She’s the only woman in sight with a coconut tan and a flower tucked behind her ear, and the street guy is thinking she’s a tourist and an easy touch. So he walks by twice, making sure, and then he asks for directions to Woodward Avenue.
In a few minutes, he’ll try the act on somebody else. Look earnest, start a conversation, wheedle a buck. But the woman with the flower just points him two blocks east, and he doesn’t even make the attempt with his modest little con. There’s something about her that says she owns the place… and for a while, she mostly did.
For more than two decades now, Emily Gail has been saying nice things about Kailua Kona, Hawaii. But the woman who believed in downtown when nobody else did is still saying nice things about Detroit, too.
That was her slogan in the ’70s and ’80s: “Say Nice Things About Detroit.” She put it on T-shirts and bumper stickers and the occasional banner trailing behind an airplane, and now it’s embedded in the history of an era.
Gail is 62, not that she looks it, and her naivete and trademark braids are long gone. For all her talent as a promoter, she took an inventory of her inner self awhile back and decided she’s an introvert.
The high-profile romance with the hot-button boyfriend flamed out when the first George Bush was president, and there has been no replacement: “I would love to fall in love like that again.”
That’s pretty much it, though, for the list of sobering realities. It’s 80-plus degrees and the sun is gleaming off the river, maybe her favorite sight anywhere, and she’s strolling the sidewalks in a place that still feels like home.
“I love this,” she says. “I’ve always loved this.”
Looking back
A quick word about downtown Detroit back when Gail began to make herself known: Ugh.
Hudson’s was still around, but dreariness had descended.
Then the Renaissance Center opened in 1977, sucking tenants out of the old office buildings and into the glass fortress on the river.
“People walked with their heads down,” she says. The streets were so empty that Gail and beau Herb (Pooh) Squires would bring out her old baseball gloves and play catch on the asphalt.
Her family owned Gail’s Office Supply in the Penobscot Building. She opened a tiny gift shop in the skyscraper, then a larger one at Congress and Shelby called Emily’s Across the Street. She sold jewelry and T-shirts, often using one day’s receipts to buy the next day’s merchandise, and branched out into hot dogs, ice cream and cookies.
Profit margins were minimal, but the fun factor was high. She sponsored bike days and a fun run that grew from 100 pairs of feet to more than 20,000. Emily became the first name in civic boosterism.
Then she lost her lease, married Pooh and moved to Hawaii. No more stickers, no more fun run, no more Detroit, except in her heart.
In love through tough times
Way back when, Gail says, Pooh had written a bad check for $450. That made him a felon in Canada, from whence he came, and the U.S. decided he wasn’t welcome here.
The legal battle lasted most of a decade. Ultimately, he had to leave the country for a year.
They married in a minister’s backyard in Windsor, landed in Hawaii when his exile expired in ’86, and discovered that the fight was all that was holding them together.
Once, they were so giddily entwined that they’d order one dinner at the London Chop House and eat from the same plate. Now she doesn’t know where he is. But that’s history, and her present is Hawaii.
She sells real estate there, hosts a radio show, and tells everyone that Detroit is better than they think.
Her sister, Ann, still lives in Indian Village, and they spent one day on her current trip just driving the city. Later, she watched a few innings of a Tigers game from outside Comerica Park and spent three hours sitting on some steps at River Days, watching people enjoy themselves.
She still gets recognized, which is nice. She doesn’t always recognize what she’s looking at, which is also nice. She couldn’t have been much more pleased by the new Doubletree Guest Suites Fort Shelby if you’d made her a stockholder.
“You realize there’s a new era of people, and you have to support them,” she says. She’s on Washington now, where she’d joke with firefighters outside a station that no longer holds trucks.
“You don’t have to do anyt hing spectacular,” she says. You just have to notice the things worth appreciating, like a blue sky over the water, or a visitor with a flower in her hair and a bounce in her step.
nrubin@detnews.com
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