2009 February

Crash

A bit after 3 on a January afternoon, Pauline Lee was driving south on Seventh past Pioneer High School. She had just picked up her grandson, Jackson, at his piano lesson. There was already an inch of snow on the ground and...

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Echoes of 1933

Seventy-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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Soft Healing at the Arb

Last November, several U-M students met to study methods for preventing riverbanks from collapsing. They cut red osier dogwood from one bank of the Huron River into short sections called “live stakes” and pounded...

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Jagerbombs hit South State

Quickie Burger & Dogs, which opened last year at State and Hill with a sexually suggestive logo that delighted the frat boys and infuriated the campus feminist contingent, now has a Class C liquor license. It’s the...

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Layoffs at the Observer

The Ann Arbor Observer Company laid off five staff members on Tuesday. “They’re all good people who have contributed tremendously to the Observer’s publications,” says publisher and co-owner Patricia...

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Dating Ms. Arbor

An Ann Arbor woman visiting family in Minneapolis in January accompanied her college-age nephew to a movie. Returning to their car, they were dismayed to find a city cop about to ticket it for being illegally parked, something...

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Vinx

Vinx is a hypnotic one-man band. A bookish-looking but genial figure with black clothes, thick-framed glasses, and an orange head scarf, he takes the stage with an African drum hanging from a cord slung over his shoulder. There...

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From Fly to Elephant Ears

If you’re a disc golf fan and you’ve dreamed of opening your own disc golf store, Matt Cyrulnik can get you off to a good start. He figures that when he closes Fly—his combination disc golf and urban clothing store...

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Ann Arbor’s oldest cemeteries

Q. What is the oldest cemetery in Ann Arbor?A. The oldest headstone, in Terhune Pioneer Cemetery near Packard, commemorates young Emily Whitmore, who was buried in 1825. However, there are no bodies in this public park—the...

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Hot Stock

“It’s hard to stop once it gets going,” says Ann Arbor State Bank CEO Bill Broucek.The new bank began selling stock last summer just as national banks like IndyMac were hitting the skids. Yet local investors...

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Don’t blame Pfizer

With shelves picked clean, Bello Vino Marketplace closed its doors on January 8, a week ahead of the schedule it had announced shortly before Christmas.”It actually wasn’t Pfizer,” says Jennifer Ferris,...

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Homeless Soccer

“It takes your mind off your worries,” says a player during a break in a soccer game at World Wide Sports Center. Raul, a soft-spoken twenty-four-year-old, plays regularly with the SSPORT team. It’s made up of...

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Preserving traditions

For local cooks looking to relearn old tricks, a group called Preserving Traditions is reviving an earlier concept of community: starting this month, it will be using the kitchen at the Pittsfield Grange to teach food...

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Busy shelter

Are teen pregnancies on the rise in Washtenaw County? Christina Rivest, director of Father Patrick Jackson House at Main and Pauline, thinks so. Over the last four years she’s seen Father Pat’s, the area’s only...

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Pizza trumps Coneys

There aren’t five guys named Moe in this story. But there are two guys named Mo, one restaurant named Moe, two properties named Pittsfield, and a lot of juggling of names and concepts.Mo (short for Mohammed) Kasham opened...

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John Beranek & Karen Park

When Karen Park and John Beranek got engaged, friends scrawled the story of how they met on the sidewalk between their homes.”John met Karen at Top of the Park,” they announced in colored chalk. “She lives that...

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Partridge Rule

Tom Partridge describes himself as “a disabled senior citizen.” He’s also a self-appointed community conscience who often scolds public officials for not doing enough to support progressive causes. “Tom...

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