I grew up in Detroit and spent much of my adult life there. My kids were born there (and attend college there). My mother and sister live there, too. I live in Baton Rouge now but I still consider Detroit my home town.

So when I read that they were dancing in the streets downtown last night, well, I had to watch the video (see below).

It reminded me of another time forty years ago when the Detroit Tigers won the World Series and we piled into my mom’s car. We, like so many others, had one destination in mind: downtown, which was a short drive from our house. My mother knew I was a huge baseball fan. She intuitively knew that it would be a once in a lifetime experience to take me and my sisters to see the celebration.

Detroit was a much bigger town in those days than it is now. You can only imagine the sheer pandemonium that we drove into. Like Groucho said in Night at the Opera there was dancing in the streets, drinking in the saloons, and necking on the park benches. There was ticker tape. There were drunks directing traffic. Joyful bedlam everywhere. And/But what I will never forget was the sound, the roar of the assembled thousands that was so enormous that it blotted out the sun. My sisters and I took turns leaning on the car horn just to prove again to ourselves that we could not hear it over the roar of the crowd.

That sound is just an echo in my memory now, but watching the people downtown last night brought it all back again.

P.S. Oakland County, north of Detroit — MI-09 — has been represented by a Republican in Congress since at least 1933, but on Tuesday night, it appeared that streak ended when former state senator and lottery commissioner Gary Peters pulled an upset over incumbent Republican Joe Knollenberg. My son Michael worked on Peters’ campaign and he was over the moon last night.