MISENERS: THE EARLY YEARS

Family and a sense of community had always been everything to the Miseners.

Jack and Gloria grew up five houses apart on Evelyn Street in Hazel Park. He'd moved there from Detroit with his parents when he was three, before Gloria was born. Later, Jack ran around with Gloria's brother, Richard, and she hung around with his sister, Joan.

But with five and a half years' difference between them, they didn't pay attention to each other much—until Jack returned home from what he still calls the Korean Campaign. Politicians then were careful not to call it a war, despite all the dying. It was either a "police action" or a "campaign," and war never was officially declared. Today, Gloria will tease him: "You can say 'war' now. They finally called it a war."

Jack never made it to Korea—he spent 18 months of his two-year Army tour of duty in Japan, making it to private first class—and first took serious notice of the fast-maturing Gloria at a party in the neighborhood soon after his return to civilian life.

"She was there and we just started dating," Jack recalls. She was 16, he was

21. The relationship never had any formal beginning. The young war vets and their friends did a lot of partying, and Jack and Gloria kept finding themselves at the same parties, hanging around. They hung around so much that by the time they actually got around to a real, formal date, it was no big deal. Today, they're not even sure what it was. "Probably a drive-in," says Gloria with a smile. "It must have been a drive-in. That's what we did all the time, then. That's what we did every weekend."

And if they weren't at the local drive-in, they were out square dancing. They loved that.

A year later, they were engaged. The circumstances weren't particularly

dramatic or romantic in the storybook way, but more of an evolution in the relationship of two people who just seemed to fit, whose life seemed to be already heading along a predetermined path.

The fall of 1954 they were sitting there and Jack said: "Do you want a ring for Christmas?"

"I don't know," Gloria responded, "I'll have to think about it," which she did for a minute or two. And then said: "Sure, why not?"

Three years later, they were still engaged. "That was a long time to be engaged, then," she says. "I think we'd still be engaged if we weren't forced into getting married. It could have gone on forever. Engagement—that's the best time of your life. But my mother said, 'You ought to set a date. You've been engaged for three years.' So, she cashed in my insurance—it was like $500 back then—and that paid for the whole thing."

The neighborhood lovers were married on June 28, 1958, in a Lutheran church in Hazel Park, then had a reception for 200 guests at the nearby Knights of Columbus Hall. Her mother bought all the food and brought it to the hall, and friends and relatives cooked and served it. His aunt made the wedding cake.

They had grown up in Hazel Park, gone to school at Hazel Park High, gotten married in Hazel Park, and now they moved into their first house in Hazel Park, too, on Hazelwood Avenue, seven houses down from the home their youngest daughter, Leann, would buy when she was getting ready to be married herself.

Those were boom times in Detroit, the post-war 1950s. GI loans financed what had once been unattainable for young married couples—homes of their own. As the new thoroughfares called freeways were built leading out from the central cities, suburbs sprang up where cornfields used to wave in the wind. The corn gave way to FHA-financed housing and new streets that were soon filled with all the little kids who would one day be dubbed the Baby Boomers.

Hazel Park was an older suburb; no cornfields had made way for the Miseners' home on Hazelwood. But I-75 went in just a few blocks away and in the not-so-distant future they would follow it north to the brand-new suburb of Troy, where cornfields did give way to new houses. The experts say the suburbs were invented when techniques of factory mass production built the from-scratch

city of Levittown, but a better case could be made that they were invented in Detroit. The first mile of urban freeway in the country was poured in Detroit; city fathers thought high-speed, submerged highways would lead people into the city, take them downtown for shopping and culture, but it worked in reverse, giving them a fast way out. And the first suburban shopping center in the US Northland, opened in Southfield, just west of Hazel Park, in 1954. People would ride the buses way out there just to look at it, a cornfield turned cornucopia.

Detroit was the fifth-largest city in the US, then, with about 1.5 million people. The economy hummed. Anyone wanting a job got one. Unions made sure the jobs paid well and provided benefits and health care. The auto factories worked three shifts seven days a week. No one would hear of such words as "Honda" or "Toyota" or "Volkswagen" for years. (By the late 1960s, Detroit's downtown would be a ghost town, a third of its population would have fled to the suburbs, its factories would be turning out horrible cars no one wanted, unemployment lines went around the blocks and in winter those waiting in the lines would burn garbage in the trash cans to keep warm. Detroit became Murder City instead of Motor City). In the Fifties in southeastern Michigan, life seemed brimming with promise.

Jack's dad worked at the Young Spring and Wire Co. in Detroit and got Jack in there. He worked there before getting drafted, then went back to work there after his time in the Army. Then a better job opened up at John R Lumber, just a couple of miles away from their new house. He'd stay at the lumber company for 17 years and they'd stay in the Hazelwood house for seven years. In the meantime, they started a family.

Their boy, Chris, was born first, in 1959, a little more than a year after they were married. The next year Lindy was born. Lisa was born in 1964 and Lori in 1965. After they thought they were through adding to their brood, Gloria got pregnant again and Leann was born in 1970.

By the time Lori arrived, they had outgrown their Hazel Park home and, as thousands of other young married couples were doing, they moved up and out, following the freeway north into a larger lot, larger house and larger opportunities. The Miseners bought their first house for $10,500 and made a

killing when they sold it seven years later for $15,500, which, after they paid off their mortgage, left them a sizable down payment for their new house in Troy, which seemed a steal at $16,000, and came with a six-percent GI loan.

Gloria came from an average-sized family—she has a brother, Richard, and a sister, Jean. (Her father, Richard Knisley, was a truck driver who died when she was three; he was just 32 and died of kidney failure caused by riding too many years on bad shock absorbers over bad roads; a sad parallel is that her granddaughter, Hannah, lost one of her parents when she was three, too.)

But Jack came from a large family, and having a large family of his own was always the plan. His youngest sister has ten kids and the other four siblings have twenty-five kids between them. At Christmas time, the Miseners and their in- laws rent a hall every year to handle the crowd of 80 or so. They chip in on the hall rent, everyone brings a dish and each year they take turns dressing as Santa Claus, showing up with gifts for the kids. In 1999, despite the tragedy of a few months earlier, Chris played Santa.

So when Gloria found out that she was pregnant, again, as Jack was nearing the age of 40, that was fine with him. The more the merrier. It'd make it a little more crowded when the family all piled into the car to go to the drive-in on those sweltering, humid Michigan summer nights, but, hey, so what?

(Drive-ins were hugely popular in southeastern Michigan in the 1950s and 1960s, and scattered throughout the area, fitting for the city that put the world on wheels. Lovers would come to the later shows, where some kinds of American Motor cars were banned because they had fully reclining seats and there was already enough trouble going on with bench seats, but families poured in early for the twilight shows. The kids would tear off for the playground, giving mom and dad a half hour or so of quiet while the on-screen cartoon characters, barely visible in twilight, counted down the minutes to the start of the feature, with Mr. Popcorn and Mr. Soda Pop dancing out enticements to visit the concession stand. Sometimes there'd be a fireworks show, too. Later, the Miseners would spread a blanket next to the car, turn up the little speaker that hung from the window up as high as it would go and sprawl out in the fresh air, or at least as fresh as it gets in July or August in Michigan when it's 90 degrees and 90 percent humidity.

Today, one of the last drive-ins in America is still going strong in suburban Dearborn, with nine screens, all showing first-run movies to sold-out or nearly sold-out crowds.)

The four older Misener children were excited when they found out they'd have a new baby, the first to be born since they moved to Troy. With four kids already in the family, no one was about to get a nose out of joint or feel jealous over one more. While Gloria was in the hospital, they all made big signs on posterboards, and they were scattered all through the house, including one that greeted them as they came in the front door: "WELCOME HOME, LEANN."

"We had our dolls," says Lisa, "but she was a real baby for us to play with." "She was the most spoiled of anybody, but she never took advantage of it,"

says Lori.

Lindy, the oldest sister at age 10, was particularly loving with the new baby. "She was my baby. I had her all the time. I'd take her shopping with me when I was older. Then, later, I'd go to her school functions as a chaperone. Later, we became best friends. We talked every day."

Shortly after Leann's birth, Jack had a career change. "The best move he ever made," says Gloria.

In 1971, older at age 39 than most people beginning their factory careers, Jack hired on at Ford Motor. Or, as he says it, "then I went to Ford's," with the possessive. It's a small thing, nuance, really, but today's workers call it Ford or Ford Motor. Older generations called it Ford's as in something owned by Henry. Long after it became a public company, the workers still called it Ford's, and somehow they seemed closer to the company, then, more invested in it psychologically, when they saw it as something owned and guided by a single man, or his family, than as a huge corporate entity.

Jack Misener's last day was Dec. 31, 1998, and he still speaks proudly of his time there, of how the company treated him and how he in turn treated the cars he made. Jack was not one of those auto workers of a succeeding generation who left loose bolts inside the frame on purpose, or who called in sick on Monday because he wanted to extend the weekend partying financed by Friday's paycheck, or who got drunk at lunch on Friday with all that money burning a

hole in his pocket. (Smart buyers used to know that you never bought a car built on Friday or Monday, because the lines were short-staffed or manned by replacement workers, and demanded proof of the date of assembly from their dealers.)

No, Jack Misener was a Ford man. Still is.

Typical for a Misener, the career break was a result of family. One of his nephews came up to him one day and said, "Jack, I can get you in at Ford's."

"Great," Jack replied.

As he recalls today: "You had to have somebody get you in in those days. Later, I couldn't even get my son in. No one got in on their own. It was sons of union officials or sons of Ford management upstairs."

But his nephew had some clout and sent him to the Sterling Heights plant nearby. There weren't openings there, as it turned out, but the guy his nephew had sent him to had a buddy at the Utica trim plant who owed him a favor, so he wrote a note on a piece of paper, handed it to Jack and sent him on his way.

Jack drove over to Utica and was hired on the spot. Not one to burn any bridges, he took a week's vacation from John R Lumber to get the lay of the land at Ford, liked what he saw in his first week and told his old bosses he wasn't coming back. They understood. You couldn't beat the benefits and overtime of a factory job with the Big Three.

"I was lucky to get in and I was at a good plant," says Jack. "I think I was laid off once for two months in 27 years."

For many of those years, he worked six days a week, 12 hours a day, racking up the overtime. He did just about everything there was to do on the line over the years. He built door panels, head rests, arm rests, made bumpers, painted tail lamps, even acted as supervisor running the line for a good stretch.

Jack built parts for Tauruses and he bought them, too. Today, he leases a Ford van so he can haul the grandkids around, but, man, when they came out with that Taurus, it was the car for him. In 1997, when Leann decided to get a better car, she bought a Taurus, too. It was used, but it was low-mileage, looked new. She only had it a few months when she was killed. Jack cleaned it up, vacuumed it, sold it for what she owed on her note.

"It ran so beautiful," says Jack. "She got it because we love Tauruses."

Susick Elementary School was around the block from their home, with their back fence sharing the lot line. Gloria could watch her kids walk almost all the way to the school. Leann was the last to go there; when Hannah turned four, they enrolled her at preschool there, too. "Hannah will say, 'You can walk me to school, Grandpa, but you can't stay. But you don't have to walk me home 'cause I know the way,'" recounts Jack. "But it'll never happen." Grandpa waited faithfully at the door each day, waiting for her to come out for the short walk home.

The Miseners still live there, though the house is much larger, now, than when they bought it, and, in what has turned into an upscale community, they'd probably fetch upwards of $200,000 or more if they put it on the market. It's got five bedrooms, including the one in the basement where young Mick Fletcher spent the summer before he and Leann were married. Over the years, they had a dormer built upstairs, added on a garage, had a family room built out back. "We paid $1,000 cash for the family room," says Jack, the kind of man who's proud to let you know he had that kind of money on hand to pay for his expanding dreams.

It was a house that had grown as their family had grown, that was big enough now to hold all their grandkids at holidays. A perfect house to have grown a family in, a perfect house to enjoy a retirement, too, except that Jack didn't have long to enjoy his retirement.

Leann was shot eight months later and the next year and a half were pretty much filled with criminal proceedings against Mick and a bitter and protracted child-custody fight over Hannah.

"I can't wait to get all this behind us and get back to retirement. Do all the things we want to do," he said, a couple of months after the trial concluded. They made it to Branson, Missouri, once and can't wait to go back. Loved the shows.

Then Gloria's sister, Jean, and her husband live in Ocala, Florida. That's a nice place to visit. They'd like the Miseners to stay at their place, but Jack and Gloria like their time in the morning. Watch a little Weather Channel. Have

some coffee. Look at the paper. So they prefer a motel. And there's one they like. It's nice, clean, quiet, and you can get a room cheap in the off-season. Last time they went, seven days for $117. Can't beat that with a stick.

Maybe Branson one year, Disneyworld the year after that. One site a year would be great.