Detroit

It was July 1967, I worked the night shift at the Big D grocery store in Utica, Michigan, 20 miles north of Detroit. Four of us guys were working a shift and at about 3 AM we heard a loud tap on the store entrance door. At the door we could see in the lighted parking lot an Army jeep with a large mounted machine gun. We opened the door, went outside and conversed with two National Guards. They had just returned from a stint in Vietnam. We were told to keep the doors locked at all times – a riot broke out in Detroit.

It was a day or so later, mom and I were talking in the living room of our home, one that dad, my brother Ron and I helped build. We heard a commotion in the hallway and we saw dad coming with a shot gun – he said he was going to Detroit. Dad, for years worked for Packard Motor Car Company in Detroit starting in 1928 – a lot of memories living and working in Detroit. He was originally from Nashville, Tennessee – and what he knew was racism – he ate and breathed it while growing up and so he wanted to help the cause to protect keeping what he saw as the natural order of things – “the blacks are way out of line and they need to be put back in their place.” My mom and I intercepted dad in the hallway and reasoned with him that this is a job for the National Guard, they do this work so you don’t have to. Dad listened to what was said and he let go of his intention.

I was really surprised by dad’s intense distraught over the riots – there was a side of him I did not pay all that much attention to. I did not share his disposition about race – but I could understand where it came from. It was a few days later we talked – not all that much but I wanted to learn more from his world. I was not embarrassed by him, I just wanted to listen, not fix or defend. I heard his world, and I expressed what I knew. I said that blacks I knew at college want the education needed for good paying jobs and the freedom to live where they want to live just like we do – and there is also a lot of poverty even among white folks who also live in unkept houses. I believe from our conversation dad wrestled with his own prejudice against what was honest and true from my end and he could see things were not so cut and dried.

As I look back, the summer of 67 was the beginning of dad’s world coming apart. Sometimes he came home from work and could barely eat dinner and wept. He shared with mom that some of his co-workers at Chrysler turned on him because he could not keep up with tasks. Soon he made an appointment to see his family doctor – who immediately referred him to a specialist. In a hospital a routine bone marrow sample was gathered and later analyzed – the diagnosis was early stages of leukaemia. Thus began a five year journey of chemo therapy, hospital visits and grateful periods of remission. It was a year later dad had his work friends over – they had a party in the basement of our home – lots of beer and laughs. Dad was not one who held grudges all that much and when his co-workers knew the whole story their eyes soften and wanted to make things right.

fullsizeoutput_4d4f