Community

Jessica Thatai knew she had to lose weight on the February morning when she told her then four-year-old daughter that she was too tired to go out in the snow to play. “Mommy,” her daughter Sonia responded, “you...

Mysterious rituals, clandestine meetings, lost treasure, murder: the Freemasons, or “Masons” for short, are a rich source of literary fodder. Real-life Masons, for their part, tend to accept the attention with good...

A proud liberal, I moved from an East Coast factory town to Ann Arbor in 1954, sure I would find a compatible political atmosphere. I couldn’t have been more wrong. Mayor Bill Brown, a Republican stalwart, was elected to...

After the Big Day, it gets dry-cleaned, wrapped carefully around bodice-shaped cardboard, placed in a double-thick acid-free cardboard box the size of a bathtub, and stored in the closet. And there it stays, year after year.You...

“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...

“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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...