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 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