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.

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 As A Warrior (Chapter One)

   As I may have said before, from the moment I emerged from my mother's womb hanging on to my twin sister's big toe for dear life, it became clear that I had not been born to be a warrior. I wasn’t even the passive aggressive type. In the cradle when my twin sister kicked me, I rarely kicked back. And when I did, I wasn't happy about it. I wasn't combative.

   In the fourth grade, at Coventry school when Reno Koepke, whose father was the manager of Mayfield Cemetery, viciously tackled me in a touch football game, I didn't fight back. I walked away and never played football in the schoolyard again. I didn't even blame anti Semitism.
   I just didn't do contact sports. I did try out for the track team, but was not anywhere fast enough.
   I occasionally got angry with my twin sister, and I remember chasing her around the dinner table with a sharp pencil and swinging out at her face. (I missed, Doctor Carson.) But I remember feeling very angry. Can't remember why, Doctor.
   So by the time I was ready to graduate from high school, I was perhaps the last person you might expect to volunteer to be inducted into US Army in the middle of World War II.
That was 1944. There was this ethos: War on. And for some inexplicable reason I signed on with the other guys, to be inducted the morning after graduation, it was the thing to do, to avoid being thought of as something less than a real man. I signed on. I was ready. I told every one who would listen. Particularly my girlfriend Rita Barnett, a nice Jewish SDT sorority girl. Her dad was manager of the shoe department at Sterling’s, a classy women's store downtown.

   At the time I really believed that I would be assigned to an officer training program on some college campus, since that is what happened to my good friends who went before me. Tom Schattenfield was at the University of Michigan, Larry Coben at the University of Kansas, and Bob Saslaw at Penn State. So I plowed forward.

   Reality struck when I got to Columbus after a tearful goodbye to my mother at Pennsylvania station at 55th and Carnegie. After a day of painful shots in the arms and all kinds of tests much like the SAT that I was sure I had aced, the minute the group of about 50 of us were assembled the captain called us to attention. I felt like top dog. Maybe an appointment to West Point, Dr. Carson.
But the mystique of any sort of academic future faded quickly as the captain barked:
   “We've had a new order from headquarters, the ASTP program has been cancelled."
I nearly wet my pants. He went on, “Private Weidenthal, you got the highest grade on the test. You are assigned to the 95th Infantry division at Indiantown Gap, Pennsylvania.”

   At that memorable moment in my life, I had become a warrior, first class. Like it or not.
And although I squirmed a bit, I accepted reality and decided to go with the flow. None of the cheap psychotic tricks that some of the guys talked about, like the peanut butter on the toilet seat trick, or simply feigning insanity. Not for me. This neurotic kids from Cleveland Heights was playing it straight, Doctor.
   It turned out that the 95th had been training for combat for two years at Camp swift in Texas, and was assembling in Pennsylvania for the trip to the war zone and had been assigned to join General George Patton’s famed army for the march across Europe. It was not all fun and games. I saw it as historically significant, but personally dangerous.
Basic training for this kid from Cleveland was more than learning the “F word” as the adjective preceding every course of every meal.
   “Basic” had its memorable moments. Like the day someone shoved an M 1 rifle under my arm and ordered me to crawl in my belly through 50 yards of Pennsylvania mud while a fifty caliber machine gun mounted on a Jeep fired real bullets over our heads.
I remember being petrified, Doctor.
   We heard later that one terrified young man stood up and his body was torn apart by the the deadly bullets. They say the shooting ceased for awhile so they could remove his remaining body parts. I didn’t see it, but they say it happened, Dr. Carson.
   Or the day on mountain maneuvers in the Snake River Canyon of West Virginia, where I was assigned to carry tree pigeons in a cage on my back. They were geniuses. So smart, you could tie a note to their feet telling them where to go, and by God, they would make it. Of course my back was covered with more bird droppings in one day than the Ciivil War monument on Public Square gets in an entire summer. So much for basic training.
   Sometime during this period, my magnificent, caring mother, taking view of reality as only a mother can, came to Pennsylvania. She was on her way to New York on business and took me to dinner with some people she knew, including dear friend Leo Shore and his wife Shirley.

   Leo was a tough 32 year old Jewish business man who happened to be assigned to my unit. It was toward the end of the evening that she looked Leo in the eye, wagged her finger him and declared,
“You take care of my boy!”
Her words turned out to be more meaningful than we at that table in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania in 1944, could ever imagine.

To be continued…

Next week:
B-bombs and blackouts
Missing the boat to Omaha Beach
“I Always Wanted to Kill A Jew”
Having lunch with Gen. Patton
Winning the air medal
The Battle of the Bulge
Losing best friends
My life as a muckraker

Andrew and Me

Andrew and I spent last weekend together without his mom, who was off to a high school reunion in Wisconsin.

It turned out to be a somewhat traumatic and intellectually challenging experience for both of us.

He’s three, and pretty smart for his age.  He knows and understands words.  He has good instincts.  He seems to sense what is happening around him. He knows when it’s time to go to the bathroom, and almost always knows how to tell me. He announces in his own way when he is hungry or thirsty. And when I put his food in front of him he won’t touch it until I put grated cheese on top.

I sense that he really likes me. He follows me wherever I go, even into the privacy of my bathroom. He sits under my chair when I eat. He even comes with me to den to watch the Indians game…and unlike me he seems rather relaxed about it.

Is he suffering like I’m suffering? I asked myself, after my once beloved team began to fall apart.  My jaws were tight, my mouth dry I was sweating, wondering what this embarrassing performance  means to the reputation of my beleaguered town…I’m beginning to hate the coach, the owner and everything about the team. I even hate the announcers. 

There's Something About Ann Arbor

Three Wolverines - One Happy Family

     There is something about Ann Arbor that seeps into the soul almost unnoticed shortly after one arrives on campus.  For each of us it is something different.  For me it was football and getting my act together after two years of combat in WW II. (It wasn't easy, but it was memorable)  For my daughter it seemed to be the opportunity to stretch. To become herself, to explore graphic design, and enjoy the company of a talented group of young people who have become lifelong friends. And my granddaughter, well, she just seemed to fit in. That's her style and she has become an integral part of AEPhi and of the Department of Communications, as a Social Media expert.  I am so proud of her. For me it is kind of a summation of the thing called family.  The picture was taken in front of the Union last Fall when my granddaughter returned for her Senior year.  We will be back in April for her graduation.  Can you believe that?

Does the football tail wag the university dog?

Thursday, June 02, 2011  Cleveland Plain Dealer

When I was a sports editor of The Michigan Daily back in the middle of that other century, legendary coach and Athletic Director Fritz Crisler told me he wanted to double-deck the already huge Michigan Stadium and increase the capacity of the "big house" to 125,000.

1948 Rose Bowl . Coach Fritz Crisle

The reaction to my story, which appeared on page one of The Daily, complete with an architect's drawing, was immediate and final. 
 
No way, said the university president, who was an aging but world-renowned biologist, whose specialty was reptiles. No way, said the board: We already were the "victors," as the fight song goes. We had won the national championship the previous year.