SINGLE LIFE

Back To Their Futures

Mike Hoffman tired of
jumping icy medians
in Washington, D.C.

Susie Merkow was
hapy to leave the
sunshine behind.

RICHARD PEARL

Staff Writer

T

hey call me the
wanderer,
Yeah, I'm the
wanderer,
I roam around 'n 'round 'n
'round .. .

— "The Wanderer," Dion and The
Belmonts, 1960s.

Consider the possibilities:
• being a private detective
in Washington, D.C.; or
• an advertising/public re-
lations man in Los Angeles;
or
• a television news cor-
respondent in Israel; or
• a ski buff living in
Alaska; or
• a leader of Jewish sin-
gles in sunny Phoenix, Ariz.
Many a Detroit Jewish
single would find such situa-
tions intriguing, at the
least.
So did the native Detroiters
who did these things and
more after leaving the friend-
ly confines of their old
hometown.
But those same Detroiters-
in-self-exile also found they
missed certain things that
living and working in

Glenn Triest

All about singles who believed
their lives and dreams lay
A.B.D. (Anywhere But Detroit)
but who ultimately came back
to Motown and why.

faraway places couldn't pro-
vide; that there were, in-
deed, some definite advan-
tages to the metro area they
once spurned.
The advantages were
sometimes economic,
sometimes social, sometimes
both.
Or, as one now married-
with-children ex-wanderer
said, tongue-in-cheek: "Back
in the 1960s, you did like
everybody else was doing:
you got a Volkswagen
Beetle, drove across country
and found utopia. Then you
realized you screwed up and
you came back home."
For Michael Hoffman, a
Southfield attorney, the op-
portunities on familiar turf
were reason enough to come
back.

After Hoffman was
graduated from Kenyon Col-
lege in Ohio in 1978 with a
degree in political
philosophy, "I knocked on
every door in Washington,
D.C.," he said, "thinking
that a political philosopher
might be of use to someone."
However, Washington had
far more use for systems
analysts. So Hoffman, whose
fellow Kenyon alums in-
clude actor Paul Newman,
drew upon his own collegiate
acting experience and hired
out as a private detective in
the nation's capital.
For the next eight months,
Hoffman investigated
worker's compensation
fraud cases, taking pictures
of people doing things they
said they couldn't do. He

also got evidence of people
doing things they shouldn't
do — such as adultery.
Washington is "a fas-
cinating city," said Hoff-
man, but "the hours I work-
ed were incredible." Though
intrigued by investigating
and already eyeing a law ca-
reer, his work as a private
eye ended soon after the D.C.
winter weather set in.
"I found myself jumping
medians to follow people in
cars and I'm not a real good
driver on ice, so I decided I'm
going for the sun, down to
Florida," Hoffman said.
He did hotel convention
set-ups there for a few mon-
ths; migrated back to his old
college town, where he
bartended; spent the follow-
ing summer backpacking

through western Europe;
then studied law in
Michigan.
Now a partner in his own
Southfield law firm, Hoff-
man, a Cranbrook graduate,
said networking kept him
from practicing law
elsewhere: "Since I'd grown
up here, it just made sense to
at least start as an attorney
here."
Apparently, his decision
was good for him: the bache-
lor barrister owns his own
home and the law firm has
grown to five attorneys, with
two more soon to be hired, he
said.
Susie Merkow, a learning
disabilities teacher at Har-
ding School in Detroit, said
things like Michigan's sea-
sonal weather and the estab-
lished Jewish community in
metro Detroit came to mean
more to her than all the
Jewish singles and sunshine
in the Sun Belt.
But that wasn't how she
saw it when she headed west
in 1973. With her Wayne
State teaching degree in
hand, and imbued with the
prevailing counterculture
philosophy that the Rocky
Mountains brought inner
peace ("hippy stuff," she
says today), Merkow follow-

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