Kathy Groehn was born in 1946 and grew up in Grosse Pointe, Michigan. She graduated from Grosse Pointe High School in 1963, then from the University of Michigan (B.A. 1967) and Southern Oregon College (M.A.). During the 1960s she was a reporter for the Grosse Pointe News and used her experiences as a basis for research on her book, Grosse Pointe, Michigan: Race Against Race, by Kathy Cosseboom (Michigan State University Press, 1972). The book deals with racial and social attitudes in the Detroit suburb of Grosse Pointe as revealed in education, school-community relations, housing discrimination, and religious institutions. It won the American Pen Women’s first prize for information books in 1974. As Kathy El-Messidi, she earned a Ph.D. in American history from the University of Oklahoma. Her Ph.D. dissertation was published as The Bargain: The Story behind the 30-Year Honeymoon of GM and the UAW, by Kathy Groehn El-Messidi (Nellen Publishing Co. 1980). This book deals with the history and politics behind the 1948 collective bargaining agreement between General Motors and the UAW. As the daughter of Thomas Groehn, former news relations director for GM, El-Messidi had special access to materials and individuals at GM for this study. In the 1990s, Dr. El-Messidi was associate director of the Center for Research on Parallel Computation at Rice University in Texas and more recently has worked as an education consultant and market intelligence specialist in Texas. This collection contains the files and research materials for both of Kathy Groehn Cosseboom El-Messidi’s books.