Book cover for "Builder's Apprentice," published by Huron River Press.

It is both a luxury and a curse of modern life to be doing “all the right things” while fearing you’ve missed something vital along that road not taken. Andy Hoffman, a University of Michigan professor and author of “Builder’s Apprentice,” confronted that suspicion in the mid-1980s while mulling grad school offers from Harvard and Berkeley.

As he prepared to graduate with a bachelor’s degree (“grades thirteen, fourteen, fifteen and sixteen”) in chemical engineering, Hoffman writes, he “fumbled” through interviews with prospective employers: “I had assumed that recruiters would tell me what I was supposed to do for them. … I would be guided on to the next step in life.” He took a job with the Environmental Protection Agency, “generating paperwork” for two years, and assumed that the next step – and the cure for his aimlessness – would be graduate school in public policy.

But what he really wanted to do was build houses.

And so he does. Hoffman gets his start in the business when, well, when a recruiter tells him what he’s supposed to do. Jack, a contractor advertising for carpenters, is willing to take a gamble on a young guy whose experience in the construction industry consists of helping his girlfriend’s father build a deck. Hoffman is green, but he’s eager, smart and honest – a rare mix of assets in the construction business, as Jack well knows.

Hoffman eventually figures this out, too – along with many other things that are not specific to slicing wood and hammering nails. He marvels at the drifters, migrants and occasionally scary misfits who hire onto the construction crews. He takes the measure of the architects, clients and occasionally scary subcontractors he encounters on the job sites. He admires the artistry and street-smarts of the cement boss, of an Italian stonemason, and of a fellow named Benjamin who buries his money in mason jars, dodges a Social Security number and holds up progress on a house by insisting his men cut their joints “so you can’t slip a piece of paper between them.”

And while Hoffman glories in Jack’s increasing faith in his abilities, he also comes to terms with Jack’s bottom line: Business is business. Hoffman encounters a whole new world and he’s thrilled not only by what he finds, but by his own determination to seek it out in the first place.

The Scent of Pine

Hoffman names each house he builds after the man who’s paying for it. He learns his craft working on the Rogers house, a sprawling place in Nantucket. The Winslow house in Connecticut is next, a much bigger and more complicated site where Hoffman acts as Jack’s “eyes and ears on the job.” When Jack takes over construction of the Shaw house, he puts Hoffman – who is first stunned and then juiced – in charge of a mammoth structure whose ridgeline “rose at least fifty feet from the first-floor deck,” required steel infrastructure and featured seven fireplaces and “two cylindrical turrets on either side of the front door … at least twenty feet in diameter” that rose the full height of the house.

The best reading in “Builder’s Apprentice” comes from Hoffman’s recollections of the scent of fresh lumber and the beauty of a fine grain; about his faith in “level, plumb and square”; about the deep satisfaction in beholding the tangible results of hard, physical work directed by disciplined intelligence:

… I was never happier. The sugar pine was a sensual pleasure, unlike any other wood we’d used on the job so far. The surface was like felt, smooth and soft on my hands. The grain of each board possessed a unique beauty, the dark strands bending and swirling like waves of smoke drifting in a gentle breeze.

Hoffman is also very good at describing his encounters with a few nonsense-spewing architects in thrall to their own exquisite aesthetic. But not all of them are twits, and “Builder’s Apprentice” may have been a better book if its author had heeded Mies van der Rohe: “Less is more.”

Ann Arbor-based Huron River Press has produced a beautiful volume with a handsome jacket, elegant fonts and design, and only a few typos of the kind that have obviously slipped past the spell-check. (One appears, excruciatingly, in the very first paragraph of the prologue; anyone who has ever written anything for publication can only weep in empathy.)

But flabby dialogue and cluttered prose slow the first two chapters to such a plod that some readers may be tempted give up. The narrative that moves Hoffman’s people from place to place and moment to moment – in other words, some of the really heavy lifting for any writer – is often painfully tedious. An example: “The heavy plane pulled to a stop and the two engines quit their violent labor by exhausting one last gasp of smoke.” Hoffman has arrived in Nantucket and, in this case, that’s all we need to know.

A seasoned line editor or copy editor could have made a real difference here. But such attention has become an extravagance for many academic and trade publishers, not to mention what’s left of newspapers and magazines. If this was the case for “Builder’s Apprentice” and Huron River Press, then that’s too bad. (If not, there’s a copy editor out there who needs to review the basic rules governing the use of commas.)

The Morality of Desire

Hoffman is the Holcim Professor of Sustainable Enterprise at UM; he has a joint appointment with the Ross School of Business and the School of Natural Resources and Environment, and is associate director of the Erb Institute. He has written a number of books about the growing influence of environmental considerations in corporate decision-making. So I came to “Builder’s Apprentice” with the reasonable expectation of a mea culpa, that somewhere along the way I would witness a simple carpenter’s epiphany as he beholds in his finished work a monument to extravagance for its own sake.

That’s not what we get here – and that’s fine. The story of Hoffman’s journey from Shaw house to “sustainable enterprise” has the makings of a compelling sequel. But reading “Builder’s Apprentice,” you can’t help but feel some ambivalence because Hoffman masters the work he loves while he’s building massive homes for the massively rich – and with nary a hint of reflection on any broader implications. But the morality of imagining, desiring, and spending millions of dollars to design and erect a monstrous house isn’t what Hoffman wants to explore this time. So, ultimately, this is what we root for:

I looked to my side and eyed down the line of shingles the roofers had just finished nailing off. To my shock, they weren’t straight! In fact, none of the courses were straight. The crew wasn’t even using a straight edge. I watched as they nailed them down freehand. … I climbed over to the foreman.

“What’s up? Those courses’re crooked.”

“No one’s gonna be able to see ‘em up here. What difference does it make?”

I looked at the foreman in firm resolve. “I want ‘em straight.”

“That’ll take too long,” he protested.

“That’s not my problem, is it? Look at this house. Do you really think we’re gonna accept second-rate quality? … We have a contract and that contract calls for a quality roof. So that’s what I want.”

A shingle, a roof, a house; a word, a book, a life. Hoffman discovered what was worth doing, and that doing it well was what made all the difference.

Andy Hoffman will read from “Builder’s Apprentice” at 7 p.m. Thursday, June 10, at Borders bookstore, 612 E. Liberty Street in downtown Ann Arbor. Click here to watch a video of Hoffman discussing his memoir, or read the most recent in a series of columns by Hoffman, based on “Builder’s Apprentice,” on the Harvard Business Review blog, “The Conversation.”

About the writer: Domenica Trevor is a voracious reader who lives in Ann Arbor and has never built a house herself, but does live in one.

Cover for Margaret Fuchs Singer's memoir.

When a member of my book group recommended Margaret Fuchs Singer’s recently published “Legacy of a False Promise: A Daughter’s Reckoning,” I assumed the longtime Ann Arbor resident’s contribution to the literature of America’s red-diaper babies would be another account of growing up with a parent who joined the Communist Party in the 1930s, became disillusioned but still refused to inform on former comrades – and suffered for it.

I got it wrong.

Singer’s father, Herbert Fuchs, cooperated with the House Un-American Activities Committee. He informed. He named names. He told the whole truth – about a profound commitment and a profound mistake – and suffered for it.

His family, of course, suffered for it, too.

Singer’s story opens on a June evening in 1955, when she was 13 and her father, a law professor at American University in Washington, D.C., reveals to his son and daughter that their parents had been members of the Communist Party – and that he expected to be subpoenaed soon by HUAC.

The news stuns her:

“… My father might as well have told us that he and my mother were convicted felons. Or terminally ill. … What I had learned about Communism I had learned from the media, which reflected our government’s conviction that Communists were the ultimate enemy of the American people, an evil threat to the free world, a force determined to infiltrate our cities and take over the minds and lives of innocent Americans, just like me.”

Committed Communists

Singer’s parents were labor lawyers in New York City who saw in the Communist Party in the 1930s an organization committed, in Fuchs’ words, to “social reform, opposition to fascism, fighting against unemployment and bigotry.” And like many other well-educated, left-wing intellectuals, they were drawn to Washington by the possibilities of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal.

Frances and Herbert found jobs in the federal government: she with the Bureau of Labor Statistics and, later, the War Production Board; he went from a Senate staff position to the National Labor Relations Board, where he led a secret unit of employees who were party members. Singer’s parents joined another party group in Denver after Fuchs relocated there to work at the National War Labor Board. But by the end of the war he had grown disillusioned with the CPUSA and, after returning with his family to Washington, left the party in 1946.

Nine years after that, Fuchs was subpoenaed by HUAC. Using her father’s journals, Singer lays bare his anguish and examines the complex factors that went into his decision to cooperate. And she shares the overwhelming anxiety, loneliness and shame that consumed her as her father’s past became not only front-page news but the talk, albeit hushed, of the neighborhood. Decades later, Singer learned of the “neighbor-to-neighbor calls cautioning the parents of our friends not to let their sons and daughters associate any longer with ‘those Fuchs children.’”

Her father’s troubles added to the sense of being an outsider in a community, Singer writes, “where my parents’ liberal views stood out as strange, where houses a block from ours were closed to Jews, and where jeering boys called me ‘Jew girl’ as I walked home from school.”

Cause Célèbre

The hard left shunned Fuchs. From the crank right came nasty, anonymous phone calls to the family home. And American University fired him – mere days after a memo from AU President Hurst R. Anderson proclaimed that it “would be beneath the dignity of the institution” to do anything but support an “intelligent, loyal and devoted teacher” who made “a serious mistake in his past, which he has recognized and declared.”

Fuchs’ dismissal and AU’s refusal to reconsider became a cause célèbre among anti-Communist mainstream liberals. The Association of American Law Schools and the American Association of University Professors recommended AU’s censure. Even William F. Buckley’s brand new National Review chimed in, criticizing the persecution of a witness who had assisted with what the magazine saw, of course, as vital work by HUAC.

“Every time you turn,” Singer said, in an interview, of the dizzying complexity of the affair, “there’s another way of looking at it.”

With assistance from HUAC Chairman Francis Walter, Fuchs eventually found work on the staff of then-House Judiciary Chairman Emanuel Celler, where he remained until his retirement. In the intervening years, Singer’s parents rebuilt a life that included meaningful work and friendships as well as travel and other comforts of middle-class American life.

“It ended, and we just closed it off,” she said.

But the emotional fallout remained. Singer writes that the anxiety present in her household even before her parents’ past became known stayed with her, leaving her with a “crippling, amorphous fear that affected my personal and professional life.”

And “the shame that they were Communists … and then shame that they named names…,” she said, “it lasted our whole life.”

‘Resolving the Trauma’

“I was not destined to write,” Singer said. In high school, she tried to put her family’s experience into words for a class project and “bombed utterly. Couldn’t get any of the feeling, any of the emotion.”

Author Margaret Fuchs Singer, next to a display that includes her memoir at the downtown Borders store on East Liberty. As of Thursday, the store had sold 45 copies of the book, “Legacy of a False Promise: A Daughter’s Reckoning." She'll be holding a reading there on Feb. 9. (Photo by The Chronicle)

It would be decades before the possibility resurfaced. “It was at the point at which my parents died,” she said, “and I started to read.” She started with “Loyalties: A Son’s Memoir,” by red-diaper baby Carl Bernstein, “and then the need to write just really overwhelmed me.”

What resulted is what Singer calls “a memoir informed by research” whose principal aims were “resolving the trauma” and laying out the full story for the next generation.

“I really had a need to tell my children and my two nieces as best I could, as truthfully as I could, what happened,” she said. “Because I really didn’t think anybody else was going to dig up all that stuff.”

It took guts to write this book. Singer not only returned to a painful youth in order to bare “the family secret,” but in her reading and the study of her parents’ papers discovered and investigated another, darker possibility: could her mother – perhaps knowingly – have spied for the Soviet Union?

“The fact is, the American Communist Party was a group of very enthusiastic people who had goals that were as good as they could be,” Singer said. “They worked very, very hard for their country, they weren’t disloyal, they thought that the Soviet Union represented a hope for the future of working people, racial relations, anti-fascism.

“At the same time, I am now convinced, without any question, the Soviet Union had as a goal to get help in the U.S. getting information.” The CPUSA, she says, was “the obvious” tool to get that job done.

Singer believes her mother would have understood the motives behind “Legacy of a False Promise.”

“The family secret really wasn’t doing me any good,” she said. “And I don’t subscribe to keeping family secrets when you don’t have to. I actually experienced freeing myself of the shame by writing the book. And she would have approved of that.”

Of her father’s approval, she is less certain.

Early in the book she recalls his warning: “’I don’t know what will happen, and I must ask you not to discuss this with anyone.’” For decades the words and the fear remained with her. Her father was a private person, Singer said, and “a man who was basically a very decent human being: ethical, conscientious, hardworking, very bright, who was human. And in some ways his greatest strengths were also his flaws; it’s a tragic story.

“But I think it comes across as a portrayal of a man who is really a good man. That’s what I think. Without actually being self-serving about it, without making excuses. If I did that, then I think that that’s a good thing.”

More From an Interview With Margaret Singer

A recent show of support: On Jan. 19 at Nicola’s Books, a big turnout – at least 50, Singer believes – of friends, family, colleagues and others bearing congratulations left her “geeked.”

Her long-term support system: Singer and fellow authors Susan Morales (two as-yet unpublished novels, “Mornings One Winter” and “A Barroom View of Love”) and Brenda Meisels (the self-published “Family at Booknook”) have met every two weeks for the past 10 years to share feedback on manuscripts-in-progress. “It is so gratifying,” she said, to have “no doubt about their being in your camp and respecting you and your ability to write.”

The meaning of tenacity: Singer says she wrote about 90 query letters in her effort to find an agent and a publisher for “Legacy of a False Promise.” She realized early on that a university press would be the best option, and working with the editors at The University of Alabama Press turned out to be an “absolutely fabulous experience.”

A legacy of McCarthyism at the University of Michigan: The UM Senate’s annual Davis, Markert, Nickerson Lecture on Academic and Intellectual Freedom. In 1954, UM suspended three members of the faculty (it later reinstated one of them) for refusing to testify in front of a group from HUAC who were visiting the campus. The senate established the lecture, named in honor of the targeted faculty, in 1990 and passed a resolution criticizing “the failure of the university community to protect the values of intellectual freedom.”

A “fellow traveler”: Journalist Kati Marton took a literary journey similar to Singer’s. “Enemies of the People: My Family’s Journey to America” (Simon & Schuster, 2009) is Marton’s examination of the lives her journalist parents in Communist Hungary and the consequences of their choices for their two daughters. Singer said she drew up her courage and sent Marton an e-mail “listing the ways I related to the book; I felt a kinship to her.” Marton replied moments later: “I’m going out now to get your book,” she wrote; “thank you for your kind words about mine.”

Margaret Fuchs Singer will read from “Legacy of a False Promise: A Daughter’s Reckoning” on Tuesday, Feb. 9, at 7 p.m. at Borders Books, 612 E. Liberty St. in Ann Arbor.

About the writer: Domenica Trevor is a voracious reader who lives in Ann Arbor.

This snapshot of Del Rio's staff was taken in the early '70s. Co-owner Ernie Harburg is in the back row, far right, wearing glasses. His wife, Torry Harburg, is in the middle of the back row, wearing a red shirt. In the front row, far right, is chef Sara Moulton. Just behind her, with a moustache and glasses, is co-owner Rick Burgess. (Photo courtesy of Larry Behnke.)

Some time in the mid-1970s, waiter Larry Behnke pinned a large sheet of paper to the bulletin board that hung in the kitchen of the Del Rio Bar. Behnke, also an artist, had written at the top in bold, psychedelic lettering: “What the Del Rio Means to Me.”

After a few days the sheet was filled with responses, ranging from the thoughtful to the droll to the pitiable – with some that were just plain wacky.

“A nice corner bar that suffers from delusions of grandeur.”

“A place where you get paid to have fun, where you can be crazy without being committed, and where customers and employees are more important than money.”

“It’s my substitute home where people are nice to me.”

“The Del Rio means a million things to me, which I refuse to limit to the narrowness of words and the confines of space.”

“The Del Rio is benevolent despotism.”

Probably a majority of Ann Arborites never walked through the door of the funky old saloon that used to sit at the northeast corner of Ashley and Washington. But for plenty of those who did, the Del Rio was more than just a bar. It was a state of mind, a way of life, a second home – a tiny world unto itself.

Born of the idealistic spirit of the late 1960s, the Del Rio was a combination bohemian sanctuary and bold socioeconomic experiment that somehow survived racketeers, recessions, and Reaganism to become a three-decade-plus Ann Arbor tradition whose passing in 2004 is still mourned by many.

Here now to help assuage those feelings of loss is “Liberty, Equality, Consensus and All That Jazz at the Del Rio Bar,” a history of the idiosyncratic watering hole published this month by Huron River Press. The book is a dream-come-true for all those longing to return to their favorite old hippie hangout – if only for a time, and only in their minds. But even those who never set foot inside the Del Rio will find it an absorbing read.

The book’s primary author is Ernie Harburg, one of three partners who founded the Del Rio nearly 40 years ago. But as Harburg freely acknowledges, he had “a little help from his friends” – especially Larry Behnke, an authentic Ann Arbor hippie who worked at the Del from 1972 to 1983, and for six years lived in a 1969 Chevy Step-Van that was often parked by the back door of the bar.

During his stint at the Del Rio, Behnke kept a regular journal. “After work I would usually write a page about the night’s events,” he says. “I felt like the historian of the place.” Later he turned his voluminous journal entries into an anecdotal chronicle of the bar. The resulting manuscript was never published, but Ernie Harburg has included a healthy crop of excerpts in “Consensus.” Behnke’s appealing and often amusing yarns add an extra dimension to Harburg’s more journalistic approach, making the book something of an artful mélange – much like its colorful subject.

Mirroring Ann Arbor

The story of the Del Rio is in many ways the story of the transformation of Ann Arbor from the heterogeneous, real-world community of yesteryear to the gentrified yuppie playground of today. In the late ’60s, the small business district west of Main Street was a rough-and-tumble working-class neighborhood where violence and vice were part of the everyday routine. Ernie Harburg remembers that, in the first year or so that he was operating the Del, he could read a book by the flashing lights of police cars.

But the arrival of three classy new bars – Mr. Flood’s Party, the Del Rio, and the Blind Pig – in the early ’70s would begin to change all that. Mr. Flood’s was opened in the summer of 1969 by youth-savvy entrepreneurs Ned Duke and Robert “Buddy” Jack, and the arty décor and live jazz, country, and blues music soon attracted a different sort of crowd – younger, hipper – and wealthier.

A year later came the Del Rio. Ernie Harburg, his wife Victoria (“Torry”), and friend Rick Burgess bought an existing blue-collar bar of the same name and proceeded with an extreme makeover. Out was the Naugahyde and Formica; in were antique wooden tables and chairs and the original brick walls. Out was the yellowed drop-panel ceiling; in was the elegant hundred-year-old pressed-tin ceiling that had lain hidden underneath. Out was the ’50s-era jukebox; in was a state-of-the-art sound system and an eclectic collection of hundreds and hundreds of homemade eight-track tapes, from Charlie Parker to the Beatles to Bach. And every Sunday night, Rick Burgess and others would play live jazz – at no charge.

Despite the mighty effort, however, success would not come overnight to the new and improved Del Rio. It would take time before the crew cuts made way for the longhairs. Plus, there were all the usual difficulties involved in starting up a new business venture. Such as the disastrous choice the partners made for the bar’s first manager, who had previously managed Mr. Flood’s. He was there for only a short time during the first year, and was hired because neither Burgess nor Harburg knew management, recalls Larry Behnke. But he didn’t bother to pay taxes or keep accurate books, Behnke says, and almost killed the new bar.

A New Way of Managing

Ironically, however, it was this debacle that paved the way for what was perhaps the Del Rio’s most distinguishing feature: management by consensus. When that first manager was let go, managerial duties were assumed by the rank-and-file workers, who eventually came to the conclusion that there didn’t need to be a manager. The owners agreed, and turned the day-to-day running of the bar over to the employees. Eventually this would evolve into management by consensus, with owners and employees having equal say.

It was not an arrangement that the Harburgs and Burgess entered into lightly. The Del Rio was like a family; and they vowed to abide by the family’s decisions, even if it didn’t always go their way.

Luckily – and perhaps a little surprisingly – the system turned out to work exceedingly well. The mostly young, nonconformist workers created the sort of environment they felt most comfortable in, which also happened to be a powerful attraction for the younger, hipper crowd that was starting to frequent the Main Street area.

Take as an example the relaxed attitude toward drug use during the Del Rio’s early years. This was a consequence of the time (the swinging ’70s) and the place (back then Ann Arbor was known to some as “the drug capital of the Midwest”) as well as the managerial power wielded by the staff. And it wasn’t only the customers who were high – often it was the employees, too.

“If our evening shift began at 7 p.m.,” recalls former waiter Larry Behnke, “we would all gather at the wait station and do a shot of tequila together at 9 p.m. By 10 or later we would gather at the pizza oven exhaust vent to share a joint.”

“I can remember only a couple of times when someone came to work tripping on acid,” he adds, “but we discouraged that because the customer would get poor or no service. We could give great, happy service when we were buzzed on pot or beer, since our customers were similarly altered. It was like we were all partying together.”

At one point Behnke worked with an editor from New York on his Del Rio manuscript. “She didn’t believe we functioned as well as we did, considering all the weed and booze and acid we consumed.”

Although in general the owners shared the workers’ lack of concern with regard to drugs such as alcohol, marijuana, and even LSD – as long as it didn’t get out of hand – they took a “hard line on hard drugs” (as a notice posted in the bar was titled). Anyone involved with hard drugs like cocaine or heroin on the premises would be banned from the Del Rio. In this the employee-managers were in (mostly) complete agreement with the owners.

But consensus didn’t always work perfectly. It was very difficult to fire anyone, because the employees were reluctant to take such drastic steps against one of their own, even when someone was caught outright with a hand in the cookie jar. Ernie Harburg also remembers one instance in particular where he feels that collective governance worked against the common good.

“I was deeply frustrated that we were unable to reach consensus about forbidding smoking in the bar,” he says, “because half of the staff smoked.” This included Harburg’s wife Torry. After much debate the group did agree to get rid of the cigarette machine and establish a small non-smoking section. But on the whole Harburg still feels that the battle over smoking represents a failure of the consensual decision-making process. That failure must have been all the more painful when Torry passed away in 1981 from lung cancer.

There were also other problems with the Del Rio’s lack of management. While it contributed greatly to the laid-back atmosphere that many Ann Arborites loved, it could also make the bar seem cliquish to infrequent patrons, and would sometimes turn workers and customers into adversaries. For instance, bartenders had absolute control over the music, both in what was played and how loud. No one – not even the owners – could force them to change either.

But in most respects the Del Rio’s system of collective management was quite successful. Compare, for instance, the traditional way that bars have dealt with troublemakers to the method employed at the Del. Instead of a bouncer instigating a confrontation that could lead to violence, the communally-minded staff (occasionally joined by a few customers) would all gather round the miscreants and quietly order them to go. Not even the toughest muscle-bound, bar-hopping badass could bear the disapproving stares of so many people for long. The rowdies would soon leave, almost always peacefully.

Changing Times

As the years passed and the countercultural scene faded away, the Del Rio kept as close to its hippie roots as was possible during the Reagan-led return to conservatism and materialism that epitomized the ’80s and ’90s. Ann Arbor was changing – whether for the better is open to debate – and the Del resisted as best it could. As Harburg explains in his book: “The local downtown restaurant and bar scene grew, with most of the newcomers part of a national chain. But the Del – defiantly true to its unconventional underpinnings – stayed open, holding a sort of monopoly on the glory days.”

Over the decades the Del Rio had acquired a loyal group of followers – “an irreverent, bohemian mix of artists, poets, musicians and working folk,” wrote Laura McReynolds in a 1994 Ann Arbor News article, “who don’t simply frequent the place, they help define it” – and became something of a local institution. Those who weren’t so into the free-spirited atmosphere would go for the fresh, cheap, and flavorful food. One of the Del’s offerings even earned a measure of national recognition. The Washington Post once rated the Detburger – named after its inventor, Bob Detwiler, who worked at the bar in the early ’70s – as one of the 20 best burgers in the nation.

The Detburger was really just a well-made cheeseburger covered with pizza toppings, but with one all-important difference: the patty was steamed in beer. Celebrity chef Sara Moulton has demonstrated the preparation of a slightly-enhanced Detburger on television, and included the recipe in her book “Sara’s Secrets for Weeknight Meals.” Moulton’s passion for the Detburger comes as no surprise to those who know that she worked at the Del in the early to mid-’70s when she was an undergraduate at the University of Michigan.

Despite the popularity of its unique fare, however, the Del Rio would ultimately succumb to the pressure to be profitable. Ironically, it seems as though it was management by consensus that was the major contributor to the bar’s downfall. By the turn of the twenty-first-century, competition had become so fierce that the owners felt a major change was in order – including a switch to a more traditional management system.

“The bar’s operation as a collective no longer seemed feasible,” writes Harburg in “Consensus.” “In years past, a few dedicated employees had always emerged as informal leaders. But over the past decade, this had happened less and less frequently. Most of the employees of the ’90s lacked the idealism of earlier workers and weren’t committed to a collective.”

When the switch finally came, however, the owners discovered that the current crop of employees were in fact very committed to the concept of communal governance. Not only did several veteran workers quickly resign, many of those who left (or were fired) formed into picket lines that marched the sidewalk in front of the bar. The owners, all well into their 70s, decided that they simply didn’t have the time or energy to cope with this latest crisis. When no buyers could be found, the Del Rio closed its doors for good, following a gala last-night celebration that went on into the wee hours of January 1, 2004.

But the legacy of the Del stretches on, in the lives of the people that worked and played there. “It helped me to follow my dreams,” says Larry Behnke, who today lives out the ultimate hippie fantasy – a geodesic dome home powered entirely by solar electricity – on 20 wooded acres in northern Florida, which he purchased with money saved while working at the Del Rio. “It gave credence to our being happily unconventional.”

Editor’s note: Ernie Harburg will be in town to sign copies of his new book on Wednesday, Nov. 11 at 7:30 p.m. at the Jewish Book Festival. The event will be held at the Jewish Community Center of Greater Ann Arbor, 2935 Birch Hollow Drive.

About the writer: Alan Glenn is currently at work on a documentary film about Ann Arbor in the ’60s. Visit the film’s website for more information.