Tales of Detroit

I've only been to Detroit once, in the early 1970s, to visit a friend of mine who was in a special hospital there. He had just come out of a six week coma and we could only visit with him for a few minutes. As luck would have it, my hypothetical wife had some relatives there, so we dropped in on them to make it worth the trip. They lived in a nice neighborhood, but they didn't think it would stay nice for very long and were already working on their exit strategy. We had to drive through the riot torn area on the way to the hospital. It had been a few years since the riots and we didn't encounter any trouble. Every thing was boarded up and we didn't see anybody on the street. My friend was soon released from that hospital and came back to Cheboygan, so we never had another reason to go to Detroit.

Some of the guys I worked with at the paper mill had gone to Detroit to work in the auto plants after they graduated from high school. In those days it was said that Cheboygan's biggest export was high school graduates. Some of them came home when the paper mill re-opened and some other small factories started up. Others moved to the suburbs, raised their families, and came back to Cheboygan when they retired. One guy I knew said that, when he was working in Detroit and still single, he lived in an apartment building that was almost entirely inhabited by Cheboygan exiles. Once a month they would throw a "Cheboygan party" for all the other exiles in the city, but I don't remember him saying how many there were. Another guy I worked with had been born and raised in Detroit and expected to raise his own family there. He said he had held on as long as he could, which proved to be too long, because he had to sell his house at a loss.

Some people blame the decline of the auto plants for the depopulation of Detroit, but others say it was the riots and their aftermath that caused the decline of the auto plants. I seem to remember that competition from the Germans and Japanese had something to do with it as well. I understand that General Motors still has their headquarters there, in some big shiny office building that used to be called the Renaissance Center. They would show a picture of it on the news whenever they were talking about the bailout. I always thought they should have sold the building and moved into something less pretentious before begging Uncle Sam for alms.

More recently, when they were talking about the bankruptcy of Detroit on the news, they would show pictures of the downtown area, which looked pretty prosperous to me. I have also seen pictures of some devastated neighborhoods that looked like they had been bombed in World War II. I wonder why they didn't show those pictures when they were talking about the bankruptcy.

I originally proposed that Michigan expel Detroit from the state long before this bankruptcy thing came up. This was on another site, and I couldn't get any agreement from my esteemed colleagues. They said that they didn't to lose any territory, although I had already pointed out that we don't control that territory anyway. What good is a territory that you can't live in, or even drive through on your way to someplace else? The last guy I heard of that tried it was beaten to within an inch of his life. He had accidently hit a kid and stopped to render assistance like you're supposed to. They didn't say what he was doing in Detroit in the first place. I didn't think that anybody went there anymore.

No deer this year. Old Betsy worked just fine with her taped up stock, but I didn't see anything to shoot at except the target I have set up by the house.