Homecoming

I was recently in Detroit for my father's 80th birthday and took the opportunity to visit a friend of his who owns a used machine warehouse in Detroit.



The picture is of my father and Harold "Kuhnie" Finegood surveying the scrap. Kuhnie knows from industrial decline : he bought the old Graham-Paige (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graham-Paige) factory and sold off its contents, along with many other car-making machines. Right now he is selling an old crane: anyone who wants a piece of American industrial history can snap it up for a song, just call Kuhnie at Sarah-Lil Inc.

We drove around Detroit looking at old factories and talking about how the industry has changed. We went by the iconic River Rouge Plant : even in the last 30 years it has been transformed - when I was a kid, visiting River Rouge felt like walking through old black-and-white newsreels, now its a gleaming marvel of robotics and automation. No more blood, sweat and tears : my grandfather, who worked here during the war (taking 5 subways to get from central Detroit to the Rouge Plant) would be shocked by the changes.