Walking tall: Bob Kozaren backed style with substance

Hamtramck’s longest serving mayor, Robert Kozaren.

 
By Greg Kowalski
(Second of two parts)
It was a chilly Friday afternoon; bright, but not exactly the type of day that encouraged you to go for a walk outside. Despite that, Hamtramck was on the verge of launching its first city festival.
Put together almost hastily, it was the child of then-new Mayor Robert Kozaren, who had taken office less than a year earlier.
That was 1980, and it had been a busy year indeed. Chrysler Corporation had closed the Dodge Main factory and Hamtramck was wrestling with its shaky economic future.
There was a sense of doom hanging over the whole community. In June, 1980, the city got some potentially good news when GM announced its plans to acquire the now-abandoned Dodge Main factory site to build a new assembly plant, but that was far from being a done deal. In fact, the obstacles standing in its way were immense.
In the meantime, Hamtramck was in limbo. It was not a place that Bob Kozaren wanted to be in, and while he couldn’t propel the process to build the GM plant, at least not at this point, he could do something to bolster the city’s sagging spirits. His plan was simple — let’s have a party.
Actually, a festival. A big festival.

The Hamtramck city festival, created by former Mayor Robert Kozaren, grew to be enormously popular.

Kozaren pulled in everyone he knew who could help and within a short time the first city festival was organized for late September. It really was too late in the year for that kind of activity as the weather was already beginning to turn chilly (it would be moved back to Labor Day weekend the following year), but that didn’t stop the event from being a huge success, drawing several thousand people to Jos. Campau between Caniff and Carpenter for the weekend event.
But that Friday afternoon, just hours before the festival was to begin, no one was sure how it would turn out. But if Kozaren was worried, he didn’t show it.
The festival was the first major success he recorded, and it demonstrated an amazing talent that often overshadowed his abilities as a political and civic leader.
He knew how to put on a good show.
His administration would be marked by all kinds of high profile events, whether it was city festivals, bringing the Stanly Cup to Hamtramck for a visit, staging a telethon to help an ailing Hamtramck child or welcoming a host of politicians and dignitaries from across the country.
Governors, congressmen, senators and even presidents came to Hamtramck during Kozaren’s administration. The high point may have been the visit of Pope John Paul II in 1987.
Yet even as these events were presenting a positive image of Hamtramck, the financial situation continued to erode, Jos. Campau was losing its main retailers, the population was declining, labor strife was a persistent problem and every day seemed to bring a new challenge.

Among those attending Kozaren’s 60th birthday party was Gov. Jim Blanchard.

In some cases, Kozaren brought them on himself. His proposal to create a park on Jos. Campau was a brilliant stroke of public relations, but Kozaren stumbled over a critical element after it was built — how to pay for it.
Still, his enthusiasm and energy managed to achieve some nearly impossible successes. He played a pivotal role in clearing the obstacles in finalizing the deal for the GM Detroit-Hamtramck Assembly Plant, especially in managing to wrangle a favorable tax-sharing arrangement with the city of Detroit.
That was helped greatly by the good relationship Kozaren built with Detroit Mayor Coleman Young. Kozaren also got the long-standing Urban Renewal lawsuit moving again mainly thanks to the trust he carefully crafted with all the parties involved.
These were things that were engineered behind the scenes, yet were vital to Hamtramck’s future.
Kozaren’s administration went through a lot of changes in the 18 years he served in office. Several long-time trusted aides died or left. And in time his patience seemed to wear thin with the unending problems.
It seemed as though he became more isolated in his office in city hall. He grew more defensive, especially after the U.S. Justice department raided his office, seizing financial documents, and generating speculation that he was misusing money from the city festivals.
Ultimately he was charged with taking money raised at his annual fundraiser for personal use and not paying taxes on it. He was sentenced to do community service. He might have gotten a stiffer sentence, but the judge no doubt took note of the letters signed by dozens of persons testifying to Kozaren’s character and his love for Hamtramck.
Even so, Kozaren would finally succumb to the changing nature of the city as it became even more diverse in the 1990s. People from around the world were moving into Hamtramck, so much so that the popular slogan the city adopted in the early 1980s “A Touch of Europe in America” no longer was valid.
As the city changed, new voices arose, and Kozaren lost a tight race to Gary Zych, ending his 18 years in office in 1998 — the longest time served by any Hamtramck mayor.

He didn’t show it often, but Kozaren could blaze with flashes of a fiery temper, as he did at an appearance before the Common Council.

The loss was deeply painful to him and he virtually disappeared from public view. It was only shortly before his death that he began to come forward again as he started attending Historical Commission meetings. As in the past, he was full of ideas, including holding a fundraising telethon.
But time was not on his side. On Dec. 20, 2007, he died of heart failure at age 73.
Regardless of his many accomplishments, the most meaningful thing anyone could say of him is that he loved Hamtramck. Really loved Hamtramck.
And that’s enough.