Going Home

A shout out

Calling all current and former residents of the City Airport community. If you want to be part of the Sept. 8 Fletcher Playground cleanup effort, please email me at mhappy@detnews.com today.

Together, the past and the present combined, we can forge a better tomorrow.

And now the rest of the story ...

Children of the weeds

The baseball diamond at Fletcher Playground in June.

One other thing that Leon told me upon our first meeting was that children still play at Fletcher Playground because they have no place else to go. And given what I had just seen at the park, that testimony seemed implausible. Fletcher Playground was not fit for Leon's nemesis the pitbull, let alone kids.

Despite my fond memories of the park, I certainly couldn't imagine my three children frolicking through that current hell hole. The image shook me almost as much as Karen's story about her murdered father.

The image stuck with me as I wrote the narrative for my video column and remains with me today as we near a cleanup of Fletcher Playground on Sept. 8 -- an event I hope can start to change the face of a neighborhood in need of a face transplant.

But I've gotten ahead of myself. First, I want to tell you the story of how the cleanup plan came about and the amazing people behind it.

D-Day

Fletcher Playground in June.

Knowing that going back to Dobel Street would be emotional for me, I wanted to be with a friend. And so on that bright, sunny morning in late June, Tom Gromak -- one of the guys who talked me into this project -- picked me up in his jeep and we headed toward Van Dyke.

Tom and I worked together at a small paper in Lapeer for a short time about a decade ago, and our career paths crossed again at the Detroit News in 2000. We have been good friends and running partners ever since, did the New York City Marathon together last fall. Don't ask me who won.

Tom is a tech guy for detnews.com but has worked professionally as a photographer in the past and aspires to do so again in the future. I wanted him to take the present-day pictures of Dobel Street and Fletcher Playground.

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craigslist.com

One of Karen Siadak's photos of the park taken in 1976.

Being a New Yorker, if even for a short while, I was well aware of craigslist.com -- a website featuring classified ads for just about everything. While living in New York, we used craigslist to find our house, babysitter, my wife's job and an industrial-strength treadmill that took up half our living room.

The site isn't as well-traversed in Detroit as it is in NYC, but the number of ads in the section dedicated to our area is increasing by the day. Knowing it was a long shot, I still decided to post an advertisement soliciting pictures of Fletcher Playground on craigslist. And wouldn't you know it, I struck pay dirt.

I received one reply, from a woman now living in northern Michigan, Karen Siadak, whose father once owned Grimm's Florist & Greenhouse on Van Dyke, just a few blocks south of Dobel Street. Back in the 70's, Karen worked for the city's recreation department and managed the athletic equipment at Fletcher Playground.

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First contact

Me and some of my friends back in the day.

I reached out to Joyce Morey, formerly Joyce Lacomb, who -- like my grandparents -- lived across the street from us on Dobel Street back in the day. Joyce remained a distant friend of my parents over the years and had recently been in contact with my brother, Brian, because they lived in the same Madison Heights neighborhood. He actually made the first move, called Joyce and eventually picked up a shopping-bag full of old photographs for me that had been slightly damaged in a fire.

One afternoon at the office, with rubber gloves on to keep the delicate pictures safe, I picked through them and they began to stir a part of me that hadn't been tapped in eons. Most of my family's photos were, well, of my family. Many of Joyce's pictures featured childhood friends -- heck, they were more like brothers and sisters at one time -- and staring at their faces again, I found myself in a melancholy state, wanting to go back, aching for a sunny afternoon in Fletcher Playground with Jimmy, Vicky, Theresa, Johnny, Bernie. I still knew their names, could hear their voices, remembered our fights and our reconciliations -- usually minutes later.

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The video column

A couple of months ago, I took a long weekend. Didn't go anywhere. Just spent some quality time with the family near our new home in Grosse Pointe Woods -- swimming at the community pool, fishing for bluegill off a park pier with my 8-year-old son, reading a mind-numbing horror novel. Basically, I just needed a break from the office, time to get the creative juices flowing again.

When I came back to work, two colleagues of mine, who also happen to be very good friends, alerted me that they had volunteered me to do a video column on my old neighborhood. The piece would be part of detnews.com's package for the 40th anniversary of the '67 riots/rebellion/civil unrest -- whatever one wants to call it -- a chronicle on the effect that summer had on the area around McNichols and Van Dyke.

I cannot recall what my reaction was, probably because ideas are plenty and time is short in a newspaper environment and believed that this particular idea would die on an editor's desk. I think I just shrugged my shoulders, shook my head yes and moved on to another task.

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Home again

My childhood home at 8271 Dobel in the early 1970's.

For most of the past year I have been asking myself -- and others -- this not-so-simple question: Why am I back here in Detroit, a city I have been running from since I was 19?

This is the fourth time I've come home after living as far away as Diego Garcia, a tiny island in the middle of the Indian Ocean, during my seven-year career as a Navy journalist.

Most recently, I came back from New York City, where I worked for The New York Times for three years. My family and I reluctantly left New York almost a year ago to the day. Frankly, the cost of living for a family of five in NYC drove me back to The Detroit News. I previously worked at the News for nearly five years before leaving for the Times.

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