Frightening and beautiful, they’re known simply as the “Big Heads” to longtime Detroit Thanksgiving Day Parade-goers. In fact, these giant papier-mâché puppets date back to the origins of the parade itself.
ome are pirates. Some are Martians. Some are animals. And the oldest ones—arguably the most elaborate and haunting—are Italian. Italian, because in the mid-1920s, Charles Wendel…
Richard Bingham talks about the summer he spent building the Mackinac Bridge.
My friend’s dad had a home in St. Ignace, and the family had a cottage in the Les Cheneaux Islands, east of the Straits. And Paul, my friend, said that I should come up there and look for work…
In all the photography that’s come out of Detroit in the past few years, we’ve yet to find someone like photographer Dave Jordano. Born in 1948 into what he calls the typical “GM family,” Dave was a suburban kid who cut his teeth shooting streetlife in Detroit in the…
I can pinpoint the exact moment Michigan’s gravitational pull officially reeled us back into orbit. We were lounging on a hotel room bed during a post-Thanksgiving getaway to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and for evening entertainment, all we could focus on was hunting down a…
Why I hope to spend More Time Up North by living in Detroit
Growing up as one of the many metro Detroiters who clog up I-75 on summer weekends to get away from the swelter of city life, I developed a serious infatuation with certain places up north. It started with my…
Our return to Michigan is just nine days away, and we’re beyond ready to be home amongst our fellow Midwesterners: people who love things like Big Ten football, who don’t take themselves too seriously, and who actually pronounce R’s at the ends of words (if you hear us…
Last week we started musing about the adage “Midwest is Best,” and asked a handful of friends to let the saying inspire a piece of writing to appear here on Found Michigan. This week we finish up with the essays, with contributions from Portlandia, the Windy City…
A few weeks ago, I signed a one-year lease on a home in Detroit. The signing was a culmination of a long search — of both Craigslist and my soul — to decide where I wanted to plant my roots in Michigan. So, when I put my signature on that piece of paper, I felt relieved.
Earlier this month we put a call out for your funny Thanksgiving memories/stories from Thanksgivings past and original insights into the holiday from a down-home Midwestern perspective. We’ve collected some of your best (and some of ours) for this round of short…
This is the final week of classes for many colleges around the state, meaning thousands of students will soon be out looking for summer jobs: waitressing, bartending, landscaping, painting houses—you know how it goes. For one particular born-and-raised Yooper, though…