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...
Read MoreSurely 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...
Read MoreFifty 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...
Read MoreMolly” is only half dressed. The headless dress form in Helen Welford’s studio wears a silver-green 1840s-style bodice with lacy short sleeves, but the full skirt has yet to be added. Welford fingers a plum-colored...
Read MoreAnn 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...
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Someone suggests a tune, and a fiddler kicks it off. The music sets your toes tapping right away. Outside this room it’s 2008, but in here it sounds more like 1910.Two more fiddles join in, along with a banjo, guitar, and...
Read MoreSadly, Edvard Munch didn’t own an SUV. So when he decided to portray a person overwhelmed by existential dread, he had to settle for painting a figure with a rubbery haunted face walking near a fjord in Oslo.Fortunately,...
Read More“He’s always liked guns.”Seventeen-year-old Benjamin Lucas is sweating bullets. He’s on the witness stand at the 14A District Courthouse in Pittsfield Township, testifying for the prosecution at the...
Read MoreThe Bell Road Bridge in Dexter Township is on the National Register of Historic Places. The plaque so designating it, however, is sitting in neighbor Bill Klinke’s garage—because for twelve years the nineteenth-century...
Read MoreAt first glance, it’s like any other league at Bel-Mark Lanes in Scio Township. But look more closely, and you’ll notice a few people need their shoelaces tied. Some speak haltingly or in three-word sentences. A few...
Read MoreRichard and Carole Murphy were driving through North Dakota several years ago when they noticed three enormous metal blades spinning slowly in the prairie wind.”We were curious, so I turned around and drove back until we...
Read MoreDon’t go to Michigan, land of ills;The name means ague, fever, and chills.-Popular nineteenth-century sayingIn September 1824 a twenty-year-old Irish immigrant, Walter Oakman, bought 123 acres of land near Ypsilanti....
Read MoreEvery neighborhood in America has a mail carrier, and Ann Arbor’s are no exception. Six days a week, fifty-two weeks a year, carriers fan out from the city’s three post offices to walk or drive its 137 delivery...
Read More“What has surprised you most about life in Ann Arbor?” I ask the women gathered in a small, drab classroom on North Campus.”The man next door mowed his lawn without his shirt!” exclaims a young Japanese...
Read MoreLast summer, Deb Adamic was cleaning the ceiling of the U-M Law Library’s reading room when she spotted a cubbyhole where the ceiling beams meet the wall. Reaching in, Adamic felt something loose and pulled out a grimy...
Read More“Our goal is to provide birthdays to children in need of a birthday surprise when they would otherwise go without this year,” explains the website annarborbirthdaysurprise.com. “We are not an organization. We...
Read MoreWe had just come around the first turn when I saw someone walking toward us, then a dog, then another.”Hi,” I said. “I see you have dogs.”No answer.”I have two cats with me,” I said....
Read More“We get three types of traffic,” says the man guarding the door at 425 East Washington—”the workers, the patients, and the movie people.” The workers park outside while they’re building the 411...
Read MoreSeventy-six years ago this month, the country was at the low point of the Great Depression. In Ann Arbor, American Broach, King-Seeley, and Hoover Ball and Bearing all had cut production and laid off workers. Local retail sales...
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