Thrift Shop Exodus
“We’re down to one volunteer a day,” says Janet Fritsch, chair of the PTO Thrift Shop. “We used to have ten or fifteen.” The shop, which raises money for PTO and booster groups in the public...
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Sonya’s Faithful Steppers
“Lung cancer seems to carry a stigma, because people think everyone who has lung cancer is a smoker,” says former Ann Arborite Janice Nash. In fact, Nash points out, “over fifty percent of people with lung...
Read MoreLeo Zulueta and Jared Leathers
It’s a running joke in the tattoo world that everyone owes Leo Zulueta $100. It started when an inker friend handed him a $100 bill, saying it was partial payment for all the money he’d made from the designs Zulueta...
Read MoreCommunity Foundation Meeting
Sue Upton of the Ann Arbor Area Community Foundation called to correct an error in the Ann Arbor Observer’s April Events listings: the AAACF’s annual meeting will take place on Tuesday, April 28, not on Friday, April...
Read MoreThank You, Sam
Surely Sam Breck has helped many thousands of people over his long and varied lifetime. My ex-husband, Don Hunt, and I were among the multitudes. In 1976 we started the Ann Arbor Observer.During the preceding year I had been the...
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Gossip & Gunpowder
“He’s always liked guns.”Seventeen-year-old Benjamin Lucas is sweating bullets. He’s on the witness stand at the 14A District Courthouse in Pittsfield Township, testifying for the prosecution at the...
Read MoreBridge to the Nineteenth Century
The Bell Road Bridge in Dexter Township is on the National Register of Historic Places. The plaque so designating it, however, is sitting in neighbor Bill Klinke’s garage—because for twelve years the nineteenth-century...
Read MoreDisabled Bowlers Knock ‘Em Down
At first glance, it’s like any other league at Bel-Mark Lanes in Scio Township. But look more closely, and you’ll notice a few people need their shoelaces tied. Some speak haltingly or in three-word sentences. A few...
Read MoreTesting the Wind
Richard and Carole Murphy were driving through North Dakota several years ago when they noticed three enormous metal blades spinning slowly in the prairie wind.”We were curious, so I turned around and drove back until we...
Read MoreThe Ambulance Chase
Fifty years ago, the ambulance business in Washtenaw County was up for grabs. Almost anyone with a vehicle big enough for a person to lie down in provided emergency patient transport. That included hospitals, gas stations, taxi...
Read MoreSewing Up History
Molly” is only half dressed. The headless dress form in Helen Welford’s studio wears a silver-green 1840s-style bodice with lacy short sleeves, but the full skirt has yet to be added. Welford fingers a plum-colored...
Read MoreJam at the Mill
Someone suggests a tune, and a fiddler kicks it off. The music sets your toes tapping right away. Outside this room it’s 2008, but in here it sounds more like 1910.Two more fiddles join in, along with a banjo, guitar, and...
Read MoreFamily Secret
Ann Arbor has its share of amateur historians, but few can match Patrick McCauley.In 2006, when he was twenty-eight, McCauley and his girlfriend, Andrea Kinney, purchased an old Greek Revival home on Pontiac Trail. They set to...
Read MoreScream Therapy
Sadly, Edvard Munch didn’t own an SUV. So when he decided to portray a person overwhelmed by existential dread, he had to settle for painting a figure with a rubbery haunted face walking near a fjord in Oslo.Fortunately,...
Read MoreAgue in Ann Arbor
Don’t go to Michigan, land of ills;The name means ague, fever, and chills.-Popular nineteenth-century sayingIn September 1824 a twenty-year-old Irish immigrant, Walter Oakman, bought 123 acres of land near Ypsilanti....
Read MoreSpecial Delivery
Every neighborhood in America has a mail carrier, and Ann Arbor’s are no exception. Six days a week, fifty-two weeks a year, carriers fan out from the city’s three post offices to walk or drive its 137 delivery...
Read MoreInternational Neighbors at 50
“What has surprised you most about life in Ann Arbor?” I ask the women gathered in a small, drab classroom on North Campus.”The man next door mowed his lawn without his shirt!” exclaims a young Japanese...
Read MoreHerman Bock, Decorator
Last summer, Deb Adamic was cleaning the ceiling of the U-M Law Library’s reading room when she spotted a cubbyhole where the ceiling beams meet the wall. Reaching in, Adamic felt something loose and pulled out a grimy...
Read MoreThe Attack Cats
We had just come around the first turn when I saw someone walking toward us, then a dog, then another.”Hi,” I said. “I see you have dogs.”No answer.”I have two cats with me,” I said....
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