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and when a Sunday driver who wore coveralls during the week put-putted past the great pink-and-white marble mansions on Lake Shore Drive, instead of shaking his fist, he thought of the day when he’d occupy one just like them. Hadn’t Henry Ford begun as a machinist’s apprentice?
    That placid certainty, that today was better than yesterday and tomorrow would be better still, stumbled in 1927, when Ford discontinued the Model T. That decision ended the beetle-black little chug-chug’s twenty-four-year reign, forced production cutbacks at the factory in Dearborn, and led to the layoff of thousands of foreigners, hillbillies, and coloreds, who had come swarming in like grease-stained bees toward the promise of five dollars a day and a company-owned home. It went down for the count on October 29, 1929—although most of us west of the New York Stock Exchange wouldn’t get the message until the ripples from Black Tuesday reached us across Lake Erie a year later. Even then nobody thought things would get as bad as Lewis machine guns mounted atop the Rouge plant for the purpose of mowing down striking laborers.
    Detroit was a night town then, trading overalls and work shoes for seersucker and black patent leather when the sun went down somewhere beyond Inkster. Dancing the Charleston and Detroit’s own Black Bottom at the Arcadia Ballroom on Woodward, checking out Gloria Swanson and John Gilbert at the Oriole Terrace on East Grand, lapping up real nigger jazz, down and dirty, on Hastings Street, and drinking—always drinking, from hip flasks and coffee mugs, crystal flutes and clay pots, silver cups and the hollow handles of trick umbrellas. You could pass the pint around at Navin Field while watching Ty Cobb hit and Dutch Leonard pitch, or you could put on the dog and sip champagne at the Polar Bear Cafe in Ecorse and hear Frankie Trumbauer and Bix Beiderbecke hotting up the band to cover the noise of Piejacki’s Navy unloading Ontario’s finest on the dock below the dining room. There, and all along the riverfront they called Michigan’s Barbary Coast, broken noses lined up with highbrows and the hard-eyed young killers who ran with the Purple Gang rubbed shoulders with the sheiks who greased their hair down like Ramon Novarro and the hennaed shebas who tried to look like Theda Bara in pearls and fringe, not to forget the occasional city councilman. In 1929 a scribe at the New York Times wrote an article estimating the annual profits of Detroit’s three top industries as follows: Automobiles, $2,000,000; Chemicals, $90,000,000; Liquor, $215,000,000. Blind Blake sang it, and others joined in:
    When I start makin’ money, she don’t need to come” around When I start makin’ money, she don’t need to come around ‘Cause I don’t want her now, Lord, I’m Detroit bound.
    There were casualties, of course. The business belonged to the survivors. In 1926 alone, three hundred and twenty-six Detroiters died from bullets, bomb blasts, and that faithful Sicilian export, the garrote, compared to less than half that number in 1917, when you could drink a beer in a public place without risking arrest. Little or no attempt was made to investigate these killings, most of which involved gangsters and the odd citizen who violated the unwritten law against waltzing into the crossfire. Oh, the dicks came around and made their chalk lines and smoked their cigars and had their pictures taken pointing at bulletholes, but the atrocities might have taken place in Turkey for all the attention they got after a new one came along to shove them off the front page. I was present at a press conference in Mayor Charles Bowles’s office when he commented, “Perhaps it’s just as well to let this scum kill each other off.” The bulls were happy to agree, and the papers ran the murder count like box scores.
    By then my days at the Times were numbered. The trouble with working for innovators like Mr. W. R. Hearst is they got all that