(CBS DETROIT) – It’s prime back-to-school shopping season. As inflation woes continue, families do everything they can to stock up on items to kick off the school year.

“I don’t necessarily go to dollar stores or thrift stores because I know if I pay attention to Facebook and look at those pages that offer the community free things for children to go back to school. I’m on it,” said parent Ecora Foshee.

Foshee is just one of many parents in the area searching for back-to-school deals.

According to the National Retail Federation, back-to-school shopping will top $39 billion this year, up from $26 billion in 2019.

“Families with children in elementary to high school are expected to spend around $875 on average on clothing, shoes, and school supplies,” said Katherine Cullen, VP of Industry and Consumer Insights at the National Retail Federation.

This year marks the second-highest figure on record, according to the NRF.

Experts say as families opt for ways to save money reselling clothing stores, they see more shoppers, looking for deals at a fraction of the cost.

“For example, our kids’ clothing, we start at 50 cents; I say the most expensive thing is $10, maybe $12. We’re a third of what things cost retail,” said Melanie Williams, co-owner of Regeneration.

New inflation data shows consumer prices rose 2.9% in July over the last year, dropping below 3% for the first time since 2021.

Thousands of Metro Detroit families fill stores looking to fulfill the school supply list. The NRF says school essentials like pens, pencils, and paper will cost the average American parent around $141.

“The most popular destinations for both back-to-school and back-to-college shoppers are online, followed by department stores and discount retailers,” Cullen said.

As the race to the White House rolls on, the American economy is a major topic.

As some retailers raise prices, the shopping season becomes even more stressful for families on fixed incomes.

“It kills the poor person who is barely making it, and even when you go to dollar stores, it’s 1.25 when it used to be 99 cents,” Foshee said.

In a recent Credit Karma survey, parents who identify as Gen Z and millennials were more likely to take on debt to afford school supplies.

Jay Leno’s upcoming visit to the Woodward Dream Cruise has been three years in the making.

Well, really, it has been 61 years in the making.

Leno, an avid car collector and returning attendee of the Dream Cruise, will be coming to metro Detroit to see the thousands of cool cars lining Woodward, but he will also be here to pick up — and tell some stories about — his 1963 Chrysler Turbine Car, an experimental coupe built by Chrysler. The car is powered by a turbine engine and coated in a glowing orange coat of paint over its swoopy, sleek body. There were 55 of them made, and Chrysler rolled them out as a sort of publicity stunt.

Eventually, Chrysler decided it didn’t want to take the car to market and rolled them back, destroying most of them. Only nine of them still survive. Six of them are in museums. Chrysler owns two. The other belongs to Jay Leno.

Stay dry: Prepare for rain: Showers likely through Dream Cruise weekend

According to Leno’s friend, Steve Lehto, the cars ran on any liquid that burned: “You can drive these things on kerosene, diesel, palm heating oil, Chanel No. 5, vodka, tequila.”

Lehto, an attorney with a law office in Southfield and also a successful car-law-related YouTube channel with over 500,000 subscribers, has written a whole book about the Turbine Car, featuring a forward from Leno himself. The two have been friends for years, but it began with Leno poking fun at him on his late-night show, “The Tonight Show,” for a different book he had written, called “Death’s Door,” which had been advertised as a good Christmas present. Leno joked that the title was too morose for a Christmas gift, and moved on.

Lehto found it funny, and sent a copy of “Death’s Door” to Leno, along with a manuscript for his book about the Turbine Car, knowing he was a car enthusiast, on a whim. Leno called him, interested in the manuscript, and they sparked a friendship over a fascination with the experimental vehicle.

Eventually, Leno convinced Chrysler to sell him one of the nine remaining Turbine Cars.

Lehto and Leno kept in touch over the years, with Lehto even flying to California to take the car for a spin, but contact was sporadic and intermittent, Lehto said.

That is, until Leno called three years ago with a problem: The engine in his Turbine Car had completely failed. Kaput.

“He said he had tried everybody he could think of to fix the car,” Lehto said. Not even Leno’s own team of automotive experts could fix it. Leno wanted to know if Lehto knew anyone who might be able to make it run again.

“There’s only one thing I can think of that we haven’t talked about yet,” Lehto remembers saying. “The guy who is like the godfather of (the Turbine Car) was named Sam Williams.”

Williams, a celebrated engineer known for his work on turbine engines, left Chrysler in the ’60s. He opened his own business, Williams International, in Walled Lake soon after, bringing a number of the original Turbine Car engineers with him. Nowadays, Williams International specializes in jet engines on military contracts, and they are certainly not in the business of repairing antique cars.

See it all: How to make the most of 2024 Woodward Dream Cruise: When it starts, where to park, events

But Lehto said whatever brainpower went into building the Turbine Car in the 1960s went to Williams International, and if anyone could help Leno, it was them, he said.

Leno asked him whether he knew anyone who worked there.

“Yeah, my brother works there,” Lehto remembers saying.

After a little hemming and hawing, Lehto said, Williams International agreed to take Leno’s car and fix it as long as it didn’t disrupt their normal workflow.

For three years, Lehto’s brother and other engineers at Williams International worked to put the car back together after Leno had it shipped to them in crates. They 3D-printed parts in steel. They remade parts that haven’t been manufactured in decades. They rallied together long-retired engineers from the ’60s who worked on the initial Turbine Cars.

And three years later, as the product of hours of late-night and weekend maintenance, Leno’s Turbine Car started running and driving last week, Lehto said. On Saturday, he’s coming to pick it up.

Lehto said it’s the nature of the car community to come together for a project like this.

“Everybody was helping on this,” he said. “It’s true of a lot of car communities where people who rally around a particular car are happy to share their knowledge, share their expertise and even happy to share their parts.”

You might think car collectors get greedy, Lehto said, but the saga to rebuild Leno’s ride has been an exercise in sharing.

“If you’ve got one of these cars, you would think you’d hang on to your parts, like ‘Don’t touch my stuff I might need it!’ ” Lehto said. “But no, they’re happy to help because they want to see another car stay on the road.”

News reporter Liam Rappleye can be reached at LRappleye@freepress.com

By ED WHITE, Associated Press

DETROIT (AP) — A Detroit judge who ordered a teenager into jail clothes and handcuffs on a field trip to his courtroom will be off the bench while undergoing “necessary training,” the court’s chief judge said Thursday.

Meanwhile, the girl’s mother said Judge Kenneth King was a “big bully.”

“My daughter is hurt. She is feeling scared,” Latoreya Till told the Detroit Free Press.

She identified her daughter as Eva Goodman. The 15-year-old fell asleep in King’s court Tuesday while on a visit organized by a Detroit nonprofit.

King didn’t like it. But he said it was her attitude that led to the jail clothes, handcuffs and stern words.

“I wanted this to look and feel very real to her, even though there’s probably no real chance of me putting her in jail,” he explained to WXYZ-TV.

King has been temporarily removed from his criminal case docket and will undergo “necessary training to address the underlying issues that contributed to this incident,” said William McConico, the chief judge at 36th District Court.

The court “remains deeply committed to providing access to justice in an environment free from intimidation or disrespect. The actions of Judge King on August 13th do not reflect this commitment,” McConico said.

He said the State Court Administrative Office approved the step. King will continue to be paid. Details about the training, and how long it would last, were not disclosed.

King, who has been a judge since 2006, didn’t immediately return a phone message seeking comment. At the close of his Thursday hearings, accessible on YouTube, he made a heart shape with his hands. The judge’s work includes determining whether there’s enough evidence to send felony cases to trial at Wayne County Circuit Court.

Till said her daughter was sleepy during the Tuesday court visit because the family doesn’t have a permanent residence.

“And so, that particular night, we got in kind of late,” she told the Free Press, referring to Monday night. “And usually, when she goes to work, she’s up and planting trees or being active.”

The teen was seeing King’s court as part of a visit organized by The Greening of Detroit, an environmental group.

“Although the judge was trying to teach a lesson of respect, his methods were unacceptable,” said Marissa Ebersole Wood, the group’s chairperson. “The group of students should have been simply asked to leave the courtroom if he thought they were disrespectful.”