Lila Denes - May 19, 1989
Detroit
Now, let's come back to where, you moved to Detroit from Windsor? And uh, your husband went into business here?
Yes. Uh, because we had machines and things like that in our shop and he knew something about it, so my brother at that time was a, a foreman, later on a manager in a machine shop, he took him in and he used to work as a tool maker. Later on, he passed a test and he was a journeyman. So, that's how he worked, as a toolmaker.
Um, so you're living in Detroit, your children went to school right away?
The children went to school here and they went to college, all of them. It wasn't easy. They worked summertime and uh, after school and weekends and they all finished and had diploma, all of them. It wasn't easy.
Um, when you came to, to Detroit, was there a Jewish agency that offered to help?
Not really, but we didn't even go. We didn't go.
Okay, so you didn't...
I don't know, maybe there was, I can't tell you, we didn't go.
Uh, how did you like it in the United States?
Oh, I like it.
I mean, when you first came? Were you...
I liked it in the first place, right away. I liked it.
Did you um, did you move right into a house, an apartment in Detroit?
We moved first into an apartment, in a duplex on Fullerton, and the people who owned the house and used to live downstairs was one of the Bormanns. You know, the Bormanns, one of them. And their daughter was married to Dr. Freedlander, that allergist. He just retired I heard. That's where we used to live for one year but it was a very cold apartment wintertime. That time we paid forty dollars a month heating bill and it was so cold you couldn't stand it. So, we moved out. We bought--we had a little money because in Windsor, we bought a house. We put down a down payment and we fixed it up real nice, so when we sold it we had a little more and so we put it down on Monica, on a three family house. So, we had two tenant upstairs and we used to live free downstairs.
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