Detroit Stories

Gven Golly's friend Kate had the opening of her show at the new art department space over at Evangelical Brethren College Friday evening, and it was the least I could do to show up. As I confided to a co-worker at the end of another long week, it really was about all I could do. So I dutifully dragged my exhausted left brain across Alumni Creek to Collegeview Road to schmooze and let my right brain look at art.

Am I ever glad I did. Like the sign on the transmission shop across the street from Tiger Stadium at the corner of Michigan and Trumbull: LIMP IN, LEAP OUT! The gallery was a clean, well-lighted space full of vibrant visual stimulation, friendly people, and balm for my weary mind. The whole show was composed of narrative quilts linking the artist's family and friends with mythological characters, and they were beautiful, some of them emotionally touching, like dyed cotton fibers pieced together by human muscle fibers that drew upon memory fibers to penetrate deep cardiac fibers. I felt better.

By the time a bunch of people regrouped at the home of Kate's neighbor for a dinner in her honor, I was well on my way to accomplishing re-entry into the everyday world of social interaction - no mean feat. With a glass of red wine in my hand, I found the next portal in the company of Kate's main men - her son Tedy (Icarus), her husband Jim, and her father Dick (Zeus stirring his drink with a lightning bolt).

For the next couple of hours, the conversation flowed as freely as the wine, with Dick's stories about selling Fords for umpteen years - first in Detroit and then in Pittsburgh - and gambling in Biloxi. Dick likes to play poker and drink Crown Royal, thinks we should pump oil wherever we can find it, in the Artic or in your front yard, and he enjoys the perks of being a regular at the casino, the complimentary hotel room and meals, the quality competition, the occasional big win.

This was when the Tigers were about to play in the World Series, against all odds, so everything Detroit was briefly cool again. We shared our admiration for their old-school manager, their strong young pitching staff, and their few steady veterans. And how can you admire the '06 Tigers without paying tribute to the '84 Tigers, like Trammell and Whitaker, and of course the '68 Tigers, like the aging but peerless Al Kaline, the clutch pitcher Mickey Lolich, the psychotic and lucky and self-destructive 31-game winner Denny McLain.

For the elders, of course, that legacy goes back another generation, so Dick had stories about Charlie Gehringer, George Kell, and Hank Greenburg, who were playing baseball before my time except in legend. By this time, the party had thinned a bit. Tedy and his high school friends had gone to a dance club in the hot rod Lincoln his grandpa Dick gave him for his birthday. Jim and I listened eagerly to the tale of how Lee Iacocca rose like a meteor from selling Ford trucks in New Jersey to master-minding the company's comeback during the '60s by introducing the Mustang, which infuriated Henry Ford, Jr., and then bolting to Chrysler.

There was the night Dick walked into a bar at Nine Mile Road and Telegraph, and the bartender said, "Hey, Dick, don't make a big deal of it, but that's Lee Iacocca sitting over there." Sure enough, tie loose and jacket off, the boss had stopped in for a drink on his way home from work. He lived in Bloomfield Hills, you know, because the Fords all lived in Grosse Pointe.