Short biography of John D Rockefeller
Author:
Mark Hanna from Citizendium
Short Mark Hanna biography
“How the world’s first rock concert ended in chaos” BBC News Story on Moondog Coronation Ball Concert
“How the world’s first rock concert ended in chaos” BBC News Story on Moondog Coronation Ball Concert
Moondog Concert was 3/21/1952
The BBC story ran 3/21/2012
How the world’s first rock concert ended in chaos
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21 March 2012
Sixty years ago the world’s first rock concert was staged in Cleveland by two men whose passion for music bridged the racial divide in a segregated US.
Jimmy Sutphin was playing poker and drinking beer in a hotel room with some hockey team pals when they heard the commotion outside.
Peering out of the fifth-floor window, they saw thousands of people besieging the indoor arena across the road.
The 20-year-old student and his friends abandoned their card game and piled downstairs to investigate.
It was Friday evening, 21 March 1952, in Cleveland, Ohio, and they were about to witness history being made.
The crowd was angrily demanding entry to a performance featuring a radical new music movement that was about to sweep the nation.
Pandemonium
The world’s first ever rock concert – the Moondog Coronation Ball – was about to end in turmoil after it had barely begun.

The years seem to peel away from Mr Sutphin, now a 79-year-old grandfather, as he stands outside the former site of the Cleveland Arena, remembering.
“The crowd were screaming, ‘let us in’, and banging on the doors,” he recalls. “It was chaos.
“Turns out the place was sold out and they had closed the doors on them. And these people had tickets and were not happy.
“The doors had a glass centre panel and they ended up breaking them so they could get into the building.”
When police captain Bill Zimmerman arrived with dozens of officers, he was confronted by pandemonium.
Gatecrashers had stormed the 9,950-seat venue and it was dangerously overcrowded.
‘Race records’
The musicians, who are thought to have only performed several songs, were ordered to stop playing as police waded into the mob. A man was stabbed in the melee.
The next morning, Mr Sutphin remembers entering the Cleveland Arena, which his father built, to find it strewn with whisky bottles.
John Soeder, music critic for the Cleveland Plain Dealer newspaper – which carried a front-page story on the tumultuous event the next day – says the Moondog Coronation Ball was the “Big Bang of rock’n’roll”.
But it might not have been possible without two visionaries who raided the airwaves with this pulsating, insurrectionary new sound, and in doing so brought black and white kids together to dance in post-war America.
One of them was the concert’s MC, Alan Freed. The other was Leo Mintz, owner of a music store on the fringes of Cleveland’s black community.
Mintz had noticed an increasing number of white teenagers sifting through his extensive collection of rhythm and blues tracks by African-American artists.
But the singles were often a turn-off for such buyers because the industry marketed them as “race records”.
And it wasn’t just west-side white folk who viewed these juke-joint tunes as undesirable.
Terry Stewart, president of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum in Cleveland (which has a permanent exhibit dedicated to Alan Freed), says: “These songs were filled with double entendres, lyrics like, ‘she just loved my 10-inch record of the blues’.
“Many of the churchgoing black families were just as upset as the white families with this music being played for their children.”
However, when Mintz listened to this raucous sound – with its thumping back beat, locomotive rhythm, and infectious 12-bar blues melodies – he heard the future.
Old blues euphemism
Mintz convinced Freed – a friend and onetime radio broadcaster from orchestral dances in Akron, Ohio – that the obscure tracks deserved some airtime.
His son, Stuart Mintz, says his father told Freed the “kids are rocking and rolling in the aisles to these records, but they won’t buy them”.
Mintz helped Freed, then a humble sportscaster, secure a new show on the city’s WJW radio in 1951, devoted to playing this underground music.
Freed would coin the term rock’n’roll – an old blues euphemism for sex – to describe the tracks.
Using the on-air alias King of the Moondoggers, he would ring a cowbell, drink beer and howl in tribute as he played the records, while pounding out the beat with his fist on a phone book.
The flamboyant Freed’s late-night show caused a sensation with black and white listeners alike.
Mintz and Freed’s logical next step was to stage a live concert featuring the edgy new acts.
Headlining the Moondog Coronation Ball that night 60 years ago was Paul Williams and his Hucklebuckers, supported by Tiny Grimes and his Rockin’ Highlanders, the Dominoes, Varetta Dillard and Danny Cobb. Tickets were $1.50.
One of the few photos from the event shows the men in flannel suits, saddle shoes and fedora hats, while the immaculately coiffed women wear dresses with pinched-in waists and high heels.
It is all a far cry from the ripped jeans, merchandise T-shirts and untamed hairstyles sported by rock fans of later years.
Disastrous printing error
Mr Stewart says that when Freed appeared on stage that night there was uproar.
The predominantly black audience apparently could not believe the exuberant radio personality whose show they had been tuning in to for nine months was white.
The delighted crowd “went nuts”, says Mr Stewart.
He adds: “The fact that this many people would show up for an all-black rhythm and blues event, based solely on advertising on a late-night radio show, and tear the doors off an arena to get inside, made promoters and record labels say, ‘wait a minute, something’s happening here.'”
Less well known is the reason why the Moondog Coronation Ball ended in disaster: a minor printing error.
The mistake was caused by someone forgetting to add the date to tickets issued for a follow-up ball, which Mintz had set about organising immediately after the initial one sold out.
As a result, an estimated 20,000 people showed up on the same night for the first concert – at a venue which could hold half that number.
Rock devil knocking
Mintz was on holiday that Friday in Florida when he was informed by an afternoon phone call of the ticket foul-up.

Stuart Mintz says: “My dad was told, ‘there’s an emergency, you’d better come home right now’, and he took a plane.
“By the time he arrived [at the Cleveland Arena] there was already a full-blown riot.
“The fire department opened up hoses on the crowd. He just tapped the cab driver on the shoulder and said, ‘find me a bar.'”
The concert that was billed on a promotional poster as “the most terrible ball of them all” had certainly lived up to the pre-show hype.
Freed narrowly escaped criminal charges, although the event’s notoriety helped propel him to stardom.
Younger generations raised on rap videos might well be perplexed at the idea that rock’n’roll could have once made the authorities squirm with unease.
But this was a dozen years before the Civil Rights Act. J Edgar Hoover’s FBI would place Freed under surveillance because the records he played were deemed such a threat.
As broadcast historian Mike Olszewski says: “Back then, it seemed, the United States was always looking for new enemies.
“It was the beginning of the Red Scare. In 1948, you had Roswell and the UFO scare.
“People were always looking for a devil and rock’n’roll was a devil that came right into their homes.”
A new era
Freed’s downfall would be just as sudden as his meteoric rise to fame.

In 1957, the trailblazing DJ’s nationally televised rock’n’roll show on the ABC network was cancelled after a black performer danced with a white girl on stage, outraging Southern affiliates.
Freed’s career was finished by the payola scandal, a then-widespread practice of disc jockeys accepting gifts from promoters to play their records.
Convicted of commercial bribery in 1962, he died of complications from alcoholism three years later, aged 43.
Though Freed had been silenced, the rock’n’roll genie was well and truly out of the bottle. The Moondog Coronation Ball laid the foundations for every rock gig that followed, from Woodstock to Glastonbury.
The Cleveland Arena was demolished in 1977 and an American Red Cross office block stands today at the spot where a new era of live entertainment was born.
Recalling how he came to be a bystander to the dawning of a new era on Euclid Avenue six decades ago, Mr Sutphin says: “Who would have thought it would be such a memorable event?”
Veeck as in Wreck – Chapters 7 and 8 (1948 Cleveland Indians)
From Google Books
The link is here
Rockefeller, Religion, and Philanthropy in Gilded Age Cleveland
Paper developed by Kenneth W. Rose and Darwin H. Stapleton for the Rockefeller Archive Center
How Regulation Came to Be: Red Moon Rising
From the Daily Kos, how pollution in the 1960s was wide spread and not just in Cleveland.
“The State of the Great Lakes” Chris Korleski at Cleveland City Club 7.11.14
Chris Korleski is director of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Great Lakes National Program Office (GLNPO). GLNPO coordinates U.S. efforts in implementing the goals and objectives of the Canada – U.S. Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement, working under the strategic framework of the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative. Before coming to GLNPO, Korleski was director of the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency. He also served as counsel to Honda of America Mfg. Inc. in Marysville, Ohio, and was an assistant attorney general in the Ohio Attorney General’s Environmental Enforcement Section. Korleski earned a bachelor’s degree in agronomy from The Ohio State University College of Agriculture, and a master’s degree in agronomy from the University of Nebraska. He received his law degree from The Ohio State University. Tickets: $18 members/$30 nonmembers
Tom L. Johnson by Robert H. Bremner
Article about Tom L. Johnson, mayor of Cleveland from 1901-1909
From the Ohio Historical Journal
Confessions of a Reformer by Frederic Clemson Howe
Confessions of a Reformer by Frederic Clemson Howe (google books)
Frederic Howe, Cleveland reformer, councilman, journalist writing about his favorite mayor, Tom L. Johnson
(to get rid of yellow marks, hit “clear search”)
Time and Again from Cleveland Magazine July 2009
Cleveland Magazine article by Michael Roberts
The link is here
Issue Date: July 2009
Time & Again
Our writer travels back to his childhood in Cleveland’s Cedar-Central Apartments, one of America’s first public housing projects.
Michael D. Roberts
My first memory of the city is like old film: faint and grainy. It is hot, that summer of 1942, and I am talking with two black men who are sitting on orange crates on Cedar Avenue. Their smiles are luminous, and the air is pungent with tobacco.
The men comment on my sailor suit and ask if I am going to the lake. I don’t know what a lake is.
My mother, who is holding my hand, explains it to me. We walk to East 30th Street, and she points north to a sky with no horizon. She says the lake is out there. Until I actually saw Lake Erie, I thought lakes existed somewhere in the sky.
I was wearing the sailor suit because we were at war. Everyone in the Cedar-Central Apartments was cloaked in patriotism.
Cedar-Central, which opened in 1937, was one of the first planned public housing projects in the country. We lived at 2830 Cedar Ave., No. 532, for $20 a month. My father was a cook. By government standards, we were considered needy.
The 650 apartments, on 18 acres, were advertised as having airy rooms, tile baths and cross-ventilation. Few domiciles in Cleveland could boast those amenities then, nor the slides, swings and sandboxes that drew us kids away from the heavy traffic on Cedar and Central avenues.
Then-city councilman Ernest J. Bohn, who became a nationally acclaimed public housing expert, conceived of Cedar-Central. Even then, public housing was fraught with debate. One letter to the editor complained of “the folly of conveniences such as iceless refrigerators, hardwood floors and tile and chrome bathroom fixtures for the type of people who will live there.” The comment spoke to the wound the Depression had driven into society, for the people who would live there were mostly middle class.
The project was built on a former slum. Some 200 buildings were razed to make way for it. City councilmen representing black wards had argued in 1935 that the black people displaced for the project would not be allowed to live in the apartments. They demanded an agreement with the federal government to ban segregation in the complex. They lost the vote. When families moved in on Aug. 10, 1937, they were all white.
Preserved in the Ernest J. Bohn collection at Case Western Reserve University are the residents’ monthly newsletters, The Cedar-Centralite. The newsletter was mimeographed, several pages long, with a circulation of 650 and a readership of 2,000. It carried birth and marriage notices, lists of new residents, for-sale ads, recipes, regulations, announcements and admonishments. It urged residents to take turns cleaning the hallways and warned them that shaking mops from the porches only dumped dust on those below.
Indians night baseball, introduced in 1939, caused a disturbance in the apartments. The open windows carried the sound of the game broadcast,
waking those who had to rise early for work.
Surprisingly, most of the newsletter was devoted to fiction, criticism, movie reviews, theater announcements, essays and tips on child behavior. Its writers clearly had taste and education but were jobless or underemployed. One lengthy movie review raved overCitizen Kane and the performance of Orson Welles.
My memories of public housing are full of brightness and fresh smells: the playground, a nearby swimming pool and a library my mother often visited. Everything seemed clean and freshly painted.
I remember the admonishment not to walk on the grass. The complex had been landscaped by Donald Gray, the famous garden designer who had planned many East Side mansion grounds. With so many children living at Cedar-Central and taking short cuts across Gray’s carefully designed lawns, the residents formed a grass committee and sent out patrols of adults skilled in shrill scolding. One misstep and you were reported to your mother, which brought severe condemnation. Your odds were better in a mine field.
Not far off was downtown Cleveland, kinetic with motion and sound, its sidewalks a strolling milieu, buff-colored streetcars clanging at stops. Its odors were savory, metallic, human and heavy.
We moved in sometime in early 1940, when I wasnot yet a year old.My father and mother had met in Cleveland at the Southern Tavern, a nightclub at Carnegie and East 105th Street where he was a cook and she a coat-checker. My father’s low income from his job in the kitchen qualified us for residence at Cedar-Central.
Apartments ranged from two to five rooms and rented for $20.40 to $30.45 a month. In those days, three cans of Campbell’s Soup sold for 25 cents, sirloin steak went for 32 cents a pound and a new car could be had for $500.
The war is my most vivid memory of those years. Women made bandages for the Red Cross, people saved tin cans, and rationing became a part of life. Even children like myself had a book of stamps for food items. I noticed uniformed men and women on Cleveland’s streets, always going somewhere in haste. Teenagers
built model airplanes for the services to use to identify aircraft.
I recall a sense of alarm around the spring of 1942. The newsletters reinforce my memory of my neighbors’ obsessive fear of air raids. Though the Luftwaffe presented little threat to Cedar-Central, civil defense was organized quickly. The wardens, with white helmets and flashlights, patrolled the complex on blackout nights. They expected the apartments to be 99 percent dark within two minutes. In June 1942, the Cedar-Central newsletter proudly announced an almost perfect blackout in the complex.
I remember the blackouts, the wardens’ visits and my heightened awareness of aircraft passing above. My brother, Richard, threw a rubber duck out a window during an air raid drill, causing a warden’s rebuke. I vaguely recall seeing aircraft drop shiny scraps of paper above Cleveland to simulate an attack.
Sometime that year, for reasons long forgotten, a little girl named Shelia hit me in the face with a milk bottle. I still have the scar — my only wound in the war.
Mother used her savings to send Dad to welding school. His new skill made him a valuable worker in the growing defense industry, and his factory job meant our days in Cedar-Central were numbered.
Once residents found work at a decent wage, they had to seek housing on the private market. Commenting on the passing crowd, the newsletter quoted a motto found on an old Euclid Avenue house: “Welcome ever smile[s], and farewell goes out sighing.” I remember my regret when we moved from my first real home sometime in 1943.
Over the years, I have driven past the complex, slowing to identify our building, feeling a flood of melancholy and noting how time has bestowed no favor on its visage. I recall visiting the complex once as a reporter to cover some long-forgotten crime.
I wanted to see the apartment one last time. I called the housing authority and was told the current residents would have to approve the visit. Several weeks later, my request was denied. The occupants preferred their privacy, and I understood. Today, a stranger seeking admission to one’s home can raise suspicion.
Looking back, I benefited greatly from Cedar-Central. Living there gave me a curiosity about the city that probably shaped my vocation as a journalist. For me, the complex had a richness that far exceeded the reason it was built.
Few things are left from the world in which I grew up. People are still in need of Cedar-Central’s shelter. But in other ways, this is a different America: Less neighborly, the solidarity of community fractured by technology. Excess has made us a more remote and indifferent society.
Maybe today, nobody can really go home again.