John Carlisle

Detroit Free Press

Sam Awada sat at his desk, surrounded by a hurricane of bicycles stacked all around him. His walking cane leaned against the drawers. His .38 revolver was sitting in front of him.

Based on past experience, he felt it was smart to keep it there.

Sam’s the owner of Livernois Bike Shop on Detroit’s west side, the oldest bike store in the city — there since 1938. He sells and repairs not just bikes and bicycle parts, but also offers video games, something he added several years back to get through the lean winter months.

For decades, the shop was owned by his dad, who died not long ago. Now it’s all his.

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Sam’s 56, with short gray hair and a square-jawed face. He’s soft-spoken and friendly. His knees have gone bad, so he spends much of the day sitting at the old desk at the back of the dimly lit, bike-crowded shop, greeting whoever makes their way through the plywood front door.

A young man walked in. Sam recognized him from a distance.

“This guy’s always trying to sell something, get a couple of bucks,” Sam whispered. “He’s in the ozone, that kid. Something’s wrong with him.”

Sure enough, the visitor made his way into the store, down the narrow aisle between all the bikes, and toward the desk until intercepted by "Magic," one of Sam’s employees. The visitor lifted his shirt, reached down into the front of his pants and began pulling something out slowly — an attention-getting gesture.

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But it was only another stack of random items he was trying to sell for a buck or two: A Wolverine comic book, a Spider-Man comic book, a cheap key chain with a cartoon figure on it and a free DVD for Geek Squad tech support. He handed the pile to Magic, who brought it back to Sam.

Sam shook his head. “I don’t even know what to do with this,” he said, puzzled. But he did what he always does, pulled out two dollars and told Magic to hand the money to him — and give him back his stuff, too.

The young man wordlessly and thanklessly took the cash, took back his wrinkled comic books and his key chain, and wandered out.

“I’m always trying to help him out,” Sam explained after he’d gone. “Two dollars to him is a lot of money. My dad was like that. He used to help people out. We’ve always done that.”

For some small business owners like Sam, who’ve stayed through the years in some of the city’s rougher neighborhoods, the role of storekeeper has evolved. A guy like him isn’t just a merchant, he’s also a social services agency doing a little of everything — offering counseling and advice, or a place to work, or a handout, or just serving as an unofficial pawn shop.

“There’s a lot of people I see coming in from the street, and they want to make an honest buck, but he (Sam) doesn’t need it from them, he doesn’t buy nothing,” said Majd Maroun, 21, known by everyone as Magic.

“He gives them a dollar or two, looks out for them and just says, ‘Stay out of trouble.’ He’s just trying to help people, help out the community.”

Some days, selling bikes becomes secondary to this unrequested role as everything to everyone.

Because everyone in the neighborhood knows that Sam will always be here for them.

Family ties

He’s been here since he was 8, working with his dad, a Lebanese immigrant named Mike Awada who’d brought his wife to Detroit in the 1960s to raise their 12 kids.

“Everybody was coming to Detroit back then,” Sam said. “All the Lebanese people, the Italian people, everybody. We got the word back then that this was the place to come to.”

The bike shop had been here since 1938, when a world-famous, one-eyed championship bike racer named Mike Walden opened it just across from the University of Detroit. But by the time the 1967 Detroit riot hit he wanted out, and he closed the store and opened a new shop north of the city in Hazel Park.

Sam’s dad loved bikes. He raced them in the old country. And when he first arrived in the states he opened a little bike shop on Hamilton in Highland Park. When he heard in 1968 that the famous, much-bigger Continental Bike Shop was for sale, he bought it.

The store sits just south of the University of Detroit-Mercy campus. To the east is the school, bordered by neighborhoods with big, beautiful homes and well-kept yards. To the west is a largely empty retail strip, behind which are smaller, older houses that range along a wide spectrum of disrepair. Many are boarded-up. Some are long gone, leaving only their lots behind.

It’s a tough area for a small businessman to earn a living. Many customers buy used bikes. Now and then, someone brings one to sell, and sometimes it's a bike that didn't actually belong to them. The shop tries to prevent getting burned by taking down sellers' driver's license info, but one or two stolen bikes have slipped through the cracks over the years. It's made them pretty much quit buying bikes off the street. The majority of his stock nowadays, he said, comes from buying bikes in bulk at police auctions.

“The last thing I want is somebody to come in here and say their bike is in here,” Sam said. “A couple times it happened, but obviously we take care of it and give it back to them. That’s why I don’t really buy a lot, because you can’t really tell if it’s hot.”

Most customers, though, come here just to buy a part or two, for a dollar or two, trying to extend the life of an already old ride.

“In this neighborhood, it’s hard to sell a high-end bike to somebody,” Sam said. “You tell somebody $400, $500 on up they’ll walk right out and say ‘We’re going to go to Walmart.’ ”

"He's like my father"

At 16, Magic was a drug-dealing, would-be rapper spending more time in jail than out. Sometimes it was for little things, like getting pulled over with no driver’s license but with bags of weed on him. Sometimes it was more serious, like when he got mixed up in a breaking-and-entering with an uncle, and spent a year-and-a-half in jail before most kids can legally drink.

He’s 21 and has two children, both infants. He named the youngest after Sam, and made him the child’s godfather, too.

Because Sam has always been here for him. And Magic reveres him.

“He’s the only man I can let yell at me,” Magic said. “My own dad can’t yell at me. This guy practically raised me. He took me off the street. He helped me out when I needed it. He’s like my father. He taught me to be a man.”

Sam has known him since childhood, when their two immigrant families grew up in the new country together. He calls Magic his nephew. And when he heard about the problems he was having, Sam gave him a job. It enabled Sam — who was once married, but has no kids — to keep an eye on him.

“He’s not like that no more,” Sam said proudly. “He’s straightened out a lot. He’s changed his life.”

Sam’s given other kids jobs over the years, too, like James Bledsoe, a neighbor who has been coming in for years. “I’ve been here ever since I was a kid, 12 years old,” he said. “I pretty much grew up out here. I learned a lot.”

At 38, James still works at the bike shop part-time — repairing bikes, fielding customer requests, or showing little kids how to do the repairs themselves like he was taught at their age at this shop. “Instead of going to their mama and papa all the time, we try to show them how to do little things so they can do them on their own.”

He doesn’t need the job full-time, but likes being here, he said. So he stays.

But Magic needs the job full-time and still wants another one to support his young family. He’s looking only for night jobs so he won’t have to quit this one.

“I want night work ‘cause I want to be with him during the day,” he said.

An easy target

Nobody was with Sam on the day 18 years ago that two guys came in with guns.

One of them put a gun to Sam’s neck and demanded cash. Sam put his hands up and complied. Then, for no apparent reason, the gunman turned to his partner. “Should I shoot him?” he asked casually.

Whether he didn’t get an answer or didn’t wait for one or just didn’t like the answer he got, he went ahead and shot Sam in the neck. The shot went clean through one side and out the other, but somehow missed just about everything vital.

“I remember blood gushing out of both spots,” Sam said. “I was putting my hands like this (holding his hands to his neck), holding the blood in.”

He managed to grab his own gun and start shooting at the two men, who were firing back as they tried to run from the store. Sam got hit again in the shoulder, a graze. But he got one of the robbers in the thigh. The guy ran a few blocks and collapsed on the street, where police caught him. He wound up serving 15 years, the other guy got a little less. Both are out now.

Sam’s dad insisted the family close the store. Sam agreed at first.

“He went crazy,” Sam said. “He said, ‘Get out of here. It’s not even worth you being here.’ But I kind of changed my mind after a week in the hospital. I thought, 'what the hell, come back to work, what else am I going to do?' So I just opened it up again, gave it another roll.”

Sometime after that, a man came in, pretended to ask about something, then pulled out a pipe wrench and started beating Sam on the head with it. Sam grabbed his gun, put it to the man’s crotch, and pulled the trigger.

Nothing happened. The gun jammed. The two continued fighting until someone called the cops, who came and arrested the attacker. “There was blood everywhere, from me and him. I was hitting him with a fork,” he explained.

Luckily, those kinds of assaults have been rare. More frequent are the burglaries — people sledge-hammering through the back brick wall, or cutting through the plywood roof and dropping in, or breaking into the empty building next door and smashing through their shared wall, or crashing through the front door, which is now a plywood board.

“It’s terrible, it really is, for a person that’s been up here so long,” Bledsoe said. “We’ve seen generations up here, but what can you do? A couple bad apples spoil the whole bunch. But even then, he continues to be himself, not trying to be hard.”

Still, Sam admits he’s thought often over the years about finally giving up and moving on.

“I wanted to leave so many times, to get out of here,” he said. “I’m getting sick of it, to be honest with you, break-ins and other crazy stuff. It’s just not worth it sometimes. I mean the money is decent, but sometimes you wonder, 'is it worth it?' ”

Keeping people happy

Yet despite the burglars and robbers, the hustlers and the thieves, this is still the old neighborhood bike shop. And a lot of his customers are good, friendly people who appreciate him.

In walked an excited Orlando Brian, 33. “I’m trying to put together a little toy for the summer so in my spare time I can hop on it and blow in the wind,” he said. He needed a three-wheeler.

“My homeboy, he gonna put a motor on it, so he just told me to find a bike that’s comfortable with the seat, ‘cause I’m old and I ain’t got no butt no more.”

Brand new ones elsewhere, he said, cost $350. Sam said he’d find him one for $200. “Yeah, that’s what I’m talking about!” Brian said.

In walked a young man Sam didn’t know, in his mid-20s. “What up, doe,” he said. “I dropped a bike off yesterday to get a chain put on.” The bike wasn’t done. Magic was supposed to do it. Instead, he was down the street getting coffee for him and Sam.

“I haven’t seen him before,” Sam admitted. “But let’s make him happy.” He told the guy to come back in 20 minutes, and he’d knock $10 off the price for being late.

In walked Vincent Watley, 48, who came in to replace a broken pedal on his 9-year-old son’s bike. “I’ve been coming here since I was a little, bitty boy,” said the 48-year-old. “I was always here. My dad would be like, ‘Boy, don’t you be going down to that bike shop,’ and I’d be cashing in bottles to get all these fox tails, lights, flags for my bike.”

There’s a bike shop closer to his house, but it’s hard to find quality service there. “Come to find out, one of his workers would be upset, and they would go through there and punch holes in all the inner tubes. I was like, I ain’t going down there. I’m going to Sam’s.”

Sam’s, he called it. Funny that the shop now unofficially bears his name. To him, it’s still his father’s. When his dad retired years back, he was like a lot of old-timers who can’t quite slow down: He’d still come to the shop most days, just to hang around his life’s familiar place. Sam would try to find him something to do to feel still a part of it.

“I kind of felt sorry for him,” Sam said. “I mean, when you looked at him, he spent all his life down here, almost 45 years.”

Through the years and through it all, that’s what’s kept him here. His father’s whole life went into this place. It’s not easy to just give up all of that. “My dad was here so many years,” he said. “It’s hard to leave.”

Watley told Sam he couldn’t stay and wait for the new pedals. He had to pick up his daughter-in-law from work across town, and would try to return after that to get his bike.

“OK,” Sam told him, sitting at the desk. “I’ll be here.”

John Carlisle writes about people and places in Michigan. His stories can be found at freep.com/carlisle. Contact him: jcarlisle@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @_johncarlisle.

Livernois Bike Shop is located at 16657 Livernois Ave. in Detroit. For more information, call 313-864-8734.