The Golden Dream by Stephen; Birmingham

considered “terribly important” in Grosse Pointe, for example, because her husband happens to be Mrs. Edsel Ford’s sister’s son.
    All the Ford talk in Grosse Pointe can be confusing, however, since there is not one Ford family in the community but three. The richest Fords are of course the royal Fords, or the “car Fords,” as they are called. But far from poor are the so-called salt Fords—the John B. Fords and the Emory Fords—whose money comes from such enterprises as the Wyandotte Chemical Company and the Libbey-Owens-Ford Glass Company (soda ash from salt beds is used in glassmaking). Then there are the “old Fords,” who would include the Frederick Clifford Fords; they, though not as rich as the others, have been around longer, and have prospered in such endeavors as law and banking. Frederick C. Ford’s mother was a Buhl. The original Buhl was given a land grant by King George III in the 1760s, and not long ago, when a Buhl wanted to sell off some of the land, an elaborate search was made into the title of it. When no title could be found, Mr. Buhl grew exasperated. “Damn it,” he said finally, “there isn’t any title to that land; the Buhls just took it!” Mrs. Frederick C. Ford is an amateur genealogist and has made an ancestor search of her family, the Brushes—another first-cabin Detroit family. She discovered that the Brushes descend directly from Alfred the Great in the ninth century, so “old” would certainly apply to these Fords. None of the three Ford families, as far as anybody knew, was related to any of the others until the Frederick C. Fords’ son, Walter Buhl Ford, married “Dodie” Ford, Henry Ford II’s sister. This union created a family known locally as “the Ford-Fords.”
    Grosse Pointe started—as did Westchester County and the Philadelphia Main Line—as a resort, and the old first-cabin families built summer and weekend homes there. There was a logic to it. Detroit’s rich used to live in large city mansions along Jefferson Avenue, and the Jefferson Avenue trolley line ended at the Grosse Pointe line. Beyond that was country, and Lake St. Clair was still clear and sweet, as the name implied. Immigrant French farmers, who gave the fat point of land its name, had small, rectangular farms in the area, and as these were bought up, one by one, by the rich, roads were built along the farms’ borders, which accounts for the strict grid pattern of Grosse Pointe streets today. The French influence lingers in strange ways. A street with the odd name Kercheval is presumed to descend from the French cours de cheval —“horse path.” The old rich built along the lakeshore places that were sprawling, comfortable, countrified, but not particularly grandiose. Life in Grosse Pointe was unhurried and informal. “It was lovely in the old days,” says Countess Cyril Tolstoi, kin of the McMillans and the widow of one of Count Leo’s nephews. The countess, whose house is now on a typically crowded Grosse Pointe street, says: “This place is all that’s left of my grandfather’s farm. His property ran all the way down to the lake, which is now I don’t know how many blocks away. It was a long walk through the woods to the nearest neighbor’s house. Now Grosse Pointe is so big and crowded that when I go to parties I hardly know anybody. I’m introduced to people I’ve never even heard of.” The countess’s butler pours a martini from a silver shaker and, as if to emphasize her remarks, the tinkle of a bell from a Good Humor truck can be heard outside her heavily curtained windows. And Mrs. Raymond Dykema, another old-timer, says: “There was a feeling of importance , growing up in Grosse Pointe in those days. As a girl, I would sit on our veranda and watch the ships go by and know that my father built them. They were our ships. It made one