MIMichigan Famous People

Two babies born in Omaha, raised into Michiganders

No US president has ever been born in Michigan. The state's claim rests on Gerald Ford, and Ford was born in Omaha, Nebraska, on 14 July 1913 under the name Leslie Lynch King Jr. His mother left his father within weeks, moved to Grand Rapids, remarried, and her new husband gave the boy his name. Ford represented Grand Rapids in the House from 1949 to 1973, became the only person to hold the vice presidency and then the presidency without being elected to either, served from 1974 to 1977, and is buried on the grounds of his museum beside the Grand River.

Malcolm X followed almost the same route. He was born Malcolm Little in Omaha on 19 May 1925, and his family moved to Lansing when he was three. Their house burned down in 1929, his father died on the streetcar tracks two years later, and the Lansing years shape the opening chapters of his autobiography. Two men born in the same Nebraska city, both raised in Michigan, both national figures by the 1960s.

The state's other presidential near miss is Thomas E. Dewey, born in Owosso in 1902, the district attorney who prosecuted the New York mobs and then lost the presidency twice, in 1944 and 1948. The second is the one remembered for a newspaper headline that got it wrong.

Hitsville, 2648 West Grand Boulevard

Berry Gordy Jr. was born in Detroit in 1929, worked the Lincoln-Mercury line, and in 1959 borrowed 800 dollars from his family's savings club to start a record label in a two-storey house on West Grand Boulevard. He hung a sign reading Hitsville U.S.A. across the front and ran the place in shifts around the clock.

Smokey Robinson was born in Detroit in 1940 and met Gordy while auditioning with the Miracles. Diana Ross grew up in the Brewster-Douglass projects and was born in Detroit in 1944. Stevie Wonder was born in Saginaw in 1950, six weeks premature, and signed to Motown at eleven. Aretha Franklin was born in Memphis in 1942 but was raised on Detroit's north end, where her father C. L. Franklin preached at New Bethel Baptist Church and hosted Sam Cooke and Mahalia Jackson in the front room. Marvin Gaye, often assumed to be a Detroiter, was born in Washington, D.C., and came to the city for the label.

The car, the cornflake and the search engine

Henry Ford was born on a farm in what is now Dearborn on 30 July 1863. He did not invent the automobile, but the moving assembly line he installed at Highland Park in 1913 cut the time to build a Model T from over twelve hours to about ninety minutes, and his five dollar day in 1914 doubled the going wage and remade the American working class.

Will Keith Kellogg was born in Battle Creek in 1860 and spent decades as bookkeeper to his brother's sanitarium before the accident with stale boiled wheat produced the flake. He founded his cereal company in 1906. Elijah McCoy, born in Canada in 1844 to parents who had escaped slavery in Kentucky, settled in Ypsilanti and Detroit and held more than fifty patents, most of them for automatic lubricators that let locomotives run without stopping. Larry Page was born in East Lansing in 1973 to two Michigan State computing academics, and co-founded Google in 1998.

Born here, credited somewhere else

• Charles Lindbergh was born in Detroit on 4 February 1902, though he grew up in Minnesota and the state gets the credit.
• Serena Williams was born in Saginaw in 1981. The family moved to Compton, California, while she was a toddler.
• Madonna was born in Bay City in 1958 and raised in Pontiac and Rochester Hills.
• Francis Ford Coppola was born in Detroit in 1939 while his father played flute for the Detroit Symphony, and his middle name comes from the radio hour the orchestra performed on.
• Iggy Pop was born James Osterberg in Muskegon in 1947 and grew up in a trailer park outside Ypsilanti.
• Thomas Edison was born in Ohio but raised in Port Huron, where he sold newspapers and sweets on the Grand Trunk line into Detroit.

Ralph Bunche, Rosa Parks, Sojourner Truth

Ralph Bunche was born in Detroit in 1903 and in 1950 became the first Black American to win the Nobel Peace Prize, awarded for mediating the 1949 armistice agreements in the Middle East. Rosa Parks was an Alabamian, but after the Montgomery boycott cost her and her husband their jobs she moved to Detroit in 1957, worked for Congressman John Conyers for over twenty years, and died in the city in 2005. Sojourner Truth spent her last decades in Battle Creek and is buried at Oak Hill Cemetery there.

Lansing, Flint and the comedy pipeline

Earvin Johnson was born in Lansing in 1959, earned the name Magic from a local sportswriter at fifteen, and took Michigan State past Indiana State and Larry Bird in the 1979 title game that made college basketball a television property. Joe Louis was born in Alabama and moved to Detroit at twelve, boxing out of the Brewster recreation centre. Derek Jeter was born in New Jersey and raised in Kalamazoo, where he told his high school he intended to play shortstop for the Yankees.

Detroit turned out comic performers in quantity. Lily Tomlin, born 1939 on Hazelwood Street, and Gilda Radner, born 1946 in the same city, both went on to define separate eras of American sketch comedy. Michael Moore was born in Flint in 1954 and built his first film around the closing of the plants where his father and uncles worked. Terry Crews was also born in Flint, in 1968, and played defensive end before acting.

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