Within two years, the Dodge workforce had tripled, from 5,000 to 16,000. Getting a job at Dodge was a coup; while no one would get rich on $3 to $5 a day, it was several steps up from peddling junk on the street. I didn’t know much about the auto industry growing up, but I knew enough to wonder why Hyman never managed to get a job at one of the plants, the way so many other immigrants did.
Which is why I was surprised when I obtained Mom’s 1917 birth certificate, and under Father’s Occupation, it said: “Dodge Bros. employee.”
Punching the Dodge clock was no guarantee of stability, however. Like other auto factories, Dodge slowed its production at the end of each model year, resulting in layoffs for a portion of the workforce—particularly the unskilled, like my grandfather.
By the time Annie was born in April 1919, Hyman no longer worked for Dodge. Annie’s birth certificate lists his occupation as “laborer,” with no mention of where he was laboring. At some point, he managed to land a job at Ford, but that didn’t last long either; Ford’s archives show that a Hyman Cohen worked there briefly, in late 1918 and early 1919. When 1920 arrived, Hyman was looking for work and Tillie was taking Annie to the Children’s Hospital clinic for the first of many examinations of her deformed leg. With two young daughters, and Annie’s worsening health problems, it was not the best time for Chaim to lose his tenuous grip on a steady income.
Detroit and the auto industry, meanwhile, had accumulated so much wealth that its leaders literally could not spend it fast enough. The Dodges built themselves opulent estates in the countryside to complement their mansions near downtown, and Detroit prepared for a series of public works projects and land annexations that would transform the city’s character and economy forever. In a space of five years, the city built and opened a new art museum and a new public library; it acquired the privately owned streetcar system; it went on an annexation spree that pushed the city’s borders outward in every direction, expanding the city’s footprint by nearly 70 percent in just three years, from 80 square miles to more than 134.
A world-class city needs a world-class hotel, so on December 1, 1924, the 28-story Book Cadillac, with its 1,200 rooms, 20 retail stores, and Italian Renaissance grandeur, took its place as the postcard symbol of Detroit’s coming of age—and later, for my parents and others in their generation, as the starting point for a downtown date (“Meet you at the Book”). Then, at the close of the decade known appropriately as the Roaring Twenties, privately financed architects, engineers, and construction crews joined forces to complete what others had only dreamed, erecting not one but two routes across the Detroit River to Canada. On November 11, 1929, just thirty months after ground-breaking, the first cars lined up for the 1.6-mile trip across the Ambassador Bridge; less than a year later, the owners of the Detroit-Windsor tunnel opened its lanes—and cash registers—to international traffic.
But for my grandfather and his family, the Roaring Twenties might be better described as the Declining Twenties. Hyman spent the first part of the decade pushing his peddler’s cart, while Tillie spent hers at home, caring for one child considered “exceptionally bright” and a second with such a severe handicap that she could not go to school until three years after her age group had started.
When Nathan Shlien showed up from Chicago in 1921 or 1922, Hyman and Tillie probably saw his presence as a boon, or at least a second income; with Nathan contributing a portion of his auto-plant paycheck, they scraped by, renting an apartment on Hendrie Street. Then Hyman returned to Ford for a time, and was working steadily enough to rent slightly larger quarters on Medbury Avenue, for $35 a month.
Hyman stayed with Ford for six years before illness forced him to leave, the Routine History says (although records in the Ford archive could not confirm this second round of employment). By the end of the decade, he was back on the streets, peddling “spasmodically,” in the odd phrasing of the Evans report. When the Depression devastated Detroit, the Cohen family lost what little foothold it had. If it was hard for Hyman to get a job when times were good, it became impossible when times went bad. In early 1930, social worker Helen Hall wrote after visiting Detroit, “I have never confronted such misery as on the zero day of my arrival in Detroit.” With no federal aid system in place, that misery overwhelmed the city’s welfare department, which saw its average monthly caseload soar from 5,029 in the second half of 1929 to 49,314 in the first six months of 1930.
Every day, Hall reported, hundreds of unemployed men lined up at the seven temporary welfare stations established in neigborhoods on the city’s east and west sides; after interviewing dozens of them as they waited in the bitter January cold and observing their oppressive sense of gloom, Hall concluded: “The only worse thing I’ve seen was the look on the faces of a company of French polius [infantry soldiers] who had been in the trenches four years; all hopes seemed to have been wiped out and an intense weariness had taken its place.”
Detroit, which had prospered with the auto industry’s rise, now died by its precipitous decline. More than 125,000 autoworkers found themselves on the street in early 1930, a third of the industry’s workforce; an additional 100,000 lost their jobs in 1931, and most of the rest battled for the part-time work that remained. Many ended up as POGIEs—the Poor Old Guys in Eloise—living in the barracks-like building that the hospital constructed for the city’s growing homeless population.
Detroit, so recently the symbol of affluence and progress, now became the standard for scarcity and despair. “Children scavenged through the street like animals for scraps of food, and stayed away from school,” Robert Conot wrote in American Odyssey, his history of Detroit published after the riots of 1967. “The attendance department made little pretense of tracking them down…Each day four thousand children stood in bread lines. With their sunken, lifeless eyes, sallow cheeks, and distended bellies, some resembled the starving children in Europe during the war.”
Mom had just reached her teens when Detroit hit economic bottom, old enough to remember what it was like. Yet she never said anything in detail, perhaps because she could not find a way to talk about those times without talking about Annie as well. So her description of growing up poor had shape but no substance. “It was awful,” she would say. “I never want to be poor again. I never want you to be poor.”
Reading the city’s own records on what happened in that decade, I can finally fathom the depths of my grandparents’ despair in those Depression years, as well as the depths of Mom’s resentment. Annie’s leg, in particular, required more attention, and more treatment, than the family could afford. In 1936, when Dr. Frederick Kidner at Harper Hospital decided to amputate her misshapen leg, the city welfare department paid for the wooden one that went in its place.
If Mom was embarrassed by her father’s woeful work history, she was mortified when her family joined the welfare rolls in 1934. The city welfare agency later hired Hyman as a part-time janitor, but his fortunes never turned around, not even after World War II arrived and Detroit regained its place as the nation’s industrial heartland. Mom was determined that her parents’ fate—impoverished, isolated, still uncomfortable with their English—was not going to prevent her from attaining something better.
{ THIRTEEN }
Invisible
Stepping into Annie’s world: Oakman School, 2008 (Elizabeth Conley photo)
Marty Moss, eighty-two years old and two decades retired from his job selling appliances, lives just a few miles from the suburban Detroit apartment that Mom called home for twenty-three years. When I call him on a June afternoon at his sister Millie’s suggestion, he tells me that he hasn’t seen Mom “since the war” (referring, of course, to World War II), but he has no trouble remembering the young woman he first knew as Bertha until she made it clear that she wanted to be called Beth.
“I have to tell you—I had a little crush on her.” He says the word “crush” with a youthful mischievousness. “We never went out or anything, but we spent a lot of time together. I r
emember her being worried about getting married. She was a pretty girl, and I used to joke with her that if she didn’t find anyone, I’d marry her.”
A secret suitor!
“When was this?” I ask.
“Before the war, 1938, 1939.”
That’s just before Annie went to Eloise. It’s taken four months and several false starts, but I’ve finally broken into Mom’s social circle. I ask Marty if the group revolved around the neighborhood or school—he and Mom, I remind him, were close in age, but they had several years on Faye, Sylvia, and Julie, so I wasn’t sure what held the group together.
The mention of Faye’s name distracts him. “Faye,” he sighs. “Everyone was in love with Faye. I used to date her before I went into the service. She was one of the girls I would have considered marrying, not that I ever suggested that to her.”
What about the group? How did they become friends? “I’m not exactly sure. I think it started with the neighborhood, then friends from school joined in. I lost touch after I got married, although I would hear about them from time to time. Most have passed away—Faye last year, Sylvia recently. I’m not sure about Julie Reisner. I think she’s still alive, maybe in California.” He paused. “Millie said your mom died a few years ago?”
“In 1999,” I tell him. “You know she had a sister, Annie?”
“Yes, but I don’t remember seeing her much. She was crippled, right?”
She must have been a striking sight, this young girl with a brace and crutches, and later with her wooden leg, and yet she moved through the neighborhood as if she were invisible. Not invisible, exactly—her neighbors, her sister’s friends, the people she passed on the street, her fellow bus passengers, they all saw her, but they didn’t see her. She had no presence, no substance, and no impact on their lives.
I think Annie understood this at some level. From the Routine History: During the winter of 1939 and 1940 she seemed to be suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that she would never be able to live a normal life such as other girls have. She began to display interest in boys and yet could not look forward to marriage…She began to lose interest in activities inside and outside her home, no longer finding consolation in books, in sewing, or attending movies or listening to the radio, and would spend all her time sitting in a chair, refusing to even go out of the house.
By early 1940, she saw hardly anyone outside her family—so hardly anyone saw her. Once merely ignored or shunned, she became isolated and shut in.
Needing to inhabit Annie’s world, I stop by the Oakman School for Crippled Children on one of my Detroit visits. The handsome sandstone-and-brick building, which opened its doors in 1929, still serves physically handicapped students, who make up about one-third of its three-hundred-student population. The word “crippled,” however, disappeared from its name long ago; it’s now known formally as the Oakman Elementary/Orthopedic School.
On the long drive to the school, located on the city’s west side, I wonder if there’s any purpose to my visit. It’s unlikely that Oakman—the equivalent of a junior high school back then—has any yearbooks or records of Annie’s six years there, ending in 1937 when she was eighteen, three years older than the typical ninth-grade graduate. She only got a diploma, the Routine History said, “because it was felt that it would encourage her, not because she had actually accomplished this level of work.”
As I approach Oakman’s front door, I have the impulse to turn around and head back to the car. What am I going to say when I enter the main office? “Hi, I’m looking for a student who last walked these hallways sixty-eight years ago…” The school’s staff is going to think I’ve lost my mind. Annie might have been here once, but she’s here no longer.
How wrong I am. No written record of Annie exists, but as a kind assistant principal gives me a tour, pointing out the original wooden handrails running the length of every hallway, I have no trouble envisioning Annie on her way to class, steadying herself as she goes. Amid the school corridor’s usual cacophony—the hum of a hundred voices, the giggles and shouts and light taps of quickly moving shoes—I can hear the click and thwud and schwush of crutches, prosthetic legs, and wheelchairs on linoleum. I can’t hear my aunt’s voice or ask her any questions, but I can see her phantom figure, the brace on her useless right leg, struggling as best she can manage with either crutch or handrail, pushing herself forward, a disabled Sisyphus on her unending journey.
As classes begin and the noise recedes, I stand alone in the now-empty hallway, vacillating between feelings of anger and sadness—anger that she had to endure so much pain, and sadness that she was born before science and medicine could do much for her afflictions.
Mary Greco listens patiently and politely to my pitch, but she’s steadfast: If I want the state of Michigan to undertake a search for Annie’s medical file, she’s telling me, I’ll need a court order. That’s how the Michigan Department of Community Health interprets the law governing mental health records, she says, pointing me to the specific sections that the department cites to support its view. My status as Annie’s personal representative isn’t good enough.
Another agency, another roadblock in my hunt for the rest of Annie’s medical file. After Patricia Waterman informed me that Wayne County had no record of Annie ever being treated at Eloise, I took my search to the state capital in Lansing, where the Michigan Department of Community Health has responsibility for the surviving records of the now-closed Northville State Hospital. Greco works in the department’s legal affairs office, and it’s her job to handle requests like mine.
As Greco and I talk, I think back to the conversation I had in May 2000, when I naively called the same department to see what I could learn about this secret aunt I had just discovered. You and five thousand other people, said the helpful woman who first warned me that I would need a court order to get any information. What do you tell them? I had asked her. I can’t tell them anything. State law doesn’t let me…
I had come full circle. Six years earlier, Northville was still open (luckily for me, otherwise I might not have gotten either the Eloise records or the 1972 Northville summaries), and I was fumbling in the dark for Annie’s medical records. Now Northville was closed (unluckily for me, because closure increased the likelihood that Annie’s file had been destroyed as part of a routine disposal of records older than twenty years), and I had specific legal authority allowing me to seek Annie’s medical records, but in the eyes of the Department of Community Health, nothing had changed.
Looking at the section Greco cited, I’m even more convinced that the department’s response is more or less automatic. One section specifically allows “a court-appointed personal representative” to authorize the release of the deceased’s medical records. I’m surprised and heartened. It seems clear—and I make my case in an e-mail to Greco—that I already qualify and that the judge’s signature on my Letter of Authority is the equivalent of a “court order,” if the department is worried about setting a precedent.
How much of Annie’s file had gone with her when Eloise sent her to Northville in January 1972? I didn’t know for sure, but it must have been a substantial portion, based on my first forage for Annie’s records in 2000. My contact back then had said her friend at Northville didn’t feel comfortable sending Annie’s entire record, so she had photocopied just the beginning and end of the file.
I had to know if the middle portion existed. If it existed, I had to see it. Who needed to be protected? The patient died thirty-four years ago, both hospitals were now closed, there’s a history that needs to be told. What’s the harm?
You and five thousand others…
Needing to inhabit Annie’s body, I pay a visit to Frank J. Frassica, the head of orthopedic surgery at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Medicine, a post that makes him one of the leading practitioners in his field. His round face, balding head, and playful wisp of a mustache give him a theatrical air, and he bears a passing resemblance to one of those TV doctors. H
e has read the Routine History and the court papers on Annie’s commitment, which I sent him in advance, so he knows as much as I do about her deformed leg and Dr. Frederick Kidner’s decision to amputate in October 1936.
I tell Frassica what I’ve learned about Kidner—that he was not only the top orthopedic surgeon at Harper Hospital and in the prime of a distinguished career when he operated on Annie, but he had just been elected to a one-year term as president of the American Orthopedic Association. His reputation and renown brought him invitations to deliver lectures at the country’s leading orthopedic centers, and made him a major force in the development of Michigan’s Crippled Children’s Service, one of the country’s first such agencies. A 2005 book on major figures in orthopedic history describes the Massachusetts-born and Harvard-educated surgeon as “not one to be carried away by new ideas just because they were new, but was always ready to accept new proposals that had been thoroughly tested by time and experience.”
In other words, Annie’s surgeon was no slouch. The contrast between his circumstances and his patient’s—Kidner lived in Grosse Pointe Farms, one of the city’s wealthiest suburbs, in a house staffed by servants, while Annie and Mom shared a bedroom in a four-room apartment—could not have been starker. He was the eminent surgeon, the voice of authority. I doubt that my immigrant grandparents had a clue how to talk with him, question him, or challenge him.
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