Jan 21, 2009 | Community |
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 MoreJan 19, 2009 | Community |
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 MoreJan 2, 2009 | Community |
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 MoreDec 30, 2008 | Community |
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 MoreDec 29, 2008 | Community |
“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 MoreDec 26, 2008 | Community |
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 MoreDec 21, 2008 | Community |
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 MoreDec 20, 2008 | Community |
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 MoreDec 19, 2008 | Community |
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 MoreDec 16, 2008 | Community |
“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 MoreDec 16, 2008 | Community |
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 MoreDec 13, 2008 | Community |
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 MoreDec 12, 2008 | Community |
“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 MoreDec 4, 2008 | Community |
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 MoreDec 2, 2008 | Community |
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...
Read MoreNov 30, 2008 | Community |
It is hard to imagine now just how rare parks were in Washtenaw County in 1972. Ann Arbor and other big towns had their own parks, and there were the Metroparks on the river and the state recreation areas at the northwest edge...
Read MoreNov 25, 2008 | Community |
A spinning disco ball dapples light on the walls of a darkened room. Travis, a fifteen-year-old with autism, walks toward an illuminated bubble tower. As the tube changes colors, Travis presses his face against it and glides his...
Read MoreNov 24, 2008 | Community |
Thrift- and style-conscious Ann Arborites have long been fans of the weekly Saturday sales at the Kiwanis building downtown. Few realize that on Thursday mornings, the store opens again for a private sale to a select group of...
Read MoreNov 22, 2008 | Community |
Ann Arborites are rediscovering the art of preserving their own fruits and vegetables. “Everybody’s doing it,” says Mark Ho¬desh of Downtown Home & Garden. “We normally get in hundreds and hundreds...
Read MoreNov 22, 2008 | Community |
Against a backdrop of skyscraping cranes, a towering framework of I-beams, and the pounding of pneumatic tools, a lone forklift recently chugged into the courtyard behind C. S. Mott’s Children’s Hospital and, in a...
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