"Oh, Ypsi girls are very fine girls, With codfish balls they comb their curls."

While national politics lead us away from our lives and towards war,
local politics generally fortify us despite the divisions in philosophy,
or so we'd like to think. Which is why I've long been enamored with
local history over national and global histories. All are important but
the local is severely undervalued and largely ignored.

"Oh, Ypsi girls are very fine girls, With codfish balls they comb their curls."

Gundella's connections to Marcello Truzzi, EMU professor and scholar, have piqued my interest in Ypsilanti and the university in its many permutations.

While looking for information on the Michigan State Normal College News
from the late 1800s I found this interesting spat between coeds from
that institution and "Michigan Men" from 1940.

An article in the Michigan Daily, a student newspaper, claiming that the girls of Normal
College weren't as pretty as they used to be sent a throng of coeds to
Angell Hall in a bus to protest the "Walrus Faces" at the University of
Michigan.

Detroit Free Press, May 11, 1940 (enlarge)

A crowd of 1,000 gathered to watch the spectacle as the
girls marched with signs protesting affronts to their own beauty as
well as the ugliness of the Michigan men.

The girls then marched
to the Parrot, a student center, where en route a couple of girls,
Marion Kemps and Marjorie May, encountered Michigan football legend Tom
Harmon and lost some of their vigor while posing for pictures with him.

There, Even Wunsch, the editor of the campus humor magazine and
proprietor of the fighting words between the two factions, relented on
his stance and admitted his error saying that the girls "look O.K. to
me."

But the Michigan men weren't off the hook just yet. Two
Michigan students David Zeitlin, a senior from Bridgeport, Connecticut
and Joe Walker, a Boston junior, tried to stowaway on the girl's bus
back to Ypsilanti but were tossed off.

Brilliant on both accounts!

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A Dudley Randall Poem in Milestone 2

I bought this Milestone 2 poetry Magazine at a Livonia estate sale this week. Milestone was the literary publication of Wayne (State) University and this second issue dates to 1949. While I don't recognize most of the names, Dudley Randall was both a nationally known poet and the librarian for the Wayne County General Hospital at Eloise via the Wayne County Library System. The poem featured is The Southern Road which was a revised version of the completed poem from 1948 that h as a handful or two of word differences between the two. I don't know if Randall edited the poem for later collected works editions or earlier but this link features it in its likely final form in 2009. Neither version particularly enchants me but the block print in the magazine is an added bonus.

A Cabinet Card of a Dead Man Lying in Repose From Wayne Photographer Susan Doolittle

The City of Wayne, Michigan was not a large village at the turn of the 20th century so it stands to reason that there wasn't a glut of photographers practicing their trade there. As such, the 3 cabinet cards and carte de visites that I own represents roughly a quarter of the early ones. Considering that the wives of Frank Hickok and William Corlett, first Village President of Wayne, took over after Frank's death in 1892 the list grows smaller beyond those two families. Had I snagged the Doolittle dead man cabinet card I'd be even that much more Wayne-rich in photographs. Speaking of Susan Doolittle, of whom I have learned very little about, it is interesting to note that Wayne had three women photographers in an era oft dominated by men in that very field. This photograph of a corpse is a startling example of her work.

Frederick Soop: Not An Equal Opportunity Restraunteer

Detroit Free Press , March 28, 1890 If you don't want to hear a racist tale of a suburban namesake then close your eyes now. As early as 1876 Frederick Soop had left his Belleville farm once again, having done a stint at the Hawkins House in Ypsilanti during the Civil War and the City Hotel in Detroit thereafter, and ventured off to Chatham, Ontario to run the Rutley Hotel , which was conducted as a Temperance House. Detroit Free Press , August 17, 1879 In 1879 he was searching for a good restaurant or small hotel to operate. Eventually he ended up on Washington Avenue near State Street running a dining hall which he ran until around 1890. Detroit Free Press , April 16, 1890 It was in 1888 when the aforementioned racial incident occurred at his dining establishment. It was then that William H. Haynes, a black doctor, sat down with his former classmate S. W. Barkwell for dinner. The men ordered but when the food was served none was placed before Mr. Haynes who, ironically, ha...

The Nankin Township Historical Society

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