“Regionalism and the West Shore Communities” forum 11.14.16

“Regionalism and the West Shore Communities” forum 11.14.16

Panelists:
Pamela Bobst, Mayor, City of Rocky River
Armond Budish, Cuyahoga County Executive
Dave Greenspan, Cuyahoga County Council, District 1
Edward Kraus, Director of Regional Coordination, Cuyahoga County
Michael Summer, Mayor, City of Lakewood

Moderator: Janice Patterson, LWV-Greater Cleveland

The panel discussed current initiatives in the delivery of services in Cuyahoga County. They explored possibilities for future cooperation and responded to audience comments and questions.

Sponsored by the League of Women Voters-Greater Cleveland and Lakewood Public Library

What Joseph M. Proskauer said about Newton D. Baker in his 1950 Autobiography

This is a passage from the autobiography of Joseph M. Proskauer, partner in a major law firm (Proskauer, Rose), judge, speechwriter for Al Smith and a contemporary of Newton D. Baker. “A Segment of Our Times” was published in 1950 and I was struck by his inclusion of this passage about Baker who had died in 1937, quite number of years before. It gives striking testimony of at least one man’s admiration for Mr. Baker.
 Joseph M. Proskauer
From the Chapter: “The Fight Against Bigotry”  (the .pdf is here)
I cannot close a discussion of this war against bigotry without a tribute to the creator and leader of the National Conference of Christians and Jews, the late Newton D. Baker. This last phase in a brilliant career was the ultimate flowering of a great soul. The seed was a profound and reverent belief in human brotherhood. At every stage of his life, not merely at its end, he could say: “Write me as one who loved his fellow men.”
He was a great lawyer, entitled by genius and position to command. Yet those to whom was given the high privilege of association with him bear witness to his gentle consideration for his colleagues, his innate modesty, his impulsive readiness to yield the glory while the labor was his.
It was a paradox that to this ardent follower of the Prince of Peace was entrusted the solemn responsibility of leadership of his country’s army in the awful catastrophe of war. In the discharge of that responsibility, he never permitted rancor to poison the wellspring of his compassion and though he had to devise the horror of battle, always his goal was a healing peace that should find its fruition in a benevolent parliament of the world. For that he never ceased to fight. And those of us who were so fortunate as to hear his glorious proclamation of his creed at the Democratic National Convention in 1924 can never forget his passion for peace nor ever doubt the eternal rightness of his call to beat the swords of nations into plowshares.
Charity for the underprivileged found in him its champion. In outstanding struggles against injustice, by reason of his very nature, he became of course the head of this great association to enforce the gospel of peace on earth. At a time when the world was rent asunder with hatred and bigotry, he above all others, gave practical and wise and self-sacrificing leadership for all men of good will who believe that no human being should be made to suffer for the choice of his religion. Sympathy, mutual understanding, forbearance and tolerance, he preached and exemplified. We shall not look upon his like soon again.

175 years of telling Cleveland’s story: The Plain Dealer by Joe Frolik 1/9/2017

175 years of telling Cleveland’s story: The Plain Dealer by Joe Frolik 1/9/2017
The link is here

on January 08, 2017 at 5:00 AM, updated January 09, 2017 at 9:42 AM

By Joe Frolik, special to the Plain Dealer

CLEVELAND, Ohio — Cleveland was just 46 years old, a mere child as great cities go, when The Plain Dealer came into its life. This city and this newspaper have been inseparable ever since.

Cleveland has matured and prospered, slumped and rebounded. It has been a center of innovation, a magnet for immigrants and a poster child for post-industrial decline. It’s given the world John D. Rockefeller, Tom Johnson and the Stokes brothers. A burning river and the best band in the land. Bob Feller, Jim Brown and LeBron James.

For 175 years, The Plain Dealer has told Cleveland’s story. Always on deadline, often imperfectly, the paper has tried to deliver what founder Joseph William Gray promised on Jan. 7, 1842, in the very first issue.

The newspaper, he wrote, would be a lens through which the people of the Western Reserve could see themselves and the rest of the world:

“The Presidential Message was delivered in Washington on Tuesday at 10 o’clock A.M., and was published in this city within three and a quarter days thereafter. The news of the far west is brought to us by steamer at the rate of 15 miles an hour. If WE are not the center of creation, then where is that center?”

Days of old

Gray’s center of creation was home to 6,000 people. The Ohio Canal had recently linked the Ohio River with the Cuyahoga River and the Great Lakes; 10 million pounds a year of wheat, corn, hides and coal flowed through the Port of Cleveland. The first shiploads of Minnesota iron ore would arrive soon.

Iron and coal eventually would make Cleveland an industrial powerhouse and an Arsenal of Democracy. The fortunes created would fund cultural and philanthropic institutions on par with New York or Paris.

But in 1842, pigs still roamed Public Square. Superior Avenue was a sea of mud. There were no street lights, no sewers.

The Plain Dealer that first year was full of stories that would resonate for decades – and sound familiar yet today.

Clevelanders still recovering from the Panic of 1837 worried that banks were unstable and the national debt too large. Factory owners decried unfair foreign competition. The president and Congress barely spoke.

Dispatches from Asia detailed drug abuse in China and the slaughter of a British garrison by Afghan rebels. There was turmoil in the Middle East. A slave rebellion in Jamaica. A deadly earthquake in Haiti. Tension stood between the young Republic of Texas and Mexico.

Armed insurgents demanded voting rights in Rhode Island. A race riot shook Philadelphia. Chicago boomed.

Here, 57 buildings were under construction. A visitor from New Jersey preached the value of public schools. Temperance crusaders destroyed Mr. Robinson’s still in Chagrin Falls. Ohio legislators debated what to do with runaway slaves, and how to deter corruption.

Over the next few years, as immigrants flooded Cleveland and the nation, traditionalists warned that American values were being lost. The Mexican War added California to the Union. The Republican Party was born. Slavery tore at the soul of the country, and a Hudson abolitionist named John Brown took matters into his own hands in Kansas and at Harpers Ferry, West Virginia.

Civil War

As America rushed toward Civil War, innovators shaped its future: Edwin Drake struck oil. Elias Howe invented the sewing machine, Samuel Morse the telegraph.

A dispatch in The Plain Dealer on June 5, 1844, credited Morse with “the annihilation of space.” Overnight, Gray’s center of creation was closer to the rest of the world. The presidential message that took three days to reach Cleveland in 1842 could now be wired here in moments. The Information Age had begun.

On April 12, 1861, just hours after the first cannon barrage at Fort Sumter, Page One of The Plain Dealer announced:

“The city of Charleston is now bristling with bayonets, and the harbor blazing with rockets and booming with big guns … What a glorious spectacle this would be, were it to defend our common country from a common enemy. But as it is, a sectional war, people of the same blood, descendants of that race of heroic men who fought at Bunker Hill, now with guns intended for a foreign foe, turned against one another, it becomes a sad and sickening sight.”

For four long years, news from Antietam, Shiloh and Gettysburg filled the paper, just as latest from the Marne, Iwo Jima, Chosin Reservoir, Khe Sanh and Falujah would in years to come. Devastation became normal.

Far removed from the front, Cleveland’s iron mills and shipyards stoked the Union war effort – and prospered. A young merchant used profits made selling grain and meat to the military to enter the oil business. John D. Rockefeller would soon amass America’s greatest private fortune.

After the Civil War

His success mirrored Cleveland’s and Ohio’s in the years after the war. The city’s population grew to 381,000 by 1900. Millionaires’ Row on Euclid Avenue flourished. Ohio replaced Virginia as a birthplace of presidents and became America’s political bellwether.

The nation’s course was rockier. With Lincoln dead, Reconstruction failed to bring reconciliation to the South or lasting equality to blacks. Panics, currency crises and income inequality birthed a new political ideology: Populism. Skilled craftsmen led by Samuel Gompers formed the American Federation of Labor. When white settlers raced into Oklahoma in 1889, Frederick Jackson Turner proclaimed the end of the frontier.

Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone, Thomas Edison the electric light and the motion picture. Clevelander Charles Brush’s arc lights illuminated city streets and ballparks. Orville and Wilbur Wright of Dayton continued Morse’s “annihilation of space,” though the impact of Kitty Hawk was not immediately apparent:

A three-paragraph story headlined “Machine That Flies” was buried on Page 4 of Dec. 18, 1903’s Plain Dealer: “Two Ohio men have a contrivance that navigates the air.” Three days later, an editorial predicted the Wrights’ achievement “will tend to revive interest in aerial navigation.”

The new century brought tragedy, the Titanic sank and an earthquake leveled San Francisco, and hope. Teddy Roosevelt’s progressive agenda inspired Mayor Tom Johnson’s Cleveland reforms. Women got to vote. America launched a “noble experiment” against demon rum; Prohibition instead spawned organized crime.

War time

An assassin killed the heir to the Austrian throne, and soon Europe was in flames. Three years later, President Woodrow Wilson urged America to join what he promised would be a “war to end all wars.” He was wrong.

World War I was followed by the Roaring ’20s, the Great Depression, and a second, even more horrible global war. Improbably, a patrician New Yorker beloved by everyday Americans led the nation out of economic calamity and to the cusp of victory in World War II. Writing from on Inauguration Day 1933, The Plain Dealer’s Paul Hodges noted:

“The determined voice of Franklin Roosevelt cut like a knife through the gray gloom of low-hanging clouds and the bewildered national consciousness as he pledged the American people immediate action and leadership in the nation’s crisis.”

It still took more than a decade and a monstrous war to restore America’s economy and swagger. On June 6, 1944, Plain Dealer reporter Roelif Loveland rode in a Maurauder bomber piloted by First Lt. Howard C. Quiggle of Cleveland and headed for Normandy:

“We saw the curtain go up this morning on the greatest drama in the history of the world, the invasion of Hitler’s Europe.”

Victory over the Axis was followed by four decades of Cold War, hot wars in Korea and Vietnam, and a nuclear showdown over tiny Cuba. Colonial empires collapsed. Israel was born. Germany, Japan, Western Europe and Korea rose from the ashes to become U.S. allies, and economic competitors.

At home, Americans prospered like never before. The GI Bill created a new middle class. We liked Ike and loved Lucy. Ed Sullivan brought Elvis Presley into our living rooms. Motown, a British Invasion and a counterculture followed.

America survived McCarthyism and inspired by Rosa Park and Martin Luther King began to live up to its ideals. It wasn’t easy. The Army had to integrate schools in Little Rock. Birmingham turned dogs and firehoses on children. In the North, middle-class families fled desegregation orders: Cleveland’s population peaked in 1950 at 914,000. By 2000, it was half that.

For a time in the 60s and 70s, the nation seemed to be imploding. Assassins killed John F. Kennedy, his brother Robert and Dr. King. Hough and Glenville burned as waves of rioting left no American city unscathed. College students raged about the Vietnam War. Ohio National Guardsmen killed four students at Kent State University.

“What is happening to America,” The Plain Dealer asked. “Is the sickness of hate and violence poisoning America?”

Dawning of a new age

There was some good news. In 1962, John Glenn of New Concord became the first American to orbit the earth. A decorated combat pilot before he became an astronaut, Glenn went on to serve four terms in the U.S. Senate – and return to space at age 77. On July 21, 1969, Neil Armstrong of Wapakoneta took “one giant leap for mankind.”

Glenn and Armstrong embodied American resiliency and optimism. During the closing decades of the 20th Century, the nation battled back against seemingly overwhelming challenges: AIDS, energy shortages, a hostage crisis in Iran. The Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union fell without a shot being fired. Red China embraced capitalism. Air and water quality water improved.

A U.S.-led global coalition forced Iraq out of Kuwait and seemed to herald a new-world order of peace. Technology in the 1990s sparked an economic boom. Giddy commentators proclaimed Pax Americana and suggested that technocrats could now control the business cycle.

Not quite. On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, two airliners crashed into the World Trade Center, another dive-bombed the Pentagon and a fourth crashed in western Pennsylvania when its passengers attacked their captors. Sept. 12’s Plain Dealer editorial was blunt:

“The United States is at war today.

“We know not yet with whom, nor precisely why they struck – if the “why” behind the unimaginable horror of yesterday’s terrorist attacks can ever be fully plumbed. But we are at war as surely as we were on Dec. 7, 1941.”

Today, the mastermind of 9/11 is dead, but that war continues against an ever-evolving enemy that prefers terrorism to traditional battlefields. America has survived the worst economic crash since 1929. For the second time in 16 years, we will have a president who lost the popular vote.

Gray’s center of creation was pummeled by the retrenchment of American manufacturing and abandoned by people who believed Northeast Ohio had no future. Even many who stayed embraced self-fulfilling pessimism.

Now a new generation sees not a Mistake by the Lake, but an affordable, livable city blessed with brilliant architecture and an Emerald Necklace, with ethnic diversity and abundant fresh water, with enduring institutions that are the legacy of past success. The once “muddy” Public Square this past year has gone through a multi-million-dollar revival transformation. And thanks to the Cavaliers, the Indians and a well-run Republican Convention, the rest of America may be getting the message too.

After 175 years of tumult and triumphs, The Plain Dealer remains as promised, although drastically changed from its inception. Now the newspaper has a smaller web width, a website (online publication) and is home delivered just a few days each week. But it remains the lens through which the people of the Western Reserve can see themselves and the rest of the world.

Henry Goldblatt, Developer of the Goldbatt Kidney : Mt Sinai Collection

The link is here

Goldblatt clamps for hypertension experiments, 1934

clamps_goldblatt-detail
Goldblatt’s clamps, one shown in placement tool.
Below instruments used to operate clamps.
clamps_goldgbatt-tools

Harry Goldblatt (1891-1977) received his M.D. from McGill University Medical School in 1916. He began a surgical residency, but when the U.S. entered the war he enlisted in the medical reserves of the U.S. army. He was sent to France and later Germany as an orthopedic specialist. He returned to Cleveland in 1924 as assistant professor of pathology at Western Reserve University School of Medicine, and in 1954 was appointed Professor of Experimental Pathology. In 1961 he was named emeritus, but in the same year was appointed director of the Louis D. Beaumont Memorial Research Laboratories at Mt. Sinai. He worked there until he retired in 1976. He died January 6, 1977.

Goldblatt’s interest in hypertension, sparked during his days as a surgical resident, eventually would lead to his international fame. During his early days in pathology, he noted persons with normal blood pressure who had systemic atherosclerosis (colloquially referred to as hardening of the arteries) that did not affect the kidney, and conversely patients with hypertension where arteriosclerosis was confined to the renal arteries. He had been taught that so-called benign essential hypertension was defined as persistent elevation of the blood pressure of unknown etiology, without significant impairment of the renal functions, and that the elevated blood pressure comes first and results in vascular sclerosis. In some cases renal damage does occur and may eventually lead to uremia. Goldblatt’s own observations; however, led him to believe that vascular sclerosis came first, followed by elevated blood pressure.

Testing this theory was difficult however, because Goldblatt did not know how to reproduce vascular sclerosis. He decided that simulating the results of obliterative renal vascular disease by constricting the arteries leading to the kidneys would be sufficient. In order to achieve constriction of the renal arteries, Goldblatt developed the clamps seen in the picture. His experiments using the clamps, performed on dogs, showed an increase in hypertension with no renal impairments. One of the earliest, unexpected findings was the constriction of one renal artery resulted in temporary elevation of blood pressure which returned to normal when the clamp was removed. Subsequent experiments by Goldblatt and others revealed that the constriction of the renal arteries causes a chemical chain reaction leading to hypertension. Renin, a substance released by the kidneys, is generated when the renal arteries are constricted. Renin in the bloodstream causes the production of angiotensin 1. Angiotensin 1 is benign until it reacts with the angiotensin converting enzyme (ACE) to become angiotensin 2, which is a major cause of hypertension.

Goldblatt, HarrryThe clamps built by Goldblatt initiated a chain reaction as well. Successive experiments and discoveries eventually led to the isolation of an ACE inhibitor. By preventing angiotensin 1 from becoming angiotensin 2, this inhibitor has reduced the risk of stroke, heart attack, and heart failure in many hypertension patients.

Goldblatt received many honors, most importantly the scientific achievement award of the A.M.A. in 1976. Because of the implications of his work, the American Heart Association established the Dr. Harry Goldblatt Fellowship. In 1957, to commemorate the 25 th anniversary of Goldblatt’s first successful experiment to induce arterial hypertension by renal ischemia in the dog, the University of Michigan held a conference on the basic mechanism of arterial hypertension at Ann Arbor. It was here that the confusion regarding the names of the various compounds was settled, and a universal nomenclature for angiotensin was accepted.

Housing Crisis in Northeast Ohio – Where are We in 2015? forum

Housing Crisis in Northeast Ohio – Where are We in 2015? 


Wednesday, October 7 7-8:30 p.m.
CWRU Siegal Facility in Beachwood, OH
Panelists:
• Thomas Bier, Senior Fellow, Maxine Goodman Levin College of Urban Affairs, Cleveland State University
• James Rokakis, Former Cuyahoga County Treasurer, Cleveland Councilman, Director Thriving Communities Institute
Moderator: Brent Larkin, The Plain Dealer

Northeast Ohio was one of the hardest hit housing markets in the U.S. in recent years. The market has begun to recover, but housing values and real estate taxes remain two of the most important economic issues facing local residents today. This forum will discuss current home prices, new construction, demolitions and foreclosures.

Cosponsored by City Club of Cleveland, Cleveland Jewish News Foundation, CWRU Siegal Lifelong Learning, League of Women Voters-Greater Cleveland

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