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.

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 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 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 As a Muckraker (part one) As Told To Dr. Freud

Doctor, please pay attention. Your wife left some coffee for you. That should help.

There was another bizarre turn in my life. 

In the summer of my senior year at college, after struggling with my manhood for four years, I was hired by The Cleveland Press. It was the largest newspaper in Ohio. I was to be a COPY BOY. Yes, boy...B-O-Y. 

I took the job, of course, because it was my entryway into the profession of my dreams. But to be called "boy" 15 or 20 times a day, five days a week, was to say the least, 

unnerving. 

You understand Doc, don't you? 

Remember the cemetery? 

The broken little finger?

The Cleveland Press at E. Ninth & Lakeside
Photo courtesy of The Cleveland Memory Project

The press was a classic big city paper. One hundred twenty-five men, all in one room, all very busy, seemingly knowing what they were doing. We were working on eight deadlines a day, starting at 9 a.m. up to the Final Edition, at four in the afternoon.

(One inside secret. The Final always carried the number of stocks traded each day. That number was used by the gangster numbers guys to ply their trade. And then, of course, we crusaded in the paper against those racketeers, and allegedly helped put them in jail.)

The only other time I can remember holding the presses, was just before the final deadline on the day President Kennedy was shot in Dallas. lt was chaos, and I was caught up in it. (More on that later.)

The daily paper was pretty much the major source of news and information in those days. This was before computers, before cell phones, before cable news, before "alternate facts", before Trump. Remember those days, Doc? They were different. Truth mattered, and we did our best to get the truth, whatever that was, to 400,000 readers in the Cleveland metropolitan area.

The Cleveland Press city room 1955
Photo courtesy of The Cleveland Memory Project

Each reporter had a desk, typically messy, with at least one stack of paper and plenty of carbons. Remembers those awful carbons? Remember them, Doc? Carbon paper. Did they have them in Germany? Every news article, every movie review, every fashion story, had to be written in triplicate. It was messy, to say the least. Unnerving and slow. Remember white out? Every error had to be corrected on each of the three copies.

Once the reporters finally were finished writing, they called out "Boy!", and that's where I came in. I ran over to the desk, took one copy of the story to the city desk, (more about that later) and one to the copy desk...then took my place back in the center of the room again. It was not was intellectually stimulating, but if you kept your eyes and ears open, you could pick up bit of the routine.

For that, I made $35 a week.

The Cleveland Press City Desk

At least I was in good company, and I considered myself fortunate to have the job in those post war days, when the competition for jobs in journalism WAS FIERCE.

Among my colleagues, was Strobe Talbott, later to become head of the Brookings Institution in Washington. (I used to think Strobe was a funny name, but he turned out to be a pretty nice guy.)

Then there was Oliver Brooks, who ended up as a University Circle Inc. executive. And oddly, (in those days) a woman, Donna Shalala, who later became president of the University of Wisconsin and then Bill Clinton's secretary of Health Education and Welfare. Donna, I remember, was from Lakewood; a great tennis player. I often wondered how the guys felt calling her “boy” all day. It didn’t seem to hurt her ego. Who knows? Maybe it helped. That would be a good case to study, yes Doc?

Louis B. Seltzer

Well, I survived the summer in that hot, old city room as we called it. There was no air conditioning. A few of the windows opened part way. Yet our ultimate boss Louis Seltzer always wore a dress shirt and tie and a suit coat, maybe to show he was different.

And he really was.

In his book "The Years Were Good" he tells how he grew up on Cleveland’s west side, quit school after junior high and got a job as a mail boy at The Press. 

He eventually worked his way up to Editor. He knew the city and its people, a blue collar town and The Press, for the most part, was a blue collar paper. There were no aspirations to be another New York Times or a Wall Street Journal, or even a Chicago Tribune. It all started in the 19th century as the Penny Press, the first of the famous Scripps Howard Newspapers.

Perhaps The Cleveland Press was the first of the populist papers. In telling the news, we never forgot our readers. We never overlooked Parma or Garfield Heights, Kamm’s Corners, Buckeye Rd., or Glenville. It is said that we covered Buckeye Rd. (a primarily Hungarian neighborhood) like we owned it. Those were our people. We also helped put their councilman, Jack P. Russell, in jail. And many thought we elected most of the mayors and city councilmen in those days. Think of Celebrezze, Lochar, Voinovich.

We didn't care if the intellectuals in the Heights and Rocky River read The Plain Dealer. (The competition.) I understand many of the high brows in town did read The Press, but never talked about it. It was right for those days, Doc. We had an "editor" for almost everything. There was Ted Andrica the "Hunky editor" who went to eastern Europe to visit the relatives of our readers, for example. I'll get back to him, later.

When the summer ended, I went back to Ann Arbor to finish up my education.

Graduated with no distinctions. (No honors, a B minus average.) Not even a graduation ceremony.

I accepted an invitation from my fraternity brother Stanley May, to spend a week's vacation with his family in Toledo... yes Toledo. Mid-week I got a frantic call from my mother.

“Norman Shaw called, and wants to know where you are!”

Shaw was the number two guy at the Press. So I cut my vacation short, and headed home on the "Mercury" (the streamlined train that ran along Lake Erie from Cleveland to Detroit with a stop in Toledo) to begin my career as a journalist.

But it wasn't that easy...

Next: Sending a boy to do a man’s job.