I booked a sleeper car on the train, through
Chicago, to Detroit. My father was
famous in the family for always suggesting, whenever someone complained about
traffic or airports, "Why don't you take the train?" I had finally called his bluff. I was preparing a speech to deliver in Dearborn,
and I asked him to come with me on the train across country. I had him, and he had to say yes.
The train is a faded pleasure. No more white-gloved porters to wait on your
every need. No more three-star
meals. The train was simply full of
people who were fearful of traveling, afraid to fly, and they all smoked.
The cabin seemed luxurious to start with until
we realized that the two sleeping berths popped down. We had to sleep in here too. In a poor location decision, Railroad
management had positioned the smoking car, just up wind of us, so we got the
back draft of a hundred people sucking as much as they could on tobacco
plants. The even nastier result of this
was that we had to pass through the smoking car to get to the observation car,
which was where you could get afternoon cocktails and thus, a place we often frequented.
It took us six hours to get to Reno. We must have stopped at every crossroad along
the way. If I had known this when I was
booking the train, I too would have planned a stop-over there, half the people
on the train got off in Reno, just to go gambling.
We pulled out of Reno about 7:00 pm and
decided on late dinner. We had already
figured out that an early dinner, 5 rather than 7, left us with the hours from
6-10, or midnight, with little to do other than: smoke, drink, or watch the
inky blackness go by. We opted for the
middle path. The food was
atrocious. I wasn't sure that Dickie
could stomach this food. We decided to
stick with hamburgers from here on in, and this worked out well. The chef was working from a menu that he had
seen in an up-scale magazine and was trying to imitate it, but the sauces were
bad, the entrée mis-cooked, and the garnish missing. The whole thing didn't blend well into a meal
that was worth eating.
OK, so we had to work to avoid smoke and food.
The morning after Reno was the desolate desert around Salt Lake. It's a big country and we spent the day
approaching the Rockies. The vistas were amazing.
My father had driven us past the Rockies panorama
on our way to California, when I was ten years old. He was concerned then with the "When do
we get there?" and "I have to pee" type of problems to have seen
the view. We were now in an observation
car, crawling along at twenty miles an hour.
I looked straight up a sheer cliff, thousands of feet above me. It was awe-inspiring. The vista took me aback. That was the Rockies and the railroad planned
the trip so that we would see the most impressive views of it, late in the
afternoon. How small I felt among the
power of nature around me.
Added to the majesty of it, our slow speed let
the storm we had started in, back in Oakland, catch up to us, all along the way. There was thunder and lightning. We went to sleep with rain falling and an
exhausting day behind us.
We awoke the 2nd morning in Kansas City,
and I devoured a local newspaper. My
father told me about growing up in the Plains States. The rainstorm that had been coming down in
buckets when we started was now progressing across the country at about the
same speed we were, just preceding us by a 2-3 hours. We followed that storm front for two thousand
miles, back in distance and time, as we made our way to the Midwest where we
had both grown up. We got to talk in
depth about life in the Midwest over those next few days.
In Chicago, my father had all sorts of memory
places to visit. We started with the
swanky Drake Hotel he had come to, during the war. It was famous for the Palm Court Room. We had drinks there and then, on to Shaw's
Crab House, still a popular place when visiting Chicago. It’s a '40s-style
restaurant with a vast menu of fresh seafood and live Jazz music. The place was full of beautiful women and[PA1] they tempted us to
continue partying, but he didn't want to upset me, and I didn't want to upset
him. The next day we got back on a
morning commute train. We talked with a
black man the whole way. He was about my
father's age, and we spoke of the war and Michigan in the thirties. This, as we rambled through gorgeous Western
Michigan countryside, flat and well-wooded with water; ponds, streams and
lakes.
When we arrived at the Detroit station, I
couldn't believe it. The railroad had
kept the station on the outskirts of town.
It was a deserted whistle stop.
There was one taxi cab, a beat-up car.
The trunk lock didn't work; then again, neither did the door locks. We quivered as the driver took us to the
designated hotel along Woodward Avenue.
My father showed me four landmark sites;
Tillie's boarding house where Mother lived, before they were married (’37), BH
Tool where he worked (40’s) until the
move to California. We went out to
Grosse Pointe to my elementary school and the house on Lewiston. My parents always associated Detroit with the
Lewiston house. We ate at two places he
loved fifty years before, and he told me Detroit stories I'd never heard and
don’t remember.
I wouldn't call it a jam, but my father and I
got scared as we left Grosse Pointe and tried to retrace his morning commute to
BH Tool, fifty years prior. We pulled up
to a light in a depressed area. The
houses were all boarded up or burned out.
A car pulled up along-side of us and a group of angry, young black men
cursed us and screamed at us that they would kill us. We were scared. We took out of there like bats out of hell.
He flew back to SFO Sunday night. I stayed in the area the next few days. There was an armed-guard riding the “BART”
system there; my hotel had keycards that gave me access to certain floors; the
mall had full-time police-patrols. This
wasn’t my Detroit.
Detroit was a stepping stone for some during
WW-II: the war brought good money, and if you saved it, migration: Exit West,
afterward. For others, it was a jump to
the middle class, but then, each subsequent American war brought a new
automobile maker into the world market: Volkswagen, Japanese, Korean. Manufacturing moved South, leaving Detroit abandoned.
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