The Other Sam Sheppard

  In the first week of my first year at Heights High back in the 40’s we had “orientation” in the auditorium.  In the front of the room were these big good- looking guys. They all were wearing Heights letter sweaters indicating their athletic prowess.

   As an aspiring sports writer, I immediately idolized each one of them.  Including Sam Sheppard, who was president of the senior class and gave us a welcoming speech talking about how great life can be at our new high school.  Mr. Morley, the bald headed principal, spoke too.
But I was really awed by Sam.

  Life at Heights, I quickly surmised , was certainly great for him. He seemed to have it all.  At his side most of the time was this attractive girl, Marilyn Reese, his steady.  Good looking but not beautiful.  “She is the luckiest girl in the school,” I thought to myself.
  And he, what an athlete! Quarterback on our winning football team, point guard in basketball.  But what impressed me most was his ability to run track at a variety of distances.  Sam, Bob Little, Eugene Whipple and a fourth runner, whose name eludes me, were so good that they went down to Columbus and won the state track championship for Heights.      I was there that day in Ohio Stadium. Hoarse from cheering, I couldn’t wait to write my story for the Black and Gold, where I managed to become sports editor. 
     The B&G, by the way, had a great team of top editors that year. Lois Wolgemuth (later Lois Wyse, the famed New York children’s book author) was editor.  Roger Englander (who later went to New York to become Leonard Bernstein’s television producer and Emmy winner) was assistant editor. And Bud Weidenthal, who stayed at home to write for The Cleveland Press.
  Anyway, Sam and Bob Little had this company that played music at Heights and Shaker for the gentile fraternity and sorority dances.  My good friend Bob Lehrfeld (who later became first Oboe for the New York Philharmonic) and I had a similar company, and we competed with the big guys for business and performed at many of the Jewish fraternity and sorority dances. (That’s how it was in those days.)
      We both charged $50 and played mostly at the Masonic Temple auditorium on Lee Rd. at the corner of Mayfield, or at the ballroom in the Rockefeller building diagonally across the street. Needless to say, Sheppard and Little got the lion’s share of the business, but we held our own and earned enough to keep buying new records and some other goodies.
  After graduation we all went off to war and I didn’t hear much about Sam until the morning of July 4, 1956, when I was working the holiday shift at the City Desk of the Press, when the word came that Marilyn Reese Sheppard had been found bludgeoned to death in her bed in the Sheppard’s Bay Village home. Ray DeCrane, the assistant City editor at the time, who also lived in Bay Village, came in and told us the initial theory that someone had broken into the house for drugs, killed Marilyn, fought with Sam and then escaped.
   Well, the rest is history. Sam’s murder conviction, his retrial and legal vindication, his bizarre post-prison life and his premature death have been well recorded.  It was all pretty grim.

   For me, having known the other Sam Sheppard makes the whole sordid tale something infinitely more than just another sensational newspaper story.