It was a favorite of townsfolk for 67 years

"I feel real bad that I've celebrated my last birthday there," says Gottlob Schumacher, a former owner of the Old German, who turned ninety-one on January 29. After almost fifty years of working seven-day weeks, the restaurant's current owner, Bud (Robert) Metzger, is closing the business and retiring.

Although Metzger's rest is well deserved, his customers are in mourning, many of them coming in for a last chance to savor a menu that embodies the cuisine of Ann Arbor's Swabian population: southern German specialties such as spatzen, warm potato salad, stuffed noodles, Koenigsberger klops (veal meatballs in a caper sauce), and liver dumplings. One item, "German meat patties," is an Old German original. In the 1940's, the restaurant was fined for selling "adulterated" hamburgers because they added breading and seasoning. But the item was so popular, explains Metzger, they resumed selling it--"We just hung on a new label."

The Old German started in 1928 as a small eatery on Ashley with a horseshoe counter and a few tables. Original owner William Schwarz was a German-trained butcher who specialized in sausage making. When Prohibition was repealed in 1933, Schwarz couldn't get a liquor license because he was still a German citizen. He sold the restaurant to the Haab brothers, Oscar and Otto, but they found it too hard to run restaurants in both Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti, so after a few years they offered to sell it back. Still not a citizen, Schwarz asked Gottlob Schumacher, a tailor at Wild's Men's Clothing, to become his partner and apply for the liquor license. By the time Schumacher joined the restaurant in 1936, it had expanded into its current L-shaped layout by taking over a grocery store facing Washington Street.

Carolina Schumacher and Anny Schwarz cooked traditional German fare, with daily specials such as spareribs, sauerkraut, and pig hocks, and chicken dinners on Sunday. At lunchtime they served workers from the three factories in the area--King Seeley, American Broach, and the International Radio factory (later Argus).

Bud Metzger's father, Fritz, bought the restaurant from Schumacher in 1946. Trained as a baker in Germany, he left in 1926 to escape the rampant inflation, only to run into the Depression here. He first ran a restaurant in Ypsilanti, then moved to Ann Arbor and ran the German Inn at what had been a Coney Island on Huron Street across from the bus station. Metzger had two brothers in Ann Arbor, William and Gottfried, who were also trained as bakers. (Their father owned a bakery in their hometown of Wilhelmsdorf.) Just a few months after the Old German opened, William started a similar German restaurant, Metzger's, right next door (where the Del Rio is now). Gottfried ran the DeLuxe Bakery on the corner of Fourth Avenue and Washington, and for many years furnished the black bread for his brothers' restaurants.

Bud returned from the navy in 1946 and immediately went to work for his father. "We never talked about it," he recalls. "It was just understood that I would work there." In 1952, when Fritz became too ill to work, Bud took over. While keeping the original customer base of factory workers and people of German descent, the Old German began attracting a much wider clientele, becoming the special-occasion restaurant for many townspeople and university students. During the 1960's and 1970's, the lines of people waiting to be served often extended outside and down the block.

A fire on April 1, 1975, destroyed the Old German. It was out of business for two years, but customers flocked back after it was remodeled and expanded. Competition from scores of newer restaurants has put an end to the long waiting lines, but the Old German is still very busy at mealtimes. Some regulars come every day, including a group, mainly lawyers, who gather at the traditional round table for lunch. Many university alumni feel that a visit to the Old German is a must when they return to Ann Arbor to relive their first dates or their first beers at age twenty-one. What was missing at a lunch visit in early February was the under-forty crowd.

The Old German will close the first or second week in March. They have to be out for the new owners, the Grizzly Peak Brew Pub, by the first of April, but Bud doesn't want a big deal made out of the actual final day. "I couldn't handle it," he says. He thinks his twenty-four employees, many of them long-term (cook Bill Dettling has been there since Schumacher's day), will have no trouble finding other employment. Some already have plans. He isn't sure what he'll do in retirement, but he won't be leaving town. "Ann Arbor has so much to offer," he says.

Bud Metzger's beer stein collection, which is almost as famous as the food, will be auctioned off in May.

When book groups click, participants gain deeper insights into literature and sometimes, into themselves.

Ann Arbor is a place where people like to read -- a town of "read-a-holics," in the words of Cindy Osborne of Little Professor. "A lot of our customers are big readers," agrees Dallas Moore of Borders. "Some we see in here almost every day."

Reading is, of course, a solitary activity. But more and more, the city's readers are getting together to talk about the books they've read, sharing both ideas and one another's company. In homes and bookstores, in churches, clubs, and restaurants, Ann Arborites are meeting to discuss everything from Hamlet to The Bridges of Madison County.

The Observer's unscientific poll identified at least sixty local book discussion groups, a third of which have sprung up in the last five years.

Local historic preservationist Louisa Pieper jokingly calls her book group "Gossip Incorporated." It started as a bridge group. "We got tired of bridge and ran out of gossip, so books were a good al≠ternative," says Pieper.

At First Unitarian Church, the women's reading group became so intrigued by Clarissa Pinkola Estes's Women Who Run with the Wolves, that they organized a workshop based on it. Expecting about fifteen, they were amazed when fifty-six women enrolled in "A Gathering of Wild and Wise Women."

"We read about the gay experiences of other people," says Joel, a member of a reading group that's an offshoot of Our Little Group, a gay men's social club. Members of a group focusing on works with lesbian authors and themes jokingly called themselves "Dykes Who Read." Joan Innes is a member of a group that specializes in nineteenth-century British literature. "I love that century!" Innes says. "So much happened. The world changed forever." A descendant of George Eliot's husband once came to a club's meeting to display one of Eliot's paintings and subsequently joined the group himself.

While dramatically different in membership and purpose, the book groups that work are satisfying for the same reasons. When they click, participants gain deeper insights into literature and, depending on the subject matter, into themselves.

Literature meets real life

At nine o'clock on a Friday night, four African-American women arrive at Sylvia Holman's Orchard Hills home. They exchange news and enjoy a generous snack of chicken, grapes, strawberries, and cheese before drifting into the cozy family room.

This month's book, Pushed Back to Strength, is a memoir by Gloria Wade-Gayles, a professor of English and women's studies at Spelman College. It's clear that Wade-Gayles has hit a nerve. Discussing the early parts about the author's childhood in segregated Memphis, Tennessee, the women praise her gutsiness. Made to sit in the upstairs "colored" section of a movie theater, she rebelled by throwing popcorn over the balcony rail onto the white people below.

At the same time, the women are interested in Wade-Gayles's discussion of the advantages of segregation, including the tightly knit, supportive all-black neighborhoods. "You were 'Amened' into high esteem," recalls Regina Mason, a Ph.D. candidate in educational administration. "We were told, 'You are part of this community--you won't go out and embarrass us!'"

This group has been meeting for a dozen years; most of the ten original members worked at Mack School. Although two members have left town, and everyone has moved on to other schools and jobs, the group has endured. It is a very tight unit that rarely allows visitors because members' reactions to the readings are intensely personal.

"We read anything that deals with black women," says Mason. Past selections have included books by Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Terry McMillan, and Octavia Butler. They also read the first book known to be written by an American black, Clotel: or The President's Daughter, a narrative of slave life in the United States written in 1853 by William Wells Brown.

Hour after hour, the group analyzes Pushed Back to Strength. At 12:30 a.m., schools administrator Betty Schaffner decides to call it a night. The others stay to discuss the last few chapters. It's not unusually late for the group. When they discussed educator Derrick Bell's Faces at the Bottom of the Well, they talked until four in the morning.

Bodice rippers and beyond

The mood is lighter one Sunday evening when four women, all white, meet at Little Professor Book Company. At the back of the store, where a couch and several leather chairs are grouped invitingly around a working fireplace, the romance book discussion group comes to order.

Tonight's book: Bewitching Minx, by Janis Laden. In contrast to the African-American women's group, none of these participants knew each other before joining the group, which was organized by the store. Anita Morgan, a history teacher at Huron High, leads the discussion.

"I liked the characters," says Wynn Hausrath. "The mother-in-law was great!"

"There was too much bickering," says another member, twenty-year-old Shira. "In lots of romances, they argue too much."

"I liked the way that the heroine was a real person with her own viewpoint," says Nancy, who like Shira asks to be identified only by her first name. Moran replies that it's a trend in recent romances for the heroines to be older and more independent.

The requests for anonymity are a reminder that some people sneer at romances and the people who read them. The members' comments show that they, too, are well aware of the limits of romance novels--the formulaic style, the familiar characters, the predictable conclusions. But they enjoy the books just the same. One member says she alternates between reading romances and mysteries, depending on whether she's in the mood for "relational stuff versus putting clues together." And Shira notes that she went out and bought a copy of Tom Jones, the 1749 novel by Henry Fielding, after reading about it in a romance.

After their discussion, the four women peruse the Little Professor's romance section, deciding what to read next. When they return with several possibilities, I'm surprised. Instead of the usual "bodice ripper" covers I expected, these have decorous, tasteful designs--a decanter and two roses on a blue background on one. Lifting that cover, which doesn't go quite to the edge of the book, I discover a second cover beneath it. This one is a photo of the male model Fabio, shirtless, embracing a woman who is falling out of her dress. The extra cover isn't exactly a plain brown wrapper, but it evidently makes the book less embarrassing to carry in public.

Besides the romance readers' group, Little Professor sponsors a black literature group, a mystery group, and a contemporary literature group. Other bookstores have gotten into the act. At the request of their customers, the owners of Aunt Agatha's mystery and crime bookstore lead a mystery discussion group that meets in the store.

Borders for years has been helping existing book groups select and order books, but until recently had resisted pleas to actually set them up. Last year it relented to the extent of helping groups get organized, but it still doesn't provide leaders. "We tell them they can do it on their own," Dallas Moore explains. "They don't need an authority to tell them the themes, the hidden meanings." Currently, Borders sponsors an international fiction group, a Victorian literature group, and a vampire fiction group. After an organizational meeting at Borders, the groups are meeting outside of the store, at the public library or at coffeehouses around town.

Through the public schools' Rec and Ed department, the city itself sponsors classic and contemporary book discussion groups. And organizations like the U-M Faculty Women's Club, the American Association of University Women (AAUW), and the Women's City Club have been sponsoring groups for decades.

Book groups often start at local churches and religious organizations. Every Thursday at the local Jewish Community Center, senior citizens tear into such heavy-duty classics as The Scarlet Letter, Gulliver's Travels, and Pere Goriot, under the tutelage of retired English professor Sidney Warschausky. Members take the group seriously. JCC senior coordinator Yehudit Newman says it's not uncommon for members to skip the center's lunchtime speaker on Thursdays to hole up in her office and finish their assigned reading. The group once started to read the Bible as literature but got into so many arguments that they gave it up.

Last year Borders relented to the extent of helping groups get organized, but it still doesn't provide leaders. "We tell them they can do it on their own," Dallas Moore explains. "They don't need an authority to tell them the themes, the hidden meanings."

Booked for fun

Not every group is so intense. By far the most common book groups in Ann Arbor are loosely organized collections of friends. They read a wide variety of books, usually contemporary fiction, and generally meet in one another's homes about once a month.

Reading lists vary widely, but a few titles are mentioned again and again: Like Water for Chocolate, the works of Barbara Kingsolver, and Jane Smiley's A Thousand Acres. Popular nonfiction titles include Jill Ker Conway's The Road from Coorain and Thomas Friedman's From Beirut to Jerusalem. Books made into movies are also popular, such as Orlando, Howards End, The Remains of the Day, and The Age of Innocence.

At many meetings, though, discussing the month's book is second to the socializing. "We spend ten minutes talking about the book--fifteen if everyone's read it--and three hours talking about everything else," jokes Betty Kirksey, who is in a group with five other women. While friendship leads some groups into personal topics, it also makes for richer literary discussions, because friends are more comfortable sharing personal experiences and insights related to the reading. After a women's group read Penelope Lively's Moon Tiger, in which the main character's wartime romance influences the rest of her life, each recalled a man in her own past who had dramatically affected her life.

"We know each other's stories," says Margaret Dawson, part of a group whose founding members were all nurses. Members of one group of women that has been meeting for thirteen years have helped one another survive two divorces, three pregnancies, five house purchases (a big step because the buyers were single women), and one diagnosis of breast cancer. The night before that woman's surgery, the group met in her hospital room.

No wonder many longtime members find their groups essential to their lives. Says Janet Chown, "After I read the book, I can hardly wait to get to the meeting and talk about it. I tell my husband we can never move away from Ann Arbor because I can't leave the book club."

The male minority
Most local book groups are exclusively female. Sometimes, that status reflects a conscious decision. "We're mean about [excluding men]," says Joan Weisman, whose group meets on Sunday mornings. "We all have nice husbands who are not macho, but they don't read what we do."

More often, though, women predominate in book groups because men just haven't been as interested. At an organizational meeting for Borders' international fiction discussion group, 90 percent of the attendees were female.

But lately, some Ann Arbor men, seeing how much pleasure their wives and women friends derive from their groups, are starting to form their own. Investment analyst Doug Gross modeled his book discussion group after his wife's group. He found three like-minded men, two of whom he had met while working on his M.B.A. at the U-M: Tony Glinke, owner of Ann Arbor Plastics, and Todd Doenitz, a structural engineer. Mike Mayotti, a civil engineer, learned of the group through his wife, who works with Gross.

"We're not a bunch of sensitive, caring guys," Glinke insists. "But when we get to know each other, we talk freely."

One rainy evening, the group meets at Palio on Main Street. After ordering desserts (cannoli, gelato, sherbet) and coffee or beer, they settle down to a serious discussion of Edith Wharton's Ethan Frome.

As with the women's groups, the discussion at first sounds as if it could be taking place in an English class. But then the men begin to get more personal, relating the book's themes to their own lives.

The social pressures that forced Ethan Frome to stay with his wife, Zenobia, despite the fact that he loved another woman, remind several members of their own small-town childhoods. "The social constraints in a community like that are stronger," comments Gross, who grew up in Adrian. Todd Doenitz, who grew up in an even smaller town--Wayela, Illinois, population 550--explains that in a small town no one is sheltered from gossip. But they agree that Ethan's tormented choice is still topical. They discuss a contemporary example of such a situation, involving an au pair girl's effect on a marriage. Gross sums it up: "There but for the grace of God go I. What do you do if you have to work harder to have a relationship than you want?"

Food for thought

Even during the most serious discussions, food is seldom far away. The men meet at restaurants. For women's groups that meet in members' homes, the hostess usually serves refreshments. The AAUW afternoon group and the Women's City Club book group both have lunch in the City Club dining room. While many of the groups end the year with a potluck, Margaret Dawson's group has one at every meeting. "Nurses are food-oriented," she explains. "It's part of the nurturing complex."

But these being reading groups, even the food is likely to have a literary flair. Participants in the brown bag reading group at Washtenaw Intermediate School District bring their own lunches to eat while they talk, but someone always brings a dessert based on the month's book--Middle Eastern confections when they read Naguib Mahfouz's Palace Walk and sweet potato pie when they read Having Our Say: The Delany Sisters' First Hundred Years. For another group that meets in the evening, the hostess served food mentioned in Peter Mayle's A Year in Provence: goat cheese, sun-dried tomatoes, olive oil. In a classics reading group, a participant of Irish descent brought Irish soda bread when they discussed Yeats's poetry.

It's literally food for thought. "The book club provides an opportunity to explore ourselves and each other," sums up book club member Jane Peterson. "And to eat wonderful desserts."

[Photo caption from original print edition: After members of this African-American women's book group read Derrick Bell's Faces at the Bottom of the Well, the discussion was so intense that the meeting lasted until 4 a.m.]

[Photo caption from original print edition: Men are scarce in most book discussion groups. Doug Gross (far right) was inspired to start this group when he saw how much his wife enjoyed hers.]

"An unbelievable gem" Ted Heusel, radio personality and actor, calls the Whitney Theater "an unbelievable gem." He says the Whitney, located on the corner of Main and Ann from 1908 to 1955, was "the theater of southeast Michigan. It had the most perfect acoustics. You could whisper on the stage and they could hear you." In its day, that stage hosted such greats as Sarah Bernhardt, Nijinsky, and the Barrymores. Today its site is a parking lot. The Whitney was originally Hill's Opera House, built in 1871 by George D. Hill, a local entrepreneur, after another building he owned on the site burned down. When he replaced the food and clothing stores and the hotel that the older building had housed, Hill decided to make room for a theater upstairs. By then, Ann Arbor was large enough to need a big public hall, and Hill's location was perfect--right across from the courthouse square. Hill's Opera House opened August 10, 1871, with a benefit performance of a Civil War drama, "The Spy of Shiloh," performed by a cast of "prominent citizens." It played for five nights to sell-out crowds. The opera house also hosted traveling shows, starring such greats as Edwin Booth. (Booth was reportedly booed off the stage because his brother, John Wilkes Booth, had assassinated President Lincoln.) The theater thrived under Hill and, later, his son Harry. But it began to falter after Hill, suffering financial difficulties, sold it to a man from Syracuse, New York. Several absentee owners followed, all of them neglectful. Finally too expensive to repair, Hill's Opera House closed altogether. Herman W. Pipp, a local architect and city alderman, is credited with the theater's revival. Asked to draw up renovation plans, he became interested in the problem of funding the project. Mutual friends arranged a meeting with Bert Whitney, who owned theaters in Chicago, Toronto, and Detroit. Whitney agreed to buy the building. In 1906 he began renovations and repairs, and he added two stories to the three-story building, making the Whitney the largest theater in Michigan. Local contractors, the Koch Brothers, did the outside work. National experts were called in to finish the theater: Hiram Cornell as stage carpenter and Melbourne Moran of New York City for scenery construction. Since not all touring companies brought their own, Moran made nine basic sets--a fancy parlor, a plain "chamber," a kitchen, cottage, prison, garden, woods, street, and horizon. The new theater included three stories of dressing rooms, twenty-five in all. The fanciest, nearest the stage, had stars on the doors. Large changing rooms under the stage served the chorus. The public section of the theater was richly decorated with an Italian tile floor, walls of red burlap, three handsome French candelabra, red carpets, and red leather seats. Above the main floor were two balconies and at the top a gallery with hard bench seats. These seats, the cheapest, could not be reserved. On the afternoon of performances, people seeking gallery seats--mostly young townsfolk and university students--would line up on Ann Street, climb a fire escape, and buy their tickets at a special window on the second balcony. A denizen of the gallery, Arthur Schlanderer, recalls, "You looked almost straight down. It's a wonder we didn't fall." Like Hill's Opera House, the Whitney was launched with a gala opening, this one a performance of the play "Knight for Day." Whitney spent $175 to send his own fourteen-piece orchestra from Chicago to provide the music for it. He must have easily recouped his investment: main-floor tickets sold for the then astronomical price of $25. Gallery tickets were $1. The Whitney operated in the heyday of touring theater productions. Before television or movies, the only way people could see shows was in live performance. Touring companies could take a show on the road for years before running out of audiences. Thanks to Bert Whitney, all the theater greats played Ann Arbor. Working closely with the Klaw and Erlanger booking agency, Whitney made it clear that if they wanted their acts to play in Chicago and Detroit, they also had to include Ann Arbor in their plans. Old Whitney playbills read like a theater Who's Who: actors Ed Wynn, Katharine Cornell, and Helen Hayes, dancers Anna Pavlova, Ruth St. Denis, and Ted Shawn. According to stories handed down to Ted Heusel, Maude Adams got chicken pox when she played here and had to stay in a "pest house" connected to University Hospital. Al Jolson's show had so many set changes, the sets had to be piled outside on Ann Street during his performance. In addition to plays, from light comedy to Shakespeare, the Whitney hosted vaudeville, opera, dance, and lectures. Local talent also used the stage, including the Michigan Union Opera and the Junior Girls Plays. Pauline Kempf, who ran a music studio on Division with her husband, Reuben, got her professional start when friends and backers arranged for her to give a vocal concert at the Whitney. The concert raised enough money to allow her to go to Cincinnati to study. The town's young people loved the theater. Schlanderer remembers seeing Sigmund Romberg's "The Student Prince" with a friend who was so thrilled with the show that he quit school to join the chorus. Don Mclntyre had been the theater's head usher when it opened, and in 1915 he bought the Whitney in partnership with James Murnan. Murnan, who had managed the Cook Hotel (predecessor to the Allenel and the Ann Arbor Inn), took over the Whitney Hotel next door (where all the glamorous touring stars stayed), while Mclntyre concentrated on the theater. (Murnan's son, James Jr., for many years manager of the U-M's Mendelssohn Theater, was the source of much of Heusel's Whitney lore.) Don Mclntyre's older brother, Frank, was a Broadway star who often played the Whitney. Don lived in a big house on Division near Huron (now Catholic Social Services), and Frank lived there between performances and then permanently after he retired in 1939. Schlanderer, who as a kid caddied at Barton Hills, remembers that the Mclntyres played golf almost every day in the summer. He describes them as physical opposites--Don as very skinny, Frank so big, "you wondered he could reach around his belly." George Sallade, who lived across Division from the Mclntyres, remembers Don as a great promoter of downtown. He was a very dapper dresser, Sallade recalls, who wore a Panama hat and used a cigarette holder. Morrie Dalitz remembers that Don ate at the old Round Table on Huron and hung out at the Elks, on Main at William (once the Maynard mansion, most recently the Civic Theater, and now a parking lot). When he died, his heirs gave the Whitney Theater organ to the Elks. Movies gradually crept into the Whitney's lineup. In 1914, after much discussion, the theater started to show movies on Sundays, promising that they would be "good clean pictures that anyone would be glad to see." The aim was to keep townspeople from going to Toledo for Sunday amusement. The first time a movie was the attraction was in 1917, a showing of D. W. Griffith's "Birth of a Nation," accompanied by a twenty-piece orchestra. During the Depression, big road companies were no longer profitable, and the Whitney closed in 1930. In 1934, it was reopened as a movie theater, and two years later Mclntyre leased it for ninety-nine years to the Butterfield movie chain. The Whitney didn't come close to living out the lease. Butterfield, which also had the much newer and larger Michigan, Orpheum, and State theaters, ran only "B" movies at the Whitney--adventures, cowboy movies, serials. As a Michigan Daily article commented, the theater went "from grand opera to the horse variety." The fire marshall closed the Whitney in 1952 and ordered it torn down a few years later. The Butterfield chain talked of building a large community theater on the spot but never did. The county bought the land and used it as an exercise area for inmates of the jail next door on Ann Street. Since the jail moved in 1978 to Hogback Road, the space has been used for parking.

A Real Family Restaurant

Just before World War II, Antoniette Yanitsky and her eight children ran a small restaurant at 515 East William. With the whole family plus in-laws and friends pitching in, they kept Yanitsky's open from seven in the morning until eleven at night, seven days a week.

The children--Andy, Marie (O'Brien), Violet (Gayeff), Pauline (Flis), Audrey (Milliken), Nicky, and twins, called "the Babes," Helen (Marten) and Rose (Barnes)--ranged in age from high school students to young adults. They cooked, did dishes (no dishwasher in those days), waited on customers, and did whatever else needed doing. "We were glad to be there," recalls Marie. "We wanted to help. We used to laugh and kid. Everyone was so young."

Along with traditional all-American stews and roasts, Yanitsky's served Ukrainian pierogis and cabbage rolls. Antoniette (her nickname was "Tone") was born to Ukrainian immigrant parents in 1893 in the Pennsylvania mining community of Bentleyville. At sixteen she married Joseph Yanitsky, a Ukrainian immigrant who worked in the mines and was boarding with her family. Long hours and miserable conditions led the miners to protest, and Antoniette, more proficient in English than many of the foreign-born workers, became one of the leaders. The company retaliated by firing her husband.

The Yanitskys were glad to leave Pennsylvania, anyway, since they did not want their sons to grow up to be miners. They moved to Cleveland, where Joseph got a job in a silk factory. Their eldest son, Andy, learned to cook in a program designed to keep children off the streets. But the family moved again after their youngest son, Paul, died of spinal meningitis. They came to Ann Arbor in 1926 to live near Antoniette's sister, Catherine Bandrofchek.

The Yanitskys chose Ann Arbor partly because they wanted to live in a small town. According to Pauline, that's just what Ann Arbor was in the 1920's: "We walked everywhere. Doors were never locked." Says Marie, "Everybody almost knew each other." Joseph soon got a job working as a maintenance man at University Hospital. He also worked on weekends helping to finish Michigan Stadium. The family had planned to rent a house, but when none was available, they talked to Judge William Murray, the developer of Murray and Mulholland streets, who offered them a new house at 314 Mulholland for $6,500 on reasonable terms. In the mid-1930's they moved to a bigger house, on Detroit Street next to the Treasure Mart.

Never one to sit still, Antoniette did what she could to help the family finances. She earned enough to pay the taxes on the house by taking all the children to pick berries at the Taylor strawberry patch on the current site of Northside School. (Today there is a Taylor Street on the south side of the school.) Later she sold Christmas trees from the house, enlisting whoever was at home to be the salesperson.

The whole family pitched in to run Yanitsky's. Andy Yanitsky (in cook's whites) stands at the rear next to his sister Marie. Marie's future husband, Jack O'Brien, helps "the Babes"--twins Helen and Rose--behind the counter.

Antoniette began her restaurant career when she got a job at a coney island at Packard and State. When the owner's health began to fail, he asked her to take over. She decided to supplement the chili and hot dogs with foods she served at home, such as pot roasts and soups.

She took a motherly interest in her student clientele. There was a slot machine in the restaurant, but when students spent their money on that instead of on food, she threatened to write to their mothers. Her kids told her, "Mom, they're your customers. Leave them alone."

When she began running the restaurant herself, Antoniette recruited her kids to help--even Nicky, who was then still in grade school. One night, when he was alone at the restaurant, he fell asleep on the counter. The students hanging around called Antoniette at home to complain that he wasn't serving them. When they woke him and called him to the phone, Nicky said in his defense, "You know, those guys are not eating--they're just playing the [slot] machine."

The place was really too small for the operation Antoniette had in mind, so when a bigger restaurant, the Campus Sandwich Shop on East William, became available, she rented it. It still was small by today's standards: just a counter and one row of tables in the front and the kitchen in the back, with a pass-through window.

With a bigger place, Antoniette needed more help from her family--but they were up to it. She ran her restaurant with whatever kids she needed, while Joseph, still working at the hospital, spent his off-hours at home, taking care of the house and the children who weren't working. (The kids weren't allowed to hang around the restaurant when they weren't needed, since it was impossible to do homework with so many people coming and going.) Pauline and Marie both loved working at the restaurant, even when they had other jobs. There was no set pay, but their mother would usually give them something for coming.

By the time Yanitsky's opened, Pauline and Violet were married to university students. Their husbands also helped out at the restaurant, although they had other jobs. John Flis, Pauline's husband, worked as a janitor at St. Mary's Chapel around the corner. He made points with his mother-in-law by coming in at noon and offering to work for his meal. The other son-in-law, Todd Gayeff, a Macedonian with a Turkish passport, had a regular job at a coney island on Main Street. He also worked as a waiter at Yanitsky's, but it wasn't always a net gain for his mother-in-law, because he would feed his fellow countrymen for nothing. Pauline laughs and says they all were guilty of that on occasion when their friends came in, although the friends also provided free labor. Jack O'Brien, Marie's boyfriend (later her husband), would get behind the counter and help when he came in, and Audrey's girlfriends, coming to meet her to go to the movies, would help her finish up the dishes so she could leave sooner.

The restaurant served meals all day long. At breakfast, cereal with milk was 10 cents, cereal with cream was 15 cents. For lunch they offered a variety of sandwiches and homemade soups, all for 10 cents. At dinnertime 30 or 35 cents bought a meal of stew, roast beef, leg of lamb, or spaghetti. On days when Antoniette made her Ukrainian specialties, they also had considerable take-out business.

Marie remembers that because the help was so young, customers thought they didn't know how to do anything. Instead of just ordering a sundae, they would give directions--telling the kids to put chocolate syrup on the ice cream and then add nuts. Cherry sundaes were a favorite of Francis O'Brien (the future probate judge), who was a regular at the restaurant as a law student. When they saw him coming, the kids would start scooping up the ice cream.

Several of the Yanitsky kids had specialties. Pauline was good at making pie crusts. Andy, who helped out when he wasn't working at the Law Quad or the Michigan League, would make the fillings, and he also enjoyed baking bread and Parker House rolls. Audrey was very good at making cakes, which she decorated according to the season with shamrocks, Christmas trees, or valentines.

As hard as the kids worked, their mother worked harder. She was indefatigable. Marie remembers that the children would urge her to go home, telling her they would take over. But she would refuse, insisting that they go home instead. And, says Marie, "If she wasn't cooking at the restaurant, she would be cooking at home." Her husband worried that she was doing too much, but she answered that she was doing just what she wanted to do.

Besides students, Yanitsky's also served employees of Jacobson's and other nearby businesses. The late Ben French, owner of Campus Bike and Toy across the street, was a regular. Students from the Alexandra School of Cosmetology, upstairs at State and William, were briefly a problem: they would come in at lunchtime but order only coffee. Antoniette talked to the school's owner, Edith Alexander, who agreed to change the lunch hour so her students would not interfere with the regular trade.

On Sundays parishioners from St. Mary's would come in after mass, especially those who had fasted in order to take communion. The Yanitskys, themselves Catholic, took turns going to different masses so they could keep the restaurant open.

Some loyal customers ate at Yanitsky's every day. When out-of-town friends and family came, they would bring them to the restaurant to introduce them. When they graduated, they would write to the Yanitskys. "It was a meeting place," says Marie. "People were so glad to come. They would come in and talk." But when they saw people coming in and waiting for seats, they would leave and continue their conversations out in front.

Antoniette couldn't keep the place going during the war years. Sons Andy and Nicky went into the service, and the girls were marrying and leaving town.

Gold Bond Cleaners moved into the space and stayed until 1967, when the building was torn down to make way for Tower Plaza. Antoniette outlived the destruction of her former restaurant. She died in 1983, at eighty-nine, on January 6, the Ukrainian Christmas.

[Photo caption from original print edition]: On Sundays parishioners from St. Mary's chapel across the street would come in after mass. The Yanitskys, themselves Catholic, took turns going to different masses so they could keep the restaurant open.

For over a century, a bevy of stores served the farmer and the fixer-upper

Downtown Ann Arbor was once a mecca for hardware shoppers. From the town's early days, there were always at least four hardware stores, which drew customers from the entire city and from all the small towns and farms in the area. During the week, the stores served the area's tradespeople--plumbers, painters, carpenters, plasterers, contractors, and builders. On weekends, farmers came into town to buy supplies--pitch-forks or baling twine for the harvest, axes or mauls for chopping wood, and all the myriad bits of hardware they needed to repair their farm machinery and to fix their barns and fences.

As the farmers' ranks dwindled in this century, they were replaced by growing numbers of home owners and do-it-yourselfers. If the part needed wasn't made, the hardware store could make one. And if it needed installation, they had work crews they would send out.

By 1835, just eleven years after promoters John Allen and Elisha Rumsey began selling lots in the village of "Annarbour," William Dennis and Hierome Goodspeed were advertising a hardware store on the corner of Main and Huron. Along with farm supplies like cowbells and horseshoes, their inventory included knives, scissors, coffee mills, waffle irons, razors, and latches. By the 1870's and 1880's, the early competitors had sorted themselves out into four major stores, all of which survived well into this century: Schumacher's, 1870-1940; Schuh's (later Schuh and Muehlig, Muehlig and Schmid, Muehlig and Lanphear), 1872-1962; Eberbach's (later Fischer's) 1880-1981; and downtown's sole surviving hardware store, Schlenker's, founded in 1886.

Hardware was big business back then. Schumacher's, located where Kline's is now, grew to fill three storefronts. Schuh's occupied all three floors of a building on the southeast corner of Main and Washington. Hardware stores were valuable assets that were passed on from generation to generation: after founder John Schumacher's death, his business was taken over by his sons, Bert, Philip, and Robert. Jacob Schuh took a younger clerk, Andrew Muehlig, as a partner and eventual successor. When Schuh's original store was torn down to make room for the First National Building in 1929, Muehlig's nephew, Edward Muehlig, and partner Don Lanphear moved to a new building at 311 South Main (now the Full Moon).

Eberbach's, on the northeast corner of Main and Washington, was started by Christian Eberbach as a business for his two younger sons, Ernest and Edward, since his oldest son, Ottmar, was getting the pharmacy. Later, the State Savings Bank, which had an interest in the store, moved into the very corner, nestled in much like the Del Rio fits into the corner of the Old German. Bob Eberbach remembers that as a boy he could enter his great uncles' store from either Washington or Main. By 1892 the store was taken over by John Fischer, who had been a clerk there, although the Eberbachs continued to work there and kept an interest in it. In 1937 the store moved two blocks east, to 219-223 East Washington.

Schlenker's was first located on West Liberty in the building that is now Rider's Hobby Shop, then across the street in the store now owned by Ehnis & Son. In 1906 they built the present store a block west with room upstairs for the family to live.

The hardware stores sold all the small, practical items that other stores didn't want to bother with--tools, nails, fittings, and utensils. The owners were all tinsmiths, and before the days of mass production and easy transportation, they made much of what they stocked--gutters, furnace parts, funnels, coffeepots, pitchers, and pans. The tinning complemented the other stock in the store, and it also helped keep the employees busy during the slower winter months.

Each store also developed its own specialty. Schuh and Muehlig's was sewing machines: they sold and repaired all the major brands. They also sold such house finishing items as tiles, grates, mantels, and pressed tin ceilings. (Edward Muehlig put a tin ceiling in the house he built in 1909 at 801 West Liberty.) Later, Muehlig and Lanphear put in furnaces and made a specialty of installing locks. Schumacher had plumbing crews and later spun off Schumacher and Backus Plumbing and Heating. Fischer's and Schlenker's both had roofing crews. (Schlenker's put the slate roofs on the First Methodist Church and on many U-M sorority and fraternity houses.)

Until central heating became widespread in the 1920's, wood and coal stoves were a big part of the hardware business--Risdon's, one of the pre-Civil War stores, put stoves above hardware on their sign. Eberbach's sold Round Oak heating stoves and Adams and Westlank Monarch cooking stoves. Marty Schlenker remembers that in the 1920's his father's store had a row of stoves all along one wall from front to back.

Often newly developed products were first sold in hardware stores before being spun off to a store dedicated to them. Schumacher's sold washing machines as early as 1916 ("My neighbors can't understand how my washing can be on the line by 8 o'clock," said one ad). They also had a niche in sports equipment. Doris Schumacher Dixon, daughter of Robert Schumacher, remembers that as a girl she always had the newest in sports equipment from her family's inventory--bicycles, footballs, baseballs, tennis rackets, ice skates, roller skates, hockey equipment, and golf clubs.

Fischer's was the first area hardware store to specialize in housewares. It also was known as the store with the most university trade, maybe because it was closest to campus. Schlenker's sold the first refrigerators in town and was also a pioneer radio dealer, selling Atwater Kents. When Marty Schlenker's uncle Paul was involved in the store, he sold all kinds of fishing equipment--outboard motors, tackles, rods. And, as today, Schlenker's was known as the store where you could get anything: if you couldn't find what you were looking for anywhere else, you would go to Schlenker's.

A store's proprietors set the tone of their store, not only with what they sold, but with their personalities. John Schumacher was a leader of the temperance movement, and during his lifetime his store was known as a center for like-minded idealists, just as Eberbach's pharmacy had been a center for early Republicans. Muehlig and Lanphear contributed to the community by furnishing supplies for Albert Warhnoff, Ann Arbor's Santa Claus, who made toys for needy and sick children in the 1930's and 1940's.

When there were numerous hardware stores within a few blocks, the owners cooperated as much as possible, honoring their specialties and sending customers to each other. Mary Cruse, a stockholder of Fischer's and co-owner of East Ann Arbor Hardware, says they even traded inventory when something moved in one store and not another. Marty Schlenker remembers running joint ads with Fischer's, Ann Arbor Implement, and Herder's, figuring they were appealing to a similar crowd while offering different merchandise. They also sometimes ordered together, going in on train lots to reduce costs.

After World War II, a new generation of hardware stores opened on the commercial strips on Washtenaw, Stadium, and Packard. With easy access and ample parking, they gradually took over most of the business that had previously come downtown. Schlenker's singular survival was thanks in part to a 1950's decision to tear down the old tin and roofing shops to build its own parking lot.

With appliances and other mechanical products getting cheaper, fewer people repair broken appliances and the like, so there is less demand for traditional hardware services. Many stores now sell other merchandise, such as Christmas decorations, office supplies, table linens, and toys, to fill the gap.

Some of today's nonfixers give their broken or worn-out appliances to the Kiwanis sale instead of the landfill. On Kiwanis sale days, Marty Schlenker is reminded of the old days, when people flocked in to buy small parts to make their bargains work again.

[Photo caption from original print edition: Employees watch a parade on Main Street from Schumacher's upstairs windows. In its heyday, the store filled three storefronts in the spot where Kline's is today.]

Woodlawn Avenue was once his driveway

The majestic towered mansion on Woodlawn just north of Packard has piqued the curiosity of passersby for decades. What is it doing in this modest residential neighborhood?

Named Woodlawn, it was the country estate of Christian Eberbach, Ann Arbor pharmacist, businessman, and politician. He built the house between 1861 and 1866, when this stretch of Packard was still an unpaved country road. Today there are three houses between the mansion and Packard, set on what was originally Eberbach's front lawn. An orchard, flower gardens, and a working farm stretched back behind the house, across where Forest and Olivia now run, filling the entire area bracketed today by Wells and Granger as far as Burns Park Elementary School.

Born in Stuttgart, Eberbach emigrated to America as a young man. When he arrived in Ann Arbor in 1838, Eberbach was just twenty-one. But he had already apprenticed for three years with an apothecary and stud≠ied chemistry for two at the Stuttgart Polytechnicum, making him Ann Arbor's first trained pharmacist.

He found his first job here at William Maynard's general store on the corner of Main and Huron, working as a clerk and preparing medicines prescribed by local doctors. By 1843 he was ready to go into business for himself. He opened Washtenaw County's first drugstore in a small frame building on Huron across from the courthouse. He quickly outgrew the space and joined with confectioner Herman Schlak to build a commercial block on Main Street between Huron and Washington.

Just three years later, Eberbach took a partner, his cousin, Emanuel Mann, son of Jonathan Mann, one of Ann Arbor's original German settlers. The two built a store next door at 112 South Main Street (now Mayer-Schairer office supplies) and remained together for twenty-eight years. Open to new kinds of medicine, Eberbach knew about homeopathy because of his work in Germany. He also was a customer and advocate of Dr. Alvin Wood Chase.

Eberbach did not limit himself to his pharmacy; he had many other business and civic interests. In 1857 he and Mann and another relative, August Hutzel, started the Hutzel plumbing company next door to the pharmacy at 114 South Main (now also part of Mayer-Schairer). He was among the founders of the Ann Arbor Savings Bank and of Bethlehem Church of Christ and a member of the relief fire department. He was a musician and singer. (His son and grandson would become active in the University Musical Society.) But his greatest interest was Republican politics.

Eberbach started out as a Whig, supporting presidential candidate William H. Har-rison in 1840. After the demise of the Whig Party, he took part in the 1854 convention in Jackson that formally launched the Republican Party. Local Republicans began hanging out in a little room behind Eberbach and Mann's pharmacy to discuss the issues of the day. In 1864, Eberbach was a member of the Electoral College that re-elected the nation's first Republican president, Abraham Lincoln.

In 1868, Eberbach ran for office himself. He was elected mayor of Ann Arbor but lost his bid for re-election the next year. According to a memorial talk given after his death, he was rejected after "a gallant fight to drive the hogs and cows from the streets but the people believed that the experience was contrary to the principles of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution." Eberbach was paid a gold dollar for his year's service. His great-grandson, Robert Eberbach, still has it.

The same year Eberbach opened his store, he married Margaret (sometimes referred to as Margaretha) Laubengayer, who had been born near Stuttgart and immigrated with her family to a farm in Scio Township.

During the years Eberbach was establishing his business, the family lived in a brick house on West Washington in a spot now part of the Brown Block parking lot. In 1861, he decided to move to the country, where the air was better. He chose the site on Packard because it was still close enough to town that his children (he had eight, five of whom lived to adulthood) could go to Ann Arbor schools.

The grand house, solidly constructed with 15-inch walls, took more than five years to build. (The builders spent one year just waiting for the basement to settle after replacing a bed of quicksand with lime and cement.) The house was in the Italian Villa style and included a high tower reminiscent of German castles. It was said that you could see Ypsilanti from it on a clear day. Eberbach used the tower as an observation post to oversee his farm workers and also as a playroom for his children.

The interior of the house boasts the finest 1860's craftsmanship: carved woodwork, fireplaces, and four-over-four windows. Upstairs were five bedrooms (one since converted into a bathroom) and downstairs the kitchen, pantry, dining room, and library, and a parlor large enough to be divided into two rooms by folding wood doors. The basement included a large vaulted brick storeroom and a smokehouse. Except for the former servants' quarters, usually rented out as a separate apartment, the house has remained a single-family home since it was built.

In 1874 Emanuel Mann retired and Eberbach's oldest son, Ottmar, became his father's partner. Ottmar was well prepared, having studied science and pharmacy in Stuttgart and Tubingen in addition to working in the drugstore. He convinced his father to expand the business to supplying, and sometimes manufacturing, chemicals and lab equipment. That business continues to this day.

Germany at that time was the leading manufacturer of scientific instruments. Since Ottmar spoke German and had both scientific training and good connections there, he was in a perfect position to be an importer. Eberbach and Son grew to serve industrial labs, schools, and hospitals all over the world.

Christian Eberbach stayed active in the firm until six months before he died in 1901 at age eighty-four. He remained a loyal Republican to the end. As he lay on his deathbed, wracked with pain from spinal problems caused by lower-body paralysis, his doctor told him that he himself would almost be willing to assume the pain if it would relieve Eberbach. Eberbach replied that he wouldn't want anyone else to suffer so. Then, after thinking a minute, he reconsidered. "Yes, I would too. If you could only take it away and give it to that rascal Czolgosz, I would be glad." He was referring to Leon Czolgosz, the anarchist who had fatally shot President McKinley earlier that month.

Margaret Eberbach remained in the house until her death in 1908. The year before she died, the surrounding prop≠erty was subdivided into eighty-one house lots and annexed to the city. In 1913 the school board bought the property on the corner of Wells and Forest for a new seventh ward school, to be named after Ottmar, who had served for twenty-one years on the school board. (The school was later replaced by what is now Burns Park school; the building on Wells and Forest burned down in 1971.)

Ottmar Eberbach held on to his parents' house until his own death in 1922, but he didn't live there. Back in 1883, he had built himself a house downtown at 402 South Fourth Avenue (now part of the Beer Depot). Until World War I, the Eberbach estate was looked after by a resident caretak≠er. The war cut off the Eberbach company's supply of glass beakers, all of which were made in one village in Germany. Before the U.S. entered the war, Ottmar brought one of the German glassblowers to America to make the beakers here, housing him and his family in splendor in the vacant house.

After Ottmar died, the house was sold to state senator George McCallum, who did a major remodeling, putting in a new furnace, modern plumbing, electricity, and hardwood floors. The business stayed in the Eberbach family through two more generations, passing to Ottmar's son Oscar and then to Oscar's son Robert, both of whom studied chemistry at the U-M. Gradually the lab equipment supply and manufacturing business became bigger than the retail pharmacy. As Robert Eberbach put it, "The tail began to wag the dog."

In 1909 they had moved from Main Street to a four-story building on Liberty at Fourth. By the time that building was demolished in 1971 to make way for the Federal Building, the three parts of the business had already been separated, in what Robert Eberbach calls a "reverse merger." Eberbach Corporation, the manufacturing division, had moved in 1951 to 505 South Maple. It's still there under the same name, although Robert, the last Eberbach in the firm, retired in 1980. The supplier division was sold to Will Scientific in 1961, and the retail pharmacy was sold in 1969.

The Eberbach mansion is today owned by John and Christa Williams. After they bought it in 1987, they did a major restoration to bring it back to its former glory, adding a garage designed to look like an old carriage house. The house is basically the same inside as in Eberbach's day, albeit with modern amenities. During the Eberbach occupancy, the house was a wonderful place for holiday gatherings and musical evenings. The Williamses continue the tradition: last year they hosted a Robert Burns evening for forty people in the double parlor.

[Photo caption from original edition: Christian Eberbach, pharmacist, businessman, and politician. He built his home outside the city limits in the 1860's, when Packard was still an unpaved country road.]

[Photo caption from original edition: Christian and Margaret Eberbach celebrating their fiftieth anniversary with the family in 1893.]

[Photo caption from original edition: The Eberbach estate was so large that it provided eighty-one additional home sites when it was subdivided and annexed to the city in 1907.]

The heavy snow that ushered in 1999 brought traffic almost to a standstill. For a few days, Ann Arbor’s older neighborhoods, blanketed in white, looked not much different from the way they would have appeared after a winter storm at the close of the nineteenth century.

Compare that pristine scene with old photos of Ann Arbor in the winter, though, and you’ll notice something missing from today’s picture: black smoke. Today, most home chimneys give off the almost invisible by-products of natural gas furnaces. A century ago, they belched columns of sooty coal smoke. Coal-fired boilers in offices and stores, factories and laundries, added to the pall that hung over the city.

From the late-nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth, coal was Ann Arbor’s chief source of energy. Coal heat helped make winter tolerable (Ralph Waldo Emerson praised its capacity “to make Canada as warm as Calcutta”), and coal-fueled steam engines powered almost every local mill and factory--as well as the locomotives that brought virtually all people and goods to the town.

But the age of “King Coal” was also incredibly dirty. When traveling, Carl Malcolm remembers, “if you left the train windows open, or if you were standing on the platform, you’d be covered with tiny cinders.” At home, says Sam Schlecht, “every week you’d get a quarter of an inch of [coal] dust from the furnace.” So prevalent was the soot, Malcolm recalls, that “in the winter you’d notice the dirt on the snow.”

Ann Arbor was far from the harshest and most dangerous part of the coal economy, the underground mines of Pennsylvania and West Virginia. Even so, scores of residents spent their lives working intimately with coal, unloading it from rail cars at local coal yards, storing it, and delivering it to homes as needed. It was difficult, dirty work.

In the 1940s and 1950s, Raleigh Alexander was co-owner of Blue Ribbon Coal, a yard by the Ann Arbor Railroad tracks on South State, near today’s Produce Station. Alexander’s son John remembers, “Dad would use twine to tie his pants and cuffs so not so much coal would get on his skin. He looked like a clown with his pants blowing out, neckerchief around his neck.” Nonetheless, Alexander says, “The dust would crawl up his pant legs—he’d soak his feet up to his knees every night.”

Ron Patterson, whose father, Jim, delivered coal for Blue Ribbon, remembers helping unload coal and then coming home to bathe. “It’d all come out in the tub,” he recalls. The memory of that grimy water is so vivid, he says, that “I can’t take a bath today--I have to take a shower.”

Mary Visel, wife of Carl Visel, co-owner of Cornwell Coal, remembers that her husband, when he got home, even sneezed black. “It was a hard life,” she says, shaking her head. “I advised my girls to marry guys who worked in offices.”

“As early as 1300, the scarcity of firewood drove Londoners to heat their homes with coal, despite the ‘intolerable smell’ of the smoke,” Priscilla Long writes in Where the Sun Never Shines: A History of America’s Bloody Coal Industry. But coal took hold late in the United States, where the forests--and the supply of firewood—were long thought to be inexhaustible. As late as 1860, the city directory listed only one place to buy coal, Widenmann Hardware, and one place to buy furnaces, Schumacher Hardware. But by the 1880s, central heating was gaining in popularity, and the directory listed seven hardware stores selling furnaces and seven places selling coal.

At first businesses got into heating as a sideline--the Staeblers through their agricultural implement business, for instance, and the Rohdes as an extension of their building supply inventory. But by the turn of the century, consumption was high enough that companies devoted exclusively to selling coal began to emerge. For the next fifty years, there would be as many as fourteen coal yards operating in Ann Arbor at one time, all based along the railroad tracks. Except for a single Depression-era co-op, all were owned privately by a family or one or two people.

Central heating greatly simplified the problem of keeping warm in the winter--there was only one furnace to feed instead of individual parlor stoves or fireplaces in each room--but tending a coal furnace was still a chore. For many years, coal had to be shoveled into the furnace by hand. The job became easier after the introduction of electrically powered stokers, but clinkers (unburned bits of rock) and ashes still had to be removed regularly. At night the fire had to be banked so that it would burn very slowly overnight but still could be restarted in the morning.

Robert Hayden paid tribute to his father’s tending of the family’s coal furnace in the poem “Those Winter Sundays”:

Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the 
blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday 
weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever
thanked him.

Ford Ferguson, retired freight yard manager of the Ann Arbor Railroad, was familiar with the local coal operation from the early 1940s until its final days in the late 1960s. “Almost all the coal came in on the Ann Arbor Railroad, although some came in on the New York Central,” he recalls. “All [the yards] got lots of coal, sometimes five or six carloads at a time.” According to Ferguson, the yards were all about the same size and charged similar prices. “The only difference was who bought coal from them.”

All the yards had similar layouts: a small office to take orders and schedule deliveries; a rail spur used to park the coal cars; an area along the track, rented from the railroad, that was used to pile up the different types of coal (a few people splurged on “hard coal,” clean-burning anthracite, but most chose less-expensive “soft” or bituminous coal); and a truck scale to weigh outgoing loads. Small bins were placed alongside the scale, so that coal could be added or subtracted to reach the exact weight ordered. “Poorer people used to bring bushel baskets and get coal out of the coal bins,” remembers Bob Beuhler, whose father, Herman, owned Ann Arbor Fuel on Madison. “They’d record it in a ledger and, when they got money, come back and pay.”

Many small companies came and went, but there were ten major ones that people still alive remember. Two were side by side on Depot Street along the Michigan Central tracks:

Staebler’s, 115 Depot. Staebler’s decaying coal trestle can still be seen alongside the building that is today the headquarters of First Martin Corporation. The cinder-block office was built by Ken Heininger in 1941, when Neil Staebler went to Washington to work for the federal Office of Price Administration and Heininger was hired to take over day-to-day management of the various Staebler enterprises.

McCudden, 229 Depot. Owner Frank McCudden also had a good reputation for fixing furnaces. Much renovated, the building is now Fry & Partners Architects.
All the other yards were along the Ann Arbor Railroad. In order, running south from the river, they were:

Blaess, 124 West Summit. Oscar Blaess took over the Hiscock coal operation and then passed the merged company on to his sons, Earl and Harold. According to Earl’s widow, Eloise, “Harold did the bookkeeping. Earl figured the weights. They did it all themselves. They loved that kind of work.” Huron Valley Roofing now occupies a new building on the site.

Cornwell, 410 Miller. This yard was started by Frank Cornwell, who sold it to two employees, Carl Visel and Leona Schlafer, in the 1940s. Schlafer ran the office while Visel took care of the yard. After 1961, when the shrinking business could no longer support them both, Schlafer left and Carl’s wife, Mary, took over in the office. The building is currently vacant.

Artificial Ice, 416 West Huron. Owner Gene Heinzman sold coal in the winter, when demand for ice fell off. Today the building houses Fireside Foods.

Ann Arbor Fuel, 214 East Madison. The Staeblers helped their relative, Herman Beuhler, set up this business, although it competed with theirs. In 1938 Beuhler sold to Lewis & Frisinger. The yard is now part of Fingerle Lumber.

City Fuel, 108 East Madison. Owned by Edwin L. Feldkamp, this yard also became part of Fingerle’s.

Ann Arbor Co-op, 635 South Main. The co-op started in the Depression as a coal buying club, taking orders over the phone, picking the coal up at the Staebler coal yard, and distributing it to members. It eventually grew to include its own grocery store, in the building at Main and Mosley where the Neutral Zone teen club is now, and a gas station on Catherine Street (now Argiero’s restaurant). The co-op’s office was in the Main Street building, while its coal yard was to the north, where Don’s Auto Wash is today.

Crane, 207 Hill. Run by John Crane, this was one of the smallest but also earliest coal businesses. It later merged with Blue Ribbon. Its site, too, was eventually absorbed into the Fingerle complex.

Blue Ribbon, 1709 South State. Raleigh Alexander and Clarence Sevey bought the business from their boss, Ralph Osgood. Originally located at 513 South Ashley, the yard moved to State Street in 1944.

The U-M was too big to bother ordering coal through a local yard. It had its own spur off the Michigan Central on Fuller, and its own switch engine to shuttle cars up the hill, via a track east of Glen, to the power plant on Huron. The coal was piled on what is now the surface parking lot behind the Power Center.

Another big consumer was the artificial gasworks on Broadway between the Michigan Central tracks and the Huron River. The plant heated bituminous coal in a vacuum, drawing off flammable gas that was piped to customers to fuel gaslights and cooking stoves. A by-product, coke, was a nearly pure form of carbon that could also be used as a fuel. Because it was harder to light than coal and burned faster, coke was used mostly in industry. Today the gas plant’s site is a Michigan Consolidated Gas service center.

Some other local businesses used enough coal to buy wholesale but didn’t maintain their own inventory, instead making arrangements for local yards to accept delivery and bring it to them. Cornwell had such agreements with Nielsen’s greenhouse, the Argus and King-Seeley factories west of downtown, and the Kyer laundry on South Main.

Ferguson recalls that the Ann Arbor Railroad carried “mostly soft coal. Few used hard coal; it was much more expensive.” The coal cars were dropped off at the turntable near Ferry Field; Ferguson’s crew, usually three men, would deliver it to the coal yards with a switch engine. Bob Beuhler’s family got to know the crews so well that he was sometimes invited to ride with them as they made their deliveries—a real treat for a boy.

Operators invented various methods of unloading the coal. Beuhler dropped it from the car into a pit and had a pulley arrangement to hoist it up. Several places, like Staebler’s, had elevated trestles so that the coal could be dropped directly into trucks. But delivery was the real key to a successful business. “We had more customers than coal, more delivery requests than personnel,” recalls Heininger. The yard owners all had their own trucks and delivered as much as they could themselves, but they also hired other drivers, especially in the busy winter season: Blue Ribbon recruited farmers who had spare time in the winter.

Delivering coal was best done by two people, one to stay on the truck and keep the coal moving into the chute and a second to level it off in the basement. “I liked riding around with Dad, jumping up and down from the truck,” Ron Patterson recalls. “The better houses had special coal bins, but others just had a fenced-off area of the basement to store the coal. If there was stuff already there, a puff of soot would come out. We’d wait and then go down.”

“I’d go in [to the coal bin] and level the coal off, breathing dust,” recalls Carl Thayer, who as a teen helped deliver coal for the Ann Arbor Co-op. “The coal would be up as close to the ceiling as you could get. If we could get it high enough, it would last all winter.”

Most coal operators offered lower rates in the summer, but human nature or lack of cash--many of these memories are from the Depression--kept most people from ordering until the cold was upon them. Coal yard operators found other work to supplement their incomes in the summer, using the same equipment, if they could. Visel did hauling and grading and eventually moved into building swimming pools, Alexander and Sevey did yard work, Patterson hauled trash, Frisinger built roads, and Beuhler sold ice harvested from Whitmore Lake until Heinzman’s manufactured ice put him out of business.

During World War II good coal was hard to get, since the best was saved for the war effort and trains were filled with military freight. The Visels remember getting an inferior coal from Illinois, delivered in “monster trucks.”

On the plus side, no one was able to switch to oil or gas during the war. By then, though, the coal yard operators were all working against the clock. Says Heininger, “We all knew that after the war, coal would disappear.”

“As soon as they built the [natural] gas pipeline in the 1940s, school was out,” explains Beuhler. Clean, simple, and cheap, natural gas quickly supplanted coal and oil as the preferred fuel for home heating. After the war Staebler’s bought the customer lists of Artificial Ice and Ann Arbor Fuel, but even so, their volume fell 40 percent. They closed in 1947 and switched to building houses.

By the mid-1960s there were only three coal yards left--Blaess, Blue Ribbon, and Cornwell. “They went down together like a house of cards,” recalls Alexander. The very last to give up the business was Cornwell. “Coal was the most expensive and dirtiest way to heat,” says Jerry Visel, who with his twin brother, David, had been working with his dad since the early 1960s to develop a swimming pool business. (Their first pool was at their parents’ house at Second and Mosley.) When the Visel sons took over the bookkeeping, they discovered that the pool business was paying taxes for the coal operation and convinced their parents to get out of it. They sold the building to Calvert’s landscaping and hauling company and moved out Pontiac Trail, where they’re still in business today as Cornwell Pool & Patio.

Of the original yard buildings, only Cornwell’s and Staebler’s are as they were. A few artifacts can be found around town, such as the Staebler sign in Casey’s Tavern. John Alexander, a farmer, still uses his father’s old truck scale to weigh corn. Coal chute doors are still visible on many houses. For the most part, though, only memories remain.

On a recent visit to Sault Sainte Marie, Ron Patterson toured a dry dock where a coal-burning ship was being repaired. When he reached the boiler room, he reports, “It threw me back. The smell triggered my memory--the soot smell.

“It was good, but it choked."

Providing affordable housing for fifty-four years

Sunnyside Park, at 2740 Packard Road just east of Eisenhower, is the oldest residential trailer park in the county and probably the oldest in the state. It opened in 1940 and survives today as Ann Arbor’s only mobile home community.

Harold Kraft founded what he called the Ypsi-Ann Trailer Park as an adjunct to his business selling travel trailers. Kraft was a Grand Rapids native who had been transferred to Ann Arbor by his employer, Michigan Bell Telephone. According to his son, William, Kraft was worried that he wasn’t earning enough at Bell to retire on: “Dad was looking for something to get into. Trailers were a new business.”

Kraft started selling trailers part-time in the late 1930’s. He persuaded a good friend, Hob Gainsley, who owned a gas station on South University at Forest, to let him display a Palace Travel Coach there. Whenever anyone showed an interest, Gainsley would pass the name along to Kraft. At that time trailers were used primarily for camping, although a debate was raging about whether they might be suitable for permanent housing.

The trailer industry developed in the 1920’s, and campgrounds for the “tin can tourists” soon began popping up around the country. According to Allan D. Wallis, author of Wheel Estate: The Rise and Decline of Mobile Homes, communities at first welcomed the trailer tourists and the money they spent. But during the Depression, some owners started using their trailers as permanent homes.

The trailer industry preferred to see their products used for travel and recreation, not as affordable housing. But as preparations for World War II started, they reversed themselves, arguing that they should be given access to scarce resources and labor in order to build housing for defense industry workers. A local example of such housing was the 960-unit Willow Court Trailer Project at Willow Run, which opened in 1943 to provide homes for workers at the nearby Ford bomber plant.

Michigan was the first state to take a stand in the debate: in 1939, it passed a law to deal with trailers used as housing. Under the Michigan Trailer Coach Park Act, the stationary trailer was considered a building and regulated as such, while the travel trailer remained under vehicular regulations.

The year after the Michigan law passed, Kraft made the big jump into full-time trailer sales and began his own trailer park. He located it in Pittsfield Township, on farm frontage on Packard, which was a dirt road then. He bought the land from Ethel and Everett Rose. According to Mary Campbell, who lived across the street at what is now Cobblestone Farm, the Roses had a tough time in the Depression and had to sell some of their farm to avoid forfeiting it for back taxes.

Even out in the country, there was opposition to the trailer park. Kraft remembers a woman from East Ann Arbor worrying that “trailer trash” would move in. But he says his father, who was a nondrinker, a member of Grace Bible Church, and active in the Gideons, “was a religious man. He wouldn’t allow that.”

Mary Campbell remembers that the Pittsfield Township clerk gave the necessary permission for the land use and then regretted it just fifteen minutes later, when she learned that most of the nearby residents had signed a petition against the trailer park. Campbell, who thinks she probably signed the petition herself, says, “We’d rather it wasn’t there--a lot of traffic, that sort of thing.” But she says there was no point in complaining after the trailers arrived, and in fact there were no grounds for complaints because Kraft did a good job of maintaining the trailer park.

Kraft put in dirt roads and blocked out the individual sites. Friends from the telephone company helped him put up poles for electricity. He built a cinder-block building in front for his sales office. It also had shower stalls, bathrooms, and laundry facilities, since many early trailers didn’t include these amenities. A patch of ground in front of the office became his sales display area.

William Kraft recalls that his father had no trouble filling the park. Campbell remembers that the park looked pretty bare at first, but that trees and flowers were soon planted. “Everyone kept up their little plot; there was competition for keeping it up nicely,” she says. She describes the early residents as “nice people, quite a few students, bomber plant employees.” Kraft recalls them as “working people, good people, families.” He remembers a cab driver and a man who worked for the police department.

Kraft sold several brands of trailers, including Palace Travel Coach made in Flint, and National Trailers from Indiana. (Today most mobile homes are still made in Indiana.) In those days banks wouldn’t finance mobile homes--for buyers or for park operators. Kraft had to pay for the trailers on delivery, and then he sold them to his residents on the installment plan and charged them for site rental and electricity. He protected himself from deadbeats by making sure the buyer had a job that paid enough to cover the payments.

In 1946 Kraft sold the park to Ruby and Sven Keenan, his wife’s niece and nephew-in-law. He continued trailer sales there for another five years. The Keenans changed the park’s name to Sunnyside and added a second story to the cinder-block building as an apartment for themselves. A 1951 ad boasts that the park is “away from the noise, yet conveniently located.”

After his five years at Sunnyside expired, Kraft moved to 3770 Packard and continued to sell trailers from a Quonset hut. He was active in the Michigan Trailer Coach Association and for a while co-owned a trailer park in Belleville. In 1958 he moved back to Grand Rapids. The trailer business had done for him what he had hoped it would: given him enough money to retire comfortably. He owned stock and property and even a home in Florida. When he died in 1969, his obituary described him as a “pioneer in the house trailer industry.”

The Keenans owned Sunnyside for three decades before selling it to Margaret Jacosky, who in 1986 sold it to John Chin. The only structure left from Kraft’s original occupancy is the front office. All the trailers have been replaced (the oldest one still in use was built in 1960). The area once used for display has been made into a lawn, the roads have been paved, and the utilities have been upgraded and put underground.

According to Chin, today’s trailers are larger and much better built than they were in Kraft’s day. But economy, not mobility, is still the main reason people buy manufactured homes. How else, asks Chin, could someone get a brand-new two-bedroom house for $450 a month?

A venerable building, an activist congregation

With its steep slate roof, stone walls, and pointed stained-glass windows, St. Andrew’s Episcopal was designed to look like a church out of the Middle Ages--you could almost picture Martin Luther nailing his theses to its heavy wooden doors. Standing at the northeast corner of Division and Catherine, it’s the city’s oldest operating church and its finest jewel of Gothic Revival architecture.

St. Andrew’s Parish was organized in 1827, just three years after Ann Arbor was founded. Its first meeting place was the home of Hannah Gibbs Clark, a widow who lived on the northwest corner of Ashley and Liberty. In 1839 the congregation dedicated its first building, at Division and Lawrence (then called “Bowery”). Nestled among original burr oak trees, it was a simple wooden church, painted white.

That building survived two near catastrophes in its first year--confiscation by the sheriff for nonpayment of bills (two members quickly made up the arrears) and a fire--and St. Andrew’s continued to grow. After the Civil War, members decided to build a larger church on land they owned to the south, the present location.

To design it they hired Gordon Lloyd, Michigan’s premier Gothic Revival architect. Lloyd was born in England in 1832, moved with his family to Quebec, and returned home at age sixteen to apprentice under his uncle, Ewan Christian (1814–
1895), an eminent English architect who specialized in designing and restoring churches. Gothic Revival, sometimes called Neo-Gothic, was at its peak in England at that time, and Lloyd was steeped in it during his ten years there.

St. Andrew's Episcopal Church, begun in 1868, is Ann Arbor's oldest church.

Setting up his own architectural practice in Detroit, Lloyd designed churches and other buildings all over the Midwest, primarily in the Gothic Revival style. “I don’t know through whose influence the vestry of that day was led to employ Mr. Lloyd; but to that person, whoever he or she may have been, St. Andrew’s Parish and the city of Ann Arbor owe an everlasting debt of gratitude,” wrote Henry Tatlock, the church’s rector from 1889 to 1922.

Despite the eminence of the architect, however, the congregation’s fund-raising campaign came up short. Deciding to start with just the nave, the main section of the church that contained the pews and altar, they laid the cornerstone in 1868. Silas Douglass, a professor in the U-M medical school who had overseen construction of several university buildings, did the same job for the church. The contractor was church member James Morwick, who also built the Lloyd-designed entrance to Forest Hill Cemetery.

The walls were made of local stone, mainly granite, with stained-glass windows in geometric designs made by Friedrick of Brooklyn, New York. Inside, the pews were made of butternut and walnut. Those original pews are still in use, complete with the dividers that once separated one family’s rented section from another’s.

The nave was finished in 1869; the rest of the present church complex was built as money allowed over the next eighty years. The old wooden church was used for a chapel and Sunday school until 1880, when the congregation built a new chapel east of the nave and a new rectory on the site of the old church. The bell tower rose in 1903, paid for by a bequest from member Love Root Palmer. “Mrs. Palmer told me that she intended to bequeath to the parish a sufficient sum of money to build the tower after [her] death,” Tatlock wrote, “regretting that she was not able to do without the income of the amount involved, so as to have the tower built while she was still alive. It was suggested to her that it was highly desirable that the tower should be designed by Mr. Lloyd, who at that time was still active in his profession.” Palmer commissioned Lloyd to design the tower while she was still living--a fortunate decision, since the architect died only a year after she did.

The last major change came in 1950, when the rectory was torn down to make room for a parish hall. Finances precluded building in the same style as the church, so the congregation decided on a more modern building. U-M architecture professors Ralph Hammett and Frederick O’Dell, using stones from the rectory, designed a building that blends well with the church. They also designed very modern-looking stained glass for the parish hall chapel.

Over the years, much of the original geometric stained glass in the nave has been replaced by representational memorial windows. Eleven of these are the work of Willett Stained Glass Studio of Philadelphia, a company founded in 1898 and still in business. “Willett’s does an excellent job of personalizing stained glass,” says Barbara Krueger, an expert on Michigan stained glass. Most of the new windows portray religious figures; four windows depict composers, honoring a choirmaster and other parishioners who had special connections to music. The bottom sections are filled with personal images: a schoolteacher is shown reading to children, and an athlete’s memorial features a baseball mitt and golf clubs. Carolers sing out on one window in remembrance of the organizer of the church’s Christmas sing, and no fewer than five dogs help memorialize their masters.

The most intriguing window in the collection is a lovely angel that may be a genuine Tiffany. Although it is not found in Tiffany records, Mark Hildebrandt, author of The Windows of St. Andrew’s, which is being published in celebration of the congregation’s 175th anniversary, says it may have been transferred from another site. But Krueger cautions, “There were more than a dozen East Coast studios doing that kind of work.”

Besides gracing Ann Arbor with a beautiful building, St. Andrew’s has fed the aesthetic appetites of the community with music and plays. Reuben Kempf, of Kempf House fame, was organist and choir director from 1895 to 1928. He organized a famous boys’ choir, recruiting talent citywide. Veteran local radio host Ted Heusel, a church member who recognizes a good theater space when he sees one, has produced A Man for All Seasons and Murder in the Cathedral in the nave, as well as a rendering of the stations of the cross in which readings were interspersed with dance. One of the dancers in the late 1970s was U-M student Madonna Ciccone.

St. Andrew’s has also developed a reputation for community activism. Many of Ann Arbor’s mayors have been St. Andrew’s members, including Silas Douglass and Ebenezer Wells in the nineteenth century and Cecil Creal and Sam Eldersveld in the twentieth. Henry Lewis, minister from 1922 to 1961, was leading picketers around City Hall to urge city council to enact a fair housing ordinance at the same time that Mayor Creal was senior churchwarden. “They’d have pitched battles during the week but come together on Sunday,” recalls longtime member Barbara Becker.

St. Andrew’s was the first local church to react to the growing problem of homelessness caused by releasing people from mental hospitals. In 1982 the congregation began a breakfast program that is still in operation. “It started as a Monday-through-Friday program until we realized most people eat breakfast seven days a week,” recalls church member Pat Lang. The church’s efforts to also provide homeless people with a place to sleep helped lead to the organization of Ann Arbor’s Shelter Association.

In 2000 St. Andrew’s became the first church in the area to have a staff person dedicated to welcoming and affirming the gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender communities. The Oasis Ministry, as it is called, originated in New Jersey, where rector John Nieman served before coming to Ann Arbor in 1997. “We all are created in the image of God,” says Oasis coordinator Kate Runyon. “We all have gifts to share with one another.”

As part of the congregation’s 175th anniversary celebration, St. Andrew’s and the Washtenaw County Historical Society will jointly sponsor tours of the church and surrounding historic neighborhood from 2 to 4 p.m. on Sunday, April 27. See Events for details.

A living monument to feminism’s first wave

“It is estimated that over 5,000 men pass through the doors of the Union every day. They meet around the cafeteria tables, they read together in the lounging rooms, the Pendleton Library, and swim together in the swimming pool.” In striking contrast, “the girls have a little corner of the upper hall of Barbour Gymnasium partitioned off for the League offices where only a small committee may gather at a time.”

The year was 1926, and the speaker, Mary Henderson, was advocating construction of a building for the Women’s League, the female counterpart to the all-male Michigan Union. The alumnae she was addressing scarcely needed to be reminded of the unequal status of women at the university. In 1870, U-M placed itself in the forefront of American colleges by admitting women. Since then, however, it had fallen behind the rapid gains women were making in society at large.

In 1919, after a fifty-year battle by America’s first generation of feminists, Congress approved a constitutional amendment giving women the right to vote and sent it to the states for ratification. Yet even as they took a giant step toward equality on the national scene, women remained second-class citizens at the U-M. The only facilities for female students were two dorms (Martha Cook and Helen Newberry) and a few sororities. Most women lived scattered around town with families or in rooming houses, “where they have no opportunity to come into contact with the more refining and more highly cultural influences,” in the words of another League proponent.

So in 1919, the Women’s League started seriously discussing building a place of their own. In 1921 they asked the Alumnae Council (of which Mary Henderson was secretary) to support the effort. The council, in turn, petitioned the regents.

The regents approved the concept and offered to provide the land, but required that all other costs be covered by donations. The goal was $1 million—$600,000 for construction, $150,000 for furnishings, and $250,000 for an endowment to support the building’s operation.

The women raised money in many small ways. Students made flapper beads out of lamp pulls, hemmed handkerchiefs, and even shined shoes (a fund-raiser christened “She Stoops to Conquer”). Some double-bunked so that they could rent their rooms out on football weekends. Students and alumnae alike sold all sorts of small items, including “freshies” (thin leaves of paper in booklet form with films of face powder between the pages), pineapple-cloth linens from Hawaii, and League playing cards. Paul Robeson gave a benefit performance of Porgy (the play that Gershwin’s opera was based on) in Detroit, and Clara Clemens, daughter of Mark Twain, toured major Michigan cities performing Joan of Arc.

But the big money was raised by Mary Henderson, a U-M grad and the wife of the director of university extension. In a reminiscence for the League’s twenty-fifth anniversary, Mary Frances Gross characterized Henderson as “determined and ruthless in getting what she wanted.” Henderson traveled all over to talk to alumnae groups and potential donors, somehow convincing the Ann Arbor Chamber of Commerce to underwrite expenses. “Whenever she heard of a possible donor, or one who could afford to give, she always had a contact, and off she would go. And she always came back with a contribution,” recalled Gross.

“Toward the end of the campaign, after consulting with the architects, she [Henderson] was in her office and still trying to think of someone to contact for a large donation so that a theater could be included in the plans and building,” Gross recounted. “All of a sudden she thought of Gordon Mendelssohn of Detroit. He was wealthy and had a real interest in the theater. She immediately phoned Detroit but learned that he was in Europe. Securing his address there, she composed an obviously successful cablegram and sent it to him. In a few days she had her answer by cable. He would give $50,000 if the theater would always bear his mother’s name.” And so the Lydia Mendelssohn Theater was born.

By 1927 the women had gathered $1 million in gifts and pledges. Eliza Mosher, first dean of women, turned the first shovelful of dirt at the ground-breaking on June 18, 1927. The cornerstone, filled with items the women had sold as fund-raisers, was laid on March 29, 1928.

The League was designed by Allen and Irving Pond, the same Ann Arbor–born architects who had designed the Michigan Union. Compared with the Union, “the woman’s building will be more gracious and more feminine in its atmosphere, but the underlying strength will be there,” Allen Pond wrote. “The day of the purely charming young lady is past.” The Ponds also designed many of the building’s decorative touches, including the statues above the front entrance (female figures identified as Character and Friendship), the stained glass windows, and the murals. Allen Pond, sadly, never lived to see his creation completed. The building was dedicated on June 14, 1929, two months after his death.

Henderson ran the League for its first year on behalf of the Alumnae Council. But with the arrival of the Great Depression, even she had trouble getting pledges redeemed. Though the cost of the building and furnishings was in hand, the promised endowment was never collected. Left without operating funds, the alumnae had no choice but to give the building to the university in 1930.

Under Dr. Ethel McCormick, the U-M’s social director of women, the League nonetheless became exactly what its founders had wanted: the center of women’s activities on campus. Mary Marsh Matthews, who attended the university in the 1950s, remembers McCormick as “a small person, energetic, funny, fierce, but lovable. She made the League part of our lives.” The building hosted orientations, teas, dances, meetings, and recreational classes (such as bridge and ballroom dancing), but the real bonding activity was the annual play put on by each class: Frosh Weekend, Soph Cab (for cabaret), the Junior Girls’ Play, and Senior Night.

The school year ended with the Drama Season, which always followed the musical May Festival and attracted the same caliber of discerning audience from far beyond Ann Arbor. The Drama Season ran from 1929 to the late 1950s; Ted Heusel, who directed the series in its later years, recalls Grace Kelly appearing in Ring around the Moon, Charlton Heston in Macbeth, and E.G. Marshall in The Crucible.
Drama Season actors stayed at the League’s third-floor hotel, as did many musical performers appearing at nearby Hill Auditorium. Aileen Mengel-Schulze, who worked in the League while a student in the late 1940s, recalls seeing Danny Kaye, Skitch Henderson, and Eugene Ormandy. Another alumna remembers sitting in the lounge and hearing some wonderful piano music in an adjoining room. The pianist turned out to be Van Cliburn.

In 1954 the Union signaled a new age by letting women enter the building--though at first only through a side door. By 1965 both buildings were fully integrated. To eliminate needless duplication, the governing bodies of the Union and the League were merged to create the University Activities Center, today part of the Office of Student Affairs under vice-president Maureen Hartford.

In 1997, the Friends of the League was organized to increase student and community appreciation and use of the historic building. They’re researching the League’s history, restoring the enclosed garden on the building’s east side, and offering monthly docent-led tours of the building. Call 647–7463 for more information.