Mitch is my oldest friend. We met in 1951 or 52 at the fire hydrant fifty feet from my driveway. He wandered around the block, and I was standing atop my usual perch, surveying the neighborhood. We met, exchanged a few words, and have been friends ever since. That’s my first official memory.
We served on Abraham Lincoln’s school safety patrol and drank hot chocolate with the other “safeties” on cold winter mornings. We went trick or treating on Halloween, rang doorbells and ran, played hide and seek and frozen tag with the neighborhood gang, and went home when the porch light turned on.
We spent our youth playing “pick-up” baseball at Kenwood Park and on organized teams. We played 8th grade football at Clara Barton Junior High. Bill Graham joined us when we road the city bus home after Friday practices lugging our uniforms and towels with a week’s worth of sweat for our moms to wash. We bowled together on Saturday mornings, winning the youth league several times. While other teammates changed from year to year, we were the constant two. We went golfing at the Royal Oak Golf Club with borrowed clubs. We shot pool in our basement, played tennis in the street with the neighborhood kids, and “tennis ball hockey” in our driveway. Tennis ball hockey was brutal. Mitch was “all time goalie” while Bill and I battled over the ball with our hockey sticks. He fearlessly stopped shot after shot.
Since our birthdays are two days apart, we took drivers training together. We did part of our driving on the road and the rest on “the range”. We were assigned to the same car. Coach McClain was our instructor. Driving an automatic was pretty straight forward, but everyone who had never driven a stick shift jumped and bucked their way around the range. I was sitting in the back seat on the day that Mitch attempted to drive the stick for the first time. He not only jumped the car around the course, he jumped the curb, ran across the grassy island, and back down on the other side. I bounced around in the back like a rag doll. And then it was my turn.
We talked about life and shared our troubles. We discussed girls, girl problems, went on double dates, and cruised Woodward. He backed me up when I needed it, and I did the same. We went to Friday night football games searching for cute girls that were on our radar, and we found a few. He was my wingman and I was his.
After high school graduation we helped coach the Edward Furniture little league team for a couple of summers. He coached first and I took third. We taught young kids how to hit, pitch, throw, and slide into home. Mr. Wiseman, the head coach, took us to a couple of Detroit Tiger baseball games as a reward for our help. During one of the games Willie Horton hit a deep fly ball to left that was caught near the wall. I predicted that Willie would hit one out to deep left/center the next time he batted. He did. You remember little things like that when you’re with your best friend.
We played miniature golf at the new Putt Putt Golf course a few blocks from home when the proprietor offered up a challenge over the loudspeaker, “For a free game of golf, who knows how we got our name?” I thought I knew the answer, shared it with Mitch, and he said, “Go tell him.” I replied, “No, you go.” He did, and he won the free game. The answer was, “Par in golf is computed by the distance from the tee to the green plus two putts, therefore, Putt Putt.
We never fought and seldom argued. If things did get frazzled the worst he would utter was, “Ah, come-on Rob.” I used various tones of “Mitch” to get my point across. We knew when to stop and when to push forward. He was the brother that Mom and Dad never had.
Mitch entered the army in 1967. I was entering my third year of college. We didn’t see much of each other after he went into the service. We were doing “our thing” in two different worlds. He started dating Sandy before he went in. Sandy and her family lived directly across the street from the fire hydrant where I first met Mitch. Small world.
I don’t recall if we spoke in person, he sent a letter, or if I received a phone call. In any case, he told me that he and Sandy were getting married, and he asked me to be his best man.
TBC