Ann Arbor 200 is not the public library's first foray into celebrating a milestone in our community's history by creating resources about it.  For Ann Arbor's sesquicentennial back in 1974, the Ann Arbor Public Library produced a series of videos for television called I Remember When.  This series, produced by Catherine Anderson and hosted by Ted Trost, assembled newly-collected interviews with prominent Ann Arborites into episodes about various topics in history like city politics or the Greek and German communities.  The Ann Arbor District Library digitized all seven episodes of I Remember When from VHS tapes back in 2014 and made them available online.  It has since become beloved not just for its interviews with local people we can otherwise only read about but also for its delightfully goofy 1970s-ness.  It turned out there was more yet to come.

About five years ago, a box was unearthed from a back corner of the basement of the Downtown Library that contained a set of old videotapes in a format with which no one was familiar.  AADL Archives staff took a closer look and realized that what had been found were the original interviews performed to create those episodes of I Remember When.  These were on a long-obsolete format of magnetic tape called EIAJ-1, briefly used by the television media in the early 1970s.  Having sat neglected for nearly 50 years, we had little hope we would get much out of them.  They were shipped to a specialist digitization company in Pennsylvania who knew how to extract the audio and video from these tapes (not as simple as just having a player; these tapes need to be baked in an oven before they can even be played).  

As it happened, almost all of the contents were salvageable, and those contents were more than we could have hoped for.  Interviews with over 30 prominent Ann Arborites of the twentieth-century, each between 20 and 60 minutes long.  We had of course seen bits of these, but at most there might be six minutes in an episode from any given interview, so there was a great deal of material we had not seen before.  In addition, an eighth episode of I Remember When was discovered; whether this episode was never aired or just never transferred onto the VHS tapes we originally digitized we do not know.  

This lost episode, School Days, featuring segments with Lela Duff, Linda Eberbach, David Inglis, Bill Bishop, and Ashley Clague, is now available on aadl.org.  

The complete set of interviews is also available below, offering a wealth of archival material from Ann Arbor's past.  These have been fully transcribed and indexed by AADL Archives staff.  Enjoy hearing voices and seeing faces from Ann Arbor's past, but take note before you do: the sensibilities of 50 years ago are not the sensibilities of today, and some of the things you hear may be surprising coming from these storied citizens.  But the heroes of Ann Arbor history were people, and people of their times, and that knowledge alone is worth the unearthing.

Osias Zwerdling	Linnia Knox Carpenter	John Feiner	Emanuel & Elizabeth Haas
Gerald Hoag	Guy Larcom	Edith & Paul Kempf	Helen Kokales & Frank Kokenakes
Fred Looker	A.D. Moore	Anthony Preketes	Alva Joanna Sink
Nan Sparrow	Burnette Staebler	Neil Staebler	Fred Wahr
Letty Wickliffe	John Hathaway	Ashley Clague & Frances Danforth	Lela Duff
AAHS Class of 1924 50th Reunion - Linda Eberbach, David Inglis, Bill Bishop	1974 Gemutlichkeit German Festival - Albert Duckek, George Sauter, Hans Rauer	Yassoo Greek Festival - Frank Minikes, Andrew Kokenakes

Art Fare, a local news publication, began in 1973 when David Friedo saw an opportunity to cover the vast array of arts, cultural, and social events in Ann Arbor. The Ann Arbor Art Fairs inspired the play on words in the title, but its coverage went beyond the arts. Articles touched on many changes in town (including issues of housing and urban design) and offered a counter-perspective to dominant narratives in papers like the Ann Arbor News. Music, cinema, plays, art exhibits, and nightlife were included in an events calendar that predated the Ann Arbor Observer's own. Friedo and his small team worked to publish the magazine through 1979 when it briefly became known as the Ann Arbor Entertainer and then subsequently ceased publication. Issues are available for reading or downloading at aadl.org/artfare.

In 2023, David Friedo, Mary Bleyaert, Paul Wiener, Mary Dolan, and Barbara Torretti sat down with us for an interview to discuss the initial inspiration for the magazine, how it developed, and its reception by the public. Each recounted their roles in the production of the magazine, and reflected on the changes in the Ann Arbor art community and beyond.