June 20, 2001
Grand Blanc, Michigan
After a good night’s sleep in our own beds and a breakfast befitting grandparents who are pumped to have a grandchild in town, we were told it’d be the day we were given the grand tour of Flint. Today, Flint is known for its horrifying water problems. In 2001 Flint was in the dying days of the abandonment of the auto industry. Home to the largest General Motors plant on earth, and the origin of brands like Chevrolet, Oldsmobile, Cadillac, and Buick, Flint had been synonymous with building cars. In fact, it’d even been the home of vehicles prior to automobiles, having led the nation in carriage building at the end of the nineteenth century. Win’s grandfather had worked at Buick for his entire adult life, as I recall twenty years later, and in his retirement wanted to show us where he’d worked during the high point of the industry. He was proud, as he should’ve been, but he clearly wanted to show us those empty, dilapidated buildings before they disappeared forever.
So off we went, just the four of us, in his Suburban (of course). Would’ve been a tighter fit in their Cadillac. A company man, through and through. I don’t remember much after all these years, but what I will never forget is how easy it was to just pull up next to some of the largest buildings I’d ever seen: buildings with broken windows, with weeds growing up through the completely empty parking lots, just a quick turn off residential streets with fewer houses than there should be. In some ways I wish I’d been older, so I could better appreciate the magnitude of the changes before me. But then this wouldn’t be a story of a trip to see the country, in all its size and grandeur, and, in this case, one of the highest profile examples of the incredible economic and societal changes shifting the country in the direction of the world we now inhabit. Back then, though, we were awed by the scale of the operations we’d only heard about as legendary in America’s story of industrial might.
On our way back, after a harrowing wrong-way one-way situation, we stopped for lunch at Little Joe’s Tavern, a true local’s joint in Grand Blanc. The location where we shared lunch with Win’s grandfather had been open as Little Joe’s since 1936, after opening nearby the year prior. I didn’t remember off the top of my head, but my small journal tells me I had “the biggest stromboli ever.” That sounds about right for the perfect spot to fully appreciate the day’s exploration of the century preceding our own.
Later, back at the house, Win’s grandfather moved on from the place of his employment to the items of his interests. These included his John Deere riding mower, his enormous gun collection, and his utterly astounding number of mesh-backed hats with the names of companies and teams that blew our minds. In my memory anyway, the man was as close to the stereotype of a Twentieth Century American Man as I can imagine. It was hard not to be impressed with what had been promised and delivered to workers of his generation.
For dinner we had company, the Kettlers, old friends of Win’s grandparents. Over steaks and corn-on-the-cob, we got to know these family friends. By the time we got to peach cobbler and ice cream, an answer to one of our most immediate questions emerged. Two nights hence, we’d be crashing with my aunt and uncle just outside of Minneapolis. The question needing answering was which way would we go to get there, given the impediment of Lake Michigan between where we were in eastern Michigan. The Kettlers made our desert even sweeter by, out of the blue, offering their house on the lake for our next night’s stay.
What lay ahead was beyond our wildest dreams, and it set up an incredible traveling arrangement with deep family ties we wouldn’t learn about for several weeks.
