Mitchell Aclise is a lucky 77 now, a man who should have been a star high school and college athlete, except there was no money in his family to allow him to play.
Instead, he worked a good solid 38 years at Ford Motor Co., making a decent living and watching as the fortunes of his city, Detroit, and its public schools drifted steadily downward.
Thirty-five years ago, he and a group of his buddies realized the schools no longer had enough money to award athletes individual trophies. So they founded something called PSLASA – the Public School League Alumni Sports Association, dug into their pockets and started working to raise more money to keep those trophies coming.
They managed to do that. But as one of their members, retired history professor Howard Lindsey told me, by the early 1990s they decided to expand the scope of what they were doing, as they saw their city and its schools continue to lose support, monetary and otherwise.
They raised money to replace stolen pom-poms for Mackenzie high school cheerleaders, bought gym shoes for the girls’ basketball team at Southeastern, even helped pay for bus transportation to a tournament for the city high school chess team.
Most recently, they donated $500 to buy library books for Munger elementary and middle school students; they have a slogan there – “Munger leads when Munger reads.”
That’s much truer than most political slogans I heard this fall. Here is something that’s very clear to me: The Public School League Alumni Sports Association has done and is doing more good than a hundred mid-level politicians I could name.
But unlike any of the politicians, it gets almost no notice in the media. Well, it should. I’m told they have no overhead, nobody gets a salary and there is no paid staff. Except for what it costs to print fliers and raffle tickets, every penny they raise goes to the kids.
They members aren’t using this as any kind of vehicle for themselves. They are just a bunch of guys seeking to see that the next generation has a shot at success. Maybe a better shot than some of them, like Mitch Aclise, ever had.
Helping others get somewhere is, to me, what being a man is all about. Helping the next generation have a better shot at life than we did is, to me, what being an American is all about.
There are folks all over Detroit, all over Michigan, who are unsung heroes. Linda Brundage, the executive director of the Michigan Coalition to Prevent Gun Violence is another.
She has paid her dues many times over, working in the prison system treating violent offenders; working as a chief psychologist treating the chronically mentally ill behind bars.
But she’s been fighting for social justice her entire adult life, and knows what havoc and destruction guns are doing to our society. So she is fighting, not to try to abolish guns but to at least force our government to take some common sense precautions, like background checks.
Maybe even a waiting period, and sensible restrictions on carrying weapons. She isn’t looking for glory or political office; she just wants to save a few lives.
There are lots of people like these two. Some I know; some you probably know. Most of them, we likely don’t. They are making more of a difference than even they will ever know.
And I am grateful for this chance to celebrate a few of them.
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