Name That Summer
Let’s see if you can remember the year. It was the summer that …
James R. Hoffa testified before the Select Senate Committee on Improper Labor-Management Practices in Washington and was grilled by two ambitious young brothers named Kennedy.
Detroit movie theaters were playing the recent Academy Award winner “Gigi.”
Young Charlie Starkweather was electrocuted in Nebraska State Prison for his 11-murder shooting spree the year before.
Ingemar Johansson knocked down Floyd Patterson seven times in the third round to win the world heavyweight boxing championship at Yankee Stadium.
The Detroit Free Press reported that “tests of oral contraceptive tablets over the last three years by 1,000 women [showed] a higher degree of conception control than contraceptives now used.”
Jack Parr was holding forth nightly on the Tonight Show and frequently touting his “good friend,” Dr. Castro.
Pope John XXIII, in his first encyclical since assuming the papacy, announced that he favored world unity and peace.
Two members of the U.S. Military Assistance Advisory group were killed by a bomb in a U.S. compound in the tiny Southeast Asian country of South Vietnam.
Vice President Nixon, in the kitchen of the model house at the U.S. Exhibition in Moscow, told Soviet Premier Khrushchev, “The way you dominate the conversation, you would make a good lawyer yourself.”
Shortly before our Great Debater paid his visit to Moscow that summer, the Soviet First Deputy Premier Frol Koslov came to New York to open the Soviet Exhibition and embark on a goodwill tour of our country. Warm greetings were waiting for Koslov at the White House and the Capitol and in a number of American cities on the Russian’s itinerary. The story in Detroit, however, was a little different.
Some months earlier another Soviet leader, Anastas Mikoyan, had been bombarded with eggs pitched by 300 angry Hungarians besieging the Detroit Club; 112 of Detroit’s finest were needed to restore order. Apparently as a result and in an effort to make political hay at the State Department’s expense, Mayor Louis Miriani flatly refused to meet or greet Koslov and announced that he was not welcome in Detroit. The Free Press editorialized that Miriani’s “unwillingness to greet the Russian visitor and his obvious dislike for him and all he stands for is a feeling which most Detroiters and most Americans share.”
Koslov came anyway. Arriving at a nearly deserted Metro Airport, he and his Soviet entourage were whisked away within nine minutes. With Detroit Edison’s Walker Cisler as their host, however, the Russians toured the city, inspected three auto plants and lunched at the D.A.C. Later they were the guests of 200 Detroit businessmen and industrialists at a reception and dinner at the Fort Shelby Hotel.
Koslov was reputed to be the muscleman who had swung the Soviet Central Committee behind Khrushchev two years earlier. But in Detroit, with friendly words and a dimpled smile, he turned out to be a real charmer. His mission after all was, like that of our new Chinese friends more recently, the promise of a vast untapped market for American goods and services. Reporters hawked Koslov’s every move, describing even the way he darted a green plastic comb through his iron-gray hair as the party moved from the cocktail reception to dinner in the hotel’s Crystal Room. On the street outside, 25 Hungarian freedom fighters demonstrated quietly. The Russians never saw them and left the city later that night without incident.
Changes. The old Fort Shelby has gone through several on its West Lafayette block between the News and Free Press buildings. It was then one of the town’s classier hotels, which of course was why it was hosting the Russians that summer night.
Thereafter its fortunes declined with those of a city that seemed bent on turning itself into the epitome of American urban decay. The dissolution of Detroit, intensified murderously by our own particular version of the great civil disturbance so popular in the Sixties, finally brought death to the place: a slow, lingering, painful death, marked by frequent talk of—and even some genuine effort at—rebirth and metamorphosis. The Fort Shelby was standing empty several years back when a few young, monied suburbanites decided they had always wanted to own a hotel. They simplified the name (The Shelby), opened a new bar, restaurant, nightclub and dinner theater, all hopelessly trendy, and trimmed the lobby with camp, flash and mirrors.
The only problem was an image of the city so bad that those few who were forced to visit on business or other desperate missions came prepared to be murdered. The whole operation died again, and the building somehow passed into the good-doing hands of the wonderfully improbable Mother Waddles. Mother ran it as a refuge, a residence for folks with low-or-no income. But funding soon ran out and the place emptied once more. Someone else decided to turn it into an apartment building, but it wasn’t long before Edison arrived with a fistful of unpaid bills and turned out the lights.
Except for a cafe called Lips in one small corner and the recently “redecorated” Anchor Bar, it’s a barren hulk now.
Changes. So righteous in his snub of the Russians, Mayor Miriani, you’ll remember, ended his days in disgrace. A few years out of office he was shipped off to prison for fraud and income tax evasion. The mayor who’s been rightly touted as the motive force behind the city’s remarkable turnaround is a black man who in his younger days showed more than passing interest in the economic theory (if not practice) espoused by those Soviet visitors of ours twenty years ago. In the summer of 1959.