John Beranek & Karen Park
When Karen Park and John Beranek got engaged, friends scrawled the story of how they met on the sidewalk between their homes.”John met Karen at Top of the Park,” they announced in colored chalk. “She lives that...
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Bicycle Stampede
Or the Boys’ and Girls’ Glee Club of Ann Arbor. Or Candy Death Squad. By any name, they’re a self-described “hard-core” late-night bike-riding group.Weather permitting, they tear through town every...
Read MoreDream House
Valerie Laken played a mean second base on the O Team—the Observer’s co-rec softball team—a few years back. I usually played catcher, and I enjoyed chatting with her on the bench or over postgame beers. She had a house on...
Read MoreMissing pigs
Three bronze pigs have gone missing from the playground at County Farm Park. According to Washtenaw County Parks and Recreation deputy director Tom Freeman, the metallic mother and her three piglets that once clustered near the...
Read MoreOverheard on Miller
Walking down Miller in the first snowstorm of the season, two men bowed their heads to the wind as their boots crunched the newly fallen snow. “So what do you think about this weather?” asked one.”I like...
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Behind the veil
Like a flashy lure, Liberty Street Robot Supply and Repair demands attention. From the street, large windows give an unobstructed view of comical, lounging robots and kid-friendly shelves lined with boxes of mechanical arms,...
Read MoreMy time had come
Its time for Mattie to share her story with the world, says Gratia Lousma. Mattie King, eighty-seven, moved to Ann Arbor from North Carolina in 1950, escaping the humiliations of Jim Crow. Gratia was just thirteen when they...
Read MoreSnips and songs
It was a snowy December afternoon at Vicki’s Wash & Wear Haircuts. Vicki Honeyman was cutting hair at the barber chair in the middle of her Heavenly Metal boutique while David Menefee, a white-bearded local stonemason...
Read MoreThe Threshold Choir
Before my father died, he was in the grip of a profound dementia. He was in a hospital in Florida and my brother and I were still here in Michigan. We phoned daily, but he was confused, anxious, and incoherent.Then one day my...
Read MorePolls and pigeons at Mack
“My ‘educated’ guess [for November’s I Spy] is the Ann Arbor Open at Mack School, 920 Miller Road,” wrote Alice Ralph, correctly identifying it as “one of many school buildings used for...
Read MorePast Present
The dirt road to Ray and Karen Berg’s home in Manchester takes visitors past farms, cornfields, and rolling green pastures to a light blue Queen Anne perched on a hill. The Victorian-style house and its pastoral setting...
Read MoreEast Side Story
On the evening of October 13, residents on Buckingham Road smelled gas.As a DTE technician fruitlessly wandered the neighborhood with a flashlight and digital detector, neighbors recalled that one house, which had sat vacant...
Read MoreLapping It Up
Grace Bowles spreads a soft blanket on the floor at Chelsea’s McKune Memorial Library and sits beside her nine-year-old collie, Cassie. Bowles strokes the dog’s fluffy mane. Like Leo the Labrador and Boomer the...
Read MorePrincipal Ben Edmondson
At a recent Scarlett Middle School rally, principal Ben Edmondson playfully demonstrates some dance “steps” in front of the pep squad. But a few minutes later, when student leaders read aloud the results of the...
Read MoreGift House
“You’re supposed to give until it hurts,” says ninety-year-old Henry Vander Kaay. “And I wasn’t hurting enough.”Vander Kaay was active in Kiwanis and Motor Meals but says he felt “a...
Read MoreRinging up $180,000
The holiday season’s been up and down for Ann Arbor’s Salvation Army. With a goal of $180,000, the bell ringers were down $2,000 the day before Thanksgiving, then up $800 the day after, down a week later by $1,400,...
Read MoreStorming the court
When the U-M men’s basketball team beat Duke on December 6, fans rushed the court to celebrate. And it wasn’t just students on the floor of Crisler Arena: the giddy crowd included a couple of middle-aged friends of...
Read MoreSelling the Holy Toaster
“The skylights leaked from day one,” says University Reformed Church pastor Sung Kim.The URC building at 1001 East Huron was erected in 1962 at the height of Ann Arbor’s brief flirtation with modernism....
Read MoreWhat’s that light?
John Beilein’s first year at the helm of Michigan basketball looked like more of the past, only worse. The Wolverines started 4–8, including a loss to perennially awful Harvard—now coached, ironically, by Beilein’s...
Read MoreCoach blue
The U-M’s miserable football season tested the patience of first-year coach Rich Rodriguez. Fans who attended practices reported hearing a lot of cussing at the young team members by the head coach and his staff. “Bo...
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