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Sesquicentennial Interview: John Hathaway

When: 1974

This interview was conducted in 1974 as part of the I Remember When television series produced by the Ann Arbor Public Library.

Transcript

  • [00:00:10] JOHN HATHAWAY: Well, Herman Staebler was from one of the pioneer families. The Staeblers were here, and I think there were seven brothers. The family were the ones that had built the old Germania House Hotel, which is more recently known as the Earle Hotel, and is now the site of several antique shops and ice cream parlors and things at the corner of Washington and Ashley Street, but the Staeblers had gotten into many other businesses as well, and owned many other properties. They had a steam sawmill out on Liberty Road and the family farm and a number of properties in town. They had grocery stores, and banks, and bicycle shops, and one of them was mayor of Ann Arbor, and one of them was postmaster, and they held a number of positions. Of the large number of brothers, I don't remember all the names. Walter and Herman, and I think Albert and Michael Staebler. That was Neil Staebler's father, were all part of the large group of Staebler sons who substantially owned and operated many of the businesses in the west side of Ann Arbor for many, many years. The Staebler-Kempf Oil Company, which was a very large operation, was part of that group, as well as the Staebler Pontiac distributorship, and the Germania House Hotel, and a number of other things. They used to make carriages right across the street, but he was the sales manager for Reo based upon having the early automobile distributorship for the old pioneer cars that were built. Reo was one of the ones that they had and he got into the business as one of the first people selling Reos and having the local distributorship.
  • [00:02:17] MALE_1: That's Herman Staebler?
  • [00:02:18] JOHN HATHAWAY: Herman Staebler. Yeah. Herman and Walter had the Pontiac dealership here for many, many years. It used to be across the street right next to the Schwaben Halle and they were very well known.
  • [00:02:36] MALE_1: How about your own family? How long have they been living here?
  • [00:02:39] JOHN HATHAWAY: Well, actually, we came in 1936, but my grandfather and great grandfather had been in this area before. My great grandfather had been the first minister in the Methodist Church in Brighton and had helped to build the church structure, which now stands there. My grandfather had been a postmaster in Green Oak Township just north of Ann Arbor back in around 1880 or 1890 somewhere as in there, but we left except for an aunt who lived here in town and had a student rooming house on Thompson Street right across from the University administration building or where it stands now. She was the only one that was here until we came back in 1936, but that's one point, which many people, I'm not sure are aware that on Thompson Street, right next to my aunt's rooming house, which I think was 520 Thompson Street, was an old fraternity house, which is torn down for the parking structure. This was a musical fraternity. I don't remember the Greek name but this was the fraternity house that Thomas E. Dewey lived in when he was a student here. Of course, he was the famous prosecutor and governor and law and order man, was also the fraternity house that Leopold and Loeb lived in when they were students here in Ann Arbor. One of them had been a singer, a musician, and had lived in the same house. You had some extremes there as far as the old fraternity house on the Thompson Street.
  • [00:04:29] MALE_1: In the '30s, your aunt what did she get per month for room?
  • [00:04:34] JOHN HATHAWAY: Well, the ordinary student room then would have run somewhere probably from $2.50 to $3.50 a week, but I can remember some that were as low as a dollar and a half for a single room, a small one. These were usually in the large old wooden frame rooming houses, most of which have now been converted to apartments, but there were also room and board places where the lady would not only rent rooms, but would also furnish meals for students. It was quite common in those days for the student to work for his meals by serving dinner or cleaning up or washing or whatever, preparing the food. In most cases, they had meal tickets. He had a meal ticket for meals for a whole week, and there were a number of student eating places up on State Street. The Wolverine Den, and Fingerle used to have a student eating place up in the old Nickels Arcade building. You would buy a meal ticket for a week, which would usually be maybe $4 or $5, and that would give you all your meals for the week.
  • [00:05:49] MALE_1: Guy Larcom was saying he thought one of the reasons why the center of town here at old Ann Arbor Town hasn't changed as much as it has in some other cities is because of its proximity to the university, because it's had the stabilizing influence of always having a ready clientele there from the university.
  • [00:06:07] JOHN HATHAWAY: Well, I think this is help. Of course, part of the problem in any central business district is to find a way to change the use of the business district to reflect the needs of the people in the area. If there's nothing there to serve them, if there's nothing there that they want to buy or do, then they won't come. Of course, in a university community, with the students being on the campus and having needs to be near the campus, there are many services, restaurants, and shops, and things of this sort, which can be easily designed to fit into the student community. Which cannot be replaced with a shopping center that you would drive a station wagon to in order to pick up a blue book or a pencil or something like that. The student need is obviously very important, but the downtown has really existed up until very recently, independent of the students and of the student need. It has served the town community rather than the gown community. It's only with the recent addition of Briarwood that this is very sharply changed, and now you see a different emphasis in the downtown.
  • [00:07:25] MALE_1: When you grew up you were living on the east side of Main Street, then?
  • [00:07:29] JOHN HATHAWAY: Well, we lived sort of in between. We lived on Thompson Street, which was just to the west of the campus, of course. Then we lived on Monroe Street, which was right in the middle of the campus area, and then on Greenwood Street, which is on Packard, which is part of the east side now, but it was mostly toward the center of the city.
  • [00:07:53] MALE_1: Did you feel that split that you were talking about before between the east and the west?
  • [00:07:57] JOHN HATHAWAY: Very definitely. This was very apparent to me in the sixth grade. Our sixth grade class was told when we finished the year that we would have to decide whether we were going to be east side or west side, that our school was in the middle. It was right on the line, and those who were going to be east side would have the choice of going to Tappan School over at Burns Park. Those that were going to be west side would have the choice of going to Slauson School, which was over on West Washington. As I recall, it was a matter of the individual students choosing which of the sides of town they wanted to belong to, to select the junior high school that they would go to.
  • [00:08:39] MALE_1: You mean, if you lived on the west side, you could go to school on the east side if you wanted to?
  • [00:08:43] JOHN HATHAWAY: Only for the Perry School area, which was right in between, right on the line. That was the one area where the kids could go either way. About half of our class, our sixth grade class went to Slauson, and half of the class went to Tappan, and I chose to go to Tappan.
  • [00:09:06] MALE_1: When you went to the University of Michigan, you got you got your degree before you went to law school. Do you recall how much it cost to go to school then? Was it tough to go to school then as it is now?
  • [00:09:14] JOHN HATHAWAY: You mean the tuition at the undergrad here?
  • [00:09:17] MALE_1: Because Michigan University is really like the biggest business in town and he has been for quite a while.
  • [00:09:22] JOHN HATHAWAY: Well, there were some vague figures that I recall about tuition. My recollection is that it was substantially below $100 per semester for a full undergraduate load. But I was on a scholarship then, and I guess because I didn't have to pay my own money, I don't remember it quite as well. But the figure of sixty or seventy dollars comes to mind as being the full in state tuition for one semester, something in that area, so that it would have cost 140, or $150 a year to attend for a full year at the university. Then you bought your books and supplies in addition to that of course. But it wasn't expensive at all compared to what it is now, but you had to scrap for the scholarships, and getting through school was hard even in those days.
  • [00:10:22] MALE_1: What was it like here during the war?
  • [00:10:25] JOHN HATHAWAY: Well, in the war of course, the university turned into a military camp, and the military training programs came here. The Navy had the V5s, the V7s, and the Marines were here with their training program. They had the Judge Advocate General School at the law school, they occupied the whole law quadrangle, and they had the Japanese language school here. That was interesting because the Japanese language school was taught by Nisei Americans. These Nisei were people who had been displaced from California on the West Coast, and had been sent to concentration camps. The university and the Ann Arbor community was quite outraged by the way these people were being treated. There was a program to try to make homes and jobs available, for any of the Nisei Americans who wanted to come to Ann Arbor. There was a large influx. Because of the presence of many of these people were very well educated, they had the substantial advanced degrees. They set up a Japanese language school here, and the Armed forces took advantage of that then and training people in Japanese language, history, and preparing them for military service in the Far East. Many of those Japanese people are still here in the community. They've made Ann Arbor a permanent home now. I can think of any one of a number of my high school friends and classmates who came here under that program.
  • [00:12:05] MALE_1: This particular building here, you said used to be a polling place?
  • [00:12:10] JOHN HATHAWAY: Yes. This building, it's called the Second Ward Public Building, was built by the city, and they authorized it I believe in 1901. It was completed in 1903, and it was built as a ward hall, which was basically a voting place, but also was used for any other political or social meetings of the people in the area. At this time, of course, the second ward was considered part of German Town, you might say, The people in the second ward were almost exclusively German, and they all spoke the Schwäbisch German dialect. This was their building, until they built the additional buildings across the street, which was the Schwaben Halle, which was right next to the Germania House Hotel. That was all part of the German community. This whole area, if you want to talk to someone, if you met someone on the street, you were probably best off to address them in German rather than English, because you're more likely to be understood.
  • [00:13:26] MALE_1: You're talking about the bricks here, too Some of the bricks predate the building. You can tell by the names and dates?
  • [00:13:31] JOHN HATHAWAY: Yes. There are names and dates carved in the bricks that we found here, many of which are thirty to forty years earlier than the date of construction of the building. Though we don't have any specific information, we assume that they're used brick that were brought here, from some other site. Presumably, a university building that was demolished at about that time, and that they were used to build this. There are different kinds of brick here and they're all used brick. This is fairly apparent. It may have been from some of the old buildings on the old original main campus, such as the old medical building which stood where the physics Randall Lab is now. There were some other medical buildings where the natural science building is now. Those were buildings that were put up at about the time that the brick would have been brought here, for the second Ward public building.
  • [00:14:33] MALE_1: You got the bar from the Roundtable. Now, being a newcomer here, I don't know much about the Roundtable.
  • [00:14:37] JOHN HATHAWAY: Well, the Roundtable was a very famous establishment. It was at one time known as Haas's after Freddy Haas, who was one of the operators, and then it was known as Davenport's. Then subsequently when Davenport had it for a while, a custom grew up in the community that there was the round table in the back of the restaurant. People would come and sit there, and have their coffee, or have their meal. There would be a rather vigorous conversation. Everyone was welcome to sit there as long as they would join in and participate in the conversation. They had to be aware of the fact that they might be somewhat abused or insulted. They had to be ready to take that and maybe give a little bit out too. But the idea was that people were welcome to come there and have their coffee, or their soup and crackers, or whatever it was and participate in the discussion. It got to be that this became a center of political, economic, and social exchange in the downtown area. Many of the financial decisions for mortgages or for loans, many of the political decisions, who's going to run for public office. Many of the legal decisions, which way are we going to go on this case, or will we enter a plea, or will we have a trial, or what is it? Were all made around the round table in the old restaurant. The tradition was very well established, and is still carried on to some extent in the new Roundtable building which is over on Liberty Street. But there was no room in the new building for the bar. We prevailed upon the new owner to sell us the bar with the understanding that we would preserve the bar, and try to keep up the tradition of the old establishment. That's what we're trying to do here.
  • [00:16:34] MALE_1: How old do you think the bar is?
  • [00:16:36] JOHN HATHAWAY: I would say that the bar is probably at least sixty years old. How much older than that? It's a little difficult to say. There's no real indication. It comes, there's a bar and there's a back bar and then some mirrors that also are part of the same installation. The brass work on the hardware on the back bar would seem to indicate that it was pre World War I. But beyond that, it's a little difficult to tell. We'd say it's probably at least sixty. It's all, it's very elaborately carved golden oak on the front of the bar, and then the top of the bar of course, is a black walnut, eighteen feet long. That's a nice piece of black walnut.
  • [00:17:28] MALE_1: There used to be a brewery in this town didn't there, two or three?
  • [00:17:30] JOHN HATHAWAY: One there used to be I think, seven breweries in Ann Arbor.
  • [00:17:33] MALE_1: Seven?
  • [00:17:34] JOHN HATHAWAY: Of course, one of them is where the university television center is now. That was the old, well, more recently when I remember it in operation, it was called the Ann Arbor Brewery, and they made what they called cream top beer. But there were other breweries such as the one over on Jones Drive, which was also at one time known as the Ann Arbor Brewery. This was part of the Rehberg family for many years. They made a pilsner beer there. They had their own spring of course, and they got their ice from cutting ice off of the pond right there next to Jones Drive. The stream still flows through there. They'd use the ice put it in ice houses in the winter and use it for their pilsner process of making beer. That was quite a custom here. Of course, with all the Germans in town, they had beer I think with every meal practically, and the pilsner beer was very popular. There were a number of breweries, and it's only probably about 20 years ago that the last one went out of business.
  • [00:18:46] MALE_1: They must have been set up then right after prohibition or before?
  • [00:18:50] JOHN HATHAWAY: Well, many of them were set up before. Some of these breweries date back into the 1870s and 1880s. At that time, they went very strongly up until prohibition. Then of course, during prohibition, there was a lot of amateur brewing. Wine making all through the area, very largely in this old Second Ward area, the German West Side, because everybody had a vineyard in his backyard. Everybody had an apple tree that he could make cider and, everyone had a big crock that they could make home brew in. This was quite common. Everyone understood that. I think the real non-amateur type thing was where they got to selling the hard liquor which was brought in from Canada of course, smuggled in and sold in the community. One of the man who put the roof on this building here not too long ago, used to be one of the bootleggers. He was delivering laundry around the community, and he had the bottles of Canadian whiskey underneath the baskets of laundry as he would deliver the laundry to the houses around here. He can tell you about that sometime if you want. He's known as the Mayor of the West Side, and his name is Harry Koch. He's very proud of his contributions to the community. Not the least of which is that he used to fly a flying Jenny of the same kind that Charles Lindbergh flew when he was first a pilot. There's a man with some interesting stories.
  • [00:20:32] MALE_1: How'd you decide to become a lawyer?
  • [00:20:35] JOHN HATHAWAY: Well, that was interesting. Actually, it was because I got interested in the state tax sales of real estate. They used to advertise that every first Tuesday in May, they would have a tax sale down at the old county building. Anyone who hadn't paid the taxes on their property could go down, would have the property sold for the taxes. As a kid, this fascinated me that anybody could own a piece of land for just a few dollars. As a kid, I went down there and bid on some of the property and actually got some deeds, tax deeds for real estate for as little as two or three dollars a piece. In those days, the taxes weren't very high, but some people couldn't pay them. Then the problem was that once having gotten these deeds was to how to perfect the title and how to go ahead and get something useful as far as the legal aspect of the ownership was concerned. I had to go up to the law school to read some of these law books to try to figure out what these tax laws were and how you got title to real estate. Subsequently decided, well, there's no use just going halfway, if you're going to do all this research, you might as well have some benefits. I decided I would try to go to law school.
  • [00:21:57] MALE_1: Did you buy any property?
  • [00:21:59] JOHN HATHAWAY: Yes. We've still got some of the property that I bought when I was a high school student on these tax sales.
  • [00:22:06] MALE_1: Whereabouts?
  • [00:22:07] JOHN HATHAWAY: It's west of town, it's undeveloped subdivision lots from an area out near Wagner Road. Most of the rest of it, I guess, has been lost one way or another in the interim. But we still have those two lots in Dexter Avenue Hills. I think they were $3.80 a piece for the original tax sale.
  • [00:22:33] MALE_1: When you got out of law school, did you join a firm here that had been in existence for a while?
  • [00:22:38] JOHN HATHAWAY: No. I opened up an office up on State Street by myself and hung out a shingle and sat there for a while waiting for people to find out that there was a lawyer around. Then I was in the prosecutor's office for a few years, and then I was invited to join the firm that I'm with now. I've been with that firm since 1963.
  • [00:23:02] MALE_1: You talked about subdividing. You said this building cost $1,000 when it was built, and that was expensive.
  • [00:23:09] JOHN HATHAWAY: Well, the city's put up a very substantial building here, and it did cost exactly $1,000 to put up. It's a full basement with a field stone foundation walls, about two feet thick. The solid brick masonry walls, a foot thick all the way up for two floors, and very substantial hardwood floors and it cost them $1,000 to put up that kind of a building. But it was a good building, it was worth it.
  • [00:23:42] MALE_1: I'm not sure what I want to ask now.
  • [00:23:49] JOHN HATHAWAY: Some of the stories you might be interested in are about some of the people from the area here. Herman the Staebler, of course, always used to tell a lot of these stories, and he used to do it every friday noon at the Old German restaurant at the Stammtisch, the liars table, in the back of the restaurant. He was very fond of telling some of these stories, some of which I'm not sure I could repeat here, although Herman wouldn't have any compunctions. But there was one he told about when his brother had the grocery store. Which I think then was, if I'm not mistaken, over on Liberty Street. It might have been Washington, but I think it was Liberty Street and they sold fireworks in the grocery store for kids to use on the 4th of July. Under the arrangement with the fireworks distributor, if a local grocer or distributor sold a certain amount of fireworks, he would get certain free fireworks as a bonus. Herman, who was working in the store then as a stock clerk and as an errand and delivery boy, was very fond of getting these bonus fireworks. He and his brothers used to be competitive about who was going to get the biggest firecracker or sky rocket or whatever it was. Well, they had a particularly good sale one year when Herman was working there, and they got a huge sky rocket. The way he describes it, in his 70s, it must have been an enormous firework. But the old city streets didn't used to be paved the way they are now. They used to be brick surface and instead of having storm drains with sewer gradings, the way we do now, they had a drain that was sort of a v trough down the center of the street. Herman and his brother decided one day that they had this huge bonus sky rocket, that they were going to take the sky rocket out and lay it in that v trough right in the center of the street and fire it and see what would happen. Ordinarily, a sky rocket, if you'd direct with a bracket that sends it up into the sky. Herman got out there with his brother and they got this big sky rocket and laid it down right in the trough in the middle of the street, and they lit the fuse, and then they stood back, and it was aimed up the hill towards Main Street. They thought it'd be more exciting to have it go up where there were some people around, you see. All of a sudden, this sky rocket fuse lit and the sky rocket went up the trough and it was throwing sparks and smoke out in all directions and really creating quite an impression. Just as it got up towards Main Street, an old junk man came along with his horse and his wagon full of junk. He was evidently oblivious to what was happening down the street here where these kids were playing with fireworks, and he went on across the intersection. Just as his horse got to the middle of the intersection, the sky rocket went right underneath the horse. The way Herman described it, the horse went about 10 feet up into the air as that sky rocket went underneath him, and he came down running. The junk man was thrown off of the seat because he'd just been casually holding onto the reins and trotting along. According to Herman, that that horse spewed junk and debris and everything, all the way from that intersection, all the way out to the village of Saline before they got the horse stopped and turned around. That junk man never did know what happened. I guess he never knew anything about the sky rocket or anything else, but I guess Herman and his brother hid down behind Allen's Creek here until after supper that night because they sure they were going to be put in jail or prosecuted or something like that. But Herman was quite a one for playing pranks. They had an elephant stampede as a result of fireworks on Main Street.
  • [00:28:09] MALE_1: That was during the Barnum and Bailey parade?
  • [00:28:12] JOHN HATHAWAY: They had a parade, and it was right over here by the Detroit Edison Company. Herman seemed to remember how it happened, but he didn't claim to have any of the fireworks that day. But some student, evidently threw a firecracker under one of the elephants. The elephants were going along, each one holding on to the tail of the elephant ahead in line. The firecracker got them so excited that they started stampeding and they headed down across the hill towards Ashley Street. I guess some lady was injured by being run over by a stampeding elephant or something like that, but they always used to tell him about the elephant stampede in Ann Arbor. That was back in the 1890s, I think it was.
  • [00:28:56] MALE_1: One thing that I've read about in several places, but I'm really unclear what happened was that the famous riot in a theater?
  • [00:29:03] JOHN HATHAWAY: The Star Theater. Well, I don't remember exactly the cause, Ted Heusel's father was there. I've heard the story, and I've seen pictures of the episode. It was over on Washington Street, as I recall, where the Star Theater was located. Seems to me that it had gotten into some kind of a personality dispute. They finally, as the students used to do in the old days, they decided to take over the theater, and they had a riot down there and really tore things up. I can remember the Michigan Theater riot though very well. When in the good old days, back in the '30s, the students would get organized on a fall evening, and they would be a pep rally for a football game or maybe on Black Friday night or something like that, they would have a battle or a tug of war or freshman and sophomores fighting each other all over the campus and tipping over cars and de-pantsing people. That was prior to the panty raids. In any case, one of the standard items of entertainment was what they called the theater rush. Nobody saw television in those days, and the radios were not very lively sport for students. Movies were the big thing, and they used to have stage shows at the Michigan too. Louis Armstrong and some of the other great performers would come here regularly and give personal appearances. The theater rush was the idea that the students would all go there and demand to be let in free. That if the theater manager would not let them in free, that they would all go in mass and try to break in and get in and see the movie without paying. One night, they had some kind of a theater rush, started up at the Michigan Theater, and the manager had gotten chains on the bars of the door, which, of course, was illegal because they were fire safety doors, but he'd gotten chains and padlocked the doors, so the students couldn't get in. They had a high marquee, and it was all with there were no fluorescent lights. It was all with little light bulbs. The students got up on this theater marquee, which went way up beyond the top of the building, and started unscrewing the light bulbs and throwing them in the street. They were shouting and carrying on and being very rowdy. The police decided that this was enough. They weren't going to allow that sort of thing. The police had just purchased a new piece of equipment, which was a tear gas gun. They decided that they would use this tear gas on the students and drive them out of that area and clear up this matter. They got up there with their tear gas gun and started firing the tear gas canisters at the students. But the police had forgotten the fact that they'd never bought any gas masks for the police so they had nothing to protect themselves. The students started picking up these tear gas canisters and throwing them back at the police. The police were all getting gassed, and finally, they called in the sheriff and the state police. The thing was really wild, and everybody was up there. I can remember, just a huge mass of people milling around at the intersection of Liberty and Maynard Street there. Finally, they arrested all of the students who were there who didn't leave after the police fired the tear gas. They had so many students arrested that they couldn't hold them all in the jail or in the local police station. They ended up taking a number of the students, as I recall, out to the Milan Federal Penitentiary to put them in the lockup out there. Those who thought they were out for prank and to have a good time that night ended up getting a taste of some rather unfortunate prison life for a day or two until somebody got them to court and the university got them released after making sure that they'd learned a good lesson and that they wouldn't do that again. But those theater riots and the theater rushes occurred quite frequently. It was rare that the police let it get as far out of hand as it did on the one occasion.
  • [00:33:42] MALE_1: You had that interesting story about the fellow who paid for the law quad, too?
  • [00:33:49] JOHN HATHAWAY: W. W. Cook. Well, he was a law school graduate of the University when the law school was in the old Haven Hall at the corner of State and North University. He'd been quite a contributor to the university. Over a period of years, he'd already built the Martha Cook women's dormitory to honor his sister. He decided that he would get the money to the university for a new law school building, and he wanted it to be something special. He gave the money, which, I think, at that time was something like nine million dollars, which was really a large sum for those days. It was in the mid 1920s, and they built this wonderful law school, the whole quadrangle, the dormitories, the classroom, the legal research building, and the lawyer's club. The story was that he never came to see it, that he would write letters to the university, he would write letters to the architects, and that he employed a local photographer by the name of Rentschler, to take pictures of all the work that was being done and progress, and that Rentschler would get these pictures and develop them and make the prints, and that he would take the prints down late at night to a train. The engineer would stop the train at the Michigan Central Depot, New York Central Depot rather. Rentschler would give these photographs to the conductor or the engineer of the train, and he would take them to New York State where Cook lived. Cook would pick them up at the railroad station there and then review the pictures and see how the work was going and write his letters to the architects or to the university, either telling them to change this or that or put in a more expensive this or that so-and-so was not doing a very good job. It should be done over. This went on through all of the details of construction. The story is that Cook never came here to see the building, even though he'd given the nine million dollars to build it. That he never saw it or met any of the people here, or ever had any knowledge of it other than the photograph sent to him by Rentschler. There is some claim that at some time he snuck into town in a disguise or something like that and actually walked around the law quadrangle or saw it. But there is no indication that W. W. Cook ever came to Ann Arbor or ever actually saw, in person, that very beautiful building that he gave to the university and to the city, of course.
  • [00:36:44] MALE_1: Maybe you were too young, but do you remember the great parking meter controversy here when they brought parking meters into town for the first time?
  • [00:36:50] JOHN HATHAWAY: Oh Yes. [OVERLAPPING] There were no parking meters here when we came at first. Of course, anything of this sort was considered to be a great imposition. Our family, we had a car, so we were probably one of the unusual families. We had always assumed that when you wanted to buy something in a store on Main Street, that you would drive your car down right in front of the store and park and go into the store and make your purchase and walk back out of the front of the store and get in your car and drive away again. That was just the way you did business. It was all angle parking on Main Street in those days, and there were not so many cars that it was a problem. But as those 1930s, as General Motors and Ford started putting out mass-produced cheap cars, more and more people had them. As the parking meters came in, it was a way of controlling the traffic, as well as getting the revenue to buy parking lots for the city. I think the first city parking lot that they acquired is the one which is next to the public library now on Fourth Ave. That was acquired with funds that were raised from the parking meters, but there was a great deal of controversy. As a matter of fact, some of the people used to take the parking meters right out of the wet concrete, and pull them out and throw them out on the street because they said, "You can't do that. We're entitled to park here, and you can't make us pay for it." They thought that the whole thing was a violation of a basic constitutional right to park your car anywhere you wanted to.
  • [00:38:40] MALE_1: If I get a ticket, I may agree with them. Let's see. Do you have any other favorite anecdotes that you like?
  • [00:38:48] JOHN HATHAWAY: Well, there are a lot of stories about the people downtown. As a matter of fact, if you get a table like this with some of the old timers around, they'll just go on for hours and hours, and it's fascinating to listen to some of the stories that they tell. Stories about the old Allen Creek drain here and when it was built. Stories about the paving of the streets when the brick was laid, stories about the building of the buildings. The fact that it was embezzled state funds that build the Ann Arbor Trust building.
  • [00:39:22] MALE_1: Is that true?
  • [00:39:23] JOHN HATHAWAY: Well, substantially. It was Mr. Glazier from Chelsea, who was the state treasurer. Whether the funds that were misappropriated were actually the ones used for that building or not, is not clear, but he was the one who built the building. He was the one who was charged with the misappropriation of the public funds as state treasurer. That there's some validity to that. We have a picture on the back wall here of the sheriff of Washtenaw County, who was known as the horse thief sheriff because he was convicted after having been sheriff of stealing horses. There was a good deal of discussion about that in those days, too, of course. Of course, the days of prohibition, brought lots of stories about some of the people who were involved in various kinds of illicit brewing or distilling or other matters. The local football was always very important. We used to have a fellow here by the name of Ernie Allmendinger. He was an All American football player and learned his football and played his football here in Ann Arbor. The area, which was the most notorious nest of football enthusiasm was what is now called West Park. But in those days, back around the turn of the century, it was a pasture. It was a low land where there was a creek flowing through and good grass land on both sides. It was a pasture and it was level enough and big enough so that the boys could get down there and play football. This is where the people like Otto Pommerening and Ernie Allmendinger and Johnny Maulbetsch, all of whom were All Americans, all played football together. It got to be a fairly well known fact that they would play games against the university varsity. The local boys, you might say, the high school boys would play football against the university varsity, and they would sometimes win. This was when Fielding H. Yost was coach, and of course, he was enough of an entrepreneur. He wasn't going to let that kind of local talent get away. All of these stars of the local football scene played football for Fielding H. Yost on some of his great teams. There are many people around town, such as Bill Royce, who remembers the first Michigan Rose Bowl game in 1901, who can tell you about how Johnny Maulbetsch was such a great running back in the old football before the forward pass. The way they described him was that he could run low to the ground, but very fast, so that you couldn't see where he was or who had the ball and he was so low that you couldn't tackle him or knock him down. If you didn't get him right away, he'd be down the field and over the goal line before you could figure out where he was or what he was doing. Of course, it was all played with mostly line plunge or around the end type play, similar to rugby football, so that the man who could run and who could keep his balance and who could go very fast while keeping his center of gravity low was the star. Johnny Maulbetsch, who was a local player, was an All American for that reason. He was the best.
  • [00:43:02] MALE_1: Football is, I guess it's always been a big business here. In your lifetime, who's the biggest star for the team, Harmon?
  • [00:43:09] JOHN HATHAWAY: Well, of course, Tom Harmon was the great All American for at least two or three years here. Of course, we had a local boy from Ann Arbor, who had been the captain of the Ann Arbor High football team who was an All American the year after Harmon left, and that was Bob Westfall. Many of the local people thought very highly of Bob Westfall, and he subsequently played for the Detroit Lions and was all pro fullback one year during World War II. But there were a number of All Americans here, but Harmon is probably the best remembered of the really great players. If you saw him play in the stadium, he would play both ways, both offense and defense, a full sixty minutes. That was the way they played in those days. If you saw him out there on the field and saw the way he could play, he was triple threat. He could kick, he could pass, he could run, and he did all three of them better than anybody else did. I can remember one game he was playing defense, defensive right half back. I don't remember which team it was, but I can remember seeing him intercept the pass out in the flat run the whole length of the stadium with that pass for a touchdown. You could just tell that was nothing but a great football player.
  • [00:44:39] MALE_1: When did they get rid of the cable cars here? Did they have them when you were growing up?
  • [00:44:45] JOHN HATHAWAY: They didn't have trolley cars here. They had city buses. The trolley cars had gone out sometime before we came to town. But some of the people who were involved in the famous old trolley cars are still around. There were two systems, there was the inter-urban line, which ran from Detroit out to Jackson as a local stop railroad and it ran along the center of Packard Street, and ran out down Main Street and then out Huron Street, out toward Dexter and Jackson. Then there was the local trolley, which was just around town, which went around the campus and down to the depot and down around Main Street and back around to the car barns, which were out by Burns Park. On that local trolley, there were the two men who ran the car. One of them was named Love, and one of them was named Darling. You'll see some of their children are still around town, so the names have not been lost in the community, but they used to do a vaudeville act with their trolley car when they were getting ready to start it up, and one would say, are you ready to go, Love? The other one would say, yes, are you all set, Darling? You say, yes Love, very well Darling. Let's start the car. All right Love, here we go. They would go on with this kind of a routine. The son of, I think it was Mr. Darling, is still living out at Whitmore Lake, and I think he has a piece of that old trolley car track that his father used to run the trolley on. He remembers a lot of the stories about the old trolley. But, of course, the most famous was when the cars got loose up on the end of Huron Street, ran all the way down the hill and went through the lobby of the Ann Arbor Bank, causing great consternation. Of course, the favorite was with the kids who would get down with sticks as the trolley cars were going down under the Ann Arbor Railroad and push the trolleys off of the wires so that they'd get stalled there and they couldn't do anything until the conductor would get out and go back and haul down on the rope and get the trolley and put it back up on the wire so they could move again. Of course, the kids were always filled with all ideas of how to stop these trolley cars or give them trouble, play tricks on the people who were riding them.
  • [00:47:19] MALE_1: Before we go, I get back to this building more time. What are you plan to do with the building? Tell me that.
  • [00:47:25] JOHN HATHAWAY: Well, the reason that we bought the building in the first place was to try to give people the idea that the older buildings downtown could be put into functional use and that there was a lot of value in some of the older buildings, and this one we thought was a prime example, and what we would like to do is to use it for meetings of groups that are interested in community activities or projects, and hopefully at some time when we get enough interest or enthusiasm, to have an informal luncheon group that would meet here on regular occasions, which would represent different parts of our community, different groups of people, different social or economic or educational levels, and have them get together informally for the kind of lunch that you used to get at the old bar, the free lunch on top of the bar, you buy a nickel beer and get the free lunch. To have them talk about community problems or things that people are concerned about, and to get some exchange, or some communication between different parts of the community by having the conversation that they used to get at the roundtable over on Huron Street, and hopefully that way, maintained some of the local traditions as well.
  • [00:48:59] JOHN HATHAWAY: His father used to have the shoe store on Main Street where, what is it? Wanty & Reule