By Scott Sullivan
Editor
Renaissance
“Janice Bleil made a pile right in the middle of Belle Isle,” kids teased my mom growing up in 1940s Detroit, last name from a father she never saw.
I saw 982-acre Belle Isle in 1984 crewing for Mitchell Miner and Karen Hipkiss riding tandem in a 24-hour bicycle race till they crashed near the Conservatory.
From that glass dome you could see across the Detroit River Windsor, Ontario east and Detroit west reflecting.
“What caused the crash?” I asked Mitchell.
“What causes anything?” he asked, stanching his and Karen’s blood with a towel I’d tossed them.
“Band-Aids?” I asked. “How are you, Karen?”
“Fine,” she said. The mirrored Renaissance Center peered across the water at their broken bike.
Mom grew up here long before the Ren Cen went up in 1977; I stayed in it Nov. 24-25, 2010 with my daughter, Flannery, then 10, as Great Lakes Sports Publication’s video crew for the downtown Turkey Trot, prelude to America’s Thanksgiving Parade. It had been sponsored from 1924 to 1979 by the 25-story downtown Hudson’s department store ala New York City’s same-year-founded Macy’s extravaganza.
Hudson’s closed in 1983 with Detroit still fighting post-July 23-28, 1967 “Long Hot Days of Summer” riot aftereffects and its store leveled, but a foundation had maintained the parade and added the Trot we’d shot.
Flannery was awed by the floats, bands and giant balloons staged on Woodward Street near the finish of the race, in which thousands had run wearing costumes. She was boggled too by the Ren Cen, where our room was a floor below Tom Brady’s New England Patriots, in town for their Turkey Day beatdown of the lowly Lions, giants defying gravity sharing elevators with us. We sat for breakfast watching barges cross the river around Belle Isle and a foreign country across the way.
“Your Grandma grew up here,” I told her. “Not in this building but a German ghetto.”
The Ren Cen, built by the automaking Ford family and now owned by General Motors, rose 10 years after the riots as a response to them. Flannery asked about Joe Louis’s 5,000-pound giant forearm with fist sculpture hung in Hart Plaza as another counterpunch.
“What’s that?” she asked.
“What do you think?” I answered. “Joe Louis, Detroit’s ‘Brown Bomber,’ was the 1937 to ‘49 heavyweight boxing champion. He KO’d German champ Max Schmeling, who had beaten him in 1936, in their ‘38 rematch when anti-Nazi sentiment here was peaking.
“Another black American, Jesse Owens, won four gold medals in the 1936 Berlin Olympics, much to Hitler’s displeasure.”
“You talk too much, Dad,” she said.
I was 12 the night riots erupted on 12th Street, spreading and ending in 43 deaths, 1,189 injured, more than 7,200 arrests and 400 buildings destroyed, per records. I read in the Free Press all could about it and the Tigers — with Al Kaline, Norm Cash, Willie Horton and Denny McClain a year shy of their ‘68 World Series title — as we stayed at my Dad’s Dad’s cottage on Montcalm County’s Crystal Lake 60 miles northwest.
The floor was crooked; my brothers and I putted golf balls curving across its thin rug towards an aluminum cup tipped sideways — plunk! — often while I sat on that floor typing my first “newspaper.” “Come out and play, Scott,” my brother Steve teased, “you old hermit crab.” Tap tap.
Then I’d too lotion up and splash in the lake while sunbathers onshore listened to AM transistor radios playing “Light My Fire” by The Doors, Aretha Franklin’s “Respect,” Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit” and Procol Harum’s “Whiter Shade of Pale” …
At nights Crystal Speedway’s quarter-mile dirt track roared a mile southeast and through windows we’d hear an announcer whistling S’s through his nose, which was fun to imitate.
Scott, Shawn, Steve and Stuart we were, Sullivans in order of age alphabetically. We’d walk from the cottage across a schoolyard to a downtown different than Detroit’s, where I loved fountain lemon sodas and comic books Grandma Sullivan bought me at the drugstore. On my own I studied Wanted posters thumbtacked to a corkboard post office wall. Saw “To Sir, with Love” in the movie theater, a 1947 Quonset hut built from World War II surplus steel.
“Can we go home?” asked Flannery. We’d finished our shoot in the rain and she’d seen enough floats.
“Let’s beat the traffic,” I agreed.
Back through town we drove past the giant Uniroyal tire and neon Vernor’s gnome, still visible from the Lodge Freeway upon which Dad long ago had grown angry at the traffic and boys’ distraction, when we’d driven to visit Mom’s Mom, who’d remarried a man who wouldn’t run out when she was in labor, ‘though too late by then. Nearby was a valley of ashes for miles after ’67.
As a girl Mom had sat out a year of school with scarlet fever and read so much they advanced her two grades when she got back. She did a Detroit News internship, earned an Alma College scholarship and there won the Barlow Cup for Outstanding Student. Her sons saw her serve gravy from it during Thanksgiving dinners. There she’d met Dad too.
To be continued