5000 Ways You know You’re from Detroit - DetroitYES interview with the authors
5,000 Ways You Know You're From Detroit by Chris Edwards [long-time DetroitYES member] & Elaine Weeks is an exciting and comprehensive picture-filled book [1400 images!] chronicling Detroit from the baby-boomer era forward. It is clearly the most extensive pictorial-historic book about Detroit I have ever seen. For purchase details, with a special 20% off DetroitYES discount code, see details at the bottom of this interview.
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Elaine and Chris are Windsor-based publishers and a wife/husband team, renowned and well-established for several Windsor-themed historical publications, whose knowledge, as this extensive volume clearly displays, extends north of the border to Detroit.
DetroitYES: One of the things that comes through clearly in your book is an undeniable fascination and love for Detroit. Tell us how this evolved from your background and how you came to know so much about Detroit and, indeed, our common international metropolis.
Chris: Growing up in Windsor as Baby Boomers, for all practical purposes we were living in a Detroit suburb. My formative years involved hanging out with Detroiters at my family’s cottage outside of Windsor on Lake Erie. They became close friends so during my teen years I spent as much time as I could across the strait in Detroit. Windsor was just a hick town to us – Detroit was action central. The live music scene in the seventies was a huge draw, and while I was too young for the Grande Ballroom years, my friends and I made up for it by frequenting every other venue. You could easily catch bus from downtown to downtown for 35 cents. We always joked it was the cheapest ticket out of town! Once I got our first set of wheels, me and my Windsor pals would drive all over Detroit in search of excitement. It was a very heady time!
Elaine: Other than trips to Greenfield Village, the Detroit Zoo, Hudson’s and maybe catching the Boblo Boat at the foot of Woodward once or twice, I rarely went to Detroit when I was growing up. It wasn’t until I met Chris when I was 23 that I started to explore the city; in fact, our first date was at P’Jazz at the Pontchartrain. I got a t-shirt a couple of years later and I still have it! [[Look for a pic of me wearing it in the book.) Chris also introduced me to the Tigers and delights of Mexican Town; afterwards he would show me the sights – the neighborhoods of Detroit, good and bad. This was in the early 1980s; not only was I amazed at how the heck he knew where he was going, I was stunned by the ruins. We took lots of photos, but unfortunately, we’ve lost track of them.
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Chris: A few years after Elaine and I got married, we moved away from this region and didn’t return for eight years. Coming back to Windsor in 1998 with our two kids, we soon launched a history and current events periodical called “The Walkerville Times” – our town Walkerville was founded by a Detroiter [[by way of Massachusetts): Hiram Walker. Then we discovered the architect Albert Kahn who launched his career here in Walkerville. We came upon Lowell’s “The Fabulous Ruins of Detroit” website early on as well and that opened up a lot of interest in Detroit’s built history.
Sixty-one editions of The Walkerville Times and a bunch of books later, we decided it was time to write an epic story about Detroit from 1939-1980. It is not what we had in mind when we moved back in ’98, but as John Lennon put it: “Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making plans.”
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DetroitYES: Tell us how the idea for this book originated and why you chose the focus [from the baby-boomer years forward] that you did.
Elaine: We noticed how much people enjoyed post-WW2 photos and stories. Although fascinated by our archival images from long ago, they sometimes just couldn’t relate to many of the images – too much time had passed and hundreds of really old buildings had been demolished. So in 2012 we released “500 Ways You Know You’re From Windsor”, which covered the years post-WW2 in Windsor [[and there were many Detroit memories in it too). It was a romp through the baby boomer years with lots of photographs, short stories and anecdotes. The book was very well received, in fact, it went double gold in Canada, which took us by surprise, but it was very gratifying to see how people responded to that particular “wayback machine”!
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Chris: After writing and publishing three more books on Windsor, we felt it might be time to finally attempt a photo book on Detroit. We had in mind something like we had done for Windsor with the “500 Ways” and when we searched for books on Detroit’s Baby Boomer years, we were surprised to discover that while there had been many chapters written about specific boomer stories [[Hudsons, Vernors etc.), no one had focused full attention on that era of Detroit. This revelation emboldened us to move forward with the project.
The scale of the project was a bit daunting – Detroit is such a huge canvas, and we had to determine how to get our arms around the story, as we knew it could easily grow into something too big and unmanageable – there is just so much history! We used The Detroit Almanac as our guide, then spent hundreds of hours combing though online and traditional archives.
We then mapped out the story from the end of the Great Depression when Detroit was smacked down hard, which led to the advent of World War2 and the Arsenal of Democracy. Those events set the stage for the Baby Boomer phenomenon after WW2, which some have labeled Detroit’s Golden Years. The checklist kept growing!
We enlisted the help of numerous Detroit contributors as well; almost without exception everyone we approached agreed to contribute to the project. In the end we culled more than 5,000 images to just over 1,400 photos, 480 pages of Detroit’s incredible baby boomer years.
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DetroitYES: What is your first memory of Detroit?
Chris: There were six kids in my family. My parents would drag us over to visit relatives out by the Detroit airport and then take us shopping. We would wear all the layers of clothes they bought us when we drove through customs on the way home; it was my introduction to border smuggling, which is a time-honored tradition in these parts! That and of course going to Tiger Stadium for the first time – I had never seen anything like it!
Elaine: I also had six kids in my family, but as my parents came from Montreal and had no family on the Detroit side, we didn’t go over much at all. Maybe my older siblings did, but didn’t tell me. I would say that waiting in line to see Santa on the 12th floor of Hudson’s is my first real Detroit memory. It was magical, but I don’t actually remember sitting on Santa’s lap. That must have paled in comparison to the wonders of the “North Pole”.
DetroitYES: What is your favorite new Detroit story, event or feature that you discovered during the research for and creation of this work?
Chris: That is a tough one. What emerges from the book is a story of determination and a “can-do” attitude possessed by Detroiters; it’s in their DNA! Time and again we uncovered stories of entrepreneurs and risk takers who changed the course of history. Think about the Arsenal of Democracy: Detroit automakers – fierce competitors who came together to defeat the threat of fascism. The Willow Run story, the role women played during the war, Rosie the Riveter, the B-24 bomber. We had written extensively on Albert Kahn, but his legacy in Detroit is absolutely mind-blowing. We are glad that there suddenly seems to be a lot on interest in him, which is long-overdue.
Elaine: I would also say it was discovering how the blacks were treated in Detroit before WWII and after. We wanted to ensure that their experience during the Boomer years was not regulated to mainly Motown and the riots/uprising of 1967. When we researched what the Baby Boom was like for black Detroiters, it was certainly eye opening to discover why it was primarily a white phenomenon, and that there was virtually no black middle class back in those days, which had a lot to do with the fact that black vets were not allowed to take full advantage of the GI Bill after WWII. And we knew that there was a lot more to what happened in 1967 then met the eye so we decided to research the riots in the 1940s, which basically set the stage for ’67, as things like adequate housing and jobs were never provided and there was so much overt racism. We felt it important to include those stories in the book.
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DetroitYES: Is there anything else you would like to share with the DetroitYES audience?
Chris: Just what a tremendous honor it has been to put this collection together. We consider our works as legacy pieces, so we put a lot of energy and care and attention to detail into all our books. We had considered breaking this book into two volumes but decided instead to launch it as one big, nearly six-pound book. We like to joke that you get a free workout with every copy. We hope it will stand the test of time.
Elaine: I’d like to add that we know that some people, once they discover who we are, might think it’s surprising and maybe kind of odd that people from Canada got it in their heads to do a book like this, let alone managed to pull off such a big volume. The reality is, the Windsor and Detroit region is unique geographically in all of North America. Not only is Windsor [[Canada) south of Detroit, we are the only two foreign cities that are practically within shouting distance of each other. In our “About the Authors” at the end of the book, we didn’t put photos of ourselves; instead we posted a photo I took of Detroit and the river called, “The View from Over Here”.
We are amazed how many people in Windsor have bought this book! But then, anyone who grows up or moves here is acutely aware of the big city next door. They are fascinated by it and all have their own memories of the Motorcity, even if they’ve never been. Anytime Windsorites drive by or walk along the river, Detroit is right there – just a mile away. We virtually live in the shadow of Motown. I wouldn’t say the same is true about how Detroiters think of us, if they think about Windsor at all. We are well aware that Detroiters and other Americans usually say they’re going to Canada, not to Windsor, when they cross the border, and that’s okay. We get it. Windsor is small potatoes, although, we know there are people who will say they came over here to drink because of our lower drinking age or to watch the fireworks over the river in the summer. It’s pretty fascinating that when Cadillac arrived here in 1701 to set up his fort, that was not only the beginnings of Detroit, it was the virtually the dawn of Windsor too. [[Now why Detroit grew so huge and Windsor stayed small is a whole other story.)
And finally, believe it or not, we completed our research, writing, design and layout, and editing in about nine months and printing took another two. [[When Chris and I put our minds to something, we are like machines.)
DetroitYES: How and where can this book be purchased?
Chris: For DetroitYES readers we are pleased to have a special web page where the book will be available for 20% off [[$39.95 vs. $49.95 retail) plus free shipping and handling.
Just go to this page: https://www.detroit5000.com/detroityespromo
And enter this password: detroityes5000
We have also them at booksellers all over town. For retail locations it is best to check our website at Detroit5000.com as we keep adding to the vendor list.
Elaine: I wish we could say they are at Hudson’s!
DetroitYES: Thank you and best wishes with your wonderful book. I would add that Elaine is too modest to mention that her father, Bert Weeks, was a three term Mayor of Windsor and a key player in the development of Windsor’s splendid waterfront.
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5,000 Ways You Know You're From Detroit
by Chris Edwards & Elaine Weeks
1st Edition
480 page/full color
lllustrations: 1,400 color/black and white photos and images
Publisher: Walkerville Publishing Inc.
Dimensions: 12 x 9 x 2 inches
Weight: 5.108 lbs
ISBN: 9781927591116
