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confront him, sometimes with violent undertones, you could say the belt and hickory stick worked. Like his father, Jim was a driven personality, although in his case that drive was wrapped up in a charm and wackiness that also betrayed the influence of his easy-going and loving mom.
    Around Coachville Gardens, Mr Osterberg was regarded as an intimidating presence, although a few people speculate that some of that severity came from necessity, given his job. According to neighbour Brad Jones, ‘He’d only be severe if you let him get away with it.’ James Senior ’s tough, no-nonsense attitude (‘trailers make sense’ was how he justified the family’s unconventional abode) was reflected in his dress and military haircut. But he would also take Jim Junior on long idyllic drives into the country. When Frank Sinatra came on the radio, Osterberg Senior would sing along with him. Over fifty years later, his son remembers drives in the Osterberg Cadillac, listening to his dad crooning ‘Young At Heart’, and dreaming of becoming a singer.
    Louella Osterberg, née Kristensen, was a cuddly woman of Danish, Swedish and Norwegian blood, who doted on the two men in the house and became a well-loved figure around Western Ypsilanti, despite working full-time in an office at Bendix, one of the main industrial employers in Ann Arbor. In later years she would preside over increasingly competitive arguments between father and son, but remained remarkably unfazed. Somehow, for all the male aggression on display in the tiny trailer in later years, there seemed little doubt that this was a happy, loving, if unconventional, family.
    For many people in Coachville Gardens, the trailer park represented an American arcadia, where kids in bibbed denim overalls played happily in rolling fields, dreaming of Sputnik and Superman. Parents could leave their children to play around the park, safe in the knowledge they’d be watched over by friendly adults in the close-knit community. It was probably this family atmosphere, plus the postwar housing shortage in Ann Arbor, that initially drew the Osterbergs to the park; once there, though, they stayed put until the autumn of 1982, becoming some of Coachville’s longest-term residents. There was green farmland all round, the nearest building being a stone, one-room elementary school on the other side of Carpenter Road. The Leveretts’ adjacent farmhouse was the premier hangout for kids in the area, who could earn pocket money working at Chuck and Dorothy’s vegetable stall or picking corn for them in the summer. For Osterberg Senior the presence of Pat’s Par Three golf course, right beside the trailer park, was a major draw. Behind the trailer park a small track led to the railway lines. Young James could hear the mournful hoot of freight trains passing through at night, and in the daytime he could sneak down to watch them clatter past on their way from New York to Chicago.
    On most days, kids from the trailer park played baseball or football around its snaking driveway. From the age of two or so Jim was a regular at the kids’ birthday parties, although he spent more time in his trailer than most. Although not a snob, James Senior was careful about the kids with whom his son associated. He was particularly worried when Jim Junior wandered down to see the Bishops, who were ‘different’. Jim would later describe them as ‘bona fide hillbillies’; however, the Bishops were well liked, fun to be around and a natural focus for Jim’s attentions. But when Jim Junior later developed a fascination with the precocious Diane Bishop, Jim Senior seemed to acquire an almost supernatural omniscience, and he inevitably turned up to whisk his son away from her. Osterberg Senior had no such concerns about Duane Brown and Sharon Ralph, whose parents had helped develop the site, and both remember childhood games around the park, although Sharon remembers, ‘Jim didn’t play out as much as the other kids,