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Legacies Project Oral History: Connie and Ethan Stewart
Connie Gibbon and Ethan Allen “Al” Stewart were married on August 31, 1948 in East Orange, New Jersey. Al had just completed his BA at MIT. They moved to Indiana for his job at Procter & Gamble. Within a few years Al started working for Ford Motor Company’s Saline plant and the couple moved to Ann Arbor. They had three children: Carol, Connie, and James. Connie organized a cooperative preschool with neighborhood mothers, and later in life she volunteered for Planned Parenthood, including serving as temporary director. They moved to Glacier Hills Retirement Community in 2004, and then Rochester, Minnesota to be closer to their son James. Al passed away on April 22, 2014.
Connie and Ethan Stewart were interviewed as part of an internship at Applied Safety and Ergonomics in Ann Arbor in 2008 as part of the Legacies Project.
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Legacies Project Oral History: Clyde Bennett
Clyde “Buck” Bennett was born in 1918 in Houdathotit, Alabama. When he was 10, his family moved to Birmingham, Michigan. He attended Birmingham High school and two years at Antioch College, where he gained experience in sales and newspaper advertising. Bennett served in World War II, and returned to Michigan to work for the Jam Handy Organization and Chrysler Advertising. Later in life he switched careers to become CEO of the Bennett Realtors and Commercial Development Company in Deland, Florida. He passed away on January 25, 2020.
Clyde Bennett was interviewed as part of an internship at Applied Safety and Ergonomics in Ann Arbor in 2008 as part of the Legacies Project.
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Legacies Project Oral History: Carolyn Houston
Carolyn Houston was born in 1925 and grew up in Lakewood, Ohio. She spent the majority of her working years as a homemaker and mother of four boys. During World War II she was a nurse’s aid, and she was a secretary in Stanford’s civil engineering department to support her husband’s graduate studies. Her children grew up near Dexter, Michigan. After she divorced her husband in 1980, Houston worked at Rackham as a secretary to the associate dean. She married Bill Houston and moved to Pittsburgh in the late 80s, but returned to Ann Arbor in 2001.
Carolyn Houston was interviewed as part of an internship at Applied Safety and Ergonomics in Ann Arbor in 2008 as part of the Legacies Project
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Legacies Project Oral History: Carl Guldberg
Carl Guldberg was born in 1917 and grew up in Suttons Bay, Michigan. He graduated from the College of Architecture and Design at the University of Michigan in 1940. He began his career as an aircraft draftsman in Baltimore, but soon returned to Michigan to marry his wife, Julie Hart. Guldberg was a draftsman for the Stinson Aircraft Company in Detroit during World War II. He ran his own advertising agency, Guldberg Advertising, for 35 years in Ann Arbor. He passed away on July 21, 2018.
Carl Guldberg was interviewed as part of an internship at Applied Safety and Ergonomicsin Ann Arbor in 2010 as part of the Legacies Project.
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Legacies Project Oral History: Benita Kaimowitz
Benita Kaimowitz was born in 1935 and grew up in Pascagoula, Mississippi, where her father ran a general store. When she was 11, her family moved to Nashville, Tennessee. After graduating from college at the University of Hawaii, she got her master’s at Sarah Lawrence College. Kaimowitz helped register voters in Louisiana as a volunteer for the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). She was a teacher and a longtime employee of Borders Bookstore in Ann Arbor. She and her first husband Gabe lived in a collective house for over two decades.
Benita Kaimowitz was interviewed by students from Skyline High School in Ann Arbor as part of the Legacies Project.
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Legacies Project Oral History: Ben Helmke
Ben Helmke grew up on a farm in Pratt County, Kansas in the 1930s. He served as an organist in the Army chaplain’s office at Camp Schimmelpfennig (now Camp Sendai) in Japan. Helmke graduated from Hastings College and McCormick Seminary and got his masters in social work from the University of Michigan. He and his wife Polly raised three children and he started his own mental health clinic. Late in life, he came out as gay to his wife and children. He lived happily with his partner Len Quenon for 25 years.
Ben Helmke was interviewed by students from Skyline High School in Ann Arbor in 2016 as part of the Legacies Project.
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Legacies Project Oral History: Anna Noble
Anna Noble was born in the early 1920s and grew up in Pittsburgh with 11 siblings. She worked as a launderer as a young woman. She applied to several nursing schools, but faced discrimination due to segregation. She attended Mercy Douglass School of Nursing in Philadelphia, which was an all-Black nursing school. In 1950, Noble moved to Detroit to take a nursing position at Haynes Memorial Hospital. She became the director of nursing at DMC Harper University Hospital, where she worked for 23 years. Later in life, she volunteered at the Lula Belle Stewart Center, which offered parenting assistance to single mothers.
Anna Noble was interviewed in partnership with the Museum of African American History of Detroit and Y Arts Detroit in 2010 as part of the Legacies Project.
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Ignite | Ann Arbor
Enlighten us, but make it quick!
How would you share your passion in 5 minutes, with just 20 slides? We asked Ann Arbor this question; Ignite | Ann Arbor is the response. Watch your neighbors engage in this international phenomenon of fast-paced geekery! Discover what your community geeks have to say – whether it's food, tech, business, music, art, history or something strange and new, it's sure to be a feverish night filled with discovery!
The first Ignite took place in Seattle in 2006.
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Stars Rising: Why U-M's Detroit Observatory Matters and Where It's Going
Why is an observatory in Ann Arbor named for Detroit? What made the Detroit Observatory a milestone for the University of Michigan and American higher education? How was the Observatory central to the growth of American astronomical science, when did it lose that role, and how did it get it back? And who were some of the people who made it all happen? Gary Krenz of the University’s Bentley Historical Library will explore these and other questions in this talk. In its 165-year history, the Observatory has gone through many transformations, and it is currently going through another—the construction of an addition to improve access, education, and programming. Krenz will also look at what that project entails and what lies ahead.
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Author Event | Morgan Parker Discusses Magical Negro
Magical Negro is an archive of black everydayness, a catalog of contemporary folk heroes, an ethnography of ancestral grief, and an inventory of figureheads, idioms, and customs. These American poems are both elegy
and jive, joke and declaration, songs of congregation and self-conception. They connect themes of loneliness, displacement, grief, ancestral trauma, and objectification, while exploring and troubling tropes and stereotypes of Black Americans. Focused primarily on depictions of Black womanhood alongside personal narratives, the collection tackles interior and exterior politics—of both the body and society, of both the individual and the collective experience.
In Magical Negro, Parker creates a space of witness, of airing grievances, of pointing out patterns. In these poems are living documents, pleas, latent traumas, inside jokes, and unspoken anxieties situated as firmly in the past as in the present—timeless black melancholies and triumphs.
For this event, Parker was in conversation with Aisha Sabatini Sloan, Visiting Professor of Creative Nonfiction at the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan.