Share Your Hill Auditorium Memories
We’re celebrating Hill Auditorium’s 100th birthday during this 2012-2013 season, and we want to know about your experiences in Hill!
Check out our gallery of select “In Hill Auditorium, I am…” submissions below. We’ll grow it throughout our 2012-2013 season.
Download a flyer and submit your own Hill Auditorium Experience.
Featured memory, collected at the Mariinsky Orchestra performance on October 27, 2012:
“I used to sit up here in the 2nd balcony when a student at U-M (1953-56). This time, I was startled all over again by the clarity and distinctness of the separate instruments. Magical acoustics!
My father told me, years ago, that it was a picture of the just-built Hill Auditorium that inspired him to yearn for higher education. One of ten children on a farm near Fremont, he had never traveled further than a horse and wagon could go. He had never seen a remarkable building. In his memoirs he wrote, more than 60 years later, “I leafed through a “Michiganesian” in the school library and was captivated by a photo of Hill Auditorium, so majestic, so academic. Desire for college sprouted anew.”
After crops were planted in the summer of his senior year, he was released by his father to earn money as a laborer in Grand Rapids. That fall he had saved enough to enroll as a freshman at Calvin College.
In 1925, he and his new bride (my mother) came to Ann Arbor for graduate study. Two years later he was offered a job as instructor in the U-M Rhetoric Department, later absorbed into the English Department where he taught until he retired. Many many times they entered the great doors of Hill Auditorium and sat under the soaring bands of lights, and then in darkness heard the music.
His name was A. K. Stevens.”
Read the U-M memorial for A. K. Stevens. Notably, in 1944, A. K. Stevens was the faculty sponsor of the first University of Michigan Inter-Cooperative Council (ICC) co-op house, which was named in his honor, the A. K. Stevens Cooperative House.
Gallery of recent submissions:
PS. Yes, we love MoMA.
