More Michigan

The SECOND reason I went to Michigan was to see my friends, Peggy & Larry Huntington and hang out in Mount Clemens. The first day they took us to the truck production line at the Ford Rouge Plant in Dearborn, where I took this EXTREMELY illegal photo of the assembly line - which shows not much of anything.

Classic Line of cars - Model A, Model T, something else, a Thunderbird and a Mustang.

Henry Ford with some young things!

After the factory, we went to Greek Town for lunch - and had a lovely lunch, including Flaming Cheese!  OPA!

That night, Peggy had a party for me to meet up with all my local friends, I had a GREAT time, but I FORGOT to take photos. Dingbat!  Luckily, Marvin Thompson stayed late.  He was one of Jim LeDuc's best friends, and I hadn't seen him in TWENTY years.  So nice to catch up.  

  

But wait, there's more!  The next day we took a drive through St. Clair Shores, Grosse Pointe and into Detroit.  As you might know, Detroit just declared bankruptcy - the biggest municipality in the nation to ever do so.  And it's in REAL trouble.  Chris read that over 75,000 homes have been abandoned, and the whole thing is just so hard to believe.  So we took a drive to check things out.  Even driving down the freeway, we could see that about every fifth house was burned out or boarded up.  These photos were taken from the window of a moving car, so please forgive the poor quality.

There are destroyed factories, the street lights have been stripped of their copper wiring, there are burned out houses, boarded up windows, and decrepit buildings - and many of these are NOT the abandoned ones!  People are living in them with no wiring, no heating, no utilities.  Many of the fires started because in the winter, with no heating, people would burn their furniture, etc.

THEN, two blocks later, there were houses like this!  There are pockets of lovely, prestigious houses in the midst of near slums.  It's unbelievable!

 It's a sad, strange time here in Detroit.  They may end up selling the millions of dollars worth of art in the Detroit Institute of Art center, to help pay debts.  There are SO many complications and implications.

However, to make the journey more pleasant, I asked Larry to stop at the Grosse Pointe house where I grew up (yes, I WAS a little rich bitch - my dad was superintendent of schools in the ritzy suburb of Grosse Pointe).   As we drove by, we noticed that someone was just getting out the car in the driveway, so we parked and went to speak to them.  It was a lovely young woman with two little kids.  I introduced myself and told her that I had grown up this house and she immediately said, "Come on IN!"  It was SO interesting.  She had just moved in about two weeks earlier, and she and her husband were trying to restore the house to its original state. So she asked me all kinds of questions - was there wallpaper in this room?  Do you remember the wall sconces?  It was very rewarding for us both - wasn't that sweet of her to invite us in?
Here's my house - as if you care... I was about the age of the little girl in the photo when I left there for Hawaii.

I know this is a long post!  If you got to the end of it, you must really love me!  Write me and tell me that you made it....whew!