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

Doc, welcome back. Hope you had a nice Vacation in Miami Beach. You look good. Healthy. Better than Vienna right?! Had a little bout with something. Last week but I'm fine now...

To bring you up to date: I spent about two years chasing cops on the police beat. Auto accidents, fires, and the like, before my time came to move ahead. On the beat I learned a lot about the human condition in Cleveland; the plight of blacks and whites struggling to maintain a decent lives. It wasn't easy in the city, even in those relatively benign days of the 50's. Of course, the raucous 60's were just around the corner. We should have seen that coming, but we didn't. It wasn't a soft touch for the cops either. The police beat experience made me wonder what happens to a good, decent human being when he or she puts on a uniform.

Doc, you probably understand this better than I. Human nature, right? The uniformed guys lose their humanness. Can't change that, Doc. The uniform brings out the feeling of power. Every time I encountered a cop in later years, I tried to deal with them like human beings. It simply didn't and doesn't work. The law is the law. I invariably ended up saying yes "Sir, yes Sir," and they mostly ended up telling me to tell it to a judge.

One night when I first went down to Texas, I was driving in a relatively dark busy road on the way to a religious service in Sun City about ten miles away. After I had made a turn onto a main road, there was the sight of flashing lights the sound of a siren.

“What have I done?,” I thought to myself.

The cop pulled me over, and walked toward the car. Oh good, it was a woman! A young blonde. Not bad looking. I breathed a sigh of relief. I can handle this. But I had sighed too soon. From those beautiful lips she barked,  

“You got a license? You a citizen?! What are you doing down here? Do you know where you are going?”

“I’m going to a religious service at Sun city, and I'm a bit lost Ma’am. Maybe you can help me? By the way I really like your town, the library, the theater...”

“Any drugs in the car? Do you know you were doing 25 in a 40 mile zone?! That's a violation of state law. And you made a wide turn into Williams Drive,” she barked as she poked her flashlight into my face.

“I’ll let it go this time, with a warning. Better not happen again.”

So much for good looking blondes in uniform.

My opportunity to move up from the police beat arrived when Alex Groner, a fine reporter and writer, accepted a job with Time magazine. He had covered the Health and Welfare beat for the Press. Louis Seltzer asked me take over the assignment, a prime job. He was strongly involved in the health and well being of the town's citizens, particularly for the powerless and the disadvantaged. I was told that Health and Welfare was important. The editors weren't socialists, but good journalists. We became the champions of the weak and the powerless, and we were interested in the rapid growth of health care in the city. 

Dr. Crile

Dr. George Crile led the way. He came to the east side where he founded the Cleveland Clinic, initially known as the Crile Clinic. The Press was on top of the story. The paper was also concerned for the care of the elderly and the poor. They were convinced we could do better, and our readers wanted it that way. It was a huge public issue in those days, too.

After I established myself on the beat, the editors agreed to send me on an ambitious five week trip to Europe to take a look at the advanced social systems that were emerging in the West. If they could meet the social needs of their folks why can't we? The question of course, is unanswered to this day. For me it became, with the boss’s permission, much more than a simple journalistic venture.

It was my sentimental return to Europe, only a few years after the war. This time I took the Queen Mary, the stately ocean liner of its time. I had my own bunk, but not much more. I holed up in the lowest class. It must have been fifth class. Four of us shared a so-called room. There was me, another fellow my age from Chicago, who I hung out with, a priest, and a middle aged guy. A group of us from steerage hung together, found a secret passage to First Class and had a ball. There were a number of young single guys and some very lovely British young ladies.

But there was a hooker to this, Doc. These girls were all Brits who had married American soldiers during the war, and were now returning home to visit their families. I, of course, was very careful, not wanting to create an international incident, but not careful enough. To this day I blame it on the guy from Chicago. (And of course the priest, who should have prayed for me.)

I was controlling myself as best I could, because my Cleveland girlfriend, Bette Daneman, was to meet me in London. I forgot to tell you about her, Doc. Bette was a very bright young lady, and head of the Cleveland Junior council on World Affairs, who was studying in Oxford for the summer. We’d planned to travel together on a five week adventure. Innocents abroad, so to speak. I would stay in a hotel on Sloane Square, do my reporting in the London area and then drive up to Oxford and pick her up.

Well, it didn't quite work out that way. Doc. You know, raging hormones.

By pure coincidence Doc, honest, I happened to be innocently walking hand in hand down the gangplank with one of the British gals, and would you believe, standing there among the greeting crowd to surprise me was Bette, with a pained look on her face. Boy, was I surprised. She saw me “walking the plank,” so to speak. I ducked away from the British girl, but it was too late.

Bette never really smiled that day or the next. You understand, don't you Doc? Girls are funny. They're sensitive. It seemed like a wonderful friendship begun in Cleveland, but it was destined for disaster in London.

Can you help me with this one? Can you, Doctor?

Next: Crying in my beer in Asmunhausen, and a dicey encounter with Yugoslavia's Dictator, Tito.

My Life with PTSD As Told to Dr. Freud (Part Two)

Thank you, thank you so much, Doctor for seeing me again! I'm so sorry about not paying you last time, but your wife wouldn't take my MasterCard. She didn't know what it was.

MasterCard is modern day miracle, Doctor. It's a scientific wonder. But I brought dollars this time. They are as good as Deutsche Marks. I promise!

But back to my story.

As we were heading to Boston in the troopship we were told we each would get a 30 day leave at home before regrouping at Camp Shelby in Mississippi, for "jungle training" before heading for the Far East for the invasion that would make Normandy look like child's play. Japan had pledged to defend its country to the death of every man woman and child.

You know what sublimation is, Doctor. I sublimated, big time, all the way home on the train ride from Beantown to Cleveland, as I prepared for my grand entrance back home as a hero.

In Cleveland, you come into the terminal under ground, not like in Europe, Doctor.

So there I was, trudging up those steps (that was before escalators) to the grand hall, one of the grandest terminals in America, with my duffle bag on my shoulder and battle stars and an air medal on my chest. It was the hero's welcome I had envisioned.

My mother was in tears. She rarely cried. Little did she or the rest of them know that I was carrying a lot more baggage than that heavy duffle, but more on that later.

This was a time for joy and celebration. We were among the first back from Europe. When I walked down the street, people saluted. Honest. And sometimes I saluted back. I had been faithful to my girlfriend Rita Barnet, a sweet high school senior who would graduate Heights High in the spring. One of the high points was the day she took me to school to show off to her classmates. (They looked like children to me, Doctor after my year and a half away. And I, of course, was a man! A hero, a warrior.)

At the beginning of our 30 day leave, I hooked up with my friend Lawrence Siegel, a neighbor in Cleveland Heights. He had been assigned to the 104th division which took the brunt of the surprise Nazi attack in the Battle of the Bulge. What was left of the division was pretty much decimated and sent back to the States. He didn't talk about it much. I didn't push. He was one of few survivors of his unit.

So Larry and I did the last dance in Cleveland, you might call it. We took our girlfriends out early, dropping them off about eleven, then headed downtown. It was pretty lively in those days. Nothing much was said about Japan but I felt it, Doctor. It had a doom-like quality finding a special home in my brain... get it Doc?

Baggage…doom…BRAIN…PTSD.

At the end of our month I was shipped down to Mississippi, and Larry went to a military hospital for rehab, whatever that meant in those days.

My trip took me first to Camp Atterbury near Indianapolis for a few days for reassignment work. By some huge coincidence I ran into my first cousin Malcolm Krohngold, who had spent several years in Australia, and was also ticketed for Japan.

On the second day in Indiana I picked up a copy of the lndianapolis Star. It had this huge headline: TRUMAN SAYS WE DROPPED AN AUTOMATIC BOMB ON JAPAN.

OMG I said to myself and then to Malcolm, “What the hell is an automatic bomb!?”
"You're reading it wrong. It's atomic bomb." my cousin said.

I didn't know what the hell it was except it was another weapon to scare and kill a lot of people. We had already carpet bombed Tokyo, killing two hundred thousand human beings in one night...what could be worse?

Little did I know.

There was a lot of talk and speculation, but nothing for certain. As we climbed aboard I the train I noticed something unusual. There were no Negro* troops in our car. They were all sent to the back of the train, to the last two cars.

I wondered why, but I didn't think much more about it. There were no Negroes in my division. Didn't see many in combat. They were mostly in quartermaster units. Maybe that’s why. I’d known of two at Heights High. Both smart. The son and daughter of the custodian of the apartment next door, I remembered.

As we moved along the tracks heading south, we crossed into Kentucky at Cincinnati and into another world, where I was to learn a lot about the disgusting treatment of Negroes in the American south.

Hattiesburg, here I come, where we would prepare for the landing on the southern island of Japan. As the train pulled into to the station I was stunned. I hadn't seen any like this before. Over the entrance to the station there were large signs over two separate doors. One sign said "White," and the other, “Colored”.

Welcome to the land of Dixie, I thought to myself. Aren't we all fighting the same war?!

I turned to Dr. Freud.
“Does this remind you of those signs in the stores and houses in Germany? Big stars of David and the word JUDEN?”

I had seen some in Dortmund.

“Ya, ya,” he said quietly, barely showing emotion.

“Remember to take your Valium, son. See you in two weeks.”

I swallowed hard, gave him the money and turned away. I wonder how long he will put up with me, I said to myself as I turned and walked out down the narrow staircase and out the door...

(to be continued)

* In this essay African Americans are referred to as "Negroes," as this latter terminology is what was used at the time. Usage here is meant to reflect the language of the period and is not intended to be derogatory or disrespectful.

My Life In The Roaring Twenties

Family lore has it that on Thanksgiving Day, 90 years ago, a little guy to be named Maurice for his grandfather, emerged kicking and screaming out of his mother's womb, 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.55th 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 Cleveland Heights duplex on Meadowbrook Blvd. near Lee Rd.

Everett Mansion Owner: Sylvester T. Everett . Architect: Charles and Julius Schweinfurth
Construction: 1883-1887 Style: Mature Romansque Revival 1089 Euclid Ave. Razed: 1938

The mid-twenties were 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 and the Van Sweringens. It was the time of Calvin Coolidge, Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, F. Scott 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 Van Sweringen 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, the soot, and the crime of the city. 

Union Terminal under construction

It was rumored that the Van Sweringens had arranged to route the sewers from this new development directly into Lake Erie, 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 money houses, Cleveland Trust and Union Trust, were flourishing in spectacular banking halls that looked more like palaces, at E. 9th and Euclid.

Cleveland Trust 

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 savings 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. Our small family made it well enough. Cousin Peggy Krohngold 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 when 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 political 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.

*written on my 2015 Thanksgiving birthday

My Life As A Warrior (Chapter One)

   As I may have said before, from the moment I emerged from my mother's womb hanging on to my twin sister's big toe for dear life, it became clear that I had not been born to be a warrior. I wasn’t even the passive aggressive type. In the cradle when my twin sister kicked me, I rarely kicked back. And when I did, I wasn't happy about it. I wasn't combative.

   In the fourth grade, at Coventry school when Reno Koepke, whose father was the manager of Mayfield Cemetery, viciously tackled me in a touch football game, I didn't fight back. I walked away and never played football in the schoolyard again. I didn't even blame anti Semitism.
   I just didn't do contact sports. I did try out for the track team, but was not anywhere fast enough.
   I occasionally got angry with my twin sister, and I remember chasing her around the dinner table with a sharp pencil and swinging out at her face. (I missed, Doctor Carson.) But I remember feeling very angry. Can't remember why, Doctor.
   So by the time I was ready to graduate from high school, I was perhaps the last person you might expect to volunteer to be inducted into US Army in the middle of World War II.
That was 1944. There was this ethos: War on. And for some inexplicable reason I signed on with the other guys, to be inducted the morning after graduation, it was the thing to do, to avoid being thought of as something less than a real man. I signed on. I was ready. I told every one who would listen. Particularly my girlfriend Rita Barnett, a nice Jewish SDT sorority girl. Her dad was manager of the shoe department at Sterling’s, a classy women's store downtown.

   At the time I really believed that I would be assigned to an officer training program on some college campus, since that is what happened to my good friends who went before me. Tom Schattenfield was at the University of Michigan, Larry Coben at the University of Kansas, and Bob Saslaw at Penn State. So I plowed forward.

   Reality struck when I got to Columbus after a tearful goodbye to my mother at Pennsylvania station at 55th and Carnegie. After a day of painful shots in the arms and all kinds of tests much like the SAT that I was sure I had aced, the minute the group of about 50 of us were assembled the captain called us to attention. I felt like top dog. Maybe an appointment to West Point, Dr. Carson.
But the mystique of any sort of academic future faded quickly as the captain barked:
   “We've had a new order from headquarters, the ASTP program has been cancelled."
I nearly wet my pants. He went on, “Private Weidenthal, you got the highest grade on the test. You are assigned to the 95th Infantry division at Indiantown Gap, Pennsylvania.”

   At that memorable moment in my life, I had become a warrior, first class. Like it or not.
And although I squirmed a bit, I accepted reality and decided to go with the flow. None of the cheap psychotic tricks that some of the guys talked about, like the peanut butter on the toilet seat trick, or simply feigning insanity. Not for me. This neurotic kids from Cleveland Heights was playing it straight, Doctor.
   It turned out that the 95th had been training for combat for two years at Camp swift in Texas, and was assembling in Pennsylvania for the trip to the war zone and had been assigned to join General George Patton’s famed army for the march across Europe. It was not all fun and games. I saw it as historically significant, but personally dangerous.
Basic training for this kid from Cleveland was more than learning the “F word” as the adjective preceding every course of every meal.
   “Basic” had its memorable moments. Like the day someone shoved an M 1 rifle under my arm and ordered me to crawl in my belly through 50 yards of Pennsylvania mud while a fifty caliber machine gun mounted on a Jeep fired real bullets over our heads.
I remember being petrified, Doctor.
   We heard later that one terrified young man stood up and his body was torn apart by the the deadly bullets. They say the shooting ceased for awhile so they could remove his remaining body parts. I didn’t see it, but they say it happened, Dr. Carson.
   Or the day on mountain maneuvers in the Snake River Canyon of West Virginia, where I was assigned to carry tree pigeons in a cage on my back. They were geniuses. So smart, you could tie a note to their feet telling them where to go, and by God, they would make it. Of course my back was covered with more bird droppings in one day than the Ciivil War monument on Public Square gets in an entire summer. So much for basic training.
   Sometime during this period, my magnificent, caring mother, taking view of reality as only a mother can, came to Pennsylvania. She was on her way to New York on business and took me to dinner with some people she knew, including dear friend Leo Shore and his wife Shirley.

   Leo was a tough 32 year old Jewish business man who happened to be assigned to my unit. It was toward the end of the evening that she looked Leo in the eye, wagged her finger him and declared,
“You take care of my boy!”
Her words turned out to be more meaningful than we at that table in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania in 1944, could ever imagine.

To be continued…

Next week:
B-bombs and blackouts
Missing the boat to Omaha Beach
“I Always Wanted to Kill A Jew”
Having lunch with Gen. Patton
Winning the air medal
The Battle of the Bulge
Losing best friends
My life as a muckraker

My Life With Guns (Revised and Updated)

   The first time I ever saw a gun was when Don Glaser fired a pistol into the ceiling in Mr.Tubaugh's ninth grade English glass at Roosevelt Jr. High in Cleveland Heights. Needless to say mayhem ensued. Naomi Garber, who was sitting next to Don, screamed hysterically,
   "I can't hear! I can't hear!"
   Don, who later in life went on to win the Nobel prize in physics, had no idea the pistol was loaded, trembled and dropped it to the floor. Mr. Tubaugh, a round faced little bald man, who looked for all the world like Oliver Hardy, seemed about to explode. Punky Bernstein, a street-smart trouble maker who owned the gun, looked perplexed.
   "It's only a starter pistol," he shouted.
   "It’s okay. Nothing to worry about.”
   But it wasn't okay. Mr.Tubaugh grabbed Bernstein by the collar and threw him out of class, calming Naomi as well as he could. Of course no one called the police, and the class was dismissed with no assignment for the next day.
   But I had learned a lifelong lesson. It was back then, just before WW II was about to tear the civilized world apart, that it I came to the rather simplistic conclusion that guns, real or fake, loaded or unloaded, had no place in the classroom. And creeps the likes of Punky Bernstein, needed to be watched by someone carefully. BUT, with all that, Punky popped into my young life early on. We were neighbors. He lived in the next apartment building over on Euclid Heights Blvd. near Coventry.    There was no avoiding him. One day, we heard several loud snapping sounds not far away.
   “That’s a gun!,” he shouted, with considerable assurance.
   “Let's go!"
   We raced toward Coventry and the noises. Punky was exuberant.
   "It's gunshots!" There was no doubt in his voice. He was excited. Frantic. I was breathless and confused. What we found was not nice. It was the Bird brothers, a nationally notorious gang of bank robbers. They had attempted to hold up the Central National Bank at Lancashire and Coventry.
The Heights police had caught them on the spot. It was a nasty scene. There had been a shoot out. Two of the four Birds were shot and lay bleeding in the street. An innocent woman waiting for a trolley had been killed in the crossfire. When the smoke cleared and I had time to think, I asked myself, "Why?!" This was crazy. Had the world gone crazy?
   Fast forward a few years to World War II. I was the innocent, chosen at 18 for the infantry to fight with General Patton in Europe. Plenty of guns and much ugliness. Enormous devastation and lots of questions. Occasionally in the silence of an evening or two, I paused to ask myself,
   "Why this craziness? Why?"
   On my first week as a police reporter at the Cleveland Press, after college, I learned of a terrible tragedy. A woman in East Cleveland had accidentally shot and severely wounded her baby boy. I pounced on the story with visions of a page one byline driving my passion. With the help of police I found this attractive, but terribly distraught middle class white mother. She of course, was beside herself in horror and guilt. The gun was somehow left on the bed loaded. It was there, she claimed, to protect herself and her eight month old son from her husband, a madman who had threatened to kill her. Somehow the baby, while crawling on the bed, gotten hold of the gun and it fired.
   “Why?!,” I wanted to ask. But this was not the time. I was too busy getting my first story, which did indeed appear across the top of the page the next day. Mixed feelings, of course. It was a victory for my budding career.
   That was sixty years ago. No time for philosophical thinking. Strange how the memory of my first page one byline sticks.
   I don't remember whether the little boy died, or whether that mother went to jail, but I have often wondered about this fetish with guns. And as I read with distress about infants being shot in their homes or in their car seats, teenagers dying in gang shoot-outs, there are more questions about this human inanity. And I ask why, hoping that someone is listening.
   Maybe I should ask my Texas friend, Mark, a retired motorcycle policeman and gun aficionado, who once shot himself in the foot while loading his rifle, proudly posting a picture of it on Facebook.
Okay Mark, why?
   Perhaps that monumental intellect Jeb Bush had the answer the other day when asked by a reporter about the massacre of students at that Oregon Community College. With only a short pause, he declared without further comment,
   "Stuff happens," and then went on to brag about how he cut taxes in Florida when he was governor.
I guess that's it Jeb.
   "Stuff happens".
Why Jeb, WHY?

My Life As a Jock Watcher

It is difficult to identify the exact moment when I began my life as a jock watcher. Most likely it began some time in the tenth grade at Heights High.

On our first day at school, there was an orientation in the auditorium, and the first thing I noticed were these big muscular Arian looking men in the front, looking extremely important.

They each wore a black cardigan sweater with a large gold H, meaning they were athletes, rewarded with the letter for their physical prowess.

I decided that I really admired these guys, and perhaps at that moment I became a “jock watcher,” better described for me as a sports writer.

It made sense. There was no way that I was going to be one of them. I wouldn't be invited to their parties, certainly not their fraternities, and wouldn't have a prayer with their girlfriends. They were in another world, and I knew it that first day at Heights.

But as a writer I could become close to them. (As close as a little five foot five Jewish kid with glasses could ever become.)

So I signed up to be a sports writer for the school paper, The Black and Gold, a pivotal point in my young life.

This assured me immediate entree into the magical world of sports, into the locker rooms and all the games, even allowing me to travel with them to away games. But let me be clear, this was not a sexual thing. By that time as a high school freshman, I had clearly defined myself as a raging heterosexual. Or at least as hetero as one could be in the tenth grade. You do what you do for satisfaction, but that was it. I liked these athletic bodies, but I didn't want to touch them. It was more of a form of hero worship.

My heterosexuality was pretty much limited at that time to Virginia Hill, a tall slender, blue eyed blonde, who was a hall guard three days a week. Each of those days, I made of point of walking slowly past her, smiling and moving on. At first she didn't notice, but as time wore on she began to smile at me, and I smiled back. That was pretty much it for the tenth grade.

Back to those guys up front in the auditorium on the first day. One of them was a fellow named Sam Sheppard.To my mind, he was the classic picture of the ultimate jock; handsome and muscular. And standing next to him was his attractive girlfriend, Marilyn Reese, whom he would later marry.

Sam was a classic athlete. A star on the basketball team, quarterback in football, and a runner on the track team that won the state championship in Columbus. My career as a jock watcher in high school gained me some recognition, and even Sam would call me by my first name. “Hi Bud!" he would say. 

I would say "Hi Sam!" as though we were real pals. That gave me the stature at Heights that I longed for.

My next encounter with Sam Sheppard came a number of years later when I was working on the city desk at the Cleveland Press one Fourth of July. The call came from the police reporter that the body of Marilyn Reese Sheppard had been found in her bed, brutally beaten, bloodied, and partially dismembered by blows from a sharp instrument. 
Sam had become a surgeon in his father's hospital on the lake.

Sam protested his innocence and claimed that a bushy haired stranger had entered the house, fought with him, and then murdered Marilyn. So much for hero worshipping. The rest is history.

As I progressed in my young life as a jock watcher, I signed on as a sports writer at the University of Michigan Daily, after my stint in WW II. This was the big time. And I became totally immersed in the ethos of big time sports.

There would be none of this fighting for seating in Michigan's gargantuan 100,000 seat arena, the largest in the western world. There was greatness here, and I planned to become an integral part of it. Early on I arranged for my press pass and entered into the enormous press box high above the field, and of course high above the ordinary fans. They served hot dogs and coffee there, for free. Everyone had a seat with their name on it.

I pretended to know the game and its intricate ins and outs. Michigan executed its plays from the single wing formation. Half back Bob Chappuis as the passer, became famous. And coincidentally, he also had a girlfriend named Marilyn. I worried about her in later years.

By my senior year Michigan had won two national championships and made it to two Rose Bowls, and I went with them. 

On campus some people noticed me in class. Once, my philosophy professor asked me who I liked for the upcoming Ohio State game. I would puff up and respond, “I like the Wolverines, but we will have to wait and see to see. Pete Elliot has a bruised knee," I would tell the philosophy prof. As if really knew.

"Cogito ergo sum."

 "I think, therefore I am”, I whispered to myself, feeling certain that I now would get at least a B in this intellectually challenging class.

As for my jock watching, after graduation I gave it up to become a real reporter on a real newspaper, only once returning to Ann Arbor for a football game in 65 years, more than half a century.

Now on football Saturdays I can be found at The Fox and Hound Tavern at Eastgate, frantically cheering on the Wolverines along with “ordinary alumni," rarely recognized as the storied jock watcher of another mighty era. No press pass, no free hot dogs, no adoring sorority girls.

Just this little guy struggling to bring home a winner for another generation.

Politics and Yom Kippur Don’t Mix. Or do they?

           My magnificent mother, whose lifetime in Cleveland literally spanned the 20^th century, (born in 1898 at 30^th and Orange, died 1989 at Mt. Sinai Hospital), was a tough, independent and lovely woman.

          Although she was a member of The Temple and often turned to Rabbi A.H. Silver, a personal friend of the family, for advice and comfort, she was more a pragmatist, and fatalist, than a religious Jew.

          When her husband William Weidenthal, publisher of the Jewish Independent, died in 1931 at the depth of the Depression, she was left, in her 30’s, with twin five year olds. She courageously (or perhaps stoically) told her friends, “It was meant to be”, and plunged ahead, without complaining, doing what was necessary to maintain a stable family.

          She took over the Weidenthal Co., our printing and publishing plant on Bolivar Rd. (just west of 9^th St.) and successfully ran it for a number of years. She insisted years later that she was no feminist. She left the kitchen and got into business because, “I had no choice”.

          Mother was by nature a serious Republican. She Disliked FDR and the New Deal with a passion. (It should be noted that in pre-depression days, much of the Jewish political establishment in Cleveland was Republican).  As a loyal son, I stood by her, and the cause.

          When Alf Landon the colorless governor of Kansas was nominated to challenge FDR in Cleveland Public Hall in 1936, I was excited about it and determined to do my part for the family.

          I recruited two friends at Coventry School, went down to the printing plant and printed out posters declaring LANDON FOR PRESIDENT.  Then we walked over to the Landon headquarters at the Hollenden Hotel, scooped up as many sunflower buttons we could fit in our knickers pockets and then headed back to the Heights.

          We were naively certain that our campaign efforts would swing Landon for Ohio, or at least Cuyahoga County.  As it turned out, it was a landslide for FDR. 
 Among my young Jewish friends who by now were almost entirely New Dealers, I was a rebel with a lost cause.

          In 1940 it was Wendell Willke, the One World idealist from Indiana who captured my allure. I was taken by his world view, and mother, now owner of Evelyn Wayne, a children’s store in Shaker Heights, continued her dislike for FDR. (Among other things, she resisted posting an NRA sign in her store window, as dictated by Washington.) When it was announced that Willkie would be coming to Cleveland for a campaign appearance at Public Hall, there was no doubt that I would be there.

          The situation got dicey when Grandma Kolinsky, an observant Jew, discovered that Willkie was coming to town on Yom Kippur. Her grandson, she declared at the dinner table, would not attend a political rally on the holiest of holy days. (It had been my habit to walk her to and from the synagogue on Superior Rd. up from Mayfield each year on the High Holy days, which complicated the problem.)

Courtesy of the Minnesota Historical Society

Wendell Willkie, Republican presidential candidate, campaigning with Harold Stassen in 1940.

        Over her protests, and somewhat guilt stricken, I rode the street car down to the terminal where the man from Indiana had arrived on his campaign train. I raced alongside his open car up Euclid Ave., down Ninth St. to Public Hall, where he gave a stirring speech in front of thousands of enthusiastic Gentiles and one Jewish teen-ager from Cleveland Heights, who thought he was cheering on the next president of the United States. Sadly, no such luck.

        Again a landslide for FDR. No hanging or pregnant chads. And no one even thought about asking for a recount.