Once in a Great City
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(9) Cavanagh considered himself an acolyte of JFK. There was more than a hint of Hyannis Port modeling in the way Cavanagh treated his brood of children. He paraded his young sons around in ties and sport coats and promised them a reward if they reached twenty-one without drinking or smoking.
(10) Henry Ford II (standing, foreground) and the Ford Motor Company board. A Ford public relations man called the company “the most isolated and insulated community I ever saw. It was, they thought, the Big Operation.”
(11) Three generations of Fords. The original Henry Ford in the center, with his grandson, Henry Ford II, on the left, and son, Edsel, on the right.
(12) Henry Ford II at the River Rouge plant with black foundry workers. Ford Motor Company was the first of the major auto companies to recruit black workers, its five-dollars-a-day motto helping to fuel the first great migration from the South.
(13) The debutante party for Charlotte Ford (left, with parents Henry Ford II and Anne McDonnell Ford), held at the Country Club of Detroit, featured Frank Sinatra, Gary Cooper, Peter Lawford, and a decorator flown in from Paris who trimmed the chandeliers with exotic fruits.
(14) The family of Henry Ford II at home, standing beneath a Manet portrait. Henry and Anne were divorced a few years later. Their daughter Charlotte (second from right) called it “a marriage without laughter . . . It was second nature not to ask questions, not to be emotionally involved.”
(15) The threat of violence hovered over Walter Reuther’s Detroit. This iconic 1937 photo shows Reuther and fellow auto union organizers about to be attacked by Ford goons outside Gate 4 of the River Rouge plant as they waited for a platoon of women handing out leaflets demanding a decent wage.
(16) A close friend said of Walter Reuther that he was inculcated in the belief that “working people have a right to more of the good things in life—security, dignity, standard of living, education—and that all human beings of whatever race, creed, and color were equal before God and before their fellow men.”
(17) Berry Gordy Jr. at the Motown studios on West Grand Boulevard, with the HITSVILLE USA sign in script above the front picture window. Detroit’s west side landscape could evoke a sense of drowsiness if not for the jobs and creativity crackling out of Motown.
(18) Top billing in the early days of Motown went to the Miracles, led by William (Smokey) Robinson (lower left), who could do it all—sing, write, and produce—and also happened to be Gordy’s best buddy and closest associate.
(19) The Motown troupe of singers, mostly homegrown in Detroit and stunningly talented, were called the “sound of young America.”
(20) The Supremes (left to right: Flo Ballard, Diana Ross, Mary Wilson) walking outside the Brewster Project in their hometown. Berry Gordy made two decisions near the end of 1963 to set them on the path to stardom. The first was to name Diana Ross the lead singer. The second was to team them with the songwriting trio of Holland-Dozier-Holland.
(21) Little Stevie Wonder, born Stevland Morris in Saginaw, came to Motown at age eleven, a legally blind wunderkind who could play any instrument. He caught Gordy’s ear with his proficiency on the harmonica.
(22) The Reverend C. L. Franklin (with daughters Aretha and Erma), the flamboyant preacher at Detroit’s New Bethel Baptist Church, was a master at building a homily with tension and expectation and using his voice as instrumental accompaniment.
(23) The old Lindell Cocktail Bar, run by Jimmy Butsicaris and his brother, Johnny, was a hangout for professional athletes and scribes and hangers-on of various sorts, including gamblers.
(24) Tony Giacalone, the son of a vegetable dealer on Detroit’s east side, rose through the underworld ranks as a bartender, bodyguard, chauffeur, bookie errand runner, street boss, and finally a capo of the Detroit numbers racket. In 1963, Detroit police caught him in a sting operation.
(25) Martin Luther King Jr. came to Detroit on June 23, 1963, for the Walk to Freedom down Woodward Avenue to Cobo Hall, a demonstration on behalf of civil rights that drew more than 100,000 participants. The rally was organized by Rev. C. L. Franklin ( far right). UAW president Walter Reuther (far left), a strong King ally, also participated.
(26) When King arrived in Detroit, among those greeting him was Lt. George Harge (in police hat to left rear), whose assignment was to serve as MLK’s bodyguard throughout the day. “You’ll see no dogs and fire hoses here,” King was told.
(27) Making their way through Cobo Hall at the end of the Walk to Freedom, King’s entourage included Reverend Albert Cleage ( far right) whose name rhymed with “vague” but whose politics most decidedly were not. Cleage pushed, unsuccessfully in the end, to keep white leaders like Walter Reuther and Mayor Cavanagh outside the leadership circle.
(28) What he said at Cobo on that Sunday in June was virtually lost to history, overwhelmed by what was to come, but the first time King dreamed his dream at a large public gathering, he dreamed it in Detroit.
(29) “It was a joyous experience. We sang all the way,” said one participant at the Walk to Freedom. “I had never seen anything like it, just unbelievable. But I think part of it was pent-up emotion.”
(30) Lyndon Johnson visited Detroit in January 1963 to unveil a plaque at the Second Baptist Church marking the hundredth anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation. He returned in May 1964 and declared Detroit the “herald of hope.”
(31) William D. Laurie, the head of advertising giant J. Walter Thompson’s Detroit office, oversaw the agency’s account for Ford Motor Company during the selling of the Mustang. Laurie was part of Detroit’s automobile royalty, married to the daughter of a former Chrysler Corporation treasurer.
(32) Henry Ford II in front of the Mustang, the car “designed with young America in mind.” The car was unveiled at the Ford Wonder Rotunda at the New York World’s Fair in April 1964.
(33) Music and cars, Motown and the Mustang, merged seamlessly in a video of Martha and the Vandellas on the assembly line at Ford’s Dearborn plant singing “Nowhere to Run.”
(34)
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
DURING MY LIFE and writing career I have been lucky to work with many great editors. The first were my mother and father, Elliott and Mary Maraniss. Then came Dick Harwood at the Trenton Times; Len Downie, Bob Woodward, and Bob Kaiser at the Washington Post; and Alice Mayhew at Simon & Schuster. Another editor who influenced my life died at age ninety-three the same week I finished the manuscript of this book. There will never be another Ben Bradlee, not even close. His search for truth, unafraid yet joyful, is something I will not forget. A few months earlier, after the paper I love was acquired by an outsider, Don Graham moved his offices from the Post Building on 15th Street and his niece left as the Post’s publisher, ending the era of the family newspaper. I worked my entire adult life for the Grahams and consider Don Graham the greatest boss ever. I cannot thank him enough for all the support and advice he provided over many decades. Whatever happens with the Post, good or bad, it will never be the same.
All of our friends in Madison and Washington and far-flung places once again provided a wonderful support system for Linda and me during the years I worked on this latest writing obsession. This is the eleventh book for which Alice has been my editor and Rafe Sagalyn my agent, and I could not ask for a finer tandem. Thanks to everyone else at Simon & Schuster and the Washington Post, my inspiring and embracing home courts, and to my new pals and colleagues at Vanderbilt University.
My time in Detroit doing research was made more productive and meaningful with the help of Jon Wolman, editor of the Detroit News, an old Madison buddy and fellow second-generation journalist. I’m also grateful to Detroiters Tom Stanton of the University of Detroit, Mercy; Allen Rawls and Robin Terry at the Motown Museum; Mike Smith and Mary Wallace at the Reuther Library; Romie Minor at the Detroit Public Library; and Danielle Kaltz at the Detroit News library; as well as Bob Ankony, Mark Cavanagh, Bob Toohey, Matt Lee, Maurice Kelman, Jack Casey, and the friendly staff at the Inn on Ferry Str
eet. My way into the world of Motown was eased with the gracious assistance of Harry T. Edwards, chief judge emeritus on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, who happens to be the stepson of the late Esther Gordy Edwards, older sister of Berry Gordy. My path into the subculture of Detroit law enforcement was paved by Ron Fournier, a fellow Washington political journalist who grew up in Detroit, the proud son of a DPD cop. Fournier and Wolman were also generous enough to serve as early readers of the manuscript. I am indebted to the archivists at the Benson Ford Research Center and the Bentley Historical Library in nearby Dearborn and Ann Arbor.
I rank librarians and archivists near the top with nurses and teachers in my personal hierarchy of Good Samaritans. Along with those mentioned from Detroit, I am also grateful to the staffs at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, the Boston University Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center, the Duke University Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising, and Marketing History, the University of Wisconsin Library, and the LA84 Foundation. In the year before her death, Jean Halberstam, widow of David Halberstam, one of my writing heroes, eagerly allowed me access to his papers at Boston University, including raw notes he accumulated for The Reckoning, his powerful book on the Detroit auto industry of a later period. A special thanks to Gabrielle Banks, John Pulice, John U. Bacon, and Andy Cohn for at various times helping me accumulate and sift through thousands of documents, and to Sheila Weller for sending me one.
My main editor always, along with being researcher, photographer, videographer, publicist, and friend-maker, is my wife, Linda, who was with me every step of the way with this book as with all the others before it. From Green Bay to Rome, from Nairobi to San Juan, from Ho Chi Minh City to Detroit, she has made wherever we are feel like home. She loves Motown as much as I do and never complained about the rollicking sounds pounding full blast out of my office as I wrote. My Girl, always. Andrew and Alison with Eliza and Charlie in Nashville; Sarah and Tom with Heidi and Ava in Lawrenceville, New Jersey—this is the family that makes every day worthwhile, the human miracle that somehow arose from those summer nights in 1949 when Linda and I came into the world. I don’t know if it’s true or not, but I like to believe the story that my dad took my older brother and sister to a Tigers game at Briggs Stadium the day I was born, once in a great city, in Detroit.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
David Maraniss is an associate editor at the Washington Post and the author of six critically acclaimed best-selling books about history, politics, and sports. Among the most honored writers and journalists of his generation, Maraniss won the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting for his reportage on Bill Clinton, was part of a Post team that won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for coverage of the Virginia Tech tragedy, and has been a Pulitzer finalist twice more for his journalism and once in history for They Marched into Sunlight. A fellow of the Society of American Historians, Maraniss was born in Detroit and grew up in Madison, Wisconsin. He lives in Washington, D.C., and Madison with his wife, Linda. They have two grown children and four grandchildren.
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NOTES
The narrative of this book was constructed from more than 120 interviews in Detroit, Los Angeles, Nashville, and Washington, D.C., and documents from the following archival sources:
Benson Ford Research Center, Dearborn, Michigan (BFRC)
Boston University, Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center (BU)
Detroit Historical Museum (DHM)
Detroit Institute of Arts (DIA)
Detroit News Library (DN)
Detroit Public Library, Burton Historical Collection (BHC)
Detroit Public Library, E. Azalia Hackley Collection (EAH)
Duke University, Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising and Marketing History (HC)
John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, Boston (JFKL)
LA84 Foundation Library, Los Angeles (LA84)
LBJ Presidential Library, Austin, Texas (LBJL)
Library of Congress (LC)
Motown Museum (MM)
University of Michigan, Bentley Historical Library
Walter P. Reuther Library of Labor and Urban Affairs, Detroit
Chapter 1: Gone
The ninth of November: “Pleasant, Fair, Warmer,” Detroit News, Nov. 9–10, 1962; “When Flames Consumed a Christmas Fantasy,” Detroit News, June 12, 1996; Detroit Free Press, Nov. 9–10, 1962; Associated Press, Nov. 10, 1962; interview, Robert Ankony, Dec. 2013.
The Ford Rotunda was circular: Michigan in Pictures, Dec. 12, 2009; Ford Rotunda, File 1, BFRC; “Ford Rotunda, Glory and Tragedy,” Automotive Mileposts, online.
Ankony . . . was fourteen in November 1962: Interviews, Robert Ankony, Dec. 2013, May 2014. Ankony said he started going downtown by himself when he was nine or ten. He would either walk or take the Baker bus and transfer to the Woodward bus north if he wanted to go to the Detroit Public Library or Detroit Institute of Arts.
Ankony’s parents were Lebanese and French: Interview, Ankony. His grandparents on his mother’s side moved from Lebanon to a small Arabic enclave in Hull, Quebec, at the turn of the century. His father’s family came directly to Dearborn. His father was Muslim, his mother Presbyterian. “My mother was a great cook, and she cooked all the Arabic meals as well as pork. The names of Arabic meals are about the only words I know in Arabic as my mother was a proud American and would only speak Arabic with our aunts and uncles.”
Roof repairmen since midmorning: Description of Rotunda fire drawn from AP, “Ford Rotunda, Big Draw for Tourists,” Burns, Nov. 10, 1962; “Ford Rotunda, Glory and Tragedy,” Automotive Mileposts, online; “Sift Mystery of Rotunda Fire,” Detroit News, Nov. 10, 1962; “Rotunda Destroyed by $16-Million Fire,” Detroit Free Press, Nov. 10, 1962; “Fire Had Too Big a Start for Dearborn Department,” Detroit Free Press, Nov. 11, 1962; follow-up stories in News and Free Press, Nov. 11–20; Ford Rotunda file, BFRC; interview, Ankony.
The rest of Detroit was mourning: “Tears for the Rotunda,” Mark Beltaire, the Town Crier, Detroit Free Press, Nov. 10, 1962. “How many will remember that in the 30s Fred Waring and the Lane Sisters played three shows a day as the Rotunda became more firmly implanted in the public mind?” Beltaire wrote.
The phone call finally came: Description of George Edwards’s actions on the day of the Gotham Hotel raid from unpublished manuscript of Edwards autobiography, George Edwards Collection, Series III, Personal Papers 1961–63, Box 68, Reuther Library.
In its headline of the raid: “T-Men Hit Gotham Hotel Like Raging Football Team,” Michigan Chronicle, Nov. 17, 1962.
To walk into the Gotham: Depiction of Gotham Hotel drawn from interviews, John Conyers Jr., David Williams, Berry Gordy, Nicholas Hood; also Borden, Detroit’s Paradise Valley, 25–67.
Martin Luther King J
r. stayed at the Gotham: MLK Archive, BU, letters between King and White, Sept. 25, 1959. In his return letter, White told King that he had also placed copies of the book at the Phyllis Wheatley Home for Aged Women in Detroit.
And now here came those police: Drawn from accounts in Detroit News, Nov. 10–11, 1962; Detroit Free Press, Nov. 10–11, 1962; Michigan Chronicle, Nov. 17, 1962; and unpublished Edwards autobiography; also Stolberg, Bridging the River of Hatred.
Chapter 2: Ask Not
Raymond Murray was stationed at the west entrance: Interview, Raymond Murray, November 2013. When Murray arrived at the DPD in 1962, he said, “Most of the veteran officers were World War II vets, and they emphasized safety above everything else they would teach you. I was trained by guys who were tail gunners on bombers, guys who parachuted into France during the Normandy invasion, and guys who fought at Iwo Jima, Bougainville, and Saipan. . . . I was enchanted by their stories.”
With its 1,200 rooms: Ibbotson, Detroit’s Historic Hotels and Restaurants, 48–49.