Just for the fun of it!

Detroit Emanations, Tponetom.

I am in a favorable position of invulnerability. I cannot be accused or imprisoned or otherwise punished for any of my posts or opinions.

My defense being, I am either too aged, senile, suffering from Alzheimer’s and CRS, or just plain hopelessly addled. ! And if anyone challenges those peculiarities, who really cares? In addition to that attitude, I can only say that ‘sticks and stones may break my bones’ as long as they do not get stuck in my urinary tract.

That being said, I just love this forum and, especially, the people I have encountered.

So, back to the title of this essay. In our kitchen in Detroit, during the Thirties, there was an embroidery hanging on the wall. It said, “Everything I am or ever hope to be, I will owe to my darling mother.” I have to think about that for a minute or two, because:
Ma smoked cigarettes. She played poker. She went to the Hazel Park Race Track to bet on the horses with her sisters. She hosted a coffee clutch every morning in her bath robe and her hair in curlers, for the National Bank’s field agents. They were the people who gave my Dad the work that let us survive. [[Their only option was to go some where else and PAY for the coffee.) But, most important, Ma was always home on every school day of the year, waiting for me, to teach me how to play poker, pinochle, euchre, cribbage and ‘goodness’ will not reveal the other things.

I almost forgot. Ma played the Numbers Racket Game, just like a million other Detroiters. Nearly every neighborhood store owner was an agent or ‘bag man’ for the game.

Just pick 3 numbers from 0 to 9. [[Like 467 or 359.) The payoff was 600 to 1. Most of the bets placed were for one penny, which would win you 6 dollars. If you bet one dollar, the prize would be 600 dollars. That would buy you a new automobile in the Thirties!.

The odds against you were 1000 to one. [[The State Lotto’s do not pay anywhere near that much, percentage wise.)

Those are my first adolescent remembrances, emanating from Detroit.

P. S. I have a story about the Detroit Race Course, circa 1965. It is heartbreaking from the standpoint of 'greed.'