Enotes

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...

Was George McGovern the worst presidential candidate to come from the two major parties, in history? You could make a case for it.  Not that any Democrat would have defeated Dick Nixon in 1972, all of the president's dirty tricks notwithstanding.  Yet somehow McGovern, the senator from South Dakota who passed away last week, became the Democrat nominee in '72, when there were better and more appealing men available. It wasn't just that McGovern was more left than a freeway's fast lane shoulder. The times were kinda, sorta, right for a left-winger such as McGovern to run for president. There was the Vietnam War, for one; McGovern was a famous opposer of the war.  But the Democrats didn't need to go so left of center to have a shot against Nixon, even with the war raging on.  Part of the blame could be laid at the feet of Lyndon Johnson. It was LBJ who shocked the nation by not seeking re-election in 1968, after pretty much trouncing the ha...

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 ...

Who doesn't love a good mystery? Whether it's a novel, a movie or a story lifted from a true crime magazine---we love a whodunnit, a "what happened to it," and a "where did it go?" It's coming up on 75 years ago when one of America's---and indeed the world's---greatest mysteries was born. Amelia Earhart, the beloved female aviator, went missing on July 2, 1937, somewhere in the South Pacific. Her plane crashed, and that's pretty much all we've known for three quarters of a century. Now there may be some sort of closure on the horizon, though it would be wise not to get your hopes raised too high. This summer, the U.S. Government, with the help of $500,000 provided by The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery, will focus on the remote island of Nikumaroro, in what is now the Pacific nation of Kiribati. There, they hope to use state-of-the-art equipment and technology to locate the remains of Earhart, her navigator Fred Noona...

I've been stuck in a time warp, yet again. Those who've dared to view this space to see what I'm blathering about now, know that I tend to enjoy living in the past. Well, is the present so nifty? My latest jag is to point my browser to YouTube and start searching for old commercials---beer, food, even cigarettes. I'm talking REALLY old commercials, circa the 1950s and '60s, mostly in black-and-white. The commercials of those days were typically no less than 60 seconds, and sometimes longer. They weren't filled with eye-popping special effects or talking babies or scores of beautiful young people breaking into an impromptu party just because one of them popped open a cooler of light beer. The commercials that I've been fixed on show a simpler time, when a cold beer was something enjoyed by well-dressed couples inside a spiffy tavern, served by well-dressed waiters and drawn by well-dressed bartenders. It was a time when little kids ran home to partake in Bee...

It has often been the M.O. of the American assassin to not have much of an exit strategy---no real end game beyond committing the act itself. Leon Czolgosz had absolutely no chance of escape following the murder of President McKinley in 1901. Same with Charles Guiteau, killer of President Garfield 20 years earlier. Witness the random, aimless meanderings of Lee Harvey Oswald following the shooting of President Kennedy, when he couldn't even get out of town despite the chaos within it. There was one exception, however. One hundred and forty-six years ago Thursday, actor and miscreant John Wilkes Booth sneaked into the suite of President Abraham Lincoln in Washington's Ford's Theater and shot him point blank in the back of the skull. Booth's mission was accomplished; Lincoln was mortally wounded and he would die several hours later. Beyond that, Booth knew what he wanted to do---get out of Dodge, and fast. After pulling the trigger of his pistol, Booth leaped from the s...

I wasn't around when it started, but I have a feeling that the Hollywood Walk of Fame's original intent was to be a big deal. The HWOF was established in 1958 and to date includes over 2,400 stars that are laid on both sides of a 15-block stretch of Hollywood Boulevard and three blocks of Vine Street in Hollywood. It attracts over 10 million visitors annually, according to Wikipedia . So by that definition, the HWOF is a big deal. But it's a big deal as a spectacle, not so much for its Hall of Fame chops. It used to be that to get a star on the HWOF, you had to be among the industry's giants. But for years, pretty much any Tom, Dick or Harry in the entertainment biz is getting his or her due, in the form of those five-pointed terrazzo and brass stars. The Hollywood Chamber of Commerce decides who should get a star, and they've been doing so at breakneck speed in recent years. As a result, whenever I hear of another person getting a star, the news is usually met by ...

Whatever one thinks of Ronald Reagan, I submit this without too much fear of contradiction. He was a much better president than he was an actor. That's about as far as I'll go, and as far as a lot of other people will go. There are many others, as you know, who'll go much further than that. The Gipper's 100th birthday is almost upon us. Reagan was born on February 6, 1911. He was 69 when he was elected president in 1980, and almost 70 when he took the oath of office. Reagan was among the eldest of presidents, on the cusp of turning 78 when he gave way to George Bush I. I feel bad for the Reagan legacy, no matter what you think of it, because those who are enamored of him have unwittingly cheapened it by going overboard with their exultation. The pro-Reagan zealots want everything to be named after him, and then some. They want him on currency. They want him added to Mt. Rushmore. And that's just the beginning. All this does is make the fence-sitters and the anti-Rea...

In the days leading up to President John Kennedy's fateful trip to Dallas in November, 1963, it would seem that, by today's standards, all the wrong things were done---if you wanted to keep a president alive, that is. Maps of Kennedy's motorcade route through the city were published on the front page of the local newspapers. The "bubble top" of his limousine was removed, so people could more easily see him---and shoot him. All this in a part of the country where he wasn't exactly a native son. Can you imagine such egregious decisions being made today? Of course not. Today, presidents can bug in and out of town in almost stealth-like fashion, compared to JFK's Texas trip in 1963. Often, news of the president's impending visit doesn't hit the papers until the day before or even the day of the visit. And those stories certainly wouldn't publish the president's planned route from stop to stop. But it wasn't as if Kennedy's peril didn...

Vice President John Engler? It almost was, according to a recently published memoir from former President George W. Bush. Bush, in "Decision Points," writes that the former Michigan governor was among nine finalists for the Veep nomination in 2000. Engler, Bush says, was one of four current and former governors considered for the ticket, joining Oklahoma's Frank Keating, Pennsylvania's Tom Ridge, and Lamar Alexander of Tennessee. But among those four, the top two candidates were Engler and Keating. "I knew I could work well with either one," Bush writes. If that had happened---Engler as Bush's vice president---how would that have changed the political landscape in the Mitten State? John Engler as U.S. Vice President? Not as far-fetched as you might think The 2000 presidential campaign occurred right smack in the middle of Engler's third term as Michigan's governor (this was pre-term limits). Had Engler joined the ticket, he would have left for Wa...

I hear them now on the radio and I can practically recall what they looked like in their physical form. Record labels called Capitol, A&M, Columbia and Mercury. They were my 45 records and I had a bunch of them. I hear the songs now and I smile to myself. Suddenly I remember what they looked like, spinning on the turntable---with the yellow plastic thingie in the middle so the disc can play on the narrow spindle of your parents' stereo. The list comes to mind now. "Kung Fu Fighting" by Carl Douglas, who should be inducted into the One-Hit Wonder Hall of Fame. "Fire" by the Ohio Players. "Philadelphia Freedom" by Elton John. Plus tons of tunes by the likes of The Monkees, Stevie Wonder, the Brothers Johnson, Barry White, and Neil Diamond. Can't forget the novelty songs, such as "Shaving Cream" by Benny Bell, and "Earache My Eye" by Cheech and Chong. I can just about see the labels in my mind---their color, the logos, even the...

The 41-year-old explorer obsessed with finding a western route to Asia struck land 518 years ago today, believing that he'd accomplished his goal. He hadn't, but that's OK; he accomplished much more. Christopher Columbus, the Italian from Genoa, was born to be a seaman. He started at a very young age and eventually became a maritime entrepreneur. It wasn't much longer before he was brimming with how delectable it would be to head west and end up in China, India, and the gold and spice islands of Asia. Because of the Ottoman Empire's barricades of both land and sea, the route to Asia via Egypt and the Red Sea was closed off to Europeans. That left Columbus with only one direction to his white whale of destinations: west. Columbus and others of his ilk had no idea that the Pacific Ocean even existed, so when he struck land with his fleet of three ships (Nina, Pinta, Santa Maria) on October 12, 1492---a little over two months after departing from Palos, Spain on August...

Bernard Schwartz was a Bronx kid spawned by Hungarian Jews, his mother a diagnosed schizophrenic. He didn't even learn to speak English right away---Hungarian was his first and only language until age six. He was inspired by the actor Cary Grant, even enlisting in the U.S. Navy because he marveled at Grant in the film "Destination Tokyo." Bernard Schwartz was further inspired by Grant to pursue acting, and went to Hollywood mainly for the girls and the money more than for the craft. It was on the Left Coast, in 1948, when Schwartz borrowed a first name from the novel "Anthony Adverse" and a version of the surname Kurtz from his mother's family and became, just like that, Tony Curtis. In his younger days in film, Curtis was a raven-haired ladies man with beveling eyes and a slight pout. The Bronx accent never left him. Curtis played the ladies man on film and in real life. He was married six times, and infidelity played a role in the breakup of his first, to ...

Somewhere, way upstairs, Forrest Pitcher will be smiling on October 9. Mr. Pitcher was my grandfather and he passed away on April 30, 2005 at the age of 96. Just six months prior to his passing, he had to endure the heartache of his adored Yankee Air Museum in Willow Run being ravaged by fire. The date was October 9, 2004, and the museum's hangar caught on fire, destroying eight aircraft and thousands of artifacts, along with tools. While most of the museum's collection survived, the fire essentially put an end to the tours and day-to-day operations. That's where my grandfather comes in. Forrest Pitcher, well into his 90s, conducted guided tours of the museum. I took my family on one such jaunt not long before the fire, and what a treat it was---not only to see the museum's unbelievable collection of air and military history, but to be guided by my grandfather and our daughter's great-grandfather. On October 9, the Yankee Air Museum will re-open to the public---six ...

Thirty-six years ago, the worst song of all time reached #1 on the Billboard charts. That sounds like opinion, but it's almost morphed into fact. The poll was conducted by CNN in 2006. The winner (loser?) was Paul Anka's ode to his expectant wife, "(You're) Having My Baby," which found itself on the top of the charts on this day in 1974. Anka, whose songwriting prowess cannot be denied, penned a stinker when he wrote "YHMB," which was written in celebration of the impending birth of Anka and his wife's fifth child. Anka wrote the song while appearing at Lake Tahoe. At the suggestion of United Artists recording executive Bob Skaff, Anka was asked to change the song from a solo effort to a duet with virtually unknown vocalist Odia Coates, who made the mistake of being present in the studio when the song was about to be recorded. Anka took a lot of abuse from women's rights activists, who saw the lyrics and the spirit of the "YHMB" to be h...

The spot is marked with a round metal plate, embedded in the cement on the doorstep of the University of Michigan Student Union. It was there, nearly 50 years ago (gulp), where presidential candidate John F. Kennedy stood and delivered a speech late in the evening of October 14, 1960. There were only a few weeks to go before the election. And Kennedy was tired and haggard after whirlwind campaigning. But he wasn't too tired to go public for the first time with his vision of an organization that would encourage recent college grads to serve their country overseas as voluntary missionaries. It was called the Peace Corps, and JFK first stumped for it while in Ann Arbor, running a neck-and-neck race with Vice President Richard Nixon. There's doubts that Kennedy was the very first individual to concoct the premise of the Peace Corps, a volunteer program run by the Federal Government. Minnesota Senator Hubert Humphrey, for example, introduced a bill in 1957 that would have establishe...

We're doing all the wrong things in our cars nowadays. We're texting, talking on the phone, shaving, putting on makeup. Driving falls somewhere in the middle of the pack. I like what we used to do in our cars---like eating (when the car is parked) and watching movies with speakers hanging on the windows. The Woodward Dream Cruise is this weekend, so it's impossible not to turn on the wayback machine. They ran rampant in the 1950s and '60s---drive-ins of both food and cinema. Woodward was one of the main providers of the greasy spoons at which you'd park and a gum-chewing, sassy girl would take your order. Maybe she was on roller skates. But other main thoroughfares were drive-in havens: Gratiot, Groesbeck, Jefferson. Now, all you can muster for a drive-in food fix is the occasional A&W or the newish Sonic locations. If you wanted dinner AND a movie, you could do that in your car as well; but the drive-in theaters are pretty much gone, too. I missed the cruising ...

The only thing we know for certain about Jimmy Hoffa's fate is that he's dead. The former Teamsters union leader and jailbird disappeared 35 years ago this Friday, and was probably dead hours later, if that. You've heard the rumors, the speculation, the jokes, about what became of Hoffa after he pulled into the parking lot of the Machus Red Fox restaurant on Telegraph and Maple in Bloomfield Hills on July 30, 1975. For days and weeks afterward, though, there was still hope that Hoffa would be found. Likely, though, Hoffa was murdered moments after hopping into a car to go visit mob bosses. Hoffa was about to take control of the Teamsters once more. At least, that was his hope, after serving jail time for racketeering and other charges. According to the most reliable accounts, Hoffa thought he was meeting mobsters Tony Provenzano (of New York/New Jersey) and Tony Giacolone (of Detroit) when he went to the Machus Red Fox. Police later found Hoffa's car in the parking lot ...

The smoking gun document leaked out, and its words were damning for the words' originator. The President of the United States, no less, was being called out by a powerful general for having a different sort of wartime strategy than the general would prefer. If the president's path was taken, the words said, then the ramifications could be dire. The president, after huddling with his Defense Secretary and the Joint Chiefs, rendered a decision: the general would have to be replaced. Because no one calls out the Commander in Chief on military matters, especially during wartime. And that's how it came to be that Harry S. Truman fired General Douglas MacArthur. If you had Stanley McChrystal's name on the brain, you're forgiven. But it's another example of the adage: if you stick around long enough, you're liable to see history repeat itself. The Korean War was the conflict in 1951, when much-decorated General MacArthur, commander of the forces defending South Kor...

Whatever you think of unions, this one can't go unacknowledged. The UAW turns 75 this month. It's true. The United Auto Workers union was founded in Detroit in May 1935. It was first born under the auspices of the American Federation of Labor (AFL). Seems that the AFL's focus was primarily on craft unions at the time, and some within were getting restless. Then union leader John L. Lewis, at the AFL's 1935 convention, created a splinter group of industrial unions and called it the Committee for Industrial Organization---the original CIO. After just one year, the AFL suspended the unions within the CIO, so Lewis and his people---including the new UAW---formed the "new" CIO, the Congress of Industrial Organizations. It wouldn't be until 1955 when the CIO would rejoin with the AFL, forming the aptly named AFL-CIO. But back to the UAW. The UAW was one of the first major unions that was willing to organize African-American workers, which is no surprise when you...