Side by side, separate resorts catered to blacks and whites

People once came from all over southeastern Michigan to play golf, dance, swim, and fish at two resorts on neighboring lakes north of Chelsea. But the guests rarely mingled, because one group was white and the other was black.

Both resorts were established in the 1920s—Inverness, on North Lake, by a white former Detroit business owner, and Wild Goose Lake, a short hop away, by three black families from Ann Arbor. The latter was born in controversy. When word first got out that some farmers were considering selling their land to blacks, neighbors circulated a petition urging them not to do so. When grocer Perry Noah refused to sign—he reportedly told the petitioners, “My father died in the Civil War to free these people”—his store was briefly boycotted.

The sellers, descendants of the area’s original settlers, refused to be intimidated. And that is how dual resorts, each with its own country club and a beach, grew up almost side by side.

The land around the two small lakes, about five miles north of Chelsea, was first permanently settled in 1833. Charles and John Glenn and their sister Jane Burk¬hart came from upstate New York with their spouses and children. Charles Glenn reportedly had decided to move west after his first wife and two young children were killed when flax she was spinning caught fire.

The siblings bought adjoining tracts of government land and built houses. Charles Glenn’s original house at 13175 North Territorial Road still stands. John Glenn had a fancier Italianate house down the road. The Burkharts settled just south of Wild Goose Lake.

Other settlers quickly followed, enough to justify a post office at North Lake in 1836. That year the Glenn family organized a Methodist church. Nineteen people gathered at John Glenn’s house for the first service, with Charles Glenn presiding as lay preacher. Ten years later the two brothers built a small church that also served as a school. In 1866 John Glenn deeded land for what is now the North Lake United Methodist Church. He also gave land for a cemetery on Riker Road.

The land around the lakes, hilly and full of glacial gravel, was best suited to fruit farming. Charles’s son Benjamin Glenn went into the nursery business with his cousins William and Robert, starting apple trees from seeds they procured at a cider mill. (At Wild Goose Lake today, aged apple, pear, and cherry trees are the remnants of a much larger orchard.)

The local Grange built a hall that served as the community’s social center. The North Lake Band, which played in neighboring towns, was based at the Grange Hall from about 1897 to 1906. In 1925 the North Lake church bought the building for $1 and moved it to church property to use as a Sunday school, dining room, and kitchen.

In 1920, Doug Fraser, president of American Brass and Iron Company in Detroit, retired and moved to North Lake. Fraser had ulcers, and his daughter Lauretta had contracted whooping cough, tonsillitis, and diphtheria; he hoped farming would be a healthier way of life for them both.

Fraser and his wife, Laura, bought John Glenn’s seven-bedroom Italianate farmhouse from John’s grandson Fred Glenn. The dining room was so large, Lauretta Fraser Sockow remembers, that the family preferred to eat meals in the sunroom next to the kitchen.

Sockow, now in her nineties, remembers how she loved the rural area as a child. She attended the one-room North Lake School at 1300 Hankerd, now a private home. Her family joined the North Lake church and sometimes hosted barn dances, playing music on their Victrola. Fraser grew apples, strawberries, raspberries, and currants and also raised pigs, but his pride and joy, according to Sockow, was his registered cattle.

Unfortunately, her father eventually developed an allergy to them. “His arms swelled up to the size of a football,” Sockow recalls, and he had to sell his animals and machinery and find another way of making a living.
His property reached all the way to North Lake, so in 1927 Fraser decided to start a resort. Invoking his Scottish heritage, he called it Inverness and gave its streets such names as Glencoe, Aberdeen, and Bramble Brae. He divided the land between his house and the lake into lots for cottages and set up the deeds so that all owners would have lake privileges. He put in tennis courts behind his house, and he built a nine-hole golf course, expanding into additional land he’d bought along North Territorial Road. He moved his family to Ann Arbor and turned the former Glenn home into the golf course’s clubhouse.

Fraser’s gamble paid off. In the 1920s, greater prosperity and rising car ownership created a new demand for resort communities, even in once-remote areas like North Lake. Ads for Inverness noted it was “only sixty miles from Detroit,” and Fraser encouraged potential buyers to drive out for the day to sample activities, such as pony rides for children and dances for adults (the clubhouse living room was big enough to accommodate two sets of square dances simultaneously). Sockow remembers that one neighbor might play the piano and another the violin.
Sylvia Gilbert, who today lives in the house built for the farm’s hired man, says the original clubhouse “was gorgeous. There was a beautiful powder room upstairs, wicker furniture. You could eat in the dining room or the sun porch.” Gilbert recalls dances where people would dress in kilts, and Halloween parties with elaborate decorations. Her house has since been moved from its original spot to 7095 Glencoe, around the corner.

Inverness attracted people of means from Detroit and Ann Arbor. Doctors, dentists, and businessmen built large cottages. Laurence Noah, Perry Noah’s son, earned money by doing chores for the summer people, such as delivering wood and taking away garbage. In the winter, Laurence and his father cut ice from North Lake and stored it to sell in the summer.

A mile away, at Wild Goose Country Club, the members enjoyed the same amenities as at Inverness—swimming, dancing, fishing, and golf. But for the people who frequented it, Wild Goose represented a much rarer opportunity.

“Blacks had no place to go,” explains Mercedes Baker Snyder. Her father, Charles Baker, along with Donald Grayer and Iva Pope, bought the land and organized the resort. Baker, co-owner of the Ann Arbor Foundry, was interested in the venture because “he loved golf, and blacks couldn’t play at public courses,” explains Mercedes’s husband, Charles Snyder.
The partners developed the club on the 250-acre farm of Sam and Fred Schultz, who were descendants of the original settlers, the Glenns. The petition drive that residents of North Lake started to keep out the black resort community didn’t deter the Schultzes. After the sale was completed on June 1, 1927, the Wild Goose Country Club was formed, with ninety-three lots for cottages and a stretch of communal lakeshore with a fishing dock. As at Inverness, the original farmhouse eventually was converted to a clubhouse. A nine-hole golf course began behind the clubhouse and went across Wild Goose Lake Road toward the lake. A dance hall was built on a hill.

Pawley and Carrie Grayer Sherman, Charles Baker’s father- and mother-in-law, became the first residents when they moved from Ann Arbor to the farmhouse. Mercedes Snyder, who came out for weekends to visit her grandparents, remembers it had three bedrooms downstairs, two big living rooms, and a big kitchen, but no plumbing. Her dad would play golf while the children romped around, walked in the woods, or swam in the lake.
The first two cottages, one built by the Shermans, the other by Donald Grayer, were log cabins made from Sears Roebuck kits. A couple more cabins were built before the Depression. The rest of the eighteen or so members merely owned unbuilt lots, which sold for $100. “At that time most Ann Arbor blacks worked in fraternities or cafeterias,” explains Charles Snyder. “Fifty cents an hour was considered a good wage, so they couldn’t afford to build.”

Most of the members were relatives or friends of the organizers. A much larger group, consisting of other friends and extended family members, came to visit and swim, dance, or golf. Visitors often traveled for hours to get there; in those days there weren’t many recreational facilities open to blacks.

Coleman Castro used to come in the 1930s to fish with Don Grayer Jr., his future brother-in-law. Ann Arbor resident Donald Calvert recalls coming out in the late 1940s or early 1950s to swim with friends at Wild Goose Lake. Back then, he says, the resorts favored by his white classmates, such as Zukey Lake or Groomes Beach at Whitmore Lake, did not allow blacks.

In its heyday, Wild Goose hosted big dances organized by Jim and Harriet Moore (a Sherman daughter), who moved into the clubhouse after the senior Shermans moved out. The public dances attracted blacks from all over southeastern Michigan. U-M dentistry graduate D. J. Grimes, who was one of the first black dentists in Detroit and a cousin of Jim Moore, told his Detroit friends about the dances and also put Moore in touch with good bands. Ann Arbor residents would go home after the dances, but the Detroit visitors often stayed, sleeping in rooms the Moores rented to them, either in the clubhouse or in another house they built across the road.

The lakeside resorts’ golden age was brief. Once the Depression hit, “people didn’t need cottages. People didn’t need to play golf,” says Sockow. Sales at Inverness dropped so precipitously that her father had to incorporate and bring in other investors to keep going. Although he ceded control of the development to a board of directors, he kept managing the country club until his death in 1952.

Cottage building completely stopped at Wild Goose Lake during the Depression. The dance hall was knocked over during a big storm in the 1930s and was never rebuilt. Russell Calvert, Donald’s brother, remembers that the golf course was still there in the late 1940s and 1950s but had become less popular because by then blacks could play on municipal courses. It eventually fell into disuse and is now overgrown.

North Lake residents and Wild Goose Country Club members apparently reached a state of grudging coexistence after the failure of the initial petition drive. Wild Goose people patronized North Lake businesses and report they were treated well. But the two groups did not socialize much.
After World War II, building at both lakes resumed. The prewar cottages were winterized and often enlarged, and the old prejudices began to ease. In the 1960s a Wild Goose resident, Bessie Russell, joined the North Lake church. “They were glad to have her,” recalls Mercedes Snyder. “They needed someone to play the organ.”

Today, both former resorts have turned into bedroom communities where working people and retirees live year round. At North Lake, the Inverness Country Club is going strong, with a waiting list to join. Buying a house in the original subdivision bestows automatic membership. The clubhouse has been replaced with a more modern building that looks like a ranch house.

The Wild Goose clubhouse was sold and is again a home. Much of the communal land, including the golf course, has also been sold and is divided into residential lots awaiting development.

The biggest change at Wild Goose Lake is that the population is now about 50 percent white. “As older blacks die, young blacks don’t want to live in the country,” explains Charles Snyder. But residents still often have family connections—including some that cross the old color line. Members of one of the new white families are the in-laws of Coleman Castro’s son, Tommie.

7-5-1 Doug Fraser boating on North Lake with daughter Lauren “Courtesy Sylvia Gilbert

7-5-2 Glenn House, later the country club “Courtesy Sylvia Gilbert”

7-5-3 Inverness clubhouse today “Courtesy Adrian Wylie” 

7-5-4 Shirley, Sherman, Carl, and Mercedes Baker at Wild Goose Lake with their father, Charles, and grandfather Pawley Sherman. “Courtesy Mercedes Snyder”

7-5-5 Wild Goose sign “Courtesy Adrian Wylie”

7-5-6 Original plat for Inverness “Courtesy Sylvia Gilbert”

7-5-7 The first cottages at Wild Goose Country Club were log cabins built from Sears Roebuck kits “Courtesy Mercedes Synder”

7-5-8 Mercedes Baker Snyder and her husband, Charles, still enjoy the lake. “Courtesy Adrian Wylie”

"Not too many in Ann Arbor lived such a life," says Molly Hunter Dobson of her great-aunt and great-uncle, Carrie and Harry Boyd Earhart. The Earharts' 400-acre estate along the Huron River included a small golf course for "H. B." to practice his swing, forty acres of woods where he went horse­back riding, and formal gardens and a greenhouse where Carrie indulged her love of flowers. Today, most of the estate has disappeared, swallowed up by Concordia College and the Waldenwood subdivision. But the stone-walled mansion the Earharts built in 1936 still stands on Geddes Road near US-23. Newly renovated to serve as Concordia's administrative center, the man­sion and adjoining gardens will reopen with public dedications on June 16 and 22.

Born in 1870, H. B. Earhart made his fortune in the gasoline business. He was the Detroit agent for the White Star Refin­ing Company, a faltering oil company based in Buffalo, New York. Earhart bought the company in 1911 and moved its headquarters to Michigan--just as the automobile industry was taking off. Under his direction, White Star grew into a major enterprise, with a chain of gas stations and its own refinery in Oklahoma. Earhart eventually sold out to Socony Vacuum, later Mobil.

Four years into his retirement, at age sixty-six, Earhart decided to replace the farmhouse where his family had lived since 1920. Earhart's correspondence with his landscape consultants, the famous Olmsted firm of New York, reveals that Carrie Earhart had doubts about the proj­ect. Though she eventually went along with her husband's desire for a big house, she insisted that it be functional rather than gaudy or ostentatious. Their extended fam­ily would use every inch of it, from the basement pool room to the attic theater.

The mansion was designed by Detroit architects Smith, Hinchman, and Grylls, with input from the Olmsted firm. Its clas­sic, simple proportions were enhanced with elegant details that included a slate roof, copper eaves and detailing, and a Pewabic ceramic fountain. Outwardly traditional, the house incorporated the latest in modern technology. Beneath the limestone exterior (hand-chiseled to simulate age), its struc­ture was steel and concrete. It boasted what is believed to be the first residential air-conditioning unit outside of New York City, showers with ten heads, and vented closets with lights that went on when the door opened. There were bells every­where--Carrie Earhart never had to go more than ten feet to summon a servant.

The Earharts and their four children moved to Ann Ar­bor in 1916. "I always un­derstood that we did so be­cause Mother liked small town living, and Ann Arbor at that time had a population of only about 28,000, not counting the university," daughter Eliza­beth Earhart Kennedy explained in her 1990 memoir, Once Upon a Family.

The Earharts initially rented a house on Washtenaw Avenue. But within a year, they bought a historic dairy farm on Ged­des Road known as "the Meadows." Be­fore they could move in, World War I in­tervened. Feeling he should be closer to his business, H. B. moved his family back to Detroit for the duration. They used the farmhouse for vacations and getaway weekends until 1920, when they moved to Ann Arbor permanently.

By then, the three older children, Mar­garet, Louise, and Richard, had left for college. Elizabeth attended Ann Arbor High, but because the family lived so far in the country, she had to be driven each day by her mother's chauffeur. Embar­rassed, she had him drop her off two blocks from school so she could arrive on foot like everyone else.

H. B. Earhart kept the farm active, but he did promptly tear down the old barns, which according to Kennedy's memoir, "were too near for mother's fastidious nose." He had them rebuilt on the other side of Geddes at the corner of what would soon be renamed Earhart Road.

While vacationing in North Carolina the first year they lived at the Meadows, Elizabeth fell in love with horseback rid­ing. When they returned home, her father bought a pair of horses. Like his daughter, H. B. Earhart enjoyed riding, and although Carrie Earhart did not share their enthusi­asm, she contributed to their pleasure by having daffodils planted in the woods, which spread and naturalized. "She was to daffodils as Johnny Appleseed was to ap­ples," says her grandson, David Kennedy. Even today, residents of the Earhart subdi­vision tell of buying a house in the winter and being pleasantly surprised when the daffodils bloom in the spring.

H. B. and Carrie Earhart were both inter­ested in gardening. They established a for­mal garden behind the house and built a greenhouse behind the garage. To superin­tend it all, they lured to Ann Arbor a prizewinning horticulturist, James Reach. Born in Scotland, Reach was working on an estate near Philadelphia when the Earharts met him at a flower show in New York.

The late Alexander Grant began work­ing as a gardener for the Earharts in 1929. In an interview before his death in Janu­ary, Grant admitted that when he first came looking for work, he didn't know "a daffodil from an ice cream cone." But when Reach discovered that Grant had grown up near Edinburgh, his own birth­place, he hired him anyway.

Carrie Earhart was herself a serious gardener. She won prizes at national gar­den shows, served as president of the Michigan Federated Garden Club, and was cofounder of the Ann Arbor Garden Club. For two years in a row, she and Reach re­created part of the Meadows' garden on the stage of the Masonic Temple for the Ann Arbor Flower Show.

While the new house was being built, near the site of the old farmhouse, H. B. and Carrie went on a round-the-world cruise. Returning, they settled into their new home. H. B. filled the library with history books. On the walls of the library the Earharts displayed their art collection, which included origi­nals by Velazquez, Picasso, Millet, and Goya. Carrie enjoyed music, so the living room was dominated by a grand piano. She often hired members of the Detroit Symphony to perform for guests.

The house was decorated with treasures the Earharts had picked up on their travels. "They traveled more, and to more exotic places, than was then common," remem­bers great-niece Molly Dobson. Two huge oil portraits of the Earharts were displayed on the stairwell leading to the second floor. (The portraits hung in Ann Arbor's YMCA for many years, commemorating the Earharts' funding of the Y's residential wing, and are now in the conference room of the Earhart Foundation.) Upstairs, H. B. and Carrie each had a bedroom complete with dressing room and bathroom.

Two of the Earhart children, Richard and Elizabeth, lived on property adjoining their parents' estate. Richard farmed a piece of land just to the north known as "Greenhills." (The school of that name is now on part of his property, as well as Earhart Village Condominiums.) Eliza­beth, married to lawyer James Kennedy, lived west of her parents in part of an or­chard originally owned by Detroit Edison. The southern part of the orchard, running down to the river, was owned by H. B. Earhart's nephew, Laurin Hunter.

Hunter, who worked for Earhart, had originally planned to build a house on his property and had even hired an architect. But one day in 1935, Earhart rode up on his horse while Hunter was working and offered to give him the old farmhouse if he would move it. Although Hunter's property was close enough to be seen from the Earharts', it took three months to move the house--the hard­est parts were turning it at a ninety-degree angle and get­ting it over a ravine.

The Earharts enjoyed having family around and encouraged the younger generation to visit. A room in the basement was fixed up as a playroom, and the pool room--reached by a secret door in the library that looked like part of the bookcase--was a big draw. Grandson David Kennedy re­members having a lot of fun upstairs, too, in the attic theater, which included a stage at one end and a movie projection booth at the other. "We would play in the theater, just goof around," he recalls, "or watch family movies of kids hamming it--not Hollywood movies because there was no sound system."

Outdoors, they could swim, play tennis, or even golf. The area around the house was carefully landscaped. Grant recalled that the gardens included a peony-lined walk, a rose garden, a grape arbor, a gaze­bo, and a lily pond. Grape ivy grew along the back porch and espaliered apple trees were cultivated along the wall to the east of the porch.

Carrie Earhart died in 1940 at age sixty-eight after a short illness. A private fu­neral  was held in the home. Dobson remembers that the living room was filled with a great profusion of Easter lilies from her greenhouse and that Burnette Staebler, soloist at the First Presbyterian Church and a friend of the younger generation of Earharts, sang "I Know That My Re­deemer Liveth." A front-page obituary talked of Carrie Earhart's many contribu­tions to the community.

H. B. Earhart stayed on in the house af­ter his wife died, keeping busy with his many interests and charities. With more time on his hands, he would frequent the greenhouse lounge, reading or talking to Grant, who had become the greenhouse manager after Carrie Earhart's death. Grant described Earhart at this time as a "tall, stately man, very upright, very delib­erate in what he said, and what he said he meant. He wasn't a man who spent time gossiping, he was very serious."

When Earhart had visitors, he often brought them to the greenhouse. Over the years Grant recalled being introduced to many prominent citizens, including Henry Ford, society people, and a physicist from Stanford who was working on the atomic bomb. One day when Grant was edging the driveway, he heard sirens approaching. He looked up to see a police motorcade escorting then Michigan governor Kim Sigler, who was coming to visit Earhart. 

Earhart was involved in many charity works as well. Although he was a member of the First Methodist Church, he took an interest in the nearby Dixboro Methodist Church, where he was friends with the minister, Loren Campbell. Campbell re­membered that when the church needed an addition, Earhart offered to match the con­tributions made by the congregation.

Although much of his charity was not publicly known, Earhart was very re­spected in the community. Campbell re­called in an interview before he died that when Earhart and his sister (Josephine Hunter, who lived with her son Laurin) came to church in Dixboro, there would be a buzz in the community as if a celebrity were visiting.

H. B. Earhart died in 1954 at age eighty-three after suffering a heart attack. He was buried beside his wife in Botsford Cemetery on Earhart Road. His obituary, like hers, was front-page news. Among other accomplishments, the obituary mentioned his support for industrial education and his role as a prime mover in the cre­ation of the Huron-Clinton Metropolitan Authority, which is responsible for the string of parks still enjoyed today. The Earhart Foundation, which he started in 1929, is still in existence, mainly funding educational projects. After Earhart's death, his son Richard ran the foundation; it is now headed by David Kennedy.

In the early 1960s, the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod bought the land for Concordia College from Richard Earhart and the house from the Earhart Founda­tion. The campus, designed by architect Vincent Kling in a 1960s modern style, was dedicated in 1963.

Over the decades, Concordia has grown from a two-year college to a four-year col­lege with an enrollment of 600 students. Now, thanks to a gift from Fred Schmid of Jackson, who donated the money as a memorial to his father, the college has the resources to restore the Manor, the name it uses for the Earharts' house. "We don't have to tear down a lot to bring it back to its former glory," says Chris Purdy of Archi­tects Four. Most of the design features, such as the Pewabic tiles in the bathrooms and the carved wood in the dining room, are still there. The room lay­out will remain the same except for the addition of an eleva­tor, necessary to make the house handi­capped accessible.

The downstairs rooms--the living room, dining room, and library--are be­ing adapted for public uses such as meetings, receptions, or wait­ing rooms. H. B. Earhart's bedroom will be the office of Concordia president James Koerschen, while Carrie Earhart's will be a conference room. The basement pool room will serve as another conference room. The third floor, left pretty much as it was as a theater, provides a perfect meeting place for the Concordia Board of Regents.

Restoration of the gardens is being planned by HKP Landscape Architects. At first it looked like a simple project of putting in plants that would have been used in the 1930s, but as more information surfaces from the Olmsted archive and from those who remember the gardens, a more authentic restoration is now possible.
 
Concordia plans to make the renovated Earhart Manor available to the community for events such as conferences, meetings, or weddings. "We're looking forward to giv­ing it back to the community in Ann Arbor to use and enjoy," says Brian Heinemann, Concordia's vice-president for finance and operations, who is in charge of the project. "It'll be the front door to the college as it was the front door for the Meadows." The work on the house is scheduled to be com­pleted in June. Public dedications are planned for the evenings of June 16 and 22, following church services.

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[Photo caption from original print edition]: H. B. Earhart with grandson James Kennedy Jr. He was sixty-six and already retired from the gasoline busi­ness when he built his dream house. He looked up to see a police motorcade escorting then Michigan governor Kim Sigler, who was coming to visit Earhart.

Its headquarters on Fifth Ave. attracted hoboes and passersby alike

Saturday night was once the busiest time of the week for Ann Arbor merchants, because that was when farmers would drive to town to do their weekly errands. As families milled about, shopping and catching up with the news, the Salvation Army brass band would march from the army's headquarters at Fifth and Washington up to Main Street, playing hymns and summoning the crowds to open-air services.

"It was part of Saturday in Ann Arbor," says John Hathaway, who grew up here in the 1930's. He remembers that when he attended Perry Elementary School as a child, Salvation Army kids were always eager to enroll in the music program so they could prepare for playing in the band.

Mary Culver recalls that when she was in college, the band would stop outside bars frequented by students. After a few hymns, a band member would come through the bar with an upside-down tambourine, collecting money as the students sang, "Put a nickel in the drum, save another drunken bum." Culver remembers it as a good-natured scene, but doubts that the Salvation Army got much money, since the students of that era had little to spare.

Virginia Trevithick, a retired Salvation Army employee and a former band member, recalls, "It was a nice little band, about fifteen members, all good musicians. On Saturday when the stores stayed open late we held street meetings in front of Kresge's at Main and Washington [now Mongolian Barbeque]. There would be a big crowd."

William and Catherine Booth held the first Salvation Army street meetings in England in 1865. Designed to attract people who would not attend more conventional churches, the Booths' services combined elements of the English music hall and religious evangelism. Finding that it was hard for people struggling to survive to even think about religion, the Booths also began the Salvation Army's social ministry, providing food and shelter for those in need. They organized along military lines to establish clear lines of command, and in an age characterized by a love of the military, the style appealed to many recruits.

The Salvation Army arrived in the United States in 1880, and the Ann Arbor branch was founded in 1896 by a Captain Gifford and a Lieutenant Handicott. An Ann Arbor News article forty years later reported that one of their original recruits, William Hatfield, was still active, especially at meetings held at the County Farm (the poorhouse). Services were also held at the county jail. It took a while, both nationally and locally, for the Salvation Army to be appreciated for the good work it did, and in the early days members were frequently abused. Ann Arbor lore includes stories of their being pelted with stones, rotten eggs, and tomatoes. According to one account, a businessman once drove his horse and buggy right through a band of Salvation Army soldiers.

In its first three decades, the army met in various rented quarters downtown. By 1926, after a fund drive, it was able to build a permanent headquarters downtown. A 1940 paper in the Bentley Library, written by one of Emil Lorch's architecture students, Beth O'Roke, attributes the design to a Chicago architect, A. C. Fehlow, who was a friend of the district commander. According to this paper, Fehlow went on to design many other army headquarters in the Midwest.

Fehlow put the main entrance right on the corner, accessible from either Washington or Fifth. The office was just inside and up a half-flight of stairs, easy for transients and people in need to find. Beyond that was the sanctuary, which held 150. The floor above was used for Sunday school, Bible classes, and youth activities; the lower level was a caretaker's apartment and a room for donated clothes and household goods.

Originally, the local Salvation Army took as its province family welfare. When the United Way was formed in 1921, the army, as a charter member, agreed to concentrate on offering emergency help. Local families hit with unexpected misfortune might be given food and clothing, furniture and dishes. The army also ministered to transients seeking help. Trevithick remembers that the "hoboes" who rode the rails during the Depression would get off at Ann Arbor and walk up to the Salvation Army, where she would give them vouchers good in certain restaurants. She sent those needing a bed for the night to a boardinghouse at 501 North Main. "They were never a bother, just once or twice," she says of the transients.

In addition to people in need, the central location drew passersby. For instance, Marion Lutz was walking by one day and, hearing the music, went in and was warmly welcomed. She eventually became very active. Later, her husband, William Lutz, a Methodist minister, became a counselor at Arbor Haven, the Salvation Army's shelter for homeless families.

After fifty years, the army outgrew the downtown space, and like many other churches, moved to where there was space to expand and to park. In 1978 they dedicated their new citadel on West Huron at Arbana. Paul Wilson, commander at the time, explains that the new facility was about double the size of the old one and handicapped-accessible, so they could offer a fuller senior program, serve meals rather than send people off with vouchers, provide office space for six social workers, and offer craft space and a gym.

The Salvation Army still has a band, but it no longer plays on street corners. That ended in the 1940's, Wilson says, the victim of increased traffic and the high cost of insurance.

The army's social service has become more sophisticated over the years. Says the current local co-commander, Gary Felton (who shares the office, literally and figuratively, with his wife, Karen Felton), "Where it used to be a bag of groceries and God bless you, now we try to figure out why they come in week after week." But in many ways the Salvation Army is the same as always. Members still visit hospitals and nursing homes. They still give toys to needy children at Christmas and clothes at Easter. And they still collect money in kettles at Christmas. The kettle drive, begun in 1892 in San Francisco, provides half of the local budget. The rest is supplied by United Way, contributions, and money from their congregation.

The army sold its downtown building to Dr. Michael Papo, who redid the inside and built an addition on what had been the parking lot on Fifth Avenue. The only reminders of the building's first use are the cornerstone, which states "Erected to the Glory of God in 1926," and the Salvation Army logo on the top of the center tower.

Four stained-glass windows that originally graced the tower were moved to the new sanctuary in 1979. Up where two of the windows once were, Jeffrey Michael Powers takes advantage of the natural light to use the space as a makeup area in his beauty spa. Although his use is entirely different, Powers says he appreciates the building's history: "A rental point was that the building was graced by the presence of God for a moment."

[Photo caption from original print edition]: The only reminders of the building's first use are the cornerstone, which states "Erected to the Glory of God in 1926," and the Salvation Army logo on the top of the center tower.

[Photo caption from original print edition]: From 1926 to 1978, the Salvation Army worshiped God and ministered to the poor from the corner of Fifth Avenue and Washington Street.

He's one of the nation's leading antique plant specialists

Walking by Scott Kunst's house on Third Street on the Old West Side, you might guess that the owner had more than a passing interest in historic landscaping. Up front are a wrought-iron planter and carpet bedding, both authentic Victorian styles. Peering at the backyard, you can see a more relaxed, early twentieth-century garden with some of Kunst's favorite plants--early pinks, irises, peonies.

In fact, Kunst is a nationally recognized expert in old-fashioned plants. He runs a rapidly growing business, Old House Gardens, out of his home, with the help of his wife, Jane, their nine-year-old son, David, and a few part-time helpers in the busiest season.

Since he founded Old House Gardens in 1983, Kunst has invented his own career, taking what for many would be a hobby and finding ways to make it pay. An English teacher at Scarlett Middle School for the last nineteen years, he went down to half-time four years ago as his business began to take more of his time. Last spring he took the final leap, buying out his retirement in order to devote all his time to his business. "It's riskier all on my own," he says, "but I like the unpredictability."

An avid gardener since childhood, Kunst became interested in historic plants when he moved into an 1874 home in Ypsilanti's Depot Town area and tried to put in a garden that fit the house's age. He started with the remnants he found still there--a privet hedge, tiger lilies, and single white peonies--the botanical equivalent of antiques in the attic. The next step, trying to figure out what else should go with them, was more difficult.

Although there were many books on period house styles and furniture, he found very little on Victorian gardens. He ended up doing a lot of original research, scanning photographs of period homes to see what was planted in the yards, reading old magazines to see what plants were discussed, and hunting down out-of-print books and old seed catalogs.

Kunst received an enthusiastic response when he began sharing his knowledge of antique gardens. He has since lectured from Nantucket to Omaha and given advice on historic gardens all around the Midwest, including such prestigious sites as Greenfield Village and Meadowbrook. A recent project was the Bloomington, Illinois, garden of David Davis, a Supreme Court justice appointed by President Lincoln. Kunst traced the garden's history through letters from Davis's wife and a plan done by a great-nephew in the 1920's.

Kunst has been adept at finding his niche. Three years ago, when he began selling antique plants directly, he limited himself to bulbs because he knew that no other nursery was selling them and that the regular nurseries were eliminating more varieties every year.

Kunst's bulb varieties were first introduced anywhere from 1500 to 1920; he finds them in obscure nurseries around the country and even abroad. (After the fall of the Iron Curtain, he found a grower in Latvia who had three varieties of crocus that Kunst had read about but never seen.) He sorts bulbs in his basement and runs the mail-order business from an office at the back of the first floor. He doesn't grow any of the bulbs he sells, but he does use part of his garden and those of a few lucky neighbors to test them.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Literature meets real life

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bodice rippers and beyond

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Booked for fun

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Food for thought

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

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

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

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

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

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

Providing affordable housing for fifty-four years

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What went on at the fairgrounds the other fifty-one weeks of the year

For four days each fall from 1922 to 1942, Veterans Park was the site of the Washtenaw County Fair. The forty acres bounded by Jackson, Maple, and Dexter roads were filled with exhibits and events, including music, fireworks, and horse racing. The race horses were stabled near the track on the corner of Dexter and Maple, while show horses were on display in an exhibit barn near Jackson and Longman Lane.

The other fifty-one weeks of the year, the show barns turned back into Guy Mullison's riding stable. "Shorty" Mullison was only about 5 feet tall--so small, recalls retired U-M phys ed prof Marie Hartwig, that he looked incapable of governing a horse. "But the horse would do whatever he asked. You felt if he asked it to sit down and cross its legs, it would."

Born in 1876 in New York State, Mullison moved to Michigan with his family when he was five. As a young man, he ran the City Ice Company out of the barn behind his house at 326 East Ann (now part of the City Hall parking lot), using horse-drawn delivery wagons. He also had a part-time job taking care of the fire department horses, which were housed around the corner in the old fire station at Fifth Avenue and Huron.

Mullison started his stable in 1914 out of his home and for a while ran the ice company concurrently; he probably used some of the same horses. "It was popular," Hartwig recalls. "The horses were always out. I would get on a horse and go clopping through town until I came to the country. If a car came behind, I would get on the side. I remember being in some precarious positions until the car got by."

After the County Fair moved from what is now Burns Park to what is now Vets Park in 1922, Mullison moved the main part of his stable operation from his home out to the new fairgrounds. With the move, his customers no longer had to ride out to the country--they were already there. The Maple Village and Westgate shopping center sites were still farms, and even to the east there were open fields all the way down to the Eberwhite Woods.

When he moved, Mullison increased his stable from six horses to thirty. People who rode them still remember many of them by name: tall, plodding Ted, calm Barney, lively Jimmy McCracken, the beautiful Anne's Navy Girl, and the terrible Dickey Boy, who tried to knock his riders from the saddle.

Mullison also boarded a number of horses, including one belonging to the daughter of his vet, Dr. Lane, and Topper, which belonged to riding instructor Bertha Lyon. The boarders had their own box stalls, while most of Mullison's own horses were in standing stalls.

Mullison converted the box stall closest to the door into an office. A second fairgrounds barn served as an indoor riding area. Although respected as a good businessman (he counted Henry Ford and U-M president Alexander Ruthven among his friends), Mullison could not read or write--his wife, Gladys, did all the accounts.

Marty Ball, who as a teenager worked at the stable in exchange for a chance to ride the horses, remembers that people came every day, even in winter, to ride. If they rented the horse for an hour, they would usually ride in the area where Abbot School is now. If they had more time, they would go down to the Huron River, either straight north on Maple or out Miller to East Delhi--both Miller and Maple were still dirt roads with very little traffic.

Mullison also supplied horses for special events, including the National Guard's summer maneuvers in Grayling. Betty Smith remembers him painting one of his white horses red, white, and blue for a Fourth of July parade.

During the Depression, Mullison joined forces with horsewoman Bertha Lyon. Like Mullison, she had grown up on a farm and had always loved horses. (She told her daughter, Roberta Barstow, that as a child she used to tie horseshoes to her feet and pretend to be a horse.) Lyon arranged with the University of Michigan to offer riding in their physical education program. Hartwig remembers that the classes were very popular.

On Saturdays Lyon offered an all-day program for young people--mostly pre-teen girls at the horse-crazy stage, but some as young as five--whom she would pick up at their homes. Each would bring a bag lunch and dress appropriately in jodhpurs and boots. Dorothy Coffey still remembers Lyon's drill: "Knees in, heels down, back straight, hands up." In the summer, Lyon ran an informal riding camp at the DeForest farm, near Dixboro and Geddes roads (now Village Green apartments); she used six or eight of Mullison's horses, which she kept in a corral made of saplings. Students would ford Fleming Creek, ride through the woods and up a hill, and then canter across a field.

Lyon's alumnae rave about the experience even today. Coffey remembers how she waited all week for Saturday to come and how she would return home exhausted but happy. She says that Lyon "gave us a love of horses and fair play."

With the move, Mullison's customers no longer had to ride out to the country--they were already there. The Maple Village and Westgate shopping center sites were still farms, and even to the east there were open fields all the way down to the Eberwhite Woods.

Also fondly remembered are the excursions organized out of the stable: breakfast rides ending with coffee and doughnuts at the Mullison house on East Ann, supper rides ending at what is now Delhi Park to roast hot dogs, and moonlight rides--a favorite with the college kids. Lyon or an≠other stable employee would lead the expeditions, and Shorty and Gladys Mullison would meet them at the destination with food and supplies. Isabelle Reade, who began riding at age eight to strengthen her legs after recovering from polio, remembers a ride that ended up at a one-room school, where they played on the teeter-totter.

When it came time for the County Fair, Mullison moved his horses out of the barns, except for a few that might be needed by people entering riding competitions. Some would already be at Lyon's summer camp. Others were taken to a pasture on the Huron River near North Main Street.

Mullison died of a heart attack in 1941 at age sixty-four. The Jackson Road County Fairs lasted only a year longer. After the war the property was sold to the city for a park, and in 1955 the exhibit barns--by then considered a fire and health hazard--were torn down.

Bertha Lyon died in 1960. After she left Mullison's she set up her own stable on Joy Road, where she broke and trained many horses. She had a high reputation in the field, and her trainees won awards in shows all over the country, including Madison Square Garden. A horse named Cherokee Chieftain, who started out in Mullison's stable and was broken and trained by Lyon, went on to become famous as the Lone Ranger's horse, "Silver."

[Photo caption from original print edition]: (Left) "Shorty" Mullison on horseback at his Ann Street home. The riding stable grew out of an ice delivery business based in a barn behind the house. (Right) Mullison joined forces with riding instructor Bertha Lyon during the Depression. Lyon (top, far left) and students posed at Mullison's Stables at the county fairgrounds.

Layers of paint conceal Eli Gallup's monument to George Washington

"The Rock" at Washtenaw and Hill was placed there sixty years ago by Eli Gallup, the parks superintendent who virtually created the city's parks system during his forty-five-year tenure (1919-1964). Gallup had a love of interesting rocks and a highly developed scavenging instinct.

He happened upon the mammoth limestone rock at a county landfill on Dhu Varren Road near Pontiac Trail. Attracted by its size and the glacial scratch marks on its surface, Gallup thought the rock should be displayed in a public place. George Washington's two-hundredth birthday was being celebrated, amid much fanfare (he was born February 22, 1732), and Gallup decided to make the rock a bicentennial monument to the first president. City council agreed to support Gallup's idea with a frugal allocation of $15, and he also received an unspecified contribution from the Daughters of the American Revolution.

Gallup chose to put the rock on a triangle of land between Washtenaw and Hill that the city had owned since 1911. Winifred Favraux, granddaughter of dentist Louis Hall, who donated the land, remembers that her grandfather had retained title to the land after an unsuccessful stint at berry farming in order to prevent the development of a gas station rumored to be in the offing. He then gave the land to the city for a park.

Gallup buried a time capsule containing information about 1932 in a lead box on the site, then built a cement pedestal on top of it to hold the rock. He moved it one cold February day, borrowing a heavy-duty Detroit Edison truck to carry it, and ties and jacks from the Michigan Central Railroad to lift it. His wife, the late Blanche Gallup, remembered in a 1967 interview, "They had to wait until the ground was frozen before they could begin or else the truck would have sunk into the earth. Then they had to get it up on a rise and roll it down to the spot where it is now." A crowd of about thirty, including Gallup's seven-year-old son, Al, watched the rock put in place.

Seven years later, Gallup added a marker designed by local artist Carlton Angell. Students from the University High School, including Gallup's older son, Bill, cast the plaque under the direction of their industrial arts teacher, Marshall Byrn. They used copper and other metals that Gallup had salvaged from the city's several landfills.

Gallup put up several other rocks around town during his tenure as parks superintendent: on Huron near First, to commemorate the founding of Ann Arbor; at Gallup Park, near the lake (since moved to the entrance); and at the fork of Jackson and Dexter, to mark an old Indian trail. (This one was recently moved to Vets Park after a car drove into it, with fatal results.)

Rocks weren't the only interesting artifacts Gallup scavenged for the parks. After an interurban demolished the Farmers and Mechanics Bank in 1927, he salvaged the building's pillars and put them up at the Miller Street entrance to West Park. For years, he kept an old millstone he found on Huron River Drive, intending to use it for a water power museum.

Gallup also kept an eye on the city's land transactions, having learned firsthand how it worked when he subdivided his own farm. He kept track of land that would make good parks and tried to acquire it before the price went up (according to Al Gallup, he wouldn't have waited for a Black Pond or Bird Hills situation to develop). He added Huron Hills Golf Course and Fritz, Gallup, Allmendinger, Hunt, Buhr, Frisinger, and Veterans parks to the city system.

Hunt and Buhr parks were both donated to the city. (Gallup had trouble convincing city council to take the land for Buhr--they thought it was too far out in the country for a park!)

Students began painting the Washtenaw rock sometime toward the end of Gallup's tenure as parks superintendent. Favraux, who lived in her grandfather's house on the corner of Hill and Washtenaw in the years before the painting began, recalls that her son, Paul, and his neighborhood friends enjoyed climbing on the rock on Sunday afternoons. But sometime in the mid-1950's the painting began, making climbing on it or even playing around it almost impossible.

The late Rozella Twining, who lived across the street on Cambridge recalled the first incident in a 1987 letter to the editor of the Ann Arbor News. "About 30 years ago my husband, Herb, and I were returning from Farmers Market on the Saturday morning of THE game. And there on our lovely rock . . . were three big green letters: M.S.U. My husband nearly jumped from his car. He had seen nothing so scandalous in his lifetime."

In spite of such reactions, people continued to paint the rock. At first the parks department tried to clean it up after each new assault, but soon gave up the losing effort. Today it is painted so often that it usually feels wet.

Most painters are college students from nearby fraternities and sororities, but younger students, even nursery school children, and older townsfolk have also been seen at work. Messages vary from Greek letters and romantic name pairings to political slogans, birthday wishes, athletic victories, and nonsense letters meaningless to the uninitiated.

As for the marker, it is still there, buried under many layers of paint. It was last seen in 1982, when Brian Durrance, an Ann Arbor native then attending MSU, spent two days chipping off the paint to expose the lettering: "To George Washington this memorial erected in celebration of the two hundredth anniversary of his birth, 1932."

[Photo caption from original print edition]: Parks superintendent Eli Gallup found the Rock in a landfill on Dhu Varren Road. With a $15 appropriation and a borrowed Detroit Edison truck (above), he moved it to the corner of Hill and Washtenaw in the winter of 1932. The tradition of constantly repainting the Rock (right) apparently began with a surreptitious "MSU" painted before a football game in the 1950's.

When gardening was a civic cause

When the Matthaei Botanical Gardens organized the 1990 Ann Arbor Flower and Garden Show, they revived a local tradition that had lain dormant for forty-nine years. From 1926 to 1941 Ann Arbor was the site of twelve garden shows, beginning with a members' competition organized by the garden section of the U-M Faculty Women's Club and growing to a sophisticated community-wide effort.

When the original shows were held, a number of leading citizens were dedicated gardeners. In what was then a smaller, more close-knit town, the serious gardeners were all known to each other, and they saw gardening not only as a hobby but as a cause. In 1937, a front page article in the Ann Arbor News called on "every man, woman and child" to join the gardening movement so "the entire community will gain in beauty, will become a more delightful place in which to live and work."

The first flower shows were internal club events for members to compare their garden output, and only a few hundred people came. The change to a community event began in 1931 when the Faculty Women's garden club invited the Ann Arbor Garden Club and the garden section of the Ann Arbor Women's Club to host a joint show that would be open to everyone. They recruited a token male, Dr. Louis Hall, a prominent dentist, to be chairman. (He had an old-fashioned English garden, complete with hollyhocks by the side door, at his house at 1530 Hill.)

The new format encouraged serious male hobbyists to become involved, including contractor Carl Weinburg, whose peony gardens off Lutz were a showplace of the city; hardware merchant Andrew Muehlig, who had a beautiful garden at his old red brick house at 609 North Fifth Avenue; tailor Samuel Burchfield, known for his glorious irises; Dr. A. S. Warthin, whose garden was well set off by the stone wall he built along Ferdon; and Charles Harris, proprietor of the Harris Seed Company at 303 South Main.

During the 1930's, shows were held in Harris Hall, in the Masonic Temple on Fourth Avenue (since torn down to make room for the Federal Building), and finally in the U-M's Yost Field House.

Though the core group was made up mainly of wealthy citizens who employed professional gardeners, the organizers encouraged as many people as possible to become involved. The shows were always held in June and so featured the flowers then in bloom--roses, peonies, irises, and delphiniums. Along with species flower judging, other competitions that anyone could try their hand at were tea table arranging, shadow boxes, miniature gardens, flower arranging, landscaping, and photography.

Special exhibits varied from year to year. The 1934 show featured a "Wayside Garden," similar to one planned by Mrs. Henry Ford for the North American Flower Show in Detroit, which showed the best way for farmers to arrange their goods for sale. The next year a "French Market" of potted plants, cut flowers, nosegays, and window boxes was designed and equipped by Mrs. Rollin Drake (women were always called by their husbands' names), reproducing as far as possible the flower and vegetable markets she visited on her trips abroad. In both 1935 and 1936, Mrs. Harry Boyd Earhart, with the assistance of her gardener, James Reach, re-created her June garden on the Masonic Temple stage.

For the 1939 and 1940 shows, held in Yost Field House, Dr. George Ross, assistant professor of landscape design, transformed the gym area into a scene of outdoor beauty, with paths, trees, and even a fountain and reflecting pool. Many individuals and groups set up imaginative displays--an all-white garden by Mrs. and Mr. James Inglis, a trout stream complete with fish by Dr. and Mrs. Harry Towsley, and a re-creation of Ann's Arbour (the apocryphal scene of the city's naming) by the Northwest Civic Association.

The event was a lot of work, but it was obviously also a lot of fun, both before and during. Large numbers of volunteers, divided into committees to plan each part of the show, worked almost all year. They met at each other's houses, often staying for tea or a light lunch. Some took field trips to other garden shows, particularly to Chicago.

The show was an excuse for a lot of out-of-town visitors--each of them, in true small-town fashion, listed in the Ann Arbor News. Many were relatives of the show's organizers or representatives from other cities' garden clubs. In 1940, Mrs. Henry Ford attended, and a lunch was given in her honor, hosted by that year's chair, Mrs. Frederick Coller of Wallingford Road. Another distinguished visitor was author Carl VanDoren, who while visiting the university was persuaded to open the show. Attendance totaled an impressive 14,500.

The last show was held in 1941 at the cloisters of the university law school. Because of the impending war, it was a much scaled-down version of earlier shows and lasted only one day. The News, which always gave the garden show excellent coverage, was loyal to the end, reporting that it was "beautifully done and unique but on a smaller scale that proved as satisfying and attractive."

The flower show was revived as a fund-raiser for the U-M Matthaei Botanical Gardens last year. Both it and the upcoming 1991 show, to be held April 11-14 at Yost Field House, while modeled on past shows, also show changes in gardening. Besides the wider variety of plant materials available, the biggest change is probably that people have less free time for gardening or for volunteering, so the show is now organized by a professional staff, and more of the exhibits are from commercial firms. Nevertheless, volunteers still play an important part, especially at the time of the show, and local clubs and individuals still enjoy participating.

Despite the nearly fifty-year lapse, interest in gardening is clearly still high: 23,000 people attended last year's show. Organizers of this year's show expect that attendance will reach 35,000.

[Photo caption from original print edition]: Yost Field House was transformed for the 1940 show with plantings, a fountain, and a reflecting pool. The shows started out as a showcase for wealthy garden buffs (Mrs. Henry Ford was a guest in 1940), but organizers also sought to involve the whole community; an Ann Arbor News article urged "every man, woman and child" to join the gardening movement to help make Ann Arbor "a more delightful place in which to live and work."