Detroit Free Press from Detroit, Michigan • Page 15

0) CIMj I SECTION Michigan Dateline, Page 4B Obituaries, Page 4B Call City Desk, 1-313-222-6600 Friday, September 30, 1994 Hctroit 4frce Prcs Susan Group to challenge TV station purchase i i watsoii River YIELDS CAIfflOH Workers from Detroit Historical Museums hoist a mussel-crusted cannon Thursday from the Detroit River. Historians think it may be a U.S. relic from the War of 1812. Story, jPage 4B. PAT WEST Detroit Free Press By Jim finkelstein Free Press Staff Writer Lansing developer Joel Ferguson said Thursday he is organizing a group of other black businessmen to block the sale of Detroit's WGPR-TV (Channel 62) to CBS.

The group, including Bing Steel President Dave Bing and GMC Truck general manager Roy Roberts, will try to convince the Federal Communications Commission that WGPR should remain a black-owned station affiliated with CBS. "We're going to win, too," said Ferguson, owner of Lansing's WLAJ-TV, the ABC affiliate and chairman of Michigan State University's board of trustees. Ferguson said he offered $34 million for the station on Aug. 31 more than three weeks before CBS announced its deal td buy the low-rated station for $24 million on Sept. 23.

CBS was forced to buy the station to maintain a presence in the Detroit market after its affiliate, WJBK-TV, (Channel 2) was bought by Fox. The See TELEVISION, Page 2B Opportunity came after eviction scare hen I wrote about Be mice Hi James earlier this year, the I 1 1 76-year-old Detroit widow It ased me to read the column to her. She wanted to feel the touch of the words written about her; she wanted to lose herself and find herself in the rhythm of phrases and pauses that rose from the printed page. It was late January. Mrs.

James was about to be evicted from her $30,000 home because she didn't pay her 1988 county taxes. A Downriver I I. k. A I UM1 V. uu doctor wife got the rights to the house by paying the $251.38 back tax bill.

By Christmas of 1993, the James home legally belonged to the jilLillMM jIj LJ imm. I 7 -L LJ LJI 1 imam Suspect maybe serial rapist By L.L. Brasier Free Press Staff Writer Police are trying to determine if a man arrested Thursday in the early morning sexual assault on a girl at the Uptown Motel in Royal Oak has attacked four other women in a string of rapes in suburban communities in the last two weeks. Police say the suspect broke into the motel about 5 a.m. Thursday and assaulted a 16-year-old girl, who was staying there with her grandmother.

The grandmother was not in the room. The man was spotted a short time later riding a bicycle south on Woodward and was arrested. The 33-year-old Southfield resident is expected to be formally charged today. Police did not release his name Thursday. The attack occurred less than 24 hours after another Royal Oak woman was raped in her home on Lincoln in the southeast part of the city.

In that case, the man approached her outside her home about 11 a.m. Wednesday and told her he needed to use her phone. When the woman went inside to get a portable phone, the man followed her in, pulled a handgun and raped her. She was able to escape and ran screaming to neighbors. The attack is also similar to one in Hazel Park on Sept.

15. In that instance, a man knocked on a woman's front door, asked about buying a car, then forced his way inside, using a gun. The woman was fondled, tied with electrical cords and robbed. Women were similarly attacked in their homes in Warren on Sept. 15 and Sept.

23 in neighborhoods near 9 Mile. See RAPE, Page 2B I I I mumism msmnsm mmmamA PAT WESTDetroit Free Press Michelle Sanborn was picked recently over more experienced hands for the top job al the Macomb County Jail because, "She has the moxie." By Jeanne May Free Press Staff Writer all Michelle Sanborn's job qualifications, the one that most impressed her boss was her moxie. It became apparent when SHE'S YOUNG, SHE'S TOUGH At 32, she runs jail "The old stereotype is if you're young and pretty, you can't be bright and tough, but she's all of the above." Yvonne Dowrie, who worked for Sanborn as a computer maintenance secretary in her old job, said only someone who didn't know Sanborn would think she couldn't do the job. "She's very sharp," she said. And Sanborn has a gentle side, too.

"She's very thoughtful and considerate," Dowrie said. "She's the best boss you can have, I think." See IN CHARGE, Page 3B Sanborn started a program to make prisoners who have money pay at least part of the cost of their stay at the Macomb County Jail. She has garnisheed wages, intercepted IRS refunds and repossessed cars to get the money either while the convicts are in jail or after they leave. Once she even seized a dune buggy. This year, the program expects to collect $600,000.

"I've had to be tough," Sanborn said. That attitude along with her education and her experience persuaded Macomb County Sheriff William Hackel to pass over older, more experienced hands to give Sanborn the top job at the jail. At age 32, she heads an operation that houses 1,000 inmates some of the moxie." Sanborn's first day at her desk was Monday. She makes $53,000 a year. She knows some people at the jail think she's too young for the job, though none have told her that to her face.

"I had a couple of people who thought maybe some of the officers in the department who have been here longer should have gotten the job," Hackel said. them in maximum security a staff of 360 and an annual budget of more than $15 million. She was Hackel's first and only choice when former administrator Don Amboyer retired last week to head the continuing education program at Macomb Community College. "She's been dealing with prisoners for some time, and not in a position where they want to hear her call," Hackel said. "So I know she has Yak Fact Moxie was a soft drink sold in the 1930s.

The people who made it said it would give you pep and energy to do great things. To say someone has moxie is a compliment meaning that person has courage and know-how. woman. Bernice James Mrs. James' story, along with the names of the Downriver couple, ran on Tuesday morning, Jan.

25. By that afternoon, the couple had a change of heart. It was a happy ending, but Mrs. James couldn't read about it. She was illiterate.

She couldn't recognize the letters in her husband's name nor the name of the street she lived on for 20 years. The spelling of her own name was a mystery to her. Her education in rural Louisiana had been spotty, at best. When she quit school in the eighth grade, she couldn't read a word. That's why she almost lost her home.

All the proper warnings and notices about the impending sale had reached her, but she couldn't decipher them. So she stacked them in a corner with the rest of her mail. When her husband was alive, he handled those things. After his death, she turned to a few close relatives for help. Until she almost lost the house, she kept her reading problem a secret.

"I try to learn," she told me during an interview, "but maybe there's something wrong with my head." There was nothing wrong. "She was an intelligent woman," explained Ollie Brown, an adult literacy instructor who read about Mrs. James and offered to tutor her. By March, Mrs. James was attending reading classes offered by New Prospect Missionary Baptist.

"She was very nervous at first," Brown recalled. "She would tell me, 'The reason I'm so nervous is I want to know so bad. It's here in my head, but it just won't come "After the third or fourth session, she got to where she was more comfortable. Still, she was trying so hard. 'I just want to know so she would say." "Just slow down," Brown would tell her.

"You're not going to do this overnight. Just look where you are now and where you were when you started. You know this letter this week. Each week you keep building on, until before you know it, you'll be reading." Brown turned the lessons into games. To learn her ABC's, the women played alphabet bingo.

"When she won, I'd give her a little prize," Brown said. and really gave her problems." Slowly, Mrs. James gained tiny footholds in that seemingly insurmountable mountain of letters that had blocked her path for years. During part of the sessions, Brown would read to Mrs. James.

"I would point at the letters. Sometimes before I could say the word, she would say it." But always, foremost in Bemice James' mind was the desire to write and recognize her own name. All her life, those skills eluded her. By late June, Mrs. James wanted a break from classes.

Summer was her busy time; her family would be visiting from down South. Ollie Brown reluctantly said OK, but made plans to meet again this fall. The sessions never resumed. Mrs. James died Sept 21, after suffering two strokes.

Her funeral was Wednesday at United Kingdom Missionary Baptist Church. During the services, Brown told the mourners how hard Mrs. James worked and how smart she was. Then she told them something that filled the room with smiles. Before her summer break, Bernice James had learned to read and to write her name.

1 ah IF mm i -h tr 3 By Roddy Ray The extended family in the house on Tyh ynder an overcast sky Sunday morning, Howard stepped up to the lectern and managed only a sentence. Freda Rosenblatt poses for a photo with Charles Fabian. 1 i Charles needed something. Howard endured willingly. Saturday morning, Charles, 87, was found dead in bed.

Howard helped Freda arrange the Orthodox funeral. The service, at Hebrew Memorial Park in Fraser, was small, with the rabbi, Howard and wife Jacqueline, Freda and four others. Until he stepped up to the podium to say a few words, Howard had been strong. But Charles was like a member of an unusual extended family that dates back 35 years, and Howard could say only, "I come today with joy and tears," before he broke down. When he recovered, he regretted aloud he'd not been a better shepherd like the times Charles wanted to play chess and he'd begged off.

But Rabbi David Nelson, knowing that a fundamental call of Judaism is to help your neighbor, begged to differ. badly Charles missed his wife, how he kept her clothes in the closet. And how he cared for Carl, who was blind. In 1989, while carrying Carl's laundry, Charles fell and broke his hip, confining him to bed. Eventually he took up residence on Tyler, in a back bedroom of the second upstairs flat, where Howard now lived, across from Freda.

Carl went into a nursing home. Despite a busy life of his own he owned a small trucking company Howard looked after Charles. They'd play chess or talk about the Bible, politics or sports. Eventually, to make it easier to wheel Charles outdoors, he was moved into a spare bedroom in Howard's mother's first-floor flat Charles could be a burden. Howard would come home and fall to the couch, exhausted, when the phone would ring: his mother, to say This was Howard Baker, 49, a Pentecostal, who 35 years ago moved with his mother into a downstairs flat of a three-flat home on Tyler, in a Jewish area on Detroit's near west side.

In one of the upstairs flats lived Freda Rosenblatt, who came to regard Howard as a son. Though a Jew and a Gentile, they held mutual respect for one another's faiths; Freda even visited Howard's church. Some miles away, on Kentfield, lived Freda's brother Carl and sister Shirley, and Shirley's husband, Charles Fabian. When Shirley died in 1979, Charles and Carl, brothers-in-law in their 70s, had to fend for themselves. Freda, approaching 70, began taking meals over; she'd get a ride from Howard or his mother.

Thus Howard, at 34, met Charles at 72. It touched Howard to see how GEORGE WAIDMANDetrort Free Press Howard Baker, who moved into the three-flat home on Detroit's west side when he was a teenager, stands with his wife, Jacqueline. GOT A REAL LIFE STORY? CALL (313) 222-2659 ANYTIME ML Clemens blamed for lake pollution, Page 2B. Labor leader worked for civil rights, Page 4B..