Thread by @DavidCranmerUn1

Rocket Companies stock soars 70%, mirroring GameStop rally

Rocket reported Thursday that it did a record amount of mortgage business in 2020 during what was likely the most profitable year ever for the Detroit-based mortgage lender founded by freep.com/story/money/pe…

billionaire and Cleveland Cavaliers owner Dan Gilbert.

Gilbert was born to a Jewish family in Detroit, Michigan. He grew up in Southfield, Michigan, where he attended Southfield-Lathrup High School. He earned his bachelor's degree from Michigan State University and a Juris Doctor from Wayne State University Law School,

and is a member of the State Bar of Michigan. While in college he earned a real estate agent's license and while in law school, he worked part-time at his parents' Century 21 Real Estate agency. (Century 21) was founded in 1971 by two real estate agents, Art Bartlett and

Marsh Fisher, in Orange County, California. Century 21 was acquired by Trans World Corporation in 1979, when Trans World Corporation decided to focus on hospitality and housing. In 1985, MetLife acquired Century 21 from Trans World Corporation.

When MetLife decided to leave the housing business, Century 21 was sold to Hospitality Franchise Systems (later Cendant) in 1995. When Cendant split in 2006, Century 21 became part of Realogy.

Gilbert is also a co-owner of the National Basketball Association team the

Cleveland Cavaliers, along with Usher and his brother, Dan Gilbert, chairman of Quicken Loans. Gilbert founded Rock Financial in 1985 with his older brother Dan. After a series of mergers, the company, through Quicken Loans, has become one of the nation's largest mortgage lenders

In 2002, he led a small group of private investors that purchased Quicken Loans and its affiliated national title company, Title Source, Inc., from Intuit. Gilbert continues to serve as the chairman of Quicken Loans, Inc.

Gilbert received national attention July 8, 2010, when NBA basketball superstar and northeast Ohio native LeBron James announced that he was leaving the Cavaliers for the Miami Heat on a highly criticized ESPN television special dubbed The Decision. Following the

special, Gilbert published an open letter in Comic Sans font (dubbed nationally as "The Letter" as a counterpoint to The Decision)[24] to Cleveland Cavaliers fans in which he strongly criticized how James made his announcement.

Protect America has teamed with universities such as Michigan State University and the University of South Alabama to help students provide aid to local area charities.[11] It has also partnered directly with the Austin Police Department, providing financing for police

initiatives, including the updating of their security equipment. In November 2009, Gilbert and a group of partners successfully backed a statewide referendum to bring casino gaming to Ohio's four largest cities. Through a joint venture with Caesars Entertainment Corporation,

the groups operate urban-based casinos in both Cleveland and Cincinnati. The first of the casinos, Horseshoe Cleveland, opened in May 2012.[8] In 2013, Rock Ventures, the umbrella entity for Gilbert's investments and real estate holdings, announced it had formed Athens

Acquisition LLC, an affiliate of Rock Gaming, and acquired the majority interest in Greektown Superholdings Inc., owner of the Greektown Casino-Hotel located in downtown Detroit.[42]

In late 2018, Gilbert bought the online dictionaries, Dictionary.com and Thesaurus.com.[

According to professional Call of Duty player Matthew "Nadeshot" Haag,[44] Gilbert has made a multimillion-dollar investment into Nadeshot's eSports team called 100Thieves.

Quicken Loans moved its headquarters and 1,700 of its team members to downtown Detroit in August 2010,

where Gilbert and the company are helping lead a revitalization of Detroit's urban core.

In 2011, Gilbert's Bedrock Detroit purchased several buildings in downtown Detroit, including the historic Madison Theatre Building, Chase Tower and Two Detroit Center (parking garage)

, Dime Building (renamed Chrysler House), First National Building and three smaller buildings on Woodward Avenue. In 2012, Bedrock Detroit purchased the former Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago Detroit Branch Building, One Woodward Avenue, 1201 Woodward

(Kresge Building), and five smaller buildings on Woodward Avenue and Broadway Street, totaling 630,000 square feet of commercial space in downtown Detroit. In 2013, Bedrock Detroit purchased the 1001 Woodward office tower, several smaller buildings in the downtown area and

announced, along with The Downtown Detroit Partnership and the Detroit Economic Growth Group, a placemaking plan for revitalizing Detroit's urban core.

In September 2013, Gilbert was named co-chair of the Blight Removal Task Force. The group, appointed by the Obama Administration Gilbert has been cited as a leader in downtown Detroit redevelopment initiatives. A 2017 Politico Magazine article named Gilbert one of "America's 11

Most Interesting Mayors", listing him as though he were Mayor of Detroit due to his role in the city's development. Gilbert established two Neurofibromatosis research clinics at the Children's National Medical Center (CNMC) in Washington, D.C. and at the Dana Children's Hospital

at the Sourasky Medical Center in Tel Aviv, Israel

In 1913 the United States Congress created the Federal Reserve System, which established twelve regional Federal Reserve Banks, including the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. Detroit was included in the Chicago region. Regional

banks had the authority to create branch offices, and in 1917 the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago authorized the establishment of a Detroit Branch. In March 1918, the Detroit Branch opened, operating out of three local institutions.

This site was within the Detroit Financial District, at a location that had once been part of Fort Shelby. After the fort was demolished, the land associated with it was divided into lots. Hiram Walker purchased several lots and constructed a house there.

Fort Shelby was a military fort in Detroit, Michigan that played a significant role in the War of 1812. It was built by the British in 1779 as Fort Lernoult, and was ceded to the United States by the Jay Treaty in 1796. It was renamed Fort Detroit by Secretary of War

Henry Dearborn in 1805.

Although the British had promised to abandon their forts in U.S. territory following the end of the Revolutionary War in 1783, they continued to occupy six of them, including Fort Lernoult (others were Fort Oswegatchie, Fort Niagara, Fort Ontario, Fort

Miami (Ohio) and Fort Mackinac). President George Washington sent Chief Justice John Jay to London in 1794 to negotiate a resolution to this and other issues. The Jay Treaty called for the forts to be turned over to the U.S. by June 1796. The British abandoned Fort Lernoult and

moved their forces to Fort Amherstburg on the Canadian side of the Detroit River.[3] The Americans occupied the fort on July 11, 1796, under the command of Colonel Jean François Hamtramck with 300 men.

The fort remained in British hands for over a year, until the Battle of

Lake Erie. Following their defeat in the naval battle, and with General William Henry Harrison advancing on Detroit with 1,000 troops, the British retreated to the Canadian side of the river. Duncan McArthur, by then a general, took possession of the fort on September 29, 1813,

and the fort was renamed Fort Shelby in honor of Governor Isaac Shelby of Kentucky, who had come to the aid of General Harrison with a regiment of volunteers.

The fort was centered on the present-day intersection of Fort Street and Shelby Street in downtown Detroit, and

bounded by Michigan Avenue, Griswold Street, W. Congress Street, and Cass Avenue. While excavating in 1961 to build the Detroit Bank & Trust Building, the remains of a wooden post from the fort were discovered. A total of over 8,000 artifacts were retrieved and are now housed at

the Anthropology Museum at Wayne State University.[10]
Today, the site is occupied by the Theodore Levin United States Courthouse, the western portion of the Penobscot Building, the former Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago Detroit Branch Building, and other commercial buildings.

It was constructed adjacent to the Detroit Trust Company Building, designed by Albert Kahn in 1915, as offices for the Detroit Bank and Trust Company, later known as Comerica.[2] The bank occupied space in the building until 1993, when it moved to One Detroit Center.

In 1849,

the company was founded in Detroit by Elon Farnsworth as the Detroit Savings Fund Institute.[4][5]
Its name changed to The Detroit Savings Bank in 1871 and to The Detroit Bank in 1936, being one of the few area banks to survive the Great Depression.[6] In 1956, the company merged

with Birmingham National Bank, Ferndale National Bank and Detroit Wabeek Bank and Trust Company to form The Detroit Bank & Trust Company.[6] In 1973, it formed a holding company, DetroitBank Corporation.[6] The current name was adopted in 1982.[

The railroad actually began construction on May 18, 1836, starting at "King's Corner" in Detroit, which was the name by which the southeast corner of Jefferson and Woodward Avenue was then known. Note that this is not the location of Michigan Central Station, which apparently

replaced this building. The Michigan Central Railroad (MCR) and then parent New York Central Railroad (NYC) owned the Canada Southern Railroad (CSR), which had lines throughout southwestern Ontario from Windsor to Niagara Falls. The railroad operated a car-float service over the

Detroit River; an immersed tube tunnel below the Detroit River between Detroit, Michigan, and Windsor, Ontario; and the MCR Cantilever Bridge at Niagara Falls, which was later replaced with a steel arch bridge in 1925. The car float operation ended when the Detroit River tunnel

was completed. The Michigan Central Railway Bridge opened in February 1925 and remained in use until the early 21st century. It replaced the earlier Niagara Cantilever Bridge which had been commissioned in 1883 by Cornelius Vanderbilt; the older bridge was scrapped as the new

MCR bridge went into service. All major Michigan railroads operated a rail ferry service across Lake Michigan except the Michigan Central. This can be attributed to MC's most direct route across Southern Michigan from Detroit to Chicago. The Michigan Central also had the best

access to Chicago of any Michigan railroad. The Michigan Central did own part of the Mackinac Transportation Company, which operated the SS Chief Wawatam until 1984. Michigan Central was the owner of Michigan Central Station in Detroit. Opened in 1913, the building is of the

Beaux-Arts Classical style of architecture, designed by the Warren & Wetmore and Reed and Stem firms who also designed New York City's Grand Central Terminal. As such, Michigan Central Station bears more than a passing resemblance to New York's famed rail station.

Principally due to the Cousin report's influence on two men, John Davis Pierce and Isaac Edwin Crary, the basic tenets of the German education model had made their way into the Michigan Constitution of 1836,[10] which officially chartered the University of Michigan and was the

first state constitution in the U.S. to truly embrace the German model. between 1849 and 1851 and became increasingly convinced of the superiority of the "German model" (or Prussian model, as it was known at the time) of public education, in which a complete system of primary

schools, secondary schools, and a university are all administered by the state and supported with tax dollars.

Detroit Central is located in the Corktown district of Detroit near the Ambassador Bridge, approximately 3⁄4 mi (1.2 km) southwest of downtown Detroit. It is

located behind Roosevelt Park, and the Roosevelt Warehouse Detroit school book depository building The growing trend toward increased automobile use was not a large concern in 1912, as is evident in the design of the building. Most passengers would arrive at and leave from

Michigan Central Station by interurban service or streetcar, due to the station's distance from downtown Detroit. The station was placed away from downtown in order to stimulate related development to come in its direction.

The union station began construction in 1891 and opened

to the public January 21, 1893.[1] It consolidated the operations and services of several rail companies serving Detroit with the exception of the New York Central Railroad and Canadian Pacific Railroad, which used Michigan Central Station, and the Grand Trunk Western Railroad,

which used Brush Street Station. The Baltimore & Ohio Railroad used the Fort Street facility. Upon its opening, the station was located in a transportation district which included the original Michigan Railroad Central Depot two blocks south, and the Detroit and

Cleveland Navigation Company nearby on the Detroit River.
The station was extensively renovated in 1946, adding a restaurant, fluorescent lighting, a baggage room, train gates and other updated amenities. Urban renewal in the 1950s saw the construction of Cobo Hall to the south

of the station, and the tunneling of the Lodge Freeway beneath the railway tracks. However, due to dwindling ridership, the station closed April 30, 1971, and despite the attempts of preservationists to repurpose the building, was demolished in January 1974.

In its heyday, the D&C Line was among the most well-known shipping companies in business on the Great Lakes, with its vessels being among the largest and most palatial ever seen.

Two of them, SS Greater Buffalo and the SS Greater Detroit, were both built in 1923, and were known as the largest side-wheeler passenger ships in the world. Naval architect Frank E. Kirby designed many D&C ships.

During World War II, Greater Buffalo was converted into training aircraft carriers for use on the Great Lakes.

Naval Air Station Grosse Ile was a Naval air station located on the southern tip of Grosse Ile, Michigan. It operated from 1927 until late 1969, and is now a township

airport. During World War II NASGI was one of the largest primary flight training stations for Naval aviators, and RAF pilots. Among the many thousands of Navy pilots who began their careers at NASGI is game show host Bob Barker.[1] Former President George H. W. Bush finished his

active Navy career at NASGI attached to Torpedo Squadron 153(VT-153).

Camp X was the unofficial name of the secret Special Training School No. 103, a Second World War British paramilitary installation for training covert agents in the methods required for success in clandestine operations.[1] It was located on the northwestern shore of Lake

Ontario between Whitby and Oshawa in Ontario, Canada. The area is known today as Intrepid Park, after the code name for Sir William Stephenson, Director of British Security Co-ordination (BSC), who established the program to create the training facility.

Camp X was established December 6, 1941 by the chief of British Security Co-ordination (BSC), Sir William Stephenson, a Canadian from Winnipeg, Manitoba and a close confidant of Winston Churchill and Franklin Delano Roosevelt.[7] The camp was originally designed to link Britain

and the US at a time when the US was forbidden by the Neutrality Act to be directly involved in World War II.
On the day before the attack on Pearl Harbor and America's entry into the war, Camp X had opened for the purpose of training Allied agents from the Special Operations

Executive (SOE), Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and American Office of Strategic Services (OSS) intended to be dropped behind enemy lines for clandestine missions as saboteurs and spies. However, even before the United States entered the war on December 8, 1941, agents

from America's intelligence services expressed an interest in sending personnel for training at the soon to be opened Camp X. Agents from the FBI and the OSS (forerunner of the Central Intelligence Agency, or CIA) secretly attended Camp X in early 1942; at least a dozen attended

at least some training. The CIA even named their recruit training facility "The Farm", a nod to the original farm that existed at the Camp X site.[10]
Camp X was jointly operated by the BSC and the Government of Canada. There were several names for the school: S 25-1-1

by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), Project-J by the Canadian military, and Special Training School No. 103. The latter was set by the Special Operations Executive, administered under the cover of the Ministry of Economic Warfare (MEW) which operated the facility

After it had closed, starting in the fall of 1945, Camp X was used by the RCMP as a secure location for interviewing Soviet embassy cypher-clerk Igor Gouzenko, who had defected to Canada on September 5 and revealed an extensive Soviet espionage operation in the country. Gouzenko

and his family spent two years at the facility.[Gouzenko exposed Soviet intelligence's efforts to steal nuclear secrets as well as the technique of planting sleeper agents. The "Gouzenko Affair" is often credited as a triggering event of the Cold War,[2] with historian Jack

Granatstein stating it was "the beginning of the Cold War for public opinion" and journalist Robert Fulford writing he was "absolutely certain the Cold War began in Ottawa".[3] Granville Hicks described Gouzenko's actions as having "awakened the people of North America to the

magnitude and the danger of Soviet espionage". In February 1946, news spread that a network of Canadian spies under control of the Soviet Union had been passing classified information to the Soviet government.[11] Much of the information taken then is public knowledge now and the

Canadian government was less concerned with the information stolen, but more of the potential of real secrets coming into the hands of future enemies.
Canada played an important part in the early research with nuclear bomb technology, Canada along with the UK being part of the

wartime Manhattan Project, and that kind of vital information could be dangerous to Canadian interests in the hands of other nations.

The Ford Nuclear Reactor was a facility at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor dedicated to investigating the peaceful uses of nuclear power.

It was a part of the Michigan Memorial Phoenix Project, a living memorial created to honor the casualties of World War II. The reactor operated from September 1957 until July 3, 2003. The reactor was a swimming pool reactor, originally operating at 1 MW using 93% enriched U-235

aluminum-based fuel. The Department of Energy fabricated, transported, and disposed of the fuel at no cost to the University. The reactor had a peak thermal flux of 3×1013 n/cm2s. It had 10 beam ports. It was constructed by Babcock & Wilcox under a subcontract with Leeds &

Northrup. In February 1955, the Atomic Energy Commission licensed the FNR. In the summer of 1955, construction began. The reactor was dedicated on November 16, 1956. On September 18, 1957, the final mechanical manipulations and calculations were taking place

Research was performed in many multi-disciplined areas. Work was done investigating the safety of food irradiation. The Phoenix Lab featured a greenhouse, allowing for much of the early work on the effects of radiation on plant life to be done. The Chemistry department ran a

program testing radiation's ability to crack hydrocarbons. A carbon-14 dating clock was set up, allowing scientists to accurately date organic relics. Neutron radiography was possible, allowing high resolution imaging of dense materials.

The reactor was used to produce several

isotopes. Iodine-131 and nickel-59 were produced as a radioactive tracer for the medical school, bromine-82 was produced for the auto companies, who made use of it to track oil consumption in internal combustion engines. The reactor was also used to train utility workers in 1-2

week nuclear instrumentation and reactor operation courses. The reactor offered neutron- and gamma-radiation damage testing services. The FNR was often open for tours.

Outside the University community, the Michigan State University Department of Geological Science,

Louisiana State University, the University of Nevada Las Vegas, Buchtel College of Arts and Sciences, the University of California Santa Barbara, the University of Georgia, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, NIST, the NRC, Sandia National Labs, EPRI, Ford, and GM all expressed

interest in keeping the reactor operational, while NASA (among others) had no interest.