Aside from a few brief years, Judy Renfrew Hart, ’73, MA’75, has lived in Ann Arbor her whole life — she attended Ann Arbor public schools as a child, graduated from U-M with a degree in physical education, and taught in Ann Arbor for her entire career.
Now retired, Hart draws University of Michigan landmarks, using her lifelong love of drawing to capture the unique qualities of the very campus she grew up on.
Hart’s father, Al Renfrew, was U-M’s hockey coach from 1957-73, and directed ticketing for 16 years after that. Hart remembers she, her siblings, and her mother, Marge, always supported U-M athletics behind the scenes and cheered on the Wolverines in any way they could.
In 1962, U-M football was struggling. Looking for a way to help, Al Renfrew asked Marge to sew two handmade “M” flags on sturdy poles, painted maize and blue on the ends. It became a ritual for athletes and coaches to meet at Ferry Field and rally around them.
Sound familiar? It’s the origin of a quintessential Wolverine football tradition: players running onto the field under the “M Club Supports You” banner.
“It was a simple idea; my dad just wanted to fire the team up, so my mom made the two flags on her sewing machine with a little help from her neighbor,” Hart recalls. “My dad asked that I always continue to share her story, saying, ‘Your mom deserves the credit for that because she’s the one who made those flags, and it wasn’t easy.’”
Today, Hart usually draws in her basement studio plastered with U-M memorabilia, including parts of the legendary flags her mother made that spurred a beloved tradition. She sells her illustrations, as well as her book “A Maize and Blue Ann Arbor,” which takes readers on a visual tour of the city, in her Etsy shop, sharing her love for her home with every pencil stroke.
“U-M’s a beautiful place with so much history,” Hart says. “I realized I could use my drawings to preserve how it looked in my time for future generations to appreciate.”
Steve Zoski, ’13, is a freelance writer based in Dearborn, Michigan.
