If you’re looking for the perfect Christmas gift for that Livingston County person on your list, a paperback copy of “A Taco Bell for Howell and Other Livingston County Crusades” is a spectacular choice! It’s only $10.99 on Amazon and it’s available by clicking here. Buddy Moorehouse’s book is a collection of 40 years of Livingston County stories, columns, opinions and more. Here’s an excerpt, a chapter entitled “The differences between Brighton and Howell.”
For all intents and purposes, there are five main communities in Livingston County: Brighton, Fowlerville, Hartland, Howell and Pinckney. I suppose you can throw Gregory and Cohoctah in there, too, and you can count Hamburg as a separate community if you want. We also have parts of Byron, Fenton and Whitmore Lake.
But the big five are Brighton, Fowlerville, Hartland, Howell and Pinckney. And they each have their own distinct personality.
Fowlerville is a small town surrounded by farmland. The biggest day of the year is the last day of school, when all of the high school seniors drive tractors to school. Hartland is essentially a collection of beautiful subdivisions surrounded by traffic. Pinckney is where you find all the lakes and trails.
And then you’ve got the two big boys, Brighton and Howell.
Livingston County is unique in Michigan in that we have two main communities that are roughly the same in both population and stature. If an outsider were to ask you which town in Livingston County is the biggest, you’d say, “I don’t know. It’s either Brighton or Howell.” That makes us unique. In almost every other county in Michigan, you’ve got one clear-cut city or town which is the king of the hill.
The biggest city in Wayne County? Detroit. The biggest city in Washtenaw County? Ann Arbor. The biggest city in Montcalm County? I have no idea. I have no idea where Montcalm County is.
The point is, Livingston County is unique in that we don’t have one big kid on the block – we’ve got two. The only other county that might be similar in that way is Oakland, where you’ve got about 10 big kids on the block – Southfield, Pontiac, Troy, Rochester, etc.
But in Livingston County, Brighton and Howell are the big dogs. Those towns are where you find most of the restaurants and stores, the biggest downtowns, all of the hotels and most of the dentists, doctors and insurance agents.
The two towns are natural rivals, as you’d expect. They are HUGE rivals when it comes to high school sports (although you can throw Hartland into that mix, as well), and they’re huge rivals when it comes to thinking that they, and they alone, are the one truly great place in Livingston County.
The towns each have a unique personality and character. And if you want to keep score, I would do it like this:
BEST DOWNTOWN: Brighton has the Mill Pond, the Imagination Station, a beautiful performance venue that cost way too much money and the most vibrant nightlife scene this side of Royal Oak. Howell has the historic Livingston County Courthouse, an equally historic movie theater and about a hundred stores that all sell old pieces of broken-down wooden furniture that somebody found in an old barn and then painted and sold to my wife for $250. Advantage, Brighton.
MOST FAMOUS RESIDENTS: Brighton has sports legend Drew Henson, TV anchor Dave LewAllen and Detroit Lion Dave Pearson. Howell has comedian Heywood Banks, Brooklyn Dodger Bert Tooley and, for a few weeks, former child star Melissa Gilbert. Oh, and me. Advantage, Howell.
DUMBASS TRAFFIC INTERSECTIONS: Howell has the Burkhart Road/I-96 interchange, which looks like some traffic engineers threw a few pieces of spaghetti on a plate and said “let’s make it look like that.” Howell also has these ridiculous and stupid teeny-tiny roundabouts all throughout the city that serve no purpose other than to induce snowplow drivers to accidentally ram their snowplows into them. Brighton has the Lee Road roundabouts. Advantage, Brighton.
BEST HIGH SCHOOL FIGHT SONG: Brighton High School’s fight song is the same as Ohio State’s. I have no idea what Howell High School’s fight song is. Advantage, Howell.
MOST HIGH SCHOOLS THE COMMUNITY WAS SUCKERED INTO BUILDING WHEN THEY DIDN’T NEED IT: Howell has Parker High School (or whatever it’s called now), the con job of all time. Brighton has nothing. Advantage, Howell.
BEST DOWNTOWN RESTAURANTS: Howell has so many – Cleary’s Pub, Diamond’s Steak and Seafood, Cello’s Italian Restaurant, Coratti’s Pizza, 2FOG’s Pub. Brighton has so many more, including the Brighton Bar & Grill, where I proposed to my wife in 1995. Advantage, Brighton.
BEST DOWNTOWN STATUE: Howell has a statue of Duane Zemper, an acclaimed World War II photographer, community icon and a track star who almost made the Olympics. Brighton has the Ugly Naked Guy. Advantage, Howell.
I could go on and on, but if you want to know the real difference between Brighton and Howell, it’s this: When it comes to something new that comes to their town, people in Brighton complain about EVERYTHING. People in Howell complain about nothing. Even when they should.
Through the years, the list of things people in Brighton have complained about include the roundabouts, the Tridge, the Stillwater Grill building, the condos on the railroad tracks, the Mill Pond amphitheater and most especially the Ugly Naked Guy. We will have entire chapters later in this book on some of these things.
I first noticed this phenomenon back in the 1980s, when one of my beats at the Livingston County Press (in addition to covering sports) was the Genoa Township Board. Genoa is the Mason-Dixon Line of Livingston County, the township that directly straddles Howell and Brighton. People on the western side of Genoa identify as Howellites. People on the eastern side of Genoa identify as Brightonians. Back in the 1980s, I was covering all of their meetings.
In 1981, a group of 12 investors led by a guy named Myron Serbay announced plans that they were going to buy up the Burroughs Farms Recreation Area at the corner of Brighton and Chilson roads and turn it into a housing-and-golf development called Oak Pointe. This was on the Brighton side of Genoa. The people involved in this story are all Brightonians.
Burroughs had been a sleepy little campground and park that bordered West Crooked Lake, and for decades, it was a summer getaway for employees of the Burroughs Corporation. It had cottages, picnic areas, a golf course and a beach. But in the 1980s, they decided to sell the property to Serbay’s group so that they could build a new paradise called Oak Pointe.
You’ve seen Oak Pointe. You’ve been to Oak Pointe. It’s gorgeous. So right now you’re thinking, “Who in the hell would have possibly opposed THIS?”
Well, remember, this is Brighton. So here’s the story.
From the moment Serbay’s group announced plans for the development, the crap hit the fan. Leading the charge against Oak Pointe was a homeowners group from the nearby lakes area called the Tri-Lakes Riparian Association. They showed up at almost every meeting of the Genoa Township Board, demanding that the project be turned down. Their main objection? They just didn’t want it there.
I picked up the story when I came to the LCP in 1983. Oak Pointe was still in the planning phase at that point, and the people from the Tri-Lakes Riparian Association were still showing up at every meeting to oppose it.
They were getting so mad that at one point in 1985, they actually floated the idea of seceding from the township. They wanted the area around East Crooked, West Crooked and Clifford lakes – the area that surrounded Burroughs Farms – to break off from Genoa Township to become its own village. That way, they could make their own laws and tell Oak Pointe to go to hell.
That’s how Brighton rolls. If they don’t like something, they don’t just complain. Oh, no. They form their own country.
So naturally, when I heard about this secession talk, I wrote a story about it. And naturally, since they were running out of people to be mad at, they got mad at me.
The president of the Tri-Lakes Riparian Association, a man named Douglas Brown, wrote a letter to the editor in which he used almost all of his words telling everyone how bad I was at my job.
“Buddy Moorehouse’s article in last week’s Argus and Press about the Tri-Lakes Riparian Association considering ‘secession’ is a demonstration of irresponsible reporting,” Brown wrote. “Moorehouse has demonstrated his writing abilities over the past two years, but has yet to prove himself as a reporter.”
And so on and so on. Yes, my feelings were deeply hurt and I cried myself to sleep that night. That wasn’t the first letter to the editor we would receive telling me what a bum I was and it wouldn’t be the last.
What happened next, of course, was that the Tri-Lakes area shockingly did not secede from Genoa Township, Oak Pointe was eventually built and everyone came to accept it, and I turned my finely honed irresponsible-reporting skills onto other matters.
Now, we will be discussing many more incidences in this book of when people in the Brighton area FREAKED OUT about something (see “Guy, Ugly Naked”), but that was one of the first.
As for the folks in Howell, they have always taken the opposite approach. They don’t get mad about anything, even when they absolutely should.
Case in point: The teeny-tiny roundabouts. The story of roundabouts in Livingston County goes back to 2003. That year, the City of Brighton decided their people needed something new to complain about, so they put their heads together and decided to build Livingston County’s first roundabout at the corner of Main and Third streets. Naturally, the good people of Brighton crapped their pants about this and began spending most of their waking hours writing letters to the editor about it.
Seeing how much commotion this one little roundabout was provoking, the folks in Green Oak Township (that’s the area south of Brighton) said, “Hold my beer.” The new shopping centers at the intersection of Lee Road and U.S. 23 were opening – Costco on one side of the highway, Green Oak Village Place on the other – so they decided to build the world’s first DOUBLE roundabout at the intersection. Not just one dinky little roundabout like they have at Main and Third. No, sir. We’ll have TWO roundabouts on one side of the highway and another roundabout on the other side, and they’ll be HUGE. And don’t worry, we have a whole chapter on those bad boys coming up.
That was in 2006. The Double Roundabouts of Green Oak made their appearance, and everyone in Brighton, naturally, had a conniption.
Well, the City of Howell, apparently deciding that the Brighton area was getting too much attention for its many roundabouts, decided to get in the game. But they were clever about it. They knew they couldn’t outdo Brighton my making an even BIGGER set of roundabouts, so they decided to go in the opposite direction.
They decided to build the smallest roundabouts they could possibly build. Teeny-tiny ones, maybe six feet across, and they decided to put them everywhere. Every random intersection throughout the city would have a teeny-tiny roundabout installed, at a cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars. The explanation as to why we needed these things is that they would “calm” the traffic in the neighborhoods, as though people were drag-racing down Washington Street every night. But they were just plain ridiculous. They didn’t calm anything, and people making a left turn couldn’t figure out if they were supposed to turn in front of them or behind them.
They were the dumbest things ever, so what did the people in Howell do in response?
NOTHING. Not one thing. Everybody in Howell just seemed to say “eh, whatever” and then went on about their business. If just ONE of these teeny-tiny roundabouts had shown up in Brighton, there would have been protests in the street and talk of seceding from the union. But because this was Howell, nobody said a damn thing.
I did my best to rouse the troops. I wrote a bunch of columns about the little roundabouts, telling everybody how stupid they were and how they needed to rise up and revolt, but all I got from the people in Howell was a bunch of nothing.
Finally, in 2011, somebody took up the cause. A guy named Richard Pybus Jr. took out some ads in the paper and conducted a poll, asking people what they felt about the teeny-tiny roundabouts. Pybus was a guy who lived in Marion Township south of town and owned some rental property in the city, and I don’t know what he hated those little things as much as I did, but I didn’t really care. He was fighting the good fight.
His ”survey” supposedly showed that people didn’t want the mini roundabouts, so he took that information to the Howell City Council, demanding that they take a vote to rip them out. When they eventually voted, it was 4-3 to keep the stupid little traffic circles in place. Twelve years later, they’re still there – and aside from me and Richard Prybus Jr., nobody in Howell seems to care.
Still, as crazy (or non-crazy) as the people can be sometimes, I still love both Brighton and Howell with a passion. They are two of my favorite places in the world, and there’s nothing like a Friday night in Howell watching the Concerts at the Courthouse, or a Sunday night in Brighton listening to an oldies concert at the Mill Pond.
Roundabouts aside, Brighton and Howell are awesome.
Once again, you can order a copy of “A Taco Bell for Howell and Other Livingston County Crusades” by clicking here.
