Welcome to Hicksville

Perspective can be a beautiful thing.

Two of my older sisters demonstrated this years ago while musing aloud on the front porch steps.

"Some people have a swimming pool, but we have 10 kids," said one.

"Some people have a color TV, but we have 10 kids," said the other.

In a neighborhood where the next biggest family had five children, ours seemed like a lumbering hulk -- 10 children, two parents, a grandma and a dog. Vacations required two station wagons. Other adults joked about our family being big enough to field a baseball team or wondered how our dad would finance weddings for his seven daughters.

"Five bucks and a ladder," he'd say, referring the price of a marriage license and a way to get to the upstairs girls' dorm in our home.

Now our parents, grandma and two sisters are gone. When the surviving eight McNicholses reminisce, different stories are often told about the same events. Take those daylong car trips to visit mom's family in Michigan's upper peninsula. Were we a big jolly group singing our way up Interstate 75, a bunch of Crabby Appletons elbowing and pinching for space in the crowded back seat (out of the view from the rearview mirror, of course!) or too carsick to do either? Were we the Clampetts or the Gilbreths (as in the 1948 book, "Cheaper by the Dozen")? It depends on who tells the story. It depends on which trip the story is about. Sometimes it depends on what's worth remembering, what proof exists.

I thought of this as I left the Chaffee City Council's special meeting Thursday. A man on his way out had snarled something about Chaffee being a "little Cairo."

Earlier in the day, Cape Girardeau County Presiding Commissioner Gerald Jones had bemoaned the brouhaha surrounding County Auditor David Ludwig's return, after Ludwig's 76-day absence over what lawyers are categorizing as low-level sexual harassment. Jones said the controversy makes the county look bad, like some kind of Hicksville -- which might be disputed by residents of Hicksville, Ohio, and Hicksville, N.Y.

I thought about perspective Friday after a text message from a co-worker popped up on my cell phone.

"Haha your mayor's in jail," it said, referring to Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick's overnight stay in jail Thursday for violating a judge's orders. On Friday, after posting bail, Kilpatrick was charged with two felonies for an unrelated incident in July. He has already cost the city an $8.4 million judgment in favor of the two police officers fired for being whistleblowers. In March, Kilpatrick netted 12 felony charges -- for perjury during the whistleblowers trial, conspiracy, obstruction of justice and misconduct in office.

Kilpatrick faces no less than three concurrent efforts to remove him from office and still won't resign.

I looked at Friday's text message and thought of all I know about Detroit. Nicknames like Arsenal of Democracy, Motown and Motor City are dusty. There's an unenviable sting in the label Most Dangerous, barely more benign than Murder City. But Detroit is also Hockeytown, still the place with the nation's second-largest theater district and city owned art museum; a celebrated symphony orchestra; and a richly complex ethnicity that serves as a reminder of our interconnectedness. Detroiters, even those of us who no longer live there, can be fierce about the town. I like to think Detroit will get back up after being knocked down, but wonder: How much does one man's bad behavior define a city, a county, a region, a state?

The answer depends on who responds to the question and how.

Questions, suggestions or tips for Lost on Main Street? E-mail pmcnichol@semissourian.com or call 335-6611, extension 127.