The Merry-Go-Round (As told to Dr. Freud)

Doc, you probably don't remember when Euclid Beach closed in the fall of '69. It was an amusement park loved by kids and grown-ups alike. Something like that marvelous park you had in Grinzing, with that great ferris wheel. Remember that movie "The Third Man"? It was filmed there.

One of my favorite rides at Euclid Beach was called the American Racing

Derby, a very fast merry-go-round. The horses really raced each other.

We loved it, but as I recall, when it stopped we all came out a little dizzy.

Which takes me to my story.

Leading the Public Affairs team at Tri-C was like that merry-go-round.

You have great fun, Doc, going round and round, but it also had its ups and

downs. Looking back I would say there were more ups than downs. But when the music stopped, it was a real downer.

Some of the most inspiring moments for me were our Monday staff

meetings. The team loved them. Each member had an opportunity to describe their project; be it a celebration, a fund raising campaign, the catalog, television advertising, what have you.

It was an amazing group, including Sandy and Leslie, who I found deep in the bowels of the Tri-C Metro Campus. I had known Sandy from her winning reputation as journalism instructor. Leslie was like her unindentical twin. We found Marcia, of all places, at Mt. Sinai Hospital. I knew she was right for the team when she withstood a withering cross-examination by Ellison in his office.
"We got a gem!" I told Sandy.

Joyce was already on board as fundraiser and levy expert, and her expertise was invaluable. Audrey was rock solid as our administrative assistant, bringing order out of chaos, and Dolores and Joanne were assigned to cover our outposts at the Western and Eastern campuses.

It may sound corny, but we, and others not mentioned, almost instinctively made beautiful music together, and I saw myself as sort of a concert master. Our work brought us great rewards, even at the top, where President Ellison loved parties, making speeches, and raising money touting tax levies. We did that all with great creativity and teamwork. 

We won fifty-two national awards for excellence in nine years, including the national award for best education marketing and public relations project of the year from CASE. (The Council for the Advancement and Support of Education) With the help of the $500 prize, I took members of the team to San Diego to be on hand for the awards ceremony.

Teamwork. Here's one for the books. When the U.S Maritime Academy approached the college for a partnership, Ellison asked us to get the word out. It was a creative challenge. Somehow we thought of one of those huge ore ships that docked on the Cuyahoga. Why not, we asked one another.

“I know the PR guy at the Mather Steamship,” sandy said. And we

were off and running.

At the next staff meeting we mentioned this far out idea. Leslie immediately said, “I'll do the party on the dock.”

“I'll get the NCJW to manage the hosting and the food,” said Joyce. Audrey, bless her heart reminded us that this might cost considerable money. “We'll get it from Ellison,” I promised.

And so the bizarre encounter with the flats, a huge ore carrier, police boats, and balking labor unions, fell into place. It wasn't easy but it worked. Except it turned out to be a freezing day with snow coming in off the lake. A highlight was the dedication of the tech center, where ground was broken by a robot.

I must tip my hat to that team, who still gather annually for a reunion these last 26 years. Love those folks. Geniuses all.

But the downside was grim. The boss had a giant electric temper that belied his sweet smile and gentleness. He would fire people on the spot for being late to a meeting, and the hire them back. He literally got into a fist fight in his office with the superintendent of the Cleveland schools, which we managed to cover up. When someone tipped off the Plain Dealer, they sent a reporter. The operative answer was "what fight"? (today they would say what collusion?) And not a word saw the light of day in the paper.

When Ellison and the president of CSU, had a disagreement in a meeting at CSU, he stripped off his suit coat and his glasses and went after President Waetjen, a one time college football player, he responded in kind. It took the entire group at the meeting to pull them apart. Again, the word was "what fight?" and nobody leaked. Nobody. I thought myself, "A hell of a story.”

I must say, Ellison was a master at playing the good guy. And he truly believed believed that I was doing my job of polishing his image and the image of the college.

That was, until an unpleasant young reporter from the Plain Dealer, don't recall her name, Doctor, started asking some hard questions in a meeting I attended. I could see Ellison’s his face turning red.

“Are you investigating me?” he snarled. “Get out of my office. I don't ever want to see you again!”

He lunged at her as she left. I was stunned. I knew this woman. She was the kind who would do anything for a story; anything to destroy someone's image.

I met with her the next day and got the gist of her story. Ellison had hired the former President of the University of the District of Columbia to come to work at Tri-C full time with a lofty salary, for a special urban studies project. What had been leaked to the PD was that the new hire had been fired in DC, and then charged by a grand jury for stealing valuable property from the president's house. (Also and he came without a job description or a signed application.)

There was no way I could stop the publishing of the story the next morning. Ellison raged.

I did all I could to diminish the flames. The personnel office produced an after-the-fact signed job application and job description, not really kosher, to soften the blow. I arranged a meeting between Ellision and Tom Vail, the publisher and editor of the Plain Dealer. We went to Vail's office. I tried to calm Ellison down by talking about my experiences in WW II with General Patton, telling him how scared I was, but how I pulled myself together and survived. (At that moment I wished I was back in Germany instead of in this hot seat in Cleveland.) But my guy calmed down and walked into Vail's office, sweet as a pussy cat. After a number of exchanges, Vail attempted to assure him that the Plain Dealer has been leading the fight for racial equality. Vail promised to look into the matter of this young reporter. Ellison seemed satisfied and thought he had seen the last of the reporter, but of course he was wrong.

I saw danger down the road.

The next morning at the top of the editorial page was a sizeable editorial: "Seeing Red About Green.” (Green was the DC guy's name.) The boss went into a rage again. It was a fairly mild editorial in my mind, but there was no way of calming the boss.

“Racist bastards!,” he howled.

Dr. Green was a reasonable guy and things settled down when the Grand Jury in Washington found him not guilty on all six counts. This soft spoken academic had gotten himself embroiled in ugly DC politics, and had paid the price. But he survived.

But the PD wasn't through. One more scandal brought us very close to a parting of the ways. It involved the president of the Eastern Campus. She was a bit arrogant and not liked by much the faculty. One day word came downtown that she was in a brawl with the faculty over her thoughtless and stupid habit of parking her Mercedes in a garage built for ambulances and vans dropping off handicapped students. As news guy I saw this as a potential disaster, and I told Ellison at a meeting in his office on a Saturday, that it would probably appear on page one the next morning.

“What should we do? What should we say?”

“Don't do anything,” Ellison said, as we walked out.

"It will give her some humility".

“Yes sir,” I said, and left.

“This is it,” I said to myself.

I called the Eastern Campus pres. at her Gold Coast home in Lakewood, and told her not to say anything to reporters. I learned later that she had spilled the beans herself, calling the Tri-C faculty "a bunch of children."

The next morning, there it was across the bottom of page one: A photo of her and the Mercedes in the handicapped garage. And a side story about a disabled young student in a wheel chair, describing how they had to push him through the snow to get into the building from his parent's van.

It was awful. But I did nothing.

What she did was indefensible. I knew that after nine mostly rewarding years my time was about up. And I was the fall guy.

Or was I?

Tell you next time.

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 Wolverine with PTSD As Told to Dr. Freud

Frankly Doctor, the end of the war may have solved the world's problems, but not all of mine. Let me explain.

Yes. I was home, alive, a hero of sorts, clutching a four year free ride at the University of Michigan, thanks to the GI Bill.

Yes, the home of the Victors Valiant, where athletes were students, where winning was a tradition. Where campus life is everything that a battle weary soldier might desire. I wanted to become one of them. A victor, a winner.

A man.

But it really didn't work out that simply.

First my girlfriend Rita and I broke up. Once I shed my ribbon draped uniform the glamour was gone. That hurt, Doctor. It really did! Was I less handsome? Less masculine? Inside I felt okay. My hormones were raging. Perhaps hers weren't. You know what they say about Jewish girls.

Dr. Freud looked up at me through his squinting eyes.

"Son, you should know that is a myth," he said with a knowing smile.

("That little old guy was a fount of wisdom," I remember telling myself a couple of years later.)

Rita moved with her family to Waukegan, Illinois and attended the University of Illinois. (More on that later.)

I told myself that campus life in the coveted Ann Arbor, would heal the wounds of my fragile sense of self, as I made the transition into civilian life.

The first psychological blow was my assignment to live in Willow Run Village, a make-shift development built by the government to house laborers in Henry Ford’s Willow Run Bomber Plant, where they built the B-24 Liberator bombers that helped win the war. Now it was empty and the university, desperate for housing, grabbed it.

When I arrived in Ann Arbor I found the town and university swarming with ex Gl's, most on the GI Bill. I was one of them; just another number at the very overcrowded university.

The "village" looked very much like the barracks back at Indiantown Gap where I did my basic training. It was in Ypsilanti, an ugly town, 12 miles from Ann Arbor. 

Can you imagine Doctor, my dream of campus life, relegated to a barracks and riding a school bus to and from campus? Maybe that was it, Doctor. Was that it? There weren't many women at Willow Run Village.

He grunted. Put down his pipe and and picked up his pencil.

"Ya" he said. “Tell me some more."

What I saw of the campus was through the window of a rattling school bus. The high point of the barracks life was listening on my radio to the Cleveland Indians play the Boston Red Sox in the World Series.

Even that didn't rock my soul.

I wound up the session by telling the doctor, of my difficult experience with class registration. We gathered in huge, impersonal classrooms (lecture halls) where professors, some well known, read from their so called scholarly books.

For example, our European History class with Professor Reichenbach was held in the lobby of the University museum. There were, perhaps, 500 folding chairs in this cavernous space. Since the bus from Ypsilanti was usually late, I always sat near the back. I could barely understand or hear what he was saying as he read from his book, which I am sure was a great literary document. I rarely took notes. It was uninspiring, to say the least.

I knew that something unsavory was happening. I couldn't concentrate. I was depressed.

Finally, I went to the University Health Service to see a "counselor". There was what he called a “Worry Bird" on his desk.

"Give your problems to the bird. Maybe you will feel better".

I scoffed.

Can you imagine that, Doctor? A worry bird!

Instead I headed back to Cleveland for a serious mid semester rest and visit to a real therapist, who I had known. That, and the change of scenery helped and I soon made it back to Ann Arbor, just in time to finish the semester with acceptable grades.

There was hope.

Next: My major campus achievements in Ann Arbor...

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

“PTSD? Vat in the Vorld is that?,” the old man murmured as I started telling my story.

I understand, Dr. Freud, they hadn't dreamed up the disease in those days, sir, but let me explain.

In the spring of 1944 the 95th Division was wrapping up the war in Europe. We had taken Metz in a brutal battle that had cost us 50% casualties. Our first sergeant, a fine man from Indiana, was dead from a fatal wound to the stomach. Several of my close friends had been killed in an ambush. Our regimental commander was sent back to Paris for psychiatric treatment. Then there was a brush with The Bulge, another trauma.

I was still a callow 19 year old, shaken but not battered by these events. We ended up the war by crossing the Rhine and taking Dortmund, a Cleveland-like steel town on the Ruhr, destroyed by the battering of the final surge of the war.

We were the labeled “Victory Divison.”

On VE day we celebrated with the rest of them.

We took off our steel helmets and simultaneously breathed in the fresh spring air. No guns, no carbines, no M ones. The weight was off our shoulders.

It was like being reborn, Doctor. You understand the feeling. I was alive, I had survived the war!

“Ya, ya,” he murmured, showing absolutely no emotion.

I was ready to become a human being again. I was a young buck ready to come home a hero to my beloved girlfriend, who wrote me almost every day. To my grandmother, Goldie, my twin sister and some adoring friends. I was joyous.

But there was a hitch. There always is, Doctor.

Right?

Word somehow slipped out, perhaps through WikiLeaks, that our unit would soon be moved to the port of Hamburg and shipped back to the states to prepare for the invasion of Japan!

OMG, I screamed to myself...What will I tell my mother?!

Compared to Japan, Europe was a piece of cake, Doctor Freud. I was really anxious.

I tried to pretend this was all a bad dream, Doctor.

Why me? Why the 95th? What did we do to deserve this?!

We tried to kiss it off as just a wild army-type rumor, as we climbed aboard the troop ship in late May for the trip back to Boston and wherever destiny would take us. We were the first combat division to go back.

Dr. Freud, Dr. Freud are you asleep?

You dropped your pencil! I was going to Japan, Doctor. Did you hear me?

lnvade. Japan. A terrible place! I can't even speak the language.

The old man scowled, a bored scowl.

He mumbled, “You're time is up, son. I will write you a prescription for Valium. Take two before you go bed. You'II feel better.”

But Doctor! Japan!  Banzai! Kamikaze!

Unmoved, he murmured, "Stay calm, call my secretary in two weeks. Maybe I can help.”

(To be continued)

My Life As a Hero

This headline says...My Life as a Hero!

Wait a minute. Hold on, guys.

Who wrote that headline?

I'm no hero. Never have been. Never really wanted to be.

How did that word get up there?

Well, it turns out that there is a germ of truth here. I have been reading about this utterly remarkable woman who was born in Africa. I was wandering through her aerial exploits in her single engine monoplane over unsettled unfriendly countryside, taking off and landing on rough, uncharted landing strips, and my mind led me back to another continent, to another time, indeed another century.

It was late Fall 1944, in Europe. There was this moment in the war when I might have had a brush with the heroic...didn't seem so at the time.

We were in this historic battle for that fortress city of Metz, right on

the French-German border, a bastion that had never been captured by

enemy warriors throughout history, and here we were: fighting the Germans who had holed up in the forts of the Maginot Line. (Built by the French, but captured by the Germans during the Blitzkreig.)

Two companies in our 95th division, were attempting an end-around

attack, devised by our bombastic regimental commander, Col. Bacon, a Patton protégé. (come to think of it, he now reminds me of Donald Trump)

By U.S. Signal Corps [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Well the maneuver didn't work, and two companies were trapped on the

other side of the Maginot fortress, running out of food and ammunition and in

desperate need of first aid materials for their wounded comrades.

In the midst of all this mayhem, Captain Compton, our company

commander a decent human being, a high school gym teach from South

Carolina, called me to his quarters.

“Weedenthal,” (he incessantly called me Weedenthal)

“Weedenthal, you ever flown in a plane?”

“No sir, never flown in a plane.”

“Well here's your chance. Show up tomorrow after breakfast. We need you to help in a rescue mission. We picked you and Corporal Spinelli to volunteer for the mission. You're small. You'll fit in the space behind the pilot."

So he had volunteered.  Maybe that explains the “hero” word.

"Hold the headline guys. Maybe we can still use it!”

The next morning, after very little sleep, I showed up and we got in a couple

of jeeps. They took Corporal Spinelli, a little cook from Chicago, and me to a

sprawling cow pasture. It was very uncharted; very uneven. In the distance four

Piper Cubs...looking old and fragile, not unlike the plane that our African

queen had been flying a few chapters back. They we actually artillery

spotter planes connected to the battalion of cannons supporting us. In the

Army they were called L-4's

Well Spinelli, and I and two little guys from another unit, looking as

confused as we were, stumbled across the pasture and we each climbed

aboard our plane.

"Private Weidenthal, climb board aboard." said the pilot. (I was pleased

that he, at least, had pronounced the name properly.)

“There is a box back there you can sit on. We'll put the boxes of supplies and your lap.”

So there I was, cramped in the space behind the pilot, sitting on a box

with three boxes on my lap, and we were ready to take off.

This was not Cleveland Hopkins. It was a cow pasture.

I cannot accurately describe how I felt at the moment the plane started

moving.  No stewardess, no seat belts. As I told my mother in a letter later,

it was "like living history in a movie".

I didn't tell her this: Getting off the ground was harrowing. Worse than

driving through a rutted parking lot in our 38 Plymouth.

From the air we could see a battle ground painted by years of

history. Cults, tribes, nations had fought over this land. It was surreal.

Directly below was the Maginot Line. This was not a sightseeing trip for

Senior scholars. This was war, live.

No sign of the enemy, and down the hill were the remnants of the two stranded companies.

Our guys were waving at us madly. We dropped down to maybe 50 feet

and the pilot dipped his wing.

“Okay Weidenthal, open the door!" he shouted above the din of the engine.

In no time I had thrown out all three boxes. The guys waved. I closed the

door and I said to myself, “Thank God this a round trip.”

We swung around, picked up speed and flew back over the forts at a

higher altitude. By that time the Germans figured out what was going on

and were firing at us. Thankfully, we were too high.

We made three round trips, as did the other planes, without casualties

except for a hole in the wing of one of the other Pipers.

A couple of months later, as I recall, I was called to Capt. Compton's

Quarters. There he was again.

"Weedenthal, l want you to show up tomorrow morning."

“Oh my God not another rescue mission,” I thought to myself.

The next day all eight of the four little non-coms and the four pilots were

lined up on the field and a General from the Third Army decorated each of

us with an Air Medal for valor.

And for that moment I felt like a hero.

The rest is history.