Pearl Evelyn (Wolfe) Kyzivat (1912 - 2011)

In the early 50's (and before) my mom and dad belonged to the Detroit Yacht Club. We used to drive there from our home in Grosse Pointe on weekends. I learned to swim there. I was told that my mom had signed up for swimming lessons but then couldn't do it due to some problem. (Ear ache?) So they signed me up instead.

As I recall, to get to the club on Belle Isle we had to jog off Jefferson onto East Grand Blvd to get onto the bridge. I remember being told that right after they were married my parents moved from the Dotten boarding house to an apartment on East Grand Blvd. I think I was driven by it once, but have no more info about it. As I recall it that whole area was quite run down, but it is my impression that it was quite grand at the time they moved there.

Later they bought a two family flat on Three Mile Drive in Detroit. It was the 2nd building up from Mack Ave, next to a gas station. (Apparently 3437 3 Mile Drive.) I was born while we lived there, but have only a vague recollection of it. I think they were able to buy that with an inheritance my dad got from his dad, but am not sure of that.

When I was three (in 1949, we moved to our house at 285 Mt. Vernon Ave. in Grosse Pointe Farms.

My mom wanted to be called Evelyn, not Pearl.

She wrote the following for me:

"I was born September 21, 1912 to parents Bessie Seybert Wolfe and Frank Carl Wolfe. They lived on a farm near White Pigeon, Michigan. A year later my father bought a grain elevator in Wolcottville, Indiana. It was there that my sister, Vivian, was born when I was two years old. We lived there until I was about eight years old.

How well I remember walking to school across a long bridge (not so long when I saw it through adult eyes) and up a hill to the school house. I was small and the school house doors were very heavy. I had to hurry to walk in as those doors were opened by a larger student, or wait for the school janitor to let me in."

I visited the area in 2011 after she died, and drove over to Wolcottville to see if I could find what she was describing. While it appears the old school is no longer there (not surprising), I did come across what seems to be an old school bell at the corner of the playground of the current school. And across the street I found some open land with a bridge crossing a stream and a hill to climb from the stream to the site of the bell.

I wonder if that old bell is perhaps sitting on the site of an old school - perhaps the one she was talking about.