Log Cabin to Fraser’s Pub

continued

"The neighborhood came back," Conlin agrees. "Now it's a family tavern during the day and a sports bar at night."

"It's a brotherhood," says Harold "Bubba" Jackson, who works in marketing communications for the U-M. "We're all in our sixties, and here we can be together and feel like we did when we were in our twenties."

These days, Joan Fraser has a full time job tending to Bill and keeping her kids talking to one another. (Family businesses, she says, are hard on family relationships.) But "I have a very positive attitude," she says. Whether raising a family on milk or beer, she says, "I have never had a glass half empty."   

[Originally published in November, 2012.]