The Nankin Township Historical Society

Yes, Ypsilanti is outside the periphery of Nankin Township but being where it is in proximity to the general area of said place it has many ties to the community. As such, anytime I have an opportunity to pick up relics from the town I will do so and feature them here. I've had such opportunities numerous times in the past year and took full advantage of the fact. I don't know the campus of Eastern Michigan University very well and it's probably a hate crime to post these vintage photographs of EMU coeds "misappropriating the heritage" of the Huron Indian tribe but I would assume that they were just having fun, somehow, in the age before cell phones. I don't recognize the buildings and those who attend the campus and would have knowledge of such claim none. So until somebody happens upon this with pertinent information we're stuck assuming that these are former buildings of the Eastern Michigan University campus. The EMU jersey screams the 1970s but that...

  Listen, I'm just one Yeti doing my part in constructing the matrix. I don't know why I'm compelled to track these things down but here I am. Considering that I don't particularly like the city of Ypsilanti, the university attached to it or the fight songs of said university it makes no sense--other than the Marcello Truzzi connection--that I had to fight myself not to buy this book but I compromised and took some photos instead. The $25 price tag on the split binding of the 80+ year old Songs of the Michigan State Normal College made it easier to come to that resolution. I must stay away from John King Books. That will be much easier since I've found a copy in Florida for $12. While it's en route I'll post a few song pages: M. S. N. C. We Sing of Thee based on Maryland, Maryland and written by Austin George, 1863. M. S. N. C., we sing of thee, Mich-i-gan, my Mich-i-gan! With- in thy courts we love to be, Mich-i-gan, my Mich-i-gan! Thy tow-ers high and...

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 sc holar, 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 ...

I won't belabor the Gundella letter thing too much (but will leave it for my blog on her ) and will leave the subject for the time being after this post. This letter seemingly indicates that Truzzi and Gundella first corresponded in October of 1969 and likely met shortly thereafter. There's nothing groundbreaking in the letter from my standpoint since I've researched Gundella for close to 10 years but a few things of note are as follows. 1. That her sister believed that she was less-than-authentic and was too theatrical, despite not being a witch herself (many relatives were including their mother, grandmother and great grandmother, among others so the sister was aware of how a witch "should" behave.). 2. That she was partial to Italian men! She was not only a ham but also a flirt. Good to know.

They often misspelled her name! Eastern Michigan University was fortunate enough to have renown sociologist Marcello Truzzi on their staff and when he died his papers were donated to the institution. Among those were many letters to Gundella the Witch (Truzzi had brought her to local and national prominence a few years beforehand and the two became good friends), both for her Witch Watch column in the Observer newspapers and personal correspondences asking for spells, that Truzzi was using for a study. Hundreds of letters, in fact. Fortunately for me I have a co-worker who goes to school there and was willing to grab me some photos of a few of the letters. Originally, I had wanted them scanned but seeing the photos that she sent makes me realize that they are better seen as is. Since I'm likely going to EMU today to gather some of the Gundella letters so as not to overburden my "colleague" (as the librarian referred to my co-worker in an e-mail; laughably since I'm...