Ghosts of Flint: Corvair Monza in Anacortes, Washington

Feeling Blue in Flint and San Francisco

The more things change, the more they stay the same, at least when it comes to politics.

My old Flint precinct in Civic Park is decidedly blue, just like my current precinct in San Francisco's Bernal Heights, according to this great New York Times "extremely detailed map of the 2016 election."

Teardown: Memoir of a Vanishing City by Gordon Young

Now Available for Pre-Order on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Waterstones in Great Britain, and Indigo.

Praise for Teardown: Memoir of a Vanishing City by Gordon Young

"One can read Teardown and go 'My, my, my! What a horrid town! Thank God I don't live there!' Oh, but you do. Just as the 'Roger & Me Flint' of the 1980s was the precursor to a wave of downsizing that eventually hit every American community, Gordon Young's Flint of 2013, as so profoundly depicted in this book, is your latest warning of what's in store for you — all of you, no matter where you live — in the next decade. The only difference between your town and Flint is that the Grim Reaper just likes to visit us first. It's all here in Teardown, a brilliant chronicle of the Mad Maxization of a once great American city."
— Michael Moore 

"There must be a thousand good reasons to flee Flint. I can't assume there are many reasons to return. Gordon Young's Teardown supplies a few of these answers. A humorous, heartfelt and often haunting tale of a town not many could love. Fortunately for us, a few still do."

— Ben Hamper, author of Rivethead: Tales From the Assembly Line

“Teardown is the tragic and somehow hilarious tale of one man's attempt to return to his hometown of Flint, Michigan. Gordon Young is a Flintoid at heart, and his candid observations about both the shrinking city and his own economic woes read heartbreakingly true.”

— Novella Carpenter, author of Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer

“Armed with an aluminum baseball bat and a truth-seeking pen, Gordon Young returns to the post-industrial wasteland of his hometown — Vehicle City, aka Flint, Michigan — in search of a derelict house to buy and restore. At least that's his cover story. Young's true mission is to reclaim his past in order to make sense of his present. If you're bewitched by the place where you grew up, you'll find comfort and a sense of home in the pages of Teardown.

— Jack Shafer, Reuters columnist and a former Michigander

“Like so many other Flintites, I visit my hometown with a mix of sadness, repugnance, and anger. Flint is too easy to criticize, but I look back in gratitude for the values Flint instilled and the bonds I made that remain with me to this day. You can take the boy out of Flint, but you can’t take Flint out of the boy.”

— Howard Bragman, author of Where’s My Fifteen Minutes?

“Teardown is a funny and ultimately heartbreaking memoir. The travails of house hunting are skillfully interwoven with Gordon Young’s attempt to reconcile life in his adopted city of San Francisco with his allegiance to Flint, Michigan, the troubled city of his childhood. The result is an all too contemporary American story of loyalty, loss, and finding your way home.”

— Tom Pohrt, artist and author of Careless Rambles by John Clare, Having a Wonderful Time, and Coyote Goes Walking.

For more information, including excerpts, photos, and events, visit www.teardownbook.com.

Flint, Michigan would be hard hit by G.O.P. Medicaid work requirements

Flint, prepared to get screwed, as usual. This time it's Medicaid.

Alice Ollstein of TPM reports:

In the GOP-controlled states of Kentucky, Michigan, and Ohio, waiver proposals would subject hundreds of thousands of Medicaid enrollees to work requirements, threatening to cut off their health insurance if they can’t meet an hours-per-week threshold. 

Those waivers include exemptions for the counties with the highest unemployment, which tend to be majority-white, GOP-leaning, and rural. But many low-income people of color who live in high-unemployment urban centers would not qualify, because the wealthier suburbs surrounding those cities pull the overall county unemployment rate below the threshold. 

In Michigan, the GOP-controlled legislature is trying to pass a bill to make the 700,000 people enrolled in the state’s Medicaid expansion either work at least 29 hours per week or lose their benefits for a year. According to the state’s own numbers, 105,000 people could lose their insurance, but that burden will not be shared equally across the state. 

A Washington Post analysis found that while African Americans make up about 23 percent of Medicaid enrollees in Michigan, they would make up just 1.2 percent of the people eligible for an exemption. Meanwhile, 57 percent of Michigan Medicaid enrollees are white, but white residents would make up 85 percent of the population eligible for an exemption.

Places to Park by the Factories and Buildings

I see the shapes
I remember from maps
I see the shoreline
I see the whitecaps
A baseball diamond, nice weather down there
I see the school and the houses where the kids are
Places to park by the factories and buildings
Restaurants and bars for later in the evening

Then we come to the farmlands, and the undeveloped areas
And I have learned how these things work together
I see the parkway that passes through them all
And I have learned how to look at these things, and I say

[Chorus]
I wouldn't live there if you paid me
I wouldn't live like that, no siree!
I wouldn't do the things the way those people do
I wouldn't live there if you paid me to

I guess it's healthy, I guess the air is clean
I guess those people have fun with their neighbors and friends
Look at that kitchen and all of that food
Look at them eat it, I guess it tastes real good

They grow it in those farmlands
Then they bring it to the storeThey put it in the car trunk
Then they bring it back home
And I say

[Chorus]
I wouldn't live there if you paid me
I wouldn't live like that, no siree!
I wouldn't do the things the way those people do
I wouldn't live there if you paid me to!

I'm tired of looking out the windows of the airplane
I'm tired of traveling, I want to be somewhere
It's not even worth talking
About those people down there

Goo goo, ga ga ga
Goo goo, ga ga ga
Goo goo, ga ga ga
Goo goo, ga ga ga
Goo goo, ga ga ga
Goo goo, ga ga ga
Goo goo, ga ga ga
Goo goo, ga ga ga
Goo goo, ga ga ga
Goo goo, ga ga ga
Goo goo goo goo, ga ga ga ga!

Happy Birthday Tiger Stadium

"April 20, 1912 —the day should be trumpeted. There should be balloons and bunting. A celebration. A cake. There is none of that. Just silence. They would prefer we forget.

"It opened in the era of ragtime music and black Model T's. Airplanes were still aeroplanes. Mary Pickford was becoming a star, and Jim Thorpe soon would be. The First World War had yet to begin and women wouldn't get the right to vote for eight years. It was a time when fans wore sports coats and dress hats and paid to stand in the outfield, separated from the players not by a home-run fence but by a rope that defined the playing area."

           — Tom Stanton, The Final Season

Deindustrialization, Decline, and Opioids

Andrew Sullivan, writing in New York Magazine, on "the emptiness" and opioids:

"If industrialization caused an opium epidemic, deindustrialization is no small part of what’s fueling our opioid surge. It’s telling that the drug has not taken off as intensely among all Americans — especially not among the engaged, multiethnic, urban-dwelling, financially successful inhabitants of the coasts. The poppy has instead found a home in those places left behind — towns and small cities that owed their success to a particular industry, whose civic life was built around a factory or a mine. Unlike in Europe, where cities and towns existed long before industrialization, much of America’s heartland has no remaining preindustrial history, given the destruction of Native American societies. The gutting of that industrial backbone — especially as globalization intensified in a country where market forces are least restrained — has been not just an economic fact but a cultural, even spiritual devastation. The pain was exacerbated by the Great Recession and has barely receded in the years since. And to meet that pain, America’s uniquely market-driven health-care system was more than ready."

And...

"Market capitalism and revolutionary technology in the past couple of decades have transformed our economic and cultural reality, most intensely for those without college degrees. The dignity that many working-class men retained by providing for their families through physical labor has been greatly reduced by automation. Stable family life has collapsed, and the number of children without two parents in the home has risen among the white working and middle classes. The internet has ravaged local retail stores, flattening the uniqueness of many communities. Smartphones have eviscerated those moments of oxytocin-friendly actual human interaction. Meaning — once effortlessly provided by a more unified and often religious culture shared, at least nominally, by others — is harder to find, and the proportion of Americans who identify as “nones,” with no religious affiliation, has risen to record levels. Even as we near peak employment and record-high median household income, a sense of permanent economic insecurity and spiritual emptiness has become widespread. Some of that emptiness was once assuaged by a constantly rising standard of living, generation to generation. But that has now evaporated for most Americans."

Flint Photos: Doomed Space

"A rich silence, heavy with secrets and untold stories, hangs in the air of each doomed space, and the banal residue of everyday life seems to cling to the blank walls like mold"
— Holly Myers, LA Weekly, 2001

Flint Photos: Illinois Avenue

In Memory of Patricia McFarlane Young

Pat Young during her days as a department store model.

Patricia McFarlane Young, who lived an adventurous, unconventional life guided by her generous spirit and sense of humor, died on December 8, 2017 in Tacoma, Washington. She was 87. 

Pat was born and raised in Flint, Michigan when it was a thriving hub of the automotive industry. “I grew up on the Eastside and recall the unexplained pride I felt when the 3:30 Buick factory whistle blew and the roughly dressed workers poured out of the General Motors’ labyrinth swinging their lunch pails,” she wrote in an essay about her early life. “Some were headed for home and some for the corner bar, but all with the determined step of an army after a battle won. I somehow felt as if I were a part of this giant assembly line and the city it fed.”

But she also knew there was a bigger world beyond Flint, and she was eager to explore it. “Nostalgia, I’m sure, is the opiate of old age,” she wrote. “Memories over ten years old automatically become the ‘good ol’ days. We remember only the happy things and leave the shaded areas behind. And yet, faintly sifting through the sands of time, I seem to recall saying, ‘The day I’m 18, I’m leaving this town.’"

After graduating from Central High School in 1948, she lived in Detroit in the early fifties, where she fell in love with jazz and a jazz musician or two. She moved to New York and became a department store model at Bergdorff Goodman’s and a regular at clubs like Minton’s Playhouse when Bebop was exploding. She had great stories about seeing legends like Charlie Parker and Dizzie Gillespie perform. She remembered loaning saxophonist Gerry Mulligan money to buy coffee and a newspaper early one morning in Harlem. “He still owes me a dollar,” she said.

Pat eventually worked for National Airlines as a stewardess — she wasn’t fond of the term “flight attendant” and refused to use it — and regularly flew out of Miami, Havana, and New Orleans. 

Later, as a Navy wife, she set up houses all over the country — San Diego, San Francisco, Jacksonville, Florida, and Olathe, Kansas, to name a few — but she eventually returned to Flint. There was a part of her that was disappointed to be back, but she wasn’t the type of person to mope. As a single mother, she worked hard to create a stable, happy life for her four children. She was an admitting clerk at McLaren Hospital for many years, earning money to send her kids to college. 

As a devout Catholic, she attended Mass at St. Michael’s and St. Mary’s. Her love of football was intertwined with her faith. She was a regular at Powers Catholic High School games when her kids were students. (The hot rum cider she brought to Friday night games in a thermos was legendary in the parents’ section of the bleachers.) And she energetically watched Notre Dame football after dutifully placing a small statue of the Virgin Mary on top of the television before kickoff. That didn’t stop her from berating the refs when calls went against the Fighting Irish. Expletives were not always deleted.

She loved her parents, who moved to Flint from the cornfields of Iowa in the 1920s. She described her father, Verne McFarlane, as “my gentle hero all my life,” and credited her mother, Leone, with giving her the determination to deal with life’s setbacks. “Their love, and growing up in Flint, made me into a person who could handle tough times and appreciate what really matters,” she wrote.

Pat worked at Jacksonville University, organizing performances for the School of Fine Arts, after moving to Florida in 1986. It was the perfect situation for someone who, by her own count, had around 50 different jobs during her life. She enjoyed talking to agents in New York and getting updates on the places she remembered. Many were long gone, but not all of them. And she had an easy rapport with the performers, making them feel welcome in a way that the college professors could not.

Cooking down on the farm.

After retiring, Pat put a lot of miles on a red pickup truck she called Bubba. She had taken more road trips in the last 20 years than most college kids, often driving from her home in Jacksonville to the family farm in Maple Leaf, Iowa. She slowly but surely restored the century-old farmhouse where her mother grew up. Pat had visited the farm for long stretches every summer as a child, so in many ways this was also home to her. She liked the solitude, and she looked forward to seeing old friends and relatives, people who had known her folks. She certainly wasn’t a farmer, but she understood the rhythms of life in small-town Iowa and liked being a part of it. 

When she visited her kids on the West Coast, she drove cross country, lately with her 90-pound dog, Rob Roy, by her side. (He was a lovable guy, even though he looked fairly menacing.) She listened to unlikely musical combinations on her cassette deck. Frank Sinatra might share time with country singer Dwight Yoakam and Rod Stewart on a stretch of highway. She relied on a dog-eared atlas with handwritten notes detailing where to get blueberry pie in Montana or a good burger in Missouri. She knew where obscure Frank Lloyd Wright houses were located on her northern route. And she knew how to find the Palm Court Jazz Cafe when her travels took her to New Orleans.

Pat made these trips so often she had friends along the way, people she had quickly bonded with over lunch at a diner or during conversations in hotel lobbies. She even exchanged letters with some of them over the years. She could easily turn strangers into confidants. She was someone people liked to be around, an open, unpretentious woman who had a way of understanding what you were going through, whether it was good, bad, or in between. 

She spent the last few years living in Tacoma, Washington, where she could be close to her son, Matt, and daughter, Martha, who lived on the same street. She often talked about how much she loved her daughter, Catie, who lives in North Carolina. She got to see her grandkids and great grandkids regularly. This summer, she got to hold her newest grandchild, Larkin, when her son Gordie visited from San Francisco.

Pat often described herself as a dreamer. She admitted that she was always searching for something in life, even though she wasn’t quite sure what it was. (That’s probably the case for most people, if they are brave enough to admit it.) But she never stopped trying, and she never let the search overwhelm her. She maintained her independence, her intense love of her family, and her kindness for those who were struggling until the end.

It’s hard for her children to imagine life without her. But she taught them that sometimes the hardest things in life can be the most meaningful, and that our memories of those we love can continue to guide us and comfort us. 

We love you, Big Mama.

Pat is survived by her daughters, Catherine and Martha (Patrick), and her sons, Matthew and Gordon (Traci). She is also survived by her grandchildren Claire, Grace (Michael), Hannah, Dylan, and Larkin, as well as her great-grandchildren, Violet and Cash. She was preceded in death by her parents, Verne and Leone McFarlane.

In lieu of flowers, please consider a donation to Luke M. Powers Catholic High School in Flint, Michigan.

Pat Young with her dog, Rob Roy, on the family farm she restored in Maple Leaf, Iowa.