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.
No comments:
Post a Comment