We called my maternal grandfather, Mershell C. Graham, “Poppy”. My grandmother, Nanny, and his friends called him “Shell”. His co-workers called him “Bill”.

In the summer of 1953 my mother, sister and I stayed with my grandparents while my father was organizing a new church and parsonage across town. He stayed with his parents. We didn’t have a car and each morning we walked our mother around the corner to the bus stop where she caught the bus to Wayne State University. She was taking classes to get her teaching certification.

I was almost seven and my sister Pearl was four. I remember spending most of the summer playing in the backyard. My grandmother would be doing what she did in the house, my great aunt Abbie mostly stayed up in her room looking out of the window. After 35 years, my grandfather was working his last months at Ford Motor Company. He retired on December 31.

My grandparent’s house and yard was surrounded by an alley on two sides. On the third side was the Jordan’s house next door and on the other side of them was the third arm of the alley. You can see on the map below that the long arms of the alley went through from Theodore to Warren Ave, which is where the bus stop was. My grandfather did have a car, but he didn’t use it to go to work. He caught a streetcar and it took him right to the River Rouge Plant. He had built a little ramp against the back fence against the wooden fence. We could see him coming home through the alley carrying his lunch box.

My grandfather began work at Ford’s Highland Park Plant on May 10, 1918, as a machinist. He was 30 years old and single. During that time Ford’s was paying five dollars a day, to qualifying workers, for a forty hour week. There were no benefits.

He returned to Montgomery and married my grandmother, Fannie Mae Turner, in 1919, they returned to Detroit the same day. In the 1920 census his occupation was an “auto inspector”. He was transferred from the Highland Park plant to Rouge plant on March 14, 1930 and went to work as an electrical stock clerk, which is the position he held until his retirement in 1953.

He was at the Rouge Plant during the May 26, 1937: Battle of the Overpass and the unionizing of the auto plants. My mother told me that after he joined the union, he carried a gun to work for protection. Unfortunately, I never heard my grandfather talk about any of this.

In September 1949 the UAW won a $100-a-month pension, including Social Security benefits , averaging $32.50 a month, for those age 65 with 30 years of employment with Ford’s. My grandfather was among the earliest workers to receive the pension when he retired at age 65 after working there for 35 years. His Social Security benefit was $85 a month. My grandmother received $42.50 as his homemaking wife.

Other posts about my grandfather’s life.

One Way Ticket
From Montgomery to Detroit – Plymouth Congregational Church – 1919
Mershell Graham and Fannie Mae Turner
Graham-Turner Wedding – 1919 Montgomery Alabama
F – FAMILY, MY GRAHAMS in the 1920 Census
The Graham’s in the 1930s
Mershell Graham’s Notebook – 1930s
Lizzie – 1934
1940 Census – The Grahams
The Graham’s in the 1950 Census

These are my cousin Dee Dee’s memories of Lizzie. You can see more about Lizzie in Part 1

My cousin Dee Dee McNeil remembers Lizzie

Our grandfather called his Model T Ford “Lizzie.” I always referred to Poppy’s car as a Model T Ford, but when I looked up the photos, I think his car might have been a little later Ford Model B or Model 40.  This I decided after looking at photos of the Ford Motor Company 4- cylinder engine, 2-door cars. Lizzie was all black.

Just about every Sunday morning, me, my sisters (and sometimes our two cousins, Kris and Pearl) climbed up on the running board and piled into the backseat of Poppy’s historic black Ford that rumbled down Theodore Street on the East Side of Detroit, Michigan, towards Plymouth Congregational Church.  Our grandfather, who we called ‘Poppy,’ always drove, with his wife Fannie Graham sitting proudly in the passenger seat by her man’s side.  Unlike the youthful looking grandmother’s of today, our soft spoken, proud grandma always looked like a grandmother.  Her gray hair was always neatly braided into two braids that were bobby-pinned across the top of her head.  Her blue veins shown through slender hands with long, delicate fingers and when she was upset, her lips were pursed in a straight, stubborn line across her sweet face.  Every Sunday, in the summertime, (when we often stayed at our grandparent’s home) we rode in Lizzie to church and then to the cemetery to visit the graves of my mother’s two brothers who died as children.  In our innocence, we thought that lovely, well-kept cemetery was our private park, as we body-rolled down the slightly sloping hillsides, arms and legs flailing past the cemetery markers.

I don’t remember Lizzie having leather seats or being fancy.  The seats were of some sort of cloth, because Nanny (our grandmother) used to sew and repair the small rips and tears.  She also darned Poppy’s socks, using a plastic egg and she taught me how to do the same as a young child of maybe eight or nine years old.  I remember, when I was older, nearing my teen years, several hippie looking, young, white boys used to drive up next to Poppy’s old iron car and roll down their windows to shout at him. 

“I’d love to buy your car.  Is it for sale?” 

Poppy always kept Lizzie sparkling clean and well kept.  If it was a cold morning before church, he’d have to let her run for 2-3 minutes before we took off. 

“She’s got to have her engine warmed up,” he’d tell me as he adjusted the ‘choke.’  Those cars had a throttle and a choke you adjusted by hand.  I think that old collectible car lasted so long because of Poppy’s good care and the fact that he never took it on the freeway.  He always putt-putted down the avenues at about twenty-five to thirty-miles per hour, much to the frustration of those driving behind him.  Several times I saw impatient, rude, and irate drivers pull around him and call him everything but a child of God for driving the speed limit.  I’d cringe, but he’d just whistle a tune, as though they were invisible and keep driving at his slow rate of speed.  There was always the slightest smell of gasoline and oil in the backseat of Lizzie.  Underneath the carpeted floor there were wooden floors.  All four cousins could curl up in that back seat of Poppy’s old Ford and we’d sing songs or giggle, the way little girls do, over little to nothing.  I remember there was a little switch on the wall inside the car that could turn on the overhead, inside light. Lizzie was a familiar ride and we felt safe and comfortable in that Ford Model “A”, until my Aunt Doris, (my mom’s sister) finally persuaded her dad to sell that car and step into the 2nd half of the twentieth century.  Today, those old Fords are a hot-rodder’s dream.

Read Part I here Lizzie