Excerpt #1 from Ridin' the Blinds

My brother, now long since grown grey and retired, goes by the name Ted. But in those days, he was known by his middle name, Gwan and is still Gwan to me even today. In theory at least, he and I walked to school together each day, under a cloud of threat of bodily harm from our mother if we separated. Keating Elementary was only a few blocks away from our home and back then most families had only one car, and the one car was seldom used by moms, or anyone else to deliver kids to school. As my Grandpa, whom we all called Papa said, we arrived by “shanks mare.” In fact, many “housewives”, if not most, were like my own mom and had not yet learned to drive, at least not in the big city. Sitting in the driver’s seat had been considered a man’s job and privilege before the war, but, with the introduction of “Rosy the Riveter” to the workforce, things were changing and would stay forever changed.
By late 1943 the great American war production machine had been geared up to spit out the guns, ammunition, tanks, planes and ships needed to drive the Italians, Germans, and Japanese out of the lands they had taken by force and to put them on the defensive. The war department in concert with Hollywood and the media were not at all subtle in suggesting that if you were an able bodied woman and simply sitting at home doing anything so mundane as raising a family, you were more than a little suspect of being patriotically challenged. All of these working women slid behind the wheel of automobiles to get to work and found the seat to their liking. In the period following the end of World War II, prosperity combined with newly realized “needs” produced a period of automobile production that was phenomenal as families went from one to two to three cars. The irony of this change in society is that the countries that had forced the change, Germany and Japan, became the prime producer of the “second car.” I remember quite clearly a billboard display near downtown Detroit that showed the back end of a Volkswagen Beetle sitting in a two-car garage next to a Detroit “big three” product, fins and all, with the caption “MOTHER’S LITTLE HELPER”. It was at least a decade and a half before Detroit took the VW and Datsun seriously. After all, “made in Japan” meant cheap, not quality. It was big mistake – huge, on Detroit’s part.
Being two years older than I, Gwan felt very much “the boss of me,” and was daily compelled to issue copious instructions and loudly announce belittling remarks, to his little sister, mostly for the benefit of his older boy friends. Of course he thought me very ignorant of the ways of the world, other children, and Keating Elementary School – which happily, at five years old, I suppose I was. I vividly remember that it was on one walk to school, when we were passing a horse drawn junk wagon, that he felt compelled to explain to me from where ponies came. I could not have been less interested, was pretty sure what he was telling me was impossible, and generally tried to disregard his detailed instructions. It was not sex education’s finest moment.
Since we lived on the near east side, just south of Jefferson Avenue, the Detroit River was only a few blocks away. On foggy nights, lying in my bed, I could hear the gigantic ocean freighters sound their big horns to warn other vessels passing them in the shipping channel of their presence. After a minute or so the other ship would answer and so the calls and answers would go throughout the night. Somehow it was lonesome sounding, like the mournful sound of a freight train in the night. You always knew that there were people out there, busily working through the mist shrouded night while I was tucked snugly in my warm bed.
I also remember that the army had some sort of installation next to the river and there it kept row upon row of armored tanks. Perhaps it was a storage and shipping point, since both Chrysler and Cadillac had converted their normal production of automobiles to wartime purposes and manufactured Sherman Tanks to supply General Patton’s famous Third Armor. I know that they supplied other Generals also, but General Patton was the one whose name appeared in the Detroit News every day and was best know by little girls like me. There was a constant stream of warnings in Detroit to be on the lookout for sabotage (Sabataurers were the terrorist of our day). A number of army boys, handsome in their uniforms, were stationed there to guard the precious goods which the installation held. Mamma constantly warned us not to “be fooling around down there around those boys.” Although no one could doubt the wisdom of Mamma’s fears, as I think back, I suspect that most of them were barely older that teenage boys, homesick for whatever town in America they had come from, and missing their own kinfolk. Usually soldiers “just want to go home.”
Mamma had grown up in the Hickey Community. Hickey was not really a town, rather it was an area that boasted a crossroads, a couple of small stores, a church building or two and an elementary school, or grade school, as my cousins and aunts in Tennessee called it. Hickey was just east of Silverpoint, Tennessee about seven miles from the town of Baxter and was geographically located about halfway between the towns of Cookeville and Gordonsville. Today it is adjacent to the busy I40 corridor and has its own exit by which folks from Nashville take highway 56 to Center Hill Lake and to Smithville to attend the annual Old Time Fiddlers Contest. But, in the days prior to Center Hill Dam and Interstate Forty the community was rural and isolated, since the only route into the area was via narrow, two lane, mostly gravel roads or by the Tennessee Central Railroad which ran from Nashville to Knoxville and directly through Silver Point. Of course it was not a regular stop, only a flag stop, meaning that you had to set a flag down the tracks if you wanted the train to stop, otherwise it just went right on through hooking the outgoing mail bag and throwing the incoming mail onto the depot platform.

In contrast to this rural life, the dangers of metropolitan Detroit, already teeming with millions of people who had come to get cash paying jobs in the automobile and defense plants, must have seemed enormous indeed to a gentle soul like Mamma. She continually warned us against going near the river, about going near the soldiers at the military installation, against strangers on Jefferson, and about playing in the alley. .......