Registered: Oct 2001
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Posts: 17889

May of 1943 was a pivotal month in my life. On the 4th of that month I became 16 years old and attained, in my view, a level of wit, wisdom, and sagacity unsurpassed in mankind. On the 11th of that month I received a license to drive a vehicle upon the roads and streets of the state and nation. On the 26th of that month I graduated from Austin High School the only high school then in existence in Austin, Texas. On the 27th of that month my mother and I loaded all of our worldly possessions in the back seat and trunk of our 1938 Studebaker Commander (a wonderful car by the way) and headed for South Lyon, Michigan to join my father. Even though I had moved 42 times before in my life I had never been north of Liberal, Kansas so this was my first venture into Yankee-land

South Lyon was more a village than a town. I had lived in many small towns. The fact that South Lyon had only two grocery stores, one bank, one drug store and one school was not surprising. The fact that we lived two blocks from the heart of downtown and used a brick privy with facilities for five did surprise me but not for long---most of the town had privies even though South Lyon had a city sewage system. The citizenry did not want to pay the extra cost of connecting to the sewage system.

It was only about thirteen miles to the edge of Detroit to the east and about the same distance south to Ann Arbor. But South Lyon was not on the main road to anywhere and was little known. It had one and only one industrial plant that was a maker of seamless copper tubing and was named The Michigan Seamless Tubing Company. Seamless copper tubing was a needed war material in 1943 and that plant worked 24 hours a day 7 days a week producing it. It was here that my Dad worked as a maintenance electrician.

My first task was to find a job. In the man-starved world of wartime 1943 it was no trouble at all. For three years I had worked weekends at a meat market and had a marvelous teacher trying to make a butcher of me. I walked into the largest grocery and asked the owner St. Claire Hamlin if he needed a good butcher. As luck would have it his butcher of many years service had left the week before for a better-paying defense job and I had a job the first day I tried. The next morning I tied on my butcher’s apron and became the only butcher in South Lyon making the grandiose sum of 60 cents per hour that I considered kingly pay indeed.

Having a job aided my getting acquainted in the town very much. I was soon aware that I was referred to by all the young people in town as “the new hillbilly” and they regaled themselves with Imitations of the way I talked and the words I used. “I reckon so”, “It’s over yonder”, “I hit the bird with a rock.” (rather than a pebble or a stone) were all expressions that the Michiganders considered hilarious. I resented the title they had given me until I got to know them and it actually changed to a term of endearment of sorts. And I kidded them about calling cash registers “tills” and calling a trail a “path” and more than once heard a skillet called a “spider”.

In getting new gasoline ration cards issued to the family I met a girl at the ration office named Dorothy May Woodmancie that I considered absolutely eligible to become my social consort and was about to ask her for a date when my Dad suggested I ask the girl across the street for a date. The girl across the street was named Dixie Babcock and looking down upon her yard from above-garage bedroom I had taken her to be a mere child. Dad shrugged and said, “She may be, but she has breasts like a watermelon.” Investigation proved that she was actually a few months older than I was, that her family was from Texas originally and that she was lonesome. I fell in love immediately and knew that I had found my life long soul-mate after our first date to a movie at Northville. I still had some gas rationing stamps left from the trip up so I could afford to be extravagant.

As I became better acquainted I began to “hang out” (although that expression was not yet invented) with a group of guys who had just graduated from South Lyon High School. One of these had parents who owned a house situated at Sand Lake about a hundred and fifty miles north of South Lyon. Over time we all admitted to each other that none of us had ever been drunk and we conceived a plan to go to Sand Lake for a week and nominate a different person each day to remain sober and be the custodian of the car keys, the boat house keys, and the gun cabinet keys while the rest of us got stinking drunk. We put this plan into effect. We took huge amounts of beer, bourbon, wine, gin, vodka and even a little rum if I remember correctly and started drinking each day (except the sober one) right after breakfast and until midnight. We invented new drinks of different mixtures. By the second day we were becoming sicker than we were drunk and the entire experiment seemed pointless by the third or fourth day and we were all sober as judges but very sick on the fifth day. Alcohol had lost its lure for us.

Mother and I had arrived on the 1st of June and sometime in mid November Dad and his supervisor were standing in the yard of the tube company talking when a flight of wild geese passed overhead. Dad said, “See those wild geese? They are flying south for the winter. I like to think that I’ve got as much sense as a goose. I quit.” The next day we were packing to move back to Texas.

My parting with Dixie was awash with tears. We promised to be true to each other and marry as soon as I got my college degree and found a job — I always was a responsible kid. We wrote letters to each other daily for thirteen months. By that time I was in the Navy and suddenly experienced a two month period of no letters despite my constancy with pen and ink. Then without warning or preamble came a formal wedding announcement from Dixie’s parents inviting me to attend her wedding. No word from Dixie herself. That evening in the barracks my Navy friends and I ceremoniously burned the 11 x 17 portrait of Dixie. And that is how I learned just how cruel women can be. From some other friends in South Lyon I heard that she married an FBI agent.

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Registered: Jan 2002
Location: Saskatoon, Saskatchewan
Posts: 1055

The detail with which you document your life is astounding. I couldn't for the life of me name the day that I got my driver's license, or graduated from high school. It saddens me to know that no one will ever learn as much about my past as I can learn about someone else's from a few threads.

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Registered: Jul 2000
Location: Minneapolis, MN
Posts: 10178

Oxsan I could read your stories all day long. Very good.

As much as i love living in the age of technology, when reading your tales i find myself wishing i couldve been there too.

Last edited by Dingle on 02-14-2003 at 02:22 AM

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Registered: Nov 2001
Location: Rio de los Brazos de Dios
Posts: 3876

SG the memory bit is really not so astounding. The 4th was my birthday--I would hardly forget that--I remembered that I got my driver's license exactly a week after I became 16 so that made 11
May the date--I just happened to remember the graduation date and remembered also that we left the next morning for Michigan.

Glad you like them Dingle. One of these days I am going to write a thread about why I think that I was inordinately lucky to have been born in the year 1927 and whar it allowed me to be a witness to in the world. It was a fast-paced world from 1927 to 2003 and I don't think that I would choose any other 75 year period of history to have spent my life. I will write that thread someday.

I have been fortunjate in another respect. I have always been satisfied with whatever age I was. Even now at a decrepit 75 I am perfectly happy to be that age. There are a lot of desirable things that come with old age.

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Registered: Jul 2000
Location: zanzibar
Posts: 10413

South Lyon (no big suprise) is still around, and as far as I know, has been overtaken by urban sprawl. Although there are areas north of Detroit that are still undergoing suburban construction and the locals are being forced to get hooked to City water and are resisting, but the charge is not optional.

I have been reading a biography of John Lee Hooker, he came to the area around the same time and found work in the factories. There was a huge migration from the south of people looking for work, so much that there's a lot of southern culture hanging around here. In fact, Hooker said that work was easy enough to find at the time that he would get fired from his janitoral duties at one factory and go across the street and pick up another job.

I liked reading your account of the area, like Hooker or better yet Hemingway, even though his accounts apply mostly to northern Michigan. Although I am better acquainted with northern Michigan than South Lyon, metro Detroit is so spread out that I haven't seen much of it.

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Registered: Nov 2001
Location: Rio de los Brazos de Dios
Posts: 3876

During the summer of 1943 while I was in South Lyon a major race riot occurred in Detroit. While it was in process I had to go over to Detroit to the packing house. I was accompanied on the trip by a 300 pound black man we called Tiny. Nothing much happened except that some teen agers threw some bricks at the truck and I got quite scared by the deal. Tiny thought it was a fun trip. There were a number of casualties in the riot---lodged in my memory is that 19 were killed but that number may not be correct.

I have seen an aerial view of South Lyon in the last year or two and it has grown considerably. The place where I used to live is no longer there and is a vacant lot---South Lyon did not lose a
bunch. The place is famous now for a horse training facillity on the outskirts of the town according to a Chamber of Commerce blurb I read

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