Four years ago, Margaret Schankler was just another anonymous Internet retailer. When competition killed her business selling cool kids’ clothes and toys, she bought a streamlined vintage delivery truck and started Hello!...
Read More“The mushroom hunters have been here!” Patrick Terry exclaims as we enter the infrequently visited Leslie Woods Nature Area off Plymouth Rd. The city’s herpetologist points to the clues: crushed grass and...
Read MoreKeith Poncher cinches his helmet tight then tips his skateboard over the edge of the cloverleaf bowl at the Ann Arbor Skatepark. Momentum carries him far up onto the opposite wall, where he slingshots around and heads back down...
Read MoreSue Schooner was a workaholic auto executive when a group of middle school girls “sort of started taking over my life.” What began as a volunteer stint working with girls at Peace Neighborhood Center and the...
Read MoreAn expert on substance abuse, U-M nursing prof Carol Boyd talks to people across the social spectrum–including a few small-time drug dealers. “It’s not like I go into crack houses,” she says–but she...
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Suzanne Smith closes her eyes, dips her head slightly, and sends her bow smoothly across the strings of her 250-year-old cello. A melancholy riff, low and resonant, fills her cozy living room near Haisley Elementary...
Read MoreAt Cafe Zola, the waiter bringing coffee smiles at the attractive young couple but doesn’t recognize either Charlie White, 2014 Olympic gold medalist in ice dancing, or Tanith Belbin White, who took silver in the same...
Read More“Jazz is not dead,” Frank Zappa once intoned. “It just smells funny.”Zappa’s quote fit Ann Arbor’s jazz scene five years ago, after the closing of downtown strongholds the Bird of Paradise,...
Read More“The dreads are kind of a spiritual thing for a lot of people,” says Sandy Alcini, owner of Grateful Dreads, a hair salon tucked behind a house on N. Fourth Ave. For Jamaican singer Bob Marley, whose photograph hangs...
Read MoreWhen June Manning Thomas started high school in Orangeburg, South Carolina, in 1965, her classmates either ignored her completely or stared at her in stony silence. When grades were distributed–she was an academic...
Read MoreAfternoon Delight Cafe has closed for the day, but seventy-one-year-old busser Walter Roberson–who walks with a stoop and smiles frequently–is still hard at work in the back of the restaurant, folding cardboard...
Read MoreRebecca Arends is a massage therapist, not an artist. But she painted murals at ten locations around town over the summer.The most prominent is at Orchid Lane on Liberty. The store’s alley wall once was covered with...
Read MoreWaiting nervously for his life-changing interview, Andy LaBarre was startled when “this great, big bear-like man comes out of his office.” LaBarre’s voice deepens as he quotes the man’s words:...
Read MoreRandall Torno builds his canoes for the water–even though some of them may never touch a river or lake. “Many people buy them to hang on the wall,” he explains, leading a tour of his basement workshop, where...
Read MoreReprinted from the June 1981 Ann Arbor Observer. Stevens died on July 26, 2015.His gaze fixed ahead upon the Greek Revival house at 126 North Division, City Historian Wystan Stevens backed slowly out into the middle of the...
Read MoreIn the summer of 1981, Marc Taras went out for breakfast with his good friend Paul Joseph Ryder. After steak and eggs, the two took a stroll and passed a vacant shop in the 600 block of Packard St. “Wouldn’t this be...
Read MoreSpring is a very busy time for Heather Phillips. It’s not unusual for her to work twelve to eighteen hours a day at Heather’s Place, the little sewing shop in the lower level of her Water Hill home, making and...
Read MoreOn a late March morning at the Arb the temperatures hover in the twenties, but Community High senior Sarah Toner doesn’t seem to mind the cold as she sets off along a trail in the Dow Prairie in search of birds. The...
Read More“Wynken, Blynken, and Nod?” calls a woman, standing in the doorway of Kaleidoscope Books & Collectibles on Fourth Ave. “Check next week!” owner Jeff Pickell shouts back.Pickell (pronounced pick-ELL)...
Read More“Some people just don’t believe it,” says Art French, when he tells them that Ann Arbor once had a namesake automobile. But the proof is in his garage, parked next to his Buick sedan. On a snowy January day at...
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