The Merry-Go-Round (As told to Dr. Freud)

Doc, you probably don't remember when Euclid Beach closed in the fall of '69. It was an amusement park loved by kids and grown-ups alike. Something like that marvelous park you had in Grinzing, with that great ferris wheel. Remember that movie "The Third Man"? It was filmed there.

One of my favorite rides at Euclid Beach was called the American Racing

Derby, a very fast merry-go-round. The horses really raced each other.

We loved it, but as I recall, when it stopped we all came out a little dizzy.

Which takes me to my story.

Leading the Public Affairs team at Tri-C was like that merry-go-round.

You have great fun, Doc, going round and round, but it also had its ups and

downs. Looking back I would say there were more ups than downs. But when the music stopped, it was a real downer.

Some of the most inspiring moments for me were our Monday staff

meetings. The team loved them. Each member had an opportunity to describe their project; be it a celebration, a fund raising campaign, the catalog, television advertising, what have you.

It was an amazing group, including Sandy and Leslie, who I found deep in the bowels of the Tri-C Metro Campus. I had known Sandy from her winning reputation as journalism instructor. Leslie was like her unindentical twin. We found Marcia, of all places, at Mt. Sinai Hospital. I knew she was right for the team when she withstood a withering cross-examination by Ellison in his office.
"We got a gem!" I told Sandy.

Joyce was already on board as fundraiser and levy expert, and her expertise was invaluable. Audrey was rock solid as our administrative assistant, bringing order out of chaos, and Dolores and Joanne were assigned to cover our outposts at the Western and Eastern campuses.

It may sound corny, but we, and others not mentioned, almost instinctively made beautiful music together, and I saw myself as sort of a concert master. Our work brought us great rewards, even at the top, where President Ellison loved parties, making speeches, and raising money touting tax levies. We did that all with great creativity and teamwork. 

We won fifty-two national awards for excellence in nine years, including the national award for best education marketing and public relations project of the year from CASE. (The Council for the Advancement and Support of Education) With the help of the $500 prize, I took members of the team to San Diego to be on hand for the awards ceremony.

Teamwork. Here's one for the books. When the U.S Maritime Academy approached the college for a partnership, Ellison asked us to get the word out. It was a creative challenge. Somehow we thought of one of those huge ore ships that docked on the Cuyahoga. Why not, we asked one another.

“I know the PR guy at the Mather Steamship,” sandy said. And we

were off and running.

At the next staff meeting we mentioned this far out idea. Leslie immediately said, “I'll do the party on the dock.”

“I'll get the NCJW to manage the hosting and the food,” said Joyce. Audrey, bless her heart reminded us that this might cost considerable money. “We'll get it from Ellison,” I promised.

And so the bizarre encounter with the flats, a huge ore carrier, police boats, and balking labor unions, fell into place. It wasn't easy but it worked. Except it turned out to be a freezing day with snow coming in off the lake. A highlight was the dedication of the tech center, where ground was broken by a robot.

I must tip my hat to that team, who still gather annually for a reunion these last 26 years. Love those folks. Geniuses all.

But the downside was grim. The boss had a giant electric temper that belied his sweet smile and gentleness. He would fire people on the spot for being late to a meeting, and the hire them back. He literally got into a fist fight in his office with the superintendent of the Cleveland schools, which we managed to cover up. When someone tipped off the Plain Dealer, they sent a reporter. The operative answer was "what fight"? (today they would say what collusion?) And not a word saw the light of day in the paper.

When Ellison and the president of CSU, had a disagreement in a meeting at CSU, he stripped off his suit coat and his glasses and went after President Waetjen, a one time college football player, he responded in kind. It took the entire group at the meeting to pull them apart. Again, the word was "what fight?" and nobody leaked. Nobody. I thought myself, "A hell of a story.”

I must say, Ellison was a master at playing the good guy. And he truly believed believed that I was doing my job of polishing his image and the image of the college.

That was, until an unpleasant young reporter from the Plain Dealer, don't recall her name, Doctor, started asking some hard questions in a meeting I attended. I could see Ellison’s his face turning red.

“Are you investigating me?” he snarled. “Get out of my office. I don't ever want to see you again!”

He lunged at her as she left. I was stunned. I knew this woman. She was the kind who would do anything for a story; anything to destroy someone's image.

I met with her the next day and got the gist of her story. Ellison had hired the former President of the University of the District of Columbia to come to work at Tri-C full time with a lofty salary, for a special urban studies project. What had been leaked to the PD was that the new hire had been fired in DC, and then charged by a grand jury for stealing valuable property from the president's house. (Also and he came without a job description or a signed application.)

There was no way I could stop the publishing of the story the next morning. Ellison raged.

I did all I could to diminish the flames. The personnel office produced an after-the-fact signed job application and job description, not really kosher, to soften the blow. I arranged a meeting between Ellision and Tom Vail, the publisher and editor of the Plain Dealer. We went to Vail's office. I tried to calm Ellison down by talking about my experiences in WW II with General Patton, telling him how scared I was, but how I pulled myself together and survived. (At that moment I wished I was back in Germany instead of in this hot seat in Cleveland.) But my guy calmed down and walked into Vail's office, sweet as a pussy cat. After a number of exchanges, Vail attempted to assure him that the Plain Dealer has been leading the fight for racial equality. Vail promised to look into the matter of this young reporter. Ellison seemed satisfied and thought he had seen the last of the reporter, but of course he was wrong.

I saw danger down the road.

The next morning at the top of the editorial page was a sizeable editorial: "Seeing Red About Green.” (Green was the DC guy's name.) The boss went into a rage again. It was a fairly mild editorial in my mind, but there was no way of calming the boss.

“Racist bastards!,” he howled.

Dr. Green was a reasonable guy and things settled down when the Grand Jury in Washington found him not guilty on all six counts. This soft spoken academic had gotten himself embroiled in ugly DC politics, and had paid the price. But he survived.

But the PD wasn't through. One more scandal brought us very close to a parting of the ways. It involved the president of the Eastern Campus. She was a bit arrogant and not liked by much the faculty. One day word came downtown that she was in a brawl with the faculty over her thoughtless and stupid habit of parking her Mercedes in a garage built for ambulances and vans dropping off handicapped students. As news guy I saw this as a potential disaster, and I told Ellison at a meeting in his office on a Saturday, that it would probably appear on page one the next morning.

“What should we do? What should we say?”

“Don't do anything,” Ellison said, as we walked out.

"It will give her some humility".

“Yes sir,” I said, and left.

“This is it,” I said to myself.

I called the Eastern Campus pres. at her Gold Coast home in Lakewood, and told her not to say anything to reporters. I learned later that she had spilled the beans herself, calling the Tri-C faculty "a bunch of children."

The next morning, there it was across the bottom of page one: A photo of her and the Mercedes in the handicapped garage. And a side story about a disabled young student in a wheel chair, describing how they had to push him through the snow to get into the building from his parent's van.

It was awful. But I did nothing.

What she did was indefensible. I knew that after nine mostly rewarding years my time was about up. And I was the fall guy.

Or was I?

Tell you next time.

Muckraker No More

After an agonizing weekend of uncertainty, I felt like a drug addict who had decided to flush all the pain pills down the toilet, but at the last minute couldn’t do it. I didn’t realize how addicted I was to being a news guy, and when I got up Monday morning I decided to go back to The Press. I couldn’t shake the habit, much as the sensible side of my brain told me that I was making a mistake, to say nothing of what my lovely wife Grace was telling me.

I had no sincere solid, sensible reason for what I was doing. There must be a name for that, Doc. So I jumped into my Maxima and headed down Chester, rather than Carnegie as I had planned, and arrived at The Press at the usual hour, my brain feeling relieved.

That’s how it felt. I can’t tell you why. That familiar and welcoming building at Ninth and Lakeside, the roar of presses downstairs, the clatter of typewriters. The familiar faces of friends and colleagues. My home away from home?

But when I walked into the city room some of the guys looked at me funny.

”I hear you’ve got a new job!”

”You‘re so damn lucky.”

“It’s pretty grim around here. People are trying to get out any way they can”.

Suddenly the room sort of darkened. I didn’t recognize the faces of the guys in the front office. It was home no more, to coin a phrase. Then rational thinking took over. I grabbed some stuff from the piles on my desk and headed out.

I was a muckraker no more and it felt OK. Suddenly my brain felt comfortable about my venture into a very new and uncertain world. Was all that mental chaos necessary, Dr. Freud? Do you have a theory, Doc? Separation syndrome? The good doctor winked at me as if he thought I was on the right track.

I slept well that night for the first time in weeks, got up at the usual time, showered, dressed in shirt, tie, and jacket, and had my usual breakfast. I kissed my wife Grace goodbye, as we agreed we loved each other with more intensity than the classic telephone “luv ya”.

I headed out the door with a new Land’s End brief case, got in the Maxima and headed for Carnegie and Ontario. I arrived at the new district headquarters of Tri-C where I discovered I had a parking space reserved for me in the “executive” cabinet space.

Whoa, I like that executive stuff! Never been an executive. How should I act? Have the secretaries call me “Sir”? Bring me my morning tea? It was the beginning of a new era of my life, a milestone one, I hoped. I felt good about this place. But it got better. My office was next to the president’s. It was off a bright cheerful lobby where three secretaries greeted me.  

“Good morning, Mr. Weidenthal.”
“Call me Bud,” I replied with great humility.

I had never had a secretary before. I had never had a private office before. And it had a window! (No matter that I overlooked the parking lot. I could keep an eye in my car.)

President Ellison was something else again.

Nolen Ellison was born to an African American father and a Native American mother, in a disadvantaged area of Kansas City, Kansas. He was in junior high when the US Supreme Court was deciding the landmark Brown v. The Topeka Kansas Board of Education case on school desegregation. The high court found the Topeka board guilty and declared that “Separate is not equal in the nation’s schools.” A year later he was enrolled with a handful of blacks in a mostly white high school under court order. He excelled in almost everything, except being comfortable with his schoolmates. No love lost, it could be said.

Upon graduating he was recruited by the University of Kansas in nearby Lawrence, where he again excelled in almost everything, and played basketball on the University’s championship Jayhawks team with Oscar Robertson. He was drafted by The Baltimore Bullets, an NBA team, but decided on pursuing a career in education instead. He earned his masters and doctorate degrees at the University of Texas at Austin, and by the time he was thirty became the youngest college president in the nation at Seattle Community College.

When Ellison was 32 he was invited to come to Cleveland to head the growing network of campuses that was Cuyahoga Community College, aka Tri-C.

He was a big handsome guy, smart and articulate. He had the preacher’s touch and could really turn it on. Even the folks in Brecksville loved him, which paid off big time in the long run.

I knew most of this stuff before I took the job. I had written a background story about him for the Press when he was hired, so I was prepared for almost anything. I wasn’t really surprised at what happened on my first day at my first meeting with him in his office.

He greeted me with a bear hug and a huge smile.

“Great to have you aboard! ” 

He smiled, and then in an instant he turned grim and serious.

“Bud, you gotta help me with John Koral,” he said looking me directly in the eye.

“He doesn’t understand what I’m trying to do. He doesn’t get my vision.”

I agreed to talk with Koral, (the then Tri-C Western Campus President) who I knew from my earlier encounters with the college. But first I had to figure out Ellison’s vision myself. That was not going to be easy.

I told Ellison that I would prepare a one page bulletin each morning outlining the events of that day, as well as some personal background on some of the board members whom I knew rather well. It would give him a head start on the day with an insider’s view.  

As I was leaving the room he said, “Bud, do you know Louis Stokes? How about George Forbes? Louis is a great guy and a good friend of the college, but I wouldn’t trust George Forbes.”

The president looked happy as he waved goodbye, and I knew I had made it. I sensed it was going to be a rocky road ahead, but I was on the inside lane.

Welcome back, Doc.

Another year, Doc. They rush by so fast. Before you know it you’re elderly. Your friend Einstein spent most of his life trying to mess with it, but never quite got there. But you look great.

Looks like Miami was just what you needed. So tanned and rested. A kind of therapy, right? They say the sun, or perhaps any bright light, is a good treatment for winter depression. Certainly looks like it worked for you.

Unfortunately, my winter escapes to Texas and Florida are history. Doctor, those trips for me were like a drug. I was thinking about it the other day as I turned up the heat in my apartment. There was one trip that stands tall in my memory, many years ago, and still makes me smile.

Back in the early 1950’s I was assigned to cover spring break in Ft. Lauderdale for The Press. It made sense, of course. I was the education writer, right? I flew out of drab Hopkins in a snowstorm headed for Miami International. It was one of those awful Cleveland winters, much worse than Vienna, I assure you. The flight was delayed several hours, but once we finally took off something happened to my brain. I could feel it, Doc. I was getting unexplainable signals from my brain, just a few hours out of Cle town. The moment I walked out of the terminal in Florida, I felt the sun, inhaled the sea air, my nostrils opened up to the freshness, my skin chilled and then turned warm, even my ears unplugged and I could hear better, I could see better. My muddled brain settled down in comfort. I could feel it all over, Doc. Like some magic medicine.

When the car rental guy told me he didn’t have the compact I’d reserved, and gave me a Buick convertible, metallic light blue with tan leather seats instead. I was ready for paradise. Can you imagine my ecstasy, as I began my foray up I-95 to the sea of scantily clad undergraduates?  I was very professional, of course, always carrying my pen and notebook.

I recall there was this attractive undergraduate sitting at the bar in her two-piece swimsuit…someone told me she was a journalism student at Northwestern, so of course we started talking shop. I told her I almost went to Northwestern, but picked Michigan instead, because they had a better football team. We got involved in comparing the curricula of those two journalism giants. It got rather heated, as you can imagine.

Can’t really tell you the details right now. Not here, not now. I think your wife is listening. You understand. I was a bachelor, just a kid, but I broke no laws, I assure you Doc. I was a professional.

It strikes me that if someone might create a pill that makes the brain thinks and feel like it’s in Florida…well, enough fantasy.            

Anyway, before my hour runs out, we’re into the 70’s now Doc. By comparison to the 60’s, the 70’s were pretty quiet, particularly in my area of newspapering. No more war, no more riots, no more new colleges and universities. Back to normal, whatever normal is. In the 1970’s there was a lot of examination of what colleges and universities really are, and what they teach. And who are these “awful socialists and commies” that are teaching them? Made for good print. The reporting of Woodward and Bernstein at the Washington Post leading to Nixon’s resignation was a classic in investigative journalism.

Cleveland’s community college and Cleveland State University and the University Circle development were going full blast. The Press proudly took credit for much of these enormous steps forward in progress, and we won several local and national awards for my aggressive writing. We ballyhooed these gains as just what the town needed for its revival. It was great thing, particularly for so many who had been left out of the learning curve. The area’s fine, but small private colleges had almost completely ignored the students of the inner city. A college education was almost nonexistent for the poor and disadvantaged, and was it a perfect crusade for The Press, and we ran with it.

Yes, I got some awards.

In 1959 I went to Long Beach California, for a meeting of the American Association of Junior and Community Colleges. My first story began “The time is right for the state of Ohio to consider the creation of junior and community colleges to meet the needs of changing communities.”  

A few years later a large picture appeared on page one of The Press with the headline, “Miracle on 14^th St.”, showing hundreds of students lined up to register at the new Cuyahoga Community College.  It was refurbished schoolhouse, funded by private dollars that I helped raise during a newspaper strike. I still have a copy of a personal check written by George Gund, President of Cleveland Trust. Glidden Paints donated all the paint to redo the entire building.

I felt good about that, Doc, but the town was changing in major ways, and The Press was changing too. It had been a great newspaper, named one of the top ten newspapers in the US, but the brutal decline of the industrial age was taking its toll. The giant steel mills, foundries and auto plants were disappearing. It was no longer a working man’s blue collar town. You could smell it in the air. The Press, a journal that was designed to appeal to working folks, began to lose circulation, and people were moving away. Unemployment became a major problem.

The great post war boom was over, and for Cleveland, well, we became a “rust belt town whose river burned.” You could feel it when Dennis Kuchinich was elected mayor. I remember the day of his inaugural luncheon at the Hotel Cleveland ballroom. We were standing there, as Dennis walked in. He looked and grinned at us and shouted “Can you believe this!?”

“No!’” I shouted back. But Dennis, with all his bombast, couldn’t stop the movement of history. Perhaps no one could. Not even Mayor Ralph Perk, who accidentally set his hair on fire, giving our town another black eye.

It was not good for Cleveland, for the paper, and my life as a professional journalist. I had been offered non-journalism jobs a number of times during those years, but I brushed them off. I was a newsman. That was my life, my father’s life, my grandfather’s life.

But when Nolan Ellison, the chancellor of Tri C (Cuyahoga Community College) approached me one day, saying he had a healthy contract for me for an executive position, I got interested. When Scripps Howard decided it was going to sell the Press to Joe Cole, a wealthy key manufacturer, I envisioned the end of an era.

The Press was cutting its staff by offering buyouts of one year’s pay, and I was really interested. But for a journalist, leaving the profession is a truly painful decision. There is something about that byline, that public recognition, that daily challenge. Strangely, that becomes your identity. I often hear  “You’re Bud Weidenthal, from The Press! I read you! I know you!” I’m sure there’s a word for it in your lingo, Doc.

Herb Kam

I had a chat with the Press editor Herb Kamm, who told me that I was considered indispensable, so not eligible for that one-year salary buy-out payoff. It put me in an odd position. A week or so later I met with Ellison. He offered me the job of Executive Assistant to the Chancellor. By the first of the year, I would be appointed by the board as Vice President for Public Affairs. He was offering me an annual salary increase of more than $10,000 a year, with the opportunity to build my own staff. That almost made up for the byline, but you can’t buy ego. Ego is a big thing, Doc. You understand.

Nolan Ellison

I told him I would think about it over the weekend.

Making the change from journalism to education. Executive assistant?  What the hell does an executive assistant do? Does anybody care?

And what will my friends say? It might change my life. I could be a total flop.

I agonized, Dr. Freud, every minute of that weekend.

You might be surprised at what I did. 

Or maybe not.

My Life As a Muckracker As told to Dr. Freud (part seven)

Funny, Doc., how life goes on even in the worst of times. Like the 60’s, for example. I know, people listened to the news and read their papers, thank goodness! But for our generation who had emerged from the war, we looked ahead to a family, a home, ordinary stuff. Maybe we were in denial. 

DENIAL. Good word, Doc?

The Goff Estate, Bratenahl

For me, getting ahead in my chosen profession and getting married were my priorities, and of course, building a family. I rented a very nice three bedroom cottage on an estate on the shores of Lake Erie in Bratenahl. Our home was the gardener’s cottage of the Goff Estate on nine acres, with a beach and a barbeque.

Frederick Goff had been the president of Cleveland Trust, Mayor of Glenville, and helped to establish the Cleveland Foundation. When he and his wife died, it was directed that his estate be torn down, and the property sold. We lasted about six months in that little slice of paradise. We loved to show it off to baffled out of town friends and relatives. We tried to sell them on the idea that this was typical Cleveland living. It may have worked.

By 1960 it was clear that my wife Grace, was physically unable to bear children. After consulting some top docs in town we decided to adopt. We had purchased a lovely little 1917 house on Coleridge Rd. in Cleveland Heights. It was a wonderful tree lined street of older homes, that began at Lee Rd. and ended at Coventry at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church.

We went through the adoption process, applying to the Jewish Children’s Bureau. After we passed through the interview questions I met with the director.   

“I think we have the perfect child for you!” he whispered.

And he was right!  But “perfect” was an understatement. The moment we met, we stared into each other's eyes and knew we were soul mates. Our little girl, Susan. Our gift for the sixties.

We still joke today that she was so perfect, she could change her own diaper. If there was ever a poster child for the perfect adoption, Susan was it.

A moment or two about my professional life, Doc. After all, I had to make enough money to send Susan to best the journalism school. I fantasized her as the first female editor of the New York Times. I, of course, was well ahead of my time.

One of the joys of being a journalist in the prime moments of life, Doctor, is that you not only learn about history, but you live it, observe it up close, and write about it as best you can, without malice to one side or the other. It wasn’t easy to do that in those turbulent times.

We were expected to be impartial observers, and to the extent that my restraint allowed me, I kept the faith. That, in my mind, is journalism. In the midst of a war and later the nation and a world in turmoil, I think about that sometimes when I watch FOX or NBC news on TV today.

It was a turn-on, and almost every day was a new adventure. I was often in the right place at the right time. After I was married, I begged off the 5 a.m. shift at the Press, and turned my focus to covering education, cultural development and University Circle, Cleveland’s cultural hub.

Cleveland’s schools, colleges and universities were exploding, so to speak, both figuratively and literally. I had hit the news jackpot. 

The Supreme Court ruling in Brown vs. Board of Education (separate but equal is not equal) had set the stage for upheaval in urban education, first in the south, and then in Boston, and inevitably in Cleveland. The result was a five-year battle in federal court over what the Supreme Court language really meant, and what was going on in Cleveland. The school board, with them attorneys from Squire Sanders fought it every inch of the way, arguing that Cleveland had not intentionally segregated its schools. 

Eventually Federal Judge Frank Battisti, a really tough guy who I never quite figured out, ruled in favor of the NAACP’s claim that Cleveland had violated the edict of the court.

I had researched and prepared a series of articles attempting to explain as simply as I could, how and why the judge could order cross town bussing of thousands of students as a remedy, In hopes that it might calm the reaction. Much understandable frustration followed, but not the brutal battles that were waged in Boston where another judge, had rendered the same remedy. It was done peacefully and perhaps with some positive results. A plus for The Press.

The rape and murder of a Louise Winbigler near Wade Park Lagoon as she walked to Cleveland Orchestra chorus practice, set the stage for enormous change and the creation University Circle Inc. I was on the beat, and the Press led the way in calling for change in that scattered, disconnected array of cultural, musical, and educational organizations. Change that included creating a separate police force, improved lighting, and a plan that would make sense without destroying the surrounding residential areas.       

When students at the Sorbonne University erupted in revolt, in Paris in 1968 I was there. That’s a chapter in itself, Doc. Perhaps I will save for later. I think we are running out of time.

Forgot to mention my coverage of the killings of Kent State students by the National Guard..…the bizarre incidents at Case Western Reserve University, including head bashing on campus by Mayor Stokes’ mounted police. The bombing by student radicals of the Rodin Statue, The Thinker, in front of the art museum, the heavy guns mounted on top of the museum to prevent further incidents, the machine guns mounted on the railroad bridge at the entrance to Little Italy during the Hough and Glenville riots…

Oh yes, there was a war in Vietnam, and Richard Nixon was president.

It was a busy time, Doc. 

Hope you got it all down in your notes.

See ya next week, okay?