J. Adrian Wylie
In the late 1970s, John Hilton was working nights installing windshield wiper motors in Ford Granadas at the Wayne assembly plant. One morning, he stopped at the former Kroger on Broadway St. and saw “a little green stand with Observers in it.” The discovery would change his life.
Hilton says he “fell deeply in love” with the publication and what he calls its “affectionate, no bullshit” style. In 1982 he traded his $39,000 Ford job for a $13,500 staff writing position. Last October, he retired after thirty-nine years as the Observer’s editor.
“I could not imagine a better life for myself,” he says, “and it only existed because Don and Mary [Hunt] invented the Observer.”
On a late fall afternoon, Hilton, seventy-three, sits at his old kitchen table in the front room of his circa 1880s home, just north of Kerrytown, where he’s lived since 1980. His days are still busy with meetings as he and his business partner, retired Observer publisher Patricia Garcia, are in discussions with the Ann Arbor District Library about the magazine’s future.
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Hilton says that, hoping to impress the Hunts, he worked for a year to get a column published in Newsweek. Turns out, he says, “they wanted me to write about what I was interested in writing about.” So in 1980, he pitched his first story about Eclipse, a bike luggage company on Jackson Rd.
After he joined the staff, he learned to edit by entering the Hunts’ changes from their marked-up printouts into an Osborne 1 “luggable” computer. He says his high school debate skills supplied the “readiness to rethink” a story’s structure.
In 1986, when the Hunts were ready to sell, they approached Hilton and his coworker Garcia. The pair took the leap with personal and bank loans.
Garcia says Hilton has a “brilliant mind” and represents “journalism with integrity.” Because the partners often worked late nights, she’d sometimes find him taking a power nap under his desk during the day.
As they moved from their first offices above Kiddie Land children’s store downtown (now Echelon restaurant) to the Kerrytown area, and finally to Winewood Ave. on the west side, Hilton says “there were all these daily stresses, but it was so exhilarating … to work with so many people who were as curious as I was.”
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A proud Yooper, Hilton grew up in a “big old house” in Marquette, the third of five children. His dad, a Northern Michigan University English professor, would load the kids into his used Hudson Wasp each morning and drive them to the university’s K–8 laboratory school. Hilton’s mom, the daughter of Presbyterian missionaries, was a community volunteer, and the author of Northern Michigan University: The First 75 Years.
“We were poor by the standards of the time,” he says. “I remember not liking beef heart or beef tongue.” He says he’d be relieved when his dad, an avid fly fisherman, would stock the freezer with brook trout.
Hilton and his siblings helped their father build his camp; they were paid by the weight of each cinder block they carried up the hill. If a toilet leaked at the house, Hilton fixed it, and when the exterior needed painting, he painted it.
In 1970 he followed his older sisters’ “path to Michigan,” where he chose a degree in general studies. “The one goal that I ever articulated,” he says, “[was] that I wanted to know everything.”
Hilton says he met his “first sweetie,” Paula Shanks, when they lived at Vail House co-op where she was the work manager and he did maintenance. Hilton says when Shanks’ father realized they were “living in sin,” they married in 1973 in Ann Arbor District Court, then on the top floor of City Hall.
Hilton continued to work as a handyman during and immediately after college, often biking to gigs, until a fellow co-op member tipped him to the Ford job in 1976. In 1987, he and Paula welcomed daughter Kati (she works for Michigan Medicine and lives in Ypsi).
In 2004, at fifty-two, Paula died suddenly. Hilton says she’d come home from her job at Mathematical Reviews in the middle of the day feeling sick. She slept through the next day, and went to the emergency room the following morning. She died that night. An autopsy revealed she’d died of hypercalcemia triggered by an undetected cancer.
“When you’ve been part of a couple for so long you kind of don’t know who you are,” Hilton says. “And I was in that situation, losing my identity. We were always Paula and John, John and Paula.”
Fatherhood (Kati was then a senior at Community High) and his job kept him going, and Observer staff provided a steady meal train.
In 2013 he married longtime staff writer Eve Silberman. He’d been shocked several years earlier when she revealed she “loved him as more than a friend,” Silberman says. Still grieving Paula, Hilton wasn’t ready, but years later, when he visited her condo to help her with a small repair, they shared their first kiss.
The couple kept their relationship a secret from staff for several months, until they announced their engagement. “You’ve never seen so many dumbfounded people in your life,” Hilton laughs. They married at Temple Beth Emeth.
Silberman says when someone hasn’t received an Observer issue, Hilton will deliver it himself, and that he’s a “walking encyclopedia” of Ann Arbor business history. They often walk arm in arm to the Farmers Market and the downtown library. Hilton bakes their bread and makes a big batch of iced rooibos tea from TeaHaus each week. They often lie at opposite ends of their big living room couch, laptops open, with their toes touching.
The doorbell rings and Hilton opens the door to a neighbor who lives in Avalon Housing on Main. The man asks for cans and Hilton emerges from the kitchen with a garbage bag full.
Later, Hilton explains that helping his neighbors is “the example we were given” when he and Paula were welcomed into this “old Black neighborhood,” which has since gentrified. He’s forged lifelong bonds with the Baker family who lived next door, and fondly recalls huge Fourth of July cookouts hosted by the Seeleys.
With deadline days in his rearview, Hilton has a few retirement goals: road trips with Silberman, reading from his stacks of nonfiction books, tackling his list of home repairs—and always making time to greet the neighbors at his front door.
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