WW: Hello, today is February 7, 2017. My name is William Winkel. This interview is for the Detroit Historical Society's Detroit '67 Oral History Project, and I'm in Monroe, Michigan. I'm sitting down with –
LO: My name? My name is Latitia O'Connell. Okay?
WW: Thank you for sitting down with me today. Feel free to start your story.
LO: Okay, this is my story. The Sunday that this happened rose beautiful and sunshine and not much humidity, and it was beautiful and hot. And so some of the sisters decided to go over to the cathedral for mass, which they did. Now, they didn't come back, so we were afraid that something had happened. Finally, they got back, and they said that when they went into mass, everything was quiet and beautiful. When they came out, everything was burning and they could not get home, so every road they tried to take to get home, they were blocked by fire.
So it took a long time to get a detour around all the fires and get home. And if we wanted to see the fires, we should go up on our roof, right then, and we would see Detroit burning. So some of us went up on the roof and sure enough, you could see black plumes of smoke coming up in sort of a circle, all around Detroit.
So then we came back and everything was quiet where we were. So we ate our supper and we cleaned up and came in to sit down where we had what we called recreation—where we gathered in the evening. And now I'll have to stop for a minute to let you know geographically how this goes. If you were to look up, you would see Fenkell, which was like a big top of a T, and the stem of the T, about a block down, was where we were. Now also, between our house and the house next to us was a rather narrow alley, but an alley people could go through.
Okay, so we sit down for a nice quiet evening when suddenly we hear the crackling of shattering glass. And not too long after that, people start bringing the furniture that they had looted from the furniture store on the corner— I never will forget there were two or three older people carrying a beautiful new, great big sofa. And so they took all the furniture through the alley.
Now when that was over, they threw Molotov cocktails in all of the buildings, I don't know how far down, but at least a block. And they all went up in flames. So by two o'clock in the morning our convent was so full of smoke you could hardly breathe. And naturally, we didn't go to bed because we didn't know whether they were going to come our way or not. So enough for the night.
The next morning, we found out— now, here, the chronology of the actual dates is a little bit fuzzy, but it's exactly the way— the way it happened. We first heard that the court in Detroit had taken in more than two hundred people, and they couldn't keep all of them, and obviously not all of them were guilty, so they wanted as many typists as they could get who were skilled typists and could do legal documents. So a number of our sisters— this worked out of Marygrove, so I don't know any more about it, except that I do know that a number of our sisters went. Meanwhile, in our place, Governor Romney had called out, by this time, the National Guard, so there were tanks strategically placed all around from our place downtown, and there were also armed National Guardsmen, and always had their guns at the ready, to shoot. The tanks had their guns sticking out over the street and the Guardsmen had their guns cocked, ready to shoot, if anybody came near. So it was kind of dangerous.
But anyway, about this time, Sanders called us up and said, We did our big baking just before the riots started, and we have all this merchandise and we can't deliver it. So if you would like any of it, you're free to come down and take any and as much as you want, and it's all free. So we were actually willing to go, and I volunteered, and some sister drove with me, I don't know who she was, but anyway— we drove down to Sanders, through the tanks. I can still remember those big guns sticking out. But nobody stopped us. We went to Sanders. We filled the car with Sanders merchandise, like cakes and everything. And came back, uneventfully, and put the Sanders things in a deep freeze that we had down in the basement, and came back and had our supper. Now that was that day.
The next day, or thereabouts, the court wanted a survey of all the people that were still living in all the burned out places, to see what the situation was, so they wanted some volunteers that would go from house to house in these burned out areas and see what the situation was. The questions were about how burned out the house was, are you safe, are you well, do you have enough food, and so on. So it was rather uneventful until we came to one house, and this poor old African American woman, about middle age, was so scared, she opened the door about one inch and was scared to even talk to us. But after we convinced her who we were, and what we were doing, she opened it up and she started talking to us. And she told us that the roof of her house was burned out, but she was still going to live there, because she didn't dare show her face. Did she have any food? No, she didn't have any food. Did she have any way to get any food? No, because if she showed her face, she was afraid that she would be shot. And worst of all, her son had disappeared on Friday evening. He had left, and he never came back home again, and she didn't know whether he was alive or dead. And that was worrying her more than any of the other things.
So we took all the data down, amongst other data, and sent it in to the court, where we were supposed to send it. And what they did with it after that, I don't know. So that was one day.
So then, the next day— this was Thursday by now— we still couldn't go outside unless we were pretty sure. So we had a late mass that was over about four o'clock, I think, in the afternoon, and a sister was just ready to clean the sacred vessels when a knock came at the door, and it was one of the National Guard, armed, of course, and he said take cover immediately, there are snipers all around. And don't leave until I give you the clear sign.
So we went to a little tiny place, like a little hallway between two parts of the house, and we sat there until he came back and gave us the all-clear that the snipers had gone. So that's really the major things that happened in my personal story.
Now my second story has to do with a manuscript— did you get it? A manuscript that Sister Mary wrote about a family that she knew and she kind of tried to make it into a story, but it's absolutely true, and the people in it were personal friends of hers, so it's a rather, I think, good summary of what happened during the riots. And there probably is quite a bit of information in the general archives of any of our convents that were open that summer, because most of them were in the midst of where the riots occurred, I think. But you'd have to check this out with the archives.
St. Benton, where we were, was open, and Holy Trinity was open. St. Agnes was open, I think. And St. Rose. You'd have to check. And maybe some more convents. And most of those convents were in areas where the riots were. So you probably would find quite a bit of information there.
Now that's pretty much the end of my story. Do you have any questions?
WW: Did what you see during '67 change the way you looked at Detroit?
LO: I suppose, subconsciously, it did. I didn't realize it at the time. But not Detroit, so much. It made me very, very much interested in the race problem, which I've been studying even until today. And the other thing that really, as I look back on it, was that Detroit was one of the only cities where this was so throughout the whole city. Most all of the riots that have occurred since, and even the ones that occurred this year, in Baltimore and New York and all these— they were localized. They were localized to the place where the injury happened. But the Detroit ones were all over the city. And another irony was that I don't know what they were doing, exactly, because I was not in on it, but there was a group of activists in Detroit, and I think some of our sisters were in on that— you might look up Shirley Ellis's file, she probably had some things, and some other people— but they had been working on this problem. They knew that it was a very volatile problem, and that something could happen at most any minute. But nobody that I ever talked to realized that something would trigger it like it did, and as far as I can see, from what I've read and studied, nobody has ever found out exactly what was used to trigger it.
WW: To trigger it?
LO: To trigger it. To start it off.
WW: It was a raid on a blind pig, on Twelfth and Clairmount.
LO: Was that it? And they've definitely established that now? And okay. So that's established. Any other questions?
WW: No. Is there anything else you'd like to share?
LO: I think— I think about all the people of Detroit, would be good people to begin to study the race problem as it still exists today. I just finished two articles, one in the America, and then the conclusion to a very good book called When Race Meets Real, and it's right up to date. Has people we all know in it. And the conclusion from both of those— I'm putting the two together— is that we are never going to solve the race problem, until the white race realizes its own sin in the way it has treated the blacks, and is humble enough to admit that we are no better than the blacks. That we're brothers and sisters, and that's going to take a lot of doing. It's not going to happen overnight. At least that was the conclusion. In this one article, in America, on conscience, Europe has already come to its knees and seen its sinfulness that led to the Holocaust. But America seems never to have realized the guilt the white man has because he always feels superior, even today. And until he stops feeling that superior, we can't solve the race problem. Does that answer your question?
WW: Can you ask me a question?
LO: No.
WW: I thought that's what you said. That was perfect! Thank you so much.
LO: Really? And it came through okay?
WW: Today is January 31, 2017. My name is William Winkel. This interview is for the Detroit Historical Society's Detroit 67 Oral History Project, and I am in Monroe, Michigan. And I'm sitting down with -
SD: Sister Sharon Defever.
WW: Thank you so much for sitting down with me today.
SD: Oh, I'm glad to be here.
WW: Would you like to share your story?
SD: I remember the day of the 27 of July -
WW: 23.
SD: 23, excuse me. It was my first summer at Marygrove in the graduate program. And they had a new program going where they took a two-hour course in two weeks, another one next two weeks, and the third session was about to begin on Monday. And I can remember Sunday afternoon there was a lot going on. Was hearing guns, and as it got dark and getting ready for bed, a lot of gunshots, and I know I was very frightened.
The next morning we were to begin a class, a history class, and at that time no student could come in from outside of Detroit. In fact, I think they probably had everybody off the streets. But we went to class that morning, and I wasn't much interested in my history class. I was very aware of the danger around us. Marygrove is at Six Mile and Wyoming not very far from Livernois.
And at that time, I had a cousin who was working and taking a class also, at U of D [University of Detroit]. And she tells the story of the snipers being up in the towers where she was in the college buildings. She also was in the dorms there. But you know, it was a very frightening summer. Something that I still remember today, of the anxiety and the fear that I had. I didn't know if I was going to be alive. Just very, very frightened.
And today, 50 years later, I travel to my brother's home on the east side, going up East Jefferson, and just to look at the streets, and the destruction that has taken place in the 50 years.
WW: Did '67 change the way you looked at the city?
SD: It did. I did not stay in the city. After that I went to Ann Arbor for a year, and then I was in Alabama for many, many years, teaching. But I was afraid to come back in the city. And even when I go to see my brother today, and I drive down Jefferson, I'm very cautious and I try to stay in the middle of the street, rather than go too far to the - you know, to the side of the street, to the right side. Just for fear.
WW: So did you stay, just hunkered down, that entire week?
SD: I did. Didn't leave the grounds. And I know there was a lot going on outside, of course. We could watch TV, but - didn't actually see anything right on the grounds. I didn't.
WW: Thank you so much for your stories.
SD: You're welcome.
CG: Hello. Today is December 6, 2016. This Celeste Goedert with the Detroit Historical Society’s Detroit 1967 Oral History Project. Today I’m in Monroe, Michigan, and I’m sitting down with --
MS: Sister Monica Stuhlwier.
CG: Thank you so much for sitting down with me today.
MS: You’re welcome.
CG: So if you could just begin by telling me where and when you were born.
MS: I was born in 1939 in Cincinnati, Ohio. But I went to college in Detroit at Marygrove, 1957-61. Then I entered the Congregation, the IHM [Immaculate Heart of Mary] congregation in Monroe, Michigan. In 1967, I was studying in Detroit at Calvert and LaSalle at the Pious XII Religious Education Institute. We were taking classes at Central High School.
The night that the riots started I was visiting a Sister at Marygrove, Six Mile and Wyoming, and somebody told us that we’d better not try to cross Livernois at Six Mile or Five Mile because the riots were beginning. So, they took me up to Seven Mile, and I crossed over. I was staying at St. Gregory Convent, which was at Fenkell, Five Mile two blocks north of Livernois, a block down maybe.
Anyway, when I got home that day and the next few days we had to stay in and we were observing a lot of the rioting that was going on in the small shops on Livernois. There was a furniture store so we saw people coming down the street with TVs and lamps and there was a Honeybaked Ham Store on Fenkell, so boy, they were having a great time with the Honeybaked hams, coming down the street with the Honeybaked hams. I just remember there were a lot of helicopters above and one Sister got the idea, “Let’s go up on the roof so maybe we can see better.” Well, another Sister said, “You better get down there, the police have said they’re looking for–
CG: Snipers?
MS: –snipers up there so get down because they might shoot you.” [Laughter.] So anyway, it was just quite a time the few days. We couldn’t go to class yet, and in the meantime I think after they said that down at Central High School there were tanks
CG: Mmhmm.
MS: And soldiers and stuff like that. Then, one of our Sisters was very active in social justice, and she asked any of us that wanted to go down to the jails because a lot of the young people were taken off the streets because they had a curfew.
CG: Right.
MS: And they didn’t realize, I suppose, that there was a curfew so they were out. The girls were taken to one jail, and the boys were taken to another, and she took us to the girls’ jail. We were to interview these girls–a few of these girls each of us–to get their names, get their parents’ names, and their phone number, and we were to go home and call their parents and tell them that they’d be home within a day, not to worry.
CG: Oh, okay.
MS: So that’s what I remember mostly.
CG: Do you remember any of the interviews?
MS: No. I mean it’s been 50 years, honey.
CG: Yeah, a long time ago.
MS: 49 maybe, it’ll be 50 in the summer. It was just young kids, 13–
CG: They were all young kids who had just been arrested?
MS: Yeah, they were just out, they weren’t supposed to be out past eight o’clock or something, I don’t know what it was. I don’t remember that part.
CG: Do you remember where they were keeping them?
MS: They were in the jail, I don’t know, some jail downtown.
CG: Downtown?
MS: Yeah. And Sister Mary Gerald, Shirley Alice, was the one that standing at our convent too, there was a bunch of us. We were studying, as I said at the Pious XII Center, and there were older sisters. When Sister Mary Agnes asked me, “You know, who else was there?” I said most of them either are dead or left to community [laughter]. The Superior I know she was dead, she was wonderful. And I remember the other gal, she’s 100 now, and she was all scared, better sit down, get down to get out of the windows, you know, get into the corridors so nobody shoots you. Well there was no shooting, we didn’t have any shooting, no. I mean we could hear shots, and there was the smell of burning.
CG: Oh yeah? Did you see any smoke?
MS: Yeah, we saw smoke because we were only two blocks from Livernois and there was a lot of stuff going on on Livernois.
I do remember that as a result of the riots, that there were people–white people–who got together like out in Southfield I remember we had a big meeting, “What can we do? What can we do to try to help in some way or another?” Because I think most people were not aware probably of the effects of racism and all of that. I do remember that meeting in a home, I think it was one of our convents–
CG: That was after the riots?
MS: –in Southfield, yeah, yeah, after the riots to try with some laypeople and men, businessmen who wanted to know what they could do. That was a very interesting time.
I remember coming home and wanting to call my parents and tell them I was okay. Well, they were up at the Expo ’67 or something in Canada, was up in Montreal or something, they didn’t even know there was a problem.
Basically that’s what I remember. Of course, a lot of fire and stuff down where it was actually happening around the seminary. I remember they painted the face of Jesus black.
CG: What did you think about that?
MS: I thought that was neat. And then they tried to take it off, and then they painted it black again, so they just left it black. The Church was slow on the draw, but we were trying anyway. I think the Sisters were more aware, and then of course our Sister Jane Mary, who was a temporary President of Marygrove, wanted to take 68 African American students for 1968. 68 for ’68.
CG: And did that happen?
MS: Yeah, it did.
CG: Do you feel like that was kind of some of the response that at least the Sisters had to the riots?
MS: Right, oh absolutely, absolutely. I think we were very much made aware of it. Because you know, Marygrove is right in the middle. As times have gone on, a lot of people moved out of the area: white people move out, they were frightened or whatever. Some tried to stay; I know that in the Gesu area, the University District area, a lot of the people were very open to being caring and so forth and so on, but sometimes it got really tough and some of the black kids from further in would come out and they’d cause problems with children walking home from school and stuff like that, so some moved out. Now, I have a friend, however, who raised all her kids there, and is still there in the University District, and she just loves her neighbors and Gesu Perish has worked to be open to everybody.
CG: Yeah, I’ve heard that they do a lot of social justice work.
MS: Mmhmm. Yeah.
CG: What year did you leave Detroit?
MS: Leave Detroit? Well, let’s see. After we studied, I taught at Immaculata which was right on the campus there at Marygrove which is a–what do you call it?–preparing you for college, you know. These girls were very bright, ’68-’70. In ’70 I got a job because I’d been in this religious education program which was a new program, and I was invited to go to a parish, had no school, so we had to do the religious education programs, so I moved out to Birmingham, and then I was there for four years. Then I moved to Chicago, and I went to school for a year, but then I worked at an inner city parish in Chicago. Then I moved back to Detroit in ’77-’78, ’78-’82. Lived on the Marygrove campus actually, then. And then our community decided not to leave that area, to keep the college and it went co-ed and now many, many students are African American, they’re open to anybody, but urban leadership is one of the things that they are trying to offer to the city of Detroit.
CG: Definitely. So earlier I heard you use the term ‘riot,’ and this is often a question that comes up. Do you think of it in terms of a ‘riot,’ or others use the term ‘rebellion’ or ‘uprising’?
MS: Well we just heard that’s what they called it: the ’67 riots.
CG: Yeah.
MS: So, I mean I can certainly see why it was an uprising: because they weren’t being treated well.
CG: Had you heard of a lot of incidences of police violence?
MS: Then?
CG: Or sort of tension?
MS: Before that? No, not before that. But you know, it was just, we were in a culture that didn’t pay attention to it, I guess. This is what caused us to pay attention to it. But you know they had the riots out in Los Angeles right before that, and then this just blew up.
It’s a difficult thing, isn’t it, really we’re still in it. Really, when you look at what’s happening now, these crazy things and that election, really. But lots of people are trying to be sensitive; I just read that book Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson, it was a wonderful book. It’s amazing though how racist a whole state–I couldn’t believe it. Alabama I think it was, or Mississippi, I forget which one, Alabama, wasn’t it?
CG: I think.
MS: And as somebody said who was working in one of our Sisters is working in Alabama, she said that Sessions that is now appointed to be whatever he’s appointed to be, is so racist, she said, “I can’t believe that he was picked.”
Yeah, it is.
CG: I know you have to go, so I have just one last question to wrap it up.
MS: Yeah, sure.
CG: I would just be interested in hearing your thoughts on the future of Detroit and maybe how you see 1967 affecting what’s going on now, or just your general feelings about the city right now.
MS: Well, you know, I love to read the Free Press. I always like to keep up on what’s going on in Detroit. I have to say this one thing: I went to visit my sister–and you don’t think this is connected but it is–my sister lived for a couple years in New Orleans and this was in the Nineties, probably early Nineties. I noticed that the black people in New Orleans were so different than the black people in Detroit. In Detroit, “Black is beautiful, you got to pay attention to me, you know we’re important!” They were assertive, and down there they were like meek and mosey. You know? It was just to me very amazing, and I think that’s what the ’67 riots and everything that’s happened since then has done for the city of Detroit –I guess Motown and all the rest of it. But black people, Black is beautiful, you know, and so forth and so on. I was amazed the difference in the culture. I was only there, it was a couple of weeks or maybe even just a week, but I just noticed what a difference in the culture of the black people, of the African Americans, how they were not assertive. Isn’t that interesting?
CG: Yeah.
MS: Really. And so really when you say, “What is the hope of the Detroit?” I think it’s that black people have come a long way, and they have a long way to go too because of the prejudice and the racists and the probably unconscious racism of a lot of people. That’s what we keep trying to work on in ourselves: the unconscious racism.
But we have a community, our sisters were founded by a black woman, she was partially black, she was not really recognizable. She was Haitian and English–her father was an English soldier, and her mother was from Haiti. The priest that brought her to Monroe was looking to make some Sisters because he felt there was no education for young girls here in 1845. So she came, and she could pass. So I think we have gotten back to, she came from a black community that she thought was going to dissolve because they didn’t get very good rapport with the Archdiocese of Boston–not Boston, Baltimore, the Diocese of Baltimore. So she though the community was going to fall apart, so she went with this Father Gillet who came here. We have now reconnected with that community, the Oblates of Providence, it’s a black community, and we have gone for retreats with them, and there’s two other branches of our community. We came together and showed us this movie which–ah, gee, I wish I could think of the name of it–but I couldn’t believe the racism of the policemen toward the black people, even well-off black people. What was it called? It was a few years ago, and it won an academy award.
CG: I know there’s been quite a few documentaries about this.
MS: It wasn’t a documentary.
CG: It wasn’t a documentary?
MS: No. I can’t think of the name of it.
CG: Oh, was it Fruitvale Station?
MS: No, no, no, it was just one word. I can’t think of the name of it. See when you get old you forget names. Anyway, it struck me more powerfully than almost anything I’ve seen–Psycho, it wasn’t Psycho. I don’t know the name of it, but I’ll try to find out and get back to you.
CG: Yeah. Did you have any other thoughts that you wanted to share, or experiences, memories of ’67?
MS: No, it was just, you know, kind of a shock. But, it was a good shock to us. I guess my own, I know I’m sure I’m racist unconsciously, but I remember when I was working in Chicago in that inner city, I came to really expect–I mean the whole school was black except the principal and a couple of teachers, the other teachers were black too. I just really, when I moved back to Detroit, I did live and work in Detroit, so I saw a lot of black people. Then the other experience I had was where there was no black people, and I just really missed them. You know? It was kind of funny.
So much is part of the culture in which you grow up in. You know? Really.
So I love Detroit. I have a very good feeling about Detroit and, like I say, I think that the Free Press is one of the best papers. When I go to other cities, I go, “Oh, not as good as the Free Press.”
CG: Yeah.
MS: But, it costs money, so I try to get deals. So that’s about it. That’s all I have I think that I can share with you.
CG: Well thank you so much for sitting down with me today.
MS: You’re welcome, Celeste.
WW: Hello, my name is William Winkel. Today is August 22, 2016. I am in Detroit, Michigan. This interview is for the Detroit Historical Society’s Detroit 67 Oral History Project and I am on the phone with Mike Stacy. Thank you so much for sitting down with me today.
MS: I missed that last question?
WW: I said thank you for sitting down with me.
MS: Oh yeah, you’re welcome.
WW: Can you start by telling me where and when you were born?
MS: I was born in Dearborn, Michigan.
WW: What year?
MS: March 24, 1931.
WW: Did you grow up in Dearborn?
MS: I grew up in Dearborn and graduated from high school there, yes.
WW: Did you enjoy growing up in Dearborn? What was it like?
MS: It was home. I enjoyed it. My dad worked at the Ford plant and one summer, I even worked at the Ford plant when I was 17 because I forged my birth certificate so I could be 18 and I got a job there for the summer.
WW: Wow [laughing.] During your time growing up in Dearborn, did you come to Detroit at all?
MS: Oh yeah, we used to go to Detroit but there were a lot of gangs there so the only way we could go to Detroit, we’d take the Baker streetcar. But we’d have to have five or six of us go in a bunch to one of the theaters to see the movie because the Detroiters didn't like the folks that were from Dearborn. So, we didn't want to fight like hell all the time to go to Detroit. So we always went to Detroit in a group.
WW: So you didn't feel comfortable whenever you came to the city?
MS: No.
WW: After you graduated high school, did you continue to work at the Ford plant or what did you do?
MS: After I graduated high school, my friends and neighbors sent me a draft card and I was drafted into the Marine Corps.
WW: Lovely. How long were you in the service?
MS: I wouldn't call it lovely, but it turned out to be lovely.
WW: How long were you in the service?
MS: Two years.
WW: Did the city seem any different to you after you came back, or was it still the same city?
MS: Things were improving, Detroit was moving along in a very positive way at that time. Things looked good. I was impressed with Dearborn and I was impressed with Detroit. I had essentially no problems when I returned. Then I went on to Michigan State to take advantage of the GI Bill.
WW: After you left Michigan State, did you return to the city?
MS: I returned, let me see, after I got out of military. And then went to Michigan State, and then after I graduated, my parents moved from Dearborn to Melvindale and so I lived with them for a period of time in Melvindale. And then I decided to go to Michigan State and I took police administration at that time. And now they call it criminal justice. So, I graduated from Michigan State, I was offered a job as a campus cop. I said, well, I didn't want to graduate from Michigan State and become a campus cop, but they told what the salary would be and of all the salaries of the police departments of the state of Michigan, the Michigan State campus police were paid the best. So I went with the flow and with the money and worked at Michigan State for three years. Then I decided I wanted to find out what Detroit as all about and I decided to take the job at Recorder’s Court. And I think there were thirteen judges there at the time and I was interviewed by all of them. The reason they decided to hire me—there were about a dozen applicants—and I surfaced as number one and I said, “Well, why did you pick me?” And they said, “Well, you were a cop and we have 1700 people locked up in the county jail, sleeping in the aisles and very overcrowded. We want you to do a pre-sentence report on all of them to tell us what to do with them, whether to send them to prison or put them back on the street. I did that for two years and I cleaned out the crowded conditions in the jail and then I at that time was living in Warren, Michigan.
WW: Did you enjoy your time at Recorder’s Court?
MS: Oh, it was the best job I’ve ever had. I enjoyed it immensely.
WW: And what two years did you do that job?
MS: At Recorder’s Court?
WW: Yes.
MS: I’m trying to think. I left Michigan State in September of, I want to say ’61. From September of ’61 I worked at Recorder’s Court and I worked there until May of ’68. I was there during the course of the riot and the thing that’s interesting about it, if you allow me to editorialize a little bit about it here—
WW: Go right ahead.
MS: The riot, you know, that occurred – I’m trying to get my thoughts together here. What was the question you wanted me to respond to?
WW: Oh, I was just asking what years you worked there and then I was going to go into ’67 after that.
MS: Okay, well, the years that I worked there was from ’61-’68 and I was there during the riot of ’67 and in that July of ’67, we were coming back from a vacation at Camp Dearborn. I was doing 80 miles an hour on I-94 and I looked in the rearview mirror and I said to my wife, “ Oh damn, I’m busted” because a blue goose- you know, a State Police car was fast approaching. And it passed me at about 100 miles an hour and that was followed by about 30 other State Police cars. And I said to my wife, “Something bad must have happened somewhere.” And I had no idea what bad meant. And we finally got home to our home in Warren, Michigan, turned on the TV, and I saw Detroit in flames.
WW: Did you have to go into work that week or did you stay home?
MS: That was Sunday and I got a phone call about five o’clock and it was the chief probation officer who told me, “Mike, don't come to work until we call you.” And I said, “Why not?” And he said, “Well, the snipers have taken the high ground and they’re shooting into the courthouse. They’re shooting the windows out of the courthouse and we can’t do any business there. So as long as the snipers hold the high ground, we can’t do any work. So we’ll call you when the Detroit Police clear the snipers off the rooftops.” So I was called to come in the following Friday after the riots began.
WW: Oh wow.
MS: Yeah. And the thing that’s interesting that you should probably know about is Governor Romney, as a matter of fact, he activated the National Guard and they were understaffed and undermanned and he said, “I’m going to petition the President, Lyndon Johnson, to send in the Federal Troops.” So he contacted President Johnson and President Johnson said, “This is unprecedented, this is unheard of and I’m looking for a set up. I don’t trust you” —you know, to Romney—“because I think things cannot be that bad in Detroit.” And Romney insisted that things were bad. And he says, “Well, I still don’t trust you so I’m going to send in my administrative assistant, Cyrus Vance. Cyrus Vance finally came in, he took a tour of the Detroit area which was burning in flames and he said to the President, “Yes, it’s that bad. It’s worse than bad. Bring the federal troops in.” Well, they didn't have enough federal troops to bring in so they brought in the 37th Airborne from Vietnam. And they surrounded the courthouse. So then on that following Friday, I went in, I see these 37th Airborne troops sitting in front of the court eating an apple out in front of the court with a couple of the guys and they were doing perimeter security. The guarded all of the courthouses and city hall, the critical-where you get your drinking water and all that kind of thing. And they were very angry because they said, “We could solve this riot in about a week or so and bring things back to normal but they got us guarding these installations like the court house here.” Anyway, they were not happy campers. And so, in answer to that question, okay?
WW: So you know, the federal troops that were brought in were recently already back from Vietnam. They were already in Kentucky.
MS: They were brought in from Vietnam, yes.
WW: So what was the mood of Recorder’s Court when you did come in to work?
MS: When I came into work, we had to process 7,200 folks who had violated the curfew. In other words, when the riot began on that Saturday night, early Sunday morning, John Conyers was on top of a car pleading with the rioters to settle down and go home and then word on the street came out that the Detroit Police were not shooting looters. And the switch boards opened up all over Detroit. They said they’re not shooting looters and so then the riot intensified and they broke into stores and began stealing all of the merchandise and began kicking in doors and all of that business and so forth. And things literally went to hell in a hand basket. And so that’s another reason why they brought in the federal troops. Because the local state police, the Detroit police, the suburban police, they brought people in from police departments all over the state and we could not stop the rioting and looting and burning until finally Cyrus Vance came in and told his boss, Lyndon Johnson, “Yeah, it’s that bad. Bring in the federal troops.” So it was a political issue too, you know.
WW: Oh yeah.
MS: Johnson and Romney didn’t trust each other, you know.
WW: Going back to before that Sunday, did you sense any tension in the city? In the months leading up to it?
MS: I was totally blindsided and flabbergasted because my particular jurisdiction as a probation officer in Recorder’s court where Gratiot and Woodward Avenue meet, Mack Avenue and all the way down Mack Avenue to St. Jean’s and over to the river, that was my district. That was- in other words, Detroit was chopped up into pieces of pie and I was probation officer. Anything that happened in that particular district from Gratiot to Mack Avenue to St. Jean over to the river, that was my responsibility and I would do pre-sentence reports on any of the individuals that were there and then I would supervise that district. So that was my area. Now, when you say did you sense anything? No, I did not sense anything, I was totally blindsided and it was a horrendous overreaction. It was like an explosion and I was flabbergasted. I thought that the people of color really overreacted and not only people of color, but Caucasians and Hispanics as well. Not only blacks were arrested but of that 7,200, it was a combination of blacks, and whites and Hispanics. But no, I did not sense anything. I still haven’t been able to figure it out, I’m still searching for answers as to why it exploded the way it exploded, it made no sense at all. Everybody, including the blacks, the Hispanics, the whites, lost a great deal over the overreaction by the folks that rioted. And once it started, you couldn't stop it. And once again that’s why Cyrus Vance recommended, “yes, it’s bad, bring in the federal troops.”
WW: So, you spoke about how the arrestees were integrated, would you say that it’s simply a riot and not a race riot?
MS: No, it wasn't a race riot, I want to say it was probably an opportunity to steal, break open doors because the word on the street was “Cops were not shooting at looters so that we can take any damn thing we want to take because the cops aren't shooting at us.” And there were not enough police to protect the city and it was a license to steal because of the undermanned staffing of the Detroit police and even the suburban police that were called in. Even the National Guard, up until when the federal troops came in. That’s when things began to settle down. Anyway, after the riot I said, “I’ve got tp get out of here.” Because I could see Detroit going to hell in a hand basket now, there’s no way to salvage this community. So I stayed in Recorder’s Court until 1968 and in 1968 I took a job at Macomb Community College. And they hired me because they said, “We noticed that you’ve been a campus cop at Michigan State and we want you to start a police department here at Macomb Community College like you had at Michigan State.” And I said, “Well, that’s a no brainer.” So I went to the community college for three years and set up their criminal justice program and their police academy and so forth and got them operational and then I was recruited to go to Kalamazoo to do the same thing. So I went to Kalamazoo and ran the criminal justice program at Kalamazoo Valley Community College, where I trained police officers for 22 years and retired in what was it? ’96 I want to say, yeah it was 1996.
WW: Wow. So the reason you left in May was you were just trying to find the right reason to leave or you decided to leave in that May?
MS: Well, I could see Detroit going to hell in a hand basket. The city had been destroyed and I knew it was going to fall on hard times so I decided to get out of dodge, as did thousands and thousands of other blue collar workers. They fled to the suburbs, including myself, you know. I had fled to the suburbs before because I didn't want to work in— Warren isn't that far from my district—I couldn't even have my home phone number and address in the phone book because of possible reprisals. You know, by the folks I was doing pre-sentence reports on and recommending that they go to prison or that they be released back into the community. That’s another reason that I moved to Warren. You get some safety and security that was faltering badly in Detroit.
WW: Did you ever return to Detroit—
MS: Oh yeah, we go to Detroit. We have friends in Detroit that we visit. As a matter of fact, we’ll be going to Detroit tomorrow to visit some friends that we have there—
WW: How do you feel—
MS: But Detroit is on the mend. The yuppies and people mover wanting to build new homes and move there, that’s a mighty big question. I don’t know if that’s going to happen or not.
WW: Are you optimistic for the city moving forward?
MS: Well, I think Duggan is doing a marvelous job. I’m optimistic to the extent that I think yes, Detroit can recover but they have to make some really, really hard decisions. As I said earlier in the interview, the turning point in Detroit, in my opinion, occurred when they disbanded the Big Four. The Big Four was the safety net for keeping gangs at arm’s reach, where they could control the streets and the hoodlums and the gangs. The Big Four did a fantastic job but politically, they were a liability and so that’s why they disbanded them. And then they identified 200 cops, they called them TMU “Tough Mother” you-know-whats. “Tactical Mobile Unit” “Tough Mothers” [laughing]. Anyway, they would move in and then computers began to get very-computers came into being and they could track crime more effectively than they were able to. So they would take these 200 tactical unit officers and put them into a high crime area. And yes, crime would stop in its tracks. So then the hoodlums, they said, “Well if you’ve seen one tough mother, you’ve seen them all.” So they would get in the ditches in the expressways and go to an area where the tough mothers weren’t. It was cat and mouse. The criminal element, they out-foxed the TMU units. So it’s cat and mouse kind of a game. It’s tough keeping crime under control. The tactical mobile unit was disbanded because they were not sufficiently effective to that particular problem. You move them from one area to another, then the mercenaries, they were smart, they’d move them to another area where you didn't see a TMU.
WW: Is there anything else you’d like to add today?
MS: Well, if you got any more questions, I’d be happy to answer them.
WW: I think I’m all set. Thank you so much!
MS: Well, thank you and I appreciate the opportunity.
WW: Hello, today is August 18, 2016. My name is William Winkel. This interview is for the Detroit Historical Society’s Detroit 67 Oral History Project. I’m in Grosse Pointe, Michigan. And I’m sitting down with—
CB: Hi, my name is Connie Boris and I grew up on the west side of Detroit near Michigan Avenue and Loniel. I majored in mathematics at the University of Detroit. It was during that period that I encountered one of the most traumatic, life-threatening events of my life. In fact, it was almost unbelievable, I could not believe what I was seeing. I should mention that all of my life I’ve always been for the underdog. I always fought prejudice. My best friend was an African American woman who was majoring in mathematics at the University of Detroit with me. We also lived a few blocks from, it was a white neighborhood, but we had an entire block that was totally African American. We all got along. When I saw what was happening in Detroit, I really couldn’t believe it.
The not so good part happened around July 22, I think it was a Sunday.
WW: 23
CB: 23, a Sunday, in 1967. I remember the 22 was kind of key, it was my brother’s birthday. I was invited by a friend of mine at the University of Detroit, by the name of Judy Merlot, and I’m amazed after all these years I can still remember her name. But her parents drove us, to of all places, Camp Dearborn, which is up in Milford, to enjoy Sunday and be at the beach and have a great time. In the afternoon, word had spread that there was rioting in Detroit and it looked like we were not going to be able to get home. I started to worry about my parents, whether or not they would be okay or not. So as word spread, I know where Twelfth Street and Clairmont was because we had relatives living not far from there. I heard on the radio that it was a blind pig that was being raided by the Detroit police. Evidently there had been some false rumors spread and pretty soon there was like gang, and bottles were being thrown. On the news, on the television, black and white at the time, we could see fires erupting in the City of Detroit. Then we heard there were snipers on the bridges. We said, ‘Snipers on the bridges?’ We won’t be able to get home. So Judy Merlot’s parents said, ‘We’re not going home. We’re all staying at Camp Dearborn.’ We stayed there for three days then her dad had to come back.
By this time, there was, the state police had been called in, the National Guard had been called in. Then, of all things, something I never thought I would ever see, the 82nd Airborne with tanks. So, to make a long story short, as we were driving home, we’re Catholic, we prayed all the way home that a sniper would not get us. When we got home, I felt relieved because my parents were okay. But then I had to go back to school. It was about four days later, I started back at the University of Detroit, taking math, so I really got to go there. I can’t miss any day for class. Primarily because I’m working two jobs to put myself through the University of Detroit so I wasn’t going to miss a class for anything. As I’m driving down Livernois Avenue I saw a tank with the 82nd Airborne paratroopers with guns and bayonets. I said, I don’t believe this. This is the Detroit I love. What are we doing seeing tanks? I could see this in a war in Europe, but I can’t see it here on Livernois Avenue, near the University of Detroit. This is one memory that I have never gotten over. The other thing that I’ll always remember is when we were in class is that there was a group called the Black Action Movement. It was a group of black males who came in right during the math class and shoved the professor, tore down the project screen, tore it down, and started to destroy all of the desks. I thought, I’m out of here. All of the students ran out of the classroom.
I think the University of Detroit was, I would say, far ahead of its time in giving free tuition to African Americans. I think I was in the exact same economic background as the African Americans were, but I could never get a scholarship. That’s why I had to work two jobs to put myself through. I eventually got a PhD in civil engineering through the University of Michigan, but it was all due to the University of Detroit, and the great, critical, analytical thinking skills that came from the Jesuit priests who are phenomenal teachers. So that’s pretty much my thinking. It’s something that’s stayed with me for a very long time. You could see the results of what had happened. To see the firemen being attacked on the news for trying to put out fires, to see all those homes destroyed, all those businesses looted. You had everybody taking advantage of breaking out windows to steal from a person who worked hard to establish a business. To me, it’s stealing, it’s wrong, and I was amazed the pictures on TV showing from white and black young males and females to grandmothers with blankets full of things that were stolen from the buildings. I don’t think anything justifies robbing other people of their homes and of their businesses. I think that’s a sad chapter because the Detroit, Michigan, that I knew, drastically changed.
We never, ever locked our doors at night, never. I grew up never locking the back door, but after the riots, we locked the back door. Life had changed. I know that’s a simple thing, a very simple thing, but you started to—and I think to this day, I always watch my surroundings. I will always watch it. I always look behind me and I shouldn’t have to live— you know, I shouldn’t have the feeling. But, you kind of grew up that that’s what happened, later. It changed from a bucolic, thirty-foot lots, where you walk, you’re close to your neighbors. Black or white, you walk to the store, and now the stores have closed. And what else has happened is the churches started to close. The church that I grew up in closed. You saw that throughout Detroit. So much was closing. Your major department stores, your churches, the whole city unraveled.
I’m very happy to see it coming back. We owe that to your generation, to the young people, who see the value of Detroit. Detroit is famous. Detroit helped win World War II. We were the Arsenal of Democracy. Without us, I’m not sure you would’ve won World War II. It was us. My dad worked in a bomber plant at Willow Run producing things, B52s. You know, this is phenomenal. You know, we produced the stuff. We stopped making cars, we’re making tanks. We’re making Chiefs. We’re making bombers, you know. That helped win World War II. It seemed like that wonderful heritage. We got the reputation then, of being a murder city for a long time. That was bad. People didn’t want to come to Detroit. But, this younger generation, thank God, is starting to rebuild Detroit, clean up the neighborhoods, and so on. Okay.
WW: After you graduated from U of D, and you went to U of M, did you come back to live in the city?
CB: Okay, I did not. I did not. I came—that’s a good question. That’s a very, very good question. When I got my PhD, I was offered a wonderful job that I always wanted in Washington, D.C. So I lived in Washington, D.C. for 13 years. Then, my parents, though, never left Detroit. They never did. People were afraid, I know a lot of the friends that I went to school with at the University of Detroit, they left. They wanted their families to be safer so they went to the outlying areas, out of Detroit, to protect their family or so they thought. My mom and dad never left Detroit. They died in Detroit, both of them. We still have the house in Detroit, but I live now—when we came back from Washington, D.C., we came back, my dad was dying and I wanted to be here, to be with him. We looked for homes and there were only three available. We wanted a place with good schools. That was key. We wanted good schools. Detroit did not have a reputation of having good schools, so we moved to Grosse Pointe for the school system. We looked at Birmingham, Bloomfield Hills, and Grosse Pointe. We loved Grosse Pointe, automatically, just like that. Although, I didn’t know much about Grosse Pointe when I was going to the University of Detroit. I had friends, and yeah, I visited Grosse Pointe, but we were west siders all the way. You know, that’s what we were going to be.
I want to just say one other thing though that, you know, how life kind of goes in a circle. That area, Twelfth Street and Clairmont, is not far from where I did a lot of work after I came back after 13 years to Detroit. I did a ton of work on a super fun site. It’s an extremely hazardous waste site, doing the engineering to clean up a really bad site. The site was really bad. In fact, it’s not far from where this picture was taken on Warren Avenue. What’s interesting about it is that it’s all African American. We had to fence the site so that people would not get contaminated. It wasn’t so much to keep them out, it—well, it was to keep them out, but mostly it was so that they didn’t get their feet full of soil because the soil was heavily contaminated with PCBs, polychlorinated biphenyls. It’s not a good thing to have. In that time period, it took us about four-and-a-half years to clean up that site from beginning to end. I was out at that site a lot every week. Because I became fixture in a neighborhood that was almost totally African American and I am amazed how close we became. It got to the point where, and I can honestly say this, you don’t see color anymore. You don’t see it. You see Mr. Clark. Or you see Mr. Williamson. You don’t, you just don’t associate color. If you’re with them all the time, with these folks, they protect you, and they did.
I had to do the security, make sure there was no breakage in the cyclone fence or whatever. One day, I was walking along, the fence it’s Warren and Buchanan, is where the area was. There was a Rottweiler and it was tracking me down. It was stalking me. Mr. Clark caught it. He took his gun, he didn’t shoot the dog, but he shot over the dog’s head. He saved me from being mauled by a Rottweiler. The same way with the other fellas, I mean, we all looked out for each other. Somebody needed a loan, okay, give me ten bucks. They’d pay me back whenever they can. It was just like the old neighborhood used to be before the riots, you know. Even in my dad’s family, he grew up up-north in Elmira, not far from Gaylord. Next door neighbor was Joe Allen and his family. They both had 200-acre farms. They helped each other. Joe Allen was black and they got along like this. We really can get along. Sometimes I think, you know—we’ve come an awful long way from the old thinking of, prior to the ’67 riot. We have come a long way, we’ve really—again, even at the U of M, one of my best friends, African American. We helped each other throughout our school, our classes and whatever. So, you know. Okay.
WW: Thank you so much for sitting down with me.WW: Hello, today is June 18, my name is William Winkel. We are at the Detroit Historical Museum for the Detroit Historical Society’s 1967 Oral History Project. Can you please state your name for me please?
BF: Brian Fountain.
WW: Alright, thank you for sitting down with me today.
BF: Say it again?
WW: I said thank you for sitting down with me today.
BF: Oh, oh, thank you.
WW: Can you start by telling me where and when you were born?
BF: I was born in Kansas City, Missouri, but I’ve been in Detroit my whole life.
WW: When did you come here?
BF: When I was two months old.
WW: Okay. What year was that?
BF: 1957.
WW: What neighborhood did you grow up in in Detroit?
BF: I grew up on the west side of Detroit in the area of Tireman and Livernois.
WW: What was that neighborhood like for you?
BF: Wonderful. Growing up in Detroit in the 1960s, I had a lot of fun. Enjoyed elementary school, enjoyed middle school. A lot of things for kids to do. My big thig was baseball; I played baseball every day, or every chance that I could get. My father, he worked at Ford Motor Company, my mother, she was a housewife. I have two brothers and three sisters, and my grandmother stayed about maybe a 10 minute walk from my house. She stayed on Northfield and Tireman which was probably a mile and a half or two from where the riot started.
WW: What’d your parents do for a living?
BF: Oh, I just mentioned it! My father worked at Ford Motor Company–
WW: Oh sorry, I missed it.
BF: –and my mother was a housewife, yes.
WW: Sorry, I missed that. Where were you in July 1967?
BF: In July of 1967 I was at my grandparents’ summer cottage in Carlton, Michigan.
WW: Why were you there–just a family vacation?
BF: Yeah. Well we would go pretty much every weekend out there, during the summer months.
WW: Mmhmm. How did you first hear about what was going on back in Detroit?
BF: I was in the garage area of my grandmother’s cottage, and a special report came on Channel 7 News, and it said that there was rioting going on in Detroit, and all of us kids and grandparents got around the television. We saw aerial photographs of just big plumes of smoke coming from all these buildings all over the city.
WW: How’d your family react?
BF: My grandmother, she panicked. She told my grandfather–she called him "Daddy" –she said, “Daddy, we gotta go back, we gotta go back to the city.” So she told all of us kids to start packing up our stuff, and probably within an hour we were en route back to the city.
WW: What was the drive home like? Was it anxious?
BF: For my grandmother, probably. For us, we were more curious because the only recollection I had about a riot was in Watts out in Los Angeles. So I knew what a riot was, and from the pictures I saw from the Channel 7 News report, it looked like exactly the same pictures I saw and videos that I saw from Watts. So the ride back for us, again, was more of curiosity. The route that we took, coming in 94 Eastbound, we came up around McGraw, we didn’t see anything that was unusual at that point.
WW: At what point did you see something unusual?
BF: When we got back to my grandparents’ house, she stayed on Northville off of Tireman, I was in the backyard–and my grandparents were just relieved that the house was still there. I was in the backyard, and I was at the fence by the alley, and I saw two guys carrying a brand new couch down the alley. Being a 12-year-old kid, in my mind I’m thinking, “I wonder where they got that brand new couch from?” And I had heard about looting on the news reports, and I’m thinking they got that from some store.
WW: So you didn’t see any smoke in the sky or anything from where you were in the city?
BF: At that point, no.
WW: Okay. After getting home, did you and your family explore the city at all, or did you stay hunkered down?
BF: Yes. My grandad took me and some of the kids up to Grand River and the Boulevard, and that was probably a half mile from where the riot started on Twelfth Street, and when I got down there, it looked like some World War II bombers had flown over that area and dropped bombs. It reminded me of the same photos that I saw from Dresden. I mean the buildings were just burned out, you could see smoke everywhere. There were still firetrucks there, people milling about, and the furniture store–and I don’t know if this was the furniture store where these guys got that couch from–the furniture store was burned out, Cunningham Drugs was burned out. At this point you could see smoke. I don’t really remember any flames, I just remember little embers of fire burning and little wisps of smoke coming out of all these buildings.
WW: Were any buildings that you frequented affected, or no?
BF: Yes. This had a big impact on me as a 12-year-old. My father was also a bowling instructor at the Lucky Strike bowling alley which was located on Grand River and the Boulevard across the street from the present Tabernacle Baptist Church. It was owned by a guy by the name of Mr. London, he was a white guy, but most of the people that bowled there were African-Americans and everybody loved Mr. London. On Friday and Saturday nights, that’s where we hung out at; it would be the equivalent of kids hanging out at a skating rink or a recreation center. The Lucky Strike was our recreation center. We went there every Friday, every Saturday until the parents of the kids would finish bowling.
Well I had heard the next day that they had set the bowling alley on fire, and I didn’t believe it. I’m thinking in my mind, “Well it’s just probably partially burned, Mr. London will repair it.” So my grandad took me back up there and when we got up there, I was in absolute shock. The whole building was burned out, and I was crushed because that was a place when you think about your childhood memories and some of the places that you hung out at, that was our hang out. The ironic thing about that was all those kids that we hung out with, I never saw most of them again, it wasn’t until later on as an adult I would see a few of them and all of us would reminisce about the good time we would have at the Lucky Strike.
So as an impact on me, that was probably one of the biggest impacts, was not having a place to go, a place that you went for probably the last–I think I started going there when I was eight, and at the time it burned down I was 12. That was a big, big thing for me as a 12-year-old.
WW: Was your family further impacted by what happened?
BF: Not from the standpoint of economics. My dad still worked at Ford’s, my grandad, he worked at Ford’s. My grandmother, she was a homemaker, my mother was a homemaker, so from an economic standpoint it did not impact us in any way.
WW: How did your parents react to what was going on?
BF: My parents, we all talked about it, but they didn’t really get into it from the standpoint of the impact it was going to have overall on the city. At the time of the riots, I think the city was around 70 percent white and 30 percent black. They didn’t talk about it in terms of how it was going to impact the neighborhood or anything, we weren’t looking at it from that standpoint, we were looking at it from the standpoint of people telling us that Twelfth Street was gone, and at that time that was probably the closet shopping area for African Americans on the west side.
WW: What kind of shops were there?
BF: They had clothing stores, they had jewelry stores, cleaners, a lot of night clubs. Just a nice mix of different places–shoe shops, barber shops, some were black-owned, some were Jewish-owned, but it was a nice mix of places where you could go to get just about anything.
WW: As a kid did you notice any change in atmosphere in the city from before the riot and then afterwards for you?
BF: As a 12-year-old, no. Later on, in looking back, I saw a transition in the racial make-up of the police department, but I didn’t know it was because of what had happened in 1967.
WW: Are there any other experiences you’d like to share?
BF: Yes. There was two other experiences. One was at night, the tremendous amount of gunfire heard one particular night. It was coming from the East, and later on I found out that at Henry Ford Hospital, there was a gunfight between some snipers and they had pinned down some National Guardsmen and it was like a gunfight that you would hear like in Vietnam. It lasted for more than five, seven, eight minutes.
The other thing that impacted me was we took a drive down Linwood, and I looked down one street, and I’ll never forget this: it was like the first ten houses on this street were burned out. It was like each house was just a shell, and it looked like some bombers had hit this whole block. I don’t recall the name of the street, but later on, I think the street was Pingree. I’ve seen pictures of a street that look similar to this in research that I’ve done on the riots, but I’ll never forget that. And I’ll never forget the devastation that I saw on Linwood.
WW: You said the word “riot” a couple times. Is that how you identify what happened?
BF: Yes. Some people call it an “insurrection,” some people say it was a race riot. I don’t think it was a race riot, I think it was the climate that existed in the city of Detroit between a predominately white police department and a black community that was being mistreated.
WW: Have you ever thought about leaving Detroit?
BF: Oh yes. You know I’ve lived here my whole life, and I’ve always entertained thoughts of going other places–Kentucky, Tennessee, the Carolinas, Virginia. If there’s a place better than here, I owe it to myself to find out. This is what I always tell people: I don’t want to live here wondering if I could have had a better life somewhere else.
WW: Is there anything else you’d like to add today?
BF: Ah, no.
WW: Alright. Thank you very much for sitting down with us.
BF: Alright. Thank you.
WW: Hello, today is August 5th, 2016. My name is William Winkel. I am in Detroit, Michigan. This interview is for the Detroit Historical Society’s Detroit 67 Oral History Project, and I am sitting down with Mr. Michael Smith. Thank you so much for sitting down with me today.
MS: Thank you for having me.
WW: Can you please tell me where and when you were born?
MS: I was born 1950 in Camden, New Jersey.
WW: What year did your family come here?
MS: My mother and I came here in 1955, and I’m an only child, so it was just the two of us.
WW: What brought your mother here?
MS: We lived in New York and my mother and father separated. My mother had a brother here, in Highland Park, so she decided to leave New York. She said she didn’t want to raise a child alone in New York so she decided to come here because her brother was already here in Highland Park.
WW: And you moved into Highland Park?
MS: We moved into Highland Park originally. We stayed with my mother’s brother, which was my uncle, for about a year, until my mother’s paperwork came where she could get a job with the federal government.
WW: What was your first impression of the city of Detroit? Do you remember?
MS: I thought it was great, I thought it was nice. I mean, a kid growing up, we were having fun. I was going to school and playing ball, interacting with friends. I didn’t have any negative connotations of the city at that time. I hadn’t really experienced any type of prejudice of any type. I thought Detroit was a great city at the time.
WW: The neighborhood you moved into in Highland Park, was it integrated?
MS: I don’t remember if it was integrated in ’55. I really don’t remember, but we were only in Highland Park for, like I said, about a year, and then we moved into Detroit. I think the first place we moved to were the projects, which were not integrated at the time.
WW: So the kids you grew up with were primarily black kids?
MS: Primarily, yes. But I went to a parochial school, St. Dominic which was in the area, and that was very integrated.
WW: At St. Dominic’s, did you feel any racial tension at all?
MS: No, not at all. I mean, at that age, I was too young to—if anything was going on, I didn’t realize it. I was at St. Dominic’s for roughly two or three years before we moved again, so I didn’t experience anything there. At that point, we moved somewhere else in Detroit, and I went to another Catholic school called Visitation. The thing was there, it was just a handful of Afro-American kids at the school. It was predominantly white, and still, we had good times at the school.
WW: Growing up in Detroit in the ‘50s and into the ‘60s—mainly the ‘60s—did you become attached to any of the social movements that were going on? To the civil rights movement?
MS: I did not. I heard about a few things, but as a kid growing up, I wasn’t involved in anything, as far as activism or anything of that nature. I was just a kid growing up and minding my own business. I do remember an experience that really caught me was when Martin Luther King got killed, that particular night, I was being recruited by the University of Detroit to play basketball, and they were taking my mother and I out to dinner. In the car, on the car radio, they announced that Martin Luther King had been shot. Naturally, there was a silence in the car, and that really got me thinking about social events and things that were really going on around me. It kind of put a damper on the evening, but we still went about it. Wasn’t much said, the air got a little thicker, you might say, after hearing that. I mean, it was something that was unexpected, to me anyway. That was a strange night, to say the least.
WW: As you’re growing up in your later teens, did you explore the city more, or did you tend to stay in your neighborhoods?
MS: At that time, we were all over the city. The busses ran fairly well. We caught busses everywhere. We went everywhere. We went downtown. Downtown was very nice at the time, so we went downtown, went to movie theatres, went to dances, we went all over the city. We just didn’t stay in the neighborhood. We ventured out, and we enjoyed Detroit.
WW: Going into ’67, did you anticipate any violence that summer?
MS: Not at all. Not at all. I didn’t see it coming. Like I said, once again, as a teenager, you’re just caught up in school or maybe girls, a few sports. You’re not thinking that far beyond yourself and really your surroundings. We thought everything was fine. We didn’t get into adult business, whatever issues adults had. It didn’t appear to be discussed that much with the kids, so we weren’t really discussing it. Also, it was a time when I was getting ready to go into my senior year of high school, so we were just excited about that and that’s where our focus was. School, senior year, what your plans for the future, things of that nature. Kid stuff, basically.
WW: Do you remember what neighborhood you were living in then?
MS: During the riot, at this point I was on Sturtevant and Linwood area. I lived at 2750 Sturtevant and it was an apartment building. Very nice building. I was the only kid that they allowed in the building. Actually we lived in that building from—I started there when I was in the fourth or fifth grade ‘til I graduated, so we were there for a number of years. Nice clean building. It was owned by a Chaldean gentleman and he kept the building nice. Me being the only kid in the building growing up there, I had to be low-key, not making any noise or anything like that. Plus my mother wasn’t going to have it anyway. She was a stern woman. The neighborhood was clean, it was nice, and I enjoyed the time there.
WW: Do you remember how you first heard about what was going on on that Sunday?
MS: I do. I got up that morning. My mother worked, but she was off that day. Anyway, she sent me off to church and Visitation Church was on 12th and Webb. It was roughly a half mile to a mile from where the riot was starting from the first police incident. I go to church, not knowing anything had happened. We hadn’t heard. But when we got down on 12th, we heard some noise, saw smoke, little bit of smoke and fire. Curiosity led us to that direction, but the police kept us at bay. After church we decided that we were going to go home and change and come back down there and see what was going on. When I got home, my mother heard what was going on, and she said, “You’re not going down there; you’re not going back out.” She kept me in the house for maybe two days. Like I said, my mother was a stern woman, and what she said, went. I was in the house for two days. As bad as I wanted to get out, I couldn’t. I wasn’t going to buck her. I did that.
WW: Being so close to 12th Street, did you see people, did you see looters? Were they coming down your street at all?
MS: Not on that Sunday, no. Then after the first two days, I didn’t see any looters. I think maybe that third or fourth day, my mother finally relented and let me out, and I did see a few looters at that point. Not many, because I was right on Linwood, and that section of Linwood, it didn’t appear to be that wide-spread at that particular time.
WW: Was your neighborhood threatened by fire at all during the week?
MS: Not fire. We did have an incident with the National Guard in my apartment building. It was rumored that there was a sniper there. I didn’t hear any gunshots, but they sent the tank with some troopers down my street, and they turned the gun towards my apartment building and they asked that the sniper come out. There was no movement, but somebody came out and told them that the sniper wasn’t in our building, he was across the street adjacent to another apartment building. They turned the gun over that way, but whoever it was, I think they got away, because there was no shots fired. But it was scary because they meant business. If somebody didn’t do something immediately, we were going to have serious trouble.
WW: When the National Guard came into the city, for you, did it create more stress? Or did it alleviate the stress of the situation?
MS: It created more stress. People were really unnerved. I had an incident with some friends, like say, after my mother finally relented and let me out. Our daily routine in the summer—I had a couple of friends in the neighborhood. We’d walk about a mile past our high school, Visitation, on 12th and we played basketball at this elementary school outside. On our way, I guess I was about six blocks down, we were across the street from Central High School where the Guard were centralized. The Guard pulled their rifles out on us and made us lay down and put guns to our head. What their concern was a blow-back bag that I was carrying. I just had a small towel and extra shirts, because I played ball, I sweat a lot. I just had extra shirts in the bag to change, because I played all day from maybe one o’clock in the afternoon until it got dark. Then we’d walk home. I was there all day, so I had extra shirts. Anyway, they wanted to see what was in my bag, and after they saw it was nothing to harm anybody, just my own stinking shirts, they finally let us up and told us to get on our way. That was my first real incident with the negative side of the riot. We went on and played ball, did our thing. I didn’t tell my mother, because she probably wouldn’t let me go out the next day. I left that alone. Then after that, a few days, the riot started spreading more. I was wandering around the neighborhood, then I started seeing a lot more looting, a lot more burning, fires, mainly stores. I didn’t understand why the store right around the corner from us, which was a cleaner’s right in the neighborhood, nice cleaner’s—they broke in and were looting the cleaner’s. I couldn’t understand why they were in there because it was our clothes that were in the cleaner’s, and what was the purpose of going in there, trashing our clothes? It didn’t make any sense. Also next to the cleaner’s was a nice market. It wasn’t a large market, but it was a nice-sized market where you could get a lot of things. They went in there and looted, and here again, this was right in our neighborhood. These are stores that we use every day. The thing about these stores is that the Chaldeans that owned and ran the stores—and there was a few Jewish folks that had these stores—they always gave credit to the neighbors. You’re biting the hand that feeds you, to a degree. It made no sense to me, but this was what was going on. I can’t explain why. People get frustrated about different things, but they take their frustrations out in the wrong way. This did no good for us or our city, which we’re still trying to recover from, basically.
WW: Do you interpret the events as a riot or as a rebellion?
MS: More of a rebellion, I’d say. I would term it more as a rebellion, sort of an uprising. People were frustrated, and that’s how they vented. I think it was wrong, but yet, when you have frustrations, you take your frustrations out, I guess, whatever’s closest to you. It’s not necessarily the right way. I don’t know how we should have, whatever the issues were, how we could have solved them. They say everybody can come to the table and talk about it. Sometimes you get people’s attention when you rebel, so to speak, or riot. But like I say, I feel it was more of a rebellion than a riot. We were just—and I say “we,” I wasn’t rioting or rebelling, but I was there—people were just venting the best way they knew how. It was hot times, and I guess older folks that had jobs or were looking for jobs, they had more to be angry about for whatever reason. I’m a 17-year-old, I’m not angry about anything, at the time. I’m just sort of happy-go-lucky, so to speak. But people did have issues.
WW: Did what happen change the way you viewed the city?
MS: No, but I was just wondering how the city was going to come back after all the devastation. Where are we going to shop? Where are we going to buy the things that we need? Where are we going to go? What are we going to do? I was concerned about that. The people that did lose homes, where are they going to live? How are they going to live? I had a lot of questions, but we didn’t get many answers. They say after the riots, people started coming to the table to talk, but a lot of damage was done, and like I said, we still haven’t recovered from that damage. I still love Detroit and still want to be a Detroiter. I did go to college here in Detroit. I decided to stay. I had an opportunity to go to Michigan State, but I decided to stay here and go to U of D which was recruiting me pretty heavily at the time. Another bad thing that I know that came out of this was my mother’s girlfriend and coworker of hers, her son got killed in the riot. He was out looting, and he was one of the—I think it was roughly forty-three people that got killed in the riot—he was one of those forty-three, unfortunately. That really hit home because he was older than I was, maybe ten years. I knew of him, I knew his mother very well because his mother and my mother were good friends. My mother was very upset about that, naturally. That was one negative out of this little rebellion.
WW: Did your mother ever think about moving out of the city?
MS: No, I don’t’ believe she did. She worked for the government and she had a significant amount of years with them. I don’t think she ever—she never mentioned to me anything about trying to move. She wanted to stay here, which we did, and make a go of it. We did move from Sturtevant about two years later. Actually, we moved back to Highland Park, somewhere else in Highland Park. A nice area in Highland Park. But no, I don’t think she ever really, seriously contemplated leaving Detroit.
WW: So you already said that you believe that ’67 still affect the city today?
MS: I do. I do believe that.
WW: Are you optimistic about Detroit moving forward? Or do you think we’re still going to have this shadow over us?
MS: We’re moving forward. Naturally, after the riot, we had an extreme amount of white flight and things are changing back because they’re building up the city from downtown, which they always start with downtown. They’re branching out. I think it’s going to take some time, but I do believe Detroit will get better if people stay level-headed and work together. We do need to come to the table and work together. We need a lot. The economy has to pick up. The city still needs job, but the people in the city have to have access to get to those jobs, their jobs in the city. Our schools need to be maintained a lot better. They’re in shambles. A lot of work needs to be done there to educate the kids so that the kids are prepared for the good jobs that do become available, that are available. That’s on everybody. That’s on each parent. They need to put more effort to make sure their kids get all they can get out of school. They need to push them toward school. In the ‘50s and ‘60s, you had the automobile plants in Detroit that were going 24/7. A lot of people migrated towards those plants in a hurry because you could get a job so quickly in there with top pay. Those days are pretty much gone. The jobs—you have to have a skill to be qualified, more technologically, for those jobs. To qualify for them, you have to be somewhat educated now. Before you could quit high school and people went right into the plants, and you could make paying jobs, you know, make good money. That’s not the case now. The city’s coming back. There are jobs available. There are jobs in the suburbs, but people need to get educated and then you need access to get to those jobs.
WW: Is there anything else you’d like to add today, sir?
MS: The only thing is the riot, as a 17-year-old, to see houses on fire, to see the city appear to be like we’re in a war zone, I mean, it was just amazing. It’s like watching a movie. You just can’t believe the devastation that you’re actually witnessing and I actually saw people looting, running into stores, and taking things, and interacting with the police. Naturally, it’s not a good thing. Interacting with the National Guard, which wasn’t a good thing either. Because if you’re doing wrong, there are consequences, naturally. But to witness what I saw, places that I frequented, and then after a week or two, then they’re all gone, it was devastating. It’s amazing. As I drive through the city now, I still see those places that were there that are not there any longer. I think about the riot all the time. Going forward, the lack of progress in the city of Detroit, in the neighborhoods, you see a lot more burned out structures, stores, whatever. That’s not good, but hopefully, Detroit will come back and things will get better, but it’s going to take a concerted effort on everybody’s part and everybody that cares and loves Detroit. We shall see.
WW: Thank you so much for sitting down with me today.
MS: Thank you.
WW: We greatly appreciate it.
INITIALS OF INTERVIWEE: RV
INTIALS OF INTERVIEWER: WW
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: JW
RV: …enough room on that camera.
WW: Hello today is August?–
JW: 12th.
RV: Yes.
WW: 12th, 2016. My name is William Winkel. This interview is for the Detroit Historical Society’s Detroit 67 Oral History Project and I am sitting down with:
RV: Richard Viecelli, police officer.
WW: Thank you for sitting down with me today.
RV: I beg your pardon?
WW: Thank you for sitting down with me today.
RV: Yes.
WW: Can you please tell me where and when were you born?
RV: 10/7/30, born in Clarence, Pennsylvania.
WW: And what year did you come here?
RV: Thirty-five.
WW: What brought your family to Detroit?
RV: Coal mine closed down, my dad was a coal miner.
WW: Were there coal mines in Detroit?
RV: Not that I know of.
WW: Oh, okay.
RV: He went to work for Ford Motor Car Company.
WW: Oh, okay. And what neighborhood did you grow up in?
RV: Dequindre and Nevada area. Poor, very poor area.
WW: What was your first impression of the city, do you remember?
RV: No, I don’t. I grew up in a neighborhood that was all poor people, so, we all got along.
WW: Despite being poor, did you enjoy growing up in that area?
RV: Oh yes, oh yes. I loved it.
WW: Would you like to share some memories from growing up in that area?
RV: Yes, after probably about I would say six years, my parents separated and I went into a project.
WW: Do you remember which one?
RV: Yes, on Oakland Avenue, it was called Temporary Housing, only we stayed there 13 years. My mother and father separated, and three kids and myself went with my mother.
WW: Was that housing project integrated?
RV: No, no way.
WW: Okay. And what schools did you go to growing up?
RV: Courville.
WW: Courville. Was Courville integrated?
RV: Slightly integrated at that time, yeah. Then I went to Nolan, which was slightly integrated also, and then I graduated from Pershing.
WW: Okay. Growing up and going around the city, did you explore the city or did you tend to stay in the neighborhoods?
RV: Oh no, I explored the city, man, I was all over.
WW: [Laughter.]
RV: You couldn’t find me, man. Eight to four and out the door. I was gone.
WW: Did you tend to go by yourself or did you go with your group of friends?
RV: A couple of friends, myself.
WW: What areas did you like to explore?
RV: Detroit.
WW: Okay.
RV: And all over the other the other places. You name it, I was there.
WW: Okay. Do you have any memories from the 43 riot?
RV: Yes I do.
WW: Would you like to share them?
RV: Yes. I was in the grocery store at the corner of Ryan Road and Nevada when the riot broke out. And we were in the grocery store then, me and my friend. They were setting up machine guns: thirty caliber, tripod machine guns to block the streets off and keep the people away from the projects. Sojourner Truth, I think it was, wasn’t it? Yeah, Sojourner Truth Project. And they were keeping the people out of that area.
WW: Afterwards did you just head straight home?
RV: Hell no, I went out the back door. Me and my buddies–two buddies–and we finally made it through the neighborhood backyards over to his house. And that’s where we stayed. We got the hell out of there, quickly.
WW: Did that change the way you looked at Detroit?
RV: No, uh-uh.
WW: You weren’t any less–
RV: No, it didn’t bother me.
WW: Okay.
RV: Then when the one started in 45, was it? Yeah, 45, that was Belle Isle, that didn’t change–
WW: That was 43.
RV: 43? Oh, okay, 43. 45 was Sojourner Truth then. 42? Okay.
WW: Um-hm.
RV: Okay.
WW: Were you around for the Belle Isle?
RV: Yeah, yeah. Still lived in the same house.
WW: Okay.
RV: Lived on McKay then.
WW: Growing up in the city, what drove you to become a police officer?
RV: What? I wanted to be a police officer.
WW: Why?
RV: Why? I thought, at that time, I was married, I’d come out of the service, I was in the skeet troops in Alaska. When I come out of the service, I had married my wife before I went into service, and I owned a steady income for my family. I didn’t want to be a coal miner and be kicked out one month after another. So I wanted to become a police officer.
WW: And what years did you serve in the army?
RV: Let me think. Christ, I can’t even remember that, and I’ve got a memory like an elephant. 51.
WW: You got out in 51?
RV: No, no, I got out in 53.
WW: Okay.
RV: I became a policeman in 55.
WW: After you became a police officer, what precinct did you work in?
RV: After I got out of the academy?
WW: Um-hm.
RV: After I got out of the academy, I walked the beat right down the street here.
WW: What street is this?
RV: Jefferson. All by myself.
WW: Did you enjoy?
RV: Oh yeah, hell yeah, I had a great time.
WW: So in what precinct is that?
RV: 5th precinct.
WW: 5th precinct?
RV: Yes. It was called McLaughlin, McLaughlin Station. That’s long gone because there was nothing but a three-story building, and they tore that down.
WW: Working as a police officer in the fifties and going into the sixties, did you notice any growing tension in the city?
RV: Oh yes.
WW: Could you tell me some examples?
RV: Well it depends on what years. I didn’t go to-I didn’t go to Petoskey Station, that’s number ten, until I’d been on the job about a year or so. Because my break-in period was Jefferson Avenue. And, uh, when I was transferred, I was transferred to the 10th Precinct–I don’t know when that was, but it was a couple of years. Because that neighborhood was predominately Jewish at that time, completely Jewish, and it was changing, so they sent myself and a few others over to the 10th Precinct. I’d never even heard of it, I’d never heard of Petoskey Station–the hell that’s on the West Side. So I was sent over there.
WW: Did you immediately notice a difference between the 5th Precinct and the 10th?
RV: Oh yes, by part. The 5th Precinct here was partially integrated, no problems. But over there, no way, that was a jungle, a total jungle.
WW: What about it was a jungle?
RV: What’s that?
WW: What about it was a jungle?
RV: The neighborhood was changing; they were driving the Jewish people out of there.
WW: Who’s ‘they’?
RV: The Black people.
WW: Okay. Did you feel uneasy about walking the streets over there?
RV: Hell no. When I went over there, I walked the beat by myself.
WW: Okay.
RV: And it was changing then. But there was a lot of ten-ten over there, a lot of PG coming in over there. You know, that was bad news.
WW: What’s ten-ten and PG?
RV: Ten-ten is prostitutes: ten minutes for ten dollars.
WW: Okay.
RV: And PG is paregoric that they cooked down and shot in the back of their hands, and it gives them the same high as marijuana would do. A lot of that was being bought then because it wasn’t prescription, then when it became script, they couldn’t buy it, and it started to get heroin.
WW: Working at the 10th Precinct, were you involved in a lot of drug arrests then, given these problems?
RV: No, no.
WW: Just worked the beat?
RV: I just walked the beat, you know took care of things. See, you got to picture this now: 12th Street was two different precincts: the east side of 12th Street was the 9th Precinct, at that time, when I came on the job. The west side of 12th Street was the 10th Precinct. There was two different precincts. Then, when they combined the two, it made it into number 10. That’s when the problems had started because they had already started pushing people out of there.
WW: How long did you stay in the 10th Precinct?
RV: Oh my career practically, until long after the riot was over.
WW: Okay.
RV: I probably had one of the greatest careers of a police officer that anybody could ever have.
WW: How did the police department react to–
RV: To the riot?
WW: No. To the changing conditions in the 10th Precinct?
RV: They didn’t care. They didn’t care at that time because it was in its infancy of getting bad.
WW: Okay.
RV: At that time. Because there was still a lot of Jewish people on 12th Street, which, naturally, they were pushed out.
WW: Did it get increasingly bad throughout the sixties?
RV: I beg your pardon?
WW: Did it get increasingly worse throughout the sixties?
RV: Oh yes. You mean 12th Street? Oh hell yeah. Completely turned over.
WW: Did you ever think about leaving the 10th Precinct?
RV: No, oh no, no. The more action, the better it was. I didn’t care, I still was doing my job.
WW: Throughout the sixties, did you stay working the beat, or did you move around–
RV: I moved around the scout car.
WW: Okay.
RV: I was moved off the beat at that time. See, we walked the beat by ourselves, and then they started putting two people on the job. Both of my partners, more or less–Gino [unintelligible name], he died here a couple of months back, and Roger Poike, he’s the one that was shot, my partner who was shot here and here, in the groin, and he was shot during the riot. The guy that shot him jumped out the window.
WW: Going throughout the ’60s, did the Detroit Police Department anticipate any violence?
RV: At that time, no, no. Not until it started on Clairmount and 12th.
WW: Okay.
RV: Unh-uh.
WW: Were you involved in any way in the Kercheval Incident in 1966?
RV: No. No, that was East Side, it was nothing to do with us.
WW: Okay.
RV: We had our own problems.
WW: Was the incident known around the police department?
RV: What?
WW: The Kercheval Incident?
RV: No.
WW: Oh, okay.
RV: It might’ve been on the East Side, I never heard about it on the West Side.
WW: Oh, okay.
RV: I spent most of my career as a patrolman. At number 10.
WW: Being in a scout car, and you get to explore the 10th Precinct more, did it change your perception of the area?
RV: Yes.
WW: How so?
RV: Bad.
WW: Bad?
RV: It was getting worse and worse the more integrated it got, the worse it went.
WW: Okay.
RV: Because–I’m not talking about all Black people don’t get me wrong. I worked with Black people, one of my best friends was a Black guy–him and I worked together for the court system. I was a bounty hunter for the courts after I retired from the Department, I was asked to retire by Judge–he became a good friend of mine, he lived in the 10th Precinct, and he asked me to retire and go to work for the court system. When I retired, for six years prior to me retiring for the Department, I worked for the City Council, I worked for Carl Levin for a couple of years as his driver, drive around and bullshit and all that. Then I was assigned to Mr. Roggell for five and half years. And I stayed with the Council until Mr. Rogell retired, and then the judge asked me to go to work for the courts. Which I stayed there six years. Six years and four months. You emphasize six years, four months.
WW: [Laughter.]
RV: Because it was a reason, there was a reason, six years, four months.
WW: Going into ’67, you said the police department didn’t anticipate any violence that summer?
RV: Not at that time.
WW: Did you?
RV: No, I didn’t think, not in Number 10.
WW: Oh, okay.
RV: It was almost spontaneous, almost spontaneous. But, you know, the feeling–I can’t say the feelings for the police department. But the feelings for the people that worked and lived down there, they knew they were being pushed. They knew it.
WW: How did you first hear what was going on?
RV: They called me up. Told me get the hell in the station, right away, quick. They’d already called my three partners, we all lived in the same area. In Copper Canyon, they called it. We all lived in the same area, and they says, ‘have you got a shotgun?’ I said, ‘hell yeah.’ They said, ‘bring it along. It’s started, it’s started, get down here quick.’ So I picked up Gino and Jerry Miller, that was one of my other partners, and Roger Poike, my partner that got shot, and the four of us went down into the 10th Precinct with the guns out all four windows at that time. Laughing like hell, we didn’t know what was going on. But the minute we turned on John Lodge, Jesus Christ fire all over the place. We barely made it to the station.
WW: Why?
RV: We didn’t know which way to turn. Finally we went up Elmhurst and shot up Elmhurst all the way to Livernois.
WW: When you got the call and they said, ‘It started,’ did you instinctually know what ‘it’ meant?
RV: No, no, oh no, no.
WW: Oh, okay.
RV: No, we were wondering what happened because all you could see south of us was a glow of fire, you know. At that time, 12th Street, they were burning it by that time. Then we were assigned to cars, three cars with four men in it together.
WW: When you left your house, were you worried about leaving your family behind?
RV: My wife was. My wife was very religious, she prayed every day that I went to work. I married a preacher’s daughter. She’s an angel, thank God, I married an angel.
WW: [Laughter.] Once you got to the precinct, what was the atmosphere–
RV: Oh Christ, it was crowded all over the place. There was cops all over the place.
WW: Okay.
RV: Trying to get assigned here. Like I say, assignments were three cars, four guys to a car, they called it a unit at that time.
WW: What was your first job?
RV: First job is going up Linwood Street to the restaurant where we all the policemen, ate there, Stafford’s Restaurant, that was at 8333 Linwood. Two doors down, somebody was down there going like this here to the car, we went over there and here laid this old man, he was a shoemaker about four doors away from Stafford’s. They had kicked his head in and they killed him. They stomped him to death. He was about 110 pounds, and he was laying on the sidewalk, and [choking sound]. And, you know, goodbye Charlie. They stomped him to death. And they got the guy that stomped him. Because one of the guys that was with the guy that killed him later on had called the police and told them. He was only here six weeks from down South, Georgia.
WW: Wow.
RV: He was only up in Detroit six weeks.
WW: Wow.
RV: But they got that guy. But they killed a guy too. Poor guy lived in the back, you know and goodbye.
WW: Did that affect your–
RV: Yes, it pissed me off. It pissed me off. ’Cause who the hell did he hurt? He didn’t hurt nobody. But I found a couple of them like that, dead. You ever hear of an author by the name of uh … oh God, almighty ... trying to think of his name. He wrote a book about the Detroit riot.
WW: Sidney Fine?
RV: No.
WW: Thomas Sugrue?
RV: No.
WW: John Hershey?
RV: No. This guy wrote a book about Detroit. But his grandfather was stomped to death too. His grandfather had a store just north of Davison, on the 12000 block of Davison, first or second block, and two guys went in there and they stomped him to death. And we got the call on that one. Again, the guy was still alive when we got there, but a Black woman who witnessed it told us, she said, ‘one guy was stomping him to death when his heal.’ We didn’t know it on the way down to–I almost had the author’s name–Christ that’s 50 years ago. Not Charlie LeDuff, not Charlie. It’ll come to me.
WW: Okay.
RV: But it was his grandfather, his father, excuse me, his father. When he got down there, we told him, we had shipped his dad to a hospital. His wife said, ‘is he still alive?’ I said, ‘yes he is.’ But that was a lie because he died on the way down there. She cursed me up and down for lying about it, but I thought he was still alive. But that’s another thing. But he died too, he was killed.
WW: Did the police department have any concrete plans to put down the riot in the beginning?
RV: No, not at the beginning, no. It was just mass confusion until they started bringing in the National Guard and the state police and everybody else.
WW: Okay.
RV: But how the hell you going to put something down when you don’t know what’s going on, you know what I mean? It’s not until you’re there and find out what’s going on. But, what I want you to know is I was only on that riot for three and a half days. We had come in on the third day and we were at that time it was called Kiefer Command. You remember that? Well, that was Inspector–Christ–Donley, Inspector Donley, Inspector DeLuca, and some Sergeant, I didn’t know the Sergeant, he was from the East Side, and myself, assigned to Kiefer Command at that time, because they took me off the street, I was sittin’ there... All of my partners, we were all sitting there taking a break because we’d been on the street all night, we were tired, and the Salvation Army truck came in with sandwiches and coffee and doughnuts, and we were sitting there eating and Inspector Donley come out and says, ‘anybody know how to operate one of them phones?’ I said, ‘yeah, I do.’ He said, ‘you, come with me,’ and that’s the last time I was on the street.
WW: What phones?
RV: We had the cell phones, you know. We talked to each other and talked to other units.
WW: Oh, okay.
RV: I knew how to operate one of them, but I didn’t know what the hell he was talking about, ‘come with me.’ That was the last time I saw the street. But I had a job inside that was just as important.
WW: What was your average shift length, when you’re working?
RV: Oh shit, ’round the clock.
WW: Okay.
RV: I mean, whenever you got a break, you got a break and came in. Otherwise that, you were out on the street until … We got reinforced by the National Guard and state police.
WW: When the National Guard came in, was there a sense of relief?
RV: Oh yes, to everybody–God, you know take me off the street for a while, we’re going around the clock with no sleep and all that crap.
WW: For you, did the round-the-clock shifts add to the stress?
RV: Oh yeah, oh hell yeah. You didn’t have any sleep, you were tired, you were cranky, you know. Besides that being shot at, you know. Ugh, get the hell out of here, let me sleep, you know? Show you something my friend, you too. You can talk all you want about the riot. It was a war, it was a baby war. That’s all it was. Being shot at: you call that a riot? No, I’m sorry, no.
WW: Um-hm.
RV: I was in on the incident where the little girl was killed. She was four years old. We were come up on 12th Street, and we’re being sniped. We had sniped shots fired at us. So we ducked in the driveway, Gino, my partner, was across the street. Roger was over from the street, and I was right on the corner twice the distance from here to that wall to a side street. And I was shot at I think two or three times, and other shots were being fired, but I didn’t know where the hell they were going, you know. They could’ve been shot at my partner and everybody else. But then when I was hiding in the doorway and this place was on an angle from me, and I hear this truck coming, and I could hear this noise, tremendous noise, and I thought it was garbage trucks. They were pushing cars out of the street, you know, to open the streets up because they were abandoning cars and everything else. And it was a tank. And the tank pulled out about half the distance to that wall and I could see the front of the tank and the guy behind him talking to him. Boy, when that guy starts shootin’ out that window again [mimics sound of tank, gun shots]. Pow! The whole corner of that building came off. The windows were flying all over, the road was flying all over. And then the guy says, ‘commence firing,’ and then another bunch of rounds went off, .50 caliber, not .25 or .30 caliber. Fifty caliber, and it ruined the whole corner of the building, and that’s when that little girl was laying on the porch, killed. Four years old.
WW: Did that take a toll?
RV: I beg your pardon?
WW: Did that take a toll?
RV: We didn’t know it at the time, no.
WW: Okay.
RV: We didn’t know it at the time. But at the same time, I don’t know how long difference it was, my partner was being shot at a different location, you know, that’s something else. No, uh-uh. It could be a riot to a lot of people, but it was a war to the police department, that’s all. They just didn’t want to call it that because, you know, you’ll get the people worked up, you know what I mean?
WW: Um-hm.
RV: Shit, get out of here with that crap. Anyway, that’s all in there.
WW: And what happened to your partner?
RV: He got shot. He got shot twice. No, here, that’s another story. When they took me off the street and I was manning that radio, my partner’s father-in-law was on the job, Howard. Howard was on the job. And he was only two blocks away from where we were, not where my partner was, where I was. When the run come out that my partner was shot, and I was on the radio and I says, ‘we need the badge number and name of the officer that’s down.’ And when they come out with Roger Poike, that was my partner, I says, ‘oh no, Jesus Christ, no, not Roger.’ And I told the inspector, I said, ‘inspector, my partner was just shot.’ I says, ‘his father-in-law’s a couple of blocks over.’ He says, ‘take the car, and go.’ So I took the inspector’s car. I picked up Howard, and we went right over to Ford Hospital which was only five minutes away. And Roger was upstairs, and they called Judy [voice cracks], and she was on her way down, he was shot, we didn’t know if he was going to live or die. But, excuse me, she came down … but anyway …
Don’t tell me it was a riot. No, I’m sorry. I saw too many people drove out of their stores and burn down and crap like that, you know?
Abe Goldstein, one of the finest guys you’re going to meet in your life, big distributor shop that used to sell to sellers, you know? The sellers would come in there and buy the product. Burned to the ground. He said, ‘I’ll give $10,000 to anybody who finds my safe.’ He said, ‘there’s a $100,000 worth of jewels in there.’ Nobody ever found it. Esquire Pawn Shop, 230 guns all gone, all gone. They found 122 rifles in there. All looted and burned. Did you know that the little restaurant on the corner of Clairmount and 12th Street where this thing started, the little restaurant there? That belonged to the Jewish, the gangsters and the Jews. Ah, what the hell was the name? Anyway-
WW: The Purple Gang?
RV: The Purple Gang. One of the Purple Gang was sitting there, one of the big leaders sitting in that little restaurant on Clairmount and 12th Street, right across from where the riots started. Guy walked in there, boom, boom, boom, boom, killed ’em right in there and walked out. One of the leaders of the Jewish Purple Gang. That was all Jewish. Esquire restaurant was all Jewish, and then it went all Black. Oh, shit, boy, let me tell you, it was no riot, no, I’m sorry.
WW: Do you believe that the event was spontaneous, or …?
RV: The riot?
WW: Yeah.
RV: Yes, it was spontaneous. If Sergeant Hollison–I think that was his name then–yeah, Hollison, Sergeant Hollison. When they were bringing these guys out of that place, it was upstairs, over the printing shop. When they were bringing them out, a crowd had started watching, you know, bringing them out. Then some idiot threw a bottle and hit Hollison in the side of the head. And when they went to get that guy, well that’s when it started.
WW: Do you think there were any other underlying causes of what happened?
RV: At that time? No, I don’t think so. I think through a period of time, 12th Street would have went Black anyhow, eventually, because all the Jewish people were being driven out. They weren’t going to stay. In fact, I’ve only seen four violent Jewish people in my whole career over there. Four violent ones. Usually they’re subtle people, they don’t want to be bothered. And that’s coming from a cop [laughter]. Shit. I’d go home with bagels and everything else, they were all halfway decent people. No, I can’t say that about them. I could say that about the Blacks because they drove ’em out. And they did a good job, because most of ’em moved out to Oak Park and Southfield just to get away, to save their lives. Shit. I been through it, brother.
Read it, it’s all in there. Every bit of it’s in there. Here’s my partner getting shot. [Pages ruffle.] Yeah, right here: Roger, Roger being shot, right there. Took two in the guts, and you know what, when Roger moved out of there, him and Judy and the boys and his daughter, and naturally we were still close, but he moved 200 and some miles away. He says, ‘the best thing that ever happened to me was being shot,’ that’s what he said. He says, ‘I got a chance to retire on disability, I can’t work no more. I live up north, my kids go to a good school, I live in a good neighborhood, I don’t have to go south of Eight Mile road for nothing. That’s the best thing that ever happened to me.’
And my other partner, the same way. He moved 85 miles north. And another partner of mine, he moved way the hell out of the state of Michigan after that. They all abandoned their houses too.
I could tell you it all, brother, I could tell you it all.
WW: What made you want to stay?
RV: Well, my family, my kids were still going to school, and it was a white neighborhood then, then. It’s destroyed now. Every house that I have ever lived in has been destroyed. Every one of ’em. I lived in a nice neighborhood, I lived in Copper Canyon up on Cadieux and Mack between Mack and Cadieux there. I lived in Copper Canyon.
WW: In the closing days of the riot, you worked at Herman Kiefer Hospital, is that right?
RV: It was called Kiefer Command Post, that’s where I worked.
WW: Okay. And you worked in communications for them?
RV: I beg your pardon?
WW: You worked in communications for them?
RV: Yes. No, no, I was working for that office with the inspector on that phone.
WW: Okay.
RV: Keeping contact with outside, any calls that came in or anybody injured and stuff like that.
WW: Oh, okay.
RV: At that time, I kept notes of the incoming and outgoing calls. But who the hell knows where those went.
Now, let’s get to another thing. After the riot subdued a little bit, we had a newspaper man from New York City, a Black dude come rushing into the office. He say, ‘which way is the riot? Which way is the riot?’ As he was standing there at the door with this Black fella carrying his camera and all that stuff, ping, ping, ping! Three shots came right through there. The old man says, ‘get down,’ the guy says, ‘the force of Jesus Christ they’re shootin’ out there, they’re shootin’ out there!’ He said, ‘what the hell do you think just went through here?’ They shot four shots right through that office.
WW: Wow.
RV: Yeah, the poor guy was scared, oh was he scared. We told him, ‘stay on that floor. You want to get out, back out of the door on your stomach, get the hell out.’ He ended up on the street. They sent him in from New York City.
It was something, it was really something. I was grateful for many things. I was grateful I come out of it, and I was grateful none of my partners were killed. When Roger was shot, there was–what the hell was his name?–Sal, Sal Palazzolo [?] was the one that was shot, Riese [?] was shot, my partner was shot, there was four of ’em that were shot. Riese went nuts, he went crazy. It affected him long after that riot. Anytime a policeman got shot, he was going down to receiving to kill the guy that shot him. He was a basket case. But, you know, that’s what happens. Anyway.
But I had good friends. I had a wonderful, wonderful police career. Wonderful police career. I wouldn’t trade one minute of it for anything I could have ever done. I ended up with medals. I ended up with citations. I ended up as one of the bravest police officers in the whole United States. I got cited for, I was chosen by the United States as one of the top ten. I saved a man’s life on a truck that went over, and we were hanging five stories in the air. He was bleeding to death, and I stopped his bleeding. It was all over the country.
WW: Wow.
RV: But the riot, it was no riot, it was a war. I can’t help it, that’s the way I think, feel about it. Another thing–you want that on?
WW: Sure.
RV: Another thing was after the riot, after it was all over and I was reassigned, I was assigned to the record bureau at that time. The inspector came in and says, ‘I want you in my office, I want to talk to you.’ I says, ‘Okay.’ So I went into the office and I says, ‘What’s up?’ He says, ‘tomorrow,’ he says, ‘they’re sending a helicopter in here.’ And I says, ‘for what?’ He says, ‘you and I, we’re going to go up with them, we’re going to up in that helicopter, and they’re going to point this out and point that out and you’re identifying all these places.’ I says, ‘that sounds good.’ So we went up to Selfridge Air Force Space, and they brought in the helicopter from Kentucky, and they were coming back from Vietnam, but the one helicopter was assigned to Detroit to photograph the riot. Did you know that?
WW: Uh-huh.
RV: You did know that? Okay. You knew about the book. You didn’t know about the book?
WW: No.
RV: Well they photographed and they came out with a book about this big, about that big. After we did all that photographing–in fact, one of them is in here–one of the [pages ruffling] [unintelligible]. Anyway, after all that crap, you know, transpired, I was reassigned out of the record bureau, signed out to the council. Because the chief that time, I worked with the chief–not Gerard, ah shoot, what the hell was his name?–another inspector. DeMarco, yeah, DeMarco, Inspector DeMarco, I was assigned to the Detective Bureau, and I went into the Detective Bureau and worked there for a couple of years, then the chief said to me, ‘all you through will all that that crap in the street?’ And I says, ‘Yeah.’ So he says, ‘Come in the office.’ I went in the office, they picked up the phone, they made a phone call, they says, ‘tomorrow, you go up and be body guard for Carl Levin.’ I says, ‘tomorrow.’ So I called the inspector and told him I was being transferred. I went up there, And I stayed up there six and half years.
WW: And what year did you retire?
RV: I don’t know. I think 12 years ago. But I went to work for the courts for six years and four months.
WW: [Laughter.]
RV: And the judge specifically, the chief judge, said, ‘six years, four months.’ And I looked at him and said, ‘what the hell you talking about, judge?’ He said, ‘six years and four months, you’ll be eligible for a pension from the county. Now, do you want to go to work for me?’ Hell yeah.
WW: [Laughter.]
RV: So me and Black Jim, my partner, we went to work for him for six years and four months. He was a great guy, great guy.
WW: What year did you move out of the city of Detroit?
RV: When I moved outside the city of Detroit, it was after, long after this, long after. I stayed there. Well, Roger left first because he’s the one that got shot.
WW: Uh-hm.
RV: Then Gino was living out of the city right after the riot. We all went up there, there was eight of us went up there, he bought an old junk farm house up in Sandusky, Michigan and we all went up there and cleaned it up and painted it and everything. He took his family, and he moved up there, but he stayed in Detroit til he retired, then he moved back up to the farm. Because we weren’t allowed to move outside the city. We had to stay in or be fired. He stayed in, and after his retirement came, goodbye Charlie, you know, he was out that door so fast there was nothing but smoke. Get the hell out, you know.
WW: After you retired, did you immediately want to move out?
RV: Yeah, after I retired, yes. Because that’s when I went to work for the courts. I went to work for the courts and was a process server, and then I became a bounty hunter, me and my partner, Black Jim. I called him ‘Black Jim,’ he called me, ‘Dego Dung’ [?]. So, we got along real good, Jim and I, he was my brother, my Black brother. He sure was a great guy.
But, again, I had a great career. Just a great career. I loved my job. I loved going to work every day. My wife knew it, and that’s why she stuck it out. What can I say?
WW: Do you think the summer of 67 still affects the city of Detroit?
RV: Yes, yes. It will always affect Detroit for a long time. A lot of people remember the riot of Sojourner Truth and the riot of Belle Isle, they all remember that–my age, not your age, but my age. Because I remember people, when that Belle Isle thing started, my neighbors across the street all had guns out, because I lived right on the border of a Black section of Detroit. Anybody that come cross Nevada better look out. And nobody ever bothered, nobody. I had three policemen lived down the street from me: Promansky [?] brothers. And my judge lived way down the street from me, my Black judge. Shit. Did it come across Nevada, look out: there’d ’a been some shit, you know. That’s past, a long time ago.
There’s always going to be hostility. Always. Those people, like I said before, when they took over the Jewish section at 12th Street, 14th Street, Linwood, Dexter especially–because Dexter, we called it Little Israel–had a lot of fun down there too.
WW: You think there will always be hostilities between whites and blacks?
RV: Yes, I think so. Always, always, always. Because to quote, quote Charlie LeDuff, ‘Everything they touch turns to shit.’ And Charlie LeDuff was the man who said it. You know who Charlie LeDuff is?
WW: From Fox 2?
RV: Yeah. He wrote the book. He wrote the book. What they did to his mother, what they did to his sister, what they did to him. Read that book, that’s the greatest book I ever read. Charlie LeDuff told it like it was: ‘Everything they touch turns to shit.’ They ruin neighborhoods, they ruin businesses. The easy living, easy living. Welfare. That’s easy living.
WW: Do you have any optimism left for the city of Detroit?
RV: No.
WW: No?
RV: No, no.
WW: You think it’s down and out?
RV: I think the hub is going to be a great thing for Detroit, the hub. I think they’re trying to do the thing, but that little inner circle that they’ve got down there is great, and I hope they do bring it back. But here? No, no. You come out there trying to bring it back, you can’t, not for many years to come. I’m sorry to say, but that’s the way it is.
WW: Okay.
RV: That’s it.
WW: Is there anything else you’d like to share today?
RV: Anything you want to know, I’ll tell you. I’ll tell it like it is.
WW: Can’t think of any more questions right now, but if I do, I will get back with you. [Laughter.] Thank you so much for sitting down with me today.
RV: Yeah.
TIME STAMP END OF INTERVIEW: 42:44
End of Track 1
JW: Good Morning. Today is August 23, 2016. My name is Julia Westblade. I am here in Detroit, MI with the Detroit Historical Society’s 1967 Project. Can you tell me your name?
RN: My name is Ronald Navickas.
JW: Thank you so much for sitting down with me today. Can you tell me where and when you were born?
RN: I was born November 3, 1936 in Pontiac, MI.
JW: Did you grow up in Pontiac?
RN: No, I did not. My family moved from Pontiac, actually from Michigan to the state of Maryland when I was very little. We spent probably the first four or five years of my life in Maryland and then at the beginning of the World War II we moved back to Michigan to Pontiac and then in 1942, I believe it was, we moved to Highland Park, MI where I attended the schools and lived until I went into the service in 1954.
JW: What brought your family back at World War II?
RN: I think it was monies. Due to the fact that we were living on a farm in Maryland and when push came to shove the demand for workers was paramount here in the area. So my mother worked out at Willow Run. She was a line inspector when they were building the B-24s. My dad was a draftsman for Lincoln at that time and living in Pontiac, she had to commute every day from Pontiac to Willow Run and my dad rode the train from Pontiac to Detroit to his job.
JW: Did your mom continue to work after the war ended?
RN: Yes she did. My mother and father divorced when I was ten years old. We were living in Highland Park at that time. She continued working. She worked for Burroughs – at that time it was Burroughs Adding Machine Company. I have no idea what my father was. I think he was working for Fischer Body but I’m not sure at that time but we had nothing in common and he had departed and end of story as far as he was concerned.
JW: What was your neighborhood like growing up in Highland Park?
RN: Very diversified. A lot of different ethnic groups, in fact, I still meet with some of the guys I went to high school and grade school with even to this day. We had a very unique city. It was independent of Detroit even though it was surrounded by Detroit we had our own water supply, our own fire, our own police. We had two hospitals, our own educational system and it was the best of both worlds living there at that time.
JW: Did you primarily, when you were growing up, did you primarily stay in your neighborhood or did you explore around the city?
RN: Well, we could explore because we had a transit system at that time, the DSR, where we could jump on a streetcar, go downtown. We did a lot of walking in Highland Park. Everybody basically knew everybody. It was a situation where we were a little enclave very much – I would say not cloistered but we were a very proud little city.
JW: So you primarily stayed in Highland Park but did you go explore with the bigger city of Detroit at all?
RN: We did. Sunday back in those days was a typical Sunday drive. We would get in a car and we would of course drive over to Belle Isle and we would have to do the routine of going across the boulevard, getting to the bridge, and going under the tunnel and having to honk the horn. That was traditional. And then of course getting out and walking around Belle Isle and seeing what was and what wasn’t. It was always families that were out at that time, something that you don’t see that much of anymore.
JW: What were your impressions of the city at that time in the 50s and early 60s?
RN: I thought it was a box of gems to be discovered. It had anything and everything that would boggle your mind. Things today that we look back and we laugh at but, I mean I remember the huge stove down on Jefferson as you went going to Belle Isle and I was always amazed by that because I could never figure out who would stand there and cook on it. Going up the State Fairgrounds, you used to have car races there years ago and so many different aspects of the city that were just beautiful to go look at.
JW: Then you said you entered the service in what year?
RN: I went into the regulars in 1954, I was originally in the reserves. I was stationed out at Selfridge. I was an air policeman out there at 17 years old. Still wet behind the ears but I went into the regulars in 1954. Left Detroit. Went to San Antonio, TX. Did four years and was a nuclear and thermonuclear weapons mechanic when I was in the Air Force. Came back out of the service in 1958 and couldn’t find a job because nobody needed a hydrogen or atomic bomb repaired so I went to work for an armored car outfit and they were located on Seldon between Cass and Second. We had started out there as a rookie driver and worked my way up to a messenger were I had my own route and my own vehicle and everything.
JW: Is that where you were working throughout the 60s?
RN: Yes, I started there in 1958. It actually was 3 months after I got out of the service. I left there in 1969 and moved to Florida where I went and married my wife.
JW: Very nice. In the early to mid 60s, did you notice any tension in the city or anything?
RN: Towards the – about 1966 – correct that, I would say 1965, I noticed that there was a lot of stress and of course I think it was created by the Detroit Police Department. At that time they had a STRESS unit and it was looked upon as though it was a special tactics type of outfit who predominantly went after minorities which I didn’t see. Of course I was never involved in it but there was a lot of – I could see ethnic slurs, I could see tension in places especially when I worked in downtown Detroit. I worked all over. I worked from Eastern Market to Western Market. I worked down in the Port Authority and all the wholesale houses for all the produce companies and I could notice that there were attitudes then that were displayed that because more and more evident as time went on but when the civil unrest I’ll put it – it wasn’t a race riot as people want to call it in my opinion, it was an upheaval. We first noticed, it was a Sunday morning, I had finished playing golf at I can’t even remember the name of the golf course now. Anyway, Glen Oaks, I believe it was at 13 Mile and Orchard Lake Road, we were coming in off the golf course and noticed a huge, huge fire and at that time we went in to actually have a drink after our round of golf and they had the television on and we saw what was going on. I immediately left there and went home to get my family. Low and behold, one of my golf partners was my wife’s uncle and what I ended up doing was taking my family from Highland Park to Northwest Detroit to get them out in what I thought was a safe area. As I drove back into Highland Park, I could see madness. People breaking windows, just looting and I didn’t care what store it was. They were just grabbing anything and everything. I got my family out to my friend’s house. I went back to the house and it was all hell broke loose. I was in the house and I could feel the building, my house start to shake, it was rumbling and then I realized it was tanks heading from one of the armories down Hamilton through Highland Park and going down the Davidson and about a half hour or so afterwards, I heard the gunfire, the 50 caliber open up and that in itself was a very, very sobering moment. I stayed at the house. I could hear gunfire. Monday morning I got up and went to go to work and in the process I was driving down Hamilton in Highland Park. I was approaching Davidson and I saw an individual standing out in the middle of the street, armed and come to find out it was either a paratrooper from the 101st or the 82nd Airborne who was questioning me where I was headed. I was in full uniform and I had my sidearm on, my weapon, and I had another weapon in the vehicle to take with me. And in the course of it, he actually warned me not to go in which I totally appreciated. And then I noticed there was a sandbags off to one side and they had a 30 caliber machine gun trained on me and that sort of made my mind up. I wasn’t going to go into town. I turned around, came back, called into the office. I told them what had just transpired and come to find out all of the armored cars that we had with our company had been not commandeered but had been requested and taken over by the Detroit Police Department and the rest of the State Police, they were using them to transport people from point A to point B for safety reasons. When I finally did make it back into work, it was almost total devastation. Places that you would never feel that would be touched by any of this were gutted. Going past tall apartment buildings and windows smashed out and curtains flapping in the air. It looked like a bombed out city and there was still sporadic gunfire. In fact the Saturday after I was making a stop. My driver had gotten out to get the deposits from the company and as he came back out, he needed some other bags or whatever, I can’t remember, he went back inside and as I was sitting there doing some paperwork, I felt the truck rock and I thought he was back to drop off more money and there was no one there and I couldn’t figure out what was going on. Did it I think two more times and finally he came back out. I opened the door and I asked him had you been out knocking on the door. He said no, I was inside. Come to find out we had taken three shots to the side of the armored car which came from a burned out building and we had no idea. We couldn’t hear the reports from the rifle because they were firing from inside. It was – even that, almost a week later, there was still chaotic conditions. There were still squads of police going after idiotic snipers. It was something that no matter who relates it, it’s unbelievable.
JW: You said you took your family to a friend who lived out of the danger zone, why did you then come back? Why didn’t you stay with your family?
RN: I think it was a little bit of, I don’t think it was false bravado, but I think it was a little bit of I don’t want anybody messing with our house. Because I was allowed, and legally so, to carry a weapon, I figured that I could protect the house. I knew almost every police officer on the force in Highland Park. I had three or four of them that were very, very close friends of mine and I figured if push came to shove, I could give one of them a call if something happened. Of course, that was the days with no such thing as a cell phone and you needed a landline and if I needed help, I could be there rather than just leave it open to somebody looting it. But I guess it was just, I wanted to protect the property.
JW: So did you stay alone in the house for the rest of the week?
RN: Yes, I stayed – I went and I picked up the family, I think it was about three days later I picked them up. Brought them back and I was totally, totally blown away by what we witnessed on our ride back from the Northwest side of Detroit to Highland Park. It was one stop that we used to have that our company used to service was Star Furniture which was on Livernois just south of Puritan and it was now just a smoldering hulk. There were so many things that you wouldn’t believe. Safes that we had in stores that had been melted right down to the concrete. The only thing left was the capsule that contained the monies. There was just things that I don’t even know how to describe some of it. I won’t say it was horrific or horrendous but it was unbelievable.
JW: As you were driving out to pick up your family, how far out did the damage go out?
RN: When I went to pick them up, I would say from where we lived, at that time we lived on a little one block street called Kirwood, it was between Pilgrim and Puritan, one block west of Hamilton. To drive out Puritan, I would say, if I went across Livernois to going toward Schaffer, there were signs of looting out about that far. I don’t know anything that transpired other than that area or from me going in town because I made no attempt to go anywhere else. I do know that the curfew was on. People were having, if you needed gas you had to get outside the city to buy gas. You couldn’t buy gas in Highland Park, you couldn’t buy gas in Hamtramck. You had to go north of 8 Mile because the idiot fringe was using it to make Molotov Cocktails so they figured they would restrict the flow. Well, where are you going and where are you going to get it. As far as any type of incendiary makeup fuels and oils and whatever, but as far as the devastation that I saw, I would say it would be to Puritan up toward Shaffer and that was it in that area, but heading into town, south of Highland Park, I never saw anything happen in the city of Highland Park.
JW: Okay,
RN: Which to me was a compliment to all of the people, all of the residents, but once I crossed from Highland Park into Detroit, it was a different world, totally.
JW: Did the Highland Park police stay in Highland Park or did they go out into the city and help there?
RN: They basically were protecting in the city, I don’t know if a few of them were handed off to other agencies. My buddies all stayed in Highland Park. My one brother-in-law had just graduated the day before from the Detroit Police Academy when this started and it was unbelievable. He ended up going to Vietnam and he said it was almost the same way when he saw what was happening here in the city back during the riots. Or I shouldn’t say he went to Vietnam. He had been to Vietnam and had come back and said it was just as chaotic here as it was there. Unbelievable.
JW: So then you said you stayed in the area until 1969?
RN: Yes.
JW: So why did you move?
RN: Number of reasons. The situation that took place created a carrying a gun. I almost killed a person.
JW: We can stop for a minute if you would like.
[End of Track 1 00:21:51]
[Start of Track 2]
RN: I had been making a stop and in the course of I had ten thousand dollars on me and an inebriated person who was joking at the time created a scene and in the process I was forced to draw my weapon and I found out at that particular moment that the gun had become mightier than me. I decided at that time that a change of venue would be best. Thank God it happened because I went into partnership with a friend of mine. We decided to go into business. We ended up – he was a Detroit Cop who had had enough, too, and we both moved to Ft. Lauderdale, Florida where I met my wife. We got married, lived down there, moved back here it was three years later, wasn’t it? Have resided in Michigan ever since.
JW: When you came back did you move back to Highland Park?
RN: No, Highland Park was on the demise then. People had used the terminology “White Flight” for reasons that I will never know. No, my wife and I moved back to Detroit. We hadn’t two nickels to rub together at the time so we moved back to 6 Mile and actually Seymour and Gratiot Detroit’s northeast side and we lived there for a period of time and then we moved out to Sterling Heights. Lived out there for 25 years in our house and we now reside in Shelby Township.
JW: How did you find the city when you came back?
RN: Changed. Drastically changed. Polarized. I see a city even today that is polarized but to me it’s just my opinion, I see a city that is following in footstep with our country. I don’t understand it but for reasons that certain factions have, it’s divide and conquer right now as far as I can see. I see a city that is building. I see a city that is predominantly putting a lot of rouge and lipstick on but I don’t see any substance. I see a town that right now has looking here, I can look across at the Detroit Institute of Arts, a place I used to go to when I was a kid in grade school, loved it. Still do. And my wife and I used to go for the Wassail Dinners years ago and now we hardly even come into the city and not for fear but there’s really nothing here that we would want to become part of anymore. And we’re members of the Detroit Zoological Society. We used to volunteer there. So many different things that we used to be a part of in this city and now sadly to say, we just don’t want to be a part of it and we feel in the past there was some commonality to it. I would go to ball games all the time. I would be at Olympia all the time. When I was a kid I was hung up on sports. Now I don’t even want to partake in any of it and it’s because of, I find, attitudes that – and it’s always using the same terminology. “White Flight.” It’s “You people did this and you people did that.” I don’t know why. I can’t figure it out and nobody can explain it to me.
JW: What do you think would need change in the city to change that view?
RN: People’s attitudes towards each other. I see there is so much I would say individualness if there is such a word. I see people today who think more of themselves than they do of the whole. I see more selfishness. I mean, think when you sit back and look at the city of Detroit, 40s and 50s when I was grade school and high school, it was nothing to jump on a streetcar and go from here to there. To go to amusement parts, we had so many of them around the area. Today, I mean, they reopened up Belle Isle and it turned into a beautiful park. Prior to that, if you drove over to Belle Isle, you had to be careful where you drove because of the broken glass. It was just the attitudes and we some that is still there. There’s a lot of beauty in this town. Beautiful stuff, but you only see about four different factions that are benefitting from it. Why do we need another hockey arena? We had one that was torn down, this one of course is on its last legs so we’re building another one. We’re going to have a soccer arena in town. Not we. Detroit’s going to have. And if you get a chance and just a plug for the, what is it? United States Baseball League out in Utica. Grassroots place, but people feel comfortable. People feel safe there. And to cross 8 Mile Road, I don’t know. I have no idea just what my own personal thoughts are about trying to create, it wouldn’t be a Utopian situation because you’re going to always have people who begrudge others something but just the decency towards each other would be appreciated.
JW: So do you have any wisdom for the city of Detroit?
RN: Yeah, don’t relive the past. Right now all I can say is that I enjoyed my time when I was here working here. I enjoyed my time visiting and seeing all the jewels that were on display for the city and for the people of the city. And now I just see, I don’t know. I don’t know how to describe it. I’m not that knowledgeable in the English language, I’ll put it that way.
JW: Is there anything else you’d like to add or any other memories you have?
RN: Oh, memories? Geeze. I could start singing the song. No, I just, I do appreciate what you’re doing here because there’s so much of that year that should be remembered. Not for the tragedy that took place but things that took place with people actually coming together to help each other during that time. Everybody hears about the Algiers Motel incident. Everybody hears about so much negativity and there was a lot of people who bent over backwards, like in our neighborhood in Highland Park. The street I lived on, we had a diverse neighborhood. People, black, white, pink, purple, plaid. It was every group you could think of. And we all liked each other and even after the riot, or the civil unrest, let me correct that, even after that, we still liked each other. It wasn’t a situation where somebody held a grudge against you because you were of a different color. They liked you for who you were. Now that seems to have changed. If you’re of a certain color, you’re frowned upon. You are thought less of and I don’t think that’s right.
JW: Why do you call it a civil unrest rather than a riot?
RN: Well, I would say it’s a civil unrest of the simple reason that it was basically the whole city. It ignited so fast and spread so fast, I mean, when you say a riot, a riot had to me, my definition of a riot is something that happened in one locality. This was throughout the city. There were people who were just aching to get involved. I had stocks that I didn’t even recognize. I had about three or four places I had to go on Trumbull and we had no idea what was left, what customers we still had with the company. And I would have to call in to my office if a specific customer wasn’t open. Well, the day that I went out, that Saturday after the unrest, the reason, I was on the two-way radio and I was on Trumbull where I must have lost it was six customers in a row. And it wasn’t because they were closed; it was because they were no longer there. The buildings were torched, they were gone. Burned to the ground. They were still removing bodies from the basements of some of these stores where people had been looting and got trapped inside and it was something like I say. It was from here to there. It was a situation you had to experience. You had to sit there and say to yourself and say I can’t believe human beings would do this to each other and for what? And a lot of hate. A lot of hate came out of it but it was everybody. It wasn’t just one specific ethnic group. People shot for looting, I mean, it’s just. I told my wife, I still remember going into one store that was a customer, in fact, it was just around the corner from here. It was over on Third near Seldon and when I pulled up to make the pickup I noticed that the front plate glass window had been smashed out. It was boarded up. The brothers who owned the inner city market that serviced the area were being brought up on murder charges because the people who had come through, had broken the window out, jumped through the window and when they jumped through the window, the brothers were waiting inside with shotguns and blew them back out onto Third. Because of the attitude at that time, because they were protecting their property, the city didn’t see it that way. Or somebody didn’t see it that way and they were charged with murder. I’d have no idea what took place afterwards if they were found not guilty or whatever but it was a time that the city after all these years is still trying to heal. Hopefully it will.
JW: Alright, well, thank you so much for coming in to share your story.
RN: I appreciate it.
HS: Hello, this is Hannah Sabal. We are in Detroit, Michigan. The date is August 9th, 2016. This interview is for the Detroit Historical Society’s Detroit 67 Oral History Project, and I am sitting down with Mr. William Girardin. Thank you for sitting down with me today.
Can you start by telling me where and when you were born?
WG: Yes, I was born at Henry Ford Hospital, August 16th, 1940.
HS: Well, happy early birthday to you. Where did you grow up?
WG: Basically the west side. Coyle Avenue, it’s off Plymouth Road, and I believe Evergreen. When I was 8, or 7, 7 really, we moved out to Livonia, and that’s where I spent until I got married. Livonia is most of the memories I have. My father was a Detroit Diesel timekeeper and he put in thirty years with them. Before that he was at Ford Motor Company as a timekeeper. He was at the Battle of the Overpass. The funny part about it, my wife’s father was at the Battle of the Overpass, but on the other side of the bridge!
HS: For any listeners who might not know what that is, could you explain what the Battle of the Overpass was?
WG: Basically it was UAW organizing, and they were organizing out in front of Ford Rouge Plant, at their main entrance. People could get over the railroad tracks by an overpass to get into the building. Of course, the union organizers were on the outside and Bennett’s police (Ford Security) were on the inside. They came out and beat up Walter Reuther and a few of the other big wigs of the union. This was in 1937.
HS: What did your mother do?
WG: Basically, she was a home mother. She worked later in life. She ran a Detroit Times substation for about ten years.
HS: In Livonia, was Livonia integrated at all at that time?
WG: No.
HS: Strictly white?
WG: It was basically still rural at that time. My joke is that my first TV show that we saw on our TV was the Howdy-Doody show, on my birthday in 1948. That’s why I know. It was a quiet time out there. Didn’t pay much attention to Detroit, although I gotta admit, we would take the bus down Plymouth Road to Grand River, Grand River down to downtown, and do shopping at J.L. Hudson’s. I remember that mainly because we always went downstairs to the clearance areas. That's about it.
HS: Being rural, were you close with your neighbors in Livonia at all? Or was it more spread out?
WG: No, we were in a subdivision called Rosedale Gardens. It was about a quarter mile, eight blocks, and one side was the [unintelligible], the other side were the [unintelligible]. Then a few friends, my friends, my sister’s friends around the area, but that’s about it.
HS: You said you lived there until you got married?
WG: Yep. ’65.
HS: ’65. And then where did you move after that?
WG: Adrian, Michigan.
HS: Adrian, Michigan. That’s a bit of a hike.
WG: By the way, that’s in ’65. I graduated from Adrian in ’62. From college.
HS: So you went to Adrian for college and I presume you met your wife there?
WG: Nope, met her back here.
HS: Met her back here! Okay.
WG: After I graduated, joined a Catholic youth group of the over 21 to 35 age, back in those days.
HS: So what they would call millennials these days?
WG: Yeah. Definitely what you would call them today. The joy of that group was that they ran dances at Jesu Parish up on 6 Mile, right across from U of D. Every Friday night, we’d get two, three, four hundred kids dancing there.
HS: Wow. That sounds like a lot of fun.
WG: Oh, it was. It was a good time. Of course, we did our own monthly activities. I met my wife at a picnic at Camp Dearborn. I saw fireworks when I kissed her the first time. That was July 4th, 1963.
HS: So metaphorical fireworks and real fireworks? That’s great, that’s wonderful. So why Adrian?
WG: Quite frankly, Eastern wouldn’t accept me and Adrian would, so I went there for four years.
HS: And then when you moved there in ’65, what was the—
WG: It was a job, I was working for GM as an accountant. They were opening a brand-new plant in Tecumseh, Michigan. I volunteered to go there.
HS: How long did you stay in Adrian?
WG: Three years. In ’68, we moved back to St. Clair Shores.
HS: All right. Moving into the ‘60s, after you had moved to Adrian, did you spend any time in Detroit?
WG: No, not really. I wasn’t a sport nut or anything else like that, so there was no reason—my dad did take me down to a couple Tiger’s games, down on Michigan Avenue and Trumbull, but that’s all I remember from those days.
HS: Working for GM, you didn’t come to their office in Detroit at all?
WG: Nope, I was strictly out at the tech center.
HS: Moving in the 1967, how did you hear about the events that occurred in Detroit?
WG: In ’67, I just graduated from Michigan Military Academy, the OCS for Guardsmen, officers. I just became a Second Lieutenant the week before the riots.
HS: So the Michigan Military academy, is there a specific branch—
WG: No, it was Michigan National Guard, army.
HS: All right. Then were you called to duty in July of ’67?
WG: Yes, I was. Not the first day. There’s another side story, I’ll get to that later. On Sunday, we heard about the problems. My buddy, who was in a different unit who had just graduated with me, went in on Sunday to 12th and 13th Streets. My unit was still up at Grayling that week. When they got activated Monday morning, they called me and told me to meet them at the artillery armory.
HS: Where was that? What city?
WG: That’s up there, it’d be Southfield now, the old artillery armory. I got there Monday, already the city was flaming. We’ve seen two bad nights already. From the artillery armory my platoon got moved down to a fire station at West Chicago and Livernois. Could be Joy Road, but I still think it’s West Chicago. We were security for that fire station at the time. Quite frankly, we were at the, if I can call it, the outskirts of the main riots.
HS: That was Monday?
WG: Yes, that was Monday. It would be the 26th, 27th—whatever that day would be.
HS: 24th, I think. So you said that you worked security for the fire station at Chicago and Livernois. What exactly did that entail?
WG: Basically walking up and down in front of the station and keeping it secure. Later on that day, I was taken with about a squad of soldiers. We went down to the main fire station which is down near Cobo Hall, right across from Cobo Hall. I spent my time walking up and down in front with my rifle on my shoulder. The highlight to that day was all the businessmen were coming into work and leaving, but the highlight for me was that afternoon, the chefs at the Ponchartrain, which was right across the street, brought over a big barrel or tray of beef tips. Best dinner I had on those two weeks.
HS: We actually had a woman who works here now, who I believe was a waitress at the Ponchartrain, tell us that same story. I know a lot of National Guardsmen were sent out with firemen to protect them while they were firefighting, you never—
WG: I never got into that part. I had stories from my buddy, but I did not witness it at all.
HS: What was the mood or atmosphere, would you say, of the National Guard in general during this week? Tense, worried, relax?
WG: A little tense, but not worried. At night, if we were outside the fire station, you would hear gunfire, some of it in the area, but the old timers that were coming out, were saying, “Don’t worry about that. What they’re doing, the people that are coming out on their top porches or up on the roofs, firing off shotgun, then going right back in the house again.” Nothing was shot at us. I was never threatened, per se.
HS: Did you feel more relaxed during the riots as opposed to afraid or anxious?
WG: What’s that?
HS: Did you feel not relaxed, but I guess calm during the riots? Were you afraid or anxious at any point?
WG: No, I wasn’t afraid. I was alert, more than anything else. I realized that that can change in an instant, but I wasn’t afraid, but I wasn’t relaxed, either. I knew that was going on all around us, and it could happen right there at any time, which it didn’t.
HS: So more cautious than anything. Okay. How long were you in the city for?
WG: I was there for two weeks. The first week was on the west side. They pulled us back into the artillery armory the middle weekend, and quite frankly I don’t remember which day. Then sent us to the east side, and we got based out of Eastern High School, which is on Van Dyke, south of 94. That was a long day for me because I remember I was up already over thirty hours. All I remember is that once we got settled in at the high school, I sat down on the floor in the hallway, promptly fell asleep until morning.
HS: I was going to ask, if you lived in Adrian, but were serving in the city during this time, where did you stay?
WG: Either at the fire stations or at the armory. The second week was always at the high school. Basically you took a classroom, moved all the school chairs to the back of the room, rolled out our sleeping bags, and slept right there in the classroom. The beauty of Eastern, it had a swimming pool. After a twelve-hour shift at night, we’d come back and rather than just take a shower, we’d strip, jump in the pool, and swim for a while. On a hot summer night, that felt real good. We only had one call out in the evening. Again, gunfire in a residential area. My only memory of that is that we’re coming down the street here, quietly walking along the sidewalk, nothing’s happening, and a unit pulls up behind us and it turns out to be the 82nd, I believe it was. They came through us and say, “You guys stay put. We’re going ahead.” So they did. The second week was actually boring. It did have one highlight. On the one night, and I can’t remember what day it was, we’re driving up Gratiot, somewhere around Van Dyke, a flame comes out from behind the store fronts and lands right in front of our little squad convoy. We pull up, I’m in the jeep, I look down. We were shot at by a flaming arrow. Fired it up over the building, landed in the middle of the street. I said, oh, you’ve got to be kidding me.
HS: That’s unexpected. I would’ve guessed, when you said a flame, I would’ve thought a malotov cocktail or something, but an arrow?
WG: Yeah, an arrow! But the biggest challenge we had the second week in the neighborhoods were people—we kept pushing them into their homes for safety or security purposes, and of course they’d come back out. We’d drive by an hour and a half later, and “Please folks, you’ve gotta go back inside.” Understanding those days and times, that’s like saying, “Get out of the heat and go into the steam room.” None of those homes had air conditioning of any type. About the only other fun time, a friend of mine that had just gotten married—well, no, he’s been married for three years. But they lived in Hamtramck and I knew their address, so I drove up to their address in Hamtramck in a jeep with a couple of GIs, and I calmly walk up to their apartment, which was a second-story flat. I guess the mayor of Hamtramck at that time lived on the same street and he was a mite nervous about us. From the actual riot period, that’s about as much as I remember.
HS: When you were working security at the fire station, did anybody ever try to break through your lines?
WG: Oh, no. No nothing. Like I say, it was a boring stint. You were there for hours, but nobody ever came up or challenged us or anything else.
HS: Other than your run-in with the 82nd that one night that you got called out, did you have any other interaction with the federal troops when they were called in?
WG: No. If we had to say anything about it, we were a little irritated that they were. From what I remember of it, I’m thinking, hey, it’s under control. Why do we need the airborne now? That’s what stuck in my mind.
HS: So you were kind of a little offended, like, they don’t think we can handle this?
WG: Yeah.
HS: Those two weeks that you were in Detroit. Was your wife still in Adrian?
WG: Yes.
HS: How was she handling all of this and feeling?
WG: We had a little girl. She was only a little bit over 1, so she was, and of course the news, she was nervous. Second week when I was able to give her a call, I told her, “It’s quiet here. We should be breaking up soon. I’ll be home soon.”
HS: So you didn’t get to call your wife until the second week? That must have been nerve-wracking.
WG: Long before cell phones.
HS: Yeah, I know.
WG: The only other thing I remember is that first day when we went down to the fire station. I remember crossing Grand River, and like I say, we always went across Plymouth and went Grand River downtown. All I remember is looking down this road and seeing all these buildings crumpled down onto the main drag there on Grand River. The only relatively clear was in the center of the road. Everything else was bricks, mortar, ashes, whole nine yards. I was so saddened to see such shambles in my town. And of course, as I went to the east side, I saw more of the shambles, but it was already done, over with. People weren’t coming back in for a while.
HS: At what point would you say the city returned to its normal level of calm?
WG: Technically, about the third week. After my two weeks, it was pretty calm, and that’s why they started releasing units to go back to their home towns.
HS: Are there any other experiences from those two weeks you wanted to share before we move forward?
WG: About the only other one is I remember on the east side, the policemen that were with us that one night said, “I gotta show you this.” Took us to a black grocery store. A little local storefront grocery store. It was just shambles. Trash was just this high on the ground, and human feces on top of the pile, and he said, “This is what happened.” He left it up to us.
HS: Now, was that Detroit police or state police?
WG: Detroit.
HS: Looking back on the events then, would you classify them as a riot, or would you consider them a rebellion or an uprising?
WG: At the time, I always considered it a riot. It wasn’t’ until, what, two, three weeks ago? This article in the Free Press caught my eye. What’s the date? “Riot or was it a rebellion?” And in thinking back on it, remembering back in ’43 there were race riots, I do remember a little bit of the Kercheval the year before. Officially, Detroit wasn’t acknowledging there was a problem there.
HS: What do you think that problem was?
WG: I’m afraid I sort of tend to see it as this article states. It was basically just a simmering, boil if you want to call it, the hatred of the cops, who were just blowing them away, and they just couldn’t stand it any longer.
HS: So you think the rioters were rebelling against mistreatment on the hands of the police?
WG: I think so. I remember, even before the riots, being told about the Big Four and how they could get across the city of Detroit in thirty minutes and they don’t care where it was at. If there was something that they had to get to, they could get anywhere in the city of Detroit in less than thirty minutes. I’m thinking, how can they do that? I’ve been in Detroit and I can’t do it. Then all of a sudden it dawned on me, they drive the shoulder of the expressways. They keep getting around bridges and get across town rather quickly. I do remember hearing those stories about the Big Four.
HS: You said you moved from Adrian to St. Clair Shores?
WG: Yeah, in ’68.
HS: ’68. St. Clair Shores isn’t too far from the city, so in those following years, did you see the city change at all?
WG: Because of my job, didn’t have to come down to the city for any reason. I worked at the tech center, the GM tech center, so basically I’m at 12 Mile at the lake, I go straight down 12 Mile to the tech center. Because I was a traveling job, the only time I went to Detroit was to go across to the airport to fly to my assignments.
HS: So from a suburban point of view, you didn’t see any change in, say, news stories or anything like that?
WG: No. About the only stories, of course, I heard were white flight. People selling their properties to get out of Detroit and move to the suburbs. That was the time of the “Warren Ranches” springing up in Warren, Sterling Heights, all those upper suburban communities were building all the new homes at the time.
HS: I know you said you’re not a big sports fan or anything, but was there any other reasons why you didn’t come into the city? Did you find it unsafe at all or just no interest?
WG: No interest at that point. In ’69 I moved to Ohio. I basically didn’t see Detroit again for twenty years. Went with the company to first Elyria, Ohio, then down to Columbus, Ohio. When the jobs started dying out in the late ‘90s, I finally got back to Rochester Hills in ’89. By that time, Detroit was already, well—
HS: Deteriorated?
WG: Destroyed and deteriorated. Basically, when we came back, the only reasons we came into Detroit were to go to the Fischer Theatre. It was always on a Saturday or Sunday matinee. In other words, I can get in, see a good show, get back in the car, back to 75, gone. I didn’t stay to eat in town or anything else. I usually came right back out to the suburbs. Later yet, when I did come back into Detroit a little bit more often, it’s sickening to see all the burned out houses off of 75 and the Lodge. So hard. My grandfather had a home on American. That home was destroyed for 96, down by Grand River. I have a feeling the service drive took out his house. That was the sad part. The next time, on my computer, we had an application, Street View. I punched in my wife’s—her name is Jenny by the way—punched in her old address on Maywood. Nothing there. Just open fields and trees. It looked like it’s been mowed, but nothing there. And I swept around, did the 360 view, even the other side of the street—empty. There was only one house that I could see in that whole view and it was the first house off of Van Dyke. Then I found out the church we got married at was St. Thomas the Apostle, near Van Dyke and Harper—gone. No reason for us to go back anymore.
HS: Where do you see the city headed? Positive outlook, or negative, or realistic?
WG: I think it’s positive. Basically, unfortunately the news plays up all the tear downs and the rip ups and the plowing over, and I see that. But this last couple months ago, we went to Pewabic Pottery and we went down—I couldn’t tell you how we got down there—
HS: With the construction.
WG: Yeah, definitely wasn’t Woodward. But I saw a lot of empty land, too, which didn’t surprise me, but what did catch me was the newer rentals and condos and even homes being built there over here on the near east side, just the other side of 375. And I thought, good, the people of Detroit are waking up. They’ve got empty land, let’s refill it and refill the city. That’s what we’re going to have to do.
HS: So you see potential for the city?
WG: Yes. Oh, yeah.
HS: My last question for you would be what advice would you leave for future generations of Detroit? On any topic.
WG: I know, I realize that.
HS: It’s a broad question, but you can take it wherever you want.
WG: We have grown. We can grow again. Maybe not quite the same way, but we can grow, we will grow. We’ll be good.
HS: Sounds great. All right, William, thank you so much for sitting down with me today. I appreciate you sharing your stories.
WG: Okay.