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‘This line of bullets missed me by 15 feet’
A survivor remembers Sunday, Dec. 7, 1941, started quietly for Herbert J. Elfring, BS ’50. The U.S. Army private had just finished breakfast and was scanning the weekly assignments on the bulletin...
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The Tappan Oak: A tale of life, death, and rebirth
Branching out The Tappan Oak was located near the west side of the Hatcher Graduate Library. (Image courtesy of U-M’s Bentley Historical Library.) You can be lonely even in a crowd, and certainly on a...
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The first Teach-In
Rolling Thunder American fighter jets launch from the USS Coral Sea in March 1965 as part of Operation Rolling Thunder. (Image: U.S. Navy.) Operation Rolling Thunder began on March 2, 1965. That night,...
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The power of the pin
A tiny treasure lost Source: The Michigan Daily. In December 1941, when the Japanese army began its swift conquest of the Philippines, Santiago Artiaga, then 63 years old, was one of his nation’s...
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Bentley website tracks African American students to 1853
Exclusion did not deter her In 1941, budding student activist Jean Emily Fairfax responded to the war in Europe by chairing “Starvation Day” on the University of Michigan campus. She encouraged fellow...
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Mr. Smith’s baseball adventure
A secret mixture Shirley Wheeler Smith (Image: U-M’s Bentley Historical Library.) One evening between the world wars, Shirley Wheeler Smith, the University’s vice-president for finance, stood up at a...
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Crowdsourcing a time machine
‘Picturing Michigan’s Past’ An underwater worker with a hefty copper diving helmet rests on a stool in Frankfort. A Kalkaska man lounges in a lawn chair with a cat on his lap and a pipe in his mouth....
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The action was affirmative
“The Mystery Hour” In the fall of 1953, three professors in the Law School combined their individual classes in contracts, equity, and damages into a single, dense course. It was so hard that students...
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Invitation to a Nazi
An unwelcome announcement The fall semester of 1964 had barely begun when a small advertisement appeared on a page inside the Michigan Daily. It said: “U. of M. Union wishes to announce the appearance...
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Talent to spare, even in a writing class with Arthur Miller
A father’s promise Sometimes one teacher makes all the difference. That’s how it was for Edmund G. Love, BA ’36, a classic product of the Great Depression. Love was the oldest of three sons of a...
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The star who skipped every class
No Joy in A2 It was the week after New Year’s, 1910, and James Joy Miller, newly elected captain of Michigan’s varsity football team, was missing. Students were returning to campus to start winter...
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‘A truly noble woman’
Crashing the ‘intellectual male club’ Elizabeth Farrand (1852-1900) grew up in Ann Arbor when the University, according to one chronicler, “was exclusively an intellectual male club of Regents,...
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Coming home: A Vietnam Veteran in the Law School
Flying at 30,000 feet Tom Carhart remembers the day he and his wife drove their Volkswagen into Ann Arbor for the first time. It was the fall of 1970. He’d spent months in combat in Vietnam. After...
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It was a wonderful life
What happened to her? Virginia Patton Moss, who died in August at the age of 97 after a long life and career in Ann Arbor, lives again this month on millions of screens. As she always liked to say,...
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Keep the light alive: The glimmer of cautious optimism
‘Something more than a mound of stone’ The idea started just before Christmas 1946. Members of Michigan’s Student Legislature were discussing J-Hop, the big dance that dominated U-M’s social calendar...
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‘A place that respected one’s confusion’
Not just nostalgia In 1965, the University was approaching its 150th anniversary. Somebody had the idea that to mark the occasion there ought to be a book, an anthology of essays by distinguished...
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How the Michigan Union came to be
A barstool ambition 1917: Crews begin construction on the Michigan Union.(Image courtesy of U-M’s Bentley Historical Library.) Late one night in the spring of 1903, a Michigan junior named Bob Parker...
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No women allowed
Who goes there? The Michigan Union was founded in 1903 as a club for all University of Michigan students, faculty and alumni — all, that is, except women. From 1907 to 1916, the all-male Union occupied...
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Adieu, Elbel Field
A trapezoid goes quad Robert A.M. Stern Architects provided this image of the stunning new residential complex. In February 2023, the University announced it soon will ease a chronic shortage of space...
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Rebel in the multiversity
Roger and the U As Roger Rapoport said himself, “No one ever has a good word for the multiversity” — the 1960s term for universities grown too big and powerful to serve the public good. And in 1967,...
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