Two Square Miles

Book excerpt: Clawson, Michigan is a small town-only 2.4 square miles. Once little more than two sawmills and a few farms, it was eventually captured by the urban sprawl of Detroit. In the years following WW-II the town rapidly grew as large numbers of homes were built for the blue collar workers needed to fuel the auto and manufacturing plants of the post-war boom. There is, however, little remarkable in that. It's the story of thousands of small towns-places from which you would expect very little. But that would be a mistake. Those two square miles wound up producing an extraordinary number of truly remarkable and gifted people. In an area smaller than what would be needed for a few good sized urban shopping centers, it somehow managed to produce a host of professional athletes, innovative business people, writers, and major players in the arts and entertainment industries. This does not include the hundreds of doctors, lawyers and other professionals-nor the tens of thousands of simple, honest, hard-working people-who got their start there. Clawson got the job done the way most small towns do-in a simple, off-hand, no nonsense, blue-collar kind of way. It represents a value system and a way of life that seems to be evaporating in our modern high-tech world. Yet, despite it all, the city remains as a symbol of everything that is right with America.