Terror in the City of Champions (39 page)

Who will you be supporting in the fall presidential race?

“I don’t care who is elected president.”

What about Roosevelt’s taxes on business?

“Too many businessmen and industrialists are lazy,” he said. “And I mean mentally, too. They won’t think.”

What about the eleven million who are unemployed?

“A lot of them don’t want to work. . . . They’re going to have to work all the harder for the loafing they’re doing now. . . . They’ll pay later.”

Ford had nothing to say about the city’s sports teams. He was only a casual fan.

On Saturday, Champions Day, bad weather canceled the Tigers’ game. They had played their home opener on Friday at the expanded Navin Field. The new right field stands were filled and the ballpark workers wore fresh outfits. Two hundred ushers were in French blue and navy blue uniforms. Food vendors donned antiseptic white. Cigarette girls, caps strapped to their heads like hurdy-gurdy monkeys, wore satin jackets. They glided through the aisles as snow flurries fell, shivering while selling tobacco and gum. Owner Walter O. Briggs, still in Florida, missed the game, but 32,000 fans came out. Among them was Grace Navin in a heavy hat and fur coat, her colors appropriately dark and dignified for one in mourning. Mary Cochrane, Mickey’s wife, sat beside her. Not far away were Harry Bennett and Harry Kipke in fedoras and overcoats. Bennett looked like a movie gangster in a bow tie and flipped collar.

In the evening limos and taxis pulled up to the Masonic Temple for the Champions Day Dinner. Those who drove parked around Cass Park on Temple, Second, and Ledyard. Some would have walked past the legion’s Little Stone Chapel and Maurice Sugar’s Winchester Apartments. Hundreds flowed into the temple ballroom to honor their sports heroes. The big names were all there: Joe Louis, Mickey Cochrane and his Tigers, Jack Adams and his Wings, Potsy Clark with assorted Lions, Gar Wood, and so many others. The stars spoke briefly, thanking their fans and the city repeatedly. “I’m not a champion yet but I hope to be,” said Louis. They ate, drank, and talked together. It was a glorious moment, the celebration of an unparalleled achievement, a snapshot in one city’s history that would be forgotten by no one who attended. It was, said the
Times
, “the greatest gathering of champions.”

If only the joy could have lasted.

Rumors

Sunday brought unusual weather for May 10, unlike anything the city had seen in decades so early in the month. The day started with sunshine and warm temperatures. In the morning residents poured onto Belle Isle, the glistening Detroit River gem designed by Frederick Law Olmsted. By afternoon, with the thermometer peaking at ninety degrees, an estimated 100,000 people had crowded onto the island. Scorching, sunny days always drew Detroiters to the park, but usually those days occurred in July and August. The island provided an escape from stifling factories, cramped neighborhoods, and overcrowded apartment complexes. Outdoor parks and air-conditioned movie theaters were practically the only two places where ordinary residents could find relief during extreme heat.

Detroit’s version of Central Park, Belle Isle offered long shorelines that looked either toward the city’s Jefferson Avenue to the north or toward Windsor, Ontario, a leg of Canada nestled—as visitors were often surprised to learn—beneath and to the south of Detroit. The island’s nearly one thousand acres had lakes, lagoons, and canals filled with canoeists. There were swimming areas, fishing spots, winding walkways in the shade, and myriad attractions: a casino for parties, a zoo, a yacht club, a glossy, green-tiled aquarium, a glass-and-steel conservatory, a gazebo on a hill, a band shell, athletic fields, water fountains, riding stables, and monuments to generals, newsboys, and children’s temperance. On Sunday cars clogged the four-lane, one-way road that circled the island. With masses of people flocking onto the picnic grounds, empty tables proved almost impossible to find. On blankets, in chairs, beneath hats, and under umbrellas, hordes of visitors tried to cool themselves by sipping from bottles of Goebel and Stroh’s pulled from buckets of ice. For the kids there were Cokes, Faygo strawberry sodas, and ginger ales by Vernor’s. Music wafted from portable phonographs. It was a hot yet beautiful day.

But as evening arrived, the sun vanished. Clouds rolled in and storms rumbled through Detroit. Thunder shook the city. Lightning pierced haunted skies. Winds snapped power lines. Somewhere out in the mess was Roy Pidcock, who had once again left home without a word. He had departed on Saturday. When he returned on Monday, he told his beloved Nellie that he had been in the woods for two nights. He looked it. Unshaven and filthy, his clothes dirty, he had little else to say except: “They are going to get me and you, too.” But he wouldn’t explain. He sat around all day and night in his underclothes. Nellie found a piece of maple bark in his pants on which he had written, “I love everybody.”

On Monday evening Dayton Dean went to Eppinger Sporting Goods for target practice. All Black Legion members were required to own pistols, but not all carried them. As part of a legion Death Squad, Dean did. The Wayne County Rifle and Pistol Club, to which he belonged, had been chartered through the National Rifle Association as part of a federal program aimed at encouraging such clubs. After qualifying, the group had received four rifles and thousands of rounds of ammunition from the government. Club founder John George Quindt Sr., unaware that the Black Legion had infiltrated his group, was hoping that one or two of his shooters would develop into marksmen. Until they did, he wouldn’t allow use of government rifles or ammunition. He didn’t want the supplies wasted.

Dean, despite his boasts about his Navy skills, lacked deadeye accuracy. He carried two pistols, a .38 and a .45, but he wasn’t an expert shot. He did practice though. A good soldier of the Black Legion never knew when he would be called into action or what the reason might be, the sins of an errant member or the overthrow of a dictatorial US government. September 16—the ill-defined day of reckoning that Major-General Effinger had been hazily promoting for months—was four months away.

The Wolverine Republican League convened at eight o’clock in the evening on Monday, May 11, in Findlater Temple. Two stories, boxish, and with a front entrance that opened between twenty-foot columns, the temple stood in southwest Detroit at Waterman and West Lafayette. Nearby was an industrial area that included factories for American Brass, Ternstedt Manufacturing, and Fisher Fleetwood. Fewer than two miles away was sinister-looking Zug Island, a desolate, uninhabitable black, white, and gray place where Great Lakes Steel operated blast furnaces.

The temple itself had been built in a neighborhood of pleasant homes. A red-bricked school sat across Waterman Street and a half-block of shops (a butcher, grocer, and barber) lay kitty-corner from the temple. Originally home to Masonic Lodge 475, the facility rented space to twenty organizations. The Wolverine Republicans met there, usually taking a small room in the basement. The league was a front for the secret society. Who, after all, would rent space to something called the Black Legion? Some legion members didn’t recognize their organization by the name for which it would become known. Among members the Bullet Club, Black Knights, and United Brotherhood of America were as familiar as the Black Legion.

In April, when former governor Wilber M. Brucker had made his first public appearance after announcing he would be challenging Senator James Couzens in the October primary, he did it before the Wolverine Republican League in the temple’s auditorium. The elder Couzens, the father of Detroit’s mayor and a wealthy man from his early business days with Henry Ford, had sided with President Roosevelt on some issues, angering conservative members of his party. Brucker, a teetotaler, accused Roosevelt and Couzens of abandoning American principles and toying with socialism. “The sooner the New Deal is rooted out, root and branch, and dumped in the ash can of history, the better it will be for all,” Brucker said. Common pleas court judge Eugene Sharp spoke at the event. As the speeches ended, a supporter called for the league to endorse Brucker then and there. The crowd thundered its support, casting their “ayes” with him.

League members viewed Brucker’s appearance as a triumph. It generated press coverage and “put the Wolverine League out in front,” wrote Secretary Floyd Nugent in an April 30 letter to members. Along the left edge the letter included a list of league officers. Many were in the Black Legion. Leslie Black, Judge Sharp’s balding court clerk, served as president. He had been involved in the plots against attorney Maurice Sugar and
Highland Parker
publisher Art Kingsley. The cadaverous Harvey Davis, organizer of the Silas Coleman joy killing, was on the league’s entertainment committee. Jesse Pettijohn, who had schemed to have Mayor Voisine of Ecorse assassinated, belonged to the membership committee, along with Roy Lorance and Ervin Lee, who had participated in the Coleman hunt. The membership chairman was Wilbur Robinson, a legion recruiter. There were others. The most intriguing name on the letterhead belonged to Harry Z. Marx, the delegate chairman. Marx was the attorney who had intervened in Adrian when State Police pulled over the car of legionnaires. An up-and-comer, Marx had credentials more sterling than most of the men featured on the stationery. He had a successful practice with an office in the Union-Guardian. A losing candidate in the same judicial election as Maurice Sugar, Marx also had connections. He had once chaired the American Legion’s Americanism Committee. More crucial was that one of his friends and clients was Col. Heinrich Pickert, the police commissioner. Within the league Marx wasn’t a mere figurehead. His law office doubled as the Wolverine League’s address. On the night Brucker spoke, Marx had introduced him.

Nugent’s letter urged members to come to the May 11 meeting and to bring their signed Wilber Brucker nominating petitions. Many who showed returned the next night, on Tuesday, May 12, to hear Russian-born Victor Nicholas Schultz address the crowd. Schultz lived nearby and worked in an auto factory as a mechanic. In his younger days he had battled Russian revolutionaries. He lectured that evening against communism, lamenting that his beautiful native land had been destroyed. He warned the nearly fifty men present that the same thing could happen in America.

When Schultz finished, another legionnaire, a candidate for the statehouse, delivered a political speech, and then Harvey Davis took center stage. There was a serious issue to be tackled, Davis said. A Catholic man, Charles Poole, had beaten and kicked his expectant Baptist wife, Rebecca, so badly that she had to be hospitalized, Davis said. She was in Herman Kiefer Hospital at this very moment and her baby wouldn’t be born alive, he added. Davis indicated that members Lowell Rushing, Rebecca’s brother-in-law, and Herschel Gill, whose wife was her close friend, had told him of the abuse. They had heard of the mistreatment from Gill’s sister-in-law, Ruby Lane, who had heard it from Rebecca Poole’s sister, Marcia Rushing, a woman later described by a family member as a loud, dramatic, boozing gossip. There was one big problem with the story: It was untrue. Poole had not hit his wife. No beating had occurred. Rebecca was in the hospital because she had delivered their second daughter, Nancy.