrived in Detroit or actually Farmington Hills sometime in the middle of the night.  Travelling with Dennis you never stopped for the night at a hotel - that was too much trouble - just drive all night to get to where you need to get to. At least Ford was going to pay for two rooms so all four of us, two cats, my bicycle and clothes for a few weeks were not all stuffed into one room. 

On the 584 mile trip from Riverton New Jersey there was a lot of time for me to be angry about my situation and a lot of time to think about how I managed to get myself into not being part of the decision making on anything except how a house was decorated.  I know that Paul, Kenny and I all took after our Dad in being the best in the world at being non confrontational.  I had learned within the first few days of being married to Dennis that there was never going to be a way for me to win an argument.  That disagreeing with him on anything only resulted in me being stupid.  This behavior on my part only gave him more power over me. The worse part is that I only became more unhappy as I tried to keep him happy.

Somewhere along those 584 miles my little brain clicked and I realized I was doing a lot to create my own misery and perhaps it was time to change course.  The light bulb really clicked on bright when we drove over to see the new house and the stage of construction it was in.