My parents bought a house in 1971 in Plymouth with 2.5 acres that backed up to Hines Park between Haggerty and Riverside Dr.

Every year we had three or four drunks pass out in the barn, one falling asleep on the hood of my Mom's car. My parents wound having to rip down a tree fort six month after my brothers and I built it - after we found a cocaine and dope stash that had been cleverly hidden in to the floor boards.

Three charming gentlemen in their mid thirties refused to leave our back yard after they saw my sisters [[one college, one high school) out sun bathing. It took six sherriffs deputies to get them out of our yard even though the girls had left through the front door hours previously.

A weekly almost daily exercise was to see what had been pilfered from the barn. Bikes, full gas cans, tools, skateboards you name it.

Things stopped on our property and the general vicinity after my old man installed a motion detector flood light and he and two neighbors took turns sitting out side all night with a with his .22 rifle. It wasn't the thefts that prompted that, it was the seven rapes within a mile of our house that took place in Hines Park. It only took three or four incidents where shots were fired in to the air a second or two after the lights came one for word to get around not to fuck with the four houses up the hill.

So yeah. Wheeeee! Beer and fun in the park! Rape! What hoot! Just innocent kids having a good time! Those were the days! Yaaaay!.



Then there was the time my old man had to get his