Old School

I'm reposting this entry, since my brother and dad noted some errors of the family memory that came down to me over the years. The amended version is below.

My brother Phil at two years old with our step-grandfather Bill Ellis. There is some family story about the dog "Cuddles," but I forget what it was. It was like a crazy dog or something like that. Looking at this photograph, it's hard to tell the social activist lurking beneath the cute boy outfit.

My mom Barbara Simon and dad Ronald Bokovoy in 1959. Check the cool 50s style going on here. My dad used to work at a gas station in high school and all his buddies used to bring their cars there at night to hang out and tune up their rides. I think the gas station was on 8-Mile Road in Detroit and there was a Big Boy drive-in across the street where all the girls used to hang out. It was the classic "American Graffitti" scene, guys and gals hanging out being too cool. I think that's how they met. I think Ron soon thereafter went to work on the Great Lakes on an ore tanker one summer while enrolled in college at this time. But this is right after they were married.

This is Bill Ellis and Mary, out on the town in Detroit during the 1950s. They used to go to the "black and tans," or the integrated nightclubs so numerous in Detroit after WWII. Since they were from immigrant families, it was no wonder that blacks and second generation Southeastern Europeans went to these places, no doubt, the basis of the Democratic Party and UAW in Walter Reuther and Coleman Young Era Detroit. You certainly would not see the Detroit "Old Money" from Grosse Pointe hanging in these places.

Bill's family was Scottish and I always remember him walking around in one of his many Tam-o-Shanters, usually with his tool belt on. He used to remodel and customize their home. Every time I came over to visit their house, Bill had a tank or airplane model to give me. Pretty cool.

This is my mom at Palmer Park in Detroit during the 1940s.

This is my mom and Mary Beth Simon, my aunt, I guess on their front porch in Detroit in 1948. All these photos in this section were scanned and compiled by Aunt Mary Beth, so we have them for posterity. I'll have a section on them and the Colorado Ranch in the future.

This is a photograph of my grandmother Mary Malerick Ellis and her brother August (or "Uncle Gus") in Detroit in the late 1930s. She passed away in 2004 and we all miss her alot. The whole family was Croatian and there is a wild story of how my mom's family came to America, something about a dispute between my great grandfather Franjo and another Austrian military officer during WWI that made it necessary to get the family out of the Hapsburg Empire.

Mary used to tell me the story about Uncle Gus being the Dodge-Main sit-down strike in the late 1930s. All the great uncles and her father Franjo worked in the auto industry, and when Franjo worked at Ford, they fired him for getting injuried (he stuffed seats, and a needle pierced his artery while grabbing the pile, he had been "negligent" according to Ford). Needless to say, the strikes led to better wages and benefits for Ford workers, which brought comfortable retirements for Mary and Gus. It was the last generation of good labor-management relations now absent in corporate America.

So Franjo urged them to consider joining the UAW, headed by Walter Reuther. Mary said that she and other girls in the neighborhood would go to Hamtramack where the factory was located, and they would throw bundles of food through the windows so the strikers had food. When Uncle Gus retired, he used to cruise around Detroit in this white Chrysler LeBaron convertible, with red leather interior. He was pretty cool for an old auto worker guy.

This is a photograph of Franjo Malerick, Mary, and an unidentified family friend I think. I've heard alot stories about Franjo over the years, so I have a composite picture of him. According to Mary, he wanted his kids to get a good education and there was always alot of books in the house. He also owned some properties on their block, and was supposedly the first person to rent his property to a black family, who lived next door the Malericks. He didn't like the neighbors suggesting that he was helping to destroy the block. When Mary was older, she organized a campaign to clean-up Woodward Avenue,which had a bad drug trade and petty crime. I guess that's why my grandmother became a neighborhood activist. She actually ran for city council back in the 1970s, and knew people like Carl Levin, John Conyers, and Joe Madison, the DC radio personality known as "The Black Eagle."