The M.U.G. (Michigan Union Grill) in the 1950s-1960s

Although an affluent community like Ann Arbor was hardly the culture in which ‘The Beat’ movement (theoretically) thrived and was designed for, nonetheless the influence of ‘The Beats’ was present and very much felt in Ann Arbor back in the late 1950s and the early 1960s, student poets and hanging out.

There were no lines of skid-row apartments or dives where the beats hung out like you might have found in Detroit or Oakland, but we did our best. The hang-out of choice was the university “Michigan Union” (Michigan Union Grill or MUG as it is officially called), located in the basement of the Michigan Union at 530 S. State Street. Of course, all that has changed now, and those rooms are unrecognizable but in the late 1950s and early 1960s this was where it all went down, and for many years.

Back then there were three very large rooms in the basement of the Michigan Union, each one capable of seating between 100-200 people and the clientele in each room was segregated…segregated not by race but by the type of people who hung out there.

The room to the extreme right as you entered the MUG had not only the self-serve cafeteria line but both tables and booths. Here you would find mostly students, some townies, and people none of us knew. We didn’t go there, although I can vividly remember that room one dark day in 1963, my staring up at the elevated TV, on the death of John F. Kennedy. That is where I was when Kennedy died.

The large dining room on the extreme left as you walked in was not always open or at least was empty most of the day except for dinner or sometimes for lunch overflow. It was dinner time when this room was most active. People I know never went there unless they really needed to study or just to be alone. Otherwise, it was empty, with the lights dimmed much of the time.

It was in that central, middle room where everyone I knew hung out, a large low-ceilinged room with its harsh flat light, filled with small gray Formica-topped tables that seated four each. The tables and chairs coupled with the low ceilings gave the impression of a sea of gray, about as 1950s a look as you could ever hope to find. But those who sat there in the early 1960s were anything but 1950-ish.

The monotony of the place was punctuated here and there by large columns. We ignored all of that because here was where all the “Beats” originally hung out, and we usually would sit at tables closest to the door between the middle room and the empty dining room on the left. And this was how it was for many years. It was here that I sat around with folksingers like Joan Baez drinking coffee or patiently waited with a nervous Bob Dylan for the review in the Michigan Daily of his concert (of the night before) to appear.

Earlier yet, when I was in high school, I used to bus dishes in the MUG, so even back then I knew it well, but not as well as I would just a few years later. As mentioned, it was here that the local Beats sat around, often so serious and with long faces. But it was (as mentioned earlier) also where the folk crowd hung whose faces were anything but long or dour. It was a case of two generations or lifestyles passing one another in time or coexisting. Poets and philosophy students hung there. I wanted ever so much to fit into the Beat crowd but in the end, I found myself already naturally a part of the folk crowd and later on of the arts crowd.

In the end, it was with the music and arts crowd that I made my peace and more or less fit in. This was in 1960-1963, some years before I began to play music professionally. Back then I was… well… nothing much, not yet anyone at all. Some would say I was serious, and I would say I “meant well.” That was the sum total of my ability at the time, to mean well. I was about twenty years old.

The Union was not like a restaurant or café where you were served or watched over. It was all cafeteria style and if you weren’t in the cafeteria line you were out of their mind as far as the establishment was concerned, unnoticed, and free to just sit there with one cup of coffee (or nothing at all) the entire day. No one ever came by and kicked you out. And we did just that, we sat there and waited for one another to show up.

This was before there were any coffee houses in Ann Arbor, even before Mark’s Coffee House, and certainly before the plethora of caffeine-saturated places that Ann Arbor sports today. Oh yes, there was one sanitized Beatnik coffee house, “The Promethean,” on E. Williams Street, but that was earlier, in 1959 or so, and there only briefly -- hardly there at all, someone’s wishful thinking.

Of course, the cafeteria food of the MUG sucked, which is why we mostly just drank tea or coffee, plus the fact that no one had any money. And as we sat, we drew on the napkins with our little Rapidograph ink pens, either that or with drawing pencils. You had to be quick or the ink would spread fast and spoil your drawing.

And there we sat… and talked…and talked. We smoked cigarettes. This went on for years and looking back it was a wonderful time, a time of belonging to a small close-knit group of friends, friends that were not too, too-close, mind you, but always (so it seemed) getting closer. And that was the fun. To us this was living and life as I knew it back then, in the early 1960s.

I was not a UofM student and I lived about a block away in an attic room at 335 Packard, facing the little park-like piece of grass that juts out and meets Packard and Division streets, right across from ‘Krazy Jim’s” at 551 S. Division, and his Blimpy Burgers, food we all loved. Krazy Jim’s had been there since 1953.