My father was a heating and air-conditioning serviceman and a mechanic’s mechanic. We lived in southwest Detroit, and when he got home from work he’d spend the rest of the evening fixing anything mechanical, even turning out replacement parts on his lathe. He loved working with his hands, and a lot of the time he spent working in the garage was really pure mechanical engineering: he’d experiment with everything, whether it was building a new suspension system for his ’58 Olds or designing an electric mixer for my mom.
I last saw Mike just two weeks ago, at the Old Chicago in Southgate. We were best friends for forty years.
My journey with Mike began in the early 1970s, when we started hanging together with friends at the K-Andy bar in Detroit. Mike was small in stature and suffered from many physical difficulties, but it would be a mistake to judge a man like him by his size. Mike was a giant.
