Community

Nuns on the March

Some might say miracles followed four Dominican nuns as they drove east from Chicago in July 1996.”We were on our way to New York,” recalls Mother Assumpta, the group’s leader. “We were coming this way,...

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Burns Park Divide

When poet Jeff Kass leaves his house in Lower Burns Park in the middle of the night to practice his poetry, he sometimes wanders east across Packard to Upper Burns Park. As he shouts his poems into the darkness among the big,...

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Ann Arborite Lou Caincross

The Mustang squeals as I downshift into the lot at Lou’s Wolverine Transmission on Packard south of Stadium. It’s louder than Led Zeppelin, and I fear it means the junkyard for the nine-year-old ‘Stang with its...

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West Side UFOs

This past winter, neighbors overlooking Slauson’s athletic field observed some strange doings: once a week, an illuminated disc appeared, flying over a makeshift airfield for sixty to ninety minutes at a time.The apparent...

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This Old House

It’s one of those quintessentially low-key Saturday nights, the kind that involves flannel pajamas and a very comfortable couch. I’m reading an old Ann Arbor Observer article that lists local participants in the...

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Powwow in Exile

After nineteen years at Crisler Arena, the U-M Native American Student Association (NASA) moved its annual Dance for Mother Earth to Saline Middle School last year to protest what it terms the university’s...

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Cover Story

Sharp-eyed visitors to the Traverwood branch of the Ann Arbor District Library–or readers studying the cover of this month’s Observer–may wonder about the names written on a ceiling beam. The beam is supported...

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Vulcan’s Anvil

“I Spy ‘Vulcan’s Anvil’ on North Campus,” writes Alex Cao. “Who knows why Spock needs a hammer in the 24th Century?” Who indeed, but in the twentieth century Vulcan’s Anvil, by an...

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Two Birds

A whopping 245 Fake Adders spotted the March Fake Ad for Two Birds, a fictitious company that offered to perform two services at the same time, saving its customers time and money.”I have already decided that I will go for...

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Island Hopping

“College towns are unlike other places, but that’s a good thing.”–Blake Gumprecht,The American College TownYou can’t live in Ann Arbor long before someone tells you that the city is...

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From Teacher to Terrorist

Diana Oughton’s death still makes no sense, even after forty years of pondering. She was a bringer of light, of joy. Yet the FBI found the tip of her right little finger in the rubble that was left of a Manhattan...

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Alumni Abroad

Lisa R. Tucci is a 1985 U-M grad who runs her own company offering audio guides of Italy. Although she’s lived in Italy since 1992, her connections to Ann Arbor run deep–her grandfather emigrated from the mountains...

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Kroger Chaos

The ongoing makeover of the Maple Road Kroger is leaving customers confused. As departments hopscotch around the store, disoriented patrons roam the aisles with stricken looks on their faces, beseeching employees to tell them...

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Dixboro Pure

What’s in those big blue bottles sprouting at the base of the trees surrounding the Dixboro village green and the old Dixboro School on Plymouth Road? Gallons and gallons of sap that will be reduced to maple syrup by five...

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Lefty’s Lessons

This story begins like a third-grade math problem: you enter a room and count thirty-six limbs. Nine people are in the room, right? Wrong. You should have said eleven humans and a dog. Two people in the room have all their...

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Ann Arborite Gregory George

Gregory George was doing carpentry work at a friend’s house when the friend’s college-age son walked in. “He knew that I danced, but he didn’t know I knew how to build a house, and he [had never seen] me...

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Cafe Verde

“I Spy Cafe Verde (or at least the floor above…),” writes Noah Levin. The building on North Fourth is “all of 200 feet from the Observer’s door,” points out Ross Orr. “It’s the...

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“Women of American…”

We received 173 entries to our little contest last month, of which 169 correctly identified the Fake Ad for International Introductions on p. 30 of the February issue.Most Fake Adders thought the ad, which offered to match...

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Medical Marijuana Center?

What to do with an outdated downtown filling station? Garth Bolgos has a plan: give it a new identity, put up a sign, and open a medical marijuana dispensary.Bolgos owns the dilapidated gas station at the corner of Liberty and...

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WJN’s Journalistic Triumph

More than twenty years ago, I met a new neighbor while we mowed our back yards. We were amused to learn that we both were editors (not a common occupation, even in Ann Arbor). I’d recently taken over the Ann Arbor...

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