Detroit Free Press from Detroit, Michigan • Page 114

it DETROIT FREE PRESSSUNDAY, APR. 27, 1986 FORDSON HIGH: An American Experience A legacy of magnificent endurance -IT to 1 SB rfe i If fti ft Detroit Fordson High School Ford Rd. ISSHE: Dearborn fl Dearborn WZ Rouge ComplexX Y7T Edsel Ford I cent in the Midwest. Many loyalists insist that it still is. It cost $2.5 million to build then an unheard-of amount and it foretold an era when Dearborn would live high off its industrial tax base.

The architectural style is Gothic revival, with detailing that suggests an English manor house of the 1 6th Century. The center hallway is lined with marble busts of Plato, Socrates, Aristotle and 15 other ancient Greeks. Throughout the building there are bronze and marble statuary and full-sized reproductions of paintings by American and European masters, all in remarkably good condition considering the nearly 60 years of teenage wear and tear they have endured. The library an oak-paneled hall with a massive fireplace and the air of a turn-of-the century British men's club displays a series of murals dealing with transportation themes. "This touch of opulence," wrote the Detroit Free Press in 1928, "indicates not only that the best is none too good for Fordson students, but is an ever present reminder to the children of sources of the great benefits they enjoy." Fordson has a reputation for solid academics.

Generations of children of immigrant auto workers have gone there to get ahead in the world. More than half of Fordson's graduates go on to college. The choice for many is Fordson High School is as much a part of Dearborn as Ford Motor Co. Construction of the school began in 1926, and two years later it opened in what then was known as the village of Fordson. The village had changed Its name from Springwells to Fordson in 1925 to honor its most celebrated local product the Fordson tractor, manufactured by Henry Ford Son Co.

on the site of what is now the Ford Rouge complex. Fordson High's athletic teams are nicknamed the Tractors. In 1928, the year the school opened, the neighboring villages of Fordson and Dearborn (which had shortened its name from Dearbornville the year before) decided to merge, keeping the name Dearborn. It never has been an entirely satisfactory union. West Dearborn the original Dearborn always has been the more upscale of the two, and tends to think of itself as a middle-class suburb.

It has the country club and the Henry Ford Estate. East Dearborn considers itself a working-class factory town. It has the Rouge complex. THOSE IMAGES prevail today. Fordson High School has a reputation for a certain colorful, streetwise toughness, while Dearborn High and Edsel Ford, in the West End, are more typically suburban.

When Fordson High School opened, it was acclaimed as the most magnifi -fail I If iMIJs ft a i 1 iff J-L mi I II II I 'II 0 III II PAW Free Press Map bv DOMINIC TRUPIANO adviser to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson. The late Orville Hubbard, who was Dearborn's mayor for 36 years and whose segregationist views left a lasting imprint on the city, was also a Fordson alumnus. Tom Hundley Free Press Pholo by PATRICIA BECK Henry Ford Community College, a school that began in the basement of Fordson. The school has its share of notable alumni. Former U.S.

Sen. Robert Griffin went there, as did Jerome Wiesner, the former president of Massachusetts Institute of Technology and science When Fordson High School opened in 1928. it was acclaimed as the most magnificent in the Midwest. A Gothic revival structure, it cost $2.5 million to build. Mid-America meets Mideast: It's a rich cultural stew FORDSON, from Page 1 third-generation Italian and Polish, but there also are recent arrivals from Romania, Albania, Pakistan and the Ivory Coast.

It is not always a harmonious mix. There are occasional fights, and more often than not the hostilities seem to develop along ethnic lines. Two years ago a minor cafeteria brawl between Arabs and non-Arabs brought the police and a lot of bad publicity to the school. Tensions rose again this year after Dearborn's new mayor, Michael Guido (Fordson 1972), made a campaign appearance at the school shortly after publishing a pamphlet setting forth his views on Dearborn's "Arab problem." "Fordson is a reflection of what's happening in the community," says Alan Amen, a third-generation Arab-American and 1965 Fordson graduate whose son, Sam, is a junior there. "What's happening in the community can't be left at the school's doorstep." Nor can some events that occur far from Dearborn.

"When there are problems in Libya, it kind of tenses the air," says Keith Derry, 18, a non-Arab Fordson senior who says Arabs and non-Arabs are equally responsible for the problems that arise. After the cafeteria fight in 1984, Alan Amen became active in a parents' group that sought to defuse tensions at ft wallets, yet use state-subsidized lunch coupons; that they treat women as inferiors; and that they deliberately exclude non-Arabs from their circle by speaking Arabic. "It's no secret that there are people here who don't like Arabs. I'd be a fool to say there is no Arab problem," says Todd Gonzalez, an 18-year-old senior who is president of Fordson's Student Congress, i Todd admits that at times he gets a little exasperated with the Arabs. "But I'll catch myself," he explains.

"You can't condemn a whole race because of a few bad individuals. There are some people who are jerks because they're jerks, not because they're Arabs. You have a bad experience with one, and you want to condemn the whole culture, but that's pretty stupid." Even though he's been involved in a few scuffles with Arab students, Todd says he's "upset by the negative attitude toward Arabs in Dearborn. "They're a different culture, and some people can't accept that. Then you get these people who say, 'Why can't they Americanize themselves? Why can't they dress like I guess they are afraid of people who are different from themselves.

"When you get two groups that are different, you're going to get friction, you're going to have fights. It could be jocks against non-jocks, but every time there's a problem at Fordson, people say, 'Oh, it's the Arabs Todd and most other non-Arab students are quick to draw a distinction between the second- and third-generation Arab-Americans who seem eager to fit in at Fordson and those often the sons and daughters of recent immigrants who don't. "It seems the ones who are willing to participate don't cause problems. The other ones, they just seem to take a dislike to everything," says Ted Stockton, a 16-year-old junior. "Once someone makes it known that they want to participate, there's no discrimination well, only a little but they're pretty much accepted." Paul Swiatlowski, an 18-year-old senior, recalls a conversation he struck up with an Arab student in one of his classes: "The guy didn't want to be here at all.

He wanted to be in Lebanon, fighting. He didn't like it here. He had no national pride. Three lockers down from me, another kid has pictures of Khomeini and a burning American flag. This kid, he's not a troublemaker; he doesn't fit in anywhere.

But I sort of resent it. What is he doing here? If you have a picture of a burning American flag, what are you doing here? Why don't you go back?" tne nign scnooi. i nat where he met Will Derry, Keith father. "We all wanted the same thing for our kids. We wanted them to be able to go to school without being intimidated.

We wanted to be able to get a good education," said Derry. "Funny thing," Amen added. "Nobody really knew what the fight was about. Nobody knew what the issue was, but everybody could clearly identify the enemy it was the other guy. Once we got past the finger-pointing stage, it turned out that all of the parents wanted the same thing." An ethnic festival Filomena Lindros, daughter of Italian immigrants, grew up in the South End and graduated from Fordson in 1966, but feared that because the school was so overwhelmingly Arab A test of tradition Dearborn residents traditionally have taken great pride in their community institutions, but Fordson High School seems to inspire an unusually deep loyalty and pride among current and past students.

"A Fordson graduate will make a point of telling you he went to Fordson, even if you didn't ask," says Ralph Hartshorn, a teacher and social worker in the school system since 1957. In part, this loyalty and pride reflect an affiliation strengthened over several generations. A remarkable number of today's students have parents who were Fordson graduates. A few even have grandparents who went to Fordson. But this sense of loyalty and community identification is being put to the test by an influx of immigrants from the Middle East that has probably quadrupled in the last decade.

Fordson principal William Letsche predicts the school will have an Arab majority within four years, and some Arab community leaders expect an 80 percent Arabic enrollment by 1995. Most of the immigration over the past decade has been a direct result of Lebanon's war. School records show big jumps in Arabic enrollment after the outbreak of the civil war in 1975, and again after the Israeli invasion of 1978. Unlike previous generations of immigrants who came here seeking economic opportunities, these newcomers are not immigrants at all, but refugees escaping car bombs and free-lance militias. Often, they view their stay here as temporary.

Their attitude toward assimilation is ambivalent, even hostile. In addition, many of the children of these refugees not only have difficulty with English but are illiterate in Arabic as well schools being a casualty of Lebanon's decade of war. The challenge facing Fordson is enormous, and has few parallels in American education. But for the most part, staff, students and parents face an uncertain future with equanimity. "Somehow," says principal Letsche, "we'll manage." I she shouldn't send her daughters there.

"But frankly I realized that no matter where they go they will encounter the same situation, so they might as well learn to deal with it. 1 "When I was growing up, first encounter I had with a black person was when I began working in the bank. I felt my children should be more aware of the people around them." Her oldest daughter, Dania, now a junior, says many of her classmates "feel they are being invaded by Arabs," but that she happens to like Fordson's unique atmosphere. "There's a potential here for a riot every 10 minutes, but it doesn't happen," Dania says. "The kids know how to handle it.

The faculty knows how to handle it. "When outsiders hear about Fordson, they think about Arabs. They think we are dripping with oil. A lot of Americans have trouble accepting (Arab) culture, but I think it's neat to be exposed to something like that. We don't have to go downtown to see an ethnic festival.

Some Americans don't realize how neat this is, and they resent being exposed to it." i i I Factory rats and cake-eaters Arabs have been a part of Dearborn and Fordson High School since the late 1920s. The first immigrants settled in an area known as the South End, a working-class neighborhood in the shadow of the Ford Rouge plant. Through the mid-'60s, the South End remained a multiethnic environment with Poles, Romanians, Italians and Arabs living side by side. "I grew up learning to swear in half a dozen languages," said Alan Amen, whose parents still live in a house on Holly Street. Successive waves of Lebanese, Palestinians and Yemenis gradually gave the area a distinctive Middle Eastern flavor.

A mosque at the intersection of Dix Avenue and Vernor Highway has been the neighborhood's most prominent landmark since 1952. Z0d Preppies, burnouts and 'Ugly Arabs' Any urban high school will sort itself into a complex society of in-groups and outcasts, popular kids and social pariahs. Fordson is no exception. It has its jocks and preppies, its miscreants and burnouts, the latter term apparently referring to the '80s hybrid of the '50s greasers. Then there are the Arabs.

For the most part, Fordson's Arab and non-Arab students make friends with each other and participate in school activities together quite naturally and normally. Fordson has Arab jocks and Arab preppies and even a few Arab burnouts. But among non-Arab students, there is a very specific stereotype of the "Ugly Arab," a perception that some Arabs are too clannish; that they are not grateful for the privilege of living ifl America; that tey drive big cars and have fat Free Press Photos bv PATRICIA BECK Fordson High's cross-cultural kaleidoscope: Students pass each other in front of the school greenhouse (upper photo); three students stop to look at a display of senior pictures (lower photo'. See FORbsON. Page 5.