"John R. Carroll" wrote in message
...
Ed Huntress wrote:
"John R. Carroll" wrote in
message ...
Ed Huntress wrote:
"F. George McDuffee" wrote in
message ...
On Sun, 18 May 2008 13:04:01 -0400, "Ed Huntress"
wrote:


"F. George McDuffee" wrote in
message ...
On Sun, 18 May 2008 10:40:04 -0500, F. George McDuffee
wrote:

snip
FWIW -- the average age of the current US supreme court is now
68, which helps explain why SCOTUS cannot seem to relate to the
problems and concerns of the people in the current times.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supreme..._United_States


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demogra...d_St ates#Age
snip

It was Hamtramck Ed.

Obviously a blighted place.

Actually it wasn't Ed. Certainly less than much of the rest of Detroit.

Damn, I'm being too facetious today. Yes, I know what you mean. I've been to
Hamtramck.

Hamtramck had lost about a third of it's land when I-75 was built and the
community fought so hard that the short section that went through it
didn't
get finished until the late 70's.

The community was almost exclusively Polish immigrants and their families.
The founding group had emigrated during and immediately after WWI and
before
and to some extend during WWII and then after. Hamtramck became the
largest
single grop of Poles outside of Poland and they were very proud to be both
American citizens and of Polish Heritage.

We had some horrible Hamtramck Polish jokes when I was at Michigan State.
g

You wouldn't have survived a bad mouthing of either in a club there. The
city was an excellent example of how immigrants can embrace their new
country and not abandon their culture.

My first college roommate, Bohdan Huzar,
was from Hamtramck. He arrived on a soccer scholarship but then they
learned he had played semi-pro ball in Hamtramck for $25/game, and
they kicked him out of the NCAA.

I don't know his story but it was a club town so he probably played for
one
of the many clubs. I'll bet it never even crossed his mind that he'd done
anything either unusual or worth reporting.

That's right. He was flabbergasted and furious when they told him he
couldn't play NCAA. They were tough about that in those days.


They deserved to have the town flattened for stupidity. g

Maybe.
The population was disposessed at a bad time. Their homes, while largely
paid off, weren't worth much compared to the out lying burbs and the
population was pretty long in the tooth. In the end, a couple hundred
thousand old people without any real means of support ended up out on the
street. The rest of Michigan was concerned about the survival of the auto
industry and those old folks got thrown under the bus quicker than quick.
The closest thing I can think of off hand where an entire ethnic comunity
vanished is also Polish and the residents of Hamtramck weren't killed as
were the residents of the Warsaw ghetto's but things were pretty rough by
our standards.

It's also interesting that the manufacturing comples built on Hamtramck is
now gone. Should you ever speak with Bohdan Huzar, ask him what he thinks
of
that.

I lost track of him after freshman year. We had 42,000 students on one
campus, and I moved into a residence college, James Madison College of
Policy Science, which had fewer than 1,000 at the time. We were a little
isolated from the rest of Michigan State.

--
Ed Huntress