Disappearing Schools Map

Here's a map with all the schools slated to be closed by the Flint Board of Education.


View Flint School Closings in a larger map

Chrysler Declares Bankruptcy

It's bankruptcy for Chrysler.

"The bankruptcy filing could serve as a preview of what a filing by General Motors might look like. G.M., which like Chrysler received federal assistance last year, faces a June 1 deadline for its own restructuring," reports The New York Times. "Chrysler said that as part of the restructuring, it would idle most manufacturing operations beginning Monday, and resume production 'when the transaction is completed, which is anticipated within 30 to 60 days.'"

Flint School Closings: Central High and Civic Park Elementary on List of Eight

The verdict is in on school closings in Flint. The Flint Board of Education approved its 2009-10 budget today, and it appears six schools will get the ax at the end of this year:

Central High School
Anderson Elementary
Civic Park Elementary
Garfield Elementary
Merrill Elementary
Stewart Elementary

Coolidge and Wilkins elementaries will close at the end of next year.

The Flint List

A friend just asked me to run down the list of every auto-related factory that has closed in Flint, along with approximate locations. I got a little nervous because I feel like that's a list I should be able to just rattle off, along with the roster of the '84 Tigers and every party store in town that wouldn't card you in the eighties, but I'm pretty sure I came up short:

Buick City
Chevy in the Hole
Fisher Body
A.C. Spark Plug

What am I missing here? Fisher Body had more than one plant, right? Fisher Body 1 was the site of the Sit-Down Strike, but how many other Fishers were there? Or was it all one big plant with different sections? And Delphi's Flint East Plant was just AC with a different name, right? And are there plants and factories that are closed and still standing, or has everything been torn down? Somebody help me out here. It's clear that you're expected to know this depressing list if you're from Flint.

Flint Postcards: Chevrolet Motor Company

Flint Artifacts: AC Spark Plug Beer Stein

Flint Artifacts: The Smiths

Not exactly a Flint Artifact since the show was in Royal Oak, but the ticket was purchased at Hudsons in the Genesee Valley mall and it sounds like a few readers from Flint were there to see The Smiths.

Let's Get Small

Damn...

"By the time it is finished, G.M. expects to have only 38,000 union workers and 34 factories left in the United States, compared with 395,000 workers in more than 150 plants at its peak employment in 1970," reports The New York Times.

Boombox Redux

For a lot of people my age, the boombox was as much a part of Flint life as Boone's Farm and Halo Burger. Since our family car didn't have a tape deck and our house didn't have a stereo unless my older brother was home from college, my boombox and the accompanying cassette tapes were pretty much my only source of music for a long time.

NPR — in their typically earnest way — had a nice eulogy for the ghetto blaster last week, complete with videos and some great interviews:

Back in the day, you could take your music with you and play it loud, even if people didn't want to hear it. Fifty decibels of power-packed bass blasted out on street corners from New York City to Topeka. Starting in the mid-'70s, boomboxes were available everywhere, and they weren't too expensive. Young inner-city kids lugged them around, and kids in the suburbs kept them in their cars.

They weren't just portable tape players with the speakers built in. You could record off the radio, and most had double cassette decks, so if you were walking down the street and you heard something you liked, you could go up to the kid and ask to dub a copy.

The only cassette-tape mementos I have left are decidedly uncool, but they do reflect the musical dichotomy that defined my listening habits for a chunk of high school: B-52's, Agent Orange, Tom Tom Club, Dead Kennedys, English Beat (or just The Beat if you were trying to be elitist and show you knew the band's real name in England). One of my most schizophrenic mixtapes — featuring Fear, Prince, The Vapors, Crass and ABC — was too worn to survive the scanner. My endless cassettes of WDZZ taped from the radio have disappeared.

As NPR points out, boomboxes have now passed into the realm of collectibles:

These days, you don't see or hear many boomboxes, except at Lyle Owerko's house. He collects them. He keeps most of them in storage, taped up in bubble wrap to, as he says, preserve the domestic bliss. His favorite is the GF9696.

"It's absolutely my most mint box," Owerko says. "It's incredibly shiny; it's 40 watts. The speaker grilles detach, which makes it look really mean."

Owerko's collection of 40 boxes includes Lasonics and Sanyos, JVCs and Crowns. He photographs them and blows the prints up to make the boxes look even bigger than they are in real life.

My last boombox interaction happened a few years back when I went to see the Flaming Lips Boombox Experiment with my niece at Bimbo's in San Francisco. It was a fitting orchestral farewell.



Thanks to Jim Holbel for pointing this story out via Facebook.

A Hockey Player/Artist and a Girl Named Angel

Requests like this in the comment section simply demand their own post...

Richard Carr has left a new comment on your post "Vikings on Ice":

"There was a guy who used to play for Northern. He had snake-skin Camelton brand skates and a ice rink in his garage over on Lester Ct. I think he was also an artist, and had a girlfriend named Angel. What was his name?"