- Join us online or on the telephone at 7:00 p.m. each Thursday, February 11 through March 11, as well as Tuesday, March 30, to see and listen to the Clarke Historical Library’s spring speakers.
To make a reservation for any or all or the first five presentations, visit clarke.cmich.edu/Speakers2021 to register and receive an access code for each event.
- Please contact us at
clarke@cmich.edu or 989.774.3352 for more information, including information about connecting to the presentation via telephone.
- The exact time and access information for the March 31 Hemingway the presentation will be made available later.
Thursday, March 4 at 7:00pm:
Aladdin Homes in Southeast Michigan
Wendy and Andrew Mutch have specialized in identifying Aladdin homes in southeast Michigan and will discuss the company and homes they have found.
The Aladdin Company of Bay City, Michigan, was one of America's most long-lived manufacturers of mail-order, "kit homes." Begun in 1906 by two brothers, Otto and William Sovereign, the family-owned firm continued to manufacture houses until 1981. Over the firm's long history, it sold over 75,000 homes to
both individual and corporate customers.
The records of the Aladdin Company were donated to the Clarke Historical Library in 1996. The almost complete run of company catalogs, full set of sales records, over 15,000 post-World War II architectural drawings, and various other company records create an extraordinary historical resource.
Abra Berens is a chef, former farmer, and writer.
Ruffage: A Practical Guide to Vegetables is her first cookbook and is rooted in her personal experiences. It is a teaching cookbook that aims to help build reader's confidence in preparing vegetables by providing recipes, explanations of cooking techniques, and a myriad of variations for each recipe. The book was one of the
New York Times twelve best new cookbooks in the spring of 2019 and was named a Michigan Notable Book in 2020.

Berens grew up on a farm in Wisconsin and started cooking in Ann Arbor's Zingerman's Deli while in she was in college. She went on to study cooking in Ireland. After returning to the United States, she began cooking in Chicago. But while in Chicago she began to think about getting back to the farm and to cook with local ingredients.
"It was that desire to have my food be of a place. I had been talking with my husband Erik about these ideas. Then he went to Ann Arbor and had a beer with Jess, [who became] my business partner. Jess had just started farming for Zingerman's." In 2009, she co-founded Bare Knuckle Farm in Northport. From 2009 to 2014 she had two homes; moving to Michigan in the spring and then back to Chicago in the fall.
In 2015, she left Northport to open the café at Local Foods in Chicago because it made more "fiscal sense." But in 2017, she relocated to southwest Michigan and joined the team at Granor Farm in Three Oaks. There, she combines her love of farms and restaurants to create dinners on the farm that celebrate southwest Michigan's diverse agriculture.
Wednesday, March 31 at 6:30PM
(Date of event changed from March 30)Register for this event at wcmu.org/hemingway Hemingway
Lynn Novick, who co-produced this forthcoming PBS documentary with Ken Burns, and local Hemingway experts will discuss the documentary, which will air on WCMU April 5-7. The documentary includes material from the Clarke telling the story of Hemingway's time in Michigan.
Hemingway is a three-part, six-hour documentary film
that examines the visionary work and the turbulent life of Ernest Hemingway, one of the greatest and most influential writers America has produced. Interweaving his eventful biography, a life lived at the ultimately treacherous nexus of art, fame, and celebrity, with carefully selected excerpts from his short stories, novels, and non-fiction, the film seeks to see beyond the façade of the public man and allow the viewer to become familiar
with a brilliant, ambitious, charismatic, and egocentric genius.
This presentation is sponsored by the Clarke Historical Library and WCMU Public Media.