www.teachingcleveland.org
BALLOT ISSUE 26 FORUM
Cleveland Heights
Charter Amendment Thursday, October 10, 7 pm
Here’s the video
Cleveland Heights High School Cafeteria
13263 Cedar Road
Featuring representatives of
Citizens for an Elected Mayor and
Cleveland Heights Citizens for Good Government
Panel will present statements and
answer questions from the audience.
Presented by the LWV of Greater Cleveland Heights Chapter
CUYAHOGA COUNTY, Ohio– The passage of Issue 3 renews a tax levy in Cuyahoga County that will help expand resources for its community college district.
53 Year-old father of three, Steven Brooks has spent many hours with IT hardware and walking the halls of Cuyahoga County Community College, or Tri-C, as it’s known, Brooks balances work and fatherhood.
“It’s very challenging, I’m kind of always tired but, you know, it keeps you going, it keeps you striving, it keeps you wanting to be better, “says Steven Brooks, Tri-C student.
And, with ten years in the IT field, he’s taking advantage of the resources to stay employable, and hopefully, even earn a promotion in his industry.
“It’s always changing, and I either go and learn something else or get left behind in old technology, which I’m not willing to do,” says Brooks.
The Tri-C Tax levy renews 1.9 million dollars and adds 400,000 dollars in funding to the school’s programs for students seeking an affordable higher education option and job training. With the property tax increase, the owner of a 100,000 dollar home would pay an extra 14 dollars a year.
That tax increase is worth it for the non-partisan League of Women Voters. “Having a skilled, trained labor force is so important to this region. We’re a rust belt area, we need new technologies, health care center, and so many people can get their start in community college,” says Janice Patterson, League of Women Voters.
One of those students getting their start is 20-year-old student Balquise Alshafei, who lives on her own while managing life as a full-time student.
“It’s challenging, you know, it gets lonely sometimes,” says Alshafei.
But the tax levy will allow Tri-C, the lowest costing school in Ohio, to keep tuition affordable, so students like her can have more opportunity to reach their educational ceiling.
Morrie Zryl brought pizzazz and showmanship to movie theaters: An appreciation Obit
– Jan 24, 2019 Plain Dealer
By Joanna Connors,
CLEVELAND, Ohio – In July of 1981, Morrie Zyrl gave Clevelanders a taste of true showmanship.
Zryl, who had just taken over the moribund Colony Theater in Shaker Square, had to work harder than other theater managers to bring audiences to a theater that had been closed, except for the occasional special event, for years. He had to work harder to book movies with Hollywood distributors, too, who balked at giving him a shot at first-run films in a theater with only one screen.
His solution was to take advantage of the Colony’s 70mm projector, one of only three in northeast Ohio at the time, and show movies on a second-run basis in their full, big-screen glory. He backed up that strategy with old-fashioned promotional pizzazz.
One of the first movies he booked, Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979 Vietnam epic, “Apocalypse Now,” had come and gone from the area’s multiplexes two years earlier. So Zryl rented a huge helicopter, attached giant speakers to it, & sent its pilot buzzing over the city blasting “The Ride of the Valkyries,” the soundtrack to the film’s most indelible scene, the helicopter cavalry attack orchestrated by Robert Duvall’s unhinged Capt. Kilgore.
To borrow the line from Kilgore: Zryl loved the smell of popcorn in the evening.
Zryl, who died in Florida on January 16 at the age of 69, loved everything to do with movies. He told a reporter from The Plain Dealer in 1988 that he caught the bug when he was 3 years old and living in Israel with his parents, both Holocaust survivors. They took him to see “Gone with the Wind,” and his romance with the movies began.
It continued in Cleveland, where his parents moved when he was 8 years old. At 14, he got a job as an usher at the Cedar Lee Theater, became assistant manager of the Colony when he was still a teenager, and from there went on to work as a theater manager, a specialty film distributor and the owner or operator of several Cleveland theaters, including the Colony, the Centrum on Coventry Road in Cleveland Heights, Tower City Cinemas and the Fairview.
To each theater, Zryl brought his irrepressible zeal for promotion and zany stunts.
“He was this P.T. Barnum figure to me,” remembered Cindy Barber, the co-owner of the Beachland Ballroom, who met Zryl in the 1980s when he was running the Colony and she sold ads for the Cleveland International Film Festival’s program guides. As Barnum said, “Nobody ever made a difference by being like everyone else.”
Zryl, as many who knew him have said, was a showman. The lobby of his theater was his stage.
When he booked “The Wizard of Oz,” at the Colony, he dressed up as the Tin Man, spray painting his face silver. “One little girl looked at me and said, ‘The Tin Man didn’t have glasses or a beard,’” he told a Plain Dealer reporter. “I told her, ‘He aged.’”
For a 1982 showing of Abel Gance’s restored 1927 masterpiece “Napoleon,” Zryl dressed as the Little General himself. “I’m the right size,” he told The Plain Dealer’s gossip columnist, Mary, Mary, referring to his own rather short stature. “And it does give me a feeling of power.”
And before a big-screen showing of “Ben-Hur” in 1982, he planned the obvious Zryl stunt, given that the Colony is located on Shaker Square. “I’ve already located two chariots,” he told a Plain Dealer reporter. “Fortunately, we have a round square here.”
“He was very good at getting free publicity,” said Jonathan Forman, the owner of Cleveland Cinemas, whose Cedar Lee Theater competed with the Colony for both audiences and film bookings. “He was nutty, but I would admire somebody who took their job that seriously. I thought it was very clever.”
John Ewing, the director of the Cleveland Cinematheque at the Cleveland Institute of Art, said, “Morrie was clearly bitten by the bug in the ’50s and ’60s, when movies meant big-screen entertainment and prestige presentations and so forth. What I liked and respected about him was he had a sense of what was important and would make a great presentation.”
The press certainly loved him. One Plain Dealer columnist called him “the human equivalent of a perpetual motion machine.”
This was not hyperbole.
When Zryl lost the lease to the Colony Theater in 1991, in part because he opposed chopping the big theater into five smaller theaters, he teamed up with developer Charles Zuchowski to renovate and reopen the movie theater on Coventry Road in Cleveland Heights. Zryl and Zuchowski rechristened it the Centrum Theater. and the renovation won plaudits from Plain Dealer architecture critic Steven Litt when it opened in 1992. Litt, who considered the Colony’s multiplex renovation a disfigurement of a grand Art Moderne space, said the Centrum was a triumph.
“Without question the Centrum is one of the best places in greater Cleveland to see movies,” he concluded. “Architecture is the reason. As Zryl rightly says: ‘The place is part of the show.’”
In addition to running theaters, often several at a time, Zryl was active in the Jewish communities of both Cleveland and South Florida, and was the Second Generation president of the Kol Israel Foundation here.
He was able to combine his faith and his passion for movies when he took over managing the Hanna Theater in 1986, before it was renovated and officially became part of the Playhouse Square complex. The first film he booked was “Shoah,” the monumental, 9 ½-hour Holocaust documentary directed by Claude Lanzmann.
When he moved to Florida in the early 1990s and managed a multiplex in Boca Raton, Zryl championed the Steven Spielberg film “Schindler’s List.” He called it “the ultimate film of the Holocaust” and spoke about it to audiences before screenings.
Monday, August 12, 2019 at The City Club of Cleveland
Elizabeth Bennion, Ph.D.
Professor of Political Science & American Democracy Project Director, Indiana University South Bend, and Host of WNIT’s “Politically Speaking”
Harry Boomer
Anchor Reporter, 19News/CW43, and Immediate Past President and Member, Greater Cleveland National Association of Black Journalists
Richard Davis, Ph.D.
Professor of Political Science and Director of the Office of Civic Engagement, Brigham Young University
John C. Green, Ph.D.
Interim President, University of Akron; Director, Ray C. Bliss Institute of Applied Politics; Distinguished Professor of Political Science
Moderator
Dan Moulthrop
CEO, The City Club of Cleveland
A forum on journalism in Dayton July 29, 2019
What: Media and Democracy: What the proposed sale of Cox Media might mean to Dayton.
Why: The Dayton Daily News, Channel 7, and WHIO Radio are being sold to a private equity fund.
What might the impact be? What can you do?
The Video is here:
Join us for an exploration of how media and democracy intersect and the importance of strong local media. Panelists include:
In order of speaking (from right to left)
Yosef Getachew, Common Cause’s Media and Democracy Program Director, will provide an overview of media consolidation all over the country and its impact on communities.
Plus
Justin Bibb still gets accused of acting white.
He was a seventh-grader at Shaker Middle School when I first met and interviewed him. That was seven years ago.
Back then, some black kids tormented Justin for being smart. They spit on his food at lunch. Called him names. Punched him. One day in the restroom, they urinated on his daily planner.
Back then, Justin cried himself to sleep some nights. His dad put him in private school after a boy picked up Justin and dropped him on his head in gym class.
Back then, a black principal suggested to Justin’s parents that his interests – debate and studying hard – were too white.
Last week, I was sitting at a restaurant when a tall, GQ-handsome black man in a crisp black suit and deep purple dress shirt called out my name. I recognized his eyes.
Justin Bibb.
He’s 20. He left Shaker Heights for Orange Christian Academy and went on to graduate from Trinity High School. He’s a junior at American University in Washington, D.C.
He interned his freshman year with Congresswoman Sheila Jackson-Lee of Texas. Sophomore year, he interned with Sen. Barack Obama. He was elected president of his pre-law fraternity.
He got a scholarship to study urban issues in one of the poorest neighborhoods in D.C. He created a nonprofit called D.C. Today-D.C. Tomorrow to help students create service projects and become leaders.
Justin interned this summer at the Cleveland Clinic. He leaves in two weeks to study abroad. He’s spending his junior year at the London School of Economics.
The boy he once was told me, “Why can’t I be who I am?”
The man he is gets quiet about that painful time.
“I didn’t really know who I was,” he said. “Kids were calling me white, yet I look in the mirror and see an African-American male.”
Justin grew up in Cleveland where his mom taught him to dress for success, for the part you want in life. His first day of school, he wore a buttoned-down dress shirt tucked into khakis. The taunting began.
Justin has straddled two worlds, splitting time with his mom in Cleveland and his dad in Shaker. He has caddied at a country club and has worked construction jobs in the inner city.
At college, he sees too few black males. In some classes, he’s the only one.
“The spotlight is on you. You represent the black race,” he said. “I’m on the path not just for me, but to help another brother. I represent them.”
Justin believes every success he makes will show others that blacks are so much more than what TV and movies depict.
He tells kids it’s not acting white to be successful. He reminds them that Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X both wore a suit and tie.
“We’ve lost that sense of history,” he said.
He doubts the stereotyping will stop anytime soon. The key, he said, is don’t let it stop you.
Justin has no regrets. His experience at Shaker taught him a message he passes along to every child who wants to achieve:
“Dream big,” he said. “The dream has to be greater than the struggle.”
Join Regina Brett today at 9 a.m. on WCPN FM/90.3, where she hosts “The Sound of Ideas” every Friday. Today’s topic: “Reading. What’s on your nightstand?” To reach Regina Brett: rbrett@plaind.com, 216-999-6328
Subtitle: Community, Philanthropy, and Planning
1. The Context of the Circle: Community, Philanthropy, and Planning
2. Doan’s Corners: A Changing Community
3. Neighborhoods, Outreach, and Discrimination
4. System, Sobriety and Shaping the Circle: Jeptha H. Wade, Amasa Stone, and Hiram Hayden
5. Case School and Its Neighbor: Community as Co-Existence
6. The Michelson-Morley Experiment
7. Science, Technology, and the Rise of the Military-Industrial Complex
8. Gathering the Circle: Art, History, and Music for the Public
9. The Kinship of Nonprofit Institutions
6. The Michelson-Morley Experiment
Bibliography of Darwin H. Stapleton’s Publications on University Circle, Cleveland and Ohio History
By ARIANE LIAZOS
The flyer is here
Making Sense of Ohio’s Court System
Saturday, October 12, 2019
10:30 a.m. to 1:00 p.m.
Heights Library Main Branch
2345 Lee Road, Cleveland Heights 44118
Eager to learn more about Ohio’s court system, how judges are selected, and how you can take action to ensure our courts are fair and impartial? The Ohio Fair Courts Alliance is a nonpartisan engagement project designed to educate Ohioans about challenges and opportunities facing the justice system. In this training, you’ll learn how Ohio’s court system impacts us—from voting rights, gerrymandering, the environment, and education to bail reform, healthcare, and immigration—and what citizens, like you, can do to improve it.
Free and open to the public
Training facilitated by Common Cause Ohio and Ohio Voice
RSVP here for Cleveland Heights
Training facilitated by Common Cause Ohio and Ohio Voice
Florence Ellinwood Allen is sworn in as a Common Pleas Court Judge for Cuyahoga County in 1921. Prior to her historic election to the trial court bench, Allen, a mean piano player, wrote music criticism for The Plain Dealer. (Kent State University at Ashtabula)
Before RBG, a Cleveland judge made history; it’s time to recognize Unstoppable Florence Allen: Andrea Simakis
Plain Dealer June 30, 2019
The link is here