My 11-year-old self was fascinated with the Battle of the Sexes. I had recently taken up tennis, partly because of stars like Jimmy Connors and Chris Evert, but more because my good friends Jon Kamisar and John Lazar had taken up the sport, too. The Jo(h)ns were excellent players and the three of us (mostly them) would go on to successful high school tennis careers. Jon even went on to win the Big Ten one year and to play briefly on the pro tour. That success was all in the future, however, and in the summer of 1973 I was just a kid taking group lessons at Huron Valley Tennis Club on the northeast side of town, struggling with my backhand and my lack of self-control. Timothy Gallwey’s The Inner Game of Tennis wouldn’t come out for another year and, well, it would be a few more years after that before I was able to absorb some of Gallwey’s zen-like influence.

Most of the good players played at Liberty, Ann Arbor’s only other tennis club, but Huron Valley had one player who went on to a top-10-in-the-world career and was certainly the best player to ever come out of Ann Arbor. The presence of this prodigy could have shown me what was possible with talent, self-control, and hard work, but instead the prodigy discouraged me because she was an 8-year-old girl. Lisa Bonder was a slip of a girl, too, and she didn’t look like someone who could take a hard shot and, using your own force against you, hit it back just as hard but with far more accuracy and consistency. I never thought I was remotely as good as her and it would take a more self-confident boy than me to not be a bit discouraged by that. You can see an older version of Lisa below at Wimbledon.

I think it was my proximity to Lisa, and to all the other feminist issues floating around Ann Arbor, that made me so excited to watch the Battle of the Sexes. Bobby Riggs had been a great player in the 1940s, winning seven major titles, but he was 55 years old in 1973 and looked even older. Riggs was a hustler and a gambler, however, and so he challenged the leading women’s pros to a match, claiming that he could beat them even at his advanced age. Australian Margaret Court - one of tennis’ all-time champions, 30 years old, and a recent mother – took Riggs up on his offer in the Spring of 1973, not least because she’d make more than Billie Jean King had earned when winning the U.S. Open the previous year, when the Men’s and Women’s champions had received $25,000 and $10,000, respectively. For whatever reason – perhaps because she used poor tactics or because she wasn’t fully back in shape after childbirth – Court lost to a delighted Riggs in April 1973. Always looking to capitalize on a business opportunity, Riggs crowed that he’d administer the same kind of defeat to any other of the top women pros. He was willing to bet on it, too, and a part of me admired his brashness.

Billie Jean King took up Riggs’ offer because she thought she’d win and because of the $100,000 payday. This second Battle of the Sexes was much more heavily publicized than the first one and was played in Houston’s Astrodome on national television in September 1973. It was hard to take Riggs seriously and so King didn’t. When Riggs came into the stadium surrounded by young models, King dressed as Cleopatra and was carried in on a litter by a train of body-builders. When Riggs gave her flowers, King gave him a piglet to evoke the term “male chauvinist pig,” more widely used then than now. It was all very camp and funny, but then the match started and Riggs went ahead in the first set as he patiently lobbed balls back to King while waiting for a mistake. Yet King changed her tactics and went on to win the match in three straight sets. Riggs took the loss in good humor and soon appeared with King in the “The Pig Who Came to Dinner” episode of The Odd Couple, a popular TV comedy of the day.

The Battle of the Sexes had many ironies. For one, Margaret Court later gained fame – infamy in some quarters – for her Pentecostal faith and for her statements against homosexuality and in favor of Apartheid. The Australian Open’s center court in Melbourne is in Margaret Court Stadium, but there have been many requests to rename it, including by Billie Jean King and Martina Navratilova. Another irony is that Margaret Court’s victory in the 1973 U.S. Open (just before the King-Riggs match) earned her the same $25,000 as men’s champion John Newcombe, the first time a major tennis tournament had equalized prize money. That change was in turn at least partly due to Billie Jean King’s threat to boycott the event until there was parity. A last irony is that I rooted for Bobby Riggs out of male solidarity and out of the hope that some of his self-confidence might rub off on me, even as I knew that little Lisa Bonder could run me ragged.

The King-Riggs match especially intrigued me as a new matriculant at Ann Arbor’s Tappan Junior High who was surrounded by girls who were maturing – physically, mentally, and intellectually - much faster than I was. This sense is common among all 7^th grade boys, but it was heightened for me due to my ill-advised skipping of a grade three years earlier. The girls of Tappan – with their composure and their self-control – seemed like aliens as we boys struggled to stay still during the 50-minute classes. Mrs. Roeder, our social studies teacher who had seen at all, was always looking for ways to not kick disruptive boys out of class. I distracted myself in class by counting how much more school I had to suffer through – the seconds left in this class, the minutes left in this day, or the hours left in this school year - anything to keep myself calm at my desk. I was unaware of Germaine Greer’s cheeky statement that “testosterone is a rare poison,” but there’s no doubt that it got in the way of sitting still in junior high school. When we left Tappan in June to the tune of “School’s Out” by Detroiter Alice Cooper, it was the boys who felt most ebullient.

Germaine Greer came to Ann Arbor in 1971 and caught the eye of Ann Arbor News columnist Cal Samra, a Lebanese immigrant and a University of Michigan graduate. When Greer said that women should sleep with whoever they wanted, Samra quoted – or more likely made up - an old Lebanese proverb that “Better to eat camel straw by yourself than to share honey with the whole tribe.” A favorite topic of Samra’s column in the News was that feminism was destroying society in America and in the world at large. If the women’s movement was particularly strong in Ann Arbor – and it was – then Samra was the leader of the local backlash, one that had both male and female adherents. But then you’d expect that from a man who had recently founded the Society for the Emancipation of the American Male (SEAM), one of the earliest men’s liberation movements.

SEAM’s aims were most clearly articulated in Samra’s book The Feminine Mistake that was published in Ann Arbor in 1971, the same year as Greer’s visit. The book is eccentric and jokey, but it sincerely wanted to “restore the American patriarchy, preserve the family, return the male to his rightful place at the head of the family, and free him from discriminatory divorce, alimony, and custody laws.” The title was of course a riff on Betty Friedan’s far more serious book of the previous decade. Samra’s book is, I think, one long joke, and includes mock-serious tables that purport to show that more “madness” prevails in societies with patriarchal family structures. Samra claimed, for example, that the matriarchal United States had a “madness factor” of 14.2, whereas the patriarchal Australian Aboriginals had a madness factor of 1.2. This is all absurd, of course, both in its measurement of patriarchy and madness, but Samra still spilled considerable ink in the Ann Arbor News on these theories. The book has a serious facade, but its jokey undertone is tipped off by its use of comic panels from The Lockhorns, a popular comic of the day.

Two of Samra’s Ann Arbor News colleagues reviewed The Feminine Mistake s on November 27, 1971. Jan Stucker wrote that:

I found precious little to chuckle at in this preposterous book which is laced with heavy-handed attempts at humor. The main thesis of the book is that American men have become emasculated by feminist women and that society becomes increasingly nuttier in proportion to the amount of freedom granted to women. Or in the exact words of Samra’s Law: The wilder the women, the crazier the country.

Norman Gibson was more sympathetic to Samra’s theories, especially the one that matriarchy makes people crazy while patriarchy makes them sane. I don’t get the sense that either of these commentators was hip to Samra’s humor, even if it was tethered to genuine anti-feminism. Samra’s persistence is perhaps best explained by the News’ position as a centrist papery in a very liberal town, and the fact that a little outrageousness can goose circulation. Samra left the News in 1974 and later founded The Joyful Newsletter that published Christian jokes and humor and that was popular with preachers looking to lighten up their sermons.

Adolescent tennis fans of the 1970s got other early, less comic educations in sexuality and identity. Renee Richards was born Richard Raskind, had been captain of the Yale men’s tennis team and was a successful physician, but she always thought of herself as a woman and, in the early 1970s, she had gender reassignment surgery and began hormone therapy. Richards was about 40 at the time of her transition and immediately sought to play as a woman in Wimbledon, the U.S. Open, and other professional tournaments. She was denied entry in 1975 on the grounds that she was not a female, but a court order granted her entrance to the 1976 U.S. Open. Richards lost in the first round in singles but made it to the finals of the Doubles tournament, where she lost to Martina Navratilova and Betty Stove. Richards was 42 years old at the time and her increasing age began to outweigh any advantage she had from being 6’1” and having developed as a male. My 14-year-old self, so taken with the drama around Bjorn Borg and Jimmy Connors, did not know what to make of Renee Richards.

The Women’s Tennis Association were also uncertain about what to make of Renee Richards. Billie Jean King was strongly supportive, going so far as to file an affidavit stating that being born a man did not confer any special advantage upon Richards. Others - like British champion Virginia Wade – were broadly supportive of Richards but also thought that “she should(n’t) be playing on women’s tour.” Others were far more critical, as Dianne Fromholtz described Richards as “a freak,”; Glynnis Coles wore an “I Am a Real Woman” t-shirt when she played Richards; and Kerry Melville Reid defaulted rather than play Richards. Opposition to Richards was particularly strong among players who, like Margaret Court, were Australian.

Gays would soon make themselves known in tennis, too. A recently-retired Billie Jean King was involuntarily outed as a lesbian in 1981 when her long-time lover sued her for palimony. (King lost many endorsements from sponsors anxious how the public would respond to a gay pitchwoman, but today the scandal would be more about how King was having sex with her employee.) Martina Navritilova – another top ten player of all-time – outed herself that same year, one of the first professional athletes to come out as gay while simultaneously being the best in their sport. There have by now been many successful lesbian tennis players but, to this day, there have been precisely zero male tennis players who were both highly ranked and gay. Make of that what you will.

Of the sports that commonly show up on American television, tennis and golf are the ones where the performance of elite men and women are most similar. The best men are still bigger and stronger and so a bit better, but elite women tennis players can kick the ass of all but the very best male players. My psychiatrist and I have attended the semi-finals of the Washington stop of the WTA tour and I always come away extremely impressed with the power, coordination, and overall level of play. I grew up in a town and a household that, Cal Samra notwithstanding, were early adopters of most aspects of the women’s movement and I think that’s often helped me navigate the ensuing changes in sex and gender roles. Yet I also think that I was well-served by that humbling youthful experience of looking over at the court next to me and, while I fumed in frustration at a missed shot, seeing Lisa Bonder patiently knock shot after shot into alternating corners of the court.

Whatever the cause, their restricted post-war lives left many American women with a sense that surely there must be more interesting things to do. Betty Friedan (below) encapsulated this view well:

Each suburban wife struggles with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night- she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question-- ‘Is this all?’

Mom was a half-generation younger, but she felt seen and heard in Friedan’s book. Mom hadn’t gone to Smith, but she was a Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Texas who, as of 1970, had spent most of her adult life devoted to housework and childrearing. She was also asking `is this all,’ and that in turn made her rebel against certain aspects of her own life as a homemaker, as a mother, and as a wife.

The thing Mom rebelled against least – and perhaps not at all – was being a wife. My parents had their issues – only some of which I can know about – but they were a great match and remained married for 63 years until my mother’s death. Mom married Dad because he was “the best guy I knew” and she never backed off that position. Those views were reciprocated. Shortly after her death in 2016, the maître d’ at their favorite restaurant recalled being impressed that a couple of such longevity could have so much to say to one another – about politics, about history, about literature. Their conversation never stopped. Mom had more mixed feelings about her role as a mother – a topic I’ll cover in more detail in a coming chapter – but she was a warm and intelligent presence in her children’s lives. I would occasionally wonder – as a third kid born after a 5-year gap – whether I was the result of an unintended pregnancy, but I never sensed that she regretted having four children.

Yet like Friedan, Mom really was bored and frustrated with housework. Mom had a painted plaque above her sink that said “Housework done properly can kill you,” and it’s a maxim that she took seriously. It’s perhaps not coincidental that Mom’s revolt happened while new machines were making housework easier than ever. Vacuum cleaners, washing machines, clothes dryers, and refrigerators – we had two – made housework more efficient. Mom had a special affection for kitchen gadgets like mixers and coffee makers, and I never saw her more excited than when her Cuisinart food processor arrived in the mid-1970s. Housework bored Mom partly because – even if done properly – it no longer took all that much time.

Mom also came to find daily cooking for children unsatisfying and boring. She was a talented and prideful cook, and we on occasions had fancy dinners of cheese fondue, coq au vin, and steak au poivre along with desserts like chocolate mousse and “floating island” – essentially meringues floating in crème anglaise. They were all delicious and I ostentatiously complimented her mushroom preparations to annoy my siblings. Yet I clamored as hard as anyone for Kentucky Fried Chicken, Domino’s pizza, and Jello, and Mom came to resent having to cook for such an unappreciative crowd. When I bounded up the stairs after school to ask what was for dinner, she always answered with a sarcastic “slime pie.”

There were of course many feminist voices besides Betty Friedan, and Mom’s favorite columnist in the Ann Arbor News was humorist Erma Bombeck (1927-1996, pictured below) who wrote books with titles like If Life Is a Bowl of Cherries, What Am I Doing in the Pits? and Just Wait Until You Have Children of Your Own. If Friedan’s guidance was to look outside the home for fulfillment, Bombeck’s was to laugh at the housewife’s predicament, though of course Bombeck herself was a successful and well-paid columnist. Mom listened to both voices. Her dear friend Wendy told me that Mom took all the sturm and drang – both for and against feminism – as a license to do what she wanted rather than as a prescription to follow any particular path. She was far too independent to be anyone’s acolyte.

I was exposed to many of these same ideas in the media that I consumed. I loved Mad magazine – written entirely by men - and from it I deduced that parents often argued and struggled with their roles. Mad’s humor often came from men struggling to fill the new household roles – especially cooking and childcare – that they were increasingly being asked to fill. Dad tuned into the zeitgeist, too, and so he insisted that we all pitch in because “it’s never Mom’s turn to do the dishes,” but he did a lousy job and Mom often had to clean up after him. It was Mad satire in the flesh.

Garry Trudeau’s Doonesbury had far more provocative takes on gender relations. Joanie Caucus, one of his most enduring characters, leaves her kids and obtuse husband to join Zonker Harris in his commune and, ultimately, to go to law school at Berkeley. Trudeau gave Joanie statements like

I’m running away from my husband Clinton (because) I got fed up with the meaningless roles that defined my life.

Or, when talking to some young girls,

Growing up to be a mommy is one of the most wonderful things a little girl can want to do. But…there are other things in life she can do as well. For instance, she can work her head off and show all those arrogant boys that she’s just as capable and intelligent and creative as any little stud around.

I certainly absorbed some of this feminist ethos – both through Joanie Caucus and my own Mom – but it was also anxiety-provoking that Doonesbury heroicized Joanie’s abandonment of her own children. Garry Trudeau later came to think – as I did – that his treatment of Joanie as a mother was flip, and so decades later he reconnected Joanie with her adult daughter in a relationship that was both sweet and conflicted.

I did not see Australian Germaine Greer (below) when she came to Ann Arbor in 1971 to flack The Female Eunuch. Greer told the Ann Arbor News that her book “showed women that the way they have been living is miserable and (that) it’s up to them to re-direct their energies outside of the narrow confines of the home so they don’t atrophy.” Greer was against the constraints that society put on the women of her day – “A woman should do anything she likes.”

Greer was also tall and beautiful and liked men, and so Life magazine had recently run a cover story that described her as “The Saucy Feminist that Even Men Like.” I’m not sure what Mom made of Greer, but I was myself influenced by another Australian, singer Helen Reddy, who had a huge hit with I Am Woman in 1972:

Oh yes, I am wise, but it’s wisdom born of pain
Yes, I’ve paid the price, but look how much I gained
If I have to, I can do anything. I am strong. I am invincible.
I am woman

My 10-year-old self wasn’t sure what to make of Reddy’s song as it mixed with King Harvest’s Dancing in the Moonlight and Stevie Wonder’s Superstition, but I could feel the tension and energy.

Whatever the cultural milieu, Mom was spurred to action when my little sister enrolled in Kindergarten in 1969. She had previously “had a part-time job writing annotations for an abstracting journal” and “helped a friend teach math games at a local elementary school,” but Mom wanted new challenges. She wanted more money, too.

I could also see that sending four children to college was going to take more money than we had, particularly if we wanted to maintain our current lifestyle. Paul asked me once, “When are you going to stop volunteering and make some real money?” Since this was the time when the women’s movement started to take off, I thought maybe it was time to make something of myself before I was forty.

Mom had an economically volatile childhood and retained a measure of economic anxiety for her whole life, and so it’s not surprising that she would see the value of a second income. It’s slightly more surprising Dad encouraged her to work, but Dad liked to think outside the box and, well, he liked more money, too. The net effect was that – unlike for Joanie Caucus - Mom’s movement into the workforce was not a source of marital conflict.

Mom sought career advice at the University of Michigan’s Center for Continuing Education of Women. Noting that Mom had taken “random courses in statistics, trigonometry, and calculus since graduation” as “my way of keeping my brain active while raising four children,” her advisor suggested that Mom become a computer scientist. Mom thought this too isolating, but she bit at the advisor’s next suggestion – that she become a reference librarian. Mom (below) liked the idea because it was “intellectually challenging and involved helping people” and because she “could continue to be a dilettante.”

Mom was soon enrolled in a library masters program at the University of Michigan, and her education turned out to be technical, practical, and social. The technical side entailed courses in “cataloging, book selection and acquisition, reference, library history and management.” The practical advice included instructions such as:

If you have a book and can’t decide which of two classifications it should be placed under, then buy two books and put one in each place.

The social education started at the new student reception that “was a shocking experience” that exposed her prejudices.

This was not a fashionable crowd. Even though I was almost forty, I still cared about how I looked. My eighth grade daughter was horrified that I would become a librarian at her school – rigid and boring. I assured her that I did not want to have anything to do with children in my professional life. And I resolved never to wear sensible shoes

Mom graduated in 1972 and worked happily for two years as a reference librarian in Detroit before, after being laid off, working two boring, kid-centric years at an Ann Arbor branch library. Her desire for a job at a university reference desk was one of the reasons our family moved to North Carolina in 1978. She enjoyed helping professors and students in their research and, over time, she started wearing sensible shoes, too.

It’s ironic that Mom chose libraries over computer science given that library science has been transformed by and subsumed within computer science. Huge companies like Oracle (databases) and Google (search) use modern computing power to execute functions – storing and retrieving data – that were conventionally done by librarians using analog methods like card catalogs and magazine indexes. The staff at SubgamePerfect, for example, can now find and retrieve academic papers in a small fraction of the time that it took forty years ago. Mom would approve.

Much of the history of library science is evident in the evolving name of the University of Michigan school from which Mom graduated – Department of Library Science (1962); School of Library Science (1969), School of Information and Library Studies (1986); and ultimately the School of Information (since 1996). Mom was an eager adopter of digital technologies to library work. She was particularly excited, circa 1990, in the use of “expert systems” that were a genuine precursor to the modern development of AI. Librarians are often still thought of as stodgy antiquarians, but Mom was an eager advocate for the early versions of digital library technology in the 1980s and 1990s. This did not always endear Mom to her colleagues, but I think she was ahead of the curve.

Our parents left the University of Texas in 1952 when the expectation was that, mainly, the husband would dedicate himself to his career and the wife would raise the kids. Many marriages of their generation, including those of many of my Ann Arbor friends’ parents, foundered on the ensuing changes in norms and values. My parents’ marriage stayed strong, however, and while they delivered a kind of parenting that would seem eccentric by the standards of today’s helicopter parents, I appreciate that they stayed together as a couple for themselves and as a family for us. The great UCLA basketball coach John Wooden, a man from the generation before my father’s, once said that the best thing a father can do for his children is to love their mother. Dad had a more expansive view of fatherhood, but he loved our mother and if what she really wanted was to go back to school and get a job, then that was fine with him.

1. The Green Revolution – The post-WWII revolution in food production is a continuing miracle. Through a combination of improvements in hybrids, fertilization, and irrigation, the movement tremendously reduced malnutrition and child mortality across the globe. Many Americans – most notably Norman Borlaug (below) – played very important roles in this movement

   

2. Farm mechanization – Fewer people work on farms than ever before. That happened partly because Americans invented machines that replaced farm labor, including Cyrus McCormick’s mechanical reaper (1834), John Deere’s steel plow (1837), gas-powered tractors in the 1920s, and then post-WWII “combines” that reaped, threshed, and cleaned in a single pass. I never spent days “looking at a mule’s ass,” but my grandfather did.

3. Post-WWII Vaccines American researchers – supported by the government, universities and private drug companies like Merck – invented many vaccines that saved lives across the world, especially those for polio, measles, and MMR. Thank you, Jonas Salk.

4. National Parks – Nations had previously set aside wilderness areas, but America’s national parks are uniquely large and uniquely public. Teddy Roosevelt is one of my least favorite presidents, but he did help found the American National Park System. Many nations have subsequently set up their own park system, but America’s remains the best.

5. Petroleum - The modern industry began in Pennsylvania in 1859, and you can see it in modern brands like Quaker State and Pennzoil. Oil turned out to be a wonderful lubricant and a powerful source of energy that soon replaced coal in combustion engines of all types. Oil has brought serious problems, but do thank those early American drillers the next time you drive or fly.

   

6. Cars – The first practical cars were created in Germany and France, but the modern car industry was created in Detroit. Henry Ford and others invented the assembly line, pioneered the use of interchangeable parts, and created an ecosystem of suppliers, skilled workers, and distribution that enabled the production of cars at low cost.

7. Airplanes – There were French and German antecedents, but the Wright brothers built the first controllable, self-powered airplane in their Dayton bicycle shop. American companies like Boeing and McDonnell-Douglas later mass-produced jetliners that brought in the modern travel age. Igor Sikorsky was born in Russia, but he designed and mass-produced the first modern helicopters in Connecticut.

8. Rock and roll. Yes, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and all those other Brits took our art form and made something new with it, but all the original rockers were Americans that mixed African American blues and white rockabilly. Keith Richards idolized Chuck Berry. Also Motown, Nashville, Bakersfield, and Clarksdale.

9. Jazz. We invented jazz, too, in Memphis, St. Louis, and New Orleans and then, later, in New York and Chicago. Jazz has never been as popular as rock, but it still influences music around the world. Duke Ellington (below) was from Washington, Louis Armstrong from New Orleans, and George Gershwin from New York.

   

10. Hollywood - Some early technical advances were made by the French Lumiere brothers, but Los Angeles was the worldwide leader in film production and innovation by 1910. Americans largely invented both “talkies” (i.e., movies with sound) and “technicolor” movies. Other countries long ago followed suit, but there’s a reason why foreign film industries have names like Bollywood.

11. Electricity - Americans were not the first to understand electricity, Ben Franklin’s kite notwithstanding. But Americans like Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla (born in modern Croatia and pictured below) were the first to harness and distribute electric power to industry and households. The rest of the world ultimately copied American plants and grids and, in many ways, the availability of electric power is what most separates our everyday life from that of our ancestors.

    

12. The Light Bulb - Thomas Edison’s invention of the light bulb is a cliche, but we shouldn’t take it for granted. Pre-Edison lighting came from the burning of fats - tallow in candles, whale oil in streetlamps - and it was a dirty, ineffective, and dangerous thing. The light bulb greatly extended the fraction of the day in which productive work could be done. Never take it for granted.

13. The Telephone – There were antecedents in Europe, but the wired telephone was invented by Alexander Graham Bell in New Jersey in 1876. A telephone was only useful, of course, if you had somebody to call, and companies like American Telegraph and Telephone built connecting infrastructure and made inexpensive phones that were soon standard in American homes. The rest of the world ultimately followed.

14. Radio and Television – Wireless communication had antecedents in Europe, but wireless sound transmission was invented in America (by a Canadian) and the world’s first real radio station was in Pittsburgh. Modern television was invented by American Philo Farnsworth (below) in 1927. Radio and television required an ecosystem of broadcasters and receivers, and both systems were pioneered in America by companies like RCA and Westinghouse.

    

15. Refrigerators and Air Conditioning – The basic idea of compressor-based cooling had been around for a very long time, but it was American companies that pioneered the mass production of refrigerators and air conditioners. Thank Willis Carrier (born near Buffalo in 1876) next time you have an iced tea.

16. Household Appliances. Housework takes much less time than it did 100 years ago, and it’s largely because of appliances that were invented and popularized in America. Companies like Maytag, Whirlpool, and General Electric produced cheap and reliable washers, dryers, dishwashers, ranges, and stoves that soon became standard in American homes (and to a lesser extent elsewhere). Also, Raytheon engineer Percy Spencer invented the microwave oven.

17. Computers. Britain played an important role in the development of computers through roughly 1950, but it was almost entirely Americans – many of them immigrants – who developed and propagated the mainframe, desktop, and eventually handheld computers (i.e., smartphones) that dominate our world. You may bemoan certain consequences of the computer revolution, but the rest of the world is still eager to embrace our invention.

18. Space Exploration. America amazed the world when we put Neil Armstrong on the moon in 1969. The space shot was mostly engineering, i.e. an application of existing technologies such as rocket engines and microwave communication that had been developed during WWII. But the moon landing excited the world like no other event in world history, and it bred a confidence in human ingenuity that was available to anyone.

    

19. WWII. It’s an injustice to Americans of the time to sanitize their behavior, as war often brings out the worst in us as in other people. But we should never lose sight of the fact that America did do the world a great service by terminating two of history’s most genocidal regimes in Hitler’s Germany and Tojo’s Japan.

20. The Cold War. We chose our enemies well in the Cold War, too. The USSR really was a genocidal regime dedicated to world immiseration and domination. We have many things to regret in its prosecution, but it’s a very good thing that we won that war, too.

21. Public schools. Free public schools existed in parts of Europe, but between 1865 and 1940 America built out a public school system that was more universal than anything the world had seen before. The result was that, by 1940, America had an adult population that was more likely to have attended high school and generally more educated than any country in history. Other countries emulated our methods.

22. Basketball. Now, during the 2026 World Cup, is a good time to remember that basketball is the world’s best sport. Hoops were of course invented in Springfield, Massachusetts by James Naismith, a phys-ed teacher from Canada. Hoops were for many years an American oddity, but the rest of the world has wisely embraced it and the NBA’s last eight MVP trophies have gone to people born outside of the U.S., including Giannis Antetokounmpo.

    

23. Skyscrapers. I’ve never lost my childish awe at tall buildings – the Chrysler building is still a favorite - and I still see them as an emblem of human ingenuity and cooperation every time I fly over a city at night. The rest of the world agrees. America built the first skyscrapers and they were enabled by a series of technical advances in elevators and high-strength steel. Thank you, Elisha Otis!

24. The Pill. The first birth control pills became available in the 1960s and they – almost immediately – greatly reduced the number of unwanted pregnancies that often dominated the lives of both married and unmarried women. The pill’s development was enabled by a wide range of scientific and medical understanding, but its specific development was funded by American Katharine McCormick at the behest of American birth-control advocate Margaret Sanger (below).

    

25. Public Health. American institutions – some public, some private – led many of the post-WWII public health initiatives that have greatly reduced child mortality in lower-income countries. These include Vitamin A supplementation, the eradication of smallpox, the distribution of anti-malaria mosquito netting, and the propagation of oral hydration therapy that greatly reduced deaths due to diarrhea.

These are just my somewhat arbitrary list of 25 great things done by Americans, and there are many more that almost made the list – e.g., modern dentistry, the use of insulin in diabetes treatment (Canada gets a share here), and of course soft serve ice cream. Any reader will surely have want to make some deletions and substitutions.

You may think that, well, doesn’t every country have a similar set of accomplishments over the past 250 years? The answer is mostly no, they don’t, and not just because the United States is now the 3^rd most populous country in the world. People can debate about the why, but it’s a fact that a disproportionate share of the good things of the modern world originated in the United States. We should not take that for granted.

Thank you, Uncle Sam. Here’s to another 250 years.

Yet there were a few things that my parents did splurge on vis-à-vis their resources. First, while we all went to public school in Ann Arbor, they had no compunction about putting us in private schools in New York or Bogota if that facilitated Dad’s professional tourism. Second, they occasionally plumped for trips to Europe with one or two of their children while the remaining kids stayed behind with a niece or law student. The European trips were low-budget – the cheap charter flights had to refuel in Goose Bay, Canada – but the mere fact that we went was a luxury. Yet the most prominent splurge of our childhood was 3098 Newcastle Road – a 2,500 square foot home with five bedrooms and a woodsy yard. My parents weren’t sure they could afford the mortgage payments, but they liked eccentricity and risk and buying an aluminum house from Ann Arbor celebrity Zeke Jabbour gave them both.

Mom later described their dealings with Jabbour in 1965 as they shopped for a house in Ann Arbor.

What made the construction cost-effective was its design. Workers first put together the black steel I-beams to form the exterior frame. They then bolted the 12’x8’ panels of aluminum …or insulated glass panels into the I-beams. The house was done in less than a week. The exterior looked like a Mondrian painting, with panels of red, blue, yellow, and white. Some critics thought it looked like a bank.

Other critics thought it looked like an LSD trip. Whatever the critics thought of it, I loved our house on Newcastle Road. Perhaps that was why, right from the start of kindergarten, I became best friends with a boy who also lived in a Zeke Jabbour house.

One of the most dramatic events of my childhood happened right behind the garage door pictured above. My friend’s 16-year-old brother was preparing to drive a few of us off to play tennis when he mistakenly slipped the transmission into “drive” rather than “reverse.” The car of course lurched forward into the back wall of the garage, the kind of error that your correspondent would himself soon be making when he became a 16-year-old driver. Most collisions between cars and houses turn out badly for the car, but in this instance it was the 12’x’12’ back panel of the garage that flopped quietly onto the back lawn. The sudden removal of the back side of the house was very disconcerting, but it was a direct consequence of the modular construction and it was ultimately quite easy to repair. Our own house suffered a similar insult when a huge oak tree keeled over in a storm. The tree removal people said that they would normally pull such a tree out of the basement, often only after the EMTs had removed some bodies, but our house was merely bent. The bottom of the oak leaned against the house, a large section of trunk lay across the flat roof, and 50-60 feet of the top was in the backyard. After the tree was gone, Zeke’s men merely bolted in a new I-bar and panel, and after 30 minutes the house was good as new.

Zeke Jabbour was born in 1928 in Youngstown, Ohio, part of a community of Lebanese Christians who had left the Ottoman Empire in the late 19^th century and tended to run confectionaries and small grocery stores. Zeke himself graduated from Youngstown State and, after serving in Germany in the post-WWII U.S. Army, moved to Ann Arbor in the early 1950s to study Middle Eastern affairs at the University of Michigan. Zeke’s energy and intelligence quickly made him one of Ann Arbor’s leading citizens as he became, in short order, a real estate developer, a theater impresario, and a newspaper columnist for the Ann Arbor News. I only met him when he came by to advise my parents how to care for an aluminum house, but he always made an impression.

Zeke’s real estate company designed and built modern houses all over Ann Arbor – many of which survive today and are still marketed as “designed and built by Zeke Jabbour.” There is now an organization devoted to Ann Arbor’s mid-century modern architecture and they have a full page devoted to Zeke Jabbour and the houses he built. There were many architects – which Zeke was not – working in Ann Arbor and in other Michigan towns like Kalamazoo and Midland, and so Zeke was very much part of an artistic and architectural movement. Yet Zeke’s aluminum houses – including 3098 Newcastle – were of a style that, while it obviously appealed to my parents, was on the fringe of good taste. As my mother noted above, our house really was a Mondrian knockoff, with exterior walls an alternating set of panels in bright reds, yellows, and blues. The houses still exist, but they’ve now got peaked roofs and earth tones.

Zeke was all over the Ann Arbor News, the town’s main newspaper, in society notes, in theater reviews, and on the News’ coverage of the junior sports team that Zeke sponsored Zeke also advertised for his homebuilding business and the ads were at once funny and whimsical. To wit, when was the last time you saw a homebuilder make a sales pitch in verse:

If the details there are clean and unpretentious

And the treatments used, as right as one could ask;

If this and more is true when you’re residing,

And your housing needs are well provided for;

Then you don’t need (a fact not worth hiding) –

Or perhaps you’ve found a home built by Jabbour?

It didn’t win any poetry prizes, but I like the hustle and ambition.

Zeke hustled on many other dimensions as well. He was very active in the local theater scene, both acting and helping to develop the Greek Theater in the neighboring town of Ypsilanti, named after a general from the Greek war of independence. The Greek Theater only operated from 1963-67, but it attracted big-name actors like Ruby Dee and Bert Lahr and its productions were reviewed in the New York Times. Jabbour both acted in and produced some of the productions, and it was his construction company that created the outdoor theater out of a repurposed baseball stadium.

Zeke also sponsored youth travel teams in both baseball and hockey; he sponsored and trained a contestant for the Miss Michigan contest; and he was profiled in a 1964 Ann Arbor News article about “bachelor chefs” in which he disclosed that he learned all his tricks from his Lebanese mother. For these and many other reasons, a 1978 letter to the Ann Arbor News complained that the paper had shortchanged Zeke by referring to him as a “local contractor.” It would be more appropriate, the letter said, to refer to him as a “Renaissance Man.”

It would also be hard to overstate the breadth of issues covered by Zeke’s columns in the Ann Arbor News, and his were often the same issues that I cared about as a boy. He wrote in favor of handgun control, and by the age of 14 I was also a dues-paying member of a society devoted to a handgun ban. He wrote extensively about public aesthetics, particularly about gardens in parks and public housing projects at a time when, while at camp, I was picking up litter by the sides of northern Michigan roads. Zeke also wrote about amnesty for Vietnam draft dodgers, about democracy in Greece, and about whether or not the Watergate burglars should be exiled.

The Ann Arbor News also reported that Zeke rescued the 1973 wedding of a Toledo couple caught in an Ann Arbor snowstorm. Jabbour somehow “learned of the family’s disappointment and promised them a wedding”, persuaded a judge “to drive through the heavy snow to perform a civil ceremony, “hurried home to bring back a cake he had,” and inveigled a photographer to “travel by foot, by car, and finally by snowmobile to take wedding portraits.” Even more than the snow, Zeke Jabbour was a force of nature.

All this energy was an aside to the career – bridge – that later made Jabbour famous. He was a talented player from a young age, but he later began to play high-level competitive bridge playing in tournaments in many countries and even on cruise ships. He also wrote a column that was syndicated in many newspapers, including the Detroit Free Press, the Miami Herald, and the Palm Beach Post. (Omar Sharif - born four years after Jabbour and also the son of Maronite Christians - also wrote a syndicated bridge column.). Zeke was inducted into the American Bridge Hall of Fame in 2017, twenty years after the onset of Parkinson’s disease, and the Hall cited how Zeke “has maintained his sense of humor and amiable disposition despite the health challenges.” His wife noted that “he’s still as sweet and kind as ever” and that while ne now plays slowly “he will not allow himself to play a wrong card.” Jabbour moved from Ann Arbor to Palm Beach in the 1980s and died there in 2023 at the age of 94. He appears to have only married once, late in life, despite his excellent Lebanese cooking.

Dad also played cards during our years in Zeke’s house, though his game was poker rather than bridge. Dad played in two separate games that each met once a month for about a decade – known respectively as the “big game” and the “little game” for their respective stakes. Dad enjoyed the big game, a table full what passes for alpha males among the professoriate, but he was often intimidated off of good hands by the aggressive bidding of economics professor Peter Steiner. Steiner had recently written a best-selling Economics textbook and, as a result, Dad felt that Steiner had too much money to be a good poker match.

The little game was also full of academics, but they were a more chatty, low-key crowd. Dad came to find the little game boring and wanted to leave but could not find a graceful way of doing so. There were a number of motivations for our ultimate departure from Ann Arbor in 1978 – Dad had a big job at Duke, there were better library opportunities for Mom in the Research Triangle, and they were both restless - but in an unguarded moment Dad said that he was also looking for a graceful way to leave the little game. He never played poker again.

Both Mom and Dad had a laissez-faire attitude towards wild animals in their house. Much later, when they were old and a bit off their mental game, this expressed itself as a toleration for mice in their kitchen, an attitude that drove me nearly insane. Yet in Michigan the intruders were much more likely to be raccoons. Our aluminum house had no fireplace, but Dad had installed a wood stove in the basement, the flue of which curved back before turning up again outside the wall. The stove generated real heat in the chilly downstairs, but the flue stopped drawing one evening and smoke accumulated before we doused the fire. We quickly noticed that a foot-long horizontal portion of the flue was warmer than the rest and deduced that a raccoon resided in the flue. We thought the raccoon needed the space and so the stove was retired for the season.

Another raccoon regularly invaded our kitchen by chewing through a screen door one summer, including one evening when Dad’s big poker game was in session in the adjacent dining room. “What is that?” the other players asked when hearing non-human noises from the kitchen. “Oh,” said Dad, “that’s just a raccoon getting at the crackers.” This was not believed and so, after some discussion, Dad took them into the kitchen to see the culprit, but only after having laid a few side bets that he promptly collected.

I love the above picture of Dad and me for sentimental reasons. But I also love the picture because it shows the HVAC vents in the floor and the walls that alternated between aluminum and glass, and because it shows some of the older furniture that my parents had inherited – a lamp from one grandmother, a side table from another - and a dark oil painting from one of their aunts. We had a lot of fussy, old furniture like that, and the basement was full of cheap utilitarian furniture – bean bag chairs, bunk beds, and dressers of the sort that you might today buy at Ikea.

Yet my parents also splurged on a few pieces of modern art and furniture that went better with the house. There was an early version of the Arne Jacobsen-designed “egg chair” that is now widely available, a round lucite kitchen table that is a knock off of an Eero Sarinen original, and there was a lucite Victor Vasarely object that stands by my desk today, quite out of place with the rest of my décor. Our house was a weird mix, modern bones stuffed mostly with fussy old or cheap new furniture, but with a few objects that looked like they belonged in the house.

I loved our house on Newcastle Road. Yes, my basement room was dark and isolated, especially after my brother went off to college, and it was a long trek to Mom’s bedside when my pre-K self woke up with a bad dream. But I came to love the windowless walls where I could put up as many maps as I wanted. I even came to appreciate the isolation as a teen, when I could play my brother’s Yes and King Crimson LPs without bothering anyone else in the family. I loved the basketball hoop in the front driveway and how my mom didn’t get too mad when the ball bounced into her succulent garden. I loved the whiffleball field and the “Viking hut” that Dad had built for us in the woods. I loved sledding down the little hill into the Leveque’s yard after a snowstorm, sometimes on a runner sled but more often on a saucer. I loved playing ping pong – and later beer pong – with my brother on the basement table.

It was the house where my family was most my family, when my little sister and I became real people and when my older siblings were still in the house, and it was the last place that the six of us – my parents and us four kids – lived together under a single roof. I have an odd, romantic fascination with Wyoming, where my parents lived with my two older siblings - it’s a version of my family without me. And yet it was on Newcastle Road where my family was most fully and authentically itself, a version that included all of us before time and fate scattered us. It was home.

There were at least three things that I loved about stamp collecting. The most obvious is simply the collecting-ness of it, the idea that by a gradual system of purchases and finds you could assemble a complete or nearly-complete set of something was very attractive. There are many other manifestations of that instinct, from insects to coins to baseball cards, but it was stamps that made us want to amass, display, and collect. Stamp collecting could be very expensive if you took it seriously, as the rarest and oldest U.S. stamps were well out of my price range then or now. But you could make real progress towards filling out your stamp album for a pittance, often by just buying variety packs of 1,000 used stamps from one of the mail order catalogs. The collecting process in our family was at once collaborative – as we passed stamps back and forth and sorted through bags of mixed stamps – and competitive – as I kept an eye on my little sister’s Mexican album to see whether it was better than my Colombian one. Yet the intra-family competition was tamped down by the fact that, by collecting stamps from different countries, we were each running our own race.

The second great thing about collecting stamps is its tactile nature. Almost all stamps extant in the 1970s were made with a backside that was sticky only when moistened. That meant that, unlike modern stamps, you could get packages full of used stamps that could mingle with one another without accreting into a gluey blob. That in turn meant that large packages of stamps had to be manually sorted – by country, by year, and perhaps by type (e.g “Air Mail” vs. “Special Delivery”) - before they could be placed into stamp albums. Those albums were themselves works of art, from the plebian albums produced by the Minkus or Scott stamp companies to the elegant White Ace stamp albums that were printed on heavy paper and that had artful facts about each stamp. Stamps were then inserted into their respective spots in each album with the use of a paper “hinge” – essentially itself a glued and folded piece of paper – or by “Crystal Mount,” a set of cellophane sleeves that would be trimmed to fit after the stamp had been slid inside. It was all a delicious craft exercise and there was nothing more satisfying than paging through my album and looking at the previous white spaces newly filled with mint stamps inside their snugly-tailored crystal mount sleeves.

My father was quite astute in how he managed his kids’ intrinsic competitiveness around collecting, and his strategy was to set us off on different collecting journeys, typically tied to one or more countries. I settled into collecting stamps from Colombia, China, and the U.S., my older sister Mary collected stamps Greece and American plate blocks, and my little sister Emily collected stamps from Mexico. There was always a hint of history behind these choices, from our time in both Colombia and Mexico of from the used stamps Dad received from his Greek secretary. My brother collected stamps from the United Kingdom and, more broadly, from the British commonwealth, and much later his UK collection served him well as he pondered how to respond to a British party guest’s claim that the United States was uniquely arrogant. “What is the world’s only country,” he asked, “that doesn’t print its name on its stamps?” His Brit visitor had to concede the point.

Another great thing about stamp collecting is that you learned things about a country by who or what ends up on its stamps. We all agreed that Japan made the most beautiful stamps, although for a time I thought that Taiwan was a close second. Japanese stamps tended to have muted, tasteful paintings of natural scenes like Mt. Fuji, and, at least in their post-WWII phase, tended to have little to say about politics or history. My mom’s Japanese collection was further adorned with a subset of stamps from the Ryukyu Islands, a Japanese-controlled island chain that includes Okinawa and that for a time put out its own stamps. The fact that countries continued to put out new stamps every year – 40-50 in the United States, for example – meant that one’s collection challenge could never be over. The Ryukyu Islands were a closed set, however, and therefore potentially completed, even if the last few stamps missing from my Mom’s Ryukyu collection were beyond her price range.

You also learned something about how a country’s interest – or at least that of its government – varied over time, and to me it was America that was the most interesting of all. Early US stamps tended to be boring and unattractive silhouettes of US presidents like John Adams or George Washington, but I very much liked the stamps of the 1930s, with their pretty pinks, light greens, and blues and their celebrations of the anniversaries of various states and national parks. They had a quiet palette that, on stamps at least, I much preferred to the less-restrained look of the 1970s. The stamp below celebrates the 1935 centennial of Michigan’s statehood and, even if it’s mock heroic, I’m proud to say that I had a mint version of this stamp when the sesquicentennial came around 50 years later. I still think it’s beautiful.

American stamps also provided an insight on how stampmakers of the past thought about events that are now viewed differently – or that are at least more contested. In the 1930s, for example, there were stamps celebrating the landing of Columbus; the settlement and development of the Oregon Territory; the centennial of the founding of the Kansas Territory; and the 350^th anniversary of the founding of Jamestown, England’s first permanent colony in North America. The five “civilized tribes” of Oklahoma got their own stamp in 1948. These were all events that were at the time viewed with unreserved approval while, in today’s histories, these events are all at least partly interpreted through the lens of native American communities that had adverse or at least mixed responses to these events.

The evolution of stamps devoted to African Americans has its own historiography. The first African American on a U.S. stamp was Booker T. Washington in 1940 and again in 1948, and George Washington Carver was the second in 1948 (with Washington) and again in 1954. Washington and Carver were both very comfortable to white segregationists, accomplished blacks who did not aggressively contest the Jim Crow laws of their day. The rate at which African Americans were depicted in my stamp album began to change with the stamps of the late 1960s – including images of Frederick Douglass (1967), W.E.B. Du Bois (1973), poet Paul Dunbar (1974), and Martin Luther King (1979). The rate increased even more in the 1980s, with stamps depicting Scott Joplin (1983), Sojourner Truth (1986), and Duke Ellington (1986). Each stamp was interesting in its own right, but the frequency with which minorities and women were depicted – and their political valence – told its own story of how the U.S. thought about itself at the time. By 1999, the USPS was even putting out Malcolm X stamps.

If you could learn a lot of history from stamps, you could also learn a bit of economics. Dag Hammarskjold was a Swedish economist who served as Secretary-General of the United Nations until he died in a 1961 plane crash in the Congo. There is debate as to Hammarskjold’s time in the Congo, where he is alternately viewed as having subverted the democratic process and as having been assassinated by the KGB. Both could be true, of course. Yet there is no debate that Hammerskjold was quickly commemorated by a stamp issued by the U.S. Postal Service, or that a New Jersey collector soon owned a sheet of the stamps that had the background colors inverted. Given the time’s broad interest in rate stamp collection, this was prospectively both a printing error and a serious windfall for the New Jersey collector. In recognition of the fact that such a windfall might produce additional “printing errors” by its own printers, the USPS quickly produced an additional 4 million Dag Hammarskjold stamp with the same inverted background, thereby reducing the worth of the original mistakes to their face value. Some saw this as unfair treatment of the original collector, but others – including myself to this day – see it as an action necessary to reduce the incentives for “errors” in the printing of stamps or currencies. In either case, the two versions of the Dag Hammarkjold stamp sat side-by-side in my American stamp album.

The Ann Arbor Stamp and Coin store opened up across from Arborland in 1979, but there was no stamp store in town when I lived there as a kid. This meant that we could only buy stamps via mail order catalogs from companies like Martin Band of New York City. This was no problem, however, and a couple of times a year, almost always after Dad gave me $10 or $20 on Christmas or my birthday, I would place an order with Martin Band and, a few weeks later, get back an envelope with 30-40 US stamps that I would spend a pleasurable afternoon slotting into the right spots of my Scott stamp album. I only patronized one stamp store as a kid, and that was during the 1972-73 school year when my family lived in Manhattan. We lived on 101^st Street and Riverside Drive and my school was on 112^th Street, but on occasional Saturdays Dad would take us to the Oriental Stamp Company near Lincoln Center. The store was deep and narrow and it had a glass counter running lengthwise with glass-fronted cabinets running along one of the side walls, all of which were stuffed with albums and books of stamps. I do not remember the proprietor’s name, but he had named his shop after his father’s stamp store in Cairo. He was a jovial presence, but it was clear that he took stamps very seriously.

I fleshed out my US collection during our visits there, a few dollars a time, and I also added to my Colombian collection. It was another example of Dad’s astute attempt to get his children a little engaged in the hyperkinetic travel that he imposed on us and that we might otherwise -and in some instances did – resent for how it took us out our comfort zones. I learned a bit of Colombian history from the exercise, much of which I’ve forgotten, but I think I mostly learned that Colombia – and by extension any other country – had a rich and varied history of its own. Some of that history was heroic, some was boring, and some was quite regrettable, but it was Colombia’s history rather than our own, and the fact that they generally chose to adorn their stamps with historical figures of whom I knew nothing suggested to me that their waters ran as deep as our own. Take a bow, Camilo Torres.

It was in New York City that I started collecting Chinese stamps. I forget precisely why this connection happened, but I think it was likely that the Oriental Stamp Company was selling cheap versions of both a Chinese stamp album and a starter kit of used Chinese stamps. I was bored that year in New York, cooped up in our apartment with only so many Hardy Boys books to read, and so my dad thought I needed another distraction. It worked, too, as I gleefully populated my new album with stamps from the polities that we might know today as Republican China (1912-1949) and then the concurrent reigns of Communist China and the Kuomintang regime of Taiwan. The communist stamps were terrible – both ugly and on thin paper – but China otherwise put out beautiful stamps and I was happy to collect them. And here, too, I learned a little Chinese history – about how Taiwan had been the Japanese colony of Formosa for 60 years and about Chinese politicians like Sun Yat-Sen, Mao Tse-Tung, and Chiang Kai-Shek. Chiang was of special interest because my mom’s family, in keeping with America’s WWII fascination with China, had owned two dogs named Kai and Shek. It made me miss our one-eyed beagle Lucy, back in Ann Arbor, all the more.

I enticed my own offspring into sharing some of my own interests, things like books and basketball, but I never got any of them hooked on stamp collecting. Part of it’s my fault, as I didn’t try hard enough or creatively enough, but it’s also that stamp collecting simply isn’t as cool as it was back in the 1960s and 1970s. There are a variety of theories as to why that might have happened. First, stamps are simply less important in everyday life than they used to be. Most bills are delivered and paid electronically, far more media is distributed via other forms, and even packages are less likely to be delivered by the Postal Service than by competitors like FedEx and UPS that barely existed back then. A second reason is that the competition for attention is so much tougher today, with video games, social media, and streaming video all hogging the attention, especially that of young people who might get hooked on a lifelong habit. And as one final conjecture, it’s possible that the vicarious tourism of 1970s stamp collecting – the insight you got from pawing through a 1,000 cheap, used stamps from 80 different countries – is more readily filled by the internet and cable television. You could learn a bit about, Bolivia, for example, by buying some of their old stamps, but there are probably cheaper and more efficient modes of collecting that information today.

Whatever its underlying cause, there’s no denying that the stamp collecting business is a sleepy shell of its former self. I learned as much a few years ago when I took all of my old albums – from the US, from China, and from Colombia – to a local stamp store to sell. This was partly a desire to declutter, partly a recognition that my offspring had little interest, and lastly a belief that perhaps, somewhere in Montgomery County, there might be a few young people who would like to advance my collection, to bring it up to date, and that by keeping it in my hands I was somehow misallocating a resource, keeping it in the hands of someone who no longer gave it the love it deserved when, out there, there was someone who would adopt them like a new puppy. I was quickly disabused of this last notion when I entered the sleepy stamp store a few blocks from my house, and the proprietor, about my age, seemed almost surprised by the arrival of any patron. He did in fact pay me a few hundred dollars for my Colombian and Chinese stamps, as he knew some local collectors to whom he might resell them at a profit, and I was glad to hear that at least those stamps would find a new home. Yet he wouldn’t take my US collection at all, as he said it was worthless.

“But what about the 1924 airmail biplane stamp?” I asked plaintively.

“Not worth my time,” he said.

“But what abut the 1935 Michigan centennial stamp? It’s in mint condition!”

“Worthless,” he said.

“And what,” I asked with extra whininess, ”about the Dag Hammarskjolds? I’ve got both of them!”

“Less than worthless,” he said firmly.

And so he handed me back my US stamp album, bursting with stamps attached to album paper that was now 50-60 years old, many of them in mint condition and beautifully mounted in crystal mount, and he gave me directions about how I might send it off to a charity that provided stamps to disabled veterans who might find some entertainment from the stamps. And that’s what I did.

“Great,” I said while tearing through the questionnaire, “but where is the actual response sheet that contains our answers to these questions?”

“Oh,” she said, “I’ve already mailed that part back. I thought it was just the questionnaire that you wanted to see.”

“No!” I said, “it’s not just questionnaire that I want to see! I want to see the answer sheet, too!”

“Too bad,” she said as she went back to the homework for her class in Library Science. “It’s already in the mail.”

I cried that the next census forms would not be available until 1980 - infinitely far ahead to my eight-year-old self - but Mom barely looked up from her desk. Mom had an odd mixture of care and indifference, like many 1970s parents, but in this case I think she mostly did not want me to see her answers on the response sheet, perhaps family income in particular. The questionnaire had assured her, after all, that her answers were “CONFIDENTIAL,” and to her that meant being hidden from her own kids as well as the neighbors and the Internal Revenue Service.

I was mopey for several days thereafter, but the whole experience reflected and perhaps even heightened my childhood interest in statistics and measurement. I loved atlases, almanacs, and the Guiness Book of World Records and, as an adult, one of my most prized books was the Statistical Abstract of the United States, a compendium of American and international statistics before the days of easy internet access. I memorized the capital of every country and every state, and I routinely memorized odd lists of statistics like the 100 largest cities in the world or the world’s 20 deepest lakes, all facts built up from surveys or field observations. I was also very interested in sports statistics, then in their infancy, and spent hours on the weekend reviewing the major league leaders in home runs, runs batted in, and earned run average. I was a nerdy, data-driven kid, but then I had a lot of company in the Ann Arbor of my youth.

The pre-eminent economic and demographic data collection outfits in the United States - then and now - are the Census Bureau and the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). Both are headquartered in or around Washington, DC, and I later worked as a BLS economist for a time and had close working relationships with Census Bureau staff as well. Yet, outside of Washington, Ann Arbor is probably the headquarters of demographic data collection in the United States. There were a range of institutions in the Ann Arbor of my youth – some tied to the University of Michigan, some not – who collected, disseminated and in some cases created demographic data that were of great use to social scientists around both the United States and the rest of the world. Ann Arbor has long punched above its weight in demography, and many of these efforts were initiated around the time I moved to Ann Arbor as a child.

Perhaps the first example of this tendency was the creation of University Microfilms in 1938 by University of Michigan graduate Eugene Power. Until the mid-1990s, virtually all academic papers, books, and dissertations were circulated via paper media. Yet it was expensive to produce and ship those heavy tomes, and libraries found them expensive to store, too. University Microfilms – much later absorbed into ProQuest – was an innovator in the transfer of academic books – and especially dissertations – into microfilm formats that could be cheaply created, shipped, and stored. Reading these documents required access to an in-library projector, which was a mild inconvenience, but the libraries themselves much preferred receiving and storing the material in this format. University Microfilms was very much in business in my days as a young scholar in the 1980s and I always smiled when I saw, at the bottom of various title pages, the Zeeb Road address for University Microfilms’ operations in Ann Arbor.

In 1962 the UofM itself set up the Inter-university Consortium for Political Science Research, or ICPSR. Researchers at subscribing universities could get, through the mail, reel-to-reel magnetic tapes that, when “mounted” to mainframe computers, could dispense large amounts of data that would otherwise be inaccessible. These tapes included data on elections and congressional votes – hence the political science name – but ICPSR expanded its offerings to include data from the BLS, the Census Bureau, and from many other sources. When I was a young professor in Baltimore, I ordered dozens of tapes of ICPSR data and was always asking the Johns Hopkins computer operators – a real occupation back then – to physically mount the tapes so that my software could access the data. It was incredibly clunky by modern standards, but it was the only way to access these data prior to the internet and so ICPSR was essential to my work as a junior researcher. There were many more like me at universities across the country.

The University of Michigan was in the business of collecting data as well as disseminating it. The UofM’s Survey Research Center (SRC) was founded in 1946 to conduct a Survey of Consumers that, in slightly altered form, continues to this day. When you read or hear about consumers’ confidence in the economy, the underlying source is typically this Michigan survey. The SRC expanded its portfolio over years to address issues related to health, retirement, and environmental studies, and the attendant surveys are widely used. The Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) surveyed 5,000 families in 1968 and has followed them – and their offspring – ever since. The PSID was very much an outgrowth of President Johnson’s War on Poverty and so, in addition to its main random sample, it had a subsample of initially poor families that they also followed.

Researchers and policymakers had long wondered whether people tended to cycle in and out of poverty or whether there was a stable subset of the population that tended to be poor year after year. As a longitudinal survey, the PSID was able to show that the answer was “some of both.” One of my teachers at Huron High once asked us whether the economic identity of one’s parents made a big difference in one’s opportunities and, reflecting the consensus at the time, the answer he sought was that it did not make much of a difference. (Perhaps my teacher had read too many Horatio Alger books in his youth.) Michigan researchers later used the PSID to establish that while the income deck really is shuffled across generations, the shuffle is not so complete as to make parents’ resources irrelevant. Subsequent work using other data – such as intergenerationally linked tax records – has tended to support this original work from the PSID.

I didn’t have much grant money as a young researcher, but I used what little I had to amass a bookshelf full of hardcopy guides to the PSID survey, one for each of the 25 or so years of data that existed as of the early 1990s Each thick book covered a single survey year and, to use them, you often had to have ten or twelve spread out in front of your computer screen as you wrote computer code to, hopefully, interpret the data correctly. Those PSID codebooks were some of my proudest possessions at the time, but of course I’ve long since pulped them as more accessible online versions of the same information became available.

The ICPSR and the PSID were wonderful efforts to disseminate or collect data that would be useful in social research. Yet there was a third type of social science effort ongoing at the time my family moved to Ann Arbor in 1965. The Perry Preschool Project was an actual experiment – complete with randomized treatment and control groups – of the efficacy of intensive intervention in the lives of pre-school children. The pre-school was actually in Ypsilanti, Ann Arbor’s neighbor, and it served a population of quite underprivileged pre-school kids. The control group families got a standard level of care while the kids in the treatment group got extensive tutoring for the kids and coaching for the parents. The kids were mostly black and the teachers, coaches, and counselors were mostly white, and so the entire project had more than a wisp of white saviorism to it. Still, the Perry Preschool Project was an earnest and in some ways fruitful effort to figure out how best to help disadvantaged kids.

There were about 200 kids in the total population and they were then followed through school and into adulthood, with data on schooling, income, marriage and fertility. The study was organized by a young Ypsilanti school psychologist who had trained at the University of Michigan, and while the treatment was expensive, the better outcomes for the treated group, particularly in the form of avoided crime, probably made it socially worthwhile. There are modern debates about how well the Perry results “travel” to other times, treatments, and target populations, but the Perry experiment still influences debates about the likely efficacy of changes to Head Start and other efforts to improve pre-school education. The U.S. government spends a lot of money on old people like me, but the Perry Pre-school experiment suggests that we might be wiser to divert some of that money towards the development of disadvantaged kids.

An economist friend who ran the PSID for a time points out that there were similar efforts at other places, like Ohio State, University of Chicago, and the Rand Corporation. Yet I think he is too modest and that, indeed, there was something special about post-WWII Ann Arbor where, as a group, people were making uniquely broad efforts to collect and disseminate economic and demographic information that would provide the substrate in which people could argue about economic policy. The relationship between research and informed policymaking is at best tenuous, but I still believe that some facts are better than no facts and I’m a little proud that Ann Arbor helped to create an environment where policymakers at least had the chance to be informed by real data.

I didn’t know anything about the PSID, the ICPSR, or the Perry Preschool project on that day in 1970 when I cried because my mom wouldn’t let me fill out our census response. Yet I think I was absorbing some of that water and that Ann Arbor’s devotion to social science research and data collection had a strong effect on my ultimate career choices. I wasn’t the only one to drink it in, either, as a surprising number of my generation of Ann Arborites also went on to be economists. One of my brother’s math games’ friends went on to become an economist at UCLA and then General Motors and the Commerce Department. Two of my ninth-grade classmates went on to become quite successful Ph.D. economists working at Dartmouth and Wellesley, respectively. Gene Sperling, one of the best youth tennis players in Ann Arbor, went on to a long career in economic policymaking among Democratic elites, including the administrations of both Clinton and Obama. George Shepherd, another excellent tennis player, is a lawyer and economist at Emory Law School. Ann Arbor is a university town and so many of us who grew up there went on to be professors or researchers ourselves in all kinds of fields. Yet I think that the outsized role that Ann Arbor played in social science data collection made economics a particularly attractive field to people of my cohort. I wonder how many of them also cried on that day in 1970 when the Census forms came out.

Ann Arbor punched above its weight in the anti-war movement. The Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) was founded in Ann Arbor and its famous Port Huron Statement was authored by Michigan alum Tom Hayden. The SDS led many anti-war protests, including the March 1965 “teach-in” on the University of Michigan campus and a March on Washington that same year. The White Panthers were also founded in Ann Arbor, and they married anti-war protest to a broader critique of authority, education, and social hierarchy. Yet in the midst of all this anti-war energy, the pre-adolescent boys of Ann Arbor loved playing at war and death. The Vietnam war was too real for us to handle, and so our first loves were WWI and WWII. Like dinosaurs, they were scary, dangerous, and safely in the past.

Our love of WWI stemmed partly from Snoopy’s fantasy life in Peanuts, in which he romanced mademoiselles, drank wine in the barracks, and shot it out with the Red Baron in the sky. But it was more than that. We sensed that aerial combat was a new thing in WWI, still full of romance and novelty just a few years after the Wright Brothers had flown at Kitty Hawk. We knew Sopwith Camels from Fokker triplanes at a distance of fifty years. We loved the trenches, too, with their rats and their makeshift construction, and I was especially fond of history’s first submarine battles. If you were a boy of my cohort, then WWI was a peach of a war.

Yet we loved WWII even more. I owned picture books about The Battle of the Bulge and Carrier War in the Pacific, and I borrowed library books about D-Day, Guadalcanal, and Leyte Gulf. My favorite 5^th-grade novels were about a Jewish family’s escape across Lake Constance and about a Japanese fighter pilot’s sad wartime experience. These books were serious but, being books, they were less visceral than movies or television. There had been dramatic and realistic shows like Combat! and 12 O’Clock High, but by the late 1960s television shows like McHale’s Navy and Hogan’s Heroes made WWII seem like a lark. War might be dangerous, but its main effect was to inculcate an attractive bonhomie among the soldiers and sailors. M*A*S*H debuted in 1972 and, especially at first, it also tilted more towards comedy than tragedy. One message I took from all this was that war was very interesting and, at least occasionally, quite fun.

We brought the fun of war to our playtime, too. We built free-form Lego versions of WWII aircraft carriers, Dauntless dive bombers, and Sherman tanks. We made plastic airplane models of the B-17 Flying Fortress, the P-51 Mustang, and the B-24 Liberator (mostly made by Ford in nearby Ypsilanti). The Avalon Hill Company of Baltimore made board games like Afrika Corps, Midway, and Luftwaffe that were played out over large maps with hundreds of game pieces representing tank squadrons and army divisions. My older brother mastered their massive rulebooks and would win with an abstruse move that I didn’t know was possible. He also entertained me with his model rockets that blasted into the sky from our cul-de-sac before parachuting down on top of trees and houses. The rockets had space exploration names like Apollo and Gemini, but it was not hard to think of them as ICBMs.

The Vietnam War never caught my youthful imagination the way that those earlier wars had. Vietnam was in the pages of the Ann Arbor News and the Detroit Free Press, on the CBS evening news with Walter Cronkite, and on the public radio station that my parents favored, but my friends and I never paid it much attention. Perhaps we ignored it because it was intrinsically less interesting, with smaller stakes and ill-defined battle lines. Or perhaps we liked the binary morality that still governed our view of WWII but that seemed less applicable to Vietnam. Or perhaps it was that we didn’t know any of the combatants - my brother, for example, was 17 years old when the last young man was drafted in 1973.

Yet while I didn’t know them, there really were young men from Ann Arbor – about 60 of them in fact - who served and died in Vietnam. Many of them enlisted shortly after graduating from Ann Arbor High in the early 1960s, a half generation older than me. Most of them were single, though a few were married and had kids. Most of them were from middle-class families unaffiliated with the University of Michigan, but some of the families had ties to the university or to successful businesses. Some were black but, reflecting Ann Arbor’s population, most were white. Here are a few of their stories.

George Airey, Jr. (b. 1944) grew up on Avon Road in a posh neighborhood near the university, about a mile from where I grew up. George’s grandfather had managed a company that made gas gauges and other instruments for the auto industry and his father developed real estate and led the local United Way campaign. Ten-year-old George wrote in to the Ann Arbor News on April 29, 1955:

Dear Sirs: You don’t have to look to Detroit or Columbus for a pogo champion, you have one right here in ann arbor. My name is George V. Airey. I’m 10. I live at 901 Avon and I have jumped more than the others. I have jumped 4,210 and my mother counted for me with pad and pensel. Yours truly, George V. Airey

The letter was accompanied by a photo of George on his pogo stick with his hands in the air. In 1968 George died of fragmentation wounds when his battalion came under attack from the North Vietnamese Army in Quang Tri Province, one of nineteen men who died in the action. He was 23 years old and his mother remembered that he loved to ski, play guitar, and tend his tropical fish.

David McKenzie moved from Melvindale – a blue-collar suburb of Detroit – to Ann Arbor in 1959 at the age of 14. He lived in a modest ranch house across from Arborland and he was captain of the football team at Saint Thomas High School. Darlene Imus, three years younger, later remembered him as a “`celebrity’ among the students.” David enlisted in the Marines right after graduation and was killed at the age of 20 in 1965 while on a search and clear mission south of Da Nang. His marine buddy James Halter wrote in 2000:

Dave was my friend and my fire team leader. I was there when he died. I carried him to the chopper. He was to young to die. Many of our best friends died that day. I know that a part of me died with them I will always remember. I know I will see him some day. God how we hated that war.

Darlene Imus also recalled how, when the mother superior announced Dave’s death, the usually boisterous halls of Saint Thomas were completely silent as the kids filed out to their buses.

Pfc Clive Vere Mosier (b. 1943) was raised in Chelsea – a few miles from Ann Arbor - the son of “Mr. and Mrs. John Mosier.” Clive married and worked as a foreman with Seller’s Construction Company before entering the Army on September 1, 1966. Mosier was blown up in April 1967. According to his widow,

He was known as “Buster” by all his family and friends. Clive loved baseball. His favorite foods were chocolate chip cookies and fried chicken. He sent a picture of him holding a little Vietnamese girl. He said in his letter, ‘Honey, I miss you greatly, but these people need us. No one else will help them. We have too.’

His wife remarried in 1968 and later founded Ann Arbor’s Christian Development Center that for a time provided social services in town.

Corporal Richard Mark O’Neal lived at 1615 Pear Street, a modest house on the north side of town, and played football at Ann Arbor High School. He joined the Marines shortly after his 18^th birthday and trained at California’s Camp Pendleton before serving in Vietnam’s Quang Tri province. He died on July 26, 1968 due to head injuries suffered in a truck accident. O’Neal is fondly remembered on Vietnam memorial message boards:

Ricky, you were my older brother, fellow Marine and inspiration in life, Semper Fi. I have missed you more than words can express, I will always love you. Bruce O’Neal

Your brother,...,named me in honor of you. I hold your name in high regard and I continue to work harder every day to be the best person I can be. Every day I wake up is a chance to become better than I was the day before. Richard Mark O’Neal (nephew).

I grew up playing sports with his younger brother Steve. In elementary school, I remember Steve telling me his brother was killed in Vietnam. I remember going to Steve’s house and seeing the picture of Richard. I would like the O’Neal family to know that I think about Richard every Memorial Day and the sacrifice he and the O’neal family made. All the best to you! Tracy Gause

Tracy Gause’s brother Jay was one of my favorite high school tennis teammates.

Michael Woodrow Hunter was killed in January 1970 when a 50 caliber round sheared off the main rotor on his helicopter. Contrary to much of the narrative – including my own - about who enlisted and died in Vietnam, Mike was the son of an academic. His father Woodrow Wilson Hunter was a sociologist at the University of Michigan Medical School who wrote monographs for the federal government with titles like Preparation for Retirement, and Preretirement Education for Hourly-Rated Employees. Twenty years after the death of his son, 80-year-old Woodrow Hunter was a featured speaker at the dedication of the Washtenaw County Vietnam Memorial. Woodrow remembered Mike as an “intelligent, kind, cheerful, loyal” and caring man who was “tormented” when “it became necessary to kill other human beings.” Woodrow also said that in his last pictures Mike “looked so weary” and “much much older and so serious.”

Our son wrote his last letter to say that he expected to be home in two weeks, you can imagine how thankful we were. The next thing we knew there was an officer standing at our door to tell us that our son had been killed when his helicopter had been shot down.

Such is war.

Mike Hunter grew up a few houses away from me. I have no recollection of the Hunters but, a few years later, I became friends with Brian when his family moved into the old Hunter house. Brian and I bonded over our joint admiration of his copy of Cherry Delight – The Italian Connection, a story about how “the world’s sexiest crime fighter” gave her all “to the destruction of the mafia.” The book was credited to Glen Chase but it appears to have been the work of Gardner Fox, a prolific author of comic books and pulp fiction. You can buy it on Amazon today and its reviewers are accurate when they describe it as “campy fun” and “a sex-filled romp,” which is all to say that you can see why it appealed to my 13-year-old self. I have no memory of the plot, but I do specifically recall how Cherry could tell that one of her contacts was “all man” by the way that he looked at her in her swimsuit. Aspiring to one day be a man, I found this very inspirational. Cherry Delight was written after the time when Mike Hunter would have been interested in such dreck, but there had been trashy books – with titles like Campus Tramp and The Velvet Underground – available to the adolescents of the 1950s. I hope he had a few of them at his disposal and that, like Brian, he stuffed them into the couch cushions to hide them from his parents.

It unsettles me that I was playing at trifling war games when the real thing was going on, that I was obsessed with WWII when there was an atrocious war going on at the same time, and that I was ignorant of how many people, some of them from just up the street, were being killed while I was building plastic models of B-52s and P-51s. It unsettles me, too, that I read this pulpy, adolescent novel right in the house where Mike Hunter had recently grown up to be a man. Aging inevitably brings a sense of loss, as more actions, places, and things are imbued with connections to the dead, and so our steps are increasingly attended by ghosts. But sometimes they were there from the beginning.

I was therefore grateful when senior Billy Kahn, taking note of my confusion, walked me to my 1^st period portable classroom next to the tennis courts. I had only met Billy a few times, but I was friendly with the Kamisar brothers, a trio of star tennis players like Billy himself, and that was enough for him to notice me. Billy gently shoved me into Mr. Harris’ Analysis class, and I thereafter felt a connection to the tennis players that lasted for the rest of my time at Huron.

Huron – only seven years old - was shaped like a barbell, with two circular structures connected by a wide two-storied hall that had the school’s driveway beneath it. Most of the classes and lockers were in that large hall. It was chaos between periods, with hundreds of kids fishing books and papers out of their lockers and rushing to get to their next class.

Ann Arbor had spent the previous 15 years fighting about integrating its junior high and especially its elementary schools. The elementary schools typically served a specific neighborhood and, given that Ann Arbor’s neighborhoods were stratified by race and class, they were very homogenous. My own school – Bader Elementary – had only a handful of minority and absolutely zero blue-collar students. The junior highs were bigger, but Tappan had still been full of professors’ kids.

Yet since where were only two public high schools in town, both Huron and Pioneer were roughly representative of the city as a whole. The diversity of Huron was apparent as I walked the hallways and bumped – often literally – into far more black and blue-collar classmates than I ever had at Tappan. It was an interesting new world and, after a few days, one that I found comfort in.

Yet that diversity evaporated whenever I entered classes that were once again full of the children of professors, doctors, and engineers. This occurred because I took classes that were tagged as AC (“accelerated”) or even more often as AP (“advanced placement”). The kids who took these fast-track classes were smart, motivated and had role models – parents, neighbors, and older siblings most of all – who expected them to get a college or graduate degree. Some of us were at times lazy or disconnected – including your correspondent - but we had some respect for the teachers and for the school.

There were black kids in the fast-track classes, too – kids like Robin Webb and Sheila Deskins - but there weren’t many and they tended to also be from families with connections to medicine or to the university. There were hardly any blue-collar kids at all. The tennis team was well-represented in fast-track classes, while the basketball and football teams were not.

Most Huron students took the standard-track versions of Math, History, and English and I knew some of these kids well, either because they lived in my neighborhood or because they were on the tennis team. They were themselves headed off to college, though in most cases their target schools were Michigan or Michigan State rather than the expensive, snotty schools that we fast-track students had our eyes on.

Yet there was another whole world at Huron that was outside of both the standard- and the fast-tracks. These were the kids taking vocational classes aligned with specific jobs that you might get after graduating from – or even dropping out of – Huron High. These were classes like woodshop, metalworking, and especially automotive. The people I hung out with would occasionally refer to these kids as “Grease Monkeys,” but the fact is that we barely knew they existed. They didn’t live in my neighborhood, they didn’t take my bus, and we were never in the same classes together.

The separation of kids by within-school tracking was nothing new. Andy Campbell (Huron High ’70) had written in to the Ann Arbor News in 1972 to argue against cutting funding for school sports teams.

There were no blacks in any of my academic classes. Everyone seemed to be a professor’s son or daughter. Only on football and basketball teams did I meet blacks. Only on track and cross-country teams did I make lasting friendships with people of different social origins. The most vicious snobbery I came upon at school was in advanced-placement classes where students had been convinced by their parents that they were the elite and the world was theirs. The pride of a football captain or homecoming queen was humane in comparison.

My English teacher Larry Merx later confirmed some of Campbell’s impressions:

Both football and track, which I was involved with at Huron and later Ypsilanti and several other schools (and most team sports) put students of many backgrounds together working for a common goal. They encountered experiences well beyond those possible in the classroom.

I knew many of the football players and would attend games on Friday nights.

Yet the integrating effects varied from sport to sport. I knew none of our basketball players – nearly all black - and never went to a single game even though I love basketball. My classmate Erich Santifer went on to be a star at Syracuse, but I never met him. There actually were black and Asian kids on the tennis team – like my friends Jay Gause and Tom Kumasaka - but none of us were working class.

My 1977 summer job was at Frank’s Nursery and Crafts, a Michigan chain that sold plants, mulch, and crafts, kind of Michael’s with a nursery. I quit at the end of my first shift because, you know, they had me do actual work - like water plants, stock shelves, and carry bags of manure out to customers’ cars. When I got home I bragged to my older brother about my refusal to kowtow to the man. I thought I’d made him proud and that maybe he’d share some of his marijuana with me.

“That wasn’t very smart,” he said.

“What do you mean?” I asked. “I didn’t like working there.”

“Nobody likes working anywhere,” he said. “That’s why they pay you.”

“But you’ve quit jobs before.”

“Not on the first day,” he said. “And not until I had another job lined up.”

“Oh,” I gawped.

I saw that perhaps I’d been a bit rash. There really were a few things I wanted to buy over the summer - like the new Bad Company album and the speakers that my brother said I needed to keep my stereo system from being completely lame - and without this job I would have no money to buy anything. So I went back to my next shift at Frank’s and acted as if I hadn’t quit. The manager looked at me askance, but they took me back because stockboys were hard to find.

I came to like working at Frank’s – even hauling manure and peat moss – and I continued to take after-school shifts into the fall. I bonded with a long-haired white kid named Carl – also a stockboy and a Huron student - over our love of Grand Funk Railroad and our tendency to overstay our lunch breaks. Carl was in a garage band called The Crypt and he proudly pulled out of his pocket the cover of their future album cover, replete with jackal, asp, and scarab beetle. I was impressed.

The summer ended, school started up again for both of us, and our shifts became more irregular. I only saw Carl once at Huron during September and October, and I came to realize that it was because his shop and vocational classes were on a different side of the high school that I almost never visited. We went to the same school, but we didn’t.

The last time I worked with Carl was in late October, when there were chrysanthemums to water and pumpkins to load into customers’ cars. Carl seemed happy that day, almost giddy, and so I asked him what was making him smile.

“I got suspended today,” he said.

“Suspended?” I asked with a mixture of admiration and disbelief. “For what?”

“For punching my shop teacher,” he said. ‘In the face.”

“You punched him in the face?!?” I said, at once shocked and trying to act as if punching a teacher in the face was something that I had done plenty of times in the past. “Why did you do that?”

“He was riding me,” said Carl. “I warned him, but he kept riding me.”

“Wow,” I said as we both stooped to load a heavy tree on to a cart.

I wasn’t sure whether to console Carl or to give him a high five. I never saw Carl again after that one post-suspension shift at Frank’s. I later learned that he had dropped out of school altogether, and his name and face do not show up at all in any of our subsequent yearbooks. I wondered whether he had an older brother and, if so, how he had responded to Carl’s suspension.

The movement to integrate public schools – in Ann Arbor and across the country – was at its zenith in the early 1970s when my dad was on the school board. He and his liberal colleagues believed that putting kids into classes mixed by race and class was a win-win, that the blue-collar kids would raise their academic game and that posh kids would get important life lessons without any decrement to their own learning. The result was many fights over redistricting, curriculum, and especially busing, a topic so contentious that it spawned a movement to amend the constitution.

Yet many of the liberals of Ann Arbor didn’t act as if they believed their rhetoric when it came to their own kids. Their kids still went to their posh neighborhood elementary schools and, when their kids did get to junior or high school, they pushed for the creation of separate tracks based on academic performance. One of these tracks was the vocational track that my dad supported, but another was the fast-track that his own children attended.

Academic tracking had been around in big cities – especially New York – for many decades. The Bronx School of Science, for example, was founded in 1938 as one of the country’s first magnet schools. Yet tracking gained steam in smaller cities, like Ann Arbor, during the 1960s and 1970s, as college attendance and graduation became more common and as the ranking of colleges on perceived academic merit became more apparent. If college admissions have always been a rat race, then there were suddenly far more rats in the race.

All of this made the parents of Ann Arbor anxious. To wit, the Ann Arbor Association for Gifted Children was founded in 1970 and militated for fast-tracks and for grade jumps for kids identified as “gifted” based on their performance on standardized tests. My parents were not members of their association, but I had been (unwisely) skipped ahead a grade that very year.

Tracking systems are both more in demand and more controversial than ever, as rising income inequality and smaller families have made many parents even more nervous about their children’s place in the academic and economic pecking order. Alexandria, Virginia’s public Thomas Jefferson High (“TJ”) was for many years highly selective and sent many kids on to elite colleges. Kids were admitted based on grades, recommendations, and performance on various standardized tests. It was a reprise of the tracking of my youth though, as a sign of the new times, in 2020 Asian-Americans accounted for over 70 percent of TJ students (in a district that was 20 percent Asian).

Yet, at TJ and elsewhere, tracking has been critiqued as elitist and segregating. This led the local school board to move TJ admission towards a holistic approach that elevated the importance of grades and life experiences and that put no weight on standardized scores. The reforms significantly elevated the shares of black and Hispanic students while simultaneously reducing the share of Asian students to less than 60 percent. Some people applauded this change but others, including the Trump administration, argue that it discriminates against Asians.

The type of experiences I had long ago – with Billy Kahn, with Erich Santifer, and with Carl – are still very much with us. Parents still push to see their kids isolated with the smartest, most ambitious peers, either by moving to elite school districts, by pushing them to private or public magnet schools, or by getting their kids fast-tracked at the local school. Tracking has its benefits, such as educating me early that, um, I was not the sharpest knife in the drawer. Yet tracking and its kin work against the integrationist instinct that animated so many school reforms of the 1960s and 1970s, in Ann Arbor and across the country.

The tension between the desires for tracking and equality are not exclusively American. Germany, for example, is often cited as a middle-class paradise because of its high average income and low inequality, and indeed my Dad loved Germany for these very reasons. Yet Germany tracks and separates youth – explicitly by performance and implicitly by race and class – far more aggressively than the United States.

German children typically attend a common primary school to the age of 10, but students are then shunted into secondary-school tracks – often at different sites - based on academic performance, standardized tests, and work habits. Gymnasium are the most advanced track, kind of the German version of TJ or Huron’s fast-track, but there are also hauptschule and realschule that are akin to standard and vocational tracks as well.

If Carl and I had been German, then we might have been stockboys together, we might have shared an occasional joint, and that might have both overstayed our lunch breaks. But we wouldn’t have attended the same school.

Our group of twelve didn’t get back on the train, however. Rather we hiked out of the canyon and bushwhacked to meet the Agawa downstream from where the train tracks entered the canyon. We were hot and tired when we rejoined the river, but there were soft mossy spots to cool off on in the afternoon sun, and then we swam, built a wood fire, and ate our gorp, our noodle casserole, and our bug juice. I loved it.

Over the next weeks we walked down to the mouth of the Agawa and then turned north to hike along the Lake Superior shore. There were pebbly beaches, but most of the hiking was along the boulder-strewn shore and entailed frequent climbs over trailless knolls that abutted the lakeshore. We drank straight out of the lake, which was fresh and clear, but it was too cold to swim much. If you looked out on the lake, you could see the stretch where the Edmund Fitzgerald had foundered the previous November.

One day we dug a hole on the beach into which three people could crowd, heated rocks in a nearby fire that we carefully rolled into the pit, and strung our ponchos over a roof of branches and sticks. It was a real sauna – hot and steamy – and then we jumped into Lake Superior. It was beautiful and invigorating and, what was more, it gave a sense of accomplishment and a unity of purpose to teenagers that often struggled for connection. We only saw two other people – a pair of kayakers – over our three weeks in the wilderness.

British writer Paul Kingsnorth would have heartily approved of our fire, our connection with nature, and our sense of community. Kingsnorth was born in 1972 in London, then and now one of the world’s largest and greatest cities. If Samuel Johnson was correct that “a man tired of London…is tired of life,” then Kingsnorth was exhausted at birth. He was active in the English environmental movement in the 1990s, protesting against roads, cars, and fossil fuels. He got arrested, wrote popular books, and was a general darling of the day.

Kingsnorth ultimately came to think that what was needed was something more radical than electric cars fueled by solar cells and televisions and computers charged by windmills, what he perceived as the desiderata of the modern environmental movement. To continue on that line, it seemed to Kingsnorth, was an insufficient remedy for the rootlessness and disconnection that was our real problem. We Moderns lack faith, physical human interaction, and a sense of personal history and place….and so he became a Wiccan.

Kingsnorth soon evolved from his Wiccan chrysalis and moved to a remote part of Ireland with his own psychiatrist and their children and where he writes books like his recent Against the Machine. He is still bothered by roads, planes, and cable television, but he has now rebelled against the entire package of modernity – against electricity, against the internet, against the endless stream of video content available online – indeed against everything that takes us way from our woods, our neighbors, and our ancestral faiths and history. It’s only by returning to those things that we can regain a sense of place and connection that serves, in Kingsnorth’s view, as the only basis for a satisfying life. He’s also embraced the eastern orthodox church and spent several weeks of silence at Greek monasteries.

I discussed Kingsnorth’s thesis with my own psychiatrist and she assumed that I would find Kingsnorth preposterous, someone who slips drunkenly from one all-encompassing philosophy to another. Yet I actually sympathize with some of his views and it makes me think that we should get an outdoor fire pit and that we should have people over for dinner more often and that I should go out to pubs and talk to the barflies. Our brains are perpetually bathed in an incredible amount of stimulation - video, music, phones, media, news – and perhaps we would be happier if we turned it all off more often. Indeed, my psychiatrist and I just returned from a week-long yoga retreat on a secluded island that included a great deal of chanting and four hours of silence each day. It was a very Kingsnorthian week.

Yet I also think that Kingsnorth overstates his case. He’s too quick to imbue the technology-poor lives of our ancestors with meaning and happiness. It’s just possible that he’s correct, but it’s hard to read interior lives in the present let alone at a distance of hundreds of years. Maybe they were happier, but maybe they weren’t.

Kingsnorth acknowledges some benefits of modernity - e.g., vaccines - but he wants to jettison most of the rest of it. Yet I’m not sure the “good stuff” and the “bad stuff” are as historically separable as he seems to think. We probably needed cars, ships, mail, and telecommunications to develop all the stuff that he’d like to keep, and the same is probably true for advances yet to come.

Kingsnorth is very big on people feeling tied to the land, tied to their history, tied to their family....with a measure of pride but not arrogance. Yet this is slippery ground in the modern world, especially in the U.S., where people are discouraged from celebrating white European history, because to do that would be intrinsically racist and white nationalist! He’s aware that family/national/ethnic pride can cause trouble, but he thinks we need some of that - with a dose of self-awareness, too - to be a cohesive polity. I actually agree with him, and of course this blog often visits episodes in my ancestors’ lives for some of the same reasons. Perhaps I’m trying to address my own rootlessness.

Kingsnorth thinks that cities take us away from the connections – to nature, to our family, and to God – that really matter. He’s probably right, too, as cities really do take us away from nature, family, and religion. Yet people have been rejecting those things for millennia despite the admonitions of scolds like Kingsnorth. Indeed, we’ve never been more urban and there is no sign that it’s being reversed anytime soon.

Marx and Engels noted in 1848 that the bourgeoisie “has greatly increased the urban population as compared with the rural, and has thus rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life.” It’s nearly 200 years on, but most people still act as if they agree with Marx and Engels. It’s ironic that the one force militating against urbanization is the internet – one of Kingsnorth’s least favorite parts of modernity. Kingsnorth himself is a good example of remote work, as he supports himself with his Substack and his books that are sold to people in big cities.

It’s also interesting to contrast Kingsnorth with the very popular Canadian novelist Emily St. John Mandel (b. 1979). Mandel’s best-selling Station Eleven follows a troupe of actors who walk through a post-apocalyptic Michigan. They do what they can to keep Shakespeare alive, but they look longingly at the weedy gas stations, the unpowered neon lights at an abandoned McDonald’s, and the rusty ferries in the harbors. They escape the clutches of a maleficent prophet and, at the end of the book, find a measure of hope when they look across Lake Michigan at a few electric lights aflicker in the distant skyscrapers of Chicago.

In an interview, Mandel said that

(she) wanted to set a novel in a post-technological world because I thought it might be interesting to think about and write about the modern world by contemplating its absence in the same way that you can talk about a person by delivering a eulogy. It can absolutely be read as a love letter to electricity, plane travel, antibiotics, insulin, all the trappings of civilization we tend to take for granted.

I’m more of Mandel’s view than with Kingsnorth’s, notwithstanding that week at the yoga retreat.

It’s also interesting to note again that Kingsnorth grew up in the London megalopolis before moving to a remote part of Ireland. Mandel, by contrast, grew up on Denman Island, a very remote island in British Columbia with only 1,000 residents, and then moved to Toronto and then Brooklyn as an adult. It’s also interesting to note that Mandel is a lesbian and, of course, the draw of the city has long been most felt by those who find village life oppressive as well as idiotic.

The cabbie driving us to the airport in Tenerife kindly treated us to a truckstop coffee that, after our caffeine-free retreat, we treated like thirsty nomads coming into a desert oasis. My psychiatrist was seated next to a man devouring a hard-boiled egg and, having also been protein deprived during a week of veganism, she ordered two eggs that we also devoured. They were delicious, too, and we were both delighted to leave our vegan diet back at the yoga retreat.

About 10 years ago I was on a shorter backpacking trip with economist friends in West Virginia’s Dolly Sods Wilderness. It’s a beautiful area, full of mossy bogs that reminded of that hot day by the Agawa River. We had our cellphones off for the first two days, partly due to poor service, but also to execute a Kingsnorthian retreat from the modern world. I checked my phone on top of a ridge on the third day and, amid the dross and the dreck, there was a note from my psychiatrist that a dear friend’s cancer had recurred. Occasional bouts of magical thinking still make me wonder whether she’d have survived if I had never turned my phone back on.

I really did love those three weeks in Canada back in 1976, and indeed they are some of my best childhood memories. Yet it’s also true that I felt deprived of certain aspects of modernity as we moved towards the end of our trip. The small town of Wawa - Land of the Goose - was at the end of our hike, and our leaders assured me that the town had both a 7-Eleven and a McDonald’s. The anticipation of Doritos and Fanta began to occupy a large portion of my mind, and while I was looking forward to seeing my family, what I really wanted was a Big Mac. I think that Emily St. John Mandel would understand.

P.S. Thanks to Madeline Carrington for bringing Paul Kingsnorth’s work to my attention and for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this post.

Clinton I parents openly objected to the required busing and the longer school day and - less openly - objected to mixing with poorer, blacker kids at the behest of Ann Arbor’s liberal establishment. My law professor dad vocally supported McPherson’s “pairing” plan, speaking forcefully at board meetings and writing op-eds for the Ann Arbor News.

Dad had good company on the school board’s liberal bloc.

• Charles Good was an Ann Arbor native, a UofM grad, and a Bendix engineer. Good was a joiner/volunteer of the first order, had three kids, and I often rode my banana-seat bike past his house to visit friends. In a 1966 campaign, Good had said “that it is a responsibility, as a citizen, to serve the community to the fullest of your capacity.” JFK couldn’t have said it any better.

• Ronald Bishop taught at the UofM Medical School and, upon the death of he and his wife in 2009, their minister said they “were two of the most generous-hearted, intelligent, and socially committed people I’ve ever known.” Their daughter is an economist, so they must have done something right.

• Henry Johnson had attended segregated (and integrated) schools in Georgia where his mother made him wear a tie every day. Johnson was in 1972 the head social worker at a juvenile detention center north of town, but he would soon join UofM and would later become its first black vice-president.

I’m a cynic, but these men’s sense of duty impresses me.

Four Gowns on the board left five spots for the Towns.

• Bob Conn was a police lieutenant who ran programs to prevent burglaries and other property crimes. Conn disagreed with my dad on taxes, school discipline and just about everything else, but they shared beers after late-night board meetings.

• Cecil Warner and Ralph Bolhouse were both fathers of six with few direct connections to the UofM. Warner worked at Bendix, coached baseball, and volunteered with the Boy Scouts and Junior Achievement. Bolhouse was a real estate developer and directed the Ann Arbor-based American Flag Foundation, a relic of the 1950s that sought to inspire patriotism in American youth.

• Duane Renken (below) was yet another board member with connections to Bendix. He was from Iowa and had trained as an engineer at Iowa State. He was active in his church, drove his kids to morning hockey practice, and loved to travel with his wife of 61 years. His 1971 campaign emphasized vocational training and school discipline.

• Ted Heusel was a long-time talk-show host at WAAM, the premier local station that broadcast the UofM basketball and football games. Heusel and his wife led the local theater community and attended St. Andrews Episcopal Church where they listened to me singing in the choir. He was literally known as “Mr. Ann Arbor.”

The Towns were smart and dedicated to their community, just like the Gowns, but they didn’t work for the UofM and they didn’t live near the professors in Burns Park.

In a February 1972 op-ed in the Ann Arbor News, Dad noted that the Gowns’ pairing plan would preserve friendships by keeping kids together as they advanced through the system. (This is a bit funny given how much his own wanderlust interrupted his own kids’ schooling.) He acknowledged that “the pairing will have a marginal effect on property values in” Clinton I, but he was confident that both Clintons would attract new families as “two of the best schools in town.”

The Towns countered with a series of less-integrationist plans that were debated at multiple school board meetings over the next few months. Dad’s policemen friend Bob Conn said that the Gowns were “hypocritical” and that it was not the school board’s job to counteract the effects of residential segregation. “I don’t want our kids hurt any sooner than they have to be,” he said, but “I didn’t build the houses.”

Board meetings were generally civilized, but there were sharp words, too. Town board member Cecil Warner said that “mixing kids up doesn’t make them learn any better” and that “they don’t learn by osmosis.” My father answered that

kids learn to get along with each other through mixed schools and they don’t just learn from teachers, kids learn from each other….It isn’t just the black students who benefit…there are a lot of things whites can learn from blacks.

Gown Henry Johnson agreed with my dad:

This is the most closed-minded group of people I have ever met…. we’re keeping (kids) sweet and ignorant. (We should) not continue to let kids come into junior high school with stereotype and racist ideas that result in having a fist upside a jaw.

Student board member David Sandalow – son of another UofM law professor – said that abandoning pairing would mean “leaving yourselves wide open for the possibility of (court-ordered) busing for racial balance.”

The Gowns thought that integration would eliminate racial prejudice, but some Towns and even some other professors disagreed. Clinton I resident George Perkins, an English professor at Eastern Michigan, wrote in the Ann Arbor News that “the paired plan will generate considerable ill will in the community and thus prove to…(reinforce) the prejudices it is designed to eradicate.” Subsequent research on these topics is mixed, but suffice it to say that Perkins had a point.

In May the Towns passed what came to be known as the “Renken Plan.” Clinton I and II kids would go to their respective schools for K-3 and then all kids would go to Clinton I for grades 4 and 5. The Towns saw this as a balance between integrating and preserving the neighborhood school concept and, by modern standards, it was aggressively integrationist.

Yet the Gowns hated the Renken Plan. Dad referred to it as “the Renken Three-fifths Mason-Dixon Line” and said that “Ann Arbor was behind Jackson, Mississippi in its relationship between black, white and poor students in schools.” Henry Johnson described the plan as a “separatist proposal” and said that “most of the remarks he heard were purely racist with everyone looking down their noses at everyone living south of the expressway.”

The Renken plan induced Dad to write yet another op-ed for the Ann Arbor News.

The board did a mean thing. All the children are hurt, black and white, rich and poor, present and future. (Clinton I) parents (understandably) prefer….to protect their children….but those charged with a public trust (i.e. the school board) have no right to indulge such feelings when the result is to harm children and the future welfare of us all. In short, five trustees failed to perform their duty.

Dad was often diplomatic, but emotions were raw.

The Board was quickly sued for the Renken Plan, and by its own superintendent whose plan they had overruled! McPherson testified at trial that fall that “poor and minority students achieve more academically in integrated schools” and that “contrary to myth…children from affluent homes do not learn less in an integrated situation.”

The Ann Arbor News reported that Dad attended the trial:

I feel strongly that the board’s action in this case is the most distressing decision we’ve made during my time on the board. I think some kids are going to be ruined…..Some of the trustees who voted for (the Renken Plan) did it wholly because of political pressure brought to bear on them.

Theodore Heusel - Mr. Ann Arbor – couldn’t “really understand why Carrington is going to testify against the board action when he is a defendant.” The complaint failed in federal court, however, and so the Renken Plan proceeded and Clinton II was opened in the fall of 1973. You can see it below on opening day.

I still strongly identify with Dad’s school board goals and, in my own youth, I would have agreed with his words and methods. Yet I’ve come to view my father’s school board adversaries with more sympathy in my old age, and indeed Dad himself did, too. One of his last books advised lawyers to be “stewards of democracy” who shepherded the resolution of disagreement instead of lecturing the less-enlightened on their ethical failings. The book was aimed at the young lawyers of today, but I can’t help but see it as a letter to his younger, immodest self.

Yet even that younger version of my dad, as he wrote op-eds in the News, worried about coming off as an arrogant boffin who lectured the hoi-polloi on ethics and policy. Dad was born and raised in Dallas, but by 1972 he had excised his southern accent after twenty years in the north. Yet law school colleagues listening on the radio reported that he sounded oddly Texan during board meetings. This puzzled him at first, but he came to view it as a form of code-switching, that his subconscious thought it better to sound like an uprooted Texan than an arrogant law professor.

The people of Ann Arbor ultimately agreed more with the Towns more than the Gowns. Ronald Bishop lost his reelection campaign in 1972 to a more conservative candidate, something gleefully noted by Ted Heusel. My dad spent 1972-73 - the last year of his term - living in New York City with myself and the rest of our family. He came back for some meetings – and for the Clinton School trial – but he seems to have been disengaged and missed quite a few meetings. He didn’t run for reelection and he probably would have lost if he had. Superintendent McPherson headed off to take a job with the Ford Foundation in Chicago. My dad later viewed McPherson as being undone by an excess of righteous aggression, but I think he viewed himself in the same light.

Ted Heusel – the radio host known as Mr. Ann Arbor – may have been my dad’s antagonist, but he was more than that. He was a big personality, a local actor, and the mentor to a high school friend – Lucy Ann Lance – who has had a media career that is in many ways similar to that of Heusel. You might even call her “Ms. Ann Arbor” and you can tune in to her radio show here: The Lucy Ann Lance Show | Ann Arbor’s Talk 1290 (WLBY-AM) Lance has nothing but good things to say about Heusel and she even spoke at his memorial service in 2007.

Heusel described his listen-first approach to call-in radio with the Ann Arbor News in 1990. Some of his words strike me as quite in line with my father’s later-in-life approach to politics:

I can tell by talking to my guests what they’re thinking. You start them out and you let them define what they’re doing and sort of fit in with them. You get that from acting. You don’t memorize your lines, you go from cues from the other actors.

The News also noted that “protecting callers’ anonymity allows disenfranchised people, who may have no place else to turn, to call the Heusel show for help.” Heusel himself said that “some people who call in couldn’t write a letter to the editor and this is their chance to express themselves.” Those are words that my older father – the one who wanted lawyers to be “stewards of democracy” – would have admired.

If there’s one thing that dissatisfies me about this history, it’s the absence of the voices of parents from Clinton II, the poorer, blacker school in the controversy. The pages of the Ann Arbor News were full of the voices of the Gowns and the more connected Towns, but it’s hard to find the voices of working-class people of any race. It’s a shame, because I’m sure they had views and opinions that would surprise me.

P.S. I thank fellow Ann Arborites John Brussolo, Christine Bishop, David Sandalow, and Lucy Ann Lance for sharing their memories with me. I do not presume that they agree with my characterizations and opinions.

Residents often ask the association to weigh in on local political issues like road-widening, rezoning, and school redistricting. It’s the redistricting that gets people most upset and I’d probably be upset too if my kids weren’t out of the house. Yet we are a purely social group and do not take political stances…even if that leaves some residents annoyed with their president.

Far more people were annoyed with my dad in early 1972 when he was a trustee of the Ann Arbor Public Schools (AAPS). Clinton Elementary School (below) was seriously overcrowded as new housing – some subsidized, some not – was built on the south side of Interstate 94. The school was built in 1967 for 300 students, but by early 1972 nearly 600 students crowded into the school and its rented portables.

Clinton parents vented their frustration at school board meetings and in the pages of the Ann Arbor News. To take just one example, “Mr. and Mrs. Wood” wrote in November 1971 to say:

Those of us in the Clinton School community are in the crisis, but our burden would be lessened if individuals and PTO’s throughout the city who felt empathy and perhaps a twinge of guilt, expressed their concerns over our situation to the school board and school administration.

The Board heard the pleas and mooted several plans to alleviate overcrowding at Clinton.

One proposal was to bus some Clinton kids to vacant classrooms in parts of Ann Arbor where the post-war Baby Boom had faded. This would match supply and demand for space, but the head of the Clinton PTO said that

We do not want our children … used as pawns to fill empty classrooms scattered throughout the city. Why should our children pay for poor planning of school officials and city government?

Another proposal was to stagger school times, such as moving some kindergarten classes to the afternoon. Yet another proposal was to add even more portables (see a Clinton portable below with a map of Michigan on the wall), though it was easier to add classrooms than to add shared facilities like libraries, cafeterias, and gyms.

Most Clinton parents were happy, therefore, when AAPS superintendent Bruce McPherson proposed building a second school within the Clinton School’s catchment area, basically splitting the district in two. The new school – Clinton II, for our purposes - would be ready in the Fall of 1972 – just 8 months away. The school board quickly obligated the funds for the new school and while details were scarce, the expectation was that kids north of I-94 would attend Clinton I and that kids to the south would attend Clinton II. Call this the “closest-school” plan.

Yet Superintendent McPherson soon threw a spanner in his own works when he announced that Clinton I would be “paired” with Clinton II. McPherson’s pairing plan had all kids attend Clinton I for grades K-2 and then switch en masse to Clinton II for grades 3-5. This would entail “safety busing” kids across I-94 depending on their grade and the side of I-94 that they lived on.

McPherson liked pairing because to do otherwise would leave “one school on the north side of the expressway with an enrollment of white upper-class students (and) another school south of the expressway with mostly black students.” This would entail “blatant segregation” and he was fully committed to “integration and diversity of the mass population for the benefits of the students and the community.” He would not be privy to the creation of a second Mason-Dixon line in Ann Arbor.

Most Clinton I parents - i.e., the richer, whiter parents – didn’t like the pairing plan. One mother complained that her kids would no longer come home for lunch, and other parents were vexed that busing would add an hour to the school day. (I note for the record that my own mother wanted me gone for more of the day, not less.) Other Clinton I parents worried Clinton II kids would be rougher and less well-disciplined.

Some heard these as acceptable concerns of loving parents, and indeed Dad wrote in a defense of the pairing plan that

It is all too easy to put down the (Clinton I) residents complaining of the pairing of Clinton School as racists or elitists. I know some of those people well enough to know better.

Yet others did think that Clinton I parents were bigots. Maria Palazzola, a 9^th grader at Pioneer High, wrote in to say that she was “truly disgusted with what is so obviously bothering” the Clinton I parents. Indeed, at a heated school board meeting Dad said:

Speaking specifically to members in the audience who had spoken out harshly against pairing, what I hear you saying is we don’t want our nice kids messing with those dumb, hostile kids across the expressway.

Readers can make their own judgments.

My father, Superintendent McPherson. and other pairing proponents like board member Henry Johnson (a U of M administrator pictured below) were motivated by interesting beliefs and assumptions. First, they believed that Brown v. Topeka Board of Education (1954) and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 imposed an obligation to actively desegregate whenever a new school was created. Subsequent court decisions would muddy this interpretation, but that’s what they believed.

Clinton I parents thought this a bit rich. Even under the closest-school plan, both Clintons would be majority white with significant minority representation. Why were these schools singled when other Ann Arbor schools, including my own Bader Elementary, were even more racially out of balance? Clinton I parents weren’t all that rich or upper-class, either, and they saw pairing as being foisted upon them by hypocritical University of Michigan parents who lived in richer, far whiter neighborhoods. Indeed, one of the angry Clinton I residents taught English at Eastern Michigan, the less snooty college located in nearby Ypsilanti.

My father and McPherson also believed that integrating elementary schools would reduce students’ racial prejudice later in life. My father wrote that “students coming from schools such as (an integrated) Clinton are less likely to become in social conflict in secondary schools.” There is still debate on the extent to which this is true, but pairing supporters thought that early school integration was the key to long-run interracial comity.

My father and McPherson also believed that integration would improve the academic performance of the lower-class kids without harming upper-class kids. Dad wrote that “the science presented to the Board” shows that “children who bring a lot of literacy to school share it without loss to themselves.” Given that, a failure to mix kids by socioeconomic class would lead the board to “be false to its most basic obligation, which is to maximize the attainment of basic skills.”

This benign view of the effects of integration on academic performance was widely held. Indeed, Pioneer High freshman Maria Palazzola wrote, speaking again to Clinton parents, that

if your children should happen to end up in a classroom housing children of (ahem) ‘different backgrounds,’ let me assure you that they will not be harmed in any way. In fact, if such turns out to be the case, consider it a blessing. You will if you truly have your children’s best interests in mind.

Some Clinton I parents accepted these arguments and wrote in the News that “we also feel that the educational benefits of this recommendation far outweigh any inconvenience for parents.”

Yet most Clinton I parents were very angry. Clinton I parent Linda Chessler wrote that

to overlook most of a community’s needs and feelings…to intimidate a healthy atmosphere of opinions from being expressed by using names as `bigot’ and `hypocrite’ to anyone of a different opinion (McPherson)I s perhaps the worst hypocrisy of all.

(You can see Chessler below, in the middle, at a 1973 Chanukah event at Clinton I). Clinton I parent Wendy Raeder - who later served on the school board - was “furious” that her children would be bused “to satisfy some dingbat’s perverted sense of social justice.” Another “furious” Clinton I parent wrote that it wasn’t fair to bus her kids “just to balance the scales somewhere.”

The board pushed on with Superintendent McPherson’s pairing plan despite the community unrest. My father tried to calm things when wrote in the News that

I express not only sympathy but gratitude (to the parents of Clinton I) and the hope that they will, in the end, find the pairing to be beneficial to their children, as I believe that it will be.

I still see that as a generous and sympathetic statement, but some Clinton I parents viewed it as condescension from a University of Michigan boffin whose children were not being bused.

They would have been even madder if they had known that my father was then arranging to take a visiting position at Columbia in the 1972-73 school year. His initial idea was that the family would stay back in Ann Arbor, but my mom insisted that we all go with him. In so doing, they seem to have not really considered putting their four school-age children in the public schools near our apartment that overlooked the Hudson River on 101^st Street. No, we all went to private schools instead.

My older brother spent his senior year at The New School down in Greenwich Village. My older sister went to Dalton, the east side school that would soon hire Jeffrey Epstein as a math teacher (she hated it). And my little sister and I attended the Bank Street School on West 112^th street, a very liberal school that would have fit right in with Ann Arbor’s counterculture. I loved Bank Street, my look in the class picture notwithstanding (I’m upper left).

I have to acknowledge here that my generous, civic-minded father really was a bit of a hypocrite in many of the same ways that Clinton I parent Linda Chessler described above. He really did demand that middle-class families submit to busing, to disruption, and to rubbing shoulders with the schoolchildren of the unwashed masses, even as he placed the children he loved in far cushier situations.

My father had a lot of company as private schools were popping up all over to teach the children of wealthy elites who were simultaneously demanding the economic and racial integration of the public schools. Ann Arbor’s Greenhills School (below), founded in 1968, was one of them. This did not go unnoticed by the unwashed masses, and so the Battle of the Clintons was just getting started.

Dad had run for the school board partly because he hoped that Ann Arbor – in the same election that he won – would approve additional taxes and bonds for the schools. Huron High School had opened in 1969 and we had visited the site several times in the years of its construction. They were great visits, as I loved the bulldozers and cranes and he loved the physical manifestation of public spirit. He was excited to build more schools during his time on the board.

But the bonds and taxes didn’t pass because, as he had learned from his campaign, there was a great deal of anger at the schools from all sides. One of his first acts as a trustee was therefore to propose the appointment of an ombudsman as a means of dispelling “the distrust of the public schools” that he had observed on the hustings. Many Ann Arborites “harbored grievances and suspicions against school officials,” he wrote, and it would be “in the interest of everyone to provide a better means of venting those hostilities.”

The Board in August 1970 – just a month after my dad took office - did hire Robert Potts to be the Ann Arbor Public Schools’ first “human relations grievance officer.” (See Potts (seated) below). The board’s choice of Potts to fill the new post reflected their understanding that Ann Arbor’s black community had longstanding grievances around black underrepresentation among school staff (notwithstanding Mrs. Boykin) and overrepresentation among student suspensions. Dad was intent on addressing those grievances in a pointed but lawyerly fashion.

Potts and Dad both soon had their hands full for, on September 30, the Ann Arbor News reported that “classes were suspended at Pioneer High School…(after) a demonstration by black students erupted into rock-throwing and vandalism.” Head librarian Esther Criss testified that “a group of black people rushed in with sticks and hammers,” that windows were smashed, and that “damage was done to equipment and furnishing in the library and the cafeteria.” A handful of black students were arrested for felony vandalism and three were suspended until their appeal could be heard. The protest was small beer for its time, but it was big news in Ann Arbor.

The library vandalism was motivated by black students’ sense that school administrators had slow-walked their promises to appoint more black counselors and teachers. Yet, very much of the day, the black students also wanted a Black Student Union, a separate Black Studies curriculum that would replace any History requirement for interested students, and changes to what they saw as an overly punitive (by design) and racist (in application) discipline policy. Many black Pioneer students saw the three suspensions as yet another unfair application of an overly harsh discipline policy.

The school board’s public meeting on October 21 – three weeks later - was “one of the most uproarious sessions in the history of the Ann Arbor Board of Education” (per the Ann Arbor News). The main issue was school administrators’ request that the board - all men, mostly white - weigh in on the suspensions levied after the vandalism at Pioneer. The board initially voted to maintain the suspensions until a hearing could be held the next week, but it reversed its decision later in that same meeting after a “wild 60 minutes of shouting and table-pounding that teetered on the brink of trouble.”

The “trouble” was mostly the voices of black students angry about what they saw as the lack of due process in the suspensions. One girl yelled “you’re doing just what the cowboys did to the Indians – shoot first and ask questions later.” Black students also argued that the suspended students were “missing an education” that they couldn’t make up after the suspension was over. One of the suspended students asked “What are you going to do if I’m found innocent in court – say you’re sorry? How can I make up my work?” Black high school students were inspired by similar, prior protests just down the street by the Black Action Movement at the University of Michigan.

Black parents were also upset, though more quietly and for somewhat different reasons. Like their children, they were upset about black kids “being placed in double jeopardy and were being found guilty by the board and punished by suspensions before they were even brought to trial.” Yet, like many white parents in a time of intense teen alienation, they worried about losing their kids’ attention and respect if the schools didn’t at least appear to listen to their children’s grievances.

Voices were angry, but there was physical intimidation as well, as “black parents and students gradually moved from their seats until they stood five deep in front of the board table as the trustees voted. Most of the audience, in fact, was standing and tension filled the room.” Some of the students were particularly angry with my dad who had proposed temporarily admitting the suspended students to a special program outside of school.

“We don’t want your hand-outs. We want justice,” one teen-ager yelled as he pounded the table several times in front of Carrington’s nose.

My father (2nd from the right at the board table) changed his vote that night along with several other board members and the students were reinstated. The Ann Arbor News reported that “a white man in the audience angrily told the trustees that they were ‘gutless’ and that they had been ‘intimidated.” Board member Cecil Warner agreed and said that “we gave in.”

Dad quickly had second thoughts on that meeting, or at least about how it might be portrayed, and he said as much in an op-ed published in the Ann Arbor News three days later. He had no real problem with ending the suspensions, and indeed he had campaigned on making school discipline less punitive. Yet he was torn by a conflicting desire to both back up school administrators and to stick with established discipline procedures (even if he wanted to subsequently reform them).

Dad wrote that he was won over to leniency by “the tears of loving (black) parents” who worried both about their kids’ education and about their kids’ growing sense of alienation. He acknowledged that kowtowing to a student mob might invite future trouble, but he saw black parents and educators as the best remedy for the “alienation which is eating trust.” “Won’t you join me,” he wrote,” in lending them our support and best wishes?”

By contrast, his op-ed extended a warning to students -

I regard the behavior of some of the youth at the meeting of October 21 as…(the) kind of behavior (that would merit) exclusion from school.

He had not forgotten the board’s “obligation to other youth to provide a reasonably safe learning environment” and “if there be youth wishing to test the board’s resolve in exercising that ultimate responsibility, I confidently predict that they will not find it lacking.” The Board obviously hoped that this would cool emotions before the board meeting the next Wednesday, i.e., the 28^th, but they had two plainclothes policemen in the audience just in case.

It’s good the cops were there. The Ann Arbor News reported that the school board’s meeting on the 28th was

abruptly adjourned (at 11:15pm) after the trustees refused to engage in another dialogue with Pioneer High black students about their demands made over the past 2.5 years.

The black students were particularly angry about my father’s op-ed. One angry youth asked “How does what I do outside of school time mean I should be kicked out of school?” Another asked “How the hell do you expect us to be rational when you won’t even discuss our demands with us?” Yet another said that “we know you’ve got pigs all over the neighborhood and in here now, so if we disrupt this meeting we’ll be carted off to jail.”

There were nine board members, but Dad became “the main target of the students’ verbal wrath as most of them surrounded him to demand an explanation of his remark printed in the News.” My dad “listened but said little,” and ‘most of the black students left within 10 to 15 minutes after the meeting was prematurely ended.” Dad was quoted in the News three days later as saying that “the public interest does not require haste in ‘having it out’ with every angry mob.” He also started sleeping with a baseball bat by his bed.

October of 1970 really was an extraordinary month in the history of the Ann Arbor Public Schools, but the era brought many similar months for school systems across America. The early 1970s were a combustible stew of resentment based on racial discrimination, the Vietnam War, and the still-active draft that was sending thousands of boys off to their death. Race-related anger was particularly widespread, both among the blacks who had been so ill-served by schools and by working-class whites who felt that they – and not their upper-class overlords – were the ones bearing the costs of repair in the form of busing and redistricting. There were many meetings like the ones described above and the angry people – even in Ann Arbor – were as likely to be white as black.

I was not a serious malcontent in Mrs. Boykin’s class that fall, but she really did call my parents in for a conference. She said I was acting up out of boredom and recommended booting me up to the fourth grade over winter break. My little sister had previously skipped a grade and that seemed to be going well, so my parents and I agreed to the move. I came to regret the move because, as one of the friends I left behind said, “I was ahead with the books but behind with the common sense.” I do not know whether my father’s position on the school board played a role or, if so, how Mrs. Boykin viewed him.

I do know, however, that a different black teacher in the Ann Arbor Public Schools very much appreciated my father. Samuel Perry was born in Gloster, Mississippi in 1938, the ninth child of a sharecropping family who, per his 2023 obituary, “worked as a farm laborer in his formative years.” Mr. Perry ultimately got a BA in Industrial Arts from what is now Alcorn State University and, after moving to Ann Arbor in 1966, began a long career as a counselor and industrial arts teacher at Tappan Junior High. I knew him there in the mid-70s as a warm and thoughtful teacher in woodshop, but he had many side hustles as a carpenter, a painter, and as a real estate investor. His obituary says that he “never met a stranger.”

We moved to North Carolina in 1978, by which time my father was off the school board and racial issues in the Ann Arbor Public Schools had reduced to a simmer. Tensions fell for a variety of reasons, but one reason is that Ann Arbor had convinced its black residents that things were getting better - not perfect, but better - and that their concerns were being taken seriously. They could see this in the appointment of Mr. Potts (the ombudsman), the creation of a commission to study racism in the schools, and in the appointment of an increasing number of black faculty like Mr. Perry. One of these new appointments was William Harris, the wry Huron High geometry teacher who loved talking about English mathematician Bertrand Russell.

My parents held a going away party for their many friends, most of whom were white and many of whom were Jewish. Mr. Perry was one of few black attendees and he recalled me with an engaging warmth that I still remember. It turned out that Dad and Mr. Perry had gotten to know each other during Dad’s time on the school board. Mr. Perry and his wife had three children in the schools and so he knew the administration’s challenges from several perspectives. I know my father appreciated Mr. Perry, but the respect went both ways.

Bader students were particularly tied to their neighborhood because they were required to go home for lunch. This was unusual for Ann Arbor – or anywhere else at the time – but it was feasible because its students all lived within a few blocks. We lived on the outskirts of Bader’s catchment area, but it was still less than a half mile from our house and so I went back and forth twice a day, once before and once again after lunch. I had a lunchtime birthday party in 1967 because that was my favorite part of the day, and the proximity meant that school friends were all within walking or biking distance during the summer or the weekend.

Bader teachers surely loved their lunchtime break, but my mother didn’t like it one bit. For mothers like her – who either worked or were in school - sending kids home for lunch was a mid-day handcuff that seriously constrained their ability to get things done out of the house. My mother accepted the situation while she worked on her Masters degree in Library Science at the University of Michigan, but she rebelled upon taking a job at the Detroit Public Library in the Fall of 1973. I was moving on to Tappan Junior High that year, but my little sister had two more years at Bader and so Mom negotiated – with difficulty – the right for my sister to eat lunch every day in the principal’s office, one of only two kids who ate lunch at Bader that year. The whole send-kids-home-for-lunch system fell apart soon thereafter as more moms went to work, but I tell the story in part to emphasize the connection between Bader and its neighborhood.

The Leave-it-to-Beaver nature of Bader life is what made it so incongruous when, in 2^nd grade in 1969, we were bussed back and forth in an exchange program with Mack, an older elementary school in downtown Ann Arbor. The exchange occurred because Mrs. Lewis and the corresponding teacher at Mack thought their respective students would benefit from spending time together and, indeed, I did enjoy our time together even if the friendships made did not survive after our exchange program ended that same year. You might wonder why the teachers went to all the trouble, but the answer is that Bader was (mostly) rich and white and Mack was (mostly) poor and black. The teachers at both schools - and indeed judges, legislators and administrators across the country - believed that early exposure to students from different races and classes could nip discrimination in the bud, that these field trips would help us get along when we inevitably met again in middle and high school. The whole exchange was very much of the time.

Ann Arbor was (and is) the home of the University of Michigan, we had a famous summer art fair, our football team was very good, and the Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra played Michigan’s fight song at the end of its annual weeklong residency in Ann Arbor. We were Athens mixed in with the best of Sparta. We were politically progressive, too, being against the Vietnam War and hosting an annual Hash Bash sponsored by our representative in the Michigan House (pictured below). There were Republicans in Ann Arbor, but I lived in a Democratic party monoculture that reveled in the self-immolation of the Republican party in the mid-1970s. I was at summer camp in northern Michigan when Nixon resigned, and the Ann Arbor progressives who ran the camp made sure that we all watched it on television. We were progressives on issues of race and gender, too, at least by the standards of the day. The South had de jure segregation in schooling and accommodations and in many other facets of life, while we northerners were proud that we did not. When my 14-year-old self watched the Roots miniseries in 1977, I viewed its slavery-related stories of domination and abuse as being from both another time and another country.

Yet of course Ann Arbor had its segregation, too. The first Black families had come to Ann Arbor in the late 1800s, but the pace of migration accelerated in the 1940s and 1950s. Most black migrants came from the South, especially the Alabama counties around Birmingham and Montgomery. These migrants often followed kinship networks or relocated as part of church communities. There were black students and professors at the University and a smattering of black professionals and schoolteachers, but in the 1960s most Ann Arbor blacks worked at custodial and clerical positions at the University or at blue collar jobs in construction or auto parts manufacturing. The jobs didn’t pay much, but they beat what was on offer in the South.

Ann Arbor had a population of about 100,000 in 1970, and about one in ten were African American. (There were some Asians but virtually no Hispanics in Ann Arbor at the time.) The neighborhoods of Ann Arbor of course varied on dimensions such as family income, education, and inevitably race. Some of the segregation was driven by racial differences in income and education, or by householders’ desire to live among neighbors who “looked like” themselves, a tendency that could affect both black and white homeowners. Yet some segregation surely also came from steering by real estate agents or redlining by lenders, two actions that were banned by federal law in the 1960s. As the Ann Arbor News once wrote:

Far away from the segregated lunch counters and water fountains of the Deep South, Ann Arbor was wrestling with its own brand of racism in the 1940s and 1950s. Blacks moving to town were only shown houses in the North Fourth Avenue area, a grimy neighborhood heavy with the odor of slaughterhouses and coal-fired plants.

The children of the black families steered into the Fourth Avenue neighborhood were enrolled in the closest elementary schools – Jones (pictured below) and Mack.

The Ann Arbor School Board, as the 1960s progressed, recognized that residential segregation made it difficult to create schools that were at once integrated and “neighborhood.” Something had to give. As of 1960, the Board’s position was that “neighborhood” should be the priority.

The Board of Education will designate attendance areas for the schools under its jurisdiction. The purpose in so doing is to secure equitable distribution in enrollment and to recognize the neighborhood community as an important factor in school - community relationship.

Yet in June of 1962 – the year I was born - Emma Wheeler, president of the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), asked whether the school board should do anything about the fact that virtually all of Ann Arbor’s black elementary students were shoved into two older schools with declining physical plants. Was that fair, she wanted to know? If not, what could be done? Board member Alexander Gotz correctly noted that “the district is administered on a purely geographic basis” and that “we do not have any segregated schools,” and further that redrawing districts would be “artificial meddling” with neighborhood schools. Yet board member James Crippen noted that school segregation was largely a product of residential segregation and that the latter process was illegally distorted.

To assume that a Negro family can buy a home anywhere in Ann Arbor is putting your head in the sand ... They are going to buy where they can.

The concerns of Crippen and Wheeler carried the day and the Board commissioned a report that was released in 1964.

The report observed that, relative to whites, blacks scored lower on standardized tests, got lower grades, were less likely to be enrolled in advanced courses when they got to high school, and were more likely to drop out of school altogether. The report attributed these differences to discrimination, to economic deprivation, and to the fact that Ann Arbor elementary schools were segregated by race. As the report noted:

A Negro child attending Jones School attends a virtually all-Negro school which cannot be divorced from this total environment and the attitudes it generates. He is denied association in school with white children who enjoy the opportunities and expectations of our society and thereby create the educational milieu that promotes a desire to learn and the urge to excel.

Black parents and local civil rights leaders asked the school board to “act speedily to end the de facto segregation at Jones School.” When parents noted that doing so would violate the town’s commitment to a neighborhood school, Dr. Albert Wheeler noted that “we’ve had neighborhood schools for 100 years…yes, but we’ve had segregated neighborhoods for 100 years, too.” Below is a picture of Emma and Albert Wheeler, the latter of whom served as Mayor of Ann Arbor from 1975-78.

Ann Arbor wrestled for the rest of the 1960s with what to do with Jones and Mack. As always, there were a limited number of levers that the School Board could pull to integrate elementary schools:

• It could redraw district lines to increase school-level integration, a sort of racial gerrymandering familiar from today’s fights over political redistricting.

• It could merge adjacent “black” and “white” schools with one becoming K-3 and the other 4-6, both of which would automatically be racially integrated.

• It could bus some black kids to previously “white” schools and vice versa.

Versions of these plans were implemented all over the country in the early 1970s and they were always controversial. The conflict arose because schools became less “neighborhood,” because some families objected to integration for various reasons (including racism, of course), and because the costs of integration were unevenly distributed. Black parents like the Wheelers thought that the inconvenience of integration was disproportionately visited on their children, and working-class whites thought that their kids were bussed while rich liberals increasingly sent their kids to the secular private schools that were popping up in Ann Arbor and across the country. Views varied even among groups that seemed similar. Black parents at Jones school happily accepted the closure of their school in 1965 and the subsequent distribution of their kids to majority white schools. Parents at Mack School – a much more mixed-race school than Jones - fought hard to keep their school open. If they had not succeeded, then I would not have taken those bus rides to Mack in 1969.

My parents took us away from Ann Arbor to spend three months in Mexico and Colombia in the period between December 1969 and March 1970. We were idle vacationers in Cuernavaca for six weeks, which I liked, and then temporary students in Bogota, which I did not. My sister and I attended Nuevo Granada, a lovely English language school, but it was my first experience away from the Norman Rockwell comfort of Bader Elementary. I had to take a bus, I didn’t know anybody and I didn’t walk home for lunch. I didn’t like any of it and, in retrospect, my sense of alienation must have in some ways resembled the experience of those Jones School kids whose parents had caused their transfers to new schools. Back in Ann Arbor, I gave a resounding “no” when my father asked me whether he should hire former Nuevo Granada Headmaster to be the new head of the Ann Arbor school system.

My father asked the question because he had won a seat on the Ann Arbor School Board shortly after our return from Colombia. His campaign ad in the Ann Arbor News emphasized the need both for “a neighborhood school system” and for a new tax levy to fund improvements to both Mack and Northside, another disproportionately black school. He also had ideas on how to address “student misconduct,” an issue very much on the minds of Ann Arbor voters after violent Vietnam War protests at the University of Michigan. He implicitly criticized the school’s overuse of disciplinary suspensions and wanted to look for methods to “keep the offenders on the path toward useful adulthood.” It was obviously a winning campaign platform, but perhaps the key to his victory was the candidate’s photo from the previous summer with his then 7-year-old son.

I was unreservedly proud the day that Dad was elected to the school board, but he himself saw that it was going to be a rough ride. The Ann Arbor News reported that

Carrington…had “mixed feelings” about being elected to the board, in view of the fact the millage and bonding issues had been defeated and “we have no additional resources to work with.” He blamed the defeats of the millage and bonding issues on the fact that people are “sore” about many things today, and the schools are the “most visible” and “easiest to clobber.”

Dad was in fact able to fund a modernization of Mack School, but his forecast was otherwise accurate as a wide swath of Ann Arbor – students, parents, blacks, and whites – turned out to be very angry during the three years of his term. So angry, in fact, that he began to keep a baseball bat by his bed at night.

My mom pitied me and so, while I was hiking on Isle Royale one summer, she carpeted my room and installed corkboard floor-to-ceiling along the longest wall. I immediately tacked up my National Geographic wall maps of Europe, China, North America, and Michigan. The room still had only one little window, but it was suddenly attractive and warm. Our one-eyed beagle liked it better, too.

I soon showed the maps to my friend Rick and I’m happy to report that he was suitably impressed. We ran our hands over the thick paper, following the Rockies and the Yangtze and pointing to WWII battle sites like Monte Casino, Stalingrad, and Guadalcanal. The maps were beautiful and we looked at them quietly for several minutes.

“It should belong to us,” Rick ultimately said as he waved his hand over the map of North America.

“What should belong to whom?” I replied with some puzzlement.

“Canada,” he said. “I mean just look at it. It should be part of the United States.”

Rick had a point, I thought, partly because Michigan was nearly surrounded by Canada. Annexing Canada would not change our grades, our jump shots, or the price of candy, but we agreed that, yeah, it should definitely be the 51^st state.

Our irredentism had a domestic component, too. Rick and I ran our hands over the adjacent states on my wall map – Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, and Indiana – and we were happy to let the borders lie where they were in each case. But when we got to Ohio, just 40 miles away from Ann Arbor, we saw more land that should really belong to Michigan. The land had admittedly been in Ohio for 150 years and had therefore been deeply tainted, but we agreed that a reunion with Michigan would bring out the best in the Toledo Strip.

Our football rivalry left the kids of Ann Arbor with an abiding distaste for Ohio. Ohio had some things to be proud of – like Michigan basketball star Phil Hubbard – but we viewed the entire state as overfed farm boys swirling around a constellation of mediocre cities. Columbus was “the biggest small town in America” while Ann Arbor, a much smaller place, had a famous art fair and hosted the Philadelphia Symphony every summer. We were Athens to their Sparta. It was a source of personal shame that my family had moved to Ann Arbor from Columbus, but then the converts are always the biggest zealots.

Rick and I had learned a lot of Michigan history in school. The French were the first Europeans to enter what is now Michigan, and they did so with a light touch. They were mostly priests and voyageurs who trapped and traded and lived peacefully with the Indians. The French left their names to Michigan towns like Cadillac, Sault Ste. Marie and Detroit, and my thespian career peaked in third grade when I chewed up the scenery as Father Jacques Marquette.

The first British-Americans moved into Ohio and then Michigan in the years after the Revolutionary War. Indeed, one of the casus belli of that War was the King’s desire to keep his colonists east of the Appalachians. The Brits lost the war and, as they had predicted, the ensuing flood of farmer/settlers soon butted heads with the Shawnee, Chippewa, and Ojibwa that were already there.

Indians and settlers often got along, trading pelts, goods, and land, but there were inevitably some battles, too. The most famous is probably the Battle of Tippecanoe (1811) in which federal troops in central Indiana fought the Shawnee and their chief Tecumseh. The Americans prevailed at Tippecanoe, but Tecumseh and the Shawnee allied themselves with the British and captured Detroit in the War of 1812. Though he died fighting in Ontario in 1813, the town of Tecumseh - 25 miles from Ann Arbor and known as the Refrigeration Capital of the World – still commemorates the man.

There continued to be battles in the upper Midwest – the Ho-Chunk War of 1827 and the Black Hawk War of 1832, for example – but the battle lines gradually moved west as more settlers arrived and as Indians either accustomed themselves to the new world or moved west themselves. All this left the Northwest Territory - comprising the modern states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Michigan - in an increasingly pacific position as the years rolled on.

And yet I’m pleased to say that Michigan and Ohio fought the War of the Toledo Strip in 1837. It was a real war – with real guns being fired and real militia being called up – even if nobody died directly from battle. The dispute was over the swath of land from Lake Erie to the Indiana border that both states coveted. You might wonder why anyone would fight over Toledo, but it was (and is) tremendously productive farmland and, well, that was what people most wanted at the time. It’s still the closest thing to a war ever fought between two American states.

Rick and I had learned in class that while Michigan may have lost Toledo in the ensuing negotiations, it had been more than compensated by Congress’ granting Michigan the Upper Peninsula, including my summer stomping grounds of Isle Royale. Yet, as we stood there, Rick and I kind of wanted Toledo, too. We were ready to grab our toy rifles and head south.

We also thought that Michigan’s claim on the Toledo Strip went beyond history. The entire great lakes region was very tied to the Detroit auto industry in the 1960s and 1970s. Toledo’s proximity to Detroit – just 40 miles north and closer than Cleveland or Columbus - had allowed its manufacturers to grow with Detroit throughout the magical first half of the 20th century. Building on a pre-existing bottle industry, Toledo-based companies like Libby-Owens-Ford and Pilkington supplied GM, Ford, and Chrysler with millions of windshields, windows, and mirrors.

Toledo made its own cars, too, starting with the WWII Jeep that was engineered and produced by Toledo’s Willys-Overland Company. “Meet the Jeep” wrote Scientific American in early 1942, “the United States Army’s answer to Schicklegruber’s Panzer divisions.” The reference to “Schicklegruber” (Hitler’s father’s birthname), the picture below, and the very word “Jeep” were all meant to defuse the anxieties of new recruits about to face German tanks with names like “Tiger” and “PantherFist.” I’d have felt more comfortable in a tank, but the Jeep should have been produced in Michigan.

The Great Lakes were an economic ecosystem that connected all the adjacent states. Iron ore was mined in Michigan and (especially) Minnesota and then loaded on to huge ships in ports like Duluth and Two Harbors (both in Minnesota) and Superior (in Wisconsin). The iron ore was taken to the industrial cities of the Midwest such as Detroit, Gary, and Toledo that refined it into steel. The Great Lakes also served as a highway for the shipment of grain (especially from Duluth) and limestone (from ports in upper Michigan) used in the steelmaking process.

The iron ore carrier Edmund Fitzgerald was nearly 800 feet long, the maximum length allowed to pass the Soo Locks that connect Lakes Superior and Huron. Like other large “lakers,” the Fitzgerald was long, skinny, and had a shallow draft, all things that worked great when the lakes were calm. The Fitzgerald typically took loads of taconite (a pelletized form of iron ore) in Minnesota and Wisconsin and then delivered it to Detroit’s Zug Island, but often it delivered to Ohio ports like Toledo, Ashtabula, or Cleveland. The boat even wintered in Toledo and the plurality of its crew lived there.

It was huge news in Michigan when the Fitzgerald sunk in eastern Lake Superior in November of 1975, just a few weeks after Rick and I had run our hands over that wall map. There have been tens of thousands of shipwreck deaths on the Lakes, but the Fitzgerald has an outsized place in the collective memory and indeed there is currently a NYT bestseller on the topic. In his famous The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, Canadian Gordon Lightfoot sang that

In a musty old hall in Detroit, they prayed
In the Maritime Sailors’ Cathedral
The church bell chimed ‘til it rang twenty-nine times
For each man on the Edmund Fitzgerald.

Toledo grieved, too.

Toledo and Detroit were also connected through sports. The Toledo Mud Hens were the Triple-A affiliate of the Detroit Tigers and, in their broadcasts, George Kell and Ernie Harwell kept us informed of Toledo’s progress. Tiger greats like Bill Freehan, Gates Brown, and Mickey Lolich played for the Mud Hens first. Detroit native Ron LeFlore was in prison when he took up baseball and, after an unlikely sequence of events, made it through Toledo to become a Tiger great. Levar Burton starred in the movie. Below is a picture of Toledo native Jamie Farr (Corporal Klinger from M*A*S*H) holding a jersey of his favorite team.

I’ve known two people who commuted between Toledo and Ann Arbor. The first was Mr. Cavanaugh, my math teacher in the Spring of 1978 who was simultaneously a third-year student at the University of Toledo Law School. My law professor father had recently been hired as the Dean at the Duke Law School and there had been a small announcement in the Ann Arbor News. Nobody noticed but Mr. Cavanaugh.

“Carrington,” he said in class one day. “I see your dad’s going to be a dean.”

“Yes,” I said with a mixture of pride and embarrassment.

“So what’s it going to be like,” he went on, “to be the son of the new Deanerino?”

“Dunno,” I said.

“Well,” he went on as he looked around at the other faces, “I’ll expect the son of the Deanerino to really knock tomorrow’s exam out of the park!”

The pride boiled off, I was left a seething pot of embarrassment, and I definitely did not ace the exam. I recently corresponded with Mr. Cavanaugh – now a retired law professor himself - and reminded him of this little dialog. “Sorry about that,” he said, “but I must have been salty about not getting in to the Michigan Law School.”

I was quiet in Mr. Cavanaugh’s class, not least because I never knew anything, but there were other quiet kids, too. One of them was a boy named Smith who was on the gymnastics team and who sat next to me every day. I would have forgotten about Smith had not Mr. Cavanaugh walked into class one day and, pointing to the empty chair next to me, said that “Smith killed himself yesterday.” We weren’t sure what to say and so of course nobody said anything, and so after a few more words, Mr. Cavanaugh got down to the differential equations.

The blunt delivery of this information still shocks me, and of course today there would be counselors to help the kids who had known Smith. Yet there was something about the tone of his voice and the manner of his expression that let me know that Mr. Cavanaugh was really hurt by the loss of this kid in the second row who hadn’t said anything all semester. It made it easier to continue on with the lesson and I’m still appreciative of how he acknowledged and grieved for Smith.

My good friend A is the other Toledo-Ann Arbor commuter that I’ve known. A grew up in Toledo and, after a decorated career as a DC economist, was recruited back to run his family’s manufacturing company. It’s honorable work, A’s company does it well, and as the picture below shows, they have a beautiful facility. You might think, therefore, that A would be happy to locate himself and to raise his family in Toledo. Yet, no, A has chosen to live in Ann Arbor, commuting down to Toledo three days a week. A also prefers Athens to Sparta.

My psychiatrist and I went back to Michigan last summer, mostly to Detroit and the Lake Michigan shore. We skipped Ann Arbor but we did stop for dinner in Toledo on our way back to DC. We had a nice dinner in an artsy area that was being renovated, and we met some nice young people running a new ice cream store. The surrounding area was pleasant and looked like a sort of hybrid of Detroit and Ann Arbor. You see a lot of Ohio State gear in Toledo, but you see nearly as many Michigan shirts and, indeed, US23 that connects Toledo and Ann Arbor can be crowded on fall Saturdays. The Toledo Strip may have been ceded to Ohio back in 1837, but its connections to Michigan remain strong.

Political maps are always being redrawn for all kinds of reasons, but oftentimes someone in power just wants to splash a little more of their country’s color across a world map tacked up on their office wall. Rick and I were powerless boys back in 1975, but we were certainly animated by those same emotions. It’s good that we were constrained in our mapmaking, but I still like the way that “Toledo, Michigan” rolls off the tongue.

JB and I bonded over the Tigers that night, but the fact that JB had spent his whole prior life in Michigan left me feeling short on Michigan authenticity. My family had, after all, decamped for North Carolina in 1978 and I had only been back to the state once. I tried to make up the Michigan-ness deficit by recounting to JB my small, youthful contributions to successes the state’s economic policy. I thought they would impress anyone with a joint interest in Michigan and economics.

Yet these stories only led JB to curse me and, really, I can’t blame him. I earned my first curse by pointing to the deposit information on the back of my Stroh’s bottle.

“You see this?” I asked.

“Yeah,” JB said in his slow, deadpan voice. “It’s the back of a Stroh’s bottle.”

“Look closer,” I said. “Do you see how Michigan has the 10-cent deposit, how a few other states have 5-cent deposits, and how most states aren’t even listed.”

“No shit, Sherlock,” said JB. “Everybody in Michigan has known about that for years.”

“Well,” I said with a proud smile, “I was part of the campaign that got this enacted. You can thank me for the bottle deposit and the clean roadsides.”

That was all true, too. I had circulated flyers in support of Michigan’s 1976 “bottle bill” that, by requiring a 10-cent deposit, sought to encourage recycling and curb litter. I was a very small cog in the campaign, not least because I couldn’t vote, but the bill passed and came into force after my family had moved away. It may or may not have reduced litter, but it certainly spawned a Seinfeld episode.

JB turned his barstool towards me, to compliment me I presumed. I felt warm inside.

“So let me get this straight,” he said sarcastically with that flat Michigan intonation that I can no longer produce. “You forced us to return all our bottles and cans to the recycling center.”

“Yes,” I said with hesitation.

“And then moved away? Before the law came in force?”

“Apparently,” I said.

“You’re an asshole,” said JB. “The bottle bill was one of the worst things in Michigan history. People in every other state can just throw their bottles in the trash or the recycling bin but, because of you, we have to haul them back to the grocery store to get our money back. Do you know how much people hate that? Do you know how much I hate that?”

“But isn’t it worth it?” I asked. “You know, given that Michigan roadsides are now free of broken glass and crumpled cans?

“No, it’s not worth it,” he said. “It’s just one big pain in the ass. And you should at least have the decency to live with the laws that you advocated for.”

I was chagrined, but I was grateful that I had a second story to burnish my claim to Michigan economic royalty. This second story was the very small part I had played in the creation of the crown jewel of Michigan’s beautiful shorelines, something that everybody in the Great Lake State, even JB, should appreciate.

The National Park Service established Sleeping Bear Sand Dunes National Lakeshore in the early 1970s out of a mixture of state- and privately-owned properties. The private properties were acquired via “eminent domain,” the principle that governments can forcibly possess private property as long as it serves a state interest and owners are paid a fair price. My father – a University of Michigan law professor at the time – sat on a panel that set the fair price for the larger properties being hoovered up via eminent domain.

The panel (and my 12-year-old self) listened to arguments from federal lawyers from the attorneys of Pierce Stocking, a lumberman who owned the most important tract being incorporated into the park. Each side trotted out sales of comparable properties and, for Mr. Stocking, elaborate plans for how the property might be redeveloped as a valuable, high-end resort. I asked my dad where the panel would come out - “About halfway between the two sides,” he said. It was the first – and to date the most enjoyable – trial that I ever sat through.

Our family spent two weeks in 1973 in Benzonia, Michigan, hiking and swimming in nearby lakes when we weren’t at the trial, and spending our nights at Rosier’s Motel. I was always the first one up and I would try to rouse my elder siblings by reading, over and over again, the back of our room key. “This key belongs to Rosier’s Motel, Benzonia, Michigan. Drop in any mailbox. We guarantee postage.” Perhaps not the most exciting text to start your day with, but it did get my brother out of bed if only to chase me into the parking lot. We had a pleasant fortnight in Benzonia and I got a good lesson in the application of eminent domain at the same go.

The public’s view of eminent domain changed rapidly during the decade around 1970. Nobody embodied eminent domain more than New York City planner Robert Moses who believed that governments couldn’t “make an omelet without breaking eggs.” Moses’ “omelets” were expressways and airports and the “eggs” were neighborhoods, homes, and small businesses. Moses believed that governments must “build for the future” even at the cost of displacing existing communities. This view held sway in the post-WWII decades when, for example, the interstate highway system was built and national parks were expanded.

If Moses was the apotheosis of eminent domain, then Jane Jacobs was its most successful urban critic. Jacobs argued that city planning should respect neighborhood autonomy and that cities provide “something for everybody…only when they are created by everybody.” Bulldozing neighborhoods for expressways, she argued, destroyed the very urban diversity and spontaneity that made cities thrive.

Jacobs began to win the argument in the 1970s and, really, it’s her world that we live in today. (She even showed up in in a Mrs. Maisel episode.) There are many good things about that development, too, as it is harder for governments to ignore the costs that they might otherwise impose on local communities. Yet even some progressives, such as Ezra Klein, now wonder whether the pendulum has swung too far, to wonder whether the proliferation of environmental impact statements and community reviews has made America static, and whether we would do better to get back to being “an America that builds.” Opinions vary, but there’s no doubt that the Interstate Highway System could not be built today.

Yet if liberals didn’t like eminent domain back in the 1970s, then many conservatives didn’t like it, either. The federal government owns enormous tracts in western states, much of it acquired under earlier applications of eminent domain. Ranchers and oilmen’s resentments found voice in the “sagebrush rebellion” that culminated in Reagan’s appointment of James Watt as Interior Secretary in 1980. My father didn’t like Reagan, but he had a soft spot for Watt, whom he remembered fondly as a former law student at the University of Wyoming. Watt instituted a sort of “eminent domain in reverse,” selling off or leasing to miners and ranchers many Federal lands, particularly in the Powder River Basin of Wyoming.

There is no sagebrush in Michigan, but northern Michigan property owners resented eminent domain as much as Jane Jacobs or any western rancher. As a Park Service history makes clear, the Moses/Jacobs controversy was repeated, in only slightly different form, in the creation of Sleeping Bear Sand Dunes National Lakeshore.

The early 1960s were an era of “top down” federal leadership (while the later 1960s brought) growing distrust of government and federal initiatives. The attempt to create Sleeping Bear Dunes took place in the midst of these contradictory political currents and …property owners with deep personal attachments to their holdings were never going to yield without a fight.

Jane Jacobs would have been on the homeowners’ side.

The creation of Sleeping Bear increased tourism and provided many benefits to northern Michigan, but the process left a legacy of bitterness that still lingers. As a later Park Service history recalled,

Many felt that the process wasn’t transparent and that communication from the federal government was inadequate. A survey found that many owners “did not believe they were properly informed … or were treated fairly during the negotiation process.”

Even today, 50 years later, one homeowner says that “we used to believe the government was apple pie and the American flag….(but now we think) it’s all about power.” In short, the process left many landowners angry and resentful.

The tribulations of Pierce Stocking, the lumberman whose property was argued over at the trial I attended, are in some ways representative. Unlike many of his neighbors, Stocking was in favor of the lakeshore and had made many of his purchases with the view of eventually selling to the National Park Service. Yet the protracted battle to create the lakeshore prompted Stocking to open his own dunes park, with a scenic drive among other improvements. Stocking was quite willing to sell in the early 1970s, but he thought the government’s offer was low and that it was “taking advantage of every possible hardship.”

Stocking insisted that his 2,976 acres were worth $4.3 million while the government offered only $1.8 million. As my Dad predicted, Stocking ultimately received about $3 million, roughly half-way between the opening offers of the two sides. Stocking died of a heart attack the day after the government wrote the final check, but you can still see his name memorialized on his scenic drive.

I have been back to Sleeping Bear many times since the creation of its eponymous Lakeshore, most recently with my psychiatrist this past summer. We hiked up the eastward face of the dunes and, after looking across the smaller Glen Lake, we accompanied a Portuguese couple on a hike to the west where we could see Lake Michigan and, in the distance, the Manitou Islands. It was late afternoon, the sun was setting, and it was beautiful. I even took a small measure of pride in my father’s role in the creation of the park.

My recollections had not gone so smoothly back with JB in the bar in 1984. I had laid out the basic facts above, about how Congress had established the Lakeshore but how somebody – in this case my father - had to do the hard work of setting the prices at which the park’s constituent properties would be acquired. “Isn’t that cool?” I asked.

JB did not think it was cool.

“So you’re telling me that your father was responsible for the Federal government’s confiscation of all the land around Sleeping Bear?”

“Well, I wouldn’t put it quite that way,” I said. “It was Congress that established the Lakeshore….my dad’s only job was to set a fair price for the associated land.”

“So your dad was merely the shill for the Federal government’s confiscation at below-market prices,” said JB.

“Well, again,” I said, “I wouldn’t put it quite that way. I was at the trial and, while Mr. Stocking might have been dissatisfied with the outcome, it was certainly a fair and orderly process.”

“Screw you,” said JB. “And screw your father and everyone else who put the Feds’ plans into practice.”

“Um,” I said, genuinely surprised. “I seem to have pushed upon a bruise. Why do you feel so strongly about this issue?”

“Because my parents had a cabin up there that the Feds took without paying us what it was worth.”

“But aren’t you glad that the land will be forever preserved, that future generations will be able to enjoy the pristine hills and the sandy beaches, free of any noxious hotels or developments.”

“No, I’m not glad at all,” JB said. “I enjoyed all those things when we owned the property. And you know what? Now nobody enjoys that land. It’s a wilderness and nobody ever walks back there and the stretch of Lake Michigan beach near our house is never visited by anybody. It would be one thing if they took our land and put it to good use, but they just took the land and put it to no use at all.”

The conversation could have continued in this awkward form, but fortunately Kirk Gibson distracted us by hitting a home run. JB and I became good friends and remain so to this day. A few years later, he even invited my psychiatrist and me up to his parents’ cabin, which the Park Service had leased back to them for a 20-year period that was about to run out. The structure was pretty basic, but the plot was beautiful, in the northern woods with a path down to Lake Michigan. The lease is now long over, the structure has been torn down, and JB has moved out of the state. It’s a bit sad.

I view the two properties – JB’s and that of Pierce Stocking – as representing the two sides of the eminent domain coin. The Stocking property was and is truly special, and I’m glad it’s in the public domain, even if it did leave Mr. Stocking a bit salty. Yet JB’s property, while lovely, was never really mission critical to the creation of the lakeshore and, while they were paid something for the property, it would have been wiser to leave it in private hands. But that’s the thing about eminent domain – it’s great except when it isn’t.

My anxiety was not entirely autogenous. Chicago professors took economics and themselves very seriously, and I did not get the impression that they were eager to waste their time on advising me. I was intimidated when a professor said “I think you’re lazy!” to one of my smarter, more sophisticated friends. If he thought that about him, then what would he think about me? It didn’t help that the Economics building looked like Hogwarts.

I was therefore lucky then when my friend Brooks steered me towards a research assistant job with Bob Topel, a then-young economist in the business school. Bob is one of the smartest people I’ve known, but more than that he was a warm, supportive presence as both an employer and an advisor. Bob coached me up and, being only six or seven years out of graduate school himself, he tolerated the time it took for me to get up to speed as a programmer and researcher.

I was particularly fortunate when Bob steered me towards the Displaced Worker Survey (DWS) as a potential source of dissertation material. The decline in manufacturing employment during the 1970s and the severe recession of 1981-82 had renewed interest in the consequences of job displacement – i.e., being laid off by your employer – and the DWS was designed to provide information on those effects. It did so by asking workers whether they had lost a job in the past five years and, if so, how their wages and employment had changed in the ensuing time.

The results of the ensuing literature are easily summarized – getting laid off is often not a big deal, particularly for the young and the newly hired, but it is often very costly for workers who are older or, even more importantly, had spent many years on the job. My own analysis was good enough to get me a plum job at Johns Hopkins, but the results were not especially novel and were being simultaneously replicated by other young researchers looking to make their name. Such are the vagaries of academic competition.

Later researchers used better data to show that displacement had longer-term effects on earnings, divorce, health, and even death. Again, these adverse effects were typically concentrated amongst those who had become specialized in the job, occupation, or industry from which they were displaced. Losing a job you just started in New York City is probably not a big deal, but it’s a real problem when the mine closes in the rural West Virginia town where you’ve lived your whole life.

I write about this little history now partly to show the vagaries of research and the importance of supportive mentors, but also because it is of some relevance to the Nobel Prize in Economics that was awarded this very week to Philippe Aghion, Peter Howitt, and Joel Mokyr. In very different ways, these researchers made important contributions to the how and the why of the amazing improvement in economic conditions that has occurred throughout the world over the past two or three centuries. They also showed that advances and innovations always displace firms and workers in the unpleasant ways documented by myself and others.

The material substance of human life has increased at an unprecedented rate over the past 2-3 centuries. Indeed, the chart below depicts the truly incredible growth in average income over the recent past and how it was quite unpredicted from the trends of the prior centuries. It’s a miracle. There is debate about why this miracle happened, but Joel Mokyr (and others) taught us to not take these incredible changes for granted.

If your instinct is to find the above chart unbelievable, to believe that life is as it always was, then please consider the range of new technologies developed in the past 150 years. It is incredible to just list a few:

• planes, trains, and automobiles

• psubmarines and huge, fast ships

• telegraphs, telephones, and emails

• refrigerators, air conditioners, and freezers

• radios, television, the internet

• electricity, electric motors, and electric light

• radical improvements in drugs, vaccines, and diagnostic techniques

• improved fertilizers and better cultivars that have mostly ended famine.

Life is of course not perfect, but our material conditions are dramatically different from those of our ancestors.

Yet these changes in technology are never good for everybody, particularly for the old guard trained on outdated technologies or living in ghost towns bypassed by markets. There were about 150,000 horses in New York City in 1890 and many people earned their living in saddling, feeding, and driving them around the city. The automobile – and the bus and the train – killed this industry and by 1940 there were roughly 10,000 horses in the city (and many fewer today). The new industries created new job openings for mechanics, cab drivers, and train operators, but they destroyed horse-centric jobs in the city. Young people – those starting their careers – made the required changes with relative ease, but many of the old guard struggled with the new technologies.

The advent of cheap and accurate computing had a similar effect on many jobs in the last decades of the 20^th century. There were over one million American typists, stenographers or secretaries in 1970, but the advent of computers and word-processing software mean that this work was no longer needed at anything like the prior level. The numbers of telephone switchboard operators, data entry card punch operators, and certain types of bookkeepers were also greatly reduced by cheap computation.

The above examples are the rule rather than the exception. Movies, radio, and television, crowded out live shows, cabarets, and plays; “talkies” required a different kind of acting than did silent movies; television rewarded telegenic actors at the expense of those with “a great face for radio.” The advent of photography moved painting away from literalism and towards more symbolic or abstract forms of art, and this in turn required different skills. The Dutch masters had an uncanny ability to produce realistic images, but who cared once cheap Nikons were available?

This week’s other laureates – Aghion and Howitt – worked these ideas into a theory of economic growth. Innovation raises productivity and living standards in the aggregate – the “creative” part of “creative destruction.” Yet innovation inevitably renders some capital, skills, and business models obsolete. Incumbent firms lose their profits; incumbent workers lose their jobs; and entire regions can be depopulated. This is not a pathology but the price of progress.

The Luddites were skilled English textile workers who violently resisted the spread of mechanized looms and knitting frames during the Industrial Revolution. They feared — correctly — that new technologies would destroy their livelihoods by allowing factories to produce cloth with cheaper and less skilled labor. Under the symbolic name “Ned Ludd,” they smashed machines in mills across northern England. The British government responded harshly: thousands of troops were deployed, many Luddites were executed or transported, and the rebellion was crushed.

The Luddites’ story endures because it dramatizes a recurring social dilemma: technological growth brings greater productivity, wealth, and progress—but also damages individuals and communities rendered obsolete. Each wave of innovation, from the steam loom to artificial intelligence, revives the same question: how should societies balance the collective gains of efficiency against the (sometimes very high) costs of displacement imposed on subgroups?

The Luddite instinct has moved from Lancashire to the halls of congresses and parliaments all over the world. Incumbent businesses and their workers fight for legislation that would protect them from being driven out of business or out of work. Some of the resulting law, particularly in Europe, does insulate and protect those specific industries and workers. Yet those same laws tend to slow advances, and Europe’s slow economic development (vis-à-vis the United States) may be due to its overprotection of incumbent workers and firms, leaving them in situ but working with obsolete technologies and business models. If taken to the extreme, these policies would have left us driving horse-drawn buggies and ordering hammers from the Sears Roebuck catalog.

Other policies strike a better balance between allowing creation while moderating the effects of destruction. Unemployment insurance, for example, provides compensation (albeit temporary and incomplete) to displaced workers. Trade Adjustment Assistance provides additional benefits to American workers who lose their jobs due to increased import competition. While not specifically tied to job loss, other aspects of the welfare system cushion the blow of obsolescence. Perhaps we should do more of this, both because these people need our help and because doing so would reduce opposition to innovation that will, if unfettered, further improve our material conditions.

German physicist Max Planck lived through what was perhaps the most rapid transformation of any scientific field ever. He wrote in his 1949 autobiography that

A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.

This quote is often paraphrased as “science proceeds one funeral at a time.” It’s funny because it’s true, and the observation applies with varying force to virtually all occupations.

The advances in economics over my career have been nothing like those of the physics of last century, but many of the theoretical and statistical models that I was taught in the 1980s have been relegated to the dustbin, replaced by new theories and, particularly, new approaches to empirical work. I mostly embrace these changes and yet the new world has had an unsettling effect on me, leaving me proficient in models and statistical programs no longer widely used. I remain aboveground, but perhaps my move towards writing has advanced economic science a bit.

Thirty-five years ago Bob Topel, that Chicago professor whose warmth and kindness got me through graduate school, said that “unemployment reminds economists that they have a lot to be modest about.” I think that’s still true. It’s also true that the tensions between innovation and growth (on the one hand) and disruption and private costs (on the other) are still with us. This year’s laureates have shown us that this is more a feature than a bug.

The first disruption was when my parents took us from Ann Arbor to Mexico and then Colombia for three months of my 2^nd grade year. Our first six weeks were in Cuernavaca where Dad took Spanish lessons to prepare himself for teaching law in Colombia. We stayed at the Los Amates hotel, down the street from Cortez’ house, and we children didn’t go to school. I woke early and would wander down to have breakfast with an American priest, the only other guest awake at the time. It now seems unwise to have let a young boy hang around with a priest, but it turned out fine. We swam in the hotel pool, ate delicious tortillas and roasted peanuts from the bodega, and watched Dad drunkenly help put out the fire started by the hotel’s New Year’s Eve fireworks. The next day I asked Dad why everyone had been so excited and, after thinking a moment, he said that people hoped to leave their troubles behind them.

Dad got me some English language children’s books on Mexican history, and I took to them with enthusiasm. I even wrote my own “history of Mexico,” really no more than a few scribbled paragraphs apiece on heroes of Mexican independence like Jose Morelos and Miguel Hidalgo and on latter-day Mexican politicians like Benito Juarez, Pancho Villa, and Francisco Madero. It was that year that I first heard the famous quote from Mexican President Porfirio Dias – “Poor Mexico, so far from God and so close to the United States.” Los Angeles Dodger manager Tommy Lasorda, an otherwise decent fellow, foolishly stated in the 1980s that his pitcher Fernando Valenzuela was the first hero in Mexican history, but even my childhood self knew this wasn’t true. I had my time in Cuernavaca to thank for it.

Dad had driven our car solo from Michigan to Cuernavaca in two days, meeting the rest of us at the airport in Mexico City. After six weeks it was time to head off to Colombia and so Dad, this time with me as a companion, drove the wagon back to Dallas where we stashed it with his parents. We stopped one night at a roadside hotel in the high desert town of Matehuala where we ate tamales and played miniature golf. We then flew from Dallas to Miami and then on to Bogota, where we met the rest of the family. Dad was devoted to his work, but he was good at finding such one-on-one adventures with each of his four children. It was also the only year that he wore Mexican shirts.

My father’s travel to Colombia – and by extension that of our family – was funded by the Ford Foundation. The Foundation believed that Colombians – and most other countries - needed more American law. Americans were rich and civilized and if only the Colombians could be more like us, then they could be rich and civilized, too. And so the Foundation sent law professors out to such countries in the hope that they would adopt American standards of law and political culture. This all sounds quite arrogant, and of course it was, but Colombian political culture and self-confidence really did need some improvement. As one example, the university in Medellin where he was initially assigned went on strike – faculty and students united in disaffection – and so he was reassigned to the Universidad de los Andes in Bogota. As another example, a law school colleague in Bogota half-jokingly balked at America’s Bill of Rights, noting that “Colombians only want the right to beat the shit out of their neighbor.” As a last example, my parents were told the story, perhaps apocryphal, of the 1950s dictator who, after soccer fans booed his wife, had his soldiers shoot up the offending section at the next game. These and other stories made it clear that Colombia, while full of wonderful people, lacked some of the institutions and civic trust that we take for granted in the United States.

Dad returned from Colombia with a cynical view of American attempts to “install democracy” in countries like Colombia. Yes, it was possible to learn from other countries’ experience, just as America’s founding generation had learned from the history available to it, but good politics and law had to mostly come from a country’s own struggles to resolve disagreements. To believe otherwise was to court disastrous wars such as that in Iraq, an event that enraged my father. I asked him in 2004 why he hated George W. Bush so much, a fellow Texan with a similar biography. “Because he’s everything that I’ve spent my life trying to not be,” he said, by which he meant an entitled know-nothing. Yet Dad’s anger surely arose partly because, in his view, W had failed to learn the lessons of his own experience in Colombia which, if anything, deteriorated politically after our residency there.

My little sister and I went to Nueva Granada school in Bogota, an English language school with many Americans and Europeans, while Mom and my older siblings took Spanish classes. Mom was bored in Bogota and so she quickly found ways to get us out and about Colombia. The first effort was a trip to Tequendama Falls, about 20 miles outside of Bogota, in the car provided us by the Ford Foundation. It was a beautiful day and Mom parked the car on the steep road so that we could hike down to the falls. It was all lovely until its parking brake failed and the car started rolling down the hill, slowly at first and then with more speed. It would either go over the cliff or turn into the hillside, and I could see that the latter outcome would be very bad. The car made the right choice fortunately, and we headed back to Bogota rather than further risk parking on the steep road. The falls are still beautiful, as was Maria, the housekeeper who came with the Ford Foundation house.

My mother was undeterred by this event and so we soon headed out on four consecutive weekend getaways via Colombia’s Avianca Airlines, each time with Dad in tow. I remember the orchids of Medellin, the size of the Amazon at Leticia, the fort at Cartagena, and the sunburn we acquired on the Caribbean islet of San Andres – but mostly I’m now struck by how adventurous and competent my parents were to troop all over Colombia with four kids between the ages of 6 and 14. Such travels would seem like small beer to modern immigrant families, but they seem remarkable in my own modern bubble of helicopter parenthood.

We returned home to Ann Arbor in March of 1970 and I recall the sense of homecoming I felt upon re-entering Mrs. Lewis’ second grade classroom. But grade school friendships and alliances are always being rearranged and, after being away for three months, I wasn’t as comfortable as I had been. Latin America was just one of many instances in which my parents shook up their children and, indeed, they moved three of their four kids in the summer before the start of their senior years in high school. When they had a 50^th anniversary party, they tacked a world map to a board and stuck pins in all the places they’d spent at least a month or two. There were pins in Japan, China, Australia, Italy, Germany, Colombia and the absurd number of schools where my dad had taught law in the United States, including Texas, SMU, Wyoming, Michigan, Indiana, Ohio State, Minnesota, Northwestern, UCLA, Berkeley, Columbia, Harvard, Duke, and Hawaii. They kept traveling into their 70s, but most of this was done when they had school-age kids.

My parents were exceptionally restless by the standards of their day, but they were of a generation of academic families that moved around the world with their families. Many children in the Ann Arbor public schools of the 1970s would vanish for a year only to come back a grade later with stories of Cambridge or Chapel Hill. Academics still take new jobs and visiting positions, but they are less frenetic than the University of Michigan professors of the 1970s. The decline in wandering is largely due to the rise of the two-career couple, which impedes moves that serve one spouse’s career but not the other. Academics still travel to give seminars and to attend conferences, but these are typically short-run trips that do not entail the transport of entire families. My father’s peripatetic career would be even more anomalous today.

This all makes me think of my own mother’s Texas childhood. She had a smart father who kept his family in a nice part of Houston until his alcoholism deteriorated. My grandmother divorced him and moved the family to Austin under reduced circumstances as she worked as a riveter at an aircraft factory. My grandmother said that her husband “had gone west with a drink in one hand and a pair of dice in the other,” but she remarried him a few years later after he sobered up. My mom’s sister Blanche was born with a heart condition that slowed her cognitive development and ultimately killed her in her early 30s. These trials and disruptions imbued Mom with a strain of cautiousness, especially around finances and career choices. Her typical response to any of my hare-brained ideas was “that wouldn’t be very smart.” It’s interesting to me that the caution co-existed within the mother that tramped her kids all over the world.

There weren’t many Native Americans left in the Ann Arbor of my youth, but the Potowatami and Wyandots had left their mark in place names like Washtenaw County, the Huron River, and the neighboring town of Ypsilanti. My parents joined the Chippewa Swim Club - named after a Michigan tribe - even though the Racquet Club was nicer and within biking distance of our house. My father later said that, despite its convenience, he had spurned the Racquet Club because it asked applicants about their college fraternities and sororities. I sympathize with my father’s revolt against snobbery, and I would have added their spelling of “racquet” as an additional offense. Yet my friends played tennis at the Racquet Club and so I snuck in repeatedly one summer until I was called out on it by a member who knew my parents. There is a tennis club in my current neighborhood that I’ve also refused to join, partly as a nod to my patrician father’s proletarian pretensions. I was recently delighted when, while playing there as a guest, the tennis pro asked me to leave. My father would have been proud of me.

Ann Arbor was a different place in 1965, but then so was the rest of the United States. Millions of people had immigrated to the United States between 1880 and 1914, and they were primarily from eastern and southern Europe. Northern cities like New York, Detroit, and Chicago had suddenly become full of Poles, Italians, and Greeks, and some of them ended up in Ann Arbor, too. Being a university town, Jews were especially well represented. Many people welcomed the newbies and reveled in the image of America as a nation of immigrants, but others, partly fueled by the scientific racism of the day, worried that the country’s “blood” was being diluted with inferior stock (see cartoon below). That backlash led to the restrictive immigration laws of the 1920s that both reduced immigration and restricted subsequent immigrants to come from Western Europe. Many people wanted even more restrictions, and the Prohibition movement had a strong anti-German element.

The politics of 1920s immigration restriction seem odd to the present mindset. Immigration supporters back then included previous immigrants (who wanted the door open for their families) and employers (who wanted cheap labor for the assembly lines of Ford, Chrysler, and John Deere). By contrast, the prominent opponents of continued immigration included unions and groups like the NAACP that sought economic advance for African Americans. These groups may today be perceived as liberal and therefore presumptively pro-immigration, but that wasn’t true back then. The NAACP thought that restricting immigration would open new opportunities to southern blacks that might move to the North if immigrants weren’t hoovering up all the good manufacturing jobs. They were at least partly right about this, too, as the Great Migration of blacks to the north coincided with the cessation of immigration from Europe, and northern cities like Chicago, Detroit, and Flint soon had sizeable black minorities. Detroit would have been a different place without that 1920s immigration crackdown, and there would perhaps have been no Stevie Wonder, no Temptations, and no Smokey Robinson. Perish the thought!

The restrictive 1920s immigration regime stayed in place until the passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. This act both allowed in many more immigrants – roughly 400,000 per year back in the 1960s and nearly one million per year today, on average – and removed the preferences for western European immigrants. The change of political heart came about through the support of old friends of immigration, such as large employers, but also because many Americans had come to view the preferences for western Europeans as both morally wrong and as a political disadvantage in their dealings with countries from Asia and Latin America. Whatever its cause, the change in law started a change in American demography that is still with us today. As just two examples, the share of the U.S. population identifying as Hispanic has grown from 5% in 1970 to 19% today and the share identifying as Asian has grown from less than 1 percent in 1970 to about 7% today. I’m grateful for these changes for many reasons, but not least because my psychiatrist might not be here without them.

Yet those changes were all in the future as of 1965, and so Ann Arbor was a very white town. The main exception was the black minority that had moved from the South to Washtenaw County during and after WWI and especially WWII. The Willow Run bomber plant, the source of thousands of B-24s, wouldn’t have been able to operate without thousands of blacks that moved to Ypsilanti during the 1942-45 period. The 1960s were a tumultuous period in the racial history of Detroit, as blacks both protested (and in some cases rioted) and gained political clout that culminated in the election of Coleman Young as the first black mayor of the city in 1974. Those same years saw a huge decline in Detroit’s population when many white people moved to the suburbs – perhaps the leading example of “white flight.” That in turn created fiscal problems for the city and led to, among other things, my mother’s layoff from her job at the Detroit Public Library in 1974. There was of course some racial strife in Ann Arbor, too, and I’ll discuss this issue in a future post, but the town’s economic and social challenges were mild compared to that of Detroit.

There was otherwise little ethnic strife in the Ann Arbor of my youth.German Americans had been somewhat persecuted in Ann Arbor (and elsewhere) during WWI, when families and German-themed cultural institutions changed their names to avoid association with the Kaiser.And yet this type of ethnic strife was uncommon by the 1960s and 1970s as the Germans, Italians, and Greeks of Ann Arbor had, at least for external purposes, lost all ethnic insignia except their names.Two Jewish friends gently mocked me much later for my perception that, among whites at least, there had been little sense of ethnicity in Ann Arbor, and I suppose that they were correct about the Jews. Yet I still think that the Schmidts, Oosterbaans, Johnsons, and Olafsens of Ann Arbor did not spend a lot of time thinking about ethnic distinctions about themselves. Maybe old friends who read this will disabuse me of that idea, but I know that I didn’t think about it much.The only common butt of ethnic (or racial) jokes of my youth were the Poles, but virtually all of them lived forty miles away in either Detroit or Hamtramck.

There were two small private schools in Ann Arbor as of 1970 – a catholic school and a newish secular private school - but I barely knew any kids who went to them. We attended Bader Elementary, a small suburban school with one class per grade, about 200 kids in total. Bader was highly unusual in one way however, even for the day, in that its students were required to go home for lunch. This was not overburdensome to us kids, as I rather liked a little break from the stress of the school days. I even had my fifth birthday party – kids had parties only at ages five and ten in our family – during lunchtime, a time-constraining idea that my mom appreciated. Yet of course sending little kids home every day required an adult to be there every day and that adult was almost always the mother. I suppose that many mothers didn’t mind this arrangement, but my mother did.

My mom had been born in 1930s Texas, but she was very much part of the women’s moment of the 1960s and 1970s. Mom later said that Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, published on my first birthday and while Mom was pregnant with her fourth and last kid, had really opened her eyes. Friedan’s book was based on her 1957 interviews with her Smith College classmates on the occasion of their 15tth reunion. Some of these women had held important jobs during WWII, when women like my grandmother entered the workforce, sometimes happily, sometimes not, but almost all of them had been funneled into postwar roles that centered heavily on housework and motherhood. Many of them felt bored and unfulfilled. Mom felt seen and heard in the book, and while it didn’t happen right away, it and the rest of the movement inspired her to get a Librarian’s Masters from the University of Michigan in 1972. There were many women in Ann Arbor (and elsewhere) who felt the same way and this required the renegotiation of many marriages that had been formed in the 1950s. My parents’ marriage survived, but many others did not.

Mom’s first full-time job of my lifetime was during the ensuing school year that we spent in New York City. My little sister and I arrived home to an untended apartment that year, but the novelty of that was mostly lost in our general sense of deracination in Manhattan. We were back in Ann Arbor for the Fall of 1973 when Mom got that job as a reference librarian at the Detroit Public Library, 40 miles away from our house. She took calls from Wayne State professors, from high school students writing term papers, and from drunks trying to settle mid-day bar bets, and she loved very minute of the job. It didn’t hurt that the Library building is quite beautiful.

I was by this time off at junior high school, where you were expected to eat lunch in the cafeteria, but my sister Emily was still at Bader Elementary where kids were still sent home for lunch. After much negotiation between Mom and the school, the solution for that school year was that Emily ate lunch alone at the Principal’s desk. There were far more kids at lunch the next school year – Emily’s last – but almost all of them were kids bussed in from Mack School, a school attached to a poorer, blacker neighborhood whose students were being redistributed to schools like Bader. The school soon instituted a stay-in-school lunch policy, just one of many ways that institutions reconfigured themselves to accommodate the rising tide of working mothers.

Mom left at 8am and returned at 6pm every day except on Wednesdays when she worked the night shift. My Mom hired my older sister Mary – who turned 16 in 1973 - to take care of me and Emily during the afternoons and early evening. This entailed fixing meals on some nights and, on some occasions, taking our family’s shift behind the wheel for carpools to swim or band practice. Mary was an exceptionally responsible teenager and did a fine job on all these things, and yet other parents were not thrilled about having a teenager drive their kids around. (I can only imagine what they would have thought if the driver had been me or my brother.) My mom viewed these complaints as the opening salvos of a still-ongoing battle between working and stay-at-home moms, and I took my mom’s view at the time. And yet, as a long-time parent myself, I now more sympathize with the other parents as I would also have not wanted my elementary school age kids being driven around by even a sober responsible 16-year-old.

One of the reasons that my parents’ marriage survived was that Dad made an effort to accommodate his newly-employed wife. This entailed exhorting all of us that “it’s never mom’s turn to do the dishes” and, indeed, we did endeavor to always do the dishes without mom’s help. Yet we tended to do a half-assed job, especially my dad, and so there was a passive-aggressive element to our support for her. It was moments like these that inspired my Mom to buy a placard that said “Housework done properly can kill you” and that she kept above her sink for decades. A similar theme played out on the nights Mom worked as, instead of cooking, Dad took us to the Greek restaurant run by his secretary’s family. Dad really did take care of dinner, but it was in a manner that was above our family’s typical spending patterns and, as far as I was aware, Mom and Dad virtually never went out to dinner as a couple in Ann Arbor. Still, I think my mom appreciated my dad’s support, his willingness to meet her in a sort of middle-ground, even as he remained a workaholic who wasn’t much use around the house.

My town, my family, and my schools had their idiosyncrasies, but the themes of immigration, segregation, and changes in the gendered structure of work and parenting that we experienced were in many ways emblematic of what was going on elsewhere in the country. It’s a world we still live in today. Ann Arbor thought of itself as the best place on earth, a mixture of Athens and Sparta, a marriage of learning and modernity, and so some of us surely thought that we were above the struggles of the rest of the country. And yet of course we weren’t.

Still, we really were much better than Ohio State.

My dad built a wiffleball field in a clearing in the woods to the side of our house, the outfield fences made of treefall bound with chicken wire. It was a popular hangout for neighborhood kids for several summers, part of a culture of outside summer games like capture-the-flag, kickball, and various riffs on baseball. We played football on the field over Thanksgiving and Christmas, but that was less common. Dad also built us a “Viking Hut,” which was a dugout room with a dirt floor, plywood walls, and a sod roof. He liked building it but never spent any time in it with us. My dad was a busy man but he was an engaged father, too, especially relative to the standards of the day.

The Hollowells lived next door, and their youngest son Tom, four years older than me, was another older brother to me, teaching me the basics of baseball, football, and basketball. He once shot me in the butt with a bi-bi gun, but that was an accident and I probably had it coming anyway. A friend of Tom’s had his bike slide out from under him in the gravel left by the snowplows and he went into convulsions right there in the cul-de-sac. The kid turned out to just have a concussion, but I still remember the urgency in Tom’s voice when he said “Go inside and get your mother!”

The Asplunds lived two doors over. They were great neighbors, with three kids, an engineer dad, and a smart, loquacious mother who was friends with my mother. I often sat for their golden retriever Velvet, mostly just letting her out in the morning and back in at night. She was free to roam the neighborhood in between those times and, while Velvet survived, many neighborhood dogs were hit by cars or trucks as they wandered about. One of the fatalities was our basset hound John. I had a fondness for Velvet’s dry kibble, which she generously shared, and the smell of wet dog still reminds me of her.

The Burdicks’ had a large yard in which we played baseball and capture-the-flag. Their son Rick was the best athlete on Newcastle Road. My brother Clark was an avid model rocketeer and Rick and I often watched him shoot Estes rockets up into the air, a loud whoosh followed by a soft pfft when the rocket deployed its parachute. Rick fondly remembered Clark and his rockets to our sister Mary at their 50^th high school reunion this year. Rodney van Valkenburgh lived just up the street, too, and he, like Tom Hollowell, was a generous tutor about basketball and football. There were a lot of Dutch-Americans in Ann Arbor, though nothing like western Michigan where there are tulip festivals, Calvinist colleges, and a pretty lakeside town called Holland.

Don Canham, the very successful Michigan athletic director, lived at 3034 Newcastle. Canham was one of the first to prove that high-end college sports could drive revenue and donations for the entire university, but neither his house nor the nearby house of the head football coach were extravagant. Canham’s daughter Claire, much older than me, was a Michigan cheerleader and for several years ran the parks department summer recreation program at what was then Bader Elementary. We had tetherball tournaments and made crafts with plastic gimp. Claire ran the program with Bob Elliott, a basketball star headed off to Arizona to play for Fred Snowden, a Michigan assistant who would become the first black head basketball coach in the NCAA.

I took several years of piano lessons from Mrs. Stebbins in 3040 Exmoor – though I was a poor and unmotivated student. I remember seeing an ambulance leaving her house and later asking my mom what had happened. “That was Mr. Stebbins,” she said. “What happened?” I asked. “He died,” she said. He might have been the first person I knew who died, and I never had another piano lesson.

Wes Yard, a very fine French hornist, grew up on 3005 Exmoor. He had thin lips. I played cornet for a while with Steve Domino at 3071 Exmoor, but he was much better than me. I was exiled in 8th grade to the baritones, which is where all the mediocre cornet players went. I failed there, too, but I quit band altogether before they could move me to tuba.

The Maughs, a family with two smart, pretty daughters, also lived on Exmoor. Sarah was later a Duke undergraduate with me. Keller Laros lived a few doors down, and he has made a career out of guiding Hawaiian tourists to swim with manta rays off of Kona. He lived next door to a sandy vacant lot where we deployed our Tonka trucks.

The McCarthy’s lived at 3025 Exmoor – they had two older boys, Bill and Dave, one of whom had a long career (I’m told) as a UAW machinist. Dave and I used to ski together at Mt. Brighton on Saturday trips organized by a local ski shop. The ski school at Mt. Brighton offered iron-on blazes that indicated your proficiency, and I once bitterly complained to my instructor when he said at the end of the day that I had not earned a yellow stripe. “You can’t do the yellow stripe turn,” he said. “You don’t want the stripe just to have it, do you?” I don’t recall my precise answer, but I’m clear that, yes, I did want the yellow stripe that I hadn’t earned. Mt. Brighton might be the lamest ski hill in the United States.

The Guttmans lived at 3035 Exmoor until I was in high school. I cannot overstate how fantastic it was to have a house nearby with five boys in it – I spent many hours playing with Lego and Hot Wheels in that house. The Guttmans were an instant party. The density of children in the neighborhood was remarkable and, sadly, my children have not had nearly as many playmates as we did. The Guttmans were one of the few Jewish families in my immediate neighborhood, but there were many more sprinkled throughout Ann Arbor and they played an important part in my early life, not least because my first classroom was at Beth Israel Nursery School.

A very nice kid named Mark Fawke moved onto Exmoor when I was in Junior High School. He had moved to Ann Arbor from Malta, but he had what I construed to be an English accent. Here are some lyrics I sung to him to the tune of Frere Jacques: “Mark Fawke, Mark Fawke, English Boy, English Boy, Piccadilly Circus, Piccadilly Circus, Cup of Tea, Cup of Tea.” Mark tolerated me pretty well, which was good, because I was an idiot.

I broke my arm in ninth grade on Exmoor while Steve Damschroder and I were trying to run each other’s bike into the curb. I lost. My mom had to cut short her visit with her old friend Harriet Cramton, visiting from Ithaca, to take me to get my arm set. One of my other long-time friends, John Lazar, always told me that I got an A for book smarts and a D for common sense. He was half-right. There were a lot of German-American families in Ann Arbor, and the Heidelberg restaurant paid a pilot to tow its banner over Michigan Stadium on game days.

The Carbeck family lived on Exmoor, too, and our houses backed up to each other. My older brother and I attended my cousin Paul’s wedding in Houston in 1974, when I was 12. I got very drunk and threw up on the plane coming back. I thought this would be my little secret, but the Carbecks turned out to be in the seat behind me, coming back from a dog show, and they kindly looked after this neighbor boy who was obviously stricken with the flu. They filled my mom in on the event when she met us at the gate. My mom nodded at the Carbecks while slyly pinching my arm to let me know that she wasn’t buying the flu story.

My beagle Lucy accompanied me on a bike ride one summer morning in 1969 or 1970 and, as was her habit, she chased and barked after a workman’s van headed east on Exmoor. Her head hit the front bumper right in front of the Guttman’s house and she was knocked out cold – I also remember the urgency of his voice when he told me to “Go get your mother.” Which I did, riding as fast as I could. Lucy lost an eye in the event, but she remained a great if subdued presence in my life.

For years my best story to tell other boys was about how Lucy, while Mom drove her to the vet, had looked out the window with her eyeball hanging from its socket by the optical nerve. This story was actually true, unlike my other go-to story about the Tokyo truck driver who had his outstretched arm knocked off by another truck and who didn’t notice it was gone for ten miles. Tween boys can never have too many gross stories.

Tracy Heston and her family lived on the street behind us, on a cul-de-sac off a cul-de-sac. The Hestons were Ann Arbor royalty because Tracy’s great grandfather had been a star running back on the 1902 Michigan football team that trounced Stanford in the first Rose Bowl game. You cannot overstate how much we cared about Michigan football, and I took its history more seriously than most.

Exmoor petered out into its own cul-de-sac and, beyond its end, there was a path that threaded its way between a creek and a swamp full of frogs and snakes. The path continued out of our neighborhood and, if you crossed the newly-constructed Huron Parkway, you could continue on through a field that led you to a grey cinderblock wall. The wall was a good six feet high and was only climbable by young kids because, in its construction, the masons had arranged to have small bricks stick outwards on either side, sort of like a modern climbing wall. Dropping down from the last brick left you on the far edge of a very ‘50s shopping mall, with stores like Sears and Montgomery Ward arranged around an inner courtyard. I found it intoxicating because it was the closest place I could buy candy. The mall was soon eclipsed by indoor malls that went up all over suburbia in the 1970s, but I think of that outdoor mall as an emblem for of the aesthetics of my youth - a hodgepodge of kitsch and mid-century modern. The mall was called Arborland.

P.S. Subgameperfect has been on hiatus partly because my assistant (pictured below) is now on senior kibble and has been sleeping more on the job. Yet it was also that life events and other writing took time and attention away from my work here. I’m happy to say, however, that all six legs of the Subgameperfect staff are back at it and so I hope to be on a more normal, biweekly-ish publishing schedule. We thank you for your patience and attention.

That’s what makes the history of Konigsberg, the largest city Germany’s East Prussia so ironic. Germany fought to protect its eastern flank from the Slavs, but most of East Prussia is now part of Poland with formerly German cities such as Stettin and Danzig now referred to as Szczecin and Gdansk. Konigsberg itself is now Kaliningrad and is now a Russian exclave tucked in between Lithuania and Poland. Much of the city still looks like Berlin or Hamburg, but the signs are in Cyrillic.

Kaethe Kollwitz, perhaps 20^th century Germany’s most famous artist, was born in Konigsberg in 1867 to a wealthy progressive family with a house that backed up to the Pregel River. Kollwitz had a sensitive, artistic temperament from the start:

I remember once hearing my Aunt Lina, who was then quite young, singing a lovely but very sad song in the pavilion.

At the end of (our yard), along the Pregel, there was a raft for rinsing laundry. A dead girl washed onto this raft one day and taken away in the “poor hearse.” I can still see the terrifying hearse and coffin.

On the whole I was a quiet, shy child, and nervous as well. Later on, instead of these tantrums of kicking and roaring I had moods that lasted for hours and even days.

There were many things that Kollwitz enjoyed in life, especially her family and friends, but she was, shall we say, always in touch with her depressive side.

Kollwitz was also taught early that life was both serious and fleeting. Her maternal grandfather led a congregation that “fostered a type of life which somewhat resembled the kind of life found in present-day young idealistic communist circles.” When her little brother Benjamin died of meningitis at the age of one, this grandfather said to Kaethe “do you see now how fleeting everything is?” Kaethe later recalled that “they were the earnest words of a minister” but that they also sounded “cruel and unloving.” My psychiatrist agrees with 6-year-old Kaethe’s assessment.

Kollwitz’ father encouraged his daughter’s artistic interests and she was later admitted to the Berlin School of Art for Women, one of the few avenues open to female artists in the rigidly gendered art world of 19th-century Germany. There was joy in her family, and Kollwitz shared in it, but in her art she was always drawn to darker topics.

Occasionally even my parents said to me, “After all there are happy things in life, too. Why do you show only the dark side?” I could not answer this. The joyous side simply did not appeal to me.

One consequence of this view was that her work – both in drawings, etchings, and sculpture – was almost entirely monochromatic.

In 1890 Kollwitz married a physician from Konigsberg and moved to a working-class neighborhood of Berlin, and there she encountered firsthand the social realities that would become the subject of her mature work.

The more I see of it, the more I realize that this is the typical misfortune of workers’ families. As soon as the man drinks or is sick and unemployed, it is always the same story. Either he hangs on his family like a dead weight and lets them feed him – cursed by the other members of the family - or he becomes melancholy, he goes mad, or he takes his own life. For the woman the misery is always the same.

March of The Weavers is probably her most famous pre-WWI work, and it depicts participants in a failed 1844 peasants’ revolt. The work was slated to receive a prestigious prize, but Kaiser Wilhelm vetoed it on account of its “revolutionary content.”

The Kollwitz’ had two boys, Hans (b. 1892) and Peter (b. 1896), but Kaethe kept up her steady work.

The quiet, hardworking life we led was unquestionably very good for my further development. My husband did everything possible so that I would have time to work.

This was of course a luxury not afforded to many female artists of the day. While most of her pre-WWI work depicted peasants and workers, she also found time to create images of herself and her bookish children. Below is a 1910 drawing of Peter Kollwitz.

Despite her dark edges, Kollwitz took to motherhood with enthusiasm, joy, and wisdom. In a 1912 letter to 20-year-old Hans, Kollwitz wrote:

I have seen so many things in life go awry and turn out unhappily; and often the unjustified feeling comes over me that even a grown child…must be guided. That is nonsense, of course. One must have confidence in one’s child; one must trust that he will be strong and wise enough to settle everything for himself. And I do have this confidence, my boy.

Below is a picture of herself and Hans that she drew around 1908.

Hans and Peter were 22 and 18, respectively, when WWI started in August 1914 and so both volunteered immediately to serve in the army. Peter was killed in Belgium in October of that same year. This loss transformed her both personally and artistically, and indeed Kollwitz’ obsession with Peter’s artistic commemoration is immediately clear in her letters and diary.

November 1914. I have in mind a sculpture in honor of Peter. That is one goal for living.

December 1, 1914. Conceived the plan for a memorial for Peter tonight. It must stand on the heights of Schildhorn, looking out over the Havel. To be finished on a glorious summer day. The monument would have Peter’s form, lying stretched out, the father at the head, the mother at the feet. It is a wonderful goal, and no one has more right than I to make this memorial.

December 9, 1914. My boy! On your memorial I want to have your figure on top, above the parents. You will lie outstretched, holding out your hands in answer to the call for sacrifice: “Here I am.” Your eyes – perhaps – open wide, so that you see the blue sky above you, and the clouds and birds. Your mouth smiling. And at your breast the pink I gave you.

Below is a photograph of Kollwitz taken in 1915.

I have a friend who went back and forth over the inscription on her son’s gravestone for more than a decade. It was partly that nothing was good enough and partly that the process of struggling with how to memorialize her son kept his memory alive in her. Those same emotions are very evident in Kollwitz’ diary and letters.

1915 letter to Hans. You speak of seeing his image before your eyes, wonderfully clear. It is so much harder for you, and for Father too, to keep him in mind. For all your work in the world takes you away from him. My work leads me back to him all the time. But he often recedes from me, too.

December 1915. To remain the same person one was before fate struck – this must not be.

July 1916. I beg that I may be able to do the work. Above all the work for Peter, but also all the rest of it. Once I have done that I will be glad to die, but first I must do it.

1919. As I stood up on the scaffold beside Peter and saw his sweet smiling face, his air of devotion, and then thought of all the time I had worked, of all the love and aspiration, all the many tears that are frozen into that work, I promised him again: I will come back, I shall do this work for you, for you and the others.

Any grieving parent can see some of themselves in Kollwitz’ words and in works like The Mothers (1919).

Kollwitz’s mourning culminated in 1932 with the installation of the sculpture The Grieving Parents in German Army cemetery in the Belgian village of Roggevelde, near where Peter was killed. The sculpture remains one of the most well-known commemorations of war dead in Europe.

Kollwitz enjoyed substantial recognition during her lifetime, and I suppose that the popularity of her morose work says something about how Europe felt about itself after WWI. Indeed, her works were widely exhibited and reproduced, she was elected to the Prussian Academy of Arts, and her studio became a pilgrimage site for young artists, and her works were widely exhibited and reproduced. Her work was intrinsically sad, but a 1923 letter to her son Hans shows that a good reception could still bring her joy – “A great response from my show. How happy I am!”

Kollwitz was not aligned with any party, but her art was embraced by a wide spectrum of reformers, from Christian pacifists to leftist agitators. The Nazi’s suppressed Kollwitz’ work - as they did with Erich Maria Remarque and other German artists with a pacifist bent - but her international reputation protected her to some degree. She lost her teaching job, but nothing more.

Kollwitz’ surviving son Hans went on to become a famous epidemiologist and had a son that he named after his brother. This second Peter enlisted in the WWII German Army and Kollwitz wrote to him shortly after the death of her own husband in 1940.

How your grandfather loved you. How he worried about your coming back. Once I wrote to you that you must always think of him and of me together. If, fate permitting, we see one another and embrace one another again, you must think then that through me your grandfather embraces you.

Peter was killed in 1942 near Rzhev, a key battleground in the failed German attempts to capture Moscow. He was 21 years old.

Kollwitz spent the latter half of WWII in ill health and her longtime home in Berlin was destroyed in an Allied air raid. She died in April 1945 at the age of 77, just weeks before the fall of Berlin. She was subsequently lionized in East Germany as a socialist heroine — though her pacifism and spiritual humanism were sometimes at odds with official doctrine. In West Germany and abroad, she was honored as a universal voice of maternal grief and anti-militarism. There is now a Käthe Kollwitz Museum that has branches in both Cologne and Berlin.

I think that Kollwitz said something important about grieving parents when she wrote in 1917 to her son Hans

I am deeply grateful for (all the praise), and it restores strength to me. I still wish very much for the chance to say what I have not yet said. I consider it important. If only that chance may be granted me. But really, when does one stop and say: now there is nothing more to express?

And a few years later, in 1921, she wrote in her diary:

Day before yesterday I was reading my diary of 1916. Even then I was already complaining that I was no longer in tune with Peter. Now seven years have passed. And his image is dissolved, even as his body has become wholly earth. The pain has vanished. I am glad to be alive, intensely glad when I can work.

I would not want to live like Kaethe Kollwitz, as there is no evidence in her art or writing that would suggest humor, snark, sarcasm, cynicism, fun, or so many of the other things that make life worth living. Yet I’m grateful for her work, and I now realize that it’s no coincidence that I was drawn to write about Kollwitz on the 23^rd anniversary of the death of my daughter Maria.