Joybox Express
Mark Braun’s nearly 2,000-mile bicycle ride along the Mississippi River almost didn’t happen. Ann Arborites have long known Mr. B for his boogie-woogie, blues, and jazz piano concerts, including, for the past...
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Sharon McRill
Sharon McRill’s office is illuminated by a pair of vintage-style lamps, so pea green and oddly shaped that any vintage shop would be envious. But McRill, forty-eight, didn’t pay a dime for them–or for the...
Read MoreFootball in Chaos
This year, the Wolverines seem to have found most of them. They opened the season at 3-4, losing to average competition (Minnesota, Utah, Rutgers), and beating only one top-100 team (dismal Penn State). Against Minnesota, the...
Read MoreTillerman’s Tea
We received 168 entries correctly identifying the Fake Ad for Tillerman’s Tea on page 71 of the October Observer, with the name of the previous month’s winner, “Jennings,” hidden in one of the varieties...
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When Water Was Wealth
Ann Arborites cavorting in the Argo Cascades, or communing with nature out by the rapids at Delhi, may not realize that these wonderful spots are actually relics of industrial sites created by the region’s first European...
Read MoreThe Panhandler Initiative
Q. What became of the panhandler initiative, with a fellow on the street helping panhandlers connect to services, and donations collected at downtown stores?A. The Dawn Farm program was described in the November 2001 Observer,...
Read MoreLife After Everest
Moni Mulepati, thirty-three, has shared her remarkable wedding story so often you sense she’s a little impatient with yet another retelling. But the Nepal native knows her headline-making marriage in 2005 helps promote the...
Read MoreA Visual Feast
Last month you found us visually embracing a single tree. This month we go for the entire forest.It is autumn in a town populated by deciduous trees. October will show us oranges brighter than marmalade, reds more intense than...
Read MoreNerdfighters
The club is for fans of John Green, author of the young adult bestseller-turned-movie The Fault in Our Stars. Green and his musician brother, Hank, have popularized the movement through live tours and YouTube videos, including...
Read MoreDoughnut medicine
Over the past four years, Jim Smith III figures he’s donated 6,000 donuts to staff and patients at the U-M Cancer Center. After seeing a kid in a wheelchair waiting for radiation treatment, the co-owner of Washtenaw Dairy...
Read MoreIn the Rough 2014
In our survey of fifteen local golf businesses, from country clubs to driving ranges, the vast majority say that business has stagnated or declined in recent years.”There’s a convergence of factors” behind...
Read MoreReading, Writing, and Politics
Except for the spring of 1991, I have never attended an ice cream social. That year I went to thirteen, without ever tasting ice cream. I was running for the Ann Arbor Board of Education, and it was part of the job.So were the...
Read MoreJewett memorial:
Almost two years after Coleman Jewett’s death, friends are closing in on their goal of building a memorial to the popular retired teacher and Farmers Market vendor. Marsha Chamberlin, the former Ann Arbor Art Center CEO...
Read MoreReturn of the Sidewalk Surfer
I was introduced to skateboarding–then called “sidewalk surfing”–on a family visit to California in 1963. I got my first skateboard in 1965 from Beaver’s Bike and Hobby on Church St. So I’ve...
Read MoreThe Legacy Bur Oak Tree
“I Spy the 200-year-old oak tree that the Michigan Ross School of Business is moving to make way for new construction,” writes Janet Max. As part of a $135 million expansion, it will “be moved at great...
Read MoreThe Arminius Leadership Academy
There’s a great scene in a book whose title I can’t remember in which the main character is involved in a debate at school. His opponent goes first and just goes too far, too over the top, too much. Instead of...
Read MoreTower of pizza
The days when groups of six or seven students shared rundown houses with one bathroom are receding fast, judging by September’s opening of a leasing center for the latest luxury high-rise in the South University area. The...
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