[lbo-talk] Ann Arbor & Robert Hall

[Carrol Cox]

At least into the '60s Ann Arbor was (so to speak) a paradise of local
merchants. When Robert Hall tried to open a shop there, the local
merchants arranged that no trucking company would carry goods from the
Detroit Rail Freight yards to Ann Arbor for Robert Hall. The local
merchants also had a private club (one of those with a stream running
under a glass floor in the dining room) one of whose rules was no one
connected to the university could be a member. I presume by now the
local merchants' grip on the town has been broken, but in the 1950s it
made Ann Arbor, _except_ for the university, a pretty grim place. It
didn't seem to have change an enormous amount (except for a build-up on
Stadium Boulevard) when I was there for a conference in 1970, but that
was only a few days and I could have missed a lot. The biggest change I
remember from that year was that they had replaced crockery with plastic
cups in the Mens' Union cafeteria.

Carrol