The Hangout

continued

Many of the regulars go way back--some almost as far as the bakery itself, which opened in 1915. One group of Dexter seniors socializes after doing water aerobics at nearby Wylie School.

Alice Lesser, eighty-eight, has been making the two-mile trip from Ann Arbor to enjoy coffee at 9 a.m. with her friend, eighty-two-year-old Louis Ceriani of Dexter, every Wednesday for the past twenty-two years. They used to work together at Edwards Brothers printers in Ann Arbor.

In the cold months, John Bates Mann, Bill Figg, and Bill Maloney of Dexter also meet up at the bakery at 9 a.m. Bates and Figg have been friends since the sixties at Pioneer High in Ann Arbor--where Figg was the drummer for the primal garage band the Rationals--and the two later taught at Washtenaw Com-

munity College. In the summer their meetings start an hour earlier, when they pull up in their classic cars and hold what they jokingly call a "neighborhood watch" at an outside table.