July 1958 – Wordless Wednesday
“H” is for Linwood and HOGARTH
This post continues a series using the Alphabet to go through streets that were significant in my life as part of the Family History Through the Alphabet Challenge.
The church still stands on the corner of Linwood and Hogarth in Detroit. It has gone through several names through the years, beginning as Central Congregational Church in 1953. It became Central United Church of Christ after the merger of the Evangelical and Reformed Church and the Congregational Churches in 1957. In 1967, after a large mural of the Black Madonna was painted for the Sanctuary, it became the Shrine of the Black Madonna. My father was the minister. I am going to write about my memories from the 1960s as I was growing up.
I remember many hours spent at church. There were church suppers and political meetings. There were Christmas Eve services, Christmas caroling and my father’s annual “Little Patricia” Christmas sermon. He gave these for several years. They featured a little girl living in a cave with her family following a nuclear war. I think the last time he gave this sermon she had two heads. I remember a bazaar with booths of handmade items to buy as gifts and game booths with a shooting gallery. The year I remember best was 1962, during the Cuban Missile Crisis of late October. A nuclear war seemed all too possible. I was 16.
I remember Youth Fellowship meetings, where we talked about what was happening in the city, and around the country. Afterwards there was a social hour. Standing next to the coke machine and not being asked to dance, while at the same time, dreading being asked to dance, is not one of my happier memories. Social hour became less stressful once a ping pong table was added for those of us who didn’t dance much. I remember Workdays for Christ where we spent the day doing yard work to raise money for international service projects. And the “Friendship Circle” where we held hands and sang camp song like “Tell Me Why The Stars Do Shine” and “A Friend on Your Left and a Friend on Your Right”.
I remember the choir director, Oscar Hand (far right above) singing and the time he held the door open for someone stealing a typewriter because he thought it was the repair man. There was a wonderful production of “South Pacific” one year. There was the tragic and shocking murder/suicide of two married choir members. They had been having a clandestine affair. Mostly though I remember the good singing Sunday after Sunday.
There were lots of church dinners. All members were organized into Area Groups that raised money and sponsored events for socializing. Sometimes Area Groups sold dinners to take out. I remember one such sale. Nobody was coming in to buy the dinners until one of the women suggested burning onion skins. They laughed about it, but someone burned some onion skins and people actually started to come.
The Church was fully involved in the movement for equal rights and black power. There were always speakers and rallies and seminars.
My parents divorced when I was 8. We lived with my mother but often spend the weekends with my father. He would start writing his sermons Saturday night. He wrote at the kitchen table. There were piles of old mail, old sermon notes and who knows what, piled up at one end of the table. There was enough space for the three of us to eat and for him to write. He wrote late into the night, sometimes taking breaks to come in and comment about what we were watching on TV or to order some shrimp from Jags up on 12th street. He never finished the sermon on Saturday. Sunday morning he would get up early and continue writing until the last minute when we would get in the car and drive down Linwood to church. Sometimes there were slow drivers in our way or people had already parked in his usual spot so he had to park farther away. At that time, he always parked on Lamothe, which was what Hogarth was called on the other side of Linwood. Service started at 11. Sunday morning excitement – would we make it!? We always did.
The bulletin and sermon notes below are from Sunday, July 3, 1966.
His sermons always spoke to what people needed to understand about their lives in the present day. And they were always timely. Someone once asked me if he planned and wrote them maybe weeks or months ahead of time. He didn’t. And you could tell because of the current issues he always included.
Swimming Through the Years
My family enjoyed seeing themselves reading and cooking so much that they asked me to do another. What better topic for a monster collage than swim suits? Here we have my mother, my sister, several cousins, my husband, children and grandchildren swimming in lakes, pools and the Ocean.
For other collage extravaganza’s you might try these:
We Read, We Write, We Print and We Publish
Tennis in the Alley
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.
Summer 1949
Belle Isle Pony Rides, 1953
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.
Barbara Dancing
“F” is for Fairfield
This post continues a series using the Alphabet to go through streets that were significant in my life as part of the Family History Through the Alphabet Challenge.
In the fall of 1968, Henry, my mother and her parents, Mershell and Fannie Graham, bought the flat at 16201 Fairfield. The Graham home on Theodore had been invaded, shot into and suffered an attempted armed robbery. Nobody had been hurt.
In the spring of that same year an insurance salesman was shot to death in front of our house on Oregon. The murderer cut through our backyard during his escape. Although nobody was home, my mother never felt the same about living there. They began to look for a flat to share.
I lived there from the fall of 1968 until I left home in the spring of 1969. My grandparents lived there until they died in 1973 and 1974. My mother and Henry were there until 1976, when they moved to Idlewild. My sister, Pearl, was a sophomore at Howard University when we moved and never lived there, although she came home for holidays.
The people in the photos are, starting upstairs and going from left to right – Henry looking firm, me the night before I left on my cross country tour, Pearl and my mother. Downstairs we have my aunt Mary Virginia who lived with her parents for some months, Alice (my grandmother’s youngest sister), my grandmother Fannie, my grandfather Mershell and my mother holding my daughter, Jilo. I got the idea for this photo house from a photograph I saw via twitter of a house in Detroit. You can see it at Detroitsees here.
The flat on Fairfield was kitty-corner from a University of Detroit field. The only thing I remember happening on that field while I lived there was a high school band rally with different bands doing routines throughout a Saturday. I remember staying up late working on art projects and catching the bus across the street to go to campus. Most of my memories are of returning to visit with my oldest daughter. I know that I didn’t spend half as much time as I could/should have spent talking with my grandparents when they were right downstairs.
This house is still standing and looking very good. You can see it on the corner in the street sign photo above. Although the hospital that used to be directly across the street is gone, the rest of the block is all there! Whooooohooooo!
You can see my mother and grandfather’s wonderful garden and read more about Poppy in “Poppy Could Fix Anything.”
Father and sons – Atkinson 1952
Here is a photograph that has quite a bit of damage but still, it is one of my favorite pictures of my father. It was taken on the front porch of my grandparents house at 2270 Atkinson. Today would have been my father’s 101 birthday. He has been gone for 12 years.
Visiting Athens, Tennessee
