Kicking & Screaming Into a Wonderful World

Maurice, Evelyn & Margaret

         Weidenthal family lore has it that on Thanksgiving Day, many years ago, a little guy to be named Maurice, for his grandfather, came splashing out of his mother’s womb, kicking and screaming, hanging on to his twin sister’s big toe for dear life. 

         The event is reported to have taken place at a small hospital converted from an aging apartment house on E.55^th St. between Cedar and Woodland Avenues.  It was not much of a neighborhood   and in a matter of days young Maurice and his twin Margaret were hustled up Cedar Hill to a rented duplex on Meadowbrook Blvd. near Lee Rd. in Cleveland Heights.

        
The mid-twenties was a good time to be born. Cleveland, the fifth largest city in America, was alive with economic vigor, led by such industrial luminaries as Severance, Mather, Rockefeller, Van Sweringen. It was the time of Calvin Coolidge, Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Fitzgerald and J. Edgar Hoover. Flappers flapped. Speakeasies and black and tan clubs were all the rage.

         By then a huge swath of land on the south side of Public Square was being cleared for what was to become the grandest railroad station of its kind, topped by an office tower, the tallest between New York and Chicago. And the brothers were quietly planning a local rail system that would take workers from the city to a new suburban shopping mall and residential suburb, well away from the smell, soot and the crime of the city. It was rumored that the Van Sweringens had arranged to route the sewers from his new development directly into the lake. Pollute it, and drive the rich from their lake front Bratenahl mansions to the new Shaker Heights. And it worked.

         The wealthy were growing wealthier. Building enormous monuments to themselves on Euclid Ave. (known then as Millionaire’s Row) and nearby Bratenahl. The banks were growing mightier. The housing market was soaring. Two of the greatest, Cleveland Trust and Union Trust, were flowering in spectacular banking halls that looked more like palaces, at E. 9^th and Euclid. They looked strong and powerful.

         But, as are most excesses of the free enterprise system, the boom, the good times, were much too good to be true.  Too much money concentrated in too few hands. And as it must in free enterprise economies, it all came tumbling down as President Herbert Hoover assumed office.

          Having studied economics at Stanford, the bastion of conservative thinking, he assumed office insisting that the failing economic system must take its course.

Which it did with a vengeance, leaving us with a stock market in chaos and the disintegration of the banking system. (And I lost my entire saving that I had accumulated and deposited from my Union Trust Liberty Bell dime bank.)

         Soon Franklin Roosevelt came to the rescue telling us in a speech at Chautauqua  N.Y. that  “we have nothing to fear but fear itself.” Some believed it. Others were more realistic.

         After the death of my father in the midst of the Hoover years, my magnificent mother started her own business in Shaker Heights and somehow thrived even as she defied the New Deal and refused to put the NRA sign in her window as ordered by Washington. We made it okay in our small family. Cousins like Peggy Krohngold came came from Sandusky to get a social work job and shared a room with my sister. Grandma Kolinsky slept in the back room where it was cooler and got some breeze.

         It turned out to be the war and not Adam Smith that brought us out of the depression and after I left to do my part, my room was protected as a shrine, in the otherwise overcrowded apartment, according to those who were there.

  Having survived the war, thrived in Ann Arbor, conquered the Cleveland Press and Cuyahoga Community college and 15 years with RC 2000, I am thankfully here to share the tender moments of this wonderful day with my spectacular family and friends

         I must pause to say that Thanksgiving and this birthday is reinforcing my strong feeling about this still tenuous experiment we call America, and our role in it.  There is too much complaining, too much finger pointing.  This is not the America that I know and have come to love.  Really love.  It has been good, very good, to me.

         But there is one missing link in this story which I need, in good conscience, to reveal. As hard as I try cannot for the life of me discover what happened to that third turkey my mother had in the oven that day…the one that was left unattended in the Weidenthal kitchen all those years ago. 
We will have to leave that to historians more deft than I.