If you live through a winter, is it hyperbole to call it brutal? Probably not for Ethol Fred Nordman, LaVerne Drake, Robert Granville, and other young Washtenaw County men who welcomed January 1919 fighting for their lives near...
Read MoreWhen I was a kid, I had a friend down the street named Kwame whose older brother was mentally handicapped. This gave Kwame license, he felt, to make fun of other mentally handicapped folks he encountered. Of course, if anyone...
Read MoreIn the late 2000s, when Bill Lockwood and Riley Trumbull rented a townhouse near Malletts Creek, they often found stray cats in the neighborhood. “Some of them were lost cats,” recalls Lockwood, “but the area,...
Read MoreOf the ten years Stephen Postema’s been Ann Arbor’s city attorney, the past one’s been his best yet for big wins in court.The blond-going-gray lawyer hasn’t lost a lawsuit since he got the job. But...
Read MoreTurning eighty last year, neurologist Sid Gilman proudly displayed all the hallmarks of a distinguished career: An endowed chair at the U-M med school. National acclaim as an expert in Alzheimer’s disease. The...
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7-Eleven found out to its surprise that the students who live in the Landmark, the new student high-rise on the corner of Forest and South U, prefer fresh fruit and sandwiches to chips and candy bars. A few days after opening,...
Read MoreJim Cacini, the owner of Dexter’s Coney Island, says he stumbled on his latest business by accident. The sixty-year-old Albanian (whose name is pronounced cuh-SEE-nee) has owned restaurants in Livonia, Dearborn, and...
Read MoreHeidi and John Obeid may not seem like the most likely people to be starting a health food store: they’ve worked in car dealerships in Garden City for most of their lives. But Heidi developed food allergies about five...
Read More“I’m a third-generation battery guy,” says Neal Anderson, which isn’t something you hear every day. He’s the manager of the newly opened Interstate All Battery Center in Woodland Plaza. His father,...
Read MoreAmid falling leaves, hammers and cranes are back again at the Chelsea Fairways subdivision at E. Old US-12 and Freer Road.It’s been an unusual sight recently: after the real estate bubble burst in 2008, many Michigan...
Read MoreSharada and Viswa Kumar started the local Chinmaya Mission in the basement of their home in 1984. Now, 750 families attend the Hindu religious and educational center on Packard in Pittsfield Township.”It has been going up...
Read MoreVegetarian cats: “What the hell does a thin cat have to do with diet?” Much to his amazement, veterinarian Bill MacArthur of Affordable Vet Services says he hears that question fairly often from someone who’s...
Read MoreThe University of Michigan’s annual veneration of the birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King takes on a local tone when the University Musical Society presents “From Cass Corridor to the World: A Tribute to...
Read MoreA few readers will remember Jeff Epton from his years on the Ann Arbor City Council in the 1980s. Epton was probably a true socialist, yet he got along rather well with moderate Republicans (yes, there really were such...
Read MoreThe community concert band is something of a two-headed animal: concert bands perform the marches and popular songs that are central to community celebrations, but there’s also a rarer strain of the tradition that treats...
Read MoreOn The Tracks is a new monthly music series in Chelsea. It debuted in September and will continue through next May on the first Wednesday of every month in the Chelsea Depot–hence the title.Is it a concert series? Not...
Read More“It’s all over,” says Allison Dondzila of Cribley Drilling & Champion Water in Dexter. She figures the company finds dangerous levels of arsenic in the water of one out of twenty wells it drills, and it...
Read MoreI still vividly remember the first time I heard Maura O’Connell sing. It was at the Wheatland Music Festival in 1981. I was walking through the woods behind the main stage, from the workshop lane to the dance stage, when I...
Read MoreMagic has arrived in Ann Arbor. We’re home to just about every other performing art–even a highly respected comedy club–but magic doesn’t happen all that much around here.Kip Barry says, with an air of...
Read MoreQ. What is Carrara glass, and are there examples in Ann Arbor?A. Carrara glass is a trade name for a colored “structural glass” that was developed about a century ago as an inexpensive substitute for marble. Smooth...
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