A gift from the past at the Law School

Last summer, Deb Adamic was cleaning the ceiling of the U-M Law Library’s reading room when she spotted a cubby­hole where the ceiling beams meet the wall. Reaching in, Adamic felt something loose and pulled out a grimy tube. Inside was a rolled-up piece of canvas bearing the inscription “Herman Bock—Feb. 5, 1931—Ann Arbor, Mich.—Decorator.”

“It was like a gift from the past,” says Adamic’s boss, Ron Koenig. “He put his name up fifty feet off the ground where no one could see it, with the thought that someday someone would see his name.”

Many people know that Law School alum William Cook (class of 1882) gave the money for the beautiful Law Quadrangle. Historians are well aware that York and Sawyer, well-respected East Coast architects, designed the buildings. But until Adamic discovered Bock’s note, the artisans who decorated the building had remained uncredited.

A city directory of the time shows a Herman R. Bock and his wife, Elizabeth, living at 435 South First Street. His occupation is listed as “painter.”

“Decorative painters were the unsung heroes” of historic buildings, Koenig says. “They traveled from project to project and kept a low profile.” Although they’re rare, Koenig had previously run across a couple of other examples of artisans who have left their names to posterity. In the early 1990s, when he was working at the state capitol in Lansing, he found the name Frank Baumgras written on the top of a door frame. The door was poplar and pine, treated to look like walnut. Koenig did some research and discovered that Baumgras was only peripherally involved in the decoration—his brothers and nephews did most of it—so it’s possible he signed his work because he was unused to anonymity. The name was left intact, with a piece of Plexiglas to protect it.

Working at Wisconsin’s capitol in 1996, Koenig was cleaning and replicating painted surfaces when he found five or six signatures entwined in a floral design high on a wall. He realized they were all women’s names and thought, “Wow—what a great thing.” When the wing where he was working was built, from 1910 to 1913, it would have been unusual for women to be involved in such a project.

It is easy to imagine why Herman Bock would have wanted credit for his work on the Law School’s reading room. The coffered ceiling, made of plaster hand painted to look like wood, is gorgeous. The recessed square panels are painted in a fleur-de-lis pattern in blue and ivory. The beams that run across the ceiling are richly decorated in bright colors and have winged shields at their midpoints. Figures of griffins—mythical winged lions—hold more shields at the points where the beams meet the walls.

The four Law Quad buildings were erected between 1923 and 1933. The library was the third completed, in 1931. It looks and feels like a Tudor Gothic cathedral, except that the entrance is on the low, long north side rather than the high, peaked east or west end. There’s even stained glass in the windows—though instead of depicting saints, these feature the seals of other universities with law schools.

Except for routine maintenance and repair, no work had been done on the reading room since it opened. Small lights lit the desks, and light streamed in from the stained-glass windows higher up, but the area between was gloomy. The painted ceiling had darkened with age.

In June 2007 the Law School received a $3 million gift from Charles Munger, a Warren Buffett associate who attended the U-M as an undergrad but didn’t finish (interrupted by World War II, he never got a bachelor’s degree—but did graduate from Harvard Law School). The school raised matching funds for what it called the “lighting project,” since the focus was on making the reading room brighter (it also included safety improvements in the library and neighboring Hutchins Hall).

“The reading room is such a gem,” says Lois Harden, the Law School’s facilities manager. “We wanted to do updates as needed while enhancing the iconic areas and have it all work together, not pull apart.” For instance, exit signs were required but would have looked out of place on the walls. Instead, they were installed on historic-looking metal poles.

Ron Koenig was delighted to win the bid to renovate the ceiling. He had lived in the Law Quad in 1971 when he was a grad student studying English and had fallen in love with the Law Library. Even then, he had noticed that the ceiling needed cleaning.

The ceiling job presented two major challenges: how to work safely fifty feet above the floor, and how to clean and restore the paint without doing any damage. The first challenge was solved with rolling towers. The second was made easier when Koenig discovered that the paint was oil based, not water based, and therefore wouldn’t dissolve in water-based cleaner.

Still, the job was huge. “We cleaned a ceiling the size of a football field with balls of cotton,” says Koenig. He also recast medallions damaged when lights were installed, cleaned parts of the limestone walls that had suffered water damage, and treated metal light units to look like stone.

While work on the ceiling proceeded, Harden sent the reading desks, also untouched since the library opened, out to be refinished. When the ceiling work was done, she also had the original cork floors replaced. They had worn remarkably well and did an excellent job of keeping the noise down, but they were dirty and scuffed. Most of the work was finished by the time the Law School opened last fall. The last job, rehanging the restored chandeliers, was done over Christmas break.

Herman Bock’s signature hasn’t been forgotten. Koenig had the canvas framed on acid-free matting, with glass on each side so that both the front and the back are visible. He will give it to the Law School to display in the building.

The Law School’s enrollment has doubled since the Law Quad opened. Its next challenge is to create more room without harming the beauty of the original buildings.

Two attempts to expand the complex have been made in the past, one more successful than the other. The ­modern-style metal addition to the library stacks facing Monroe Street is widely disliked, while the clever underground library addition is widely applauded. The Law School is now raising money for a three-pronged project: to replace the stacks’ metal cladding with a stone facade; to create a student commons by filling in a courtyard between the library and Hutchins Hall; and constructing an entirely new building in place of the parking lot across Monroe Street, next to Weill Hall.

Carleton Angell's beloved sculptures return to the Natural History Museum

The two pumas that guarded the Ruthven Museums Building on North University for sixty-six years are missing. Generations of kids had clam­bered over the stylized black cats, and countless museum visitors had posed for pictures standing in front of them. But last July, a hole was noticed in the head of one of the pumas.

Officials first sus­pected vandalism. "They've been hit with paintballs. They were once trimmed with masking tape to look like zebras. And they've been painted green (probably in deference to a certain Big Ten ri­val)," writes museum employee Dan Madaj. But a more careful look made it clear that the real culprit was years of exposure to the ele­ments. The big cats were removed for restoration and replace­ment—the first time they'd left their perches since museum sculptor Carleton Watson Angell put them there in 1940.

A farm boy from Belding, in west Michi­gan, Angell overcame great obstacles to build a career as an artist. Born in 1887, he got his first art lessons as a child from a customer on his father's milk route. But then his father died, and his mother moved back to her hometown of Hion, New York, where Angell worked for seven years to save up for art school. He finally enrolled at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1909, at age twenty-two. Afterward he worked at the American Terra Cotta Company in nearby Crystal Lake, making decorative panels for building facades but lost that job dur­ing an economic downturn. He returned to Illinois, worked in his brother's grocery store, and married Gladys Thayer.

But Angell continued sculpting and drawing, and in 1922, when he was thirty-five, his persistence finally paid off: he got an offer from the U-M to be a half-time instructor at the College of Architecture and Design. By then he and Gladys had three children, so to supplement his income, they ran a boardinghouse at 1438 Washington Heights (about where the new School of Public Health building is today). Their daughter, Jennett Angell Hamilton, re­members watching her dad strip the sheets from the beds and bring them down for her mother to wash.

In 1926 Angell was offered additional work at the U-M Museum of Natural His­tory, which was preparing to move from State Street to North U. Celebrated indus­trial architect Albert Kahn designed the V-­shaped building, but Angell contributed many decorative details, including the bronze front doors and the limestone bas-reliefs of animals and naturalists on the facade. And even after the building opened in 1928, he continued to produce busts of important people connected with the museum, both living and dead. They were placed in alcoves around the rotunda as he finished them during the 1930s.

The pumas were his last major contri­bution to the decoration. In an article in the August 17, 1940, Michigan Alumnus, Angell explained that although lions are often chosen to guard public buildings, he preferred Michigan's native cats. After building scale models to check the propor­tions, he constructed full-size figures of wood, wire, plaster of Paris, and clay. From these he created plaster molds, which were used to cast the final versions in terrazzo, a stone aggregate. Sixty-six years later, the terrazzo finally began to show its age.

Angell's main job was to make mod­els for dioramas, miniature re­creations of natural and historic scenes. He worked with scientists to mod­el extinct animals from fossil skeletons, and with anthropologists to show how people in different cultures lived. He often depicted American Indians, whom he typi­cally showed at work—making pottery, drilling, carrying things.

None of Angell's Indian dioramas are still on display, but it's interesting to wonder how he would have reacted to the recent protest by art students who charged that the museum's current repre­sentations of Native Americans are racist. Angell worked hard to create accurate de­pictions. Jennett Hamilton recalls how the family traveled to a reservation in Missaukee County, where her father spent nine hours sculpting an Ottawa chief named Henri. When the chief died soon afterward, the Angell family went back north for the funeral.

His work at the museum led to com­missions from other university depart­ments, community groups, and individu­als. Angell eventually completed hundreds of local projects, including a bronze bas-relief of philanthropist Horace Rackham in the Rackham Building and a plaque at An­gell School depicting the school's name­sake, U-M president James B. Angell (the two Angells were believed to be distant relatives).

By 1936 Carleton Angell was earning, enough that he and his family were able to leave the boardinghouse. They lived at 933 South State Street and 1217 Lutz before building a home at 3125 Hilltop in the early 1950s. Angell created Arborcrest Memorial Park's Four Chaplains monu­ment in the family room at the Hilltop home. It depicts four clergymen—two Protestants, a Roman Catholic, and a Jew—who died after giving up their life jackets to others when their ship was tor­pedoed during World War II. He complet­ed another commission—relief panels for the Washtenaw County Courthouse depict­ing local life—in the home's garage. Daughter Jennett remembers how when he was done her father enlisted her husband and brothers, along with every other able-bodied relative and friend he could find, to help him deliver the massive artwork.

Angell died in 1962 from a massive heart attack. Though he was seventy-four, granddaughter Barbara Gilson says that his death came as a shock, since he seemed in good health and was by then taking care of Gladys, who had suffered a stroke. Dariel Keeney recalls, "The last thing my grandfather said to me on my last visit to him in the hospital, hours be­fore he died, was 'Take care of your grandmother. She is so precious to me.'"

Since their installation, Angell's pumas have served as symbols of the museum, standing out in all weather. Over the years various small repairs were made, but last July's discovery made it clear that the time had come for a com­plete overhaul.

This time the museum is taking a twor pronged approach. The Fine Arts Sculp­ture Centre in Clarkston made molds from the original figures and then cast replicas in bronze. The Venus Bronze Works in Detroit has added a black finish to the bronzes, and also has restored the original terrazzo figures.

The pumas are expected back around the middle of May. The bronze cats will take over the plinths outside the doors, while the terrazzo originals will be placed in a yet-to-be-determined location inside the museum. On June 2, the museum will celebrate their return with a Puma Party, including a display of Carleton Angell's work in the rotunda.

[Photo caption from original print edition]: Farm-boy-turned-artist Carleton Angell created much of the ornamental detail on the Ruthven Museums Building, including the ornate bronze doors and the bas-relief sculptures on the facade. The two pumas guarding the entrance were the final touch—Angell chose Michigan's native cats instead of the customary lions.

[Photo caption from original print edition]: Bronze replicas of the pumas were cast at the Fine Arts Sculpture Center in Clarkston. The Venus Bronze Works in Detroit has since added a black finish to match the terrazzo originals.

Photo: Carrie, Jeffrey, and Laura Pew at University of Michigan Museum of Natural History, August 1972

Once the height of local luxury, the vintage apartment building has a new lease on life.

When Cathy Nowosielski was a U-M medical student in the 1970s, she passed Observato­ry Lodge, at Observa­tory Street and Washington Heights, every day as she walked between her sorority and the old University Hospital. A panoply of almost every Tudor detail ever used, the 1930 apartment building has turrets, oriel windows, half-timbering, a slate roof, cooper eaves, and stained-glass windows.

Nowosielski admired the building, and when she learned that it was owned by the U-M and rented to employees and grad students, she decided to investigate living there. Directed to the second floor of the LS&A Building, she was told that she could have the one available unit if she took it right away. She gasped but agreed. "It reminded me of walking into an ele­gant mansion," she recalls. It was not only (in her words) "phenomenal" but also a much better deal than her sorority.

On a recent visit to Ann Arbor, No­wosielski asked a friend to drive her by some old haunts. When they got near Ob­servatory Lodge, her friend, Alicia Marting, couldn't believe it—the building Nowosielski wanted to see was the same one Mcirting's division, kinesiology, was moving into. They were even more amazed when they figured out that part of Nowosielski's top-floor apartment had been preserved just as it was—vaulted ceiling, textured plaster, phone alcove, and all—as the dean's office.

Observatory Lodge was the last in a string of eight ele­gant, multistory apartment houses that various devel­opers built near campus in the decade before the Great Depression. Six are still standing, but two were recent­ly torn down—the Planada on Ann Street was replaced by a parking structure, and high-rise apartments are currently going up on the site of the former Anberay on East University.

An elegant entrance foyer and lobby set the tone of Observatory Lodge, with a fire­place, art-pottery floor tiles, ornate wall panels, and antique furniture. The thirty-four apartments included efficiencies and one- and two-bedroom units. A hair salon and barbershop, entered from an outside door on the northeast side of the building, was convenient for residents but was also open to the general public. Both a manager and a caretaker lived on the premises.

Observatory Lodge's location made it perfect for hospital employees. City direc­tories from the 1930s list a hospital phar­macist, social worker, stenographer, and cataloguer, as well as doctors, interns, and nurses.

The main U-M campus was also well represented, with every level of academia from full professors to stu­dents. From the town side came Otto Haisley, superintendent of the Ann Arbor Public Schools, and Julius Schaffer, the manager of Kline's depart­ment store. Several women residents re­ported their occupa­tion as "widow." Former Washtenaw County sheriff Doug Harvey knew the building well: after World War II, his fa­ther, also named Douglas, was hired as caretaker by the Ann Arbor Trust Company, which owned the building. The family moved into a rent-free one-bedroom garden-level apartment on the east side. The fu­ture sheriff and his brother slept in the liv­ing room on roll-away cots.

"A grand old place" is how Harvey re­members the building. Most of the residents were "people of high stature, who lived there for years. It was hard to get in—you didn't just ask. It was rented far in advance; you had to wait until someone died." Harvey describes his father as a "jack of all trades—whatever he was asked, he knew how to do." He could paint, put up wallpaper, and repair plumbing, along with more mundane chores like stoking the furnace and keeping the hallways clean. He was so capable that his employ­ers soon combined the jobs of caretaker and manager.

Since people lived there for years, the caretaker knew them all well. "He used to coddle them. They loved him to death," Harvey recalls. For instance, his father used to walk the Irish setter belonging to Edgar Kahn, the famous neurosurgeon, and feed the dog an egg when they re­turned.

No one was allowed into the building without being buzzed in—certainly a plus for the widows. If no one answered a buzz, the elder Harvey would go to the door and interrogate the visitor. Not even the paperboy was allowed in; he just dropped the newspapers in the foyer and rang the buzzer. The manager then deliv­ered them to the apartments.

The younger Harvey was in high school when his dad took the job. He en­joyed going up on the roof and looking at the view out over the Huron River valley. When his buddies came over after school, they used to see whether they could get the elevator to stop short of the second floor and then climb on top of it to ride the rest of the way up. "Dad would get mad, but we thought it was the best thing since canned beer," he laughs.

Celebrated Observatory Lodge residents included U-M neurosurgeon Edgar Kahn, Kline's department store manager Julius Schaffer, and Ann Arbor Public Schools superintendent Otto Haisley. As a teenager, future sheriff Doug Harvey "surfed" atop its elevator—angeringhis father, who managed the building.

The university bought the building in 1966. By the time Cathy Nowosielski lived there, students made up about half of the resi­dents. They tended to be assigned to the top floors, she recalls, probably because they could deal better with the stairs when the elevator broke down.

Nowosielski remembers the building as being "very quiet. There were no parties. It was a place to come back to and call your own." The units were unfurnished and there were no group activities, but the young med student loved it—she enjoyed eating in the breakfast nook in the turret and having the sun shine in on three sides through casement windows. But much as she enjoyed living in Observatory Lodge, she admits that even then, more than twen­ty years before it closed, the plumbing, the elevator, and other parts of the building were showing their age.
Noreen Clark, professor and former dean of the U-M School of Public Health, lived in Observatory Lodge in its last dec­ade as a residence. She was first drawn to the building by the location—it's literally in the shadow of her school. She had to get on a waiting list before she could move in, and once she was in the building, she got on other lists to move into bigger apartments. Eventually she had a two-bedroom unit with a terrace. But even the smallest unit was fine, since she has a commuter mar­riage (her husband works in New York).

Coming from the UK, where professors often live "in college," Clark enjoyed see­ing students wandering around on evenings and weekends. She also loved the old building details—"the old gesso still intact, the arched doorways, the accordion-door elevator."

Toward the end of her stay, though, Clark was the only faculty member in the building. In 2001 she was the last resident to move out.

When the university closed Observatory Lodge, it cited concerns about the building's safety—specifically, the poor condition of the electrical system and fire alarms. By then over seventy years old, it still had its original knob-and-tube wiring with horsehair insulation, as well as as­bestos. People who loved the place held their collective breaths, fearing the univer­sity might demolish it as it had the Planada. They were delighted when, in 2005, the U-M announced plans to convert it to of­fices for the division of kinesiology.

Kinesiology desperately needed more space. As the division's mission expanded, it was spilling out of its quarters in the Central Campus Recreation Building into an annex next door. Besides its traditional curriculum of teaching people to be gym teachers and physical education administrators, kinesiology now helps communi­ties use sports as a tourist attraction and does research in "movement science"— studying, for instance, why certain activi­ties can control diabetes, or how exercises can reduce developmental delays in babies with Down syndrome.

The university's exterior renovations enhanced the building's historic character. The slate roof and copper gutters and downspouts were repaired, and new win­dows were installed that mimicked the original small-paned casements. The origi­nal squirrel weathervane was preserved, and a duplicate was made of the original wooden sign. The only visible "change is the addition of a retaining wall in front, which should provide ft pleasant place for students to sit in warmer weather.

The changes inside were much more extensive. Because total rewiring was needed, and because the thirty-four bath­rooms and kitchens were not needed, the inside was pretty much gutted, except for load-bearing walls. But the new offices and labs have been largely furnished with older-style wooden furniture, in deference to the building's history.

Two places were kept much as they originally were—Cathy Nowosielski's top-floor apartment, now the dean's office, and the lobby and foyer. The hope is that "someone can walk in and get a sense of what the building was like," explains Jim Mclntyre, development director of kinesiology.

To redo the front entry the university hired Saline-based Ron Koenig, who has done restorations all over the country, in­cluding several state capitols and the Detroit Opera House. Koenig's goal was, in his words, "to have the lobby look old but well maintained. It's key to reading the building."

Luckily all the design elements were still there, although some were in bad shape or painted over. Koenig started by taking samples of the lowest layers to dis­cover original colors and finishes. He then brought everything—the raised decorations in the wall panels, the floor tiles (a mix of Pewabic, Moravian, and possibly Flint Faience), the wainscoting, and the stained glass—as close as possible to its original condition.

Kinesiology began moving in last Oc­tober and completed the transition during the semester break. A few labs and class­rooms remain in the CCRB, but everything else is finally under one roof. "Because of the location, we're also talking about more collaborative work with public health, medicine, and orthopaedic surgery," Mclntyre says.

After kinesiology moved in, Noreen Clark was given a tour by dean Beverly Ulrich, a friend of hers. "I'm really happy it's occupied by a group who has respect for the building and are happy to be there," Clark says. But she admits she misses her apartment. If she could, she says, "I would move back in a New York minute."

The U-M is holding a grand opening of Observatory Lodge on April 3. The public is invited to take tours and hear opening remarks by U-M president Mary Sue Coleman and kinesiology dean Beverly Ulrich.

[Photo caption from original print edition]: Kinesiology dean Eeverly Ulrich (left) now has her office on the building's top floor—in the same turreted corner where Cathy Nowosielski (right) lived as a medical student in the 1970s.

A living monument to feminism’s first wave

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Was it a case of religious one-upmanship?

Newberry Hall, the miniature stone castle at 434 South State, is a fitting home for the U-M's Kelsey Museum of Archaeology. But the sumptuous structure wasn't built as a museum, or even by the university. It was completed in 1891 as the headquarters of the U-M Student Christian Association.

Most early American universities were founded by churches. Even at the state-financed U-M, organized religion was a powerful force during the nineteenth century. The board of regents' insistence that religious indoctrination was essential to higher education was partly responsible for their dismissal of Henry Tappan, the university's visionary first president. And the Student Christian Association's palatial headquarters very likely also reflected a lively case of sectarian one-upmanship.

When the SCA was organized in 1858, "there was no Union, no League, no deans of men or women, no counselors in religion or workers with foreign students," notes C. Grey Austin in his 1957 booklet, A Century of Religion at the University of Michigan. The group became a social as well as religious center of campus. It sponsored lectures, published a student handbook, ran its own employment and room-listing service, and established a library open to members and guests.

By its twenty-fifth anniversary, the interdenominational SCA had over 300 members--more than 20 percent of the student body at the time and twice the number that could fit into its meeting place in South College. As an anniversary project, members decided to raise money to build a permanent home. They purchased a lot on State Street across from University Hall, predecessor of Angell Hall, and in 1887 began construction.

The SCA's first plans called for a simple, one-story structure. But at some point the group's ambitions expanded drastically. Austin's book doesn't say why, but SCA leaders could hardly have missed the sight of a rival student religious center rising just three blocks to the north, at the corner of State and Huron. Completed in 1887, it was renamed Harris Hall in 1888 in honor of its sponsor, the Right Reverend Samuel Smith Harris, Episcopal Bishop of Michigan.

The evidence of a rivalry between Newberry and Harris halls is all circumstantial. But the resemblances between the two are too numerous to be entirely coincidental. The SCA first discussed building a headquarters in September 1883. The first mention of building an Episcopal student center appears in the minutes of St. Andrew's Church one month later. Harris Hall was built of brick in the then-fashionable Richardson Romanesque style. Newberry Hall was built in the same style, but with stone. Both centers had parlors and libraries on the first floor and auditoriums upstairs. Harris Hall's seated 500; Newberry Hall's seated 550.

The expanded Newberry Hall was finished as impressively inside as out, with inlaid wood floors and tile fireplaces. For the head of the imposing central staircase, the SCA commissioned a Tiffany window in an abstract, Art Nouveau style--one of only two Tiffany windows in Ann Arbor.

In all, the SCA raised $40,000 to build Newberry Hall. That's exactly the amount that Bishop Harris raised for Harris Hall. The Episcopalians' list of donors included fur baron John Jacob Astor. The SCA's largest gift came from Detroiter Helen Newberry in honor of her late husband, Judge John Newberry, U-M class of 1849. Newberry Hall is named for him. (After Helen Newberry's death, their children donated the money to build the U-M's Helen Newberry Residence, next door to Newberry Hall.)

The SCA flourished in its stone castle. In 1917, it built and moved into an even bigger headquarters, Lane Hall, at the corner of State and Washington, and made Newberry Hall available to the U-M. During the terrible flu epidemic of 1918, Newberry was used as an infirmary. In the 1920's the U-M used it for classroom space before turning it into an archaeological museum in 1928. Francis Kelsey, the museum's eventual namesake, was a Latin professor at the U-M from 1889 until his death in 1927. He was both a distinguished scholar (his edition of Caesar's Gallic Wars was a standard text for many years) and an inspired fund-raiser who single-handedly launched and built the U-M's Near East collection. His greatest coup was persuading Detroit attorney Horace Rackham, one of the founding investors in Ford Motor Company, to finance a U-M excavation at Karanis, Egypt, a farming community about fifty miles southwest of Cairo that for several centuries was part of the Roman Empire. Findings from the eleven-year dig--textiles, coins, glass, papyri, wood, dolls, pottery, and terra-cotta lamps--account for almost half of the Kelsey's holdings.

The SCA fell on hard times in the irreligious 1930's. In 1937 it deeded Lane Hall and Newberry Hall to the U-M, and its services were taken over by a new U-M Student Religious Association. The association was later absorbed into what is now the Office of Ethics and Religion. (A similar fate befell Harris Hall: it was leased rent-free to the USO during World War II, then rented to the U-M for decades before St. Andrew's finally sold it in 1974. Beautifully renovated in the late 1970's, it's now home to Harris Advertising.)

The first floor of the Kelsey Museum still looks much as it did in the SCA days. The upstairs has been divided into offices and storage areas. However, the stage is still discernible, and the floor, which slopes slightly, is full of drill marks where the auditorium's 550 seats once were bolted down. The Tiffany window, unfortunately, is no longer publicly accessible, but it still graces the north side of the stairwell, now protected from weather and vandals by Plexiglas.

[Photo caption from original print edition]: Newberry Hall today (top) and under construction in about 1890 (left). Completion of the ecumenical Christian center was delayed four years to allow fund-raising for a much more lavish building than originally planned. The upgrade may have been spurred by rivalry with the Episcopalians' new student center, Harris Hall (above).

Demanding and inspirational, Bill Revelli struck awe into generations of U-M students. Playing under him "was a love-hate relationship," says former regent Tom Roach. "More love than hate."

"A legend in his own time" is a phrase reserved for individuals who have clearly dominated an entire generation in their chosen profession. Football has its Vince Lombardi, Symphony Orchestra has its Toscanini, the film industry its John Wayne. The bigger than life figure in the history of 1he American Band movement is clearly, Dr. William D. Revelli.

--Arnald D. Gabriel, Commander-Conductor, United States Air Force Band, in his foreword to the recordings The Revelli Years

Dr. William Revelli was director of the University of Michigan bands and chair of the wind instrument department of the music school from 1935 to 1971. He built the U-M bands into the best in the nation, toured worldwide to universal acclaim, and won virtually every possible award for himself and his bands. Today, at eighty-nine, he has only two regrets: that he did not learn to speak Italian fluently, although it was spoken in his home when he was a boy, and that he did not get to know John Philip Sousa more intimately.

Revelli met the March King in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1931. The Hobart (Indiana) High School band, founded and directed by Revelli, had just won its sixth consecutive national championship. Sousa was one of the judges of that contest, as was Edwin Franko Goldman, the famous New York bandmaster and composer, who became a lifetime friend and mentor of Revelli. After the competition, Goldman asked Revelli to stop by his hotel room. When Revelli got there, he found six of the seven judges, including Sousa, standing to greet him.

Sousa told Revelli that he had a great future, and he invited the young bandmaster to visit him when he was in the New York area. To this day, Revelli wishes he had accepted the offer immediately. He didn't, and the legendary composer-conductor died the next year.

It was a rare disappointment in a long, accomplished career. Twenty years into retirement, Revelli still bristles with the qualities that drove generations of student musicians to something close to perfection: charisma, autocratic self-confidence, and a single-minded passion for music.

It's Saturday, October 19, the morning of the U-M's Homecoming football game, against Indiana. In one of many U-M band traditions that Revelli introduced, it is also the "Blast from the Past," the annual reunion of Michigan Marching Band alumni.

Some college reunions are just one big party, but Revelli's alumni work hard. They arrived at Revelli Hall early this morning to rehearse the music they'll be performing, some pieces by themselves and others with the current band, which they call the "junior band." Among the Revelli-era alumni on hand this morning are former U-M regent Tom Roach, playing snare drum; Washtenaw County probate judge John Kirkendall, recapping his one-time role as a baton twirler; and local Episcopal priest Alex Miller, who has shown up in his band uniform but decided just to watch.

To a few friends, Revelli is "Bill." To the thousands of students who passed through the band over the years, he is either "Dr. Revelli" or, simply and reverentially, "the Chief." His legendary status among band alumni seems to be made up of equal parts of fear and awe.

Father Miller played in the band in the 1930's, spent his career ministering in Plymouth and Flint, then "retired" to Ann Arbor, where he's a busy volunteer priest at St. Andrew's. After his return, Miller recalls, he ran into Revelli in a bank. He said, "Hi Chief, I'm Alex Miller." According to Miller, the Chief replied, "I know who you are. You played the snare drum in the marching band and the bassoon in the concert band--both equally badly."

Generations of students accepted the Chief's critiques simply because he was the best--and was determined that they would be, too. "He taught everyone the meaning of excellence," explains Tom Roach. "It's not good enough to be almost in step, almost in tune. You had to be perfect."

The air is still crisp at 9 a.m. as the combined alumni-student band warms up on Elbel Field. Several conductors, past and present, stand on ladders stationed on each side of the field to take turns leading the band. Current marching band conductor Gary Lewis starts off with "I Want to Go Back to Michigan," followed by Eric Becher with "Temptation," George Cavender with the "Hawaiian War Chant," and then H. Robert Reynolds, current director of Michigan bands, leading "St. Louis Blues." An announcer, directing the action through a loudspeaker, says that Dr. Revelli will be arriving soon.

Just then, a murmur runs through the crowd as a golf cart crosses the field toward the conducting tower on the south side. There's a hush as the stocky, jovial conductor climbs out of the cart and walks toward the tower. Revelli makes the steep climb easily, then launches the massed band into "God, Bless America."

Revelli directs intensely and energetically. The band responds to him, playing with such precision and feeling that when the song is finished, some spectators have tears in their eyes. The conductor, though, hears plenty of room for improvement. "You'll do it better at halftime," he says. "Take more breaths. Think the words while you play. Cymbals--let them ring." Then he adds, "You're wonderful. I love you very much."

Revelli remounts the golf cart for the short ride back to Revelli Hall, the band's headquarters. As he heads inside, he's approached by a student. The young man asks whether Revelli remembers a certain name, apparently his father's. Revelli asks him to repeat the name, thinks for a minute, and then asks, "Trumpet?" The student nods, beams, and runs off.

Bill Revelli was born in Colorado and raised in a small coal mining town in southern Illinois called Panama, population about 1,800. His father, John, ran a theater and several grocery stores. His parents were not musicians, but his father had grown up in a small town near Milan, where his father often took him to the La Scala opera house. He instilled the same love of music in his own son. "I'll never know as much opera as my dad," says Revelli. "He knew every Italian opera's libretto, all the characters. We had an old Victrola that played cylindrical records. Our family used to wake up and go to bed to opera arias."

As far back as he can remember, Revelli always wanted a career in music. When he was only four, he formed an "orchestra" of neighborhood kids, using a small stick for a baton. When he was seven, he started taking violin lessons in St. Louis. His dad went with him the first time he took the long train ride; after that, he went alone, getting up at five-fifteen every Sunday morning in time to flag down the St. Louis train. He still remembers the cold, dark winter mornings, and signaling the incoming train with his flashlight. The engineer would give an answering toot before stopping for him. Revelli continued the lessons and the seven-hour Sunday round trips on the train until he graduated from high school.

Revelli went on to Chicago Musical College, graduating in 1922 with a degree in violin performance. (Twenty-five years later, the school would recognize his accomplishments with an honorary Doctor of Music degreeóthe first of five honorary doctorates he's received.) He went to work playing in silent movie orchestras at theaters in the Loop. These were complete symphony orchestras, playing music specifically composed for each movie. Occasionally, on a conductor's day off, Revelli would fulfill his boyhood dream by conducting the orchestra himself.

When talkies displaced pit orchestras in Chicago, Revelli took a job at a theater in Joliet, Illinois. He knew it was only a temporary reprieve, but he's still pleased that he took the job: in Joliet he met Mary Vidano, a schoolteacher. They have been married for sixty-seven years.

In 1925 Revelli enrolled in the Columbia School of Music in Chicago to earn a teaching degree. After graduation, he was hired by the Hobart public schools as supervisor of music.

In those days, public school music was primarily vocal, but Revelli wanted to do more. Two weeks after the fall semester began, he asked the superintendent if he could organize an instrumental program. The superintendent replied that the school had no budget, no room, and no time for such instruction. He also suggested that perhaps Revelli could put together a group of four or five students to play at basketball games.

Revelli felt frustrated when he left the office until he realized he actually had what he wanted: permission to organize an instrumental program. He recruited twenty-two students and arranged with his friend the chemistry teacher to rehearse in his lab before class. Every nook and cranny, in town was rifled for instruments. He borrowed a bass drum from a local jazz musician, picking it up early in the morning and getting it back before evening. For scores, he used music from his own library or borrowed from friends.

To support his band, Revelli organized the first Band Mothers group in the nation. "They were my entire budget," he says. The mothers depended largely on chicken dinner fund-raisers, with great success. Years later, when they gave Revelli a farewell chicken dinner on the occasion of his departure for Michigan, he joked, "I don't believe one single chicken is left in Indiana."

Although he had studied clarinet and cornet as part of his teacher training, Revelli knew very little about the other wind instruments or about percussion when he came to Hobart. Like many beginning teachers, he stayed just slightly ahead of his students, studying charts at home to teach himself the embouchure and fingering for each instrument.

Revelli was already commuting to Chicago once a week for lessons from cornetist H. A. Vandercook. At Vander-cook's suggestion, he increased that to twice a week, using the second trip to study other instruments with members of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. He devoted a full year to each instrumentófirst the flute, then the oboe, then the bassoon, French horn, trombone, and percussion.

He went into Chicago twice a week for ten years. It cost him a lot of time and money, but Revelli says it paid off for the Hobart band. "This is why we won six national championships," he explains. "None of the other school band conductors were receiving this type of instruction. I was passing what I learned on to the students."

In ten years at Hobart, Revelli earned a national reputation and developed enormous community support. He created two other bands (grade school and junior high) and was given his own rehearsal building and practice rooms. In fact, he did so well that he actually took a pay cut when he moved on to the U-M in 1935. The Revellis and their two-year-old daughter, Rosemary, also moved from a large house in Hobart to a smaller one in Ann Arborówith a much higher rent.

Revelli accepted Michigan's offer to become bands director and head of the wind instrument department because he believed the U-M was a sleeping giant in the band world. He also wanted to move to the university level because he knew he could have a greater influence on music education; each of his students was a potential bandmaster.

The Michigan Marching Band of 1935 was also a step down from Hobart's. It had been a good band under Nicholas Falcone, a fine musician and conductor, but Falcone had suddenly gone deaf, and the band was foundering under student management.

Rehearsals were held in Morris Hall, an old house on State Street where the LS&A Building is now. Revelli's second-floor office featured a library and large fireplace, he recalls, but the rehearsal space downstairs was "horrible." Furthermore, the band shared the building with the fledgling radio station WUOM; sometimes their broadcasts could be heard during rehearsal, over quiet sections of music.

Revelli describes his first few years in Ann Arbor as "a building process that was anything but easy." At the same time he was rebuilding the U-M bands, he was at first the entire staff of the wind instrument department. He wondered if he'd made the right choice in leaving Hobartó"I did a lot of soul-searching," he says. But very quickly he turned things around.

Alex Miller was in the band at the time. He recalls things changing "dramatically" with the new director's arrival. "Revelli was not fussy," he says drily. "We just had to be perfect." Those who fell short were liable to be criticized publicly. "He would dress you down if you were doing badly," one former band member recalls.

Revelli reinvigorated the students he inherited and recruited new players like a football coach. As the bands grew, he also hired an outstanding staff. Earl V. Moore, then dean of music, gave him a free hand in hiring, Revelli says, and "I got the best."

His desire to bring the laest students to Michigan was indistinguishable from his commitment to encourage top quality high school bands. He worked tirelessly to improve high school music programs, networking with band directors and serving on countless occasions as a clinician, lecturer, adjudicator, and guest conductor.

"Revelli set the pattern for all young band directors to aspire to," says Ed Towers, executive director of the Michigan Band and Orchestra Association, which Revelli helped found. Retired Fowlerville band director Chuck Hills regularly bused his students to U-M band concerts in Ann Arbor. Afterward, he says, "the kids would be sky high. They all wanted to be like Michigan."

Revelli's efforts bore fruit. Tom Roach's wife, Sally, played in a high school band in Muskegon and planned to go to MSUóuntil her band director urged her to go to Michigan and arranged for her to audition with Revelli. Merrill Wilson, a high school student in Fort Pierce, Florida, chose Michigan because Revelli was the only one of the judges in a contest he participated in who took his playing seriously and gave him useful advice. When John Kirkendall was a high school senior in Burlington, Indiana, he visited Michigan because by then Revelli had securely established the Marching Band's reputation as the finest in the country. Kirkendall met Revelli, who asked him to twirl baton at a basketball game. Kirkendall did and, in his words, "was hooked. I decided Michigan was the finest place in the world."

Once the students got to U-M, Revelli worked them hard. "He was rough on his musicians in order to achieve what he desired," says longtime music professor Leslie Bassett, who played in the band as a graduate student. "In the long run, they look back and realize he was after the best in music."

Revelli's students remember how he scared the daylights out of them with his unannounced tryouts. He would go down a row and have each player perform the same passage in front of everybody. But he was very fair. Whoever came the closest to Revelli's ideal became first chair, even if they were brand new and unknown. Merrill Wilson, who went on to graduate school at Juilliard and then played in the New York Philharmonic, said he found the pressure in those later situations no more severe than what he experienced at Michigan under Revelli.

If Revelli was quick to criticize his students, he also made it clear he cared about them. According to Towers, "He was the first to know he had to have a close relationship with the students to make the whole greater than the parts." Former music school dean Alien Brit-ton, who at one time counseled all the music students, says fewer dropped out of Revelli's program than out of any other.

Revelli worked himself as hard as his students. Band directors "must be willing to make sacrifices," he told an interviewer for Impresario magazine in 1970. "My wife, Mary, very seldom sees me before 11 p.m." To spend some time with him, she would accompany him on band trips. "Mary loves bands," he noted, "and after forty-five years of listening to them, she has become a very competent and exacting critic."

Revelli's great expectations, insistence on perfection, and attention to detail worked wonders with his regular band members. But he also couldóand still canóelicit great results from other bands. Alien Britton recalls a music education conference where a band made up of the best students "sounded marvelous under Revelli's direction but like a pick-up high school band under another conductor." Britton credits this phenomenon to "a talent for keeping attention. [Revelli] can walk into a room and everyone will listen to what he has to say. His genius is that he can stand there and get everyone's concentration."

The Michigan Marching Band gave Revelli an opportunity to preach his musical gospel to hundreds of thousands of listeners. "His real contribution was the introduction of standards, which until his time were basically unknown," says his successor and longtime assistant, George Cavender. "Standards in intonation, blend, balance, tone, rhythm, and style." John Kirkendall remembers that the band took pride in playing their opponents' fight songs better than they could.

Revelli also greatly expanded the marching band repertoire. He was the first to play classical music on the field, using special scoring. " Revelli's a natural teacher," explains former band member Merrill Wilson. "He increased the repertoire to educate the public, to expose them to good music."

Although the Marching Band's major activity was performing at football games, the athletic department did not play a large role in its management. "I wouldn't have dared tell Revelli what to do," recalls former athletic director Don Canham. "But he would always keep me well informed." When he was track coach, Canham let the band practice on the inside track when it was too muddy outside. He was later instrumental in getting the athletic department to donate land on Hoover Street for Revelli Hall, built in 1973 as the marching band's headquarters.

Revelli felt the Marching Band had really arrived when it was invited to perform at the 1948 Rose Bowl, the first Big Ten band to appear there. Since it was too cold to practice outside, they practiced for their performance in a hangar at Willow Run Airport. They traveled to Pasadena by a special train that left the day after Christmas, stopping on the way to pick up band members who lived further west. En route, the band drilled at Salt Lake City and played concerts in Denver and San Francisco. Though it was considered impolite in those days for public colleges to engage in overt fund-raising, Revelli had an arrangement with GM's Buick division to sponsor the band's trip. For the last leg, from San Francisco to Pasadena, they rode the GM Train of Tomorrow, a state-of-the-art wonder with glass domes, luxurious dining cars, and electronic systems throughout.

The band received rave reviews and was invited to return to Pasadena when Michigan played in the Rose Bowl again in 1951. Tom Roach played snare drum in the band that year. (He had wanted to go on the first trip, but only two snare drummers were needed, and he had placed third out of ten who tried out.) Roach had already started law school but had stayed in the band specifically in hopes of a Rose Bowl trip. When that looked doubtful early in the seasorjióthe team didn't seem that goodóBuick offered to send the band to New York, where they performed in Yankee Stadium during the Michigan-Army game. Then, after a few lucky wins, Michigan made it to the Rose Bowl after all. Revelli calls that year's band "my transcontinental band."

They again took the train on the twelve-day round-trip but reversed the route, playing at Albuquerque and Los Angeles and returning via San Francisco, Fresno, and Kansas City. Roach remembers that band members were excited to learn that there would be five club cars on the trainóuntil they learned that Revelli had ordered the liquor cabinets locked. On New Year's night, after the Rose Bowl, he had the cabinets unlocked, but the students, having gotten up at 5 a.m., marched seven miles in the Rose Bowl parade, and performed at the game, were too tired to do anything but fall into bed.

The Marching Band played in the Rose Bowl twice more during Revelli's
tenure, in 1965 and 1970. But its most spectacular shows were in Michigan Stadium. Revelli was in touch with many important people in the music world and often invited celebrities to appear with the band at halftime. On September 27, 1958, the guest was Meredith Willson, composer of the Broadway success "The Music Man." It was Band Dayóa since discontinued Revelli innovationówhen high school bands from around the state were invited to play on the field with the Michigan Marching Band. The Guinness Book of Records lists the 186 bands that played that day, made up of 13,500 students, as the largest mass band ever assembled. When Willson conducted the huge band in his hit song, "Seventy-Six Trombones," there were 1,076 trombonists among the players.

For all the spectacle on the football field, Revelli never lost sight of his main objective, to produce beautiful music. "If you want to know how good a marching band really is," he says, "close your eyes and listen."

Revelli's first love was actually the less glamorous U-M Symphony Band, which he called "the queen bee," or the "piece de la resistance." The Symphony Band was larger than the Marching Band and always included members of both sexes. (The Marching Band was for many years solely male, as marching bands were everywhere. When George Cavender succeeded Revelli as director in 1971, his first act was to let women in; he was the first Big Ten director to do so.)

In 1937, Revelli began the tradition of making a spring tour with the Symphony Band. Initially the band toured nearby Michigan cities, then expanded to nearby states, gradually pushing farther until they had performed on both coasts and Florida, and finally touring abroad. They performed at Carnegie Hall and many other prominent concert halls in the nation, including the Philadelphia Academy of Music, Symphony Hall in Boston, Lincoln Center, Hartford's Bushnell Hall, and Chicago's Orchestra Hall. A typical review appeared in the New York Times following the band's 1955 Carnegie Hall appearance. Revelli, the reviewer wrote, "got out of his students what not many bandmasters ever achieveóa brilliant, yet luminous texture of tone, a smart-sounding ensemble, well-balanced choirs and instrumental virtuosity."

The high point of the Symphony Band's touring was the 1961 USSR tour. The band was chosen by the Department of State to represent the United States in the first cultural exchange program, and spent eight weeks in the Soviet Union. After an additional eight weeks tcturing Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Turkey, Greece, Cyprus, Rumania, and Poland, the trip culminated in a concert at Carnegie Hall.

According to George Cavender, the State Department committee arranging the exchange originally opposed the idea of sending the U-M band, saying that a college band wasn't good enough or disciplined enough to represent the U.S. One committee member from Philadelphia, who had heard them play, insisted the committee hear the band before making a final decision. The members all flew out to Ann Arbor to listen to a concert and became converts.

The response was overwhelming. The Soviets "had never heard anything like it," Revelli recalls. The band played encore after encore, and fans even rushed the stage after performances. It was still so unusual for westerners to travel in the Soviet Union that Cavender remembers looking out of his sleeping-car window at five-thirty on a pitch-dark morning and seeing thousands of people at the station; they had come just to see what Americans looked like.

Even more often than with the Marching Band, Revelli invited luminaries of the music world to play with the concert band. Famous composers, performers, and conductors all came at one time or another. The list reads like a Who's Who of musicócomposers such as Percy Grainger, Morton Gould, Edwin Franko Goldman, William Schu-man, Aaron Copland, James Clifton Williams, Vincent Persichetti, Vittorio Giannini, Henry Cowell, Karel Husa, Ross Lee Finney, and Leslie Bassett; and performers such as Victor Borge, Doc Severinson, and the New York Brass Quintetóto name just a few.

Revelli took the band abroad a second time, just before he retired in 1971, to England, Germany, France, and Italy, with a final concert at Carnegie Hall.

Since his retirement, 'Revelli has continued to appear with bands around the world and as close by as Kalamazoo, where he recently conducted a concert by the Municipal Band. At eighty-nine, he has commitments to conduct at the Midwest International Band and Orchestra Clinic in Chicago and to be guest conductor at George Mason University. He will be chief adjudicator for the Festival of Music, held in cities across the continent. He has also been invited to participate in the Discovery Festivals, celebrating the 500th anniversary of Columbus's setting sail, to be held in Spain, the Caribbean, Washington, D.C., Boston, Chicago, and . San Francisco.

Revelli still keeps in touch with many former students and still is famous for remembering their names. Those who have known him for many years, like Alien Britton and Alex Miller, say he hasn't changed much at all since he retired. A few years ago Miller, hearing that. Revelli was conducting the Ann Arbor Civic Band, went down to watch the rehearsal. He reports that Revelli was "as demanding as ever."

That's the essence of the Revelli experience. Tom Roach sums up playing for him as "a love-hate relationshipó" more love than hate." When the Chief conducted, "a little chill would run down your spine," Roach recalls. "You played a little louder, a little better."

[Photo caption from original print edition]: Revelli with band alumnus Tom Roach. "He taught everyone the meaning of excellence," says the former U-M regent. "It's not good enough to be almost in step, almost in tune. You had to be perfect."

[Photo caption from original print edition]: As a director, Revelli is intense and energetic. Rehearsing the alumni and current bands in "God Bless America" in October, he elicited such precision and feeling that some spectators had tears in their eyes.

[Photo caption from original print edition]: In the mid-1920's, Revelli was hired to teach vocal music in Hobart, Indiana. Told the school system didn't have the budget, space, or time for a band, he borrowed instruments and held practice in the chemstry lab before school. His Hobart High School band went on to win six national championships.

[Photo caption from original print edition]: As a high school student, probate judge John Kirkendall was attracted to the U-M by Revelli's reputation. After meeting the conductor and twirling baton at a basketball game, Kirkendall recalls, "I was hooked."

[Photo caption from original print edition]: Even with bands he hasn't trained, the charismatic conductor has a reputation for strong performances. "His genius," says former music dean Alien Britton, "is that he can stand there and get everyone's concentration."

[Photo caption from original print edition]: At eighty-nine, Revelli still keeps a busy conducting schedule. People who know him well say he hasn't changed much at all since he retired. A few years ago, former student Alex Miller went down to watch him rehearse the Ann Arbor Civic Band; he was, says Miller, "as demanding as ever."

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.

The U-M's elegant retreat was built with a fortune based on factory fans

At one time or another early in this century, all six children of Detroit physician Richard Inglis lived in Ann Arbor. An interesting bunch, they included Agnes, the first curator of the U-M's Labadie collection of social protest literature; Frank, a Detroit pharmacist; David, a pioneer neurologist; Will, a Detroit businessman; and Kate, who owned a fruit and chicken farm that stretched all the way from Geddes Avenue to the Huron River.

But the sibling who left the most imposing legacy was James, a wealthy industrialist. He and his wife, Elizabeth, built Inglis House, an elegant English-style mansion that since 1951 has been owned by the U-M. The university uses it to house and entertain its many visiting dignitaries in suitable style. During her fourteen-year tenure, former facilities coordinator Sandra Simms amassed a collection of thank-you notes extending from former president Gerald Ford and his wife, Betty, to the exiled Tibetan religious leader the Dalai Lama. (An aide wrote to say that "His Holiness very much enjoyed His stay.")

The Inglises built the secluded mansion, which occupies an 8.5-acre plot at 2301 Highland Road, as a retirement home. Its formal, traditional style belies the mundane business that paid for it.

The Inglis’ stately home, designed by local architect Woody Woodburn to resemble a French Chateau, has hosted visitors ranging from Gerald and Betty Ford to the Dalai Lama.

James Inglis was ten when his father died. The family was left a legacy of $3,000 a year from real estate holdings, enough to live comfortably at that time, but James left school at age fourteen. According to family legend, it was because his mother wouldn't give him enough money to get his hair cut as often as he liked. Starting out as an office boy at $2.50 a week, Inglis advanced to become owner of American Blower Co., where he developed fans for cooling Detroit's burgeoning auto factories. The company was immensely successful and respected — so much so that during the Depression, the National Bank of Detroit asked Inglis to serve on its board to help raise public confidence in the institution.

In 1903, when he was thirty-nine, Inglis married Elizabeth Hughes, a Presbyterian minister's daughter fourteen years his junior. They moved to Ann Arbor about 1918, living originally on Baldwin Street.

They had become familiar with the town during frequent visits to Inglis's sister Kate, who had moved to the farm on Geddes with her husband, Frank Smith, in 1901. The Smiths' big white farmhouse still stands, looking much the same, at 2105 Geddes, near Concord. During the city's building boom in the 1920's, the Smiths started subdividing the farm into residential lots on what are now Highland, Concord, Lenawee, and Lafayette streets. James Inglis saved his sister the job of platting the bottom of her farm by buying the land that ran down to the river as a site for his dream home.

Architect Lilburn "Woody" Woodworth designed an English-style house of stones and irregular bricks, with a slate roof and elegant accoutrements. Though large (twelve rooms on four levels), it worked well as a family home. Inglis's niece, travel writer Carol Spicer (daughter of brother Will), remembers the house as the natural gathering place for the extended family. She recalls "lots of jokes and laughter in the house."

The gardens, designed by Elizabeth Inglis, were also quintessentially English, with a formal garden, a cutting garden, a meadow, an orchard, and wildflower areas. The grounds also included a tennis court and a three-hole golf course and even, at one time, peacocks. (They eventually had to be banished because of their noise.)

James Inglis died in 1950, leaving the house to his wife for her lifetime and then to the university. But Elizabeth Inglis did not wait that long. She gave the house to the U-M less than a year later when she moved to Kalamazoo to be with her daughter.

Elizabeth and James Inglis (top center) with their children and grandchildren sit under the wisteria covered arches at the back of their house in 1945.

The new U-M president, Harlan Hatcher — like all incoming university presidents since — was given the choice of living in Inglis House or in the president's house on South University. In a 1982 seminar on the evolving role of the president's wife (published by the Bentley Library), Hatcher's wife, Anne, recalled thinking that "in many ways, it would have been nice, for the children particularly, to be in a neighborhood rather than in the middle of a campus with no little kids around to play with. But we really felt that it was important to maintain the central location."

Inglis House stood empty until 1964, when the university decided to use it as a guest home for important visitors and out-of-town regents. They refurbished it, filling it with a mixture of modern, traditional, and French Provincial furniture and hanging some original paintings by Courbet and Turner borrowed from the U-M art museum.

It took horticulturist Chuck Jenkins five years to restore the gardens to their former glory after fourteen years of neglect. He says he "got a good sense for the major elements" by looking at pictures and talking to Walter Stampflei, the Inglis's gardener, who still lived in the gatehouse; he also corresponded through a third party with Elizabeth Inglis, who lived until 1974.

Inglis House can accommodate forty people at a formal dinner and more for a reception or meeting. The Inglis family's unusual combination living room/dining room now serves well as a big dining room. Guests easily make do without a living room by beginning their evenings in the paneled downstairs library with hors d'oeuvre and cocktails. Carol Spicer, speaking of the house's present use, says, "If my aunt and uncle came back, they would be pleased."

From the YMCA to women's studies

If the walls of Lane Hall could talk, they might recall discussions on ethical, religious, and international topics, and distinguished visitors such as Bertrand Russell, Reinhold Niebuhr, and the Dalai Lama. The elegantly understated Georgian Colonial Revival building on the south-west corner of State and Washington has been an intellectual center for student discussions since it was built. From 1917 to 1956 all varieties of religious topics were examined; from 1964 to 1997 it changed to an international focus. In October, after a major expansion and renovation, it was rededicated as the new home for women's studies at the U-M.

Lane Hall was built in 1916-1917 by the U-M YMCA. Within a few years it came under the control of the university's Student Christian Association, which included the campus branches of both the YMCA and the YWCA. In addition to organizing traditional religious activities, SCA published a student handbook, ran a rooming service, and helped students get jobs.

Funded in part by a $60,000 gift from John D. Rockefeller, Lane Hall was named after Victor H. Lane, a law professor and former judge who was active in SCA. When it opened in 1917, students could read books on religion in the library, listen to music in the music room, meet with student pastors in individual offices, or attend functions, either in the 450-seat auditorium upstairs or the social room in the basement.

Post card view of Lane Hall when it was still the Y.M.C.A.

SCA cooperated with area churches and also provided meeting places for groups that didn't have a home church, such as Chinese Christians and Baha'is. But Lane Hall is most remembered for its own nondenominational programs, which were open to all students on campus. Some, like Bible study, had an obvious religious connection, but the programs also included the Fresh Air Camp (which enlisted U-M students to serve as big brothers to neglected boys), extensive services for foreign students, and eating clubs.

Lane Hall became one of the most intellectually stimulating places on campus. "While the university was, much more than now, organized in tightly bounded disciplines and departments, our program was working with the connections between them, and particularly the ethical implications of those interconnections," recalls C. Grey Austin, who was assistant coordinator of religious affairs in the 1950s. "Religion was similarly organized in clearly defined institutions, and we were working, again, with that fascinating area in which they touch one another."

With the coming of the Great Depression, many students struggled financially. In 1932, looking for a way to save money, a local activist named Sher Quraishi (later an advocate for post-partition Pakistan) organized the Wolverine Eating Club in the basement of Lane Hall. The club's cook, Anna Panzner, recalled in a 1983 interview that they fed about 250 people three meals a day. She was assisted with the cooking by John Ragland, who later became the only black lawyer in town. About forty students helped with the prep and cleanup in exchange for free meals, while the rest paid $2.50 a week.

Lane Hall itself had trouble keeping going during the depression, often limping along without adequate staffing. Finally, in 1936, SCA gave Lane Hall to the university. The group didn't stipulate the use of the building but said they hoped it might "serve the purpose for which it was originally intended, that is, a center of religious study and activities for all students in the university." The university agreed and, while changing the name to Student Religious Association, kept and expanded the SCA programming.

The official head of Lane Hall would be a minister hired by the university, but the work was done by Edna Alber," recalls Jerry Rees, who worked there in the 1950s. "Alber ran Lane Hall like a drill sergeant," agrees Lew Towler, who was active in Lane Hall activities. "You'd try to stay on her good side."

The first university-hired director of Lane Hall was Kenneth Morgan. The high point of his tenure was a series of lectures on "The Existence and Nature of God" given by Bertrand Russell, Fulton Sheen, and Reinhold Niebuhr.

Morgan left during World War II and was replaced by Frank Littell. "He was a dynamic man who you either liked or didn't," recalls Jo Glass, who was active at Lane Hall after the war. "He made changes and left." After Littell, DeWitt C. Baldwin, who had been Lane Hall's assistant director, took over. Called "Uncle Cy" by many, he was an idealistic former missionary who also led the Lisle Fellowship, a summer program to encourage international understanding.

Although social action was important, religion as the study of the Bible was not ignored. For instance, Littell led a seminar for grad students on aspects of religion in the Old and New Testament. Participant Marilyn Mason, now a U-M music prof and the university organist, compares the seminar to a jam session, saying, "They were very open minded."

Other Lane Hall activities were just plain fun. Jerry Rees enjoyed folk dancing on Tuesday evenings in the basement social hall. Jo Glass has happy memories of the Friday afternoon teas held in the library. "You'd go to religious teas and meet people you met on Sunday, or go to international teas and meet people from other countries," she says, "but you'd go to Lane Hall and meet a mixture of everybody--all kinds of people wandered in."

Doris Reed Ramon was head of international activities at Lane Hall. She remembers that in addition to providing room for international students to meet, the building had a Muslim prayer room and space for Indian students to cook meals together. After World War II, with the campus full of returning servicemen struggling to make it on the GI Bill, a new eating co-op was organized, called the Barnaby Club. Member Russell Fuller, later pastor of Memorial Christian Church, recalls that the group hired a cook but did all the other work themselves, coming early to peel potatoes or set the table, or staying afterward to clean up.

The Lane Hall programming came to an end in 1956, when the religious office was moved to the Student Activities Building. The niche that Lane Hall held had gradually eroded as more churches established campus centers and the university founded an academic program in religious studies. Also, according to Grey Austin, there were more questions about the role of religion in a secular school. "The growing consensus was that the study of religions was okay but that experience with religion was better left to the religious organizations that ringed the campus."

In the 1960s, centers for area studies began moving into Lane Hall--Japanese studies, Chinese studies, Middle and North African studies, and South Asian and Southeast Asian studies, all of which were rising in importance during the Cold War. Many townsfolk, as well as students, remember attending stimulating brown-bag lunches on various international topics, as well as enjoying the Japanese pool garden in the lobby. During this time visitors ranged from president Gerald Ford and governor James Blanchard (who was delighted with the help the center gave him in developing trade with China) to foreign leaders such as the Dalai Lama and Bashir Gemayel, who became president of Lebanon, and famous writers such as Joseph Brodsky and Czeslaw Milosz.

One of the people who passed through Lane Hall during this period was Hugo Lane, great-grandson of Victor Lane. In response to an e-mail query, Lane recalled that he had an office in Lane Hall when he worked as a graduate assistant for the East European Survey, a project of the Center for Russian and East European Studies. "Needless to say, I took great pleasure in that coincidence. . . . On those occasions when my parents visited Ann Arbor, a stop at the hall was obligatory."

The centers for area studies eventually joined the U-M International Center in the new School of Social Work building across the Diag. After they left, Lane Hall became a temporary headquarters for the School of Natural Resources and Environment while its building was renovated. Then Lane Hall was vacated for its own extensive addition and renovation.

Today, the new and improved Lane Hall is home to the U-M's Women's Studies Program and the Institute for Research on Women and Gender. "It's wonderful space to the occupants, very affirming," says institute director Abby Stewart. "It feels good to be here."

The Michigan Union Opera’s Cross-Gender Fun

In 1949 U-M junior Jimmie Lobaugh landed a starring role in the Michigan Union Opera. He dressed up as a pregnant woman and belted out a showstopper entitled “I Want a Pickle.”

The show was Froggy Bottom, a parody of the efforts of World War II veterans and their families to cope with the red tape of the GI Bill. “It was dreadful, horrible,” Lobaugh laughs, “but we had a heck of a lot of fun.”

A U-M tradition from 1908 to 1955, the Michigan Union Opera was created to raise funds for the Michigan Union building. Since the Michigan Student Union was then an all-male club, men made up the entire cast, playing both male and female roles.

Since the Michigan Union was an all-male club, men played all the roles-both male and female.

The cross-dressing was always a source of much hilarity, especially among the friends of the “actresses.” But some spectators were taken in. “After the shows, guys would wait outside to get dates with the ‘girls,’” recalls Jim Graf, who as a child saw many of the pre–World War II shows, because his dad built the scenery. “It was that good, their costumes and makeup.”

There couldn’t have been any question, however, about the gender of the burly football players who were recruited to form chorus lines in female costumes relevant to the plot. Depending on the year, they might appear as geishas, Egyptian temple dancers, or can-can girls.

The MUO’s first show, 1908’s Michigenda, set the tone for ensuing productions. The plot concerned efforts to keep a rich donor, Mr. Moneyfeller, from finding out that his nephew wasn’t actually on the U-M faculty. The “real” professors—students impersonating well-known faculty members of the time—were hidden away in a tunnel, which eventually exploded from all the hot air. Meanwhile, the student characters were transported to the magic land of the title, a place where there were no professors and where Granger’s, a then-popular dance hall on Huron Street, was open six nights a week.

Michigenda opened at the Whitney Theater downtown, a location chosen to encourage attendance by local residents as well as academics. On opening night the enthusiastic audience stood in the aisles and refused to leave until the cast had taken five curtain calls. All five performances were sold out, with special trains of U-M alumni coming in from Detroit.

The next year’s show, Culture, was just as big a hit. The plot revolved around a ten-foot slide rule that could solve any problem. After the show, the slide rule was acquired by the engineering department, where for years afterward it was a fixture of the annual Engineers’ Ball.

The Michigan Union, the first such organization in the country, was formed in 1904. In 1907 the group purchased the State Street home of law pro¬fessor Thomas Cooley. The rest of the site of the present Union was purchased with the proceeds of the first two Michigan Union Operas.

The custom of using football players in the chorus originated with the fourth production, The Awakened Ramses. Two weeks before the show opened, the dean of students announced new eligibility rules that prevented half the cast from taking part. The production could have been doomed but for the timely intervention of football coach Fielding Yost, who convinced his players to fill in.

The players had recently concluded their season and showed up with “bruised shoulders, bandaged knees, and clumsy feet,” recalled Earl Moore, the show’s student conductor (later the U-M music school dean). But “there was no question of the dedication and zeal that these new ‘actors and dancers’ put forth in Whitney Theater to match the same qualities in their performances on Ferry Field.” The athletes caused such a sensation that from then on, no MUO performance was considered complete unless it included a chorus of football players dressed as women.

Planning for the MUO productions started with a campus wide competition for scripts. The director usually reshaped the material, and often cast members had ideas to make it funnier, so it would turn out to be a group effort.

Star Jimmie Lobaugh mugs with audience member Governor G. Mennen Williams.

The MUO became so popular that many more students tried out than there were roles available. The men who were cast came from all over the university. “You crossed paths with people you wouldn’t otherwise know—premed, athletes,” recalls Jack Felton, who appeared in several 1950s productions and wrote some of the music for one. “I wanted to do it for an extracurricular activity, to do something besides grind away at books,” recalls Jerry Gray, who danced in the chorus for 1953’s Up ’n’ Atom wearing a woman’s dancing outfit complete with a stuffed brassiere. Although Gray claims he wasn’t much of a social dancer, he had no trouble learning the steps, which he often practiced going home through the Law Quad.

The MUO went on the road for the first time in 1914, when both the Detroit and Chicago alumni associations offered to sponsor shows. That year’s opera, A Model Daughter, took place in Paris and so seemed well suited for export. There had been talk of touring before; questions about whether out-of-town audiences would catch the U-M humor, and if so whether it would paint an unflattering picture of the campus, had made the producers hesitate. But the first road trip was such a success that it became a yearly tradition.

Construction on the present Union building started in 1916, and subsequent operas helped pay off the bonds that financed it. But the tradition nearly faltered when the United States entered World War I the following year. By 1918 so many men were off fighting that Union manager Homer Heath asked, “Which shall it be: an opera with Michigan girls or no opera?” That was the only year in which women appeared in the MUO.

A turning point came with the arrival of Broadway director E. Mortimer Shuter in 1919. Unable to get into the army during World War I, Shuter was doing his bit for the war effort by directing USO shows when MUO general chairman F. C. Bell met him in Philadelphia and convinced him to come to Ann Arbor for a year.

The 1919 show, Come On, Dad, featured elaborate scenery, fancy costumes, and new dance styles. (Shuter’s good friend Roy Hoyer, a Broadway singer and dancer, helped coach the students.) Earl Moore praised Shuter’s “ability to create almost professional results with average amateur materials.” The show was such a triumph both in town and on the road that Shuter was persuaded to stay instead of returning to Broadway.

In 1921 Shuter produced Top o’ th’ Mornin’, with pre-law major Thomas Dewey play¬ing the male lead. As Patrick O’Dare, an evil pretender to the Irish throne, the future New York governor and Republican presidential candidate stopped the show with a number called “A Paradise of Micks.” Reviewers raved about the “velvety texture” of Dewey’s baritone voice, and he toured eight cities when the show went on the road. But according to Dewey’s biographer, Richard Norton Smith, “usually on these train trips, he could be found alone, often in the last car, uncomfortable with the camaraderie and alcohol” shared by the rest of the cast.

Star Lionel Ames went on to a vaudeville career as a female impersonator.

Shuter reached his peak with 1923’s Cotton Stockings (Never Made a Man Look Twice). Lionel Ames, described by a reviewer as “a clever actor and mimic,” played the female lead so successfully that he later went on to a vaudeville career as a female impersonator. That year the MUO invaded Ivy League territory, playing in Philadelphia, New York, and Washington, and receiving rave reviews wherever it went. Several female characters “looked astonishingly real as pretty fixtures of feminine grace,” reported the Washington Times. “Others, chorines notably, were such virile masculines that all fashion’s fripperies and layers of cosmetics couldn’t disguise razored chins or stalwart underpinning.” The cast met President Coolidge in Washington and went on to New York, where they set the record at the Metropolitan Opera for the highest box office of an amateur production.

By then there were complaints that the MUO was straying too far from its roots, so Shuter chose Tickled to Death for the next production, with a plot that revolved around U-M archaeologists in China. The set contained a temple reputed to be a replica of an actual Chinese one, but the characterizations were evidently less authentic—a Chinese graduate student wrote a letter to the Michigan Daily complaining that the production was “a gross misrepresentation of Chinese.”

Although the shows originally made a lot of money, the productions were always financially risky because of the high costs of sets, rented costumes, and travel. On New Year’s Eve 1929, shortly after the stock market crash, the MUO suffered a major loss, playing to an empty theater in New York during a blizzard. The next year the opera suspended production.

In the mid-1930s the MUO was revived in a lower-budget form, with students doing more of the work. The plot of the 1934 show, With Banners Flying, had athletic director Fielding Yost taking over as university president, and featured scenes in the Michigan Daily, the Arb, student boardinghouses, and the Union. It was followed by Give Us Rhythm in 1935. But neither show was a big financial success, so the operas were suspended again.

The next revival, in 1939, went in the opposite direction, returning to the days of full-scale productions. Plans even called for Shuter to direct, but he died that November. His death delayed the premiere of Four out of Five (based on the gibe that four out of five girls were pretty, and the fifth went to the U-M) until February 1940. Football players, including Forest Evashevski and Bob Westfall, again formed a chorus, while Heisman Trophy winner Tom Harmon played a lead: as Jimmie Roosevelt, the president’s son, he helped a freshman become a Big Man on Campus by fixing him up with movie star Hedy La Tour. The MUO returned to its usual December dates later that year with Take a Number. It featured a date lottery, modeled on the draft lottery, which set up boy-girl meetings in the Arb. The last show in this series, Full House, opened four days after Pearl Harbor and was hardly noticed.

The MUO resumed in 1949 with Froggy Bottom (a takeoff on Foggy Bottom in Washington, D.C.), which dealt with the problems of veterans and their families on campus. “Congress didn’t understand academic requirements, universities couldn’t understand the red tape to make them work, and the GIs were caught in the confusion,” Jack Felton recalls.

Some of the lyrics for Froggy Bottom were actually written by a woman student, Ann Husselman (now Rusanoff). Edward Chudacoff, an MUO composer, had come up with a tune but had no words for it; Husselman suggested some, and he asked her to write more, which she did. Although she never came near the all-male set, one of the songs she wrote, “Till the Dawn,” was picked up by Fred Waring and played on his radio show.

Jimmie Lobaugh, the lead in Froggy Bottom, helped publicize the show by co-hosting a reception at the Women’s League with the “male” star of the Junior Girls’ Play. He recalls getting into wig, makeup, black dress, black hat, and black high heels, and riding from the Union to the League in a horse-drawn carriage. His counterpart was a short woman dressed as a farmer, wearing a hat with a big brim. The two stayed in character through the reception. When it was over Lobaugh went back downstairs, but to his dismay the horse and carriage were gone. His costume didn’t include a purse, so he had no money to call a cab. He describes the walk back in high heels as “no treat.”

Lobaugh went on to play leading-woman parts for the next four years, alternating with roles in productions of the Gilbert and Sullivan Society, of which he was a founder. He played a Mae West character in the 1951 Go West, Madam and a former vaudeville star the next year in Never Too Late. “Gosh, I was beautiful,” he laughs.

Cast of the 1914 "Junior Girls’ Play".

Four years before male students began the Michigan Union Opera, female students were putting on the Junior Girls’ Play, with women cross-dressing to play men’s roles. For the first show, in 1904, dean of women Myra Jordan lent her husband’s clothes to the “male” characters.

Like the MUO, the JGP was written, composed, and directed by students. The story lines also were similar—takeoffs on campus events, satires of classic books, or fun in exotic locales. After the men produced their first show, Michigenda, the women responded with a parody called Michiguse. One of the male leads in the 1914 production (above) was played by future dean of women Alice Lloyd—better remembered today for giving her name to a postwar dormitory.

Originally most of the performances were open to women only. But in the 1920s the JGP took a page from the men’s book and opened the play to the general public as fund-raisers for the Michigan League building. After the building was completed in 1930, the JGP moved into its new Lydia Mendelssohn Theater.

The JGP not only predated the MUO, it outlived it as well—the last JGP show was in 1962.

Lobaugh’s parents would come by train from Bartlesville, Oklahoma, to attend the opening nights, sitting in the orchestra next to such dignitaries as then-governor G. Mennen Williams. Lobaugh once posed for a photo sitting on the governor’s lap. After graduation Lobaugh was asked to come to Broadway as a female impersonator, but he didn’t want to spend his life playing women, opting instead for a career as a high school music and drama teacher. Even there, though, he found his MUO experience valuable: “I could direct both males and females,” he says. “I could help the girls walk, talk, act, and behave in style.”

The postwar MUO stuck to the original formula but with up-to-date subjects such as the atomic bomb (Up ’n’ Atom), labor unions (Lace It Up, set in a lingerie factory), and radio giveaway shows (Never Too Late). Football players continued to form chorus lines in costumes appropriate for each play—in Go West, Madam they were can-can girls.

The postwar plays also toured, traveling by bus around Michigan and to nearby states. If not quite as glamorous as playing Manhattan, the experience was still memorable. “We had so much fun, it’s a wonder we had any voice left,” recalls Felton. Arriving and playing at important theaters was always awe inspiring. Lobaugh remembers performing in a theater in Buffalo where Mae West had appeared the week before.

At the parties after the out-of-town performances, alumni were often more interested in meeting the football players than the stars in the cast. Robert Segar, who played a male cheerleader in 1954’s Hail to Victor, recalls football players “taking an empty wine bottle to show the plays. The center would put it between his legs and toss it a few feet to the quarterback. The alumni loved it.”

In the 1950s the cross-dressing was still considered risqué by some. From the first there had been accusations of vulgarity, partly due to suggestive ad-libbing by cast members. “The humor was slightly naughty,” admits Jack Felton. And of course, the gay implications were also there. Lobaugh recalls that one of his leading men would bring a girlfriend to rehearsals. “He told me, ‘I don’t want anyone to get the idea you and I are a pair.’ I was so naive I hadn’t thought of it.”

In 1956, the year the Union finally opened to women (before that they could come in only through a side door and, with a few exceptions, had to be accompanied by a male), MUO was absorbed into MUSKET—“Michigan Union Show and Ko-eds Too”—ending almost half a century of same-sex casting.

But even though it ended almost half a century ago, the MUO is not forgotten. Besides raising money for the Union building, the shows created a treasury of U-M songs, the tours were great publicity for the university, and the productions provided a start for many show business careers. Among the long list of notables coming out of the MUO are Billy Mills, who was the bandleader for the Fibber McGee and Molly radio show; Jay Gorney (Gornetzky), who wrote the music of “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?”; and Valentine Davies, who wrote the story for the movie Miracle on Thirty-fourth Street.

At the Michigan Union centennial in January 2004, the Union acknowledged its debt by making the Michigan Union Opera the centerpiece of the celebration. The Union invited MUO alumni back, had present music students sing MUO songs, and rechristened a room the Union Opera Lounge. Located on the first floor across from the Anderson Room, the lounge is a treasury of MUO pictures and memorabilia.