One of the things that seems to have fascinated people most about todays story on the North End neighborhood in #Detroit was Aretha Franklins history in the community. Thanks to the best journalism professor ever, Clarence Waldron, I had the good fortune of conducting a brief phone interview with Ms. Franklin. Unfortunately, I could not fit everything into the article, but here is a little bit that she told me that was left on the cutting room floor, as well as a short anecdote from the last living member of the original Temptations, Otis Williams: Arden Park became a hub for the black elite. One prominent black resident, Charles Diggs Sr., a funeral home proprietor and the first black to serve in the Michigan state senate, once caught a young girl picking a flower out of his yard. He called her father, C.L. Franklin, a Baptist minister who moved his family to the North End in the mid-1940s, to tell him. Mr. Franklin promptly reprimanded his daughter, Aretha Franklin. Ms. Franklin, who counted Diana Ross and Smokey Robinson among her neighbors, walked the neighborhood regularly as a youngster, sometimes going to the Log Cabin, an Oakland Avenue barbecue joint with a fake log cabin facade that specialized in barbecued pigs feet, to get takeout for her father. Along Oakland, Ms. Franklin sometimes saw people getting thrown out of the Champion Bar -- a “blood and guts” establishment, as she called it, where “They were very, very loud over there” -- or a man dressed like a chauffeur running up and down yelling, “I got it! I got it!” Turned out, he was the man selling numbers for gambling. When Ms. Franklin moved away from the neighborhood in the late 1950s it offered everything residents wanted -- barbershops, restaurants, ice cream parlors, drug stores -- although depopulation and deindustrialization already were taking hold. After the Temptations formed in 1960, they spent a lot of time in their early years performing at the Phelps, which had become one of the city’s premier destinations to see hot musical acts. It was where Otis Williams, the last living original member of the group, learned an important lesson. During one performance at the Phelps, Mr. Williams said, he noticed a group of women in the front row, including a cocktail waitress at the nearby Zombie Lounge whom he fancied, staring at their waistlines. When he asked the waitress afterward why they were doing that, she told him that they would learn, as they become more famous, that that’s what female fans do, Mr. Williams, 72, recalled.
Posted on: Mon, 07 Jul 2014 16:15:16 +0000
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