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TMCNet: OPINION: Love, grief for a hometown fallen farther than the Big 3

[January 03, 2009]

OPINION: Love, grief for a hometown fallen farther than the Big 3

(Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, The Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) Jan. 3--I've been thinking a lot about Detroit lately.

Though I haven't lived there in decades, I still feel a strong sense of loyalty and love for the Motor City. Much of my family still lives in the area.

Right now, it's a city in pain. And it's sad to see.

It begins and ends with the troubles in the auto industry. But it also includes a city awash in crime, a city mired in poverty and a failing school system.

The former mayor is in jail and the local economy is in tatters.

Martha Reeves, who used to be the lead singer of Martha and the Vandellas, is a Detroit councilwoman these days. With all of the bad news swirling around town, evidently the best idea she had to save the city was to hatch a plan to raise money to erect statues of the great Motown singers.

I'm not sure that's what Marvin Gaye would have suggested.

On a whim one recent Sunday morning, I e-mailed a former high-school classmate. I asked him if any of our classmates were in the auto business.

Within minutes, Bob e-mailed back. Off the top of his head he came up with a dozen or more classmates who worked in some capacity in the auto business.

There were people working for the Big Three. There were people who sold cars, people who owned dealerships, people who worked for auto parts suppliers. There were classmates who ran trucking companies moving automobiles around the country. Or bankers who lent money to consumers to buy new cars.

All of them, Bob said, were worried about their futures in a town synonymous with the automobile.

I shouldn't have been surprised. When I was growing up in Detroit in the '60s and '70s, either your mom or your dad worked for one of the automakers. And if they didn't, more than likely they worked for a company that was heavily dependent on the auto industry.

My father was in the food business. He ran cafeterias and dining rooms for the auto plants around the Detroit area.

My father spent most of his time working at GM plants. Not surprisingly, we never owned anything but GM cars. You didn't want to be caught dead driving a Ford or a foreign-made car, God forbid, in a parking lot filled with GM workers.

Loyalty and love for the Motor City.

A few weeks ago, my brother, who is an executive in a company whose fortunes are intertwined with the auto industry, had a meeting with some Ford executives to finalize a long-term contract.

The good news is that my brother had a contract to sign. The bad news is that the Ford executives who showed up in his office told him they were likely to lose their jobs in a matter of weeks.

When I was growing up in Detroit in the '60s and '70s, you didn't mark fall just by the falling of leaves.

Fall began when new cars began to fill Woodward Ave. and the other major streets of Detroit.

In those days, the automakers would let company managers and executives drive the new models around town. It was a perk, and it was noticeable.

It seemed natural to me. And I thought it would go on forever.

Now you can find all of the new cars you want in an auto dealer parking lot.

When I was in high school in the early 1970s, I had a part-time job cleaning office buildings in a Detroit suburb.

One of the buildings housed a lab that my supervisor said was supposed to be top-secret. It's a lab run by one of the automakers, he said. They are doing research and testing on a battery-powered car. Don't touch anything, and don't tell anyone what you see, he said.

I was fascinated. There were a lot of test tubes and batteries in the lab. There was science going on here.

But a battery-powered car? Who needs that?

In those days, Detroit-area gas station owners were famous for price wars. I had just put five gallons in my mom's Pontiac Tempest car for $1.

That's right: 20 cents a gallon.

And the battery-powered car? We're still waiting for that to roll off the assembly line.

I paid a visit to Detroit two months ago. Nearly every time I go back home, I drive by my boyhood home just to see what it looks like.

I grew up on the west side of Detroit, just blocks from where the 1967 riots broke out. By that time, we had already moved out of the city. We were white flighters, and we weren't alone.

During my recent visit, I was pleasantly surprised that my old home looked to be in pretty good shape.

It was occupied, which said something, given the state of the rest of the neighborhood.

The neighborhood looked awful and desolate. A block or so away, the old Imperial market, a grocery store owned for decades by Chaldean Christians, was empty, boarded up and covered in graffiti.

It looked like it had been damaged by fire.

And I wondered where local residents bought their groceries.

Matt Labash, a writer for The Weekly Standard, recently paid a visit to Detroit. Among other things, he said people thought of Detroit as the "national ashtray."

But there are signs of hope, he wrote, though it was hard to find much hope in his piece.

As proof, he quoted Charlie LeDuff, a legendary reporter who works for the Detroit News. LeDuff excels at writing about the underdogs, the forgotten and, more recently, people going through some tough times.

LeDuff is naturally defensive about the abuse Detroit and its weary residents have taken, much of it self-inflicted. He told Labash that he cares about the "Detroiters in a hole."

Using an epithet repeatedly, he said Detroit matters because people know how to make things and fix things.

"Saved the union a couple of times, you know what I mean?" said LeDuff, referring to the country, not labor unions.

For Detroiters, it's time to start fixing things again.

Don Walker is a Journal Sentinel reporter.

To see more of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://www.jsonline.com.

Copyright (c) 2009, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.
For reprints, email tmsreprints@permissionsgroup.com, call 800-374-7985 or 847-635-6550, send a fax to 847-635-6968, or write to The Permissions Group Inc., 1247 Milwaukee Ave., Suite 303, Glenview, IL 60025, USA.

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