And it was, until the events of Sept. 11, which redefined everything and made the nine weeks since the Tricentennial bash feel like a lifetime. There's an undeniable dark cloud stretching over the country from the East Coast, trying the sap the American spirit.

Polish people know about such things. Outside forces -- from Prussians to Nazis to Russians -- have been trying to sap their spirit for centuries. Those forces drove thousands of Poles to seek new lives in America, where they became integral to the development of cities, notably Detroit.

"Polish Americans were the single largest immigrant group who came to Detroit during the greatest period of its growth," said Thaddeus Radzilowski, a historian of the local community and president of St. Mary's College of Ave Maria University in Orchard Lake. "They created 31 neighborhoods from what had been farmland. . . . They transplanted intact values, customs and institutions from their old lives, but they really created a Polish-American culture.

"The polka, for example, is not a Polish dance, but a creation of urban Polish Americans. They were creating a whole new society. The history of every group in the Detroit area is marked by the fact that for four, five and six generations, they have shared city and neighborhood with Poles."

They are an enormous part of the Detroit story, as significant to Detroit's formative years as the African-American community is to Detroit's recent decades. This region has never been much for visible integration, but culturally, well, suffice it to say that one of Mayor Coleman Young's favorite dishes was kapusta -- a one-pot Polish staple of kraut and kielbasa for which Young submitted a recipe in a 1987 national mayors' cook book. It's a story that Radzilowski and others are endeavoring to tell the community, including the estimated 600,000 people of Polish descent in southeast Michigan.

With a grant from Detroit 300 and other support, Radzilowski has led the development of a new historical exhibit, "The Polish Presence in Detroit." The collection of art, artifacts, photos, a reproduction of a classroom from a Polish Catholic school and other pieces will open a six-month run at the Detroit Historical Museum, with a black-tie event on Oct. 12. For the less-formal crowd, Radzilowski will preview the exhibit Sunday as part of a program that begins with an 11 a.m. mass at St. Albertus Church in Detroit and dinner at the Polish National Alliance Hall in Hamtramck.

"It's not just about Poles in Detroit, it's about Poles and Detroit," said Radzilowski. "It's about the women who staged the sit-down strikes in the cigar factories, the men who made Polish the lingua franca of the auto plants. It's about black Catholics in Detroit, whose history was all kept in Polish by Polish nuns."

Radzilowski went on with great enthusiasm during a meeting last week at the college, part of the picturesque Orchard Lake Schools, a former military academy that was reincarnated by the local Polish-American community in 1909. The schools include a seminary that has educated Polish-American priests for parishes all over the country.

The schools have a lot of time and energy invested in the exhibit, which will tour the country for two years after its Detroit run. Unfortunately, they see their efforts being overshadowed by the events of recent weeks, the Detroit mayoral race, and a general sense that the Tricentennial is over.
It's not. It feels different, like everything else since Sept. 11, but the "Polish Presence" exhibit is one of several major Detroit 300 events still scheduled.

It does tell a good story, one that's worth knowing, if you care about the forces and values that shaped this community and still have a role to play in its future. It's especially interesting if you have a last name like mine and a family history that's reflected in the narrative Radzilowski delivers. But more than a Detroit story, more than a Polish story, this is an American story. And the more you learn about how this country came together, the greater your faith that it will stay together in these troubled times.

For more information about the exhibit and tickets to the Oct. 7 or Oct. 12 events, call 248-706-5355 anytime or check out www.orchardlakeschools.com
RON DZWONKOWSKI is editor of the Free Press editorial page.

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