http://www.freep.com/article/2014081...overty-detroit
First in an occasional series
Once, they were all young together, Margaret, her brother John, and a blind neighborhood kid named Stevie Judkins — who wore pants that, Margaret recalls, “never reached his ankles.” His mother would drop Stevie at their small house on 25th Street on Detroit’s west side, and while John played guitar, Margaret would teach Stevie piano chords.
“He played a lot with one finger, and I showed him how to use two hands to make it sound better,” she says. “After that, all he wanted to do was music. He said if he could beat me playing piano one day, that would be the best thing in the world.”
The blind kid grew up to be Stevie Wonder, and he would beat Margaret at the piano and, you could say, pretty much everything else. Wonder, now 64, is an internationally famous recording star, has 22 Grammys, more than 30 Top 10 hits, owns or owned luxury homes on both coasts, and boasts a net worth reportedly in excess of $100 million.
Meanwhile, Margaret and John [[who was Wonder’s earliest musical partner) still live together in the house on 25th Street, a decaying, one-bathroom structure that is slowly being reclaimed by the earth. Weeds and brush grow high, grass has overtaken what used to be sidewalk, and inside the dark, largely windowless interior, small flowers are growing up through a hole in the bathroom floor, where a raccoon recently burrowed inside and “about scared me to death,” Margaret recalls.
The house, rotted by any standard, is all Margaret Terry, 72, and John Glover, 66, say they can afford, living on the meager fixed incomes of Social Security checks. In this way, they are similar to thousands of other seniors in Detroit. But they have been robbed five times, Margaret says, “at least twice because people think we got money on account of we know Stevie Wonder.” Their plastic blinds are always shut, she says, “because they shoot guns around here.” An extension cord hangs across the ceiling, borrowing electricity from one place to the next. The walls are cheap paneling, the water only works in the bathroom sink, a broken boiler is in the middle of the kitchen and there is barely room to walk amid suitcases, boxes and plastic bags of clothes, the result of John moving back eight years ago, after his place was robbed while he attended a funeral.
This is what poor looks like in Detroit.
But so is this. In the rear of the house is a cramped room stuffed with John’s keyboards, guitars and memorabilia. And resting high on a wooden plank is a gold record for the song “You Don’t Have to Be a Star [[To Be In My Show),” a No. 1 hit in the 1970s for Marilyn McCoo and Billy Davis Jr.
Baby, come as you are
With just your heart
And I’ll take you in …
You wrote that song, Glover is asked?
“Yeah,” he replies, softly. “I wrote it.” He points to a shelf of old albums, by artists as varied as the Jackson 5, Tom Jones, the Supremes, and Donny and Marie.
“Wrote for all of them, too.”
Meanwhile, sitting in the outer room on a faded couch, her graying hair braided long and hanging halfway down her sweatshirt, Margaret recalls a record she once made in her younger days called “This Will Never Do.” She has no copies anymore. [[“I got nothing to play it on anyhow.”) But you can search it on the Internet and hear her sweet, lovely voice singing a soulful tune, with John on guitar and what he claims is a preteen Stevie Wonder playing the drums.
Once they were all young together, three musical Detroit kids. The piano they gathered around, a Wurlitzer upright, still sits in the corner, yellowed and dusty. It was the launching pad for a Motown legend.
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