What’s Wrong with Cleveland By Rabbi Daniel Jeremy Silver 1985 (with intro by Roldo Bartimole)

What’s Wrong with Cleveland  By Rabbi Daniel Jeremy Silver 1985 (with
intro by Roldo Bartimole)

the link is here

The late Rabbi Daniel Jeremy Silver, who was the spiritual leader of The Temple, gave a sermon in the mid 1980s that should be well remembered by Clevelanders, especially as the city examines why its population has declined so severely over the years.

It may offer some insight into how Cleveland deteriorated and why. I believe it dissected Cleveland’s downfall and the reasons why the city decayed over the years. It suggests the city suffered the inertia of its past success. I think it also gives us something to think about when we get over-excited about projects – like the East Bank Flats development now and Gateway and other costly developments of the past couple of decades.

Cleveland’s greatness, he tells us, was a “matter of historical accident.” Geography, indeed, played a major component in our growth. It was not planned, nor could have been, I’d say.

Rabbi Silver’s words were taken from a sermon he gave in the mid-1980s. It was given wider exposure in the Cleveland Edition on March 6, 1985, more than 25 years ago. To me it’s as fresh as if it were given yesterday.

His words should receive much wider exposure in this day of the internet. It traces our downfall. It details many of the reasons we have failed.

I was particularly struck by his recitation of an attempt by John D. Rockefeller to finance higher education here and the response he got from Samuel Mather, one of Cleveland’s wealthy leaders of our iron ore and steel industry. Mather told Rockefeller that his children and his friends went to Yale. Cleveland didn’t need a great university. Go elsewhere, he advised Rockefeller. Rockefeller did. He gave the first million dollars to the University of Chicago, setting that university on its way to greatness. Cleveland lost its chance.

Rabbi Silver also told us that “… the future of this city does not depend upon entertainment or excitement….” He goes on: “In real life people ask about the necessities – employment and opportunity – before they ask about lifestyle and leisure-time amenities.” How about that?

Here are his words. This is a first attempt to look at Cleveland’s population losses and its tragic downfall as a leading American city.

I suggest anyone interested in the history of the city to print out Rabbi Silver’s address and keep it to read and re-read. It may be 25 years old but it speaks to us today as we make some of the same mistakes.

I hope to be able to trace some of the city’s decline and its causes as I have seen it from the mid-1960s until the present soon.

What’s Wrong with Cleveland
By Rabbi Daniel Jeremy Silver

Cities grow for practical reasons. Cities grow where there is water and farm land. Cities thrive if they serve a special political or economic need. A city’s wealth and population increase as long as the special circumstance remains. A city becomes a lesser place, settles back into relative obscurity, when circumstances change. Some, like Rome, rise, fall and rise again. Some like Nineveh, rise, fall and are heard of no more.

In this country the larger towns of the colonial period – Boston, Newport, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore – came into being and grew because they provided safe harbor for the ships that brought goods and colonists to the New World and carried back to Europe our furs and produce. New York continued to grow because it had a harbor and great river, the Hudson, that could carry its commerce hundreds of miles into the hinterland. Newport did not grow because all it had was a landlocked harbor.

Cleveland was founded as another small trading village on Lake Erie. We began to grow because of the decision to make the village the northern terminus of the Ohio Canal. The canal brought the produce of the hinterland to our port and these goods were then shipped on the lakes eastward to the Erie Canal and to the established cities along the eastern seaboard.

In 1840, shortly after the Ohio Canal was opened, there were 17,000 people in our town. We became a city through a second stoke of good fortune: Iron ore was discovered in the Lake Superior region. Because of the canal, this city was the logical place to marry the ore brought by ships from the Messabi Range, the coal brought by barge from the mines of southern Ohio, West Virginia and western Pennsylvania and the limestone brought by wagon and railroad from the Indiana quarries. Here investors built the great blast furnaces that supplied America the steel it needed for industrial expansion. From 1840 to 1870 our population increased tenfold. It is claimed that from 1880 to 1930 we were the fastest growing city in America. By 1930 Cleveland had become America’s sixth city. There was nothing magical about our growth, or really planned. It is a matter of historical accident: the siting of the canal, the discovery of iron ore and the ease of transportation here, the basic materials from which steel is produced.

There is an old Yiddish saying that when a man is wealthy his opinions are always significant and his singing voice is of operatic quality. During the years of rapid growth no one complained about the weather. For most of this period our symphony orchestra was a provincial organization and our art museum was either non-existent or a fledgling operation; yet, no one complained about the lack of cultural amenities. Our ball club wasn’t much better than it is today, but no one was quoted as saying that the town’s future depended on winning a pennant. There was then no domed stadium and no youth culture. Yet, young people of ambition and talent came. They came because there was opportunity here.

Those who believe that the solution to our current faltering status lies in a public relations program to reshape our tarnished image or in the reviving of downtown are barking up the wrong tree. We all welcome the city’s cultural resurgence – that Playhouse Square is being developed and that there is a new Play House – but, ultimately, the future of this city does not depend on entertainment or excitement, but upon economics. In real life people ask about the necessities – employment and opportunity – before they ask about lifestyle or leisure-time amenities.

We grew because we served the nation’s economy. We fell on hard times when the country no longer needed our services or products. Fifty years ago the nation and the world needed the goods we provided. Today the world no longer needs these goods in such quantity, and we can no longer produce our projects at competitive prices.

Once upon a time the steel we forged could be shipped across the country and outsell all competition. Today steel can be brought to west coast ports from Asia and to east coast ports from Europe and sold more cheaply than steel made here. The Steel Age is over and so is the age of the assembly-line factories that used our machine tools. This is the age of electronics and robotics, and these are not the goods in which we specialize.

Cleveland grew steadily until the Depression when, like the rest of the country, it suffered. Unlike many other areas we did not recover our élan after the Depression and World War II. It is not hard to know why. We were a city for the Steel Age. America was entering the High Tech Age. We lacked the plant, the scientific know-how and, sadly, the will to develop new products and new markets. The new age was beginning and the leaders in Cleveland preferred to believe that little had changed. We played the ostrich with predictably disastrous results. The numbers are sobering. The human cost they represented far more so. There were some 300,000 blue-collar jobs in the area by 1970. By 1971 this number had been reduced to 275,000 and by 1983 to 210,000. One in four factory jobs available 15 years ago no longer exists.

Cleveland lacks the two special circumstances that have made for the prosperity of certain American cities in the post-war era: government and advanced technologic research. This has been a time of expanding government bureaucracies and of the transformation of our information and control systems. Silicon Valley is the symbol of the new economy. We are a city of blast furnaces and steel sheds, not sophisticated laboratories.

The years between 1980 and 1982 were a time of national economic stringency, but the number of jobs available in the United States still grew by slightly under 1 percent. In the same period Cleveland lost 50,000 jobs between 1982 and 1984; when there was resurgence in employment levels, Cleveland lost another 30,000 jobs. The census for metropolitan Cleveland indicates that between 1970 and 1980, 168,000 people left the area and that the exodus continues at about the rate of 10,000 a year.

These facts should give pause to anyone who still believes that Cleveland will again become what Cleveland was a half-century ago. The numbers are sometimes rationalized as the result of the elderly leaving for warmer climates and a falling birth rate. These are factors, but the heart of the exodus has been our children. Our young, excited by new ideas, believe that another market will offer more opportunity or that their professional careers will be enhanced if they settle elsewhere.

Why has this happened to Cleveland?

Labor blames management. Management did not reinvest in new plant and equipment or research. When local corporations expanded into electronics, they generally built plants elsewhere. Management blames high labor costs and low labor productivity. Both groups are right, but in the final analysis, whatever the mistakes our political, business and labor leaders make, these alone do not account for Cleveland’s slide. Had there been fewer mistakes this town would still be suffering a serious economic downturn. We no longer are in the right place with the right stuff. (My emphasis.)

Our inability to adjust to a new set of circumstances is the inevitable result of a prevailing state of mind that can only be called provincial. Over the years Cleveland has been comfortable, conservative and self-satisfied. Clevelanders believed, because they wanted to believe, that what was would always be. Those who raised question were politely heard but not listened to. The city fathers set little value on new ideas, or indeed, on the mind. Business did not encourage research. Our universities were kept on meager rations. I know of no other major American city which has such a meager academic base.

A vignette: In the mid-1880s, John D. Rockefeller, then in the first flush of his success, went to see the town’s patriarch, Samuel Mather. He wanted to talk to Mather about Western Reserve College. Rockefeller believed that his hometown should have a great university. He knew that Mather was proud of Western Reserve and each year made up from his own pocketbook any small deficit. But Western Reserve College was small potatoes and Rockefeller proposed that the leadership of Cleveland pool its resources and turn the school into a first-line university. Mr. Mather was satisfied with Western Reserve Academy. It was just fine for Cleveland. He and those close to him sent their sons and their grandsons to Yale for a real education. He listened to Rockefeller, thanked him for his interest and suggested that he might take his dream somewhere else. John D. took his advice and in 1890 gave the first million dollars to the University of Chicago, a grant that set that university on its way to become what Western Reserve University is not – one of the first-rank universities in the country.

The same attitude of provincial self-satisfaction was to be found among our public officials. At the turn of the century we were certainly the dominate political force in the state; yet, when Ohio’s public university system began to expand, no one had the vision to propose establishing a major urban university in Cleveland whose research facilities would concern themselves with the problems of the city, its people and its industry. Again, in the 1950s, during the second period of major expansion by the state university system, Cleveland showed little interest. I am told that at first the town fathers actually opposed the establishment of Cleveland State University. They came around, of course, but ours is still one of the branches with the least research potential and fewest laboratories. Even today much of what it does is limited to the retraining of those who came out of our city schools and to the training of those who will occupy third-level jobs in the electronic and computer world. Change is in the air. Our universities are struggling to come of age, but a half century, at least, has been lost because Cleveland did not prize one of God’s most precious gifts – the mind.

Some argue that those who ran Cleveland limited their academic community because they did not want an intelligentsia to develop here. Academics and writers have a well-known propensity for promoting disturbing economic and political ideas. The comfortable and complacent do not want their attitudes questioned, but Cleveland’s lack of interest in ideas extended beyond political conservatism. Our leaders do not subsidize research and development in their corporations or in the university. Case was not heavily funded for basic research. Instead, it was encouraged to provide the training for mechanical and electrical engineers, the middle-level people needed by the corporations. It is only in the years of economic decline that our business leadership has begun to provide money for the research that ultimately creates new business opportunities and provides new employment.

Cleveland did not, however, fall behind in one area of technology: medical research. If the city fathers believed that the Steel Age would last forever, that real education took place back East and that it was wise and proper for them to look for investment opportunities elsewhere, they still lived here and the made sure that first-rate health care was available. Our hospitals have been well-financed. Medical research has been promoted. Such research was valuable and non-controversial, and the results of this continuing investment are clear. The medical field has been the one bright spot in an otherwise gloomy economic picture. Our hospitals are renowned worldwide. The research being done here is state-of-the-art. Recently the medical industry has come on straitened times, be even so, the gains are there and it is not hard to see what might have happened in other areas had our investment in ideas and idea people been significant and sustained.

Cleveland majored in conventional decency rather than in critical thinking. Our town has a well deserved reputation in the areas of social welfare and private philanthropy. Social work here has been of a high order. Until World War II the city had one of the finest public school systems in the country. We were concerned with the three Rs, but research goes beyond the three Rs. We never made the leap of intellect and investment that is required when you accept the fact that the pace of change in our world is such that yesterday is the distant past and tomorrow will be a different world.

We have fallen lengths and decades behind cities whose leaders invested money, time and human resources in preparing for the 21st Century. They broke new ground and laid foundations for change. We stayed with the familiar. As long as the economy depended upon machines and those who could tinker with machines, Cleveland did well. But when it was no longer a question of having competent mechanics retool for the next year’s production but a question of devising entirely new means of production, we could no longer compete. To a large extent, we still cannot.

In recent years Cleveland’s industrial leadership seems to have come awake to our mind and research gap, but the CEOs of the major corporations no longer have the power to singlehandedly make over the economy. In the High Tech Age, the factory that employs thousands of people is no longer the dominate force. Three out of every four jobs that have been created over the past decade have developed in businesses that are either brand new or employ fewer than 100 people. Those who lead old-time production line corporations struggle not to fall further and further behind and are an unlikely source of jobs.

Another problem has been that for decades the major banks were not eager to support bright, young outsiders who had drive and an idea but little ready cash. We all know people who went to our banks, were turned down, left town and set up successful businesses elsewhere. The officers of our lending institutions preached free enterprise and entrepreneurship, but most of their loans were to the stable, old-line corporations. For all their praise of capitalism, they were not risk takers. New business formation here has lagged behind that in most other cities. The birth of new business in Cleveland over the past three decades has been about 25 percent lower than the rate of new-business birth in other second-tier cities. Despite a new openness at the banks, we continue to trail. Catch-up takes a long time.

Cleveland’s business leadership has become aware of the need for research and development and of the need to stake bright young men and women who have ideas and are willing to risk their best efforts to make these successful; but even as we come alive to the importance of the inquiring mind and the risk takers of the academy and the research laboratory, we must recognize that Cleveland has a special albatross about its neck; Cleveland is not a city. There are over 30 self-governing districts in Cuyahoga County. There are over 100 self-governing communities in the metropolitan area. What we call Cleveland is an accumulation of competing fiefdoms.

This sad situation is also a result of our parochial outlook and our unwillingness to look ahead. It is easier to let each group draw into itself than to work out ways to adjust competing needs and interests. The result is a diminished city. There were 970,000 residents of the city in 1945; there are 520,000 today (My note: Try 396,815 as of 2010). Only one in four Clevelanders live within the metropolitan area. The economic gap and the gap of understanding between the suburbs and the city and between suburb and suburb has widened, not narrowed, over the years.

Those who live here lack of shared agenda because we have allowed each area to go its own way and seek its special advantage. Some of our fiefdoms are run simply for the benefit of their traffic courts. Others are run for the benefit of white or black power groups. Some exist to protect the genteel ways of an America that no longer exists. Each is prepared to put obstacles in the way of community planning when a proposal threatens its attitudes or interests.

Do you remember those small groups of white and blacks that used to meet on the High Level Bridge to signify that we were really one city? Their tiny numbers, the very fact that their actions were seen as symbolic, underscored how far we have moved away from each other. To be sure, Clevelanders meet together in non-political forums where we profess infinite good will and talk of shared goals, but the talk rarely leads to decisive actions. Why? We lack a political area where our needs are necessarily brought forward and brokered. We lack a political structure that would force us to adjust our interests and develop an agenda to which we could commit ourselves, and until such a structure is in place we will not be able to marshal the shared purpose.

When suburbanites look at the problem of the city, they tend to focus on the long-range economic problems: how to create jobs and prosperity. Any who live in the city have no work in the city or outside it. Their problem is not how we can, over a 5-year period, establish X number of new businesses that will provide X number of new jobs, but how to keep body and soul together; how to provide food, clothing and shelter for their families. We do not see the immediacy of their needs. They do not see the wisdom of our plans, and inevitably we frustrate each other’s hopes. The suburbs mumble about their particular concerns and the community stumbles into a future for which it cannot plan.

In 1924 the citizens of Lakewood and West Park voted on a proposal to annex their communities to the city of Cleveland. That proposal was defeated soundly. Since then every proposal to create countywide government has failed and failed badly. Yet it should be clear to all that only when we succeed in becoming citizens of a single community will we be able to do much about our economy and our future.

Because the city’s concerns stop at the borders, its ability to handle the future stops at its borders. The same is, of course, true of the suburbs. In Columbus the city grew by annexing to itself the farm land on which the commercial parks and the new suburbs were built. In Cleveland we went the other way; today you could do some large-scale farming within the city limits.

Will we confront this structural challenge and create metropolitan government? I see little reason to believe that we will. Our history has, if anything, intensified racial and class polarization. If we become a unified city, every group and municipality will lose some precious advantage. I can’t imagine the citizens of Moreland Hills wanting to throw in their lot with the citizens of Hough. Many minorities would lose their power base. The suburbs would no longer be able to provide services tailored to the middle class and would have to bear an expensive welfare load. Yet, until we unite politically we will be unable to address effectively the needs of Cleveland tomorrow. We simply cannot plan constructively so long as members of our many councils are able to thwart well-intentioned proposals.

Recent years have been better years for this city. There has been significant construction downtown. The highway system is in place. We have created regional transport, regional hospitals, and a regional sewage system. But big buildings downtown do not guarantee the city’s future. Big buildings can be empty buildings, as some of them are. Regional transport can mean empty buses. The future of Cleveland rests first on a revived economy. A revived economy depends upon bright people and new ideas. People do not get ideas out of the air. Ideas begin in our schools, universities and laboratories. High-quality education is costly. The future for Cleveland cannot be bought cheaply.

A meaningful future depends upon a new recognition of where a city’s strength lies. It’s nice that our suburbs are famous for their green lawns and lovely homes. It’s nice that everybody agrees that Cleveland is a wonderful place to raise children. It’s a wonderful place to raise children if you don’t want your children to live near you when they become adults. As things stand now, they will make their futures elsewhere. Our suburbs are the result of yesterday’s prosperity. Employment and political unity must be today’s goals if we are to have a satisfying future.

Unfortunately, we did not prepare in the fat years for a time when we no longer could take advantage of the circumstances that had made us prosperous. Those who study such things say that if the American economy stays healthy and the formation of new businesses in Cleveland continues at its present rate, we will be fortunate if in 1990 we have the same number of jobs we had in 1970.

Our future is to be a second-tier city. I do not find that such a discouraging prospect. A prosperous city of two million can be a satisfying place and can provide many amenities. But before we can feel sure even of a second-tier status, we must develop a new economic base and a renewed concern for community. We need to reevaluate our attitudes toward the mind. It is tragic that one in two who enter the city schools never graduate.

Of those who graduate – the best – who enroll in Cleveland State University, 51 percent need remedial work in mathematics; 62 percent need remedial work in English. Half the city’s children do not graduate from high school. More than half who graduate are not prepared for this world. Is this any way to prepare for the 21st Century?

When the rabbis were asked “who is the happy man?” they answered, “the person who is happy with his own lot.” The question that Clevelanders must ask is whether we can be happy even if we are not now, and will not become again, one of the premier cities in the country. The answer seems to me obvious. We can. But even the modest hope will escape us unless we put behind us the stand-patism that has characterized our past. We must put our minds and imaginations to work in planning for an economy and a community suited to the world of tomorrow.

Death by politicians by Roldo Bartimole 1.10.2017

DEATH BY POLITICIANS
by Roldo Bartimole

January 10th, 2017

170110-roldo-ed-hauserPhoto used courtesy of Scene.

He’s a nice guy. He’s earnest. He’s honest for a politician. He’s likely a good family man. He’s competent. He’s reliable. Don’t think he’d purposely do anyone a wrong. A stand-up guy.

But he’s going to KILL someone.

He’s a Republican Senator. Rob Portman. Of Ohio.

He’ll vote with the gang.

The gang wants to kill so-called Obamacare. It insures many people who cannot get medical coverage ANY OTHER WAY.

They want to kill it bad.

So that reminds me of a man I knew. I couldn’t call him a friend but maybe I could. He’s gone.
He’s gone because in 2008 he didn’t have any medical insurance.

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act passed the U. S. Senate Dec. 24, 2009. It became law in 2010.

His name was Ed Hauser. He was one of the good guys.

He died some months before he could have gotten coverage along with millions of other Americans.

It’s the federal act Republicans want to kill. And Sen. Rob Portman will help.

Hauser death, I wrote back in December 2008 “was a tragedy that didn’t have to happen.”

In many other countries, I wrote about Ed, “It would not have happened,” and continued: “Ed died because America doesn’t have the decency to protect its own citizens with the health care that’s basic in all other industrial societies.”

I know he shouldn’t have died because he died on the way to the hospital. They called it: “Heart attack.”

He had been delaying care because he didn’t have coverage, except for catastrophic care, his friend Cathy Stahurski told me. She drove him to the hospital that day.

She felt he didn’t want to seek help because he didn’t have insurance coverage. And he was unemployed at the time.

Hauser had been an electric engineer but had been laid off a decade before from LTV Steel. He had been working temporary jobs but at the time of his death he wasn’t employed.

He didn’t just sit home.

Ed had become a civic activist. You’d see him at meetings with his video camera, watch-dogging public bodies. He was a Citizen.

One of his causes was Whiskey Island. He took people there, including me, to see what should be saved if only citizens would pay attention.

People called him “Mayor of Whiskey Island.” It’s really a peninsula at the Cuyahoga River and Lake Erie.

Michael Roberts wrote in Cleveland Magazine: “Hauser is a pain—a persistent, nagging, unyielding pain. On the medical scale of one to 10, he would rate a 19. What makes him so painful is that he challenges the way the town and its dysfunctional government work.”

Ed Hauser waited too long for medical care because he couldn’t pay for it and had no insurance.

There was no Obamacare at the time.

He was a casualty of our government’s lack of concern.

It took a lot to pass the health care bill. Even though it was modeled after the Massachusetts bill passed under Mitt Romney. Remember him? He was a Republican.

Only Democrats in the Senate voted for the bill. Republicans have been playing a political game ever since. Telling citizens they would kill Obamacare and replace it with something better.

But everyone knows, including Sen. Portman, that they have no better replacement and if they had they wouldn’t pass it.

So Sen. Portman will kill some unknown Ed Hauser if he votes to kill the health care bill. And he will.

It’s as simple as that.

Death by politician.

Why Mike Curtin’s retiring from politics May 13, 2016, Tom Knox Reporter Columbus Business First

Why Mike Curtin’s retiring from politics

May 13, 2016, 6:00am EDT

A political scribe’s pen can pack more wallop in Columbus than a politician, especially when the writer is an outnumbered Democrat in the conservative Ohio House of Representatives.

Mike Curtin knew what he was getting into in 2012, when he traded in his reporter’s hat for a seat on Capitol Square. The homegrown journalist who rose from reporter to president of Dispatch Printing Co., owner of the Columbus Dispatch, won election nearly four years ago to the 17th District that covers much of the Hilltop, Valleyview and other down-and-out west side neighborhoods.

Even as a lawmaker, Curtin kept penning political tomes, including recently updating the Ohio Politics Almanac with a third edition.

But legislating is a time-consuming job, especially in one of the poorest districts in Ohio. Curtin, who turns 65 this summer, won’t run for re-election this year so that he can spend more time traveling with his wife and watching his grandkids grow.

“And quite frankly, I want to research and write more,” Curtin said. “If I have a talent, it’s more of a journalistic talent than a policy maker talent.”

Curtin started in 1973 as a reporter at the Dispatch and focused mostly on politics. He rose through the ranks to become the daily newspaper’s editor and eventually vice chairman in 2005. Along the way, Curtin became one of the state’s most respected journalists. He retired in 2007 but consulted with the Wolfe family-owned newspaper until he began his short legislative career.

“I was the Jim Siegel of this place in the early to mid ’80s,” Curtin said, referencing the Dispatch’s current Statehouse reporter.

As a state legislator, Curtin noted just how stark partisanship can be, which he blames in part on gerrymandering. But that’s an obvious analysis for many who follow politics.

More nuanced might be his observation about law enforcement’s diminished status at Capitol Square. In the 1980s and ’90s, police-affiliated groups could flex considerable political muscle when they were united on issues like firearms legislation, Curtin said. Words of caution from the Fraternal Order of Police, Buckeye State Sheriff’s Association, Ohio Prosecuting Attorneys Association and the Ohio Association of Chiefs of Police carried clout when they urged tighter regulations on guns.

“Today they’re patted on the heads and they (legislators) say, ‘Thank you very much for your input,’ ” Curtin said. “The attitude here is there ought to be no regulations. It’s a national trend in the Republican Party and certainly true here. Just the disdain for regulation – in my view reasonable regulation like background checks – that’s the biggest disappointment and biggest surprise.”

Indeed, a May 8 column by political writer Thomas Suddes identified utilities, banks, insurers, nursing home operators and oil and gas drillers – but not the police – as those with the most influence at the Statehouse.

Curtin thinks expanding term limits would help some of what ails policy making. Since 2000, Ohio lawmakers in both chambers have had their stays limited to eight years, though they can spend more time on Capitol Square through a loophole that allows them to switch between the Senate and House. Curtin would like to see the maximum extended to 12 years, preserving institutional knowledge on complex issues such as energy and the environment that can take up to five years to master.

“In my view we need the Ron Amstutzs, we need the Jack Ceras. We need the people who have the long view and understand how we got to where we are,” he said of the experienced Republican and Democratic representatives.

That’s a part of why Curtin wants to get back into explanatory journalism – taking a public policy issue and reaching back in time to explain how it came to be. He did that in the 1990s during the DeRolph v. State of Ohio school funding debate that ended in the state Supreme Court’s ruling Ohio’s funding mechanism was unconstitutional.

More recently, changing the composition of the Columbus City Council to 13 members from seven and moving to district representation are proposals ripe for the kind of analysis Curtin hopes to provide.

“Hard Copy in Cleveland” An Overview of Cleveland Journalism Since 1818 by John Vacha

The pdf is here

HARD COPY IN CLEVELAND
An Overview of Cleveland Journalism Since 1818 
By John Vacha

From a historian’s point of view, Cleveland’s first twenty-two years may be regarded as the Dark Ages. What dispelled much of the gloom was the appearance in 1818 of the city’s first newspaper, the Cleaveland Gazette & Commercial Register. The coming of newspapers would raise the curtain on such vital concerns as civic progress, economic growth, and political sentiment, as well as such often overlooked but revelatory matters as arrivals and departures, fashions, amusements, and the prices of eggs and bacon.

Even the spelling of the city’s name was finalized on the front page of a newspaper, though not according to popular legend. A folk version has it that the first “a” in Cleaveland was originally dropped by the Cleveland Herald in the 1830s in order to squeeze a new, slightly wider type font into its nameplate. (A computer could easily solve that problem nowadays, right?) Actually, the Cleveland Advertiser had beat the Herald to it in its very first issue of January 6, 1831, explaining that it simply considered the silent “a” to be superfluous.

New newspapers were cropping up on the banks of the Cuyahoga like dandelions in those days. Six appeared in 1841 alone, including the singularly-named but short-lived Eagle-Eyed News-Catcher. All it took was a flat-bed printing press, a few cases of type, an editor’s desk–and, hopefully, the support of a political party. Whereas newspapers in later days would support political parties, back then parties supported newspapers. The Herald was Whig in political orientation as was Cleveland, which made it the city’s dominant newspaper. It demonstrated its superiority in 1835 by becoming the city’s first newspaper to appear on a daily basis, after which Cleveland has never been without a daily newspaper–at least until the present day. The Herald also was printing on a steam-powered press by 1845 and obtaining news by telegraph two years later.

It was as a weekly that the Cleveland Plain Dealer first appeared on January 7, 1842, using the plant of the recently defunct Advertiser. As a Democratic paper, it lagged behind the morning Herald, becoming an evening daily only in 1845. Despite the fact that its politics relegated it to secondary status, the Plain Dealer nevertheless managed to produce Cleveland’s first “star” reporter. He took the unprepossessing form of Charles Farrar Browne, a gangling, solemn-faced but lucid-eyed youth who came to the Plain Dealer via Tiffin and Toledo in 1858. Put in charge of the “City Facts and Fancies” column, he was frequently at a loss for newsworthy copy. “We thought we had seen dull times in the items line, but we just begin to discover that we hadn’t,” lamented Browne in mock desperation:

Won’t somebody “pizen” somebody? Won’t somebody get mad and shoot a pistol at somebody?… Won’t some man run off with another man’s wife, previously…damaging the constitution of the husband? Won’t some “cultivated young man of prepossessing appearance” go and lose all his money at poker and then drown himself? Won’t nobody do nothing?

Browne finally decided to do something himself to fill the holes in his news columns. He invented an itinerant showman named Artemus Ward, who was wont on slow news days to send Browne letters describing, in fractured spelling and syntax, his misadventures on tour in the Midwest. “If you put this letter in the papers,” wrote “Ward” one day,

i wish you wood be more particlar abowt the spellin and punctooation. i dont ploom myself on my learnin, but i want you to distinkly understan that Artemus Ward has got sumthing in his hed besides lise. i shall be in Cleveland befour long and my hanbills shall certinly be struck off down to your offis.

But Ward never arrived in Cleveland, and Browne after three years departed for New York. His first book, which included many of his former Plain Dealer pieces, became a favorite with Abraham Lincoln, who read selections to his Cabinet.

Even as Browne exercised his fancy on the local scene, issues and events on the national level were stirring politics as well as journalism. Both the Democrats and especially the Whigs were torn by the slavery issue. Antislavery Whigs began supporting their own papers in competition with the more conservative Herald. One was the misleadingly named Daily True Democrat, which began in North Olmsted in 1846 but moved to Cleveland the following year. In 1852 Canadian-born Joseph Medill came from Cochocton to publish his Daily Forest City in Cleveland. The two antislavery Whig papers merged the following year as the Daily Forest City Democrat, with Medill joined as publisher by a printer from the True Democrat, Edwin Cowles. Early in 1855 the two publishers called a meeting of antislavery Whigs and Democrats in their newspaper office, which led to the formation of the Republican party. Cowles changed the paper’s unwieldy name to the Cleveland Leader and moved from the printing room to the editor’s desk after buying out Medill, who took his profits to Chicago and invested them in the Tribune.

Edwin W. Cowles, wrote one historian in 1910, “was the Horace Greeley of the west, the greatest editor Cleveland has ever produced.” Raised in Ashtabula County, the most radical antislavery corner of Ohio, he came to Cleveland at 14 to learn the printer’s trade. As editor of the Leader he bent his antislavery principles only once, advising the return of an escaped slave during the secession crisis in order to show the South that the Fugutive Slave Act, however hateful, could be enforced in the North. The South seceded anyway, and Cowles wasn’t going to be gulled again. Within a week of the Union defeat at First Bull Run, he was advocating immediate emancipation by the Lincoln administration and pursued that policy throughout the Civil War. As editor of the city’s major Republican newspaper, he was rewarded with the position of Postmaster of Cleveland. Regarding it as more than merely a political plum, he used it to inaugurate the nation’s first home mail delivery system.

Following the Civil War, Cowles justified his paper’s name as the pacesetter of Cleveland journalism. Its circulation of 13,000 in 1875 was double that of the Herald and several times that of the Plain Dealer, which had ceased publication for several weeks at the end of the war due to its Copperhead policies. In 1877 the Leader installed a perfecting press and printed its first Sunday edition. Cowles followed the Republican line on Reconstruction but balked at a third term for President Ulysses Grant.

Clean-shaven with a full mane of white hair, Cowles looked more like a village doctor than militant editor, but he carried a pistol on Cleveland’s streets and practiced his marksmanship on a target hanging in his office, where he beat off an assailant on at least one occasion. “In newspaper fighting he considered the sladge hammer a more effective weapon than the rapier,” eulogized the Plain Dealer, “and he went at a policy, or a rival paper with smashing blows instead of with keen thrusts.” Once the rebellion had been put down, he directed the brunt of his blows at any efforts by Catholics to divert public funds to the support of parochial schools. On the positive side, he campaigned successfully for the construction of the Superior Viaduct.

While the Leader was at the peak of its hegemony, a scrawny upstart, its opposite in nearly every respect, hit the streets. The Leader was a full-sized sheet of seven columns in width; the newcomer only five columns wide, fifteen inches in length. The Leader carried twenty long columns of ads, the newcomer but five columns in all. It took three cents to buy a copy of the Leader, while the newcomer went for a single copper penny; its name, in fact, was the Penny Press. Its founder, E.W. Scripps, would spend less than three years in the city, but his upstart newspaper would dominate Cleveland journalism for nearly a century.

Edward Willis Scripps came to Cleveland from Detroit, where he had helped his older brother James establish the Detroit News. Only 24 years of age, he was a red-whiskered six-footer with a hereditary cast in his right eye, who claimed to consume four quarts of whiskey and forty Havana cigars a day. The Penny Press, his first independent venture in journalism, would be the first link in what would become one of the nation’s most powerful newspaper chains: Scripps-Howard. From the beginning it professed to be independent politically, neither Republican nor Democrat (nor Prohibition, it might go without saying).

With its condensed format and affordable price, the Penny Press also set out to be a voice for the common workingman. “The Press was distinguished from its contemporaries in those days,” recalled Scripps, “in that it suppressed nothing and published nothing to gain the favor and approval of those people in the community who flattered themselves that they were the better classes.” When Leonard Case died unexpectedly, other papers said from heart disease, while the Press called it suicide. Against the request of its largest advertiser, the Press published news of his divorce suit. It even published the name of a young businessman cited by the ASPCA for driving a carriage with an improperly shod horse. The culprit’s name was E.W. Scripps.

But the best example of Scripps’ anti-establishmentarianism could be seen in his defiance of Henry Chisholm, head of Cleveland’s largest steel company. It began as a case of mistaken identity, when a Penny Press reporter misidentified Chisholm’s son as a man arrested for disorderly conduct. Chisholm lured the reporter to his office, where his workers covered him head to waist with black paint, and sued Scripps for criminal libel. Scripps retaliated by printing a full account of the affair headed “The Shame of Chisholm” and followed up by daily running a condensed version at the head of the Press editorial column. When Chisholm’s doctors informed Scripps that the attacks were endangering their patient’s health, the publisher refused to relent until Chisholm not only dropped his suit against the Press but paid $5,000 in damages to his reporter. Chisholm gave in but died nevertheless within a few weeks. “I believe that had I known that I was killing him at the time, I would have pursued the same course,” Scripps wrote later. “Had I taken a pistol and shot him to death, I would have felt no more and no less responsibility for that death than I have ever since felt.” Like Edwin Cowles, Scripps went about armed with a pistol; while Cowles practiced marksmanship in his office, Scripps practiced drawing quickly and shooting from the hip.

Not long after the Chisholm affair, Scripps left Cleveland for further journalistic ventures in St. Louis, Louisville, and other centers. He left the Penny Press in capable hands he had trained personally. By 1890 it had expanded in size and was known as the Cleveland Press, though its price held at one cent. Its circulation, growing apace with the population of an industrializing city, then stood at 43,510, several thousand more than the second-place Leader.

A major shake-up took place on Cleveland’s newspaper row along Frankfort Avenue as the nineteenth century drew to a close. It was instigated by Liberty E. Holden, who had accumulated a fortune from real estate and western mining investments. As a Democrat and advocate for the western silver interests, Holden purchased the Cleveland Plain Dealer in 1885 to promote his political agenda. He then joined with the Cleveland Leader in buying the once dominant Herald. The Leader maintained the afternoon edition of the Herald as its own evening edition; the Plain Dealer buried the main morning edition of the Herald in order to facilitate its own reinvention as a morning daily. The final edition of the Herald contained its own obituary, which might also serve to mourn the passing of many other newspapers in future years:

In closing the record of the HERALD we can justly claim it to have been a clean and honorable, as well as useful, record. It has devoted itself to building up the interests of the City, the State and the Nation. It has sought to deal justly with all men, poor and rich, friends and opponents alike. It has championed no cause that it did not believe just. It has endeavored to treat every person and every subject with courtesy and fairness. We know that in passing out of sight it will leave behind it a good name and thousands who will mourn its departure as that of an old, a trusted and a valued friend. That knowledge is a consolation, even in the bitterness of parting.

Even minus the Herald, Cleveland could greet the twentieth century as its golden age of journalism, with half a dozen daily newspapers. Leading the afternoon field was the Press with a circulation of 86,158, followed by the Recorder (30,000) and the World (24,843). In the morning the Leader claimed circulation of 63,228 (including its afternoon News and Herald edition), with the Plain Dealer trailing at 30,000. There was also a daily German-language newspaper, the Waechter und Anzeiger, with 24,320 readers.

Journalism had become a big business, requiring major outlays of capital, extensive printing plants, and sizable editorial and business staffs. As such, newspapers were becoming too large for the old style of personal journalism. Liberty Holden for several years tried running the Plain Dealer himself, installing the new linotype typesetting machines despite a printers’ strike and boycott. By 1898, however, Holden turner over operation of the paper to two professional newspapermen, Elbert Baker and Charles Kennedy.

While personal journalism was becoming pass, political partisanship remained a visible fixture of journalism practice. Both the Press and the Plain Dealer were supporters of Cleveland’s progressive mayor, Tom L. Johnson. As once observed by newspaper critic A.J. Liebling, “Freedom of the press belongs to those who own one.” The Leader was owned by industrialist Charles A. Otis and Mark Hanna’s son-in-law Myron McCormick, both bitterly opposed to Johnson. During the election of 1907 they brought in noted New York cartoonist Homer Davenport to lampoon Johnson in a series of front-page Leader cartoons, and James Donahey of the Plain Dealer responded in kind. Davenport may well have won the cartoon war, but Johnson won the election.

At the same time newspapers were beginning to subordinate political partisanship in favor of popular, nonpartisan civic crusades. When fireworks in a Cleveland five-and-dime store ignited a fire that claimed seven lives, the Plain Dealer began a “Sane Fourth” (of July) campaign which eventually led to state regulation of the fireworks trade. Another crusade by the morning daily helped to bring about a city manager form of government for Cleveland.

Carrying on in the tradition of E.W. Scripps, the afternoon Press continued to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. It followed up a tip in 1904 about the suspicious financial transactions of one Cassie Chadwick, a resident of Euclid Avenue’s “Millionaires’ Row.” Its investigations uncovered evidence that the audacious lady had obtained large sums of money on the most dubious of collateral, including questionable securities and the groundless implication that she was Andrew Carnegie’s illegitimate daughter. The exposures led to the suicide of one banker and the embarrassment of several others.

Meanwhile, the economic realities of modern journalism worked to narrow the playing field. The Recorder morphed into the Daily Legal News, a court reporter read mainly by lawyers. The World, Cleveland’s nearest approach to “yellow” journalism (sample head: “Killed Her Stepdaughter, And Then Cracked Her Husband’s Skull With an Ax”), was purchased by Charles Otis along with the News and Herald and consolidated into the Cleveland News. Otis then sold both the News and the Leader to Daniel R. Hanna, son of Mark Hanna. The Leader had fallen far behind the Plain Dealer in circulation, however, and in 1917 Hanna sold it to his morning rival, keeping the afternoon News and continuing the Sunday Leader as the Sunday News-Leader. Burying the six-day Leader, the Plain Dealer then had the morning field to itself.

Following World War I, Cleveland’s newspapers settled into a stasis that would endure for nearly half a century. By and large, they were a conservative lot; brash, jazzy tabloids were springing up elsewhere, but none would try the Cleveland market. Publisher William Randolph Hearst likewise never had a Cleveland outlet. One final attempt to start a new local morning daily was made in the 1920s, but despite financial backing from the Van Sweringens, the Cleveland Times lasted only five years. Only in the ethnic press was there appreciable growth during the period, as Czech, Hungarian, Slovenian, and Polish dailies joined the German Waechter und Anzeiger. By 1938 Cleveland could count fifty foreign- language papers including ten dailies; twenty years later assimilation and immigration quotas had reduced their number to eighteen, including only four dailies.

With its morning monopoly and conservative makeup, the Plain Dealer was the “gray lady” of the mainstream press. It maintained its own bureau in Washington, D.C., which helped make it Cleveland’s “newspaper of record.” In 1932 it reorganized itself into the Forest City Publishing Company to facilitate its purchase of the Cleveland News. It maintained the News as an independent afternoon daily, probably for its nuisance value against the Press, but killed the News-Leader, its only rival in the Sunday field. Unhappy with the increased government activity of the New Deal, the Plain Dealer in 1940 endorsed the first Republican Presidential candidate in its century-long history, Wendell Willkie.

Competition between the News and the Press livened things up in the afternoon field. Two former Chicagoans brought a “Front Page” flair to the Cleveland News. As circulation manager, Arthur McBride wasn’t afraid to employ strong-arm tactics against the competition, which may have prepared him psychologically for his later formation of the Cleveland Browns. City editor A.E.M. Bergener in 1927–a year before a similar trick was depicted fictitiously on Broadway in The Front Page–actually located a fugitive embezzler but didn’t turn him over to the law until he had milked him for several News “exclusives.” The News was prized for its sports coverage, its early racing editions being especially popular on Short Vincent Street.

While the Press maintained a wide circulation advantage over the News, it experienced a major change of direction. In 1924 it endorsed neither the Republican nor Democratic candidate for President but the third-party Progressive Robert M. La Follette. But founder E.W. Scripps died the following year, and the Scripps-Howard chain fell under the direction of the much more conservative Roy Howard. Scripps-Howard papers were still allowed a degree of autonomy in local affairs, however, and in 1928 the Press got a young editor determined to make the most of that independence.

Prematurely bald and only a few inches above five feet in height, Louis B. Seltzer was raised in Cleveland’s Archwood-Denison neighborhood. He dropped out of school in seventh grade to go to work, beginning as an office boy for the Leader before moving over to the Press. Just 31 when he assumed the editorship, “Louie” earned the affection of his staff as both instigator and butt of schoolboy office pranks. He never forgot–nor let others forget– his self-made beginnings. “My heart has always gone out to the children of the rich,” he once wrote. “I feel for them.”

Seltzer believed that newspapers had lost touch with their readers, and he set out to restore a personal relationship with the common people. “I went out into the neighborhoods, the stores, the saloons, the schools, the shops and offices of the town,” he recalled. “The basic thing I discovered was that wanted a paper to be close to them, to be friendly–a paper that they could call on in emergencies and that would fight for them when they had trouble.” To the top of the Press front page he raised the slogan, “The Newspaper That Serves Its Readers.” He hired a Romanian immigrant, Theodore Andrica, and assigned him to Cleveland’s nationalities beat. Andrica began making annual visits to Central and Eastern Europe, bearing messages from Clevelanders to relatives in the old country. During World War II the Press would fulfill its service objective by keeping a photo and data file on area servicemen, printing photos of their wives and infants and a weekly local news digest to be sent to them, and raising funds after the war for a War Memorial Fountain as testimonial to their sacrifices.

With its Associated Press franchise and special war correspondents, the Plain Dealer kept Clevelanders abreast of the World War II battlefronts. Roelif Loveland described D-Day from a bomber piloted by a Clevelander over the Allied beachhead. Gordon Cobbledick, a sports writer back home, reminded Americans that there was still a war going on in the Pacific despite celebrations over Germany’s surrender:

It was V-E Day at home, but on Okinawa men shivered in foxholes half filled with water and waited for the command to move forward across the little green valley that was raked from both ends by machine-gun fire….

It was V-E Day everywhere, but on Okinawa the forests of white crosses grew and boys who had hardly begun to live died miserably in the red clay of this hostile land.

Both accounts were later included in the collection, A Treasury of Great Reporting.

Reporters and columnists had begun to shed their anonymity between the two world wars. Jack Raper skewered politicians in the Press, often simply by quoting them verbatim–alongside a standard icon he employed of a rampant bull, which came in several sizes to suit the outrageousness of the quote. W. Ward Marsh turned verbal thumbs up or down on movies for the Plain Dealer. Eleanor Clarage reported society doings for the Plain Dealer, Winsor French for the Press. Ed Bang and Ed McAuley headed the superb sports staff of the News. In 1953 Plain Dealer cartoonist Ed Kuekes brought Cleveland its first (and for half a century its only) Pulitzer Prize for an editorial cartoon depicting an American soldier old enough to die for his country in Korea but not yet old enough to vote.

In 1933 reporters from the Press and the News had demonstrated their growing power by organizing the country’s first chapter of the Newspaper Guild, a labor union for editorial and business employees.

Louis Seltzer and the Cleveland Press emerged from World War II at the height of their dominance. Seltzer was called arguably “the best and most effective newspaper editor in America” by historian Bruce Catton, himself a former Plain Dealer reporter. To others he was simply “Mr. Cleveland.” He and his paper were regarded a “kingmakers” in local politics, having successfully promoted the careers of Ohio Governor Frank Lausche and Cleveland Mayor Anthony Celebreeze. After the Press moved into a new building on Lakeside Avenue in 1959 there were tongue-in-cheek rumors of a secret tunnel under East 9th Street, through which mayors might pass from City Hall to get their marching orders from the Press editor.

Such power could come with a price. When the Press endorsed an extension of Clifton Boulevard through Seltzer’s own Clifton Park neighborhood, the editor was denounced by some of his neighbors as a traitor even though the new road would abut his own backyard. His most controversial stand came in the Sheppard murder case of 1954, in which he unleashed the power of the Press against a Bay Village doctor suspected of killing his wife. When the wheels of justice-seemed to be turning a bit too leisurely, Seltzer himself wrote a series of signed front-page editorials under such inflammatory heads as “Somebody Is Getting Away With Murder,” “Why Don’t the Police Quiz No. 1 Suspect?”, and “Quit Stalling and Bring Him In!” Sheppard was tried and convicted but later released on the basis of prejudicial publicity, then retried and acquitted.

In the meantime, however, Seltzer’s Press had been named by Time magazine as one of the ten best newspapers in America, putting it in a class with such peers as the Baltimore Sun, The New York Times, and the Washington Post. When an indigent woman died alone in the city, said Time, she left a note addressed to the Press. “The only thing I own is my dog,” read the note. “Please take it to the Press. I know the home they find will be a good one.”

In its heady days of postwar supremacy, the most serious threat to the Press was neither the News nor Plain Dealer but the arrival of television. Scripps-Howard brought Cleveland its first television station in 1947. This was WEWS, which was soon followed by WNBK (now WKYC) and WXEL (now WJW). The latter in 1951 hired a Western Reserve University speech professor, Warren Guthrie, to deliver the news as the “Sohio Reporter.” Working before the coming of teleprompters, Guthrie recited his fifteen-minute telecast from memory with the aid of only a few brief notes. He lasted for twelve years before being replaced by an anchor team.

Much longer-lived was the television career of Dorothy Fuldheim, who joined WEWS when she was 54, two months before the station signed on. She brought considerable experience as a lecturer, having acquired her material through interviews with such newsmakers as Adolf Hitler (“he didn’t know I was Jewish”). At WEWS she became the first woman in the nation to have her own news show, a program of interviews and analysis. Barely five feet tall, she was nevertheless known as “Big Red” both for her flaming hairdo and take-noprisoners style. In 1970 she threw hippie Jerry Rubin off her show in mid- program for his offensive manners but several weeks later cried on-air while defending the students after the Kent State shootings. She received mostly hostile feedback for that but also discovered a basket of flowers at her doorstep with a note from some students reading “We wept with you last night.”* The only thing that could knock Big Red off the air was a stroke at the age of 91.

* Television, unfortunately, can leave a spotty paper (or even tape) trail. Transcripts of Fuldheim’s commentaries were sometimes reproduced for viewers who requested them, but evidently a complete file was never assembled. WEWS eventually sent what they had to Kent State University, but ironically, it didn’t seem to include the Kent State shooting script.

Television deprived newspapers of their news monopoly, especially those published in the afternoon. Whereas workingmen formerly would come home and pick up their evening paper after supper, now families would turn on the evening news after or even during supper. Afternoon papers began disappearing in city after city. In Cleveland the News was never able to achieve even half the circulation of the Press, and the Plain Dealer finally sold it to its afternoon rival in 1960. For a year or two the surviving evening daily was published as the Cleveland Press and News, but the name “News” got smaller and smaller and finally vanished altogether. The Plain Dealer used the occasion to move from its building at Superior and East 6th (present site of the Cleveland Public Library’s Stokes wing) down the street to the former News plant at 18th and Superior.

Under a young new publisher, the Plain Dealer began to cast off its stodgy gray image. Thomas Vail took over the reins of his great grandfather Liberty Holden’s paper and set out to brighten up its makeup and lighten up its reporting and editorials. In 1964 the Plain Dealer endorsed its first Democrat for President in twenty-four years, Lyndon Johnson. Later its full-page endorsement would help Carl Stokes become the first African American mayor of a major American city.

Newsweek magazine in 1965 praised the paper’s “tigerish” attitude. With a circulation within 5,000 copies of its rival, the Plain Dealer was poised to challenge the Press on its own terms. When the Holden heirs decided to sell the paper to the Newhouse chain in 1967, it brought a record price of $54.2 million and had little effect on the paper’s editorial policy. During the Vietnam War the Plain Dealer was the first newspaper in the country to publish pictures of American atrocities at My Lai.

Though elimination of the News had given the Press a spike in circulation, in the long run it couldn’t compensate for the indigenous problems of an evening newspaper. Cleveland’s third and longest newspaper strike in 1962 shut both of its papers down for 129 days, but the Press emerged with a circulation loss nearly three times that of the Plain Dealer. By 1970, not long after the retirement of Louis Seltzer, the Press trailed its morning adversary by nearly 25,000 copies. It may have been a writers’ paper, as exemplified by columnists Don Robertson and Dick Feagler, but it was becoming less and less of a readers’ paper. (“Newspapermen’s newspapers,” as an editor of the defunct New York Herald Tribune once observed, “always seem to fold.”)

Even as the Press observed its one hundredth birthday with a special Centennial Edition in 1978, there were signs that Scripps-Howard intended to sell it or fold it. Two years later, after negotiating concessions from its unions, Cleveland businessman Joseph E. Cole purchased the Press in a last-ditch effort to save it. His rescue measures included the introduction of a Sunday edition followed by that of a morning edition. Neither availed, and the Press printed its final edition on June 17, 1982. For the first time since the early days of the Cleveland Herald, Cleveland was a one-newspaper town. The fact that it had plenty of company in such places as Denver, Columbus, and Atlanta, did little to ease the withdrawal pains of newspaper addicts.

Some of the news void in print was filled by the appearance of alternative newspapers. Designed to provide readers with news and opinions not generally covered by mainstream media, they were usually of tabloid or smaller size and appeared weekly or less frequently. One of the earliest and most outspoken was Point of View, a bi-weekly newsletter published on a shoestring by Roldo Bartimole, a former Plain Dealer reporter. It was largely a one-man operation that gloried in the Socratic role of “a gadfly on the body politic.” Objects of his exposure ranged from City Hall to Bartimole’s former employer, the Plain Dealer. While its subscribers never numbered more than a few hundred, they included a heavy proportion of the area’s opinion and decision makers.

Somewhat more traditional in appearance and approach was the Cleveland Edition, a free weekly tabloid founded by former teacher Bill Gunlocke in the wake of the demise of the Press. Its staff included Bartimole, former Press writer Doug Clarke, and humorist Eric Broder. Like Point of View, its editorial policy tended to be anti- establishmentarian. Its exclusive reliance on advertising revenue proved to be its downfall, and the Edition ceased publication in 1992. Another alternative weekly, the Free Times, took over where the Edition left off but after a few years met the same fate. It merged into the Scene, originally an entertainment weekly that survives as Cleveland’s principal alternative newspaper.

City Magazines also helped to fill the information void left by the disappearance of afternoon dailies. Cleveland’s principal representative was the eponymous Cleveland Magazine, launched in 1972 by publishers Oliver Emerson and Lute Harmon. “The whole idea was to do stories nobody else was doing,” said Michael Roberts, the editor for 17 years. A notable example was a 10,000-word article on the mayoral administration of Dennis Kucinich by Frank Kuznik in 1978. By the turn of the millennium, however, serious journalism tended to become secondary to such “lifestyle” features as “Best Suburbs,” “Best Schools,” and “Best Restaurants.”

As Cleveland’s sole surviving daily, the Plain Dealer prospered in the 1990s. It replaced hot type with computer-set printing and increased its editorial staff from 270 to 400. In 1994 it opened a new $200 million production and distribution center in suburban Brook Park, where four huge Goss presses could each turn out 75,000 copies an hour featuring full- color reproductions. Editorial and business staffs remained at a remodeled Superior Avenue building, from where pages were fiber-optically transmitted to the Brook Park plant.

Editorially, the Plain Dealer compiled a rather mixed record of victory and defeat. Its music critic carried on such a relentlessly adverse campaign against a new Cleveland Orchestra conductor that he was finally removed from the beat. In a one-newspaper town the power of the press needed to be used but not abused. While the Plain Dealer may have been somewhat tardy in addressing corruption in Cuyahoga County government, its subsequent focus on the issue helped bring about not only retribution but reform. And finally, the paper’s long drought ended when columnist Connie Schultz won the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in 2005, the paper’s first Pulitzer in half a century. Even this had a downside, however, as Schultz afterwards turned in her resignation in order to avoid any appearance of conflict of interest due to her marriage to U.S. Senator Sherrod Brown.

With the turn of the millenium in 2000, the Plain Dealer discovered that technology could be a double-edged sword. On the one hand it enabled the paper to print electronically in color, but on the other it empowered a young generation to bypass hard copy altogether and obtain their information electronically. The internet posed a more critical threat to newspapers than television ever did. Along with other newspapers across the country the Plain Dealer began losing readers, which, exacerbated by the collapse of the economy in 2008, resulted in a loss of advertising.

Advertising generally has been an even more vital part of newspaper revenue than subscriptions, which is why editors have often been more fearful of offending advertisers than readers. Circulation figures traditionally have been important to newspapers chiefly as a means of setting advertising rates: the more readers, the higher the ad rates. E.W. Scripps had dreamed of putting out a newspaper free of advertising, reasoning that

If the public would insist on paying the publishers of the daily. . .journals the full cost of producing the same, plus a profit, so that a would-be honest publisher would not be compelled to depend for his existence upon the good will and patronage of the advertiser, there would be a chance at least of our having a less dishonest press.

Scripps actually tried such an adless newspaper in Chicago, but World War I helped put an end to the experiment. In the century or so since Scripps, newspapers have still failed to find a substitute for advertising.

Most dailies, including the Plain Dealer, have made efforts to capture internet readers by offering digital samplings of their print editions, but they’ve yet to attract enough advertisers to pay the costs. They are also trying to figure out how to persuade digital readers to pay for their electronic product, when nearly everything else on the Internet is available at no extra cost. Some newspapers began erecting “firewalls” after their first few stories, beyond which readers would have to subscribe for more. The Plain Dealer set up a website, Cleveland.com, containing stories from its own paper and other sources, but offered it free of charge.

Around the beginning of 2013, the Plain Dealer appeared to be approaching a crisis that threatened its very existence, at least as readers knew it. Advance Publications, the newspaper branch of the Newhouse organization, had trimmed back its papers in several cities from daily to three-times-a-week publications. The hit list was headed by the venerable New Orleans Times-Picayune, which suggested that the Plain Dealer itself might soon be under the gun. Plain Dealer employees, with backing from the Newspaper Guild and the Communications Workers of America, launched a public campaign to save their daily. Besides a television commercial, their efforts included a Facebook page (fighting fire with fire?) and a petition that collected more than 7,000 signatures.

A reprieve came in April of that year, when editor Debra Adams Simmons announced at a newsroom meeting that the Plain Dealer would remain a seven-day newspaper. It was not a total victory, however, as the paper would cut back on home delivery sometime that summer to four days a week. On the week’s remaining three days, readers might either pick up their “PD” at a newstand or subscribe to a new e-edition–“a digital version of the newspaper itself.” One other cost of survival would be a further reduction of the news staff: already down to little more than 160, another 52 would have to go.

Such is the state of print journalism in Cleveland, nearly two centuries after the first appearance of hard copy. What began with a single voice in the wilderness, followed by dozens of successors of various sizes and quality, has come down again to basically a single lone survivor, the Plain Dealer. True, that survivor retains a far from negligible 300,000 readers, but that is no guarantee of existence in an era of rapidly changing methods of communication.

Are those remaining readers a dying breed, or can print journalism attract new generations to the smell of newsprint? And if newsprint is to be replaced by some form of cybercommunication, will the new system possess the authority of a tightly edited metropolitan newspaper? Will it have sufficient resources to expose future Watergates, Pentagon Papers, or Cuyahoga County corruption?

More importantly, would a digital daily feel a responsibility to fulfill the historical role of American journalism as the “Fourth Branch of Government”? One regional publisher who keenly felt that responsibility was John S. Knight, who parlayed his Akron Beacon Journal into the Knight-Ridder newspaper chain. “As responsible purveyors of information and opinion,” wrote Knight,, “our newspapers are committed to the philosophy that journalism is likewise a public trust, an institution which serves, advances, and protects the public welfare.”

In the past, newspapers have formed uniquely personal relationships with their readers, who have taken their passing like the death of a friend or a relative. That has not prevented the death of some great papers, however, whenever their circulation has fallen below a critical mass. When the Chicago Daily News folded some thirty-five years ago, one of its writers wondered even then whether print journalism was an endangered species. “If the public can tolerate a Chicago without a paper like the Daily News–and apparently it can–then clearly our society is not functioning at the high pitch of informed civility that Jefferson envisioned,” wrote David Elliott. “But then Jefferson never imagined Chicago, or television, or mass advertising, or the combustion car and its stepchild of exurban sprawl.”

Or computers and the internet, we might add. It was Jefferson, too, who once said that if he had to make a choice between having “a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government,” he wouldn’t hesitate to opt for newspapers. If newspapers are a dying breed, we had better come up with their equivalent.

“Mr. Cleveland” Chapter on Louis B. Seltzer from Cleveland: Confused City on a Seesaw by Paul Porter

 

from CSU Special Collections

the link is here

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Cleveland: Confused City on a Seesaw

CHAPTER ELEVEN: Mr. Cleveland

Louis B. Seltzer was editor of the Cleveland Press for thirty-eight years. In his last fifteen years he was the single most powerful political force in Cleveland, the man most responsible for diluting the power of both the Democratic and Republican bosses. He became an unofficial, unchosen but actual, boss himself.

He became a kingmaker, a mayor-maker, by combining native shrewdness, cunning, prodigious energy, and a large ego with a phenomenal sense of timing. He did it almost entirely himself, with the constant encouragement of his quiet, charming wife, Marion, who was as serene as Louie was bouncy, flip, and ubiquitous. At the peak of his power, he attracted enough national attention to induce Life Magazine to do an extensive profile on him, in which they dubbed him “Mr. Cleveland,” an appellation he cherished and did nothing to tone down or repudiate. In his final years as editor, there were signs that he had come to believe in his own legend. He was, as the cracker-barrel philosopher would say, “really somethin’,” and in unwilling and restless retirement, still radiates an aura of importance in Cleveland, which comforts his admirers, mystifies politicians, and annoys some of his former associates. Though retired, he is a presence and apparently happy to continue as one.


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Louis had fertile ground to plow in as he demolished the party machines. Cleveland has a long history of political independence dating back to Mayor Tom L. Johnson, who defeated the Establishment of his day, then built a strong political machine himself and added a bit of civic idealism to it. The Press was always antiboss and often anti-Establishment, as it struggled to get a foothold in the city. The Plain Dealer was antiboss, too, but very much pro-Johnson, and neither the Press nor Plain Dealer belabored Johnson as a boss, which he surely was. He was a good boss. And that is what Seltzer aimed to be, when he got to the top of the heap. Whether he was good for the city is still debatable, but he certainly was bad for the political parties, which degenerated into hollow shells with no real clout. Partly it was because federal welfarism had taken away the main tools of the politicians, the small jobs, the Christmas baskets, the personal favors. Partly it was because civil service grew and diminished political patronage.

When Seltzer became editor as a comparative kid of thirty-one, the Press had been through a rough time under a succession of unsuccessful editors. Roy W. Howard, the head man of Scripps-Howard, personally chose Seltzer. From then on the Press had continuity of policy and Seltzer had the personal ear of Howard, whom he admired tremendously (and who was much like Seltzer physically and temperamentally, both of them small, wiry, combative, nervous). He even affected some of Howard’s idiosyncrasies of dress, such as the bow tie and large handkerchief flowing out of his breast pocket. Howard gave Seltzer much more freedom than the other chain editors and dealt him in on closely held stock, which made him wealthy. He appointed Louie editor-in-chief of all the Scripps papers in Ohio and was rewarded by seeing the Press grow from a struggling number three to the eminence of being number one in Cleveland for a while. Seltzer retained this enviable special position of favorite until Howard died in 1965. Not long after that, Jack Howard, Roy’s son, and his associates in the hierarchy, decided it


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was time for Louie to retire. Since then, in many ways, the Press has become more readable under its present editor, Thomas L. Boardman, a one-time protege who succeeded Seltzer. But it does not have the momentum and clout that Seltzer gave it.

Seltzer was a prime example of how a street-smart youngster, with overwhelming ambition, can get ahead on a newspaper despite a lack of formal education. He was fond of telling how he had to go to work when he was barely out of the eighth grade. His father, Charles Alden Seltzer, wrote “western” novels that later became popular, but at that time his income was low, and Louie quit school to become an office boy for the Leader. Later, while still in his teens, he worked a year as reporter for the News. At eighteen he married Marion, and began his long career on the Press at twenty. In an amazingly short time, he became city editor.

In the time most young hopefuls were going to high school and college Louie was making friends with politicians and businessmen who later rose to great heights. His small size and the necessity to earn his own living undoubtedly contributed to his brash, porky attitude toward news sources, and he developed a bravado that manifested itself in frequent profanity and assumed toughness. Officials at all levels considered it an amusing term of endearment when Louie, with a smile, called them bastards and sons of bitches to their faces. There is one classic true story about this.

When Louie was on the Press city desk, a secretary or assistant answered incoming phone calls, the usual custom on big city papers. On a particularly hectic day, the phone-answerer yelled to Louie that a Mr. Silbert wanted to talk to him. At least that is what Louie understood; he took it to mean that the caller was Municipal Judge Samuel H. Silbert, who had been police prosecutor during Seltzer’s days as a police reporter and was, like Louie, a bantamweight physically (Silbert later became senior judge of common pleas court, an authority on divorce law, and unbeatable in any election.)

With his usual insulting but friendly toughness, Seltzer


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picked up the phone and said, “Hello, you little Jewish son of a bitch.” There was a long pause, and silence on the other end, and then a deep, resonant, melodious voice said testily, “I beg your pardon!” There was reason for the haughtiness. The caller was the city’s leading rabbi, Abba Hillel Silver, famed for his fervent oratory and later to become one of the great Zionist leaders. Seltzer had an unhappy time explaining to the rabbi that he thought he was talking to Sam Silbert. The rabbi was not amused.

That didn’t set Louie back on his heels for long. He continued to address friends and enemies in this raffish, belligerent manner, and most of them understood and enjoyed it. By the time he had left the city desk and gone back to reporting he was on close, confidential terms with O. P. and M. J. Van Sweringen; also with Maschke and Gongwer, both of whom liked him personally, though the Press was regularly giving both of them hell. By the late twenties, he had become chief editorial writer, and in 1928, Roy Howard told him, at the Democratic national convention in Houston, that he would shortly be promoted to editor.

As editor, Seltzer came on slowly but surely. He surrounded himself with able subordinates who stayed with him for years. Richard L. Maher succeeded him as political writer and was still at it forty-five years later, until he died. He got Carlton K. Matson, who had been editor of the Toledo News-Bee before it folded, to become his chief editorial writer. Norman Shaw, Tom Boardman, Richard D. Peters, Richard Campbell, Harding Christ, all first-rate journalists, joined him later. He built up a fine staff of investigative reporters, and vas vigorous in backing Mayor Burton and Safety Director Ness in ridding the city of racketeers and corrupt policemen. He bemoaned the protected gambling clubs in the suburbs.

Louie was not only the editor; he didn’t hesitate to call on big advertisers, to make sure they stayed with the Press during and after the Big Depression. Nathan L. Dauby, head man of the May Company, was constantly wooed by Seltzer, and some of the pieces the Press carried about Dauby were


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pretty obvious and a little drippy. At that time Dauby and all the other department store managers were paying plenty to publish the Shopping News, to undercut all the newspapers.

During the depression Louie gave his editorial employees the impression that he encouraged the formation of the Newspaper Guild. Cleveland newsmen did form Local Number One, and Heywood Broun, then a Scripps columnist, helped organize it and became its first national president. Louie regularly maintained a close contact with his staff, spent a lot of time in the news room listening to gripes, and set up a routine of daily early-morning staff meetings, at which everyone participated in discussion of policy and decided which villains to attack next. This kept staff morale high.

Meanwhile Seltzer was involving himself in the community in a big way. With the same air of making himself available to the readers as to the staff, he appeared before every little group, no matter how small or inconspicuous, that wanted a speaker. At first he was not a good speaker, for his voice was high pitched and weak, but he managed, through practice, to expand his vocabulary and improve his elocution until he sounded fairly impressive. He was the Press’s best missionary to all the numerous ethnic groups, the PTAs, the luncheon clubs, the lodges, and the churches. He seldom passed up an opportunity to appear before as few as ten people, though it often meant an eighteen-to-twenty-hour day. He was an early riser, usually at work before the rest of the staff at 7 A.M.; yet the previous night he might have been out late, talking to a handful of people twenty miles from home until 11 P.M. This was a murderous schedule, which might have floored a man with less energy and ruined his home life, but Louie took care of that by having wife Marion go to all meetings with him, and her presence added a lot of class to the visit. She could help drive, too, while he napped, if necessary. So Marion also got involved in community projects and eventually became president of the Federation of Women’s Clubs. They were a missionary team hard to beat.


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Louie watched his health carefully, didn’t drink or smoke, ate lightly, and never seemed to gain a pound or look weary.

Adding to his attractiveness as a speaker was the fact that Louie, after he was established as editor, began to write personal editorials, signed simply “L.B.S.” in which he added his own touches to the paper’s formal editorial positions, commenting on incidents and people he knew, which fairly often oozed with banality. Although they were not literary gems, they were written in plain, simple language, which he used instinctively. A stylist he wasn’t, but an effective journalist he was. The L.B.S. editorials often appeared on the front page.

The program of getting around everywhere, often doing two or three meetings a night, and perhaps one or two at lunch, caused Louie by necessity to develop an escape technique, by which he would quickly fade out after he had made his talk, pleading that he had to rush to another engagement. At lunch, he would refuse to eat the blue-plate special and would either eat nothing at all or a special salad that waiters habitually brought him without asking. It gave the lunchers the impression that here indeed was one of the busiest guys in the world and they should be honored to have him even show up.

Louie did not confine himself to making little speeches all over town. He got deeply involved in civic groups. He became president of the Welfare Federation and president of the Convention and Visitors Bureau. He was director and vice-president of the City Club, and served several years as a board member of the American Society of Newspaper Editors. (But he did not take an active part in the inner workings of either.)

All the time Louie was thus building himself up as an ever-present personage, his rival, Bellamy of the Plain Dealer, was avoiding the tedious chore of speaking to little groups. By the time the depression ended, Seltzer’s ubiquitous performance and political savvy began to pay off, and for the first time he emerged as a kingmaker, a major political force,


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something that gathered steam as it went along, like a Caribbean hurricane.

He first showed his shrewdness by persuading Frank Lausche to run for mayor in 1941. Lausche boasted of his independence of bosses. (But he checked everything important with Seltzer, who appeared to the public to be an editor, not a boss.) Seltzer had been showing political clout even before this. At a time in the thirties when the sheriff’s office was extremely permissive about gambling, and the city was honeycombed with bookie joints, Seltzer had the Press start a write-in campaign for Police Inspector William H. McMaster, known as a clean, determined, honest law enforcer. It seemed like an exercise in futility, for both Republicans and Democrats had nominated candidates and McMaster’s name wasn’t even on the ballot. Yet the campaign was surprisingly effective. McMaster didn’t win, but he did finish a close second to one of the best vote-getters in the county’s history, former Councilman John M. Sulzmann.

During the war, Louie devised a massive publicity campaign to raise funds for a war memorial and fountain on the Mall. Plenty of funds were raised, but a hassle later developed over the architect, the design, the delays, and so forth. It was eventually erected and stands there today, in dark green marble. It was considered far-out when finally put up, but not so avant-garde now. It’s usually referred to as the Jolly Green Giant.

The power of the Press in promoting a write-in was demonstrated again, years later, when a vacancy occurred in common pleas court shortly before election. The usual batch of hopefuls was being discussed when the Press came out suddenly with a plea for voters to write in the name of Thomas J. Parrino, one of the most vigorous, best respected, assistant county prosecutors. It was a bold gamble, but it worked. The Democratic party organization had not yet made a choice, but it could hardly oppose Parrino, who was tops as a trial lawyer and had won notable convictions in newsworthy trials. It was hard to believe a write-in campaign would produce


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enough votes to win, but it did. Day after day page one editorials urged Parrino. There were also editorials inside about Parrino, and news coverage about Parrino, and signed editorials by L.B.S. about Parrino. When Seltzer plugged a favorite candidate, he pulled out all the stops. There was none of the cool aloofness, the careful separation of editorial comment from news, that the Plain Dealer habitually practiced. The Press was partisan all the way. It’s easy to understand that in later years, why Parrino, though an honorable man and able judge, was not going out of his way to antagonize the Press by giving news breaks to the opposition. He knew he owed his job to Seltzer, not the Democratic party.

While Louie was building up his position as the most active editor, he was his own best reporter. He got around town so much and was in conference with so many important people, that invariably he learned of important about-to-break news before his staff did. He’d attend a luncheon with some bigwigs and take part in decisions. It would be agreed at the meeting that all the decisions were to be considered confidential and the news would be released later in a proper, orderly way. But in the late edition of the Press that same day, the news of the decision would appear. The other members of the committee or board would be understandably furious. The top editors of the Plain Dealer and News, who also knew of the decision and had promised to keep it confidential, would also be irate, and Seltzer would be accused of breaking release dates — something unpardonable in the eyes of the other editors.

Seltzer had a regular technique for handling such situations. He simply disappeared from the office, or other telephone contact, until after the story had been printed. When charged with having tipped off his reporters, he invariably said, “I was out of the office and didn’t know anything was in the paper, until I saw the final edition. Then I raised hell about the premature publication. Somebody must have tipped off the city desk, and it got in the paper before I could stop it.” The other board members and editors had well-founded suspicions about who


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tipped off the city desk, but they never could prove it. This sort of suspected double cross went on year after year, and the Press got the reputation of breaking any kind of release it chose, if it suited the purpose of its editor. It didn’t seem to bother Louie, but the ruthlessness of the operation generated a fear and dislike of the little man in many prominent Clevelanders. Important news sources began to fear not to give their stories to the Press, and Louie’s power was obviously growing. So was the Press circulation.

In 1953, Seltzer sprang his biggest mayor-making coup, the election of State Senator Celebrezze over Boss Miller’s candidate, County Engineer Porter. The new mayor was clearly Seltzer’s creation, and he soon began to take advantage of it in the promotion of that civic monstrosity, Erieview, next door to the new Press building. (All of which has been described in detail in previous chapters.)

By now it was perfectly clear which newspaper was dominating the political scene. The Plain Dealer had also endorsed Celebrezze in the November election, but the Press had him in its pocket. The new mayor was popular, though not brilliant, and the Republicans simply couldn’t get off the ground with candidates to oppose him. The regular Democrats tried to beat Celebrezze in 1955 with State Senator Joe Bartunek, but failed. The Republicans failed miserably in later years with Willard Brown, Tom Ireland, and Albina Cermak. There just wasn’t any organized Republican party in the city of Cleveland. The Republicans showed no signs of life in the county and state until Ralph Perk was elected county auditor in 1962, and James A. Rhodes was elected governor. (This was the first year Tom Vail called the shots politically on the Plain Dealer. He endorsed both Rhodes and Perk.)

By the mid-fifties, Seltzer’s power had become so great in Cleveland that when the Sheppard murder case broke, the most sensational in years, the Press practically demanded on the first page that Dr. Sam Sheppard be brought to trial for the murder of his young wife, though Sheppard at that time hadn’t even been taken into custody. It was a positive, un-


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questioned example of a newspaper taking over after government officials had failed to act. Suspicion pointed to young Dr. Sam, but no specific evidence had been gathered against him. Practically everyone at the Plain Dealer and News, as well as the Press, believed that the finger pointed at Sheppard and that his family and Bay Village officials had been shielding him from questioning, that Cleveland detectives should have been called in at once, but had not been. Seltzer solved the dilemma by urging Dr. Samuel Gerber, the coroner, to hold a public inquest, at which Assistant Prosecutor Saul Danaceau and Gerber questioned Sheppard for the first time. It gave the newspapers the opportunity to print, libel-free, all the various suspicions about Sheppard’s dubious story about how he had found his wife bludgeoned to death. It also brought out sensational and sordid details of Sheppard’s career as a playboy and lush, and established a motive for murder.

The Sheppard case became big news all over the country and split Cleveland right down the middle, between those who were positive Sheppard was the murderer and those who believed he was an upright handsome young man who was being persecuted. After the coroner’s inquest, Sheppard was indicted for murder, and his trial became a cause celebre. The case was tried every day in all the local papers, as well as the courtroom, and columnists and trained seals from New York and Chicago gave out opinions daily, as if they were covering a world series. The Press continued to maintain an aggressive stance against Dr. Sheppard, but so did the other papers. Sheppard was convicted, sentenced to life imprisonment, began a series of appeals, which were denied, but served only ten years in prison.

Years later, a surprise legal action, in the form of a habeas corpus petition in federal court, claiming Sheppard had been denied his constitutional rights through adverse newspaper stories before and during the trial, was filed by a new lawyer, F. Lee Bailey, who had not appeared in previous appeals. At first little notice was taken of it, but a real bombshell exploded when Federal Judge Carl Weinman of Columbus held


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a hearing, and to everyone’s astonishment, ordered Sheppard released and a new trial held. He was let out of prison and fled by motor car to Chicago, with a convoy of panting reporters in chase. There he married a German woman, Mrs. Ariane Tebbenjohanns, who had interested herself in the case before she left Germany, and had been visiting him at the Penitentiary. She was an attractive, but somewhat gaudy, blonde, which pleased the photographers.

The release of Sheppard revived at once the dormant public interest in the sensational case. Sheppard and his new wife, though his lawyer had won his temporary freedom on the ground that newspapers had done him in, tried constantly to get attention from the newspapers and from TV stations. This went on for months. The Cuyahoga county prosecutor appealed Judge Weinman’s decision, and won a two-to-one decision from the federal circuit court of appeals. Bailey took

it to the United States Supreme Court, and there won the final

go round. Sheppard was granted a new trial.

The sudden emergence of Sheppard from prison revived an old threat by Sheppard to sue the Scripps-Howard newspapers, Editor Seltzer personally, and Coroner Gerber for several million dollars charging libel and slander. Nothing eventually came of the suit, which was thrown out, but a lot came out of the Supreme Court’s decision that Sheppard had been unfairly treated by the papers. Courts all over the country, urged on by bar associations, began to clamp down on pretrial publicity, refused to allow cameras in courtrooms or witnesses to be interviewed during a trial, and set up a long series of negotiations between bar and press as to what was fair balance between free press and fair trial. It’s still far from settled, though newspapers are beginning to be more circumspect about publishing ex parte statements by attorneys, and have realized that cameras in courtrooms may influence juries’ decisions. One thing is certain — it is unlikely that any big city newspaper today would again go as far as the Press did in its first-page editorial, with screaming headlines, pointing the finger at Sam Sheppard, saying “Who Speaks for Marilyn?”


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Seltzer performed a public service in trying to get the case aired. But the interviewing of witnesses before and after their testimony, the publishing of out-of-court statements by lawyers for both sides went much too far, and despite the efforts of the trial judge, Edward Blythin, to be fair, the trial was turned by the newspapers and the lawyers into too much of a hippodrome.

Sheppard was acquitted in his second trial in 1966. He was readmitted to the practice of osteopathic medicine, was sued for malpractice, quit as a doctor, and became a professional wrestler. His German wife divorced him after some public quarreling, and he married a third wife, the young daughter of his wrestling partner. His news value rapidly diminished, except as a freak, and in the end he became a pitiful figure. He died of a sudden heart attack in 1970.

The sensational Sheppard case was in the headlines at the same time that Celebrezze was being elected, and Seltzer was flying extremely high in power. The Press was aggressively going after readers in the far suburbs, particularly Parma and Euclid, which had lured many second-generation ethnic families away from the central city, people who had long been Press subscribers.

Within the next year or two, however, some important changes took place in Cleveland. Mayor Celebrezze left Cleveland, tapped by President Kennedy to go to Washington as HEW secretary. (JFK needed an Italian name in his cabinet to help him in the congressional elections in 1962.) Ralph Locher, Tony’s law director, became mayor. The construction at Erieview Tower was unusually pokey. The University-Euclid urban renewal was going absolutely nowhere, and Hough and Wade Park were fast degenerating into high-crime slums. Mayor Locher, a well-intentioned man, seemed confused and unable to act. A changing of the guard was taking place at the Plain Dealer, too. Tom Vail, young and ambitious, had become publisher and had tapped me as executive editor. In November 1962, the teamsters and the Guild struck both the Cleveland papers, and it lasted till almost Easter 1963. This combination of circumstances


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knocked the Press off its pinnacle, and led to Seltzer’s retirement two years later.

The marathon strike came about because of an internal struggle within the Guild at the Press. The Plain Dealer should not have been involved, but was dragged in. The Guild had organized the Press business office, as well as the editorial staff, but had signed up only slightly more than 50 percent of the business staff as dues-paying members. It desperately wanted the union shop, which would have required laggers to become members within thirty days after hiring. But the PD business office was not Guild-organized. Vail objected strongly to the union shop, and most of the PD editorial force was not enthusiastic about it, and couldn’t have cared less about the Press’s internal difficulties. Nevertheless, since the Guild was a city-wide union, the PD became stuck with the strike, too.

In all the thirty years of negotiations with the Guild, Seltzer had given the Press representatives the idea that he was somehow trying to help them (though he was on the other side, in management). He was very friendly to Forrest Allen, the long-time aggressive Guild leader, and several times had come up with last-minute concessions that had satisfied Allen, even though Graham of the Plain Dealer was reluctant to give them. He had been personally friendly to William M. Davy, the veteran Guild secretary, who was planning to retire soon. This time Davy had determined to make one last big pitch for the union shop. He had been asking for it for years but was regularly turned down. This time, he was confident the papers would not turn him down, if he could engineer a strike just before Christmas, the biggest advertising season of the year. There is reason to believe Davy was convinced that, in the final crunch, Seltzer would again pull a rabbit out of the hat for the Guild. But Davy reckoned without Tom Vail’s stubbornness. Though he was new on the job, and young, and with the Press leading in circulation, Vail simply said no and stuck to it. So the strike dragged on far beyond Christmas.

Seltzer did try, through his labor negotiator, Dan Ruthen-


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berg, to sign up business-office members for the Guild, so they’d have at least 55 percent of the employees. This was a clear violation of the spirit (and probably the letter) of the Taft-Hartley law, which forbids employers to sign up members for unions. But Ruthenberg’s effort failed. Despite telephone solicitation of nonmembers and the suggestion it would be all right with the boss, Dan signed up only a handful of new members. (The suspicion that Davy felt he had private assurance from Seltzer that he would achieve a last minute miracle, arose from the fact that the Guild leaders, in TV appearances after the publishers had made their announced final offer, kept on insisting confidently that it was not really a “final offer” and they expected more.)

They didn’t get any more. A revolt, led by Joe Saunders, started within the Plain Dealer unit, which at first had seemed stunned by the strike, but gradually began to resent being suckered into the Press’s troubles. In late January, the PD unit voted to tell the negotiators to accept the publishers’ offer. This cracked the log jam, and shortly afterward, after a bitter fight and by only a few votes, the Press unit took the same position.

While all the hassling was going on, Vail had wisely refused to argue the publishers’ case on TV or radio. He took the position he had to negotiate his way out, not seek sympathy from the public. But Seltzer, after the strike had become an endurance contest, apparently felt a compulsion to defend his position publicly, and made the fatal mistake of debating on TV, with Noel Wical, the Press Guild leader, before the City Club. Seltzer was not convincing; Wical, in a quiet way, was. In the end, Seltzer demolished himself by giving the impression that Wical would be in the doghouse at the Press after the strike ended. The net effect was disastrous for Seltzer, but he didn’t find that out until later.

When the strike at last ended, both the Press and PD had lost circulation from having been out of print for 129 days, but the Press lost the most. Seltzer discovered that a lot of people, who had bought the Press because they feared his


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power rather than because they enjoyed reading it, didn’t want it any longer, and disliked Seltzer personally because of his TV performance. It took about three years before the PD finally passed the Press in circulation, but it was obvious that this would eventually happen. The PD was now an aggressive paper, fighting the Press, rather than trying to ignore it. Vail had determined that the only way to overtake the Press was to beat Seltzer at his own game, to criticize the Press openly, to oppose the Press’s favorite candidates, to bring up the Plain Dealer’s own candidates, to pull no punches, either in promotion or in editorials. For the first time, the PD became aggressive in investigative reporting. Wright Bryan, who had been ineffective as a competitor of Seltzer, had resigned as editor, and Vail took over complete charge as editor as well as publisher. He surprisingly got the backing of the Holden estate trustees to battle the Press thus, something unheard of previously. The whole PD staff suddenly became gung-ho in a way not seen in forty years. For the first time, the Plain Dealer was now fighting Seltzer head on, and loving it. The staff thought it was high time someone knocked him off his self-constructed pedestal.

The combination of continuing editorial improvement, circulation and advertising gain at the Plain Dealer, the unexpected revival of the Sheppard case, and the death of Roy Howard finally unhorsed Seltzer as editor. He had continued three years beyond the usual cutoff age of sixty-five, and in late 1965, was told it was time for him to retire. It was apparently a surprise to Louie, as well as a shock. His world had really fallen apart suddenly, for at this same time, his beloved wife, Marion, after a long battle, had succumbed to cancer. Louie was offered a round-the-world trip to cushion the shock, but he refused to take it, and determined to stay in Cleveland. He moved into specially built quarters next to his daughter, Shirley (Mrs. Arthur Cooper), who had many of Marion’s endearing qualities. He is still a presence here, but without power. He and his former compatriots at the Press continued a chilly fraternalism, and though a plaque was put up in the


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outer hall attesting to his valiant long service as editor, he was seldom seen at the office and obviously not called on much, if at all, for advice. Boardman began to edit the Press in his own way, which was different from Seltzer’s, more like that of other editors in the chain, and attentive to smoke signals from headquarters in New York.

Norman Shaw, who, as associate editor, had ably run the paper during Seltzer’s absences, retired to Sarasota, Florida, obviously unhappy. It was no secret that Shaw for years had taken a dim view of many of Louie’s decisions and promises. Shaw had the ability to be top editor of any of the Scripps papers, but he stayed in Cleveland, possibly because his roots were in northern Ohio (he had attended Oberlin College, and his father had been chief editorial writer for the Plain Dealer till he retired). After settling in Sarasota, Shaw got knee-deep in civic activities there, and was seldom seen again in Cleveland.

Seltzer, too, could have gone elsewhere to big jobs in the Scripps chain. He had been asked to take a big part in the build-up of the New York World Telegram after Howard bought it, and Howard made him other offers that would have taken him elsewhere. He declined, probably wisely, for he knew Cleveland thoroughly, knew his assets and limitations. He decided to stay here and mine the journalistic ore in his own town, which he knew so well.

His impact on Cleveland will be felt for many a year.

 

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Joe Hallett: Neither party can be trusted to enact redistricting reform (Columbus Dispatch 9/16/12)

Joe Hallett: Neither party can be trusted to enact redistricting reform (Columbus Dispatch 9/16/12)

Neither party can be trusted to enact redistricting reform

On a large envelope over coffee last month, Republican Secretary of State Jon Husted sketched out a remarkably simple and logical plan to change Ohio’s process for drawing congressional and state legislative boundaries.It was an improved version of a redistricting bill that, as a state senator in 2010, Husted got the GOP-controlled Senate to pass — only to watch it die in the then-Democratic dominated House.That year was the perfect opportunity for reform, because neither party was sure who would win the statewide elections and control of the Ohio’s map-drawing board. And while Republicans appeared willing to negotiate, state Democratic Party leaders backed away and rolled the dice. They were confident that Democratic former Gov. Ted Strickland would win re-election and that Republican Auditor Dave Yost would not win, and they would gain control of the map-making.

So now we have State Issue 2, a Nov. 6 ballot proposal to reform redistricting by amending the state constitution. Husted has made no secret of his opposition to it. If not for his demonstrated commitment to ending partisan gerrymandering, Husted might now be facing legitimate accusations that the ballot language his office drafted for Issue 2 was rigged to make it fail.

That is precisely what his fellow Ohio Republican officeholders at the Statehouse and in Congress want to happen. After winning control of the redistricting process in the 2010 election, they are eager to preserve a map laden with districts contorted in their favor.

The GOP-controlled State Ballot Board’s approval of the inadequate ballot language was just another step in the Republican Party’s campaign against Issue 2 to ensure that it rules Ohio for the rest of this decade, even though the state’s partisan index is roughly 50-50.

But someone forgot to clue-in the Ohio Supreme Court, ruled 6-1 by Republicans. In a decision that restores hope for an independent judiciary, the court found that the ballot language contained “material omissions and factual inaccuracies” that would be “fatal” to its chances for approval. It ordered a rewrite, which the board did on Thursday, rendering a still confusing description of the amendment.

The guts of the Issue 2 amendment were written by two Ohio State University professors for a bunch of nonpartisan good-government groups such as the League of Women Voters, Citizen Action and the Ohio Council of Churches. The amendment set forth a complicated process to ensure that lines for legislative and congressional districts would be drawn by an independent citizens’ commission, not politicians.

The Ohio Democratic Party and labor unions — past obstructionists to redistricting reform — endorsed the amendment because it gives them a chance to get out of political Siberia before the next round of mapmaking in 2021. Democrats and the unions are now driving the campaign in favor of Issue 2.

The GOP, meanwhile, has launched a war against Issue 2, which sources say is being funded in part by Republican lawmakers motivated to save themselves.

One-party rule through gerrymandering is one reason our government doesn’t work as well as it should, because it thwarts competitive elections and empowers narrow-minded and uncompromising ideologues from the party in control. No one on Capitol Square has opposed gerrymandering more credibly than Mike Curtin, retired associate publisher of The Dispatch and arguably Ohio’s foremost political historian.

Last month, Curtin, a Democratic candidate for the Ohio House, went before the Ohio Chamber of Commerce and urged it to endorse Issue 2. He harkened back to leaders such as John Adams, who 230 years ago “recognized gerrymandering for the evil it is.” He cited U.S. Supreme Court Justice Anthony M. Kennedy’s lament “that when it comes to apportionment, we are in the business of rigging elections.”

Referring to Issue 2, Curtin said, “It is not perfect. The perfect plan does not exist and will never exist. I would ask you to use your common sense, and to acknowledge the time-honored maxim to not let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

“This is a good plan. It is 100 times better than what we have, which is in the running for being the worst in the nation.”

Republican leaders have promised that they will work with Democrats to enact redistricting reform if voters defeat Issue 2. Both have been making that same promise for four decades.

“In each subsequent decade, the gerrymandering of Ohio’s congressional and state legislative districts has become more blatant and more corrupt,” Curtin said.

Joe Hallett is senior editor at The Dispatch.

“Cleveland’s Daily News Dilemma” Cleveland City Club 9.13.13

The link is here

Published on Sep 13, 2013

Featuring Thomas Fladung, Managing Editor, The Plain Dealer, and Chris Quinn, Vice President of Content, Northeast Ohio Media Group. Moderated by M.L. Schultze, Reporter, WKSU.

Our panel of Cleveland news veterans discusses the changing landscape of daily news. Panel members discuss the shift to digital focus for newspapers, particularly how modern demand for news requires reporters not be tied to the old print schedule. They also talk about the difficulties involved in making a news organization with free online content a financially viable business.

Communications/Media/Journalism Links from Encyclopedia of Cleveland

 

 

– COMMUNICATIONS –

ACTIVE COMMUNICATIONS, INC. 
ADDISON, HIRAM M.† 
ADVANSTAR COMMUNICATIONS 
ALBURN, WILFRED HENRY† 
ALEXANDER, WILLIAM HARRY† 
ALIENED AMERICAN 
AMERICKE DELNICKE LISTY 
AMERISKA DOMOVINA 
AMERITECH (AMERICAN INFORMATION TECHNOLOGIES CORP.) 
ANDERSON, ERNIE† 
ANDORN, SIDNEY IGNATIUS† 
ANDRICA, THEODORE† 
ARMSTRONG, WILLIAM W.† 
ASHMUN, GEORGE COATES† 
BAKER, ELBERT H.† 
BALDWIN, SAMUEL PRENTISS† 
BANDLOW, ROBERT† 
BANG, EDWARD F.† 
BEAUFAIT, HOWARD G.† 
BELL, ARCHIE† 
BELLAMY, PAUL† 
BELLAMY, PETER† 
BENEDICT, GEORGE A.† 
BERGENER, ALBERT EDWARD MYRNE (A.E.M.)† 
BIGHAM, STELLA GODFREY WHITE† 
BLACK, HILBERT NORMAN† 
BLODGETT, WALTER† 
BLUE, WELCOME T. , SR.† 
BODDIE RECORDING CO. 
BOHM, EDWARD H.† 
BONE, JOHN HERBERT ALOYSIUS (J.H.A.)† 
BRASCHER, NAHUM DANIEL† 
BRIGGS, JOSEPH W.† 
BROWNE, CHARLES FARRAR [ARTEMUS WARD, PSEUD.]† 
BUSINESS & PROFESSIONAL WOMEN’S CLUB OF GREATER CLEVELAND (BPW) 
BYSTANDER 
CANKARJEV GLASNIK 
CARROLL, GENE† 
CATALYST: FOR CLEVELAND SCHOOLS 
CATHOLIC UNIVERSE BULLETIN 
CATTON, BRUCE† 
CHANDLER, NEVILLE (NEV) ALBERT JR.† 
CLEAVELAND GAZETTE & COMMERCIAL REGISTER, 
CLEVELAND ADVERTISER 
CLEVELAND ADVERTISING CLUB 
CLEVELAND ADVOCATE 
CLEVELAND BLUE BOOK 
CLEVELAND CALL & POST 
CLEVELAND CITIZEN 
CLEVELAND DAILY ARGUS 
CLEVELAND DAILY GAZETTE 
CLEVELAND DAILY REVIEW 
CLEVELAND EDITION 
CLEVELAND FREE TIMES 
CLEVELAND FREENET 
CLEVELAND GATHERER 
CLEVELAND GAZETTE 
CLEVELAND HERALD 
CLEVELAND HERALD AND GAZETTE 
CLEVELAND JOURNAL 
CLEVELAND JOURNALISM HALL OF FAME 
CLEVELAND LEADER 
CLEVELAND LIBERALIST 
CLEVELAND LIFE 
CLEVELAND MAGAZINE 
CLEVELAND MESSENGER 
CLEVELAND NEWS 
CLEVELAND NEWSPAPER GUILD, LOCAL 1 
CLEVELAND NEWSPAPER STRIKE OF 1962 
CLEVELAND PRESS 
CLEVELAND RECORD 
CLEVELAND RECORDER 
CLEVELAND RECORDING CO. 
CLEVELAND REPORTER 
CLEVELAND REPUBLICAN 
CLEVELAND SHOPPING NEWS 
CLEVELAND SUNDAY SUN 
CLEVELAND SUNDAY TIMES 
CLEVELAND TIMES (1845) 
CLEVELAND TIMES (1922) 
CLEVELAND TODAY 
CLEVELAND TOWN TOPICS 
CLEVELAND UNION LEADER 
CLEVELAND WHIG 
CLEVELAND WORLD 
CLEVELANDER 
CLIFFORD, LOUIS L.† 
CLOWSER, JACK† 
COBBLEDICK, GORDON† 
COLLINS, JAMES WALTER† 
COMBES, WILLARD WETMORE† 
COMMERCIAL INTELLIGENCER 
COVERT, JOHN CUTLER† 
COWGILL, LEWIS F.† 
COWLES, EDWIN W.† 
DAILY CLEVELANDER 
DAILY FOREST CITY 
DAILY GLOBE 
DAILY LEGAL NEWS 
DAILY MORNING MERCURY 
DAILY MORNING NEWS 
DAILY NATIONAL DEMOCRAT 
DAILY TRUE DEMOCRAT 
DAVY, WILLIAM MCKINLEY† 
DAY, WILLIAM HOWARD† 
DENNICE NOVOVEKU 
DEUBEL, STEFAN† 
DIETZ, DAVID† 
DIRVA 
DONAHEY, JAMES HARRISON† 
EAGLE-EYED NEWS-CATCHER 
ELWELL, HERBERT† 
ENAKOPRAVNOST 
EXAMINER 
FAIST, RUSSELL† 
FETZER, HERMAN† 
FINE ARTS MAGAZINE 
FISHER, EDWARD BURKE† 
FISHER, EDWARD FLOYD† 
FOREST CITY PUBLISHING CO. 
FORTE, ORMOND ADOLPHUS† 
FREED, ALAN† 
FRENCH, WINSOR† 
FULDHEIM, DOROTHY† 
GAYLE, JAMES FRANKLIN† 
GEORGE R. KLEIN NEWS CO. 
GERMANIA 
GOMBOS, ZOLTAN† 
GRANEY, JOHN GLADSTONE† 
GRAY, JOSEPH WILLIAM† 
GRILL, VATROSLAV J.† 
GUTHRIE, WARREN A.† 
HALLORAN, WILLIAM L.† 
HANNA, DANIEL RHODES† 
HANNA, DANIEL RHODES, JR.† 
HARRIS, JOSIAH A.† 
HAYES, MAX S. (MAXIMILIAN SEBASTIAN)† 
HEINZERLING, LYNN LOUIS† 
HERRICK, MARIA M. SMITH† 
HEXTER, IRVING BERNARD† 
HLAVIN, WILLIAM S.† 
HOLDEN, LIBERTY EMERY† 
HOPWOOD, AVERY† 
HOPWOOD, ERIE C.† 
HOVORKA, FRANK† 
HOWARD, NATHANIEL RICHARDSON† 
HOYT, HARLOWE RANDALL† 
INDEPENDENT NEWS-LETTER 
INGALLS, DAVID S., SR.† 
JOURNAL OF AESTHETICS AND ART CRITICISM 
KELLY, GRACE VERONICA† 
KENNEDY, CHARLES E.† 
KENNEDY, JAMES HENRY† 
KOBRAK, HERBERT L.† 
KOHANYI, TIHAMER† 
KUEKES, EDWARD DANIEL† 
KURDZIEL, AUGUST JOSEPH† 
L’ARALDO 
LA VOCE DEL POPOLO ITALIANO 
LATINO 
LEWIS, FRANKLIN ALLAN “WHITEY”† 
LOEB, CHARLES HAROLD† 
LORENZ, CARL† 
LOVELAND, ROELIF† 
MACAULEY, CHARLES RAYMOND† 
MANNING, THOMAS EDWARD “RED”† 
MANRY, ROBERT N.† 
MARKEY, SANFORD† 
MARSH, W. WARD† 
MCAULEY, EDWARD J.† 
MCCARTHY, SARA VARLEY† 
MCCORMICK, ANNE (O’HARE)† 
MCDERMOTT, WILLIAM F.† 
MCLAUGHLIN, RICHARD JAMES† 
MCLEAN, PHIL† 
MODERN CURRICULUM PRESS, INC. 
MONITOR CLEVELANDSKI 
MOORE, GEORGE ANTHONY† 
MOTHERS’ AND YOUNG LADIES’ GUIDE 
MUELLER, JACOB† 
MYERS, PIERRE (PETE, “MAD DADDY”)† 
NEW CLEVELAND CAMPAIGN 
NEW DAY PRESS 
NEWBORN, ISSAC (ISI) MANDELL† 
NEWMAN, AARON W.† 
NORTHERN OHIO LIVE 
NOVY SVET 
OHIO AMERICAN 
OHIO CITY ARGUS 
OTIS, CHARLES AUGUSTUS, JR.† 
PANKUCH, JAN† 
PEIXOTTO, BENJAMIN FRANKLIN† 
PENFOUND, RONALD A. (CAPTAIN PENNY)† 
PENTON MEDIA 
PENTON, INC. 
PERKINS, ANNA “NEWSPAPER ANNIE”† 
PERKINS, MAURICE† 
PETERS, RICHARD DORLAND† 
PLAIN DEALER 
PLAIN PRESS 
POINT OF VIEW 
PORTER, PHILIP WYLIE† 
PRESS CLUB OF CLEVELAND 
PRINT JOURNALISM 
PRINTING AND PUBLISHING IN CLEVELAND 
RAPER, JOHN W.† 
ROBERTS, WILLIAM (BILL) E.† 
ROBERTSON, CARL TROWBRIDGE† 
ROBERTSON, DONALD Q. “DON”† 
ROBERTSON, GEORGE A.† 
ROBERTSON, JOSEPHINE (JO) WUEBBEN† 
ROBINSON, EDWIN† 
ROCKER, SAMUEL† 
ROGERS, JAMES HOTCHKISS† 
SCENE 
SCRIPPS, EDWARD WILLIS† 
SELTZER, LOUIS B.† 
SIEDEL, FRANK† 
SIEGEL, RICHARD H.† 
SILHOUETTE 
SILVER, DON† 
SMEAD, TIMOTHY† 
SMITH, HARRY CLAY† 
SMITH, HERALD LEONYDUS† 
SNAJDR, VACLAV† 
SOCIAL REGISTER 
SPERO, HERMAN ISRAEL† 
STAGER, ANSON† 
STASHOWER, FRED P.† 
STEMPUZIS, JOSEPH† 
STOKES, CARL B.† 
STRASSMEYER, MARY A.† 
SUN NEWSPAPERS 
SUNDAY POST 
SUNDAY STAR 
SUNDAY VOICE 
SVET-AMERICAN 
SVOBODA, FRANK J.† 
SZABADSAG 
TELEGRAPHY AND TELEPHONES 
TELEVISION 
TELLO, MANLY† 
THIEME, AUGUST† 
THORNTON, WILLIS† 
TIME 
UNDERGROUND PRESS 
VAIL, HARRY LORENZO† 
VAIL, HERMAN LANSING† 
WAECHTER UND ANZEIGER 
WALKER, WILLIAM OTIS† 
WCLV 
WCPN 
WEIDENTHAL, LEO† 
WEWS (Channel 5) 
WEY, ALEXANDER JOSEPH† 
WGAR 
WHAT SHE WANTS 
WHITE, STELLA GODFREY† 
WHK 
WIADOMOSCI CODZIENNE 
WICAL, NOEL† 
WICKHAM, GERTRUDE VAN RENSSELAER† 
WIDDER, MILTON “MILT”† 
WIESENFELD, LEON† 
WILLIAM FEATHER CO. 
WJMO† 
WJW-TV (Channel 8) 
WKYC (Channel 3) 
WMMS 
WOLF, FREDERICK C.† 
WRESTLING 
WRMR 
WVIZ (Channel 25) 
WWWE 
WZAK 
YIDDISHE VELT

Teaching Cleveland Digital