Mother’s Flight from Detroit
Artist: James Gallant
At the turn of the twentieth century my maternal grandparents moved from Bashan, Ohio in the southeastern corner of the state near the West Virginia line (population 92, according to an 1885 atlas) to the town of Delaware, north of Columbus. Among my mother’s earliest memories were childhood trips “back home” to Bashan, a little over a hundred miles distant. To get there at the time required a day of driving on unpaved country roads.
Mother’s grandparents at Bashan, the Tuckers and the Torrences, had small neighboring farms where they grew or manufactured most of what they needed to live. During visits to Bashan, Mother would walk along a dirt road over a hill from the Torrences’ farmhouse to the Tuckers’ and back. The farms lay near the village crossroads where there were two “general stores,” and Mother recalled seeing horses and buggies tethered to hitching posts in front of the stores.
She was not sure why her parents had emigrated from Bashan to Central Ohio, but her mother’s brother and his wife had made the same move earlier. A fair guess would be that both families had gone north looking for work. In Delaware, my grandfather, Hal Tucker, had labored for a time at an orchard. Then he had a gas station, and later he was partner in a retail tire store on Main Street; and at one point my grandmother Emma Bessie Tucker, to supplement the family income, did piecework from home, caning chairs for a local furniture factory. Mother recalled water buckets standing around the house in which cane strips were softened for weaving. The family lived in a series of rented houses in Delaware before buying a house on West Central Avenue during Mother’s junior year in high school.
At Delaware High School, she took a French course from an actual French woman named Anders who’d somehow made her way into Central Ohio. Later, Mother and some other local high school graduates organized a French Club. The membership vowed to speak only French at their meetings, and they tried to do this for a time before realizing that sharing gossip in French was difficult.
Mother remembered better than the curriculum and faculty at Delaware High her two school friends, Herma and Rachael. The girls had nicknames for one another, all ending in the affectionate “y” or “i.” Herma became “Bunny,” Rachael “Billy,” and Mother’s rather old-fashioned sounding “Mildred” gave way to the sprightly “Micki.” Each of the girls had a pair of shoes she’d dyed red as an expression of camaraderie.
During Mother’s sophomore year of high school her father gave her a Model-T Ford with a “rumble seat” in the back, and the red shoes gang tooled around town in it, and drove to neighboring towns like Granville, Galion, Bucyrus, and Upper Sandusky for football games.
*
Mother met my father when he transferred to Delaware High School from a rural school for his senior year, 1927-8. Dad’s father had been doing very well selling stocks and bonds, and had purchased a house in town. He lost nearly everything in the crash of ’29, forcing cancellation of the plan for my father to attend local Ohio Wesleyan University.
After high school Dad worked for a time as a hand on the farm of his sister’s husband, later with a railroad gang based at Fostoria in northern Ohio. He would take trains back to Delaware weekends for dates with mother. At some point, he had taken a mail order course in “commercial art,” and he was back in town during 1935 as assistant to a man named Tracewell, who had a sign shop on the second floor of a Victorian-era building off Main Street. When Tracewell left town shortly thereafter to pursue an opportunity elsewhere, Dad took over the business.
I remember as a child climbing the long flight of creaking steps to the sign shop which gave off a sharp smell of paint pigments and turpentine. There was a high stamped-tin ceiling, schoolhouse lamps, and signs in various stages of completion or abortion leaning against walls. From Dad’s “drawing board” by the front window there was a view of City Hall across the Street.
My parents’ courtship had been prolonged, largely no doubt as a result of the economic circumstances. They married in November, 1936 in the parlor of her parents’ home, with a former fellow railroad-working friend of Dad’s as “best man,” and Mother’s high school friend “Bunny” as “maid of honor.” There was a lunch at a local restaurant, and then the newlyweds sped off for Chicago in the car Dad had borrowed from his father. In Chicago, they checked into a hotel, had dinner, and went to a movie. Part of the next windy, cold November day they spent sightseeing in the big city by car and on foot. They did a little window-shopping on State Street, and then started back to Delaware where they set up housekeeping in an apartment on the second floor of Mother’s parents’ residence: a big, roomy multi-bedroom, two story Victorian house near Main Street that was transformed recently into a bed-and-breakfast. (That a man whose vocational history had been as improvisatory and sketchy as my grandfather’s could have afforded such a house measures the decline of the dollar over the century since.)
A young married couple today would not likely find appealing the idea of idea of living with the wife’s parents, but this was 1936, a difficult time. (Fooling around online, I once came upon the address of my grandparents’ address in the 1940 census online, and discovered to my surprise that not only were my parents living there, but there was also a renter.)
Mother had taken piano lessons as a girl. As late as the 1950s she would sit down at the family upright to reprise a favorite piece of hers, the 1929 pop hit “Wedding Bells” (“Those wedding bells are breaking up that old gang of mine.”) The wedding bells would break up that old gang of hers, but they hadn’t yet in 1936. Saturday nights generally found her and her and my father in the company of other local young married couples, including the aforementioned “Billy” and “Bunny,” and their husbands. They would play cards, smoke, and drink “rum Cokes,” with radio music going in the background. There was some picture-taking, as the family photo album suggests. Dad had contrived a makeshift darkroom in the bathroom of the apartment he and Mother shared.
When Hal Tucker, my maternal grandfather, died in 1940, our family consisted of Dad, Mother, my brother, my maternal grandmother Emma Bessie, and me. Responsibility for our upkeep had fallen on Dad. On the day of Hal Tucker’s funeral, one of Mother’s male relatives from Bashan, who knew Dad to be a “sign painter,” took him aside to ask if he could “keep things going.” The question baffled Dad until he realized that a “sign painter” in rural southeastern Ohio was a drifter who lettered names on rural mailboxes.
Painting signs for merchants in Delaware was more lucrative than that, but scarcely the highroad to wealth and security. Mother remembered having prepared back then (and I recall having eaten) many servings of a delicacy known as “chipped beef on toast,” which, she recalled, could feed five people for thirty cents.
Hoping to improve his skills, Dad enrolled in a night school class in “commercial art” at Ohio State in 1942. He had attended only a few sessions before his instructor confessed she had nothing to teach him. He might as well have been teaching the class as she. He had learned more about “commercial art” in the sign shop than he had imagined.
He had stopped attending the class, when, on the recommendation of his Ohio State instructor, he was invited to teach commercial art at William and Mary College in Virginia. The young man from small town Ohio who always felt that, not having attended college, he’d missed initiation into some profound mystery, found himself invited to teach at one. It was the kind of improbable “move up” more common at the time when college graduates were less abundant than they were to become later, and employers were mainly interested in what a person could do, or could be taught to do on the job.
On the heels of the offer to teach at William and Mary, came another. A native of our town who had founded an advertising agency in Detroit had learned of Dad’s abilities, and offered him a job in his art department: a genuine opportunity for a young man with a family on the cusp of the postwar economic boom in America that sent the advertising business into high gear.
With the two offers of employment in hand, Dad encountered on Delaware’s Main Street one day an older acquaintance, F. Beverly Kelley, who was, or was soon to become, a publicist for Broadway productions in New York, and for Ringling Brothers Barnum and Bailey Circus. Which of the two offers would be the better choice? Dad asked him. Kelley said, without hesitation, the job in Detroit.
*
Dad broached with Mother the subject of moving to Detroit.
Detroit was a big city, and she was a small town woman who didn’t really like the sound of it, but it not the place of a wife to speak her mind in such matters at the time, so she agreed to the move.
The house in Delaware was put up for sale. Dad went up to Detroit ahead of the family, to get started. The house in Delaware sold very quickly, and late one Friday night, Mother, my brother Bob, and I, boarded a train bound for Michigan. It arrived in the outskirts of Detroit just after sunrise on tracks running alongside the impressively broad Detroit River. I awoke in my seat to a view of the city’s impressively massive skyline across water.
Dad and the owner of the advertising agency, Paul Roop, met us at the station. Roop was an impressively large, urbane-looking, mustachioed fellow in a tweed jacket, his longish hair swept back on the sides. He drove us into the center of Detroit in his Lincoln, and we went up an elevator to his offices for a look at Dad’s new work space.
Dad’s new job that had disturbed our normalcy so profoundly had for me the aspect of the vita nuova. I don’t know what I expected, but what I saw when we arrived at Dad’s work space disappointed me faintly: It was a “drawing board,” more or less like the one it his sign shop, in a big room filled with a number of similar drawing boards.
Roop, accompanied by his secretary, drove us out to a residential neighborhood of Detroit, Royal Oak, where the secretary had located what she thought might be a house suitable for our family. Mother told me years later that she felt it inappropriate that Roop’s secretary, not his wife, had accompanied us to Royal Oak. That was not how it would have been done back home.
The house was a two-story frame structure painted white, with a large front porch on a narrow, urban lot. It seemed right enough to my parents--or at least to my father. A real estate agent was summoned, and earnest money tendered to secure the deal.
Direct exposure to Detroit’s immensity had intensified the reservations Mother had had about the move from the beginning, and by the time we had returned to Delaware, she was convinced that she did not want to go. Economic considerations had been uppermost in Dad’s mind understandably, but there were others for a woman who had spent her entire life in a small town among relatives and friends. Detroit seemed impossibly alien. She could not imagine raising her children there; and it would have challenged anyone familiar with my grandmother Emma Bessie, the woman from Bashan who had lived with us after the death of her husband, to imagine her in a major American city.
Rather than expressing her opposition to the move to Dad, Mother went to his parents and pleaded with them tearfully to oppose the move. Suddenly, with less of a struggle than she’d anticipated, the move was off. Dad’s minimal resistance suggested that he, too, had perhaps had second thoughts, his background not having not been very different from his wife’s.
One wonders, though, what must have been going through his mind. The house in Delaware had been sold. The earnest money that secured the house deal in Detroit was lost, and he was for the moment unemployed.
A house in town remembered later by the family for its deficient furnace and malfunctioning toilet was rented, and in 1942, my father went to work as an odd-jobs man in an industrial plant on the outskirts of Columbus, Ohio, commuting the twenty-some miles south of our town. His tasks included sweeping the plant floor at the end of the workday. He was making a little extra money lettering names on lunchboxes for factory workers, when company executives, having become aware his skill with pen and brush, moved him off the plant floor to a drawing board in their small advertising department.
Talent won out, and within a few years he had become the manager of the department, with an increase in salary that enabled my parents to purchase the roomy, comfortable house in Delaware where they were to raise their four children, and where they spent the rest of their married life. Later, he became an account executive for an advertising agency in nearby Columbus.
Settling the family in Columbus would have eliminated the necessity of driving the twenty-some miles between Delaware to Columbus both ways each day, as he did for years. The explanation of this was, I suspect, the same as why the move to Detroit failed.
