Minding the Poll Book
Why did you sign up to be a poll worker on Election Day? I did it to see another side of our process and to make sure that every citizen got to vote in the manner of their choosing.
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Community
The Agean Golden Helmet
We received 177 entries correctly identifying the Fake Ad on page 71 of the November issue. “Finally!” writes the very clever Linda Etter. “An ad made just for me (and all those other gray/white-haired seniors)!”
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Discoveries!
The Observer’s call for historical artifacts earlier this year yielded an interesting range of items. Many will be documented by the Ann Arbor District Library as part of its digital archive of the city’s history.
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Gifts of Life
Dorrie Dils became president and CEO of Gift of Life Michigan in 2016. At the time, she says, the Ann Arbor–based agency was “averaging about 280 organ donors a year.” The number has since more than doubled, to 578 last year.
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Jim Toy Center Is Back
This month, the Rainbow Readers Book Club will hold its first meeting at the center’s new home at 560 S. Main St. The blue house across from the Union Rec restaurant is owned by Greyfort Development, Wickfield’s real estate holding company.
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Speed skater Jace Mendoza
In many ways, Jace Mendoza is a typical twelve-year-old. He likes to play video games with friends, watch YouTube videos, and eat pizza. But one thing sets Jace apart from his peers: He’s training to become a world-champion speed skater.
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Norwegian American Association of Michigan
Last month’s Fake Ad for the Norwegian American Association of Michigan (page 62) asked readers to come up with the name Matt Groening, creator of The Simpsons. One of the clues was that he created the longest-running TV show in history.
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Middle Earth and the Peace Sign Necklace
One Saturday in May 1971, I was a sixth grader on a mission: I wanted to buy a silver peace sign necklace. At the store Middle Earth on South University, in the heart of the campus, I looked carefully at the young woman with wire-rimmed glasses behind the counter. She had frizzy hair, a macramé belt, large hoop earrings, and a choker-style necklace. She looked a little like Janis Joplin and was wearing a T-shirt with the word REVOLT and a picture of a clenched fist. This young woman looked like she would be just the right person to help me.
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Kerrytown Concert House
“Lovely door, lovely venue,” writes Suzanne Tainter. October’s “I Spy is the Kerrytown Concert House on 415 N. Fourth Ave.,” writes Rudi Hauleitner. “Great place for small-scale concerts with marvelous acoustics!” he continues. “Looks good on the outside, sounds great on the inside!” agrees A.J. Kydd.
Read MoreWeathering Milton
“I will happily trade Florida’s hurricanes for Michigan’s blizzards,” muttered our son Benjamin as he spent his birthday bolting metal hurricane shutters over the windows of his St. Petersburg townhouse, anticipating a second major hurricane in two weeks.
Read MoreSeptember 2024 Home Sales
It’s barely news when houses are bought low and sold fast for a bundle, but even by local standards the speedy turn for 3163 Norwood St. is head-spinning.
Read MoreQuestion Corner | November 2024
It isn’t unusual to see foam on the Huron in the Ann Arbor area. Does that mean that we have a PFAS problem?
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Including the Wolverines
In January 2023, when Lydia Goff was working on her Master of Social Work at the U-M, she met two classmates: Wolverine quarterback Jack Tuttle and center Drake Nugent (now on the San Francisco 49ers). Goff was a longtime volunteer with Best Buddies, an organization dedicated to ending the isolation of those with IDD by pairing college students and community members with people with disabilities for one-on-one interactions and by hosting monthly events for everyone involved.
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From China to Ann Arbor to Paris
Yuan Xiao has earned a reputation for turning out top competitors. “He has unbelievable respect in the gymnastics world,” says Justin Spring, an NBC gymnastics commentator and Olympic bronze medalist who now coaches at the University of Alabama.
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Local Soldiers in the Civil War
The Civil War began on April 12, 1861, when Confederate artillery opened fire on the federal Fort Sumter, South Carolina. Three days later, University of Michigan president Henry Tappan and other dignitaries in Ann Arbor addressed a public meeting at on the courthouse square at Main and Huron. “The meeting overflowed across the square into the street,” reports a city historic marker on the courthouse wall.
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Football Families
At dusk, on fall Fridays across the county, the world of high school football comes back to life, like a prep sports version of Brigadoon. The marching bands. Singsongy cheerleader chants. An announcer’s booming voice. Armored athletes crashing into each other. And the bleacher crowd’s claps and jeers at the action unfolding before them, on 100 yards of astroturf.
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All in the Family
Steve Lesko and his younger sister Ciara attended Chelsea Public Schools, where Lesko played the violin starting in fifth grade. By freshman year of high school, he’d “burned out” on classical music and joined the Chelsea House Orchestra. That was where “I fell in love with Celtic music,” says Lesko.
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Case Kittel & Hayley Billingsley
Case Kittel and his brother, Ross, were in the middle of the Au Sable River when Ross turned thirty-two. It was midnight and they were competing in the 2023 AuSable Canoe Marathon, a grueling, 120-mile canoe race that starts in Grayling and ends the next day in Oscoda. At midnight, Case says, he started singing “Happy Birthday.” There was another canoe near them; the folks in that boat “were like, ‘What?!,’” but they joined in the singing, too.
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Home Is Where the Heart Is
Early one morning two years ago, Gail Kuhnlein left her beloved home in Pittsfield Township’s Hidden Creek subdivision for heart surgery and almost didn’t return. Kuhnlein, now sixty, suffered complications during the scheduled repair of a congenital defect in her mitral valve, and was in a medically induced coma for weeks before she recovered. When she returned two months later to the home she shares with her husband, Tim, it was with a new perspective on life. “This,” she says, “is all bonus time.”
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A Vital School Board Vote
The November 5 election is about the schools’ past, present, and future—the current board’s firing of superintendent Jeanice Swift last summer, the discovery of a $25 million hole the budget in March, the hiring of Jazz Parks as the new superintendent in June, and the need to grow enrollment to keep the schools financially sound in the future.
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