Washtenaw - Our Beat

Washtenaw - Our Beat

Carol Inglis Spicer is a writer whose pieces pop up all over the place. She has some articles coming out soon in the Christian Science Monitor, and she has had several travel articles published in the Ann Arbor News. She moved to Ann Arbor when she was four. She lived elsewhere for several years as an adult, but moved back here in 1947. She and her husband, Robert, a retired businessman, live at 740 Greenhills Drive.

By Carol Inglis Spicer

Coming into Ann Arbor from the east, from Detroit, or from the Metropolitan Airport, a motorist is likely to drop off U.S. 23 and connect with Washtenaw Avenue at Carpenter Road. From here to the outskirts fo Michigan's oldest university town, Washtenaw runs through a montage of motels, gas stations, wall-to-wall concreted shopping lots, quick-eat stops, and their attendant plastic flags and signs.

Then suddenly, just beyond the intersection with Stadium Boulevard, Washtenaw becomes and avenue of arching elms, long lawns and lovely, lovely heterogenous houses. It is still four-lane, the traffic, worse luck, still swarms, but for those who can see beyond the noses of their cars this is a serene and old-fashioned avenue - a fitting approach to the halls of academe, Washtenaw's ultimate destination.

ALL THIS TALK about old Washtenaw Avenue has started my memory electrodes shooting sparks as when a trolley mast connects with the overhead wire at a turnaround. And as I sit in my car at Cambridge Road, which crosses Washtenaw, waiting for a gap in the endless stream, the moving belt of steel fades.

I am a child again, back in the 1920s, coasting right there down Zimmerman Hill, scraping across the sidewalk and over the dirt of Washtenaw, jerking the sled to make it reach the other side. 

On top of the hill are two red brick houses. The one with the white-pillared porch is the Zimmerman's, the other, more severe, with an entrance onto Vinewood, the grandmother's. Madame Zimmerman we caller her.

Behind the houses, on Cambridge Road, is a barn sheltering three horses, one for Mr. Z, one for Mrs. Z, and one for Frances, their daughter.

I RIDE with Fran when the elders are not going out. We tear around the racetrack at Burns Park, we ride out Washtenaw to Ypsilanti, the Zimmerman's Dalmatians yipping alongside, bu what is really keen is racing the street car down Hill Street, across East U and down Monroe, then pounding down the street car tracks edging the campus on State. The tracks are laid on grass but there are crosswalks made of brick which make a metallic clatter when the horses' shoes strike.

I see a lemonade stand, also, at the bottom of Zimmerman Hill - a three-sided school house with a real rope bell, as close to Washtenaw as we can put it to catch whatever cars come by. Once in a while a small girl scoots down the street, running home to a kitchen ice box to chips some chunks of ice from the 50-pound block inside.

ACROSS CAMBRIDGE the Business Training Center dissolves in its place stands the venerable Lloyd house, Greekly chaste. Under the splendid oak tree nymphs right out of "Midsummer's Night Dream" flutter angelically. This is a Midsummer Night's Dream; the fairies, and beautiful Titania, are all pupils of Miss Alice, the Lloyd's daughter, who was later to be, for 20 years, the U. of M's beloved Dean of Women.

Miss Alice's school was open-air: the glassed-in, but open-windowed back porch at the Bigelows, a large frame house next to the flat-roofed Hall house on the corner of Washtenaw and Hill.

During those two years at the Bigelow School we sat at our desks all day, in winter, in heavy coats, with a delicious hour's interlude indoors in the Bigelow's music room, with Mrs. Delia Davis who came each day to teach us French.

Washtenaw was our street, our beat. We had squash (our squash was baseball played with a tennis racquet and tennis ball in the Quarry's asparagus patch, about where Delta Gamma's parking lot is now.

WE TRUDGED, muffled in leggings and galoshes and Mackinaws, out to the Toumy Farm to skate on our double runners on the pond back of Mr. Toumy's house- walking back in the half-dark, past the Myer's (now the Unitarian Church), past old Mr. Barhell's (the house, uprooted and swivelled, now sits on Wayne with its back to Washtenaw), our mittens stiff with icicles, wool leggings soggy next to the skin.

And once every summer, on a Saturday morning, we migrated to Barbour Gym at Dean Myra Jordan's invitation, to dance the Virginia Reel, and swing on the ropes and parallel bars, and devour cookies and strawberry ice cream.

On Halloween, we slunk thought the yards from the Triangle (Douglas Park) to South U, daring each other to frightening feats, like running right up on the front porches of Trigon House, and the Zetes, and ringing the bell.

We were driven by our mothers' electrics to the tea dances (only we pronounced them, elegantly, "thes dansants,") at Marjorie Hoover's, now termed the Hoover Mansion.

Here, in the third floor ballroom the little girls, like the crocuses under the mulberry tree in the hall's front lawn, would stand in a pastel circle at one end, waiting for a three-piece orchestra to start, waiting for the boys to walk that mile across the room and to, oh bliss, be chosen.

WE GATHERED at designated corners on Washtenaw to walk together to school, or to roller skate. (I still remember the silky feel, under the rollers, of the slate sidewalk in front of the Demmons' where the Presbyterian Church stands in its grove of trees.)

After the Bigelow school we went to Tappan, on East U across from the Engineering Arch. I don't remember ever being driven to school, or being patient enough to wait for the street car, although if it came clanging around the curve where the painted rock is, every hour on its way from the car barns at the corner of Lincoln and Wells.

Christmas vacation was the great time, though. Nobody ever went away for Christmas then. (Skiing was something the children did in the Arboretum.) During our teen-age years the 14 days of vacation were booked solid with dances, preferably, a sorority or fraternity house.

But enough reminiscing. This is now, and there is a hole in the traffic I've been waiting for. In a minute I'm rounding Washtenaw's corner at South U and parking at a meter across from the Bagel Factory. Some rock music is coming through the door of a record shop. The high-rise student apartment building blots outlet sky. And some blue-leaned students are sitting, not talking, under their seaweed hair. Perhaps they are storing up memories to write about, like me. 

STILL THERE - The old Meyer residence, left, at 1917 Washtenaw, and the Hall House, at 1530 Hill St., bring back fond childhood memories. The Meyer house now is the First Unitarian Church, but hasn't changed much.

News photos by Robert Chase

Douglas Park at Washtenaw and Cambridge was a Halloween passageway.