This is the next-to-last chapter with Detroit in it. Janet and Walt come to visit, which lets us get deeper into her relationship with Dad and Mom, and also get an outside view (Walt’s) on everything. Janet is worried about Dad now that he’s retired. He has this big beautiful house (pictured) that he will inevitably have trouble maintaining as he gets older, plus she worries he might start drinking.
A subtheme in this book is, Len does not drink to excess. He’s a social drinker, and that’s it.
Downtown Detroit had been in decline for 30 years, at least, but if you were going to go anywhere in Detroit to see the sights that’s where you’d go. Walt politely notes that Downtown looks like it’s seen its better days.
Derry Kabcenell helped me with this section, being from suburban Detroit himself (not Bloomfield Hills though). The roads you would take from the airport to Bloomfield Hills came from him. He didn’t know any steakhouses that were around back then, though, so I had to leave that unspecified!
The Best Thing about Detroit
is the canonical “Detroit pizza” place, and I went there often when I lived there. Nowadays, that style is everywhere and you can even find a recipe for it on SeriousEats:
Mom and Dad
We’ve seen Len in the other books (Inventing the Future and The Big Bucks), but what about Janet’s mom? So I gave her a few paragraphs. We know Janet lived with Dad after their divorce and not Mom, so why was that? Well, in the old days, a “tomboy” would be a girl who only played with boys, and usually that meant sports, so she wasn’t a tomboy.
She was a Science Nerd, I guess. I knew some women in computing, even back in the day. I’ve seen graphs of female representation in computing, and it seemed to peak in the mid-70’s and then begin a long decline with the PC years. Janet predated all that.
Len got her and he encouraged it. Mom did not. Maybe he wanted a son and Janet was the next best thing, or maybe she just was that way. We don’t really know. We know that, in the competition for her heart, Len won.
Walt’s puckish sense of humor manifests itself near the end. I hope you enjoyed it. [Note: oops! That’s next chapter, sorry]