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Friends for 75 Years
OUR COMMUNITY
Friends for 75 Years
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Each week, Gerald Freedman, Harold Kulish, David Lippitt and Robert Weitz sit around a table of their chosen dining spot around Metro Detroit to bicker, banter, finish and cut off each other’s sentences. It’s the kind of conversation you can only have with friends you’ve had for more than 75 years.
The four men all turn 90 this year. Among the group is a wealth of information and knowledge of history about Detroit’s bygone Jewish and other ethnic neighborhoods. They recently met at the offices of the JN to discuss their friendship and the changes they’ve seen in Detroit in the decades they’ve lived here and why they wouldn’t want to live anywhere else.
Each Saturday for the last 10 years or so, the friends pick a restaurant in Metro Detroit for breakfast or lunch. They had to take a break over the pandemic and even tried Zoom meetups, which just left them frustrated, they all agreed.
Now that cases have eased, they are back on the dining circuit, at first finding places with outdoor seating, now easing their way back into indoor dining.
Their tastes run the gamut from diners to delis, and they have a special affection for Middle Eastern food. Their favorite haunts these days are Phoenicia in Birmingham, the Stage Deli in West Bloomfield and Siegel’s Deli in Commerce. Though they might sometimes go out on Saturday evenings as couples with their wives, Saturday brunch or lunch is a time exclusively set aside for the men to catch up, schmooze and reminisce about their boyhood.
“How lucky are we that we are all 90, live in our own homes, are still married, can still drive and get around, and get together with good friends,” mused Lippitt, of Commerce Township, who worked in insurance sales.
“(Meeting up for our weekly get together) provides a good feeling that we look forward to every Saturday,” said Kulish, of Bloomfield Hills, who made a career in real estate and is CEO of property management firm Cormorant Co.
“When women get together, they talk more about personal things than men do. Men are more superficial than women are. So as a result, what we talk about by and large, is current events and the past,” he said.
But Lippitt disagreed.
“We also talk about sports and politics, and what’s going on with our houses and our family, too,” said Lippitt, who has been married to his wife, Elaine, for 46 years.
“Not to mention death and divorce,” quipped Weitz, of Huntington Woods, a retired school counselor who spent his career at Fraser High School in Macomb County.
“Talking about divorce is kind of humorous when you’re 90, because you don’t
Four friends turning 90 still get together weekly.
STACY GITTLEMAN CONTRIBUTING WRITER
TOP: Robert Weitz, David Lippitt, Harold Kulish (seated) and Gerald Freedman enjoy each other’s company, as they have for over 75 years, at Sahara Restaurant in Oak Park.
get divorced. But we talk a lot about who has passed on and who is seeing who.”
A LONG HISTORY
The men grew up in Detroit’s Dexter neighborhood. There, they met in elementary and middle school, played ball, got jobs and all graduated Central High School in 1950. They were active in B’nai B’rith Youth Organization’s Aleph Zadik Aleph No. 63 as teens.
All but Kulish graduated from Wayne University, before the institution was renamed Wayne State University in 1956.
“There were two distinct Jewish neighborhoods in Detroit,” Lippitt said. “In the Dexter neighborhood, you had multi-family homes that were built very close together and people made a modest middle-class income. As the kids living in Dexter, we all worked. The Jewish kids who lived in the Seven Mile neighborhood in the larger, single-family homes, not so much,”
Now in their 90s, the men have had their share of health problems, from diabetes to cancer to heart disease. But they all feel very fortunate to have each other, their wives, relatively good health, mobility and the independence to get out each week to schmooze with each other over a meal.
“We are all walking survivors,” Lippitt said. “We are all lucky to be alive.”
Outside of their get-togethers, the four enjoy spending time with their spouses and seeing their children and grandchildren, the bulk of whom make their homes in Metro Detroit. They talk about the changes they have seen in Detroit with wistful nostalgia and look hopefully to some of the economic progress as the city works its way out of decades of decline.
As times have changed, the four said that they think it is more of a challenge for today’s kids to form the kinds of friendships out in the suburbs compared to the way they grew up in the closely knit, multi-family houses on the streets of Detroit, where kids lived in close proximity to one another and were left to their own devices — more than today’s more scheduled suburban kids who live on bigger lots spread further apart.
“We were somewhat independent compared to the kids today,” recalled Kulish, who in 2021 worked on an initiative to provide instruments and teach instrumental skills to Detroit K-12 students in public and private schools. “You could walk to a friend’s house or a vacant lot to play. We walked by ourselves to school. Kids can’t do any of those things today; they are totally dependent on their parents to drive them everywhere. Kids today don’t have the pleasure of spending time with their friends playing ball or hanging out on the porch after school like we did.”
— DAVID LIPPITT
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