The filmmaker who chased GM's CEO grew up in Davison

In 1972, a Davison High School senior who had just turned 18 ran for the local school board and won — making Michael Moore, by the accounts of the time, among the youngest people in Michigan history elected to public office. A brand-new law had just let 18-year-olds vote and hold office, and Moore used it to land a trustee seat while he was still a student. He didn’t get along with the older members. He pushed for students’ rights, wanted to put competitive bids on contracts, and floated renaming the elementary school after Martin Luther King Jr.

That mix of small-town roots and big appetite for a fight became his whole career. Moore grew up in Davison, the quiet suburb just east of Flint, while the city next door was running on General Motors. So when GM closed plants and laid off tens of thousands of Flint workers in the 1980s, it hit close to home. Moore picked up a camera and went looking for GM chairman Roger Smith, trying to get him to come see what the plant closings had done to Flint.

He never really caught Smith, and that running failure became the joke and the engine of the film. “Roger & Me,” released in 1989, made Moore famous and helped turn the feature-length documentary into something audiences would actually line up for. The movie is about Flint, but the kid behind the camera was a Davison kid — a school-board firebrand from the town next door who grew up to make the closing of his neighbors’ factories impossible to look away from.