I am a Detroiter, to be more specific, I’m an Eastsider, i.e. people who live on the East side of Detroit, Michigan. I was born in Detroit and grew up in Warren, about 2 miles north of famous or infamous 8 Mile. No, I don’t know Eminem.
All my grandparents lived in Detroit. My mother’s parents immigrated from Canada. My grandfather came as a child, and my grandmother when she married. My father’s parents were both born in the US, but their parents were born in the Calabria area of Italy. Like so many of us, I’m a second and third generation American. I’m proud to be an American, but I’m also proud of my Italian Canadian roots. We ate handmade ravioli in the basement of grandma and grandpa Paonessa’s house and sat down to steaming stew in the dining room of my grandma and grandpa Stevens’ house. In the basement, dinners were loud and often crowded. In the dining room, we watched our p’s and q’s. At both places the food was always plentiful and wonderful.
Growing up and living near Detroit, like being a Lions fan, has its challenges. We’ve had our hopes raised and dashed more than once, but Detroiters are tough. As a child we had picnics at Belle Isle, took trips on the Boblo boat and watched Detroit Symphony Orchestra concerts at Orchestra hall. I remember looking in awe at the Rivera's Detroit Industry murals at the Detroit Institute of Arts and holding my nose in the smelly, old penguin house at the Detroit Zoo. Except for the Boblo boat and (thank goodness) the old penguin house, Detroit still has all these things to offer. Happily, the penguins still live at the zoo, but they have moved to a new state of the art penguin house. Detroit’s motto is, “We hope for better things; it will arise from the ashes.” Fitting for a city that has survived fire, riots, and bankruptcy.
After high school I left the Detroit area briefly to attend Michigan State University (Go Green) where I earned a degree in Engineering. Detroit was and still is a good place to be an engineer, so I return and started what would be a 29 year career at General Dynamics. I met and married Andy and we raised two girls in the suburbs of Detroit. Still rooting for a Detroit comeback, and for the Lions, Tigers and Red Wings, we live 35 minutes from the city center.
Recently, we loaded our bikes in the car and drove down to Eastern Market. From there we rode our bikes down the Dequindre Cut to the riverfront. We turned left at the river and made our way over the MacArthur Bridge and onto Belle Isle. We stopped for a picture at the newly renovated James Scott Memorial Fountain and spotted a pair of eagles at the east end of the park – I guess they too are Eastsiders.
Seeing as this is an “About the Author” page, I thought I should mention a bit about my first novel, The Gazette: From Detroit to the Trenches.
Years ago, I discovered a stack of homemade newspapers in the dusty attic of my grandparents’ home. I was intrigued. I learned from by grandmother that my grandfather wrote the papers from 1915 – 1919 while he was a boy growing up in Detroit. I thought, wow, there’s a story here, and maybe, just maybe I can write it. After 29 years as a computer systems engineer in the defense industry, I traded in writing technical web pages for writing stories.
The Gazette: From Detroit to the Trenches is a coming of age story that chronicles the lives of fifteen-year-old Bob Stevens (my grandfather), his friend Maggie Robinson and eighteen-year-old Davy McLeod as they experience the turmoil of the Great War. From the trials of war time America to the horror of the trenches, The Gazette: From Detroit to the Trenches transports you to this significant and electrifying time.
