Fifteen-year-old Geraldine Merz and her brothers, Irv and Rolly, promoting football parking in the fall of 1927. It cost a whopping 25 cents. | Courtesy of Doug Barnett
My mother, Geraldine Merz, was raised on a farm on Pleasant Lake Rd. Her family consisted of her parents, Louis and Lena (Bethke) Merz, and two younger brothers, Irv and Rolly.
Grandpa Louis was born in a rural community near Manchester in 1885. He had to quit school in the third grade to work on his dad’s farm, and as he got older, he did more of the work. Eventually he was the main worker on the farm, paid with a third of the profits.
He saved enough money that by 1913 he was able to purchase his own 100-acre farm on Pleasant Lake Rd. He needed someone to run the farmhouse, so he advertised in a rural weekly newspaper for a housekeeper.
This is where Lena enters the picture. Her parents emigrated to America and eventually Ann Arbor in 1882. Her dad came over first and worked for the City of Ann Arbor with his team of horses and wagon, hauling gravel. Her mother followed with their four small children; the trip from what’s now the Polish city of Poznań to Boston took a month. She spoke not a word of English, and the youngest child was only ten months old. What a brave woman, back almost 145 years ago.
Lena was born in 1885 in their home at 909 Greene St., a block east of the present Michigan Stadium. In 1913, she answered the ad Louis had placed in the rural weekly paper.
Within months, they were married, and they lived off the farm. They raised enough potatoes to last through the winter, stored in the dirt Michigan basement of the farmhouse. The apples from their trees kept all winter there too, along with Grampa’s barrel of hard cider.
They had grape vines to make jelly and another barrel of wine. They had chickens for eggs, and every Sunday there was a huge pot of chicken cooking on the wood stove in the kitchen. They raised cows for milk and beef that Gramma would can for the winter. They also had pigs for pork and cured hams in a smokehouse. A crock of pickles always sat on the back porch.
Gramma baked every day—bread, pies, and cookies. The only foods they bought were coffee, sugar, and flour. They drove into Manchester on Saturday nights to shop and watch movies shown on the bridge across the Raisin River.
There was no indoor plumbing, and water came from the well out by the road. It was always very cold, but the cookstove in the kitchen had a hot-water tank at one end (it also provided heat in the winter). They kept a pail of water on the back porch with a ladle in it. Everyone drank from that same ladle for many, many years, and, as far as they knew, no one ever got sick from sharing it.
Their children went to the Dresselhouse School, a mile west of the farm. They walked to and from school every day. My mother was one of three students in her class.
Times were tough on the farm in those years, and the Dresselhouse School only went to eighth grade. So, in the summer of 1927, it was decided that the family would move to the Greene St. home, where Lena was born. That way, my mother could go to Tappan Junior High School for ninth grade and then the following year to Ann Arbor High School. Irvin and Rolly would go to Perry Elementary School on Packard.
They rented out the farmhouse to several workers who were building Pleasant Lake Rd. and Grampa found work at the Economy Baler Company on N. Main St. And it just so happened that 1927 was the year that Michigan Stadium opened right down the street. So my mother and her two brothers decided to park cars for the football games.
An old photo shows my mother, Geraldine, in the middle, at age fifteen, and Irv, age thirteen, on the left and Rolly, age eleven, on the right. The cost to park that close to the stadium was a whopping 25 cents.
So let’s fast forward to the year 2024. As I am driving my children to a game at the stadium, we pass a sign for Ann Arbor Golf & Outing: park your car for $80. Yes, eighty dollars, and their lot is filled every game. Talk about inflation!
To round out this saga, there was a young man who lived directly across the street from the Bethke family at 904 Greene St. His name: Stephen Asa Douglas Barnett. He and Geraldine were married two months after she graduated from Ann Arbor High in 1930 and had a happy life together that lasted more than seventy years. My full name is Stephen Douglass Barnett.
I was born in the family home at 909 Greene St. on April 10, 1933. I’m five years younger than Metzger’s restaurant, one year older than the Washtenaw Dairy, and I’ve lived all my life in Ann Arbor.