For actual coverage of the announcement that the Fuller Road Station project has been suspended, see: “UM, Ann Arbor Halt Fuller Road Project.”

John U. Bacon

It’s been five days since the Super Bowl, just enough time to give us a little perspective on the whole thing. Was it a football game? A concert? A competition for the Clio Award? Or some bizarrely American combination of all three?

Let’s start with the least important: The football game. You might have caught bits of it, squeezed between the ads and the show. How could you tell when the game was on? Those were the people who ran really fast, and wore clothes.

For the Super Bowl’s first 30 years, most of the games were boring blowouts. I suspect even the players can’t recall the scores of those snoozers.

But the ads and the halftime shows were hard to forget, and often featured a member of the Jackson family having his hair ignited or her wardrobe mysteriously malfunction.

But lately, it’s been the other way around. Ten of the past 16 games have been barn burners – and the rest of the stuff is putting us to sleep.

This year’s Super Sunday delivered another exciting game, showcasing two big-time quarterbacks battling to the last second. The game even featured a first: one team scored a touchdown against its will. The New York Giants had the ball on New England’s 6-yard line, but they wanted to kill more time off the clock before they scored, so New England wouldn’t have any time left to mount a comeback.

But the Patriots didn’t want the Giants to do that, so they got out of the way like matadors avoiding a raging bull, and let Ahmad Bradshaw run into the endzone untouched. But he didn’t want to score, so he stopped on the one yard line, turned around, all but begging the Patriots to tackle him, and fell backwards into the endzone like Jacques Cousteau flipping into the ocean.

It was almost as strange as the halftime show, when Madonna put forth even less effort.

As a commentator, one of my favorite subjects to address is anything but Madonna. I’ve always considered her a mediocre singer and songwriter, whose main talent is somehow becoming rich and famous with less actual talent than the karaoke singers at your local bowling alley.

So it’s given me great pleasure to ignore her. But this time, I just can’t.

I used to think the worst Super Bowl halftime show had to be the one in 1989, when an Elvis impersonator and magician named Elvis Presto – get it? – managed to both befuddle and bore the crowd at the same time. Which, it now occurs to me, is actually a pretty difficult trick.

But no, Elvis Presto’s musical magic show was positively scintillating compared to Madonna’s performance. I discovered something worse than Madonna singing, and that’s Madonna lip syncing her way through her worn out repertoire and dull dancing. Let us never speak of it again.

The most authentic element of this year’s Super Sunday extravaganza – when the team with the ball did not want to score and the team that didn’t have the ball did not want to stop them, and the women paid millions to sing didn’t sing at all – was an advertisement, of all things, that they’d filmed weeks earlier.

Once again, Chrysler came through with the best two minutes of the entire event, this time thanks to Clint Eastwood.

When Eastwood said, “People are out of work and they’re hurting, and they’re all wondering what they’re gonna do to make a comeback. People of Detroit…almost lost everything,” he delivered the most honest line of the day – then followed that up with an equally convincing declaration: “We find a way through tough times. And if we can’t find a way, then we’ll make one…. This country can’t be knocked out with one punch. We get right back up again and, when we do, the world is gonna hear the roar of our engines.”

When he finished, I was so riveted I was ready to do some actual riveting.

So, a year from now, if you want to see a heartfelt performance, you’ll have to skip the game and the halftime show, and wait for the Chrysler ad.

For the second year in a row, no one did it better.

About the author: John U. Bacon is the author of “Three and Out: Rich Rodriguez and the Michigan Wolverines in the Crucible of College Football.” 

The Chronicle relies in part on regular voluntary subscriptions to support our publication of columnists like John U. Bacon. Click this link for details: Subscribe to The Chronicle. And if you’re already supporting us, please encourage your friends, neighbors and colleagues to help support The Chronicle, too!

John U. Bacon

The most important day of the year for a college football coach is not the home opener, the big rivalry game or even a bowl game. It’s national signing day, which falls on the first Wednesday in February.

On signing day, the end zone is not grass or Astroturf, but a fax machine tray. Only when a signed National Letter of Intent breaks the plane of that tray does it count.

Sounds pretty simple, right? A couple years ago I got a chance to see the sausage get made at close range – and it’s a lot crazier than you imagined.

The coaches start by collecting information on more than a thousand players years in advance. Then they watch hundreds of hours of film, and make dozens of trips across the country – from Pasadena to Pahokee – to meet with hundreds of high school players, their parents and their coaches. They follow that up with thousands of calls, emails and text messages – all in the hopes of getting the 25 players they think will help them win a title a few years later.

That’s bad enough, but now, thanks to ESPN and the Internet, recruiting has become a full-blown season in its own right. It lasts all year – and it’s harder on the coaches than the actual football season is.

The night before signing day, every coach in the country makes his final round of calls to his recruits, just to make sure they’re still on board. If a player flips at the last minute, all the coaches have is air.

They’re also paranoid about sleeping in. One coach I met set no fewer than eleven alarms: two clocks on the left bed stand, two on the right, and two battery-powered clocks on his bureau in case the power went out, plus three cell phone alarms spread around the house, and two more alarm clocks downstairs – all set at five minute intervals.

That’s how important this day is to the coaches – and how exhausted they are when it finally arrives.

They drive to the parking lot long before the sun comes up, open a silent building, turn on the heat and the lights on their way to the meeting room, then put ESPN-U on the big screen, and drop boxes of donuts and huge bags of McDonald’s on the table, plus plenty of coffee for everyone. It ain’t healthy.

During the final six weeks of recruiting season, most of the coaches gained 10 to 20 pounds. “You see what this does to us,” one told me, “and you figure this has got to wear the kids out too. Got to.”

Bleary-eyed and exhausted from six weeks of non-stop, no-days-off recruiting hell, the coaches settle in, waiting for 17-year old kids to determine their collective fate. Some of them go so far as to drag desk chairs into the copy room to babysit the fax machine. Nothing, but nothing, is left to chance.

One of them told me, “This is like game day. It’s miserable.”

It gets more miserable when a five-star recruit you’ve courted for years starts his press conference with three baseball caps in front of him, each with the logo of a school he’s considering. Then he asks some mysterious advisor behind him – some guy you’ve never seen before – to pick the cap of the school he’ll attend. And the mystery man picks some school out West.

Years ago, former Michigan athletic director Don Canham asked one of his coaches how recruiting was going. The coach said it was going well but could be great if he landed the player everyone in the nation wanted.

“What are your chances?” Canham asked.

“The key is always the mom,” the coach said. Then added, with a grin, “And the mom loves Michigan.”

A few months later, Canham asked him if he’d landed that big star.

“No,” he said. “But the mom is coming to Michigan!”

The year I watched, after every recruit’s fax had come in, the coaches celebrated by walking back to their offices to watch tape of recruits for the next class. The interim between recruiting classes lasted exactly nine minutes.

I don’t care what those guys get paid. I would never trade.

About the author: John U. Bacon is the author of “Three and Out: Rich Rodriguez and the Michigan Wolverines in the Crucible of College Football.” 

The Chronicle relies in part on regular voluntary subscriptions to support our publication of columnists like John U. Bacon. Click this link for details: Subscribe to The Chronicle. And if you’re already supporting us, please encourage your friends, neighbors and colleagues to help support The Chronicle, too!

The Ann Arbor Chronicle currently has no plans to implement a choice of "skins" for the website, especially not one that would allow readers to view the publication as if it were printed on the scales of a dragon we slew.

Some eagle-eyed regular readers might have noticed that in the spot on the “masthead” where the current date used to sit are now four links: Civic News Ticker • Stopped. Watched. • Comments • Events. We’re also expecting the sad grey box at the top of the left sidebar to be retired sometime soon.

This does not signal that a major design change is in the offing. We have no plans, for example, to implement a choice of “skins” for the website, especially not one that would allow readers to view the publication as if it were printed on the scales of a dragon we slew.

That initial change – swapping out the masthead date with links we’d like to highlight – was prompted by some confusion that resulted from the appearance of a current date … on the same page as an article originally published three years ago.

It’s actually somewhat encouraging that The Chronicle has now been around long enough that this kind of confusion could result.

What I’d like to share with readers this month is a little vignette from the city council’s last meeting, which concluded near midnight – so I was draggin’ tail. And the vignette itself is a little dragon tale.

The last thought that registered in my head at the end of the council’s Jan. 23 session, which included more than 50 turns of public commentary, was this: Well, you know, dragons live in caves and breathe fire! It was a perfectly natural thought to entertain sitting there in the council chambers, filing the final briefs from the meeting for The Chronicle’s Civic News Ticker.

It was a thought prompted by Alan Haber’s public commentary at the end of the meeting. He’d addressed the council on the topic of a fundamental human right – to come in out of the cold and sit in the cave by the fire. The dragon connection was easy, because Thomas Partridge had preceded Haber at the public commentary podium and alluded to Ward 2 councilmember Jane Lumm, contending she had a “dragon lady” attitude.

And that served to reinforce the dragon-themed wishes that came from Ward 1 councilmember Sabra Briere over four hours earlier, near the start of the meeting – she’d wished everyone a happy Chinese New Year. It’s the year of the dragon, folks.

So in terms of the Chinese zodiac, this is my year. From the two years Chronicle publisher Mary Morgan and I spent living in China, I have a vague recollection that it’s a hugely positive thing to be born in a dragon year. Apparently it’s a pretty big deal, and Mary is awfully lucky to be married to someone who’s described by one authoritative source this way: “And due to their hunger for power, Dragons are not well suited to growing old. The prospect of losing power, the helpless feeling of youthful strength ebbing away is unbearable to them. Irritable and stubborn, the Dragon is a real big mouth and his words often outrun his thoughts.”

Words outrunning thoughts is a pretty apt description for this month’s milestone. So I’ll conclude by echoing Sabra Briere’s thoughts: Happy Chinese New Year!

About the writer: Dave Askins is editor and co-founder of The Ann Arbor Chronicle. The Chronicle could not survive to count each milestone without regular voluntary subscriptions to support our coverage of local government and civic affairs. Click this link for details: Subscribe to The Chronicle. And if you’re already supporting us, please encourage your friends, neighbors and colleagues to help support The Chronicle, too!

Nellie Smith* heard someone coming up the stairs and sat up in bed. She could see her breath in the late-winter afternoon light. Perhaps he had left something behind. She glanced around the room. There was nothing on the table, the chair, or the stove with the broken leg propped on a brick.

Knocks sounded. Nellie stood, shook out her ragged nightgown, and opened the door an inch. The friendly gaze of a middle-aged woman in a trim winter coat and long dark skirts met Nellie’s cautious look.

Harriet Gilbert as she looked around the time she was first elected Ypsilanti Home Association president in 1875, an office she held for over 30 years.

Lizzie Swaine introduced herself, apologized for the intrusion, and said there’d been word of a little difficulty at this Washington Street address. It felt cold here, she said – did Nellie have any fuel in the house? No, said Nellie, nor food either. Lizzie asked a few more questions, reassured her that help was coming, thanked her for her time, and left. Likely the women’s interaction was similar to this imagined scene.

What is a matter of record is that some days later Lizzie joined twelve other women for the May 1896 Ypsilanti Home Association meeting at Lovina Briggs’ Huron Street home. As Lizzie described Nellie’s plight, she may have noticed some raised eyebrows. The ladies discussed the case. Later, Association secretary Cleantha Dickinson paraphrased the talk in the 1896 meeting minutes logbook.

“Mrs. Swaine came to present the case of Mrs. Smith,” she wrote, “whom she found without a fire and about to be turned out of her rooms because she could not pay her rent.”

She continued, “Investigation among the ladies proved that the woman had a father and brother in comfortable circumstances who would not help the woman unless she behaved herself … it was found that she had been under arrest for keeping a disorderly house,” a euphemism referring at that time to prostitution.

She concluded, “The ladies decided they could not help her while she persisted in wrong doing.” Luckily, Nellie was an exception – the group helped most of those cases that came before it. 

Long before federal or state social welfare agencies, the Ypsilanti Home Association was a homegrown ladies’ charity group founded in 1857 as an auxiliary of New York’s American Female Guardian Society, which operated a “Home for the Friendless.” Any woman could join the YHA for five cents [a little over a dollar in today’s money]. Schoolgirls could also join, and were exempted from the fee if they sewed one garment to give to the “Home.” The first donation box mailed to New York contained a variety of handmade clothing and bedding, and some beans.

Initially held in members’ homes and later in various Ypsi churches, the afternoon meetings began with a Bible reading and prayer, followed by roll call and member reports of needy cases. Two women from each of Ypsilanti’s then-five wards composed the executive committee, which undertook home visits and had the authority to distribute donations.

In addition to donations sent to New York, the ladies also assisted the poor in Ypsilanti. In 1863 the group chose a closer-to-home beneficiary, the “Detroit Home of the Friendless.” Seventeen years later, the YHA decided that the Detroit group was self-sufficient. Thereafter the Association’s energies turned exclusively to the Ypsi poor.

Over the decades, the YHA’s help took many forms. Shoes were purchased for a child who could not attend school barefoot in the winter. The ladies made numerous bedsheets and comforters. The group took charge of distributing Thanksgiving food donated to Ypsi churches. One meeting was held with the ladies sitting around a rectangular quilt frame, sewing as they listened.

The YHA distributed firewood, winter coats, furniture, and jars of homemade jam. They graciously thanked area farmers for donations of vegetables. They accepted 126 loaves of bread from a city-wide baking contest. During the Civil War, the YHA sent items to the Soldier’s Aid Society. They even paid for a length of sidewalk in front of the home of a man who couldn’t afford the city-assessed cost.

They asked the city council to supply a better grade of coal for the municipal free allotment to the poor, unsuccessfully. On another occasion, they approached the council again, this time with a formal petition requesting that the city’s scrap wood, offered to the poor as fuel, be sawed into stove lengths instead of four foot long chunks, to save the recipients the cost of taking it to a sawmill. They succeeded.

It seems a small victory, but the ladies of the YHA were exercising their collective social power in one of the few ways then viewed as appropriate for women. They had no vote, limited rights, and access to only a very few types of female employment regarded as acceptable. Given these societal constraints, the YHA offered Ypsi women a means of effecting change in their community and gaining authority and influence within the vehicle of Christian charity.

In an era that drew a sharp distinction between privation caused by misfortune versus questionable morals, the ladies of the Association withheld their charity on occasion, as in Nellie’s case. In the fall and winter of 1888-89, they refused help to the Moffett family, Jane Wesson, and a Mrs. Gordon, for unrecorded reasons. At the February 1892 meeting “the ladies made a vigorous protest against assisting a family where the father of the family was able to work.” The member who had given aid was Lura Parsons, who again met with disapproval at the March 1894 meeting. Lura reported that she had given money to a recent arrival from northern Michigan. The other ladies declared “the man was wholly unreliable and unworthy of assistance. Mrs. Parsons was [demoted] to only assist in case of hunger or sickness.”

This friction was rare in the group’s decades of good works, at least judging by the surviving minutes. The majority of meetings were productive and upbeat. One acclaimed president elected in 1875, Harriet Gilbert, retained the office for over three decades.

Harriet Gilbert as she appeared in 1910 at age 80, a few weeks before her death.

The YHA won community respect early in its long tenure. Within a year of its founding, schoolchildren, Normal (Eastern Michigan University) students, merchants, farmers, and residents began to channel donations of goods and money to the YHA.

Recognition also came through visits by such distinguished guest speakers as local and Detroit ministers. In July of 1864, even Sojourner Truth gave a talk to the group. The visit was a stop on her train trip from her Grand Rapids home to the White House, where the former slave met Abraham Lincoln. Her direct, impassioned manner of speaking may have been a bit overpowering to the YHA ladies. “Judging from observation,” noted the meeting minutes, “some present thought ‘distance’ would have lent ‘enchantment to the view.’”

Later, after years of experience, the group seemed to regard the local poor with a proprietary attitude. When one family’s home burned down in the fall of 1907, neighbors showered the family with money, furniture, and clothes. This irked the YHA. In the October 9, 1907 Ypsilanti Daily Press, an open letter from the association urged the community to “end the indiscriminate giving, especially of money … [instead, to the YHA’s executive committee] may be sent either a notice of contributions … or the things themselves.” It didn’t help that the family’s father had a vague but troubling connection to a recent Huron River drowning.

Active during the Depression, the YHA played a major role all over town in helping with or coordinating such projects as preserving food or making clothes. The group was shocked when in 1935 President Roosevelt introduced new legislation, including the Social Security program, that would federalize social welfare programs, to be administered top-down by the states.

The State of Michigan demanded that the YHA submit papers to Lansing proving that the group had been disbanded. The YHA debated what to do, and a read between the lines suggests that their initial response seems to have been polite yet strategic stalling.

By the April 1935 meeting the group could stall no longer. “In regard to our dissolution papers,” reads the title to one section of the 1935 logbook, “A motion was made by Mrs. Weber and seconded by Miss Minor that a personal talk with the Secretary of State might be more effective than correspondence. She moved that we drive over to Lansing and settle matters.”

And they did. Like many other local charities, the YHA worked out an agreement whereby they could continue their charity work, even as federal funds flowed in. The group lasted until just after World War II, when the YHA reduced its meetings to only two a year. It apparently disbanded in 1946.

For nearly a century the YHA had spearheaded charity work in Ypsilanti. The thousands they helped had good meals, warm clothes, and a bit of relief and hope thanks to the association’s enduring efforts.

*Surnames of charity recipients have been changed.

Mystery Artifact

In the previous column, cmadler correctly guessed that the object in question was a nutcracker.

Mystery artifact.

It really doesn’t work very well, though, which may be why only one person recognized its purported function.

Those little plier-like crackers are far better.

At any rate.

This column’s mystery artifact is a recent acquisition by the Ypsilanti Historical Museum. I stumbled upon it while nosing through the back storage area in the Archives where I volunteer.

It’s a gorgeous old machine … and yet such an enigmatic one! What was it and what was it used for? Take your best guess!

Laura Bien is the author of “Tales from the Ypsilanti Archives” and “Hidden History of Ypsilanti.” Contact her at ypsidixit@gmail.com.

The Chronicle relies in part on regular voluntary subscriptions to support our columnists like Laura Bien and other contributors. If you’re already supporting The Chronicle, please encourage your friends, neighbors and coworkers to do the same. Click this link for details: Subscribe to The Chronicle.

John U. Bacon

The rivalry between Michigan and Ohio State in football is one of the best in the country. But it obscures the fact that, in just about every other sport, Michigan’s main rival is Michigan State.

In men’s basketball, there’s no team either school would rather beat than the other. The problem is, for a rivalry to really catch on, both sides need to be at the top of their game. Think of Bo versus Woody, Borg-McEnroe and, of course, Ali-Frazier, which required three death-defying fights just to determine that one of them might have been slightly better than the other.

The Michigan-Michigan State basketball rivalry, in contrast, usually consists of at least one lightweight. When Michigan got to the NCAA final in 1976, Michigan State had not been to the tournament in 17 years.

When Michigan State won the NCAA title in 1979, Michigan finished in the bottom half of the Big Ten.

When Michigan won back-to-back Big Ten titles in 1985 and ‘86, State wasn’t close. And when State rolled up four straight Big Ten titles under Tom Izzo, Michigan was headed for probation, and yet another coach.

Around that time, Izzo told me there was no reason, given the basketball talent in this state, that this rivalry could not be every bit as good as Duke and North Carolina. But for more than a decade, it was anything but. Izzo owned Michigan, winning 18 of 21 games through 2010.

But Michigan managed to sweep State last year for the first time in 13 years. And on Tuesday night, for only the fifth time in the rivalry’s long history, Michigan and Michigan State both entered their contest ranked in the top 20.

This was it. The rivalry finally looked like a rivalry.

The stage had improved, too. Crisler Arena used to be too dark and too warm, with seats that were too soft and students scattered high among the gold seats, with a jazz band, for some reason, playing standards more suited to a smoky night club than a basketball arena. Crisler was set up not for an intense basketball game, but a Saturday matinee – or a nap.

But the place has been redone. They added lights, then tore out a section of cushy seats and replaced them with wooden benches nobody wants to sit in, and put the students there – who stand the entire game anyway. They’ve reserved the endzone for the pep band, which plays – here’s a novel idea – band music. Now the place actually gives an advantage to the home team.

But none of the improved “atmospherics” could change the fact that the Wolverines hadn’t beaten a top 10 Spartan team since a guy named Magic Johnson played for the green and white. Yes, that’s 1979.

Tuesday’s game actually lived up to its billing, with the battle raging for the full 40 minutes. Michigan built an 11-point lead, State erased it, then it was back-and-forth the rest of the way. With just 36 seconds left, the Wolverines took a one-point lead. But with just one shot, State could take the game.

The arena was electric – something it had not been for decades. With just three seconds left, State’s Draymond Green drove to the basket, jumped up, and fired. The ball hit the backboard, then the rim – and out. They got the rebound, put it back up – and missed. The ball landed into the hands of Tim Hardaway, Jr., who launched it into the air to start the celebration.

To be sure, it was a big victory for the Wolverines.

But it could be bigger than that: the start of a truly great rivalry.

About the author: John U. Bacon is the author of “Three and Out: Rich Rodriguez and the Michigan Wolverines in the Crucible of College Football.” 

The Chronicle relies in part on regular voluntary subscriptions to support our publication of columnists like John U. Bacon. Click this link for details: Subscribe to The Chronicle. And if you’re already supporting us, please encourage your friends, neighbors and colleagues to help support The Chronicle, too!

David Erik Nelson

My first job out of college was teaching humanities at a Hippie School for Troubled Youth here in Ann Arbor. Soon after being hired, I attended a school mixer where the dean cornered me in the kitchen and explained that some trucks hauling radioactive waste were scheduled to cut through downtown Ann Arbor.

She suggested we go down and protest by lying down in Main Street and generally boondoggling things up and teaching those bastards a valuable lesson about hauling nuclear waste down our streets [1].

At the time I was lightly anti-nuke. I had been militantly opposed just a few years earlier – and even protested Fermi II in the early ‘90s, when it was in disrepair and operating with questionable regard for public safety – but had since calmed down and learned a bit more about the costs and benefits of various kinds of power generation [2]. Nonetheless, even in my decidedly less-nukes mindset, I was still struck with how backward this protest plan seemed.

It’s no secret that Ann Arbor is a sorta foot-draggy, NIMBY kind of town [3]. Most of us came here from somewhere else; we loved this quaint little town when we landed here in 1975, or ‘85, or ‘95, and we basically don’t want it to ever change (except for the streets getting cleaner, the stores better stocked, and the parking both cheaper and more plentiful – but for God’s sake don’t tear anything down or build anything tall to do it. Also, could you do something about those football games? So loud, and the crowds – UGH!).

NIMBY Nukes

The proposed anti-nuke-waste-trucks sit-in would have been a classically NIMBY maneuver: There was no discussion of eradicating nuclear energy in general, just keeping this waste from traversing our streets.

From an economic standpoint, the bulk of such NIMBY maneuvers are classic zero-sum games: The gains on one side translate to losses for someone else. Take this nuke-hauling hypothetical [4]: If there had been nuclear waste and if we had protested it by generally bolloxing up Main Street, that wouldn’t have made the radioactive waste cease to exist; it would have simply shifted the hauling to a community with fewer resources – not just fewer resources to rouse the rabble on that day, but fewer resources to respond to an emergency if one occurred, and less mind-share to grab the national spotlight in the case of such an incident. For the sake of comparison, which story do you think is more likely to start a media scrum:

Mishandling of Radioactive Waste Contaminates Michigan Football Stadium

or

Concerns Over Nuclear Mishaps in Covert Township

Extra points if you know that the Covert Township in my fake headline is the name of a real township. And a special bonus if you know where it is without Google Maps. And a bonus point on top of that if you know it refers to real problems at Michigan’s Palisades facility, now rated among the nation’s worst nuclear reactors.

Sure, keeping nuclear waste trucks off your streets is textbook MBA-style risk management – i.e., offload as much risk as you can while retaining as much benefit as possible – but it’s shitty neighboring.

If I Had No Peanut Butter

In December, I was reminded of the NIMBY nuclear waste that didn’t get trucked down Main Street. WARNING: This is gonna seem very left-fieldy; just play along for about a paragraph or so and it’ll all come together. December is when Gene Marks – a white, middle-aged, well-meaning contributor to the Forbes blog – basically painted a big dumb Internet bulls-eye on himself with a very earnest, profoundly uninformed column called “If I Were a Poor Black Kid” [5].

The Forbes blog post is very short and very earnest, but just in case you don’t want to click through and read it yourself, the nutshell is basically everything any other clueless, well-meaning, affluent white technologist would advise a child in a socio-economic situation he (the technologist) clearly cannot begin to fathom: Study hard! Buy a cheap computer! Try to get a scholarship to a private school! Build a time machine, go back to December 1997 and buy lots and lots of Apple stock!

To be fair, Marks doesn’t offer that last nugget, but he might as well. When I think about the kids to whom Gene Marks is offering his advice, I think about the kids in the school where my wife teaches. It’s a basically functional school in metro Detroit, serving the children of the faltering middle class (many black, many white, some “other”). Every weekend her school distributes backpacks to just the sort of kids Marks is talking about (not in terms of race, but in terms of socio-economic prospects). These backpacks contain food to carry those kids from Friday to Monday.

Food. Just plain, old, basic food: mac & cheese, bread, apples, tuna. Donations to support this program – which come largely from the immediate community – were down in December, so her school had to stop including peanut butter in those bags.

Again, this is a basically functional community, and these are the “poor black kids” in question, and you’re telling them: Buy a computer (?!?). You’re telling them: Somehow get yourself up to Bloomfield Hills and try to talk someone into giving you one of the handful of scholarships to Cranbrook-Kingswood or Detroit Country Day (?!?). Pardon me, Mr. Marks, but if those same kids respond by telling you to fuck off with your earnest, stupid, insulting advice, I’m just gonna have to take my Cranbrook-educated booksmarts and assert that – aside from falling prey to the sophomoric tendency to use strong words to cover weak writing – they have a valid point, sir.

Why, Maybe, There’s No Peanut Butter

Setting aside the stupid, patronizing, totally uninformed advice, the real problem with a column like “If I Were a Poor Black Kid” is that it implicitly insists that whatever the problem is, it’s that black kid’s problem. It insists that the conditions that make Detroit unlivable (or West Philly or wherever) originate in Detroit (or wherever). Isn’t that akin to believing that some big swaths of forest in northern Ukraine and southern Belarus spontaneously became dangerously radioactive, as though some occult hand smote them, independent of human influence?

Perhaps the violence, joblessness, squalor, drugs, and crime of Detroit (or wherever) did not spring spontaneously from those vacant, poisoned lots. Maybe we exported all of that from our own affluent communities (see, e.g., the drug trade; at least where I grew up in the metro area this was a business operated in Detroit, Southfield, and Oak Park – i.e., economically depressed post-industrial husks – for the benefit of Farmington Hills, Bloomfield Hills, and Birmingham).

This, then, is the dark harvest of our NIMBYism, which at its heart is a heartless, but perfectly above-board, corporate-style cost shifting: We force the weak to accept our risk while we strip the value out of their communities.

Back In MY Backyard: IMBY

Fortunately, now that the problem becomes visible, the solution is clear: Going IMBY.

Isn’t that the most ethical path? Shouldn’t we perhaps insist that the most dangerous or challenging problems stay in our backyards, where we with the clout and wherewithal are best able – and most motivated – to address them? And, oh crap, what do those solutions look like?

Is it really telling a kid who can’t afford peanut butter to go buy a computer? Is it empowering families to flee “failing” schools rather than asking all of us – those using the schools, and those of us simply benefiting from their continued existence – to maybe pony up and fix the damn things? Is it protesting the trucks and reactors even while burning the coal keeps killing asthmatics? Is it protesting the coal while the solar cells are built in China by underage workers?

Or is it suddenly protesting revisions to an emergency manager law in Michigan, even while we’ve been content for decades to let some of our Michigan cities rot from the top down? Is Detroit’s real problem whatever emergency manager might come, or the fact that the rest of us spent forty years insisting that the D wasn’t in our backyard at all?

Anyhow, radioactive toxic waste in my backyard is what I think about when our political action takes the form of protesting in front of a rich dude’s house in Ann Arbor to register our distress about a law some other rich dudes passed in Lansing to govern some way of fixing what’s wrong in Flint, Benton Harbor and Detroit – where the poor black kids can’t afford peanut butter, but sure better study hard, buy a computer, build a time machine, and stay the hell out of our backyards.

[1] I recognize that there are some problems with this anecdote, the first being: If you’re afraid of nuclear contamination, it sorta makes more sense to usher the trucks through your community with due haste, not waylay them for hours while a shaggy guy with a bullhorn argues with cops. (This was back before universal police militarization; when I protested at Fermi II the cops who showed up did get in fistfights with some of the more aggressive protesters. But those cops were wearing day-to-day uniforms and plain old hats, wielded no clubs or chemicals, and mostly rolled their eyes and asked what we thought we were accomplishing by blocking the delivery gates on a Sunday.)

But, more to the essence, why would anyone voluntarily haul any rig down Main Street? It’s narrow, heavily trafficked by pedestrians and possible terrorists, there is no way to avoid being snared by every damn traffic light, and you average a swift walking pace. Of course, this was all long before we entered Terror Reality (!!!), so no one was worried about suicide jihadi movie-plots, but still: From where to where would you need to haul what, in order for Main Street Ann Arbor to be the shortest path? There are only three civil reactors in Michigan: Fermi (in Monroe), Cook (near Bridgman), and the Palisades facility (near South Haven).

I believe this no-nukes educator may have been thinking about the Ford Nuclear Reactor (aka, “The Phoenix Reactor”), University of Michigan’s training reactor (which was active until 2003), but it still seems hard to believe that the Department of Energy would ever chart the shortest path from North Campus to the freeway through the most densely populated corridor in the county. (As an aside to this aside, my dad was purportedly misplaced into some sort of reactor maintenance course in the 1960s. Being an art and architecture student, he was both unqualified for and uninterested in this course of study. Being a college kid in the ‘60s, he also neglected to straighten out this scheduling error prior to the end of add/drop. According to family lore he ultimately almost caused a small meltdown. I believe he failed the course.)

[2] At the risk of pushing too many hot buttons and totally derailing our discussion, I have to confess that, having put together a classroom reference book on the Chernobyl disaster, I’m now hesitantly slightly pro-nuke, if only for the following grim calculus: If we have a major nuclear disaster, there may be hundreds of deaths, as well as long-term lingering health repercussions for life in the immediate geographic area. Burning coal always and annually results in tens of thousands of deaths and major health problems for those in the immediate area of normally operating facilities. This is depressing math, but it is certain. Given the choice, you definitely want a normally operating nuclear reactor in your backyard instead of any sort of hydrocarbon operation.

[3] “Not In My Backyard!” As in, “Yes, we badly need a new homeless shelter. I totally support a referendum, too – hold up … you wanna build it where? But my property values!”

[4] And hypothetical it was: No action was ever taken – heck, I couldn’t even establish if anything remotely radioactive was ever hauled down Main Street. Later I learned that the dean in question was quite possibly inebriated during our discussion, which sort of reframed everything.

[5] Pundits large and small consequently piled on to Marks with glee throughout the holiday season. Much of that was standard rebuttals and tear downs, but Marks also inspired some excellent – if chilling – responses. Ta-Nehisi Coates’s sticks out as the best, and legitimately qualifies as a broad-reaching must-read. If you’ve ever looked at any historical injustice and thought something like “What the hell was up with you, Germany? I would have been Righteous Among the Nations had I been there!” then you really need to take Coates’s claim to heart.

About the author: David Erik Nelson has written columns previously for The Chronicle on topics like medical marijuana and glass-eating clowns. Nelson is the author of various books, including most recently, “Snip, Burn, Solder, Shred“. His Nebula-nominated novella “Tucker Teaches the Clockies to Copulate” is now available for Kindle.

The Chronicle relies in part on regular voluntary subscriptions to support our publication of local columnists like David Erik Nelson. Click this link for details: Subscribe to The Chronicle. And if you’re already supporting us, please encourage your friends, neighbors and colleagues to help support The Chronicle, too!

John U. Bacon

The college football bowl season has always been a little crazy – but most of that used to be fun crazy. Lately, though, it’s been turning bad crazy – and fast. Here’s why.

Michigan played in the first ever bowl game against Stanford on New Year’s Day in 1902. The Wolverines won, 49-0 – but didn’t play another bowl game for 46 years.

Pasadena didn’t host another game until 1916, and no other bowl games even existed until 1935, when the Sugar Bowl, the Orange Bowl, and the Sun Bowl all started, followed two years later by the Cotton Bowl. But the games were just glorified exhibitions, created to reward a few teams with a nice trip, and promote southern cities.

That started to change in 1948, when Michigan’s Fritz Crisler played matchmaker between the current Big Ten and the Pac-12, who started sending their league champions to play each other at the Rose Bowl every New Year’s Day. If you were second place, you only got to play in a bowl if your league champion repeated, because the university presidents didn’t want their teams to go to a bowl game two years in a row.

Bowl games were considered so insignificant that Notre Dame didn’t bother to go to any bowl games from 1926 until 1970 – and still won seven national titles during that stretch.

But when Michigan’s undefeated, fourth-ranked 1973 team tied top-ranked Ohio State, and was denied a trip to Pasadena by a vote of athletic directors, the Big Ten ended its 25-year-old ban, and let any team in the league go to any bowl game that would have them.

Since then the number of bowl games has more than tripled, from 11 to 35, and they’re spread out over a month. New Year’s Day used to be reserved for the four best bowl games, with a national title determined that day. This year not one college team played on New Year’s Day – the NFL took it over – but 24 teams played in the new year, well into the start of the semester for many schools.

On January 8 – January 8! – Northern Illinois played Arkansas State in the Godaddy.com Bowl. How many things are wrong with that sentence? Is there anything right about it?

Then, the next day – scratch that – the next night, on Monday, Alabama played Louisiana State in the long-awaited national championship game. The game ended close to midnight. How many kids stayed up that late on a school night? Let’s hope none.

The bowl games were expanded to generate money – for the bowls and networks, mind you, not the schools, and certainly not the players. Dozens of teams lost hundreds of thousands of dollars, and their students got little more than injuries. Many of the stadiums were half-filled, and the national title game got the lowest TV ratings in a decade. As one of my friends said, “It’s January ninth. We’ve already moved on.”

And now, of course, the fans and writers are calling for a playoff system. Yes, clearly, we need more games, all played by unpaid athletes who don’t get a cent more, win or lose, while their coaches can get millions in bonuses for a single bowl victory.

Do not ask for whom the buck tolls. It tolls for the adults, not the kids.

Why do we need a playoff? To determine a true national champion, we’re told. Will removing all doubt about who’s college football’s national champion really make our lives that much better? Back in 1997, one poll named Michigan the national champion, and the other named Nebraska. Neither team asked for a playoff to settle the issue, and both schools still claim the title. What’s so horrible about that?

Since then they changed to system to produce only one national champion each year. Has our happiness gone up accordingly?

We need fewer games, not more. The more they make college football mimic pro football, the more of a minor league it becomes, the less special it is.

The people who understand the actual appeal of college football the least, happen to be the very leaders who are changing it the most.

About the author: John U. Bacon is the author of “Three and Out: Rich Rodriguez and the Michigan Wolverines in the Crucible of College Football.” 

The Chronicle relies in part on regular voluntary subscriptions to support our publication of columnists like John U. Bacon. Click this link for details: Subscribe to The Chronicle. And if you’re already supporting us, please encourage your friends, neighbors and colleagues to help support The Chronicle, too!

John U. Bacon

The Big Ten is still considered one of the nation’s top leagues, despite its frequent belly flops in bowl games. This year, the Big Ten placed a record 10 teams in bowl games – then watched them drop, one by one. And not just in the storied Rose Bowl, but in games like the Taxslayer.com Gator Bowl, the Meineke Car Care Bowl of Texas, and the Insight Bowl. When Iowa got whipped 31-14, I wonder just how much insight they had gained.

Until Monday, Big Ten teams had managed to win only two games: the Little Caesars Pizza Bowl in Detroit, over Western Michigan, and the Kraft Fight Hunger Bowl, over a team that had a losing record and no coach. In non-food based bowls, the Big Ten had no luck at all.

Then, Michigan State came to the rescue. The Spartans beat Michigan during the regular season, they won their division, and they seemed poised to win the Big Ten’s first conference championship game until one of their players was called for “roughing the punter.” This is on a par with giving the class nerd noogies– and about as serious. But it cost them the game.

Their reward for all this? An invitation to a less prestigious bowl game than Michigan received. The Spartans were ticked off – and rightly so.

After Georgia jumped out to a 16-0 lead at the half, the Spartans came back to tie the game in the final seconds. And that’s when things got really nutty. In the first overtime, the Georgia kicker missed a chance at a game-winning field goal. Then, in the third overtime, the Spartans blocked his kick to win. Small wonder college coaches knock back Rolaids like Chiclets.

Michigan’s road to redemption was even crazier – and far longer.

When Bo Schembechler famously told his first team that “Those who stay will be champions,” they had to put up with him and his crazy methods for just a few months before being rewarded with a historic upset over Ohio State.

Michigan’s current senior class, however, had to put up with much more – including detractors outside and inside the program – for three years.

At the team banquet a year ago, Zac Ciullo took the podium to defend his teammates. “We received the harshest criticism of any Michigan team. [But] all the fire and turmoil has only made us stronger.”

Ciullo’s teammates proved him right after Michigan fired Rich Rodriguez. That same day, David Molk addressed his teammates. “If we don’t stay together, we’ll never make it. I don’t want to see anyone leaving.”

They did not leave. They stuck together – every game. They won all but two of them, earning a bid to the Sugar Bowl against Virginia Tech.

A few hours before the game, Ryan Van Bergen told his Facebook friends that he and his teammates had been called “losers, disappointments, embarrassments. Tonight that changes.”

The Wolverines had plenty of problems in that game, but a lack of passion was not among them. They played their best when it mattered the most – and in overtime, thanks to another missed kick, they pulled the victory.

Did they deserve to win? That’s being debated right now.

But for anybody who was in that meeting room, when these seniors started leading their team before they even had a coach, there can be no debate this class deserved to go out champions.

After all, they stayed.

About the author: John U. Bacon is the author of “Three and Out: Rich Rodriguez and the Michigan Wolverines in the Crucible of College Football.” 

The Chronicle relies in part on regular voluntary subscriptions to support our publication of columnists like John U. Bacon. Click this link for details: Subscribe to The Chronicle. And if you’re already supporting us, please encourage your friends, neighbors and colleagues to help support The Chronicle, too!

Not long after midnight, the Kerrytown neighborhood was treated to several tunes played by a group of folks Joe O'Neal had gathered up. Among the songs was "Danny Boy," performed by Chronicle editor Dave Askins. Joe's daughter, Heather O'Neal, guided performers by pointing to the notes as they played.

The Chronicle spent part of its New Year’s Eve – the midnight part – at a small gathering in Kerrytown Market & Shops. Owner Joe O’Neal credits Mary Cambruzzi, proprietor of FOUND Gallery, with the idea: Open up the building for a few people to toast the new year with champagne or sparkling juice, and give people a chance to ring in 2012 by playing the carillon.

We were able to join the small event, because earlier in the day on New Year’s Eve, I happened to run into Joe at the Ann Arbor farmers market.

As Joe and I chatted, he showed me a new alcove outside the building – with benches and a plaque – honoring Ginny Johansen, a former Ann Arbor city councilmember and farmers market supporter who died last year. We also talked about the success of this year’s KindleFest, which on one night in early December drew several thousand people to Kerrytown. The regular stores stayed open late, and the farmers market was filled with vendors – selling everything from holiday greenery to glühwein. The energy of the crowds was exhilarating, and made me wish for more events like that.

In that context, Joe mentioned the New Year’s Eve gathering later that night, and invited us to drop by and play the carillon. Though it’s been a small affair for the past couple of years, he sees the possibility for more. His vision 10 years from now is to draw 10,000 people to Kerrytown on New Year’s Eve. Maybe someone could build a sort of reverse Times Square ball, he said, that would shoot up instead of dropping down. There could be fireworks. And carillon-playing, of course.

His vision made me think of how some of the most special things in this town start small, with one or two people thinking just a little bit bigger. So in this month’s Chronicle milestone column, I’d like to share a few thoughts on that as we head into the new year.

Making Connections

Since launching The Chronicle in 2008, I’ve been struck by how our publication’s narrow focus – covering local government and civic affairs – actually cuts across a relatively large cross-section of this community. At some point, even people who have no ongoing interest in local government have some reason to brush up against it.

That interaction with government might stem from dissatisfaction about some action the city council or staff has taken – like eliminating the service of Christmas tree pickup. Or it might be prompted by someone’s desire to encourage the city council to take future action – like maintain funding for public art.

People who might otherwise never contemplate attending a public meeting might be drawn to attend a forum to find out what changes the city staff have planned for their neighborhood park. Folks who would ordinarily never show up to listen to city council deliberations might find themselves at a meeting being recognized with a proclamation honoring their achievements.

As we arrived at Kerrytown near midnight on New Year’s Eve, I thought about the cross-section of the community we typically chronicle. Joe is not exactly a usual suspect at public meetings, but we’ve encountered him for at least two reasons over the last three years. In his role as owner of O’Neal Construction, he was drawn to the community discussion of the future of the Argo dam – he was vocal about the fact that the concrete and steel dam his company reconstructed back in the early 1970s was still in good condition. Joe is also a driving force behind the Allen Creek Greenway Conservancy, and serves on its board.

The conservancy board’s president, Jonathan Bulkley, also attended the New Year’s Eve gathering at Kerrytown, along with his wife Trudy. Bulkley had been honored at a Sept. 6, 2011 city council meeting – the mayor read a proclamation honoring Bulkley’s contributions to the University of Michigan, the state of Michigan, the Great Lakes region and the nation. And Sept. 9, 2011 was proclaimed Jonathan Bulkley Day in Ann Arbor. Trudy has made her own mark in town – as “Mother Goose,” she regularly holds children’s storytelling events at Kerrytown Market & Shops.

Also participating in the Kerrytown gathering was Amy Kuras, an accomplished cellist who also rocked the carillon on New Year’s Eve with Auld Lang Syne. But regular Chronicle readers will probably recognize Amy’s name from our coverage of the park advisory commission – as a city park planner, she often gives reports to the commission at its monthly meetings. She also frequently leads public forums for special parks project in the city, like one held last year in preparation for work at Riverside Park.

The Next Big Thing?

So the cross-sectional slice of the community that Chronicle readers encounter isn’t as narrow as you might think, given the narrowness of our focus to local government and civic affairs. But events that include a wider swath of the community are invigorating, when people come together who might not ordinarily cross paths. That’s the appeal to me of events like KindleFest. It’s also the appeal of Joe’s vision – that a fairly intimate gathering to play the Kerrytown carillon could grow to a public New Year’s Eve celebration at Kerrytown.

Last year’s Water Hill Music Fest is an example of something that started with a small concept, and turned into an absolutely inspiring phenomenon. Paul and Claire Tinkerhess had a vision for a joyful neighborhood celebration, but their efforts crescendoed into a major community event. The day-long festival drew hundreds of people to that area to hear musicians who lived there perform on their front porches. It became an “instant classic” – it earned Paul and Claire one of The Chronicle’s inaugural Bezonki Awards. It also gave their neighborhood a name that both reflects and shapes its unique identity. And you couldn’t walk down the streets at Water Hill Music Fest without running into someone you knew – even if you didn’t live there.

I’m not a believer that big is inherently better. That’s one reason why I like the concept of Small Giants, Bo Burlington’s movement that encourages companies to be great instead of gigantic.

But a sense of connectedness – important for a strong, healthy sense of community – requires shared experiences. And I’m guessing that, for the most part, I won’t be able to get everyone in Ann Arbor to share the experience of sitting on a hard bench through an entire city council or county board of commissioners meeting.

So instead, I hope Joe follows up on his vision for a public New Year’s Eve bash. I’ll try to find a way to help make that happen.

About the writer: Mary Morgan is publisher and co-founder of The Ann Arbor Chronicle. The Chronicle could not survive to count each milestone without regular voluntary subscriptions to support our coverage of local government and civic affairs. Click this link for details: Subscribe to The Chronicle. And if you’re already supporting us, please encourage your friends, neighbors and colleagues to help support The Chronicle, too!