Chelsea

Wild Acorn takes root

For Dee Miles, owner of Manchester’s new­est—and only—art gallery, art should be about everyday things. “Art is a hand-carved spoon, a wooden chopping block, and what you wear around your neck,” she says. Those...

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Water Cure

Sylvan Township’s water tower looms over I-94. It looks impressive, but it’s a huge white elephant. Designed to serve 1,000 customers, the township water plant currently supplies fewer than 100.While Sylvan has too...

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Growing Needs

Faith in Action, a nonprofit that has operated in Chelsea for twenty-eight years, is seeing record demand for its free clothing room and food pantry. Director Nancy Paul says that in the last four years, the number of people the...

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Back to the Land — with Spirit

In 1972, Clark and Avis Spike bought 145 rolling acres in Sharon Township and set up housekeeping on a high point. They cut their own trees to build a cabin alongside a pond they dredged, and mowed meandering roads over the...

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Rockin’ the Stacks

When a piercing guitar riff echoes through quiet library stacks, it brings a smile to Bill Harmer’s face. It’s part of his mission of “rebranding.”Libraries desperately want to change their image from...

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Scissor Hold

Chelsea High School has offered a student newspaper class for thirty years. But outgoing principal Ron Mead’s censorship has killed interest in the Bleu Print, according to faculty advisor Phil Jones, who says the paper...

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Going in Circles

Jerry Colone tested trucks at the Chrysler Proving Grounds for ­thirty-four years. Now, he says, the huge complex southwest of Chelsea is “like a ghost town.”Employment at the grounds has fallen from 700 five years...

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Bulldog Computer Moves and Grows

Matt Minard started working on computers when he was eight and his mother needed some help. Since 2003, he’s been repairing computers and game systems at his own store in the Clocktower Annex, Bulldog Computers. Now...

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Testing the Wind

Richard and Carole Murphy were driving through North Dakota several years ago when they noticed three enormous metal blades spinning slowly in the prairie wind.”We were curious, so I turned around and drove back until we...

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Pickin’ Chelsea

In this town I could be happy, in this town I’d make new friends—In this town . . . I could start all over again.—The cover of Annie and Rod Capps’s fifth album, In This Town, shows the local folk duo lounging...

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Arctic Breakaway Takes a Shot

Hockey players can work up an appetite. So can ice skaters after a long afternoon or evening of lessons.The Arctic Coliseum plans to feed them, as well as their parents, friends, and others, at a new restaurant that offers views...

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Sew Write hits the road

With the lease up at her storefront on Adrian Street, Sew Write owner Nancy Bihlmeyer took what she calls a “leap of faith” and moved her ­thirteen-year-old business to the more heavily traveled M-52 north of...

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Jam at the Mill

Someone suggests a tune, and a fiddler kicks it off. The music sets your toes tapping right away. Outside this room it’s 2008, but in here it sounds more like 1910.Two more fiddles join in, along with a banjo, guitar, and...

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Scream Therapy

Sadly, Edvard Munch didn’t own an SUV. So when he decided to portray a person overwhelmed by existential dread, he had to settle for painting a figure with a rubbery haunted face walking near a fjord in Oslo.Fortunately,...

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Far From Hollywood

Seventeen years after Jeff Daniels named a community theater after a Woody Allen film, Allen still contributes money to the Purple Rose—but not a lot.The director of The Purple Rose of Cairo, who gave Daniels a wonderful...

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American-made crafts at Bumble’s

Carolyn McNagny didn’t intend to name her new store Bumble’s Dry Goods—until she found out there were seventeen Bumblebees already in Michigan. She didn’t set out to focus on American-made crafts, either. Her...

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Disabled Bowlers Knock ‘Em Down

At first glance, it’s like any other league at Bel-Mark Lanes in Scio Township. But look more closely, and you’ll notice a few people need their shoelaces tied. Some speak haltingly or in three-word sentences. A few...

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One Man’s Dope War

Gershom Avery spent last summer and fall tirelessly gathering signatures to get an initiative to legalize medical marijuana on the Michigan ballot. And during those same months, Avery, fifty-three, says he was waging a secret...

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