World War II. D-Day, June 6, 1944. The Canadians of the North Shore (New Brunswick) Regiment went ashore to storm and liberate the French seaside village of Saint Aubin-sur-Mer (code-named Nan Red sector, at the eastern end of Juno Beach) from the Germans. They were followed by the United Kingdom's 48th Royal Marine Commando. Days later, on June 10, 1944, an American fighter plane crashed into the sea near the same beach. The aircraft was pulled to shore at low tide by personnel from the United Kingdom's No. 2 Royal Air Force Beach Squadron. The iconic photo below captured the Saint Aubin-sur-Mer, Calvados, Normandy beach, scarred by the battle and the plane's wreckage. What many people don't know about this grim image of war is that the pilot of the plane was from Michigan. This is the story of Second Lieutenant John Alfred Weese, an Ann Arbor soldier who died in France.

Ann Arbor, Before World War II

John Alfred Weese was born January 26, 1920, in Ann Arbor to Douglas and Lorena Staebler Weese. John Staebler was his maternal grandfather. Alfred Weese was his paternal grandfather. Known as Jack to his family, he had an older sister, Virginia, and two younger sisters, Mary & Nancy. He lived here as a child and later resided with his family in several Michigan cities as his father's employment moved them around. He was a 1938 graduate of Durand High School (Shiawassee County) where his father worked for the Railway Express Agency. The Weese family returned to live in Ann Arbor after his graduation. Jack worked a variety of jobs, and attended Lawrence Institute of Technology in Detroit for one semester. He eventually found work as a lathe operator and machinist at the American Broach & Machine Company in downtown Ann Arbor, which is where he was employed when he enlisted.

 

Fighter Pilot

On August 5, 1942 Jack enlisted in the United States Army Air Corps. He worked at a Detroit recruiting center, and briefly spent time at Fort Custer. In early 1943 he reported at the Army Air Force classification center in Nashville, Tennessee and then was sent to pre-flight school at Maxwell Field, Alabama. By May 1943 he had been transferred to Souther Field, Georgia, for primary flight instruction. He stood third in his class at Souther Field. From there he moved to basic training at Cochran Field, Georgia. In November 1943 Jack was commissioned a second lieutenant and awarded the silver wings of a fighter pilot at a Craig Field graduation ceremony in Selma, Alabama. Attending the ceremony were his parents, two of his sisters, Mary & Nancy, and Irma Barnard, his girlfriend. Days later, when he was home in Ann Arbor on leave, the engagement of Jack and Irma was officially announced in the Ann Arbor News. Following his leave, Jack spent time at Mitchell Field, New York, and Bluethenthal Field in Wilmington, North Carolina, where he received his final combat training.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In 2020, Kris Koebler, daughter of Jack's sister Virginia, shared some early childhood memories of her uncle. "Jack was (I would put it) devastatingly handsome, smart, and brave.  I remember the portrait of him that hung in my grandparents’ home until they passed. He was engaged to a lovely girl named Irma Barnard.  They were to be married after the war."

"I have memories of riding around Ann Arbor, standing next to him in the front seat of his shiny red convertible.  (No seat belts in those days!!)  We would be singing “The Army Air Corps” anthem at the tops of our lungs. I was the only one of his nieces and nephews that he ever knew. One of my brothers was born when Jack was overseas, and both my sister and younger brother were born after his death, as were Mary’s and Nancy’s children. I truly wish I could have known him longer and that he could have known his extended family. "

Hell Hawks

In January 1944 Jack travelled to England as part of the United States’ 9th Air Force. In April 1944, Jack joined the 365th fighter group, 386th fighter squadron, piloting a Thunderbolt P-47. They were known as Hell Hawks, one of 18 fighter groups that were part of the 9th Air Force. When Jack arrived they were based in Beaulieu, Hampshire, England.

"So who were the Hell Hawks? Even the lowliest lieutenant of the lot had accomplished something at which tens of thousands had failed: he had completed flight training, had silver wings pinned on his chest, and was now officially qualified to pilot an aircraft. He had successfully made the transition to the mighty P-47 Thunderbolt, the "Jug," and survived to reach the combat theater...They were perfect physical specimens, these young men who strapped into an eighteen-thousand pound Thunderbolt, fired up a roaring, two-thousand-horsepower engine, and flew into battle lugging a veritable arsenal of bombs and ammunition. They had superb bodies and minds and the youthful confidence to believe they were unbeatable." - Hell Hawks! The Untold Story of the American Fliers Who Savaged Hitler's Wehrmacht by Robert F. Dorr & Thomas Jones

Jack's letters to his fiancée Irma shared his experiences as a Hell Hawk. He mentioned bombing bridges and installations in Nazi-held Europe, and taking part in strafing missions (attacking ground targets with bombs or machine-gun fire). From Beaulieu Jack flew two Normandy missions on D-Day, June 6th. He flew two more on June 7th, and one on June 8th. Bad weather with low visibility kept his group grounded on June 9th. On June 10, 1944 he flew his final mission when he was reported ”Missing In Action”. Just a few weeks before his final flight he was awarded an Air Medal with two oak leaf clusters.

Saint Aubin-sur-Mer, Calvados, Normandy, France

On June 10, 1944, U.S. Aircraft DH-5 No.276297 crashed into the sea off Saint Aubin-sur-Mer. The body of John A. Weese, United States Army Air Force, was recovered and buried in Grave No 8 of Bernières-sur-Mer White Beach Cemetery. The officiating Chaplain was the Rev. William E. Harrison, H/Capt., Canadian Army. The aircraft was recovered from the sea at low tide the next day and Royal Air Force No. 83 Group were informed so that salvage action could be taken.

Ann Arbor, During World War II

In 2020, Sally Connors, Jack's younger cousin, shared her memory of 1944. “I was 10 when cousin Jack went missing in action. I had two brothers in the service and this news worried me; would my brothers also go missing? I remember the sadness in my Uncle Doug’s family."

News of Jack's death didn't reach the Weese family until June 28, 1944. The Ann Arbor News ran the story on their front page the following day. In July 1944 the Weese family received the news that Jack had received the posthumous award of the Purple Heart.

By June 1945, a year after Jack's death, the Weese family still had few details about what had happened in France. Lorena Weese, his mother, wrote a letter to the headquarters of the U.S. Army Air Forces asking for a letter from Jack's commanding officer. Below is a copy of the response she received. The details in this correspondence were pulled directly from the original Missing Air Crew Report (MACR).

"...On 10th June 1944 John went out on what we call a Fighter Sweep in the Cherbourg assault area. His flight became separated in the clouds at about six thousand feet. This happened around 1245 hours and at 1310 hours he called in on the radio saying his plane had been hit.The propellor was out and oil pressure was gone. John said he was at seven thousand feet and could see the Beachhead. He thought he could "belly-land" the ship. By that we mean he was going to slide in without using the wheels. At this time he was very cool and acted as if he hadn't been injured. This was all we knew until confirmation of his death was received. For some reason John was not able to "belly-land" the ship and his plane crashed into the English Channel. He was buried in grave eight at Bernières-Sur-Mer Cemetery near St. Aubin-Sur-Mer, Normandy, France.

Please accept our sympathies. I am sorry this letter is so late in reaching you. The memory of John has been an inspiration to his fellow pilots and he has left his mark with us all. He was an excellent flyer who really enjoyed flying..."

Repatriation

The U.S. War Department made it clear that men and women who died overseas would remain there until the end of the conflict. The government had committed resources to fighting the war, not managing the storage and transportation of the fallen. The Weese family now faced a new kind of waiting to bring Jack back to Ann Arbor. The first war dead did not reach American shores until October 1947.

At the end of January 1948 the Weese family received the news that Jack was finally coming home. U.S. Army Transport Corporal Eric G. Gibson was loaded with 1,753 caskets in Europe, each shrouded in an American flag. 61 of these caskets belonged to Michigan servicemen, one of them being John Alfred Weese. Most of the dead on this funeral ship had died on the beaches at Normandy. A photographer captured an image of the ship that would dock in a snowstorm at Brooklyn Army base, New York, and it was published in countless newspapers across the country.

On February 7, 1948, Jack's body arrived by train at the Michigan Central station in Ann Arbor. A military escort traveled with him to the Muehlig Funeral home, and then to Bethlehem Cemetery for a private burial with full military honors. His parents were buried in the same cemetery, many years later.

Afterword/Author's Note

In 2014 aviation artist Ken Stanton contacted the Ann Arbor District Library from England. He had been shown a photo of a war plane crashed on a French beach and was tasked with finding out the story behind it. He had found record of John Weese's name as the pilot, and that John was from Ann Arbor. With our resources in the AADL Archives, I was able to piece together the story of John 'Jack' Weese. Through Ancestry.com, Ken made contact with some of Jack's surviving family members (Cousin Sally, Nieces Kris & Marti), and we all pooled our knowledge and findings. In the end, Ken created a painting of Jack's P-47, Jack's family members learned more about his history, and I dove deep into the research and grew quite fond of Jack in the process.

In 2020, Fanny Hubart-Salmon, contacted the Ann Arbor District Library from Saint Aubin-sur-Mer, Calvados, Normandy. "I grew up in the French town of Saint Aubin sur Mer, France. We are actively researching photos, stories and relatives of soldiers who died on our beach in June 1944 as we keep honoring them. It came to our attention that Alfred John "Jack" Weese, from Ann Arbor, had crashed on the beach 4 days after June 6th." I immediately reached out to Ken Stanton, who reached out to Jack's family members again, and we all provided Fanny with the information we had surfaced in 2014. The end result was a memorial plaque honoring Jack. It was installed above the beach where he, and so many others, made history. Below is a photo of the memorial, which you can visit yourself in Normandy.

A brief video of the 2020 D-Day ceremony honoring Jack Weese in Saint Aubin-sur-Mer is available on YouTube.

Special thanks to Ken Stanton, who first brought Jack to my attention. Special thanks to Jack's surviving family members who helped fill in the pieces, especially Sally Connors, Dr. Kristeen Koebler, & Marti Watson. Special thanks to Fanny Hubart-Salmon who brought everything full circle and worked to permanently honor Jack on the beach in Normandy. In memory of John Alfred Weese, 1920 - 1944.

In August 1932, during the Great Depression, the first cooperative house at the University of Michigan was organized by graduate students in the Student Socialist Club. In return for four to five hours of work and two dollars every week, each of the founding eighteen members received room, board, barber, canning, and laundry service. The first house was a rental house located at 335 East Ann Street. The house was run collectively with all members having an equal vote on decisions. 

With the assistance of the Reverend Henry Lynn Pickerell, the student pastor of the Ann Arbor Disciples Church, and his wife Katheryn, two additional cooperative houses were formed in 1936 and 1937. The Pickerells welcomed students to live in their house in exchange for performing household chores. By 1936, eight students were living in the Pickerells’ attic. With the help of a $700 loan from Reverend Pickerell, the students rented a house on Thompson Street, first named the Student Cooperative House and then the Rochdale House. Since the University did not allow men and women to live together, the women who often visited the Rochdale House sought a cooperative house for themselves. The women rented a house at 517 East Ann Street and opened the Girls’ Cooperative House. In 1939, they had to move to 1511 Washtenaw Street, and took on a new name, the Alice Freeman House, named for the women’s rights activist.

The three independent houses, joining together to allow the purchase of items in quantity, formed the Inter-Cooperative Council in 1937. The houses were organized by the Rochdale principles: open membership; democratic control; political neutrality; opposition to discrimination by race or religion; and the promotion of education.

As the number of cooperative houses continued to expand in the late 1930s and early 1940s, the ICC became responsible for the houses’ financing and assignment of personnel to the houses. By 1941, eight men’s and three women’s cooperatives were operating in rented houses. During this expansion, all the houses were rented until 1943, when the A. K. Stevens House was purchased. Professor A. K. Stevens (the father of Ann Arbor’s late city historian, Wystan Stevens) served as a faculty advisor to the ICC and agreed to co-sign the loan to buy the house.

During World War II, many of the male students enlisted in the armed services. The cost of rental housing was increased by an influx of war factory workers. These two factors caused many of the cooperative houses to close. By 1946, only three cooperatives continued in operation. In 1944, during the war, the ICC voted to buy rather than rent property. After the war, the ICC centralized some functions to meet legal requirements and to limit the liability of the members. The titles to the houses were held in common and the charges at the different cooperatives were equalized through the centralization of finances.

In 1951, despite concerns from some students that paid leadership was at odds with cooperative values, the first ICC employee was hired when the cooperative students voted to approve the hiring of a full-time executive secretary. Luther H. Buchele was hired and continued to work for the ICC for nearly thirty-four years. The Korean War, as in World War II, led to a reduction in the number of male students. College students were not exempt from the draft. 

Over the ensuing years, there has been considerable growth in the number of cooperative houses and the number of students living in the houses. The Baby Boom following World War II created additional demand. Between 1967 and 1972, the ICC tripled in size from roughly 200 to 600 members. The number of cooperative houses grew from nine to twenty-two (this number includes the nine “houses”, now called suites, in the Escher house on North Campus). The number of full-time staff increased from one (Luther Buchele) to three and then four. It would be thirteen years before the ICC purchased another property.

In subsequent years, houses were bought, sold, renamed, renamed again, changed from men’s houses to women’s houses, from women’s houses to men’s houses, houses became co-ed houses, some houses became vegetarian. After a long period of planning and contention with the University, a large cooperative housing complex was built on North Campus, one cooperative became substance free, another focused on QTBIPOC (Queer, Trans, Black, Indigenous People of Color), one house burned, and some houses combined. Ruth Bluck, who lived in three of the cooperative houses (Rochdale, Owen, and Osterweil) was the first woman to become ICC President, serving from 1946-1947. Forty-two years later, Jennifer Skwiertz (Minnie’s House) was the second woman elected as president of the ICC, 1978-1979.

The Inter-Cooperative Council now has a house at 337 E. William St. (above) that serves as its headquarters, an education center, and sixteen houses. Additional information on the Inter-Cooperative Council is available at the University of Michigan's Bentley Historical Library. The Bentley Library has an extensive archive of materials donated by the Inter-Cooperative Council covering the period of 1932-2015 and the Inter-Cooperative Council at Ann Arbor website includes A Brief History of the Inter-Cooperative Council.
 

Co-op houses north of Central Campus (north of East Huron Street)

	MichMinnies (Minnie’s House and Michigan): 307-315 North State Street MichMinnies consists of Michigan House (blue) and Minnie’s House (purple). Michigan House was the first student cooperative in Ann Arbor and has been in operation since 1932. Minnie’s House is named for Minnie Wallace, the previous owner of the house at 307 North State Street. Her playful antagonism towards the occupants of the Michigan Socialist House next door inspired the ICC to name her former house in her honor after purchasing it in 1970.
	Vail (Stefan T. Vail) House: 602 Lawrence Street Stefan T. Vail Cooperative House was founded in 1960. The Vail house is an historical building constructed in 1848. Also known as the Mitchell-Gregory-Prettyman House, the house is constructed of adobe brick. Vail House was named for Stefan T. Vail (or Stephanos Valavanis), who was an ICC member and president in the mid-1950s. While at the University of Michigan, Vail helped to devise the financial structure of the ICC. After earning his doctorate in economics, Vail was an assistant professor of economics at Harvard University. In 1958, while camping near Mount Olympus in Greece, Vail was shot and killed by an army officer who mistook him for a deserter.
	Linder (Benjamin Linder) House: 711 Catherine Street Benjamin Linder Cooperative House was purchased in 1988. Ben Linder was an American engineer and a clown. In 1983 he moved to Nicaragua, where he rode his unicycle into villages dressed as a clown to administer critical vaccinations to Nicaraguans. While working on a small hydroelectric dam that he designed and built, Linder was murdered by the Contras, a loose confederation of rebel groups funded by the U. S. government.  A Life Worth Living: Benjamin Linder, 1959-1987, by Alan Wald (Agenda, June 1987)
	Ruths’ House: 321 North Thayer Street Ruths’ House was organized in 1993 and purchased in 1994. Ruths’ House is named for two women. Ruth Buchanan was the house mother for the first cooperative house in Ann Arbor, the Socialist House (or Michigan Socialist House), which opened in 1932. She worked six and one-half days a week as a receptionist at the Exhibit Museum. During World War II, she wrote to U-M students, faculty, staff, and alumni serving in the war. She wrote 17,828 letters, 6952 birthday cards, and 7398 get-well-cards. She sent more than 57,000 copies of the Michigan Daily to servicemen and women. She requested that they call her Aunt Ruth. Ruth Bluck, who lived in three of the cooperative houses (Rochdale, Owen, and Osterweil) was the first woman to become ICC President, serving from 1946-1947. Forty-two years later, Jennifer Skwiertz (Minnie’s House) was the second woman elected as president of the ICC, 1978-1979.
	King (Coretta Scott King) House: 803 East Kingsley Street Coretta Scott King Cooperative House was organized in 1983. The house was purchased by the ICC in 1953 as the first married student housing cooperative. The house was first named Couples House, then Roosevelt, and last, as Brandeis House. Coretta Scott King was an American author, activist, and civil rights leader. The wife of Martin Luther King Jr., she was a leader for the civil rights movement, a voice for peace, the founder of the King Center, and organizer of the Coalition of Conscience. The Coretta Scott King Cooperative House is no longer designated as family housing. It has six separate units, with less common space than other cooperative houses.

Co-op houses south of Central Campus (mostly south of Hill Street)

	Nakamura (John Nakamura) House: 807 South State Street Nakamura House, founded in 1948, was one of the first houses to be purchased by the ICC. John Nakamura was a member of the Inter-Cooperative Council at the University. Nakamura was drafted into the army in October 1941 and assigned to the Signal Corps. After President Roosevelt issued orders that Japanese and Japanese-Americans living in the United States were to be classified as 4-C/aliens, he was honorably discharged from the army for “erroneous induction.” In February 1942, he registered for the draft and visited his Senator and Congressman to advocate for re-enrollment in the army. On April 15, 1945, in an assault on the German Gothic Line in Italy, he was killed in action during a barrage from German mortars and howitzers. Less than a month later, his unit broke through the Gothic Line with the German Army surrendering on May 2. He was awarded the Bronze Star, the Purple Heart, and the Congressional Medal of Honor.
	Debs (Eugene V. Debs) House: 909 East University Avenue Debs House was acquired and established by the ICC in 1967. Previously, this house had been the site of two other Ann Arbor co-ops, Congress House and Lester House. Screenwriter and director Lawrence Kasdan lived at Debs Cooperative in the late 1960s. Eugene Debs was an American socialist, political activist, trade unionist, and one of the founding members of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). One of the best-known socialists living in America at the time, Debs was prosecuted by the administration of Woodrow Wilson for his opposition to World War I. He ran for president of the United States on the Socialist Party ticket four times. His last run, in 1920, was from his prison cell. He received 3.4% of the vote.
	Johnson-Rivera (Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera) House: 900 Oakland Avenue The Johnson-Rivera House began as the Muriel Lester Cooperative House, founded in 1940 as an all-women’s cooperative. In 2019, ICC members voted to change Lester House’s name to Rivera House after queer activist Silvia Rivera and rebrand the house as the ICC’s first QTPOC (Queer & Trans People of Color) house. These changes went into effect in 2021. Rivera is a designated safe space for the QTPOC but all interested students can apply. Muriel Lester was a social reformer, pacifist, and non-conformist. Sylvia Rivera was an American gay liberation and transgender rights activist and a noted community worker in New York. Rivera co-founded the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR), a group dedicated to helping homeless young drag queens, gay youth, and trans women. Marsha P. Johnson, whose birth name was Malcolm Michaels Jr., was an African-American gay liberation activist and self-identified drag queen. She was an outspoken advocate for gay rights, was prominent in the Stonewall uprising of 1969, was one of the founders of the Gay Liberation Front, and was known as the mayor of Christopher Street.
	Owen (Robert Owen) House: 1017 Oakland Avenue Robert Owen Cooperative was purchased in 1947. Before the property was officially purchased, Owen House was located in a rented house on State Street and began operating in the 1940’s. In 1945, Owen House changed to a women’s house because of the scarcity of male students during World War II. It changed back into a men’s house a year later as soldiers returned from the war, and went co-ed in the 1960s. Owen House also housed the ICC office until it moved into the Student Activities Building in 1957. Robert Owen was a Welsh manufacturer turned social reformer and the founder of utopian socialism and the co-operative movement.
	Baker (Ella Josephine Baker) House: 917 South Forest Avenue Ella Baker Graduate Cooperative has had several names throughout its colorful history, included Mark VIII, Pickerell, Joint House, Tri-House, and the James R. Jones House. Baker originally operated as two separate houses; Mark VIII, a women’s co-op, purchased in 1961, and Pickerell, a men’s co-op, purchased in 1965. The two houses were connected via the addition of a large central room and functioned as a single co-op. After being remodeled in 2007, the co-op adopted its current name and shifted focus to attracting graduate students. Baker was an African-American civil rights and human rights activist. She was a grass roots organizer. She was the director of branches (and the highest-ranking woman in the organization) of the NAACP. She was a co-founder of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and an inspiring force in the creation of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee.
	Luther (Luther Buchele) Houses: 1510 and 1520 Hill Street Luther Buchele Cooperative House is made up of two houses on Hill Street, 1510 (photo at left) and 1520 Hill. The buildings were purchased by the Inter-Cooperative Council in 1986. Previously, the buildings were home to John Sinclair, the band MC5, and the White Panther Party. Located behind the two residential houses at 1522 Hill is the ICC’s Moses Coady-Paulo Frieire Cooperative Education Center, where many ICC events and house officer trainings are held. Luther Buchele was hired in 1951 as the executive secretary of the ICC, the first full-time staff member. At the time, he was living in Nakamuru House, one of five co-ops on campus. When he retired after 34 years in 1985, the ICC had grown to 18 houses with 600 students living in the houses. He is widely credited with professionalizing the ICC and ensuring its long-term viability.
	Black Elk House: 902 Baldwin Avenue Black Elk was acquired along with Luther in 1986, as part of a deal with the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity, who used to live there. The house has a long tradition of vegetarian and vegan cuisine. Heħáka Sápa, commonly known as Black Elk, was a holy man of the Oglala Sioux. Black Elk Speaks: Being the Life Story of a Holy Man of the Oglala Sioux, as told to John G. Neihardt, was a popular book at the time.
	Gregory (Karl D. Gregory) House: 1617 Washtenaw Avenue Karl D. Gregory Cooperative was originally built in 1909 for the Tau Gamma Nu fraternity and was purchased by the ICC in 1995. Gregory House is the only house in the organization that is expressly substance-free. No tobacco, alcohol, or illicit drugs are allowed on the property. Gregory was an African-American professor of Economics at Oakland University and an alumnus of Nakamura House. Before he joined the faculty of Oakland University he worked for the Bureau of the Budget (now the Office of Management and Budget) in Washington, D.C., and was the chair of the Congress of Racial Equality. Gregory donated $20,000 to the ICC, which served as a down payment to acquire a new coop. The house was named in his honor.
	Truth (Sojourner Truth) House: 1507 Washtenaw Avenue Truth House was purchased by the ICC from the Phi Sigma Sigma Sorority in 1970. Originally it was named Bruce House, after comedian Lenny Bruce. It was renamed Truth House in honor of Sojourner Truth. It is the largest cooperative on Central Campus. Truth House has many international students and a large proportion of graduate students. Sojourner Truth was a formerly enslaved woman, who became an outspoken advocate for abolition, temperance, and civil and women’s rights in the nineteenth-century. Born Isabella Baumfree, in 1843, she said that the Spirit called on her to preach the truth, renaming herself ‘Sojourner Truth’.  In 1851, at a women’s rights conference in Akron, Ohio, she delivered her “Ain’t I a Woman?” speech. She was involved with the Freedmen’s Bureau and lobbied against segregation.

Co-op house west of Central Campus

Osterweil (Harold Osterweil) house: 338 East Jefferson Street Harold Osterweil Cooperative House was the third house bought by the ICC. The first residents were men during the summer of 1946, but in the fall of 1946, Osterweil House became a women’s house, and, in 1970, became co-ed. Osterweil House is the smallest in the ICC, with four single rooms and four double rooms, and the nearest to campus. Osterweil lived in one of the cooperative houses and was the chairman of the personnel committee of the Inter-Cooperative Council. Osterweil was admired for his brilliant scholarship and his high sense of responsibility as a citizen. He won a scholarship to Harvard Law School and was awarded the Sears Prize for being first in his class. He enlisted in the United States Army and was a lieutenant during World II. He was sent overseas in March 1944, and killed in action at Normandy, France, while serving with the 9th Infantry Division, on July 31, 1944. The Osterweil Prize in Economics at the University of Michigan is given to a senior with the most outstanding academic record and the greatest social awareness.

Co-op house on North Campus

Escher (MC Escher) House: 1500 to 1520 Gilbert Court Escher House is the only building in Ann Arbor built specifically for cooperative housing. When the University of Michigan was developing the North Campus in the 1950s, the ICC persuaded the university to set aside three acres on a hilltop off Broadway for a “cooperative village”. When the federal government made low-interest loans available in 1958, the ICC started planning. Initially, the loan would have required the University of Michigan to co-sign and it was reluctant to do so. In 1964, Congress removed the co-sign requirement and the ICC procured a $1.24 million, 50-year low-interest loan from HUD in 1968. The opening was scheduled for the fall of 1970. The building was not quite ready and the future residents slept on the floor of the fraternity house next to the building site. Escher House is a single building comprised of nine suites: Valhalla, Bertrand, Karma, Falstaff, Trantor-Mir, Walden III, John Sinclair, Bag End, and Zapata. The doors for each suite have paintings by Joy Blain that illustrate the themes of the suites' names. These nine suites initially operated as nine distinct co-ops but were consolidated due to perceived inefficiencies in administration. MC Escher was a Dutch draftsman, book illustrator, tapestry designer, muralist, and printmaker. Inspired by the tile work of the Alhambra in Granada, Spain, Escher developed “the regular division of the plane” and often created complex architectural mazes with perspectival games and impossible spaces.

Three University of Michigan students, Alex Deighton, Curtis Hunt, and Paul Rizik, as part of the course Understanding Records and Archives: Principles and Practices (UMSI 580), in the University of Michigan’s School of Information, created a house-by-house history of each of the houses in the Inter-Cooperative Council at Ann Arbor. Some of that information helped in the writing of the descriptions of each of the houses.

For more information about the Inter-Cooperative Council at Ann Arbor, consult the 1994 book published by the council: In Our Own Hands: a History of Student Housing Cooperatives at the University of Michigan, by Amy Mericle, Suzanne Wilson, and James Jones.

The following excerpt is from the book's Afterword, "How This Book Came to Be," by Jim Jones:

“Until now, this history has largely been hidden away in filing cabinets, basements, and libraries. Of course, the current members are not totally ignorant of the past. Past written histories, stories of past exploits, and oral traditions – some of them apocryphal – have all given members a sense of how the co-ops came to be. This book, however, is the first attempt to exhaustively research and compile that rich heritage.”

For a few, brief years in the 1870s the Mozart Watch Factory of Ann Arbor was on the rise to rival the best watchmakers in America. Don Joaquin Mozart was one of Michigan’s “most promising inventors.” Called a “genius” in the New York Times, he patented 11 inventions related to clockwork. Yet his business skills never quite lived up to his innovations and he died in the county poorhouse. 

A Family Missing & A Family Made

The details of Mozart’s early life are uncertain. He was born in Italy sometime between 1820 and 1826 and moved to America with his family near the age of three. His father’s occupation varies by the source: he was a watchmaker and his son took after him, or a street musician distantly related to the more famous Mozart, or a man of wealth who fled Italy for political reasons and was assassinated in America. None of these are particularly likely, but what can be said with more confidence is that he died when Don was young. 

The remaining Mozart family ended up in the Boston area. It was near the harbor there, when Don was around the age of 9, that he was lured onto a ship “by the promise of curious shells” and taken out to sea. It wasn’t uncommon for ships to capture young men or boys as crew members when they couldn’t find volunteers for arduous journeys, and they often preyed upon poor immigrants. Young Don Mozart sailed for seven years. He searched for his family when he returned, but his efforts failed and he never saw his mother or siblings again.

Fending for himself, Don found work as a tradesman where his skill at mechanics became clear. By age 30 or so he was the established owner of a jewelry store in Xenia, Ohio and filed his first patent for an “automatic fan” propelled by clockwork. The patent advertised a quieter machine that would be particularly useful for fanning the sick or sleeping, and keeping bugs away. With his profession secured, he married Anna Maria Huntington on September 4, 1854.

Don and Anna started their family in Ohio, welcoming their first daughter, Donna Zeralla, on February 28, 1857 and then their second, Estella Gertrude, on November 28, 1858. Don continued to invent, patenting an improved clock escapement (the mechanism that moves the timepiece’s hands at precise intervals) in 1859 wherein he listed himself as a resident of Yellow Springs, Ohio. By 1862 the family had relocated to New York City and welcomed one more daughter, Anna Violet. 

Career Clockmaker

As a resident of New York Don patented another improved clock and watch escapement in 1863 with Levi Beach and Laporte Hubbell credited alongside him. The three men followed this in January 1864 with a simplified and more compact calendar clock that claimed to register leap years and run for a year with one winding.

Don’s talents gained him enough recognition that a company was created to produce his patents. The Mozart Watch Company was established in the spring of 1864 in Providence, Rhode Island and the family relocated there. Capital of $100,000 was secured along with a factory and machinery. Then, before any product seems to have been produced, the stockholders pulled out in the spring of 1866. No distinct reason could be found to explain their change of heart, other than a new belief that they wouldn’t earn a return on their investment. Don was replaced as superintendent, the company was renamed the New York Watch Company and, in contrast to the name, moved to Springfield, Massachusetts. 

Less than a year later, in January of 1867, Don Mozart began anew in Ann Arbor. Advertisements for “Mozart & Co,” a dealer in clocks, watches, jewelry, and silver-plated ware, ran in the Michigan Argus. The shop was located in the Gregory Block on the corner of Huron and Main. Still tinkering with timepieces, his first patent in this new era was filed in July of 1867 wherein he listed himself as living in New York despite his new store in Michigan. Regardless of the residency, the patent was granted on December 24, 1867 and became the basis of his even greater business venture in Ann Arbor. 

Michigan’s Mozart Watch Company

By the summer of 1868 the second Mozart Watch Company was progressing in Ann Arbor. According to a July 24, 1868 article in the Michigan Argus, “the capital for testing the invention has been furnished, a building secured in which to commence operations, an engine put up, the best of machinery purchased, and a force of experienced mechanics set to work, not exactly making Watches, but making tools with which to stock the factory.” The goal was to produce watches based on the recently issued patent that contained no dead-center or setting-point and required only a small number of parts, allowing for cheaper production.

The company’s growth continued, occupying three stories of Dr. Chase's building according to the February 19, 1869 issue of the Michigan Argus. The article concluded, “We shall expect to see the company soon turning out A. No. 1 watches.” On New Years Eve 1869 a gold watch was presented to Reverend Charles H. Brigham of the First Unitarian Church, confirming that the Mozart Watch Company had managed to start production.

Just six months later the Michigan Argus was pleading with citizens to prevent the company from leaving the city. It had “turned out a number of beautiful watches,” but “the few men who took hold of the enterprise find themselves without means to prosecute the work on the large scale which is necessary to make it a success, and that they have not met the encouragement and support which they had a right to expect from the community at large.” 

Advisors to businessmen from Milwaukee and New York had visited the factory to assess the machinery and patent’s chances of success. “The agent of the Milwaukee parties – a practical man – pronounces the watch, and clock soon to come out, a perfect success…If Milwaukee men stand ready to invest $300,000 in it, cannot our capitalists be induced to invest one third of that sum to retain it here?”

The appeals went unanswered and a group from Rock Island, Illinois bought out the Mozart Watch Company, renaming it the Rock Island Watch Company. Then, like in Providence, the company failed to produce anything before the stockholders withdrew their support. A lawsuit commenced in the fall of 1871, alleging fraud in the sale. The battle concluded in the fall 1873 when it was dissolved after an appeal.

Panic & Final Patents

Just as the court case was wrapping up a greater worry replaced it. The financial panic of 1873 swept the nation and the local banking house of Miller & Webster closed its doors for good in September of that year. The Michigan Argus reported that “a large share of the losses will fall upon parties illy able to bear them,” and this seems to have included Don Mozart. 

Don had always been reliant upon his strengths in innovation. He is recounted as saying, “that he never knew the time when, if he was short of money, he could not hide himself in a hole for a month, and work out an idea that would bring him $1,000.” The article concludes that “money has come to him so easily he has valued it little, has spent it with a prodigal generosity, not to say reckless, and having, most of his life, no special occasion for what is called business shrewdness has in later years been victimized by speculators in his genius.” As he had all his life, he persisted, and that same fall the Michigan Argus included an advertisement for watch repairs by Don Mozart.  

Before the loss of his savings, Don had filed a series of three patents that were approved in July of 1873: another improved escapement, an upgrade to calendar clocks, and a self winding watch. This trio held the potential to earn his savings back. They were designed to be used together in one watch that would include dials showing the month, day of the month, day of the week, AM or PM, quarter seconds, seconds, minutes and hour. It would be wound by the user opening and shutting the watch case five or six times a day and no damage would be sustained by heavier use. He is said to have gone to New York to find funding, but the wealthy residents who would be able to offer the capital were away at their summer homes and he was told to return later.

Always seeking improvement, he took a portion of the watch apart during the interim and lost a piece of it in the process. He was never able to figure out how to put it together again. Before he could return to New York, he lost control of his mind. On December 2, 1874, Don Mozart was taken to what was then known as the “Michigan Asylum for the Insane” in Kalamazoo. Reports claimed that his “fits of temporary insanity” had been going on “for some time” and that up until his removal to Kalamazoo “he was talking extravagantly but coherently enough, of his brilliant prospects and the wealth and success that awaited him, and detailed to friends minutely the terms of an agreement that he claimed to have just made with persons in New York, though he had never gone to that City after his visit in the early Summer.”

The papers attributed his loss of reality to “the strain upon his mind made by his newly invented watch” and the failure of Miller & Webster. In 1875 he was moved to the Washtenaw County Poor House, and died there on March 15, 1877 at the reported age of 58. He was buried at Forest Hill Cemetery and obituaries were carried in papers across the country. 

Collectible Chronometers

It is difficult to determine exactly how many Mozart watches were finished. Estimates vary from 13, to 30, to only a few. The examples that were reported on or have since been located often contain personalized engravings indicating that they were made for investors and friends. They remain as exemplary samples of American watchmaking and their rarity makes them highly sought after by collectors. 

In 2016, a "Chronometer-Lever Escapement" watch signed "Mozart Watch Co., Ann Arbor, Mich., No. 7, Don J. Mozart Patent Dec. 24, 1868" was sold by the auction house Bonhams for $5,250 (the patent date seemed to be a mistake, corresponding instead with the patent of December 24, 1867). Sotheby's auctioned another in 2004 as part of their “Masterpieces from the Time Museum” group. 

Remaining watches can be found as part of the National Watch and Clock Museum, the Paul M. Chamberlain collection, which was displayed at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1921 and found a permanent home at Michigan State University, and the Washtenaw County Historical Society.

In 1956, on empty land behind the Botsford Tile business on West Stadium Boulevard, 27-year-old Don Botsford constructed Ann Arbor's first commercial fitness center. From the outside it wasn't much to look at, just a simple 33 x 66-foot concrete block building with a Unistrut ceiling. Don built much of the structure himself, on property owned by his father Tom Botsford. The building still stands today, as part of Top of the Lamp at 415 S Maple Road. The Botsfords were an old Ann Arbor family, dating back to the pioneering days of the city. Don had graduated from Ann Arbor High School in 1946, and then attended Central Michigan University where he majored in physical education and minored in health education. Don felt that his hometown of Ann Arbor needed to improve its approach to the health and well-being of its citizens, and decided to take matters into his own hands. After years of working at his father's tile shop, and saving money for his dream, Don was finally ready to welcome the public into his new facility. He called it Ann Arbor Gymkhana.

gymkhana, noun: a meet featuring sports contests or athletic skills

Ann Arbor Gymkhana appeared in the city long before local businesses offered HIIT workouts, boot camps, pilates, CrossFit, barre classes, and all the other endless exercise options you can think of. Fitness machines weren't readily available. 1950s workouts typically involved calisthenics, and basic equipment like dumbbells and barbells. Extra frills might include hula hoops and jump ropes. Don Botsford's new business offered Ann Arbor a new twist to physical fitness: trampolines. In an Ann Arbor News article, Don boldly claimed "I bet I can get kids on a trampoline faster than on a dance floor". He declared his new business "the only one of its kind in the country, with its safe floor level type of trampolines, and its combination of weightlifting and gymnastics apparatus".

Weights & Trampolines

Opening the first commercial fitness center in town had its drawbacks. One obstacle was the reputation of weight lifting. According to Don Botsford, University of Michigan football coach Fritz Crisler gave his players detentions if he found out they were lifting weights. "They thought it would cause their players to lose all their coordination and become big, dumb weight lifters." Trampolines were also a relatively new method of exercise for Ann Arbor. Botsford himself had benefited from a combination of weight training and trampoline skills, and worked hard to convince townies of the health benefits. Safety was an important factor in using all of the equipment, and instructional classes were emphasized. Don Botsford also encouraged women to visit Gymkhana, an innovative view at the time. His enthusiasm for living a healthy lifestyle, along with his charisma, drew people of all ages to the new business.

Athletically, Ann Arbor Gymkhana was a great success. During the first eight years of business, Botsford coached weightlifters and trampolinists to win more than 125 awards in each sport, including some national and state titles. Many were in the Michigan Association of Gymnastics (MAG). One notable group to frequent the facility, and accumulate awards, was the Huntzicker family.

George Huntzicker, who frequented Ann Arbor Gymkhana as a child, would go on to lead Ann Arbor High School to a State Championship in 1965 by placing first in trampoline, floor exercise, and vault. He attended the University of Michigan, joined the gymnastics team, and was NCAA champion on the trampoline in 1968 and 1970. George also won the silver medal in the 1970 World Trampoline Championships. Newt Loken, who coached the University of Michigan's gymnastic teams from 1947 to 1983, says he believes George Huntzicker excelled and went on to win the world championship largely due to Don Botsford's coaching skills at Ann Arbor Gymkhana.

Tramp-O-Leap

In the summer of 1960, Ann Arbor Gymkhana experienced some competition in the nearby city of Ypsilanti. A franchise known as Tramp-O-Leap, which billed itself as an outdoor "trampoline playground", was spreading around the United States and Canada. Ypsilanti Tramp-O-Leap opened at 205 Ecorse Road in July. It offered 10 floor level trampolines available for 50 cents per half hour, from 10 a.m. to midnight, seven days a week. Not to be outdone, Gymkhana installed four outdoor trampolines, also available for 50 cents per half hour, one month later. Don Botsford called Gymkhana's outdoor experience "Uppen-Gebouncen Floppenfielt". Ypsilanti Tramp-O-Leap didn't last long, but helped to fuel the growing trampoline craze.

Spaceball

Many local residents who remember Ann Arbor Gymkhana will tell you it was THE PLACE TO PLAY SPACEBALL. The game first surfaced at Huron Valley Swim Club in Ann Arbor. When the response was favorable, Don Botsford installed Spaceball trampolines in Ann Arbor Gymkhana.

To understand Spaceball, it's helpful to know a bit about the history of trampolines. A gymnast named George Nissen is credited with designing the first commercial trampoline in the 1940s. His "tumbling device" was granted a U.S. patent in 1945. In World War II, the military used trampolines as training devices for pilots who handled difficult air maneuvers in combat. Near the end of the war George Nissen met a pilot named Scott Carpenter who had gone through the trampoline training. Carpenter would later become one of the original Mercury 7 astronauts and introduced the trampoline into space training at NASA. Together, George Nissen and Scott Carpenter would eventually create a game for astronauts using specially modified trampolines. Carpenter called it "the best conditioning exercise for space travel." Naming the game "Spaceball" was an obvious choice. Combining elements of volleyball and basketball, bouncing players try to put a ball through a hole in a net. If your opponent fails to catch the ball, you get a point. Behind each player a special Spaceball trampoline tilts vertically on each end so in addition to bouncing on your feet, you are able to fall backwards and rebound just as easily. The game combines aerobic exercise and manual dexterity with balance and body control, offering a great workout.

One group of female gymnasts who trained at Ann Arbor Gymkhana became well known in the niche world of Spaceball competition. (See advertisement below.) In 1965, four of these gymnasts traveled to New York City for a Sports Illustrated photo shoot covering the sport. "Like astronauts in orbit, the aerial gymnasts on these pages counteract the force of gravity as they volley the ball in a fast-moving new game called Spaceball." The photos displayed the gymnasts, clad in bright red leotards, on Spaceball trampolines.

The Fitness Business

Behind the athletic success and good vibes of Ann Arbor Gymkhana was the stark financial reality of running a business. Despite his hard work, and the enormous support he gave local athletes, Don Botsford rarely turned a profit. In a 2001 Ann Arbor Observer article, the grim details were shared. According to Botsford, he earned just $5,800 in his first year of business and "didn't make anything". His income in 1959 was $1,200. In 1960 it was only $268. In 1961 Ann Arbor Gymkhana finished in the red with a loss of $246. Don shared that the business had about 200 regulars in its heyday, during the 60s and 70s. Thousands came to take trampoline lessons, casually jump, or play Spaceball, but "the numbers never added up". Ann Arbor Gymkhana was often crowded in the winter, but summers were lean. As a married man with four children, he worked multiple jobs outside of the fitness center to make ends meet. Sign painter, bookstore clerk, and selling hot dogs at A&W were all on the list.

Despite the financial struggle, Don Botsford was committed to keeping Ann Arbor Gymkhana open. He wasn't in it for the money, he was simply passionate about fitness. In 1965, he added a sauna - the first public sauna in Ann Arbor - to the building. In 1967, Ann Arbor Gymkhana doubled in size and enlarged shower and locker rooms. In 1971 the interior balcony was extended to make room for selling health supplements.

Other fitness centers were starting to appear in the area, which took customers away from Ann Arbor Gymkhana. In 1974 a million dollar Vic Tanny health club was opened in Ann Arbor. It featured cardio equipment, a swimming pool, Finnish saunas, whirlpool mineral baths, handball and paddleball courts, sun & steam rooms, special diet plans, and lots of instructors. Vic Tanny advertisements featuring women in bikinis were a level of business competition that Ann Arbor Gymkhana had never seen before. Don Botsford's facility still appealed to children, but many local adults left him behind for the flashier new businesses in town. He decided that his business must grow with the times, and began to design a new dream facility.

Unfortunately, a new Ann Arbor Gymkhana never came to be. After numerous attempts to secure the funds needed to build a state of the art fitness center, Don Botsford finally closed his business in 1986. Ann Arbor Gymkhana was just shy of 30 years old. He went on to pursue other ventures, namely a nature preserve on the edge of the city, but nothing had the spark of the original Ann Arbor Gymkhana. Botsford never gave up on his commitment to bring the public a form of fitness that was fun. His obituary, published in 2011, mentioned "He was still actively instructing trampoline and spaceball at the time of his death".

In the mid-1960s a teenage Ann Arbor rock band inspired such passion that girls leapt onstage to tackle them and security personnel had to cut short a performance before 10,000 screaming fans at the Michigan State Fair. Their fall 1966 pre-Aretha Franklin cover of Otis Redding’s “Respect” topped radio charts around Michigan and was heard as far away as Florida and Texas, and they had a half-dozen singles and an album before they were through. Formed by students at Forsythe and Slauson Junior High schools, the group hit its stride when they were attending Ann Arbor (now Pioneer) High. With Scott Morgan on vocals, Steve Correll on guitar, Terry Trabandt on bass, and Bill Figg on drums, the band took its name from a term Correll’s brother Richard had found in a math book. Svengali-like manager Hugh “Jeep” Holland formed A-Square Records to put out their first discs and kept them gigging steadily around the Midwest, where they shared stages with Jimi Hendrix, the Who, Cream, the Grateful Dead, Pink Floyd, and many other top acts. The Rationals also made frequent appearances on television shows like Robin Seymour’s Swingin’ Time in Windsor and Cleveland-based Upbeat.

In recent years their music has been compiled in a series of lavish CD and LP packages by Grammy-nominated producer Alec Palao for Ace/Big Beat in the UK, which include much previously-unreleased material. They are available at the Ann Arbor District Library.

I interviewed Scott Morgan and Bill Figg at WCBN before a much-anticipated 1991 reunion concert. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity. – Frank Uhle

Frank Uhle: You guys started playing together before the Beatles came over, around 1962 or so? 

Scott Morgan: I had been taking guitar lessons and then one day Steve Correll called me and asked me to play something for him over the telephone. So I played “Walk, Don't Run” or something like that, and we got together at that point. We were in the same junior high school, Forsythe, with Bill, who was a year ahead of us, and we eventually hooked up and then we got Terry who was going to the other school in town, Slauson. Steve was gone for a year, and he came back and we all got together at that point. And that was the beginning of the Rationals, as history knows it. [laughs]  

Frank Uhle: You were doing instrumentals only, before you added vocals, correct?

Bill Figg: We did a lot of the cover tunes that we liked at the time, like “Walk, Don't Run.”

Scott Morgan: Lonnie Mack, the Ventures, that kind of thing. 

Bill Figg: And then as time progressed we decided that a lot of people were starting to sing and we had to pick a singer. I think Scott raised his hand first or something. I don't know how it came about. It's like, “Oh geez, a lot of people are singing. Who's gonna sing? You gonna sing?” “Oh, yeah. I guess so.”

Scott Morgan: It just kind of evolved. I think we were playing at parties and local dances and that sort of thing, and we were probably doing the kind of blues tunes most beginning bands play like “Hi-Heel Sneakers” and “Money” and “Johnny B. Goode” or something like that. That's what we cut our teeth on, vocally. And then the British Invasion came and all of a sudden we were off in another direction for a while. We started writing, trying to write, and it was all very derivative at first. It took us a couple years, I think, to actually get a handle on our writing.

Frank Uhle: Your first single came out in the summer of 1965 on your manager Jeep Holland’s A-Square Records label. A ballad you wrote called “Gave My Love” was the A-side. It obviously has a very British flavor.

Scott Morgan: A lot happened in that first year of the British Invasion, and we were highly affected by it. And I think that song shows it. Our second single was another British derived song called “Feelin’ Lost” and the flipside was a song by Deon Jackson, who was another Ann Arbor High alumnus. And then our third single was “Respect.” And at that point we had tapped into Jeep Holland's record collection, his fantastic R&B collection. And that was the beginning of an R&B string there that went on for a couple of years. We had like four singles in a row that were heavily R&B influenced.

Frank Uhle: The last one of those, “I Need You,” was a Goffin-King composition. Was that also recorded by somebody else first?

Scott Morgan: Chuck Jackson. We didn't have songwriter demos or anything like that. We were just covering the originals. We covered “Respect” and at that point it had been an R&B hit for Otis Redding a year earlier. But it had never been a pop hit. We tried our hand at it, and it was a big pop hit around here and in some other markets. But then Aretha took it like a year later and made it a REAL big hit. [laughs]

Frank Uhle: Well, your version is certainly a memorable one.

Scott Morgan: I think it’s an important version, but I think we were still learning to play R&B at that point. I think by the time we got to “Hold On Baby” and “Leavin’ Here” and “I Need You” we were getting better at it actually. None of them were really as big a hit as “Respect,” but I think we were actually playing R&B better later on. 

Bill Figg: Well, we were only 17 and 18. How much talent can you have at 17 or 18? 

Frank Uhle: There's a youthful enthusiasm that comes through in those early records, though.

Scott Morgan: That's true. I call it the punk version of “Respect.” [laughs]

Bill Figg: Yeah. Well, it's close. 

Frank Uhle: “Respect” was a pretty big regional hit. Did you see financial rewards from that? Or was it the same old story?

Bill Figg: Same old story, we didn't make any money off it. Actually “Leavin’ Here” was supposed to be the top side of the record. We were in the studio doing “Leavin’ Here” for what we thought would be an A-side and we recorded it 27 times as I remember, we just couldn't get a hot track on it. And Jeep came down and says, “Oh, let's do ‘Respect.’” So we did “Respect” in what, two cuts or something like that?

Scott Morgan: I just remember I screwed up one of the vocal lines at the end. I'm going like, “Reeschpect is what I want,” or something like that. I'm going, “Hey, I muffed that line” and they're going, “Well, nobody will ever know, it doesn't matter.” 

Bill Figg: “B-side. No problem.” [laughs]

Frank Uhle: Wow. So was it the first time you'd done “Respect” or had you been playing it live? 

Bill Figg: We’d arranged it as I remember.

Scott Morgan: We spent some time arranging it at Mothers in East Tawas. 

Bill Figg: Yeah. It was a job we were playing and we were doing a sound check and Jeep said, “Well, let's work on ‘Respect.’ We’ve got a couple hours before lunch here.” So we arranged it there, I believe.

Scott Morgan: Yeah. 

Frank Uhle: It does have a distinctive arrangement with the way the bass starts out and then the rhythm guitar and drums and harmonica each come in before the vocal. If you came up with that in the studio in two takes, that’s pretty amazing. 

Scott Morgan: We added the second harmonica in the studio, we overdubbed. So we had double tracked harmonicas on it. But most of it was prearranged. 

Frank Uhle: I heard that James Osterberg – Iggy Pop – played the bass drum on an early single of yours. Did you perform everything on the records yourselves or did any other guests sit in?

Bill Figg: On “Hold On Baby” Bob Seger is singing the high part for us on that tune, because back when we did these tunes everybody kind of helped everybody. We would go in the studio with Mitch Ryder and help him a little bit, and Seger would come with us. And it was more of a community effort when you went to the studios on a lot of different tunes. Me and Jeep, I think were the first two people to hear the “Heavy Music” track for Bob Seger. He brought it back and said, “Well, what do you think? I just did this thing, I'm going to call it ‘Heavy Music.’” And Jeep says, “Wow, that's the hottest thing I've ever heard.” Nobody was really afraid to play things because somebody was going to rip them off, because we were all friends. 

Scott Morgan: My mother always reminded me of the time Bob Seger came over to our house with his little reel to reel tape recorder and wanted to play me some songs. And I'm going, “Ah, Bob, we don't need any material.” [laughs]. And she's going, “If you would've recorded one of those songs…”

Bill Figg: It was a community effort, I thought, in a lot of the early stuff. People helping each other, which was really good. A lot of the local talents. Deon Jackson even helped us. What tune was that he played organ on?

Scott Morgan: He played on “Leavin’ Here,” on the first version of it. And a couple keyboard players from local bands, Glenn Quackenbush from the SRC played on the second version of “Leavin’ Here.” And another guy named Robert Sheff, who played with the Prime Movers, a great blues band from the ‘60s in Ann Arbor, played organ on “Hold On Baby.” 

Frank Uhle: I was wondering about those keyboards. Did you have keyboard players live too? 

Scott Morgan: No, we didn't. Just in the studio. We could do a lot of things in the studio with multi-tracking. 

Frank Uhle: Let’s talk about your live shows. I recently spoke to somebody who saw you backing up Sonny and Cher. They asked you to be their backup band?

Bill Figg: Yeah, they approached us somehow. Harold Battiste was their arranger, and Harold came up with his little bitty organ, and we met with him briefly before we were to do their backup music. And we're learning “I Got You Babe,” or whatever. And of course, we did our own show prior to that and we kind of knocked the kids out. I remember Sonny and Cher standing off in the wings going like, “Who are these guys?” We did pretty good in that concert. That was like our first big concert.

Scott Morgan: Yeah, I was totally at a loss. Their keyboard player just came to soundcheck to go over the songs with us, and I said, “You’ve gotta play because I don't know what I'm doing up here.”

Bill Figg: Yeah, because their music was fairly complex compared to what we were used to doing. And we didn't know their tunes that well.

Frank Uhle: They were big stars at the time. It must have been challenging for a bunch of high school kids. 

Bill Figg: Yeah. Because we didn't cover Sonny and Cher tunes, we were doing R&B stuff. It was neat though, it was fun to do. I think they were pretty pleased with what we did. But they weren't real pleased, I don't think, with the reaction that we got before we went on.

Scott Morgan: Harold actually was an old New Orleans guy. He worked with Dr. John on a lot of his stuff, and I think they'd been working together way back before Dr. John, when he was just Mac Rebennack.

Frank Uhle: That show was before “Respect” came out, but after it hit you became top headliners yourselves.

Scott Morgan: Our first big show was at Cobo Hall when we played a big benefit with Question Mark and the Mysterians and Richard and the Young Lions, who did “Open Up Your Door,” and the Shadows of Knight from Chicago that covered “Gloria.” Mitch Ryder just showed up and said hello and Bob Seger was there and played. It was a pretty big show. 

Bill Figg: It was called the ALSAC Show, for “Aiding Leukemia Stricken American Children.” Did you say Del Shannon? He was there, remember? He was the big guy when he came in and he was sitting there. There was a lot of people in that first show. “Walk Away, Renee,” the Left Banke? They were there. 

Scott Morgan: Tim Tam and the Turn-ons who had a local hit, “Wait A Minute.” Yeah, it was a good show. That was ‘66 when “Respect” was just peaking on the radio, so it was a good time for us to play in front of a big audience.

Frank Uhle: Someone else told me he saw the Rationals in 1967 at the State Fair, and you got an overwhelming response compared to the other acts.

Scott Morgan: Actually I recall that as being like a real big thing, that supposedly we drew more people to the State Fair bandshell than the Supremes, is what we were told. 

Bill Figg: They said, “Well, we know the Rationals are here” - the people that work there. “Well, why is that?” “Well, because there's nobody on any of the rides!” “How do you know?” “Well, there's only two people that draw like that, the Rationals and the Supremes” or some other big act like that. That was the year the girls drug Scott off the stage by his scarf. We weren't used to that and some girl came up and grabbed Scott by the scarf and she had him real good. Of course, we didn't have any security or anything. Somebody got her un-attached from Scott and we finished the tune somehow.

Frank Uhle: On that kind of show would you just do a short set like the Beatles did in those days, maybe half an hour?

Scott Morgan: We probably had less than that. And we didn't even get very far.

Bill Figg: Three, four songs really. We got about halfway through “Respect,” and they had to stop the show. The kids were jumping off the balconies and there was a big stage rush and the security people got kind of mashed at the front of the stage.

Scott Morgan: They just turned the lights off and told us to get out of there. 

Bill Figg: “Quit playing. Get outta here.” But we didn't know where to go.

Scott Morgan: It was all like that in Detroit actually, at the time. It was like Beatlemania kind of stuff. 

Frank Uhle: Rational-mania?

Bill Figg: Yeah, right.

Scott Morgan: Yeah. 

Frank Uhle: What was that like? Was that kind of a trip? Or did you get upset about it after a while?

Bill Figg:  Well, it was really weird to have 10,000 people trying to tear your van apart to get to you. We felt good about it, and it was really kind of a shock. Because we didn't really realize that we, not that we were that good or anything, that we were that popular. It was a shock for me. I remember standing downstairs with some security guard and we're all standing there going, “What happened?” It's like, “Ah, I guess we did it. We stopped the show!” I believe the Beatles were the only other people to ever stop a show in the Detroit area like that.

Frank Uhle: How long did that kind of fanatical adulation continue? Was that still going on when “I Need You” was on the charts in 1968, or was it mostly earlier when Beatlemania was big? Did it kind of wane a little bit as the decade wore on? 

Scott Morgan: It probably went through ’67. ’66 and ’67.  

Bill Figg: As soon as the psychedelic thing started and people started doing a lot of big improvisation and stuff. Then it was kind of uncool to not be listening, and people quit dancing and everybody became a music critic. All of the people sitting in the place you're playing were all of a sudden trying to listen to you rather than react to you.

Scott Morgan: And I think we took off in another direction after “I Need You.” We left our manager Jeep Holland and hooked up with another guy named Larry Feldman, who was heavily involved in the Grande Ballroom, and that meant that we played the Grande more than we had in the past. And at the Grande it wasn't like a mania thing, it was more like music. People would come and listen to the music, you know? And we started getting into that in ‘68 and ‘69.

Frank Uhle: I’ve heard a recording of the Rationals playing the Grande in 1968, which came out on CD. Is that pretty representative of your sound then? Because I don't even think “Respect” was on there.

Scott Morgan: Actually, we got sick of playing “Respect.” 

Bill Figg: We called it “Repeat,” because we played it so many times. 

Scott Morgan: I'm sure we made some moves that for us at the time seemed logical, but weren't really logical business moves. Probably playing “Respect” and “I Need You” over and over again would've been the thing to do to keep people coming in then adding more material. But we were so headstrong about it that we wanted to just drop all that and move off in this new direction. And that's what we did. So that's why we weren't playing “Respect” or “I Need You” in ’68. This would've been like maybe six months after “I Need You” had been released.

Bill Figg: Yep.

Frank Uhle: Getting back to your records, you moved from A-Square, which was run by Jeep Holland, to Cameo-Parkway, where you followed “Respect” with covers of Sam Hawkins’ “Hold On Baby” and Eddie Holland’s “Leavin’ Here.” But then you were suddenly back on A-Square again for the soulful ballad “I Need You.” Was that done because Cameo went under and you were still managed by Jeep, so he just put the next one out on his own label?

Bill Figg: Yeah. The way I perceive it is, in order to get a record deal we had to pretty much do everything ourselves first. If you've ever seen The Buddy Holly Story movie, it’s the same thing. You do it yourself, and then you go around and promote it, and somewhere somebody would start playing it, and then you'd get some interest up, and then all of a sudden you start getting calls from all these people at record companies wanting to meet with you. And that's pretty much what we did with it. Do it ourselves, get some airplay, and start selling some records. And all of a sudden Capitol or somebody comes by and says “Look, how about let's make a deal?”

Scott Morgan: We discovered that with my current band, that that actually works. We did the same thing. We went through like two demo periods where we just sent tapes to these record companies. And finally we just decided to put out a single, and then we got interest. But that's the same thing, if you generate some success on your own, immediately they want to buy into it. So that's what happened. Jeep had a pretty established little operation with A-Square Records, and “Respect” was our third single on A-Square. At that point we had established a relationship with local radio stations where actually I think we were getting airplay on the Detroit stations before Cameo-Parkway stepped in. And in Cleveland too, and other major markets in the Midwest. And it was starting to spread. I think at that point they were going, “Well, we have to have a piece of this.” So they stepped in and they took over the next three singles.

Frank Uhle: Until notorious Rolling Stones/Beatles business manager Allen Klein showed up.

Scott Morgan: Allen got this incredible reputation for being some sort of crazy businessman. Supposedly he was manipulating the stock or something like that for Cameo. And the thing just fell apart like a house of cards. Everybody was scrambling for a new label, including Bob Seger and ourselves, Question Mark and the Mysterians, and we went back to A-Square and did “I Need You.” And then Capitol walked in because we were doing the same thing again, getting local airplay again and selling records here. So Capitol stepped in and took it over, but that's the only thing that they put out, was that one single. 

Frank Uhle: I see. So they just leased the tune, they didn't sign you guys for a multi-record contract or anything? 

Scott Morgan: No. Right after “I Need You” is when we left Jeep Holland, who had engineered the deal. So our next manager went to Capitol and couldn't seem to establish a rapport with them, so we just started over again. Then we went back to another local label called Genesis and did “Guitar Army,” which was a big departure for us. This was maybe a year after “I Need You” and it's a totally different sound. And the radio stations are going, “Well, we can't play this. It doesn't sound anything like ‘I Need You.’” It was political and it was hard rock. So we had a problem there, and actually the owner of Genesis died in the middle of the whole thing. So nothing much happened with the single. But we went back in and recorded the album, and then instead of releasing that ourselves we shopped it and we found a label for it, Crewe. It was run by Bob Crewe, who had DynoVoice Records with Mitch Ryder.

 

Frank Uhle: The album was the last record you released other than a single from it, your version of the Chris Farlowe/Rod Stewart track “Handbags and Gladrags.” And then in 1970 you called it quits. Was it because the album didn't do as well as you had expected, or were there other factors?

Scott Morgan: There was a lot of things going on there. We had hooked up a production deal with Robin Seymour around the time that the album came out. And Robin's company was involved with our manager in getting the album placed and released. And shortly after the album came out our manager decided he didn't want to work with us anymore. So he just disappeared, basically. He didn't say, “Well, I think you guys should do something else.” He just sort of was gone, you know. One day it was like, “Where is he?”

Bill Figg: And then we started working directly with Robin.

Scott Morgan: We tried to work directly with Robin, and the record label actually sent us out a guy from New York who wanted to manage us. And we're going, “Look, we don't know you, and it's not that we don't want to work with you, it's just...” I mean, you can't just send a guy out, “This guy's gonna take over now.” So that didn't work out. And then Robin went on vacation and we couldn't get ahold of him, and we were kind of freaking out.

Bill Figg: Robin went on vacation and Bob Crewe went to Hollywood to start some other things for Crewe Records. And while he was in Hollywood doing some positive things his kids that he left in charge of the record company in New York had a hard time coordinating the national distribution of the album. So consequently people would hear the album and it hit in one market, and then another market, and then another market. And it was just uncoordinated.

Frank Uhle: That's really unfortunate. Because it was your only album and after so many years of hard work it seems like you should have been on tap for another hit. 

Scott Morgan: We probably should have done a second album, but I think at that point we were so disoriented that I don't know how it would've turned out. I mean, it might have been really good, but I don't know. I have no idea. I don't think we really had a handle on our career at that point. Everybody who was working with us was sort of disappearing rapidly.

With the album making little impact and their management in disarray, the Rationals were reduced to playing venues like the Colonial Lanes bowling alley and a hotel lounge in Windsor, Ontario. Feeling there was no way forward, in August 1970 the group disbanded. Of the four members, Scott Morgan and Terry Trabandt would have the most significant future careers in music. Initially playing together in the band Guardian Angel, Trabandt would later work with Joe Walsh, co-writing his hit “Turn to Stone,” before his passing in 2011. Morgan would carry on with local groups like Sonic’s Rendezvous Band, Scots Pirates, and Dodge Main, releasing multiple albums and winning a Detroit Music Award in 2015.

Special thanks to Scott Morgan and Bill Figg. Thanks also to Alec Palao, Frank Holland, Freddy Fortune, Greg Dahlberg, Jim Heddle, Amanda Uhle, and the Bentley Historical Library.

Check out the Rationals CDs at the Ann Arbor District Library.

More Rationals news clippings at the Ann Arbor District Library.

Video of the Rationals performing “Leavin’ Here” and “Respect” on Robin Seymour’s Swingin’ Time program in September 1966: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iFjd9IQfjZg

 

“My life has been full of adventures but this sounded like the ace of them all.”

With a name like Elzada Urseba Clover, you’re either born to botanize or you're born for adventure -- and it turns out she was born to do both. Clover marked several firsts in her lifetime: She was the first recorded woman (with University of Michigan graduate student Lois Jotter) to run the Colorado River through the full length of the Grand Canyon. She was the first botanist to catalog the flora along the river in the Canyon. And she was the first woman to become a full professor in the University of Michigan Botany Department.

I happened upon Melissa Sevigny’s wonderful 2023 book, Brave the Wild River: The Untold Story of Two Women Who Mapped the Botany of the Grand Canyon, and to my surprise, I learned that both Clover and Jotter were from the University of Michigan. I’ve lived in Ann Arbor for four decades yet this was the first I’d ever heard of them. As with many stories of women in science, their pioneering work was largely overlooked in their time and was unrecognized for decades.

Clover was 42 at the time of her Grand Canyon expedition, the oldest member of a six-person crew. She was born in Auburn, Nebraska on September 12, 1897, and later moved with her family to the southwest where she became fascinated by the plants of the region, especially cacti. Before coming to Ann Arbor, she taught public school in rural Nebraska and was the principal of a school in Texas. Sevigny described her as “...a tall woman, active, robust, dramatic, daring, perhaps just a little bit wicked. She drank whiskey. She could swim, fish, hunt, and ride a horse. She preferred to describe her own code of behavior as ‘gentlemanly’ rather than ‘ladylike.’”

 

“Elzada isn’t wanted because she is a woman.”

Clover graduated from the Nebraska State Teachers College in 1930 and earned her Master of Science degree at the University of Michigan in 1932, followed by her PhD in 1935. Not long before the Grand Canyon trip, she’d been denied a faculty position at U-M. Her departmental appointment was no more permanent than instructor and her department chair Harley H. Bartlett confided in his diary that “Elzada isn’t wanted because she is a woman.” Yet Clover wasn’t the kind of person to give up easily. So when she set her sights on cataloging the plant life of the Grand Canyon -- one of the few frontiers left to botanize -- she was determined to do it. “It has never been explored botanically and for that reason everything collected will be of interest,” she wrote. Clover’s goal was to gather specimens and document changes in plant life through the various elevations along the route into the river’s side canyons. 

Since hiking and riding horseback weren’t viable options, she knew she would need to raft the river. However, the prevailing viewpoint in 1938 was that the Colorado River was far too dangerous for anyone, let alone a woman. It had killed plenty of men who’d tried to run it, and the last woman to attempt it, Bessie Hyde in 1928, had disappeared with her husband on their honeymoon. Their bodies were never found. Perhaps because of these serious risks, the University of Michigan refused to sponsor the expedition. Still, Clover applied for a $400 grant from the Rackham Graduate School (they gave her $300) and chose a partner in Norman Nevills, an entrepreneur river runner she’d met by chance the previous summer. Nevills was living along the San Juan River near the remote outpost of Mexican Hat, Utah, and was looking to boost his profile as a river guide for tourists. Clover would therefore get to do her botanizing, yet it would be a commercial, rather than a university-sponsored, expedition. And she -- along with each crew member -- would need to come up with $400 to fund it.

Clover and Neville struck a deal: He would build and guide the boats, help drum up publicity, and bring a couple of men to help -- LaPhene “Don” Harris, a 26-year-old river runner for the US Geological Survey, and 24-year-old Bill Gibson, an amateur photographer who would film the trip. In turn, Clover would bring two students she was mentoring - a woman, Lois Jotter, age 24, in part for propriety since it would simply not do to be the only woman on an otherwise all-male trip; and 25-year-old Eugene Atkinson, a taxidermist working on his PhD in paleobotany at U-M. (At Lee’s Ferry, roughly halfway through the trip, tensions between the crew threatened to upend the expedition and led to the replacement of Harris and Atkinson with 44-year-old Del Reed and 24-year-old Lorin Bell.)

“The best man of the bunch”

The Colorado River was wilder and more unpredictable in 1938 than today. At the time of their trip, it was a raging torrent flowing at 70,000 cubic feet per second, full of scouring silt that clung to the body and clothes. The crew would drink unfiltered water and eat mostly canned food, though Atkinson would also shoot geese and deer along the way. They would face scorching 100-degree heat, risk rattlesnake bites and other potential life-threatening accidents with no feasible means of rescue -- as well as face the looming specter of the great unknown. As Sevigny points out, this was a period when people suspected there might still be undiscovered species of flora and fauna - potential primordial monsters - hidden down corridors of the Canyon. Clover and Jotter decided to don overalls (they considered jeans too masculine) and would take face cream and apply makeup through much of the journey before finally giving it up. 

The story of the two adventurous women spread quickly across the country, with breathless predictions and sensationalized front-page coverage -- some of it misleading or cynical. Several accounts failed to mention the science, focusing instead on the danger of the river and suggesting Clover and Jotter were attention-seeking “school ma’ams” willing to risk the entire crew for their notoriety. A male river runner interviewed by the press even worried that a successful run by women might diminish his reputation. Over 100 newspapermen and gawkers saw the expedition cast off at Green River, and when they were late for a midpoint rendezvous at Lee’s Ferry, there was a media frenzy and a search by a Coast Guard plane. Even a commercial TWA flight out of Los Angeles rerouted its course to look for the river runners. 

Yet on the river, Clover would leave the outside world behind. In the smooth-water section during the early part of the voyage, she floated along playing her harmonica, and her journal of the expedition delights in the beauty of the moon rising over the canyon wall or the wonder of a rainbow after a terrific electrical storm. She would prove to be the most reliable crew member -- Nevills referred to her as “the best man of the bunch” -- keeping her cool even as personalities clashed and tension built as they made their way deeper into the gorge and the more treacherous rapids known as the graveyard of the Colorado River. But despite Clover’s role as the scientific leader of the expedition, traditional sexism persisted: A typical 24-hour cycle saw her and Jotter setting up camp at night, waking up early the next day to gather and press their plant specimens -- all before the men were up and the journey continued. And it was just understood the women would do all the cooking. “The men depend on Lois and me for so many little things. Mirrors, combs, finding shirts, first aid, etc. Just as men always have since Adam,” Clover wrote.

The 43-day trip, lasting from June 20 through July 29 and covering over 600 miles, was a scientific success: Clover and Jotter mapped five different plant zones and were responsible for four first-discovered species (the Grand Canyon claret cup, the fishhook cactus, the strawberry hedgehog cactus, and beavertail prickly pear). Their survey is the only comprehensive one of the Colorado River’s riparian species before the building of Glen Canyon Dam. Nevertheless, Clover fretted over the quality of the specimens, as well as a plant press that went missing temporarily with over a third of the specimens gathered (it was found later that year and mailed to Ann Arbor). In a phone interview with Sevigny, she notes, “[Clover and Jotter] had some scientific complaints about the quality of the work they did. And I think that may have unintentionally contributed to this perception that their work wasn’t important. That [impression] lingered for decades. But this was absolutely untrue. They cataloged 400 species of plants. That’s half of all the plants we know along the river corridor today.”

“I’m so lonely for it now I can hardly stand it.” 

When the trip ended, Clover fell into a melancholy funk. She missed her companions, retreating to her motel room to watch the films, dreaming of further adventures. And she missed the river adventure fiercely, noting in her diary, “I’m so lonely for it now I can hardly stand it.” Almost immediately, she joined Nevills for another excursion, this time down the San Juan River, and she would continue her travels in the following years, surveying the region’s flora on foot and horseback while also making excursions to Texas and Guatemala. Regarding Clover’s wanderlust, Sevigny notes, “I think she belonged out in wild places and that’s where she was happiest.”

Despite the trip’s success -- and perhaps because of its notoriety -- Clover’s work prospects didn’t immediately improve upon returning to Ann Arbor. Sevigny continues: “I think the sensational nature of the publicity did quite a lot of damage to Elzada’s career. She wanted any publicity to be very dignified and very focused on the scientific work.” Clover gave lectures and showed her films to several groups -- women’s clubs, schools, and church groups -- and in 1944, she and Jotter finally completed their species list and published it in the American Midland Naturalist, an influential paper on Southwest plants. Some of their specimens were also given to the Smithsonian’s National Herbarium. 

But there was a notable lack of recognition for Clover’s pioneering work at the University of Michigan, and both she and Jotter were somewhat disinclined to discuss their trip with either family or friends. “I think they were proud of what they did,” said Sevigny. “But I think it wasn’t in Elzada’s personality to go around and crow about it. There were little things like, for example, she didn’t insist on being called Dr. Clover in the press. I think their honesty about the scientific challenges they faced and their reluctance to speak publicly about what they had accomplished might have contributed to people not knowing what an extraordinary thing they had done.” As to their being the first known women to successfully take a boat down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon, Sevigny points out that Clover was always careful to say she and Jotter were the first non-indigenous women to boat the Canyon. She was respectful of and interested in the indigenous cultures that preceded her in the places she visited, including the Havasupai and Navajo peoples. 

To Clover’s great frustration - one that followed her all her life - national wire stories would depreciate her and Jotter's scientific achievements and continue to focus on their gender and age. A former river runner described Clover as a “middle-aged woman who has lost her way in life” and a 1946 Saturday Evening Post article described Clover as a spinster looking for a last adventure. “The story depressed and infuriated Clover,” Sevigny writes. “Her work as a respected university professor had been reduced to bedtime stories for children, and instead of an accomplished scientist and explorer, she was depicted as an aging spinster with a life empty of meaning.” 

“Everything is so big and timeless there it makes so many worries and things here seem so petty.”

Yet Clover would funnel her passion into further botany, travel -- and teaching, eventually rising through the ranks at the University of Michigan. She became a curator at the University’s botanical gardens in 1957 (as well as the first U-M instructor to teach a class there) and she became the first woman in the U-M Botany department to earn a full professorship, serving from 1960-1967. By all accounts, she was excellent at her job. One of Clover’s former students, Jane Myers, penned an eloquent tribute to her in the Ann Arbor News when Clover died, and she recalled Clover’s infectious passion for plants and her memorable teaching style: “She was somebody with such intense interest in all things botanical that you did not want to disappoint her. She was not tough on her students—just always intense. Very quietly.” Clover also held small gatherings of students at her upstairs apartment at 1522 Hill Street.

Myers further notes: “In my class out at the greenhouses of the Botanical Gardens in their old 1950s setting, Dr. Clover had us make wire balls with soil in the middle into which we stuck many African violet plants. My mother loved it! There was nothing academic about it; it was just an imaginative use of plants. I think she was ahead of any educational trend by years. She wanted us to enjoy plants as much as she did.” During a book talk at the U-M Biological Station in Pellston, Michigan, where Clover frequently taught, Sevigny met two other former students of Clover’s, and their recollections echo Myers: “Her whole life was about plants. They both said that it changed their lives to absorb some of that passion for the natural world.”

After retiring from the University of Michigan in 1967, Clover moved to San Juan, Texas. On November 2, 1980, she died in McAllen, Texas, close to the Mexico border. Despite all the obstacles she faced, Elzada Clover dared to undertake both an epic adventure and a career path that up to that point had been exclusively the domain of men. “Before them, men had gone down the Colorado to sketch dams, plot railroads, dig gold, and daydream little Swiss chalets stuck up on the cliffs,” writes Sevigny. “They saw the river for what it could be, harnessed for human use. Clover and Jotter saw it as it was, a living system made up of flower, leaf, and thorn, lovely in its fierceness, worthy of study for its own sake.”

The same can be said of Elzada Clover herself. Her legacy is the cacti and succulent room at the University’s Matthaei Botanical Gardens, which was seeded by her southwest collections, and her over 300 specimens in the University of Michigan Herbarium.

It all began with an advertisement on the front page of the Ann Arbor News. It was Saturday, January 8, 1938, and readers were encouraged to visit page 5 of the newspaper to meet Bobby and the Old Professor "(who knows almost everything)" for an adventure in science. "The feature, written by R. Ray Baker, is intended especially for children but grownups will like it, too."

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

R. Ray Baker was a known quantity to readers of local newspapers. In 1923 he became managing editor of the Ann Arbor News, then known as the Ann Arbor Times-News, and served in that capacity until 1934 when he became Associate Editor. Baker was also a feature and science writer for affiliated Booth Newspapers, Inc. (Saginaw News, Flint Journal, Grand Rapids Press, Jackson Citizen-Patriot, Muskegon Chronicle, Bay City Times, Kalamazoo Gazette, & Ann Arbor News). He published articles nearly every day, and tried to keep the public informed on new developments in the fields of science and medicine. Much of his information came from interviewing University of Michigan staff members, and professors regularly cooperated with him on major stories.

Bobby, The Old Professor, And (Sometimes) Julia

The launch of R. Ray Baker's new Bobby and the Old Professor series was geared toward a young audience, but aimed to educate adults as well. The premise was simple: "Bobby" was a boy of roughly 10 years old who was curious about the world around him and had lots of questions. The "Old Professor" had all of the answers. With each article, a photograph depicting their weekly adventure would be published as well. Ann Arbor News photographer Eck Stanger shot all of the staged images for the series. "Bobby" was portrayed by R. Ray Baker's son Russell, and the "Old Professor" was retired University of Michigan Mathematics Professor William H. Butts. Baker thought of the "Old Professor" as a composite of all of the U of M faculty men he had interviewed over the years, and felt that Professor Butts had an appearance to fit this role. Later in the series the character of "Julia" was added, the female counterpart to "Bobby," and Jackie Carl portrayed that role in the photographs.

Scientific Adventures In Newspapers

R. Ray Baker's very first Bobby and the Old Professor article was titled "What's A Leaf?". Each week Baker would consult with experts at the University of Michigan to ensure the accuracy of his writing. Scientific mysteries would be explained in simplified language. Topics varied throughout the first year of the series from radios to turkeys, ancient pottery, the northern lights, quicksand, linotype machines, fire, sabre-toothed tigers, the four seasons, and volcanos.

The scientific adventures of Bobby and the Old Professor (and sometimes Julia) appeared originally in Booth Newspapers, Inc. publications. The Flint Journal, for example, ran the series as part of their "Children's Corner," which eventually grew into the "Wide Awake Club" page in Sunday issues. By March 1938, R. Ray Baker was encouraging children to participate in the series. "WRITE TO THE OLD PROFESSOR," the headline declared. "Boys and girls are invited to write to the Old Professor, in care of this newspaper, for explanation of anything that puzzles them." Soon the Old Professor was directly answering children's science questions in the series, increasing readership of the already popular articles.

Scientific Adventures In Books

In 1939 the first Bobby and the Old Professor book was released. "So That's The Reason!" published by Reilly and Lee, Chicago, was a collection of selected (and sometimes revised) articles from the newspaper series. Topics included spiders and webs, Saturn's rings, thunder & lightning, glaciers, why ducks swim, and snowflakes. The book contained a foreword by Dr. Alexander G. Ruthven, president of the University of Michigan, and was dedicated to "The curiosity of American youngsters - may it never grow less!". Illustrations were included, along with the photos that Eck Stanger had contributed to the newspaper series. Reilly and Lee, Chicago, would eventually publish five more of R. Ray Baker's Bobby and the Old Professor books: So That's Chemistry! (1940), So That's Astronomy! (1941), So That's Geology! (1942), So That's Life! (1943), & So That's Man! (1949).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Adventure's End

The Bobby and the Old Professor series ran weekly from January 1938 until May 1949. At the end of June 1941, Professor William H. Butts aka "The Old Professor" died at the age of 84. The photos featured in the series after his death would be of Bobby & Julia, with no replacement for the professor's character. The series continued to run steadily through the 1940s, and remained a popular feature in Booth newspapers around Michigan. As Russell Baker ("Bobby") and Jackie Carl ("Julia") grew into young adults and moved on with their lives, the series eventually stopped featuring photos of them and turned towards the use of illustrations instead.

 

On May 2, 1949, R. Ray Baker experienced some chest pain. He collapsed on East Washington Street while walking to his doctor's office, and died before reaching the hospital by ambulance. His untimely passing at the age of 58 was mourned throughout the Booth Newspaper affiliates, especially in Ann Arbor by those who worked closely with him on a daily basis. He had just finished work on his book "So That's Man!" and it was published shortly after his death, along with his final installment of Bobby and the Old Professor. Baker was praised for his wide-reaching career in journalism that successfully made science education accessible to countless numbers of adult and children alike. 

In 1960, housewife Demaris Cash (Dee, to her friends) was forced to confront how she would provide for her family if she lost her husband, Travis, who had recently survived his second heart attack. The couple had two daughters: Janis, who had been diagnosed with muscular dystrophy, and Elaine. At a luncheon with friends, the idea of a consignment store was floated and soon Demaris was on the search for a business partner. 

Unlike Demaris, who had never held a job outside of the home, Grace Bigby was an experienced businesswoman. Her entrepreneurship began around 1945 when she learned to mount figure skating blades for her daughters. As her daughters grew it became wasteful to keep purchasing new skates, so she started a skate exchange and blade mounting enterprise. In 1966, she added a gift and card store to her ventures at 1115 Broadway in the converted old Northside Baptist church and she moved her skate business into the basement there. 

The Beginning

Grace and Demaris had never previously met, but after Grace heard of Demaris’s business idea they exchanged a phone call and soon were signing a lease for 529 Detroit Street. The old industrial brick building was originally constructed in 1869 as a steam wood planing mill, the second at that location after a previous mill had burned down. It was operated by John G. Miller, who lived next door at 521 Detroit Street. The large commercial space had lived many lives, having previously been home to a machine shop, furniture store, toy company, and a produce distributor. The pair’s plan to open a retail shop required a vision, and some remodeling. 

They named their store Treasure Mart and their first sale was a matter of fate. Demaris had learned that her daughter’s dance instructor was looking for a chandelier. A sign was hung during construction to announce a future resale business. As painting was still underway a man who had taken notice of the upcoming store stopped to offer up a chandelier. Demaris was a pious woman and saw that her prayers had been answered; she brokered the exchange. 

Grace and Demaris’s partnership fit their strengths. Grace handled the financials and bookkeeping, while Demaris managed the inventory. After 15 years, family illness led Grace to leave the business and the Cashes stepped in. Treasure Mart became a family corporation owned with daughters Janis and Elaine, along with Elaine’s husband, Carl Johns.

The Business

Treasure Mart’s sales floor encompassed the building’s three stories and a garage. Each level was filled to the brim with furniture, antiques, collectibles, and home decor of all sizes and eras. Items were brought in by consignors who paid an annual membership fee and earned a percentage of the item’s profit once it was sold. If something didn’t sell after a few months the price would be reduced, as would the profit. By 2018 the store had 1,000 consignors and a two-month wait for members looking to join. The specifics changed throughout the years, but in 2018 the annual fee was $25 and sellers earned 65 percent of the sold price, or 50 percent for items listed at less than $4.

Treasure Mart went through expansions and experiments throughout its 60 years. The company tried its hand at managing estate sales and used them as a means to collect inventory. The popularity of the consignment led to franchises and by 1979 Treasure Marts could be found in Elyria, Ohio; Kokomo, Indiana; Minneapolis; Bloomington, Illinois; and Flint. Travis Cash's health had improved and in 1962, soon after his heart attack that had spurred Demaris into starting Treasure Mart, he retired from his career as a Quaker Oil Salesman. In order to fill his time he began to manage a few racks of clothing at the store. In 1963, after outgrowing the allotted space, he founded “The Tree" for clothing consignment just up the block from Treasure Mart at 419 Detroit Street. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Second Generation

In 1982, twenty years after his retirement, Travis Cash passed away and Demaris became the proprietor of both Treasure Mart and The Tree. The following year the family was able to purchase Treasure Mart's building and the house next door that had once belonged to John G. Miller.  

When Treasure Mart was established Grace was 50 and Demaris was 55 -- ages when a person is more likely to be planning for retirement than entrepreneurship. Demaris could be found greeting customers at the store into her 80s, but after developing Alzheimer’s Disease she spent her final years at the Chelsea Retirement Center. She passed away in February of 2001, two weeks after Grace.

Elaine was teaching in St. Joseph, Michigan when she decided to come home to help her mother with the store in the summer of 1974. After that, she never left. Carl joined her soon after and the two took over the store’s management in 1995 as her mother’s health was declining, with Janis remaining as a co-owner.

After the loss of both parents, and increased competition from chain stores like Value World, Janis and Elaine made the difficult decision to close The Tree in 2005. Manager Josephine Watne was 83 and had been there for all but two of the store’s 43 years. 

The Treasure Mart remained an Ann Arbor staple, but the family confronted more obstacles in November of 2019 when Elaine was diagnosed with ALS. The Johnses had a balanced partnership like Demaris and Grace before them. Travis worked the floor and took care of billing and payroll while Elaine worked in the office. Alongside Elaine's diagnosis, Carl had gone through a series of pacemakers and their adult children had pursued careers of their own.

Treasure Mart had begun in response to health complications and now was ending for the same reasons. The building and business were listed for sale together in January of 2020 with the hopes of finding an owner to maintain the consignment.

The End

The surrounding neighborhood had changed immensely in the store’s 60 years. Treasure Mart moved in when it was still "The Old Neighborhood'' and industrial works could be found nearby. When it came time to sell, real estate in what's now known as “Kerrytown” was highly sought after. The Johnses acknowledged that their vision for the store’s continuance may lose out to the building's redevelopment potential. 

The store's listing closely pre-dated the COVID-19 pandemic precautions that disallowed dense in-person shopping. It was a historically bad time to get into business and no buyer came forward. The store's permanent closure was announced in a Facebook post in June of 2020.

At Treasure Mart, it was common for employee's tenures to last a decade, or multiple. Frequent customers and consignors could expect to be greeted by the same faces, including the Cash and Johns family members. Both generations of owners had emphasized that Treasure Mart was always about the community of people who shopped and worked there. The hundreds of comments and likes that flooded in to profess gratitude and well wishes in the wake of the imminent closure proved that to be true.

Five months later, in November of 2020, Elaine (Cash) Johns passed away. She was followed two years later by her sister Janis (Cash) Raber, who lived in Florida and, true to the family business, had established herself as an antique dealer. 

The building was purchased in 2021 by the nondenominational Redeemer Ann Arbor church for $2 million with plans to undertake renovations and restoration. Treasure Mart may be gone, but the cherished finds and relationships formed there remain throughout Ann Arbor.

 

DEATH OF A WEALTHY UNCLE

This Ann Arbor story begins with the death of a Washtenaw County pioneer and the vast fortune he left behind. Luther James, born in Western Massachusetts, arrived in Washtenaw County in the 1830s and began dealing in horses. He then turned his business skills toward the wool industry, buying Michigan Territory wool and shipping it east. His work greatly encouraged sheep farms in the area and, for a while, he was the largest wool-buyer in Michigan. In later years, he loaned money to local individuals and businesses. All of these efforts amassed him a sizable fortune, and he became one of Washtenaw County's wealthiest citizens.

Luther James never married and lived alone. As he aged, and his health deteriorated, he needed an assistant to manage his business affairs and help with his physical care. His unmarried nephew, James Babcock, stepped in to fill the role and became his constant companion. When Luther James died, on July 25, 1888, his nephew was his principle heir. Unfortunately for James Babcock, this inheritance came with a unique stipulation that would turn his life upside down.

THE UNMARRIED NEPHEW

James Leland Babcock was born February 10, 1840 in Goshen, Hampshire County, Massachusetts. He was raised in Western Massachusetts by his parents, Dr. Leland Babcock & Elizabeth (James) Babcock. His mother traced her family back to the pilgrims at Plymouth Rock. James was educated in Goshen and Northampton, MA, and eventually moved west to work in Chicago around 1860. The Great Chicago Fire in 1871, as well as his uncle Luther James, both prompted him to relocate to Ann Arbor.

James Babcock worked as a private secretary to his uncle, assisting him in the management of his assets, and accumulated a small fortune of his own in the process. His uncle loved to travel, and James would escort him to the South during the winters. Each summer they would travel to Waukesha, Wisconsin where they stayed at the popular resort of George Burroughs, and visited the "healthful benefits" of the Bethesda Spring.

In 1888, Uncle Luther James died. He left behind an estate valued at half a million dollars or more, the equivalent of nearly $17 million in 2024. When the will was read, the sum of $5,000 was left to each of Luther James' 21 nieces and nephews, as well as his two surviving sisters. The rest of his estate was left to James Babcock, his close confidant and favorite nephew. This should have been the end of the story, but Luther James had left a condition in his will: James Babcock must be married within five years from the time the will was probated, or his share of the inheritance would be divided among the other surviving family members. James Babcock, 48 year old Ann Arbor resident, suddenly needed to find a wife.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

ALL THE SINGLE LADIES (and a few lonely men)

News of James Babcock's potential windfall spread across national newspapers, and even into Europe. Much like a current reality show with women lining up to marry a total stranger, single ladies across the country quickly jostled for the attention of James Babcock. No one seemed to be deterred by reports of him being "an abrupt, gray little man of 45", or the news that "In his slippers he stands up to five-feet-three".  His mailbox filled with correspondence from marriageable women of all ages, their parents, guardians, relatives, and friends. Each letter came from someone anxious to help him select a wife. James initially found these letters pleasant, but they quickly multiplied and grew to be a burden and an annoyance. He even received cables from women in England who worried that a steamship wouldn't deliver their letters quickly enough.

Many of the letter writers included photographs of themselves or someone else, all claiming to be beautiful. One music teacher remarked that her friends say "that she bears a striking resemblance to Mrs. President Cleveland." Single women looking for a wealthy husband contacted him from every state in the union. Massachusetts, New York, Wisconsin, Illinois, and Colorado, provided the largest amount of mail. Some letters arrived on delicate paper written in a fine hand, while others were impossible to decipher. Several letters were written in German, a language that James Babcock was not able to read. Many of the letters included poetry, some pulled from books and some crafted by the suitor herself. One widow from Detroit spoke of having three children that her parents were happy to take if Mr. Babcock did not want to be a father. Even men wrote to James Babcock, asking if he would share single women interested in marriage with other bachelors.

According to an 1888 article published in the San Francisco Chronicle titled "BESIEGED BY WOMEN," James took the time to read every letter. He devised a numbering and filing system for all of the correspondence, and jotted down notes about each potential suitor. When the amount of mail became too much for him to handle in his free time he was forced to hire a male secretary to take over the process.

EXAMPLES OF LETTERS TO THE BACHELOR

From Crystal Springs, Mass:

I have heard a great deal about you, and to say I am pleased with you does not express my feelings. What is the shape of your head? your complexion? Oh. Mr. Babcock, do you chew tobacco? I know I am all your heart could wish. I have a rich cream complexion that would charm the soul and paralyze the intellect. What is your ideal woman? I would practice until I reached perfection...

From Fairbury, Illinois:

...Oh, I nearly forgot to tell you my age, it is about 45, isn't that a nice age? I do hope this epistle will strike you favorably for I am so anxious to help you spend your fortune now pray do not keep me in suspense, but write to me ahead of my number and so relieve my mind, and if you write me favorably I will refuse to take in any more washings and feel that my hard lot in life is over, for I am so tired of washing for a living...

From Wareham, Mass:

Mr. Babcock: Here is one more letter from the Massachusetts surplus. If you are not too bitter a pill to take I will help protect you from the many lambs anxious to be taken into the fold. Understand, I do this from a sense of duty and not from greed. X. X.

From Indianapolis, Indiana:

I am really very much ashamed of my sex to think our American women would propose marriage to a gentleman for his wealth. I presume they will love your pocketbook and respect you...

From San Francisco, California:

I am the oldest of four children. If you have made your choice perhaps you know of some other gentleman friend who wants a wife...

THE BACHELOR CHOOSES A HOME

Before James Babcock would choose a spouse, he would choose a new home. One sentence in the City & County section of the Ann Arbor Argus, June 2, 1891, quietly announced that James Babcock spent $10,000 on the purchase of 12 N. Division Street, the elegant former residence of the late Dr. Ebenezer Wells. Wells had been a physician, a banker, and the mayor of Ann Arbor during the Civil War. The stately mansion, which we now know as the Wells-Babcock House at 208 N. Division Street, was one of the finest homes in the city. Moving into the lavish dwelling only increased the fervor of women vying for his attention.

 

THE BACHELOR CHOOSES A WIFE

As the years passed, stories circulated about who Mr. Babcock was engaged to marry. Several women claimed to be the chosen one, but none of these rumors proved to be true. In August 1892, after four years, and thousands of letters and proposals from potential spouses, it was announced that James Babcock was really, truly engaged.

On September 29, 1892, James Babcock married Ella Stanley Butler in her hometown of Waukesha, Wisconsin. The pair had met years before their marriage during James' regular vacations in Waukesha with his uncle, mother, and aunt. James appears to have thought Ella was engaged to another man, and proposed to her when he found out that she was actually single. The Waukesha Freeman ran a front page headline, "BRIDE AND FORTUNE. J. L. BABCOCK WINS BOTH ON HIS WEDDING DAY." Ella was a popular contralto who frequently sang in the area. On their wedding day James was 52 and Ella was 35, a seventeen year age difference. James had made the deadline set by his uncle, with one year left to spare. Much to the disappointment of countless single women, the news made headlines across the country.

 

HAPPILY EVER AFTER

James & Ella Babcock used some of the inheritance money to renovate their large home. The Babcock coat of arms was commemorated in stained glass, leather wall coverings were shipped from Europe, pressed paper wall coverings were shipped from Boston, and mahogany furniture was upholstered in brocatelle. Many fine details of the home were upgraded and refurbished to reflect their personal taste, including Derby satin curtains, frescoed ceilings, and a Chickering grand piano. In December 1894, the Babcocks threw a party to show off their refashioned home. Nearly 300 invitations were sent out, and their residence soon became known as the site of many popular, upscale gatherings in Ann Arbor.

Philanthropy also became a focus of the Babcocks. One of the most important projects for James Babcock to support was back in his hometown of Goshen, Massachusetts. The John James Memorial Building, dedicated in 1911, was constructed as a town hall, library, and general civic center. John James was his great-grandfather, and the Babcocks contributed a portion of the funding to make the memorial a reality. Ella Babcock sang at the dedication ceremonies for the facility. The building still stands today and is on the National Register of Historic Places.

On February 8, 1912, just two days before his 72nd birthday, James Babcock died at the Hollenbeck Hotel in Jacksonville, Florida. Ella and George Woods, his private secretary, escorted his body on a train back to Ann Arbor. He was buried in Forest Hill Cemetery, just steps from Dr. Ebenezer Wells, the former owner of his Ann Arbor home.

Three years later, in February 1915, Ella raised eyebrows in Ann Arbor when she married Allen Dudley. Ella was 57 years old, while Allen, a music student, had just turned 33. When she died on October 14, 1927, she was buried beside James in Forest Hill Cemetery. Little is known of what became of Allen Dudley, except that he moved to Beverly Hills, California and worked as a broker. He died in 1936. What happened to the fortune that started this whole story remains unknown.

A decade before Title IX would establish equal access to sports across the sexes, Betty and 'Red' Simmons founded the Michigammes Track and Field team for girls and women. Six years later, three of the club’s alumni were competitors in the 1968 Olympics. One was Ann Arbor native Francie Kraker.

The Simmons’ Support

As spectators at the 1960 Roman Olympics Kenneth 'Red' Simmons and Elizabeth 'Betty' Simmons noticed how poorly the United States women's team performed in the 800m track and field event. They recognized an opportunity.

Red (nicknamed for his hair color) and Betty had met studying physical education at Michigan State Normal College (now, Eastern Michigan University). Red had earned accolades in high school and college athletics. As an undergraduate, he participated in the 1932 Olympic trials, but fell short of making the team. After college, he spent 25 years as a Detroit Police detective before returning to Eastern in 1959 to earn his Masters in Physical Education.

The Simmons' moved to Ann Arbor when Red was offered a job as an instructor in the University of Michigan’s physical education department. Betty found employment as a P.E. teacher at Slauson Junior High. It was Betty who saw 14 year old Francie Kraker run the 600m physical fitness test in a flash. Francie finished in less than two minutes, easily outrunning every member of her class, regardless of their gender. Betty shared the news of Francie’s feat with Red. They had discovered their Olympic hopeful.

Francie was the founding member of the Ann Arbor Ann’s Track Club in 1962. The team was renamed the Michigammes in 1965, by which time their membership had grown to include at least 14 girls and women from throughout Southeast Michigan. They participated in indoor and outdoor track and field, and cross country, becoming dominant in them all. 

Red was a trailblazer not only as an early champion of girls' and women's competitive sports, but in his embrace of weight training. He designed programs for the University of Michigan Football team and for Francie. She would later credit his strength building instruction as the reason she was able to avoid many injuries.

Road to the Olympics

Francea 'Francie' Kraker was the middle child of Dr. Ralph and Norma Kraker. She attended Slauson Junior High, graduated from Pioneer High School in 1965, and went on to the University of Michigan, competing as part of the Michigammes all throughout. The Ann Arbor News profiled Francie less than a year into her training when she was already aiming for the Olympics.

Francie had all of the elements that make a good athlete. Red commended her natural stride, intelligence, ability to take instruction, and quick learning. In the lead up to the 1968 Olympic trials Francie needed to be pushed by a higher caliber of competition, but traveling to events required money. Local supporters started fundraising to aid Francie. She took a semester of college off to train and work as a waitress at the Old German restaurant to finance her dreams. She faced more challenges when she was sidelined by appendicitis and tendonitis.

After years of anticipation the Olympic trials finally arrived, but she finished just short of the top three 800m qualifying spots. Red attributed her performance to anxiety, “She wanted to make the team so much that she just couldn’t hold herself in. She thought she could hold the pace.” Despite the shortfall, her accomplishments didn’t go unnoticed. She was offered a spot at the U.S. team's training camp at Los Alamos to prove her high-altitude running abilities that would be required for the Mexico City Games. Francie didn’t squander this second chance and she secured a spot on the team. 

1968 Mexico City Olympics

In 1968 Francie made history as the first Michigan-born woman to represent the United States as part of the Track and Field team. Her Games were short-lived after she was eliminated in her first race. She had gotten an unlucky draw of tough competitors that included the eventual 800m bronze and silver medal winners. If she had participated in any other first round she would have advanced to the semi-finals. The disappointment provided motivation to keep training for a chance to race again in 1972. 

The Olympics are an occasion for countries to project an idealized national identity, but what is ignored in order to present this vision? Ten days before the games began in Mexico City the Mexican Armed Forces had killed hundreds of student demonstrators in the city. For the United States, the fight for civil rights made its way to the international stage when Black athletes Tommie Smith and John Carlos each raised a gloved first on the podium during the medal ceremony for the 200m sprint. Francie was in the audience during this demonstration and in a 2013 oral history interview recalled her reaction, “I think it was one of the bravest things I’ve ever seen anybody do.” 

1972 Munich Olympics

After graduating from Michigan Francie moved to Boston and maintained her conditioning routine with the 1972 Munich Games in mind. The Simmons’ had identified a weak point in the women’s 800m and Francie did the same years later when she recognized an opening to excel at the newly introduced women’s 1500m event. 

The switch paid off, and Francie finished second in the event's U.S. Olympic trials to qualify for the team. In a diary of her 1972 Olympic experience Francie described the buildup to her first race in Munich, “As I get into my warmup I feel perfect, to my surprise, yet still have a sense of unreality that this mere physical effort is made confusingly out of proportion to all this preparation and waiting.” This time, Francie advanced to the semi-finals. 

The Games are a global event and in 1972 violence was used to command the attention of the international media. Eight Palestinian militants affiliated with the group Black September captured nine Israeli athletes as hostages and killed two in the process, demanding the release of Palestinians held in Israeli prisons. A failed rescue attempt ended with nine athletes, five gunmen, and one West German police officer dead. The International Olympic Committee suspended events for one day to hold a memorial. 

Francie wasn't left with much time to process what had occurred. The following day she was back on the track to compete in the 1500m semi-finals. She finished with a time of 4:12.8, which would have ranked her sixth in the world the year before, but it wasn't enough this time. Her second Games were over. She left Munich before the closing ceremonies and later wrote, “My own feelings are still mixed about these and future Olympic Games. It must be a reflection of the confusion we feel to the roots of our society, this lack of agreement as to the value and meaning of these Games and our part in them. The place of nationalism must be redefined, the emphasis redirected to the competition of athlete between athlete.” 

The Michigammes' Medal Contenders

Francie was not the only Michigammes alumnus to take part in the 1968 and 1972 Olympics. In 1968 Sperry Jones Rademaker competed in kayak doubles alongside her sister, Marcia Jones Smoke. As a University of Michigan student Sperry was one of the earliest Michigammes members in 1963 and excelled at cross-country. Francie cheered her on in Mexico City and the two were close friends.  

Maxine 'Micki' King, a Pontiac native, was also member of the Michigammes at one time alongside her training with diving coach Dick Kimball. A repeat national diving champion, Micki was highly favored in 1968, but ended up fourth after she was injured mid-event. She forged a comeback in Munich to earn gold in the 3m springboard. 

Lasting Legacies

After her second Olympics, Francie vowed to keep training for more international competition, but she decided to hang up her spikes in 1975 after accepting a position at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She became the women’s athletic director and track and cross country coach, the first role in a career path made possible by Title IX's passage in 1972. She later returned to Ann Arbor where she coached Greenhills' girls' track to the school’s first State Championship, then moved on to East Lansing.

The same year that Francie ended her competitive track career, Red retired from coaching the Michigammes. Betty had recently passed away after battling cancer and her contributions to the team were indispensable. Sustaining the club often came down to personal contributions from the couple, who would cover entry and travel fees when girls couldn’t afford them. “It’s a long ways to build a club,” Red later said, “But I never really got discouraged. Every now and then, I would see a little spark and determination in the girls. That’s all I really needed."

Red was coaxed out of retirement three years later when he was offered a job he couldn't resist: inaugural coach of the University of Michigan Women’s Track Team. He spent four years building up the team's roster and skills before passing the reins to the next logical successor: Francie. 

Francie had never had the chance to race for any of her alma maters. She later reflected, “It would have been something special if I could have been running for my high school or my university but they didn’t have women’s teams and I missed that.”

Now, she was able to provide that chance to the women who came after her. While the law stipulated equal funding for women, enforcement didn't come without persistence and long-held beliefs weren't changed overnight. In 2013, Francie described leadership in the University's athletic department that didn’t believe in the value of women’s sports. “By the time I started coaching at Michigan it hadn’t gotten much better because the same people were in place… it was a battle all the way.” 

The fight continued at Wake Forest University where she and her husband, John Goodridge, both coached. A decade after Title IX, Francie was combatting inequalities regarding medical and safety concerns, scholarships, and staffing. In 1999, Francie was fired from Wake Forest and John quit in support, alleging her departure was retaliation for her support of her athletes' rights. They returned to Ann Arbor where Francie worked in the University's admissions office and John coached at Eastern.

Red passed away in 2012 at the age of 102, leaving a legacy of coaching women and girls to challenge themselves and society’s expectations for them. He took pride in the impact he had on Michigammes’ members, “The main thing I try to teach the girls is an attitude about training and about life that will carry on into other activities as they get older. You have to bring them along gradually because they don’t understand a lot of the time what it takes to become a well-trained athlete, but they do learn about themselves both physically and emotionally.” 

Reflecting on her career as an athlete and coach in 1982 Francie said, “I’ve always felt a few years ahead of things, I was too old to wait for things to happen, so I took the opportunities as they came.” In 1995 Francie became the second person inducted into the Michigan Women’s Track Hall of Fame; the first was Red Simmons.