Who'd have guessed that Ann Arbor's distinctive manhole covers were made by a black Canadian orphan and a Russian Jewish Revolutionary?

The renovated office building at 1327 Jones Drive is named after the Northern Brewery, which occupied its site, just east of Plymouth Road, from 1872 to 1908. But the building had an equally interesting life after that, from 1920 to 1972, as the Ann Arbor Foundry. The foundry's "The Ann Arbor" logo, cast into manhole covers and storm sewer grates can still be found all over the older parts of town. Newcomers who spot them sometimes get the impression that Ann Arbor is so snooty it even has customized sewers.

The Ann Arbor Foundry was anything but snooty. It employed only about forty people, and it lived on small orders - for instance, a single manhole for a street repair project - that bigger competitors couldn't be bothered with. But it was an extraordinary place all the same. It began as a co-operative, a self-employment plan for a group of displaced foundry workers. In later years, the original group of owners dwindled to an effective but improbable duo: Charlie Baker, an orphan whose forebears fled to Canada to escape slavery in the U.S., and Tom Cook, a Jewish refugee from Czarist Russia.

In 1872, George Krause bought the site for his brewery. He was attracted by its proximity to Traver Creek and to the natural springs nearby. Krause used the spring water to make his beer, and ice harvested from the creek to keep it cool. Krause sold his Northern Brewery to brothers John and Fred Frey. John bought out Fred and then sold the business to German-trained brewer Herman Hardinghaus in 1885. The next year Hardinghaus built a substantial two-story brewery - "a fine brick block," Samuel Beakes called it in his 1891 Portrait and Biographical Album. According to Beakes, in addition to beer Hardinghaus brewed "a superior quality of ale which he ships to different cities and towns."

Hardinghaus ran the brewery until it closed in 1908. Although there was no sign that heavily Germanic Ann Arbor had lost its taste for beer, many small brewers were folding then in the face of competition from regional and national brands. When Krause opened the brewery in 1872, there were five other breweries in Ann Arbor alone. By the time Hardinghaus closed it, only one other was left.

The brewery building was briefly taken over by an ice business, and later by a creamery. But it had stood empty for about three years when the organizers of the Ann Arbor Foundry bought it in 1920.

The group had worked together at Production Foundries, at 1300 North Main, and all had lost their jobs when the foundry closed. Rather than look elsewhere for work, ten of them decided to form a co-op and go into business for themselves.

Only active foundry workers were allowed to join the group - no passive investors were permitted. Each of the ten founders agreed to work for the same wage—seventy-five cents an hour— and to invest $500 in the business. With total capital of $5,000, they put $1,000 down on the purchase of the brewery building and spent the rest on used foundry equipment.

It sounded like an ideal working situation—except that even a co-op foundry was still a foundry. Melting metal and casting it in molds is notoriously hot, dirty, and dangerous work. Ernie Jones, who worked at the Ann Arbor Foundry from 1948 until it closed in 1972, remembers that some new employees hated the heat and heavy lifting so much they quit after their first day on the job.

In addition to the built-in problems, work was slow at first. Four partners left and sold their investment to the rest within the first few years. (The buy-out value was set in monthly business meetings in which the organizers reviewed the company's financial situation.) Gradually, others left for various reasons—ill health or injuries (one organizer lost an eye on the job and decided to leave before he lost another) or to take other jobs. By 1946, only two of the original ten were left: Charlie Baker and Tom Cook.

Instead of looking for new partners, Baker and Cook decided to inaugurate profit sharing. Every three months, they divided 25 percent of the profits among their employees, which by then numbered about forty. There was an additional 2 percent bonus at Christmas. Ernie Jones remembers that he was able to buy a house on Daniel with his share of the profits.

The two partners came from totally different backgrounds. Baker was born in Buxton, Ontario, in 1886, part of the black community that settled in Canada before the Civil War. According to his widow, Ruby Baker, he had no formal training in foundry work; "he just learned." (Now in her nineties, Ruby Baker still has frying pans that her husband cast for her.)

Baker's parents died when he was a child; afterward, he lived with various relatives and with people who would let him work around their places in exchange for a bed. When he was twelve, he ran away to work for the railroad. In 1918 he came to Ann Arbor and found work as a laborer in the Production Foundries. That was where he met Tom Cook.

Cook was born Tevye Kooks in 1887 in Kherson, Ukraine. He qualified to continue his schooling at the local gymnasium, but his parents were too poor to buy the required uniform. Under the czars, Jews couldn't get apprenticeships in heavy trades, but Kooks went on to learn iron molding at a special ORT trade school funded by foreign Jewish philanthropists. When Kooks was nineteen, anti-Semitic pogroms broke out. He became a revolutionary, was jailed for passing out literature to soldiers, and escaped to Austria. After working in Europe for a few years, he managed to get to the United States in 1909—where his name was changed by U.S. immigration officials.

Within a year, Cook had a job working for pioneer car builder R. E. Olds in Lansing and had saved enough money to send for his childhood sweetheart, Esther Noll. They married and moved on to Detroit, where he worked at the Stroh foundry. When his foreman there, Everett Bets, left to start the Production Foundries in Ann Arbor, he persuaded Cook to join him.

When Bets's foundry failed, the job disappeared. But wanting their children to get a good education, the Cooks decided to stay in Ann Arbor. Cook and Baker went on to become the Ann Arbor Foundry's central figures.

The two men "had a beautiful relationship," says Ernie Jones. "They were the best of friends." If they had any differences, adds Jones, "they would straighten it out behind the scenes." In the pre-civil rights era,, there were some advantages to their bi-racial partnership. Cook, for example, could attend and learn from industry conventions where Baker did not feel welcome.
Neither partner had had an easy time getting established, and both were compassionate men who did not believe in bosses. Instead of hiring foremen or overseers, they worked side-by-side with their employees. According to Jones, "If someone walked in, they wouldn't know who was boss." Nor, he jokes, could you tell who was black and who was white: within fifteen minutes of starting work, everyone was uniformly covered with soot from the smelting furnace.

The work involved a lot of heavy lifting, and was so dirty that the company provided lockers and showers so the men could clean up before going home. But Jones says the work crew was "like family. If you saw someone struggling [with a task], you would help them." At noon, everyone stopped work and sat down to eat together. On warm days, they would eat outside by Traver Creek.

Cook's daughter, Henrietta Sklar, calls the Ann Arbor a "jobbing foundry," one that specialized in small custom orders. If the city wanted a large number of sewer castings for a construction project, for instance, the bid was likely to go to a big company
like the N^enah (Wisconsin) Foundry. On the other hand, if a crew repairing a street needed a single casting, it was a lot handier to pick one up from the Ann Arbor Foundry than send a truck all the way to the Neenah warehouse in Detroit.

The Ann Arbor Foundry did machine castings for American Broach (then on Huron Street just west of downtown) and dies for General Motors. In the early years, one of its most important jobs was casting coal-furnace parts. It also made auto parts, irrigation pumps, old-fashioned door latches, and ornamental items.

The foundry also cast many one-of-a-kind jobs, ranging in weight from one pound to 5,000 pounds. The owners took pride in never turning down a job. "Anything that is hard to make—I like to tackle it," Cook told an interviewer in 1969.

Ruby Baker remembers that her husband and Cook worked very hard. "They were the owners, so they stayed until the job was done—sometimes quite late." But both men found time to be active in the community. Baker was one of the founders of the Wild Goose Country Club, a recreation center in Lyndon Township for black families in the days of segregation. He was also active in his church, Bethel AME, while Cook was active in Beth Israel and a number of Jewish organizations.

Foundry workers could take advantage of what Henrietta Sklar, who worked in the foundry office, called "our free loan association." An employee in financial straits could get an interest-free advance of up to several hundred dollars, which would be repaid in $10-per-week payroll deductions. "One of our employees was always being jailed for failure to pay child support," Sklar recalls. "We would bail him out, pay his back payments, and he would pay us out weekly."

Baker and Cook also supported each other's causes. Minutes of the Ann Arbor Foundry from the 1950's record Baker moving to give money to the United Jewish Appeal, while Cook moved to give funds to the Dunbar Center, forerunner of the Ann Arbor Community Center. Cook was believed to be the first local contributor to the United Negro College Fund.

Neither Baker nor Cook ever retired. Cook was still working when he suffered a heart attack in his early eighties; he died in 1971 at age eighty-four. Baker was one year older, but continued working until the foundry closed the next year. He died in 1978 at age ninety-one.

After Cook's heart attack, his daughter, Henrietta Sklar, tried to take his place. But the team that had functioned for fifty years had begun to come apart. The final blow came in 1972, when the foundry was cited by the Michigan Air Pollution Control Commission.

Buying pollution controls would have cost $100,000. Ernie Jones believes that if Cook had still been alive and Baker younger, they could have solved the problem, but it would have taken more than just pollution controls. Though the foundry had added cinder block wings onto the original brick brewery, it needed to be enlarged again to be competitive.

It also would have had to move out of an area that was becoming increasingly residential. When Jones started work at the foundry, three cows grazed in the field out front along Plymouth 'Road. In the 1960's, they had been replaced by large apartment complexes. While its longtime neighbors accepted the foundry, the new renters hadn't bargained on
being showered by, cinders when they went outside to sunbathe.

The Ann Arbor Foundry closed in 1972. Its building stood empty until 1978, when the Fry/Peters architectural firm took it on as a project. By then it was so dilapidated that Dick Fry had to appear twice before the city's Building Board of Appeals to convince them not to condemn the building before they could line up investors for its renovation.

Fry and David Peters turned the inside space into offices. To retain the historic flavor, they kept the overhead cranes that had been part of the foundry and painted the tall smelter stack orange. They also dug out the basement to reveal the brick vaults where beer had once been stored.

The renovation was expensive, and the space hasn't always been filled (though it is now). But Fry is still glad they made the effort. "Part of what makes Ann Arbor special," he says, "is saving something like this."

The white-collar workers who populate the building these days don't have to worry about soot, injuries, or summer heat (the building is now air-conditioned). But they do hark back to their foundry forebears in one way. As part of the renovation, Fry and Peters built a deck on the back of the building, overlooking Traver Creek. In the summer, office workers eat lunch there, watching the blue heron that lives nearby.

[Photo caption from the original print edition]: Foundry co-owner Tom Cook pouring iron. Cook and partner Charlie Baker worked side-by-side with their employees. "If someone walked in, they wouldn't know who was the boss," recalls foundry worker Ernie Jones. Nor, Jones jokes, could they tell who was black and who was white: within fifteen minutes of starting work, everyone was covered with soot from the smelting furnace.

[Photo caption from the original print edition]: Dave Drumright cleans a machine casting. As a "jobbing foundry," the Ann Arbor made its living on special orders too smaU for its larger competitors.

[Photo caption from the original print edition]: The Ann Arbor Foundry closed in 1972, when it confronted a $100,000 bill for air pollution controls. To continue, the foundry probably also would have had to relocate outside its increasingly residential neighborhood—tenants in nearby apartments resented getting sprinkled with cinders when they sunbathed. Today, the renovated building is rented out as offices.

Chelsea Farmer's Supply
It’s still got the feel of its heyday

In 1987, Greg Raye suggested that Chelsea Farmer’s Supply be torn down. Two years later he and his wife, H. K. Leonard, bought the building to keep it from being turned into a parking lot. “I had no desire to run a business,” explains Raye. But today he and Leonard are still running it.

Built about 1855, Farmer’s Supply is one of the oldest buildings in Chelsea. A classic Greek Revival structure with a low roof and gable returns, it originally faced Main Street. It looks as though it had been built as a residence, but at some point it became Chelsea’s first hotel, the Chelsea House. In 1888 the Chelsea House moved into a new, brick building, and the old building was moved to its present location at 122 Jackson. There a woman named Line Downer and several subsequent owners operated it as a residence hotel for ¬thirty-seven more years, renting rooms to railroad employees and workers at the nearby Glazier stove plant.
In 1925 the building was remodeled as a feed mill. An awning was put on the front and a one-story wing added on the west. At the time most local farmers raised cattle and brought their pickup trucks to the mill to get their grain ground into feed. Ransom Lewis owned the mill until 1936, and for the next eight years it was run by Vincent Ives.

In 1946 Anton Nielsen, a forty-year-old Danish immigrant, bought the store. He ran it for the next forty-five years. Nielsen’s father was a farmer who became a hotel operator. When he was twelve, Nielsen started an apprenticeship to be a clerk; later he went to business school. At age eighteen he emigrated to Canada and did farm work. Two years later he moved to Detroit and worked in an automobile factory and then a paint factory. At a dance in Detroit he met his future wife, Dorothy.
Nielsen served on the Chelsea Village Council and was elected village president four times. For several years he headed the community fair, and he was active in the local Kiwanis Club. He enjoyed vegetable and flower gardening and the many cats who made their home in his store.

Longtime employee Allen Broesamle was devoted to the store and often ran it when Nielsen was ill or traveling. Broesamle’s widow, Ruth, says her husband never wanted a title or ownership, even though Nielsen offered to sell him the place.
Allen Broesamle grew up on a farm in Sylvan Township. His younger brother, Roy, says Nielsen originally offered the job to whichever boy wanted it. Roy chose farming but helped in the store when needed.

When Nielsen bought the store, the main business was the feed mill operation. “Some days he’d start the grinder at seven and never shut it off all day,” Roy Broesamle recalls. “Farmers were lined up all day.” The store made most of its money selling feed additives, such as salt, minerals, and vitamins. Current Farmer’s Supply employee Jeff Weber says Nielsen sold everything from an office in the front: “You’d tell him what you wanted, and he’d go and get it.”

Ruth Broesamle remembers that her husband greased the grinder daily and repaired it often. “The equipment was old, and it was hard to find parts,” she recalls. Each type of feed presented its own challenges. “Hog feed was not a fine grind. It gets into everything,” she says. Weber remembers coming in with his grandfather in the 1960s. “Grandfather would bring in corn or wheat,” he says. “In half an hour he’d be back at the farm.”

By the 1970s many farmers had moved away from the livestock business, while others had begun to grind their own crops or had switched to commercial feed. Farmers who diversified and needed smaller amounts of lots of things became Nielsen’s customer base. Nielsen began selling more supplies such as seeds and fertilizer, and he branched out into nonfarm items such as pet food. To make more room for the additional inventory, he and Allen Broesamle built a lean-to on the back of the building, using lumber from a former railroad freight house that stood where Heydlauff’s parking lot now is.

The wider inventory necessitated more trips to pick up and deliver supplies. Broesamle drove all over southern Michigan for seed corn, feed, fertilizer, and other items, and he made deliveries to farmers as far away as Northville and Plymouth.

When Nielsen was eighty-five, he sold the store. Broesamle stayed to help Greg Raye with the transition but retired after the first summer. Nielsen died in 2001 at age ninety-six.

In his 1987 University of Michigan master’s thesis in architecture, Raye had outlined a plan to turn the area around the Chelsea railroad depot into a pedestrian mall. His wife’s parents, Walter and Helen May Leonard, published the Chelsea Standard and Dexter Leader in the Welfare Building just across the tracks from Farmer’s Supply. Once a bustling commercial center, it became a largely ignored area when passenger trains no longer stopped in Chelsea. Raye suggested that the Farmer’s Supply be replaced with a new building to be used for retail.
But when nearby Longworth Plating eyed the store for a parking lot, Raye stepped in and bought it. Contrary to his original intent, Raye became not only the rescuer of the Farmer’s Supply but also its proprietor. He and his wife have tried to keep the store much the way it was when Nielsen ran it, complete with rough-hewn studs in the walls and air bubbles in the old windows. They’ve retained most of the decor too, keeping the metal signs and the blue ribbons that come with cattle bought at auction at the community fair. The biggest change they’ve made is opening up the lean-to, which had been used only for inventory storage, as sales space.

When Raye and Leonard first bought the store, they continued to run the feed mill. But “it made the whole building shake,” Raye recalls. “It was loud and dusty. The neighbors didn’t like it.” When it broke and they couldn’t get replacement parts, they stopped operating it. They’ve kept what’s left—gears, bins, belt drives—as artifacts.

Raye and Leonard have expanded the stock too. They still serve commercial farmers, but their customers also include hobby farmers and gardeners. An animal lover, Raye has vastly expanded the pet supply department, and he caters to serious bird-¬watchers. Chelsea Farmer’s Supply also sells locally made products such as honey and maple syrup.

Fresh eggs brought in by Allen Broesamle were a staple during the Nielsen years. The new owners have carried on that tradition: now Roy Broesamle supplies them.

At the Michigan Union Brewing Company and the Ann Arbor Brewing Company, Ann Arborites could pick up beer by the pail.

The Ann Arbor Brewing Company at 416 Fourth Street was the only brewery in the city to survive Prohibition. Yet its product was not greatly valued in its hometown. "It was considered good only for putting out fires," claimed the late Carl Horning in a 1995 interview.

Horning was exaggerating: for eighty-eight years, the local brew found customers throughout Ann Arbor and beyond. And townsfolk weren't averse to stopping by for a glass or two of beer, on the house, any time of night or day. According to Will Frey, who worked at the brewery off and on from 1937 to 1943, leaky barrels that couldn't be sold were put in a back­room. Those who knew the barrels were there—namely, just about everyone in town—could come in through an always-unlocked door off the loading dock and get a drink. They used glasses hanging nearby, which they rinsed out when they were finished.

"It was a good stop for the postman. It took him longer to deliver mail there than the rest of the block," recalls Frey. The staff got free beer, too. Robert Kauffman remembers the job he got there at age sev­enteen cleaning out an old metal tank on top of the brewery: "At lunch break we went down to the main floor of the brew­ery and helped ourselves to a few pints of Ann Arbor Cream Top directly out of the barrel." People who played baseball in that era recall coming by after games to cool down with a glass of beer.

The brewery was founded in 1861 by Peter Brehm, who had recently moved to Ann Arbor from Germany. Brehm named his business the West­ern Brewery, after its location on the west side of town in the heart of the German neighborhood. In 1864, after his first building burned down, Brehm built a larg­er, two-story brewery, with a basement.

When Brehm opened his brewery, there were three others in town. Two—Hooper's (1858-1866), at State and Fuller, and the Bavarian (1860-1872), on Fuller between Elizabeth and State—were probably home operations. The City Brewery (1860-1886), at 210 South First Street, was clos­er to Brehm's operation in both size and location. It's now the Cav­ern Club—named after the basement vaults where the beer was aged.

Two other brew­eries started short­ly after Brehm's, both also named for their locations: the Central (1865-1875), at 724 North Fifth Avenue, now the Brewery Apart­ments; and the Northern (1872-1909), at 1037 Jones Drive, now an office building. Competition from the two ambitious newcomers surely didn't help Brehm's business, and the Panic of 1873 drove him over the edge: he lost control of the brew­ery and killed himself in despair.

Yet his successors managed to keep the business going for another seventy-five years. In 1880 Christian Martin and Mat­thias Fischer bought the Western Brewery. Martin, the brewmaster, walked over from his house across the street at 431 Fourth at 4 or 5 a.m. to start the fire in the boilers. Fischer, who ran the bottling operation, also lived in the neighborhood, on West Jefferson.

The new owners made a success of the operation from the start. A year later, the 1881 Chapman History of Washtenaw County, Michigan, reported, "The beer produced by this brewery finds a ready sale in all parts of the county." According to Chapman, "some 1,500 barrels of malt, 1,700 Ibs. of hops, 225 cords of wood and 800 tons of ice are used in the manu­facture and stor­age of the 3,000 barrels of beer turned out annu­ally." The West­ern Brewery's nearest competi­tor, the Northern Brewery, turned out just 2,400 barrels.

By 1903 the brewery was do­ing so well that the partners hired their German neighbors the Koch brothers to build a larger brick build­ing south of their original one. In those days they used gravity to move the beer from place to place as it brewed, so the north end of the new building had five levels—three above ground and two below. A lower section, on the south, was used for packaging— in kegs, and later in bottles.

When the new building opened, the business was renamed the Michigan Union Brewing Company in honor of the local union of bartenders and brewery workers, which represented the employees. Shortly after that, in 1906, the North­ern Brewery went out of business, leaving Michigan Union Brewing as the only brewery in town.

It delivered beer by horse and wagon to saloons and businesses all over Ann Arbor and as far away as Dexter and Saline, which also had large German populations. In 1915 the company acquired an Ann Arbor-made Star Truck and extended its delivery routes to Milan and Whitmore Lake.

The brewery also did home deliver­ies—or people could pick up beer at the brewery in their own containers. The late Harry Koch used to tell how as a young boy he was sent to the brewery by his dad, who was one of the Koch brothers, to fill a pail with beer for the construction crew's lunch.

Michigan adopted Prohibi­tion in 1918, a year ahead of the country as a whole. The brewery was renamed the Michigan Union Beverage Company and for a short time made near beer, but that didn't satisfy anyone. "The Germans wouldn't have anything to do with glorified hop water," says Will Frey. Many Germans made their own wine (you can still see their grape ar­bors around the Old West Side) or ob­tained bootleg products from Canada.

In 1920 Connor Ice Cream rented the building, since much of the equipment could be used for making ice cream (De­troit brewer Stroh's did the same thing). Florence Seitz Clark, who grew up across the street at 427 Fourth, reminisced in 1986, "The secretary at Connors ate her suppers with us. On weekends Connors al­ways had specials. If there was some left over, which there often was, she would bring us a quart for our supper. This was a real treat since otherwise we never had any. When she would come with a brown bag we knew what it was and got all excited."

When Prohibition ended in 1933, three local contractors, Chris Mack, Stanley Thomas, and Ed Bliska, decided to revive the brewery. They persuaded Jake Ludwig, a trained brewmaster who had moved to Pennsylvania to farm during Prohibition, to return to beer making. Ludwig was later replaced by Al Bek, who had gone to Germany to learn the trade.

The new business was not a union brewery, so it was named the Ann Arbor Brewing Company. Frey recalls that some­one tried to start a union but that no one was interested. "No one grumbled about the pay. It was good money in the Depres­sion," he explains.

The work was seasonal—heavier in summer, when the demand for beer was highest—so a lot of the crew was tempo­rary. It attracted young people like Frey who didn't mind sporadic hours, as well as farmers who needed a little extra work to help pay their taxes. Peter Marion recalls how his father, Alvin, came in three days a week from his farm near Saline to work the bottling line.

Frey began work­ing at the brewery in 1937, whence was just out of high school; he was hired because his half brother, Ted Ziefle, was the assistant bookkeeper. On his first day on the job he was put to work loading bottles into big crates in a small building, since torn down, in the back of the brewery. When brewmaster Al Bek saw him, he yelled, "What are you doing here?" It turned out Bek had two boys near Prey's age whom he had wanted to have the job. The next day Alvin and Dick Bek were both working there too; they and Frey became good friends.

Frey recalls that the brewery got hops from out west and grain from a Chicago grain dealer. He still remembers that every Christmas the Chicago dealer gave his family a big box filled with treats like cheese and sausage. They looked forward to the dealer's package so much that they opened it last.

Frey worked mainly in the bottling op­eration. Making the beer was very special­ized work and left to the brewmaster. Frey does remember that the mash was made in a big copper kettle, which could be seen out the back window of the main office. It was pumped up to the top floor and then sent down to the basement by gravity.

The bottling operation was semi-mechanized. The machines had to be constantly monitored, and at several points the bottles had to be transferred by hand. With all the moving, Frey admits, "there was a fair amount of broken glass in the brewery, but we also got pretty good at it. You learned fast, or you'd get all bloody."

Returned bottles were loaded onto a conveyor belt, where "they marched like little soldiers," in Prey's words, through the washing machine. It was Alvin Mari­on's job to watch the bottles as they came out to make sure that they weren't chipped and that the washer hadn't missed any for­eign objects, such as cigar butts, chewing gum, or pebbles.

The bottles were filled and capped by machine, but again they had to be watched carefully—if the pressure were wrong, the bottles wouldn't fill completely. "A bunch of us would stand around and drink half bottles," Frey says, "since it was very dif­ficult to put it through again."

Ann Arbor Brewing sold sev­eral brands: Cream Top, Old-Tyme, and Town Club. But according to Frey, they were actually all the same beer. He remembers they would attach la­bels in batches: "We'd start with, say, six hundred of Old Tyme, then three hundred of Town Club." Hazen Schumacher, who worked at the Pretzel Bell restaurant in the late 1940s, recalls that the brewery would also dye beer in novelty colors for holidays—red on Valentine's Day and green on St. Pat­rick's Day. But the only beer that was actually brewed differently was the bock produced each spring.

Brewery work­ers used a machine to attach the labels and to put a paper tax stamp on each bottle. Sometimes the machine got gummed up, which was not a big problem with labels but upsetting when it happened with the tax stamps: they were prepaid, so it was like throwing money away.

The final step was transferring the beer by hand into cases. These were made at the brewery, riveted together by the thou­sands. Frey recalls that they were so sturdy that they were used over and over, and were good for use on camping trips or as luggage for kids.

By this time, the beer was delivered farther afield. Frey says that besides near­by towns with German populations like Manchester, Stockbridge, and Milan, an Amish population in Ohio got shipments, and so did a pocket of German farmers in Texas.

In 1939 the brewery was purchased by a group of investors from Chicago. They sent Charles Ackerman, who Frey believes was the nephew of one of the investors, to oversee the operation. Ackerman, who is listed in the city directory as president, treasurer, and general manager, saw the brewery through its final decade; it closed in 1949, and the equipment was sold.

By then local breweries were either expanding or dying out as the beer industry consolidated—a trend that's continued ever since, most recently with a joint venture uniting Miller, Molson, and Coors. The brewery was sold to Argus Camera, which already owned two neighboring buildings.

The U-M bought the Argus buildings when the camera company left town in the 1960s. Beginning in 1965, the former Ann Arbor Brewing building was shared by Mathematical Reviews, a bibliographic journal that had just moved to Ann Arbor from Providence, Rhode Island, and the U-M's audiovisual education center. By then all traces of its former use were oblit­erated. "I was unaware that it had been a brewery until one of the movers told us that he had drunk a beer where our film library was going," recalls retired center employee George Williams.

Mathematical Reviews moved out in 1971, only to return in 1985, when it bought the building from the U-M. To make room for more parking, the journal removed the old shed in back where Frey worked the first day he arrived. The staff do, however, fully appreciate that they are in an old brewery.

"When I first came here and found out the building used to be a brewery, I in­terpreted it as a sign from God," recalls as­sociate editor Norman Richert. A beer buff whose first academic job was in Milwau­kee, Richert was delighted to learn from local historian Wystan Stevens that memo­rabilia from Michigan Union Brewing and Ann Arbor Brewing regularly come up for sale on eBay. He's since amassed a collec­tion that includes labels, bottles, a box, and a wooden beer keg.

Richert admits it was "a little disap­pointing" to hear, through Frey, that Ann Arbor Brewing's different brands were all the same beer. But he also points out that our standards in food and drink have be­come much more refined in recent years. "People thought of it more like a commod­ity then," he says. "You go get beer, you go get milk. You don't necessarily think what it tastes like."

He guesses the different labels may have been a way to appeal to different buyers—an early form of the steady blur­ring of consumption and marketing that has led to phenomena like Old Milwau­kee's Swedish Bikini Team. In contrast, he says, one of his Michigan Union Brewing bottles had a much simpler sales pitch: embossed in the glass is the motto "Pure and without drugs or poison."

That and the other items in Richert's collection may eventually be available for public viewing: He hopes eventually to start a small museum commemorating the building's beer-loving past.

[Photo caption from original print edition]: "There was a fair amount of broken glass in the brewery, but we also got pretty good at [handling bottles]" Will Frey recalls. "You learned fast, or you'd get all bloody."

[Photo caption from original print edition]: Mathematical Reviews associate editor Norman Richert bought most of his brewery memorabilia (above and below) on eBay—but the wooden keg was a gift from Harry Cross, whose father salvaged it from the building.

The garage at the center of the greenway debate

When the Washtenaw County Road Commission built a garage at 415 West Washington in 1925, no one dreamed that its future would ever be so hotly contested. But today, the Arts Al­liance of the Ann Arbor Area, Downtown Kiwanis, and the Allen Creek Task Force have all taken an interest in the crumbling masonry structure.

When the WCRC began operating in 1919, its offices were in the County Court­house, and the site on West Washington was a storage yard. By 1921, when former U-M All-American football player Ernie Allmendinger began working there, the commission maintained 104 miles of roads, only 8 miles of which were paved.

By 1925 it could afford its own build­ing—a simple concrete structure with of­fices above a garage. Three years later, the commission added a one-story workshop, and in 1930 the complex took on its pres­ent form with the completion of an addi­tional, brick garage.

By 1937 the WCRC staff was main­taining 1,411 miles of road. In an article written ten years later, Allmendinger re­called how three-person crews would go out and determine road and fence lines, of­ten with the help of property owners who showed them markers or deeds. The commission would then make im­provements, such as straightening roads, extending culverts, reshaping steep hills, and digging drainage ditches.

During the Great Depression, there was never enough time or money to do all that was needed. Then, in World War II, it was impossible to buy new equipment, or even parts for old equipment.

"We didn't have tools. We would work by hand, by shovel," recalls Thomas Kittel, who worked at the road commission after graduating from high school in 1944, and then again when he came back from the war in 1946.

In spring the challenge was to make muddy roads passable, mainly by spread­ing gravel. Then the crews had to grade the dirt roads to smooth out the ruts and potholes. If they didn't finish the road surfaces fast enough, "they would dry up harder than the devil," remembered one worker.

In the summer the challenge was the re­verse—keeping them from becoming too dusty. Washtenaw was the first county in the state to use liquid chloride to solve this problem. John Rayburn and Ernie Schel­lenberger worked on the first chloride truck. Rayburn recalls that he opened the tap that let out the chloride while Schellenberger drove.

Winter was the most challenging time. The crews would mix sand with flaky, sol­id chloride to keep the sand from freezing. During snowstorms, Carl Thayer's job was to stand at the back of the truck and push the sand onto a wheel that spread it onto the road. When Thayer got too cold, he would bang with his shovel on the back of the cab, and the driver would stop and let him come in to warm up.

WCRC employees fortunate enough to have indoor or part-indoor jobs—surveying, engineering, bookkeep­ing, purchasing, and personnel—worked on the second floor of the main building. Two other small county of­fices were also there: planning, with two full-time employees, and building inspections, with one. Eileen Westfall Gondak worked half time in each.

Gondak, who start­ed as a teenager in 1948, recalls that her boss, planner George Hurrell, "worried about the strip [on Washtenaw] between Ypsilanti and Ann Arbor. He said if we don't zone better, with greenways, we won't be able to tell when one city ends and the other begins." According to Gon­dak, "Everyone laughed, saying, 'Where are you coming from?'"

Road crews ran the gamut from foot­ball star Allmendinger to someone who couldn't read. Many were farmers who worked their fields in their off hours. Sum­mer help often included football players recruited by Allmendinger.

Thayer—who, like Rayburn, went to work for the WCRC in 1947 after serving in World War II—recalls that they alternat­ed between working fifty-five and forty-five hours a week. Every other Friday, when the men got their checks, many would go drinking at Prey's Cafe on West Washington and not be in shape to come to work on Saturday.

After World War II, the road commission slowly be­gan replacing its equipment. One acquisition was a truck that sprinkled sand automati­cally, so that the only crew needed was a driver sitting in a warm cab. The delighted Thayer was the first to use it. The old trucks, which were just barely functioning, were sold for scrap.

In 1965 the road commis­sion moved to a modern garage on Zeeb Road. It was right in the middle of the county and much closer to the areas where work was needed, especially after the freeways were finished.

The City of Ann Arbor took over the Washing­ton Street build­ing. Upstairs are offices for parks and recreation, forestry, parking, traffic engineer­ing, and Fairview Cemetery, along with the sign shop.

The first floor is still garage. Community Standards—the former parking enforce­ment office, now expanded to include neighborhood parking regulations and "clean community" violations—is also in the building.

This summer most of the building's op­erations will move to a new garage now being constructed on Stone School Road south of Ellsworth (Community Standards will move to the former Fire Station 2, on Stadium near Packard). There is a broad spread of opinions on the best future use of the building—or the site if the building is torn down.

The Allen Creek Task Force is divided three ways on the site's future use—be­tween tearing the complex down to form a park, tearing it down and building some­thing new on the highest portion of the land, and restoring the 1925 building for another use. Several groups are interested in the building, including Downtown Ki­wanis for its sales, and the Arts Alliance of the Ann Arbor Area for artists' studios. (See "Land War: The Three-Way Fight over the Future of Downtown," October 2006.) The final decision will be up to city council.

[Photo caption from original print edition]: (Above): Arts advocate Tamara Real and Kiwanian Dan Dever both want the eighty-one-year-old garage for their nonprofits. (Right) The building under construction in 1924, just five years after the Washtenaw County Road Commission began operating. (Below) Ernie Schellenberger and John Rayburn sprayed liquid chloride on dirt roads to keep down the dust.

From 1915 to 1943, Osias Zwerdling ran a fur store at 215-211 East Liberty. Sometime in the 1920s, he had an Art Deco sign—a twi­light scene of a wolf baying at the moon—painted on an ex­terior wall. Zwerdling always took pride in the fact that the sign was painted by a profes­sional artist, and its "painterly quality," says architectural conservator Ron Koenig, is probably the reason no one ever painted over it. But the main reason a group of peo­ple recently raised $12,000 to restore it is Zwerdling's role as patriarch of Ann Arbor's Jewish community.

Born in Brody, Austria (now part of Ukraine), in 1878, Zwerdling attended a yeshiva taught by his grand­father. His grandfather hoped he would become a rabbi, but Zwerdling's father died when he was three, and he had to work to help support his family. At age thirteen, he was apprenticed to a tailor.

As a young man, Zwerdling's dream was to immigrate to America. At age twenty-two, he got as far as Paris, where he worked for a year to save money for a steerage ticket and an English dictionary. (He studied the dictionary during the twelve-day voyage.)

Arriving at Ellis Island, he soon got a tailoring job in Buffalo. There he met Charles Schrain, an employee of Mack and Company, Ann Arbor's big depart­ment store, who convinced him to come to Michigan. Zwerdling moved to Ann Arbor in 1903 to work at Mack's as a ladies tai­lor, eventually creating his own line of women's clothes. He also worked with furs and so gained the distinction of being the first furrier in Ann Arbor.

In 1907 Zwerdling left Mack's to start his own store at 333 South Main. The same year he married Hannah Kaufman of Man­chester, England, whom he'd met on a busi­ness trip. (Like Zwerdling, the Kaufmans were originally from what was then Aus­tria.) In 1915, he built the store on Liberty.

Originally Zwerdling sold ladies clothes. But by 1918 his city directory ad mentioned "a full line of furs," and by 1926 he was dealing in furs exclusively. It was then considered the height of fashion for a woman to own a fur coat, and rac­coon coats were the rage among college students. In a 1944 paper for the Washtenaw County Historical Society, Zwerdling recalled, "Not long ago I would swear there were 5,000 coonskin coats walking about on the campus!"

When Zwerdling arrived in Ann Arbor, the city had just three Jewish families—too few to hold religious services. For his first decade here, he trav­eled to a synagogue in Detroit. But then on one Jewish holiday, according to Zwerd­ling's grandnephew, Marc Halman, a De­troit rabbi was hospitalized in Ann Arbor. He asked Zwerdling to gather a minyan, the quorum of ten Jewish men required to hold a service. To his surprise, Zwerdling succeeded—and realized that Ann Arbor's Jewish community had grown enough to support a congregation.

After meeting informally in Zwerd­ling's home for several years, Beth Israel Congregation was formally organized in 1916 by Zwerdling and five others: William Bittker, David Friedman, Israel Friedman, Philip Lansky, and David Mortsky. Zwerdling was elected the syna­gogue's president—a position he would hold for the next thirty-two years.

At first the congregation met in bor­rowed quarters, including the Schwaben Halle and the Ladies Library Association. The first building the synagogue owned was a small house on North Main, about where the Greek Orthodox church is to­day. As the congregation grew, Beth Israel moved to North Division, to Hill Street, and finally to its present location at 2000 Washtenaw Avenue.

Jewish college students from all over the country arrived at the U-M with Zwerdling's name as a resource. He might help them find a room, or a job, or simply invite them home for Friday dinner. He helped found Hillel in 1926—it was only the second such center for Jewish students in the country—and always insisted that Beth Is­rael's location be within walking distance of campus.

Zwerdling retired in 1943 at age sixty-five. He sold his business to Jacobson's, but most of his employees moved to Nagler's, the other Jewish furrier in town. The store was rented by Max Deess, own­er of Master Furrier, whose specialty was mink. Deess ran his store until the early 1970s, when he sold it to an assistant, who moved it to Lamp Post Plaza. Today, when there is nothing more politically incorrect than owning a fur coat, the only fur store listed in the Ann Arbor Yellow Pages is in Detroit.

Zwerdling lived for thirty-three years after retiring, and continued to be active in community affairs, serving on the boards of the Ann Arbor Federal Savings and Loan (now Great Lakes), the Boy Scouts, the Family Services Agency, the Commu­nity Chest, and the YMCA. He died in 1977, at the age of ninety-eight. Zwerdling was as "sharp as a tack until the end," says Helen Aminoff. She remembers him at­tending a board meeting where someone was giving a report on a piece of property the group was considering for a communi­ty center. Zwerdling, then in his late nineties, "sat, lips quivering. Sud­denly he looked up and said, 'Go back four pages. There's a mis­take in the calculations.' And there was!"

During his lifetime, Zwerd­ling retained ownership of the Liberty Street building, so the sign remained intact. But over the years it gradually deteri­orated, and although the sign had been designated an individual historic property by city council in 1988, no one had the money to restore it.

Jean King, whose law offices are upstairs in the Liberty Street building, became concerned about the sign and started working with Fay Woronoff. They enlisted the aid of Marc Halman and another Zwerdling grandnephew, John Weiss, as well as Louisa Pieper, staff director of the city's historic district commission. The group met over a five-year span in Woronoff's living room, first researching the best way to preserve the sign and then raising the necessary money from family members, foundation grants (Buhr and Taubman), and the community, espe­cially from members of Beth Israel and Beth Emeth, the Reform temple that split off from Beth Israel in 1966.

The restoration was done by the Seebohn Company, a firm that has worked on five state capitols, plus important buildings in London and Washington, D.C. Project director Ron Koenig, formerly of Greenfield Village, re-created the sign, using paint samples from the original to match colors. After repainting, he and his crew covered it with a glaze to soften it, dis­tressed it so it would look older, and put on a "sacrificial cover," which allows graffiti to be removed without damaging the paint­ing. A dedication reception will be held at Kempf House on Sunday, August 3, at 4 p.m.; afterward, participants are invited to walk over to the sign for a viewing.

An enthusiastic preservationist, Koenig was delighted when he first started work­ing on the sign and passersby approached him, saying things like, "You're not going to paint over the sign are you? I've been looking at it since I was a kid."

Painted when the coonskin coat was the height of cam­pus fashion, this sign has been restored to honor Beth Israel's founder.

A fortune built on waste paper

In 1911, George Langford took out a second mortgage on his house in order to start Economy Baler. The company, headquartered on North Main Street, grew to be the largest business of its kind in the world. In a 1943 Ann Arbor News article, Langford claimed that its success was "a direct result of the old system of free enterprise which not only permitted but encouraged the plowing of profits back into the business."

Economy Baler's motto was "turning waste paper into profit." In the early years of this century, corrugated cardboard began to replace wooden crates for shipping. While wooden crates could be used again and again, cardboard was hard to get rid of. Merchants would let it pile up in their basements, where it was a serious fire hazard, before eventually paying someone to haul it away. While paper mills were eager to get more paper waste and were willing to pay for it, the empty boxes were so light and bulky it seldom was worth the trouble to handle and ship them. Langford's invention changed that.

Langford learned about balers, and about business practices, from his uncle, Wendall Moore, manager of the Ann Arbor Machine Company on Broadway. The company made agricultural machines, including hay presses (see "The Broadway Bridge Parks," August). Langford began working for the company while living with his uncle and aunt in their big house on Moore Street, having come to Ann Arbor to attend high school. He held a variety of jobs; the last one, before he left to go on his own, was traveling by horse and buggy to county fairs to show farmers the firm's products. On one of these trips Langford heard that someone had invented a paper compressor. But the crude wooden contraption left him unimpressed.

Believing he could make a better paper compressor, Langford tried to convince his uncle to add one to his product line. When Moore refused, Langford decided to do it himself, quitting his job in 1911 to devote himself to his new enterprise. His only asset at the time was his house, on Greenwood, so he secured a $5,000 second mortgage on it. He spent $100 to build a prototype of a hand-powered metal baler. Using a picture of this single machine, he spent the rest of the mortgage money on advertising, offering to sell the baler for $50, with a $10 deposit. Within a month he had 100 orders. On the strength of those, he went to the First National Bank and asked for a $5,000 loan. They gave him $500.

With $1,500--the bank loan plus the money from his customers' deposits--Langford bought supplies and rented, for $10 a month, a small shop in the alley behind his uncle's business. At first he made the balers himself in the shop during the day. Evenings he worked at home on bookkeeping details. When the business began to take off, he hired a mechanic, Albert Wenk, to help him build the balers. Wenk later became a partner, buying a 1/15 interest for $600. In 1943, reminiscing about those early years, Langford said, "It was a tough job for a while, meeting the payroll on Saturday nights and counting on checks coming in from purchasers in time Monday to keep the company bank account in balance."

By 1912, Langford was in good enough shape to build his own shop at 1254 North Main. Economy Baler's first building was a 35 by 70 foot shed, large enough for fifteen employees. By 1916, the company had expanded into two additional stucco buildings complete with machine shop, forge shop, assembly line, printing, woodworking machinery, and electrical shop. At the north end he built a tall shed for his electric crane. Langford's son, Bob, remembers that the sign on its roof--"World's Largest Baling Press Mfgr."--was so large that it served as a landmark for early pilots.

As his business prospered, Langford became well known in town. Almeda Koebler, who worked as a cook for the Langfords in the 1930's, when they lived on Woodside Road and summered at Winans Lake, remembers Langford as a large man, partly bald, very friendly and outgoing. He loved jokes so much that he would pay people 25 cents to tell him a new one. He was also a practical joker. Anecdotes handed down include one about a chair in his office that collapsed when someone sat in it and another about rubber hooks on the wall that confounded first-time visitors when they tried to hang their coats on them.

By 1925, Economy Baler was able to claim that Ann Arbor made more baling presses than any city in the world. Langford employed 100 men who worked fifty hours a week year-round; had branch offices and salespeople in practically every important city in the country; and was continually adding new presses to handle everything from tin cans to tobacco.

In 1937, Economy Baler built a new office building facing Main Street. Architect Douglas Loree designed a "modernistic" building with glass block windows across the front. Bob Langford, who worked in the purchasing department of the new building, remembers that the glass block let in light but got so cold in the winter that frost sometimes formed on the inside.

Economy Baler continued to thrive after World War II, developing several more special balers including a huge cotton press and a scrap-metal baler that could swallow a whole auto body. By then George Langford was ready to retire. Bob Langford might have taken over his father's business, but although he had worked there, he did not feel right about going in as manager over the heads of older, more experienced people. So in 1945, George Langford sold his controlling stock, taking care to find a buyer who would keep the facility in Ann Arbor. (Bob Langford started his own Ann Arbor business and later developed properties on Huron View Boulevard and Research Park Drive.) George Langford died in 1956.

Economy Baler closed in 1976, when the last owner, American Baler Company, merged the Ann Arbor operation with their plant in Bellevue, Ohio. The company buildings were owned by Lansky's junkyard until 1978, when they were purchased by the Michigan Automotive Research Corporation. MARCO, which does contract testing of engines, transmissions, and vehicles, has adapted the buildings to its own uses. According to MARCO's Mike Boerma, the only indoor remnants of the buildings' original function are the welding outlets on the walls. The exteriors have been modernized, except for the structure closest to the river. It is still stucco, as it was in 1916, and the name painted on the wall is still discernible: "Economy Baler Company."

[Photo caption from original print edition]: Economy Baler founder George Langford believed in promotion: he spent $4,900 of his first $5,000 in capital on advertising. By developing a line of machines capable of baling everything from cardboard boxes to junk cars, Langford built Economy Baler into the largest manufacturer of its kind in the world--an achievement he boasted of in a rooftop sign so large that it was used as a landmark by early pilots.

[Photo caption from original print edition]: Twenty years after it closed, a single fading sign identifies the former Economy Baler complex, today home to the Michigan Automotive Research Corporation.

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.

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.