Bill Jeffery's narrative from 2016 on his life in & around Ecorse Creek
The Ecorse Creek was to my childhood buddies and me as what I imagine the Mississippi River was to Mark Twain and his pals.
It is the boundary between Wyandotte, Michigan, my hometown, and Ecorse to the north and Lincoln Park to the west. These are three downriver suburbs of Detroit.
Due to the creek’s looping course, from my boyhood home in Wyandotte at the corner of Sixth and Highland Streets (610 Highland), you could walk one block west to the creek or three blocks north to the same waterway. Though we ventured to other parts of the creek, this portion was our main realm.
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.
It is the boundary between Wyandotte, Michigan, my hometown, and Ecorse to the north and Lincoln Park to the west. These are three downriver suburbs of Detroit.
Due to the creek’s looping course, from my boyhood home in Wyandotte at the corner of Sixth and Highland Streets (610 Highland), you could walk one block west to the creek or three blocks north to the same waterway. Though we ventured to other parts of the creek, this portion was our main realm.
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.
Crossing another field put us at Snake Road (actual name River Drive). I don’t know the origin of the nickname. The road isn’t particularly winding. Maybe, at the time, it was due to the plethora of serpents in the field that bordered it. Shortly thereafter we took a right onto The Point.
The Point wasn’t a manicured park as it is now. Then it was fields, which were home to garter snakes, garden spiders (We called them writing spiders for the script in the middle of their webs.), large grayish-green flying grasshoppers, copse of small trees offering bird havens, and marshes full of brown cattails. |
In summer we would collect the cattails, allowing 4-6 inch stems, then tossed them onto our garage roofs to dry, which took two weeks. Then we laddered up and collected them. We smoked them pretending they were cigars. 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.
The problem now wasn’t getting dry before I went home because there was time for that. It was getting the crick-stink out of my clothes. Mom would have picked up on that quickly. So we went to one of the kid’s homes whose both parents worked (unusual for the times – most moms were stay-at-homes) and I hosed down and dried off.
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.
The problem now wasn’t getting dry before I went home because there was time for that. It was getting the crick-stink out of my clothes. Mom would have picked up on that quickly. So we went to one of the kid’s homes whose both parents worked (unusual for the times – most moms were stay-at-homes) and I hosed down and dried off.
Although my shoes were still damp, I think I got away with it because when I went home Mom didn’t appear to suspect anything. If she had found out, she probably would have been more concerned with my being in that water than skipping school that afternoon. Mom often said to my brothers, Bob and Jim, and me, “I wish you boys wouldn’t play at the creek. You’re going to get typhoid fever from that dirty water.”
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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.
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.
A couple of Lincoln Park police officers introduced themselves to four us one day in late June 1953 (I was 13). We just finished blowing up some cans and bottles with firecrackers at the dump in a pre-Fourth of July celebration. It was not legal to buy fireworks in Michigan then, so it was common to drive about an hour south to Toledo just across the Ohio line where they could be purchased legally. We weren’t old enough to drive then, but one of the kid’s dads got them for us.
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We were leaving the dump heading home when a Lincoln Park police car pulled into the dump area and two officers got out of their car. One of the officers hollered, “Hey you, kids, come here!” We had about a 100-yard lead on them, so we decided to take off toward home. We figured if we could get across the Emmons Bridge into Wyandotte before they drove down Snake Road and up Emmons, we were in the clear. 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.
These are some of my boyhood adventures on and along the Ecorse Creek. Tom and Huck had nothing on us 😊 .
Bill Jeffrey
10/25/2016
Remembrance:
This chronicle is dedicated to the memory of my father, Joseph James Jeffrey, my mother, Margaret Wilcox Jeffrey, and the other neighborhood parents who provided supervised leeway for us to be exploring kids. I am also grateful for the divine protection bestowed upon us when we strayed beyond parental parameters.
Lastly, to the neighborhood dogs that were our kindred companions, hunters and protectors…Boots, Blackie and Brownie remembered.
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.
These are some of my boyhood adventures on and along the Ecorse Creek. Tom and Huck had nothing on us 😊 .
Bill Jeffrey
10/25/2016
Remembrance:
This chronicle is dedicated to the memory of my father, Joseph James Jeffrey, my mother, Margaret Wilcox Jeffrey, and the other neighborhood parents who provided supervised leeway for us to be exploring kids. I am also grateful for the divine protection bestowed upon us when we strayed beyond parental parameters.
Lastly, to the neighborhood dogs that were our kindred companions, hunters and protectors…Boots, Blackie and Brownie remembered.