The Glen Arbor Sun won six awards in four different categories from the Michigan Press Association’s 2024 Better Newspaper Contest. Winners included Jacob Wheeler, Tim Mulherin, Eric Carlson, and Daniel Wanschura, who won awards in the following categories: News Enterprise Reporting; Best Opinion; Sports Writing, and Public Service Award.
I admit it: I tried hard to not become a Michigan football fan. As a freshman in Ann Arbor in the fall of 1996 I found myself turned off by the manic, even cultish obsession with the team and the worship that transpired each autumnal Saturday. This wasn’t what attracted me to choose U of M for college. No, I wanted the great university, the vibrant college town, the oasis for radical politics. Then a funny thing happened. The following season Michigan ran the table and won every single game. What I experienced during the Rose Bowl-bound team’s 20-14 victory over Ohio State on a cold late November day at the Big House wasn’t about football, or even sports. It was the power of unity, of euphoria among strangers, of a trance as thousands of us move together in the same rhythm, with the same objective. I felt it again, albeit this time as an adult, when the Wolverines won the national championship last week. We are in our mid-40s now—adults with responsibilities—but we still need that youthful kinship, that unity.
Turner Booth, a former University of Michigan football player who left the New York City legal grind to follow his Glen Arbor dreams, is now the proud owner of the Kelderhouse-Brammer mill on the Crystal River.