Three Notable Arborites

It was my first year in Ann Arbor back in the late 70s and I was riding my bike to class at the University of Michigan when I encountered a man standing on a streetcorner, dressed in a cream-colored suit and carrying a guitar. He said something to me in a raspy voice.

"Excuse me?" I asked. He repeated something which to me was unintelligible. I nodded, and pedaled the heck away, fast. I noticed he always seemed to be on that same streetcorner in downtown A2. Always well dressed, always carrying that guitar, which sometimes he would play, though I thought not very well.

I eventually learned that man was "Shakey Jake" (the man pictured), who became an Ann Arbor icon--a streetperson whose colorful dress and flamboyant manner entertained locals for decades until he passed away last week at the age of 82. His life was subject of much speculation locally, which he did little to clear up in interviews he gave over the years. At various times he told reporters that he began smoking at the age of one and had traveled around the world eight times though never in a plane.

Jake was quintessentially Ann Arbor for those who revel in its counterculture reputation.

Another notable former Arborite passed away last week. Unlike Jake, this man will not be mourned. Coral Eugene Watts was a confessed serial killer whose tally of victims may never be known but may have included scores of women in more than one state. I still remember the palpable fear felt by the women in the office where I worked in the late 70s after a young woman was brutally killed in Ann Arbor. One newlywed wife refused to leave her locked apartment when her husband was away.

Eventually, police fingered Watts as a suspect but they did not have the evidence for an arrest and he migrated down to Texas where he was tied to a string of killings there. Texas authorities had enough evidence to convict him of one brutal attack, but granted him immunity in up to a dozen other killings in exchange for his confession.

Through our wonderful loophole-laden justice system, Watts was to be released a couple years ago. Michigan prosecutors successfully had him extradited to Michigan where he was convicted of murder here. Watts died in an area hospital of prostate cancer, no doubt more peacefully than many of the women he encountered over the course of his criminal career.

Culling through the local news, I ran across the name of one more familiar Ann Arborite (former Arborite now that he teaches at the University of Minnesota). This area always has had a reputation of being a hotbed of literary talent and one of the more successful of these writers is Charlie Baxter.

"Feast of Love" is a movie opening this week which is based on Baxter's novel of the same name. Though Baxter used Ann Arbor as the setting for his book, producers chose Oregon as the locale for the story instead. What, is there that much more love in Oregon than in Ann Arbor?

I met Baxter myself when he formed a series of writer's support groups in our area through a grant from Reader's Digest maybe a dozen years ago. When Baxter returned some months later, I was embarrassingly the only one left to show up amongst my original group of aspiring scribes. However, the Ann Arbor author was circumspect about it and dutifully listened to the opening of a screenplay I had been drafting. He pronounced it at least as good as the work of a former student who became a TV writer in Hollywood.

Maybe he was just being charitable, but then again maybe not. Maybe my wife and I should quit our jobs, pack up, and head for tinseltown. I'll borrow from Baxter himself for my soon-to-be-award-winning movie script. I'll title it, "Feast of Blogs." Great title! Now I just need the plot and stuff.