News notes

I’ve had a summer of out-of-town visitors, and that means showing them the local sights.

Their first impressesions of Monroe County often are interesting. I’ve noticed these observations in the last few weeks:

- Monroe’s downtown seems to have sooooo much potential. First-time visitors are amazed to see the River Raisin, the quaint streetscapes, the Custer statue and St. Mary’s Park, the proximity to a Great Lake - and the dearth of development. Why have so many towns and small cities with so much less to offer managed to create thriving downtown areas, while Monroe still struggles?

- The lack of access to Lake Erie startles people. We often take visitors to Luna Pier, because, well, there aren’t many other options if you want a glimpse of Lake Erie.

Again, veteran travelers who have seen thriving waterfronts on lakes much less impressive than Erie, can’t believe the lack of development. And their jaws drop when they hear the property values.

- When we show visitors the land between Sterling State Park and downtown Monroe, including the proposed battlefield park and the proposed bike path from the lake to the college, they nod in understanding.

“That’s more like it,” is the response. “That’s the kind of vision that Monroe needs to catch up to the rest of the world.”

Connecting the city to the lake; connecting a national battlefield park to both the lake and the city; using the river as a assett instead of an afterthought; tieing downtown in with the area’s other highlights - its history and its lake - all that makes sense to visitors who are frequent travelers and have seen many tourism-related developments around the country.

Now, if we can just do it.

I don’t recall ever being as profoundly touched by a book as the one I finished tonight.

I had made reading “Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln” my summer literary project. The book, which won the Pulitzer Prize for history last year, was a Christmas present, but it took me months to turn the first page.

As the months went by, I couldn’t bring myself to launch into 750 pages of fine print on a subject I suspected would be interesting but dry.

Boy, was I wrong.

When I finally opened the cover, I was drawn by author Doris Kearns Goodwin into a book that, while an accurate account of history, also was genuinely readable.

Goodwin set out to tell the story of how Abraham Lincoln’s incredible strength of character allowed him to gather together in his cabinet all of his enemies - because he recognized that the strongest, ablest leaders, working together, were needed to save the nation from the Civil War.

When I put the book down tonight, it wasn’t Goodwin’s brilliant writing, however, that had touched my soul.

It was the brilliance of Mr. Lincoln, who comes through the pages with a clarity that is astounding. I feel like I’m a better person simply because I spent a few dozen hours in the company of Old Abe - even if it was through words on paper.

Time and again, as I turned the pages, I paused to ponder the immense gap between the powerful moral fiber displayed by Abraham Lincoln in holding a nation together through sheer force of character and the apparent lack of morality in government today.

He was called Honest Abe for a reason. How many of today’s politicians have nicknames like that.

It’s also impossible to ignore the contrast between the book’s central theme - Lincoln inviting his opponents into his government, so all sides would be heard - and the current president’s attempts to gather around himself only people who agree with him, and silence anyone who disagrees.

I know this sounds like silliness - a grown man in the early years of the 21st century caught up in nostalgia about a president from the middle of the 19th century.

But I can’t help it. Ms. Goodwin has done a good thing - and touched me in the process.

If you’re up for a reading project, I strongly recommend Team of Rivals.

A forum topic on MonroeTalks.com got me thinking about Tiger Stadium and the summer of 1967.

I only have one Tiger Stadium memory, but it’s a memorable one.

I grew up in Oregon (the state, not the city in Ohio), 2,000 miles from Tiger stadium. But my family took a cross-country camping trip the summer before I entered high school - 1967.

It was memorable for some great baseball games, but also for the terrible riots that marked the low point of the Civil Rights movement.

As we drove into Detroit in July 1967, the road to the stadium took us through some neighborhoods that looked to us like the riots had already occurred (remember, we were from rural Oregon; this was our first look at a ghetto).

Racial tension was high in cities across America that summer. Buffalo had already rioted, and there was talk that Detroit might be next. We were wide-eyed and nervous as my parents argued over the map and inevitably got lost trying to find the stadium.

But when you enter the ballpark, you’re in another world. Amidst the peanut vendors and the autograph seekers, we watched a wonderful doubleheader at Tiger Stadium. Jim Lonborg, on his way to the Cy Young award, won the first game for the Red Sox. The Tigers won the second game.

We saw some of baseball’s greats. Al Kaline, Carl Yastrzemski, Norm Cash, Bill Freehan, Tony Conigliaro, Rico Petrocelli, Willie Horton. And we saw a great old baseball park - where you really felt like you were at a Major League game.

That was July 9. The Detroit riots began on July 23, two weeks later.

By that time, we were camping in New Jersey, just a few miles from Newark, which also was being ravaged by riots. We drove through Newark on our way to New York to watch a Mets/Giants game at Shea Stadium.

We watched four games that summer - the Cubs at Wrigley Field in Chicago, an afternoon doubleheader in Detroit and a night game in Shea. It was my first three Major League ballparks; I’ve seen games in 25 others since then. But those first three are special.

We also visited the Montreal Expo that summer, which was our main destination. My parents were school teachers, and seeing a world exposition was something they thought would benefit their students and their children.

But the race riots of 1967 made an impression on all of us that transcends the great experiences in ballparks and expos.

My family partly financed our cross-country camping trip by working in the fields to harvest crops. While that seems insane today, it seemed quite normal to us in the 1960s.

Mexican migrant families came to our small town in Oregon every summer to help the local farmers harvest thier fruit and vegetable crops. It wasn’t a huge immigration issue to us - it was just life in a small town. Why couldn’t we do the same in the cherry orchards of Michigan, or the vegetable fields of New Jersey.

We met several African-American families while picking cucumbers in New Jersey. They helped us learn the ropes in the fields - how to spread the vines to find the cukes, and how to avoid getting your skin rubbed raw by the prickly leaves. 

Then they drove to Newark on the weekend to join the riots, while we went swimming in the lake at the state park where we were camping. The irony was thick.

I can’t separate my memories of baseball games in 1967 from the indelible impression left on a 14-year-old boy of working alongside families who were kind and caring - yet felt the anger inside necessary to join a riot.

And today, when I walk through refurbished downtown Detroit to go to a game at sparkling Comerica Park, those memories still aren’t far from the surface.

You can still enjoy a great experience at the ballpark - as I did a couple weeks ago. And race issues remain troubling in Detroit and most of America’s cities.