Elmo's Hideaway

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friends, including a teenage Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (then still known as Lew Alcindor).

The Hideaway isn’t fancy—it’s essentially a long, narrow room with a serving counter, a stage, and a back room. But Morales hopes small groups will use it to tap into some big dreams of their own.

Morales ran track in high school, but since his school—in a rough neighborhood near Harlem—didn’t have a track, he trained running up and down the hallways. He got so good that the U-M gave him a full scholarship. He says he and then–athletic director Don Canham ended up like son and father, and he credits Canham with teaching him how to be a successful man. “I identify with Jimmy Stewart’s character” George Bailey in It’s a Wonderful Life, Morales says. “I carved out a good life for myself.”

He was Community High’s gym teacher for many years, inspiring kids to be more fit. On the side he ran the T-shirt business and, with his wife, Susan, Bodies in Balance fitness—“We were the first ones to bring spinning to Ann Arbor,” Morales says. “It’s gentle spinning, not Nazi spinning.” This spring he turned his other T-shirt shop, on East Liberty, into Arbor Annie’s and Arbor Andy’s, selling high-quality tie-dyed clothing and accessories by appointment only. It’s “gorgeous stuff,” he says—“forty-dollar, fifty-dollar tie-dyed dresses . . . the same fabric and tie dye for men, but T-shirts, dress shirts.”