I was sorting hotel room keys one afternoon in 1978 when I looked up to see Ella Fitzgerald approaching the front desk at the Campus Inn. “Miss Fitzgerald would like to check in,” a man accompanying her announced.

I dropped the keys.

“Miss Fitzgerald, welcome!” I exclaimed. “We’re so glad you’re here!”

“Thank you,” she said gravely. She was wearing a long fur coat.

To my horror, the bellman was missing from his station in the lobby. Keep Ella Fitzgerald waiting? Never! “I’ll take your suitcase,” I said. I dragged it to the elevator, telling myself: I am carrying Ella Fitzgerald’s luggage. Ella Fitzgerald! 

During her stay, Fitzgerald’s manager—tall, well-mannered, and tired-looking—hung out at the hotel bar. It was near the front desk, so he often chatted with us clerks, a youngish, mostly student group.

“Are you going to hear Ella?” he asked, the day before her concert at Hill Auditorium. When I regretfully said that I couldn’t afford it, he volunteered, “I can get you in.”

Hill was packed, and I was thrilled to hear many of the songs that had made Fitzgerald a legend, including my favorite, “Love Is Here to Stay.” She’d recorded it with Louis Armstrong, and I’d played it over and over on a vinyl LP.

After her curtain call, the manager escorted me backstage where Fitzgerald, in a black satin evening gown, was holding court. “Thank you for coming,” she said, again gravely, and extended her hand.

Black-and-white photo of the Campus In, a tall building of more than 10 floors, with winter trees in the foreground.

The Campus Inn. | Sally White Photography

The hotel on E. Huron St. is now the Graduate, but when I was there, it was still the Campus Inn. Just a few blocks from Hill and the Diag, it attracted many well-known performers and speakers. Their visits brightened my eight-hour shifts otherwise spent checking in guests, answering the phone (“Campus Inn, may I help you?”), and plugging cables into the switchboard to connect callers to guests’ rooms.

During the eight or nine months I worked there, Fitzgerald’s visit was my high point. Other clerks hyperventilated about Fleetwood Mac, whose members checked in under made-up names (I believe John McVie’s was “Justin Case”). His already-ex-wife, the beautiful Christine McVie, stopped by the desk once with questions and was friendly enough that I asked for her autograph, explaining I wanted it for a friend.

I really did want it for a friend, but McVie breezily answered, “That’s what they all say” before obliging.

I still regret that I was off the day that Butterfly McQueen of Gone with the Wind checked in. She was playing Queenie in a production of Show Boat at the Power Center. Forrest Tucker, who starred as Captain Andy, sometimes ventured into the bar but disappointed us clerks by sleeping in his trailer in the parking lot.

Another time, our night auditor, a dry, taciturn man, startled us by leaving a note announcing that Leontyne Price was staying with us and giving her room number. “She is the world’s greatest singer,” he wrote in large, black letters. “Please tell housekeeping not to vacuum between the hours of six and eleven.”

My brushes with fame pretty much ended after I left to freelance for the U-M Hospital Star. Years later, I did wait in line at the post office with former UAW president and ambassador to China Leonard Woodcock, and I once saw former U-M football coach Lloyd Carr (and his dog) at a vet’s office, but it wasn’t the same.

I did get a souvenir of the time I met Ella Fitzgerald: I had shyly asked her to dedicate an autograph to my younger brother, Andy. He’s at least as great an Ella fan as I am, but I dawdled delivering it. It eventually disappeared into my boxes of unsorted letters, school papers, and childhood photos.

I finally uncovered it last year. On a yellow Campus Inn phone message note, she had written: “Best Wishes, Andy, Sincerely Ella Fitzgerald.”

When Andy visited last month, I gave it to him. I felt a twinge at parting with it—but reminded myself that I was the one who’d carried her luggage.