More on Detroit

    One of my first trips to Detroit was in 1986.  I was staying at the Pontchartrain Hotel, a hotel popular with American League baseball teams.  On this occasion I happened to be walking through the lobby when I noticed a group of young men huddled around an older man who seemed to be doing all the talking.  I immediately recognized him.  It was Johnny Pesky, the Red Sox icon I used to watch playing third base for the Sox back in the 50s.
    As I exited the hotel I couldn't help noticing a man standing outside leaning against the wall and smoking a cigarette.  It was Don Baylor, a fine outfielder and one of the few black men on the team.  It struck me then that all the players inside listening to Pesky were white.  The Red Sox were the last major league team to integrate.  I guess integrating on the field didn't necessarily mean everywhere else.
    My wife and I lived in Rochester Hills, an up-scale neighborhood around 25 miles north of downtown Detroit.  It was all white except for one black family.  I got to know the dad who was a linesman for Big Ten football and a jazz lover.  I remember he was grateful when I shared a new recording of Gene Harris with him.
    I mention this as another example of the racial divide in Detroit.  The city's northern limit was 8 Mile Road.  Everywhere north was almost exclusively white. But cross 8 Mile Road and you were in a foreign country.  We never got off I-75 until we reached downtown.  Even back then Detroit was dying.  Whites had long ago left the squalor behind, and blacks who could afford it were now doing the same.  What they left were the unmistakable signs of dire poverty and drug infestation, empty hulls of abandoned buildings, boarded up homes, piled up trash, and block after block of weeds and ashes where human habitation was just a memory.
    Like so many others, my wife and I left Detroit.  And never went back.