In 1968 I was a senior art student at Wayne State University in Detroit. Don’t remember why I did this drawing combining a skeleton and a coat of armor from the Detroit Institute of Art. The other two sketches are of a student posing with the skeleton.
I was 16 and my mother was 39 in this photograph. We were getting ready to go bike down Old Plank Road. I was bare footed. We used to bike past the neighbors on the hill and down to a pond that was small and weedy. Sometimes we skated there in the winter. The neighbors had two big dogs that were often outside and we would peddle fast to get past before the dogs got to the road. We’d take enough time riding to the pond and looking at the water for them to go back up and then we’d repeat the ride back to the house. The dogs never got to us.
I got my first bike on my 8th birthday. It was a basic, blue bike. I didn’t know how to ride and it took me so long to learn that my mother finally threatened to give the bike to my cousin Barbara if I didn’t learn how to ride. I don’t remember anybody holding the bike and running with me. I do remember practicing in the driveway of the house on Chicago until I learned to ride. At that point I only rode around the block.
When I was older, I remember going bike riding all around the neighborhood with my cousins, Dee Dee and Barbara. We rode in the street, which I wasn’t supposed to do. My sister and I used to go bike riding too but we usually had a destination – the library or my grandmother’s house. I lost that bike when I left it unchained outside of a store on W. Grand Blvd. We were on the way home from the Main Library. Later it was replaced by a three speed bike. I had that one up at Old Plank until we sold the place and then I had it in the Detroit. It too was stolen when my husband left it unchained on a porch one night.
When we lived in Idlewild, from 1986 to 2007, I used to ride my Uncle Hugh’s old bike. It had a bigger than average seat which made it more comfortable for me to ride, however it was old and had been through a lot and the tires were sort of crooked. I enjoyed riding it the 4 miles around the lake and for one memorable 5 mile ride into town with my daughter, Ife. She was going to work so she had 6 hours between her rides. I had to turn around and ride 5 miles back. If the streets around my house here were flat and I didn’t see rottweilers trotting down the street alone, I would get a bike and ride now. I know I am not going to take a bike to a park to ride.
Other posts about Old Plank
Picking Beans – Old Plank 1963
Playing Poker at Old Plank – 1962
Old Plank road in Shadow – 1962
My daughter Tulani pole valuting. She was one of the first to take it up when the event was added to college women’s track in 1996 as an exhibition event. In 1997 NCAA recognized and scored women’s pole vault as a regular meet event. She competed as a part of Central Michigan University’s Track team where she held the school record and was ranked in the top three Divsion I women vaulters in the state of Michigan. Tulani also pole valuted as a member of the Indiana State track team where this picture was taken.
I have posted this photograph before as part of my discovery of the numbers on photographs as a means of sorting and dating them. My father’s cousin, Theodore Page, is 
ready at the bat while my father, “Toddy” seems oblivious to the fact that he could have his head knocked off when Theodore goes to hit the ball. The photograph was taken in the summer of 1922, probably at Belle Isle, an island park in Detroit. The day was an outing for the extended Cleage family.
My uncle Henry loved baseball and often described the game in terms that made it seem like a work of art or a piece of music. My mother’s mother used to listen to games on the radio. I never liked playing the game – I could not hit the ball. I didn’t like watching it, compared to basketball, baseball games seem so long and slow moving.
Some other posts about this day at the park:
Albert and Pearl (Reed) Cleage
More information about Yesterday
In 1973 my sister, Pearl, worked with the television program “Good Morning Atlanta”. One day Susan and Big Bird, from Sesame Street, appeared on the show. There was an audience drawn from a local elementary school. My oldest daughter, Jilo, was 2.5 years old. Pearl invited her to come on the show too. She seems to enjoy sitting on Susan’s lap but be a bit skeptical of Big Bird.
“Jilo meets Big Bird, Susan, Gordon on Pearl’s show. She sang with them and will be on the show October 19, 1973. Went right up to Susan just like old friends. Received a record, autographed. Even Ife was quiet during the taping.”
Ife was about 7 months old. So, Jilo did get a momento. After I read this I remembered how we played that record over and over and over, for a long time.
When I was growing up my sister, my cousins and I always made a yearly trip to the Detroit zoo with our mothers and grandfather, Poppy. My youngest cousin Marilyn was impressed by the elephants trunk this year and went around making her arm into a trunk afterwards.
My Uncle Hugh Cleage playing tennis in the alley behind their house on Scotten. Seems to be quite dressed up for alley tennis. I don’t know who he is playing with.
Belle Isle is an island park in the Detroit River. There used to be a ferry that ran from Detroit to Belle Isle but it hasn’t run for years, decades. You can drive, bike or walk across on the Belle Isle Bridge.. From one side of the island you can see Canada, and from the other, Detroit. There are, or use to be, a Conservatory, a petting zoo, a herd of Fallow Deer (I believe disease got them), an aquarium, an exclusive yacht club (Did it ever integrate?), a casino, riding horses, horse drawn buggies, ponies, ice skating, a wonderful fountain that had colored water in the summer (It was done with lights), fishing, picnicking and swimming. We spent a lot of time on Belle Isle when I was growing up. My mother told us that when she was growing up, people slept there during heat waves. In the last few years Belle Isle has been made into a State Park and there is a charge for visiting.
My mother, sister and I seem to have spent the day at Belle Isle with some family friends. Harold and his family are the only family I remember my parents taking us over to their house to visit, as a family.Harold was about Pearl’s age and there was a sister, Andre, and a brother, Edward, who were older than we were. Andre’s mother made her get rid of her Betsy McCall paper dolls at some point because she was “too old to play paper dolls.” Many years later there was a younger daughter, Michelle.
according to the Belle Isle Conservancy page.
It says “Belle Isle” on the back of the photos. I don’t remember so many houses or buildings as you can see in the background. Corrections or confirmation from other Detroiters welcome.
The picture of the horse to the left looks much fancier than the ones we are riding above.
Connie was my mother’s best friend from Eastern High School. She and her husband, Warren, lived on the East side in one of the new little houses built after WW2. We lived on the West side and we only went to visit once or twice a year. It wasn’t in another city though and I don’t quite know why the visits were so infrequent. Perhaps my mother was too busy to go during the school year and Connie didn’t drive because I never remember her visiting us.
Other posts with photographs taken on Belle Isle Skating Champions and Mershell Cunningham Graham, Jr From a different blog, a post about outtings at Belle Isle back in the 50s and 60s. With photos of various places around the island – Detroit Chinatown: Blast from the past Belle Isle.
