Elmo Morales, seventy-seven, grew up in Manhattan’s Washington Heights, arrived in Ann Arbor fifty-nine years ago on a track scholarship, and stayed to become an affable fixture in his adopted community as a teacher, family man, volunteer, and maker of locally themed and custom T-shirts and apparel.
Fifty-nine years after he arrived in town as a U-M track recruit, Elmo Morales and love lost and found Marcia Stegath Dorr have an elegant new store. | Photo: J. Adrian Wylie
Marcia Stegath Dorr, a self-described “Ann Arbor girl” who’s now seventy-five, studied art and design at U-M and spent her career mostly overseas, consulting, curating, and writing on traditional artisanship. She’s now back in her hometown, though she still commutes to work in Oman.
College sweethearts in the 1960s, the pair reunited over five decades later and have partnered for a new Elmo’s T-Shirts boutique in the historic Nickels Arcade. The oak-paneled shop with a mezzanine office opened in April in the longtime home of Van Boven Shoes. (The upscale men’s clothier Van Boven Inc. is still very much in business just across the glass-roofed gallery.)
“You only live twice,” Dorr jokes. “And we’re so happy together, and I’m having fun because this is a bit of a museum too. We’re treasuring the space, even taking little tiny bits of putty and putting the signs up, not even sticking a pin hole in the wood. We’re not refinishing anything; there are splotches here and there.”
In 2018, she was in town settling her late father’s affairs when a friend cajoled her into going to dinner the night before she was headed back to Oman. She acceded since it was a benefit for the Peace Neighborhood Center, but she didn’t know that the evening’s honoree was her old college beau.
As Morales recalls his speech that evening, “I was saying that there are two women in my life that gave me unconditional love. That was my mom and my wife, Susan, who just passed away. And that was the first time everyone in the audience had heard Susan was gone.
“Afterward, this girl came over. She took my elbow and she said, ‘Do you remember me?’ And I turned and said, ‘Marcia, of course I remember you!’”
“Suddenly we were back together, before I knew what hit me really, in the most wonderful way,” Dorr relates. “We both married wonderful people and had wonderful long marriages and we have great families and share grandkids now.” She sees Elmo’s colorful apparel design and hand print work, which celebrate the Ann Arbor area and events and issues of interest, as a local analog of the small-scale craftsmanship she’s devoted her career to illuminating from other cultures.
Morales taught phys ed in the Ann Arbor Public Schools for thirty years, including twenty-five at Community High. He helped pioneer the Ann Arbor Track Club and the Dexter–Ann Arbor Run, ordering T-shirts so often that his vendor told him, “You might as well get into the business yourself. I’m thinking about quitting.”
What started as a supplement to his $6,900 teaching salary became a vehicle for expression and community engagement. He closed his shop at 220 S. Main in 2016 after twenty-eight years there, but with help from his brother Esteban, he retains a small outlet at 404 E. Liberty, now open only by appointment, as well as a print shop in the back of the Observer building on Winewood Ave. In storage are spinning bikes and ping-pong tables from other past ventures.
Morales sees the Nickels Arcade presence as helping “create an atmosphere for our grandchildren to want to come and learn and work here.” Joining the community of businesses along the mosaic-tiled corridor connecting S. State and Maynard makes it easier to personalize shoppers’ experience, he finds.
“What an intimate atmosphere,” he says with a calm but pervasive sense of joy. “People feel more relaxed. And so we get into conversation a lot, and we have a guest book. Let’s go make people happy today—that’s our mantra. We enjoy talking to people.”
Elmo’s T-Shirts, 17 Nickels Arcade, (734) 994–9898. Mon.–Sat. noon–5 p.m., Sun. noon–3 p.m. elmostshirts.com
