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.