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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Between them, Philip Bach and Bertha Muehlig furnished the community with dry goods and notions for 115 years

Today's Main Street is dominated by destination restaurants and specialty shops. But for most of the city's life, Main Street was a regional shopping center catering to the county's everyday needs: hardware, clothing, food, farm supplies. No store served this market longer than the dry goods store at South Main and Washington. It opened in 1865 as Bach and Abel and closed in 1980 as Muehlig's. Dry goods--a term no longer used in the Yellow Pages--denoted a business that sold both fabric for home sewing and items manufactured of cloth.

Philip Bach built the store in 1865, part of the post-Civil War building boom. He replaced a much lower wooden storefront that looked like a set for a western. Bach came to the United States from the Duchy of Baden (now part of Germany) at the age of nine and began working in the dry goods business when he was fifteen. When Bach's first partner, Peter Abel, died he was replaced first by his brother, Eugene Abel, and later by Zachary Roath.

At that time, before mass production, Ann Arbor supported as many as fifteen dry goods stores at a time. Housewives sewed nearly all of their families' clothing and even household items like sheets. In the early days, the only ready-made item in Bach's store was cloaks.

Downtown's retail market was volatile in the nineteenth century. As early as 1881, Bach had been in the same business longer than anyone else in town. He worked for fourteen more years, selling his store only months before his death in 1895 to Bruno St. James, co-owner of Goodyear and St. James, the competing store next door. Along with the business, St. James acquired the services of Bach and Roath's young bookkeeper, Bertha Muehlig, who had joined the staff in 1891 at the age of seventeen.

St. James altered the street-level windows and installed an innovative spring-operated cash carrier to send money and sales slips to a cashier on the mezzanine at the back of the store. After St. James died in 1911, Bertha Muehlig bought the business.

"There wasn't an article that was usable that she didn't sell," remembers Hazel Olsen, a former Muehlig's saleslady. Muehlig supplied the everyday things homemakers needed--mattress pads, linens, blankets, drapes, towels, aprons, tablecloths--in addition to everything needed for home sewing. She also sold clothes and accessories, primarily for her women customers--house dresses, underwear, purses, baby supplies, and children's clothing. The three floors were filled to the brim, with products hanging from the walls. Fay Muehlig, Muehlig's niece by marriage and herself an employee, remembers that people would say, "If you can't find something, go to Muehlig's; they'll have it."

Muehlig's combination of high quality and reasonable prices brought a loyal clientele. The stock remained the same year after year, regardless of fashion. Even after paper tissues were widely used, she continued to sell handkerchiefs, as one former employee remembers, "by the bushel full." She carried women's long underwear (called Tillie Open Bottoms) long after central heating made houses more comfortable in the winter.

Personal service was a hallmark of the store. Stools in front of the long counters allowed customers to sit while they were being helped. Frieda Heusel Saxon, who just celebrated her hundredth birthday, remembers twirling around on a stool as a little girl while her mother, Mary Heusel, shopped. When she was busy, Heusel would telephone her orders. Despite her sometimes vague requests--"enough blue material to make an apron," for instance--the store managed to fill them satisfactorily, according to Elsa Goetz Ordway, the neighbor girl who was sent to pick up Heusel's orders.

As Bertha Muehlig aged, her stock appealed more to mature women. "Owners buy what they need themselves," explains former employee Chuck Jacobus. Her store was the best place to get service-weight stockings, support hose, and step-in dresses without buttons or zippers. Corsets and girdles were fitted by a specially trained woman. The sales staff mirrored the customers: many worked there for years and simply cut back their hours when they reached retirement age. Muehlig herself worked even after she needed a wheelchair: she came in every day and was carried up to her mezzanine office, where she sat, wearing a visor, going over the books.

Muehlig, who never married, lived out her life in the home where she was reared, at 315 S. Main, a block and a half from her store. With no children to leave her money to, she gave lavishly to local churches, scout troops, and hospitals, earning the nickname "the Santa Claus of Ann Arbor." Her pet charities were the Donovan School, later Northside, and the Anna Botsford Bach home. In her store, Muehlig gave discounts to anyone with a hard luck story or a worthy cause. She was also good to her regular customers, giving them presents at Christmas.

When Muehlig died in 1955 at eighty-one, she left the store to two longtime employees, Alfred Diez, a German immigrant whom she had hired in 1926, and Margaret Jones, her bookkeeper since 1937. A third share was left to her nephew, who sold it to Raymond Hutzel. Muehlig's home, the last house on the block, was torn down in 1962 and replaced by a modern storefront building (now Stein and Goetz). Many mourned the loss of this landmark house.

The store continued largely unchanged after Muehlig's death. Jacobus, who was Diez's assistant, remembers that people from out of town were "flabbergasted" at the old-time feel of the store and that chil≠dren were fascinated watching the spring-loaded cash carrier whiz to the mezzanine and back. While Diez worked to broaden the stock to bring in younger customers, he never would go so far as to sell jeans. Jacobus remembers Diez's wife, Dorothy, saying, "I don't like them, I won't wear them, I won't sell them."

Diez died in 1976, and Muehlig's was sold to Tom and Nelson DeFord, who ran it until 1980, when they moved down the street and renamed their store DeFord's. The building lay empty for a year until Hooper, Hathaway, Price, Beuche & Wallace, one of Ann Arbor's oldest law firms, bought and renovated it. Using an 1867 picture, they restored the facade to its original appearance. They kept as many of the store's internal features as possible, including the pressed-metal ceiling, the mezzanine, the elevator, and the oak staircase.

[Photo caption from original print edition: Muehlig at age eighty, accepting a candy replica of her Main Street home made by grateful students at Northside School.]

[Photo caption from original print edition: Celebrating Muehlig's 60th anniversary in 1971: l. to r.) Alfred Diez, Dorothy Diez, Cora Schmid, Irene Howell, Gladys Lambarth, Fay Muehlig, Frieda Volz, Emma Schairer, Helen Coon, Elsa McGee, Lillian Hewitt, and Chuck Jacobus.]

A Real Family Restaurant

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Woodlawn Avenue was once his driveway

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The congregation of Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church celebrated for two days in 1896, after finishing the church at 632 North Fourth Avenue that they had been working on for five years. Built of brick with a stately tower, beautiful stained glass windows, and intricate woodwork, the church was worth the wait.

On Sunday, April 5, 1896, Bethel held three services--morning, afternoon, and evening. Bishop Henry McNeal Turner, who had laid the building’s cornerstone, served as guest preacher. Turner, then residing in Atlanta, Georgia, had been the first black chaplain in the U.S. Army, thanks to an appointment from Abraham Lincoln. Other guest preachers included Rev. Mrs. G. T. Thurman of Jackson; Rev. James Barksdale, pastor of Ypsilanti’s AME congregation; and, representing the white Methodists, Rev. Camden Cobern of Ann Arbor’s First Methodist Church. The celebration continued the next day with a dedicatory concert and recitations by four elocutionists. “Altogether it was an occasion which will long be remembered by the members of the A. M. E. church,” reported the Ann Arbor Argus.

Building the substantial church was a stretch for a congregation that numbered about forty at the time of the dedication. Bethel AME was an offshoot of Ann Arbor’s first black church, the “Union Church,” founded in 1855. Members built a small Greek Revival place of worship at what is now 504 High Street (with a porch added, it is today a very small private residence), but just two years later, some split off to form Bethel AME. The other Union Church members went on to organize another historic black church, Second Baptist.

Bethel AME Church was located in this building at 632 North Fourth Avenue from 1895 to 1971.

The AME Church, the first independent black church in the United States, was founded in 1816 by Richard Allen. Born a slave, Allen saved his earnings to buy his freedom. He became an ordained minister and was hired by a Methodist church in Philadelphia to preach the early morning and early evening services. But when his preaching began attracting blacks to the congregation, some of the white members were displeased. Their objections led Allen and his black congregants to leave and found a church of their own.

The church they left was called “Methodist” for its form of worship and “Episcopal” because it was organized under bishops. Allen carried both terms over at his new congregation, and added “African” after the heritage of its founders.

Ann Arbor’s AME congregation was founded by John Wesley Brooks, who was, like Allen, a former slave. Born in Maryland in 1798, Brooks was sold to a New York resident when he was still a child. Slaves in New York at the time were supposed to be freed when they reached age twenty-eight, but Brooks’s owner ignored the rule. When Brooks was thirty, a lawyer named John Spencer successfully argued Brooks’s case and won his freedom.

Brooks stayed in New York another year as Spencer’s employee and moved to Ann Arbor in 1829, just five years after the town was founded. He paid $100 for eighty acres in Pittsfield Township, where he farmed for twenty-five years. He moved back into town, to a house on North Main, at about the same time the Union Church was being organized.

Bearing the same names as John Wesley, the eighteenth-century founder of Methodism, Brooks must have been born into a Methodist family. The biographical sketch of him in the 1881 Charles C. Chapman county history says, “Mr. Brooks experienced religion at the age of thirteen, and has been a member of the M.E. [Methodist Episcopal] church for 70 years. He was ordained to preach by Rev. Swift, and for five years after his arrival in Michigan was engaged in the missionary work.” Just when Brooks joined the AME Church is not known, but since he was eighteen and living in the East when Allen founded his church, it is likely that Brooks was involved in it before coming to Michigan.

Bethel AME’s church history says that for some time before 1865, the congregation shared worship space with the Quakers at State and Lawrence. It was a natural pairing, because local Quakers had helped escaped slaves on their way to Canada during the days of the Underground Railroad. In its early years, Bethel also worshipped in a small cottage that Brooks owned on the west side of Fourth Avenue.

In 1869 Bethel moved to its first permanent home, buying a lot across the street from Brooks’s cottage and building a wood-frame church. The post–Civil War building boom was providing new job opportunities, and Ann Arbor’s black population had grown to 230. Members of the church held such jobs as laborers (John Britton, Martin and Robert Carson, Stephen Adams), carpenter (Henry Williams), plow setter (John Brown), barber (Lucian Brown), porter (George Brown), and drayman (Henry Smith).

In 1890 Rev. Abraham Cottman, the minister at the time, suggested that the members build a bigger church. The next year they moved the frame building to the back of the lot and laid the cornerstone for the new building. A group of young people formed the Furnishing Club; as soon as the basement was done, they fitted it out for services, and the congregation moved in.

The parishioners, many of whom were skilled craftsmen, continued to work on the sanctuary. Members contributed money for windows, pews, and other furnishings. Two of the stained glass windows are named in memory of early church members John Brown and B. Fassett. Fassett’s husband, a minister, had led Bethel in 1865, and the Fassetts’ daughter, Mrs. John Freeman, paid for the window. According to one local history, O. W. Stephenson’s Ann Arbor: The First Hundred Years, some of the money also came from white businessmen in town (one stained glass window has “Eberbach Hardware” on it).

Bethel nearly lost its hard-won church only a few years after moving in. In the economic depression that followed the outbreak of the Spanish-American War in 1898, church members were thrown out of work, the congregation fell behind on its payments, and the mortgage was about to be foreclosed. On the day the foreclosure sale was scheduled, church members sat in court silently praying for a reprieve. Just as the gavel was about to go down, trustee Stephen Adams came running in.

“They were in trouble. They were behind in their mortgage,” says Judy Overstreet, Adams’s great-granddaughter, relaying the story as her grandmother told it to her. “He [Adams] came tearing in with the money. He had put another mortgage on his house [to cover the church’s debt].”

Just half a block away from Bethel, on the corner of Beakes and Fifth Avenue, Second Baptist built its first church. Longtime Bethel member Rosemarion Blake recalls that on summer Sundays when both congregations had their windows open, they could hear each other singing. Blake remembers some funny coincidences--like the time one congregation sang “Will there be any stars in my crown?” and the other, singing a different hymn, responded, “No, not one.”

In Ann Arbor’s early days, blacks lived spread around town, but by the end of the nineteenth century most were concentrated around the two black churches and across the Huron River in Lower Town. The Bethel history explains that the church stood “in one of the few neighborhoods in Ann Arbor where blacks were permitted to purchase property. Consequently, Bethel was ideally situated to provide its congregation and the larger community with services that went beyond being a primary place of worship. Anyone who walked or drove past Bethel--at practically any time of the day or evening--saw a brightly lit church inviting them to come in and participate in whatever activities were taking place.”

“There were always so many activities,” remembers Irma Wright, who grew up in the church in the 1940s. She sang in the junior choir, worked on Christmas pageants with the other kids, and enjoyed the big outdoor dinners in the back in the summer. The basement was used for Sunday school and for meetings and clubs. During the week the church was open for Bible study.

Blondeen Munson has wonderful memories of the ACE youth group (short for “Allen Christian Endeavor,” after the denomination’s founder) that met at the church in the 1950s under the leadership of Harry Mial and Shirley Baker. “It was a really, really important place to be,” Munson recalls. “It attracted not just the Bethel teenagers but kids from Second Baptist and a few black Catholics in the neighborhood. It was really rap sessions. There was lots of talking about life, school. We’d get help with homework, went on hayrides, had parties.”

Mial, who at the same time was running the youth canteen at Willow Run, often organized joint activities to lessen the rivalries between the Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti communities, such as taking both groups roller-skating at a rink in Inkster. When he discovered that these weekly excursions were keeping the segregated rink in business, he used the leverage to persuade the owner to integrate it.

In the 1960s Mial was also a leader of the Ann Arbor Fair Housing Association. The desegregation group held many of its meetings at Bethel. “We’d have weekly, biweekly, triweekly meetings there, and no one ever objected,” he recalls. “We were welcome because they supported what we were doing.”

After a year of picketing Pittsfield Village because it wouldn’t rent to blacks, the group convinced the Ann Arbor City Council to pass a resolution banning discrimination in housing and employment. “It was the reference from then on, the enabler,” says Mial.

Bethel’s minister at the time was Rev. Lyman Parks, who himself was very involved in community affairs and was often asked to serve on city boards and commissions. When Parks was later transferred to Grand Rapids, he became even more involved in politics, ending up as mayor of the city. “Ann Arbor whetted his appetite,” says Mial.

Parks’s successor was John A. Woods. “Parks was more aggressive about getting on committees,” Mial says, comparing the two. “Woods was more a seer, a wise man. He would listen and counsel.” Woods’s son, John A. Woods Jr., agrees, calling his father “rabbinical, meaning teacher.” Although different from Parks in style, the elder Woods was equally involved in the community. His son remembers him as “accessible. He lived on West Summit, in the heart of the community. He was seen sitting on the front porch. People knew their pastor was there.

“There was no such a thing as making an appointment. People just showed up. I remember late-night counseling sessions, people distraught because their son or daughter was arrested. He’d do what he could to ameliorate the situation.”

Woods extended his concerns to the larger black community. “Although he had no mantle other than local pastor, he was one of the de facto leaders of the community,” his son says. His wife, Juanita Woods, was a teacher, and he became concerned over tracking in the public schools. The police would call him in to help defuse explosive situations. He also served the community by making Bethel Church available for funerals. “Some churches only bury you if you’re a member,” John A. Woods Jr. explains, “sometimes only if you’re a member in good standing. But his only requirement to be buried at Bethel was that you had to be dead.”

Woods’s biggest legacy may have been his work in shepherding the new church on Plum Street (now John A. Woods Drive) to completion. The church had owned the land across the river near Northside School since 1953 but didn’t decide to build on it until after Woods came and the congregation became too numerous to stay on Fourth Avenue.

“It was a great thing to have the church there. Lots of members lived in the neighborhood. We were sorry [to move], but we had to go on,” says longtime member Pauline Dennard. The building was too small for all the congregation’s religious and outreach activities, and parking was inadequate.

When Munson was growing up, as she remembers, “we didn’t have a large parking lot. We didn’t need it--everyone walked.” But as desegregation opened up new neighborhoods to black residents and people moved farther away, more began driving to church. Some suggested that they stay on Fourth Avenue, tear down the old church, and rebuild, but parking would still have been a problem.

The congregation moved to the new church in 1971, using the education wing for services until the sanctuary was completed in 1974. “It was remarkable,” says Irma Wright, remembering the first time she saw the new building. “There was so much parking. The church looked so big.” Second Baptist also left the old neighborhood in the 1970s, moving to a big new church on Red Oak off Miller.

In August 1989, after a successful fund-raising campaign led by Rosemarion and Richard Blake, Bethel AME burned the mortgage on its new church. John A. Woods Sr. died four months later. “He hung on to see the fruition of his dreams,” says his son.

The three ministers who followed Woods--Clifford Gordon, Archie Criglar, and current pastor Alfred Johnson--have all been active in the community. According to Mial, “Each pastor had to come and get active because it’s an active church. They inherited what their predecessors had done.”

They definitely need the parking space: today members live all around town, and most drive to church. Dennard, whose husband served on city council in the 1950s, running on a platform of fair housing, recalls that back then, housing for blacks “was limited to where you lived in that time. Now, lots of people are living all over Ann Arbor. It’s beautiful.” A scan of the church directory shows members living in every zip code in Ann Arbor, plus a handful from surrounding communities.

New Grace Apostolic Church bought Bethel’s Fourth Avenue building in 1971 and remained there until last September. “They had choir practice in the evening,” recalls Heather Phillips, who lived nearby. “Their music filled the neighborhood. It was great.”

But history has repeated itself: New Grace, too, has outgrown the Fourth Avenue church. Member Bobbie Baugh says the congregation has tripled in size since buying the building and is now close to 100 members.

“We moved because the building was functionally obsolete,” says Baugh. “It was inadequate for our needs. We want to serve the community, reach out to youth, offer weekend activities to people outside the church.” While awaiting completion of its new church on Packard across from Buhr Park, New Grace is renting space for weekday programs at First Church of the Nazarene and holds Sunday services at the Red Cross.

Mike Bielby, himself a neighborhood resident who appreciated the old church’s charm, bought the building and is turning it into four apartments (see Inside Ann Arbor, January). “I’ll have it match the earliest appearance as close as possible,” he promises. Bielby plans to create two handicapped-accessible apartments on the lower floor, where community activities were held; a luxurious three-bedroom apartment in what was the sanctuary; and a fourth apartment in a newly created third floor in the upper area of the sanctuary. He’s already restored the stained glass windows and has pledged to fix up the tower.

As Bielby starts working on the building, he is amazed at what good shape it is in after more than 100 years of use. “The craftsmanship was excellent,” he says.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dobson-McOmber returns to the Steam Printing House

By Christmas the Dobson-McOmber Insurance Company plans to move into new offices in the former Dr. Chase's Steam Printing House at the corner of Miller and Main. One of Ann Arbor's landmark buildings, it was immodestly described by its original owner, Alvin Wood Chase, as "without question the finest printing office in the West."

Chase had little reason for modesty. He started the building in 1864, putting up the corner section as a place to print his book, Dr. Chase's Recipes; or Information for Everybody. A collection of folk remedies and practical suggestions about almost every aspect of everyday life and work, it was a best-seller--at one time, his boosters claimed, second only to the Bible in sales. As sales rose and Chase began also publishing a newspaper--the Peninsular Courier and Family Visitant--which he bought primarily to tout his book--he found he needed more room. Within four years, he tripled the size of the building.

Chase opened the completed printing plant with a great flourish on December 29, 1868. Ann Arbor mayor Christian Eberbach served as master of ceremonies at a banquet for 400 people, introducing a lineup of speakers that included U-M president Erastus Haven and the Albion College president. The ceremony celebrated not only the completion of a building but also the rise of a man from humble origins to a place of prominence. In the nineteenth-century manner, Chase earned his fame and fortune with equal parts of hard work and self-promotion.

Born in New York State in 1817, Alvin Chase came to Ann Arbor in 1856 to pursue a medical degree after a career as a traveling peddler of groceries and household drugs. While taking classes at the U-M, he supported his family by selling home medical remedies and household recipes that he had picked up in his travels, starting with a single page of hints and cures.

Chase only audited classes at the U-M, since Latin was required to complete the program and had not been taught at the "log school" he'd attended in New York. He earned the title "doctor" in 1857 after spending sixteen weeks in Cincinnati at the Eclectic Medical Institute.

After returning to Ann Arbor, Chase practiced medicine and continued to expand his book of recipes. To the modern reader, many of his remedies seem very quaint. Besides cures for five kinds of "apparent death," they included tinctures, teas, and ointments made from plants, tree bark, and--in one case--cooked toads. But at a time when doctors were still bleeding patients or poisoning them with mercury, his cures may have been as much help as anything the local doctor prescribed.

Chase himself admitted to no doubts about the efficacy of his remedies. His entertaining, first-person style is full of anecdotes about where and when he got the recipes and the wonderful luck people had using them.

Chase was fifty-one when he celebrated the grand opening of his building. The next year, afraid that sales of his book would soon decline, and also sure that he would die young, he sold the building and the businesses to Rice Beal. Sales did not decline. After Chase tried unsuccessfully to get back his book rights, he began an all-new recipe book. He died in 1885 (at age sixty-eight), just before completing the book, which was published posthumously as the "memorial edition."

Rice Beal eventually passed his interests to his son, Junius, who continued to publish a newspaper from the building. In 1910 Russell Dobson Sr. bought what was by then called the Ann Arbor Daily Times-News. His specialty, according to his grandson Jack Dobson, was buying failing newspapers and bringing them back to economic health. He had just finished reviving and then selling the Akron Beacon Journal. His decision to come to Ann Arbor was influenced by fact that his son, Russell Jr., was entering the U-M law school.

Dobson's doctoring of the newspaper worked. He moved it from the Chase building to a new building on Ann Street in 1916. Three years later he sold it to the Booth chain, which still owns and publishes it--as the Ann Arbor News.

In 1924, Kyer, Whitker, and Dobson, a wholesale grocer, moved into the building at Miller and Main. The Dobson was Russell Jr. He was also practicing law and soon left the business altogether to work full-time in insurance. His partners remained in business there until Charlie Kyer's death in 1938. Henry Whitker then sold the business to Symons, a big distribution company, who used the building until they moved out to State Street in 1946.

After Symons vacated it, the building was used as a warehouse for various companies--Argus, Montgomery Ward, Smith Floor Covering--becoming increasingly dilapidated through neglect. The cornice and brackets were removed during the Symons occupancy, and during the warehouse years the windows were boarded up, probably to decrease theft.

In 1968 Johnson, Johnson, and Roy, a landscape architecture firm that was a pioneer in historic restoration, bought the building from the Whitker family and began fixing it up--demonstrating that they could do for themselves what they advocated for others. They used the top floors for their offices and rented out the street level to various businesses. Last year they moved into a new building they built on Miller right behind their old one, then sold the corner building to Dobson-McOmber Insurance.

For Dobson-McOmber, the move will be a homecoming of sorts, since both the Dobson and McOmber strands of the company have their roots in downtown Ann Arbor. The company traces its beginnings to 1893, when Fred T. McOmber left his job at the post office to start an insurance business.

The Dobson family became involved in insurance in 1924, when Russell Sr. started the Ann Arbor Trust Company. Russell Jr., who had worked as an assistant prosecuting attorney and then in a private law firm, joined the trust company in the title insurance division. When Dobson Sr. sold the trust company, Dobson Jr. retained the insurance division, starting his own company.

The two insurance companies, Dobson and McOmber, ran parallel paths, both operating in various downtown offices. Both men had sons who fought in World War II and then came back to join their father's businesses. Fred T. McOmber, although well past retirement age, held on "with grim determination" through the war in order to keep the business for his son, Ted. Ted McOmber, who returned in 1945, when his dad was seventy-seven, says, "I felt I owed it to him to try. It was the least I could do." Ted found he enjoyed working with people and stayed with the insurance business until his own recent retirement.

Bill Dobson finished his MBA right after the war and then joined his father's agency in 1948, eventually becoming the owner. Ted McOmber and Bill Dobson, who had known each other all their lives, merged their companies in 1957. Dobson-McOmber Insurance moved out to East Stadium and later Manchester Road as business grew. The tradition of passing the business on to a son is continuing: Steve Dobson, Bill's son, has been Dobson-McOmber president since 1987.

Fred T. McOmber's firm started out with one employee, a secretary. Today Dobson-McOmber employs forty-five people--enough to use all of Dr. Chase's old building. Continuing the historic renovation begun by Johnson, Johnson and Roy, they're painting it in shades of green to bring out the ornate brick detailing. Back windows that were covered over will be opened up and all the windows replaced with four-over-four glass similar to what was there originally. The garage on the back is being torn down and replaced with an entrance and an elevator shaft, making the building handicapped-accessible and providing space for customer parking.

[Photo caption from original print edition]: Chase's recipes included cures for five kinds of "apparent death" and an ointment made from cooked toads.

[Photo caption from original print edition]: (Above) Dr. Alvin Wood Chase began his printing house in 1864; his self-help medical book sold so well that he was able to triple the plant's size by 1868. (Left) Bill and Steve Dobson and Ted McOmber of Dobson-McOmber Insurance. The century-old firm is restoring Chase's showplace as its new headquarters.

Four generations of selling watches and jewelry

In four generations of selling watches, jewelry, and silver, the Schlanderer family has seen jewelry sales go up, silver sales go down, and watch sales remain steady. The need to know the time evidently remains a constant in most people's lives, regardless of economics or fashion.

Schlanderer and Sons, 208 South Main, was founded in 1933 by C. Henry Schlanderer and his two sons, Paul and Arthur. But the family story really starts much earlier. By the time he opened that store, Hank Schlanderer had already been in the watch and jewelry business for forty-seven years.

Schlanderer was born in 1870, the son of German parents. His father, also C. Henry, was born in a small town near Tuebingen and immigrated to Ann Arbor with his family in the 1850's. He found work as a baker, a trade he had learned in Germany, married Fredericka Rauscher, and bought a house at 504 South Main. A volunteer firefighter, he was mortally injured on his way to a fire in 1871. Fredericka was left with four young children and another on the way. To make ends meet, she moved the young family to the basement of their house and rented out the upstairs.

As soon as he finished sixth grade, Hank Schlanderer went to work; collectively the children managed to earn enough to allow the family to reclaim the upstairs of the house. When he was fourteen, Hank joined his brother working at the Keck furniture factory on Fourth Street. Two years later, he left to apprentice as a watchmaker with George Haller.

Schlanderer could not have chosen a better teacher. George Haller, trained in Germany, came from a long line of skilled clock and watchmakers. His father, Jacob Haller, even had several horological inventions to his name. Schlanderer was paid a dollar a week as an apprentice, and he graduated when he could make a watch from scratch. He stayed on with Haller for twenty-five years, rising to manage Haller's store at 216 South Main.

When Haller died in 1911, Schlanderer formed a partnership with another watchmaker and jeweler, Fred Seyfried. They called their store Schlanderer and Seyfried, or sometimes S & S. They bought the Henne jewelry store at 113 E. Liberty, then moved in 1922 to 304 South Main. In 1933, when both men wanted to bring their sons into the business, they dissolved the partnership. Fred Seyfried stayed at 304, while Hank moved a block north to 208. Both stores have been there ever since. (Seyfried's today is owned by brothers Bill and Jim Hart.)

Schlanderer's two sons, who joined him at the new location, brought their own skills to the business. Paul had been working as a silverware buyer for J.L. Hudson, while Arthur had a master's in business and could take over the accounting. Both were graduates of the U-M, where Arthur was captain of the hockey team.

The building that Schlanderer and his two sons moved into was almost eighty years old. Paul Christman built it in 1854 for his tin and stove shop, which remained there until his death in 1913. After Christman's death, the building became a confectionery, then a drugstore. For a time, the Staffan Funeral Home occupied the former Christman family apartment upstairs.

Schlanderer and Sons opened in the middle of the Depression. Arthur Schlanderer remembers that during their first year they didn't earn even $25 a week. Things turned around during World War II. In the 1930's they had stock to sell but not enough customers. In the 1940's they had customers but not enough stock, since many factories had switched to war production. Most of their watches came from Switzerland, which was neutral during the war, but shipments took so long that the watches were often sold before they even arrived. Some of the store's best customers were workers at the Willow Run bomber plant, who had extra money for the first time in their lives and came in to buy fancy items like diamond-encrusted wristwatches.

Hank Schlanderer died in 1941 at the age of seventy. His son Paul died in 1949, leaving Art the sole owner until 1957, when his nephew Chuck joined him after graduating from Hillsdale College with a business degree and spending two years in the service. Chuck's son, Chuck Jr., joined the business in 1989, after finishing at his dad's alma mater, Hillsdale. In addition to his regular liberal arts studies, Chuck Jr. studied jewelry making, both in high school (Huron has an excellent program) and in college. Arthur retired two years ago at age eighty-two.

The store's inventory continues to evolve as demand changes. It started as primarily a watch store with jewelry as a sideline, but sales of both are now about the same. Chuck Schlanderer says people used to have just a few good pieces but now like to have jewelry for every occasion. Because customers also prefer better quality pieces these days, Schlanderer's no longer carries costume jewelry. Another item that has disappeared is the compact, a small mirrored case for loose face powder. Back when most women had at least two, one for special occasions and one for every day, it was not unusual for Schlanderer's to sell twenty a day.

Sales of silver hollowware and flatware, once a major part of the business, have also declined, partly because per ounce silver prices have gone way up, but mainly because of changed lifestyles. People used to feel they needed silver serving pieces for entertaining, and they were common wedding gifts. Young women began collecting silver in their "hope chests" long before they ever met their future husbands. Now few women have time even to polish silver.

[Photo caption from original print edition]: Hank Schlanderer stands next to his boss George Haller (far right) in this 1891 photo. Schlanderer opened his own store after Haller's death in 1911. Three subsequent generations of Schlanderers have sold jewelry downtown: (from right) Art Schlanderer, Chuck Schlanderer, and Chuck Jr.

From El Salvador to Ann Arbor with hope and good cooking

For immigrants, it's a bittersweet experience seeing their children embrace a new culture. Pilar Celaya says this first hit her when she was at the Pioneer High graduation of her two oldest kids. "When they started playing the national anthem, [the American] not the El Salvadoran one, I started crying--thinking I was only supposed to stay here one year and now my children are graduating in another country."

An Ann Arbor resident for eight years, Celaya, fifty, has a story as dramatic as that of any refugee from Hitler's Germany or Stalin's Russia. Forced to flee El Salvador because their lives were in danger, she and her family came by chance to Ann Arbor because the Society of Friends (Quakers) offered them sanctuary. A short (four feet nine) woman with slightly graying shoulder-length brown hair and sparkling eyes, Celaya arrived penniless and without knowing English. Today, she has her own catering business, her husband, Aurelio, has a permanent job, and all five of her children have earned high school diplomas. Two have gone on to college, and one has graduated.

In the early 1980's, the Celaya family (the name is an alias they chose to safeguard their identity when they arrived in the United States) was living in El Salvador's capital city, San Salvador; Pilar worked in a textile factory and Aurelio in a food processing plant. They lived just outside of town in a small farmhouse with a dirt floor, unpainted walls, and an outdoor toilet, but lots of room outside. They grew squash, bananas, and avocados, and raised chickens, ducks, and pigs--all of which they sold. They enjoyed their pets: numerous birds that flew around freely, and five dogs, one for each child. Leaders in their unions at work, they were also active members of the Emanuel Baptist Church, inspired by its social activism.

The terrible series of events that forever altered the lives of the Celaya family began on the night of February 17, 1980, when three men pulled up in a jeep and burst into their house. The men were part of El Salvador's notorious "death squads," who didn't like the family's union activism. They killed Celaya's two brothers-in-law, wounded two of her nieces, and destroyed the house. Afraid the death squads would return--all in all, death squads killed more than 70,000 people over a ten-year span--the Celaya family went into hiding.

After Pilar's brother was arrested, Aurelio escaped to Mexico. At risk to herself, Celaya waited until her brother was released from jail before she and the children joined Aurelio in Mexico in 1982. There, she found work managing a laundry, while Aurelio worked as a chauffeur. She says of their stay in Mexico, "Even though we could speak the language, we were not so lucky in Mexico. The country is poor. There are not many opportunities."

In 1985, they accepted an offer of sanctuary made by the Friends congregation in Ann Arbor. Though half a million people had fled the fighting in El Salvador, the U.S. government did not recognize the conflict as a civil war, and so denied them political asylum. In defiance of that policy, the Friends offered to help the family enter the U.S. illegally and to harbor them in the large house they own on Hill Street.

The Celayas crossed the border in Arizona, after a four-and-a-half-hour walk that included fording a river. The trip from Arizona to Ann Arbor took a month, with the Friends transporting them in a twentieth-century Underground Railroad, exchanging drivers and putting the family up at different homes.

Finally arriving, tired and dispirited, at their new home at 1416 Hill, the Celayas were cheered when Barry Lyons, one of their hosts, welcomed them in Spanish. For a week, Lyons slept on the couch to be on hand in case of an encounter with the police or immigration officials. Luckily, the authorities didn't bother them, then or later.

A month after her arrival, Pilar Celaya began speaking in public about her experiences in El Salvador, taking a translator with her, eventually traveling around the country to sanctuary conferences. Reliving the terrible events caused her to suffer nightmares after each engagement. "It wasn't easy," she says, "but I wanted to make a real effect and do something concrete."

Celaya and her family had to adjust to everything in Ann Arbor, from the weather (they had never seen snow) to the abundance of specialized stores to Americans' fondness for gadgets. Although delighted to find such previously unknown luxuries as a blender and a mixer in the Quaker House kitchen, Celaya once exclaimed to a friend in Ann Arbor, "I think North Americans don't sleep! They have to be awake to think what they can invent to make money."

When the family first came to Ann Arbor, Pilar and Aurelio could not work because, as illegal aliens, they could not get Social Security numbers. The Friends and others took care of their day-to-day expenses and their medical and dental bills. The couple took care of the house, did odd jobs to earn spending money, and took English classes. Learning English was more of a struggle for them, because of their ages and their relative isolation, than for their children.

While learning to cope with her new life, Celaya kept Salvadoran ways alive. Although her children picked up English quickly, she insisted that they speak Spanish at home. She continued to cook Salvadoran-style food. When the younger boys wanted to go on overnights, she refused to allow them, because that is not the custom in El Salvador. She also held to a strict nighttime curfew.

At first, the Celayas assumed that they would soon be returning to El Salvador. After two years had passed and conditions back home remained unstable, they applied for political asylum. With the help of U-M law professor Alex Aleinikoff and his students, they gained TPS--Temporary Protective Status. Although technically they could still be deported, the Celayas feel safe today, after eight years.

Once she knew she could be legally employed, Pilar Celaya started thinking of a way to earn a living. As a teenager and young wife, she had earned money cooking and selling tamales and soup on the street on weekends. Early in her residency at Quaker House, she and Aurelio found that they could repay people's kindness by cooking--giving tamales as gifts, inviting new friends for meals, and cooking for Quaker functions.

Celaya began her professional cooking career in 1988 by selling tamales. A year later, she moved into full-scale catering, using either the kitchen where she lived or the one at First Baptist, their Ann Arbor church. In 1990, she took a Community Development course on how to run a small business. She now does her catering out of a kitchen she rented on North Fourth Avenue next to New Grace Apostolic Church. Relatives on the West Coast help by sending authentic ingredients like plantain leaves for the tamales and spices such as azafran, borraja, and biente de leon

Two years ago, the Celayas made the big leap from the Friends house to living on their own at Arrowwood Hills Co-op. They live in a four-bedroom townhouse, with a bedroom for each of the three boys still at home.

Celaya has filled the place with tropical plants, Latin American art, including a Diego Rivera print and a Peruvian wall hanging, pots and knickknacks from around the world, and many books, in both Spanish and English.

Eleven years after their flight to Mexico, Celaya says she still misses "everything--my people, my culture, my church, my home." A recurring dream suggests her nostalgia: "I see myself in my house in El Salvador with my kids, but always they are little. I go shopping, and on the way back I remember I have to take an airplane or a bus to Ann Arbor. Then I wake up and realize I am in Michigan."

Officially El Salvador is at peace now. But Celaya knows from contacts back home that there are still killings by people who oppose the peace agreement between the government and the rebels. And there is the Americanization of her children. "After eight years of their lives here, I can't ask them to go back," she says. Her daughter, Carla, who graduated from Nazareth College two years ago, married an American in a large and festive ceremony at Cobblestone Farm. A son, Alezandro, attends Eastern Michigan. The three other sons, all high school graduates, are working and saving money for college.

Celaya herself wishes she could afford to attend college. That and opening her own restaurant are her dreams. And while she doesn't want to give up her Salvadoran citizenship, the family is applying for a different immigration status that would allow them to leave the country and return.

Celaya's friends are amazed that after all she's been through, she's still such a warm, caring person. She says, "I thank God I'm still alive, I still have my health, and my kids are good people. We're lucky people as a family. I know bad things have happened, but I'm happy with my life."

When studio photography was king Today, when the slightest family occasion is recorded with simple pocket-size cameras, and major events bring out the camcorder, it's easy to forget that just yesterday major life events were commemorated in the photographer's studio. Births, confirmations, graduations, team membership, army enlistments, marriages--all, if the family could afford it, were recorded for posterity at the local studio. Studio photographers, masters of the bulky, tripod-mounted cameras and fragile glass negatives of the day, were the unoffiocial portraitists of the city. From 1890 to 1971, Fred Rentschler and his son and successor, Edwin Rentschler, took pictures of mayors, businessmen, service organization officers, and ministers. Their Rentschler Photographers, primarily at 319 East Huron, had almost a monopoly on U-M subjects: they memorialized every U-M president from James Angell on, photographed the leading professors, and took all the major team pictures. Fred Rentschler was born in Ann Arbor on June 3, 1868, a few years after his parents immigrated from Wurttemberg, Germany. The 1906 Past and Present of Washtenaw County described the family as "prominent in social circles of the city"--connections that no doubt helped Fred get customers. After a two-year apprenticeship in photography with the firm of Lewis and Gibson, Rentschler established his own studio in 1890 at the corner of Main and Huron, on the second floor of Brown's Drugstore. His darkroom was across the alley, reached through a covered catwalk. He would take a picture in his studio, run across the alley to develop the glass negative before it faded, then return to take the next shot. In 1904, when the drugstore was about to be demolished to make way for the Glazier Building, Rentschler bought an old house at 319 East Huron, on land now part of City Hall, to use as his studio. To capture as much natural light for sittings as possible, he built a room on the back of the house with a two-story glass wall. Next door Rentschler built a house for his family. He had married Jessie Doane, a schoolteacher from Dexter, in 1898, and the couple had three children. Fred Rentschler's grandson, Jeff Rentschler, a recent retiree from the Ann Arbor Fire Department, was a small boy when his grandfather died. He heard from those who knew Fred that he was friendly and outgoing, but also that he ran the studio with an iron hand. At his death the Ann Arbor News wrote, "He had a great deal of patience . . . and thus was able to wait for that fleeting twist of the mouth, or that expression of eyes that delighted his heart when he squeezed the bulb to flash the human countenance onto a film." Edwin Rentschler, born in 1900, was trained from an early age to be his dad's successor. He officially entered the photography business in 1926, after graduating from the U-M with a business degree. (Jeff wonders if his dad resented going right into the business and if that is why he, in turn, wasn't encouraged to take it over.) The same year Edwin Rentschler joined the business, he married Lois Gates, the daughter of Dr. Neil Gates. As his father's health declined, Edwin handled more and more of the business, taking over completely a few years before Fred died in 1940. Edwin retained the customers and used the same technology as his fa≠ther had. Jeff Rentschler remembers him standing behind the big camera or hurrying to bring out props--chairs, stools of various sizes, tables. Like his father, he was a perfectionist and a careful craftsman, good with details and very patient. Jeff remembers him as a sterner man than his grandfather; but he could also be very charming. Even with children, who can be a real challenge for a photographer, he would talk and wisecrack until they relaxed and he could get good pictures. Jeff describes his father as a workaholic who perfected the system of photography he had been taught and changed nothing unless absolutely necessary. Long after good-quality 35-mm film cameras appeared--including the Ann Arbor-made Argus--Edwin Rentschler stayed with glass negatives and a large view camera so heavy it could be moved around the room only on casters. Because the equipment was so heavy, all work was done in the studio, never on-site. Weeks before their weddings, brides would come to the studio to pose in their gowns. Whole crowds would arrive for group pictures. Even the athletic teams came. Jeff remembers it was a tradition for the U-M football team to come at the end of each season and pose for a group picture. Then they would elect the next year's captain and his picture would be taken, too. (Rentschler didn't charge teams for the pictures, but made money selling them to others.) Edwin Rentschler's studio was a one-man operation; he even made frames himself. The only help he had was a receptionist and a college student who got a room in exchange for chores such as light cleaning and snow shoveling. During World War II, though, he had to hire extra help to take care of all the servicemen who wanted their pictures taken before they left, possibly forever. As the studio era waned, Rentschler could have stayed busy by moving about, doing weddings or photographing industrial sites. But he preferred the studio. For the last ten years of his career, he shared space in the Talbot Studio on Main Street and continued taking formal portraits. The only time he ventured from the studio was for the football team pictures. He was willing to take those on-site because, when he moved out of his Huron Street studio, the athletic department had taken all his staging to Yost and would set it up for him every year. Rentschler retired in 1969 and died two years later. Rentschler took home movies of his own family, but never casual photographs. Asked when he retired if he would take pictures of his family, he replied, "My wife takes candids. I'm strictly a studio man."

[Photo caption from the original print edition]: For decades, mayors, U-M presidents, ministers, and even the entire U-M football team made pilgrimages to Rentschler Photographers (above left) to have their pictures taken for posterity. It was undoubtedly founder Fred Rentschler who photographed his son Edwin and bride Lois Gates in 1926. The Rentschler studio and home on Huron were demolished in the 1960's to make room for City Hall. [Photo caption from the original print edition]: Long after good-quality 35-mm film cameras appeared--including the Ann Arbor-made Argus--Edwin Rentschler stayed with glass negatives and a large view camera so heavy it could be moved around the room only on casters.