Once in a Great City

by David Maraniss

  Sixty years after the mass production of the first Fords, human and automotive trend lines were crossing. In 1963 far more cars than people were being born in the United States—about 7.3 million new cars, an all-time high, compared to about 4.1 million new people. But cars turned to scrap faster than humans to dust. By 1963 some five million old cars were hauled off to junkyards, while not quite two million dead were laid in their graves. Here was the flip side of the old derogatory acronym for low-performing Fords: Found on Road Dead. Obsolescence made auto industry hearts grow fonder. Life’s photos were making the case: shiny new 1963 cars rolling out of town on triple-decker rail transport cars signaled the industry was alive and the Motor City was on the move.

  People tend to see what they wish to see, comforted by facts that support their vision. How could Detroit be troubled when cars were selling at record levels, and not only that, but when so many key economic indicators appeared strong? Experts who tracked the supply line to automakers from the tool-and-die trade noted robust signs month by month. Orders were coming in nearly a third higher than the year before. When car companies added tool orders, they placed a bet on the near future, and when the tool industry cranked into a higher gear, the positive effects reverberated down the line to the steel and chemical industries, adding to an overall sense of momentum. Could the boom strengthen the tax base in Detroit itself, slowing the trend of suppliers scattering far and wide? That dispersion was irreversible, but promising news came in February, when the Budd Company, a large independent supplier to the car industry—making wheels, rims, chassis frames, brakes, and jigs—announced a $15 million modernization of its plant on Detroit’s east side, the sector of the city that had suffered a debilitating decline in jobs and housing during the fifties. Budd’s plans were hailed as “the first major industrial improvement on the city’s east side since World War II.”

  Detroit aglow and modern. At the corner of Jefferson and Washington, a new hotel was rising downtown for the first time since the 1920s. It was to be called the Pontchartrain, “the Pontch” for short, borrowing its name from a long-gone Detroit establishment over by Cadillac Square that during the early days of the twentieth century had served as the “mother of motors,” a hangout for gossipy first-generation automakers. Minoru Yamasaki, a world-class architect who had moved to Michigan during World War II, when an architectural firm there helped him avoid internment, had made a profound mark on Detroit with a softer style of modernism, most notably the McGregor Memorial Conference Center at Wayne State. He was adding to his defining work with a new thirty-two-story Michigan Consolidated Gas Company Building over on Woodward Avenue. His downtown design included the first-ever lobby requiring the installation of three-story-high sheets of glass. (Soon after Michigan Gas, “Yama” would start drafting the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan.) Up Woodward several blocks, the skeleton of what would become the First Federal Bank Building was starting to kiss the sky with its sheath of sleek black granite.

  Compose and decay. All along Michigan Avenue, the remnants of skid row, including the Lindell Cocktail Bar, were seeing the wrecking ball, and over in Paradise Valley, the Gotham Hotel, months after the law enforcement raid on the numbers operation, now faced its death sentence: a condemnation lawsuit filed by city lawyers. The lone question remaining before its demolition to make way for a medical center parking lot was whether the city had to pay for the property or could seize it since owner John White and his confederates had gambling-related income tax liabilities.

  Not all was sleek modernism in this makeover of Detroit, and not all of it was confined to the traditional white establishment. Over on East Grand, the House of Diggs, the city’s leading black mortuary run by Congressman Charles C. Diggs Jr. and his family, accentuated the year’s boom with the grand opening of its nouveau classic Boulevard Chapel, “conveniently located on Detroit’s growing east side.” The Diggs family had been in the undertaker business for more than four decades. Charles Diggs Sr. had started it all in a first-floor funeral parlor on Russell Street near the local headquarters of the United Negro Improvement Association, founded by Marcus Garvey, the pan-African redeemer whose teachings the mortician once followed. The elder Diggs eventually expanded his business into a vast enterprise that included burial insurance and diversified the family’s interests into politics, gaining election to the Michigan State Senate and paving the way for Junior’s rise to Congress, as well as setting a father-son pattern of stellar civil rights activism intermingled with problematic political ethics. The Diggs name was among the most prominent in black Detroit. More than seven thousand visitors toured the new funeral chapel one Sunday afternoon, lured by door prizes (silver tea set, AM-FM radios, and ladies’ wristwatches) and a live broadcast of the House of Diggs Radio Hour featuring the congressman and the Voices of Tabernacle choir. Myrtle Gaskill, a face in the crowd as the women’s editor of the Michigan Chronicle, reported that she and other visitors were “awed by [the chapel’s] magnificence,” with its accents of Moorish and Mediterranean detail, its oriental decor, and its lush carpet of lavender, turquoise, aqua, lilac, emerald, and absinthe green.

  • • •

  In the months since Berry Gordy Jr. had set his artists on the American road for the first Motortown Revue, the music entrepreneur and his recording studio had earned more local and national acclaim, adding to the glow from Detroit. At the annual awards dinner of BMI (Broadcast Music Inc.), the agency that collected and distributed royalties for most rhythm and blues companies during that era, Gordy and Motown came home with five separate awards for hit songs, more than any other studio. One of the songs was written by Gordy himself (“Do You Love Me?”) and two (“You Beat Me to the Punch” and “The One Who Really Loves You”) by his pal Smokey Robinson, who at age twenty-three was about to be promoted to vice president of Motown. The Detroit branch of the NAACP, the largest local chapter of the civil rights organization, also honored Gordy at its fifty-fourth birthday dinner that February. On the dais sharing recognition with Gordy were Dr. Thomas M. Bachelor, a distinguished African American physician, and the Right Reverend Richard S. Emrich, the Episcopal bishop of the Michigan diocese, who had taken a leading role in fighting for housing equality in Detroit. Gordy’s special citation came “in recognition of his spectacular rise in a very competitive field,” one that had very few blacks in positions of control. The studio at West Grand Boulevard now employed more than fifty people, most of them black. Gordy’s rise had lifted Detroit as well, the award stated, giving it recognition “as the center of the rhythm and blues recording industry.”

  Motown was in full assembly-line mode now, manufacturing shiny new hits all in a row. Gordy talked about his music as “the sound of young America.” But how to define that sound? What were the components? On February 22 Motown released a record titled “Come and Get These Memories” that seemed to provide some answers. It was written by Holland-Dozier-Holland (Brian Holland, Lamont Dozier, and Eddie Holland), who were emerging then as the company’s most reliable and identifiable songwriters along with Smokey. The origins of the song reached down into country music. Years earlier Dozier had tried to write something with Loretta Lynn in mind. He came up with the rudiments of a melody and some lyrics about a woman moving on, “Here’s your old Teddy Bear,” but could not finish it until he joined the Holland brothers and “decided to embellish it.” They took Martha and the Vandellas into the West Grand studio in late January, and when they emerged, Esther Gordy recalled her brother exclaiming, “That’s the sound I’ve been looking for!” It was deceptively simple and catchy, with elements of country, gospel, jazz, and pop. Just enough downbeat syncopation to keep it snapping, just enough female independence in the message to keep the innocent lyrics from descending too far into schmaltz, a good dose of pure joy to the feeling, and more of the gospel force of Martha Reeves, setting her on the path toward stardom.

  The rise of Martha Reeves reflected the soul of Detroit and the magic of its music. The force
s that shaped her in many ways shaped the city. Her family, like so many black families there, came up from the rural South at the start of World War II, drawn by the Arsenal of Democracy and its abundant factory jobs. She grew up in the church, singing. She was tutored by committed public school music teachers with sophisticated methods and strong expectations in an education system that honored music. And she came out of the rough-and-tumble of the east side. That last part is more important than outsiders might realize. The citizens of Detroit had many ways to define themselves—by ethnic heritage, by Catholic parish, by Baptist church, by auto company, by highway, by southern state of origin—but the first thing anyone would tell you in describing their Detroit background was east side or west side.

  Martha Reeves was east side, and the name she gave her singing group was her way of saying so. “Vandellas” sounds like some feminization of “Vandals,” but it has no connection to the ancient east European tribe or its modern-day ransacking connotations. It was another portmanteau like Motown, and Reeves coined it herself. The della came from Della Reese, the black gospel and jazz singer from Detroit’s Black Bottom neighborhood on the east side. Reeves idolized her. In an interview for this book, she recalled when she was seventeen and first heard Della sing: “I was in New Liberty Baptist Church, sitting there with a friend, and the pastor said, ‘Della’s in the house. Della, give us a song.’ And after the applause, the most beautiful black woman I had ever seen, so pretty and tall and she had her hair in a French roll and I had never seen a black woman with hair in a French roll, just like a queen, and she stood up and sang ‘Amazing Grace’ and her voice shook the rafters. And I knew it was a gift from God. She was blessed. And the next morning I am ironing my blouse to get ready to go to work at Citywide Cleaners and I turn on the little TV and there is Della singing ‘Don’t You Know’ and I said, ‘That’s Della Reese. I saw her in church!’ ” If della marked Martha’s sense of musical majesty, van denoted her sense of place. It came from Van Dyke Street, the artery that ran through her childhood neighborhood. To say Van Dyke in Detroit was to say east side. Van and dellas. And so, Martha and the Vandellas.

  The Reeves family migrated north from Eufaula, Alabama, in 1942, when Martha was eleven months old. She was the third of twelve children, a Reeves dozen that comprised the heart of the choir at the little storefront church of Rev. Elijah Joshua Reeves Sr., their grandfather. When she was three, Martha performed so well singing “Surely God Is Able” that she won a box of chocolate-covered cherries, and she never stopped singing after that, at home, at church, and at school.

  Here we find another significant factor in explaining the musical luminescence of Detroit, with its rich history of jazz and rhythm and blues musicians. Why Detroit? What gave this city its unmatched creative melody? One part of the answer is the availability of pianos to working-class families in the city, a result of steady auto jobs, disposable income, single-family housing, and the reach of Grinnell’s, the remarkable music store and piano maker with its central multistory headquarters on Woodward Avenue overflowing with affordable instruments. Another part is the city’s gospel and blues heritage, with so many Detroiters migrating from the rural South and bringing with them an oral, life-singing tradition they continued in the city’s church pews on Sundays and on weekend nights spent at music clubs or in home music parties held in living rooms and basements. Then there was the vitality of a black-owned radio station, WCHB. (The call letters were the initials of the owners, Wendell Cox, a Detroit dentist, and his partner, Haley Bell.) The deejays Martha Jean (The Queen) Steinberg and Frantic Ernie nourished local talent and gave the artists valuable airtime. Add to that the inimitable skill and imagination of a single ambitious person, Berry Gordy Jr., in assessing talent and figuring out how to make it shine. And also the luck of creative proximity, the random crucible of talents like Aretha Franklin and Smokey Robinson and Diana Ross living so close to one another during their childhood. But connecting these was the least appreciated and perhaps most important factor of all: the music teachers and programs in the Detroit schools.

  Talk to musicians in Detroit and odds are they will recall—vividly and fondly—the teachers who pushed them along. Paul Riser came to Motown in 1962 as a trombone player straight out of Cass Tech, a social naïf among the older cool-cat jazzmen of the Funk Brothers house band, but also a musical prodigy with skills at reading, writing, and arranging scores that he had learned in the public schools. Harold Arnoldi, the music teacher at Keating Elementary, plucked him out of the crowd at age seven and became a mentor and father figure to Riser, helping him get instruments at a discount and encouraging his development. Then, at Cass Tech, Riser rose under the guidance of Dr. Harry Begian, who inculcated in his music students the classics and fundamentals. “He was like a military drill sergeant, but he did it from his heart,” Riser recalled. “I didn’t understand what he was doing until I graduated years later and got a degree. I was able to laugh about it, his discipline. Harry Begian treated us as ladies and gentlemen and got us ready for the marketplace, attitude-wise, discipline-wise. I sat first chair trombone at Cass Tech, and he saw something in me, again, just as Arnoldi did. That got me ready for Motown.”

  For Martha Reeves, the public school influence traced back to her music teacher at Russell Elementary School. “Emily Wagstaff, a beautiful little German lady whose accent was so thick I could barely understand what she was saying,” Reeves later recalled. “She pulled me from class five minutes before tick-tock and chose me to be a soloist. My public school teachers had the biggest hearts and they were patient, and they could choose. They could pick out the stars and know they can instruct them and fill out their greatness.” At Northeastern High her music teacher was Abraham Silver, who, much like Begian at Cass Tech, had a capacity to teach music theory as well as direct a choir and infused his students with an appreciation for the classics and the fundamentals. Freedom through discipline: once they learned the fundamentals they could move freely into the genres of jazz, pop, and rhythm and blues.

  Reeves later remembered how Silver singled her out and then nurtured her. “He went through the whole choir section to see who could sing Bach arias. My name being Reeves, I was near the end. Some others did pretty good but no one really nailed it. So I stood up with my knees knocking. I nailed it. I had never heard of Bach. Or I had maybe heard it on the radio. One of my favorite pastimes as a teenager was listening to symphonic music and trying to hit some of those high notes.” Decades later, recalling the scene, Reeves hit those soprano notes beautifully. “So I did learn a lot listening to symphonic music. But Bach was a new name to me. Hallelujah! We were the first choir at Northeastern to be recorded. And the first choir from Northeastern to sing at Ford Auditorium. The first time I appeared before four thousand, four hundred people. I was seventeen, about to graduate. And that was one of the biggest thrills I can remember in my teenage life, to hear that applause. It was not just for me but for the entire choir, but I was the soloist. No microphones. You had to throw your voice. Abraham Silver. He taught us not only how to sing but how to read it. That made a big difference. That we learned how to read notes. That we did it correctly.”

  The route from Abraham Silver and Northeastern High to Berry Gordy Jr. and Motown records took only a year, but it was an unorthodox route, or might seem so except for the fact that many artists reached Motown by unusual paths. Reeves tried several jobs in high school and the year after: waiting tables at her uncle’s restaurant near Dubois Street, conducting door-to-door sales for Stanley Home Products and the Fuller Brush Company, and working the counter and keeping the books at a branch of Citywide Cleaners. But she never stopped singing, and through a friend she joined a girl group called the Delphis, for whom she sang second soprano, not lead. After the group disbanded, she won a singing contest at a local recreation club, and her prize was the opportunity to perform in the Gold Room, a section of the 20 Grand nightclub reserved for teenagers. Three nights, fifteen dollars. On the third
night, she was singing “Canadian Sunset” and “Fly Me to the Moon.” In the audience was William Stevenson, better known as Mickey, one of Motown’s talent scouts, an A and R man (artists and repertoire). He gave Reeves his card. That was a Sunday night. The next morning she took the bus across East Grand Boulevard to the west side, foreign territory, got off at the stop between Woodrow Wilson and Churchill, and walked across the wide boulevard to the house with the Hitsville USA sign. As Reeves recalled, there was a line outside, but she moved right past it to the front desk. The rest of her story of that day as she later told it is part legend but deeply infused with the sensibility of that time and place, accurately evoking the creativity, chaos, and freedom that made Motown possible.

  “I walked up to the lobby, to the glass enclosure, and [receptionist] Juana Royster, with this high voice, said ‘May I help you?’ and I said ‘I am here to see Mr. William Stevenson,’ and she said, ‘Oh, you mean Mickey?’ She said, ‘Close the door.’ And I walked across the threshold to where the A and R was then, and there was Mr. Stevenson standing there in the doorway. He had taken off his jacket and rolled up his sleeves and he had been up all night writing a song with the drummer, Marvin Gaye. When I saw him he said to me, ‘What are you doing here?’ I said, ‘Don’t you remember giving me a card? You said I had talent.’ ‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘but you were supposed to take that card and ask for an audition. We have auditions every third Thursday.’ So instead of fainting or crying I looked kind of dismayed, and the phones were ringing repeatedly and he said, ‘Answer this phone. I’ll be right back.’ So I did. He went off and for three or four hours I was answering phones. So I got clever, got a little notepad and tore it into sections and was taking down messages. There were seventeen men there, all of whom had two or three women calling them on a regular basis.”