Seventy-two years seems like a long while, especially if you are close to the starting line, but from my present position, it's been a short time excitement, changes, laughter and sorrows but it was very interesting every, minute of it without any regrets. I met a lot of characters during this period, and surprisingly enough very few of them were heels. I don't think anyone need worry about Heaven being overcrowded as it is not the case of people doing wrong but not doing the things they should have and could have done. The "Don't People" are our greatest liabilities. The ones who don't vote, don't belong to any group, don't belong to any church, don't like music and art, don't worry about anyone else, don't live in their home locality, don't think for themselves, and I have a sneaking feeling they will be surprised when St. Peter looks over their records.

People have not changed in all the time I have been associated with them, and I have an idea they never will although I have never given up hope. Mechanical creations around them have changed, but they seem to be one of the unchangeable elements of nature. From 1887 on, the period I knew, was the time when people were learning to talk English with the culture and habits of about five nationalities being worked into a new design. That it worked out with very little friction was remarkable, but all people being human beings with the same hope of attaining the same things in life - plenty to eat, some music, some love and health and that's all they are going to get anyway - more there ain't!

This Nation is more that half-breed now as lots of people have four or five different kinds of blood in them. The future will tell whether we are going all the way to being the first race that's made up of all the different bloods of this universe.

The earlier period from the time that Cadillac waded ashore with his polished boots and freshly laundered ruffled shirt and a beautiful ostrich plume in his hat and the flag of France floating in the breeze has been taken care of by painters and writers with idealistic conceptions. The trading scene, over the Detroit Athletic Club bar, portrays a later bit of old Detroit, but take it with a grain of salt. These trading events were a good deal like a modern salesman softening up a client. A few quick shots and an Indian would trade a sable fur for a plug hat or a worn red coat. An Indian loved red coats, shiny boots and fancy hats more than his beautiful blankets and feathered headdress - which I think were as picturesque as any costume in the world. There were a few fights, some between French and Indians, some between English and French and some just free-for-alls with a few getting killed. People were coming over here all the time and eventually made Detroit a village, a town, and then a city. This was the period, about 1888 I started to know Detroit and learned to love it.

Orleans and Sherman was an average locality in Detroit around this period. There were people with lots of Jack, but mostly they were of the middle class - mechanics, cabinet makers, printers, butchers, brewers, molders, pattern makers and some business men but few people who lived off their capital investments.

All religions were represented and many nationalities: Irish, German, Polish, French and English. Most of the people you met were from the Old Country and talked both languages, English and their home tongue. They all seemed to be happy and contented. All had their own clubs and their own ways of enjoying life with their own drink and food. All seemed to fit into an ensemble like a jigsaw puzzle.

Most of these people had a hard time telling just why they came to this new country. Often it was a combination of things: some to duck army service, some just looking for adventure, others had money in mind, but mostly they wanted to get away to something different, the old wanderlust. After they go here, they seemed to like it although all was not honey. They had their troubles and tribulations, especially those who were laborers, a class often taken advantages of. The first generation suffered, but we got to thank them as they were the real guys who built the roads, the railroads and did all the heavy work necessary in a new country. Some got homesick and returned to the Mother Country. My Father, a Prussian, came over with his two brothers and two sisters. The boys stayed, but the girls never seemed to fit in and later returned home. The Prussian race looked upon themselves as the top class in Germany - very proud, dignified and lords of their family. I can tell you it was a tough family in which to be born and raised. It took about fifteen years to get a Prussian to acknowledge that other people were as good as he was, and then he made an ideal citizen. My Grandfather, on my Mother's side, was a Bavarian who came from a beautiful section of Germany. He had a small farm and vineyard on the banks of the Rhine and did cabinet making, to order, in his own shop in winter. The Bavarians are a happy singing people, good beer drinkers and love to dance. It's a funny thing, but it seems happy people usually come from a country with scenery and climate that is happy in itself. A Bavarian seemed to be happy even when he was arguing with a Prussian.

He never told me why he'd come to this Country, but I think he heard that weed workers were in great demand over here and that he would make a lot of money. He loved his old home, but he never kicked about America and did pretty well here owning his own home and raising his family to be Americans. At that time most Germans were members of the Arbiter Society, drank good beer, sang a lot - and sang loud with guttural twang always keeping their tonsils well oiled with good old beer - argued politics - and I think they had a better voting record than we do now. I don't know why, but he did not like Mecklingurgers, and he told me a Mecklinburger, not a Jew, had killed Christ. This was a calm period. No movies, no automobiles, no television. I never heard of a Communist at this period, but there were labor troubles and most bosses were not well liked.

In this period all craftsmen were admired and very proud of their abilities. This period was just before owning a saw and a hammer and holding a union card made you a skilled mechanic. A printer could go to church wearing a plug hat, and people didn't laugh, since it was during this period that the ability of the craftsmen was admired. The block I lived in looked like it was designed by a man with a modern streak. It was different than most blocks as you can see by the sketch. No alley but a garden spot in the middle with homes around it, a brewery on one end of the block and a sausage factory on one of the corners. Since our home covered one half of the Orleans side, it made an ideal place for boys whether they were running from the policeman or playing a game. As boys we could climb our back fence, skirt around the garden spot and come out of a dozen places. If the policeman was too close, we slipped in to the out-house, locked the door, and waited for Mother to get the policeman out of our yard. She could get him out in no time. She was no lawyer, but she could talk fast and seemed to know her rights.

The Krantz family ran the vegetable garden and sold to the people in our neighborhood. I could see people buying garden products during the season. The sausage works left no bad smells, and I often wonder today why these slaughter houses smell for great distances. I don't think the workmen can smell that bad. There must be an answer, but I don't know it.

I learned about gardening from my Grandfather and by watching gardener Krantz - (i.e., how to use garbage as a fertilizer and how to make bug killer from tobacco stems by soaking them in a barrel of water - smelled a little strong but ruined any bug that lived in that period.) I also learned how to grind the stems and make snuff which was common at this time. We got these tobacco stems from cigar makers for free, but I guess they sell them to factories who make them into other products now.

Around the corner lived an artistic old German who made decorations out of some kind of colored plaster. He was all artist, though nothing else. He had a son about my age, and as I had a little art in my veins, we become very close. His Father started us drawing, helping and advising us. I think he had a great influence on my life. He never seemed to fit into the life of this Country and eventually returned to Germany. I promised to write to him so he would be able to continue his ability to talk and write English, but his writing became impossible to read after three years and we had to give up corresponding. In later years I wondered what his luck in later life was with all the wars in between. I hope he was lucky and that he could use his love of art in those later years.

During this period I learned a little about life. One day, noticing a crowd and a couple of policemen in Krantz's backyard, my Mother explained to me the oldest Krantz boy had killed himself, by hanging, to get away from the pain of rheumatism. That bothered me for quite a while as I didn't seem to be able to understand it.

A little later I watched the Rice's grocery store burn down one dark night. The fire engines were in front of my home - very thrilling to me. After the fire was put out, we found the Mother and Father were killed by smoke. They were found up against the side of a door which opened inward. It was another shock as I knew the family well. One of the boys and the hired girl saved their lives by sliding down the lightning rod which must have made another selling argument for lightning rod salesman.

My Mother warned my about "coffin nails" or cigarettes and how they gave boys consumption. That stayed in my mind for years, and when I started to smoke at about twenty years old I played safe and smoked cigars or a pipe which might have been a sensible thing to do but in later years I began to doubt it. Lots of young people died of consumption in those days, and the only remedy I heard of in those days was Piso's Consumption Cure. It is still sold today but is known as a cough remedy.

About this time a neighbor was killed in the Penberthy Explosion when the boiler in the factory blew up. After watching the funeral, I began to realize that this world wasn't too safe after all. In after years I learned that people learned a lot from these happenings, and doors had to open outward although you'll still see a few that don't. Consumption became T.B., and doctors and the general public learned a lot about its origin, its effects, how to guard against it and even cure it. Safety inspectors looked into factories, and workmen became more careful which helped to cut the number of fires and explosions. New conditions meant new dangers, and it's still a problem for which men have to find the answers and cures.

I often watched them make beer, saw the cooling room pipes covered with heavy frost, and I can still smell the hot malt and see the farmers who had come in from their farms, hauling away the steaming. I think the farmers fed the malt to their pigs and, boy that must have made some wonderful pork and certainly contented pigs. A brewery doesn't smell that way any more. Maybe science has controlled the smell, and maybe beer isn't made of malt anymore, but I can tell you that smell was wonderful to me.

Looking out of the side window of my home I could not eat after watching that operation. Schimell sausages were wonderful, and people came from long distances to get them. Mr Schimell and he had a wonderful business.

There were many family names in the neighborhood: Carp, Millenbach, Sullivan, Krantz, Eckert, Becker, Clos, Schimell, Rice, Denk, Ewald, Darmstedder, Kelly, Martz, and Apel. Most of the heads of these families brought to this country special abilities and occupations that gave Detroit its start towards building a solid foundation for our future business reputation. Besides being brewers, makers of wonderful sausages and makers of well-designed furniture, certain of them brought the cultural items, music and art. Our cultural atmosphere was at a high in this period. Our culture did not slip until we got the production fever in later years, and now we are trying to get it back. I hope we are successful as the love of music, acting and the arts in an important item for any city and people that considers them civilized.

I learned about the law very early in life. The policeman was usually a big burly character, with a large mustache, big muscles, heavy in the mid-section, had big feet and had a rather sneaky way of walking quietly on his beat. You had to keep your eyes open or he would tap you on the shoulder and ask you, "What's doing?" That was a hard one for a young boy to answer, so we always tried to keep about fifty yards between us, which occasionally meant going around the block. Really he wasn't a bad guy and participated in most of the actions of the neighborhood, knew most of the kids and parents by name and also their habits. He knew a lot of the family troubles, knew what was going on all the time, and he could spot a stranger a block away. He traveled slowly swinging his club which was fastened to his wrist by a leather thong and missed nothing. Even a loose board in the sidewalk was brought to the householder's attention. He knew how the boys were behaving and would notify the parents and suggest a remedy which was carried out in most cases. They had "Mother's Pets" in those days who were little angels to their Mothers who never believed little Willie could do anything wrong. These kids were hard to get along with. The other boys didn't like them and made life miserable for them.

Drunks, and there were quite a few, were handled according to their standing in the neighborhood and usually were walked home with a lot of good advice stuffed into them during the walk. Most wives did the rest after a drunken man got home.

I have often seen a policeman stop the driver of a horse and wagon and call him down for cruelty to his horse and make him give his horse more rest and fix his harness. He was an all-around policeman who knew his job and did it. I doubt if he carried a gun at that time as I never saw one on a policeman. He also was human as I often have seen him drinking a cool glass of beer behind the saloon and picking up a bit of fruit or peanuts off the stand in front of the grocery store or eating a sandwich which he had kept in his pocket or had gotten from some woman who liked to be on the right side of the law. His club was a useful instrument as a crack across a kid's seat didn't feel too good, and if he brought it down on a crook's skull, it could lay him flatter than a pancake.

With the advent of the "bicycle" and "scorcher" as they were called, some policemen were trained to ride bikes and watch for speeders. What the rate of speeding was I couldn't tell, but they arrested a lot of speeders. A fast guy on a high-geared bike could hit you plenty hard and killed a few people besides putting many of them in the hospital. The fastest bike cop I knew was a fellow named Kraemer, who eventually became a motorcycle cop. He was killed in an accident. In later years the police got around in cars - two policemen to a car, for company's sake I guess. They traveled faster and lost the close contact with the public, watched for speeders and could get to accidents faster but never saw the little things that are important. The police became specialists: one branch for murders, another for annoying dogs, another for drunks and another for lost persons. If you don't know what category you want, they'll send a detective out. After he finishes asking you questions, you won't know whether you've been robbed or mistreated, neither will he. Sometimes he will tell you that you should have called up the health department, and if you get too fresh with him you might even land in jail. Now policemen have joined the union, and if they have to chase a crook too far, we'll have to pay overtime or leave the prisoner to escape. One block east of our home on Dequinder was the Grand Trunk railroad. It was always exciting to kids to watch the freights go by, to hear the puffing of the locomotive and see to the wave of the engineer as he went by. Because of the roadbed, these trains never went very fast and you could see a few tramps in the doorways of the box cars or their heads on the old fashioned coal cars. Imagination entered the kids' heads at about that time, and they would talk about the wonderful, exciting lives those bums lived. The kids wished they could try it and see the wide world. No more family chores, no school, no more church, just a life free as a bird. I imagine a few tried it, but I never knew of any in our gang.

We often hopped the train to Milwaukee junction, where the trains often stopped, and waited around for a trip back - which accounts for a few fellows with one arm or one leg and quite a few that lost their lives. One silly dare the kids had was to crawl under the cars while they were standing still. We laughed at the kids that were too scared to try it - risky, of course, but exciting and proved to the gang that you were made of the right stuff. The tramps used to get off around our neighborhood and beg meals. My mother fed plenty of them, and I never remember them doing any work in return as cartoonists suggest. We kids used to look for the chalk marks they were supposed to put on houses where they got a good lunch. I never found one, but I still believe they marked the good handout places because they seemed to go to the right houses.

You know a good wife with a big heart could never refuse a hungry man, and the other kind would throw food away before she would feed a tramp. My sympathy is with the tramp. I think there would be more tramps in the world if more men had the guts and hardiness to live that way for awhile. Anyway, as a tramp, you would learn a lot about the people who live in this world.

I often wondered why I seldom saw any passenger coaches, but I learned why in later years when I made a trip to Northern Michigan on the railroad - more shakes, bumps, wavy side swings, with my stomach objecting the entire distance, sudden stops with explosive noises every time the engineer saw two milk cans on a siding. Then it all came back to me and I knew the reason for the lack of passenger coaches. It was simple: you didn't get a ride; you got a "shake-up".

I remember the old one-armed button man that visited our house about twice a year with his small suitcase. In the case were hundreds of buttons of different kinds from clay, pearl, gold, silver, and leather. He also carried a supply of pins, needles, thread of different colors and sizes. Besides his head contained a lot of gossip, some facts, and a lot of dirt about the people that he did business with--which covered about everybody on the east side of Detroit. He kept talking about other people as long as you kept buying something, and when he left, you can be sure he carried a few facts about you and your home for entertaining other customers. Later I learned he had lost his arm jumping a train for a ride a block from our home when he was a boy. Imagine that guy would be a Fuller Brush man today, or maybe he'd be writing one of the gossip columns in one of our daily papers. He was a character, and everybody liked him - more you can't ask of a guy! About this time the Klondike Gold Strike was on, and many of the young adventurous fellows left for the Klondike with all the high hopes about riches and loads of gold on their minds. We kids looked at them and wished we were older and could go with them. In about two years they started to drift back with wonderful tales of adventure, saloon fights, hunger, eating their own dogs, gals of the saloons, the wonderful strikes of gold they found and the gamblers who took it away from them. Full Houses that were beat by Four Jacks, and the wonderful characters they met with a few nuggets hanging on their watch chains, or as picket pieces. Strange to say, they started to look for work a week or so later when their families found out the real extent of their pocketbook. I imagine some got rich, but I don't remember one in our neighborhood. Maybe the lucky one stayed on and married some dancer at one of the saloons, as dancers were all beautiful and shapely as the boys pictured them.

In later years a story, I heard, cleared that up. It seems an old guide was picking out a bunch of Indians as cooks and helpers for a long hunting trip into the wilds of Canada. He picked an old Indian woman of about ninety to go along, and when asked why by one of the hunters, he was informed that he took her along for one reason: when she began to look good to the hunters, it was time to start back for civilization.

The name Klondike is still with us. Although it was in northern Canada, we always picture it with Alaska as a place still open for adventure and excitement for anyone who has the guts and the will to live to a certain extent like the pioneers of the West. Anyone who says there's no wild places to go anymore is either kidding himself or doesn't know his geography. I learned how to rush the growler and pick up a few pretzels off the bar on the way out with a quart of beer in a tin can with a cover - for the price of a thin dime. I was always told to have the bartender pack it, which was a standard funny remark at our home at this time. I usually rushed the growler about six times a session of poker. I learned the rudiments of poker by watching my father and uncles with ten-for-a-cent chips with a cent a pot being dragged down for the growler. In later years I studied and tried to improve my techniques of the game, but that failed, and I joined the gang of poker players who still claim the game is just a lot of luck.

I often carried a noon-day lunch to my grandfather who worked in the Pullman car shops on Macomb and the railroad. It was quite a sight to see all the workmen, mostly German. The wood turners make the spindles and woodwork for what must have been wonderful sleeping cars. To make a car with all the decoration and ornamental woodwork would cost a fortune today being that the beautiful hard woods are hand turned. The workmen were very skilled and very proud of their abilities. But eventually there were labor troubles - the cause I don't know, but I'll bet it was more money. Eventually the Pullman Company moved to Pullman close to Chicago, leaving the men in Detroit high and dry. Those men turned their talents to anything which made it possible for them to stay alive in this country that had invited them over with wonderful promises.

My grandfather fixed up a work shop in a small house next to our home and made some working machinery lathes, and as most workmen owned their own tools, he was in business. He had a shop with all the tools. [The power to make them work was his good right leg which he kept going up and down on a board controlling the speed by working his leg fast or slower.] He could make anything from a fancy wooden Easter egg with a hollow center to a beautiful four-poster bed. His projects were all first class jobs, and he could make them any size to fit a dwarf or a six footer. Eventually he started making baseball bats to fit you. You could see ball players trying two bats for weight, size and shape, and he kept changing them until they just suited the ball players. Then he would go ahead and make a half dozen or so to match. It was an interesting sight, and my grandfather loved it.

I always liked the smell and the look of the well-seasoned woods he kept on the overhead racks. There were rosewood, maple, mahogany, birch and lots of others. He also did inlaid work like checker boards and cribbage boards. He never allowed me to try my hand with his tools, and I guess he was right as I still have five fingers on each hand.

Eventually most of the men found other work since the right to work at any trade was up to them. Being able to do a satisfactory job whether it was painting, brick laying, hanging wall paper or running a piece of machinery was the only consideration.

This workshop was formally a home and had quite a history to go with it. A lonely old German, almost a hermit, who had studied for the priesthood and for some reason had given up his studies and moved into the house. He put heavy shutters on all the windows, new heavy locks on all the doors to keep out the burglars who he thought were after his money. Despite all his cautions, one winter night he was found murdered and the house ransacked. Whether they got any large sum of money or not was never found out as nobody knew for sure whether he had any. No clues were found, and eventually the police called it an unsolved crime. Quite a few years later, two tough characters dropped into the saloon on the corner, and after quite a few boiler-makers, they began to boast about their life activities. The one guy boasted to his pal that years before he had knocked an old Dutchman over the head and got quite a bit of money right in this same block. The bartender, remembering the murder, called a policeman and eventually the man confessed and was set up for life.

Two of my uncles were brass molders. This work was all hand work in those days. Another uncle was a pattern maker, and the youngest worked for T.B. Rayl's and sold bicycles. He eventually got the job of teaching young ladies, who had started to ride bikes at this time, how to ride them which seemed to me at my unenlightened age to be an ideal job. He had his dresser decorated with pictures of very good looking girls in frames, and as I shared the room with him, I really enjoyed the decorations. I think my artistic nature seemed to show.

Around this time, unions started to appear, but they were pretty secret as to membership and officers. Their dues were low. Naturally they had to select their president and officer’s right from among their fellow workmen - no pay of course. Naturally when they had a kick about pay, hours or working conditions, the president did most of the talking, and if he got tough, he got fired as a bad influence which didn't help his credit with the grocer and butcher. If the unions called a strike, which they often did, they certainly suffered. I remember the hardships that went with a strike. My uncles went through quite a few, and one of my uncles was blackballed for a long while and had to do janitor work in the church to keep alive.

This was the time I think the bosses made their mistake. It has been a nightmare to them for years, as it made the unions go outside their own membership to get officers and men who would conduct the unions and strikes. When they did that, they got tough men who went into the jobs with no idea of the welfare of the workmen but for the money in it. Before it was through gangsters and goons that ran the unions. All the workman did was pay their dues and hope for the best. The general effect was beating; shooting and even murder on both sides, and eventually the bosses had to hire gangsters and goons to fight their battles. They lost their chance to talk things over with the working man which was the only ideal and right way.

I listened to my uncles, their friends and my father argued about unions. My father, not being a union man and rather conservative, tried to tell them to have more faith in their bosses and their ideas, but it never rang true to me, as I even felt at that early age that you had to fight to maintain your self respect or get walked on.

Some bosses were all right, but there were a very few that realized who in this democratic form of government the right to elect a man to office was just a matter of votes. As each man had only one vote, and as there were a lot more working men than bosses, it's a simple matter to figure out that eventually the working man would be on top.

How good that will be only time will tell, and the decision hasn't been reached in the year 1960. Stoves, drugs, plumbing supplies, overalls, furniture, wagons, cast iron toys seemed to be our main products in those days. Detroit had a plentiful supply of skilled workmen, and I mean skilled workmen, not the kind you find today who are classified by the unions and that if you run a machine for a month, feeding pieces of iron in one end and pulling them out, often not knowing what they are, you are classified as a skilled workman. In fact I am a better carpenter than the last three carpenters I have hired. My wife classed me as being a clumsy ox with a hammer and a saw.

Very few women worked in factories during this period; instead, they worked in dress and clothing factories. The married ones used up the hours getting the meals for the family, baking bread and cakes and canning for the winter, doctoring their kids as they did not call in the doctor for every little thing in those days. In fact I remember two calls that my mother made for a doctor in our home with six kids at that time.

There were mid-wives, and most of my brothers and sisters were born with their help. They always seemed to do a good job. Our whole family was raised without any vitamins and pills. Without shots and without the advice you get now from the newspapers and the health authorities, and without examinations in the schools. Although I admit some of the home remedies were pretty tough to take and you smelled to high heaven at times, but most of us lived through it. The drug business with its hundreds of pills, capsules, cough medicines, headache pills, nerve tonics, sedatives and builder-uppers has given work to lots of people. That's the best I can say for it.

At this time, if a kid had a toothache and we couldn't pull it with a piece of string and a door-knob, my mother give me fifty cents, and I took him down to Doc Woods. He just took a good pair of pinchers, and with his one leg holding you down and a lot of arm muscles, he twisted it a little, and with a might yank it came out, often with a piece of your jaw. I believed that helped to make a man out of the kid. No Novocain in those days. The only thing my mother said when I got the kid home was, "I hope they pulled the right one." Of course the kids yelled with the pain just before it was pulled, but it was surprising how soon he got over it. A kid learned to suffer a toothache a long while before he wanted to see old Doc Woods.

Being a hired girl was not thought of too well, but lots of young girls and older women worked at that occupation in those days. It was good training for future mothers as they learned to cook, keep house, and take care of children which was a necessity to a female. Nowadays filing burrs off bolts, assembling machinery or being a riveter is classed as a better job. Maybe the new age with its canned goods and frozen meats and ready-to-eat foods makes a housewife almost unnecessary. Girls today feel that being a Hired Girl is beneath their dignity although I still think it takes more brains to be a good Hired Girl than to do most factory work.

Our home life was wonderful to us kids and my mother, who everybody called Jo, one hundred and ten pounds of dynamite with a sense of humor, and she needed it. She would try any new kind of a dance, liked a good joke, and in later years would smoke a cigarette with you and appreciated her glass of beer or even a little shot. There was always something happening that was good for a laugh, and she could laugh whether it was at her expense or ours.

One instance, I remember, was when she baked her weekly coffee cake supply, about twelve cakes of different sizes which we used mainly for dunking purposes. This time she got mixed up in cans in our summer kitchen and used our can of garden bug killer (just plain ground tobacco stems) instead of cinnamon for a top dressing. It looked all right, but at the next breakfast if a person took one taste, there was quite a commotion before we realized what had happened - and did we have fun with Mother. For years we reminded her of it, but it always brought a grin to her face.

Another time we couldn't find the baby's shoe, and everybody looked and turned everything upside down, but no shoe. The next day my mother decided to clean the coffee pot, and low and behold there was the shoe a little cooked but still fit to use. The funny part was it didn't seem to hurt the coffee as nobody complained about it. My Mother got kidded by everybody and reminded about it all the rest of her life, but in later years; she claimed we made the whole story up.

In those days the coffee pot was the most important thing in the whole house. Coffee was started by pouring in coffee and water, and letting it boil till it smelled good, adding coffee and water continually, keeping it hot at all times so anyone feeling the necessity for an uplift at any time - there it was. Believe me it got a workout as people, in that day, didn't call it a "Coffee Break". It is the same thing that stenographers, office help, working men and bosses use as an excuse to get a resting period today. I think it will be with us for quite a spell.

My Dad, a dignified German, must have been a trial to my mother as he talked very little and never went out any place if he could help it, couldn't dance or sing, and never appreciated a joke. All he did was read, and he read everything. He would start with the weather in the newspaper and read right through the news, the want ads and end up reading about Lydia Pinkham's Pink Pills for Pale People. He read novels, Wild West stories and only went to bed under protest. I've heard my Mother pounding on the floor which was supposed to be a signal for him to come to bed, but I don't think he ever heard it. Often I came home, around two in the morning, finding him reading, and when he looked up and found out what time it was, he'd call me down for staying out so late and continue to read his golden hours. The kids never disturbed him. Noise, fights and arguments could go on for hours and never disturbed his reading. In fact, one night I made a dart, with a cork, one of my mother's needles and a feather. I was having a great time until it landed on my father's head and gave him an Indian Chief look - all he did was reach up, pull it out and drop it on the table. I was a little worried, but he never mentioned it afterwards.

One of my brothers, a red head, was what we called a "ducker". All we had to do was raise our arms, and he ducked like one of the modern prize-fighters. I guess he knew he had it coming as he was always playing tricks, annoying my sisters and mother. I have often seen my mother crawl under the bed and pull him out to try to find out what mischief he had just committed.

Another brother, when very small, always crawled backwards. When he reached any object to stop him, he would yell at the top of his lungs, and we had to turn him around. He was quite a problem, and my mother was tickled to death when he started to walk and walked forwards. My mother was happy as she said he certainly would have been a problem if he had started to walk backwards.

Another brother sent for a muscle building book and spent a lot of his time on his back exercising - always late at night in the dark and in any room he happened to be in. He was a danger to the rest of us as often if we came home late - maybe a few beers in us and we stepped on his face or stomach, he started to raise Cain. I never knew what he was going to do with muscles as he never used the ones he had.

The old bedroom in which I slept had a slanting ceiling, and I had to roll over twice when going to bed or getting up. As I was sleeping with an uncle at that time, who was twice my size and didn't like to be disturbed, that was one of my serious problems for quite a spell.

Outside of my unscreened window, was a slightly shanty roof. As I had to go to bed in the dark, I always felt around and quite often would find a cat that had beat me to bed. Taking him, or her, by the neck I'd throw it out of the window, and heard it sliding along the roof and then drop over the edge. That never seemed to bother the cats. Back they would come. They just loved that bed.

I don't know if we had mosquitoes in those days, but they never kept me awake. We had other pests sneakier and harder to find and kill. They slept in the daytime and looked for their meals at night. My mother was in a continuous battle with them, the same as Russia and the United States today.

In cold weather that room was cold and hot in summer, but knowing nothing about air conditioning, I got enough sleep some how.

My mother was a very capable woman, and I remember her putting out a fire which started on our shingle roof one Fourth of July, her bossing the job and a little help from me. She climbed out of the upstairs window, got on the roof, and she really hit that fire with a couple of pails of water and put the fire out.

If that had happened in 1959, she would have had her picture in the paper and maybe been a guest on television and got a trip to Bermuda. That day she acted just the same as she did when she cooked dinner. It was a just that had to be done. My mother always stood up for us kids when we had policeman troubles, and woe to the policeman who came on our property after any of the kids. He would be retreating in short order. Outside fights or school troubles, we were on our own, and she wouldn't listen to them. There were no Parent and Teachers associations then, and she didn't have to worry about the rest of the kids in the neighborhood and tell the teachers how to handle her kids or anybody else's kids. My mother was corporal and sergeant in our outfit and never appealed to dad for help as he never got over his Prussian attitude and could get pretty tough on us. One thing I remember about him was when he said, "no", he meant it, and we knew it. No arguments but it worked, as at this time, kids didn't know they had egos. I'm here to tell you, that fact should be kept from kids until they are twenty-one. It's enough that the older ones have egos and use them to confuse the world.

A few years ago, that was brought back to me as I listened to a child of fifteen. They are still children until they are twenty-one now, refuse to carry some groceries from the car to the house unless his mother gave him fifty cents, and he got his fifty cents.

The temptation was great, and I had a job to keep myself from going up and punching him in the nose, but as he was as big as I was and looked in better condition, I went home and started to think about my ego and what I would do with it.

The back door of our house was never locked. That was impossible with eleven kids coming and going. All of them had friends who had free run of the house and any food that was in sight. Who was at home at any particular time always had to be looked into, and I really believe one of them could have been away for at least three days before he would have been missed.

We were a happy family, very few arguments or fights among the boys. We had a system which worked pretty well: the girls used the Parlor, Father and Mother and small kids used the dining room with the large kitchen for the boys. They played lots of games, card games, checkers and other games. I often gave my own version of Punch and Judy for the smaller kids, and they always got a kick out of it.

In good weather we never stayed in as we had a large yard. The boys rigged up parallel bars in the back yard, and we had a set of horse shoes for pitching in a sandy place. Also we had our share of work to do: cutting the grass, helping in the garden, keeping wood in the kitchen bin, bringing in coal for the base burner in the winter, carrying out the ashes. And besides we had to take care of some of the younger ones.

I wasn't very old before I could make breakfast for the other kids - a very simple one of oatmeal with plenty of milk in a soup plate with lots of sugar, coffee cake and coffee for the older ones. We always had plenty of eats and clothes although the clothes were mostly hand-me-downs.

They always kept us warm. The first real new outfit I had was when I made my first communion. I could not read at this time, but I could take a book with pictures and make a story out of the pictures, and my kid brothers never knew the difference. Pictures seemed to interest me more that the words as it left my imagination work. Radio and television today give kids, ideas but it does not help their imagination which I think is not much help to the kids.

Most families of this period lived about the same as we did - some a little better and some not so good, but I never remember seeing any kids who looked hungry. The only kids I envied where the ones who had relatives on a farm and could occasionally go to the farm for a vacation. I never got over this, and it cost me money in later years.

That longing seems to be born in boys, and very few of them ever get enough money to really enjoy the great outdoors. One of the highlights in summer was a family day outing at Belle Isle which meant as much to us as a trip to Florida or Bermuda does in the present day. It required a lot of preparation mostly by the women-folks and usually included one of the neighbors. This meant about twelve kids of all ages, but the Old Man very seldom went along, and sometimes an aunt or grandmother helped keep things moving. After the date was set, Mother cautioned us to be sure and not get the measles or whooping cough, and she meant it as nothing could put one of these picnics on the bum like a sick child. It took about two days to get the food ready which included potato salad, pickles, sausage and beef sandwiches, boiled eggs, cold sauerkraut and lots of cookies, cakes, apples, jellies and of course the old coffee pot. Kids drank coffee in those days and lived through it. I almost forgot the lemonade and sometimes soda-pop. Usually we had some milk for the babies, but this was the age when mothers usually furnished the milk.

We knew nothing about ulcers in those days, but stomach aches were common. Mother usually had some kind of a cure for that, and being sick to the stomach was just a matter of throwing up as it was usually the result of too much food.

The older children had five main jobs: watching each other, carrying the baskets, getting water, squeezing lemons, finding and holding the necessary tables and benches for the affair. There were very few fights, but I remember one baby, cute little Elsie who had the habit of biting anything she could get in her mouth. We had to watch our fingers if we wanted to use them in later life. Elsie got over this habit and eventually got married and had five kids of her own.

The trip to Belle Isle was interesting. When the gang and food were all accounted for, we started to walk down Orleans Street with the baby buggies and all the freight. When we got to the foot of Joseph Campau, we got on a boat after paying the fare, and in a few minutes, we were landed on the island. The older boys ran ahead to locate a good place and found a table close to a toilet seat to take care of the gang. Then they started the unpacking of the food and finding that we forgot the salt and few other things, but soon we were set and ready to enjoy ourselves. We all had a wonderful time: there was some squabbling, some crying, a few accidents, chasing squirrels, playing catch, wading in the river, riding on the merry-go-round, [those who were old enough rode on the ponies,] climbing trees, fishing and eating a lot of food, and a few who didn't know any better went to sleep. Eventually the sun started to get lower in the sky, and we gathered the food, counted the kids and away we were for home. A good rain storm could raise Cain with one of these affairs as shelters were hard to find, but I remember only one in my many happy trips to Belle Isle.

We eventually made the boat and returned to Joseph Campau dock and walked home with our day's haul of some crabs, polliwogs, frogs and sometimes a few sun fish which were in pretty bad shape by this time. This return trip must have looked a good deal like the Union Army Retreat at Bull Run, but we were no more tired than the returnees from Florida trips are. A few times a neighbor who drove a horse and wagon took us over and came and got us that night, but that was what we call a deluxe trip now. About twice a summer was the limit of these trips as it took Mother that long to forget the troubles of the last one and to get nerve and strength back to arrange another trip. After one of these trips, the Old Man got what was left of the picnic dinner, but I guess he considered himself lucky.

During these few years I acquired a few nicks, bumps but only two scars that remained with me for years. One was when I borrowed my uncle's razor and tried to shave and the first stroke did the work. It took eight or nine stitches to keep my cheek from leaking, and that scar was very noticeable and required fifty years to disappear amongst the wrinkles.

Another one I got by grabbing the same uncle's revolver and trying to sneak away with it, but he chased me, and I was in a hurry and slipped on the stairs and got mixed up with a chamber which was standing on the stairway. I ended sitting on a broken chamber, with the revolver still in my hands, but it took a few stitches in my rear end left a scar which was not noticeable although it's still there.

About this time my grandfather took me to Mt. Clemens to see the aftermath of a cyclone. We used a horse and buggy, and I remember him paying some money at a tool house on the plank road, seeing the wrecked town, grass blown into trees, farm machinery in trees and houses flatter than a pancake. It was quite a sight to me as he had pointed the cyclone cloud shaped like a funnel which had done the damage in the western skies two days before. He said there was a cyclone circle around Detroit starting around the Irish Hills and running through Pontiac and ending around Mt. Clemens. He seemed to be right as all through the years we had cyclones and tornadoes in these districts, and you can see the evidence on farms if you cover this district.

Everybody walked a lot in those days, and I often walked downtown with my grandfather which was quite an adventure for me. When he had taxes to pay, it was a cash deal as checks were not used as much as today. We left the house, walked about a block, and then we had our first stop at the Columbia Brewery where he had a tankard of beer right from the large copper tank. After talking in German for a while, he was all set for the trip. These drinks were free to people who knew the brew master.

After proceeding on our way at a very good pace, which meant I fell behind, but that never bothered him or me as I knew he would stop at the next saloon for a visit and another beer, and that gave me a chance to catch up and maybe have a small taste of his beer and a few pretzels. On the way down, there were about four visits before we arrived at the tax office, and afterward he hid any other shopping he thought of. We used the same technique to get home ending up in the Columbia brewery. I usually was tired but thrilled, and he just went back to his shop to finish some job he was doing. I don't think he said ten words all the way down or back, but we understood each other. The distance we covered must have been about five miles, and it always gave me a good appetite.

Downtown was a peaceful place in those days: no crossing lights, traffic signals, no cars just a few trucks and buggies but quite a few bicycles. You had to watch the bicycle riders as they were the same people who drove cars in later years and had the same consideration for pedestrians. It was quite a trick for them to hit you hard enough to send you the hospital, but it could be done and was. Around this time the city got its first speed cop on a bicycle, a fellow named Kraemer, and you could get fined for speeding and reckless driving or driving a wagon, but it didn't happen too often.

A few years later Kraemer became a motorcycle cop, chased cars and bicycles, and was the first motor cop to be killed in an auto-motorcycle collision - a very dubious honor but lots of people were killed with no honors.

Most streets around this period were paved with cedar blocks made form logs cut up into about ten-inch lengths. When building a road, they just evened up the dirt to a certain level and packed it down with a large steam roller. Then they laid about a half inch of sand, and then they set the cedar blocks right up to each other. Men came along with a pointed ladle, with a quarter inch hole in the bottom, filled with hot tar from the tar wagon and filled all the spaces between the blocks with hot tar. The whole thing was covered over with another layer of sand and the steam roller ran over that, and the road was ready to use. The smell of the hot tar and the cedar blocks was very pleasant. We stole some of the cedar blocks for future uses, one of which was to make water wings, as two blocks with a leather strap between made an ideal water wing. It was a common sight to see kids going down to the river to learn how to swim with these blocks hanging over their shoulders. I imagine many a kid would never have grown up of it weren't for these blocks as they would keep you on the top side of the river. The hot tar was used by some of the boys for chewing purposes but had the bad habit of getting on your teeth. When it hardened it was next to impossible to get off.

This block surface was pretty good for horse vehicles, and as cedar was cheap at this time, I imagine it was an economical road. It could also be a lot of trouble if we had a very heavy rain as I have seen blocks of this road just floating around after a storm and looking like a bombed town in Europe.

Kids had a lot of fun building houses and castles with these blocks while these pavements were being laid, and the city always kept watchmen on the job as these blocks made excellent firewood for the kitchen range.

When the roads got in bad shape full of holes and broken blocks and the city decided to build a new road, workmen started to loosen the blocks, and then the kids and women of the neighborhood finished the job. Everyone got the old blocks, and they appreciated them as firewood. Being tar-soaked they burned with a hot blaze with a slight odor of horses as this was the day of horse drawn vehicles. I've seen hundreds of men, women and children with all kinds of vehicles, baby buggies, carts and even cloth bags gathering these blocks and storing them away for the winter. It was a matter of economy, and I often wondered if the horse smell of the fire affected the cooking. I never noticed it in our home, and a good deal of our meals were made over these blocks. Of course you must remember the smell of horses was not uncommon in those days the same as the smell of gas exhaust is today.

Other roads which were more heavily used were paved with granite blocks about six by twelve inches and rough on the top-side which made it a sure-footed road for horses although it was the noisiest road ever built. You can still see these roads in many cities in this country on steep well-traveled hills, and they certainly are a tough road - tough to ride and tough to wear out. We also had a few brick roads with the bricks set in different patterns which you don't see often now, but our biggest auto race track is built with them and certain other testing roads. Sidewalks were built of two-inch planks crosswise with tow rows of two-by-fours length wise underneath. These were nailed with spikes, and they required a lot of attention. Disadvantages were numerous: they were never very even, full of slivers, with cracks between the planks. If you dropped any kind of money, it usually went down the crack, and then you were in trouble as the owner did not like you to pull up the plank for a nickel or so. We kids had to sneak up at night to get our money back. These walks were tough on bare feet with slivers and nails sticking up out of the boards. Little girls with tricycles and older people with poor eye sight didn't look towards the stars in these days they kept their eyes on the sidewalk.

The first cement walk I saw was built in front of Schimmel's Butcher Shop, and I had a job for two weeks keeping it wet with a hose as the builder said the water aged and hardened it, and I got paid for watering it. I was all for that idea. It didn't take long for cement walks to take over as wood was getting expensive and the constant fixing and repairing meant a lot of work. Some residences had stone walks, but that didn't work out too well. They could be the slipperiest and trickiest walk you ever met after a rain. The fences were either picket or board. The picket fence was built of about two-and-one-half-inch pickets with two-by-fours running diagonally and the pickets nailed on with air spaces of different sizes between them. If you kept a dirty yard, you built a board fence with boards right next to each other and about five and one half feet high which left you with only a few knot holes to look into the yard. The top two-by-four was just the right distance from the top of the fence to let a cat, walking along it, see over the fence and watch what was going on. This two-by-four was a Godsend to cats as they could travel around a whole block without getting on the ground once, and they could laugh at the dogs and still watch out for kids who didn't like cats. In the theaters they still have cat walks, but I don't know why. Wire fences came in later and are more economical, but a good picket fence, which can be built in hundreds of different styles, is still the best looking and is still used by people who ignore the economical idea.

As I recall the only fence I hated was the one with "barber wire on the top." I found out in later years that those fences were built by people who had a small piece of barbed wire in their pointed heads.

The boys had the same ideas, ambitions and love of adventure as boys have had through the ages. We were never called delinquents but were instead called lots of other names: "no good, bad eggs, bad companions" and some were sent to reform schools but the average where just boys some getting better handled by better parents. We lived and played dangerously, had fights and did not think about the effects of our actions. We hopped freight trains; some lost their lives and some legs, but that had little effect on the rest of us. We took fruits, melons and buns form careless merchants - why I couldn't tell you - but don't think we didn't know we were doing wrong.

The Eastern Market was a big temptation and furnished lots of excitement. The farmers came in the late afternoon with products from the farm. After stabling their horses and getting their position in the market, they usually went over to the saloons and had lunch with a few beers and maybe a shot or two. Then after either a social chat with his friends about crops or a little session of pinochle, it was time to rent a room for the night or to sleep in his wagon. It was either the weather or their condition that dictated one or the other, but it gave us kids a wonderful opportunity to satisfy our fruit and melon appetites. There was one lone policeman, and part of the fun was outwitting him. The Eastern Market was a wonderful quiet place at night and during the daytime a mad house: housewives arguing over prices in all kinds of languages, grocery store keepers buying their daily supply of vegetables and lots of small merchants around the outside - chess stores, hardware stores, clothing stores for the farmers and lots of stores selling imported stuff such as Chinese stuff and foreign breads and pastries. I don't think any market in the world was more continental.

We climbed the old light towers which were built very high to light a whole district. Any boy making that trip was a hero as he climbed the outside on small iron steps sticking out from the tower. I often tried it, but froze when I got about half the way up and my hands and feet refused to carry me any higher, but it was the best I could do. Other boys did it, but I guess I was chicken. There was an elevator run by a counter weight in the center, and the man who fixed the carbon lights had to be a certain weight or he would have been our first rocket.

The light tower on Orleans and Sherman blew down one stormy night, and our home was slightly damaged by the guide pole which was in front of our home as a brace for the tower. It fell almost straight down the street which was a lucky thing for the people who lived in the small cottages on Orleans Street. The only damage it did, besides wrecking itself, was to kill a milkman and his horse that tried to drive through the wreckage but was electrocuted.

The last of these towers was in front of the City Hall, a building I never liked, and why some people of today fight to keep it standing is beyond me. I think the Mariners' church is a beautiful building and has a right to remain, but the City Hall ought to be wrecked. All the portraits that are on the inside should be left in while the work is being done or turned over to their ancestors. There were a few bullies and kids with mean streaks, but they never were too much trouble as we could always gang up on them. They had few friends and very seldom got any place until later in life when the unions and the bosses of big business hired them to do their dirty work, and some of them are in powerful positions today. This kind will always be with us, but remember they are bad for you even when they are on your side just as they are when they are on the other side. If we could do away with them, it would be a wonderful thing.

It was good to watch the boys turning into lawyers, bookkeepers, musicians, trades, mechanics, doctors and even artists. How they found the right niche was very interesting. Some knew what they wanted all the time; some followed their parents' advice; others learned their life work from their fathers, and eventually they all found their places. It seems to me the boys of today are having a harder time making up their minds what business to follow - too much advice, I think. Too many people and teachers telling them how to make money without working hard. I think student advisors are full of hooey: a boy has to make up his own mind whether he wants to sing, be a musician, or liking machinery maybe a mechanic or an engineer. Maybe he has personality and likes people and should sell, or if he wants to starve and write poetry he should try it, or if he likes farming and shoveling manure, do it, or he maybe feels he would like to doctor people, or to help people keep out of trouble, be a lawyer, or maybe he wants to deal with muscles: let him try wrestling, ball, football and try to become an athletic trainer. There are lots of useful things to do; just pick one, work like hell, and you'll come out all right. There's only one way to get money without working, and that's using a gun, and I don't mean the army. The Army and Navy are called careers today, but that's not a civilized trade or an asset to the world.

As far as I can see, the kids and their mothers and fathers have not changed through the years. In fact human nature seems to be the same now as any time in history. Machines have been changed, our way of living made more complex, and there are some added advantages and conveniences, but human nature can't be changed by adding a spark plug. Maybe it's a good, thing for one never knows when we will be back in a new stone age where we will have to leave our hair grow and really live by doing things for ourselves and by ourselves. It might be a good experience. I feel lots of people would love it.

The boys loved to play ball, but equipment was short. We had to do a lot of contriving to furnish the first ball team we organized. I can truthfully say some were not acquired honestly.

My mother made a pretty good ball with a rubber core and wound strips of old stockings around it and finished it off with a lot of stitches on the outside of the ball. It stood up under lots of play, but it did not go too far when hit. It was economical, and boy what a curve you could put on it. The balls we bought at the store for as low as five cents would last about ten minutes and were only good for playing catch. The other balls cost a dollar and a half, which was too much money for us, so we hung around the bigger boys' games and occasionally got hold of some stray ball or bought some that were in pretty bad shape, but they answered our purpose. We played in the alleys, on the streets, on the Eastern market in the early afternoons, at the old reservoir and eventually played at Thirty-first and Warren a city play-ground. Occasionally we got a permit to play at Belle Isle or Clark Park. There were no playgrounds in our section of the town, and we were not allowed to play in the school yards. I doubt if the boys would have played there as most boys had a strong feeling of keeping away from any school in those days.

Duck on the Rock was a rough game, and most of the players carried nicks in their shins and a few bumps elsewhere into their future years. A very simple game, the boy who was the goat placed his smaller stone on the large key stone. The idea was for you to knock it off with your stone, and the goat's idea was to tag you when you tried to get back home with your stone providing his stone was still on the big rock. While this was taking place, the other boys were throwing their stones trying to knock the goat's stone off the key rock. As you can imagine, the stones bouncing off the key stone and flying in all directions and kids picking up these stones and trying to get home made it kind of a caveman game, a rough tough game with lots of noise and excitement.

"Run My Sheep Run" was a game requiring a lot of lung and leg as each side had a leader who controlled his team by yelling, and as the game covered about two blocks and the idea was for one team to catch the other, it was rather noisy.

Straight tag and cross tag were good, healthy running games with very few rules. In cross tag the one who was "it" had to tag the last boy who crossed between him and the one being chased and with seven or eight boys in the game, it could wear a boy down. "hide-and-seek" was a good night game known by everybody, boys and girls. I learned an improvement in this game while I was staying at a farm when I was about sixteen years old. They played it so you picked out one of the good looking girls as your partner, and you both hid together and naturally this was an improvement on the game. If you are still under sixteen, try it some day; you'll find it quite a game.

We knew very little about football as equipment was expensive although we played a kicking game with a large rubber ball. We played it like we played "Shinny", the idea being to kick the ball out of the opponent's end of the block. Girls played jacks - the same game that little girls play today - just jacks and a small rubber ball.

Shinny, a game similar to hockey but a little rougher, was a favorite game of the boys who really liked bruises and bumps. I only knew one girl who played with us, and I guess she just liked to play with boys. I met her in later years driving a taxi which I suppose was another rough, exciting game to her.

It was a simple game. You choose sides, no particular number of players, who made their own shinny sticks. These were just a limb of a tree with a crook or knot on the end. The puck was a small tin can filled with dirt and kind of flattened, and the idea was to drive it out of your opponent's end of the alley. The start was simple as you laid the puck of the ground, and the starters had to hit each other's stick in the air three times and then anything went. We had no shin guards or head gear and often played in bare feet, so the casualty-list was high and strung along the alley taking care of injuries. It was wonderful, a little savage, but it helped to make a man out of you even if you carried scars into your afterlife. These games sometimes lasted an hour or so, and there were no time-outs and no referees.

During the summer, we made a few trips out to the woods around Detroit to find good shinny sticks and also suitable crotches of trees for our sling shots. Every kid thought a sling shot was a necessity, and some of them were good marksmen with them. We used them to kill sparrows, which carried a two cent bounty, but the farmers killed that game as they would trap them and bring them in by the thousands.

We also played handball against the old wall or barn with two on each side with the same rules used in handball today although the ball was a lighter rubber ball than the one we now use. We played marbles in lots of different ways. Every boy worth his while had his bag of marbles and another of shooters or agates, with such names as milky, snake eyes and were made of different kinds of stones and glass. One of the simple games we called "Punk," and it started by scratching a circle of about twenty-four inches in the dirt where each player put a certain number of marbles in the ring. The idea was to knock out as many as you could by throwing your "boulder" across the alley, and all you knocked were yours. If you missed, you had to put the given amount into the ring and the next player took his shot.

We pegged marbles the width of the sidewalk at small shooters and you kept shooting until you hit the shooter which went to you. The marbles shot belonged to the owner of the shooter which was the way to build up a collection of shooters, which were the real thing to collect. We also had shooting games which required more skill. You had to shoot the shooter out of your hand with the snap of your thumb nail and it required a lot of practice - and is the game played today in kid tournaments.

Some required you to knock the other shooters out of the ring and you had to play position and put reverse on the shooter. In some games you were required to knock the other fellows' shooter into a hold. These games were hard on your knees as you were always kneeling and sometimes the kids laid down on their bellies to make a really fancy shot. These games were great for the stocking business as the alleys were a combination of dirt, broken bottles, small stones, old nails, ashes and every thing else the people didn't want in their yards. Another sneaky way to increase your shooter collection was to take an old cigar box and cut a small square hold a trifle larger than a shooter. The idea was to leave your sucker try to drop a shooter into the hold from the height of his chin. If he succeeded you gave him three shooters or any number you had agreed on and all misses belonged to you. It looked easy but you had about the same chance as a man playing a slot machine. The boys who used them are the same ones that have to watch in later years.

Some of the boys built up quite a collection of shooters and agates. A friend of mine, Chenny Mike, and me formed a partnership and eventually had over a thousand shooters. We traded another boy for a hard tired bicycle and a tricky cone nut. A cone nut is a nut which holds another nut on your wheel, on the axle, and is not supposed to turn with the wheel but this one decided to go around with the wheel. When this happened you just went over the handle bars and some times you had to carry the thing home. Eventually we gave up and sold it to the junk man. I have hated cone nuts ever since. These were the days of "bunks" and we had lots of them through the years. We were continually being run out of them for one reason or another although we tried to keep them a secret. One we had in a loft of an old barn - it was a fine place with straw on the floor, soap boxes for chairs and pretty nearly rain tight. Occasionally we would stay in a bunk all night but that made for trouble as parents didn't like it.

Most kids thought of home as a place to stay away from except when hungry or very tired. Policemen where a pain in the neck to the kids and we never passed them closer than the other side of the street and could spot one three blocks away. A policeman of this period was large, and a big mustache and a wood club on a leather thong which he could apply to your rear end if necessary. I remember two by name, Budeler and Schmeltzer. They knew everybody in the neighborhood and as they stayed on one station a long while they knew the bad eggs, their Mothers and Fathers, and all the drunkards and watched everything. An uneven board in your sidewalk or an unlicensed dog and he told people about it. He didn't like gangs or air rifles and he could spot a stranger in his route and learn his business. I think he as a better policemen that the ones that drive around in automobiles with a partner to keep him awake and knows every few people in his district except for a few blondes.

We had our fair share of fights but never used knives, brass knuckles and usually fought to establish your position in the gang.

We usually traveled in groups when going in to other neighborhoods especially if they were of a different nationality. It just wasn't safe and that when for kids coming through our neighborhood on their way to the swimming place. Mostly we wanted excitement with a little danger attached to it.

The boys in the neighborhood often spent a whole day on Belle Isle in groups of four to six. Their mothers usually picked one of the older and more reliable boys to see that everything went all right and that they got home safely. My brother Harry, although four years younger, a big kid easy going and conservative, was often picked to head the groups. The mothers had confidence in him and the funny thing about him was that he kept that quality all his life. He remained a bachelor but was a judge in the juvenile courts, and put many wayward wild or hard to handle boys on probation to him. He had wonderful success with them and most of these boys turned out reasonably well and were his friends as long as he lived. His qualities were hare to explain - namely a calmness and a patient faith in them, never called them down or threatened them and seemed to be able to put himself in the boys' confidence. It worked with boys who were really tough, carried guns if they could get them, would fight at the drop of a hat, mostly suffering from a lack of parents' love and when I say love I don't mean coddling them or trying to be a pal to them - that don't work as well as having the boy's confidence in you and knowing that's all you want. These boys know right and wrong and really want to become regular guys.

On these trips we usually tried fishing and caught crabs and at the East on Belle Isle was pretty wild at that time with few roads we could chase squirrels and woodchucks, catch pike when they ran into the streams to spawn and catch large snapping turtles along the like side. of course our mothers saw to the matter of eating and packed real lunches which disappeared very early in the day as they were less trouble in our stomachs than carrying them around with us. We watched the freighters on the Canadian side and the sail boats on the American side - a sight which always thrilled me and still does. I think to be in a sail boat with the tiller in your hand, a good breeze, beats any kind of travel. It is more thrilling and it seems more natural - nothing mechanical, no smell of gas, just fresh air, water, a boat and you and if you don't believe it you never really sailed.

Boys, being a product of nature, felt the call of the out-doors, the hills, the fields, trees and the lakes. We had few ways of really getting to nature, that is City boys that I knew, as few had relatives on farms and the transportation was not good. We had bicycles but the roads were not too good and I know how city kids envied the ones who lived on a farm or in a small town as I went through all the phases. It's the same feeling a business man gets, and hopes and often does move to a farm or gets as close as he can. The boys of today know more about cows, chickens and wild life - and how to ride a horse or how a farmer liver than we ever did. As a kid I always wanted to get a job weeding sugar beets, as the paper always carried ads calling for young boys on the sugar beet farms, but my Father never allowed me as he said the work was too hard and I guess he was right. When I think of it now it was just a feeling that I wanted to see, feel and smell a little more of nature.

That longing remained with me until I bought a farm in later years and learned the truth about farms; animals and their sicknesses, the orneriness and crudeness, how tough nature could get, what thistles were, how tough wild mustard was, the lonely sloppy roads - I learned a lot but I still love nature. The old farm houses, the fishing shacks by the sea, the rocks and streams and the trees in a forest and whenever I can, I gather my art supplies and go out and try to paint the feeling I get when I'm with the natural things of life.

Ours was a very interesting neighborhood with Schimmel's butcher shop and sausage works on one of the corners. He knew his business, which he had learned in Germany, and as they didn't fill out the interior of the sausage with sawdust or cornmeal his sausages were wonderful eating and contained the vitamins you have to buy in a drug store now. I have watched him make sausages, kill pigs, cut them up and even use the blood for blood sausage which I could never get to like - but people bought it and I expect they ate it. People came from all over town for Schimmel's meats and sausages. One thing I remember was although we lived next door to the sausage works we were never bothered by bad smells, now you can smell a slaughter house for four miles - why I don't know!

Columbia brewery was down the street and was run by the Darmstedder boys. I can still smell the hops and malt - a smell you don't find around a brewery today and "boy oh boy I loved that smell". They made real beer in those days and you could taste the grain in it and I really believe it has some food value - it was not bottled in those days. Farmers used to come and get the malt and haul it away while it was still hot and steaming and had a good healthy small. I think they fed the pigs on it and that must have made for good healthy, happy contented pigs and contented customers who ate them afterwards in the form of hams, pig knuckles, spare ribs, head cheese and I imagine even their squeals had a more musical note that today.

Across the corner, on one side, lived the Becker family and across from them the Eckharts, who ran a brewery on Orleans Street above Gratiot. I can still see Mr. Becker returning home after testing the quality of their beer swinging his gold headed cane, kidding the little boys and girls, and happy look on his face but with all the dignity only a German can show.

These families had beautiful homes and gardens, with fruit of all kinds in the gardens, which were a great temptation to all the kids in our neighborhood. They were closely watched and we got very little if it unless you went and asked them for permission which kids never thought of doing. Across the street from us lived the Millenbach family and they ran a rendering plant. They bought animals that were killed or died and made some products out of them. The only one I knew was bone meal but I was told they wasted very little of the remains. I've seen his wagon picking up horses that had been killed on the street often and it was a gruesome sight. They slipped a rope around the horse's neck and fastened onto a round pole, under the driver's seat, and turned the handle winding the rope. The horse's neck stretched about two feet before the body moved and eventually he was on the wagon, then he was covered with a canvas and then they drove away to the rendering plant. The plant was on the outskirts of the city and if you have ever passed a rendering plant you knew why. It must have been a good business as the family had a beautiful home and all the trimmings that go with good living and they had their own hired gal.

Around the corner, in a very small home, lived the Schwab family. The father, an artist and maker of small ornamental pieces, with his wife and son John who had the artistic taste, we became very close as I happened to be "Arty" myself. Mr. Schwab talked art and to me was a very interesting character although a very strict old German. He took his family back to Germany as he never seemed to fit into our culture but he had implanted in me a taste for art which I never got rid of and I often thanked him in my thoughts. I corresponded with John for a few years but he forgot how to write English and we lost track of each other. What happened to him I have often wondered - with all the wars and troubles of his Country in between then and now?

A few blocks down Catherine street lived a family named Leipsingers, a Jewish family, and they were wonderful people. The old man was very witty and visited my Father quite often. He had two sons: one became very will-known as a cartoonist on a Detroit newspaper and his cartoons had a great influence on the politics and affairs of Detroit, the other one became know as "Lepic the Great" a great slight-of-hand performer (maybe the best the world has ever seen) and he traveled all over the world and appeared before most of the Kings and Queens of the period. His manipulations of coins and cards were out of this world.

In the middle of the block was a man named Sullivan, a retired railroad engineer who I heard had invented something on a steam locomotive and been retired with a good pension. He became interested in the horseless carriage and built himself one "a surrey-with-the-fringe-on-top" buggy with a boiler and smoke stack sticking through the top. It ran by steam, coal fired, and was quite a sight going down the street with smoke coming out of the chimney and a dozen kids and dogs following it and scaring horses and small children. It had a bad habit of going find away from home but balked when turned around and started back home - just the opposite of horses who always travel best on the way back home.

I usually went with him on his trips as he needed help on the return and I have pushed that stem car often and enjoyed it. Eventually he seemed to lose patience with it and I saw it no more as this was about the time gas cars were being built.

A Professor Stow lived on Catherine Street who read the stars, your palm or the bumps on your head. He had a wonderful library and could furnish you any information you needed. The library information was good as my Father sent me down often for certain names or dates but I never had too much faith in his star or palm readings. The large picture of the hand with all of its lines each with its own name and his large picture of the heavens with all its stars and planets were very interesting and I imagine many a woman put great faith in his readings and predictions. Along side of him was on old musical instrument repair shop run by an old Swiss gentleman. He could build a violin or repair a flute and he seemed to by busy all the time but as long as I lived in this neighborhood I never heard a note of music come out of the place.

The center of the block was a vegetable garden and flower garden run by the Kruntz family who sold vegetables and chickens to the people in this locality. I could look out of the back window and see the Kruntzs' planting, weeding, fertilizing (sometimes with Chinese fertilizer) and eventually selling to the customers.

I remember my friend, John Schwab, refusing to eat chicken at our house as he pointed to chickens in Kruntz's garden eating worms and scratching around in a manure pile and telling me hey were unfit to eat.

Jitney's was the saloon on the corner with its usual back door and a peek hold for Sunday trade - kind of a neighborhood club with pretzels and boiled eggs on the back bar and a few tables, with a deck of cards on each table, and cribbage boards around the room. Lots of growler trade as beer was a nickel a pint, ten cents a quart. Kids became experts on rushing the growler and swinging it around in a circle defying gravity. Working men carried half a frozen pails on a broom stick for the men working on the streets or in small shops. On a hot day you could see the bartender handing a beer out to a tired and hot policeman, free of charge, as he was a good friend of the bartender's who felt sorry for him.

A man, named Krimmel, ran the corner grocery with a side line of brooms, pails and many other household necessities. We always bought groceries by the month and had our grocery book in which he wrote all the articles and their prices. Around the first of each month my Father and a few of us kids went around paying bills and the grocery always gave the kids a few candies and at the butcher shop we always got a slice of bologna. Most business was on a credit basis as most men were paid only once a month.

Some of the things you don't see today: finnan haddie (smoked-dried fish) hanging from the ceiling, barreled crackers and oatmeal, a barrel of molasses which we used part of the time in place of butter and the old coffee grinder. I still wonder how my Father did it with about a hundred dollars a month but I know very few men did much wild spending in those days. We did our other shopping on Gratiot Avenue which was the East side shopping district. This included Martz's hardware, Apel Grocery, drug store, harness shop, dry goods shop, book shops and a retail liquor store. I remember the liquor store very well as my Father, once a month, bought some wine and a bottle of liquor. All the liquors and wines were in barrels and you could taste any brand you wished before buying - a selling idea which would not work today but worked then. The prices were very low as you could get wine for twenty-five cents a quart and liquor around fifty cents. I always got a few tastes of different wines but never liquor, although at home I often got a little shot and I don't think it hurt me physically or mentally as I learned its dangers and how to handle it in later years. Denying yourself anything is like "a girl who will not fix her hair or paint her lips - so it will be easier to be a virgin".

One thing all boys, including myself, hated was wearing hand-me-down clothes although they were better and costlier than the clothes my folks could buy for me. An uncle's one hundred dollar suit with the pants cut off and buttons moved over on the coat was a pain in the neck to me - no matter how good I looked to my uncle and mother. Some inventive cuss should look into this subject and find the answer if there is one - it might slant a boy's future and even make a bum out of him. These hand-me-downs in a large and fast-growing family meant that maybe four brothers wore them and hated them.

The first complete new outfit I received was when I made my First Communion at the age of twelve. I could tell you the color and all bout my shoes with light colored stitching. That was one of the proudest days of my life and I have a photo taken on that day that shows plainly how I felt and it's one picture of me that I know of that didn't have a "what the hell" look.

One of the big days for young boys and older ones too was the Fourth of July which we started to get ready for about the first of June. We started doing odd jobs and gathering the dough necessary to buy the Chinese fire crackers and torpedo blank cartridges for our guns, pin wheels, sky rockets, snake pods, and power and of course the vital punk. Forgetting nothing but the salves and bandages which were usually furnished by our mothers. Lots of boys had bad burns, some lost a finger or two and some lost their lives, but the more dangerous the events the better the kids liked it. I picked black powder out of my brother's chest for a month using my Mother's sewing needle as a surgical instrument. We put caps, torpedoes and powder on the street car tracks and gave the elderly riders a rough going over, loaded our homemade cannons, threw fire crackers under other kids feet and under horses and buggies and behaved like wild Indians - as my Mother said. We would take an old tomato can, put a hold in the bottom, put a wick in the hold, fill it with about a quarter inch of powder, a piece of paper on top of that and fill the rest of the can with slightly wet dirt packed in - turn it over light and run. We could pretty nearly put it into orbit as we could put it out of sight and I admit sometimes the can would blow up (inferior cans I suppose) but it paid to run after you lit it.

Sky rockets we sent up in the air and when that wasn't exciting enough we laid them against a curb and let them go down the street. I can say it was a tough day for dogs, slow moving people and also a good day not to go bare foot.

In our neighborhood a Joe Millenbach usually put on quite a fireworks show in the evening. The boys in the neighborhood, with a few bandages, and the old folks enjoyed it very much. He usually finished the evening by warning all of us and bringing out a giant fire cracker about a foot long, lighting it and running behind a tree - then she let go with a little poof as the big cracker was only a holder of a little Chinese cracker. It worked year after year and Joe got a big kick out of it.

The Election Day was a big event for all the boys, of all ages, as that was when we had our election bonfires. We had been gathering wood for months any that was not nailed down, garbage boxes, out houses, gates, old fences and anything that would burn was gathered and hid in some politician’s yard for that event. How the election turned out - whether he was a Republican, Democrat or Socialist made no difference to us. I always thought the sure way to get elected was to be a saloon keeper as I remember the Common Council was pretty nearly all saloon keepers. The name "Common Council" always tickled me as a name with lots of meaning. The idea was to know where the policeman was - you had to get weed piled up and started before he could scatter it and put it out. It was a success when they had to call the fire department to put the fire out. After the fire got started some of the older boys (ones around 40 or so) would get in the mood to help us and then you really had to watch your fence or anything that would burn.

One year I remember we had bad luck. The woman who let us keep our wood for the fire in her back yard, ran into tough times and used our wood for making dinner and breakfast for the old man and on election night we were out of luck, but as I looked at it in later years we did a good deed without knowing it.

Valentine night was "Get even Night" and the valentines we could get were really insulting and we could buy them cheap. We knew a lot more about the people in the neighborhood that anyone suspected so we made a good many people really angry. The artists and verse writers of these valentines could have been sent up for five years but these were the days when you had to like it or lump it.

Cabbage night, usually right around Halloween, after people had made their sauerkraut. This left the heel of the cabbage for throwing at doors and occasionally breaking a window. It was fun for the kids.

We always looked forward to Christmas with its Christmas tree decorated mainly with cookies in all shapes, popcorn strings, some wrapped candy and a few store bought ornaments of angels, Santa Clause, stars and small candle lights. I remember my Grandfather buying a bunch of branches, taking a broom handle and boring holes in it and gluing the branches in place making a tree of better shape than nature ever did.

Most of our presents were useful ones: shirts, pants, hats, mufflers but that depended a lot on the money condition of your family. As I came from a large family I got few useless presents but we enjoyed the day and anything we got. Mother made wonderful Springer lees and we certainly appreciated them.

Birthdays didn't count in our family - we were just another year older and we were supposed to be a little smarter and have more odd jobs to take care of.

Of course, being Catholic, we had a lot of Holy Days and we had the day off. After the gang went to church we were free and we son learned to know them all. Around this time I tried to shave myself, when an uncle left his shaving outfit in the open, and it proved to be unsuccessful. The first downward sweep left me with a hole slit in my cheek. It required eight or nine stitches but left me with a first wrinkle and was very obvious until later years when it became lost among my other natural wrinkles.

Another time I became very fond of a revolver my uncle had in his dresser. I grabbed it one day and took off with my uncle after me. As I reached the steps going down stairs I slipped and turned somersaults all the way down eventually landing on a chamber which broke but I still have the revolver in my hand - this left me with a few unnoticeable scars.

Chambers were a necessity in those days of outside toilets and they were put on the stairs and as you went to bed the idea was to pick out your own and carry it upstairs and then shove it under the bed. If you think a dog has a cold nose you never used a chamber on a cold winter night. The older folks often had a woolen rim but you had to be in what we call the social security age to be entitled to that honor. A favorite trick of some weak-minded individuals was to put seltzer in your Mother-in-law's chamber and stay awake to hear what happened.

About this time I became conscious of my name and people asked what the "I" in my name stood for. As the only answer was "Ignatius" it always left people with a kind of smile of sympathy on their faces. Parents should really think it over when naming their children as some names can make or break a man just as misnaming a manufactured product can hurt the sales of a good product. It's a serious thing.

Rainy Sundays were a trying time for mothers with a large family. I was sent down to the Old Art Museum to absorb some culture and also to get out of her hair.

One Sunday a boy, named Tom Sullivan, and myself went down to the museum and after looking at the statues (one of which I distinctly remember was a wrestling batch between a Chinaman and a cute cue and a colored man with just a loin cloth - life size and very fascinating it was. I imagine the Art Institute still owns it and could rent it out as an ad for wrestling matches today. Then we looked at the old masters statues of Napoleon, Mozart, Venus and other old time characters. After an hour or so we became restless and we started horsing around, spiting on other kids from a balcony and pushing each other. One Sunday it happened - a kid tried to spit on me and I ducked and knocked a statue off its pedestal. Boy, oh boy, what a noise and that statue became unidentifiable and our reaction was to get out of that place and quick. We eventually arrived home scared and all out of breath. The next week was a tough time for me expecting a policeman to pick me up any day and how I could dig up the money to pay for the statue - as my mind figured anything in the museum would worth a lot of money. It was a good deal later in life that I found out museums were loaded with things other people didn't know what to do with. Eventually I felt safer as nothing happened. In later years, I met Clyde Burroughs, a guard at the Old Museum, and eventually Secretary of the New Art Institute, who informed me that the statue I knocked over was just a reproduction valued at about ten dollars and my conscience was satisfied. Reproductions have had a low place in my estimation ever since.

Around this time I started to wonder about things that happened which I could not quite understand. Joe Kruntz hung himself in the work shop, in our block, and my Mother's only explanation was that Joe had rheumatism. The daughter of Mr. Schimmel, the butcher, died of Consumption and Mother had very little to say as we kids had been taught that cigarettes gave you that sickness. A young wife died, after child birth, leaving the kids and my Mother cried for a whole week. I started to really begin to learn a little about life.

Some thing I took as natural - as having a new brother or sister every two years seemed to be the right thing - although I often heard neighbors say that Mother had too many children. I would have taken this as an insult in later life.

When we became seven years of age we had to start our education. No kindergarten, no special preparation you just started in school from scratch. We were taken to school and registered and your wild and woolly days were over.

The first day I stayed for one hour, didn't like it so I walked out when the teacher wasn't looking and went home. I told Mother I didn't like school which was a mistake as after I got through with my Father that night and had a warning from my Mother. The next day she packed my lunch and sent me off to school all alone for another trial. The funny part of it was the fact that I learned to like it.

I attended the St. Peter and Paul's School, corner of Antoine and Larned, with the No. 2 Fire Department across the street and a synagogue across the alley back of it.

The Fire Department was a little rough on the teachers as when a call came in the kids became restless and started to get up to see the hook and ladder get away.

The girls' school, the Sacred Heart Academy, was on the southwest corner of Jefferson and Antoine with the church kitty-corner from it and the Detroit College along side of it. The schools and college were run by Jesuits and the pupils were all nationalities: Irish, German, Belgium, French, Italians and I remember one colored boy who eventually became a policeman. The Irish mostly lived along the river streets, the Belgians north of Jefferson, with the Italians farther downtown and the Germans up towards Gratiot.

Most of the Germans went to St. Joseph and St. Mary schools which taught both languages but my Father wanted us to learn English first, so we went to the public school. These pupils didn't look special but they must have been a select gang as in after years lots of these went places and their names became familiar to all Detroiters.

Lots of them became lawyers: Jefford, Jeffries, Chawke, Shippacassee, Tarsney, Rabaut (who became an everlasting congressman) and others became engineers like Van Antwerp, who eventually became Mayor and his brother a priest. The Flattery boys, Bill and Tom, who ran one of the best hat stores for years. John Carroll had a trial as a picture on the Detroit Baseball team. James Canfield became a decorator and I tried to make my living as an Artist with more or less success.

Lots of the girls became Nuns. One became a very noted actress on the stage and in the movies - Mary Boland.

We were taught by sisters and I remember two of them very well. Sister Mary Matthews and Sister Bertha, and at that time a Father Boex had charge of the boys school They were very patient and good teachers and I'll give them credit for starting me on the right track. Thirty-five years later I met Sister Mary Matthews coming out of the ford Hospital and she remembered me and asked if I had followed up in Art and seemed tickled when I told her I had. She remembered all her pupils, their personalities and characters and I'll bet many a pupil came back to her for advice in later years. These Sisters were real teachers dedicated to their work with no worries about unions, pensions or politics, more money with less work ideas that we see and hear about today. Today's teachers think more about their salaries, vacations, political angles and the pupils are treated as products going through a machine like part of an automobile assembly plant.

Walking a mile and three-quarters never bothered kids in any weather and we carried our lunch and enjoyed it. We did not know we had egos so it was easier for a pupil to learn arithmetic, spelling, grammar, reading and music. No carpentry, no cooking, or how to ride a bicycle and no drawing but we spent about fifteen minutes a day in religious training and I don't think it hurt any of us. The main thing in those days was to do what the teacher told us and we had report cards to bring home. We did very little kicking to our parents about school as most parents had confidence in the teachers and figured the teacher knew her business.

I know most boys hated the "Mother's boys" who sobbed to their Mothers all the time and had their Mothers going to the teachers, or other mothers, to see that their darling smart little Fauntleroys got a square deal. he usually got what he deserved whether it was a punch in the nose or was ignored by the other boys - how we could work on a mother's pet was a shame. I remember a few - some got over it and some never did and suffered the rest of their lives.

In the Catholic school we had a show each year and that meant a miserable few weeks for me as I was no actor, couldn't sing (in fact I was in the no sing section) and couldn't even play any instrument not even the Jews Harp. We needed little scenery so my art was of little value to me in this period. The shows consisted of singing, drilling, exercising and little novelty acts with nothing humorous but our serious acting.

The first show I was in was a Brownie Act and my Mother made me a brownie outfit and I had to learn a few steps and sing what I thought was a silly song. I made it with the help of a teacher who combed my hair and tied my tie. I should have started to train my hair but didn't and that's why I ran around for years with hair that really isn't civilized - in fact my hair has stayed in the Cave Age.

Another play was called "We All are Merry Workers" and of all things they made me a musician and that called for me to play six notes on a trumpet. The music teacher gave up on me as I never got one note out of the thing.

One of my pals laughed at me and got a punch in the nose and as the sister happened to see that event I had a session with Sister Bertha but it came out all right. They made me the blacksmith with an anvil, a leather apron and a big hammer and all I had to do was hit the anvil six times, trying to keep it in rhythm with the music. I didn't cover myself with glory but I survived the evening.

Whenever a notice went up for a show, I got that sinking feeling in my stomach as that meant no baseball, or gym and that I would have to stand while my Mother made me another monkey suit. Standing on that stage in front of my Mother, Father, a couple of aunts and uncles and a bunch of strangers still haunts me. The after remarks as "Why didn't you turn your toes out?" (not appreciating that all good athletes are pigeon-toed) and "Why didn't you comb your hair?", "Fix your tie?" or "Why did you look at the floor during the whole act?". Boy, when one of these events was over, it was like getting up after a siege of Scarlet Fever. But the funny thing was I could put on a Punch and Judy show for my brothers and sisters and keep them interested for quite a while.

With the aid of a couple of doll's heads, a few rag dolls, some colored goods, and a few neckties, I would hang a blanket in one corner of the kitchen get behind it and start the show. I kept the figures moving, bumping each other and talking all the time and they loved it and of course I was the oldest and biggest and maybe that had something to do with it. In those early days I learned to make breakfast for the kids, to help my Mother when she was indisposed. It consisted of oat meal, not pre-digested stuff, but real oat meal soaked over night and boiled in the morning. The kids ate it by the soup plate-full with either brown sugar, molasses or white sugar and lots of milk - and coffee - and sometimes a bite of toast. They thrived on it as they left the vitamins in the food in those days and we never had a bottle of vitamins on the table. One good thing about this food was we never had a fat kid in our family and that satisfied my as I always disliked fat kids - they are slow, poor ball players and have a tendency to run home and tell Ma bout things, in fact I thin all fat people are really sick - it ain't natural.

My ability to draw helped me in my schooling to a certain degree as I could get out of a few classes by decorating the black boards with Santa Claus, holly or Easter Bunnies and ribbons but left a few blank spots in my education. I usually did my art work during spelling and grammar and I was sixty-five years old before I knew what an adverb was and am not quite sure yet. How to parse a sentence is still a secret to me.

Spelling and music were hard subjects to me but when they put me in the non-singing group that helped but they still expected me to read notes - why I never did find out. The non-singing group idea is a very worthy one and ought to be followed in all large groups, family get together and even in church as what one individual who lacks harmony and has a few knots in his vocal chords can do to a Lodge songfest or in church, or even in the bathroom, is hard to describe. They could stamp it on a registration card so people could register it in the membership book.

We had a gym in the basement of our school which the pupils could use a few nights of the week. We had a bowling alley, a boxing ring, pool tables, punching bags and all kinds of exercising machines. This activity was usually run by Father Boex and boy did he have his hands full. The boxing ring had ropes around it and a bell on one side and I saw many a good fight in it - and I was in quite a few and one of my reminders of it is a nose that resembles one of those instruments they use in church to put out the candles.

We usually had a referee to keep track of the two-minute rounds but he never got in the ring as that was dangerous. If the boys refused to quit at the sound of the bell, Father Boex used his cane which had a few knots and bumps on it and he could swing a mean cane and get them to quit. A few of these boys boxed around in club shows and the Beaubian boys became very good fighters but Father Boex talked them out of making a business out of it as he believed there were better ways to make a living.

I still like fights but not quite as proud of it as it seems a little uncivilized. When I see a fighter saying a prayer before each round or a fighter who takes his gloves over and has the Priest bless them, I can't understand it - and more I hope I never will.

After making my First Communion I changed to public school at my Father's request and I imagine it was an economical move. The other school required tuition and with all the kids getting ready to go to school it could have run into quite an expense. I registered at the Bishop school and after a few months catching up in some studies and others I was ahead in and getting used to having girls in our classes I got acclimated. Little girls received little of my attention before this period but soon I was interested in a cute blonde named Tillie - before I knew it I was trying to do a little favor for her by giving her spelling papers, which we exchanged and corrected, at least a 98 mark and I often sat on the room dictionary so she could have it anytime she needed it. I guess I was no bargain in those days. Tall, Skinny, wild reddish hair and pigeon toes and she showed no particular interest so I gave up and went back to baseball.

Some of my public school teachers were first class and if all had been like a Miss McAdams, I would have been a first class student and would have been able to spell correctly and learned all bout English. After her I got some teachers all the pupils disliked , and often they never did like kids either. A half year of one of them started more boys to thinking about quitting school or joining the army or even going to work.

We had to go through the eighth grade and some of the boys would have gone to night school to get through as they developed such a dislike for school.

Lots of men who had tough times and proved to be failures, through lack of education were made that way by disinterested teachers who instead of making study interesting made it something that kids hated.

Mr. Daniels was our principle and I had quite a few sessions with him mostly for fighting, once for having another boy doctor my music book and once for drawing a prize fight in the corners of each page of my speller - by flipping the pages I had something like a movie in fact that idea was the origin of the movies.

The greatest punishment I received was to have a teacher put me in the front row of desks as they were small and I was so tall my knees scraped on the bottom of the desk, I was very uncomfortable but as the teacher said she could see me much easier. Another was to stay after school with the teacher until she decided to go home. I had to walk about ten feet behind her until we got to the front gate and then she excused me - but in between she had several long talks with other teachers and always warned me to stay out of hearing or I might have learned some good stories and a lot of gossip. A week of that kind of stuff left me in pretty bad shape but it never seemed to make me try harder to behave myself.

Teaching is the most important thing in our system and teachers have great responsibilities. They are the ones who shape the future of our Country, for good or bad, and a teacher that doesn't recognize that and practice it should be fired even if she belongs to all the unions in the Country. Pupils should have slips to fill out telling their ideas of their teachers and a committee can rate the teacher the same as the teachers rate them. A teacher who is not in sympathy with the pupils can do a great deal of harm. Going to Teachers college and putting a certain number of hours and knowing all the answers don't make a good teacher - there's more to it than that.

Around this time I started to make a little spending money by peddling papers and having my own customers but being a lousy collector wasn't a financial success. I learned a lot about people and how they could stall, forget or make up excuses and that some were plain deadbeats and plain liars and for a while I lost a lot of Faith in the human race. I imagine it was good training learning the facts of life the hard way.

Kids could make a little money by delivering groceries and merchandise but you had to have a bicycle and my working capital did not allow that. The days of a dollar down and pay when they caught you had not arrived. I occasionally chopped the heads off chickens for Jewish families at a quarter a chicken but they did not eat enough chicken to suit me.

I got a paper route, Free Press, from a neighbor on the condition that I would rap on his bedroom window at four A.M. and wake him up. He would ride his bike down to the Free Press and parcel out the papers to the boys for their routes. I had to walk so I got down about a half hour later and got my papers.

My first route was High, Montcalm and Winder from Woodward to John R. The number of customers was close to a hundred and as that was a pretty classy neighborhood in those days it was one of the best routes. All routes started from the Free Press building. No collecting but we had lots of rules and special instructions from the customers. Some wanted the paper slipped under the door, others had to be put on the back porch in a certain place, some did not want it folded. Once a Minister, at that, demanded it be put in his hands at a certain time each day (winter, summer, rain or hail) putting us in the same class as mailmen without the honors. The salary ran about $7.00 a month and we had ways to improve on that but they are secrets which I am ashamed to write about. Complaints were many and were given to you each morning with your papers. The ones on white cards were first complaints but the blue ones were repeats and cost you a nickel a piece and boy how I learned to hate some people.

One of the rules that we ignored a lot was eating a lunch in one of the all night restaurants as we were supposed to forget out appetites until all papers were delivered, as the good old customers came first, and we paid a fine if caught. One restaurant I remember called Potter's Lunch - where you could get a cup of coffee and a snake bun for a nickel after the water chased the cockroaches off the bun with a fly swatter. In those days we weren't finicky and learned to live with flies, cockroaches and bed bugs.

Sunday papers were a little difficult but with the aid of two carts and a younger brother I managed to make it.

Occasionally we made a little extra money helping drunk to his feet or waking him up if it was cold and starting him home. One drunk gave me a dollar for fishing his umbrella out of a grate for him and this was on a beautiful day with the sun shining in the eastern horizon. Another time I followed the foot marks in the snow of a drunk who had a hole in his pocket and was doing pretty good while his small change lasted.

We always received a few extra papers and usually traded the milk man or a bakery man for milk or buns. Sometimes when we were low in cash we picked up a few Tribunes (which was the other morning paper) and sold them but that was a bad habit as two could play at it. This neighborhood furnished a log of the Bishop school ball team's equipment. The boys were a little careless where they left their bats, balls and gloves and we thought they weren't very good ball players anyway.

These people had beautiful gardens, flowers of all descriptions, and furnished us with flowers for the teacher when we were in the dog house and we gave them nothing but the best. How they could be dumb enough to accept them and smile and thank you and abet us in a life of small crimes I'll never know and imagine started a lot of boys thinking. I never saw a policeman that early in the morning, maybe they didn't start work until eight but we never worried about the cops.

My next rout was a long one on Congress Street from Woodward to Joseph Campau and my last delivery was to a fire engine house. I never got off that street and it ended a little closer to home and it covered all kinds of homes from the most humble to very fine ones. As there were no restaurants on this route I had to trade papers for milk and buns and when short had to pick up a few Tribunes. At this time we figured the Tribune and the Tribune boys to be very inferior things. I also tried an afternoon route for a new paper called Today but they expected you to dig up new customers and it was not a financial success with me and I soon quit it. This paper was eventually sold and is still in existence and called the Times and seems to be making money for somebody who doesn't live in Detroit.

How I lived through these days was beyond me as I was a skinny, sickly looking kid but they never could find anything wrong with me except that I coughed, my nose ran and my feet were sore. It seemed that wet feet, a cold nose, frost bite and cold fingers developed a set of protective germs in my system that seem to be with me yet. I guess the insurance company would have called me a poor risk but I could eat like a horse and my Mother's food was excellent, lots of oat meal, potato pancakes and meat. They didn't take vitamins out of food and sell it to the Drug Company who bottled and named it and sold it back to the people. This is a modern scientific improvement which makes it possible for people to either be sick or well just as they feel at that moment.

When I graduated from the eighth grade or thought I did, as I skipped school the last four days, I never went back to get my diploma or whatever they gave you for passing that grade. I always tell people I went through the eighth grade and they seem to believe me. I decided to find a job, make some money and become a man.

Skipping school was made easy as I knew a Ty Denk who always could write nice excuses for us boys.

Our family financial condition, not too good, my Father didn't say much but I know he would have liked me to continue schooling as he came to this Country with a good education and realized its value.

If I had continued in school I would have had to decide one question and that was whether to become a Priest or go to West Point, two ambitions very far apart. Both of these ambitions took money and I knew enough about life to know they were impossible at that time.

I always liked drawing but it never entered my head that you could make a living at it as I never met anybody who made money by painting pictures or drawing cartoons. I learned there was an art school in the old Arbeiter Building and I started to take lessons on Sunday morning at twenty-five cents a lesson. A sculpture named Melchers, the father of Gari Melchers, a well-known artist, taught and he was a wonderful teacher who had patience with some temper. he was well liked by his pupils and did a real job with very little monetary return - just an artist that liked the new world and wanted to do his part. The results were good and he gave many a boy a find start as an artist. Some of his pupils were Jim Goldie, John Woodruff, Mike Kumpky and Albert Kahn. I have to laugh at an article that said that Kahn gave up art and took up architecture because he was color blind. If that statement was realistic there would be very few artists as very few of them see color the same as nature, they know better than to make exact duplications whether it by minds, eyes, ears or looks and besides architecture is surely in the art category.

I can still see Melchers, on a cold winter day, coming up the steps of the school tapping his cane on the steps to warn us to get busy - and his great overcoat and fur hat. The big wood stove in the center of the building and the talks he gave us about art and that there was beauty in anything even a piece of fire weed standing beside the stove. Now it comes back to me that he had a feeling that a true artist has whether he be modern or academic. I think Melcher did a lot more for early Detroit with his few pupils than lots of politicians whose Portraits adorn our Old City Hall.

Realizing that the family needed money, and I needed money and clothes, I took a job in a bicycle shop my uncle ran in connection with a bicycle and parts sales room - it was in one of the first sky-scrapers in Detroit, the Majestic Building. I worked part time in the bicycle shop and made myself a bike, meaning I took a lot of discarded and battered parts and put them together and it turned out to be a fairly good bicycle.

While I worked in the Majestic Building, on the sixth floor, I heard a terrible noise and then saw the roof of the theater across the way, which was just being built, fall into the building and killed some of the workmen. The place was just a cloud of dust with police, ambulances and fire departments all over. It registered very strongly on my mind and I had a little trouble going to sleep for a few days.

Most boys were looking to learn a good paying trade and friend of the family, an electric platter, needed an apprentice so he talked me into taking the job. The firm he worked for made plumbing fixtures that were made of brass and then plated with nickel. It wasn't hard work but the smell of the chemicals used in cleaning was horrible. They had to be scrubbed and wired and then put into another chemical. My hands and my feet were always wet as water and chemicals were all over the place. It did not agree with me and I learned to hate it and after a few months started to look again.

Eventually I got a job at the Ideal Manufacturing Company putting toys together which was a simple job. It meant taking two sides of toy trains and riveting them together and the only trick was to hit them just hard enough and not too hard as I soon learned they were made of cast iron and broke very easily. This was production piece work and my mind rebelled at becoming a mind of machine and I decided to quit. They refused to pay me if I quit but with my Father's help and a lot of argument and threats I got my money and decided shop work was not for me. In later years that work would be called semi-skilled and would have made a good wage but it was so monotonous it almost drove me crazy.

I kept looking for a job with no idea what I wanted to do. It was a very disappointing time and I can sympathize with young men who start looking for work without knowing what they want to do. This is a period where a boy needs help and the best advice can be obtained by talking to men who are skilled workmen or successful business men not the advisor at the school or your father - he's too close to you to really know you.

Taking any job that paid money was the result. I took a job at Bryant's Music Store on Woodward Avenue which consisted of cleaning brass instruments, cleaning the store and running errands. The cleaning was done in a small room, heated by a gasoline lamp, and I soon found out how hard it was to get a fly speck off a Base Horn with a rag, some cleaner and elbow grease. One thing it kept me warm with the exception of my feet.

When an instrument was sold I used to take it a few blocks to an engraver who put the owners' initials on it usually in old English, with a lot of scrolls and flurries, and to me it was wonderful to see how skillful he was and how easy he did it. It makes me art conscious again and gave me a goal - something I would be proud to do.

Mr. Bryant was a wonderful corniest and had played at one of the theaters. I enjoyed his demonstrations to some mother to show what her son could do with a cornet - with eight or ten years of lessons and practice that is if he loved it and didn't trade it to some boy for a shot gun. It was sad to see the forlorn look on some of the boys whose mothers really believed they had wonderful unusual talent. A look that I have seen all through life on faces of people who did not love the things they were doing.

I worked there quite a while and all I learned was to hate flies and flyspecks. Then I tried to learn the furrier trade and got a job at "Mau the Furrier" as delivery boy with the promise of learning the trade. All I remember was the furrier beating furs with rattan sticks and sewing small pieces of fur together very patiently. When cleaning the furs, they played a kind of rhythm time with the rattan sticks which rather irritated my ears.

This job did not last long as I had an unfortunate accident while delivering a set of white fox furs, a muff and a neck piece, which a society dame had to wear to some social function that night. The afternoon was rainy and the streets were wet and slippery and Mr. Mau let me use his new bike to deliver them as his bike looked classier than mine and kept up the tone of Mau's store. I hung the muff box on my handle bars and carried the neck piece in a news bag on by back. I started out Woodward at a merry clip, but, alas, when going under the viaduct on Woodward my knee hit the muff box and before I knew it I want over the handle bars and skidded down the sloppy pavement. The muff came out of the box and the fur box few apart - you can imagine what white furs would have looked like after that. I realized what a mess I was in and knew enough not to deliver them but that trip back to the store was awful. I learned how low a guy can get when he's all out of luck, but my changed as Mr. Mau was in the toilet when I got back and his son, a young man with a heart of gold, told me to hide while he talked to his father. Luckily I wasn't fired but I can still see the sparks flying from Mau's eyes. Things were not the same after that and I decided the furrier business was not for me. What the dame wore to her social affair that night I never knew - maybe she stayed home!

Most of the boys had similar problems with the exception of those that went to work for their fathers or went on to High School or College.

I met lots of my schoolmates in after years and learned how they made out and often wondered whether luck didn't have a lot to do with it. Some became policemen, lawyers, mechanics and I think I was the only one to make a living at art and I know I had a lot of luck to do it. Then I got a break, which influenced all my later years, just an ad in the newspaper. "Boy with a talent for art as an apprentice". It pays to watch the want ads as I really think they have changed many a boy's life and made it a happier one.

Van Leyen and Hensler, a firm with an art studio, wood engraving and a zinc etching department, asked me to see them. After an interview with Mr. Van Leyen, I signed as an apprentice, for three years, and come to think of it my Father had to sign it too. This was about the last of the apprenticeship days and I doubt whether the newer systems are any better. The starting wages were low, about two dollars a week, with raises in salary a very indefinite thing. It was what I wanted and my Father said I did not need to pay any board until I earned enough and I certainly appreciated that for I had eight brothers and sisters and I figured he was doing as much for me as lots of fathers who could send their boys to college.

The firm was at the corner of Griswold and Jefferson with the office on the ground floor and the art department on the third floor - no elevator - no heat!

I soon learned my duties: first was to get down one half hour earlier than the others, light the stove and heat the art department, run errands for the firm and the men, get their chewing tobacco and lunches and do anything the men wanted done. I remember the stove very well and the other boy showed my how to get quick heat with the aid of a can of benzene. After being successful for a couple of weeks I wasn't fast enough one morning and the can of benzene caught afire. With the help of the other boy we got it out but the floor was pretty wet and we quickly mopped up the whole floor. I remember the foreman remarking about the place being clean and praised us and to this day I don't know whether he was kidding us or if he was that dumb.

Then I found out I was supposed to learn wood engraving - just cut lines on wood from drawings made by the artists. I felt a bit disappointed but being around artists overcame that feeling. This task of cutting straight lines on a block of hard weed was very tedious thing and I had a hard time convincing myself that this was what I wanted to learn.

The men were good to me and I certainly serviced them - got their chewing tobacco and got their box lunches (which cost fifteen cents and included two thin sandwiches, a piece of pie or cake and a pickle) and I watched the coffee pot on the stove. They even taught me how to chew tobacco as they said you could never become an engraver without learning that and I believed them. They sang at their work and it sounded good to me and it tickled me to hear it slowly die down when the boss came in. One of the first things a boss learned was to walk very quietly and they were the boys that could do it.

I remember one crippled engraver who required crutches to walk. Quite often he came to work with a few too many and couldn't make the stairs and the boys used to get downstairs in a hurry and carry him up and set him in his chair. It's funny but he could do his engraving as good as ever. I use to go swimming with that fellow and he could swim like a fish just using his arms. These men seemed to like me and gave me lots of advice which proved itself in later years and it began to dawn on me that I was learning a trade that was slowly dying but what to do about it was beyond me.

This was a very changeable period as advertising, illustrations and methods of reproduction were changing constantly. The engravers controlled all advertising art, claiming ownership of all the art, and when you needed another engraving you had to come to them for it. As advertising began to grow, filing the drawings away, taking care of them, and the insurance on them, made that idea impossible. The drawings were sent to the customer and he had to take care of them and that was a good thing for the artists, as most customers knew, were very careless with these drawings and we had a lot of work to do over.

Half tones were a new method of reproduction just coming in and its use grew very fast. The days of wood engraving were pretty nearly over putting me on the spot and I could see that I had to make a change. I talked this over with my Father and he could realize the problem and said I would have to use my own head and do what I thought right. I notified Mr. Van Leyen but he objected and said my Father and myself had signed for three years and would have to live up to the contract. I just didn't go to work and waited to see what Van Leyen would do but he must have decided to do nothing as I never heard about it.

I was on the cruel world again, disappointed, but now having a goal in mind and that was to become an artist and now I had some idea of how to do it.

I tried Calvert Lithographing Company, Peninsular Engraving Company and a few other places but I was still out of work - not knowing that Old lady Luck was working for me without telling me anything about it.

The artists at Van Leyen and Hensler decided they still needed an apprentice, as art work was in great demand and there were very few capable artists, as most artists at that time thought commercial art was beneath them and would rather starve than do advertising are. Boy, oh Boy - that certainly has changed now as we have very good gallery artists doing fine work in advertising and you can see artists driving their own Cadillac’s today.

I thank the Lord, the artists remembered me. John Woodruff, one of the best artists, suggested that Van Leyen write to me and offer the job to me. Boy, how I jumped at the offer, received another lecture from Van Leyen and got the job making me the happiest kid in Detroit. The next year was a happy one helping the artists doing small parts of jobs, or anything the artists wanted and listening and remembering all the advice they gave me.

Then it happened again - Chicago needed a lot of artists and as the studios there paid much higher salaries, out entire staff left. I was the only one left not having enough experience to be wanted. I missed the artists but it was a good experience for me. I had to do art work that was a little beyond me but I tried and soon I was capable of doing a lot of the work while the firm was trying to build up a new are department. To get a raise out of the firm, was another problem I had to beat, as business men of these days had more excuses and more ways of stalling off a raise. It took about three months to get a few dollars more and myself and my family certainly needed all I could earn.

Eventually the lack of artists, and as I improved, they had to pay good wages. We had plenty of overtime so I got into the money, could wear good clothes, go places and even start looking at blondes again.

In these days the German family expected to control their children until they were twenty one and turn all earnings into the family chest. I did it and my Father was very generous with my allowance. I never kicked about it as it seemed the right thing to do especially in our family. Realizing that I had to become a better artist, and really learn how to draw, I started at Detroit School of Art with a pal of mine, Herman Scharfenberg and we worked hard but enjoyed it.

It was the old fashioned teaching and Mr. Giess the teacher, a good painter of portraits, was good one and started us drawing from the casts with charcoal. You had to satisfy him or he would draw a heavy line through one of your drawings that would make you do it over and you didn't get out of that group until he was satisfied. This was before you put so many hours in and that made you an artist or even a teacher. After that you went into Life class and drew from the nude and eventually were allowed to use colors and to think of yourself as a real artist. The only disadvantage of that kind of teaching was that it made what we called professional students who never seemed to be able to paint anything unless they could see it - painting pictures never meant using your brains also.

Now a days, they go to the other extreme and let the students paint as they please and duck the things that require drawing. Naturally they paint and talk modern art and I know one thing - it makes the teacher's life easier as he accepts the students' ideas however vague.

The best of modern painters were conventional painters first and that is a good thing for students to remember - there are no short cuts.

Later Giess was joined by a Mr. Wicker, a fine painter on the decorative side, and in later years by Joe Kraemer. Kraemer was a newspaper artist and a wonderful pen and ink man with a love for detail, whether it be how many buttons on a Civil War veteran's coat or a spinnaker on an old sailing vessel. Joe tried to fit the students into commercial art and he did a fine job. Giess always said there was no difference between commercial and easel art - you were either a lousy artist or a pretty good one.

One of Giess fine portraits hangs in the Scarab club. It is a portrait of Frank Scott Clark, a society photographer artist who did his share in putting a little culture into this city. With the growth of advertising changes took place very rapidly. Studios were organized to do nothing but commercial art and one of the first was the Advertisers Bureau, originally organized by Charles Vollker, salesman Herman Scharfenberger and Harold Bekyers who were good commercial artists, and remained in business for a good many years.

Then we reached a period of specialization - one man was an idea man and we had lettering, figure, designers, retouches, mechanical and fashion. They tried to make a business of art but that was never a success as art is like music - you can commercialize it, control it but it loses something in the doing.

Around this period, female artists entered the art game in certain work like fashions and newspaper art. They were at their best and soon made a place for themselves as commercial artists.

The day of the all around artist was pretty nearly over and big business entered into it. They employed their own artists. The advertising agencies put artists on their staff, usually idea men - they called them layout men who did nothing but rough layouts and color sketches to help put across ideas which were usually rather weak and needed art work to put them across. That isn't always the case but look over the advertising in magazines and judge for yourself.

Eventually artists will have to work for the large firms who can guarantee a steady job, sick benefits, a paid vacation and a pension when they get old enough. This means security and it seems to be what the worker wants and what it does to the Artist, as a creative individual, is lost in the shuffle.

The art studios had production lines long before Ford invented it. One studio in Chicago, who did men's fashions, and one artist sketch the figure in pencil, another washed in the clothes, another put in the face and hands and the shoes, then a pattern was put on the clothes, a boy cleaned it and covered it. It went down the line, being handed from one man to another, until it was a finished piece of commercial art. It simplified the job but I'll tell you it wasn't much fun as you had to keep up with the line at all times. Of all things you had to punch a clock at eight o'clock, at twelve again, at twelve thirty and again at five. Sometimes they referred to you by your number instead of your name. I thank the Lord I got through life so far without punching a clock - maybe it is a necessity but the next generation can have my share of it. We used air brushes quite a while before the automobile and house painters tried it. The first air brush we used was a Rockford with a foot pump, to get the necessary pressure, and it was a necessity for certain kinds of art work.

During these days all the boys, no matter what their trade, saw the same changes in apprenticeships, changes in processes and ideas and different working conditions and had to work out their problems as they met them. The boys who went to college met their problems a little later in life than we did but they were practically the same and they had to find their places and make good under the conditions they met at that particular time. Detroit needed them all - and most of them did their share to make Detroit the dynamic city it is. It wasn't just the big shots as they could have done very little without the help of these young workers.

The younger folks, as well as the older ones, enjoyed themselves at this time. In summer we had our church picnics, went fishing, had City band concerts at Clark Park and Belle Isle, our Electric Park for excitement, played ball, canoed on the canals of Belle Isle and lots of boat trips, some with dancing, on Sunday a musical concert and always the home was a meeting place for the young folks - a place to have fun.

In the winter we had our dances, both small and large, in lots of dancing halls. I'll say one thing - in later years we had some of the best dance halls and the best music in this country. The dance halls were polite places with no rough stuff. The gals that went there were really dancers and they could spot a poor dancer a mile away. No liquor, just soft drinks and sandwiches. The men at the doors were very careful who they let in.

We could bowl which was just starting, shoot pool in a pool parlor which was a place with a good reputation, we played a lot of cards like pinochle, poker, hearts, sixty-six, checkers and dominoes. I never saw anyone play bridge until later years, in fact I never heard of it until later, and am thankful for that fact.

Most people had a piano and there was somebody who could play as the Germans especially like to sing - or that's what they called it. If they could not afford a piano there was the accordion, guitar, banjo, mouth organ or a zither and somebody who could play them. Some homes had one of the old organs and that made good music.

There were no radios, phonographs or televisions to blare out so called music all hours. When we got tired playing and singing we could sit and talk and discuss music, art or politics. No if you start to talk somebody shushes you to keep quiet while they hear what Arther Godfrey thinks about things in general - usually his favorite breakfast food. All changes are not improvements - some of them make things worse. Our entertainment and music started from us and naturally you were part of it - you were a participant - instead of an on-looker or listener

Being of German origin we got a lot of beer barrel polkas - ...... ......... ......... ................ No purple-headed people but we had our American music such as "Down by the Sea", "In the Shade of the Old Apple Tree", "Sweet Adeline" and "My Old Kentucky Home" that were as good as most of the songs written today.

Detroit, at this time, was the home of sheet music as Jorome Remick published thousands of pieces that were translated and sung and played all over the civilized world. A few years ago I met a family of musicians, who had received their musical education in Holland, who had come to this Country. The Mother played the Cello at a Hotel in Ottawa, Canada. The father taught the violin and id concert work while the son played the flute and as far as I was concerned he was the best in Canada and eventually became the leader of a television orchestra in Winnipeg. These people told me they knew Detroit years before coming to America as all their sheet music came with the name Jerome Remick - Detroit, Michigan on it - they knew that fact long before they heard of Henry Ford. Sometimes I think if Detroit publicized the fact that we made and did other things besides building autos people would have thought more of us and maybe more cultured people would have moved here.

When I think of music, I came from a musical family, I think of my Uncle Professor Franz Apel. He was a teacher and organist who never got rich but a lot of wealthy people owed him money when he died - so he must have done something for Detroit. Lillian Apel played in concerts and on the stage for a good many years. I can still see the Professor, with a cut-away coat of ........ plaid and his music case and he looked just like the stage character of a music professor. He carried the Prussian idea all through life - his only son disagreed with him about his education and left home - the father never mentioned or tried to find him. It was thirty years later that the family found out he was a sheriff in a small locality in Minnesota, had a large family and was happy in his work. He was all American and even refused to help his relatives in Germany after the first war as he blamed them for the whole thing.

I remember one boy, with a widowed mother, who lived in old Corktown who used to draw covers for Jorome Remick's sheet music. These usually consisted of an illustration and a heading to fit the song and he received about fifteen dollars apiece for them. He loved music and the stage, with its beautiful girls, and after absorbing all he could by working with Remick, he left for New York. He became on of the big shots of the stage, especially musical shoes with lots of beautiful gals and scenery. His name was Gene Buck and he added another glory to all Corktown - a place that produced a lot of lawyers and politicians out of boys and girls that had to fight and make their own way with very little help from anyone - as that was a neighborhood of poor but proud people.

I always liked that neighborhood as it had some swell looking Irish gals both the red-headed kind and the ones with black hair and blue eyes. Joan Leslie, the movie star, came from that neighborhood.

It's a funny thing about the Irish - other races like them and will be led by them. A friend of mine, right from Corktown, who was a taxi driver in Detroit, became a leader in Calumet, Michigan (a locality of Finnish people) who elected him to any office he wanted.

We had plenty of theaters in the old days. One of which was the Wonderland. It was a very popular place and you got lots of entertainment for your money. it contained a menagerie of birds from all over the world, monkeys, small animals and snakes and smelled like you'd expect a zoo to smell. Then you entered the wax gallery of notable events. Life size in full color with regular clothes and they were very lifelike. Some of the groups were scenery of Lincoln's death, Lady Godiva's ride, the death of Jesse James and many others. It seems I remember one "The Death of Beethoven" in a beautiful bedroom and his family made from a well known painting of that event. I also remember a cartoon of that event and he maintained that Beethoven died in a cheap saloon by choking on a purple wiener-worst and portrayed it that way in his cartoon. I don't know which one was correct but I enjoyed the cartoon.

From there we when into the regular theater to see a vaudeville show that was practically continuous and included dancers, jugglers, acrobats, comedians, singers and usually ended with a dog show or a trained seal which usually put the people in the mood to go home and thereby making room for other customers.

The Lyceum and Whitney theaters showed lots of drama and heavy stuff like "Willie Live, Across the Pacific", "Uncle Tom's Cabin", "Bertha the Sewing Machine Girl" and "Happy Hooligan" and for ten or fifteen cents you could get a seat in what we called "Nigger Heaven" - no individual seats just long wooden benches holding about twelve kids each. There was a head usher, or bouncer, who had to be big, tough and rough to maintain any kind of order. Those kids just wanted to get in the act and kept the hero informed of all dangers and hollered what they thought of the villain.

One bouncer, a Kid Wellman, I remember as he was well known as having knocked Fitzsimmons down in an exhibition on the stage - but I always felt that must have been an off night for Fitzsimmons. He could with a small bribe get you a seat by simply pushing the boys closer together. This usually resulted in a boy on the other end popping out of his seat and leaving a seat for you. Wellman carried a small club and for some unknown reason everybody kept their hats on until the curtain was about to go up and then he rapped the seat with the club and in a loud voice announced, "Hats Off". I don't know what the seats downstairs cost as that place way beyond me. Of course we always walked downtown and back home in those days and boy, what a kick my brother and I got of those shows.

The Temple Theater, a vaudeville house on the Campus, had seven or eight acts and later a short movie which very few waited to see as they were pretty bad in those days. The best vaudeville acts included Weber and Fields with their German dialect, Judge Kelly and his judge's stand, WC. Fields and his pool table. It was the birthplace of many comedians who entered the movies and some on into television. The tickets to see these shows cost twenty five cents and up. We saw them all, acrobats, dancers, singers, jugglers, sleight-of-hand performers and all kinds of specialty acts. The best thing was that they only appeared once or twice a year and although lots of them had the same acts for years you did not get as tired of them as you do seeing the same actor once a seek - as you do on television.

There was an orchestra in the pit and it was a good one. The drummer, named Al Green, was known by everybody as he was quite a character besides being a wonderful drummer. At this time, the orchestra worked closer to the actors. Maybe they had no union but I'm not sure. The only commercials were the few on a drop and nobody paid any attention to them. The Detroit Opera House with its high grade plays for the cultured set was a little high priced for me. I did go occasionally and saw some wonderful plays and actors like "Ben Hur", "The Virginian", "Romeo and Juliet", "Way Down East". I remember on great actor especially named David Warfield.

One scene I'll never forget was a desert scene with Vandersham as the hero. I can still see him crawling across the sandy desert, thirsty, tired and with his clothes in tatters - towards a lone palm tree. The sun was slowly frying him and eventually reaching the tree he grabbed at it. The darn thing moved along the desert about three feet with him crawling after it. The audience chuckled and I can imagine what he said in low tones - but it was a good finish and the end for some stage hand.

The Companies appearing in this theater were the original casts and the theater was well attended by what they referred to as the upper class - meaning they had the dough! Vaughn Glaser and Fay Courtney brought a stock company to Detroit every year for a month or two and played in a theater on Michigan Avenue. I remember they changed shows every week and were very heavy on Sherlock Holes and cowboy pictures in fact any play that did not require too much tricky scenery.

The firm I worked for, the Joe Mack Printing Company, did a lot of posters of him. I saw some of the rehearsals and learned why he leaned on a certain mantle, walked up to a window and looked out, picked up a book and looked into it or ever pulled his cuffs down out of his coat - they contained certain cues in the play same as the boys, with cards, do for the television stars today.

The actor is gambling a little more today as the wrong or an upside down card often produces that dumb look on the actor's face as he looks off stage and lets the shivers run up and down his back. Some look dumb without this help, but that's natural.

Jessie Bonstelle, not a native Detroiter, became a good actress after arriving here and a great teacher. She had leads in some good plays and traveled all over the country but always came back home. She played in the old Whitney Theater and many others. She eventually had a theater of her own on Woodward Avenue which she managed. She trained her talented pupils and some of these pupils like Ann Harding, Frank Morgan and Katharine Cornell proved her capability. She never was too tired to help high schools or any theatrical group that needed her knowledge or advice and everybody loved her. The Scarab club was a great friend of hers and often bought out a night of her play. When this happened this always turned out to be a long and wonderful evening. Detroit really should be proud of her as an artist who thought less of money than she did of the art she loved and taught.

Around this time a new method of entertaining people was born and it had the biggest audience of all time and could entertain a million people or more on one night - it was the movies. It's real start, as I saw it, was the Nickelodeon a method of flipping picture of action in front of your eyes that gave you the idea of motion. You could see a prize fight or a hula dance for one nickel. This was just an improvement of the pictures we drew in one corner of a page of a book - just changing the position on each page - then flipping the pages you go the effect of action. You also got sent up to the principal's office and were punished for spoiling the book and bothering the other pupils!

Mr. Kunsky owned this nickelodeon and he became interested in the movies and movie theaters, which became possible with the movie camera and the necessary machinery for throwing the picture onto a large curtain in rapid motion. This meant big business, large stages with lots of lights, actors, directors, scene painters, promoters, advertising men, ticket salesmen, ushers, projectionists, janitors and the piano player who helped give those silent pictures a musical background and drowned out the noise of the old movie projectors.

The piano player was very interesting character, very important as he had to have a large repertoire of music that fit each scene whether it was a sad affair or a happy one, a cowboy scene, an old saloon scene or even an oriental dancer. He had to change the music quick and get the feeling of the action which meant he had to watch the screen, turn his music over and play it in the right mood. When the screen broke or the machine acted up he could play anything he wished but had to keep the audience quiet. They could get very restless with the "just a moment - a broken film" statement on the screen.

In between slides gave the audience warnings such as "baby crying in lobby", "Do not spit on floor". Dish night was Friday and some theaters ran little ads such as "Smalze's Bread is Home Made" but advertising was not used too much.

This was known as the silent movie days but it was not silent as the kids cried, yelled and some people explained the pictures to their friends, the continuous piano playing, the rustle of pop corn, even snoring when someone's husband went to sleep, the constant rustling of feet of people coming in or going out to the rest rooms - the name silent movies hardly seemed to fit. How long this period lasted I don't know but some guy thought the actors should talk instead of having to be helped with slides telling what the actor was going to say or what he had already said.

You can imagine the lack of talking made the actors over act to make sure the audience knew that he was going to shoot his faithless wife. The audience contained people of all degrees: some dumb, some bright, some with bad eyes and some that couldn't read English so the producer tried to cover them all. Most people left the theater with a belief that they knew what happened and how the faithless wife was killed and why.

When the audience fell off, owners figured new ways to get them back and somebody got the idea of having a Dish Night. You got one dish with each ticket and as each theater had dishes of different designs you had to go back to the same theater, and for a good many months, to get a complete set of matched or have a mongrel set. I knew a sigh painter who sold these dishes on contract and he made loads of money and bought the entire output of a few dish factories. This did not improve the movies as much as it improved the looks of the family dinner.

Then came amateur night with small prizes and all a contestant had to do was bring his own sheet music, guitar or any equipment he needed in his act and he was entitled to walk on the stage and prove himself. Then "get the hook" was started and if the audience did not like the act all they did was yell "get the Hook" and the contestant was pulled off the stage with a long hook. One of the stage hands handled this hook and often not too carefully but I thought it was a good idea as some of these very armatures were really awful.

These amateur nights drew big crowds as the contestants usually brought lots of friends and relatives to the show. The winner was judged by the amount of noise the audience made and nobody, I know of, can make as much noise about anything as a relative. I imagine some of these amateur night actors went on to success and made a living, at least I home so. Then came a great change. Some inventive genius crossed the movie roll with a phonograph record and we got pictures with sound ending the career of the theater's piano player. The acting improved as it ended the careers of those that couldn't talk English, had squeaky voices, stuttered and it was surprising how the audience changed in the liking of certain actors. Some it just murdered and some it built up into great actors.

This combination made it possible to put on the talking movies lots of the old standard plays and musical entertainment, also the sound of nature, the howling of wolves, song of the robin, even a cricket, should of a babbling brook or the pouring of a glass of beer - in fact everything but the smell and they even tried that as one show I saw had the odor of pines blown into the theater to amplify a primeval forest scene.

As you had to pay to see these pictures, advertising was used very sparingly, but the advertisers who are a sneaky lot found ways to get their products on the screen. Some made films with the products appearing in a lot of different places and would let the theater use them free of charge. Some even paid the producers of films to use their products in one of the scenes giving it a good position and seeing that the trade name was readable. lots of people noticed these things and I hope ignored them as sneaky tricks should only be used in politics.

With the improved pictures, theaters were build all over town. Some designed with beautiful architecture and some theaters were very gaudy and over ornate. One in particular, in our own neighborhood, the Century combined a few acts of vaudeville, Monk Watson a comedian, musician and clown and he put on very entertaining shows - besides a good movie. This got the crowds, changing the show twice a week, and made it possible for this neighborhood to have a place to go with the kids and make life a little more enjoyable for a good may years.

The Michigan Theater, downtown, which had first run vaudeville and a find orchestra under the direction of Edward Werner a fine musical director. Everybody admired him and that theater always had an appreciative audience. Why this form of entertainment died I don't know but I always had my suspicions.

Mr. Werner went to law school, while directing his orchestra, and eventually became head of the Musicians Local Union. He could have become a good head but I think the union is run from the head office in New York and some of their rules are a little ridiculous when you run up against them. If there are any professions that need union rules the least it would be the artists, poets, actors and musicians.

The Fisher Theater, built right into the Fisher Building, has always been a fine theater and has tried lots of different combinations but mostly has been a straight movie theater. Then the movie business go sick - they really suffered and lots of them just passed out. The Century Theater is now a car wash, some are liquor stores, grocery stores and some are just building with For Sale signs on them. A few are churches and they usually are noisy ones - lots of shouting and singing and I imagine a lot of collection baskets go up and down the aisles.

Then there were the outdoor movies, with a big stage, and a loud speaker in the window of your car - which was a lovers' heaven and many a unwary young man got his start towards married life in these places. I remember one outdoor movie owner held a contest to name his place - the names he got in the mail - I could hardly believe that there were that many people with evil minds! I never knew who won the prize but there were very few named that the law would have accepted as a name.

Through most of these years we had our phonographs. First you had to wind them with a crank on the side, and then they were electrically driven. They were improved through the years and now we have records that play for hours and automatic record changer for restaurants and saloons. Now these are machines that cost thousands of dollars, any style, and some take up an entire side of a room - super-sonic with three speakers. They claim every note is perfect and if you close your eyes, and have a good imagination, you can feel Rachmaninoff is right in your home playing for you. You can have a record for any mood you want, you can get an education, learn to talk Russian, reduce your weight by following the record and the wonderful part was, for me anyway, you do not have to look at a fellows tonsils while he is singing. I like to use my sense of hearing alone because if I use my eyes at the same time I get a little confuse.

I was through the whole development of the radio, from the time of the Crystal Set (when if we got a got words we were tickled) until today when you have to send the kids to bed to quiet the machine. I got an idea - but I don't think they'll ever use it, but still I think it's good - that's to have a key you could carry in your pocket and have some control over it. A kid, at the age of three, knows how to turn a radio on and I really think the meals would be better. Television has entered the picture and complicated the home life. It is ideal for prize fighting, wrestling, baseball, beauty contests, travel pictures and comedians who just look funny. They have some educational television but it is usually on a wave length a fellow can't get and that is too bad because we certainly need more education in this land of the free and easy. I really believe there should be certain hours for television as that would make for healthier people, better fed and the children would get higher marks in school. It's pretty hard to cook or learn a lesson while looking at the television.

Then came color television and I don't know if that will ever work. The machines I saw had separate controls for each of the three colors and Mr. Godfrey comes out a funny purple, maybe that is his complexion, but it looks kind of gruesome to me.

In the movies color is fine as they can control it in the making and some of the pictures are wonderful. One I saw was ......... a work of art and Disney's color cartoons and other color pictures have been fine. Color is a tricky thing and reproducing all of nature's colors, with the use of their colors, is pretty tricky.

The use of Hi-Fi seems a better way to put an artist or poet or writer in a mood to do his best work as he can play the music mood to suit the subject matter at that period. I have seen artists paint very moody pictures with some heavy Russian music and even have tears running down their faces while they were painting.

I don't know what kind of music a cartoonist needs to draw pictures that make people laugh. There must be some and I'm going downtown and try to find a few - I need them! Some pictures painted by the Modern Group must be painted while the machine is a little out of time and that puts them in an off-key mood which is a necessity to produce modern stuff.