Chapter One
The Caro Years (1937–1951)
Wahjamega
I was born in 1937 in Wahjamega, Michigan, a small spot on the map just outside Caro. Our house sat next to a pig farm, more or less across the road from a small airport, and not far from the state institution for the insane. Pigs on one side, airplanes on the other, and the state hospital down the road. It made for an unusual start in life.
Living across the road from that little airport, I was fascinated by airplanes. I used to sit for hours watching them take off and land, hoping that someday I would get a ride.
One of my earliest memories comes from 1941, when I was four. On summer evenings I would climb into my dad’s car and turn on the radio to listen to the Detroit Tigers, and later in the year the Detroit Lions. Before long Dad would come out and slide in beside me, and the two of us would sit there listening together. We stayed as long as we could stand it, until the mosquitoes got so bad that we had to give up and go inside.
I was an adventurous little boy, and one of my favorite adventures nearly gave my parents heart failure. More than once they found me pedaling my tricycle right down the middle of the highway, without a care in the world. They would go out of their minds. Looking back, it may have been the first sign of a lifelong love of speed and anything with wheels.
204 Ellis Street
In the early 1940s we moved a few miles into town, to 204 Ellis Street in Caro. My first memory of that house finds me standing in the coal bin in my Red Ryder cowboy suit. A truck had just delivered a load of coal, and it all had to be shoveled down the coal chute into the basement beside the furnace. That furnace was the heart of the house. All winter long, somebody had to stoke it every night, or we’d wake up cold.
That somebody was me. My dad had started out as a lineman for a utility construction company, building towers and stringing high-voltage wires between cities to bring them electricity. He worked his way up to foreman and then district superintendent, with responsibility for projects across several states. It was important work, and it kept him on the road much of the time. At home it was my mother, me, and my three sisters, Joanne, Judy, and Jerilyn. So every night, my dog Chipper and I went down into the basement together and stoked the furnace. Keeping the family warm was my job.
Chipper was a brown-and-white German shorthaired pointer, and Dad had won him in a poker game. He turned out to be a first-rate bird dog. When Dad was home, he took Chipper pheasant hunting every chance he got. Chipper would point, then bring the birds back. I was allowed to tag along, but I wasn’t old enough to carry a gun, so I walked behind my dad through the fields and watched how it was done.
My mother, Maude, raised the four of us largely on her own while Dad was away. She was pretty strict. She had to be.
I gave her plenty of reason. One day I hitched Chipper up to a wagon, loaded my sister Joanne into it, and got him running as fast as he could go. The wagon tipped over, and Joanne hit her head on a tree. That’s what earned me the yardstick. Mother got it out and gave me a few whacks across the backside, and then the yardstick broke. We both burst out laughing, and there she was, still holding onto me, the two of us helpless with laughter.
Joanne never let me forget that wagon ride. She reminded me of it for the rest of her life, right up until she passed away many years later.
The Prisoners
In the mid-1940s the war came to Caro in a way I never expected. Our street was lined with trucks full of German prisoners of war, brought in to pick sugar beets and work the fields around town. To most people they were the enemy. To a boy and his dog, they were just men sitting in the backs of trucks. I used to walk up and down the street with Chipper and talk with them, and I never had a problem. There were very few guards around. In my experience, those prisoners were some of the best people you could meet.
They lived in Quonset huts at the fairgrounds, each one heated by a coal-burning stove through the Michigan winters. In winter the fields around the huts were flooded, and we kids went ice skating there while the German prisoners watched and cheered us on.
One day I found a wallet on the street where the prisoners had been resting. I brought it to my dad. There were six dollars inside. Dad said, “We’re going down to the prison camp to return this,” and so we did. We found the prisoner it belonged to, and he was astonished that anyone would bring it back. He pulled out a bill and handed it to me as a reward. Dad said, “You take it. That’s for being honest.” So I did.
But when we got home, I told Dad the prisoner had given me the five-dollar bill, not the one. So I went back to the camp on my own, gave the prisoner his five dollars, and he gave me the one-dollar bill instead. Those men earned next to nothing for their work. Five dollars was a fortune to him.
I took that dollar home and gave it to my mother. She thanked me, and had to brush back a few tears.
Losing Chipper
I was ten years old when we lost Chipper. After one pheasant hunting trip, he came home very sick. We took him to the veterinarian, and he died there at the vet’s office. His body was sent to Michigan State University to find out why. The answer was a rare infection carried by pheasants. The birds he had spent his life hunting were what took him in the end.
Chipper had been at my side through all of it: down in the basement stoking the furnace on winter nights, walking the street past the prisoners’ trucks, and pulling that wagon a good deal faster than he should have.
My First Management Position
In sixth grade there was a playground bully named David Putnam, and he beat up everybody. One day he walked up and punched me in the side of the head for no reason at all. So I took him on. There must have been 150 kids standing in a big circle around the two of us while we fought it out. When it was over, David was no longer the playground bully. He had met his match.
My sixth-grade teacher, Mrs. Riddle, made me stand in the corner for fighting on the playground. So there I stood, facing the wall, with the whole class cheering for me. I guess, in a way, that was my first management position.
David and I crossed paths again later, and we ended up good friends. We admired each other in an odd kind of way.
Runways and Fairways
That fascination with airplanes followed me to Caro. I hitchhiked out to the airport there, and the airport manager made me a deal. If I would pull weeds out of the runways all summer, he would give me a fifteen-minute ride around the county in a Cessna 120, all by myself. So every week, at least one day, I hitchhiked out to the airport and picked the weeds out of the cracks in the runway. At the end of the summer, sure enough, I got my first airplane ride. I was hooked. Someday, I was going to learn how to fly an airplane.
To earn some spending money, I also hitchhiked out to the Caro golf course and caddied for the golfers. I got thirty-five cents to carry a bag for eighteen holes, maybe a fifteen-cent tip, and maybe a Coke and a hamburger for lunch after nine. I was hooked on that too. Someday, I was going to learn how to play golf.
The Flathead
Around the time I was ten, my dad went to the junkyard, bought an old Ford flathead engine, and brought it home to the garage. He had a big assortment of tools, and he gave me one instruction: “Take it apart and learn all you can about why it runs.”
So I did. I took it all apart and put it back together, and had some parts left over. So I took it apart and put it back together again, and kept at it until I got it right. Along the way I learned an awful lot about crankshafts and camshafts, intake manifolds, carburetors, pistons, and everything else that makes up an engine. I guess that’s how I became a gearhead.
That engine was my hobby for a couple of years. My mother always knew where to find me: out in the garage with my friends, working on it. My friend Jerry Fenster used to bring his dad over to watch us. His dad owned a big pickle factory in Caro, so we always had free pickles. I’d come inside looking like a grease ball, and Mother would send me straight to the bathtub.
In 1951 my family moved to Mount Clemens, Michigan. We couldn’t take the engine with us. I think Dad took it back to the junkyard or gave it away, but I lost track of it. What I never left behind was everything it had taught me.
The Pine Room
I didn’t go with them right away. I was still finishing eighth grade, so my folks arranged for me to stay behind in Caro with my mother’s sister Eva and her husband Leonard. They owned a restaurant called the Pine Room. I ate all my meals there and slept at their house.
Eva and Leonard had just bought a brand-new television. One day, while they were at work, the flathead habit got the better of me, and I took that TV completely apart. When they came home, it was lying in pieces all over the living room. They were not very happy. This time I couldn’t get it back together, and they had to take it to a repairman to reassemble it. After that, I was barred from the house whenever they weren’t there. I had to spend all my time at the restaurant, where they could keep an eye on me.
So I went to work at the Pine Room. I bused tables, washed dishes, mopped floors, and cleaned windows. And whenever I wasn’t busy, I ate the shrimp. All of it. That didn’t make them happy either, and they ended up locking up their inventory to keep me away from it.
I stayed with Eva and Leonard for three or four months, until school let out. Then I left Caro and joined my family in Mount Clemens. I suspect the Pine Room’s shrimp supply was glad to see me go.