Community

The call came to the Depot Street apartment about 9 a.m. on Monday, January 10. Erin Stead heard the news, but couldn’t believe it. “Relax for the next few hours,” the woman from the American Library...

The Waterloo Area Farm Museum, ten miles northwest of Chelsea, is a living monument to a memorable immigrant family.Johannes and Frederica Seybold, together with her two children from a previous marriage, arrived in 1844. With...

During the early hours of February 11, 1931, male students living in five fraternity houses on the U-M campus received unexpected guests–police officers who searched every room for alcohol.Coming just before the annual...

The pair of peregrine falcons in Burton Tower get the press, but the real raptor story in Ann Arbor is the growing number of hawks in town. In December, a Cooper’s hawk was seen flapping down Alhambra, a full-sized...

It was a great story. Ron Koenig, a friend of mine who works in architectural restoration, was on the second floor of a building in downtown Saline. The first floor was being rehabbed into a new restaurant, Mangiamo Italian...

When an Ann Arbor District Library patron apologized profusely while paying her $8 fine for overdue materials, the clerk reassured her: “That’s nothing. We have several people who owe more than a thousand dollars in...

A U-M spin-off named after a radical sixties group is an unlikely capitalist success story.When Jeff Masters helped launch the Weather Underground as a private company in 1995, he never dreamed it would become the second-biggest...

The Pepsi Refresh Challenge left the Ann Arbor Skatepark Action Committee worn out and still thirsty–for funds. The soft drink giant has shifted some of its advertising budget to charitable donations, giving out grants...

“We are all having increasingly geeky kids,” says Dave Nelson, stay-at-home dad of four-year-old Otto Sam. But for all the kids’ skill at video games, Nelson says, those are “insular activities—and...

“I didn’t bike yesterday,” says DeWight Plotner, almost apologetically.It’s the day after a nasty snowfall in mid-January, but Plotner, owner of Wheels in Motion on Washtenaw, feels he needs to explain...

Last month’s Fake Ad for the New Year’s Eve Open House at Huron Valley Assisted Living (page 66 of the January Observer) prompted eighty-one responses. The ad contained a reference to the all-time cult film classic...

Ditch your car and save $8,000 a year by riding the bus. That’s what a recent Ann Arbor Transportation Authority press release suggests. The newly rich bus rider was assumed to have driven a mid-sized sedan 15,000 miles a...

“I wondered if the map of the world had changed while I was away on vacation,” writes Kathy Peterson of January’s clue, “Where France borders Mongolia.” “Maybe some freakish act of nature...