If I could choose, I would have been one of the chosen.
Jesse Jackson is coming here today, to speak out about "Predatory Lending" and the associated home foreclosure crisis.
Hearing this brought back a few memories, some are connected to my ex who I have not written about before. I spent seven years in a relationship that was, among other things, always volatile, stimulating and turbulent. And that brought me close, almost "family", to a culture that was somewhere I felt at home, and would probably chose to be born to if I hadn't been born in my Italian-American family.
When I was young, there was a frizzy dark haired girl with ethnic features who used to frequently step on my foot and tease me in the first and second grade when I attended public school. I still have the class pictures from those years, and only realized later that she was Jewish, back then I only knew that I felt both attraction and confused about her. As a good little Catholic boy who lived in an isolated area without many nearby houses or children, what little I knew about Jews came from television, mostly the smart and quick comedians on the old reruns like Carl Reiner and Morey Amsterdam. The movie "The Diary of Anne Frank" also made a big impression on me as a child along with the explanation my mother told me of how ugly anti-semitism had been. "Exodus", "Trial at Nueremberg" and other WWII movies convinced me that these people who were both in some ways different from "white bread America" and were hated and oppressed by the authoritarians and aggressors of the world, were a people I identified with. But spending most of my years in Catholic schools in a mid western city I didn't meet many Jewish friends. The few I did meet in my odd years in public school were so "mid-westernized" from their isolation here that they were less different from the Michigan WASP norm than my Italian relatives were.
Around age 12 I started going into Detroit frequently with my father, and as we drove down the Lodge Freeway he sometimes solemnly pointed out the modernistic looking synagogue where just a few years before a Rabbi had been shot in front of his congregation. I could sense how much that death upset him. My dad had grown up in a small industrial town that was a true ethnic melting pot, in an era when the assimilation of just off the boat immigrants, boys straight from the farm and rural blacks fresh from the Southern Delta was not a certainty. People were drawn there by the booming industrial jobs available and the related businesses to serve them. There were first generation Russians and other Eastern Europeans, Poles, Slavs, Turks, Greeks, Gypsies, Germans, Fins, Irish and others all speaking their native languages at home and observing some of their ethnic customs. (An aside - my dad would sometimes tell me how he worked at age 5 for a local vendor who drove a horse drawn wagon selling ice cream to the local kids, he had a large brass hand-held bell that he rang to alert his potential customers. My dad was sometimes allowed to ring the bell, which he loved doing, and other times ran back and forth from the wagon selling the ice cream. The proprietor was a Greek man who had a name that my dad had only known as "Bowl of crackers" and his pay was usually just some free ice cream. Mr. Bowl-of-Crackers liked to chew on raw garlic and was never clean shaven, and his fondness for my dad as a little boy lead him to give my dad a "whisker burn" by rubbing his face against my dads face. After my dad's stroke, when he was in his eighties, we met Mr. Bowl-a-cracker's daughter who was quite a bit younger than my dad, at an anniversary party back in his home town. My father told her about his employment for her father, and a few weeks later she sent her father's old brass bell to my dad. It turned out she had married a younger second cousin of my father's and had lived in the area for the preceding 70 some years. This part of the melting pot was garlic flavored and moved at a speed of one horse power.)
In the cauldron of a small town known as the foundry capital of the world, in the midst of the violence of labor organizing, political anarchists, true robber baron industrialists, prohibition fueled entrepreneurs and a more primitive law enforcement and political machinery my father and his schoolmates grew up with an appreciation and respect for a wide variety of different peoples. The city was of a size that all the children went to one school. Many of the black children didn't go to school, they were allowed to and quite a few did, but more chose not to. The biggest foundries were located together in a part of town that soon became surrounded by tar paper shacks where the blacks lived. It was quite common for the hot ash from the foundries to quickly set numbers of those homes on fire, and they were almost as quickly replaced at little cost with more of the same. The rough realities and conflicts that happened there left some impressions on those who grew up back then in that all American city.
My father's best friend from earliest childhood was raised by his grandparents. Carl had been born in Detroit, where his father worked in the distribution of alcohol, during prohibition. As a Sicilian in Detroit at that time, his main competitors were a loosely organized group of young Jewish men known as "The Purple Gang". Law enforcement at that time was little more than another criminal organization, and while in custody at the Wayne County Sheriff’s jail, Carl's father was murdered by the police, requested and paid for by the Purple Gang. Carl bore a lifetime resentment against all Jews as a reaction to his father's murder. Fortunately none of his anger rubbed off on my father.
In the years after prohibition, many of the surviving Purple Gang members and their associates became active in the scrap metal business. In those days of smoke-stack manufacturing many metal products were made by melting down metal, including scrap metal, and pouring the molten mixture into a mold. Those parts were then sold as major components of almost everything imaginable, in a time before plastic was common. To control the supply of scarp metal in a manufacturing area like South East Michigan then was similar to controlling all the oil in the Mid East today. A relatively small number of supply points were "controlled" by a small number of people who were not above manipulating the market of such a critical ingredient to all industry.
Carl married the daughter of a former prohibition era liquor importer and distributor who had no sons, but who had three daughters. All three son in laws went on to careers that were chosen by their father in law and that could be considered "mixed blessings". He was also prominently involved in a type of labor relations of that time, which involved providing services to the "Captains of Industry" to keep labor unions from organizing their employees. At that time the majority of efforts on both sides of union organizing was little more than well armed small scale warfare. As a reward and enticement the father in law gained the scrap metal contracts for these factories, once again pitting the Sicilian anti-union army against their old adversary, the remnants of the Jewish bootlegging gangs. Many of these contracts were placed in the name of the older bootleggers very young son in law, my father's best friend Carl. For several years there was a standing "contract" on Carl's life issued by the now aging Purple Gang turned scrap metal competitors, and several attempts on his father in laws life were made, one of which resulted in a nasty explosion when starting his car one morning. A few years after surviving that incident with one less leg, the now elderly bootlegger retired to a nursing home, and soon after his son in law sold his interests in Detroit and retired to a golf course in Southern Florida. His life long hatred of the Jews survived though, even as he shared his final years in the same neighborhoods and restaurants around Miami that were also popular with the survivors of the wars of industrial Detroit, and other recently war torn places.
My father was unaffected by most of this. He had many friends of all backgrounds and persuasions, and shared some special close friendships with some Jewish business friends and lawyers, many of whom had both a physical resemblance and many common attributes to my father. I have observed these shared cultural similarities between Italians and Jews; a love of and importance placed on food and the sharing and enjoyment of food (with lots of onions and garlic), love of family and an almost clannishness and special protectiveness for "our own", a high value on and encouragement for education, pressure and encouragement to succeed in career, and of course the stereotype mother provided worry and guilt, just in case we don't have enough stress and worry on our own.
So when I met my ex, during those first days of discovery of each other, I began to feel a closeness to her Southfield Jewish culture that resonated with me in many ways. I had been involved in the golf business and had worked at the Doral in Miami a few years before. It turned out her family often went to the Doral, and her father and brother knew and golfed with some of the former Detroiters I knew who lived at the Doral and they all enjoyed betting heavily on their golf games, as well as on other "games of chance and sport". Some latter time I will write more about the Doral, but to get an impression of what it was about at that time I'll just say the owners of record were a Jewish family from New York who had been bootleggers 40 years prior, it was financed by the Teamsters Central States Pension Fund as were most of the casinos in Las Vegas at that time, and the only cars allowed to park in front of the main building were not the "owner's" but some New York and New Jersey Sicilian-Americans. With the added frequent presence of lots of "heavy hitter" right wing Cubans this was a melting pot with a very different flavor.
My ex's father had a brilliant mind, but was self destructive and unusual to an extreme. When the army gave millions of American soldiers the first wide spread IQ tests, they selected the top scorers for military intelligence, the best of them were later picked to create the OSS, predecessor to the CIA. Their dad was chosen for OSS, and was at the liberation of the Bergen Belsen concentration camp. Even as a successful doctor owning his own practice, he was an unfulfilled and unsettled man, seemingly drawn to a dark side within. His attraction to gambling and other high risk activities and the "underworld" associated with that eventually ended their marriage and his career.
I did like the subtle humor they would often weave into otherwise heated arguments about politics and other issues of the day. Having grown up in a neighborhood and city (12 Mile and Lahser, city of Southfield) that in the 1960's and 70's was almost exclusively Jewish (I believe I've read it was around 85% in those years) they had a perspective and attitude that was refreshingly different. Many of my father's friends shared that "in your face" vitality and enthusiasm that offended many unprepared goyem. My family sometimes had loud, emotional discussions, but not as confrontational as this family would get over some minor story in the paper or even just a movie they had seen. And just as quickly as the tempers and voices had risen, they would drop their argument and go on to another topic, with no hurt feelings.
The father liked to toy with me at their family dinners, sensing my discomfort. I was running a hotel at the time I attended a dinner at their house for the High Holidays with a friend of mine who had worked at my hotel while at MSU, their father waited for a moment when the rest of the family was gone and calmly told us that his first homosexual experience was with a hotel employee. At the time I was shocked beyond words, my deviant sexual activities with his daughter were something that made me keep all conversation very far away from any sexual topics around him. And here was the dad telling us he had gay sex? I was in no way able to even begin to contemplate what he was trying to say, I think I believed him, I just didn't want him to talk about sex in any manner. It was only later that I realized what this was, a subtle insult aimed at both of us - hotel employees were gay, hahaha. And knowing that my friend's father was supposedly the "head" of organized gambling in Detroit made his poke at us that much sweeter; he just called the grandson of the leader of the Sicilian bootleggers a "faggot" to his face, enjoyed our puzzled shock, smiled and went on with his dinner.
When my ex first introduced me to her brother, I was impressed by his quick wit, sharp mind and aggressiveness. This was a family of early achievers, she had taught herself to read at age 3, and finished her undergrad in 3 years. She worked on some grad programs at U of M, in addition to some wasted years of foolishness in a relationship with me. Two sisters were doctors. Her brother was one year younger, in high school he had taken $500 and turned it in a few months in the commodity market into $25,000. He let his broker trade it for two weeks while he went on spring vacation and came back to almost nothing. When I first met him he was still just a tall and very skinny kid. While at Wayne State he worked out with a passion and was on the rowing team. I sometimes wondered what it was like to see the sun rise from those thin fragile boats while skimming along the water, what was the view from the river looking at the oldest streets of Detroit from the RenCen to Belle Isle, past the old East Side neighborhoods where his parents and grandparents had once lived. When she started law school at Wayne State, her brother followed her, enrolling the next year.
As I read today about Jesse Jackson visiting my home town, I think back to my almost adopted Jewish family, sitting at their dinner table in the 80's discussing the social and political issues of the day. I remember them making fun of Jesse Jackson and his gullible followers along with other easily mocked schwartzes from that time. Their mom had grown up on the east side of Detroit, back when those neighborhoods were primarily occupied by Jews and Italians. She spent 30 plus years teaching at Central High School, which she had attended as a teenager, and which was almost exclusively black during her years teaching there. A tough little lady hidden beneath a soft spoken petite exterior, she actually commanded the respect of her students and was genuinely admired by many of them. The respect however, was not reciprocal. Sociology teaches us that the ethnic groups that have been discriminated against are the most prone to discriminate against others. Although all college educated, liberal and socially conscientious democrats, the family was fairly critical and unsympathetic towards "the schwartzies". It was an unsettling scene to me when I would drive in those comfortable Southfield neighborhoods in the late afternoon and see groups of heavy set black women every block or so standing at bus stop signs that seemed so out of place in an upper class subdivision. They were waiting to be taken back to their homes in the city after cleaning the homes in those Southfield neighborhoods which were in the early 80's, still predominantly Jewish.
These Jewish transplants from the east side of Detroit didn't invent ethnic or color based segregation and subjugation anymore than the owners of the Albion foundries had. In fact in 1959 when some of those Southfield streets were just being plotted my father's friend William Bufalino was in court suing the Grosse Pointe Property Owners Association over their "point system" which rated any prospective home buyer, including himself, on a scale that included accent, descent and "swarthiness". To be granted permission to move into Grosse Pointe the applicant was judged on a sliding scale, Greeks only needed a score of 65 points, Italians had to get 75 or better and Jews needed 85 points or more. Do I need to say that Blacks were not allowed to apply at all? Does anyone not know that right now Metro Detroit is the most segregated metropolitan area in the country?
In the last months before his death, Reverend Martin Luther King had a different, larger vision of the problems in America. He was looking beyond color, beyond north south divisions, at more fundamental problems in the structure and nature of power and wealth in our society. It was playing out in the War in Viet Nam where the sacrifices were so unfairly proportioned, in cities where frustration and hopelessness brought the residents to destroy and burn their own neighborhoods, in the political process that was being cynically manipulated with racial fears disguised as "law and order" by callously dishonest candidates who claimed to represent the American Traditions of a silent (read - white and scared) majority and in the ongoing struggles of workers still fighting to unionize, the cause that brought him to Memphis where he was killed. Revolution was more than just a song lyric in 1968, and there were people in his own organization who argued for violence. Jesse Jackson was still a young man when he went to Memphis with Rev. King that June.
I'm sure, like all of us, he has changed and grown as he has gotten older.
As much as I love Detroit, as much time as I've spent there and the fond and sometimes conflicted feelings that I have about my experiences there, I don't go into the city very often anymore. But a few years ago I was there and did pick up a copy of the local rag "Metro Times" that just happened to have a cover story on predatory lending and the effect it was already having on Detroit homeowners who were losing their homes after financing them with the suddenly easy to get new types of mortgages. The bad guys in their story were Detroit area lenders, offering what we now know to call "sub prime" loans to low income, financially uneducated, mostly black inner city homeowners. And the magazines primary "villain" was the giant of these lenders, appropriately named the "Loan Giant". One detail I remember from the story gives an indication of the amount of business they were doing; it reported they were spending over $300,000 per month on advertising in Metro Detroit. The main partner and driving force was none other than my ex's little brother, now a grown up man who had started the company along with another boy I recognized as his old best friend from high school.
I actually voted for Jesse Jackson when in 1988 as a presidential candidate he won the Michigan primary. I liked the idea that an in your face black man would shake things up some, put a new slant on the party platform as he revitalized a population that had turned off to all politics. Of course I knew he'd never get the nomination, let alone have a chance of being elected being a black man in America. It was only 20 years before, in 1968 that the winner of the Michigan primary was George Wallace.
And now 20 years later going into the 2008 campaign, the popular complaint against the leading candidate is that he is not black enough.
Who would have ever thought that in 1988?
Not me, and not my old friend the Loan Giant, enemy of the Detroit black home owner,
who once mocked the Reverend Jesse Jackson over dinner.
Hours after Rev. King was killed, Robert Kennedy was about to speak to a crowd in a black urban neighborhood who had not yet heard of his death. Here are some excerpts of what Kennedy said that night.
"Martin Luther King dedicated his life to love and to justice between fellow human beings. He died in the cause of that effort. In this difficult day, in this difficult time for the United States, it's perhaps well to ask what kind of a nation we are and what direction we want to move in. For those of you who are black ... you can be filled with bitterness, and with hatred, and a desire for revenge.
We can move in that direction as a country, in greater polarization - black people amongst blacks, and white amongst whites, filled with hatred toward one another. Or we can make an effort, as Martin Luther King did, to understand and to comprehend, and replace that violence, that stain of bloodshed that has spread across our land, with an effort to understand, compassion and love...
What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence and lawlessness, but is love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or whether they be black...
But the vast majority of white people and the vast majority of black people in this country want to live together, want to improve the quality of our life, and want justice for all human beings that abide in our land...
Let us dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago:
to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world.
Jesse Jackson, Dr Martin Luther King, Rev Ralph David Abernathy
Lorraine Motel, Memphis, Tennessee, April 3 1968.
One day before the assassination
Two months later, on June 5, Robert Kennedy was killed.
Buddy
