I was born in Detroit’s Providence Hospital in 1948 and raised in an upstairs flat on Sixth Street, near Michigan Avenue and Tiger Stadium. My mother would later tell me how I loved watching the cars drive by our house and hearing the roar of the fans at the stadium each time a Tiger made a home run. But those were my mother’s memories, not mine. I was just 3 years old when we moved from the flat to our home in southwest Detroit. My mom picked the house because she felt her kids could safely walk down the alley to Patton Park and play without crossing any streets. And my dad was happy because he would finally have his own garage to tinker in, and because we were near the south end of Dearborn, where he was raised—the largest Arabic area in the United States.