The Dinosaur Days of Detroit! Tponetom

[tponetom]

http://atdetroit.net/forum/messages/...tml?1183950527

Just another re-run. Originated, June 25, 2007. My Post # 8.

I am no longer able to write the way I like to write, so I slosh around in the archives.

Warning! There are 14 pages of single spacing. It may take 30 minutes or so to read.

I think more than a few members who replied to this post, are somewhat retired. Sad.

[Maof]

tom, please continue to share your memories. im sure many would like to hear them no matter how you write them. now, on to your archives

[gazhekwe]

Hi, Tom! Who knows? You may invent a whole new way of writing that we can all look forward to. Best to you and Peggy!

[Bobl]

Best wishes to you and Peggy! I don't check in here as much as before, but always look for your posts when I do.

Peace.

[mikefmich]

Hey Tom! Good to "see" you again. Just noted on that old thread where you lived. My ma and grandma had a zillion cousins right in your backyard. I'd wager you probably knew a few of them while you were growing up.

[tponetom]

Mike,
There are 3 other forum members who had 'family' just 2 or 3 blocks away from our home on McClellan.
Give me a few 'surnames' and I will respond.

[marshamusic]

Sir, your writing, that I have seen thus far in the link, is very beautiful. Where is the rest? For I wish that I might read more, as you have a lyrical and humorous way of telling the stories of your youth, the tales of a Detroit that most on this board are too young to know. Interestingly, you are not unaware of the existence of others in your Detroit of old; Blacks, Jews, etc. and therefore do not erase us from your narrative on the city, as many do. You also convey, in human terms, the sheer will of Detroiters in the industrial days - the lack and privation of the post-depression years and the building towards the middle-class affluence for which Detroit led the way.

I am new here, and I am a tale-teller, too. You have been a gift of this forum to me; your remembrances of the minutiae of daily life in times long-gone is so instructive. Hopefully they can and will be gathered into a book of some sort, for the ages - I can just see it selling at the Pure Detroit stores. God Bless you.

[tponetom]

M & M,
Thank you for your kind words. You may [[or may not) enjoy the following:

Afro-American Tom Trotter & tponetom

My files, records, dates and postings are a kaleidoscope. I may have posted this story once or more times, and I beg your indulgence. As some of you know, I suffer from Dementia, Senility, Alzheimers and CRS. In any event I did re-edit this story.
[[Just a noteWas Racism alive and well in Detroit in 1939? Oh boy, you bet.
I lived in Detroit from 1928 through1973 and then worked in Detroit until 1987.
In 1939, at the age of 9, I got whacked by a car and wound up in the East Side General Hospital which was located near Cadillac and Kercheval or thereabouts. My left leg was put in a plaster cast from my ankle up to the bottom of my rib cage and the cast encircled my lower torso. All one piece. In the summer of that year, before my accident, my father hired a colored man as a part time laborer in his fledgling plumbing business, much to the consternation of our all white neighbors. Dad was not too popular in our neighborhood. [[Years later I would go through my Dad’s records and see that Tom averaged about 20 hours a week that got him ten dollars. Don’t assume that ten dollars were ‘slave’ wages in the 1930's.)

Tom Trotter, 30 something, was a congenial gentleman. He would smile at the not so kind remarks that he heard as he approached my father's plumbing shop which was nothing more than the garage behind our house. Tom was hired to do some of the heavy labor in dealing with cast iron radiators and cast iron bath tubs and cast iron boiler parts. Max, the 'sheeney man’ [[read, Jewish) was the 'fence' for the resultant scrap. Dad brought the scrap home and dumped it in our backyard with the help of Tom, and then Max would come and load the scrap on his horse drawn wagon with the help of Tom. It was heavy work. At the end of every month, Max would come over to our house with an envelope containing cash in payment for the scrap he had collected. Dad never questioned the poundage or the payment he received from Max. Years later, when I was old enough to comprehend, I asked him about his trusting Max. His reply was simple. "You either trust a person or you eat yourself alive worrying about it all the time.

Tom Trotter did other chores around our house but the one singular job he did, endeared him to all of us. He took care of me.
I came home from the hospital with that damm cast that weighed a thousand pounds, or so it seemed.
Dad was talking to his plumbers in his basement office. I called to my mother that I needed the "bed pan." Trauma set in. My mother was great at anything,,,except blood and poop. She called down to my father who was on the phone with a customer and he told her it would just have to wait. At that moment, Tom spoke up and volunteered to help me with my problem. He came upstairs and into my bedroom. I can still see that smiling face and the gap between his two front teeth. He placed one hand under my body cast and lifted me as though I were a feather and slid the pan under me. He told me that when I was finished he would come in and help me ‘clean’ myself.
Tom was guaranteed six weeks of work just being my friend and companion, helping to wash and feed me, and lifting me out of bed when my mother had to change the bedding.
In retrospect, I think of Tom, never in terms of color, but rather, a person of dignity.
I had asked my father how to address Tom? He said, “Mr. Trotter, just like everyone else.”
Tom stayed with us for a another year until my uncle got him a regular, [[40 hours plus overtime) factory job in 1940.
Tom and Max, the ‘Sheeney Man,’ makes me think of the song in South Pacific, "You have to be taught, carefully taught."

Note: I have heard the references, to a persons nationality and ethnic background from the obscene to the ‘politically correct,’ I consider neither acceptable. The first one is just vile. The second one is simply a subterfuge.

There are many epithets connected to the Irish, the Italians, the Poles and other races. None of them are acceptable.

I like to think of myself and my family as a ‘Detroit Person” and/or Detroit People, no matter where we are.
I seldom refer to myself as being Irish, German, Alsace Lorraine, French, American Native, and that only goes as far back as 1780.

Is it possible that the earliest Hominine Fossils were discovered in Ethiopia four and one half million years ago? I think I will run a Zaba Search for relatives in Ethiopia.

[gazhekwe]

I have not seen this one before, LOVE it!

[pkbroch]

I have not seen this one before, LOVE it!

This is a wonderful story and a joy to read with the upcoming season of peace.

Thank you so much for sharing.

[marshamusic]

Oh my goodness! Such a sweet tale. We hear so much about the evidence of racial animus, and so little about these stories of connections between people in Detroit. Thank you. I hope you tell us more. Do you recall the Riots in
1943? [[or maybe you'd rather not recall such a thing).

[marshamusic]

Gazhekwe, how do you pronounce your name? So that I might say it correctly, in my head as I read. Is it just how it looks? gaz-hek-we?

[gazhekwe]

Hi, Marsha. That seems to be the consensus pronunciation. Actually it is Gozh' uh kway, Cat Woman.

[mikefmich]

Mike,
There are 3 other forum members who had 'family' just 2 or 3 blocks away from our home on McClellan.
Give me a few 'surnames' and I will respond.

Heck, I didn't see this until now. Ok.....I gotta think hard here. I should make a database by address in Detroit

Yager
Binge
Carreyn
Off the top of my head

[marshamusic]

Hi, Marsha. That seems to be the consensus pronunciation. Actually it is Gozh' uh kway, Cat Woman.

Ok, Thanks! Gazhekwe, means cat woman? In a language?

[gazhekwe]

Yes, it is Anishinaabemowin, Language of the Three Fires People, Ojibwe, Odawa, Bodawadomi.

[marshamusic]

Yes, it is Anishinaabemowin, Language of the Three Fires People, Ojibwe, Odawa, Bodawadomi.

Ah, so it is! :-)
Thank you.