Resurrection Catholic Parish

I went to Resurrection Catholic church / school in the early 50's, took my first communion there. We lived just behind the church, on Dorothy st. It was in Detroit, right near the Hamtramck border.

I remember, on Easter, my dad would carve a pound of butter into a lamb and use black peppercorns as the eyes, take it to church and have it blessed, for some reason. We were taught by nuns. I remember sister Mary Gloria and sister Mary Pia. If you got in trouble, you would be sent to the "Sister Superior" and if you really got in trouble, you'd have to answer to the priest [["Father Banaszak"?) I remember one year my dad helped make props for a school play-- I was a "farmer with a broken shovel," which was a shovel with a hinge in the handle. The point of that quite escapes me now, but no doubt there was one.


Some surnames I remember from the neighborhood were, Pillar, Lejack, Rys, Blazinski. It was a mostly Polish neighborhood, with a few Italians, French, and, as my parents called them, "hillbillies" and "hunkies". Over the decades, the demographics shifted, and the church is now some kind of mosque and Islamic school. Nobody saw that coming at the time-- people expected blacks to move in, if anything, but it was not to go that way. As Casey Stengel said, "Never make predictions, especially about the future."