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Photograph by Rachel Woolf rd.com | february 2019 11

EVERYDAY HEROES

Reader’s Digest

Detroit’s

Proud Tiger

He fought to save his city,

and a movement followed him

By Andy Simmons

epidemic, well-kept homes had been

abandoned and kindly neighbors had

fled to the suburbs. But not George.

“Living in any city, it’s like being in a

relationship,” he told Reader’s Digest.

“Some days are better than others.

But it was my home. And when I saw

it deteriorating, I had two choices: I

could leave, or I could stay and fight.

I decided to stay and fight.”

When the abandoned home be-

hind his turned into a crack den, the

father of two grabbed some plywood

and nails and began boarding up the

house. After two neighbors stopped to

A

s John George remembers it,
the Detroit neighborhood he
grew up in was straight out of
Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life.
“We knew all our neighbors,” George,
60, told Detroit’s Metro Times. “On
Christmas Eve, we’d all go to midnight
Mass, and there’d be 300 people in our
house at one o’clock to about five in
the morning. The folks were just really
good, hardworking people.”
By the ’80s, however, the old neigh-
borhood was more Pottersville than
Bedford Falls. Due in part to economic
downturns and a nationwide drug