Word: corktown
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Cockrel is aware that much of her potential bid's appeal and challenge lies in her personal narrative. She grew up in Detroit's Corktown neighborhood in the 1950s and '60s - a period when, she recalls, it was populated largely with Irish and Maltese immigrants as well as Puerto Ricans. Her parents managed a soup kitchen. As a student at Wayne State University in the late 1960s, she had a front-row seat to one of the defining moments in Detroit's history: the 1967 riots - or "rebellion," as she recalls it. On the morning of July 23 of that...
Father Kern's dream parish, the Roman Catholic Most Holy Trinity Church, is located in a rundown, ramshackle Detroit slum, where sagging frame houses, tarpaper shacks and old brick duplexes are slowly giving way to warehouses and trucking garages. This is Corktown, once as Irish as its name, and the big white church, which has been in its present location since 1855, still sports a trim of faded Kelly green. But the Irish have moved on and up in the world; Corktown is now made up primarily of Mexicans, Negroes fresh from the South, Puerto Ricans and Maltese...
Every Thursday night, as many as 150 alcoholics-on-the-mend line up for their shots of vitamin B12. The nerve-soothing vitamins are paid for partly by the Corktown Guild, whose members are mostly bartenders, and partly by the Corktown Coop, made up of men trying to rehabilitate themselves, who scavenge scrap to raise the money for their injections...
Shakedown. The Corktown Guild and the Co-op are not the only instances of Holy Trinity help and selfhelp. There is a "foot clinic" run by Chiropodist Earl G. Kaplan in his spare time, a dental clinic operated by volunteers from the Detroit Society of Dental Hygienists, a legal clinic manned by top lawyers. There is a Filipino Club, a Puerto Rican Club, a chapter of Alcoholics Anonymous (membership: 1,000), a St. Vincent de Paul Society, a credit union that started with $80 in 1947, now has assets of $147,000; there is even a two-night-a-week...
...just as the American Medical Association exposes a quack doctor and the American Bar Association reveals the shyster." "Bing" Bingay, probably the best known newsman in Detroit, knows intimately the ways of the police and of the sensational press. He grew up with many a bluecoat in Corktown, Detroit's Irish settlement, where he was raised (although he is Canadian-born, of Scotch descent). He knows sensational newspapers because for 30 years they have been his opposition (in the form of Hearst's Times, Macfadden's defunct Daily). At 17 "Bing" Bingay started as an office...
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