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The summer I was 17 I had a job with a landscaping crew that installed an underground lawn sprinkler system at the mansion Motown founder Berry Gordy Jr. had purchased on Boston Boulevard.
I’ve thought about my very minor intersection with Gordy’s life this week when I read about the opening Sunday of his story on Broadway in “Motown: The Musical.” And I’ve paid special attention to the many statements about how the music generated by Gordy’s company brought black and whites together in the 1960s.
There’s some truth to that. I felt the power of Gordy’s music at his mansion in the summer 1968, though I’m sure my experience is not exactly what these writers have in mind when they recall the magic of Motown.
Gordy’s mansion was an amazing place. It had three stories, nine bedrooms and a roof like the roofs in Italy. Its vast yard contained a swimming pool and a three-hole pitch-and-putt golf course.
The pool was inside its own house. The interior was mostly blue, and it was filled with tile and stately pillars and cool, shimmering water. It was old fashioned and classy, and it seemed like something out of the “The Great Gatsby.”
Gordy had to be one of the wealthiest black men in America, or maybe in the world, in 1968. It seemed astonishing at the time that a black man in Detroit owned a mansion with a pool house and a backyard golf course. At least the older guys I worked with thought so. And they didn’t like it.
We were employees of a small company on E. Warren Avenue. Our crew included a couple of teenagers and two groups of guys in their 20s and 30s: Neat and efficient off-duty Detroit firefighters and scruffy characters who drank a lot and dabbled in drugs, mostly heroin. We were all white, though an African American firefighter showed up for a few hours every once-in-a-while.
The mansion bustled inside and out with workers. A middle-aged couple served as caretakers, and they sometime invited us to cool off in the pool house. We would sit in the lounge chairs and look at the Motown and Tamla records on one of those boxy phonographs of the era that played only 45s.
I never saw Gordy or anyone famous, though one day someone said they had seen Marvin Gaye in the driveway. But we got to know Gordy’s father, Berry Gordy Sr., quite well. Pops Gordy was a legendary entrepreneur in his own right who had come to Detroit in the Great Migration around World War I.
Mr. Gordy clearly was used to dealing with motley crews like ours. He watched us closely and constantly checked to make sure our trenches and hook-ups complied with specifications. He carried a yardstick and was not afraid to raise his voice. And he called us boys.
Detroit was jumpy that summer. The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy had just been killed, and people talked about the possibility of another riot, like the one that had broken out a year earlier, not far from Gordy’s mansion. The father of one of the teens in our crew was a cop who had shot and killed an alleged rioter; his family had been harassed, and they had been forced to move. The Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement led a wildcat strike at an auto plant in July. Crime and arson were ticking up.
On the radio, the big Motown song was “Ain’t Nothing Like the Real Thing,” by Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell.
The older guys on our crew detested Mr. Gordy’s supervision. Using every slur in the book, they mocked him behind his back and complained endlessly about what one called the “reverse slavery” he believed we were caught up in.
They finally figured out how to get back at the Gordys. One day, as we prepared to leave in the late afternoon, I walked into the pool house with another one of the teens and we saw two or three of the older guys urinating in Gordy’s pool. They looked very smug, like what they were doing was brilliant.
It was a startling sight, and quite a turnoff for any number of reasons. But in the anarchy of the moment, my young friend and I did something else distasteful. We took a couple of the .45s that sat on Gordy’s turntable. We considered them priceless souvenirs. We were motivated by admiration for the music, and the envy we believed the records would stir among the people we knew.
We didn’t have a chip on our shoulders. We didn’t like being yelled at by Pops Gordy, either, but we didn’t frame his abuse, like the older guys, as a battle in some sort of race war. We were boys. We were used to being yelled at.
And we had records from Berry Gord’s personal stash! We raced back to the East Side to show our friends. We left the records on the dashboard, though, and they melted and warped in the hot summer sun.
A version of this article appeared in the Free Press in 2009 as part of coverage of the 50th anniversary of Motown.
