Vince The Librarian

Today, November 22, 2011, is the 48th anniversary of one of the darkest moments in United States history. On this day in 1963, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas. Kennedy had been elected to the nation’s highest political office merely three years earlier, and his youthful image and enthusiasm gave Americans great hope for the future. He promised to get the US space program going and set an ambitious goal of sending Americans to the moon.

Also, while giving a campaign speech at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, then Senator Kennedy proposed a program that would send United States citizens to other countries to serve the people in those countries and assist with projects to benefit them. This idea became the Peace Corps, which remains as strong as ever five decades later, and is one of the best examples of the good that people can do for each other on an international level.

President Kennedy’s death was an extremely traumatic event for the country. His successor, Lyndon Johnson, did move forward with much of Kennedy’s agenda and was able to accomplish a lot in areas such as civil rights, the space program, and alleviating poverty. Nevertheless, there remained a painful sense of what might have been had not JFK been cut down in his prime, before even being able to serve his first term.

Kennedy’s assassination has also been a source of much speculation as to who was really responsible. The official story of the Warren Commission, of which Michigan’s Gerald Ford was part, is that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in the killing of President Kennedy. This story is questioned by many, in large part due to the many and often contradictory connections Oswald had. He was a United States Marine, he defected to the Soviet Union as a supposed “true believer” in communism, and he had other connections with organized crime as well as political groups on both the left and right. We will probably never really know who all was involved with the assassination, and in part that is what makes it so fascinating.

There are many great resources on the JFK assassination, here are some of them.

The United States National Archive resources on JFK:

http://www.archives.gov/research/jfk/

ABC News page on the Kennedy assassination:

http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/jfk-kennedy-assassination-intrigues-47-years/story?id=12214125

PBS “Conspiracy Theories” page:

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/white_house/july-dec03/jfk_11-20.html

“Oswald’s Ghost” also from PBS, focuses on the man accused of killing President Kennedy, who never stood trial because he himself was killed just days after JFK’s death.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/oswald/

The Thompson Library also has many books about President Kennedy, as well as historical databases with more information about him and his mysterious death in Dallas.

I am always finding new and interesting things while browsing the web, and here is one of them.

The University of Detroit/Mercy is a Roman Catholic school located in Detroit, and run by the Society of Jesus, also known as the Jesuits. The current university is a merger of two formerly separate institutions. The U of D was founded in 1877, while Mercy College got started in 1941. The two schools merged in 1990, adopting the present name which incorporates the names of both of the formerly independent schools.

U of D has had a long tradition of athletic success in a wide variety of sports. Among the great athletes to have attended and played for the Titans, Dave DeBusschere is probably the best known. He went on to a lengthy and successful pro basketball career with the Detroit Pistons and New York Knicks. Spencer Haywood, John Long, and Earl Cureton are some other Detroit grads who went on to the NBA.

For several years in the 1970s, the Titans men’s basketball team was coached by Dick Vitale. Yes, THAT Dick Vitale. As in “Dickie V,” the loud and very enthusiastic sportscaster who has been a major personality in the basketball world for so long. He posted a 78-30 record at the U of D and took the team to the NCAA tournament in 1977. “Awesome, baby!” as the man himself likes to say.

While the U of D continues to participate in basketball and other sports, their football program was shut down following the 1964 season. It was a tough decision for university officials to make, but one that they felt made sense financially.

The gridiron Titans are not forgotten by the University, though. The University of Detroit-Mercy Library has put together an online database called “University of Detroit Football Collection.” Among other things, they have scanned in all the pages of all the home game programs for Titan games from 1930 through the program’s final season in 1964. These provide lots of information on the players and coaches of the U of D and the teams they played against. There are also many cool old advertisements for Detroit area businesses, including of course the world famous automobile companies.

Old publications like these also show how certain social values have changed. For example, these college football programs included prominent advertising for cigarettes, often in full color in the center pages where the team rosters and starting lineups appeared. The 1935 U of D programs even had an ad for Lucky Strikes right on the front cover, complete with a color image of a pack of Luckies. These days, it is pretty much unheard of for college sports publications to have any tobacco or alcohol advertising.

The collection is located at:

 http://research.udmercy.edu/find/special_collections/digital/football/index.php

An interesting trivia note. University of Detroit’s football stadium, which was torn down in the early 1970s after the school ended the football program, was the original home venue for the professional Detroit Lions when they moved to Motown from Portsmouth, Ohio in the 1930s, where they had been known as the Portsmouth Spartans. The Lions won their first NFL championship in 1935, with the game being played at U of D Stadium.

OK, way past time for another entry on this blog! How about some information about a recently added database in the area of Women’s and Gender Studies??? This database is called LGBT Life With Full Text and comes from the EBSCO company. EBSCO also supplies a number of other databases that you may be familiar with, such as CINAHL (Cumulative Index for Nursing and Allied Health Literature), Criminal Justice Abstracts, Historical Abstracts, and PSYCinfo.

As the title of the database indicates, LGBT Life With Full Text focuses on information sources about LGBT which stands for Lesbians, Gay men, Bisexuals, and Transgendered/Transsexual people. This term is intended to be as inclusive as possible of all people who are of sexual orientations and/or gender identities that have been historically oppressed and still do not have full equality with heterosexual and gender-conforming people. More recently, other letters have been added to the initialism, such as “Q” for Queer and/or Questioning, “I” for Intersexed, and others.

This database includes a wide variety of information sources. More than 200 journals, newspapers, and magazines are indexed and abstracted, and at least 130 of these are available full text right in the database. Others, of course, may be available in full text in other databases, or in print or microfilm here at the Thompson Library. Like many databases, there are also full text books available here, as well as references to others that we may have in print form at the library, or that we can get from the U of M Ann Arbor libraries or through Interlibrary Loan.

Some of the publications available in LGBT Life With Full Text include: The Advocate, Gay Parent Magazine, Girlfriends, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian & Gay Studies, James White Review, ISNA News, Ladder, Lesbian Tide, New York Blade, ONE, Tangents, Washington Blade, and many more.

Also among the publications included in this database is Between the Lines which is Michigan’s leading newspaper for the LGBTQ community.

So, there are some basic facts about this very useful database. Here’s how to get to it and use it.

From the U of M Flint Thompson Library homepage http://www.umflint.edu/library/ there are two basic ways to get to LGBT Life With Full Text. One is to look in the “Browse Alphabetically” bullet point in the “Search by Subject” section of the library homepage. Click on “L” and you will find the database listed there. Or, in the same section of the library homepage, bring up the listing of subject areas by the first bullet point and select “Women’s and Gender Studies” from the pop up list. This will take you to a listing of databases on womens and gender studies topics, one of which is LGBT Life With Full Text.

Once in the database, you will find three blank boxes into which you type the keywords you wish to search for in the database. The default search is “Select a Field (optional).” Meaning that you do not have to select a specific field such as author, title, publication name, or subject heading. Most of the time, you will want to start out by leaving it on “Select a Field (optional)” as this will search for your keywords anywhere in the database, and you do not need to know the subject heading that the database uses for your topic of interest.

If you wish to find the subject heading(s) that the database uses for your topic, there is a thesaurus available that can be searched or browsed. Just click the link marked “Thesaurus” in the blue bar at the top of the search screen. You can then click on the subject heading that looks good to you, or use the check boxes to combine terms using the Boolean AND, OR, and NOT operators.

You can limit your search to documents that are full text within LGBT Life With Full Text by checking a box. There is also a check box to limit your search to peer reviewed articles. You can also enter a range of publication dates to limit your search in that manner. Any of these things can be done either before or after you do a keyword search of the database.

If you are interested in issues related to LGBT people and their lives, this is a great database to use. Try it out, and if you need help please ask me or any of the librarians.

A week from today, we celebrate the life and work of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Dr. King, along with so many others, bravely stood up and worked for peace, justice, and equal rights for all, and against racism and oppression of all kinds. And like so many others, he paid the ultimate price for doing the right thing. His wise words continue to inspire us to see beyond our narrow self interests, and to do all that we can to ease human suffering even when it is not easy to do so.

The U of M Flint Thompson Library has many resources pertaining to Dr. King, for those who want to learn more about this great person and his social activism. Searching the Mirlyn library catalog, we find a wide variety of books and audiovisual materials including books written by Dr. King himself. These include Stride Toward Freedom: the Montgomery Story (about the Montgomery, Alabama bus boycott…call number E 185.89 .T8 K5), Why We Can’t Wait (call number E 185.61 .K54), The Trumpet of Conscience (call number E 185.97 .K5), and The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr. (call number E 185.97.K5 A2 1992).

In addition to Dr. King’s own writings, many books written by others about Dr. King are on our shelves. Martin Luther King, Jr.: civil rights leader, theologian, orator (call number E 185.97 .K5 M33 1989) is a three volume collection of essays focusing on the three aspects of Dr. King’s life mentioned in the title.

Author Taylor Branch has published three books about Dr. King, which deal chronologically with Dr. King’s career as an activist. The first of these, Parting the Waters (call number E 185.61 .B7914 1988, is about the earlier years of Dr. King’s work, from 1954 to 1963. Pillar of Fire (call number E 185.61 .B7915 1998) covers the years 1963-1965, and At Canaan’s Edge (call number E 185.615 .B67 2006) the last years before the assassination of Dr. King in 1968.

Michael Nojeim’s Gandhi and King: the Power of Nonviolent Resistance (call number HM 1281 .N63 2004) brings together two of history’s greatest proponents of nonviolent social change, Dr. King and Mahatma Gandhi, who used nonviolent tactics to free his country, India, from British colonial rule.

The library also has a number of audiovisual materials including VCR tapes, DVDs, and audio recordings about Dr. King. These can be found by searching the Mirlyn catalog under “subject” for “King, Martin Luther” and limiting your search to video or audio materials.

For articles and other online materials about Dr. King and the Civil Rights Movement, there are a number of great databases at the Africana Studies library subject page.

http://www.umflint.edu/library/subjects/africana.htm

Here you will find databases that include such things as journal articles, historic African-American newspapers, and text of many of Dr. King’s speeches.

More than 40 years after the tragic death of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., so much progress has been made, yet so very much still desperately needs to be done for humankind to truly fulfill Dr. King’s vision of a peaceful, egalitarian, and just society. The task for those of us who are here on this planet now is to keep on doing all that we can possibly do to make this world a better place for everyone. By doing this, we keep the spirit of MLK alive, and step by step we come closer to his dream becoming reality.

The city of Detroit, the state of Michigan, and the game of baseball lost a great person yesterday with the passing of Ernie Harwell. For 42 years, Mr. Harwell called the play by play and provided commentary for the Detroit Tigers baseball team. More than just a sportscaster, Ernie Harwell was a kindly, grandfatherly figure whose voice became as closely associated with Tiger Baseball as eggs are with Easter, or fireworks with the Fourth of July. Before coming to Detroit, he called games for two teams who were then in New York but have since moved to the west coast: the New York (now San Francisco) Giants and the Brooklyn (now Los Angeles) Dodgers. He also was the Baltimore Orioles radio announcer just before Detroit, and worked for the California Angels in 1992 in between stints with the Tigers.

As a young sportswriter, he got to know already-legendary baseball people such as Ted Williams, Ty Cobb, and Connie Mack. And through his years with the Tigers, from Al Kaline and Denny McLain to Alan Trammell and Lou Whitaker, there was always Ernie Harwell to bring the game to life over the radio and connect Tiger fans with the team.

The Thompson Library has the following books by Ernie Harwell, and they are all highly recommended reading for anyone who loves a good baseball story (all are in the Main Collection):

Ernie Harwell’s Diamond Gems: call number GV873 .H38 1991

The Babe Signed My Shoe: call number GV 873 .H375 1994 (the title of this book refers to an actual event from Ernie Harwell’s life, March 1930 in Atlanta. The NY Yankees were playing a preseason game, and Ernie wanted to get Babe Ruth’s autograph. Not having a piece of paper for the Bambino to sign, young Ernie got the prized signature on his canvas Keds sneaker!)

Tuned to Baseball: call number GV 863 .A1 H37 1985

Ernie Harwell: My 60 Years in Baseball: GV 742.42 .H39 K44 2002

Ernie Harwell’s spirit will live forever in the hearts and minds of Detroit Tigers fans, and baseball fans in general. Next time you are watching a Tigers game, listen really closely and if you are like me, you will hear that familiar voice calling the play by play…”lonnnnng gone!” “he stood there like a house by the side of the road!” ” a fan from (random city in Michigan) caught that foul ball!!!!!”

Womens and Gender Studies is not just one of the departments i do liaison work for, it is also a subject area that i am personally very interested in. So, here are some websites i have found in my trips on the information superhighway.

U of Michigan Flint Thompson Library webpage for W&GS: http://www.umflint.edu/library/subjects/womens_and_gender_studies.htm

well, since i work here at the Thompson Library, i suppose i should start with our subject page for W&GS. We also have similar pages for other subject areas, including all the areas you can major or minor in here at U of M Flint. Each page contains links to databases and websites that are most relevant to the subject area in question. For W&GS, this includes sources such as African-American Women Writers of the 19th Century, American Women’s History Online, Contemporary Women’s Issues, Infotrac Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Issues Collection, and Women and Social Movements in the United States: 1600-2000. These are just a few of the resources available here.

Feministe, subtitled “In Defense of the sanctimonious Women’s Studies Set!” is a very good general blog about feminism, women, LGBT issues, and other related topics. http://www.feministe.us/blog/

Womanist Musings focuses on women’s and gender topics with an added emphasis on the intersection between those issues and issues faced by African-Americans and People of Color in general. http://www.womanist-musings.com/

The Bilerico Project is subtitled “Daily experiments in LGBTQ” and does a generally good job of covering Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer topics. The name, in case you are wondering, comes from the name of the founder of the site (Bil) and a friend of his (Eri) with the (co) added at the end to stand for “company.”

http://www.bilerico.com/

Shakesville is another wonderful progressive/feminist blog that i urge all W&GS folks to check out, if you have not already done so! http://shakespearessister.blogspot.com/

The last one i’d like to mention for the nonce is Questioning Transphobia, which addresses the issues and needs of transgendered, transsexual, and otherwise non-gender conforming people. http://questioningtransphobia.wordpress.com/

These are merely a small sample of what is out there on the net in terms of material on Womens and Gender Studies. I have some other favorites that i will blog about at a later time.

Wow, has it really been almost a year since i posted here?? looks like it has been. Well, we just received a two volume set here at the Thompson Library that i really want to tell everyone about. It combines two topics of great interest to me: womens/gender studies and rock/popular music. The title of the set is Women Icons of Popular Music. The author, Carrie Havranek, has a background in journalism and has written for the Village Voice among other periodicals. She has also contributed to Baker’s Biographical Dictionary of Popular Musicians Since 1990 which is available as an electronic resource at the Thompson Library.

In this two volume set, Havranek focuses on 24 female musicians from a wide variety of popular genres including rock, folk, Motown, country/western, rap/hip-hop, and blues. There is a timeline of women in pop music in both volumes that starts in 1954, when country singer Patsy Cline inked a record deal with the Four Star/Decca label. The timeline continues right up to 2008 when Tina Turner, still as dynamic as ever at 68 years of age, kicked off her first concert tour in seven years. In between, there are moments of triumph (such as Detroit’s Diana Ross and the Supremes reaching the top of the charts with “Where Did Our Love Go?” in 1964) as well as tragedy (San Francisco’s queen of rock-n-blues, Janis Joplin, passing away far before her time in 1970). One can also find out about pivotal early moments in the lives of women rockers, such as when Amy Ray and Emily Saliers (the Indigo Girls) first met as elementary schoolers in 1973. Or, several years later in 1979, when nine year old Ani DiFranco got her first guitar and soon thereafter began playing and singing in public.

The range of genres represented here is impressive. From the folk and folk/rock field, we have Woodstock veterans Joan Baez and Joni Mitchell, as well as newer artists in the folk tradition like the Indigo Girls, Ani DiFranco, and Suzanne Vega. Rap and hip-hop are represented by Mary J. Blige and Missy Elliott, while Old School Motown R&B is epitomized by Aretha Franklin, Diana Ross, and Tina Turner. Top women in country and western are here as well, including Emmylou Harris, Patsy Cline, and Dolly Parton.

For each artist in the set, there is a roughly 15-17 page entry including detailed biographical and career information as well as a discography and bibliography for those interested in further research.

As has been the case in many other fields such as sports, politics, and high profile professions like law and medicine, it has not always been easy for women musicians to make their mark. Among the great victories of the 1960s and 1970s feminist movement is the opening up of opportunities that had previously been difficult if not totally denied to women and girls. Although there is still much work to be done to reach true gender equity, much progress has been made and the women in this two volume set are proof of that.

Women Icons of Popular Music is in the Main Collection, call number ML 82 .H39 2009.

I wrote in a previous entry about the demolition of historic Tiger Stadium in Detroit, and a book the library has about Philadelphia’s Connie Mack Stadium AKA Shibe Park, which was torn down in 1976 after being the home of two major league baseball teams (Phillies and Athletics) for several decades. At present, the playing field of Tiger Stadium remains along with the stadium structure from dugout to dugout. Hope remains that this part of sports history can be saved and put to new use.

Another book has been added to the library collection that deals with a similar topic, in yet another city. In this case, not only was the classic stadium lost, but the team that played there also departed, leaving an entire borough of New York City with a broken heart that (for some, at least) may never really heal.

The borough, of course, is Brooklyn. The team is the Brooklyn Dodgers, and the stadium was known as Ebbets Field. Native New Yorker Bob McGee tells the story in The Greatest Ballpark Ever: Ebbets Field and the Story of the Brooklyn Dodgers (call number GV 416 .N48 M36 2005).

McGee begins by describing a 1960 photo showing the wreckage of Ebbets Field, three years after the Dodgers played their last game there before heading west to Los Angeles where they remain to this day. He found the photo on the same end of the country that the Dodgers left Brooklyn for, just up the west coast in San Francisco. Where, as anyone familiar with baseball history knows, is where the former New York Baseball Giants (who played in Manhattan at the Polo Grounds, like Ebbets Field long gone) moved to in the same year (1958) as the Dodgers. What once was a New York City inter-borough rivalry thus became, and remains, a northern vs. southern California rivalry.

One really gets a sense of how much the Dodgers meant to Brooklyn from this book, as well as a vivid picture of the various people who played a part in the story of the team and its home stadium. The Ebbets family, whose name appeared on the stadium, figure prominently beginning with Charles Ebbets Sr.

The fans of the Brooklyn Dodgers remind one of the Green Bay Packers faithful, with their blue collar, every day folks appeal and strong loyalty to the team and the town. They suffered through many a “close but no cigar” season, particularly during the 1950s when the Dodgers won several National League titles only to come up short against the New York Yankees in the World Series. “Next year” came at last in 1955, when Brooklyn’s team finally defeated their enemies from the Bronx.

Sadly, only two seasons after the joy of victory, Brooklyn endured the agony of losing its beloved Dodgers. The villain of the story was Walter O’Malley, who over several decades was able to gain ownership of the team. He acted as if he wanted to keep the team in Brooklyn, while at the same time secretly and sometimes not so secretly plotting his move to Los Angeles. To this day, there are people in Brooklyn who curse O’Malley for taking their team away from them. And in the decades since 1957, other fans in other cities have seen the teams they love moved by greedy owners. A prime example being the Baltimore Colts of the National Football League, who snuck out of town in the middle of the night in 1984 on their way to Indianapolis.

Of course, no account of the Brooklyn Dodgers would be complete without telling the story of Jack Roosevelt “Jackie” Robinson, who in 1947 became the first African American major league baseball player in the modern era. Jackie Robinson’s courage and dignity was so extraordinary that his jersey number 42 has been retired not just by the Dodgers, but by Major League Baseball as a whole.

Branch Rickey, the Dodger general manager who made the bold move of signing Robinson, was a graduate of the University of Michigan law school and managed the Wolverines baseball team from 1910 to 1913.

The first part of the title of this entry comes from a previous book about the Brooklyn Dodgers that quickly became a classic of sports literature: The Boys of Summer by Roger Kahn. The library also has this book, and the call number is GV 875 .B7 K3.

We are always getting new additions to our collection here at the Thompson Library, and here are some brief words about some recently acquired books in the realm of sports.

Women and Sports in the United States: a documentary reader (call number GV 709.18 .U6 O74 2007) is edited by Jean O’Reilly and Susan Cahn. O’Reilly teaches at the University of Connecticut and Cahn is a professor at the State University of New York. Cahn is also author of the book Coming on Strong: gender and sexuality in twentieth century women’s sports which is available at the Thompson Library (call number GV 709 .C34 1994). They have put together a book that would serve very well as a textbook for an introductory course on women’s sports in the USA. The book begins with a timeline of women’s sports in the United States that starts in 1882, and includes a wide variety of articles and book chapters.

Just recently, the long talked about demolition of historic Tiger Stadium in Detroit began. Some saw the old ballpark as an aging eyesore. To others, including myself, Tiger Stadium was a priceless storehouse of memories, very worthy of preservation. What is happening presently in Detroit has happened in other cities as well. Bruce Kuklick, in To Everything a Season: Shibe Park and urban Philadelphia (call number GV 416 .P477 K85 1991), tells the story of the Philly equivalent of old Tiger Stadium. Shibe Park, also known as Connie Mack Stadium, was home to two major league teams in the City of Brotherly Love. Originally built in 1909 for the Philadelphia Athletics (now the Oakland A’s), the park was home to the A’s until 1953 when they moved to Kansas City. The Philadelphia Phillies also played there, leaving after the 1970 season for a new home called Veterans Stadium, now also gone. Following the Phillies departure, Connie Mack Stadium stood empty until it was torn down in 1976. Sadly, it appears a similar fate is in the cards for Motown’s classic field of dreams at the corner of Michigan and Trumbull.

The late 1960s were a time of great social change and upheaval in the United States. Even in the often conservative realm of sports, there was evidence of this. At the 1968 Olympic games, United States track and field athletes Tommie Smith and John Carlos took first and third place in the 200 meter race. On the medal winners podium, they raised their black gloved fists in a Black Power salute. Smith and Carlos were expelled from the Olympics, and suffered much criticism and mistreatment for their brave statement for social justice. Four decades later, Tommie Smith gives his account of this story, placing it in the context of his life story,  in Silent Gesture: the autobiography of Tommie Smith (call number GV 697 .S65 A3 2007).

Barbara J. Keys takes an international approach in Globalizing Sport: national rivalry and international community in the 1930s (call number GV 706.34 .K48 2006). She focuses specifically on international politics and the establishment of international sports organizations, as well as the Los Angeles Olympics of 1932, the Berlin Olympics of 1936, and soccer in the Soviet Union.

These are just a few of the many great books the Thompson Library has on sports topics. Check the Mirlyn catalog for others!

Sometimes it seems like every day I find some really neat-o thing online that i did not know was there before. Please allow me to introduce you to a couple of these things.

For over half a century, Sports Illustrated has been the leading weekly sports magazine in the United States. Its writers and photographers have long been known as the best in the business, providing excellent written and visual accounts of the people and events of the sporting world.

Now, you can view every back issue of this great magazine in full color at the SI Vault website:

http://vault.sportsillustrated.cnn.com/

At present, there is a basic search box as well as an advanced search with “exact phrase,” “at least one of the words,” and “without the word(s)” options. There does not appear to be a way to browse the issues by date. There is a top ten most popular topics list that is clickable. Also, it appears that SI will highlight whatever is happening at the present time in sports and provide links to back issues with similar content. Since it is currently “March Madness” time, the currently featured links have to do with NCAA basketball championships of the past. The April 2, 1979 issue is front and center today (March 28, 2008) and features  none other than Michigan State’s Earvin “Magic” Johnson on the cover. It is hard to believe that it is almost 30 years since the Magic Man and his Spartan teammates beat Larry Bird and Indiana State. Some other featured covers include the one from April 3, 1967 with a very tall young man who was then known as Lew Alcindor of UCLA. He would later convert to Islam, change his name to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and have a lengthy career as a pro. And also play on the same Los Angeles Laker teams as the above mentioned Magic Johnson.

Sports fans will definitely want to check out this great archive of memorable moments!

Ann Arbor is the home of the University’s original campus and the great Wolverines sports teams. It is also a very cool and interesting city in general, with a rich history. The Ann Arbor District Library has collected many historical photos of the city at:

 http://www.aadl.org/gallery

There are five main “albums” of images. The “pictureAnn Arbor” album contains a variety of images submitted by local residents. Events such as the famous Art Fair and Michigan football are included, as well as some really interesting historical pictures such as ones of Michigan Stadium and Crisler Arena being built.

The other four albums focus on specific topic areas: history of the Ann Arbor police department, downtown Ann Arbor streets, Ann Arbor architecture, and Ann Arbor signs. Take a trip back in time to 1972, when a gallon of gas at the Mobil station on the corner of Main and Beakes was just 34 cents for regular and 38 cents for premium!!!

http://www.aadl.org/gallery/a2signs/beakes/A2signs039.jpg.html

The gas station itself is long gone now, as of course are those prices!

The venerable Fleetwood Diner, on the other hand, is still around, and is one of the better places in town to get tasty but not necessarily good for you grub:

http://www.aadl.org/gallery/a2signs/ashley/A2signs265.jpg.html

And here we see the humble beginnings of what is now a major big business. This is the original location of the first Borders Book Shop, which has since grown into a chain with locations seemingly everywhere. And it all started on State Street in Ann Arbor:

http://www.aadl.org/gallery/a2signs/A2signs386.jpg.html

Just a few examples of what you can find at the Ann Arbor District Library’s photo gallery.