I knew that my favorite cousin lived on Glynn, and Glynn is Belmont, where I went to school, on the other side. On the east side and west side of Woodward, streets have different names. I just, for whatever reason, I had no problem walking around the city, catching the bus around the city. Given the diverse community that you grew up in, both in your neighborhood and at your school, did you tend to stay in your own neighborhoods growing up or did you venture around the city? And if so, did you feel comfortable venturing around the city?ĭB: That’s the one thing that caused me a lot of problems when I was a little boy: I had wanderlust. We just said, “You should be okay.” That’s the most memorable thing about that time for me. Going to a Catholic School, you have a lot of Chaldeans, a lot of Filipinos as well as white and black students, and I had this one Filipino friend, and we were all just kids, we weren’t shy, you know, we’re walking down the street and he said he was talking about, “What are we going to do? What’s going to happen to us?” Then he said, “What if the Japanese attack us?” All the little boys looked at him like, “What are you worried about?” you know? Because we didn’t make distinctions, we just know that he looked Asian, and that was it. You don’t really know the difference between ethnicities or anything like that. In that time period, that was the thing that stuck out most to me.ĭB: Funny thing: you know how little boys are, especially back in the early Sixties, we’re just coming out of World War II and Korea, we all had army helmets and guns and we played war and did all that stuff. That was something that you never forget, I don’t care what age you are, I was eight years old, and that’s a day that I remember like yesterday.ĭB: Especially being Catholic, all of the excitement around having a Catholic president, what he meant to that. During the rehearsal, I remember one of the nuns running into the church and telling us all to get on our knees and pray, that the president had just been killed. I was raised Catholic.ĭB: I went to Blessed Sacrament, which is not too far, Belmont, where we were in Highland Park. WW: Are there any other memories you’d like to share from growing up in either Virginia Park or in Conant Gardens?ĭB: In Highland Park, I was eight years old, and we were practicing for my first communion. This was the early Sixties, ’61 to’63 is when we were living there. It was interesting because even at lunchtime, they would leave, go home, have lunch, and then go back. I would actually see them walking to and from work everyday. It was very integrated, and very viable in those days because Chrysler Headquarters was still in Highland Park, and a lot of management and executives lived in Highland Park. WW: What were some of the differences between those neighborhoods? Do you remember them being staunchly different or kind of along the same lines?ĭB: Highland Park was probably the most different of any of the communities that I lived in. My parents divorced and we moved onto Virginia Park which probably is where I would say where I grew up. We moved from there to Highland Park, which I absolutely loved living in Highland Park. We lived there for a moment, and for the most part though I remember growing up on the Northeast Side in Conant Gardens, that’s where I first started school. It was kind of interesting going back and remembering that because that whole area has been replaced by I-75. When I was born, my father was in the military, so my mother–single woman, 20 years old, she was living with relatives–at one point we lived down on Hastings and Canfield. WW: What neighborhood did you grow up in?ĭB: I lived in several neighborhoods. WW: Can you please start by telling me where and when were you born?ĭB: I was born in Detroit on Jat Women’s Hospital, which is now Hutzel Hospital. Thank you so much for sitting down with me today. This interview is for the Detroit Historical Society’s Detroit 67 Oral History Project, and I am in Detroit, Michigan.
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