Football's Ford Field, as seen from baseball's adjacent Comerica Park, 2010.

at age 88 came as sad news.  Although I didn’t know him, I considered Ford as a friend -- a symbol of my adolescent days in Detroit a half-century ago.  That he was Henry Ford’s grandson did not impress me as much as the fact that he owned the Detroit Lions football franchise.  In those days, the Lions played at Tiger Stadium – the city’s now-demolished baseball park that was clumsily reconfigured for football when necessary.  I was a regular.  Season tickets then cost under $50 – that’s per season, not per game.  The autumn Sundays grew progressively colder as the football season progressed, and on one December day after a frustrating loss to Minnesota we fans delighted in throwing snowballs at the Lions' head coach.   On another day, after the 50,000 spectators had departed, I and a friend ran onto the field with football in hand and had a great time tossing passes and kicking field goals as the empty stadium grew dark.  No one bothered us.  Talk about fantasy land! 

There was always a small post-game gathering in the dim concrete corridor outside the team clubhouse – friends and family of the players, and autograph seekers like me. It was always a thrill to meet and talk with the likes of Alex Karras, Joe Schmidt and Yale Lary.  Occasionally Ford himself would appear, accompanied by what I presumed to be his family (his children were roughly my age).  

I  remember the day in 1963 when Ford bought the franchise and its assets for $6 million.  I don’t recall if I thought Ford had overpaid or been a shrewd businessman, or if I even thought about that at all, but for some reason I never forgot the price.   You could have asked me at any time since then how much William Clay Ford paid for the Lions, and I’d have had the answer.   The franchise is now reported (by Forbes Magazine) to be worth $900 million.   

William Clay Ford was of my father’s generation and, I think, high on my father’s list of people to admire. The Ford family, after all, created the Motor City, and my father had Detroit in his bones.  He loved cars and, as the son of a doctor, had had a relatively affluent childhood.  His family survived the Depression better than others.  That he was never able to build a stable professional career of his own left him shattered.  Still, status was important; we were members of the Detroit Yacht Club even though our ever owning a yacht was beyond a dream.   (We used the swimming pool on weekends.)  And for a short while our lavender Cadillac was the classiest car on the block. 

So I think my father admired, and envied, Ford as a symbol of success in the city he loved.  He certainly perked up one Sunday when I came home from the game and presented Ford’s signature on a 3x5-inch index card; he never showed as much excitement over my sports autographs!

Ford’s tenure as the Lions’ owner coincided, alas, with the demise of Detroit.   When he bought the team, Motown music was in full swing and the youngish Mayor Jerome Cavanagh (three years Ford’s junior) was riding a wave of JFK-like popularity.  The catchphrase was “Dynamic Detroit.”   Then came the 1967 race riots, and the eventual election, in 1974, of a black-power-minded mayor who frightened white taxpayers away in droves.  The Lions, too, departed, moving out of Tiger Stadium the following year for the new Silverdome in suburban Pontiac.  The only time to smile, it seemed, was when the clownish meteorologist Sonny Eliot presented his reliably comical forecast each night on television. 

The year 1974 is also when I left Detroit for good, having accepted a job in Canada.  So I was not witness to the decades of Detroit’s deterioration. Nor did I keep abreast of what the Fords were up to, other than to notice the ups and downs of the family company –– and, of course, the construction of Ford Field that brought the Lions back downtown in 2002.  That a judge recently declared Detroit bankrupt is a sign of hope.  All talk now is about reconstruction, not final burial.  Even the lowly Lions, who haven’t won a championship since 1958, enter next season with a new coach and an optimistic outlook.  A pity that William Clay Ford couldn’t have stayed around a little longer.

An autograph seeker outside the Lions' clubhouse in 1964 with the star punter and free safety Yale Lary.

Detroit, not so dynamic in 1993

Sonny Eliot, the TV weatherman who kept Detroit laughing, was spotted in the corridor of Olympia Stadium after a hockey game in 1965.  He died in 2012 at age 91.