Guy Bissell and the early years of Ann Arbor's restaurant trade

Between 1905 and 1909, the number of restaurants in Ann Arbor doubled--all the way from eight to seventeen. One of the newcomers was the Royal Cafe, opened in 1909 by Guy Bissell at 316 South Main.

Restaurants weren't a big deal early in the century. "People didn't go to restaurants like they do now," recalls Elsa Goetz Ordway, whose family owned the Goetz Meat Market on Liberty. "As a child I can't remember ever going to a restaurant." Bertha Welker, who was a teenager growing up on Sixth Street when the Royal Cafe opened, never went to a restaurant as a young woman, either. Frieda Heusel Saxon, whose family owned the City Bakery on Huron, remembers that they might run out for a quick bite at lunch, but they didn't eat in restaurants for enjoyment.

In 1909, saloons still far outnumbered restaurants in the city. (There were thirty-seven in 1909.) But they were mainly men's hangouts. Families who wanted to socialize around eating entertained at home or, as a special treat, went out to an ice cream parlor. Ordway remembers that the favorite spots for Sunday afternoon ice cream treats were Trubey's and Preketes's, both on South Main.

The Royal Cafe wasn't intended for the sweet tooth or the drinking crowds. Despite its fancy name, it was what Guy Bissell's daughter, Eleanor Gardner, describes as a "casual restaurant," with a quick-service counter, a few wooden tables, and a simple menu. The bill of fare offered nothing stronger than coffee (five cents), and the only sweet item was griddle cakes (ten cents).

Bissell ran the restaurant himself, doing the cooking with the help of his father, Ira, whenever he was in town. (He divided his time among his three children.) Bissell's wife, Marie, stayed at home with their small children, Eleanor and Clarence, and also cared for her mother, Frederica Bernhardt.

Bissell was just twenty-six when he opened the Royal Cafe. He was born in Ludington, Michigan, the son of an English father and a German mother, and raised in Ypsilanti. He left school after the eighth grade and moved to Ann Arbor when he was eighteen. He worked as a bellboy at the American Hotel (now the Earle Building) where he also slept, and held short-term jobs, including positions as a laboratory technician and a clerk at Overbeck's Book Store. He and Marie Bernhardt were married in 1904.

Bissell's only professional cooking experience before opening his own restaurant was a short stint as a baker for Bigalke and Reule, grocers and bakers, at 215 E. Washington. Gardner says her father learned cooking from his mother, who taught him German specialties.

When the Royal Cafe opened, most of the city's restaurants were on campus or clustered around the courthouse. For a time, it was the only eating place on Main Street other than the tearoom at Mack and Company, Ann Arbor's big department store, at the corner of Main and Liberty. Workers at nearby businesses were probably the nucleus of its customers. The biggest business in the vicinity was the Crescent Works Corset Manufacturers (where Kline's department store is now); others on the block included meat and grocery stores, dry goods and millinery shops, a plumber, a hardware store, an ice company, and an undertaker.

One year after the Royal Cafe opened, five more restaurants were listed in the city directory. The cycle of growth continued, and by 1911 there were twenty-five. That year, the Royal Cafe moved across the street to 331. A year later, Bissell moved it across town to 609 Church Street to serve the college crowd.

The frequent moves were typical of the period. Restaurants had a fast turnover rate and rarely lasted long enough to pass down to the next generation. (The longest-lasting of the 1909 restaurants was Preketes's, later named the Sugar Bowl.) After two years on Church Street, Bissell was bought out by the university. He never again ran a restaurant.

By then the city had twenty-seven restaurants. Eleanor Gardner says her father quit because "the restaurant business got too big for him." It's hard to imagine what he would think of the city today, when the Observer City Guide lists more than 200 restaurants, half a dozen of them in the 300 block of South Main. The original Royal Cafe is not one of them; it's now part of Fiegel's Men's and Boys' Wear.

[Photo caption from original print edition]: Gardner was born the year the Royal Cafe opened, and has no firsthand memory of it. But this old interior photo reveals that the menu was heavy on protein: steak, bacon, pork chops, salmon, and sardines. It offered no fruit and only one vegetable: baked beans. Prices ranged from five cents for drinks, to five and ten cents for sandwiches, to fifteen to forty cents for dinners, which included coffee, potatoes, and bread and butter.

Varsity Laundry and the Federal Building block

The first washing machine was reputedly built in 1851 in an Oakland, California, gold-mining camp. A Mr. Davis used barrels with a plunger affair to keep the clothes stirred up, and an old donkey engine to furnish the power. He used his machines to set up a business washing miners' clothes commercially. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, similar "power laundries" sprang up all over the country.

The Ann Arbor Steam Laundry, Ann Arbor's first power laundry, was started in 1888 by Edward Servis and Milton Steffey. It didn't last long: by 1898 Steffey had moved to St. Paul and Servis was working as a tinner. But in 1905 Herbert Tenny opened the Varsity Laundry at the same address, 215-217 South Fourth Avenue.

Tenny chose the name because he was an avid U-M football fan. The name was always painted in blue and gold. His sixteen-person staff included several partners (originally Bert Cook, later Clarence Snyder and Fred Lantz), drivers for the horse-drawn delivery wagons, a coal man to feed the steam boiler, a maintenance man to keep the machinery going, a bookkeeper (for many years Elsa Hochrien of First Street), men to run the washing machines, and a crew of women to do the pressing, sewing, and hand touch-ups.

In about 1913, Tenny replaced the horses and wagons with Dodge trucks. Two years later, he moved the laundry to the corner of Liberty and Fifth Avenue. Though for many years it had been the site of Christian Schmid's lumberyard, the block was known as Jail House Square, because it had originally been set out by the town's founders for that purpose. George Scott, a local architect who designed the Schwaben Hall as well as many houses in town, drew the plans for the new laundry, which took three years to build.

Brothers Nate and Barney Dalitz bought Tenny out in 1924. Nate's son Morrie first saw it that fall, when his parents picked him up from summer camp and told him that they had bought the laundry and moved from Detroit to Ann Arbor. Compared to the rough Detroit neighborhood where the family had lived, Ann Arbor struck the thirteen-year-old as a sissy town: he went two whole weeks without getting into a fight. But he learned to love Ann Arbor.

Herbert Tenny was often around even after the Dalitzes took over. "Like all ex-owners, he couldn't stay away," says Morrie Dalitz. He'd even written into the sales agreement that he retained parking privileges--handy when he played pool at the Masonic Temple around the corner on Fourth Avenue.

The Dalitzes repaired and modernized the business as they had the time and money. The laundry's old wooden washing machines were replaced with larger ones that held 400 pounds of dry laundry at a time. Each load weighed 1,200 pounds when wet; they had to use a crane to lift the laundry into a big centrifugal extractor. From there it went to a flatwork ironer, called a mangle. Dalitz remembers how two women would feed laundry into the ironer, while two at the other end would remove and fold it, moving so fast they looked as if they were dancing.

The 1920's were a good time to be in the laundry business. People were enjoying the respite after World War I and wanted to dress well and have a good time. In 1927, Varsity diversified by adding rental linens for restaurants, barber shops, doctors and dentists, drugstores, fraternities, and professional offices.

As a teenager, Morrie Dalitz worked summers as a "jumper" on a delivery truck that covered cottages on the many lakes northwest of Ann Arbor. There was enough business to justify the run, he recalls, since "no one wants to spend their summer washing clothes." For those who couldn't afford Varsity's full washing and pressing service, there was unpressed "fluff dry" service (the clothes could be dampened and ironed later) or "wet wash," delivered damp and ready to iron.

As a young man, Daiitz began work≠ing full-time at the laundry, starting with two years as a jumper on the linen supply trucks. Often there would be five or six stops on a block. While the driver sat in the truck, Dalitz would run in with the delivery. To speed things up, he took the door off the old Dodge truck, leaping out at each stop, without touching the running board. (He shakes his head, remembering that after a day of jumping in and out, he still had the energy to play softball.) Later, his father put him in the plant, where he learned all aspects of the laundry business; he could repair any machine, figure out the chemistry, or work as a salesman.

In the 1930's, the Dalitzes replaced Tenny's 1913 vehicles with a fleet of Chevrolet trucks, for which they paid $3,000. They also expanded the plant, tearing down two houses to the south to add a receiving and marking room, garage, and drive-in area. They put up a neon sign, the second in town. (Mack's department store had the first.)

But by then the development of better home washers and dryers began to cut into the power laundry business. After Morrie Dalitz returned from World War II (he enlisted in the field artillery, but was transferred to the quartermaster corps because he knew laundry), he took a more active role in management and began buying out his uncle's share. Varsity diversified into supplying industrial linens, such as uniforms for garages and gas stations, and in the late 1950's it began to distribute paper products as well.

In 1964, after his father and uncle died, Dalitz sold the laundry to Bill Schumer, who moved it to Ypsilanti. Dalitz himself started a second career in real estate, where he is still active, using the knowledge of the town he gained during all his years with the laundry.

The entire block of Liberty Street where the laundry was located was torn down in 1973 to make way for the present Federal Building. The casualties included several rooming houses, the laundry, the Eberbach Building, and the Masonic Temple. The wreckers had a tough time with the Eberbach Building and the Masonic Temple (which was demolished merely to make room for a parking lot). But though the former laundry was still a good looking building, Dalitz recalls, it didn't put up much of a fight. Weakened by years of moisture and temperature extremes, it came down at almost the first tap.

[Photo caption from the original print edition]: (Above) Varsity Laundry from the Liberty Street side in the 1930's, showing the new delivery trucks and neon sign. Morrie Dalitz is the young man standing in the middle. (Right) The entire block was demolished in the 1970V to make way for the Federal Building, and Tower Plaza has transformed the skyline. Only the houses on the other side of Fifth Avenue confirm that it's the same scene.

It recalls the ebullient optimism of the 1920's

On February 21, 1929, the First National Building, the tallest and most lavish office building yet built in Ann Arbor, was opened amid great fanfare. More than 5,000 people attended the grand opening of the ten-story building at Main and Washington.

The building was designed by local architects Paul Kasurin and Lynn Fry, who also served as general contractors. Work had begun on the building on February 1, 1928, with the demolition of the three-story Wadham's Department Store, which had been on the site since 1887. Using local contractors as much as possible--Muehlig and Schmid for hardware, Mack and Company for linoleum flooring, Rohde for lime and plaster, and Killins for sand and
gravel--they were done in less than a year.

The 1920's were the golden age of the U.S. auto industry, and the whole state was booming. The First National's owners, a group of investors, spared no expense in their pursuit of elegance: the building had a granite base, bronze doors, and steel casement windows. Inside, they installed black terrazzo floors, Italian travertine walls, and a richly decorated paneled ceiling. They named it for its main tenant, the First National Bank, which occupied the two-story main lobby, a mezzanine, and the basement.

The grand opening was like a city wide party, with refreshments, live music performed by the U-M music school's symphony orchestra, and favors: corsages, nosegays, cigars, blotters, and picture postcards of the building.

By the end of the evening 2,700 corsages and 1,500 nosegays had been given away. The only untoward incident occurred when two university students managed to get themselves locked in the bank's basement vault during a demonstration of the door's mechanism. Bank officials quickly assured onlookers that the students were in no danger, since the vault had a fresh air supply and even a telephone. They had to obtain the master key to release the pair.

The bank opened for business the following Saturday. On the mezzanine opposite the bank president's office, Merrill Lynch opened one of its earliest branch offices. The new building itself was presumably part of the lure, but the choice was probably also influenced by the fact that founder Charles Merrill was a former U-M student.

The remaining eight stories were fully rented before the building was even finished, mainly to doctors, dentists, lawyers, real estate agents, and insurance businesses. Fry and Kasurin took ninth-floor offices for themselves. The whole eighth floor was rented to two prominent U-M doctors, R. B. Canfield and A. C. Furstenburg, while the entire tenth floor was taken by lawyers Frank Stivers and Joseph Hooper. Street-level storefronts on Washington were filled by the John Tice Confectionery and Sandwich Shop and Germanis Brothers shoe repair.

The space had rented out so quickly that the First National's owners decided immediately to build an addition on the south side to match the five-story section on the back. They finished it a year later. But by then the Depression had hit, puncturing the ebullient optimism of the Twenties. Demand for office space disappeared, and the owners never completed the rest of their plan, to enlarge both of these five-story sections to match the ten-story height of the building's central part. You can still see where the additions were expected to be: the south and east sides of the tower are finished in simple brick instead of the luminous white granite that covers the rest of the building.

Downtown never regained the buoyant, pre-Depression optimism symbolized by the First National Building. After World War II, new commercial development followed the housing expanding out toward the edges of town. The First National Building stood unchallenged as Main Street's tallest for almost sixty years. It was surpassed by the ill-starred One North Main only in the mid-1980's.

In 1936, the First National Bank moved out as part of a merger with the Farmers and Mechanics and Ann Arbor Savings banks to form the Ann Arbor Bank (which has since merged with First of America). The two mezzanines were then connected to form a second-story floor, which was rented out to various businesses. Over the years, the elegant details became obscured as the marble floors were carpeted, the painted ceilings hidden by a dropped ceiling, the bronze mailbox converted to a fire alarm, and the Main Street facade altered to accommodate various storefronts, the last being Daniels' Jewelry.

In 1981, local developer Bill Martin bought the building and began the slow process of restoration. He removed the Main Street storefront and restored the original bronze entryway and terra-cotta detailing. Inside, he took out most of the later additions, restored the floors, walls, bronze elevator doors, and bronze mailbox to their original condition, and had the decorated ceilings cleaned and repainted.

Martin lured Merrill Lynch back to town, and today they occupy their former quarters. Other tenants are the same kinds of genteel business services that occupied the building in its heyday--from Michigan National Bank at street level to Beacon Investment on the tower's top floors.

[Photo caption from original print edition]: (Left) Built at the height of the 1920's boom, the First National Building was the tallest, most lavish office building in Ann Arbor's history. But the Depression killed plans to expand the wings on either side upward to match the main tower, and the building lost its namesake bank shortly after this picture was taken in the mid-1930's. (Below) During the 1980's, local developer Bill Martin re-created the two-story arched entryway and other obscured original details as part of a comprehensive restoration. But Martin, too, cautiously decided against completing the long-delayed expansions--a smart move that anticipated the present glut of office space downtown.

From harness making to work clothes

Soon after Herman Ehnis opened his harness shop at 116 West Liberty, he realized he had gone into a dying field. But by adroitly shifting his focus from horses to the workmen who cared for them, Ehnis created a business that is still here eighty-two years later.

The son of a German immigrant, Ehnis grew up in Saline and attended both German and English schools before being apprenticed to the local harness maker. In 1910, he rented a storefront in the Schaeberle Block of West Liberty from Walter Mack, whose Mack & Co. department store was just up the street. Ehnis arranged to repair harnesses for Mack's horse-drawn delivery fleet and to have the fees subtracted from his rent. Evidently, Mack used a lot of harnesses: most months, the repair bill and the rent came out even.

Along with harnesses (most of which he made himself during the slower winter months) Ehnis sold saddles, bridles, horse collars, whips, blankets, and robes. As farmers prepared for the new season, Ehnis could repair their equipment or fit them up with new. But he soon realized that cars were fast replacing horses. When Ehnis opened, the city directory listed just four auto dealers. Ten years later, the classified section of the city directory devoted eight pages to car-related businesses.

By about 1914, Ehnis began selling shoes to make up for the declining harness business: not dress shoes, but the kind of work shoes worn by the farmers and tradesmen he was already serving. At about the same time, Ehnis was joined in the store by his older brother, Matt, who set up a shoe repair business in the back corner.

Ten years later, Ehnis called his shop a shoe store in the city directory, although he continued to sell harnesses to the dwindling number of farmers who were still using horses to plow their fields. A few farmers continued using horses until World War II, but by the mid-1930's harness sales had fallen so much Ehnis quit them altogether, leaving Malloy's on Ann Street as the last harness store in Ann Arbor.

Somehow, Ehnis survived the Depression, a time when many downtown stores--including Walter Mack's fabulous department store--went under. The first year after the crash, business dropped 55 percent, and on some days Ehnis made only a few dollars. But remarkably, he managed to come through with a store to hand down to his son and grandsons.

It was during the Depression that Ehnis began carrying work clothes. His son, Leroy, then a high school student working part-time, remembers there were two basic choices of work clothes before World War II: bib overalls, usually blue but also white for painters and carpenters, and two-piece gray uniforms--fleece-lined moleskin for winter and lighter covert cloth for summer. Although they never sold topcoats or suits, they were soon selling everything else for men--warm jackets, underwear, heavy socks, work gloves, suspenders, belts, and headgear.

Before World War II, Saturday night was the big shopping time of the week. Families from the surrounding farms and small towns would come to Ann Arbor for the evening, bringing along their children and hired hands. Kids might go to a movie at the Wuerth Theater (now Gratzi), the parents would run their errands, and hired hands would go off to buy candy or (after Prohibition) a drink.

Many of the Saturday night shoppers were regular Ehnis customers. They seldom bought in quantity ("In those days people got by with less," says Leroy Ehnis), but they were faithful, generation after generation. Herman Ehnis knew most of his customers by name; he kept track of their diverse genealogies and could talk to them in German if they preferred. Leroy Ehnis remembers that what he calls "low German" --German with a Swabian accent-- was spoken in the country for years after it was no longer heard in town.

After serving in World War II, Leroy Ehnis joined his father in the store. Work clothes began to appear in a much wider variety of styles and colors. No longer all cotton, they now came in synthetics for permanent press and easy care. Another postwar change was the widening popularity of work clothes, especially blue jeans. Ehnis & Son experienced a surge of student business in the 1960's and 1970's as painter pants and bib overalls became commonplace on campus.

Herman Ehnis retired in 1967. As they reached adulthood, his three grandsons, first Steve, then Jim, then Larry, entered the business alongside their father. Steve remembers that his grandfather still worked occasionally in the store until he died in 1974; sometimes he took over on football Saturdays so Leroy could go to the game. Steve remembers his grandfather greeting longtime customers and asking about their cousins and in-laws. He also recalls him wrapping their purchases in brown paper and tying them with string he pulled off a holder that still hangs from the store's ceiling.

Since 1985, when Leroy retired, his sons have run the store. Ehnis & Son still offers long-lasting work clothes, American-made whenever possible. The number of farmers, who once made up about half the customers, has plummeted, but a core of loyal customers from the farm families remains. As Larry puts it, "Farmers can come in here with muddy boots. They'd never think of going to Briarwood like that."

[Photo caption from original print edition]: When harness maker Herman Ehnis (left) posed for a picture c. 1910-1915, bridles, hits, and horse collars hung from the ceiling and fly nets hung spread across the window. As trucks took over, Ehnis adroitly shifted his focus from horses to the men who worked with them, adding work shoes and then work clothes. (Below) Two generations of Ehnises in the store today (1. to r.): Leroy, Jim, Steve, and Larry Ehnis.

The Associated Spring building recaps the city's economic history

The Associated Spring building, at 401 E. Stadium near Crisler Arena, has witnessed firsthand Ann Arbor's amazing economic evolution during the twentieth century. From 1910 to 1919, it housed a company that made wooden ladders. From 1919 to 1988, its workers produced metal springs for Detroit's carmakers. Subsequently renovated for office use, it's now the home of C-Text software, a national player in the fast-growing computer typesetting business.

The first tenant of the building, according to the City Directory, was the Newton-Haggerty Ladder Company. It was one of the first factories to locate away from the center of town, in what a 1926 Chamber of Commerce pamphlet called the "South End Industrial Section." The U-M athletic complex had not yet been built, and Stadium was then "Boulevard Drive"--a dirt road just outside the city limits.

It's unclear why the ladder factory folded after less than a decade; perhaps the Michigan Ladder Company in Ypsilanti, which is still in business, offered too much competition. In any case, the building was purchased in 1919 by the Cook Spring Company, a New York firm that was moving to Michigan to get closer to the state's fast-growing auto companies.

Cook Spring was founded in 1896, and as early as 1909 it was already selling springs to Michigan carmakers. The company, which is still in business, is today Buick's oldest continuous supplier. By the time of the company's move from New York City, three men owned nearly all of Cook Spring's stock: A. J. Donally, his nephew Melvin Donally, and William Scholey. In 1928, when A. J. Donally and Scholey were getting ready to retire, the three partners decided to sell the business.

The sale ran into an unusual complication. In 1900, Melvin Donally's father (also named Melvin) had given ten shares of his company stock to a sailor named Connors. By 1928, Connors was in the Antarctic as a member of Admiral Richard E. Byrd's Little America expedition. The other stockholders had to wait for the right atmospheric conditions before they could contact Connors by ham radio to ask him if he was willing to sell--and then wait again for the right conditions to receive his reply. As a result, the deal, which should have been completed in January 1929, took an extra month.

The buyer was Barnes-Gibson-Raymond, another East Coast spring company eager to win a share of Michigan's automotive business. (Though based in Bristol, Connecticut, it had opened a Detroit plant of its own in 1923.) The new owners continued to use the Cook name for the Ann Arbor plant until after World War II, when the entire company was renamed Associated Spring. They also kept on most of the employees, including two of the former Cook partners. Scholey served as manager until he retired, in 1932; Melvin Donally, who said he would stay as long as they paid him, was employed as production manager and then as general manager to replace Scholey.

Peg Harrigan Joseph was the plant's secretary when it was sold. Asked if the place changed, she says, "Heavens, yes." The new owners set up their own systems and added people. One of the newcomers was Oscar Joseph, an accountant trained at Ohio State who had been working as timekeeper in the Detroit office. He became head accountant of the Ann Arbor plant and succeeded the younger Melvin Donally as manager when Donally retired in 1958. He also married Peg Harrigan.

Despite the changes, says Peg Joseph, "it continued operating like a family plant. The workers took pride in what they did." Melvin Donally III, who himself started working at Associated Spring in 1942, concurs about the loyalty of the work force. "When a windstorm tore the shipping room off, the workers came back the next day," he recalls. "When the furnace went out, the workers came and worked in their coats." And the tradition of hiring members of the same families continued. Donally remembers warning a new employee "to check out [family] relationships before saying anything."

The company had ups and downs during the Depression but was still able to add new employees. In 1932, a brick office building was added on the west side of the property. During World War II, the plant made valve springs for aircraft engines. During the energy crisis of the late 1970's, they helped General Motors develop torque converter clutch springs to improve fuel efficiency.

By 1988, the plant was too small and out-of-date, so Associated Spring moved to a new 100,000-square-foot facility in Saline, where it continues to turn out engine valve springs and torque converter clutch springs. The old complex was purchased by Nub Turner and Jay Hartford, owners of GT Products.

Turner is the person who saved Ann Arbor's last downtown factory from closing in 1982, when he led a leveraged buy-out of the former Chrysler parts plant at the corner of First and William. GT Products is still based there, manufacturing fuel vapor valves, diesel governors, and oil pumps.

Jay Hartford oversaw the renovation of the old spring factory. Architects Brice Lambrix and Michael Rupert did the design. The brick office building, which was in fairly good shape, now houses offices (including those of Lambrix-Rupert Architects) plus a large recreation room with an added deck that GT Products uses as a hospitality suite to entertain customers on football Saturdays.

The factory portion was a greater challenge. Lambrix and Rupert started by hauling out fifty tons of debris and then sandblasting the walls to get rid of the residue left by years of factory use. They strived to retain the original look, keeping the high ceilings and clerestory windows and adding wood compatible with the wood trusses already there to shore up the under-designed and overloaded structure. They refurbished the stucco on the outside.

C-Text, the new tenant in the factory space, designs computer-based publishing systems for newspapers, magazines, and books. (Nub Turner is an investor in the company.) They use the space mostly for offices that, although divided by partitions into fairly small work areas, feel very spacious because of the height of the ceiling and the number of windows. Turner and Hartford plan to use the back area, which was used by Associated Spring for shipping and receiving, as additional factory space for GT Products.

[Photo caption from original print edition]: Since 1910, the same Stadium Boulevard building has produced wooden ladders, automotive springs, and lines of computer code. Cook Spring Company (top) took over from Newton-Haggerty Ladder in 1919. In 1988, the building was rebuilt and renovated as the home of C-Text software (above).

When Walter Mast went into business for himself in 1942, there were nine shoe stores on the street. Today, Mast's is the sole survivor.

When Walter Mast opened his shoe store on Main Street in 1942, friends warned him he would never make a go of it. Not only were there eight other shoe stores nearby, but he sold only one line. Now, forty-nine years later, Mast's is the last shoe store on Main Street.

Mast's first store was at 121 South Main between Washington and Huron (now part of the NBD branch), near the courthouse and across from Goodyear's department store. Though Mast was only thirty at the time, he'd been selling shoes for well over a decade. Born here in 1912 (his family home on Third Street was on this year's Old West Side Homes Tour), he started working as a teenager at Mack and Company, the big department store on the corner of Liberty and Main, just a few blocks from his house.

Mack's was the training ground for many of Ann Arbor's future business owners (Mae Van Buren, who founded the Van Buren Shop, worked in Mack's lingerie department). Owner Walter Mack was a grouchy man, Mast says, but took a liking to him and hired him for a variety of odd jobs, including unpacking china and filling the drinking water tanks on each floor. The teenager got to drive Mack to his cottage on Whitmore Lake in his fancy Cadillac.

After a succession of these small jobs, Mast became a shoe salesman. Mack's shoe department was on the first floor near the Liberty Street entrance. Only a few shoes were kept out on display. Most of the inventory was stored behind a partition, and salesmen brought out boxed shoes for their customers to try on--a system that has been replaced by self-service in many stores, but which Mast's uses to this day.

Walter Mast graduated from Ann Arbor High School and took business classes at Ypsilanti Normal College, but decided he would rather be in business than study it. He went to St. Louis for a one-year training course with the Wohl Company, the shoe manufacturer that managed Mack's shoe department. At that time, St. Louis was the shoe capital of America: all the major shoe companies were located there. After his training, Mast serviced fifteen Wohl stores in Michigan, then managed one in Williamsport, Pennsylvania. When a Susquehanna River flood closed that store, Mast returned to Ann Arbor to manage the shoe department at Jacobson's, also a Wohl outlet at the time.

After two years at Jacobson's, Mast decided to make the big leap and open his own store. He began by selling Tweedie shoes, a line of dress shoes made in Jefferson City, Missouri. He thought it was a good line, and he was a friend of the company's local sales representative. He convinced his friend to give him some shoes to start with, which he paid for as he sold them. Mast gradually added other lines, but he continued to sell Tweedie until the company went out of business.

The first Mast's was so small that deliveries were made to the front door--althere was no back entrance. Mast and his wife, Helen, fixed the upstairs into an apartment for themselves that could be reached directly from the store or from an outside stairway. Following the model he had learned at Mack's, Mast stressed personal service, a wide variety of sizes, and good, practical brands that fit well and wore well.

Since war rationing was in effect when Mast started his business, customers needed government-issued coupons to buy a pair of shoes. Mast in turn collected the coupons until he had enough to place his own next order. He also had a stock of "coupon-free" shoes made of nonessential materials, such as gabardine, cardboard, or what Mast remembers as "a synthetic felt-like substance." Occasionally, free days were declared when customers could buy shoes without coupons.

A year after he started the business, Mast himself was called to serve in the war, so Helen took over the store's management. After Tom, their first child, was born, she supervised both a sitter upstairs and the staff downstairs. Although it had once been very common for owners to live upstairs over their stores, it was rare by then. She remembers that policemen on the Main Street beat, knowing she was by herself, would stop by every night to make sure she was all right.

When Walter Mast returned from service, he began expanding his business, opening a store in Owosso in 1945 and a second Ann Arbor store, on Liberty near the U-M campus, in 1947. At first, the two local stores had identical inventories--penny loafers and saddle shoes for students and pumps and oxfords for the adults. In 1968, the Main Street store moved a block south to its present location at 217 South Main.

In the 1960's, the two Ann Arbor stores began to diverge, mirroring changes in demand. The campus store sold stretch boots and platform shoes to U-M students, while the Main Street store continued with the classic adult styles. Interestingly, the stores have come almost full circle and now carry very similar stock. The people who grew up wearing tennis shoes are old enough to have jobs and to need dress shoes. But having grown up in unconfining shoes, they are buying the lightweight, comfortable brands that have long been the mainstay of the Main Street store.

"Fashion goes in cycles, with different themes repeating themselves over and over again, but nothing ever comes back exactly the same," says Mast. When he opened his first store, open-toed and open-heeled shoes were the style for women. Right now, he says, similar styles are big in Europe and will probably hit the United States in the near future. In between have come spike heels, pointed toes, monster chunky shoes, western boots, and clogs.

Mast is now semi-retired, and his sons, Tom and Greg, have taken over the day-to-day management, Tom of the Liberty Street store (plus a Cadillac store that he started) and Greg the Main Street store. (The Owosso store was closed last year.) Both sons worked in the stores part-time and summers as soon as they were old enough, studied business in college, and then got jobs--Tom teaching business at a small college and Greg working at a bank--before returning to Ann Arbor and the family business.

Mast is pleased with that. Studies show, he says, that the average life of a family business is thirty-seven and a half years, or one generation. Mast even has his eye on the third generation--he notes that he and Helen are blessed with six grandchildren.

[Photo caption from original print edition]: (Left) Walter Mast in his original store in the 1940's, standing second from right. His family lived in an apartment right upstairs from the tiny store. (Below) Mast and son Greg in the present Main Street Mast's.

Keeping up with the changing Ann Arbor funeral

Muehlig Funeral Chapel's 1928 move to the corner of Fourth Avenue and William was a milestone in the changing funeral practices of Ann Arbor. When Florian C. Muehlig began making caskets as a sideline to his furniture business in 1852, "families took care of their own, even burying them on their own property," says Dave Hamel, who today is co-owner of the firm with Neil Bidwell and Florian's great-grandson, Bob Muehlig. "Now it has evolved to have others handle it."

Over its first seventy years, the business slowly changed from what was primarily a furniture shop into a full-time undertaking service. But retired Muehlig's partner Fred Rogers recalls that as late as 1921, when he started in the business, "it was impossible to get [a bereaved family] to let you take the body to the funeral parlor." Muehlig's staff had to make house calls to do embalming, and helped out with funerals that were usually held either at home or at the deceased's church.

That pattern changed, Rogers says, "all of a sudden. People got different ideas - they found it more convenient to have the body in the funeral home, less confusion, no people coming into the house." It was for this reason, just seven years after Rogers started, that Muehlig's owners left their upstairs quarters on Main Street to open a bigger, more accessible full-service chapel in the spacious and imposing Lynds house at 403 South Fourth Avenue. Expanded and remodeled several times in the years since, Muehlig's is, at age 138, both the oldest funeral home in Michigan and the oldest business in Ann Arbor.

Florian C. Muehlig, born in 1810 in Rossbach, Bavaria, was a cabinetmaker who came to Ann Arbor in 1840. He began making caskets as an offshoot of the furniture, lumber, and upholstery business he opened in 1847. This combination of services was common in those days - wooden coffins took the same materials and skills used in making furniture. By 1868, his services had expanded, and funerals became an important part of Muehlig's business. A full-page ad in the city directory that year promised "Metalic burial cases and coffins. A good hearse, always in attendance. Persons wishing their friends laid out can call on us night or day, free of charge."

The original Muehlig's was on the second floor of a frame building in the 200 block of South Main, about where the Full Moon now stands. It stayed in this location during Florian's day and that of his son, John, who inherited the business when his father died. When Florian J., son of John Muehlig, inherited the business in 1897, he moved it a block south to 307 South Main, above what is now the Manikas Sirloin House.

Muehlig's used two floors in their new location. Fred Rogers slept on the third floor from 1921, when he began working, until his marriage in 1926. Rogers would go to homes to embalm the bodies as soon as people died, even if it was the middle of the night. He would return later to dress the corpse and lay it in the casket, which he would bring back with him. He and the rest of the Muehlig's staff would continue to help the family, not just with the funeral and the burial, but by arranging flowers, bringing extra chairs for the many callers, and helping to set up the prayer services that were often held in the home before the funeral.

An important part of the job, then as now, was transporting the body, to the church if the funeral was held there, or directly to the cemetery if the funeral was at home. The hearses, sometimes called "death wagons," were stored in a barn and garage behind the houses of Florian and his sister, Bertie. In those days of high infant mortality, the fleet included a white carriage used just for children. Around 1918 Muehlig's switched to motorized vehicles, although they continued using horse-drawn carriages in bad weather for a few more years.

Although most funerals were held in churches or private homes, Muehlig's did have a small chapel that was used occasionally. Its second-floor location was cumbersome, however. The body would be delivered at the back of the Main Street building, taken to the second floor by a rope elevator housed in a small building also used as a car wash, and then carried over to the chapel on a tramway built to connect the two structures. After the funeral, the body would be taken back the same way, loaded in the hearse, and then driven via an alley to Main Street, while the family waited out in front.

When Florian J. died in 1926, his widow sold the business to five partners -- her two brothers-in-law, Ernest and Edward Muehlig; Fred Rogers; and two other employees, Roland Schmid and Emma Graf. The first thing the new owners did was to look for a new location better suited to holding funerals on the premises. In 1928 they found what they were looking for just a block away: the old Lynds house, an 1884 brick Queen Anne that had been designed and constructed by local builder John Gates for Joseph Jacobs, a men's clothier. Jacobs later sold it to Dr. J. B. Lynds, who used it as a private hospital until he died in the 1918 flu epidemic. His sister, Eleanor, then took it over, running it as a rooming house for "business women."

The Muehlig partners remodeled and enlarged their new quarters, adding office space on the Fourth Avenue side, a porte cochere on the William Street side for funeral exits, and a large garage accessible from both sides. Further remodeling was done in 1951 and 1964, and the parking lot was enlarged over the years by moving or tearing down several homes. (One home moved from the neighborhood stands today at 259 Crest.)

The tradition of ownership by a mixture of employees and family members has continued to this day, retiring partners selling their shares to employees who are familiar with the business. The present owners, including Bob Muehlig, the son of Edward, started as employees.

Not much has changed in the sixty years that Muehlig's has occupied the Fourth Avenue house. Bob Muehlig, who has been with the company since 1934, finds the biggest change is in the number of cremations. About 8 percent when he started, it has recently leveled off at about 40 percent. Other than that, it's rare for families to modify funeral services as freely as they do weddings, for example. But, says Neil Bidwell, there is "more participation in the planning of the service by the survivors than in the past." Occasionally a family will write their own eulogy or add poems or music. And from time to time, a family member may actually make the casket.

[Photo caption from original print edition]: Muehlig Funeral Chapel today (above) and in the early 1940's (top).

The Ann Arbor Fluff Rug Company turned old carpets into new

For more than forty years, from 1895 to 1936, thrifty home owners from all over the United States sent their old carpets to Ann Arbor for recycling. At the Ann Arbor Fluff Rug Company, 409-421 West Huron (now replaced by the Performance Network building), worn, shabby carpets were cut and rewoven using machinery developed by owner Henry Schlemmer. The end product was a new rug of a more mottled color than the original but sturdy and strong and usable on both sides.

Schlemmer initially modeled the business after a similar one in Toledo that was, according to his daughter, Geraldine Schlemmer Seeback, "more of a rug cleaning outfit." He offered every conceivable service connected with rugs: sizing, cutting, laying, sewing, repairing, scouring, trading, and buying and selling used rugs. But his biggest business soon became making new rugs out of old.

Schlemmer was born in Ann Arbor in 1864 and grew up on the family farm, which was bounded by the present-day Hoover, Davis, Brown, and Main streets. His father, who had immigrated from Stuttgart, supported the family by drilling wells. Before starting in the rug business, Schlemmer worked as a blacksmith for Staebler and Elmer, makers of road carts and wagons. His training as a blacksmith no doubt gave him some of the know-how to build his rug machines. "He never patented them," says Seeback of the machines. "If he had, we might be rich today. Of course, they are obsolete by now."

Rug prices were high enough back then that recycling was cheaper than buying a new carpet. But even with Schlemmer's machines, the operation was still relatively labor-intensive. When they arrived, all rugs were cleaned and disinfected with formaldehyde. Seeback remembers they were put in a wire bin that spun, shaking the dirt out the bottom. Next, a man named Shepard cut and discarded the totally worn areas. The good parts were then cut into strips approximately two inches wide, with a machine created by Schlemmer. Next, the strips were twisted vertically, again by a machine created by Schlemmer. The strips were then woven with conventional looms. The new rugs, which were softer (if not exactly fluffier) than the originals, could be any size up to nine by twelve feet, depending on the amount of material. The last step was hand-tying the warp into Turkish knots, leaving about four inches of fringe at each end of the rug.

Several old rugs could be combined into one, with the different colors used as stripes or borders. Customers always got back rugs made with their own materials; the only exception was when they needed a larger size than their old carpets could produce and so authorized the company to add extra rugs they had on hand. Some also requested additional materials to brighten the finished product or give it more of a pattern. Chenille curtains and rugs too light or loosely woven to be made into fluff rugs could be made into lighter-weight rugs using the same technology.

When the rugs were finished, they were delivered by horse-drawn cart, either directly to the customer's home if it was in town, or to the Ann Arbor Railroad station on Ashley to be shipped. The cart was pulled by a horse named Nancy, who lived in a barn behind the factory.

Geraldine Schlemmer and her sister, Catherine, made their contribution to the family business by modeling for its advertisements. A picture of Geraldine, still a tiny baby, lying nude on a roll of carpet, was used as the company's logo.

Schlemmer also relied on personal advertising, appearing in parades with floats that displayed his carpets and exhibiting at fairs. He almost lost Geraldine at the 1908 State Fair in Detroit. Still under a year old, she was lying on a fluff rug when a man picked her up and started to run away. Her father sped after him and quickly retrieved her.

The advertising paid off. At one time Schlemmer had fifty agents around the country who could take orders, advise customers on what size rug they could expect from their old one, and arrange for shipping. A 1912 Ann Arbor Fluff Rug Company brochure boasted, "Today you will find our rugs from coast to coast in the most up-to-date homes, churches, theaters, offices, stores, hotels, state capitals, hospitals, charitable institutions, YWCA's, etc."

The staff of the fluff rug company ranged from fifteen to twenty-five and included many Schlemmer family members. Henry Schlemmer's sister, Lydia Schlemmer Carlough, and his widowed sister-in-law, Elizabeth Schlemmer, worked as finishers. Younger brother George worked closely with Henry in the early days, serving as his right-hand man as they developed the rug business. Brother Charlie Schlemmer was a foreman and also drove the wagon. Brother Jake sometimes worked as a cutter. During busy seasons other members of the family were called in.

From 1905 to 1909, family members operated a related business, the Ann Arbor Steam Carpet Cleaning Works, out of the Germania Hall at the corner of Second and William streets (now the parking lot for GT Products). First run by Reuben Schlemmer, husband of Elizabeth, the business was taken over by George Schlemmer after Reuben died. But in 1909 George disappeared and was never seen by the family again. The steam cleaning operation, which also included feather renovation, was absorbed by the fluff rug company and moved to Huron Street.

Henry Schlemmer met his wife, Cortland Ferguson Schlemmer, when she came to work in the rug company office. A widow (her first husband, Jay Ferguson, had been killed in a trolley accident) with a young son, Lee, to support, she was twenty years Henry's junior. Even after the birth of Geraldine and Catherine, it was not unusual for Henry and Cortland to return to work at night, taking the young children with them. When the girls got tired they would just lie down on the piles of rugs and go to sleep. Their parents would wake them when they were ready to go back to their home at 537 Third Street, five blocks away. Catherine usually walked with her mother, while Geraldine rode on the handlebars of her dad's bike. (They never did own a car. If they had somewhere farther to go, for instance to Cortland's parents' farm on Wagner Road, they would ride the company cart with Nancy pulling them.)

Henry Schlemmer retired in 1919. Although he was only fifty-five years old, his health was failing and he no longer felt up to the demands of the business. He sold the company to his longtime bookkeeper, Clarence Cobb, who moved some of the equipment to 1003 Broadway, now a barbershop next to the St. Vincent De Paul store. Elizabeth Schlemmer also stayed with the business. She and Cobb ran the fluff rug company until 1936, but it was never again as big an operation as when Henry Schlemmer owned it. The original building was bought by machine tool innovator Francis La Pointe, who tore it down and built his American Broach factory (now the Performance Network) on the site.

In retirement Schlemmer continued his involvement with the Odd Fellows Lodge, then located in the brick house on Liberty that's now the Moveable Feast. Although totally untrained in music, he could play by ear, and played for all the Odd Fellows' drill teams and marching work. He died in 1945 at age eighty-one.

Geraldine Seeback still has two of her father's rugs, which she is saving to pass on to her two sons. Although both were used in her family's house for many years, they are still in excellent condition, a testimonial to the sturdiness of the product.

[Photo caption from original print edition]: Henry Schlemmer employed many relatives in the business and drafted infant daughter Geraldine to pose for the company's logo. Above right: a fluff rag today (Geraldine Schlemmer Seeback is behind it, holding it up).

The Ecology Center was once an apple-packing plant

The Ecology Center's pre-Civil War building at 417 Detroit is a model of recycling: it was a workshop, store, and factory before becoming an office. The Italianate two-story brick building lies on the triangular block between Detroit Street and Fifth Avenue, its front and back walls parallel to the streets they face rather than to each other. It isn't shown on the 1853 birdseye map of the city, but is found on the 1866 map. It was probably built closer to the earlier date, since Moses Rogers, when he bought the building in 1871, referred to it as "the old and well-known apple-packing house of David Henning."

David Henning started his fruit packing business about 1851. After immigrating from Ireland as a teenager, he learned the cooper's trade (barrel-making) in Detroit and then moved to Ann Arbor to set up. One season he made more barrels than he could sell, and he came up with the idea of filling them with apples in order to sell them off. His scheme worked so well that he soon expanded his operation, selling barrels of apples at outlets all along the Michigan Central railroad line.

Henning's original factory was probably a simple wooden building, which he replaced when he began making money with the brick structure that remains today. Henning later branched out into other businesses, including gas companies located all over the Midwest. When he died in 1901, he was reputed to be one of the wealthiest men in Ann Arbor.

The next owner of the Detroit Street building, Moses Rogers, was also a self-made man. Rogers came from New York State at age twenty-one and first worked as a teamster, driving between Detroit and Ann Arbor. (This was in 1831; the railroad did not come to town until 1839.) He found employment in Chapin's farm implement store and in 1843 started his own implement store on Washington Street (where the Washington Street Station restaurant is now). He did so well that in 1860 he was able to move to much more spacious quarters on Catherine, to what was long known as the White Swan building and is now being remodeled as Market Place. The next year, he bought his family a home at 121 North Division, which is today part of the Division Street Historic District.

In 1866 Rogers sold his building and stock and soon joined in a partnership with John Treadwell and the two bought an old hotel, the Monitor, on the corner of Huron and Second Street and converted it into an implement store. According to an article in the March 8, 1867, Ann Arbor Argus, the plan was for Treadwell to be the proprietor and "avail himself of the aid and experience of Mr. Rogers." Rogers must have thought that after thirty-six years of hard work he could step down to an advisory position, but it was not to be. On April 15, 1870, a fire destroyed a group of neighboring downtown businesses. One casualty was the three-year-old implement business, which was uninsured.

Thus when Rogers bought Henning's building on Detroit Street in 1871, it was to start business anew at an age (sixty-one) when most people are thinking of retirement. Rogers had several advantages in this late-life endeavor, including a great knowledge of the implement business, a good reputation (Beakes's 1906 county history says, "He won an honorable name through the exercise of business principles that neither sought nor required disguise"), and a choice business location. Old Fourth Ward historian Susan Wineberg points out that Detroit Street would have been an excellent site for his business, located as it was on the main route between the railroad station and the downtown area, which in those days clustered around the County Courthouse at Huron and Main.

Moses Rogers lived seventeen years after founding his third business, and he managed to regain his former financial status. His obituary in 1883 described him as "one of the most prosperous merchants of the city."

After Rogers's death, his daughter, Katie, gave up her successful portrait painting career to take over the business, running it successfully for seven years. Katie Rogers had been a dutiful daughter all her life. Trained at the Chicago Academy of Design, where she graduated at the top of her class, she had returned home to set up a studio in her parents' home. She continued her art career, painting portraits of many local dignitaries, including her uncle, Randolph Rogers, a sculptor with an international reputation, and Judge James Kingsley. Her Kingsley portrait hung in the County Courthouse for many years.

Katie sold the implement business to Hurd-Holmes in 1895, enjoying what she could of retirement--by then she was an invalid--until her death in 1901. The business died before she did: the building is listed as vacant in the 1900 city directory.

For a short while (1905-1909) the building was used as a creamery. Then Luick Lumber, located across the street in what is today Kerrytown, started using it for a warehouse. In 1915 a machine shop moved in, and this use continued, under several owners, until 1963.

In 1963, Travis and Demaris Cash, who had started the Treasure Mart in 1960, were looking for a place to expand their inventory to include used clothing. They took a long-term lease on both 417 Detroit and a one-story building next door at 419 that had been built in 1921 as an auto repair shop. They remodeled both buildings, adding shutters, brackets, and window boxes found at the Treasure Mart. The wrought iron fence that today graces both buildings came from Marie Rominger's house, which was torn down to make room for the public library parking lot. The Cashes used the smaller building for the Tree, their second-hand clothes store. They considered turning 417 into a restaurant, possibly with an eating area on the Tree's roof. According to Elaine Johns, their daughter, they were dissuaded by the general opinion that "no one would come down to this area to eat."

For the rest of the 1960's the Cashes sublet the building at 417, first to the Lantern Gallery and then to a used-fur company. When the fur company moved out, they moved the Tree's men's and boys' department into the back half of the first floor of 417.

In 1970, a fledgling activist group, the Ecology Center, was organized to continue working on the issues raised by the first Earth Day on April 22,1970. When it wasn't able to find a storefront in the downtown area, the group decided that the Detroit Street location met its primary objectives of being accessible to the general public and far enough from the U-M to establish it as a community group. "We almost didn't start it here," reminisced Doug Fulton, retired outdoor editor of the Ann Arbor News and first president of the Ecology Center board, in 1985. "There was a lot of work to be done. We had clean-up parties and so forth. It was essentially mostly an old storeroom."

Despite the unpromising start, the Detroit Street site has served the Ecology Center well, as first Kerrytown and then Zingerman's brought increasing numbers of people to the area. But the center's increased activities have far outgrown the available space. "It has a lot of charm, but not enough space for the growing environmental needs of our community," says Nancy Stone, a longtime Ecology Center employee now serving as newsletter editor.

The Ecology Center now functions out of several other locations: the Leslie Science Center, Legal Services, the landfill, and the recycle drop-off station. But Detroit Street, although crowded, still houses the offices of administration, issues development, newsletter, membership, events coordination, and recycling education. Twelve employees plus varying numbers of work study students and volunteers use the space to its maximum.