Once in a Great City: A Detroit Story (2015)

David Maraniss, Once in a Great City: A Detroit Story (Simon & Schuster, 2015). Highly readable book focusing on Detroit as microcosm from 1962 to 1964. Interesting angles include Detroit's enthusiastic bid for the 1968 Summer Olympics, development of the Ford Mustang and Detroit's role at the 1964-1965 New York World's Fair. Plenty of thought and space is devoted to race relations, economics, civil rights, music, architecture and dreams of a more holistic society.  

On May 1, 1992, Rodney King (1965-2012) asked during the '92 LA Riots, "Can we all get along? Can we get along? Can we stop making it, making it horrible for the older people and the kids?" Short answer then, before and since: "No." Easier to factionalize and fight or take flight than to harmonize and build cooperatively and peacefully. The dream lives on, though. At the bottom of Pandora's jar one thing remains: hope. 

Once in a Great City: A Detroit Story (2015) includes lots of big personalities, diverse people ranging from JFK to MLK, LBJ to Malcolm X, Lee Iacocca to the Fords, Walter Reuther and the Gordy family, C.L. and Aretha Franklin, Little Stevie Wonder, Jaramogi Abebe Agyeman, Jerry Cavanaugh, George Romney, Alex Karras, and so on.

Above all that is now lost, I would have loved to have experienced the Flame Show Bar -- but there is still Baker's Keyboard Lounge, thank God. 

Today's Rune: Warrior. 

The Week of Three Thursdays

I came across several Ford dealer booklets today, and hereby present two scanned covers from the bunch. Here: Ford Falcon '61: "The World's Most Successful New Car" (complete with racing Snoopy). Robert Strange McNamara (1916-2009), whose heavy hand would shortly be felt in Vietnam, had his fingers on the Falcon first. Some elements of the Falcon went into the Mustang, which hit the big time in 1964. 

The Falcon helped Ford recover from the disaster that was the Edsel. Here: "1960 EDSEL: new ~ nifty ~ thrifty." Fewer than 3,000 of the 1960 model were actually rolled off the assembly line.

Farewell, 2015!

Today's Rune: Breakthrough. 

In the Mix: World's Fair 1965 (Round B)

More images derived from 8mm frames, New York 1964/1965 World's Fair.

The Big Tire ferris wheel, now located off I-94 between Detroit Metro Airport and Detroit proper. It's the world's largest Uniroyal and, indeed, the world's largest tire. From the World's Fair (where it included 24 little gondolas) to Allen Park, Michigan.

NASA booster rocket!

T-Rex -- now relocated to Glen Rose, Texas.

Today's Rune: Signals.

In the Mix: World's Fair 1965 (Round A)

The 1964/1965 New York World's Fair. Here are a handful of frames pulled from 8mm film.

Hellas / Greece Pavilion. This angle is from one side off the front entrance. 

Hellas / Greece Pavilion. This is looking at the front entrance.

 The dinosaurs.

Today's Rune: Fertility.  

World's Fair Redux

World's Fair events were a great and life-affirming thing! What the hell happened to them?  There hasn't been a single one in nearly thirty years in North America. Since that duffer Reagan, come to think of it.

Is it now once again possible that Toronto will host a new World's Fair in 2015 or a World Expo in 2025? At this point, maybe not. But if it did, how would it compare to Montreal's Expo 67?   

The World's Fair and similar expositions were once upon a not-too-distant time ago very exciting magnets for people from all over the place. Here's my great uncle Clifford "Uncle Cliff" France (1899-1992) and great aunt Jessie Irene Lovejoy France (1903-1986) at some expo or World's Fair grounds -- probably during the Great War of 1914-1918. That is, I believe from their ages and attire that this is during the Great War period, possibly the 1904 St. Louis fairgrounds. I've been trying to match the backdrop architecture with photos in Cathy Jean Maloney's World's Fair Gardens: Shaping American Landscapes (University of Virginia Press, 2012), and the 1904 St. Louis "Louisiana Purchase Exposition" grounds seem closest so far. Any other ideas or suggestions welcomed!

Today's Rune: The Mystery Rune.

   

New York World's Fair 1964-1965: Return of the Dinosaurs

Going with my immediate family at four years old to the New York World's Fair in the mid-1960s was an early salient event.  Not only did the "Goldfinger car" stand out (James Bond's 1964 Aston Martin DB5), but so did many dinosaurs large and small. The real small ones that we got as souvenirs, made of some waxy substance, melted in the back of our car in the hot sun. The really big ones -- two of them at any rate -- were later relocated to Dinosaur Valley State Park outside of Glen Rose, Texas. I saw them today -- for the first time since I was four! 

At the "Friends of . . ." concession building inside Dinosaur Valley, Maud Gibbs, now in her mid-80s, told me how she, too, had gone to the New York World's Fair in 1965, flying up from Texas with a daughter. She had several tales to run by me -- about the history of the area, the locals who'd discovered the dinosaur tracks, the paleontologists, the location of various relics and the more recent discovery of dinosaur fossils in Glen Rose proper, "behind the Comfort Inn, accross from Sonic." Several major fossils found in the area can be examined in museums in NYC and Fort Worth, Texas.

My friend Evan also went to the New York 1964-1965 World's Fair, with his Dad. That's him standing by T. Rex.

This is the same T. Rex today, the penultimate day of 2012. Temporarily propped up by some weird T-bar rod thing, awaiting minor repairs. Note how his (or her?) mouth is slightly more agape than in Evan's snapshot at the World's Fair.

Charles and Lana Gramlich checked out this exact same area about a year and a half ago, so I knew from their web-published photographs and incisive observations pretty much what to expect, and what to look for. It was only in the past week that I came to understand the World's Fair connection, though, which finally got me moving. (Note to Charles: the nearby Creationist Museum was closed again. I'll take a gander at some point, hopefully, and report my findings).

Today's Rune: Signals.

Skyfall

Fifty years and still running, the contemporary epic myth of 007 continues. James Bond, the Achilles of the here, the now and the recent past: from JFK to Barack Obama and way on down the road.

Skyfall is the best so far of the the Daniel Craig era Bond films. Beyond a large budget, Skyfall has many assets propelling it forward. Director Sam Mendes (American Beauty, Jarhead, Revolutionary Road). Craig as Bond. Javier Bardem. Judi Dench. Ralph Fiennes. Naomie Harris. Bérénice Lim Marlohe. Albert Finney. Istanbul. Shanghai. Macau. London. Scotland. Title song by Adele. Traditional Bond theme saluting back to the Sean Connery era. Clone of the Aston Martin DB5 from Goldfinger (1964/1965), which I first saw as a little kid at the New York World's Fair. Oh, yes. What's not to dig?
    

Today's Rune: Defense.

Ice Station Zebra

Get your melting ice while you can! Festooned with national flags, everyone wants a piece of the pie . . . Is the world just a pie for devouring, a giant sugar bowl?  Mineral rights, mineral wrongs, minerals be going going gone.

Hands across the water: grabbing for the drill points . . . 

Anybody seen a downed satellite around here?  Mexican Standoff in the Arctic. Ice Station Zebra (1968).

  

Claims on the far side of the globe: Antarctica. "Run Like a Villian to the sugar bowl . . ."  It ain't no "saccharine suburb in the mush!"*

                                                                                                        

Gang's all here -- guns drawn, as usual . . .

Today's Rune: Strength.  *"Run Like a Villain" -- Iggy Pop, "Zombie Birdhouse," 1982.

Futurescapes: Outdoor Spaces Today and Tomorrow

What will tomorrow's outdoor spaces look like? What do they look like now? What adjustments will be made in response to climate change? Obviously air and water are key variables. In drought-prone areas, there will have to be more thought and willpower devoted to all forms of landscape architecture and resource preservation. We are nowhere near that in terms of thinking or acceptance yet (on a mass scale), but there are many designers and dreamers who are indeed already in motion. One place to look for examples of projects either planned or now in place is Tim Richardson's Futurescapes: Designers for Tomorrow's Outdoor Spaces (Thams & Hudson, 2011).

Paving and pathway materials. Building materials. Vehicle materials. All in flux. New designs for yard and commons spaces like parks, schoolyards, playing fields, and various cityscapes, village greens, rooftop terracing -- all of it is up for renewal.

What kind of outdoor spaces do you prefer? I love groves of large shade trees relatively free of underbrush. I like just about any type of space that offers protection from excessive sunlight. I love places where loud combustion engines are at a minimum. Imagine a fleet of electric or "X" vehicles floating almost silently through dense urban canyons. Places where you aren't constantly being attacked by loud noises and noxious fumes. There's a start. Less yard grass, more alternative vegetation: oh, yeah.

Today's Rune: Opening.  

Today the Future, Tomorrow a Forgotten Dream

Another library acquisition evokes Joyce Carol Oates: "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" It's a book by Gregory Benford and the editors of Popular Mechanics, The Wonderful Future That Never Was: Flying Cars, Mail Delivery by Parachute, and Other Predictions from the Past (2010), that recalls dozens of predictions and images of the future from the perspective of a time now in the past. Some were visionary, pragmatic and now do, indeed, exist in the visible world. Others persist only in the invisible world, at least for "now."

I'm supposing the biggest shifts of the last ten years have been the arrival of a near universality in communications and information synergies and quickening ecological change. In the words of a Detroit man at a yard sale, "What else you got?" 



Today's Rune: Signals.  

That Train Keeps On Moving: Early Encounters With Television, Part 1

Go back, go back. Recall your early encounters with television.

The tricky part is getting past layers of reruns and repeated images that came (chronologically) later -- including home movies, shown several times over the years, and family reel-to-reel audio tapes, heard more than once after the original recordings -- to get at the original encounters. Memory games.

I do know this: the Jack Kennedy assassination was a powerful memory-inducing earthquake. I can remember bits and pieces of its aftermath very clearly, so that's probably my first coherent TV encounter. The Cuban Missile Crisis of the year before surely stayed with those old enough to make sense of it, but I was way too young then. By late 1963, though, I was old enough to grasp the emotional impact on my parents, if nothing else.

The next year, I saw the first picture show that left an impact, at the theater and with my family: Goldfinger (1964). Hence my enduring love of James Bond. Strongly reinforced by a family trip to the Word's Fair in 1965, which included poking around 007's specially equipped Aston Martin!

The first movie on TV that left a permanent trace in my psyche featured Humphrey Bogart.  It kept because his character was killed, and this was a moving thing, especialy after JFK's death. Pretty sure it must have been John Huston's The Treasure of the Sierre Madre and  probably in 1964. The adults must have been talking about it -- I vaguely remember my Mom and friends and/or relatives sitting around in our East Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania, living room, absorbing what I could.  















Other memories from early on: I loved Johnny Quest, which started in 1964, and must have seen the "Giant Robot Spider" episode when it first aired. That was my favorite one. Turns out that Johnny Quest was deliberately created to tap into the James Bond trope, specifically Dr. No. If so, it worked for me, completely.

Also early on I loved recreating comedy skits by Milton "Uncle Miltie" Berle. I thought he was hilarious -- and Captain Kangaroo (Mr. Green Jeans lived over at Shawnee). Ping pong balls falling on people's heads out of thin air -- cracked me up every time. Oh yeah, and then there was Lost in Space -- loved it! 

A whole slew of shows adhered to my longterm memory by 1966. Next post. How about for you?

Today's Rune: Breakthrough.  

Mystery Reel

I don't really know what's on this, although my Dad's labelling is a clue: "World's Fair 1965." Can't wait to get to a projector -- I think it's 8mm film. I was four years old at the time.

Today's Rune: Growth.

Memories of a Friend: New York World's Fair, 1965

Among the great pleasures of maintaining this daily web log: connecting with people, learning more about all of us, learning new things on a daily basis, and bearing witness to our lives and times. Just yesterday, I learned that my friend Evan (we've been friends since the early 1970s) visited the World's Fair in 1965, as I had with my family. As a follow-up, here are some of his memories of that occasion (by permission) . . .

I remember a good bit - I was pretty excited about going and spending three days in New York with just my father. I can distinctly recall:

1) Seeing the big Unisphere - the globe that is still there on the site, I think. [It is].

2) The life-size dinosaurs at the Sinclair Oil Company exhibit. That was one of the big draws for me and we went there all three days, I think.

3) Riding the big tire-shaped ferris wheel thing - it had closed gondola-style cars instead of seats. We were in one with another man and his little girl about my age. Every time there was a bump, he'd say "There's another screw coming loose" and his daughter would look scared. . .

4) Going through the Ford Pavilion - we had to stand in line forever but it was cool. You rode through the exhibits about the history of life on earth in a big new Ford convertible.

5) We tried to get up into the New York Pavilion to see the fair from up high, but missed closing time and ended up never getting to do that. Think we ate dinner there instead.


I distinctly recall posing for [this photo] with the big tire and the New York Pavilion towers in the background. Check out my crew-cut...

Thank you, Evan! Now, for Michiganders and anyone traveling I-94 between Metro Airport and Detroit, here's an extra treat. That Big Tire pictured above is the same one! See the gondola on the right side of the tire above?

From Roadside America: This 12-ton, 80-foot-tall behemoth was built to withstand hurricane-force winds, and served as a ferris wheel (and a huge advertisement for Uniroyal) at the 1964-65 New York World's Fair. Twenty-four gondolas circled the tire where the treads are today, carrying nearly two million people. The tire was moved to Allen Park in 1966 . . . (source: http://www.roadsideamerica.com/story/8258)

Today's Rune: Fertility.

New York World's Fair, 1964/1965

I. Visiting the 1964/1865 World's Fair in Flushing Meadows, Queens, New York City, remains one of my most vivid memory flashes from an early age. I remember the James Bond car from Goldfinger, gigantic dinosaur replicas, small wax dinosaur figures that melted in the back of our car, and the first monorail trains I'd ever seen. It was cool, and international, and futuristic.

II. Recently, I came across this creepy thirteen-plus-minute GM/Frigidaire World's Fair Futurama film called Out of This World (1964). From the perspective of 2009, it comes across as a rapacious and lurid dystopian vision heralded as something wonderful. Its cocky narrator boasts of how humans will plunder other worlds in deep space, and under the Earth's ocean floor, and in the rain forests, and under the mountains and across remote deserts. There are operatic clichés about foreign cultures, featuring a gynoid wife in ludicrous costumes, lovingly caressing kitchen appliances and an air conditioner. But basically, 45 years later, you see what Americans take for granted in the kitchen and laundry room, plus the AC. In fact, except for the actual Earth-plundering, widespread internet availability and cell phones, it doesn't look like we've made many changes since then.

Warning: not for more delicate souls, who may be tempted to commit suicide by film's end. Here's a pertinent link to the Internet Archive: http://www.archive.org/details/out_of_this_world




Today's Rune: Initiation.

World's Fair

E.L. Doctorow's World's Fair (1985) culminates with two 1940 visits to the 1939/1940 World's Fair at Flushing Meadows Park, Queens, New York City, but much of the story takes place during the 1930s in or near the Bronx. Doctorow's semi-autobiographical tale centers around Edgar, the primary narrator, and his extended family. The finely articulated attention to detail and subtle character development allows the author to steer clear of any need for dramatic conflict; life during the Great Depression provides challenges enough. There are hooligans, yes, but most overt villains are off the stage, in Europe and elsewhere.

A few chapters are narrated by Edgar's mother, an aunt, and his older brother Donald, all as if told to Edgar, who was a young boy in the 1930s. For the most part, Edgar's childhood is described in a way that melds his contemporary boyhood consciousness with an older Edgar's reconstructions. This hybrid method works very effectively.

I really like World's Fair. It reminds me of my family's trip to the 1964/1965 World's Fair, located on the same grounds as the 1939/1940 version.

The most recent American World's Fair was the 1984 Louisiana World Exposition in New Orleans. The earliest possible return to the States would be in mid-2017, but given today's selection of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, as host city for the 2016 Summer Olympics, I wouldn't hold my breath. Expo 2010 will be in Shanghai, China.

For anyone under thirty or so, you'll either have to travel far or wait a good long while for the experience; meantime, I recommend Doctorow's novel.

A perfect companion novel to World's Fair is Philip Roth's The Plot Against America (2004); although it imagines Charles Lindbergh as having been elected president in 1940, it, too, is packed with autobiographical family details comparable to Doctorow's.

Today's Rune: Fertility.

Seventy Years On: The World of Tomorrow, 1939

Lasting cultural productions from 1939 include Billie Holiday's "Strange Fruit" (written by Abel Meeropol), John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, the original Batman, Gone With the Wind and the New York World's Fair. LaGuardia Airport opened, while Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard began HP Hewlett-Packard in a Palo Alto garage with a little over $500. The Great Depression continued, though mass war mobilization would "help" end it.


As during most milestones of the human race, 1939 saw numerous wars and atrocities. Francisco Franco established a long-running dictatorship in the wake of the Spanish Civil War. Nazi Germany invaded Poland, sparking (or widening) the Second World War in Europe.

In 1939, the Japanese Imperial Army, already rampaging through much of China, met its first match fighting the Soviet Red Army. The Battle of Khalkhyn Gol resulted in the Japanese being defeated, blocked and kept apart from Germany and Italy, and in the Japanese high command deciding to go in other directions instead (including Pearl Harbor). This key battle is still hardly known in the West, despite its major impact on the strategic flow of WWII.


To connect with events in Iran and the Middle East, let's not forget the marriage of Fawzia Bint Fuad of Egypt and Mohammad Rezā Shāh Pahlavi, Crown Prince (and subsequent Shah) of Iran. The marriage didn't end well, but Fawzia is alive and free.



So here we are now, seventy years after 1939. . .

With the death of Michael Jackson, the Benjamin Button of American Pop stars will become less the butt of late-night jokes, more a universal tragedy. And beyond Farrah Fawcett and Ed McMahon, have we already forgotten the strange death of David Carradine? Such is cultural ADHD, I guess. Don't even mention Burma/Myanmar these days. Though all the pop rage in 2007, that's already "forgotten history."

Today's Rune: Wholeness.

The Future at Forty

What ever happened to the future? Back in the 1960s and early 1970s -- despite Vietnam, global turmoil and various uprisings -- it felt like the Space Age was truly upon us. Even to me as a little kid, the excitement was palpable. Gadgets and gizmos, human rights and civil rights, environmental awareness, the ecology -- the 1965 World's Fair in New York City was one of the first major family experiences I can remember away from my home town in Pennsylvania. There was James Bond's Goldfinger car, and here was a silvery tomorrow.

Also with my family, I later saw the grounds of Expo 67 in Montreal, geodesic domes and all. More recently, I've walked the grounds of Expo 68 in San Antonio, where the space needle still aims at the heavens.

Probably the biggest disappointment was the 1982 Knoxville World's Fair -- so mediocre even The Simpsons joked about it years later. Ronald Reagan must have killed off what joy was left for the future. He was going on and on about "Star Wars," a dismal (and largely imaginary) new Maginot Line designed to ward off flying objects from the Soviet Union and Mars. (When the Challenger shuttle blew up on take off in 1986, he was heard to mutter, "Is that the one with the teacher on it?").

I've barely heard a thing about the expos since New Orleans 1984. Expos now seem more distant, less relevant, less frequent to even notice than back in the day. Under the watch of G.W. Bush, nothing good has happened at all. What happened to the great Mars project? Like everything else, I suspect, thrown onto the bonfire of the Iraq War. I don't think another hopeful International Expo will occur in the USA again for a very long time.


San Antonio-born actress Michelle Rodriguez seems like an Expo kind of woman. An appeal by her to the powers that be might help bring one back to "the Homeland."


British actress Anna Friel seems a bit worried about the future in this scene. It's her party and she'll cry if she wants to. Who can blame her? She's very nicely dressed for global warming, though.

Today's Rune: The Self.

Birthdays: Julius Caesar, Josiah Wedgwood, Pierre Louis Marie Chanel, Henry David Thoreau, Eugène Boudin, Nikolay Gavrilovich Chernyshevsky, George Eastman, George Washington Carver, Stefan George, Max Jacob, Buckminster Fuller, Pablo Neruda (b. Ricardo Eliecer Neftalí Reyes Basoalto), Milton Berle (b. Berlinger), Andrew Wyeth, Bill Cosby, Christine McVie (b. Christine Anne Perfect), Cheryl Ladd (b. Cheryl Jean Stoppelmoor), Robin Wilson (b. Detroit), Anna Friel, Trent Vanegas, Michelle Rodriguez.

A special happy birthday to my pal and former co-worker Trent Vanegas, now operating out of L.A. and going great guns with Pink is the New Blog.

"Don't stop thinking about tomorrow!"