From the Observer to the Web: Then & Now Goes Online

Sat, 10/01/2005 - 2:51pm

When: June 24, 2009 at the Downtown Library: Multi-Purpose Room

The Ann Arbor District Library and the Ann Arbor Observer are extremely pleased to unveil 'Ann Arbor Observer: Then & Now' to the public. Local historian Grace Shackman and Ann Arbor Observer editor John Hilton will discuss the history of the Ann Arbor as viewed by the Observer and staff will introduce 'Ann Arbor Observer: Then & Now' an online collection of local history articles published in the Ann Arbor Observer over the past three decades. These articles give a rich picture of the various themes, people, and places that make up Ann Arbor. Accompanying the articles is an image gallery with photographs from Ann Arbor's past. Refreshments will be served at this event, which will include a demo of this new historical resource.

Transcript

• [00:00:23.95] JOSIE PARKER: Good evening. I will introduce myself although I have-- it's wonderful after so many years to be able to say I know most of the people in the room. It's really great. Sometimes in these different programs I can't do that. But for those of you who don't know me, I'm Josie Parker, the director of the library system, and it's my pleasure to welcome you here this evening.
• [00:00:42.86] I've been looking forward to this program for a long time. I'll start with the business. If you have a cell phone, even if you think you've turned it off, would you check to make sure that you have? And we will be having-- we're filming tonight's program for future program showings on CTN and also probably will be as the DVD in the library's collections to circulate.
• [00:01:06.76] And we'll have a question and answer period, and when we do we'll ask you to raise your hand and someone from the library staff will bring the microphone to you so that your question is recorded. It's also a courtesy for everyone else in the room but we have another ulterior motive. We would like to make sure you make it onto the film. I am not a lifelong resident of Ann Arbor. You probably couldn't tell.
• [00:01:32.42] But I remember moving here 17 years ago in July to a house at the time on the West side. And the people we bought our home from were lovely people who moved into Pontiac with a car industry. And she left us the current issue of Observer on the kitchen counter with a lovely note about, you will find out everything you need to know about living in Ann Arbor if all you do is read the Observer front to back every month. And I didn't have to, but I choose to. And I'm very grateful that I still receive the Observer in my house now out on Dicksboro. And I read it front to back and I like it, John, very much. It's a pleasure to see the Observer.
• [00:02:20.84] What I didn't know until I became director of the library and became more involved in the library system is how much history has been incorporated into the work and the writings of the Observer, and how much the fabric of the community is intertwined into those articles, and who the names in-- the names meant nothing to me. Metzgers meant absolutely nothing to me. A Metzger grandson is my son's best friend and dates my daughter. I should have paid more attention to the articles about Metzger 17 years ago.
• [00:02:52.94] But those are the types of fun things that happen when you live in a place long enough and you start reading the articles and you go back. Tonight we're going to get a glimpse back. Some of you in the room have known Grace and John for a long, long time. I've only had the pleasure of knowing John for very short period time and Grace for a little longer. But Grace and I are about to start another project, which I'm going to say out loud tonight, so we'll both be committed. We're going to pick up the library history from the early '80s, where it ended the last time it was documented, and try to bring it forward. So that will be something else look forward to. I'm going to leave it to the staff of the library, who are responsible for this great project that you're about to hear about tonight, to introduce our speakers. But again, thank you, and I'd like Amy Cantu and Andrew McLaren, librarians here, to come forward.
• [00:03:41.94] [APPLAUSE]
• [00:03:47.85] AMY CANTU: Thanks so much for coming. We're very pleased to have author, teacher, and local historian, Grace Shackman, with us tonight, as well as Ann Arbor Observer editor, John Hilton, to help us launch a project that we've been working on for this past year. It's called Ann Arbor Observer, Then and Now, and in a little while you'll get a glimpse of it. We're going to show you some of the articles that are in there. It's browsing and searching access a full text to over 130 articles on local history that have been written for the Ann Arbor Observer in the past 30 years or so.
• [00:04:27.95] Before we get started, we'd just like to thank Grace and John for their cooperation along with the University of Michigan press and the Bentley Historical Library for permission to use many of the images that are part of the site. I'd also like to think AADL staff member, Debbie Gallagher, for her input and advice, and Anne Martino, for her meticulous attention to detail.
• [00:04:48.75] Grace has written for the Observer, the Old West Side News and other local publications here in Ann Arbor. She also teaches a class on local history at Washtenaw Community College, and in 2006, published a collection of her work for the Observer under the title Ann Arbor Observed: Selections from Then and Now, published by U of M Press. John Hilton has been editor of the Observer since the mid '80s, after coming on board under the Observer's original founders, Don and Mary Hunt. This year he was the recipient of the Leader in Literary Arts award from the Ann Arbor Book Festival. We're going to ask them a few questions to open the floor and then open the floor for you, and then provide a brief overview of what's available through the website. Please give a warm welcome to John and Grace.
• [00:05:30.26] [APPLAUSE]
• [00:05:40.71] So, we'll let them get hooked up here and seated comfortably.
• [00:05:46.13] GRACE SHACKMAN: As comfortably as you can in front of [UNINTELLIGIBLE] people.
• [00:05:52.15] AMY CANTU: As Josie mentioned, I'm happy to bring the microphone around for anybody who has a question. But I thought I'd just toss out the first one to get things rolling and that is to Grace. Could you just tell us a little bit about how you got it started-- writing about local history.
• [00:06:06.39] GRACE SHACKMAN: OK, well, can you all hear me. Is my mic on? OK, this is a question I'm asked often. And of course I laugh about the fact that a lot of people tell me they hate history because they had to memorize all these dates. But I find if you try to figure out like when did you first start doing anything, it's hard to like pinpoint it. But you could you could ask how I wrote when I was a kid, or how I heard my grandfather's stories or all that.
• [00:06:30.22] But I do remember a moment that you could call the start. And this is when my daughter, Leah, who is sitting there in the yellow sweater, was three years old, and I was outside watching her, because she was at an age where she didn't just go outside by herself. And I was talking to some other ladies, mothers, and I said, you know I was talking to Mr. [? Bauer ?] across the street the other day, and he told me some interesting stuff about how when he first moved in he lived in his garage, and how he had to go to the corner of Crest and Liberty to get his water. And how there were wild flowers growing in front of the street.
• [00:07:07.80] And these two ladies said, wow, you should write for the Old West Side News. Like, you know, why I was finding that interesting is maybe another story. Or why I said, sure I'll write for the Old West Side News. I have nothing better to do. I'm just raising two kids and going to school and all this and that. But anyway, I went to the first meet-- do you want to follow this up with what was the first article? OK, I went to the first meeting-- I mean, I went to the next meeting of the staff of the Old West Side News and they, the then editor, who has since left town, said, well you know there are these porches all over town that people have been telling me somebody should write about.
• [00:07:47.97] These porches that have like-- stone porches that have a circle and then other stones around them that make it look sort of like a sun or a flower. Why don't you write about that? And she said Carol [? Hollenshead ?] told me that that would be an interesting article cause her house has those kinds. She's got two porches of those stones. So she said call her. So I call Carol [? Hollenshead. ?] The Carol [? Hollenshead ?] who lives on Second and, what is it, Jefferson, and Bruce Wilson, And she said, oh yes they're real nice, you can come see them any time, but I don't know anything about them. But why don't you call Harry [? Cooke ?]. So I call Harry [? Cooke ?], and he told me a little bit and he told me to call his cousin, Carl [? Cooke ?], and I gathered some information. And then I didn't really have the whole story, but enough that I wrote an article. And I said, if anyone knows more, call me. And I put my telephone number. This was way before there was email.
• [00:08:43.19] And I got tons of calls. Everybody knew about this. I mean there was-- this is like in the late 70s. There were people in the neighborhood who had lived there since before World War II, who'd grown up in the neighborhood. And they knew this man, who's name turned out to be George [? Eberwein ?], and he worked for another guy named Chris [? Seeger ?]. And people called me up and they told me that their garage-- their foundation was repaired by [? Eberwein ?] or other jobs he did besides these porches. And then all this led me to eventually finding his daughter, an old lady, who gave me a picture that I copied. And this is all heady stuff. It was like, wow, I'm finding out all this stuff and writing it up. And it wasn't The New York Times, obviously, or even the Observer.
• [00:09:33.67] But it was like everybody in my neighborhood is like, wow this is interesting. How did you find that out? And it seemed like it just snowballed from there, because all these people calling me had other things to tell me. Did you know that there used to be schools where they taught in German? Or did you know that my grandfather had a dairy right in his barn right in the neighborhood? Or it just. I'm on a roll here. Shall I keep going? [LAUGHTER] I was thinking about it all day.
• [00:10:00.16] So I was writing about these articles for quite awhile. And then people kept saying, well you should write for the Observer. And I was like, oh no, I can't write for the Observer. [LAUGHTER] John's in there too, I know. But what turned the corner, I remember, was my husband told me that somebody at his job had gone to some service talk, like the Rotary or something or Kiwanis, and Don Hunt had been talking. And he had said, even though there are all these people in town that think they can write, we have trouble finding people that can write the kind of articles we like for the Observer. And I guess that gave me sort of the courage to call up. And so maybe I should stop there. But that was how I got started. That gets me up to date with the Observer.
• [00:10:51.28] AMY CANTU: Does somebody have a question? I'll bring the microphone around. OK, how about you, John? How about when you got started working for the Observer?
• [00:11:05.71] JOHN HILTON: I'm not sure when exactly I first encountered the Observer, whether it was the first or the second issue. But I was working at the Ford Wayne assembly plant at the time and working an afternoon shift that was on a 10-hour shift, so I was getting off work at 4:30 in the morning, stopping at the Broadway Kroger, for those of us remember a little more recent history, on my way home to pick up groceries and things. And they had a stand of these Observers there, and it was just like, oh this is such a wonderful thing. And at the time I thought that I was going to be earning some money at Ford and then following my wife onto a new professional track.
• [00:11:39.52] So I didn't really think more that except I loved to read it. But then at a later point it turned out that all the [? aged ?] librarians in the US were pretty healthy, and that my wife wasn't really aggressive enough to knock them off. So we discovered we were going to be staying in Ann Arbor. And at that point I thought, boy I'd really love to write for the Observer. And, as I said, I had the same feeling as Grace about I can't just go there and actually ask them if I could write for them. So I thought I had to sell an article to impress them first. So I spent a year-- wasted a year, actually in hindsight, trying to sell an article nationally, and finally did that and then wrote to Don Hunt, saying I sold an article nationally I'd like to write for you. And he couldn't have cared less about the other article. He wanted to know what I was going to write about for him.
• [00:12:19.82] And it was an interesting thing cause there was a guy that I had known back in Vail House Co-op back in the early '70s, who had developed a business making bicycle luggage, back when he had this lovely room under the oak tree in the corner of Vail. He had had a little old fashioned travel sewing machine and he'd been stitching little bicycle-- little belt bags and things. And then he'd paired up with an engineer, and they were actually doing this carefully engineered cantilevered. They were suspended, but there was a tension element in them so that they were stretched and were perfectly designed and one thing another. And so they had a whole business out on Jackson Plaza, out behind the car dealerships off Jackson there. And I said, how about if I write about [? Lesley ?] and his business.
• [00:13:00.59] And Tom thought that was interesting, so I wrote that article, I continued to freelance for a couple of years and then finally they said, OK, we're going to hire you. We can't afford to hire you as a writer. But how about you set up a circulation system for us and do delivery for us, cause we think that we can do that better than we're doing. And so I did a detailed study of that, and I gave Don the results, which weren't what he was hoping for in terms of what a fabulous deal it was going to be to do it ourselves.
• [00:13:26.29] But in the meantime he persuaded me to write an insider's view of what did and didn't work at the Ford Motor Company on the assembly line. And so I was still the Ford Motor Company when that article came out, which was an interesting time. Fortunately, not too many people at the Wayne assembly plant read the Observer, so it took a while to get around. But a few months after that, Don decided he could afford to have a writer, and he hired me as a writer and I've been basically writing and editing for the Observer ever since.
• [00:13:53.68] SPEAKER 1: Grace, if you have this list of ideas that people have given you over the years of things to write about, how do you choose what you're going to write about? Does one thing just strike you one day?
• [00:14:06.53] GRACE SHACKMAN: Yea. That's an interesting question. I always have this huge list. I mean, you wouldn't believe what a big list. But if someone says, I have some pictures, and my grandma can tell you all about X, that article goes to the top of the list. If it's a very vague thing, it takes a while. You know, sometimes something-- John and I always talk about trying to fit it too with something that is happening now. So that the people are interested. Like I wrote about the old county road commission building on Washington, cause they're still deciding what to do with it.
• [00:14:45.11] Or sometimes things make it the top of the list because people are always asking about it. Like one of the articles that I like that I wrote-- well, I suppose I like them all in modestly-- was The Underground Railroad article. And that one, no one told me that they knew anything about it. It was pretty much unknown territory. What got me going was that so many people asked me about The Underground Railroad.
• [00:15:13.78] And I used to have a regular thing on the Ted Heisel show, when Ted Heisel was still alive. For those of you don't know what it was, it was a call-in show. And he had me on once a month. And I'd come in with a topic, often something I was writing for the Observer. And people would call in, Bob [? Coon ?] among others, and give me information. I'd say, well where were all these gas stations? Or how did people get coal? Or I remember one that Ted though wouldn't work at all-- I digress again aren't I-- was staying glass window.
• [00:15:42.75] But people called in with lots of interesting information about stained glass windows. But anyway, it seemed like all the time people were calling in asking me about The Underground Railroad, so I thought, well maybe I should write about The Underground Railroad. So I checked with John, of course, and it was fine with him. And I thought well I'll take a little month, and I'll find out which houses people think are those kind of houses-- are Underground Railroad stops. And sort of evaluate whether they might have been. And that'll be that.
• [00:16:08.44] Well, I remember I worked on it five months. It was a real interesting challenge to try to make a story out of a sort of situation where there's a lot of smoke but no fire. But it was also interesting. And the library was an enormous help. Bette Thompson was still working at the reference desk. And she got from inter-library loan, all kinds of great books for me. Like there was somebody in Ohio who had tried to collect the names of Underground Railroad stops before they were all dead, in the like 1890s. And she got me that book from some other library, and things like that. So the way I choose these articles, in other words, is-- probably as many articles as they have, there's a story on each one. You know, why I chose it. And I'll never run out. I mean, I still have a huge list.
• [00:17:00.94] SPEAKER 1: John, do writers always come to you with the ideas? Or do you get a list of things that people want to learn about from local history and go find someone to write that topic?
• [00:17:12.59] JOHN HILTON: With local history, that's typically not the case, where I have something on my wish list. Although actually, I guess we almost lost the Kerrytown article. Perhaps that was an exception where somebody outside of Grace actually did a story on it. It was an interesting history that I'd been aware of myself only because going back through the records of my own house, I could see that it was supposed to have been demolished back in 1957 for Urban Renewal. We'd never really gotten the full story on it.
• [00:17:40.91] And so Eve actually took that one on. And that was the rare case where that was something that I knew I wanted to know about. Because usually, you don't know what the story is. You don't know what's going to be interesting about something until you are into it. So for local history, it's almost always either somebody wants to know or somebody has a story they want to tell. Other things, there's lots of questions that people have, then say, you ought to do a story about this and that. And that's another issue. But for local history it's almost always that someone's told Grace a good story or she's thought of a question that she wants to answer.
• [00:18:17.86] SPEAKER 2: Well, I wanted to ask either of you, has there been that story that you just really wanted to grab onto but you just could never find the answers to write it? Are there mysteries unsolved here?
• [00:18:33.25] GRACE SHACKMAN: No, but there's always articles that you someday want to write if you just could. And an example of one that I thought was gonna elude me, but luckily didn't, was the Frank Lloyd Wright house. A woman named Mary Palmer, and William Palmer-- he's now dead. But they owned it. It's the only real Frank Lloyd Wright house in town and I knew about it, and I'd met her several times in various ways. And she always resisted me writing about it because she's sort of a private person. And finally, one time I hit on an idea of asking her. I said, Mary, what if I wrote it like, about what this house means to other people, because she didn't want it to be so much about her. And she agreed, yeah, that would work.
• [00:19:24.78] And so I talked to everybody who'd been in there for some reason or another or had something to do it. But it also was quite a bit about her. But that was when I was so glad that I was able to do. But there's many times I read the obituary column, and I'm sad not just if somebody died, but that it's somebody that I always wanted to talk about. So yeah, there's always going to be a lot of those stories around. We could have a whole team of local history people going out and trying to talk to everybody. Just talk to people who are willing, let alone the ones who aren't willing.
• [00:20:01.53] SPEAKER 3: With the imminent demise of the Ann Arbor News, it the Observer going to be undertaking some roles that it hasn't had in the past, or be expanded?
• [00:20:15.19] JOHN HILTON: We wish we could be expanding. We're feeling to a lesser degree the same things they're feeling. We're actually shrinking and have been shrinking pretty much for the past year. Because we're 100% ad supported, the amount of editorial space we have is a direct function. It's literally I put the ad pages into a spreadsheet, and that tells me how big an issue I have. So what we've been doing, actually pretty much since the start of this year, is trying to bring things back into balance.
• [00:20:40.21] What had happened was that in past years, I've always given John Hinchey, our calendar editor, a fixed allocation of space. And I'd given him that space a year in advance. And essentially as the issues reduce size, we were finding that we were becoming more and more calendar and less and less other articles. So John has been doing a fantastic job of reorganizing and rewriting the way in which he conveys the calendar material, giving us more editorial space.
• [00:21:06.20] So we're trying to use that space as well as we can to cover more newsie topics, and in fact, probably Grace has suffered more than anybody. We probably had fewer history articles, actually, in the last couple of years, trying to get more priority to news stories. But in terms of basic format, in terms of what we're trying to do, we're not going to really reconceive the magazine, we're just going to try to make the best use of the available space.
• [00:21:30.96] SPEAKER 4: John, basically I am in Ann Arbor, right, and one thing that I always enjoyed in The Ann Arbor News, and there's still a lot of people around that are Ann Arborites, like I am, that look back in Ann Arbor history. The Ann Arbor News used to have a little article, probably about six by six or something, of Ye Olde Editor. Now this, as far as I was concerned, was one of the nicest things that The Ann Arbor News printed, because I could look and read that article back in 1876 and my dad was shot hanging or he did something or somebody did something and something and something. And that brought back not only history but the time element. And you still have a lot of Ann Arborites still alive that enjoy that type of a program.
• [00:22:41.20] Now I don't know if you can use articles out of the news and reprint them without some type of a lawsuit or something. But what I'm saying is that this is something that local people would enjoy, the past history, and I've I thought about that for a long time that maybe somebody would come up with some idea that they could at least bring back past history in a little six by six box or something like that. Now I know that-- what is it that other magazine that we get-- The Independent Times. They go back on a whole history of like VJ day and all of that. They're all listed what happened on that date and time. Now that's most interesting. And I think people enjoy something like that. But I would like to see something like that in The Observer. I enjoy The Observer very much. And grace does a nice job and so do your other people that right for you. But I think grace could do more if she wanted to but she doesn't.
• [00:24:07.12] JOHN HILTON: It is really is true that history articles have been one area that we have done more of in the past as we had more available space and had had to compress and it's an interesting question, is there a way to do it in a shorter space. We don't have the legal right to simply go back and except things from the past. In fact, typically if Grace is putting together an article she will talk to people. She will read. She'll have a quote here, a quote there, from something that was original source from the spoken history that she's gotten.
• [00:24:33.69] But we don't really have the archive either, although, who knows, with the Ann Arbor district library on the case perhaps at some point that will be online. But I understand what you're saying cause it is wonderful to see those little vignettes. I actually got my new Scientific American yesterday and it is actually my favorite section. What was 150 years ago? What was hot science then? It's like, oh really, that's how you thought it worked.
• [00:24:57.06] AMY CANTU: Somebody else have a question?
• [00:25:02.24] SPEAKER 5: For Grace. What's the most surprising discovery you made during your research for an article?
• [00:25:09.29] GRACE SHACKMAN: Oh yeah. Well, you sent me a few questions ahead of time, and that one of them but I thought you meant, I thought of an answer but in a more general way.
• [00:25:18.75] SPEAKER 5: That's fine.
• [00:25:20.12] GRACE SHACKMAN: I mean, every article you talk to people, you talk to people, and you've got all this pile of notes. And it's not making sense. And it would just be boring if you just wrote ABCD. And you wait for that moment when it hits you, like, oh yeah, I see why that happened. And so, there are a lot of those small moments. Like I could tell you the first one, maybe. Starting with the-- going back to the Old West Side News-- when I got done with the big porches, somebody else called me and told me that her porch was made with these littler stones. And she had actually found the guy who did it. And he lived in Chelsea. And she said maybe if you want, I'll drive you out there and we can go talk to him.
• [00:26:14.61] So he was a guy named [? Cub Vogle ?]. And I found out later when I started studying Chelsea more systematically that he did a lot of the porches in Chelsea, too. But anyway, he is just talking about how he laid out the stones and blah blah blah, and I'm taking notes.
• [00:26:26.59] And all of a sudden he said something very interesting. He said, now I use these little stones because the big stones were all taken. Like, when people cleared their fields when they were first farming, they take out these big stones, and the stonemason could cut them in these nice big squares or rectangles that you see all over the 19th But he's doing it in the 20th century and there were just these little stones. So that's why he had to do the little stones. And I go, oh, that's very interesting. And he told me, go to the Chelsea cemetery and you can see the old part had these big stones, and in the newer part, which he had done, the pillars, had these little stones. So, yeah. I don't know what's the most surprising. But many articles have these moments when you are surprised.
• [00:27:18.81] SPEAKER 6: All these sort of [UNTELLIGIBLE], which have been among the articles the cause the most heat. I know people would call on the Ted Heisel show and get quite excited.
• [00:27:29.61] GRACE SHACKMAN: Oh dear. Luckily, I don't write very controversial articles. And if people say to me, I don't want this, don't write that down, or, off the record, I just put my pen down, cause I don't want to be tempted. OK, tell me if you want to, but it won't go in the article. And usually it's something that has nothing to do with-- No, people sometimes get annoyed at something that you wouldn't think they would, and yet you put controversial things in and they're fine with it. So, well you know yourself from all your writing.
• [00:28:08.36] So it's hard to tell ahead of time what people might like and what they won't like. I remember just-- it's funny how you're imprinted in these early-- I'm thinking back in the early days. The article i'm talking about. The stones that I put-- the little stones that I just told you about. That lady, she was Eleanor [? Cume ?]. Her husband was chairman of the Old English dictionary and they lived in the Old West Side, when that wasn't a fashionable place to live. People were always asking me, why are you living there? Which is another whole story, how the town has changed.
• [00:28:48.13] But she was the one who called me, and she's the one who took me out to Chelsea, and she's the one who I talked to. And so I wrote the article quoting her and talking about her house and stuff. And she later told me that she was annoyed that I didn't mention her husband. So I mean, that kind of stuff happens all the time. But generally it's nothing too major.
• [00:29:20.89] SPEAKER 4: And I have another question for you in regards to Ann Arbor history. Like what Grace does. Are you going to try to continue that type of a page for the local people at Ann Arbor history of this and that? Now for example, the people my age are dying off, and they in turn sold their businesses. I'm thinking of, for example, Bud Stein at Stein and Goetz, now become the M-Den. Bud is still alive.
• [00:30:02.69] There's the Nickels arcade. Some of the Nickels family are still alive. In fact, that arcade is quite a history on the building itself, the way they designed it and how many years ago. I don't know, Grace maybe knows. But there's a lot of history in that building because I think it came from Europe, the design, or something to that effect. But all I'm saying is that there's people that have had businesses and they're sold and are still doing good, such as M-Den. And yet there's a history up to that point. And I think that that's a good page for older people to gain and keep up the information, or for Grace to get the information at the time.
• [00:30:55.77] JOHN HILTON: We definitely want to keep doing history stories, and that's one of the reasons we're trying to loosen up some other space in the issue. Actually, a little bit of the Stein and Goetz history just got into the marketplace changes recently because of M-Den. They've actually bought what many of us still think of as the old Borders store on State Street. And it was a chance to tell some of that history. And the nice thing about the history too is that it's not just of interest to people who were there. When it's told properly, what history is this is it's the human experience. It's something that affects all of us.
• [00:31:27.47] And often in history you can actually get a better sense of that story than you can in this moment where people, maybe, for various political or personal reasons may be a little reluctant to tell you what was really going on. So a good history story to my mind is, not of interest just to older people, but I know that, like Grace, I found that I was really fascinated by it at a very early point, reading about it. And I think that now that's certainly my hope for our history stories is that they reach that wider audience too and help them understand how the city got to be as it is, and some sense of how it may develop going forward.
• [00:31:57.85] SPEAKER 4: Especially when the people are still alive that activism, it's hard for Grace to go back to the cemetery and try to get information.
• [00:32:06.04] JOHN HILTON: Sad but true.
• [00:32:08.13] GRACE SHACKMAN: Oh yeah, you don't know how many times people say to me, oh my mother knew all about that, but she's been dead the last 10 years and it's like, yeah, I can't have a seance or anything.
• [00:32:18.71] JOSIE PARKER: I found out there's another Observer. I found it out just recently. It's probably been published for many years and I missed it. The Community Observer. And Grace writes for that too. You wrote an article about the East [? Dell ?] High Bridge there. And the secret is that you can find it in the Chelsea Library. So I know how to find it. What's the relationship of the two? Is The Community Observer a child of the other one?
• [00:32:44.82] JOHN HILTON: Yes, it is. And it actually goes back to a decision that my partner, Patricia Garcia, and I made fairly early on when we took over the Ann Arbor Observer, it was really distributed just within the city of Ann Arbor. And as the larger sprawl, if you will, expanded beyond the city limits, we expanded with it to the point where we were covering not just the city of Ann Arbor, but any place that has an Ann Arbor mailing address, which actually is quite an extensive area. It goes way out Jackson Road, and a good chunk out to the East and South as well, or that is part of the Ann Arbor School District. And so the circulation rose from something like I think 47.5 when we started up into the 60s. And at that point we had to say to ourselves, OK, we've hit everything that you could call Ann Arbor. What's our next step?
• [00:33:33.52] And we really thought about it quite a lot, and we decided that it didn't make sense to keep expanding the Ann Arbor Observer circulation into areas that have their own identities, their own historic identities. It seemed like we were asking a lot of Chelsea or Dexter to feel that they should be a small part of the Ann Arbor Observer. And so, after quite a bit of thinking about it, we decided that we would create a publication like the Ann Arbor Observer, but specifically focused on those nearby communities, which had roughly the same scale, much of the same history, as Grace has been able to tell us over the years. I remember her story on telephone operators in small towns.
• [00:34:09.80] GRACE SHACKMAN: Bob gave me the idea, because he used to work for the telephone company.
• [00:34:12.86] JOHN HILTON: OK. So it's really an analog of the Ann Arbor Observer. But just as the Ann Arbor Observer is all about-- I tell people we'll write about anything that happens within the boundaries of our coverage area and nothing outside of it. And the same is true of the Community Observer, the only difference is that they are adjacent areas.
• [00:34:33.23] ANDREW MCLAREN: Before we let you go, John, I wanted you to tell us what makes Grace a great local history writer.
• [00:34:42.75] GRACE SHACKMAN: Well, that's assuming you think so.
• [00:34:44.70] JOHN HILTON: I'd like to go on record here and now that Grace is a great local history writer, and it's partly because she just takes that pleasure in finding stories. She really wants to know how things happen. And you know there's the two different elements, as anybody can tell you. You have to learn things, then you have to find a way to tell them. And Grace is great at both of them. She really started out just as somebody who was curious and she's become a good storyteller, too. And once you have those two things together, there's just no end to the good stories, because, well, there's just so many stories that haven't been told yet. It's just mind boggling how little we've scratched of this whole subject.
• [00:35:25.59] ANDREW MCLAREN: We like to thank both of you, both Grace Shackman and John Hilton, for coming and joining us today, and talking a little bit about your experiences at The Observer, and now if you'd like to have a seat down here. And have an applaud for them first.