Enotes

I feel sorry for those who never got a chance to see "Truth or Consequences." I don't mean the town in New Mexico , either. I'm thinking of "T or C" this morning amid the news that host Bob Barker is in the hospital after a fall near his Southern California home. "Truth" didn't give Barker, 91, his start in broadcasting, but it put him on television for the first time. And there Bob stayed for some 51 years. It was game show---and reality TV, if you want to know the truth---pioneer Ralph Edwards who passed the torch of "Truth" to Barker, in 1956. Edwards created "Truth" on the radio in 1940. The premise was wacky yet simple. The show was among the first "audience participation" offerings of the day. Regular folks would have to answer an obscure trivia question---always designed for the contestant to fail---and when the answer was wrong, there would be consequences. These usually came in the form of w...

In another time, in another era, against another backdrop, a statue of Orville Hubbard outside of City Hall was a monument about which the good people of Dearborn didn't bat an eye. And not just Dearbornites. It wasn't just the people who lived in that city that knew what Hubbard, Dearborn's mayor from 1942-78, stood for. It was an ironic monument, really, because the statue of Hubbard, in an almost welcoming repose, belied the exclusiveness that pocked his reign over the city. Hubbard was an unapologetic segregationist . That's not opinion. But those ways were widely accepted by his citizenry, particularly in the first 25 years of his being mayor. To the people of Dearborn, Orville Hubbard represented the sheriff that kept their streets safe and the town prosperous, despite sharing multiple borders with the city of Detroit. Everyone knew what safe and prosperous was code for in Dearborn under Orville Hubbard. No blacks allowed. Hubbard made no bones a...

I wonder if you could get away with calling them "Ethnic Festivals" these days. I've kind of lost track of political correctness. I don't know what is acceptable terminology anymore. But what I do know is that, as a high schooler and into my college years, my buddies and I would descend on Hart Plaza in downtown Detroit and partake in "ethnic" food, people watch, and maybe have a nip or two. Yes, it was before we were of legal drinking age. Amazing how enterprising teenagers can be. Anyhow, they called them Ethnic Festivals and they would rotate throughout the summer, on the weekends. You know---Greek, Italian, Arab-American, etc. The Plaza would be host to live music, vendor stands/kiosks and underneath, in the below-ground portion of the Plaza, were loads of food nooks. Imagine an underground food court, like they have at the malls. All you needed to do to find the food vendors below was to follow your nose. The food was yummy. There was also...

The corner video store has turned into the city video store. Time was that you couldn't walk much more than 500 feet in any direction without running smack into a joint that rented VHS tapes. Then, you couldn't walk much more than 2,000 feet without running into a place that rented DVDs. Now, you can drive for most of a Sunday afternoon without seeing more than a couple video stores. They close all the time these days, but locally there is a closing that might tug on some heart strings. I used to go out of my way to venture into Thomas Video. So did everyone else, because there was only one Thomas Video---literally and figuratively. Thomas Video, the favorite of the intense B-movie fan, is closing up shop. To many, this is like the news of a loved one with a terminal disease passing away. You knew it was coming. Thomas Video has been located in Royal Oak since 2009, but I remember visiting when it was on Main Street, south of 14 Mile Road, in Clawson. Like I said,...

Our daughter just turned 21. And, parked in front of our house as I write this, is the car in which we drove her home. I remember strapping her tiny, 4-lb. body into her car seat and securing her in the Mustang's back seat that day in June, 1993 in front of Beaumont Hospital in Royal Oak. She was born two months premature, and thus weighed just 2-lb, 14-oz. when she was born via emergency C-section. The Mustang was purchased in September, 1992, just before my bride and I were betrothed. Little did we know that some 21-plus years and 115,000 miles later, we'd still own the car. But that's OK. It's been a good car. How could it not be, if it's old enough to legally drink alcohol? It's starting to come apart at the seams now, which is to be expected. Rust is spreading like cancer. But the Mustang still runs and it gets me front Point A to Point B. We just make sure that the distance between those two points isn't too far. We have a 2003 Mercury Sable ...

Sometimes the 24-hour news cycle gets extended. Sometimes it's a 48-hour or 72-hour news cycle. And, on occasion, a story manages to stay in the public's consciousness for a week or more. News stories anymore are like pieces of pasta thrown against the wall. Only some stick. The Stephen Utash beating has beat the 24-hour news cycle, by far. Now the question is, Will it matter? The Utash story is right out of a novel or a made-for-TV movie. White suburbanite hits a young black boy with his pickup truck, in the city. The suburbanite stops to check on the condition of the boy and is then beaten senseless, perhaps to death (that's a part of the story that has yet to be resolved), by a mob of black men. It's a story that almost had to happen, to provide the most recent litmus test of where we are as a society, particularly when it comes to violence and race relations. The elements are all there, and if they weren't, the story wouldn't work as well. It w...

Happy New Year. Or happy new year, however you choose to look at it. As I watched the big ball drop on Tuesday night in Times Square, I jokingly asked my daughter what life would be like if we did that for the change of every month instead of year. "Three...two....one....HAPPY APRIL!" Seems silly, of course. But so does, when you think about it, going through all the expense and effort to mark the start of a new year. Or New Year. It's perhaps too cynical---even for me---to say that January 1 is "just another day," but it truly is. It is different, however, in one respect: It's the one day when no one has ditched their new year's (or New Year's) resolutions---yet. Ahh, about those resolutions. There's a funny commercial playing on TV right now where a small boy calls it the New Year's " revolutions." I kind of like that. You do have to revolt, in a way, if you're going to commit to doing something different fr...

The first thing I saw was a jug of wine on the kitchen table the size of the Detroit Zoo water tower in Royal Oak. And there was barely any wine left in it. That's when I knew it would be a fun night spent with family. We're Italian---my wife more than I---and we spent a glorious Saturday evening last weekend visiting with aunts, uncles and cousins that we haven't seen in years. Probably not since the last family funeral; that's typically how it goes. It used to be that we saw each other at weddings and baby showers. We approached the condo of our cousin and I saw the huge jug of wine on the table. More than a dozen heads, some bald and those that weren't, were mostly gray, bobbed in the front room at the dining table. The food was going, the wine was going and the conversations were loud---mainly because half the folks could no longer hear. Our family is getting older, and it's somehow up to people our age (my wife is 51 and I'm 50; our daughter is ...

Maybe behind the scenes, Miley Cyrus is getting a talking to. Maybe when nobody is looking, she is being sent to her room. Maybe her Internet use is being revoked. She has no more access to the family car, until further notice. If only. No one said that the transformation from bubble gum pop to grown up music is an easy one. It's like child actors who struggle in becoming mature adults. But music means live performances. Not every song is recorded in a sterile studio. And there isn't a director, yelling "CUT!" There's no Take Two. Too bad. But there ARE parents. Theoretically, anyway. Miley Cyrus seemed to have a built in defense system against the pitfalls of growing up in the music industry as a performer. Her father, Billy Ray, is in the business himself. He's seen some things. Certainly things that he'd want to keep his little girl from getting mixed up in. But the parenting has been of the hands off variety in Miley's case, and the...

Can you imagine the world we would live in if we were all judged based on things we said or did when we were young and foolish? Actually, if you are a celebrity, you do live in that world. If we could whip out an instrument, not unlike a defibrillator, and measure what's in Paula Deen's heart at this very moment, then maybe she wouldn't be persona non grata right now. Maybe she wouldn't be hemorrhaging support from her network and from her endorsement clients and she wouldn't be kept away with a ten-foot pole by her on-air colleagues. If we could go into that ticker of Deen's and find out whether she is, today, an abhorrent racist Southern belle, wouldn't that be great? Wouldn't it save a lot of angst and hurt feelings if Deen's true views of those of color were as easily determined, were as black and white (no pun intended), as the fact that she, once upon a time, used racial slurs? Deen, fired by Food Network and dropped by Smithfield a...

It was one of the coolest things I ever saw on television, and I was just a wee lad of four years old. Oh, how I loved to watch the Batmobile in the Adam West-ravaged, 1960s TV series, "Batman," leave the Bat Cave. First, there was the firing of the ignition, which always included the stock shot of flames shooting from the Batmobile's exhaust. That was cool, too. But there was something about the black, souped-up 1955 Lincoln Futura zooming from the cave that captivated me. That's because there was this small guard rail that would flip down, enabling the Batmobile to pass through. THAT was the coolest thing. Some things just grab us and don't let go, particularly from our youth. There was something about that guard rail flipping down that I thought was just so awesome in its simple auspiciousness. That image comes to mind as I read that the Batmobile is going up for auction . It'll happen on January 19, 2013, at the Barrett-Jackson auction house ...

I was never a Halloween guy, as a kid. I could take it or leave it as a youngster. Too much effort, I suppose. I never knew what I was going to dress up like, or even if I was going to go door-to-door at all, until sometimes hours before sundown on October 31. One year, I recall, I was particularly tardy with my decision. I was planning on staying in, passing out candy, when I got a phone call from a friend. It was dusk, at the very least, when the phone rang in our Livonia home. "You going baggin'?" was the question. It was my friend, Bob Bernard, who lived a couple blocks away and who I never had gone Trick or Treating with prior to that year. I still don't know what prompted the call. It wasn't that Bob and I weren't friends; we just weren't very close. Certainly not "baggin'" close. Or so I thought. I initially rebuffed his request, but he pressed me. "I don't have a costume," I pleaded. It fell on deaf ears. I h...

There's an episode in one of my favorite TV comedy series of all time, Everybody Loves Raymond , where Ray Barone's dad, Frank, chastises his son for ruining (accidentally) dad's jazz album collection when Raymond was a youngster. Seems Ray moved the albums to make room for his new Hot Wheels car track, received for Christmas. Unfortunately, Raymond moved the albums next to the furnace. You can imagine what happened to them. So Ray tries to make up for the lost music by replacing as many of the albums as he can, with CD versions. He professes to have visited a bunch of independent music stores in his effort to replace the albums. Frank is skeptical of the discs and won't even listen to them, which frustrates Raymond. Finally, Raymond basically forces his dad to listen to the discs by having them in a portable CD player, ready to go, when his parents return from a shopping trip. They enter the home, Raymond hits the remote button, and the jazz fills the house, loudly...

Clara Peller was a retired manicurist who found fame after the age of 80, in early 1984, when she barked out three words that became a national catch phrase. Then the phenomenon dovetailed into the 1984 presidential campaign, and Clara enjoyed a new wave of popularity. You never know who will be plucked from obscurity or the recesses of our consciousness when it's an election year. In 1984 it was Peller, who famously and angrily asked, "Where's the beef?' in a Wendy's commercial mocking competitors who rely on big buns and not-so-big hamburger patties. It didn't take long before we were all saying, "Where's the beef?" in a variety of situations. It started on TV, of course, and then filtered its way to the water coolers and barber shops. The commercial hit the airwaves in January, 1984 and a few months later it got a second jolt of awareness when, in the Democratic presidential primaries, Walter Mondale used the catch phrase as a way of at...

It's one of the best snapshots taken of Jimmy Hoffa. The photographer was the legendary Tony Spina, the longtime shutterbug for the Detroit Free Press, and when Spina got behind the camera, iconic portraits often happened. It was Spina who captured Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in one of the more enduring photos of the late civil rights leader's life---taken before King was to speak before a crowd at a Grosse Pointe High School. Spina caught King, perhaps in prayer, but certainly reflective, clasped hands near his chin. Dr. King, as seen through the lens of Tony Spina And there's the photo of Hoffa, with the ex-Teamsters president smiling like he doesn't have a care in the world, snapped in front of Hoffa's metro Detroit home. The date was July 24, 1975. It's significant, the photo shoot (which included a few different poses), because less than a week later, Hoffa would leave that metro Detroit home for a lunch meeting and never return. I saw the photo...

The other day, I officially became my father. It's inevitable, they say. One day you'll become your parents. Pop culture is usually the killer. My induction into the Crotchety Old Man Hall of Fame occurred a couple of nights ago. I was in the kitchen and on the TV in the front room was a video of a performer having a tantrum on stage. I couldn't see the video; I could only hear the audio. "I'm not Justin Bieber!" the male voice screamed, followed by some bleeped out expletives. "Who's that?" I called out, because the audio clip was rather shocking. Our 19-year-old daughter answered with what I thought was "Billy Joel." Now, knowing Joel's occasional drinking and drug foibles, and his notorious temper, I thought that made sense. Joel's melted down in the past---on stage and off. "Billy Joel? Really?" I replied, a little knowing chuckle in my voice. "BILLIE JOE, dad!" Now I was confuzzled....

Ever wonder what happened to Winkelman's? Jacobson's? Uniroyal? What about Farmer Jack? Great Scott? A&P? Stroh's? Twin Pines? Pants Galore? Fretter Appliance? Belvedere and Bond-Bilt? New York Carpet World? Highland Appliance? Sanders? Kresge? Cunningham's? Red Barn? Burger Chef? To name a few. And that's just a percentage of the businesses, mostly local, that no longer exist but which I remember in my days growing up in Livonia in the 1970s. I remember the commercials for many of the aforementioned as well. Ollie Fretter promised us a five pound bag of coffee if he couldn't beat our best deal. Mr. Belvedere's phone number was TYler 8-7100. TV newscaster Marilyn Turner did commercials for Carpet Center, flashing her gams. The Highland Appliance spots were legendary, often featuring local (and sometimes national) celebrities. Irving Nussbaum proudly said that New York Carpet World was "the better carpet people." Mel Farr...

We love anniversaries in this country, good, bad or those of infamy. The dates dance around our minds: December 7; November 22; September 11; July 4. Today is another one of those dates. It was 44 years ago today when James Earl Ray took aim and cut down Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. as he stood on a motel balcony in Memphis, TN. There's film footage of U.S. Senator and presidential candidate Robert Kennedy, addressing a crowd and breaking the news to them of Dr. King's assassination. There are audible gasps and cries of anguish heard. Kennedy himself would be murdered about two months later. I suppose the anniversary of Dr. King's murder is as good as time as any to ponder: have things gotten any better, really, in this country when it comes to race relations? Is it mere irony or an indictment on us as a society that April 4 arrives as the nation is still loitering around the water cooler, talking about the February 26 killing of Trayvon Martin? The Martin case would appear ...

What's worse? To be known as a police department rife with buffoons, or one that is complicit with a loose cannon "community watch" volunteer? That's pretty much the choice being offered up to the Sanford (Fla) police department, in the wake of the fallout over the tragic shooting of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin on February 26. The shooter, George Zimmerman, wasn't so much as brought to the police station for questioning, even though he literally held a smoking gun in his hand when police arrived that fateful night. In fact, Zimmerman was allowed to go home with that gun still smoking in his truck, while Trayvon was lying dead on the ground, a gunshot wound to the chest proving fatal. Almost a month after the incident, Zimmerman is still roaming free and the firestorm is spreading more rapidly than a Hollywood rumor. The Sanford police chief, Bill Lee, stepped aside today, albeit "temporarily." This, one day after the city commission voted, 3-2, to render ...

In the wake of the news of Whitney Houston's death, you've heard a lot of folks say that we've lost "the voice." It's true, that Houston, the pop superstar who died at age 48 on Saturday, was an immense talent; certainly the best female voice of her generation. I know I'll get some argument there, but I don't care. The woman could belt it out, and her rendition of the National Anthem at the 1991 Super Bowl was as perfect as that song can be sung. But I squirm a little when "the voice" is discussed as being hushed now in her death, because have we really had Whitney Houston's true voice in recent years? And by recent years, I mean about ten. It's not as if Houston was singing like it was the late-1980s and early-1990s, right? Far from it. I saw a clip of Houston a couple years ago, trying to deliver us those pipes, and to me that was the real tragedy---not what happened Saturday in the Beverly Hills Hilton. Houston's physical form...