Once In A Great City Quotes

“The “big wheels” of Detroit, as a local society writer called them, appeared at the Ford Auditorium’s semicircular front drive in midnight-black limos and emerged in dark tuxedos and dark business suits. It was a warm night, but that did not curtail the number of women wearing mink stoles over short, bright-colored dresses with matching satin shoes.”
― David Maraniss, Once in a Great City: A Detroit Story

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― David Maraniss, Once in a Great City: A Detroit Story

“though he would deliver that speech twenty-eight miles away, in Ann Arbor, no place seemed more important to his mission than Detroit, a great city that honored labor, built cars, made music, promoted civil rights, and helped lift working people into the middle class. “This city and its people are the herald of hope in America,” he said. “Prosperity in America must begin here in Detroit.”
― David Maraniss, Once in a Great City: A Detroit Story

“he and Smokey would exchange pickup lines and laments and rhymes until they had possible stanzas for a new song. One came up with “You got a smile so bright / you know you coulda been a candle.” The other responded with “I’m holding you so tight / You know you coulda been a handle.” And eventually they had composed “The Way You Do the Things You Do.”
― David Maraniss, Once in a Great City: A Detroit Story

“the world car market had changed in the fourteen months since that 1962 auto show, when big cars seemed resurgent and Henry Ford II had talked so confidently about Detroit’s position against foreign competition. In 1963, for the first time, even as the Big Three were enjoying their best sales year ever, more than half the cars in the world were made outside the United States, with estimates that the gap would only widen year by year from then on. Volkswagen was rising, and even Japan was beginning to stir, both taking hold of the worldwide small car market. Between 375,000 and 400,000 imports were sold in the United States in 1963, and estimates for 1964 were up to a half million. One reason, experts said, was that the compact cars the U.S. automakers started manufacturing in the late fifties in response to an earlier foreign surge were getting so much bigger every year that by now that might as well be classified as midsize vehicles.”
― David Maraniss, Once in a Great City: A Detroit Story

“Reuther yearned to be near the center of power, and Johnson was masterly at the twin arts of flattery and manipulation, making Reuther feel that he was the president’s confidant.”
― David Maraniss, Once in a Great City: A Detroit Story

“The Sunday edition of the Detroit News on September 15 ran a special section about “Olympic City,” making the case for how and why Detroit would be selected. The next day Cavanagh was at the White House where, at four in the afternoon, President Kennedy signed Joint Resolution 72, expressing Congress’s full support for Detroit.”
― David Maraniss, Once in a Great City: A Detroit Story

“GEORGE ROMNEY, HAIR SLICKED BACK from his broad forehead, his tanned mug exuding executive-class prosperity, came to Grosse Pointe ready to hit the streets as a protester.”
― David Maraniss, Once in a Great City: A Detroit Story

“Like many very rich people, Ford did not have to sell himself; Iacocca knew no other way. “He had a lot of ability,” Ford later said of Iacocca. “Unfortunately his ability lies ninety-nine percent in sales. But it isn’t only in selling cars—it’s selling everything.”
― David Maraniss, Once in a Great City: A Detroit Story

“Now Solidarity House was located at 8000 East Jefferson on property that was hauntingly familiar. Edsel and Eleanor Ford once had owned a riverfront mansion on that very site. The family moved there when Henry II, the oldest of four children, was four, and left when he was nine, moving on up to a new mansion in Grosse Pointe Shores designed by Albert Kahn. The old place on East Jefferson was gone now, but the original boathouse still stood in back of an undistinguished building that looked more like a cut-rate motel than UAW headquarters, a center of the labor movement.”
― David Maraniss, Once in a Great City: A Detroit Story

“I have a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.” This was nine weeks before the March on Washington, when King would deliver another version of the same refrain that would become etched in history, eventually considered the most famous American speech of the twentieth century. What he said at Cobo on that Sunday in June was virtually lost to history, overwhelmed by what was to come, but the first time King dreamed his dream at a large public gathering, he dreamed it in Detroit.”
― David Maraniss, Once in a Great City: A Detroit Story

“Congressman Diggs introduced the main speaker. The arena roared with shouts and applause. King, at five-seven, stepped up on a small box to reach the bank of microphones placed before him on the podium. “God didn’t make me tall enough,” he said. The large room grew close, bathed in shadows and light. “My good friend, the Reverend C. L. Franklin,” he began, “I cannot begin to say to you this afternoon how thrilled I am, and I cannot begin to tell you the deep joy that comes to my heart as I participate with you in what I consider to be the largest and greatest demonstration for freedom ever held in the United States.”
― David Maraniss, Once in a Great City: A Detroit Story

“Giacalone lived in a redbrick palace on Balfour Street in Grosse Pointe Park between East Jefferson and the Detroit River. Only the highest-ranking mobsters, of whom he was one, had homes there.”
― David Maraniss, Once in a Great City: A Detroit Story

“His distaste for the Detroit underworld went back to his earliest days with Walter Reuther, when the unsavory connections between legal and illicit power centers in the city emerged in the most harrowing way.”
― David Maraniss, Once in a Great City: A Detroit Story

“The family piano’s role in the music that flowed out of the residential streets of Detroit cannot be overstated. The piano, and its availability to children of the black working class and middle class, is essential to understanding what happened in that time and place, and why it happened, not just with Berry Gordy Jr. but with so many other young black musicians who came of age there from the late forties to the early sixties. What was special then about pianos and Detroit? First, because of the auto plants and related industries, most Detroiters had steady salaries and families enjoyed a measure of disposable income they could use to listen to music in clubs and at home. Second, the economic geography of the city meant that the vast majority of residents lived in single-family houses, not high-rise apartments, making it easier to deliver pianos and find room for them. And third, Detroit had the egalitarian advantage of a remarkable piano enterprise, the Grinnell Brothers Music House.”
― David Maraniss, Once in a Great City: A Detroit Story

“but aside from the cars the stars of the show were some make-believe characters called Muppets, still seven years away from Sesame Street fame. The auto show special two years earlier had been critiqued for being too dry; this one went to the other extreme. They were “clever little puppets,” noted one reviewer, “but there must be another way to add entertainment . . . with more auto-related features.”
― David Maraniss, Once in a Great City: A Detroit Story