Danny Thomas and the River Raisin

A recent afternoon of watching reruns with my dad of The Danny Thomas Show on a cable comedy channel led me to revisit both Thomas’ history in the area and the history of the River Raisin – identified as one of the most meandering rivers in the U.S. — joining the Kickapoo River in Wisconsin, the Mississippi River, and the Cuyahoga River near where I’m from in Ohio to make that claim.

Danny Thomas was born in Deerfield, Michigan — a stone’s throw from the Monroe County border and located on the River Raisin — on January 6, 1912 as Amos Muzyad Yaqoob Kairouz and raised in a Maronite Catholic household in Toledo.

Thomas attended St. Francis de Sales Church, Woodward High School, and the University of Toledo.

Starting his career in Detroit radio on WMBC, later moving to Chicago where he and his young wife, the former Rose Marie Cassaniti, would raise three children -- Margaret Julia ("Marlo"), Theresa ("Terre"), and Charles Anthony ("Tony"). All three Thomas children would be involved in the entertainment world (Marlo as an actress; Terre as a singer, and Tony as a producer – part of the Witt/Thomas partnership that produced popular 80s TV series like “The Golden Girls”, “Blossom”, and “Soap”).

Thomas’ crowning achievements were the founding of the St. Jude Shrine in the 1950s, dedicated to St. Jude Thaddeus, one of the patron saints of hopeless causes, and, in 1962, with help from Dr. Lemuel Diggs and close friend Anthony Abraham, a Florida auto magnate, Thomas founded the St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee.

Since its inception, St. Jude has treated ill children from all 50 states and around the world.

I have written in the past about the importance of maintaining water quality along the River Raisin. There is a great deal of data available from a variety of resources published by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in partnership with the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). Deerfield is a key monitoring site. Tools available include the NHD Plus and Hydro Network-Linked Data Index.

As described on the Horizon Systems Corporation website, the NHDPlus is a geo-spatial, hydrologic framework dataset built by the EPA Office of Water and assisted by the USGS.

Since it was first released in 2006, the NHDPlus has been made available to the water resources community and the general public and has been used for many diverse applications by Federal, state, and local governments, as well as non-profit organizations, private companies and educational institutions.

According to author David Blodgett, The Hydro Network-Linked Data Index (NLDI) is a system that can index data to NHDPlus V2 catchments and offers a search service to discover indexed information.

Data linked to the NLDI includes active NWIS stream gages, water quality portal sites, and outlets of HUC12 watersheds. The NLDI is a core product of the Open Water Data Initiative and is being developed as an open source project.

Key water quality reports originated out of Deerfield beginning in 1970.

These efforts led to much of the River Raisin cleanup and restoration, including the removal of non-aqueous phase liquid" or DNAPL, which are harmful contaminants in the groundwater beneath the river.

Also removed were 40,000 cubic yards of sediment contaminated with polychlorinated biphenyls (PCB’s).

Championed by local Monroe-area environmentalist and historian, Dick Micka, and others, the Deerfield Dam was included in a river-wide plan to naturalize dam structures with rock formations and rapid development to allow fish and other species to spawn naturally. Changes were closely monitored, as the communities of Adrian, Blissfield, Deerfield, and Dundee rely on the River Raisin for public water supply.

— Tom Adamich is president of Visiting Librarian Service, a firm he has operated since 1993. He also is project archivist for the Greening Nursery Co. and Family Archives and the electric vehicle awareness coordinator at Monroe County Community College.

This article originally appeared on The Monroe News: Danny Thomas and the River Raisin