6 bedrooms, 3 baths, 3300 sq ft: $449,000


In prestigious Grosse Point Farms, MI, just a block or two from the lake, is this lovely home…..

…….which costs less than most homely, tacky, tiny houses in Lake Balboa.

Showing that there is a direct correlation between economic prosperity and house prices, even the finest suburban areas near Detroit are fast becoming cheap places to invest in.

Batman & Robin 1967


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Batman & Robin 1967, originally uploaded by Here in Van Nuys.

This is a slide I scanned from my parent’s collection of Kodachrome images taken through the years.

This is South Haven, MI in the summer of 1967. Two young people are dressed as Batman and Robin. This was the era of ABC-TV’s “Batman” and the show was quite popular with kids.

The way people are dressed, still adheres to that neat and preppy propriety that hung on through most of that decade. Granted, this is the Midwest, and trends never happen first in this area. So this picture is not emblematic of the “swinging sixties”.

Look at the boy on the lower right. He is wearing a madras plaid pullover shirt. That is something one hardly sees these days.

Some of the girls are wearing sleeveless shirts and the tall one on the left is in white oxford cloth. The men’s hair is Brylcreemed: not short, but neatly parted and combed.

“Robin” wears a gold colored blouse and small ladylike watch and short skirt. She almost looks secretarial in her businesslike attire.

These kids drank whole milk and ate ice cream, but nobody looks particularly fat.