A local hangout for decades

Eighty years ago you couldn't buy a beer at the Village Tap—then known as Mary's Saloon—because of Prohibition. But in all other respects, the establishment was a bar and a village hangout. Customers would enter through a set of swinging doors, and after passing the candy, tobacco, and ice cream counters in front, they'd find a stand-up bar with a foot rail, surrounded by tables and chairs.

Mary's was named for its owner, Mary Singer. Customers "would sit around kibitzing, smoking a pipe, or chewing tobacco. They'd talk about farming or about old times," recalls Glenn Lehr, who worked there in the 1920s, when he was a teenager. He recalls interesting characters such as Dyke Lehman, who lived three doors north of the bar and hung out there most of the day, going home only to eat meals. Lehman used to tell of the gold rush (Lehr thinks it was probably the one in South Dakota), when he got rich by rolling drunks. "He'd help himself to any cash they had, gold nuggets or coins," says Lehr.

Customers entertained themselves with chugging contests, seeing who could swallow a near beer or a bottle of pop the fastest. (Lehr says he usually won because he had more practice.) They'd play euchre and other card games such as Five Hundred or Pedro. In the winter, people would come in after sledding or ice skating to warm up around the potbellied stove.

The saloon served two brands of near beer, a special brew allowed to ferment only to about 1.3 percent alcohol content; ginger ale, cream soda, and root beer; and soda pop in several flavors like lemon, strawberry, and cherry. Lehr recalls that orange, the most popular flavor, sold more than the rest put together.

Singer sold cheese sandwiches for a nickel and ham or pickled tongue for a dime. Lehr made the last himself, buying tongue from the butcher two doors up, mixing it with wine vinegar, sugar, and onions, and cooking it for four or five hours.

Kids came in after school to buy penny candy and ice cream. Since there were no freezers, the ice cream was delivered in ten-gallon steel containers packed in big wooden buckets filled with ice and salt. It came in three flavors: vanilla, chocolate, and strawberry. Lehr made ice cream bars using skewers borrowed from the butcher. He'd stick a paper cap from a milk bottle on the skewer, add the ice cream, and dip it in chocolate.

Wednesday and Saturday nights, when the farmers came to town, were the busiest times. Lehr was supposed to close the saloon at nine o'clock but usually didn't lock up until closer to eleven. The farmers bought a lot of tobacco. "All the farmers chewed," recalls Lehr. "They would buy ten or more packages at a time. Beech Nut was the favorite." Mary's also sold snuff, sweet tobacco, cigarettes, cigars, and pipe tobacco.

The Village Tap has been owned by the Stein family for the last twenty-five years. Today, brothers Chris and Jack manage it while their mother, Jeanette, enjoys semiretirement. Chris grew up in the bar, learning pool and euchre from customers. He's been there long enough to see people who were brought in by their fathers bringing in their own kids.

The menu has expanded greatly since Mary Singer's day. It now includes a roster of daily specials: soups, goulash, knockwurst, and the burgers for which the place is famous. But just as it was eighty years ago, the Village Tap is a local hangout.

Chris Stein says people often come in after softball, bowling, or golf. Lately, he's been organizing special events, such as the recent Oktoberfest held in the parking lot. "Now that Manchester is a bedroom community, people like a chance to meet," he explains. "Times change, but people are the same."

—Grace Shackman

Photo Caption: Chris Stein and Glenn Lehr.

A little bit of Americana

On the northern edge of Dexter, where the Huron River flows into town, stands the oldest cider mill in continuous use in the state, and one of the few still using wooden presses.

"We still have the original washer, grinder, and crusher," says Richard Koziski, who owns the Dexter Cider Mill with his wife, Katherine. "People from the Henry Ford Museum have been here to observe. We share stories back and forth."

The site has been used since 1836, when Peninsula Mills started grinding flour here. In 1838 a sawmill and wool plant were added. The plant made yarn for stockings and blankets.

In 1886, William Van Ettan and a Mr. Tuttle built the two-story red-painted wooden cider mill. Apples were delivered to the second floor, where they were washed and ground into a mash called "pomace" that fed the press on the first floor. The river provided water for the twelve-horsepower steam engine and also helped keep the finished product cool. An early record reports that the mill "ran day and night in 1887 and produced 100 barrels in 10 hours." The owners shipped the cider, along with jelly they also produced at the mill, to markets by railroad.

Michigan was, and still is, a good state to grow apples. "Known as the 'Variety State,' Michigan is fortunate to have the type of climate that provides cool nights to build flavor, sunlight for color, and rain to swell the apple," Katherine Koziski writes in the introduction to The Dexter Cider Mill Apple Cookbook.

Besides making cider to sell at market, the mill also pressed farmers' apples for their own use. Longtime Dexter residents remember seeing long lines of horse-drawn wagons (and later trucks) filled with apples as farmers waited their turn outside the mill.

"Cider was a substitute for water," says Richard Koziski. "Wells at the turn of the century were often shallow and became polluted." Farmers could also let their cider turn to vinegar for preserving or cleaning, or to hard cider for recreational drinking.

In 1900, John Wagner bought the mill. It stayed in the family for three generations, as his son Otto took over, followed by Otto's son Frederick. It was the Wagners who, in 1953, installed modem bottling equipment. Middle-aged people in Dexter remember earning extra money as schoolkids washing one-gallon glass bottles for a penny apiece. The mill also used to make pasteurized apple juice and grape juice, using grapes from the Paw Paw area.

After Frederick Wagner died in 1981, his widow, Katherine, continued to run the mill with help from her children until the Koziskis purchased it in 1987. The new owners have tried to keep the mill as historically authentic as possible. The only major change is an addition, built in the style of the mill, where the Koziskis' son-in-law, Roger Black, runs an upscale produce market.

The cider mill is open from mid-August to mid-November. The Koziskis buy their apples from small family-run farms, and the whole family pitches in to help—including Katherine Koziski's mother, who makes pies.

Fall is usually a frantically busy time—but it's also a lot of fun, says Richard Koziski. "It's a little bit of Americana," he says.

—Grace Shackman

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.

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.