0: I'm so excited about being here at Michigan Central Station is
my father took his first steps into Michigan from this train
station coming from Pennsylvania.
My grandfather was a coal miner and my grandmother did not want my father to
be a coal miner,
and she put him on a train and sent him here to Michigan to get a job and he
ended up with Ford Motor Company for 30 years. I'm so proud and so happy.
I only wish he was still here for this to see it because he wanted this train
station saved. They need to save the station.
It's so important. He said.
I took my steps here into Michigan for the first time from this station.
My mother put me on the train to get everybody out of the coal mine industry,
and this is how he met my mother. I wouldn't be here if it hadn't happened,
so I'm just so excited they saved this train station.
1: My father, Juan Moreno, I'm named after him,
came here in 1923 with his family.
He came to Detroit the following year and was looking for a job and he got the
job working on the railroad and wound up staying here for the rest of his life,
which covered a span of 35 years or so. He was a proud worker working here
on the trains and because he was working here,
he had a pass to go anywhere.
It turned out that the past I used when I was a
teenager, I worked inborn or lived in Dearborn,
went to U of M and was able to use his pass to go back and forth once a month
in order to come back and say to the folks he worked here all his
life.
He retired in about 70 in the mid seventies and he saw the railroad
go down to almost nothing.
It was a very sad experience for him to see that how down,
how much the whole depot had deteriorated.
He was alive today and I'm sure he's watching.
He would say be very proud of what, seeing it as it was when he was a kid.