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?

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

My near disaster with Bette and the Queen Mary gangplank cast an ominous cloud over what was to be my triumphal and perhaps romantic return to Europe. 
Doc, I was just a young buck being a young buck. I was acting almost normal, right?

Not a word from the master. But I detected a slight smile curl up from his lips. Absolution, I thought...

In spite of the chaos, (I called it a misunderstanding) Bette decided to stay in London with me at the Sloan Square Hotel she had booked for us, while I visited the social service agencies, hospital and senior centers. I was treated royally by my hosts wherever I went, giving me a badly needed psychological boost.

The one major hang-up was the Morris Minor mini car I rented from an agency on Piccadilly Circus. It was tiny, like a toy. The driver's seat was on the wrong side and I had to shift with my left hand.

Ever been on Piccadilly Circus, Doc? It's like a merry-go-round that never stops. It is almost impossible to get off of. Even with a normal car.

Well to make a long story short, I finally got off the Circus. I did my thing, while Bette went back to Oxford to finish up the term. I was in denial, Doc. I found the much heralded British health and welfare institutions neat and clean, full of mostly happy, blue eyed Anglo Saxons who all seemed like they belonged to the same Rotary Club.

This is not Cleveland, I told to myself.

I found it pretty much the same in the Scandinavian countries later on, by the way.

On the fourth day I finished my royal British adventure and headed up to Oxford, reminding myself to drive on the left side. I promptly got lost. Finally arrived at four. I had promised to pick Bette up at one, and found her waiting with her bags in front of her dorm, not happy. The following days were difficult, but we moved on. We took the ferry from Dover across the channel to Esbjerg, the port for Copenhagen. That rainy day in Denmark added a touch of gloom to our fading relationship. Very early on the morning of the third day.... well, it happened, Doc, it happened. Very early, like at five, I heard her wandering around the room, packing her bag, and heading for the door. For some reason I didn't say a word.

Honest...she left note: “I will be at the railroad station in Bonn, Thursday afternoon.”

I didn't quite know what to make of it. Remember, I was in state of denial.

I spent the next two days on my scheduled visits to some very impressive senior centers. One evening I was hosted by a club of old folks in a government run center. Again, blue eyed happy folks in the land of Danny Kaye's "Wonderful Wonderful Copenhagen." Again, not Cleveland. Not even Columbus, I thought to myself. I made a mental note.

Then it was time to sail off for the Deutschland on a ferry from Esbjerg to the port of Hamburg, from where I had sailed home ten years prior with my division. That town took a terrific beating during the war. At my hotel I had to explain to them that I was flying solo. It was okay. So was the famous the St. Pauli neighborhood that I toured in the evening. It was good day, in spite of everything.

Thursday morning I took the midday train south along the Rhine, a beautiful trip to Bonn and destiny.

I spotted Bette in the crowd with a gentleman. My heart sank.

“This is Professor Dinbgbat from the university here. We're old friends. We’ve decided to spend a couple of weeks together. See you back in Cleveland?”

I was speechless. I said goodbye, sort of. I never saw Bette Daneman again.

Assmannshausen on the Rhine

I grabbed the next Rhine mail barge down the river through the most beautiful river valley in Europe, and jumped off at Assmannshausen, because I liked the name. I found a room in a small hotel with an attached (typically German) tavern then I cried my eyes out, sipping perhaps the most delicious finely crafted beer in the world.

That's what men do, right Doc? Right? Have a brew and move on beyond the despair of the moment.

I reminded myself that as a reporter, there was work to do.

Zurich, Vienna and Tito's Zagreb lay ahead.

My Life As a Muckraker (part two) As Told To Dr. Freud (Sending a boy to do a man's job.)

I'm sorry I missed my session last week, Doctor, but I had a bad cold and I didn't want to give it to you. Your wife said it was your policy that I had to pay for missed sessions. I gave her my card. (He nodded at me looking not at all embarrassed. I was annoyed, but I didn't say anything.)

Just to sum up from last time Doc, you recall that I was hired by the Press right out of college, spent a few days in Toledo, then hopped the Mercury Streamliner to begin my career as a journalist.

You might expect that at my moment of triumph, I would have jumped off the train at the terminal, grabbed a bus, and headed to Ninth St. and the Press to report for work. Instead took a deep breath, and took the Cedar Hill trolley up to the Heights for home. I had to find a white shirt, a narrow tie, and get a haircut and shave.

The Cedar Hill trolley

Maurice Weidenthal, my grandfather

A few days later, with dreams of becoming some kind of hot shot editor, I walked into Norman Shaw's office and presented myself for the coronation, so to speak. After all, he did call my home asking about me, right Doc?!

Shaw was a fine looking, cool type with graying hair and a straight serious face. He was an Oberlin man, the son of a Plain Dealer editor. He was much the antithesis of Press editor Louis B.Seltzer, who left school after junior high to find his way in journalism. Kind of a balance at the top, which as it turned out, worked very well.

It wasn't long into our conversation when Shaw noted that his father, Archer Shaw, and my grandfather, Maurice, had worked together at the Plain Dealer at the turn of the century. He as associate editor, my grandad as politics writer and theater critic. I said to myself, it’s my name he wants, not me or my great talents. My ego sank. I was hurt inside. Yes, Doc, it hurt.

It sank even deeper when I was told that there weren't any real reporter or editing jobs open at the moment; that I would have to start as a copy boy. Oh my God, I thought to myself, how much can my fragile manhood take?

Enough of this “boy” stuff!

But I sucked it up, Doctor, and took the job, still at $35 a week. I forgot to tell you that part of the job was to clean and fill paste pots. Each writer had a coffee cup filled with paste, necessary to clip and paste copy after proof reading or edits. It was a messy job, especially when you consider how easy it is to cut and paste on the computer these days.

My plan was to do a first class job, even with the paste pots. (Which I became very good at, by the way.) I’d get to know the territory and become friendly with some of the big guys that I admired. One of them was Dick Peters, a genuine Yalie, who looked the part. Like Shaw, he was tall, with silvering, thinning, graying hair, in his early 40's and straight as an arrow. I learned that he’d been General Douglas MacArthur’s PR guy during the war in the Pacific. I fantasized that he was there when MacArthur made his famous return to the Philippines. Maybe he even wrote the line.

Peters lived on Princeton Rd. in Cleveland Heights with his father, who was the headmaster at University School. For some reason, Peters and I hit it off. After a few months of "boy" work, Peters approached me one day saying,

"We’re going to try an experiment in our department. We need young blood and we want you to join us.”

 I was stunned. Flattered.

“You start on Monday.”

I didn't quite know how to act. I had to buy more shirts and ties for my transition from filling paste pots, to being an editorial writer. It was a real coup. There were four men in the department. I would become the fifth. My job was to deal with letters to the editor, pick out the best, and confirm their authenticity.

I would also help in the back room laying out the page, proofreading, and making the morning deadline. It was cool. And I tried to act normal among my comrades who worked in the chaotic City Room.

After awhile I was given the latitude to crank out editorials on fairly non controversial subjects. One of my first ventures into the world of editorial writing, was a full page editorial I wrote for the Saturday page, calling for a rebuilding of the Cleveland Airport, which was, at that time, nothing more than a backwater pre war facility with no concourses or jet ways. We ran three rather large aerial photos of the three area regional airports; Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Detroit. The other two were already in the construction stage. As usual, Cleveland was slow to catch up. We were entering a new era of jet travel, and Cleveland was falling behind, being dragged down by the small mindedness at City Hall, while Detroit and Pittsburgh were taking a regional approach.

Cleveland Hopkins Airport 1956

We did get some action, when the city announced it was tacking on two concourses to the existing building, but the basic small mindedness continues to this very day.

I learned a lot about the inside of the big city paper while working “up front”, as they called it. There was always this behind-the-scene tension between the local editors and the Scripps Howard owners. Scripps was conservative, and owned a chain of papers across the country. It also owned Cleveland's first television station, WEWS. (Remember Dorothy Fuldheim?)

Dorothy Fuldheim

The Press was populist liberal. Scripps didn't worry about the local stuff. It sold papers. But on major national matters, we were being watched.

Roy Cohn and Jospeh McCarthy

Those were the days of that evil man, Joe McCarthy. The editorial writers wanted to tee off on this man and the witch hunt. He was no Trump, but in those days, many felt he was a threat to the nation. He had destroyed the lives of many good people in his so-called Communist Crusade. His side kick was nasty New York lawyer, Roy Cohn, who in later years turned up advising Trump. 

Finally, aggressive lawyer Jack Welch, from Massachusetts stood up, as he defended members of the Armed services. 

He looked McCarthy in the eyes and declared,

“You have done enough. Have you no sense of decency?"

McCarthy eventually faded into obscurity, done in by growing opposition, good journalism, his own nastiness and alcoholism.

A lesson from history. 

The truth does matter.

Next: (My Life as a Cop Watcher )

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 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?

What’s it all about, Tommy?

Back in that other century, on his 90^th birthday, my “Uncle Tommy” jumped rope for twenty minutes at the downtown YMCA, without so much as breathing hard or turning red in the face. So notable was his achievement that there was a picture and story in the Cleveland Press. It was mentioned that he was a physical fitness aficionado, and went regularly to the summer Bernard McFadden health camp in Western New York, and was one of their prized students.

Tommy lived for much of his later years in a quiet house on the road to Chardon. He was never married, but was very successful in business, founding a food service business that eventually served a majority of the city’s factory workers called United Food Services.

Shortly after he reached that landmark birthday he was living in a disheveled apartment in the Statler Hotel downtown.  A year later he was dead, having been ripped off a by a couple who befriended him, feigning to care for him. He left no immediate survivors.

He was good gentleman. Short, with twinkling bright blue eyes and curly hair. Frequently giving his nieces and nephews gifts on special holidays. Tommy talked a lot when there was someone to listen and I can remember one lunch time parked at the corner of 12^th and Chester talking for half an hour about something before I got a chance to mention some charitable ideas I had. He always came through with a smile.

And he did a give a lot of money to the Cleveland Sight Center.  There is a plaque there at 101st and Chester that bears his name. He was generously involved in the Hebrew Free Loan and other charities. It is said that on the way home from work he would often stop by the site of many of his beneficiaries to see if all was going well.

His funeral was well attended in the Mausoleum at Mayfield Cemetery. It was so cold that the radiators stated banging during the service, as if someone out there was trying to protest the Rabbi’s words. And then they buried him in the cold wet mud of a Cleveland winter.

I started to wonder: ”What’s it all about, Tommy?”

Is there any meaning in the lonely childless life...that ended with jumping rope and getting ripped off?

Certainly his charitable instincts, regardless of his motive, have done good work that continues well beyond his death.

And it is said that in the light of a full moon, the shadow of a little man with twinkling eyes and a broad smile can be seen merrily jumping rope in the parking lot of the Sight Center or the Jewish Federation.

As if to tell the world, in his own unusual way, that his life had meant something after all.