AADL Talks To: Andrea Fulton, 1970s Rock Concert Promoter, Photographer, and Psychedelic Ranger

Fri, 08/30/2024 - 4:47pm

When: June 6, 2022

Andrea (aka Andye) Fulton-Higgins, is the daughter of Douglas James Fulton, outdoor editor for the Ann Arbor News from 1957 to 1984, and Anna Louise Summers Fulton, an Ann Arbor Public School teacher for 40 years. Andrea shares her memories of coming of age in Ann Arbor during the heady days of counter-cultural Ann Arbor in the late 1960s and early 1970s. She talks about her involvement in the Ann Arbor music scene and discusses the influence of her parents, in particular, her father's work and legacy as a photographer, music lover, editor, conservationist, and friend. Hundreds of Andrea's photographs are also available in the Andrea Fulton Concert Collection.

Transcript

• [00:00:09] AMY CANTU: Hi, this is Amy, and in this episode, AADL talks to Andrea Fulton. Andrea shares her memories of growing up in Ann Arbor in the 1960s; her involvement in some of the city's iconic cultural moments -- notably, the rock concerts and festivals, where she worked as a psychedelic ranger and the John Sinclair Freedom Rally. She also talks about the people who influenced her, including her parents, Anna and Doug Fulton, and about her father's work and legacy as a photographer, music lover, editor, conservationist, and friend. Welcome, Andrea.
• [00:00:45] ANDREA FULTON-HIGGINS: Nice to be here. Thank you. It's been wonderful so far to be back home. I haven't been here in about 15 years.
• [00:00:52] AMY CANTU: Really? That long. Wow. What's the first thing you did when you came back?
• [00:00:58] ANDREA FULTON-HIGGINS: I went and got together with some girlfriends. I have a friend that lives in the same house that she lived in when I visited her 50 years ago and we had a great time. It was just like old times. And you know what's so funny is that nobody took out a cellphone and took selfies, nobody took pictures, nobody recorded anything. Nobody went on Facebook and talked about it. It was just very organic and from the heart.
• [00:01:25] AMY CANTU: Exactly like old times then.
• [00:01:27] ANDREA FULTON-HIGGINS: Yeah. We didn't have cellphones back then. I was hanging out with these people in late 60s, early 70s.
• [00:01:35] AMY CANTU: Wow. Well, that's a great segue to my first question that I really wanted to ask you about, is if you would just talk a little bit about growing up in Ann Arbor -- where you lived, what schools you attended, what it was like back then? Can you give us your sense of what it was like?
• [00:01:50] ANDREA FULTON-HIGGINS: When my dad got out of the Air Force -- I was born in Fort Carson at the Army Hospital in Colorado Springs. When he got out of the Air Force, we moved to Ann Arbor, where he had fully intended to get his PhD in Linguistics. But he had to get a job to establish residency so he could pay the residents' tuition and he got a job as a painter first and hated that and couldn't work if it was raining. So he learned photography in the Air Force. He taught himself, and he applied for a job at the Ann Arbor News and got hired as a stringer photographer and just covered stuff that was going on in Ann Arbor. And he just fell in love with the business. In the early 60s, he started publishing, and this is black and white -- go figure -- a series of... Each week, there would be a picture of a Michigan wildflower, and he'd talk about the flower and what it was called and where you could find it growing and all this and that and the other and it was just really excitedly accepted by the readers. Then right around that time is when whoever was doing the Outdoor Editor was retired or whatever, and they gave him the job. He got it expanded from one page into two. He had his own column called a Naturalist's Journal and wrote about all kinds of stuff and frequently. He became later the Special Projects editor, which means that he could pick out a subject and do a whole back page, top to bottom, of photographs. Of course, there was one about the Sunday free concerts and just all kinds... Whatever was going on that was exciting, he would do a story on it. He was there from 1959 maybe 1962. He retired, took early retirement, and bailed on Ann Arbor and went back to Tucson, where he lived since he was 12 because his bursitis was acting up. He couldn't stand the Michigan weather and so they retired back to Tucson.
• [00:04:08] AMY CANTU: And you growing up here... Were you aware as a child and a young adult that your father was this important guy at Ann Arbor?
• [00:04:17] ANDREA FULTON-HIGGINS: My parents were my best friends. That's why I never learned to drive, because most kids learned to drive so they can get the hell out of the house. Now, I had a very enlightened childhood. We grew up in a house on Michigan Avenue, which is between East University and Wells, a block up from Packard. Used to walk down to Clague's Market and get a longjohn from Quality Bakery. So sad that it's not there anymore. Went to Burns Park, walked to school, went to Tappan, walked to school, went to Pioneer, walked to school.
• [00:04:53] AMY CANTU: Wow.
• [00:04:53] ANDREA FULTON-HIGGINS: In fact, we ended up getting that house because my father really wanted to live on a farm out in the country and then he started thinking about how he was going to have to schlep us all around in the car to go places and do things and he said, No, that's not happening.
• [00:05:10] AMY CANTU: That's great.
• [00:05:11] ANDREA FULTON-HIGGINS: I walked everywhere in Ann Arbor, rode my bike any and everywhere, and it was a great place to grow up. When you're 6-years-old and your parents get you up at 4:00 in the morning to go bird-watching, you don't really have anything to say about it. We would go bird watching, we'd go to Point Pelee in the spring to watch the Warblers. We would go up to the Upper Peninsula all the time, camping trips. We hiked Isle Royale and I was so excited. I found a diary when I was cleaning out my mom's house from that trip, and I was so excited and I opened it up and it was only then that I realized that the whole reason we took that trip was so that he could report back to this company on how their freeze-dried food tasted. [LAUGHTER] And so the whole diary was this dish, and this was good. I was like, Dad, really?
• [00:06:09] AMY CANTU: That's funny. You find out that later.
• [00:06:10] ANDREA FULTON-HIGGINS: It was a great trip. He was president of the Audubon Society for a while and back then -- I don't know if they do this anymore -- he'd put on his suitcoat and his bolo tie. Never saw my dad wear a tie in his life -- it was either a bolo or an ascot. He would get up on stage and introduce the movie. It used to be at the auditorium at Pioneer. I'd be so proud, I'd be this little girl all dressed up in my nice clothes, and my dad would be up on the stage talking about whatever movie we were going to see and talking about what was going on. We always did the Christmas bird count. He was always going off to a meeting at home from work, City Council or something. He was going up to Lansing a lot to lobby for environmental conservation things that were going on in Michigan at the time. I was very aware of what was going on.
• [00:07:15] AMY CANTU: Let me go back to the movies. What were the movies at Pioneer High School?
• [00:07:18] ANDREA FULTON-HIGGINS: They would show nature movies, different things.
• [00:07:21] AMY CANTU: He was just the guy that would introduce...?
• [00:07:23] ANDREA FULTON-HIGGINS: Yeah, he'd get up and talk about business, the Audubon Society is doing this, and we need volunteers for this. Whatever the business of the Audubon Society was at the time. The kids always used to make fun of me because I said we were members of the Audubon Society, and they didn't know what that was, and they thought I was talking about being a bomber or something. I don't know. It was crazy.
• [00:07:47] AMY CANTU: I was going to ask you: Clearly, your dad was an ardent environmental advocate, and I was going to ask how he imparted those values to you, but it sounds like he just demonstrated them, and you just learned as you went along. Trips, movies. Did he talk much about his work? Did he talk much about the work he did?
• [00:08:07] ANDREA FULTON-HIGGINS: Sure. All the time. This was back in the 60s when everybody sat around the dining room table, and the national news was 15 minutes long. It was the Huntley Brinkley report. Literally, the local news ran from 6 to 6:45, and then the national news was 15 minutes long, and it was just hard news. We'd sit around the table and discuss all kinds of stuff. Then, of course, Sunday morning, we would frequently wake up to the sound of my dad swearing because somebody got something wrong in the layout of the page.
• [00:08:43] AMY CANTU: Of course.
• [00:08:44] ANDREA FULTON-HIGGINS: There was always something for him to be irritated about. If we didn't hear anything on Sunday morning, then that was a good thing. We knew that he was going to be a happy dad.
• [00:08:55] AMY CANTU: That's great. Of course. Just to let us know now, what was your mom... She worked for the public schools? What was she doing?
• [00:09:06] ANDREA FULTON-HIGGINS: My mom's dad was adamant that both of his daughters learned how to make a living, that they were not to depend on a man to make a living. It was a big deal with my mom's dad and so she became a teacher just like her mother and her sister. They're all three teachers in the system, and that was in Tucson. I think her first job was up in Marana, which is on the way to Phoenix. Then she was a stay-at-home mom because back then you could afford to stay home. One family could live on one job. She stayed at home and raised us. Then when I was, let's see... She did a couple of things: She was with the first group of teachers that taught in the brand-new Head Start program and I was her assistant. That was in 19... I believe, 66. Shortly after that, she went back to school and got her master's in special ed. I know she taught at Mack School for a while, but then she was at Angell School probably for the last at least 20 years that she lived and worked in Ann Arbor and that was really exciting for her because that was all the kids of all the parents who were from all over the world. She had kids in her classroom all over the world and really took advantage of that. She also taught dance in the Ann Arbor Rec department.
• [00:10:36] AMY CANTU: Really? Wow.
• [00:10:39] ANDREA FULTON-HIGGINS: That was a woman who could get little boys to have fun doing modern dance, which is quite a feat in my opinion.
• [00:10:44] AMY CANTU: That is definitely a feat. Very good.
• [00:10:50] AMY CANTU: I want to ask you a little bit more about just growing up and the transition... I mean, in addition to all of the environmental issues that you learned from your dad and that was part of his work, he also has a pretty amazing track record for having caught a lot of the seminal events in Ann Arbor's history. The street riots, the concerts in the parks, many of these. I'm curious about that part of his work and also your part in that era of Ann Arbor.
• [00:11:28] ANDREA FULTON-HIGGINS: How did that happen? Well, I remember our church was St. Andrews Episcopal Church. Then out of that, one of the priests there, Martin Bell, he wrote a book called, The Way of the Wolf. He was an incredible person. I had a very positive religious upbringing and at that point, that was when Canterbury House started. We would go to services there. There's actually video of a service that my mom and my dad and me are in. It's so bizarre. And then there were also a lot of bands that would play there. One of the bands that would play there was the Mojo Boogie Band. I was very young. I was maybe 15, 16 and I was there with my dad and Jim Tate from the Mojo Boogie Band walked up to me and gave me this big smile and said, And who are you? I said, I'm Doug Fulton's daughter. Because that was more important to me than anybody knowing my name. I'm with the cool guy. Everybody made fun of that the rest of the time. I became good friends with them and then through a series of introductions, I met Suzanne Somers [sic Young] and Pete Andrews. At the age of 16, I was the box office manager for all the rock and roll shows at the University of Michigan.
• [00:13:02] AMY CANTU: At 16?
• [00:13:03] ANDREA FULTON-HIGGINS: Yeah. Well, we went on... Pioneer was so crowded and Huron wasn't finished yet, so we went on staggered shifts. Some people went 08:00-01:00, 09:00-02:00, or 10:00 -03:00. Because I had Latin and there was only one Latin class and it was at 08:00 o'clock in the morning, I got out of school at 01:00 o'clock. I'd walk over to the stadium, take the commuter bus, go to the student union, go to the office and get the cash box and the tickets, and I'd sit there until like 06:00, 07:00, 08:00 o'clock in the lobby selling tickets had the seating chart and the whole nine yards. I made good money back then. That was like what '70, '71, and I was making like 5.50 an hour.
• [00:13:50] AMY CANTU: Pretty good for then.
• [00:13:51] ANDREA FULTON-HIGGINS: That was pretty good money. I bought a motorcycle. And then, I got to say that through them, I met Suzanne's boyfriend. His name was Curt Andrews, and his brother was Pete Andrews. Curt Andrews had a sound company called Vulcan Sound. That was actually my first official job out of high school. I was the secretary and that's where I met "Woody" Finger -- Charles Woodruff Finger Junior -- who was a very famous...ended up becoming a very famous roadie. He was on the road with all the greats, so that's how I got involved in that whole scene. We were pretty crazy. There was a group of us that hung around the two guys from the Mojo Boogie Band that I was most closest to were Jim Tate and Bill Lynn, and Jim would always act like he was coming over to see me. But really, they just wanted to come over and play my dad's Blues records. They would just hang out and play Blues and talk about Blues and it was great fun. They played all over. They played Flick's, they played Mr. Flood's Party. I remember my dad wrote a permission note for the bar manager at Mr. Flood's Party. I think his name was Ned Shure -- I don't know why that just came to me -- anyway, saying that I had his permission to be there, because it was a bar. It wasn't even a restaurant. That I had his permission to be there, and they put the note up on the wall, and I would sit at the bar and drink cokes and see Terry Tate and Jim Tate, and all these local musicians, Siegel–Schwall Band. I remember gosh, all kinds of people. That was my introduction.
• [00:15:47] AMY CANTU: It wasn't very long after that that you became a Psychedelic Ranger. Can you talk a little bit about what they did and what their history was here in town?
• [00:15:56] ANDREA FULTON-HIGGINS: That was actually before I met Woody. When I was 16, I was with Frank Duff. I was 16, and I had 23-year-old boyfriend. (Ssh, don't tell anybody.) He and James Griffin were in charge of the logistics for the Psychedelic Rangers for all the Sunday free concerts. Me and Frank would go out to Sergeant Bob Conn's house and he was kind of the liaison between us wild and crazy hippies and the community, which looked at us with apprehension. We would go out to his house every Saturday and just talk about the event and the next day and what was going to happen and what people needed to know. It was great fun.
• [00:16:45] AMY CANTU: What were your responsibilities as the Psychedelic Ranger?
• [00:16:48] ANDREA FULTON-HIGGINS: Well, when it was a Gallup Park, I used to just stand at the entrance to the park and give directions, answer questions, tell people where stuff was, first aid, all that stuff.
• [00:17:03] AMY CANTU: Were your parents at all apprehensive that you were hanging out with a bunch of hippies?
• [00:17:07] ANDREA FULTON-HIGGINS: We all turned into hippies together. My my parents knew everybody that I hung out with, and my friends liked my parents as much if not more than they liked me. Nobody was apprehensive. I'd leave Flick's bar around 2 o'clock and take my motorcycle out to WRIF and hang out with Michael O'Brien, who was the all night DJ there. We'd just play tunes and talk and hang out. I'd come home about 4 or 5 o'clock in the morning and mother said, I never worried about you. I just waited until I heard the motorcycle, and then I said, Now I can go to sleep. But I will tell you that the riots were a different story. I'm home one night and I know there's something going on, but I really don't know about it. I was probably doing homework like a good little girl. The phone rings and in my house, we answered the phone, "Fulton residence" and he's speaking. It was my dad. He said, It's your dad. Hi, dad. What's up? He says, I'm on South U. There's a riot. I don't want you coming anywhere near this place. Okay, dad. No problem. He was definitely concerned that... because he knew I knew all the people at the Hill House, at 15:10. I know he was concerned, and he wanted to make sure that I had it from word on high that I was not to leave the house and so I didn't.
• [00:18:35] AMY CANTU: You didn't sneak out?
• [00:18:37] ANDREA FULTON-HIGGINS: No. I've got 8 by 10s. You saw some of them, I think. He was there. It wasn't much of a riot, quite frankly, but that was... That's seared in my memory.
• [00:18:51] AMY CANTU: It could have been worse than it was.
• [00:18:54] ANDREA FULTON-HIGGINS: Absolutely. I just knew that there wasn't any reason for me to be down there at all.
• [00:18:59] AMY CANTU: Now, it's pretty clear that you had a lot of... some of your music-loving influences came maybe from your dad. What about photography? You picked up the camera and you were taking photographs as well. Can you talk a little bit about his influence on you as a photographer?
• [00:19:20] ANDREA FULTON-HIGGINS: Well, first of all, there's nobody that took pictures like my dad. He caught a moment in time and was completely unseen doing it, which was quite a feat for somebody who was 6'2, and was a big guy. What I really learned and appreciated and loved about taking pictures was going to the dark room with him and learning how to develop pictures.
• [00:19:53] AMY CANTU: At the News, did you go to the...?
• [00:19:55] ANDREA FULTON-HIGGINS: Because that is as much of a part of his artwork. That was at the News. That was as much a part of what made him so great. In addition to catching the actual shot, he took pictures in black and white. So when you are sitting there in the dark room watching this image being burned onto the paper or coming to life on the paper as it will, you would either do burning or dodging to bring out or decrease parts of the picture. I actually got to do that and practice doing it and learned a lot. I didn't keep it up. I didn't keep up the dance that I did all my life up to high school, and I didn't really keep up photography. That's my brother's gig. He's all into using the computer now to play around with pictures, whereas dad did it in the dark room. Now you can just do all that stuff on computer. Don't know how what he'd think about that, but at any rate... It was really just a time for us to be together and have fun and do something that was our thing. That really meant more to me than anything. Was fun being in the dark room, and being at the Ann Arbor News after it was all closed up. It was really important for him to share that with us I think he did with Bruce, too. I think they probably went down and did their own thing there. But it was a quality time with him that counted. As for the music, I grew up with music. The first music I heard when I was born in the hospital was Bach, and I have a great love for Bach. Then, of course, I grew up listening to classical music. Then my dad discovered this program called WDTM Saturday Night. He made reel-to-reel tapes of this two-hour show that was all folk music and comedy. All the greats, all the old stuff, Dylan, Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, Joan Baez. Everybody. That was a nice transition then when I was 10, and my grandfather sent me a transistor radio, and I discovered CKLW and Top 40 and Motown. And then we were just off and running. Then when I turned into a hippie, I cordoned off one corner of my room and I put a AM FM radio in there and a lamb skin rug, and I had a little incense burner. I put on WABX, which was the best rock and roll underground station in the world. I don't have to go into detail about anything else that I might have done, correct?
• [00:22:54] AMY CANTU: You don't have to do that, no. [LAUGHTER]
• [00:22:56] ANDREA FULTON-HIGGINS: But anyway, so music has always been a big part of life in our house and all music.
• [00:23:06] AMY CANTU: You have a couple of important musical moments. One of them is the John Sinclair Freedom Rally, which you were at, which was a pretty -- talk about a legendary moment, Ann Arbor's history -- and you actually have a couple of photographs of John Lennon and Yoko Ono which we're really looking forward to putting up.
• [00:23:23] ANDREA FULTON-HIGGINS: I brought with me the CD I found of the negatives, all the negatives that I had taken from that event because I worked that event. There's only two groups of pictures. There's four pictures of John and Yoko, and there's about 20 pictures of Bobby Seale and the Black Panthers who took over one entire dressing room. They all had big huge machine guns or whatever, long guns. I don't know what guns they were. I don't know anything about guns. We didn't have AR 15s back then, but they were all heavily armed. There were only two dressing rooms and they took over one whole dressing room. I've got a picture of Allen Ginsburg. Forget who it's with, somebody cool. Anyway, I brought that disc with me, so you can see it. Maybe we could put a few of them on there just so people can get a feel and a flavor for what that was.
• [00:24:18] AMY CANTU: Yeah, absolutely.
• [00:24:20] ANDREA FULTON-HIGGINS: That was a pretty big deal. Me and Claudette, my girlfriend who worked with me in the box office, she's my best friend since 9th grade. We went to Red's Rite Spot down by Jacobson's on Williams, I think, because that was our hangout, and we got her [Yoko Ono] a cheeseburger with onions. Then we came back. Nobody did selfies back then. I didn't hand anybody my camera and say, Hey, take a picture of me with John Lennon. People didn't do that. My father certainly would not have approved of that.
• [00:24:55] AMY CANTU: That was one thing he passed on.
• [00:24:59] ANDREA FULTON-HIGGINS: I was so nervous that -- one of the pictures, I badly back-focused. But anyway, that was a pretty big deal.
• [00:25:08] AMY CANTU: What is your favorite memory from that night?
• [00:25:12] ANDREA FULTON-HIGGINS: Just standing that close to John Lennon. Everybody played. Bob Seger played. I think Mojo might have played. I know Bob Seger. Who else? Somebody else?
• [00:25:23] AMY CANTU: Stevie Wonder.
• [00:25:25] ANDREA FULTON-HIGGINS: Stevie Wonder. Yeah. David Peel. That was a character. The whole event was pretty outrageous. Then two days later, he [John Sinclair] got out of jail. A bunch of us piled into, like, eight cars, and we all caravaned to Jackson Prison to see John get out of prison. That was the denouement but that was a pretty cool ending to the story.
• [00:25:51] AMY CANTU: It certainly was. Then we have a lot of negatives from musicians that came to town when you were working to bring them into town. What are some of your favorite memories from that whole period of time? What are some of the photos that you have?
• [00:26:09] ANDREA FULTON-HIGGINS: You saw the ticket stubs I sent you?
• [00:26:11] AMY CANTU: I did.
• [00:26:14] ANDREA FULTON-HIGGINS: Because I was the box office manager there. None of them torn. They're all complete whole tickets in the, like, first row, second row, third row on the aisle. Janis Joplin, that was before I actually started working with Daystar, with Pete Andrews. Janis Joplin and Big Brother in the Holding Company James Cotton opened. That was the first rock and roll concert that I went to.
• [00:26:41] AMY CANTU: Wow.
• [00:26:42] ANDREA FULTON-HIGGINS: The fabulous picture my dad took of Janis. That was pretty special. Then when I started working, oh, gosh, we saw everybody Ike and Tina Turner, B. B. King, Quicksilver, Mountain, Pink Floyd, Tickets were $1, $2, and $3. The Union pulled the plug at one o'clock in the morning because they played an hour and a half past when they were supposed to stop. They literally just pulled the plug on Pink Floyd. Grateful Dead was there two nights in a row with their wall of sound tie-dyed speaker system. I remember sitting in the box office once and this big tall, scruffy hippy-looking dude just wandered into the box office and said, Can I use the phone? I said, Look, there's a bunch of pay phones right down there and I pointed down the hall. Claudette at this point, is now standing behind this guy and she's, like, madly madly madly trying to say, This is Kris Kristofferson.
• [00:27:44] AMY CANTU: Really?
• [00:27:45] ANDREA FULTON-HIGGINS: I said, You can use this phone right here if you want. Stuff like that. I remember going backstage and seeing all the costumes that Earth, Wind and Fire had at Chrisler. Up close, they were just ratty and stinky, it's just amazing. When you see people on stage in their costumes, it's all grand. Then when the lights go out and everything's done, it's just like... I don't know what to say. I just remember being really struck by that. I got to meet Ike and Tina Turner. I wanted to smoke a joint with Frank Zappa, and he told me I would forget to tie my shoes and I should stop smoking marijuana. At the time, I said, That's cool. Then later, I thought, Well, he probably just didn't want to get caught smoking weed with a 16-year-old. Then come to find out that he never did drugs. He was totally against drugs, never did drugs. Apparently, listening to Frank Zappa's music, you can understand why. He was high naturally.
• [00:28:53] AMY CANTU: He was already there.
• [00:28:54] ANDREA FULTON-HIGGINS: He was already there. [LAUGHTER]
• [00:28:59] AMY CANTU: That's a lot of people. That's a lot of names, a lot of experiences here. So, you said earlier when we were talking before the interview that you left Ann Arbor and came back several times. When did you first leave? Why did you come back?
• [00:29:13] ANDREA FULTON-HIGGINS: The first time I left, I very clearly remember taking the phone with a 40-foot cord up to the attic and calling my brother, who was living in Tucson in a house that my grandmother had given him. That was convenient. I said, I don't care if I have to wash dishes, I got to get the hell out of this town. It was because... Cocaine had started to infiltrate the business, and it turned everybody into major you know what: Jerks. It just wasn't fun anymore. It was getting crazy. It was getting ugly. It was not the cool peace, love, and hippie beads that I was into.
• [00:29:55] AMY CANTU: What year was this?
• [00:29:56] ANDREA FULTON-HIGGINS: That would have been '73, '74. '72, '73, '74, somewhere around in there, and I went out there and this is the second, time, actually. The first time I went out there -- I don't even know why I went out there the first time -- I got a job at Old Pueblo Traders, which was a mail order company for old ladies, and I just used to fold clothes and go stock orders all day. Most of the people that worked there were these sweet little old Mexican ladies and their daughters. That was during the Watergate hearings, and I brought a portable radio in and listened to the Watergate hearings, and they all thought I was just crazy because they didn't understand anything about it. I was totally into politics and all that stuff. That was the first time. Then the second time is when I called my brother and said, I don't care if I have to wash dishes. He takes me out to the Brave Bull Guest Ranch where he's playing classical guitar for the brunch crowd. He introduces me to the wife of the owner, and she says, Well, you can hostess if you want, but how would you like to learn how to tend bar because the wrangler is getting tired of tending bar and taking all the guests out on horseback rides. I said, Sure, so he sat at the bar with me for two weeks and taught me how to tend bar. I just fell in love with it. Just like my dad fell in love with the newspaper business, I fell in love with being a bartender. Then from there, when that place closed, he sold the bar. Anyway, I moved to Marin County because I wanted to go somewhere wet because I was tired of the hot and the dry. I was with Woody still at the time and he was on the road, so it didn't matter where I lived. He said, Well, we know a lot of people from Ann Arbor up in Marin County. Why don't you go up there? I really got into a tending bar, and then that's when I started getting into wine. We had about 100 wines on the wine list and I became the bar manager after I'd been there three months. I used to take the staff up to Wine Country, and this will be the early '80s when wine was just starting to be a thing. I got in on the ground floor and I just inhaled everything, all the knowledge that I could. I was there from '79-'84, and then in '84, I had a new boyfriend, and we moved to Austin, Texas. He had a gourmet food production company that he started, and I was miserable tending bar at several places in Austin until I met Joe Elmiger, and Norbert Brandt, who were a chef and owner, manager, restaurant, people from San Francisco. He used to fly in sourdough bread from San Francisco. I went looking for a bartender job, he says, I don't need a bartender. He says, I think I'd like to have a sommelier in my restaurant, and I said, I don't know how to do that. He says, I just looked at your resume, you know a lot about wine. You just go out there and sell wine. I pretty much taught myself how to be a sommelier. Then about three years later, I moved to Monterey, California and took the job as the seller master of the Sardine Factory, 1,200 selections on the list and 15-20,000 bottles in inventory. I lived in Monterey and did that job for 13 years. What's funny is that I almost ended up growing up in Monterey. My dad was in the service in upstate New York. In the winter, and his commanding officer didn't like the overcoats because it covered up their spiffy uniform, so he ordered everybody not to wear overcoats, and my dad caught pneumonia and missed his chance to go to the Defense Language Institute in Monterey. But his languages were French and German, and by that time they wanted people who spoke Chinese and Korean and Japanese. Didn't end up growing up there, but did love living there for 13 years. Then we went down to Paso Robles. I'm with Randy now, my husband, and we went down to Paso Robles, we lived there for a couple of three years, he got into vineyard management. Then we left there and went to Sonoma, and he did landscaping and gardening for a big hotel. Then from there, we went to Salem, Oregon and lived up in the Willamette Valley. I got a job at the Joel Palmer House, which featured wild mushrooms and had pretty much a 20-page list that was nothing but Pinot Noir. Because that's what grows there and Pino grows great with mushroom. I worked there for five or six years and then I took a dream job in Seattle that turned into a nightmare, and then I retired.
• [00:35:06] AMY CANTU: Wow, that's an eclectic history.
• [00:35:09] ANDREA FULTON-HIGGINS: When that restaurant went under, I just said, I'm done. I had a couple of other jobs that aren't even worth talking about, but I retired right before COVID hit. Boy, that was a good move.
• [00:35:20] AMY CANTU: It certainly was. Wow.
• [00:35:23] ANDREA FULTON-HIGGINS: My mom passed away in 2019 and I sold the house that she left me in California because I had always pictured living in Cambria, but with the water situation and everything else that's going on in California, it just wasn't what I wanted anymore. We're living on a river in the cascade foothills in the Puget Sound. There you go. That's it.
• [00:35:49] AMY CANTU: That's it. Wow. That's quite a career. You've lived so many different places, and that's... [OVERLAPPING]
• [00:35:56] ANDREA FULTON-HIGGINS: I've lived a lot of places and done a lot of things. I did a lot of wine events across the country. There was one event I did for 33 years straight, a big event put on by the Wine Spectator Magazine called the Wine Experience, and I was in charge of logistics for all the seminars and the grand tastings. We did sit-down tastings for 800-1,200 people. There's a lot of logistics involved in that. That was a big deal for me. Did another event at Pebble Beach, where I did the same thing on a much smaller scale and got to stay at Spanish Bay for a week once a year, which was pretty nice.
• [00:36:37] AMY CANTU: Well, I want to ask you now, so when you come back to Ann Arbor, what's changed? What stayed the same? What do you miss the most?
• [00:36:47] ANDREA FULTON-HIGGINS: Well, I want to bring it back to my dad because a lot has changed, obviously. All the big tall buildings and the construction that's going on. I couldn't be more appalled at the state of the streets, roads in this town.
• [00:37:06] AMY CANTU: The conditions?
• [00:37:06] ANDREA FULTON-HIGGINS: My goodness, really. But be that as it may, I spent an hour walking the Furstenberg trail at Gallup Park this morning. That is what is great about Ann Arbor, and that is what my dad was most fond of doing was preserving and conserving wild areas. There are so many places for people who live here to go to to experience being in nature. It's very important that we honor that these people that were doing stuff like this in the late '50s, early '60s, '70s, on into the '80s, really making a point to preserve and protect so many Bird Hills and Eberwhite Woods, and I could go on and on and on. Of course, Gallup is where we had a lot of the free concerts. There's that aspect of it, too, but just walking that Furstenberg trail this morning was really profound. I think that is what I want people to take away from this exhibit of my dad's work is his love of the Blues, which he got when he was at the University of Chicago before I was even thought about. His love of birdwatching and quiet and open spaces. We used to go to Saginaw Forest all the time. There was another place on Liberty Road, we'd go to McDonald's, the only one was out there on Stadium.
• [00:38:50] AMY CANTU: On Stadium, yep.
• [00:38:52] ANDREA FULTON-HIGGINS: We'd go there and we'd get bags of food, and we'd go up to this place where we would watch the woodcocks mate. That's my childhood. It was very precious and cherished and I was so lucky to have a teacher in my mother and someone who was so profoundly influenced by the natural world. One of his heroes that inspired him was Aldo Leopold, who wrote A Sand County Almanac. Of course, the Quality Bakery is gone and Best Steak House next to the Michigan...State Theater is gone and a lot of things are gone, but Angelo's is still there. I plan on having breakfast there this weekend.
• [00:39:49] AMY CANTU: The Fleetwood is still there.
• [00:39:52] ANDREA FULTON-HIGGINS: Fleetwood's still there, Burton Towers, Hill Auditorium. Oh, my goodness. There are so many iconic places here that haven't changed. My mother had a favorite saying that really applies to life in general, and that is a stanza from a very long poem. Then actually, a guy wrote over 200 years ago about -- he was one of the first abolitionists -- she wrote it about slavery, but the line is, "New occasions teach new duties. Time makes ancient good uncouth." And I always try to keep that in mind. It's pointless just to be angry that the Quality Bakery is gone. I was lucky enough to get to go there, and the Washtenaw Dairy is still there. That's cool. Michigan Stadium is still there. I went by the house that I grew up in and talked to the family that lives there now, and I couldn't be more pleased that there's a beautiful, loving family with children living in the house that I grew up in. And they love it just as much as I did. It all goes around and they don't know what it was like in the '60s, and that's okay. You got to keep moving forward. You know what happens when things stop changing? You're dead. What I want to do is, I just want to keep the spirit of this respect for nature and quiet and preservation of wild places that I think is the most important contribution that my dad helped to make with a lot of other people. I would love to just give you some names because they all need recognition. My dad never wanted to be thought of as "the guy." He didn't need the credit for everything. He was a guy who had no time for small talk and just was a leader who got things done. He worked very closely with the following people, Bill Stapp, Dorothy Blanchard, Eunice Hendrix, Pete Potter, Vern and Maxie Miles and Genevieve Gillette are the people that I remember that he worked with when he would go up to Lansing. It was usually with...Genevieve Gillette was usually there. She was this old broad even back then who just had a big voice and was just a character and a half. That was when they were working on the Michigan Wilderness Act, which was the first Act in the country.
• [00:42:45] AMY CANTU: Of its kind, yeah.
• [00:42:46] ANDREA FULTON-HIGGINS: Of its kind. I think that that's the takeaway for Ann Arbor is that, yes, of course, it's going to change and modern and this and that. There's nothing you can do about that. But the character is still there. The minute I got here, I felt safe. I felt peaceful. I felt at home and not in an at-home kind of way, but I felt comfortable. That's never going to go away. That's never going to change.
• [00:43:17] AMY CANTU: Yeah, no, that's an important legacy. You're right, and your dad had a big part of that. I mean, he was part of so much -- the first Enact teach-in and all of the different groups and conservation groups.
• [00:43:30] ANDREA FULTON-HIGGINS: The people he worked with to save Sleeping Bear Dunes. That was ready to become a huge amusement park -- hotels, God only knows what. My dad caught wind of that, and he just was relentless and didn't stop gathering people to come and fight with him to make sure that it was preserved.
• [00:43:52] AMY CANTU: That's a great legacy, and thanks for giving the others a shout out, too, that worked with him. That's really important as well.
• [00:44:00] ANDREA FULTON-HIGGINS: It is important. There were a couple of people before him, too, that I didn't don't know their names, but you know, Pete Potterson lives in Florida and takes beautiful pictures of sunrises and sunsets and so that's fun. Bruce has started posting some pictures. He was off Facebook for a while, but he makes jewelry, and he does his photography. He has a PhD in library science, and he just retired last December. He's having fun. He got my mom's house and they fixed it all up. Yeah, pretty neat that we're all doing some creative stuff. And I don't know if anything like this is happening now in Ann Arbor. I would like to think it is, but it probably isn't: My dad worked with the Ann Arbor Public School District to establish outdoor education for young kids. I sent you that fabulous picture of him with the kids. He would just take them to a pond and collect guppies and show them things. He was very good with kids, and not in a "kid" way, in an adult way. I mean, he really didn't have much to do with us until we were able to have a conversation, but he was good with kids, as I say, in an adult way, in that he was able to get them to be excited about learning about nature and environments and ecosystems from somebody that was really cool and fun and didn't talk down to them or talk over them, but really got down on their level and made it real for them. That was something that went all over the public schools. As I said, I don't know if they're doing anything like that now. They certainly should.
• [00:46:05] AMY CANTU: But he was part of that.
• [00:46:07] ANDREA FULTON-HIGGINS: He was part of that back then, too, and influenced a lot of people. I'm on the Ann Arbor Townies site, and there are all kinds of people that say, Hey, I remember your dad. He was the coolest ever. Your mom was cool, too. You had such cool parents. They were so important. I missed the Ann Arbor News. I miss his column. Sometimes he did not care if he irritated people. He did irritate people from time to time, but there was always a reason that he said what he had to say. I think in the end, most people respected that even if they didn't agree with him all the time about stuff. And he just had a very keen eye, not only for photography, but also to just put his finger on the pulse of what the true essence of reporting is -- who, what, where, when and why. He could do that succinctly and articulately in a way that didn't put people off. I think that that was really the important thing. He took retirement early because he had bursitis so bad. It just was too painful for him to live here anymore. He was very happy in the desert, so is my mother, so is my brother, and they can all have it. I don't do well with 10% humidity. Everybody already is complaining about how humid it is here, and I love it. We've had one of the wettest Mays in the Puget Sound we've ever had.
• [00:47:46] AMY CANTU: Now, in Tucson, then, as after we retired, he continued with the Blues Society?
• [00:47:54] ANDREA FULTON-HIGGINS: He continued with the Blues. He did the Blues calendar. He became really good friends with a guy who's up in Phoenix. He's a very famous young, well, he's not that young anymore, but a very famous harmonica player. His name is Bob Corritore. They worked together with a lot of stuff, and he went and saw a lot of people that were performing in and around Tucson and Phoenix area and did the calendar and did a couple of other things, but he mostly just listened to the blues records. He had a huge collection. We donated most of them to the local PBS station there, but God didn't give him the greatest body, and he was not interested in anything that didn't afford him a quality of life. He went into the hospital on November 5, then he passed away December 5, 1996. Then in 1997, we had a memorial for him out at Gallup Park, which was very special, very cool, very important.
• [00:49:08] AMY CANTU: And very fitting. Well, Andrea, thank you so much for talking to us about your dad and his legacy and growing up in Ann Arbor. It's been fascinating hearing this from you.
• [00:49:19] ANDREA FULTON-HIGGINS: Oh, well, I appreciate you wanting to hear about it. You know me, I could probably go on and on, but I will leave it at that. It was really a pivotal time in the country. When they say, "May you live in interesting times" we certainly did do that, and I was very blessed and fortunate to have the parents that I did.
• [00:49:47] AMY CANTU: You certainly were.
• [00:49:48] ANDREA FULTON-HIGGINS: Thank you.
• [00:49:49] AMY CANTU: Thank you.
• [00:49:54] AMY CANTU: AADL Talks To is a production of the Ann Arbor District Library.