Readers’ Compositions Page

This page is a collection of Downriver-based narratives, written & provided by YOU; our independent social media readers.

Throughout this website’s history, we have always encouraged those to submit their original material and/or photo contributions to this site for all to read. These are essays we believe take in-depth looks at various areas of local history (stories from a different angle, or unique “quirks” Downriver has which we did not know about) from a participant’s direct experiences.

We believe the dissertations spelled out below more than meet the criteria for inclusion due to their depth from the author’s passion in their stories. It is always good to hear all perspectives when telling our history, and we hope you enjoy the offerings. We have decided to put them all on one page for easy access; feel free to utilize the buttons above which will jump you to the story of your choice.

Let us know if you would be interested in contributing your reflections via our Contact Page. We will do our best to publish them verbatim while allowing for small, various edits (spelling, punctuation) where needed. We will reach out to you if there are any questions. All we ask is that the stories do not focus solely on political or religious realms… for obvious reasons.

– KEVIN HARRISON, web curator
(August 18, 2026)

Allen Park Veterans Hospital Reflections

By JAY JONES – website contributor (2026)

It looked to a kid in the back seat, like the “other place.” Like Eloise out in Westland. Like Northville. Enormous, institutional and quiet in a way ordinary buildings are not, and children Downriver grew up with a low dread of it that had nothing to do with anything they had been told.

You did not want to drive by. You certainly did not want to go in. And then one day you went in… because your father was in there.

This is the memory that a whole generation of Downriver holds in common, and it is always the same shape: The kids stayed in the lobby. Kids were not allowed upstairs, so your mother parked you on the vinyl, went up alone and brought him down, and while you waited you looked at what was in that lobby with you.

Everybody Downriver worked there or had family who did. It was one of the biggest employers on this side of the county and it ran without stopping. And the surprising thing about a place that ran 24 hours a day for 57 years is how clean it was kept.

Nurses. Orderlies. The outpatient pharmacy. X-ray tech. Grandmothers who put in 25 years and uncles who put in 30… sometimes in the same family, sometimes on the same shift. Half the nurses working Downriver into the 1990s did their first clinical rotation in that building in the 70s… in the 90s. Teenage girls in candy striper pinafores walked out of there years later with a license and a career. That is a thing a building can do.

And the volunteers – who were mostly the wives and mothers – worked the place like a second parish. The American Legion Auxiliary had an office right in the hospital, helping the men who could not read a benefits form get what they were owed. Women came in to read aloud to the blind ones. Families all over Allen Park and Lincoln Park saved their Christmas cards in a shoebox all January and handed them over to be cut up for crafts.

Ecorse Creek Memories

By BILL JEFFREY – website contributor (2016)

The only thing we didn’t do at the creek was purposely swim in it. This was the 1940s and 50s, which was long before today’s environmental knowledge and concerns. In terms of today’s standards, many waterways of that era would be classified as open sewers. (So much for the good old days of that part of my childhood.) In fact, walking behind the homes that backed up to the creek on North Drive, you saw the excrement, toilet paper and condoms* that were flushed directly into the creek from these houses.

• We didn’t know such a word existed at the time. The term passed down from generation to generation of boys in the neighborhood was rubbers or Johnny Rubbers (etymology unknown). These white tubes were commonly sighted in the creek. In a ceremony on Pontiac Point one summer day, each of my pals and I fished a rubber out of the creek on the end of a stick, formed a circle, pointed our sticks so they converged in the center and in unison, made this proclamation: “In the name of the King, we proclaim this Johnny Rubber Island!” Pontiac Point is a peninsula not an island, but the king was back in England so how would he know.

As mentioned, Pontiac Point is a small peninsula on the creek. This was not its official name as far as I know. However, this spit of land was purportedly where Chief Pontiac, Ottawa leader, met with other area tribal chiefs in 1763 to plan the raid on the British fort at Detroit, which they did in May of that year. There must be historical evidence for this because the place is now Council Point Park in Lincoln Park, Michigan. We simply referred to it as The Point.

Word circulated in the neighborhood one summer of found arrowheads on The Point. I never saw evidence of said artifacts, but a couple of friends and I decided to join the Arrowhead Rush and did a couple of digs at the east end of The Point by a tall dead tree. We found a few pointed stones, but no matter how hard we tried to imagine one of Pontiac’s braves flintknapping them into lethal weapons, they didn’t qualify.

From our neighborhood to The Point was about a mile. We started out by walking down the alley between Highland and Kings Hwy. Streets turned right onto Riverside Drive, left onto Emmons Blvd., crossing over the creek at the Emmons Bridge into Lincoln Park.

We proceeded into a field then across a landfill – known then as a dump, which we called it. The dump provided many targets for our BB guns and slingshots: rats, starlings, sparrows and bottles of many colors. I particularly took vengeance on those blue milk of magnesia bottles with my Red Ryder and sling because this yucky stuff was Mom’s go-to constipation remedy. It was like drinking liquid chalk.

Well, you couldn’t get smoke through them but they burned with a pungent aroma and the smoke kept the mosquitoes away. Chewing on the stems provided a musky pleasant taste. I hope the origin of that taste was inherent to the plant and not from the water in which they grew. In the fall the cattails went to seed and became tan fuzz-on-a-stick. We broke them off and threw them at each other. Did you ever try to get cattail fuzz off of a wool jacket…?

Fields on and around The Point were also home to pheasants and rabbits; the marshes: ducks, mud hens, red wing blackbirds and muskrats. I wacked a sitting rabbit with a marble from my slingshot once. I hit it in the back instead of its head and it got away. Jack Kralick just missed a flushed pheasant with an arrow from his bow. I can still see that arrow flash by the bird’s back. I can’t remember if we found Jack’s arrow or not, but by its speed and trajectory, it may have landed on Michigan Steel’s property.

Jack ran a muskrat trapline on the creek one winter. He placed the traps in the muskrats’ runs that are pathways to and from their homes in the stream’s bank and the waterway. His younger brother, Bill, and I worked the trapline with him a couple of times – removing the dead animals and then resetting the traps. Jack skinned out the muskrats, put the pelts on stretchers and dried them. I remember seeing them hanging from his basement’s rafters (The Kralicks lived across the street from us.). I don’t remember to whom Jack sold them, but I recall him saying he got two bucks a pelt. For the times, this was good money. The pelts were used in making women’s coats. Back then having a fur coat was considered a luxury that most women wanted – mink being the preferred fur. My mother had one made of Canadian otter. Mom deserved a full-length mink coat with cashmere lining!

Jack Kralick was best known for his baseball prowess – a left-handed pitcher. He was a standout performer locally on sandlots, St. Patrick High School and American Legion ball. Then pitching for the major-league Minnesota Twins in the 1960s. After his baseball career, Jack remained an avid outdoorsman while living in Alaska and Mexico. He died in 2012.

Besides harassing the The Point’s wildlife, we turned that 27 acres of ground into Pacific jungle islands where we rooted out Japanese soldiers; defeated Nazis in the hedgerows of France; conquered Indians; and swung from the trees like Tarzan. It was anything we could imagine or re-enact from the movies we saw at the Wyandotte Theater.

Further to our WWII campaigns, on the far side of The Point there were two side-by-side concrete tunnel-like structured that reached out into the water. We were not sure of their function. They must have had something to do with Lincoln Park’s effluent/water management system. To us they were German submarine pens. The Nazis must have gotten tired of repairing them because every time we launched an attack against Hitler’s forces on The Point, we blew them up.

The creek was too narrow and shallow for pleasure boats, with the exception of where it widened near its mouth prior to flowing into the Detroit River. Some of the homes on that part of North Drive had docks and boats. When these boats left their berths, they went east to the river. The Detroit River was one of the busiest waterways on the Great Lakes. Except for a few months in mid-winter, there always seemed to be one of those long lake boats either south bound carrying iron ore to the steel mills in Cleveland and Pittsburgh or north bound hauling coal to Detroit, Chicago and Milwaukee.

We floated the creek on rafts and in what we called cement tubs. The tubs were used for mixing cement and plaster on new-home-construction sites. Somehow one would occasionally end up at the creek…. They were steel, about eight feet long, five feet wide, flat-bottomed, blunt on both ends and they floated. We’d lay a couple of boards across them for seats and have a boat. We had a big time poling them along on the creek. No group of boys kept one very long because no matter how well it was hidden in the marsh, some other kids would find it and it became theirs for that day. It was the unwritten law of the creek and it worked.

As mentioned, we didn’t purposely swim in the creek but there were occasions that required such action.

Here is a personal experience (I think it was 7th grade): On the last day of school before summer vacation, four of us decided not to return to school after lunch. The creek beckoned to us and we were seduced by an afternoon on the water. So off we went to our raft that was hidden in the marsh just below the Pershing’s house on Riverside Drive. I was sitting on a milk crate on the back of the raft providing steering and propulsion with a long pole. All was going well until my pole got stuck in the mud. Instead of letting go of it, I tried to pull it free. Physics took over with the raft continuing with me holding onto the pole, the milk crate slid off the back of the raft with me sitting on it. More dangerous than the water’s depth was getting mired in that thick, sticky, black mud. My feet never touched the bottom because I quickly swam like Tarzan back to the raft and pulled myself aboard while my buddies broke up in laughter.

I wasn’t sure what typhoid fever was then, but we didn’t get it. Maybe we built up immunity to the fever because we spent so much time at the creek. Additionally, Bob and I survived the oil sprayed (to keep the dust down) dirt practice football field at Roosevelt High School. We looked like coal miners when we finished practice. We didn’t succumb to the intermittent, belching smoke from the foundry across the street from the field, either.

We fished the creek. Not from any of our watercraft but from the shore. Carp were the prominent species, save for an occasional bullhead (catfish). The carp were mainly the bronze ones, but we would see gold (orange) ones swimming under the ice in winter. However, I don’t remember any of us catching a gold one with line and hook. Maybe they didn’t fancy the night crawlers we used for bait. During the spring spawn, we would pull on our hip boots and wade the marshes spearing carp. We got some gold ones this way.

Since carp are considered trash fish, we didn’t eat them. Well, we tried cooking some once over an open fire on the creek bank. One bite and my mother’s admonishment was confirmed. It was awful. Our catches were either left on the bank for the birds and critters to eat or taken home to use as fertilizer in the garden.

Winter on the creek was ice skating – some free skating but mainly pickup-hockey games. The best hockey area was at the end of Sixth Street. That’s where the creek widened before it emptied into the Detroit River about a mile downstream.

A lot of our hockey was played during our Christmas breaks. Generally, the first safe ice came in mid-December. A typical Christmas-break day on the ice: pull my Levi’s on over my shin pads, duck into a heavy sweatshirt, put on two pair of wool socks and a pair of buckle boots (no shoes), slip on hockey gloves, slide my CCM hockey skates over the hockey stick, shoulder the stick and walk the three blocks to the creek. There were logs at the creek’s edge on which we sat to put on our skates.

If there was snow on the ice, the kids who lived closest to the creek on North Drive brought snow shovels and we cleared off a rectangular rink at mid-creek. One year Bob Dienst made some wood-framed, chicken-wire goals. He also bought goalie pads and a regulation goalie stick. Bob was serious about his goaltending. After high school, I think he played goalie for one of the northern Michigan colleges. Lacking Bob’s goals, we used four tin cans that were readily available and set goals with them at each end of the rink.

We would play a couple of hours in the morning; go home for lunch and returned to the creek in the afternoon and play some more. Sometimes after the game, we would take off on a free skate and head east toward the Michigan Steel Mill,* which was on the north bank of the creek in Ecorse near the Detroit River. The mill site was made up of long, black buildings. We had to be careful and stay on the south side of the creek nearing the mill because the ice thinned out there. In fact, there was usually open water from the mill to mid-creek. This was probably due to a discharge from the mill that kept the water there from freezing.

• Michigan Steel was a division of Great Lakes Steel located on the Detroit River a couple of miles upstream from where the creek emptied into the river. My father was in management at GLS from 1927-1954. After a two-year stint as a restaurateur at Sibley Gardens, he returned to the corporate world in 1956 at Chrysler Corporation from which he retired in 1972. He was director of personnel & industrial relations at Chrysler and negotiated labor contracts with Walter Reuther, founder and president of the United Auto Works Union (UAW).

On many winter evenings, we skated on the city ice pond at the corner of Highland and Alfred Streets – two blocks east of my house. This is when the neighborhood girls mingled with us on skates. We did some showing off for them with our skating prowess. Some of the girls skated well, too. As a teen, there was no better date than on a clear, cold winter’s eve skating leather glove to wool mitten with her on a path of moonlit ice.

Just beyond the Michigan Steel Mill were the trestles that crossed the creek for the four-track railroad that was the main north-south line in and out of Detroit. The creek’s waters would back up between the banked track beds for about 50 yards toward the Emmons Boulevard crossing. These waters created mini ecosystems (our terminology – “water between the tracks”): cattails, wild flowers, frogs, redwing birds, etc. In spring and summer, with our small tridents attached to old broomsticks, we gigged frogs and an occasional carp that got in there by taking a wrong turn from the creek. But the most fun we had there was playing rubber ice.

Towards the end of winter when things began to thaw, the ice became rubbery and undulated underfoot. We would run across the 10-yard-wide expanses until one of us broke through the ice. It was only waist-deep water so there was no drowning danger, only cold, wet feet and legs. What joy we had seeing how many times we could dash across the rubber ice until it broke!

While playing by the tracks, we stopped our activities when a train roared passed. During the Korean War, I remember the tanks on the freight train’s flatbed cars rushing by. The tanks were produced in Detroit’s auto plants and were headed south to military bases and seaports.

The cops got back in their car and came after us. We should have dropped into the thicket of crabapple trees and marsh near the bridge. I don’t think they would have found us there. But we hightailed it across the bridge and down Riverside Drive. We made it to the Highland/Kings Hwy. Alley when they caught us. It was then that we learned police officers from one city could cross into another town to capture fugitives.

They put the four of us in the back of the squad car, gave us a lecture on running from policemen and took us to the Lincoln Park jail. They let us sit in the cooler for an hour or so then let me call my mother. Mom showed up shortly and took us home. During the ride we got another lecture about staying out of trouble. I don’t think the other kids’ parents ever found out about our time in the hoosegow. Note: While in the cell we read names penned on the wall of former inmates. We recognized some of the signatures. We weren’t the only kids from Wyandotte who had spent time there.

Downtown Lincoln Park’s Fort Street median

By TAMMY LAVENDER – website contributor (2026)

We Parked in the Middle of the Street. Downtown, Fort Street.

You parked in the middle of the road. Not alongside it. In it. Fort Street ran wide through the middle of Lincoln Park with a paved median down the center of it, and that median was where you left the car, nose in, between the two directions of traffic, and then you took your life in your hands and crossed one lane of moving Fort Street to get to whichever store you had come for.

And along both sides of that street was everything a family needed. There was a Ford dealership on Fort (Flannery Ford; started as North Bros.) with a sign that turned colors like a rainbow, and a small girl waiting in the parked car for her parents would watch that sign cycle over and over, and would come back ten years later as an employee, running from the median to the door because she was late. There was a wooden slat fence along the whole back of the dealership’s lot, screening off the city alley, and half the neighborhood boys climbed it and half the neighborhood boys got chased off it, repeatedly, as a form of recreation. Once, for reasons lost to history, the dealership put on a small carnival, and there was a woman lying inside a box made of ice, and you climbed up and looked down through a little square window at her face.

There was the Merchandise Mart, run by a large man who was never seen without a cigar. There was Crown Discount, and Painters Supply next to it.

There was Grinnell’s, where you bought your records and, if your family was ambitious, your piano. There was a movie theater at 1583, and next to it a barber shop with a Hungarian name, and another barbershop in the same block where two men cut hair together for so many years that when the shop finally closed the younger one simply crossed Fort Street and opened again rather than leave.

There was Norton’s, which had a lunch counter, and Little League teams came in after the game, win or lose, and sat up at that counter feeling like men. There was the Edison office where your mother went to pay the electric bill and traded in the old burnt-out bulbs for new ones, which is a thing that happened, and which sounds now like something from another country. There was a shoemaker. There was a bakery run by a family from the other side of Europe, and a butcher who everybody’s grandmother swore put his thumb on the scale, and went to anyway, every week, for forty years, because he was hers.

And there was Truan’s.

Truan’s hung on longest of all, out on Ford Road by the end, and by then it sold only candy, the ice cream fountain still standing in the back of the store and no longer running. Then that closed too.

The road is still there. It is a very good road. You can move a great many cars along it quickly now, and nobody stands in the middle of it.

And nobody would.

— TAMMY LAVENDER
(August 18, 2016)