Postcard #17
Sad stories with automobiles driving through them
Fred Granger descended from French Detroiters. Born in 1892, my grandfather would witness the city’s automotive boom, the birth of the moving assembly line, the Model T, and Ford’s five-dollar-day.
But just when the automobile was set to change Detroit forever, Fred lost his parents in terrible circumstances. In 1904, his father committed suicide and two years later, his mother died in Eloise, the notorious poorhouse turned ‘insane asylum’.
George Granger came from a once-wealthy Detroit family, so the drama of his demise merited a piece in the Detroit Free Press. The family story held that it was George who lost the family fortune, and this led to his depression and suicide, though there are no available records showing when or how the family fell on hard times.
The record of Catherine’s death, cruelly scant, reads as follows:
Catherine Ballentine (Fred’s mother had remarried after her divorce from George)
Birthplace:
Late Residence: Eloise
Birthdate:
Date of Death: February 8, 1906
Age Years: 39
Months:
Days:
Hours:
Minutes:
Gender:
Disease: Exhaustion Melancholen
Burial Date: February 10,1906
Section Name: E
Section: Block 6
Grave Number: 64
Apart from the listed cause, melancholia, we see only the date of death and the indifferent geography of Eloise cemetery with its nameless plots and ordering into sections and blocks. Grave number 64, Block 6, Section E. Catherine was among the first burials there. More than 7000 patients would be buried at Eloise between 1910 and 1948. Effectively, it was the local “Potter’s Field”, a publicly run burial site for unclaimed dead (did no one come to claim Catherine?) subject to the additional humiliation of cadaver-snatching by University of Michigan medical students. (Frank Capra viewers will recall that Potter’s Field was the name given to the villainous Henry Potter’s housing development for poor people.)
So, at the age of fourteen, Fred was orphaned. He inherited the pocket watch mentioned in George Granger’s death notice but nothing else of value. He lived with his older brother Charles until 1918 when Charles died from a ruptured appendix.
The 1910 Census lists Fred’s occupation as draughtsman, but I was always told that he got a job as a driver soon after his parents died and in those early days of the automobile. His draft registration card (1917) lists him as a chauffeur for B.E. Taylor, the wealthy real estate developer behind the Brightmoor neighborhood in Detroit.
Fred married Audrie Chase who came from Middleville, Michigan. How he came to meet a country girl from the western farmlands is not known, but after my mother’s birth in 1919, the family left Detroit to live in Audrie’s hometown.
I still think of Fred as the ‘true and last Detroiter’ in our family. That his early life coincided with the beginnings of the automobile and Tiger baseball may help to explain my fascination for both these pieces of old Detroit. Certainly, automobiles and the Tigers figure in photos that were passed down to me.
In 1954, I was born in Henry Ford’s hometown of Dearborn, Michigan. Dad worked for Ford, first as a car showroom salesman, then gradually moving up the corporate ranks to work at Ford headquarters: the Glass House in Dearborn and later, the John Portman-designed Renaissance Center in Detroit.
In 1978, Dad showed me around his brand-new Renaissance Center office, explaining that each floor represented a salary grade, with Henry Ford II occupying the entire top floor. Each of the floors below had open-plan cubicles surrounded by private offices with windows above the river and city. When we walked by a cubicle desk with one of those little signs: I’d rather be fishing, Dad said, “That guy’ll never get a window office.”
There was sadness in that private tour of the Renaissance Center. Not only in its reveal of the corporate culture – and architecture – that my father had learned to navigate but in the era itself. The auto industry was only a year away from the 1979 oil crisis and Jimmy Carter’s malaise speech. Indeed, the term malaise era would be used to describe the U.S. automotive industry during the 1970s.
I remember thinking that the Renaissance Center seemed a jarring divergence from the Detroit cityscape and a portent of further decline, rather than the promise of a Motor City comeback. The glory days were gone. In truth, they began during the Model T era and reached their most brash and colorful during the immediate postwar years. When Model Ts flowed off the first moving assembly line (1914) at the Highland Park Plant, Henry Ford famously remarked that customers could have any color they wanted, as long as it was black. By the 1950s and ‘60s, the years of my childhood, such sobriety was jettisoned in favor of the garish tones of postwar bubble gum packed with additives and dyes. Sticky pinks and yellows and turquoises. The cars were damn near as big as our brick bungalow houses on the edge of Detroit.
As a Ford brat, I played with the toy Thunderbirds and Lincoln Continentals brought home by my father. We rolled the plastic models along the griddle-hot summer pavement in imaginary Barbie and Ken scenarios. The neighborhood kids liked to perch on car bumpers, metallic heat warming our thighs while we talked about the death of Marilyn or the Cuban Missile Crisis or when the ice cream truck was due. Nighttime, at the drive-in, we ate popcorn in the backseat, dressed in our pyjamas, while our parents watched the movie. When a Christmas morning surprise went awry one year, and Dad told us to wait in our room because Santa’s sleigh was “stalled” in the front yard and he was waiting for a mechanic, we believed him. Forget the reindeer. In Michigan, Santa ran on gasoline.
Years later, far from Michigan, I saw that my sense of self and my cultural passions had been shaped by these automotive spaces. Ford, GM, and Chrysler had bound themselves perfectly to notions of Manifest Destiny and to the idea that if you don’t like a place, you move to a new place. You get in your car and drive away. Westerns and road movies. If you do like a place, you just drive around it a lot, call it home, distort it, and develop an unhealthy obsession about it. Frank Capra movies. The Beach Boys. I Get Around was never I Get Away, though it made us believe we were free. And surely Don’t Worry Baby is the most beautiful car song ever penned.
Finally, if Frank Capra asked us to imagine what Bedford Falls would have been like without George Bailey, I can’t help but wonder what my world might have been without the invention of the automobile. Right back to Fred Granger, the last Detroiter in the family, who became an orphan just as the car was being born. My story is inseparable from his, and his, inseparable from the story of the Motor City. It’s a story that reaches back to Henry Ford and the Tin Lizzie. The Piquette Avenue, Highland Park, and Rouge plants all lay in the path of Grandad’s story and mine. So too, the moving assembly line, immigration and notions of the Melting Pot, the Great Migration of black workers to the northern factory towns, the Depression, the Wars, the GI Bill, and the suburban boom, right through to my father’s executive career at corporate headquarters.
By my lifetime, automobiles had transformed the metropolitan landscape and the fortunes of the city that had once grown rich on them. The young roads that cut across the woodland surrounding Detroit enabled suburbanization and northern forms of segregation. Money flowed along those roads, unfairly, away from Detroit, to take root in building plots and housing developments for white people. Shopping malls and fast-food places followed, all of these enabled by cars and roads.
There were private wounds closer to home. There was, for example, my father’s admission in later years that he had never really cared for cars. My teenage lack of appreciation for the sacrifices he made. Much later, after the crash of 2008, there was the removal of many of his hard-earned retirement benefits. The guy who gave his working life to Ford in the belief he would never endure what his father had endured during the Great Depression would end that life with a final injury. Oh, the small print of the automotive dream.
I rarely drive these days. Here in England, I walk and use public transport. The gas guzzlers are - we now accept - not good for the planet. Yet, it seems I can never stop thinking about automobiles. I still want my big brother to drive me to Cloverdale’s for a peppermint ice cream. I want to blast the radio on an open road through cornfields. I’m forever looking for cars in literature and film. The pickings are rich. Road movies, gangster and noir stories, tales of getaways. Unions and strikes and picket lines. Strip malls, novels about suburban malaise.
And outlasting all of them, The Magnificent Ambersons. Here, all the ambivalence I have come to feel about the automobile – all my love and loathing – are forewarned. I return again and again to one of cinema’s most beautifully rendered scenes in which George Minniver tells Joseph Cotton’s handsome inventor and early car manufacturer that “automobiles are a useless nuisance. Never amount to anything but a nuisance and they had no business to be invented.” Because he is courting George’s widowed mother, the hostility of the son is an obstacle, and Joseph Cotton is wounded by the remark. But being a far gentler hero than Henry Ford, he cedes to the son, and in his wistful reply, the future decay of the Ambersons’ world is foreshadowed:
When the arrogant George finally gets his comeuppance, the townspeople who once prayed for it are either dead or scattered by the cars and roads that had turned the town into sprawl. It is a final insult that George is felled by an automobile, the invention he once described as a useless nuisance. The film, made in 1942, became part of Hollywood legend after the studio vandalized it, cutting and destroying some of the original footage shot by Orson Welles, changing the ending. But I love it anyway, this story marked by deep ambivalence, unsure whether the old small-town complacency of the Amberson era was better or worse than the automotive age that followed.
For my grandfather, Fred Granger
I really enjoyed this piece, Amy. The car has certainly had the biggest social impact in the memory of our generation. And now I guess it's digital technology. Your childhood memories read like the scenes in a film set of its own.