Nothin' but Blue Skies

by Edward McClelland

  “Do you still have drafting or auto shop?”

  “We don’t have any programs for the auto industry.”

  What Sexton had was health care programs, such as emergency medical technician training, so its students could learn to care for their baby boom shoprat grandparents.

  When the librarian arrived, I opened my book and showed her the twelve-letter word. A short, stout woman in a burnt-pumpkin skirt, she seemed more offended by the idea of rejecting a book with the word “motherfucker” than by the word “motherfucker” itself.

  “Just listen to the language in the hallway,” she said. “You can hear worse here every day.”

  That seemed to satisfy Dr. Bates.

  “How’s this inscription?” I asked. “‘To the students of Sexton High School. Someday, one of you can be president.’”

  For the first time, Dr. Bates looked at me as though I weren’t there to ruin his day.

  “That sounds great,” he said.

  IN THE HALLWAYS, the lockers were buffered with more bumps and welts than a prizefighter’s face. Through the solarium windows of the lobby, I could see that the grass on the athletic fields had grown as long as Old Testament whiskers. Sexton was designed during the first year of World War II and reflected the idea, then about to give way to the atomic age, that the classical world contained the germ of all knowledge. Every few feet, I passed a wall tile, painted like a square of embellished pottery, depicting a Shakespearean character, a figure from Greek mythology, a Japanese geisha plucking a samisen. On the north wall of the school, facing the empty space where Fisher Body used to be, are grimy bas-relief sculptures of men in WPA manual poses, practicing the ten disciplines: art, chivalry, drama, education, geography, labor, law, literature, music, pioneering. For a young scholar, it was more inspiring than the functional campuses of the decades that followed, schools that looked like giant split-level houses. I was headed upstairs to the gymnasium, to meet the basketball coach. Like Dr. Bates, Carlton Valentine had grown up in Washington, D.C., but he belonged now to Lansing. Valentine had played basketball for Michigan State, in the losing years after Magic Johnson left. Not quite talented enough for the NBA, he spent five years in Sweden, then returned to Lansing, because it was his wife’s hometown. As a result of a middle-aged knee injury, he walked across the gymnasium floor, six and a half feet tall, with a gangling lope, and led me into the basketball office, a room rich with the odor of old wood baking in the late-spring heat. Unlike Dr. Bates, Coach Valentine had a reference for General Motors’s role in the depopulation of Sexton.

  “You look across the street, the GM plant’s gone,” he said. “That was one of the huge reasons why Sexton was as big as it was. People worked here. They lived here. When the plant closed, they dispersed to other areas. In 2005, we had thirteen hundred kids. People transferred out of state and took their kids. The people that own the houses in this area are older now. Their kids moved to the suburbs.”

  Sexton won the basketball championship after it was demoted from Class A—in which it competed with schools from Detroit, Flint, Grand Rapids, and Saginaw—to Class B, in which it played hick schools, most of them all-white. Shrunken to its inner-city core, the student body had urban basketball talent with rural numbers. Three of the starters—including Valentine’s son—were going on to play for Division I colleges.

  Coach V and his Big Reds were heroes to the children whose families had remained in Lansing, so he was driving the players across town to teach a grade-school basketball clinic. When I was growing up, the grade school’s neighborhood had been white skinned and white-collar. Since then, it had been infiltrated by every strain of American immigration. Besides the black kids and white kids, there were Latin kids, Asian kids, and Middle Eastern kids. In my generation, race mixing had been bipolar. Now it’s multipolar.

  “Hold up, hold up,” Coach V shouted to the children gathered around him, children whose complexions covered the spectrum from John O’Groats to the Equator. “How’s everybody doing? I need eye contact. How’s everybody doing?”

  “Good,” the children mumbled.

  “That’s not good enough.”

  “Good!”

  Coach V shook an eight-year-old boy’s hand, then gave him pointers on masculinity.

  “When you shake hands, you make sure you squeeze, and you make eye contact,” he instructed. “Go into it like a man.”

  The coach had to run off to his day job, as marketing director for an elite local gym, so I spent the rest of the hour talking to one of his players. Robert Ray Jr., whose father had been a year behind me at Sexton, was tenth or eleventh on the bench but had been profiled on the front page of the Lansing State Journal, because his was not a typical Ghetto High basketball player’s story. With a 4.18 grade point average, Robert had won a Gates Millenium Scholarship, funded by the Microsoft founder, which provided a full ride to any accredited university in the United States. He planned to major in biochemistry at Michigan State, then become an osteopath. In twenty-five years, the school’s racial composition had changed, as they would have said in Cleveland, but its image and its reputation had changed not at all. As in a white-flight neighborhood, a black population of 40 percent was far beyond the demographic tipping point that eventually results in a black population of 90 percent.

  “When I started going to Sexton, they asked me, ‘Have you ever seen someone get shot?’” Robert said. “We just laugh, ’cause it’s nothing like that.”

  One of the teachers at Sexton had told me she had trouble attracting suburban kids to her regional EMT program, because of “the reputation.” “Where I’m housed,” she said, “it’s kind of turning people off.”

  “Did winning the state championship do anything for the school’s image?” I asked Robert.

  “Not really. That kind of goes along with the picture we depict. We’re good at football, basketball, and track. They refer to us as we’re good at the black sports. We’re bad at tennis, golf, cross-country—the white sports. We’re supposed to be good at basketball.”

  I drove back across town, past the high school, with the football stadium on my left, the wildflowers growing on the grave of an auto plant to my right. I crossed the railroad tracks and parked on the side street behind Gus’s Bar. The burgundy Oldsmobile was on the sidewalk. I went in through the back door that led straight ahead to Gus’s flophouse and turned left into the bar. It was dark at three in the afternoon—the light never changed inside Gus’s any more than it changed inside an auto plant—and Gus Caliacatsos was standing behind the bar, looking like a bald Greek hobbit in his sandals. Gus knew me by now. I drank in his bar whenever I was on the West Side, and any addition to his roster of regulars was remarkable. So with my Budweiser, he also served me his personal gossip.

  “I sold the bar,” he said.

  “You sold the bar? What are you going to do now?”

  “Going back to Greece,” he said. “No more this place. I’ve been here for fifty years. Right now, Lansing the most dumb place, because there’s no jobs.”

  “What are they gonna call this place when you’re gone? Is it still gonna be Gus’s Bar?”

  Gus smiled. He had one last joke for the city that had taken away his livelihood.

  “His name gotta be Gus, too,” he said.

  Acknowledgments

  First of all, I want to thank my parents for sending me to J. W. Sexton High School in Lansing, Michigan. We are J. Dubbs! If they had moved to the suburbs, as so many of their friends were doing in the 1970s, I would never have had the Rust Belt cred to write this book. I also want to thank the people who guided me around the cities of industrial America but don’t appear in the text. In Chicago, Rod Sellers of the Southeast Historical Museum and Bob Wisz, owner of Doreen’s Pizza. In Lansing, Dave Pfaff, historian of the R. E. Olds Transportation Museum and Kathleen Lavey of the Lansing State Journal. In Flint, Connor Coyne, who read one of my chapters for accuracy. In Detroit, Darci McConnell, a high school classmate
who introduced me to urban farmer Gary Wozniak, and Tanya Irwin, a college classmate who introduced me to the architectural marvel of the Guardian Building. In Gary, Indiana, Katherine Hodges, webmistress of the “City of Destiny” blog, who took me on a ruin tour of City Methodist Church. In Cleveland, Christine Borne Nickras, who gave me a place to stay and corrected the errors in my copy. Also, Frank Ford and Bobbi Reichtell at Neighborhood Progress and Marie Kittredge at Slavic Village Development. In Buffalo, Aaron Bartley, Mike Malyak, and Mitch Gerber. In Homestead, Daniel Steinitz of the Tin Front Café and Ron Baraff of Rivers of Steel National Heritage Area. In Syracuse, Rick Simone of Sheet Metal Workers Local 58, and Frank Caliva and Kevin Schwab of CenterState Corporation for Economic Opportunity. In Decatur, retired Herald & Review business writer Gary Minich, who covered the Staley lockout in the 1990s. I also want to thank David Beers and Eric Liu for first encouraging me to write about Lansing, as well as Mark Schone, Joan Walsh, and Julian Brookes for publishing my Lansing articles in Salon.

  This book began as an idea by my editor at Bloomsbury Press, Pete Beatty, a fellow Rust Belt native from Ohio. It was Pete who insisted I interview Michael Stanley. I also have to thank Jasmine Neosh for typing the book, and Ike at SOS Copies and More for giving me a break on copying.

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