XXIV. In Search of an Image

A community image is a sensitive thing, not to be tinkered with casually or to be taken lightly, as I learned several years ago while riding a railroad across the Great West.

The train I was riding was the Santa Fe Railroad’s El Capitan, which has its very own image. It is kind of a fun train; an all-coach streamliner in which passengers perforce snuggle cozily together in their reclining seats at night and sometimes become great and good friends as they roll toward their destination.

My seat partner in this adventure was an interesting little man of advanced years who had no disposition toward sleep and an extraordinary willingness to talk about the most intimate events of a long, uneventful life. He was a sort of man-child; his skin was smooth and pink and his pale blue eyes shone with naivete and apprehension. He spoke in a half-apologetic manner as if expecting to be rebuffed, as likely he had been many times, and only when he lifted a gnarled, heavily veined hand to brush aside a lock of his neat white hair did his age assert itself.

Charlie was his name, and he was returning to St. Louis after having visited his sister in a satellite town of Los Angeles. It had been many years since he had seen his sister, and he was delighted that he had been able to make the trip. Now he was returning to his home, a farm near St. Louis, and to the loving wife-his second-who awaited him there. He called her the Widder Woman because that’s what she had been when he married her. He chuckled as he told how the Widder Woman had swept him off his feet. She really had thought that she had ensnared him with her wiles, but all the while he was playing a game and letting her win. The Widder Woman was an outstanding captor by his honestly practical standards. She had a nice chicken farm and a fair bank account.

“She had what I calls a nest egg,” he said, half-raising in the recliner seat to allow a laugh to bubble out of his stomach. “Get it? A chicken farm and a nest egg?”

Then he sank back, reflectively, and said the only trouble with his marital setup was the Widder Woman’s son by her first marriage. The lad apparently was a real trial, having been involved in a long series of extralegal scrapes.

“He even runs around with a gunslinger from Kansas City,” said Charlie. “That’s the worst part. Once, him and the gunslinger came running home to the farm, and no sooner had they arrived, all nervous, when we could see the sheriffs car coming down the road raising such a cloud of dust you could hardly see the whirling red light. The kid and the gunslinger dove under one of the chicken coops, and the police looked all around, but they never looked under the chicken coops. The Widder Woman said she had not seen the boy in weeks and the cops went away.

“That was funny, in a way, but the gunslinger hung around for a couple of days afterward and I was nervous every minute. You can’t trust anybody from Kansas City.”

I was half-asleep when he said that, but I had to have an explanation.

“That’s a broad statement,” I said. “There must be a lot of nice people in Kansas City.”

“Maybe,” he allowed, reasonably. He really was a decent old man. “Maybe. But you can’t tell me about their gunslingers.”

“Years ago, I suppose,” I said, “but not now.”

“I wouldn’t bet on it,” he said. “Nobody will ever get me into Kansas City again. Never. I was there once and the town was full of gunslingers. They were everywhere, walking up and down, their fingers just itching to shoot you. All you had to do was look sideways at them. Not that I had any trouble with them, or anything. They seemed to like me, probably because I was so small, but I wasn’t happy until I got out of that town, believe me!”

About that time there was a stirring up front and in the dim light you could see the conductor making his way down the aisle, stopping every now and then to lean down and shake some passenger. He finally reached us and he put a penlight to a card in his hand and looked down at us.

“Kansas City?” he said, and I heard Charlie choke a little.

“Chicago,” said Charlie.

“Chicago,” I said.

“Kansas City,” repeated the conductor. “You get off at Kansas City.” And he flicked his light at Charlie, who, by now, was sitting upright.

“Your ticket is to St. Louis,” said the conductor, “but you have to transfer at Kansas City.”

“Nosiree!” bleated Charlie. ’1 go through to Chicago and transfer there.”

“Sorry, old-timer,” said the conductor. “You’ve got ten minutes before we arrive. Better get your things ready.” He passed on, and there was an awkward silence.

“It’s too bad,” I told Charlie, ’’but this is 1958. Kansas City is a big, modern city. Perfectly safe.”

“Well, there’s one good thing,” he sighed. “You don’t have to get off. It’s bad enough as it is, but I’ve been around a long time. I guess I can take care of myself in Kansas City. The gunslingers there used to like me, years ago.”

He reached up and pulled down an old brown valise and shook hands very formally with me before he got off. My window was at the wrong side of the train, so I didn’t even get to see him after that, but I stayed awake for a while after El Capitan resumed its journey and I remember thinking to myself that old Charlie was one of the bravest men a person could be privileged to meet. The way he got off that train in Kansas City and walked right into the teeth of all those gunslingers was absolutely magnificent.

Not that I accepted the image of Kansas City that Charlie projected. Everybody I ask tells me it is a fine community and a great place to live, even if the baseball team is pretty bad. The very fact, though, that I went out of my way to inquire about Kansas City shows what strong medicine an image is, good or bad.

Cleveland has an image, like every other city, and in its own way it is just as grotesquely inaccurate as old Charlie’s conception of Kansas City.

The very worst problem that a person is likely to encounter in trying to correct Cleveland’s image, though, is straightening out some of the Clevelanders. An awful lot of them have been led astray into a never-never land by an enterprising public utility, the Cleveland Electric Illuminating Company, which unwittingly has induced giddy and outsized delusions among some of its own customers with an advertising campaign designed to entice new industry to the Greater Cleveland area.

The slogan of the campaign confronts the people of the nation in full-page advertisements in national magazines and on billboards, sucb as the one that air travelers see as they wheel out of the terminal area of the Cleveland Hopkins International Airport and onto the Berea Freeway leading downtown. At this junction a large billboard welcomes them to “Cleveland- The Best Location in the Nation.”

It is common knowledge among psychologists, of course, that this happens to be the worst possible way to welcome visitors. It should be obvious, even to the local chamber of commerce, that people who do not call Cleveland home and who most likely have formed an unhealthy attachment for some other town will be affronted by this slogan. Some of them even may choose to read braggadocio into it, and there have been recorded instances of visitors actually bridling. It is said that a tourist from Sioux City, Iowa, felt so strongly about the billboard that he demanded to be let out of the airport limousine and returned to the field to take the next plane back to Iowa.

That sort of reaction is extreme, of course, and should not be considered typical. But it is a fact that the slogan does tend to put visitors in a thoughtful mood. Some even will slump back in the airport limousine with their eyes hooded and their lips curled back ever so slightly in an expression that says, “Show me!” It is an attitude that challengingly calls on the entire metropolis of Cleveland to produce one single feature that the visitors will like.

This is not a good mood for visitors to be in. It places a city at a terrible disadvantage. Visitors rightfully should be shiny-eyed, joyful of countenance, and keenly anticipatory of all the delights that mayor may not be in store for them.

Just to make things a trifle more awkward for Cleveland, the motor drive from the airport to downtown is a tedious, trying route that is calculated to depress the spirits of any free man. The already-cynical tourist discovers that the Berea Freeway is merely a short burst of superhighway. It is succeeded, after a mile or so, by a succession of grim business streets slashing their way in a diagonal across the West Side and doggedly fighting their way downtown.

Like so many other American cities, Cleveland has waited too long on the automobile. There is a vast and comprehensive pattern of limited access highways currently under construction. The new roads will, when completed, change the traffic situation drastically-some traditionalists say for the worse, as in Los Angeles. Nobody denies the almost frantic need for the new superroad system, however, and the expressways already are looping around and through the city, following an army of bulldozers that is still determinedly pushing the past out of the way.

Commuters between downtown and Cleveland Hopkins Airport soon will be able to overlook the highway situation entirely, if they choose. The municipally owned Cleveland Transit System is building the last link in a rapid transit line connecting the airport with the Public Square downtown. High-speed trains will be whisking air travelers and other airport visitors to the heart of the city in approximately twenty minutes at any time of the day or night, no matter how bad the traffic or the weather, by 1968. Plans call also for baggage and freight cars on the rapid transit trains.

Meanwhile, it is not only the visitor to the city who is disturbed by the unfortunate slogan of “Best Location in the Nation.” It bothers a lot of loyal, patriotic Clevelanders as well because it can be taken as an absolute axiom that there is no harsher critic of Cleveland anywhere than a native son. The objectivity of the people who make their home in this city and their ability to recognize their own shortcomings is really remarkable. It may be said that the people of Cleveland are opposites to the people of Texas; instead of boasting about the city’s attributes, they dwell eloquently on its deficiencies to the extent, often, where outsiders feel compelled to take up the Cleveland cause in a curious reversal of normal American procedure.

A typical commentary was made by Arthur A. Watson, general manager of the National Broadcasting Company’s radio and television stations in Cleveland (WKYC) shortly after he had taken up residence, in the city in 1965.

“I’m puzzled,” he said, ’’When I found I was being transferred from Philadelphia to Cleveland, I made it a point to talk with as many Clevelanders as I could. I wanted to know about the city and they told me-they told me everything that was wrong with it. But here I am and I have found it a delightful place; a really beautiful city. Sure, it’s a pleasant surprise after what I was led to believe, but I’m puzzled when people run down their own city.”

As a matter of fact, the “Best Location in the Nation” slogan began as a much more modest contention, Robert H. Bridges, a spokesman for the Cleveland Electric Illuminating Company, recalls the circumstances.

“We first began to promote Cleveland-northeast Ohio in national publications in 1944,” he said, “The slogan wasn’t developed until the second ad, The slogan read as follows: ‘Cleveland-Northeast Ohio… The Best Location in the Nation for many industries.’ There was a subhead which read: ‘No other area in the U.S. offers this unique combination of advantages.’ And we listed the advantages.

“The New York Times refused the ad on the grounds that no area could support such a claim, We provided them with our research and requested them to check it out.

“This they did, and so the first of many, many ‘Best Location’ ads appeared in the New York Times and later in most of the major national business publications.

“In those wonderfully uncomplicated days following the war, the Cleveland newspapers, recognizing a good thing when they saw it, latched on and began to give the slogan a real fine free ride, However hard the reporters tried to be accurate, alas, they found that the headline writers simply would not use the slogan in its entirety. Since the function of our area promotion was and is purely and simply to attract new business and industry to this area and to enlist salesmen in the effort, we felt it would be ungrateful of us to be critical of this shortened version.

“In time we adjusted ourselves to the diminutive. Indeed, we even felt a little author’s pride now and then, Besides, we had by then amassed considerable evidence that BLIN was a resounding success in getting the attention of prospects. You know, people would say, What impertinence!’ and then go on and read the ads and ask for more information, or send a salesman and that sort of thing…”

The point is still valid, though, that slogans, like nicknames, must be used with discretion. There are so many variables in any municipal equation that today’s paean may be tomorrow’s pain. Cleveland found that to be true some years ago, when it was Hushed with unbelievable success and found itself one of the world’s fastest-growing cities. By 1920 it had become the fifth-largest city in the United States and, inevitably, the title “Fifth City” was picked up for wide use as a synonym for Cleveland. Newspaper writers sprinkled it throughout their stories; politicians liked its explosive sound and incorporated it in their bombast, and the Chamber of Coerce orators fell in love with the designation completely.

None of those uses really was risky, but the indiscreet people were the manufacturers and merchants who, in the Hush of the hour, adopted “Fifth City” as part of their company names. As if a population rating had any kind of permanence in a nation with a lot of young cities still growing and developing! In 1940, Cleveland was elbowed out of the fifth city position and fell back to sixth position. In the 1950 census, it became the seventh city; in 1960, the eighth city. Almost everybody was able to adjust to the new population ratings quickly, bruised egos to one side, except companies which had allowed local pride to creep into their official names. Consequently, it is possible to find in the Eighth City today such vestigial evidence of past census glory as the Fifth City Furniture Company and the Sixth City Wire Works, the Sixth City Body Company, and the Sixth City Salvage Company. But the businessmen of Cleveland are learning, at last, the transitory nature of civic glory, it seems. Nowhere in the Eighth City is there yet to be found a company called the Seventh City anything, or an Eighth City anything. The merchants at least are more cautious than they used to be.

All of Cleveland, in fact, has learned an important lesson in recent years, and it has to do with the national confusion of civic values in which size and numbers have been equated with greatness. Cleveland rode hard in the population derby and held the inside of the track for a long while, from 1850 to 1920, when it sprinted hard and spurted far ahead of a lot of cities which were older, wiser, and a little bit tired of the pace. The largest city in Ohio exulted and pranced each time it gained the lead over a competitor city, and it seemed as if this young giant were unbeatable.

The Depression that began in 1930 hit Cleveland a solar plexus blow that brought the city to its knees and sharply reduced its population growth. No less astute an observer than Cyrus Eaton believes that Cleveland was hurt more by the Depression than any other major city in the United States, and.it is his opinion that Cleveland in the mid-1960s is still in the convalescent stage, still recovering from that terrible business slump. There are other experts who share this belief. It is plausible enough to people who remember the exuberant, dynamic Cleveland of pre-Depression days and who can compare it with the somber, convalescent city that walked with a dragging gait and a querulous expression until recent years. The Cleveland that the world knew from 1930 to 1955 was a hurt town and it showed in many ways. There was a disposition toward petty bickering among the civic leaders over petty issues, while the large issue of Cleveland’s future went untended and the sprawling downtown area turned gray and shabby.

The revival actually began in the administration of Mayor Thomas A. Burke in the late 1940s, but it was slow to enlist the active support of Cleveland’s influential families. Mayor Burke led the way in the development of the first major municipal projects since the Roaring Twenties, when the fabulous Van Sweringen brothers were remaking the face of the city. He sponsored construction of a downtown airport on fill land to the east of the East 9th Street pier, and he activated the dormant plan, actually conceived and began by the Van Sweringens, for a system of rapid transit lines. The monuments to his four-term administration, from 1944 to 1952, are the Burke Lakefront Airport, which now accommodates more than three hundred takeoffs and landings every day, and the Cleveland Transit System’s nineteen-mile rapid system, extending from the Windermere Station, near Euclid and Superior avenues on the East Side, to a temporary western terminal at West 140th Street and Lorain Avenue. When the extension is completed in 1968, making the Cleveland Hopkins International Airport the terminal on the West Side, CTS officials will press for activation of long-standing plans to push the rapid system into every part of the metropolis.

Burke’s successor as the city’s chief executive was Anthony J. Celebrezze, the first representative of Cleveland’s large Italian colony to reach the high office, and while he was irreverently known up and down the street as “The Mustache,” he also was acclaimed as an outstanding performer. His major accomplishment as mayor was arousing the town’s drowsy fat cats, most of whom were brought to their feet simply by his election. Their nervous consensus was that there was something slightly un-American in having a mayor with such a foreign name. It was almost too much, following so closely on the heels of the wartime administration of Frank J. Lausche, a gentleman of Siovenian descent. The Union Clubbers were really only getting the hang of the Lausche pronunciation (it rhymes with how-she) when he up and got himself elected governor of Ohio.

As it turned out, they needn’t have worried about the pronunciation of the Celebrezze name because almost everybody settled for “Tony,” and the mayor readily answered to this informal address-which illustrates what a really smart politician he was. He showed this talent in many different ways in his record-breaking five consecutive terms in office, but it is apparent that Celebrezze’s major contribution to the city was in the conception of a plan for a drastic face lifting of downtown Cleveland. Out of his urging arose the plan for Erieview, which called for the demolition of some seventy-six acres of shabby, down-at-the-heels downtown.

That urban renewal program, still under way, has given Cleveland a new physical image. It has sent new skyscrapers like the Erieview Plaza Tower (forty stories) and the Federal Building (thirty-two stories) shooting high into the air, adding new elements to the Cleveland skyline for the first time since the Terminal Tower was finished in 1930. It has added new beauty with its parks and plazas and malls, its reflecting fountains and its splashing pools, and its lofty concept has given Clevelanders themselves a sense of pride and success that some thought they had lost forever.

But there is something else to this image business which, in Cleveland’s case, cannot be overlooked. It is, simply, the city’s insistence on looking like everybody’s hometown.

The most surprising illustration of this phenomenon is, of course, the experience of the visitors from the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. In Cleveland they see, readily, Moscow, Minsk, Leningrad, and Odessa. Czechs, conversely, see something of Prague; the Hungarians blink back their tears at the resemblance to Budapest, and so on. In like manner, American visitors to the city cannot help but see on all sides reminders of Terre Haute, Boston, Hartford, Chicago, Ashtabula, New York, Los Angeles, and Pine Bluff. It leaves some of tl,em unnerved and a trifle thoughtful to find a slice of home so far away from home.

Safe enough to say, however, that not all visitors are happily surprised. Suppose a man has traveled two thousand miles from Los Angeles to Cleveland, and wakes up in the morning eager to take in the sights and study the costumes and mores of the natives. He leaps out of his trundle bed, springs to his window and looks out, just in time to see a girl walking past with an oversized beam and. wearing an undersized pair of orange capris, and he falls back in utter confusion. This is just like home, you see, and he has a devil of a time reassuring himself that he is somewhere other than Los Angeles.

Nobody likes to be disappointed in his quest for exotic surroundings, and, conversely, nobody likes to be homesick. Either one of those two things can happen to a casual visitor who tries to swallow Cleveland in a swift, down-the-hatch way, with a quick look here and a quick look there and his eyes watering all the time. It doesn’t do the city’s image one bit of good, you may be sure, for those quickie-type visitors to leave town with their eyes still watering. That reaction leaves the way open for wide misinterpretation by onlookers.

It is a matter of common knowledge that the people who least understand and least appreciate Cleveland are those who live close by-i.e., other Ohioans. Diplomatic relations between Cleveland and other communities in the state have been shaky and tentative, at best, for the past hundred years. There is commerce back and forth, and there are polite interchanges of small talk, but there is very little communication in the real sense and nobody, certainly, ever would dare to describe the relationship that exists as a hearty camaraderie. In the minds of most Ohioans, Cleveland is a strange outland concentration, the land beyond the pale. It is to them the Colossus of the North, where strange tongues and even stranger customs prevail, and where the Simple Buckeye type had best be wary.

Understand that Ohio, unlike Cleveland, is mainly midwestern in its character. Where it is not a midwestern state, it is laced with a strong flavor of the South- so much so that a kind of southern accent flourishes among the people who live in Columbus, Springfield, Middletown, Dayton, Cincinnati, and other cities of the central and southwestern part of the state.

The preponderance of native-born Americans in the population of most of Ohio has given the rest of the state a homogeneity that is strikingly absent in Cleveland. The differences that separate the largest city in the state from the main territory are represented in the sound of foreign tongues, the strange accents, and the hard-to-spell, hard-to-pronounce names; in a subtly different appearance of the people, in attitude, in outlook, in customs, in clothing, and even in homes.

To the rest of Ohio, Cleveland is the city of foreigners-and in that category they bracket New Englanders with the Lebanese, Slovenians, Hungarians, and other exotic representations with charming and ingenuous impartiality. Whatever is unknown and speaks a strange tongue is, ipso facto, a foreigner.

The population of the Cleveland metropolitan area at the beginning of 1966 was 2,057,400, making it the eleventh metropolitan market in the nation. One of every three Clevelanders either was born abroad or was a first-generation American. It has been said that outside of New York and Chicago, Cleveland is the most cosmopolitan of American cities. In the sense of the worldwide origin of its population, this is true, but Cleveland is not a worldly city within the usual meaning of cosmopolitan. Its personality has not had time to jell. This is the most heterogenous of cities; one which has been force-fed with population from abroad like a Strasbourg goose, and it simply has not bad time to digest the diverse groups which it has received during the past century.

A perceptive observer of the Cleveland scene, Emerson Batdorff of the Plain Dealer, once wrote: “Cleveland’s melting pot does not, it seems, convert its stock to a thin and ordinary gruel. While the second and third generation is naturally much more American in Its ways than the old folk, even the third generation of Clevelanders of mid-European descent retain an affinity for the polka. Those of Italian descent still have religious parades. The Scots and the Irish still make the air wild with their music and the pipe major can be seen on occasion treading his stately measure down Euclid Avenue as the sun glints brightly on the dirk in his sock. Greeks still dance fiercely, the men alone as is their custom, to shrill music in night clubs that feature belly dancers. In Greek coffee houses patronized only by men, old folks meditate upon their destiny as they survey the new world over a hot cup…”

The international influence is everywhere apparent-from the turnip-shaped church spires that overlook the Cuyahoga Valley on the southwest side to the brick tower of the mammoth West Side Market, where rosy-cheeked women wearing babushkas and old men with caps shop at the open stands for fruits, vegetables, freshly killed chickens, exotic cheeses, garlic-scented sausages, and all the other ingredients for their native-style meals. They cling to their old custom of shopping in the open market place even as they cling to their old churches where they can worship in a tongue which allows them to be articulate. Europe is never far away when you are in Cleveland, and the traces of the origin of its people are on all sides-in the chain of cultural gardens in Rockefeller Park honoring the diverse nationalities which have settled in the city, in the strange-sounding roll call of names in the news stories of the metropolitan newspapers, and, plainly, in the faces of the people themselves.

There are more Hungarians in Cleveland, it is said, than there are in any city in the world outside of Hungary itself. An educated estimate places the number in Cleveland at eighty-five thousand, many of whom came to Cleveland as refugees after the aborted Hungarian Revolution of 1956. The Hungarian colonies are to be found in the Buckeye Road-Woodland Avenue area on the East Side and along lower Lorain Avenue neighborhoods on the West Side. Like so many of the nationality groups, however, they are beginning to venture outside of their old, established territories to take up residence in the suburbs- especially on the West Side.

The Germans, whose number is estimated around one hundred thousand, have left their original nesting neighborhoods to disperse into the suburbs, mainly Lakewood, Rocky River, Fairview Park, Brooklyn, and Parma. The Poles (160,000 strong) have fanned out from the Flats and the lower West Side toward the southern neighborhoods of the city and the suburbs of Garfield Heights and Parma, with some side streams trickling into the western suburbs. The Slovenians, Croats, and Serbs (as they prefer individually to be identified, rather than as Yugoslavs) have been shifting from their old St. Clair Avenue neighborhoods into newer neighborhoods in the northeast side and in the suburb of Euclid. Theirs is a sizable element, numbering more than forty thousand.

Czechoslovakia’s delegation, part of a steady migration reaching back to .860, is counted today around seventy thousand. The main strength of their group is strung out along Broadway S.E. and into Garfield Heights, Seven Hills, Brecksville, and Parma. The Italians, currently estimated around sixty-five thousand, have a Little Italy on Mayfield Road, off Euclid Avenue, on the East Side and another Little Italy near West 65th Street and Detroit Avenue on the West Side. They, too, are beginning to disperse into many of the suburbs in strength, as already have the Irish, once clustered (with the Welsh) in old Newburgh and in such picturesquely named settlements of the near West Side as the Angle, Irishtown, the Cheyenne, the Grove, Achill Patch, and Windy Gap. The sizable Jewish representation in Cleveland, numbering close to one hundred thousand, once clustered around East 105th Street, but in recent decades they have favored Cleveland Heights and Shaker Heights.

Lithuanians, some thirty thousand strong in the mid-sixties, had a fairly tight-knit community in the northeastern area of Cleveland and suburban Euclid, as well as in the neighborhood of East 55th Street and Wade Park. The Slovaks were to be found on the West Side, in Lakewood and to the south, on Broadway. An estimated thirty-five thousand Romanians, whose first colony was in the vicinity of Detroit Avenue and West 54th Street, have begun to spread into the southwestern suburbs of Brecksville and Parma.

The first significant inflow of immigrant stock into the little settlement of New Englanders came in the 1820s when the Ohio Canal, providing
a through waterway from Cleveland to the Ohio River, was under construction. Thousands of laborers employed on the great project- most of them Irish- were impressed by the pretty little town on the Lake Erie bluffs and settled in and around the young community.

Approximately twenty-five years later, the construction of railroads into Cleveland resulted in another large influx of laborers-Irish, Welsh, German, Czechoslovakian-and now it seemed the immigration pump was primed. The following half-century was marked by the arrival of many thousands of Europeans seeking a better life in the Ohio boom town.

There is still a thin, steady stream to keep alive the nationality stock in Cleveland; nothing to compare with that which reached flood stage in the second half of the nineteenth century and the opening decades of the current century, but still sizable enough to keep Cleveland’s naturalization rate at a level of twenty-four hundred new citizens a year. Occasionally some extraordinary event causes the stream to swell, as it did at the end of World War II and again after the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. The trend, nevertheless, is one of continuing diminution in the number of new residents from foreign countries, and it is already apparent that the process of assimilation is blurring the once clear-cut outlines of the fifty or more nationalities which set up colonies here in years past.

Assimilation should not be made synonymous with elimination in the evolution of a cosmopolitan city, for much of the foreign flavor introduced by thousands of immigrants fortunately is of a lasting nature. These people from the faraway lands change a city, even as the city changes them. Once the two elements are joined, nothing is ever again the same-neither the people nor the city. It is part of the mystery and wonder of America that there still is no such animal as The Typical American, nor is there, truly, a Typical American City. The metamorphosis continues, as Cleveland makes evident, changing shape, form, and size with fickle disregard for the calculations and predictions of the experts. In all the swirling evolution, though, some institutions and characteristics of the nationality groups persist. The foreign-language press in Cleveland still was a substantial readership for its numerous publications, and the nationality-Oriented newspapers which are printed in English claim a significant number of readers among descendants of the pioneer immigrants. There are still such newspapers as the America Romanian News; Amerikanski Slovenec (Slovenian); Dirva (Lithuanian newspaper); Hungarian Daily Szabadsag; Hungarian Weekly Magyar Vitag; Kuryer, a Polish bimonthly publication; La Voz Hispana, the Spanish paper; Novy Svet, the Czechoslovak daily; Zwiazkowiec, a Polish bimonthly; Slovenian Daily News; and Waechter Und Anzeiger, a German weekly, formerly a daily.

Somebody with time on his hands has counted no fewer than 576 fraternal and social welfare lodges based on nationality in Cleveland, and their membership total was figured at 304,600 persons-about half of the foreign stock in the metropolitan area. Further bolstering the entertainment and recreational scene are some 191 nationality-oriented groups devoted to drama, music, and singing. The Slovenians were far out in front in this department with twenty such groups, followed by the Germans with thirteen, including a brass band.

Of more universal interest are the restaurants featuring exotic cuisines aimed at the nationality trade and adventurous Cleveland gourmets, but this field, truthfully, is not what one optimistically may have expected. There are some fine restaurants with foreign specialties, especially Hungarian, Italian, and German menus, but not nearly the number nor variety that the cosmopolitan character of the city would seem to justify. The conclusion of some disappointed eaters who have surveyed the scene and analyzed it is that too many of the immigrant families who found their way to Cleveland were of frugal, thrifty, plain stock to allow for such a capricious, extravagant custom as “eating out.” So long as the aging mother or grandmother from the old country is still around to cook up some tasty kluskis or chicken paprikash, the family will continue to eat at home. The restaurant situation gradually is improving, though, and with the widespread nationality base that exists in the city, Cleveland one day could emerge as a power in the eating department.

Of steadily increasing significance in the Cleveland social scene is the city’s large Negro representation, estimated in early 1967 to include some 318,000 persons in the metropolitan area. Almost all live in Cleveland itself and almost all live on the near East Side, although there are a few Negro neighborhoods on the lower West Side-in the vicinity of West 25th Street and in the Linndale section, between West 117th Street and West 130th Street, off Bellaire Road. The Linndale colony, an enclave in the otherwise white section of the city, is of long standing, tracing its beginnings to the nineteenth century when the Linndale Yard and the Linndale Station of the New York Central Railroad came into being. The Negro movement into the suburbs is most noticeable in the Ludlow section of Cleveland and Shaker Heights, in Cleveland Heights and East Cleveland, in Twinsburg and in Oakwood Village.

Cleveland enjoyed for many years the reputation of being one of the most advanced cities in the United States in its race relations, and as recently as the 1940S and 1950s, it was hailed as the leader in the field. But the Hough Area riots which broke out in the East Side neighborhood in the late summer of 1966 made it clear that the same racial problems which were besetting other American communities existed in Cleveland, especially in the areas of housing and employment. Between 1960 and 1967, the Negro population in Cleveland increased by nearly seventy thousand, heightening the severity of those long-standing problems, perhaps the most challenging issues to confront the city administration thus far in the latter half of the twentieth century. But the Negro voice in Cleveland long has been articulate and the Negro representation in civic life long has been prominent. Some of the voices, like that of Poet Langston Hughes, have gone far beyond the city’s borders.

As of early 1967, ten of Cleveland’s thirty-three City Council members were Negroes, directly reflecting the race’s total of one-third of the city population. One of the councilmen, Charles V. Carr, serves as leader of the Democratic majority in Council and has been a member of the body since January 1946. Another veteran in the municipal legislature, Leo A. Jackson, has held a seat representing Ward 24 since the beginning of 1958. Their colleagues in the 1967 Council included John W. Kellogg, Warren Gilliam, George W. White, John C. Armstrong, James H. Bell, Craft C. Carter, Jr., and George L. Forbes. M. Morris Jackson served in the Council until early January 1967, when he took a seat in the Ohio Senate. But the real veteran among Negroes in City Hall was Harvey Atkins, Assistant City Clerk and Clerk of Council, whose tenure began in 1930.

The administration of Mayor Ralph S. Locher saw the nomination of Ralph Findley to the post of Health and Welfare Director, making this longtime civic leader the first Negro to hold a cabinet position in city government. When he was named director of the Economic Opportunities Board in 1966, he was succeeded in the cabinet post by Clarence A. Gaines. Still another Negro high in the City Hall ranks during the Locher administration was Bertram Gardner, executive director of the Community Relations Board.

On the larger city scene, Cleveland’s leading Negroes included George Anthony Moore, associate director of the National Council of Christians and Jews in Cleveland; Merle A. McCurdy, United States Attorney; Charles W. White, judge in the Cuyahoga County Court of Appeals; State Representative Carl B. Stokes, who came close to being elected mayor in the fall of 1966; Clayborne George, attorney and chairman of the Cleveland Civil Service Commission, and his wife, Zelma George, Singer-actress who was an alternate delegate to the United Nations in the Eisenhower administration; Common Pleas Judge Perry B. Jackson; Dr. Middleton Lambright, prominent surgeon and physician who was the first Negro to serve as president of the Cleveland Academy of Medicine; Municipal Judge Theodore Williams and Municipal Judge Faul White; George Elie, president of the Elie Wrecking Company, a nationwide operation, and Ludie Couch, president of the Couch Sausage Company; Emmett Cooper and William Boyd, members of the Cleveland Board of Education.

No matter what avenue you use to approach Cleveland, eventually you reach the inescapable conclusion that the influence of the New England founding fathers, their descendants and their followers, remains the most powerful single force in Cleveland’s development to this day. The city’s ancestral lineage and background is everywhere apparent-in the rather staid architecture of the office buildings and institutions and in the charming styles that predominate in the residential neighborhoods; in the ultraconservative business life of the community, the anonymity of the ruling establishment, and the city government’s lack of aggressiveness. Cleveland, in the large and real areas of personality and mores, remains a colony of Connecticut to this day.

Perhaps the heritage of New England is manifest most noticeably in the attractive residential areas of the city and its suburbs. Here is Cleveland at its very best. Other American cities have more impressive central cities, newer and higher skyscrapers, bigger and wider freeways, but no other city lives better at home. The remarkable side-phenomenon here is that the good life is widespread. The neighborhoods of beautiful homes are not concentrated in any single section, but may be found within any given set of compass points. No matter which direction you travel, you will encounter such residential beauty as to give you pause- some, in the more affluent quarters, overwhelming in their grandeur. Cleveland is heavily partial to the single home with a full sweep of green lawn, flower borders, and thick clusters of heavily leafed trees. There are many areas where apartment buildings rule, and it is true that they are becoming more numerous, but only in recent years has the city seen the development of high-rise apartments on a major scale, such as the complex of luxury towers which has sprung up along the western lakeshore, where Cleveland and Lakewood meet. The “Gold Coast” district there is the prototype for similar developments along the eastern shoreline, especially in Euclid and in Bratenahl. Those tall apartment buildings, like the thirty-story Winton Place in Lakewood, are spreading the skyline of the city and giving it a new nighttime glitter and more of the urban look that Cleveland, for all its metropolitan size, has lacked until now. Indeed, one of the cliches to be heard from the lips of discontented citizens is that Cleveland is “the biggest small town in the country.” They do not say it kindly, but fretfully. Yet it is a paradoxical fact that Cleveland also is one of the most sophisticated of cities at the cultural level, in its high residential standards, in its social and political innovations.

The Chamber of Commerce has been doing its level, confusing best to try to straighten out-or at least explain-the many contradictions that present themselves to the casual tourist and old-time resident alike in the old Forest City, but theirs is a losing battle. Some things simply are not to be explained. Anyway, it smacks of a defensive posture even to try. The Chamber should go on the aggressive and attack this image business in a forthright way by stressing the positive.

It is, for example, a positive fact that right in the heart of Cleveland there is a real, honest-to-goodness salt mine in full operation.

It is also an indisputable fact that the salt mine is situated on a piece of acreage known as Whiskey Island.

Either one of those facts is guaranteed to put any city ahead in the national image derby, but how many large American cities, other than Cleveland, can boast of both?

Motorists approaching the center of the city on the west side shoreway have a clear view of the salt mine’s superstructures to the north. This International Salt Company operation is on the banks of the Cuyahoga River, near the river’s old mouth, long filled in. The present mouth of the Cuyahoga, a short distance to the east, is a man-made shortcut. The salt has been under Cleveland a long time-millions of years. It was there even before the Ice Age brought the glaciers. It is part of the vast Salina formation that underlies several states at depths ranging from eight hundred feet to more than a mile. It extends under Lake Erie, from the lower peninsula of Michigan to Cleveland and east, past Ashtabula and into Pennsylvania and New York. It also extends south, under Ohio, to West Virginia.

The Whiskey Island mine was begun in the late 1950s and became operative in 1962. It reaches down some eighteen hundred feet and then laterals out under Lake Erie to tap a treasure-house of salt-International estimates the fifty-one-hundred-acre reserve it is working under agreement with the State of Ohio contains some one hundred million tons of high-quality rock salt.

Clevelanders haven’t quite made up their minds whether to be proud of their very own salt mine or not. As everybody knows, salt mines themselves don’t have a very good image, although the International people insist they really are very nice places. The temperature down there, under Cleveland, is about seventy-five degrees the year round and the air is very tangy.

“A salt mine’s a pretty healthful place to work,” one International spokesman said. “No respiratory trouble. The salt helps clean you out.”

Perhaps, fifty or a hundred years hence, when the company has extracted its hundred million tons of salt, the city can rent the underground caverns out as a spa, or vacation center. Then all Clevelanders will have to do to escape the whistling winter winds off Lake Erie and subzero temperatures is simply drop down the old shaft a mere eighteen hundred feet and frolic around in a subtropical seventy-five-degree climate.

Incidentally, Whiskey Island really isn’t an island, and there isn’t any whiskey there; not that anybody is admitting, anyway. It won its colorful name in the founding days of the town when it was the site of a distillery. It is a picturesque piece of real estate in its own rough-hewn, cluttered way. As the rock salt is mined and brought to the surface, it is piled in towering conical stacks on the banks of the meandering old river, and the romantic eye can see in them snow-covered miniatures of Mount Fuji. They glitter in the bright sunlight, and sometimes their salty beauty is enhanced by a distinct turquoise cast.

Contrastingly, there are other man-made mountains nearby; some of yellow sand for industrial use, and russet red peaks of iron ore carried to Cleveland from the Mesabi Range in Minnesota or the Steep Rock Mines in Canada in the long lake freighters for the steel mills. The low-slung boats, peculiar to the Great Lakes in their general conformation and size-some of them are longer than seven hundred feet-move in ponderous procession into Cleveland Harbor during the sailing season. Some make their way, unbelievably, into the crooked Cuyahoga and corkscrew their way to the steel mills upriver. Others veer to the western end of the breakwater-protected harbor, there to be relieved of their ore by the Hulett unloaders that crouch like giant grasshoppers along that part of the lakefront, just north of the salt mine.

Ifs like an industrial carnival at night when the dipping unloaders, outlined in electric lights, bob for the ore deep in the hold of the carriers, then sail it high overhead to the inland stockpile on an illuminated crane. There’s a rhythm and beauty to the scene that has its own appreciative audience among the motorists flying along the lakefront shoreway, the sitters on the grassy slopes of Edgewater Park, and the residents of such near West Side streets as Tillman Avenue and Herman Avenue, which overlook the old riverfront and lake harbor. But not everybody views the scene for its beauty. Some savvy onlookers form their own conclusions as to the health of the industrial economy through close surveillance of the iron mountains On Cleveland’s lakefront. The rate of growth and shrinkage in the ore piles can be a reliable indicator of the appetite of the steel industry, and Cleveland’s prosperity is closely linked with the well-being of steel, for this is the leading ore-receiving port in the world and one of the nation’s leading steel manufacturing centers-the headquarters city, in fact, of the giant Republic Steel Company.

Steel is an essential, integral part of the Cleveland image. It has left its mark on the landscape, it is part of the skyline, and its influence is felt in the everyday life of the city. Cleveland, in tum, has exerted a considerable influence on steel. Back in the 1840s, two Cleveland scientists, Dr. J. Lang Cassels, a chemist, and Colonel Charles Whittlesey, geologist, made an exploratory trip into the wilds of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula to scout persistent Chippewa Indian tales of mountains made of iron. Frontiersmen also had contributed to the legends of the area with reports that their compasses behaved in wildly erratic manner in the area. The expedition by Dr. Cassels and Colonel Whittlesey into the region around Negaunee, Michigan, was fruitful. They returned to Cleveland with data on the rich iron ore deposit which existed there, and in a public lecture on the trip, given in the Apollo Theater in 1846, Colonel Whittlesey described the possibilities of the situation in such glowing terms that a number of Cleveland businessmen were moved to action. The city became the heart of the Great Lakes are mining and shipping industry, and remains so to this day.

The presence of the steel industry, as well as the deep reserve of mechanical ingenuity usually to be found in an industrial, manufacturing city, helped Cleveland at the turn of the century to make a strong bid for the role of automobile capital of the world. It lost to Detroit, as everybody knows, but only after a gallant battle.

Cleveland held the leading position as an automobile manufacturing city in the earliest years of the horseless carriage-from 1896 until 1904. It remained an important center of production until 1932. In those turbulent three decades, some eighty different makes of cars were produced in Cleveland, beginning with the Winton and ending with the Hupmobile. Alexander Winton built the first car in September 1896. It was an experimental two-seat carriage that would do ten miles an hour. The following year he drove one of his cars a mile in one minute, forty-eight seconds to highlight the Memorial Day celebration in Cleveland.

On March 24, 1898, a Pennsylvania mining engineer, Robert Allison, visited Winton’s small shop on East 45th Street, between Perkins and Hough avenues, looked at the four cars under construction, and selected the one he liked best. He paid Winton one thousand dollars cash for the car, and the manufacturer agreed to deliver it to him at his home in Port Carbon, Pennsylvania, the following week. It was a simple transaction but historically important as one of the first sales of an American-made gasoline-powered automobile, and the vehicle rightfully holds a place in the Smithsonian Institution.

Winton sold twenty-five cars in that year of 1898, and the following year he drew nationwide attention when, under the sponsorship of the Plain Dealer, he attempted to drive one of his automobiles to New York City in less than fifty hours’ running time. Riding with him on the trip was a Plain Dealer reporter, Charles B. Shanks, who had promoted the distance test. He later left the newspaper to become sales manager of Winton’s company. The automobile pioneer carried with him a letter to be delivered to the mayor of New York, Robert A. Van Wyck, from the mayor of Cleveland, John H. Farley, The letter said:

“The City of Cleveland sends greetings to the executive of the nation’s metropolis upon the occasion of the first long distance automobile trip ever made on this continent. New York and Cleveland have long been connected by water and by rail, and now they are joined by the horseless carriage route.”

Winton arrived in New York after forty-seven hours and thirty-four minutes. The mileage charted was 707.4 and Winton’s ledger showed an expenditure of one dollar for the gasoline consumed by his car. Gasoline was something of a waste product in those days, and the six gallons he purchased to begin his trip cost him only one cent a gallon. Even more remarkable was that his hydrocarbon engine achieved some forty miles to the gallon and he needed only fifteen gallons for the long trip. It shouldn’t be necessary to point out that this phenomenal performance was over the worst of roads, but the fact helps to underline the wonder of it all.

A Cleveland automobile historian, J. Richard Wager, relates a story that tells bow the Winton company confronted and defeated a disgruntled motorist of 1903. The story also indicates that, however much cars have changed, the drivers remain very much the same.

“Winton was the largest exclusive auto maker in the nation in 1903 and Cleveland was the leading auto manufacturing city in America,” wrote Wager. “Besides the Winton, the Steams, White, Peerless, the Gaeth, Hoffman, Ottokar, Russell, General and Marr were made here.

“About that time in Detroit a disgruntled Winton owner rode through the streets in his car pulled by a team of horses. Signs declared: ‘This is the only way you can drive a Winton.'”

“The Winton salesman was quick to counter the attack. He followed the man around the city in a gleaming new Winton pulling a farm wagon in which was hauled a donkey. The sign said: ‘This is the only animal that can’t drive a Winton!'”

In time other names joined the growing list of automobiles manufactured in Cleveland. They included the Jordan, the Steams-Knight, the Templar, the Rollin, the Chandler, the Cleveland, and the Hupmohile, not to mention the leading electric cars of the time, the Baker Electric and the Rauch & Lang Electric. The two later merged and turned out the Baker-Raulang electrics until 1918.

Cleveland admitted defeat as an automobile manufacturing center in 1932, when the last Hupmobile came off the line, but it continued as the leading supplier of auto parts. After World War II, the industry began to return to Cleveland, joining the city’s huge Fisher Body plant which bad continued to supply the Detroit assembly lines. Ford, Chevrolet, and Chrysler all have built new factories in the metropolitan Cleveland area and are among the city’s most important employers. The automobile is still part of the Cleveland image.

Perhaps this is what makes identifying Cleveland clearly such a troublesome matter; the image is made up of too many slivers and fragmented parts. It has a little bit of everything, and in some instance a whole lot of something, but it is not what you would accurately describe as a monolithic institution. Cleveland, in fact, is not any kind of an institution. It is a collection of very interesting people who have come together from all parts of the globe to engage in a very interesting enterprise-the building of a new society in a new city in a new land. Only through patient, sympathetic analysis is it to be understood, but it is less difficult to appreciate.

A man from New Jersey-a very fair-minded type-recently gave Cleveland a thirty-day trial and testified that it made a new man out of him. Not only did the wind off the lake put a rubescent glow in his cheeks, but the variable temperatures generally gave a new spring to his step. It is not terribly uncommon for the mercury to rise or fall thirty to forty degrees in a matter of hours, the kind of development guaranteed to quicken anybody’s pace. They have a saying around town that if you don’t like the Cleveland weather, simply stick around for an hour or two-it will change.

Meteorologists assigned to the Greater Cleveland post by the United States Weather Bureau ride into town, fresh-faced and eager to battle the elements, the little weather vanes attached to their beanies whirling excitedly every which way. They can hardly wait to take up the challenge of predicting, scientifically, what kind of weather Cleveland will have from day to day. Usually it is only a matter of months- sometimes only days-before the vagaries of the climate, with all the eccentricities of performance that the slope of the terrain and the influence of Lake Erie can encourage, tum these happy, chattering young meteorologists into mature, gray-faced, and thoughtful men.

This simply is not a true picture, and it’s partly the fault of geographers and itinerant journalists who insist on confusing Cleveland with Buffalo-probably because Buffalo Bill Cody once lived in Cleveland, as a boy, for about four years.

At any rate, the confusion of Cleveland’s identity with that of Buffalo is only part of Cleveland’s terrible winter image. A good deal of the blame must reside in the well-known tendency of Clevelanders to exaggerate the severity of their own winter, in interesting contrast with the way that Californians and Floridians try to suppress news about bad weather. Clevelanders apparently would rather be cast as heroes than sissies.

Local historians like to tell especially of the year 1816, which was even rougher than most Cleveland winters. It has been called “The Year without a Summer.” The cold weather was not confined to Cleveland, but was felt generally through” large area of Ohio. An Urbana, Ohio, newspaper of the time claimed that it snowed every month of the entire year. This chilling information was amplified with the story of a local swain who started out with his sweetheart for a July 4 picnic. They never got a chance to open their big lunch hamper because en route to the picnic grove they were forced to turn back by a raging blizzard.

The year 1857 was another one worth remembering because it was said to have featured frost every month, even through the summertime. A Cleveland historian, C. A. Post, wrote, with a straight face:

“One old gentleman used to tell of coming home to Cleveland very early the morning of July 5th of that year after attending a ball at the Cataract House in Newburgh, and as he passed along the road he scraped from the top of the rail fence enough snow to make a snowball.”

There is no way of telling, at this late date, precisely how truthful the tales of terrible winters may have been, but it doesn’t really matter. Every city has good weather and every city has bad weather. Whichever a person will take it to be, good or bad, depends on his own attitude. It is possible to be bored to distraction by the monotony of blue skies and sunshine that cities less fortunate than Cleveland have to put up with every year. There is none of the pulse-pounding excitement of bounding out of bed each morning, as Clevelanders normally do, to see what fearful consigmnent of weather the new day has brought. It’s part of the adventure of living in Cleveland, this uncertainty of the elements.

There is drama and excitement in really bad weather, in the driving snow and the lashing rain, the angry skies and the boiling lake. One of the most sensitive persons of our time, Helen Keller, said it in her own way when she was trapped in her room in the Statler Hotel in Cleveland by the great blizzard that struck the city in early November of 1913. It was one of the worst storms in Cleveland history. Twenty-one inches of snow were borne upon the area by winds that reached a velocity of seventy-nine miles an hour, and life in the community came to a standstill for most of a week. Even without sight or hearing, as she was, Miss Keller’s impressions of the storm, as related to a reporter for the Cleveland Press, were vivid:

“I am stirred to the depth of my being by the storm, and my body, mind and soul are better for this great experience-the greatest of its kind in my life. Few times in my life has it been given me to feel sensations akin to those I have experienced as a captive of the blizzard in Cleveland during Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday.

“I knew it was storming before I was told. The rooms, the corridors, everywhere within the building, vibrated with the power of the storm without-when I knew it was snowing as it never had before in this part of the world, I wished to rush out and throw myself into the snow and ride upon the tempest. I raised my window, the gale blew upon me; as I was in evening dress the wind stung my chest, but I loved it. I put my hands in the snow on the window sill. It was softer than the softest down. I made a ball of it and pressed it to my cheek. I drank deep of its odor, for it has an odor soft and sweet as the daintiest perfume.”

Helen Keller voiced, poetically, what a lot of Clevelanders feel. They grumble about the weather for the record, but most of them wouldn’t want it any other way but the way it is.

Cleveland weather is capricious and it often is uncomfortably extreme, but whatever else it is, Cleveland weather is never dull. At its peak moments it is grandly dramatic, exciting, and beautiful. When one of those moments is at hand and the fresh gale out of the lake is pulling the whitecaps up from the water and rustling the city’s forest of trees, it is possible to believe that this, after all, really is the best location in the nation.