York and made another fortune in the stock market, his latest obsession. After the market crashed on Black Tuesday in 1929, Durant, along with other financial giants like the Rockefellers, disregarded the advice of friends and bought heavily to show confidence in the market. He declared bankruptcy in 1936.
A crazy dreamer if there ever was one, Durant returned to Flint for one final venture. He opened an eighteen-lane bowling alley in 1940 and later combined it with one of the country’s first drive-in hamburger joints, creating perhaps the quintessential Flint enterprise. He thought bowling and fast food were the next big thing, but he never got a chance to see his hunch pay off. After suffering a debilitating stroke in 1942, Durant and his wife survived on handouts from members of GM’s early board of directors until his death in 1947.
I couldn’t help but like Durant, despite his many faults, as I read about his triumphs and failures. For me, he came to personify that hard-to-define spirit that Flint possesses, a certain exuberant recklessness that I wanted to somehow be a part of again. Durant’s approach to business may have robbed him of prosperity in the end, but he was a visionary whose ideas transformed Flint. By 1929, on the eve of the Great Depression, GM had produced ten million cars for consumers and was well on its way to becoming the world’s largest corporation. In the process, Flint gained a reputation for plentiful jobs and good wages, causing the population to jump from 13,000 to more than 156,000 between 1900 and 1930. Finding a comfortable place to sleep was a real challenge for the new arrivals. “In the worst areas, like the notoriously overcrowded section known simply as ‘the Jungle,’ hundreds of families paid one dollar down and fifty cents a week to purchase tiny lots for their tents and tarpaper shacks,” wrote historian Ronald Edsforth. “Elsewhere, homeowners took in lodgers, while many rooming houses converted to double shifts, using every square foot for extra beds.”
Verne McFarlane and Leone Stevenson, my grandparents, were part of the influx. In my mind, they were always the picture of calm stability. I don’t remember seeing my grandfather in anything other than a suit or the well-ironed work clothes he wore on weekends. Their home was always spotless. They expressed the same disapproval of a neighbor’s uncut grass as they conveyed when someone appeared to be spending money unwisely. I didn’t think of them as particularly adventuresome, but on a visit to see my mom one Christmas at her cozy house in Florida, decorated with much the same furniture and artwork that once filled our old house in Flint, I learned that they fit right in with the spirit of the Vehicle City during the boom years.
Sitting on the indestructible couch where I had lounged as a kid, my mom broke out her meticulously maintained photo albums and filled me in on the family history that I’d never really known. My grandparents both grew up on forty-acre family farms in the northeast corner of Iowa near Maple Leaf, which no longer warrants a mention on state maps. My grandfather wasn’t meant to be a farmer, but he promised to help his dad for several years after graduating from eighth grade. Tall and lanky, he pitched for the local barnstorming baseball team and was known to participate in weekend wrestling matches. My mom showed me a flyer from one bout with his personal commentary written in neat cursive above his opponent’s name: “He got nothing but abuse!” Given my grandfather’s gentle demeanor and sense of humor, this was surely more of a joke than a boast. My grandmother was shy, smart, and good looking. She grew up with seven brothers and sisters in the house with three tiny bedrooms that her father built. After finishing high school, she taught in a one-room schoolhouse. My grandparents met at a dance called the Turkey Trot.
I had always assumed they were married in Iowa, but that was not the case. They eloped in the early 1920s and eventually made their way to Flint. They were in love, but that didn’t mean they abandoned the frugality imparted by their hardscrabble Scottish parents. They lived together but pledged to save one thousand dollars each before they got married, a lofty financial goal at the time. (Actually, it would be ambitious for many Flint families even today.) The fact that my grandparents had “lived in sin” for a short time was my first big surprise.
My grandfather worked at “the Buick” for a little while, but he was as ill suited to life on the line as he was to life on the farm. He soon started a small trucking outfit with a friend, but the entire enterprise folded when their lone asset—the truck—caught fire. My grandmother was not pleased with this development. She was more pragmatic than my grandfather and always acted as the family bookkeeper. After a few tries at other businesses, he gravitated to real estate, studying up and passing the licensing exam to buy and sell property.
My mom opened the cedar chest in her bedroom and pulled out the well-preserved, amazingly detailed financial logs my grandmother kept her entire life, tracking every penny made and spent. The dark green ledgers included all the real-estate commissions my grandfather earned, but they also listed the financial breakdown on dozens of houses he personally bought and sold. My mom told me that my grandparents had regularly purchased rundown houses with their own money. Grandma, using the carpentry skills she learned from her father on the farm in Iowa, was in charge of rehabbing the properties. A long-forgotten memory of helping her lay down a linoleum floor in the kitchen of a cold, empty house flashed into my head. We were both on our hands and knees, and she was teaching me how to measure out the tiles with a yardstick. She was a stickler for getting it right. I remember pulling up linoleum squares because they didn’t fit perfectly into a corner. My grandparents then resold the properties. The logs offered a blueprint of the entire process—the purchase price; the cost of lumber, nails, and other supplies; and the sale price. The profits, small but steady, were recorded with a blue-leaded pencil. I suppose my grandparents were early house flippers. Another revelation.
My mother was born in 1930, an event recorded in the financial journals with an entry in the debit column: “Cigars: $3.25.” The family soon moved from a downtown rental to a modest two-story house with a cherry tree in the backyard, just a few blocks from Kearsley Park and Homedale School in the working-class East Side. They would never move again, despite my grandfather’s success as a real-estate agent. My grandparents generously exported a lot of the money they made in Flint back to Iowa, helping numerous relatives stay afloat with “loans” that they knew would never be repaid. When my grandmother’s brother couldn’t come up with enough cash to purchase a farm of his own, my grandparents bought one for him. Several Iowa relatives journeyed to Flint in search of work, staying in my grandparents’ spare bedroom for long stretches. A few moved in to attend high school in Flint, which was considered a better option than their rural schools back home. This reminded me of immigrants in San Francisco who sent money back home and helped others make the journey to a better life. It was a reminder that Flint wasn’t always a place people longed to escape.
My mother showed me black-and-white photos of my grandparents from their early years in Flint. I remembered my grandma wearing modest house dresses she had sewn herself, accented with blue canvas Keds when she worked around the house. But here she was with her hair in a stylish bob and dressed in full flapper mode. My grandpa was decked out in a tailored suit with wide, peaked lapels and a fedora set at a rakish angle. They were both smiling, their arms around each other, gazing straight at the camera. They looked like Bonnie and Clyde, not the low-key couple I remembered. America was making the transition from an agricultural to an industrial economy, and my grandparents seemed happy to be a part of it all, eager for what might happen next. Flint and my family had a far different history than I had imagined.
Without any facts to back it up, I’d always assumed that Flint experienced ever-increasing economic success once the auto industry got up and running. A little research revealed that this wasn’t the case. Flint was harder hit during the Great Depression than many other cities around the country. Plummeting nationwide demand led to unemployment rates in the city that hovered around 50 percent in the early 1930s. By the time my mother was a third-grader at Homedale Elementary in 1938, more than half of all Flint families were on some type of relief. And although the population dipped as the jobless returned to their original homes in other cities and states, Flint continued to face a chronic housing
