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By Root 1497 0

the Zebra Room had absorbed the exhalations of its auto worker patrons. The place smelled of their beer and hair tonic, their punch-clock misery, their frayed nerves, their trade unionism. The neighborhood was also changing. When my grandfather had opened the bar in 1933, the area had been white and middle-class. Now it was becoming poorer, and predominantly black. In the inevitable chain of cause and effect, as soon as the first black family had moved onto the block, the white neighbors immediately put their houses up for sale. The oversupply of houses depressed the real estate prices, which allowed poorer people to move in, and with poverty came crime, and with crime came more moving vans.

“Business isn’t so good anymore,” Lefty said. “If you want to open a bar, try Greektown. Or Birmingham.”

My father waved these objections aside. “Bar business isn’t so good maybe,” he said. “That’s because there’s too many bars around here. Too much competition. What this neighborhood needs is a decent diner.”

Hercules Hot Dogs™, which at its height would boast sixty-six locations throughout Michigan, Ohio, and southeastern Florida—each restaurant identified by the distinctive “Pillars of Hercules” out front—could be said to have begun on the snowy February morning in 1956 when my father arrived at the Zebra Room to begin renovations. The first thing he did was to remove the sagging venetian blinds from the front windows to let in more light. He painted the interior a bright white. With a G.I. business loan, he had the bar remodeled into a diner counter and had a small kitchen installed. Workmen put red vinyl booths along the far wall and reupholstered the old barstools with Zizmo’s zebra skin. One morning two deliverymen carried a jukebox in the front door. And while hammers pounded and sawdust filled the air, Milton acquainted himself with the papers and deeds Lefty had haphazardly kept in a cigar box beneath the register.

“What the hell is this?” he asked his father. “You’ve got three insurance policies on this place.”

“You can never have too much insurance,” Lefty said. “Sometimes the companies don’t pay. Better to be sure.”

“Sure? Each one of these is for more than this place is worth. We’re paying on all these? That’s a waste of money.”

Up until this point, Lefty had let his son make whatever changes he wanted. But now he stood firm. “Listen to me, Milton. You haven’t lived through a fire. You don’t know what happens. Sometimes in a fire the insurance company burns down, too. Then what can you do?”

“But three—”

“We need three,” insisted Lefty.

“Just humor him,” Tessie told Milton later that night. “Your parents have been through a lot.”

“Sure they’ve been through a lot. But we’re the ones who have to keep paying these premiums.” Nevertheless, he did as his wife said and maintained all three policies.

The Zebra Room I remember as a kid: it was full of artificial flowers, yellow tulips, red roses, dwarf trees bearing wax apples. Plastic daisies sprouted from teapots; daffodils erupted from ceramic cows. Photos of Artie Shaw and Bing Crosby adorned the wall, next to hand-painted signs that said ENJOY A NICE LIME RICKEY! and OUR FRENCH TOAST IS THE TOAST OF THE TOWN! There were photos of Milton putting a finishing-touch cherry on a milk shake or kissing someone’s baby like the mayor. There were photographs of actual mayors, Miriani and Cavanaugh. The great right fielder Al Kaline, who stopped in on his way to practice at Tiger Stadium, had autographed his own head shot: “To my pal Milt, great eggs!” When a Greek Orthodox church in Flint burned down, Milton drove up and salvaged one of the surviving stained glass windows. He hung it on the wall over the booths. Athena olive oil tins lined the front window next to a bust of Donizetti. Everything was hodgepodge: grandmotherly lamps stood next to El Greco reproductions; bull’s horns hung from the neck of an Aphrodite statuette. Above the coffeemaker an assortment of figurines marched along the shelf: Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox, Mickey Mouse, Zeus, and Felix the Cat.