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?