When John Woodford took a job in Dearborn in 1977, his wife Eliza said, “We’re going to live in Ann Arbor.” Their daughter Maize says she’s “very fortunate” to again live in the 1930s-era three-bedroom in the Angell neighborhood where she grew up. | Photo: J. Adrian Wylie
It was fall 1977 when Eliza and John Woodford moved their young family from Montclair, New Jersey, to Ann Arbor for John’s new job in Dearborn with the Ford Times. John had left his copyediting job at the New York Times because the newspaper’s switch to computers was causing him vision problems.
“I just said, ‘We’re going to live in Ann Arbor,’” Eliza recalls. “I knew it was a college town and it would have good schools.” After rejecting newer subdivisions, they walked into the 1930s-era three-bedroom in the Angell neighborhood that was built by 1920 U-M football player Viggo Nelson. With its arched doorways and “slightly cottage-y feel,” Eliza says she instantly felt “right at home.”
The Woodfords, both eighty-one, still live in the house where they raised their kids, Duffy, Maize, and Will—and Maize (pronounced may-zee), now fifty-four, has joined them again.
“I love this house, and I love this neighborhood,” says Maize, who graduated from U-M and works at Amadeus restaurant. Because “Ann Arbor has become so unaffordable,” she says she’s “very fortunate” for the multigenerational solution. Although Maize says the neighborhood’s a bit noisier with the speed limit increase on Washtenaw Ave., more hired landscapers, and some “houses built out to huge sizes,” it’s retained its neighborliness.
She recalls the day her family moved in and next-door neighbor Laura Kenney knocked on the front door. “She said, ‘Wanna play in my fort?’” It was the start of “capture-the-flag-type-days,” she says. The Woodford and Kenney kids played in the fort up in the rafters of the Kenneys’ garage, snuck out in the middle of the night to climb the roof of the Unitarian Church (now Stone Chalet Bed and Breakfast), and walked the half-mile to Angell Elementary together. Mrs. Kenney—a well-known piano teacher and composer for children’s string ensembles—piped music outside on Halloween. The Kenneys have since moved, but the families stay in touch.
Eliza, who’s from the Akron area, and John, who’s from Benton Harbor, met in their freshman seminar as members of Harvard University’s class of 1963. (John is profiled in the book The Last Negroes at Harvard: The Class of 1963 and the 18 Young Men Who Changed Harvard Forever.)
Both are retired from U-M—John as editor of Michigan Today, and Eliza as fellows coordinator at U-M’s Institute for the Humanities. Like Maize, they recall many vivid moments on their block, like the line squall of the late 1970s that knocked out power for a week. Neighbors emerged from their houses day after day with thawing food from their freezers to share. “That’s when I discovered frozen Five Alive,” Eliza says, a drink that neighbors soon “mixed with vodka,” she laughs.
Though John wishes Ann Arbor had “a daily newspaper and good streets,” he says there’s no place like it for its “cultural pizzazz” and events within a ten-minute drive. Eliza regularly walks to Nichols Arboretum and swims at the Health & Fitness Center at WCC, and John enjoys touring back roads on his motorcycle.
As their neighborhood evolves, John says, “we’re excited” about two new babies expected soon on the block—one next door and one across the street. After more than four decades as Angell residents, Eliza says, “it turned out to be a good choice.”
