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.