A Family's Hero

My grandfather in 1954

When our car passed the firehouse, two firemen stood, saluting my hero’s procession as it passed by. At their feet was a fireman’s uniform, with two empty boots and an empty helmet, now waiting forever to be worn again.

I had not known that my Grandpa Walter's funeral procession would pass this firehouse. I had been fighting back tears throughout the day, but the sight of those boots and helmet and the pride of knowing he was a hero to more people than his immediate family overcame me. The funeral procession continued to the cemetery, where we said our goodbyes, but my love and respect for my grandfather has never died.

Having a grandpa who had been a fireman was extremely cool for me as a young boy. I remember his old firefighter helmets and gas mask hanging on the basement wall and how I used to pull them down to play with. As a kid, he was a hero to me for being a firefighter, but when I grew up, I understood he was a hero for many other reasons. 

My grandpa with my aunt

I do not remember my grandpa telling any stories about being a firefighter. Despite serving the Wyandotte Fire Department for three decades, my grandpa was more interested in telling me stories about family, stories about him and grandma when they were younger and stories about my dad, aunts, and uncle. He embellished stories about his athletic endeavors, but he never once embellished stories about his work. My grandpa may have been willing to risk his life for others, but he lived for his family.

At a family party a few years before my grandfather died, I overheard my dad say to my grandfather, "You know, Dad, there's a little bit of you in all these kids here." My dad may or may not have been talking only about DNA, but our grandpa gave us a lot more than DNA.

At Home in Wyandotte

My grandparents' house

Last week, I spent the better part of two days visiting my dad’s hometown of Wyandotte for my grandma’s funeral. Despite the sadness of the occasion, I was happy to return to the city where I spent so many Saturdays and Sundays as a boy visiting my grandparents and cousins.

Wyandotte has been the home base of my father’s family since 1906, when his paternal grandfather, Joseph, arrived in town after leaving his home in Poland. Joseph’s wife and two children joined him a year later, and they had four more children, including my grandpa, who was born in Wyandotte in 1912. 

Wyandotte has a lot to offer, including restaurants, festivals, and a riverfront with parks and marinas, but when I visited Wyandotte as a child we only spent time at my aunt and uncle’s house, my grandparents’ house, or occasionally other relatives’ homes. If we weren’t at a relative’s house, we were at church or a local hall celebrating a wedding or anniversary. Wyandotte meant family.

Before visiting the funeral home, I was able to drive by my grandparents’ house and old neighborhood near Fort Street and Ford Avenue. The house and street where my dad, aunts and uncle grew up looked the same. I remembered playing football in the street on Thanksgiving Day (better than watching the Lions lose) with my cousins and yelling “Car!” whenever we needed to clear the street to let traffic go by.

The rest of the neighborhood looks the same as it did 20 to 30 years ago. People have taken good care of their homes. The park and playground a few blocks away have been updated with newer equipment and look nicer than they did when I was a kid. Driving by JJ’s Pizza on Ford reminded me how my two oldest cousins and two older brothers would walk there from my aunt and uncle’s house to pick up pizzas for us to eat, but they never let me and the other young cousins tag along.

Our Lady of Mount Carmel photo by Dwight Burdette

My grandmother’s funeral mass was held at my grandparents’ second home, Our Lady of Mount Carmel Church. It is technically called Our Lady of the Scapular now because Mount Carmel merged with St. Stanislaus Kostka parish, but I will always know it as Mount Carmel. 

Polish immigrants founded Our Lady of Mount Carmel in 1899 to serve as the center of their community as well as a place to worship. My great-grandparents were among those who helped build the current church in 1915. It was the center of the Polish immigrant community at the beginning of the 20th century, but so many Poles followed friends and relatives to Wyandotte that the diocese eventually built two more Catholic churches (St. Stanislaus and St. Helena) to accommodate them.

Mount Carmel held an annual Polish festival each summer beginning in 1972. The festival overwhelmed me the couple of times I went as a child because it seemed like every time I took a step, I ran into a great aunt, great uncle, second cousin, or someone who knew my grandparents or dad. It felt like a family wedding, but with even more people pinching my cheek and telling me how I was growing like a weed. The new parish has continued this tradition, and I hope it does for a long time. St. Stan’s had its own festival, which has not continued, unfortunately.

I have vivid memories of going to Mount Carmel for Christmas Eve mass as a kid. When I was not dreaming about the presents Santa was going to bring me, I was lost in the beauty of the church’s interior. Like many of the old Polish churches in Detroit, the walls are covered with ornate paintings and statutes of saints. During my grandmother’s funeral, I thought of the countless hours she and my grandfather spent in this beautiful building. When I looked down at my 20-month-old daughter in my lap, she was lost in the artwork on the church’s ceiling. I wondered if my grandfather and father stared up at that ceiling in the same way when they were small boys.

Our Lady of Mount Carmel photo by Dwight Burdette

After the burial at Mount Carmel Cemetery, we then proceeded to a hall on Biddle near the Detroit River, where we ate Polish food, and then to my aunt and uncle’s place on the Detroit River, where we reminisced about my grandma and the wonderful times we had with each other as kids. I loved watching my five-year-old daughter play with her four-year-old second cousin and seeing the older children of my first cousins, most of them for the first time.

I had not seen most of my cousins since my grandpa’s funeral 12 years earlier, even longer for some. Despite this gap in time, there was a special comfort in being together again. We drank. We joked. We laughed. No one openly cried though. I think we left our tears at the church and cemetery. We may not have been in our grandparents’ house, but we were with each other in Wyandotte.

We were home.

Q & A: Jean Scheffler, Author of The Sugar House

I had the opportunity to speak with author Jean Scheffler about her novel The Sugar House. The Sugar House is a gripping tale about Detroit from 1915 to the 1930s [for an in-depth review, click here]. The story’s protagonist, Joe Jopolowski, grows up from a young boy who follows his Catholic school rules to a young man who associates with Detroit’s notorious Purple Gang during Prohibition. The novel gives a rare view of Detroit and the real-life characters that populated it in the early 20th century. 

Shift Change at Ford (1910s). Library of Congress

What inspired you to write a book about Detroit in the early 20th century?

My grandpa used to tell me stories when I was growing up, and some of them were very shocking to me because I was a very naïve little innocent Catholic school girl. They were so shocking to me at the time that I remember a lot of them. I’ve also always had a love for history, and being a gerontology nurse, during my downtime, I went to my patients’ rooms and asked them to share their stories with me. I was extremely fortunate to have sat at the bedsides of such a great generation and to be lucky enough to hear the stories that made up their lives.  

I decided that this was a story I really wanted to write because a lot of people of my generation, much less my kids’ generation, don’t realize the amazing history of Detroit and the surrounding area. I felt that there weren’t many historical fiction novels about Detroit, especially that era or period, and I wanted to record it for future generations.

Have you always been interested in writing, and have you ever written anything before?

I always was interested in writing but I have not written before. I sat down and tried to write a novel a couple times, but it wasn’t the right time and definitely was not the right story. Once I found this was my story to tell, I hoped I would be worthy of the story. Once I did sit down to write it, it was very easy.

While I was writing the story, I went down to Mount Olivet and found my grandparents’ grave markers. I had already written the part about Joe and his little brother Frank, and I am sitting there on a beautiful sunny fall day looking at their gravestones, and I see there’s Frank. I had never known that my grandfather had a brother named Frank because he had passed away before I was born. I looked up at the sky and said, “Who is writing this story?”

Why did you choose to have Joe’s story revolve around the Sugar House Gang?

Because of my grandfather. When I knew him fifty years after this story took place, he wasn’t a gangster. He was a Polish grandpa. We had our Polish traditions, and he worked at McLouth Steel his whole life. I wanted to show how things were so different back then and that it didn’t necessarily make you a bad guy to be on the wrong side of the law. The story works for this day and age when people try to find themselves, and might not make the right decisions. But they try to come back to where they want to be, their families, their faith.

The Sugar House: A Thrilling Tale of Prohibition in Detroit

During the 1920s, no American gang was more feared than Detroit’s Purple Gang, also known as the Sugar House Gang. The Jewish-led gang controlled the transportation of liquor into Michigan from Canada, and their ruthless tactics convinced Al Capone that it was safer to work with them than compete with them. Despite the gang’s infamy during Prohibition, the Purple Gang’s name has not remained in America’s consciousness to the same extent as the 20^th century gangs of Chicago or New York.

In her first novel, The Sugar House, Jean Scheffler takes her readers on an exciting tour of Detroit from 1915 until the 1930s through the eyes of Joe Jopolowski, the son of recent Polish immigrants. The story shows 1915 Detroit as a city busting at the seams due to growth spurred by money from the automobile industry and an influx of European immigrants and southern Blacks.

The story begins with eight-year-old Joe speaking Polish to himself while running through the streets of Detroit. The first chapters are filled with elaborate details about the life of a Polish-Catholic immigrant family in Detroit’s Polish neighborhoods near St. Josaphat’s Church. Anyone who has eaten traditional Polish food will salivate at the descriptions of the pierogi, golabki (stuffed cabbage), and other meals that Joe’s mother serves.

At first, young Joe’s only fears are that his Catholic school nuns will punish him for some minor transgression and that his next-door neighbor cousins will tag along on a family trip to Boblo Island. However, while Joe is worried about childish matters, Detroit keeps growing. Eventually World War I and Prohibition force Joe to grow up with his city, and he associates with the Sugar House Gang to help his family survive.

At first, the story feels like it might be only a portrait of the Detroit that was and the famous people that populated or visited the city. Young Joe travels to many of the city’s famous sites, such as Grinnell Brothers Music House, the Boston-Edison neighborhood, the streetcars of Woodward Avenue, a Tigers game at Navin Field, and the Sanders Candy Palace of Treats. Scheffler describes each building, street corner, and house with the finest details. A reader with an interest in the history of Detroit, like me, will appreciate this detail, but other readers might be waiting for the story to build up.

Luckily, the story matures with Joe. With the onset of Prohibition, Joe becomes caught in an exciting but dangerous world that would have seemed unimaginable to the rule-following boy at the beginning of the novel. His world expands beyond Detroit as he finds himself working in the Downriver communities of Wyandotte and Grosse Ile. Real-life historical figures, including Sugar House Gang members, populate Joe’s world. Boats (and cars in the winter) cross the Detroit River, bringing Canadian liquor to Michigan. Cops are on the take, and speakeasies pop up throughout the city. Gang wars erupt, and drive-by shootings and violent shakedowns become commonplace. Joe struggles to survive in this world without losing the values of his family, community, and church.

The Sugar House is a must-read for anyone who is interested in Detroit’s history or anyone who wants a thrilling tale of a young man trying to remain morally strong in the face of a corrupt world. Detroit area native Scheffler clearly did her research, and the reader is rewarded with characters that feel real and a view of Detroit's past that is not easy to find. 

The Sugar House is currently available in both paperback and Kindle format at Amazon.com here.

For a Q&A with Jean Scheffler in which she talks about her research, writing process, and her grandfather who inspired her novel, click here.