The War Gomes Home

The War Gomes Home

ROYAL OAK, Mich. -

The war is all the way home now.

The children of the suburbs have made their final break, unconsciously, have moved to fight in its very streets; as evidenced here in the last week of August. No blacks, no students, no commies . . . just long-haired dope-smoking high school students. White and middle class ... a revolution with a flavor and style all its own (if it is a revolution). In reality, it somehow seems like the latest fad, a pop festival of the streets.

On Monday evening, the 25th, the police moved into Royal Oak’s Memorial Park, the one place in south Oakland County where kids felt fairly free to gather, smoke dope and just generally hang-out. Most of the kids who were there left without too much trouble, but those that didn’t were dealt with in the usual manner of paranoid police who don’t have any idea of who, or what, they’re dealing.

Several people were arrested, most for possession and a few heads were busted but enough of a stir was created so that the mayor was moved to call a curfew for the next night. And the cops decided to close the park Tuesday, again, at eight p.m.

A number of circumstances need to be clarified to really grasp the import of the situation; first, Royal Oak and the position it occupies in the Detroit scene, second, who these kids are and why they are absolutely unique.

Royal Oak sits perched on Woodward Avenue, the main drag for Detroit and its suburbs, 20 odd miles from downtown, a treed community of mid-middle class residents. What front on Woodward are primarily restaurants (family-style and cheap, teen-center types, fried chicken and roast beef and hamburger clipjoints), gas stations, the occasional church, a few hardware stores, a couple of groceries. Amerika.

But Woodward has traditionally been a Motor City drag strip, from Bloomfield Hills down to Six Mile (in Detroit). Actual dragging stopped around Royal Oak, the heat getting a tad heavy in there, but Woodward’s significance went far beyond that anyway.

Detroit has simply never been a

town where one would feel inclined to hang out on the street, for obvious reasons; in place of a street scene, there was, at one time, and still is, a well-developed highway scene. “Cruising Woodward” became synonomous with going out and hanging around. Look for chicks/dudes, stop at all the bogus burger joints, drink a little beer, race a little, then back down to your home, doing everything in reverse order.

Every town has a strip like that, of course, but in Detroit that’s ALL there was, for a long time. And hundreds and even thousands of fifties/early sixties, adolescents took advantage of it. The racing would take place mostly at the north end of the strip, up where the population and the traffic was thinner, and, therefore, less chance of a bust. And on your way to the north end of the strip, or on your way past, if you came from the north of it, you could go to all the drive-ins and be strictly teen-age. If you listen to Paul Stookey’s monologue on the Peter Paul and Mary In Concert album, you’ll know what I mean; Stookey grew up in Birmingham.

Like everything else, in the mid-sixties it started to explode until today traffic is bumper to bumper; because of that, and because of the difference in drug usage (alcohol/marijuana), there’s a lot more accidents. And, if anything, these kids are more adventurous, more devil-may-care — more crazed, in a word, simply because conditions are getting farther and farther out out there.

But you can ignore Woodward now. I’d have sworn that the scene had died out, been replaced by rock and roll. But the events of last week certainly prove that assumption incorrect; the era of Woodward may have been forgotten by the radical/hip community in Detroit but now it looks like they’ll have to deal with it anew.

This all bears heavily on what happened at Memorial Park. For one thing, Woodward is so centrally located (Wayne and Oakland Counties seem to have been built around it) that hundreds of kids, hearing that there was trouble, could immediately know exactly where the disturbance was. And, again, Royal Oak is almost dead center in the strip, conveniently located for all the kids who wanted to get their hands on some real

street-fightin’. Not surprisingly, when the arrest lists were printed (a rare move in the case of juveniles), few of those popped came from Royal Oak. They came from Warren, Birmingham, Bloomfield Hills, Waterford, Detroit, Dearborn, Pontiac, Ferndale — in short, it was an uprising of the youth of Oakland and Wayne County.

But you have to understand where those kids (especially the ones from Oakland County) are at. Detroit’s hard-core hip is a relatively small faction; the majority of the long hairs, including the majority of the shoulder-length locked, come from the suburbs, unifying the hair with $20 bellbottoms and massive stereo systems, automobiles and see-through shirts. In short, deep, deep into the surface of the sub-culture, without any, or with at best a minimal understanding of its political implications. These kids still hold out hope for returning to what they’ve known as normalcy.

On the other hand, they live close enough to a high-energy rock and roll, political community to understand that there is a revolution going on out there somewhere. And they are just deep enough into the subculture to know its rhetoric, though not what they mean, and its most superficial, dangerous, but captivating tactics. In short, as Joe Booker, the Detroit Chairman of the White Panther Party, put it, “About all we could tell them was how to go about street-fighting effectively. They were determined to do it but . . . The image they have of what makes a revolutionary isn’t what being a revolutionary is at all.”

It was that macho image sparked what can best be termed a pop festival of the streets, though the press preferred to call it “a youth riot”. It was a chance to take over the street. “This is our park and I never invited them to our party,” one young dude explained. And that pretty much seemed to sum up the kids’ (and they were kids — 16, 17, 18, up to 21 maybe but not much) attitude.

II

“There were thousands of kids driving around in cars, ” Fred Frank, a local freek/radical explained. “Parents were driving up in cars and dropping their kids off.” That was Tuesday night. Harvey Ovshinsky went into the streets, to tape the material for what later proved to be an excellent documentary for WABX, one of Detroit’s progressive-rock radio stations.

Surprisingly, the adults seemed much calmer than the kids; their general perspective seemed to be one of bewilderment that the community’s park was usurped by a bunch of doping, longhaired kids who weren’t even from Royal Oak. The situation had been deteriorating for over two years, they told Ovshinsky, ever since the park was almost sold to K-Mart, the giant discount store chain. But one of the kids told Harvey, “Not too many people ever came down there at night anyway. Like, I’ve been goin’ here for a couple of years and there was never anyone here at night. Even

when not many freeks came.”

The basic problem, he thought, was the lack of anything to do. “They used to have dances last year at Kimball High every week. This year there’s no dances, there’s absolutely nowhere to go. People have to have someplace to go and this is the only place they’ve got.

“Nobody’s got a job, either. If you don’t have money, you can’t go anywhere that you have to spend money.”

The adults, on the other hand, seemed to feel that their turf was being infringed upon. “We can’t use it,” one of the local women told Harvey. “The. taxpayers that pay taxes to keep the park up, we can’t take our children down there and enjoy it. Because there’s just too many things the kids can see that they shouldn’t see.”

“I picked up a hypo and a syringe,” a man interjected, “out in my front yard and I live a block and a half away. I mean, I don’t want him (referring to his young son) to pick it up and start stickin’ himself in the arm with it. Or in the leg or the toe or somethin’. There might be anything on it.”

Dope was the main source of

concern aside from the invasion of

privacy, which seemed a highly euphemistic device to cover up

marijuana/LSD paranoia. “Out in front, when they put in sod a couple of weeks ago, I rolled the sod back and there was (sic) tubes of marijuana, and pep pills and whatever they call it, hash or whatever it is. The police told me what it was. I gave it to them,” said one disgruntled resident.

But youth sources said that it just wasn’t true. “There were no

hypodermic needles left out at the park, no dope left on the ground. I’ve been there at four o’clock in the morning and looked around myself and there was nothing left on the ground except for a little litter. Which is picked up during the day by the people,” we were told.

“I heard there were a couple of narcs who were roaming the park during the last couple of weeks but they didn’t give anyone a hassle. By the time they got down there the people already knew what they were and who they were.”

As usual, the kids from Royal Oak were largely absolved by their parents. “It wouldn’t be half as bad if the other kids would stay off,” another man insisted. “The Royal Oak kids there are only minimal. The rest of ’em are from Birmingham, Southfield, Detroit.”

III

“I don’t really care what they do,” a Royal Oak housewife insisted, loudly. “It’s just that it’s always maybe a minority who ruin it for everybody. Which isn’t right; you know, they can do their thing, who cares? I don’t care what they do, just as long as I’m not involved; when I’m involved, then I’m naturally gonna be concerned. And then, when you’ve got children you have to raise, you look at it altogether different. What they do someplace else, I don’t care.”

Some manifested the fear syndrome differently. There were the belligerent ones, like the man who, when asked by Harvey about kids crossing his lawn, replied, “Just as long as they don’t slow down. That’s all I got. That’s all 1 got to say, man. Cause if they slow down on me, I’m gonna...they wouldn’t stop.”

And it is certainly unfortunate, but all too true, that the police have the total support of the populous. A woman: “I’m glad to see ’em, I really am. Because the kids can’t do anything, my kids can’t use the park, and that’s a shame. My kids haven’t been able to use the park for two years and we’ve lived here for ten. We’ve enjoyed the park, but now we can’t. And it’s not fair. They claim it’s their park, but it’s not. It’s our park. So I’m glad to see the police.”

And the kids were really, really lost, most of them. Some of them came to show off, sure, and none of them really knew what the fuck the politics of this situation were, but they all knew they had to fight for something. Somehow, the park was an issue. Not the kind of issue, mind you, that shows the enlightened alienation of the kids from their hopelessly bourgeois suburban parents. These kids, for the most part, are next to being hopelessly bourgeois.

Tuesday night, Channel Seven said “This is not war, this is a revolution,” in an 11p.m. editorial. Misguided and ill-informed as the troops may be, Channel Seven was right. The kids simply can’t go back.

IV

WABX, in a 22 minute special from which the majority of the quotes of this article come, said “Unless all sides get together and take one step back, the only alternative is continued street fighting.” WKNR-fm’s staff put together an editorial that said, basically, that the park should be re-opened immediately, 24 hours a day. They also called for people’s control of the park scene. And as someone else put it, “Where the hell do they want people to go?”

The kid’s position was that they were trapped. “We just want our park back. We feel that we weren’t doin’ nothin’, we were just in the park, havin’ a good time, not botherin’ anyone. And they just come rushin’ in, they just moved in and they were beatin’ everybody. They wouldn’t give up, people were just runnin’ to their cars. We’re gonna get our park back.”

And the chances of that being done peacefully? “We can’t ask them because they won’t listen to us. So we have to do the same game that they do.”

And they understood it at gut level, not the way college students might, but as the high schoolers, the teen-agers, they are. “Why don’t they just give up and put swastikas on their cars, and go all the way, man. Like that’s all it is; Gestapo work.”

There were no issues; the issues were, rather, monumental and vast and so generalized as to be ridiculous. “How can you loiter in a park?” one girl asked. “Where are you gonna do your loitering? We have no place to go now. I mean this is exactly what the officials and cops wanted, I guess, since they closed the park.”

Another girl summed up why the kids wanted the park, “It was a place to go. What is there to do? You can sit home and listen to records, or go out -on a date and go park or something, but Memorial Park is a place to go where you can meet your friends and rap and get high.”

And they didn’t care, didn’t understand that rocks and bottles ain’t no match for guns and gas. “I think a lotta people are gonna get hurt pretty bad. I really do...(he paused)...It’s gonna be a bummer too.”

Ugly as it is, these kids are learning something out in the streets but they don’t know how to put all the pieces of knowledge together. The mayor says it’s a police matter, the police as usual aren’t saying much of anything by way of rationale, the parents are either freaked or totally defensive. And the kids, what about the kids?

“We’re gonna die tryin’ to get it back. - Balduck (an East Side Detroit park that was closed recently under similar circumstances ), we lost. This we ain’t gonna lose. Balduck was a bad scene; this is kind of a low energy scene. Balduck had been going on, like at Algonquin, for three or four years. It was kind of a more community scene.”

“They can’t shut the world off,” another boy added. And a friend piped up, “I think everyone’s gonna get their heads busted because the pigs aren’t really starting it. It’s the people. Because they want a revolution and it’s not time.”

For these kids, maybe not. But the Royal Oak disturbance is certainly without parallel. There was no rationale behind this, this wasn’t people’s park. These kids aren’t the unwashed, a lot of them still live at home.

James Baldwin promised Amerika the fire next time. Who’d have ever thought it would spring up from her very own womb?

Dave Marsh