{"id":52,"date":"2022-05-03T14:55:52","date_gmt":"2022-05-03T14:55:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pressbooks.ulib.csuohio.edu\/from-across-the-pond-palmond\/?post_type=chapter&p=52"},"modified":"2022-06-30T18:23:48","modified_gmt":"2022-06-30T18:23:48","slug":"chapter-7-cleveland-1975","status":"publish","type":"chapter","link":"https:\/\/pressbooks.ulib.csuohio.edu\/from-across-the-pond-palmond\/chapter\/chapter-7-cleveland-1975\/","title":{"rendered":"Chapter 7. Cleveland, 1975"},"content":{"raw":"
\r\n

Memory Flash: Ninth District Federal Court, Cleveland<\/em>, Nov 24, 1975<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/header>\r\n

\r\n\r\nOpening day of Reed vs Rhodes, the Cleveland schools desegregation case. (<\/em>An end of the year start).\u00a0And I am shocked. Truly shocked. <\/em>\r\n\r\nNathaniel Jones, lead prosecutor for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), has just begun to recount how we got here, via the first desegregation trial of national significance: Brown vs Board of Education, Topeka, Kansas, 1954. <\/em>\r\n\r\nHe tells us of a young black girl, perhaps five or six, in the witness box in that case, who was handed two dolls, one white and one brown, and was asked: \u201cWhich is the good doll, and which is the bad one?\u201d\u00a0 <\/em>\r\n\r\nThe girl pointed to the white doll as \u2018good\u2019 and the brown one as \u2018bad.\u201d Jones presented testing evidence that this was a common response from young black children. <\/em>\r\n\r\nAs a white boy growing up in England with no exposure to the emotional depths of racial segregation I had never considered this aspect of the vestiges of slavery:\u00a0the sense of inferiority from the color of a person\u2019s skin. And that it could have had such an effect on a child so young.\u00a0 \u00a0<\/em>\r\n\r\nThere was more, but I was not aware of it until much later. The NAACP lawyers in Brown were using ground-breaking studies done in the early 1950 by black husband and wife New York psychologists Mamie and Kenneth Clark into the long-term pernicious effects on society of racial segregation in the US. (They had to paint one of the white dolls brown because manufacturers did not make any brown or black dolls then).\u00a0 <\/em>\r\n\r\nShocking as the \u2018good\u2019 and \u2018bad\u2019 dolls were they also asked the kids which dolls looked most like them. Some of the children cried and ran out of the room because they did not want to identify with the brown dolls. They looked at TV and wanted blue eyes and blonde hair \u2013 and white skin. <\/em>\r\n\r\nThe Clarks were so upset they delayed publishing their conclusions.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/em>\r\n\r\nIn 2010 the US TV news channel CNN commissioned a reproduction of the studies with 133 children, from a mix of racially segregated schools, this time including a substantial number of white kids. The results, reportedly, were strikingly similar. The white children maintained an intense bias towards whiteness. The black children, fortunately, had a more positive view of the dolls of their color. <\/em>\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\nWas that my highlight of 1975, starting at the end? Hardly, because the city was being prepared for school desegregation from March onwards by outsiders from cities who were already doing it. \u201cDesegregation will come to Cleveland, city leaders are told<\/strong>\u201d was one headline on a story I wrote. In order to make it work peacefully, the outsiders said, Cleveland\u2019s leaders should start to plan for it now.\r\n\r\nThe message was given to business, church, education, news media and labor leaders by the police commissioner of Boston, the deputy superintendent of Detroit schools, an official of Memphis schools and an Ohio State University professor, invited to Cleveland State University by a Cleveland churches council. They heard from Ohio State University representative Prof Charles Glatt that Cleveland was one of the most segregated cities in the country and that blacks were trapped economically within the city, requiring an income of at least $10,000 a year to move to the suburbs.\r\n\r\nI got a further taste of desegregation planning - or lack of it - from Miami Beach the next month, at a convention of some 20,000 school board members, including about 100 board attorneys. (And no, I didn\u2019t actually get on to the beach in warm Miami. The meetings were all inside a convention center).\r\n\r\nWhat I learned from Cleveland schools lawyer William Lahman and a couple of other board members was that they were not preparing any detailed busing plan and hoping instead to expand the \u201cmagnet school\u2019 concept of city-wide students already attending the Aviation High School, Martin Luther King Vocational High Schools, Max Hayes and Jane Addams schools. Or even working up alternative schools in which youngsters spend part, if not all, the school week in a racially-mixed city-wide school in specific programs.\r\n\r\nWhat I wondered about was the instability that was growing year after year on Cleveland schools and nationwide that were chicken and egg. Which came first, instability from vandalism, violence and lower standards in schools, or planning for racial desegregation that was encouraging richer white parents and their kids to move out of city schools by the thousands? The school board members at the conference wanted to deal with vandalism, which was rife and worsening by the day, more than busing.\u00a0 An educator from Chicago said she had told her superintendent she had not yet seen one of the system\u2019s new schools. The superintendent told her: \u201cYou had better hurry because the place will be torn to the ground by the kids before you get there.\u201d\r\n\r\nIn the big world outside Cleveland\u2026. Inflation in the UK hit 24%; Bill Gates and Paul Allen started Microsoft; Patty Hearst, the kidnapped daughter of newspaper magnate Randolph Hearst, was caught in San Francisco; Muhammed Ali beat Joe Fraser in the \u2018Thrilla in Manila\u2019;\u00a0 Teamster boss Jimmy Hoffa disappeared; Spanish dictator General Franco died; and the Vietnam War ended with that humiliating spectacle of the last Americans being helicoptered off the roof of the US Embassy in Saigon, with the victorious N. Vietnamese at the gates<\/strong>.\r\n\r\nOh yes, and at the movies we had the brilliant Godfather, Part 2<\/em><\/strong>; Peter Sellers\u2019 hilarious Return of the Pink Panther<\/em><\/strong>; and Jaw<\/em>s<\/strong>, the shark movie in which just two musical notes would forever denote something sinister.[footnote]\"Two Notes That Changed the Film World: John Williams' Theme for 'Jaws.' \"\u00a0 CSO Sounds and Stories. June 8, 2017. https:\/\/csosoundsandstories.org\/two-notes-that-changed-the-film-world-john-williams-theme-for-jaws\/<\/a>[\/footnote]\r\n\r\nTwo notes that changed the film world: John Williams' theme for \"Jaws\"<\/a>\r\n\r\nhttps:\/\/youtu.be\/lV8i-pSVMaQ\r\n\r\nhttps:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=lV8i-pSVMaQ<\/a>\r\n\r\nJohn Edward Gallagher was a 22-year-old in a hurry when he was voted onto the Cleveland School Board in November, 1973, the youngest board member ever, I believe. He was an outsider, a graduate of Catholic schools and, as the vice president of a west side premiums and promotions firm (his father was president) he said he was \u201cnot tied to a desk and certain hours.\u201d\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_114\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"377\"]\"JOHN JOHN EDWARD GALLAGHER Jr,
businessman and upstart young Cleveland School Board member \u2013 and the author\u2019s best source.[\/caption]\r\n\r\nI got on well with him from the start.\u00a0We were on the same page in bringing news to the public and light to the darker corners of Dr Brigg\u2019s fiefdom, and he wasn\u2019t afraid to question and stand up for the \u2018little guy,\u2019 who was more inclined to be a Press reader than a Plain Dealer one. He was one of my main sources on the board. \u201cPeter the Leader!\u201d he would embarrassingly answer when I called him at 7.30am on Monday board meeting days, and then lay out for me all the main issues and decisions due to be taken that day. I had the best stories in the paper by noon, which the PD could rarely match.\r\n\r\nExcept once (that I know of).\u00a0My PD oppo once wrote about the time he thumbed through the voluminous agenda of a meeting and saw the board was hiring a laborer who had the same name as a board member, ie the board was hiring the son of a board member when it was cutting teaching positions. I, apparently, was staring at the ceiling. \u201cThe Press reporter told me that I got him in big trouble because he had missed it,\u201d\u00a0later wrote the PD man of his own experiences.\r\n\r\nWell, bully for you, Dick. If I got into trouble it was because it was such a rarity. The main schools stories were almost always in the Press before the PD. The editor kept me on the schools beat for six years.<\/strong>\r\n\r\nI bet my story about Breaux Palmer beat your laborer, though.\u00a0Septuagenarian Palmer was head of security for Cleveland public schools; utility man, \u201cBest-dressed Negro man in the world\u201d (a title he cherished), and Supt Briggs\u2019 bodyguard. And with almost $30,000 a year the fifth highest-paid employee in the school system. I wrote about him on Page One of The Press on Feb 26 \u201975 as part of a series about the cash-strapped school system\u2019s top earners; custodians, principals, teachers and tradesmen.\r\n\r\n\u201cHe walks into a school in sartorial perfection. Polished shoes, neatly tailored slacks and jacket, silk shirt, natty bow tie and his ever-present black wig of Chinese hair,\u201d was my lede.\r\n\r\nPalmer claimed 2000 hours of overtime - about 38 hours a week \u2013 and received $5,328 for 35,500 miles he travelled annually on his mobile-phone equipped car, most of those miles within Cleveland.\u00a0With 115 security people under his control he was often seen late at night at the scenes of break-ins, school fires, and disturbances. \u201cI will start my day at about 8.30am and many mornings I have to be in court giving evidence to the Grand Jury about various people,\u201c he told me. \u201cWe get eight or ten arrests a week for things like robberies, arsons and rapes.\u201d In the afternoon he might go to a school to check out a security guard, and at 4.30pm go home for an hour to rest.\r\n\r\nThen he\u2019s out again, \u201ca sort of cruising batman, waiting for trouble to hit one of the system\u2019s 179 schools,\u201d <\/strong>I wrote.<\/strong>\r\n\r\nPalmer carried a weapon: a silver, two-shot Beretta pistol which he pulled from his back pocket when I interviewed him. At nights he carried a 38-calibre police special revolver. He\u2019s a \u2018special sheriff\u2019s deputy\u2019, badge No 2006, with powers of arrest.\u00a0 He was on call 24 hours a day and, when I talked to him, had spent six weeks night and day at racially-fractious\r\n\r\nCollingwood High. \u201cI remember one Sunday morning at 7 o\u2019clock I had to go out and get sandblasters to remove a sign on a school wall that said \u201cKill all Niggers.\u201d\r\n\r\nYes Breaux, but still\u2026 Those overtime records?\u00a0 Do you not spend a lot of time at night at an East Side bar, claiming this as overtime?\r\n\r\n\u201cThat\u2019s Lancer\u2019s Steak House, 7707 Carnegie Ave,\u201d he replied. \u201cI\u2019m in there every night. I go in about 10.30 and leave about 11.30. \u00a0You see, one of my jobs is snooping. Most people there think because of the way I\u2019m dressed I\u2019m some kind of racketeer. I get all kinds of information. For instance, once we had a piano stolen from a school. I got it back from information obtained there.\u201d\r\n\r\nThat, according to Palmer, was genuine overtime.\r\n\r\nSo, how old was he really?\u00a0 Either 62, 64 or 73 according to three job application records over the last 30 years that I dug out. \u201cWell, the truth is, I really don\u2019t know how old I am,\u201d he said. \u201cI think I\u2019m 62 but let me check\u201d.\u00a0 He didn\u2019t have a birth certificate.\r\n\r\nHe went to the telephone, dialled a number to the school system\u2019s personnel office and to the amusement of office girls, said: \u201cThis is Breaux Palmer. Would you check my application and tell me how old I am.\u201d<\/strong>\r\n\r\nA little bit of digging around and I came up with 73 as most likely.\r\n\r\nSecond in my series was about individual, named school employees who also made a lot of money, but below the $44,540 Briggs made in 1974. \u201cHighest paid teacher was Edward Katz, who covered several elementary schools teaching music, paid a total of $22,502 on a $16,871 salary, the balance being work as a musical instrument repairman for the schools.\r\n\r\nThird in the series was \u2018How a custodian makes $27,000 a year\u2019<\/strong> -partly because of the square footage of the school, partly because vandalising students make him work overtime, and partly because they are solid union guys who know how to work the angles..\r\n
\r\n

\u00a0 Memory Flash: Newsroom, March \u201875<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/header>\r\n

\r\n\r\nSometimes you just have to run a story EXACTLY as it was published. This one Is a celebration of the bizarre and ironic, that might be called a \u2018drooper\u2019 in the sex business\r\n\r\nHeadline:<\/em>\r\n\r\n\"British Queen's subject is sex\"\r\n\r\nBy Peter Almond <\/em>\r\n\r\nOne of the facts of life being an Englishman working for an American newspaper is I get stuck with every Limey who walks into the office. <\/em>\r\n\r\nThere were the two fellows who had just rowed across the Atlantic; the chaps promoting Transcendental Meditation; the engineer who built an exact replica of the first railway engine. <\/em>\r\n\r\nThe other day I got the prize fellow countryperson to date \u2013 a porno star. <\/em>\r\n\r\nIt was the day gunman Eddie Watkins was threatening to blow up himself and six hostages in a West Side bank. <\/em>\r\n\r\nHalf the staff seemed to be out on the story, leaving me, the education writer, to write up all the other traffic fatalities, armed robberies and suchlike. <\/em>\r\n\r\n\u00a0Then the city editor walked over with a tall, slim girl wearing the most violent shade or orange hair I\u2019d ever seen, a see-through dress and black fingernails. <\/em>\r\n\r\n\u201cPeter, I\u2019d like you to meet a fellow country-woman,\u201d he said. \u201cTuppy Owens is her name and she\u2019s a porno star.\u201d <\/em>\r\n\r\nI was caught by surprise. Sex was not on my mind that crime-ridden morning and I\u2019m afraid I said: \u201cOh yes, that\u2019s nice.\u201d\u00a0 He arranged to have her photo taken and left me to interview her, I assumed. <\/em>\r\n\r\nIt was not an easy interview.<\/em>\r\n\r\nI mean, how much can one ask a porno star for publication in a family newspaper?<\/em>\r\n\r\nSo I asked where she came from in England. <\/em>\r\n\r\n\u201cCambridge,\u201d she said.\u00a0 <\/em>\r\n\r\n\u201cOh, really?\u201d said I. \u201cI went to school there for a while. I used to catch the 105 bus out of Drummer Street to Queen Edith\u2019s Way.\u201d <\/em>\r\n\r\n\u00a0Her demeanor visibly changed.<\/em>\r\n\r\n\u201cI used to catch the 103 bus out of Drummer Street,\u201d she said, unenthused.<\/em>\r\n\r\nIt turns out she is the daughter of a wedding photographer in Cambridge who sent her to the Perse School, the best grammar school in town. As I was the same age as her (29) I was therefore her contemporary, a fact she did not relish. <\/em>\r\n\r\nIt took a little time, after she had said her elder brother was a vicar, to figure out she was a raving exhibitionist.<\/em>\r\n\r\nShe won a Bachelor of Science degree at Exeter University in Zoology, went to Africa and Trinidad for a while, and in 1971 turned to pornography with a photo book on love positions. <\/em>\r\n\r\nFinding that she could make money out of her favorite hobby she wrote a couple more books - both soft-core because hard-core pornography is outlawed in England. Then she wrote her most successful book, \u201cThe Sex Maniac\u2019s Diary, a Glossary of things sexual.\u201d\u00a0The diary includes information on the sexiest clubs in the world. There\u2019s even a selection on Cleveland, stuck between Casablanca and Copenhagen.<\/em>\r\n\r\nStrangely, she rates Cleveland sexier than any of those other cities, naming a place the Vice Squad would love to hear about. Her information, she added, comes from journalists. <\/em>\r\n\r\nHer main interest in Cleveland, though, was to promote a porno movie in which she \u2018performs\u2019. It is a $25,000 production made in Holland called \u2018Sensations\u2019. <\/em>\r\n\r\nAnd that\u2019s about all I can write for publication.<\/em>\r\n\r\nExcept that she was actually embarrassed for me to interview her. <\/em>\r\n\r\n\u201cA porno queen embarrassed?\u201d I asked her.<\/em>\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, yes,\u201d she replied. \u201cI can\u2019t help thinking if we had met in Cambridge 15 years ago what a strange interview we would think this is.\u201d<\/em>\r\n\r\nI couldn\u2019t help thinking what a perfect subject she would be for a group of psychiatry students.\u201d <\/em>\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\nI am genuinely sorry about that last sentence. It was a throwaway, an unintended insult, and one I regret. It says more about me than it does about her.\r\n\r\nBecause sex remained Rosalind (Tuppy) Mary Owens\u2019 main occupation for the rest of her working life, in a vitally humane direction. In 1979 she started the Outsiders Club for socially and physically disabled people to find partners; she trained as a sex therapist in the U.S. gaining a diploma in Human Sexuality in 1986; chaired the Sexual Freedom Coalition in the UK and won several international awards for research and response to the poorly-recognized sexual needs of the disabled, disadvantaged, and lonely.\r\n\r\nAlmost 50 years later I wish I could find her to say sorry. (I keep doing that now I\u2019m in my dotage). <\/strong>\r\n\r\nBack to schools:\u00a0Lack of money, in practice, remained THE big issue for almost all Cleveland area schools in \u201875. Voters had turned down more than half of the tax levy issues in the county the year before. The federal government was struggling with inflation. The only possible source was the state of Ohio. \u201cIf school superintendents in the Cleveland area start replacing their office photos of President Ford with that of Ohio Gov. James Rhodes the reason will soon become clear to the voters,\u201d I wrote on Jan 14.\r\n\r\n\u201cGov Rhodes, they believe, is either going to save their schools from economic disaster or education in 1975 is likely to suffer.\u201d\r\n\r\nOhio was already known throughout the country as one of the worst in terms of state funding for schools. But would they budge for Cleveland, the state\u2019s biggest and most troubled school district, with more students per teacher than any of the nation\u2019s 20 largest cities - especially with Rhodes now named as the main defendant in the pending Cleveland schools desegregation case?\r\n\r\nAt the practical level at least enrollments were up at the area\u2019s Catholic schools, mostly as some 5,000 children were taken out of the city\u2019s public schools last year \u2013 providing additional tuition.\r\n\r\nThe only bright spot seemed to be a dramatic drive to improve the reading capabilities of Cleveland school children, following recommendations of a three-man panel of experts who recently examined the problem.\r\n
\r\n

Memory flash: South Euclid, May \u201875<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/header>\r\n

\r\n\r\nWe\u2019ve bought our first house, a \u2018Country French\u2019 design up the hill from Collinwood on South Belvoir Blvd, South Euclid. It has three bedrooms, a warm living room with a big picture window overlooking a steep, tree-filled 50-foot deep ravine where a tiny stream starts. To the side is a patio where I can build a tree-seat. To the front a long driveway and an expansive lawn on which there are 15 fully-grown trees. The garage has room for two cars. Anna can drive to work at her hospital. <\/em>\r\n\r\nAfter five years in a semi-basement flat we\u2019re excited. We\u2019ve bought an English Springer pup, named him Douglas (officially Sir Douglas Merriweather), and we\u2019ve got a mortgage!\u00a0 <\/em>\r\n\r\nOr do we?\u00a0We need to have a new thing called Flood Insurance, mandated to bank lenders by the government under a 1973 act which was still being rolled out across the country after some disastrous floods in Pennslyvania. Our new house was on the inside of a line drawn on a new map. The house next door was on the other side of the line. <\/em>\r\n\r\nThis was going to cost us $100 for absolutely nothing, because we were up a hill where a flood couldn\u2019t reach us.\u00a0 <\/em>\r\n\r\n\u201cThere\u2019s no way this house is going to flood,\u201d says a bank official who sent out two assessors to check the property. \u201cThe whole city of South Euclid would have to be under water before it reached the doorstep. But we have to follow the dimensions prescribed on this flood hazard map before we can give you a loan. And that house is within the flood hazard boundary.\u201d<\/em>\r\n\r\nHe produced Federal Insurance Agency Map No. H39 035 7670 01, a map of half the city of South Euclid, pinpointing our house exactly on the inside of the designated flood hazard area. <\/em>\r\n\r\nPerhaps its just as well I\u2019m a reporter. I have a nose for pettifogging officialdom.<\/em>\r\n\r\n\u201cI didn\u2019t put those measurements in there,\u201d says Stephen Hovancsek, South Euclid\u2019s City Engineer. \u201cThis isn\u2019t my map. The map I sent the Federal Insurance Agency had many more areas shaded in where there have been large numbers of flooded basements. This was supposed to be just a preliminary map, before a more detailed study could be made. It was supposed to allow people to buy flood insurance if they wanted it. I had no idea this map would cost people money.\u201d<\/em>\r\n\r\nWho overrode the recommendations of the city engineer?\u00a0 I tracked the culprits to engineers for Gannett-Fleming-Corddory Inc, of Harrisburg, Pa, one of two companies in the U.S. assigned to the Federal Insurance Administration to prepare flood hazard maps.\u00a0 An engineer there admitted that the flood maps were drawn sight unseen, and based on topographical maps, using straight lines that run parallel to roads.<\/em>\r\n\r\n\u201cIt does look in this case it would take a lot of water to reach the top of the ravine,\u201d he admits.<\/em>\r\n\r\nYou\u2019re not kidding!\u00a0 Another engineer, to whom I paid $25 for a letter to go to the bank says: \u201cTo reach your house the water would have to be half way up the Terminal Tower downtown.\u201d\u00a0ie the entire city of Cleveland under water. I wrote about this in the third person, revealing in the last paragraph that we were the couple in my story. \u201cAnd we\u2019re pretty mad about it!\u201d<\/em>\r\n\r\nWe got the mortgage, sans flood insurance<\/em>.\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\nSchool desegregation was a close second to Money, although everyone knew busing would cost a lot. I wrote hundreds of thousands of words about Reed vs Rhodes, the federal court case, between March 19 and Dec 26: forty three stories, most of them between Nov 13 and Dec 26.\r\n\r\nI have them all before me, neatly photocopied and set out in a thick folder by someone on the Press staff for to be sent off to several national journalism awards contests under \u2018breaking news.\u2019\r\n\r\n\u201cThis subject, which could have the most significant effect on Cleveland in its history, was given concentrated attention by Almond,\u201d says the introductory blurb, which I didn\u2019t write. \u201cIt is continuing with greater intensity into 1976.\u201d<\/strong>\r\n\r\nMy words won a Special Citation from the Education Writers Association in 1976, with the addition of a long interview I did with the man who ordered busing, Federal Judge Frank J. Battistsi\u00a0 (more on that later).\r\n\r\nFrankly, it gives me a headache to read through it all. I spent too many hours in court,\u00a0talking to lawyers and writing it up \u2013 often updating it edition by edition as the case progressed each day. If it wasn\u2019t for this folder I would have forgotten most of it, in detail anyway. I can\u2019t even remember when the name of the case changed from Reed vs Gilligan (the former governor of Ohio) and Reed vs Rhodes, the name of his successor under whose name the case would forever be known.\r\n\r\nI do remember the plaintiff, however, Robert Anthony Reed III. <\/strong>He was 17, had a large Afro, and was the first of 14 names on a list of plaintiffs put together by the NAACP. I interviewed him and brother Darryl - similarly tall and slim and also a plaintiff - at his home\u00a0 in Garfield Heights, a suburb but part of the Cleveland school district. With them was their mother Wyona Reed Willis and NAACP lawyer James Hardiman, who ensured they didn\u2019t stray into any legally-tricky comments before the case had even started.\r\n\r\n\u201cNeither of them, \u201cI wrote, \u201dgave any appearance of being militants, or anything else that might give satisfaction to ultra right-wing separatists. Indeed, Robert answered a question on former Black Panther leaders Eldridge Cleaver and Bobby Seale by asking \u201cwho?\u201d He said he did not agree with the aggressive philosophy of Malcolm X.\r\n\r\nI kept my opinions to myself, though, when Robert said his current hero was General George S. Patton, the World War II hero, who was white and came from a privileged background, especially after Reed and his family had made it clear he was himself the product of an all-black society and an all-black school. \u201cI used to think all white people were middle class or rich,\u201d he said. \u201cI could see them on TV. It was like they were in another world.\u201d\r\n\r\nBut more recently, he said, he had been working in a pancake house, with white kids his age \u201cand they\u2019re not so different to us.\u201d\r\n\r\nAll very nicely presented as just normal black people who are no different to white people.\r\n\r\nBut the appearance was not the reality. Cleveland\u2019s black leaders were far from satisfied they wanted the NAACP to take the desegregation case to court at all<\/strong>. As late as November, \u201975, just one week before the start of the case in federal court, the city\u2019s black leaders, led by City Council President George Forbes, were worried about the possibility of blacks being pitted against blacks in a long court battle. They knew their constituents liked neighborhood schools and feared busing.\r\n\r\nSo 30 of them came together in the top-floor Summit Room of William O. Walker\u2019s Call and Post newspaper building to thrash it out with NAACP attorneys Nathaniel Jones, James Hardiman and Thomas Atkins, led by the Rev Austin Cooper, president of the Cleveland branch of the NAACP.\u00a0It was a no-holds-barred meeting that dragged up the very basics of racial segregation. A meeting, I wrote, the likes of which has seldom been seen in Cleveland.\u00a0It ended four hours later with an almost complete transformation of attitudes.\r\n\r\n\u201cWhen the history of Cleveland\u2019s school desegregation efforts is finally written a significant section might well be entitled \u201cThe day the NAACP won over the Black leaders,\u201d <\/strong>I wrote.\r\n\r\nThe meeting nearly collapsed before it started. Everyone there was black except for one, NAACP researcher Terry Demchak. There were whisperings, a few glances, and publisher Walker said: \u201cThis is a meeting for black folks. What we got to talk about is just between us.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cWell, that\u2019s too bad,\u201d said NAACP leader Jones. \u201cShe\u2019s part of our team, If she goes, we all go.\u201d\r\n\r\nAs they prepared to leave George Forbes said: \u201cYou\u2019re nothing but a bunch of phonies. Leaving? We figured you weren\u2019t serious anyway. If you go, everyone in town\u2019s gonna know the NAACP refused to sit down with Cleveland\u2019s black leaders.\u201d\r\n\r\nAll the NAACP team left the room, leaving a cabal of leaders huddled in conversation around Walker and Forbes, deciding this was not the time to get hung up on black ideology over the presence at a \u2018blacks only\u2019 meeting of one white woman. Jones and Cooper came back to present the NAACP\u2019s case. School Board President Arnold Pinkney asked why the NAACP was using \u2018outsiders\u2019 to try to turn Cleveland into another Boston, where busing was wrecking the city\u2019s school desegregation.\r\n\r\n\u201cOutsider? There\u2019s no way you can call me or the NAACP outsiders in Cleveland!\u201d said an outraged Jones who, until he became national general counsel for the civil rights organization was a United States attorney in Cleveland. \u201cThe NAACP has worked for blacks here for more than 50 years.\u201d\r\n\r\nPolitical posturing, replied Pinkney, implying that some in the NAACP had grudges against him. Going to trial to justify national policies and recoup its legal costs, said someone else. But when asked if the case could still be settled out of court Jones said it had already gone too far, there were constitutional violations that need to be corrected, he said.\u00a0But when someone said: \u201cForget the courts and all this trial business,\u201d the NAACP\u2019s Rev Cooper exploded in fury.\r\n\r\n\u201cForget the law?\u00a0Forget the law?\u201d he cried. \u201cThat makes me sick. Don\u2019t you ever say that in my presence again. I come from a part of the country where black folks had their butts kicked all over the countryside and we had no recourse. But here we\u2019ve got the law, and the court, to protect us, to assert ourselves\u201d.<\/strong>\r\n\r\nJones talked about the history of desegregation and the kind of evidence used elsewhere, or manipulation of boundaries, transfer of teachers, construction of school buildings. \u201cCleveland is no different from elsewhere,\u201d he said to a now-quieter audience.\u00a0But still the images of busing remained. Jones kept hammering the point:\u00a0 \u201cYou\u2019re talking about the remedy. Always the remedy. You can\u2019t even reach that stage without having a declaration that what the School Board has been doing is in violation of the rights of every black child in this city. If you give up your rights and responsibilities to go to court on this subject, if you cop out in this area, you trade off your rights in other areas. You seal your doom in other areas.\u00a0This thing is much bigger than a school bus.\u201d\r\n\r\nOne by one people began to leave. The meeting ended on a somber note. The black leaders realized there was no turning back from the trial. George Forbes, the man who had expressed greatest hostility at the start, thanked Nate Jones for staying through the meeting.\r\n\r\n\u201cI was looking at some of the expressions on the faces of people here,\u201d said Forbes. \u201cNot only has my mind been changed, but I think a lot of minds have been changed.\u201d \u00a0<\/strong>\r\n\r\nFor some reason I now forget, this story did not run until the day after Judge Battisti ruled against the School Board ten months later, Sept 1, 1976. And then it was the paper\u2019s main story.\r\n
\r\n

Memory Flash: Cleveland Municipal Stadium, June 14, \u201875 <\/em><\/strong><\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/header>\r\n

\r\n\r\nSo I said to Charlie as loud as I could: \u201cHow are you enjoying Cleveland so far?\u201d <\/em>\r\n\r\n\u201cGreat,\u201d said Charlie, twisting his drumsticks around his fingers as he lounged on a sofa. \u201cA great city.\u201d<\/em>\r\n\r\n\u201cDid you know this is the town that came up with Rock \u2019n\u2019 Roll - the NAME \u2018rock \u2018n\u2019roll\u2019?\u201d I shouted, unable in all the bedlam to think of something witty, sharp, amusing or truly engaging. Not even \u201cDid you know your car is on a double yellow?\u201d would do it.\u00a0 <\/em>\r\n\r\nCharlie looked a bit surprised and said \u2018Oh.\u2019 <\/em>\r\n\r\nThen a Roadie stepped in to say something to him, and together they turned to examine a drum, and that was Charlie Watts of the Rolling Stones lost to me.\u00a0 <\/em>\r\n\r\nI only had five minutes with the Greatest Rock Band in the World, about to perform a massive gig in the raucous, packed-out 82,000-seat stadium, one of only two press reporters given access to the Stones in their dressing room beneath the building (the other, probably, being the legendary Jane Scott of the Plain Dealer - the\u2019 oldest rock critic in the world.\u2019 I had The Press slot because I had already declared in print my affection for the band from its earliest days, and because I was English the newsdesk thought I might wheedle a little more out of them than Jane, or own Bruno Bornino.\u00a0 <\/em>\r\n\r\nBut it was bedlam both outside and inside the stadium, including the dressing room. Mick Jagger was in intense conversation with a woman about microphones. Bill Wyman was curled up in an armchair, his eyes closed and plugs in his ears; Ronnie Wood, newest Stone, wasn\u2019t interested in anything but tuning his guitar; and Keith Richards wasn\u2019t anywhere to be seen. When my five minutes was up Ms PR escorted me out of the stadium.<\/em>\r\n\r\nT\u2019was ever thus. I had interviewed the Stones eight years earlier, in 1967, backstage at the Odeon Theatre in Leeds, England, and it wasn\u2019t much different then. That time I found Keith Richards to be boring, Brian Jones (who drowned, accidentally, in a swimming pool) missing, Charlie Watts downright insulting and Mick Jagger drunk and truculent and sporting a forehead cut inflicted the night before by a \u2019fan\u2019 who threw a beer can. \u201cThe only one still retaining a shred of civility,\u201d I wrote for the Yorkshire Evening Press at the time, \u201cwas Bill Wyman, who seemed the least affected by the international fame.\u2019\u00a0 <\/em>\r\n\r\nThis time, and again without satisfaction, I faded away back to the paper on nearby E.9th St. <\/em>\r\n\r\nThe next morning only my description of the Stones\u2019 preparations made it into the paper (the latter part was put on a page filled with three large schools stories by me, as if the Rolling Stones somehow had a direct connection to Cleveland schools). Anna and I did get to see the show, however, and it was as good as we expected (although she\u2019s not really into Heavy Metal). <\/em>\r\n\r\nAfter the Ten Cent Beer night at the stadium a year earlier, police were massed in considerable numbers for days before the event, 40 police officers alone dealing with ticket scalpers, 110 off-duty police assisting the stadium security, 79 dealing with illegal parking.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Even so, I remember two young lads died when they fell of the stadium\u2019s external structure.\u00a0\u00a0 <\/em>\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\nA lot of the youngsters at that Stones concert had finished school for the year barely a week earlier, ending a school year marked for its unparalleled lawlessness across Greater Cleveland. A five-part series on it started on June 9 and declared that thousands of teachers and administrators were \u2018counting the cost of one of the worst years of violence and vandalism in the nation\u2019s history.<\/strong>\u2019 In Cleveland 40 students had been expelled for carrying -and sometime using - guns, knives and other weapons, \u2018more than the schools expelled over the last 30 years combined.\u2019\r\n\r\nHerman Imel, properties control supervisor of Cleveland\u2019s public schools, said that already by spring vandalism was up 25% over last year. \u201cI am discouraged,\u2019 he told me. \u201cIf this is any indication, we\u2019re in for a very bad summer. As the days get longer, vandalism gets worse\u201d.\r\n\r\nOur photographer Herman Seid took a heartbreaking picture of students at Adlai Stevenson elementary school hunting through a pile of damaged pictures ripped from walls, trying to see if their own artwork was damaged. Seven boys, aged 10 to 16, were arrested after they smashed windows, ransacked five classrooms and destroyed artwork.\r\n\r\nAcross Cuyahoga County increasing numbers of children were simply leaving their desks and walking out \u2013 or not going to school at all. A teacher at Cleveland Heights High said she was a substitute who came to teach a class and several students just walked out. \u201cThey saw I was a substitute so they decided to walk out,\u201d she reported. \u201cI told them I would report them to the principal. They just laughed. They could care less.\u201d\r\n\r\nOn one recent Monday at Glenville High School in Cleveland 667 of the school\u2019s 2300 students \u2013 almost 30% of the total \u2013 were marked absent. Almost any spring weekday could find hundreds of youths who should be in school picknicking in Greater Cleveland\u2019s Metroparks.\r\n\r\n\u201cI\u2019m sorry to say that today the kids are looking jaded even in kindergarten,\u201d Mrs Muriel banks, a learning disabilities teacher at Gilbert Elementary school, told me. \u201cI don\u2019t know what\u2019s wrong. It\u2019s rough. Even in kindergarten kids are rude, their language is terrible. All grades have kids who miss school or walk out of a classroom without being dismissed.\u201d<\/strong>\r\n\r\nWhat\u2019s the answer?\u00a0 Big, controversial question. I spent a lot of time asking experts from across the country for their recommendations. Some said they should do as Catholic schools and return to dress codes, even if only a couple of days a week when they are required to wear school uniforms. Some said the school leaving age should be lowered from 18 to 16, or even 14. Corporal punishment wasn\u2019t an alternative, although some Ohio schools still used it.\r\n\r\nOhio was one of only five states in America that had compulsory school attendance until 18. The others were Hawaii, Oklahoma, Oregon, Utah and Washington state; none with big city problems comparable to Cleveland. David Moberly, former superintendent of Cleveland Heights schools, who moved to head Evanston school district in suburban Chicago, said: \u201cI feel that if the kids here were forced to stay in school until they were 18, like we had in Cleveland heights, we would really have to fight a battle.\u201d\u00a0But with few jobs to go to at 14 or 16 would these dropout kids be targets for troublemakers and criminals?\r\n\r\nPersonally, I thought that the sheer size of most high schools \u2013 2,500 to 3000 students, while providing wide-ranging and cost-effective facilities \u2013 made American high schools too impersonal, and too formulaic. But what sort of an expert was I, from a foreign country?\r\n
\r\n

Memory flash: \u00a0Walhonding, Ohio.\u00a0 July 1975<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/header>\r\n

\r\n\r\nWe\u2019re back at one of our favorite camp sites, next to the Mohican River. The six of us \u2013 Anna, me, Jim, Marcy, Al and Nancy, have had a delightful day slowly paddling downstream for 15 miles, looking out for the Sparrow Hawks, finches, Egrets and, of course, the state bird of Ohio, the Red Cardinal. We\u2019ve grounded a couple of times, trailed our fingers in the water, eaten our sandwiches and listened to the quiet. <\/em>\r\n\r\nNow we\u2019re sitting around a campfire eating marshmallows, drinking wine and someone is reading a creepy story aloud. If Daniel Day-Lewis doesn\u2019t leap out of the darkness with a blood-curdling scream I wouldn\u2019t be surprised. <\/em>\r\n\r\nBut what IS that noise?\u00a0A slight hissing from the darkened river. <\/em>\r\n\r\n\u201cCan you hear that noise?\u201d\u00a0say I.\u00a0 <\/em>\r\n\r\nSomeone points a flashlight towards the river.\u00a0There are MILLIONS of white-looking flying bugs streaming down the river.\u00a0\u00a0 <\/em>\r\n\r\n\u201cFireflies!\u201d says Jim, our expert for all things outdoors (since he is, indeed, The Press\u2019 Outdoors Writer).\u00a0 <\/em>\r\n\r\n\u201cI\u2019ll turn a headlight on them,\u201d say I, thinking we could see this annual migration\u00a0better.\u00a0 <\/em>\r\n\r\n\u201cNO! Don\u2019t!\u201d says Jim. \u201dThey\u2019ll turn this\u2026.!\u201d\u00a0 <\/em>\r\n\r\nHe didn\u2019t get to say \u201cway\u201d!\u00a0 because they were already doing it. Attracted by my car headlights the mllions of fireflies automatically turned left towards the brightest light, which happened to be adjacent to our campfire. Argghhh! I quickly turned off the headlights and the fireflies- after some flappy confusion that seemed to involve marshmallows -\u00a0 rediscovered their original march upriver. <\/em>\r\n\r\nAnother narrow escape for Yours Truly.\u00a0 Phew!<\/em>\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_110\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"611\"]\"WALHONDING WALHONDING SIX. Yes, you\u2019re laughing now, but you weren\u2019t last night when the fireflies came! Press reporters Almond, Dudas and Thompson \u2013 and their wives - canoe-camping on the Mohican River, central Ohio, in 1975.[\/caption]\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\nOne thing about being an education writer in the 70s was that it suggested my education included a significant understanding of science and mathematics. It doesn\u2019t, and it certainly didn\u2019t in March, 1975, when I was asked to write a piece about the new phenomenum of calculators in schools.\r\n\r\nHand-held calculators had only become available in 1972, when they quickly became popular with businessmen on airplanes, housewives in supermarkets, taxpayers at home. But for sixth graders (11-year-olds) at schools?\r\n\r\nDriven partly by a report by the quasi-government National Advisory Committee on Mathematical Education (NACOME) eighth graders and above across the country were recommended to have access to calculators for all classwork and exams.\u00a0This caused ructions in American schools and with parents. Kids being told they can use a MACHINE for the four basics: add, subtract, multiply and divide?\u00a0 How is THAT going to help children\u00a0 whose brains can barely add 10 and 5 together?\r\n\r\nBut slowly, school district by school district, Cleveland area children had started to get them, on the principle that they help you get over the basics and on into more advanced math much quicker and with fewer mistakes \u2013 30 seconds for basic calculations against several minutes working it out on paper, with a chance of getting it wrong.\u00a0I remember at school in the 60s that I failed an exam involving quadratic equations because I had mentally added or subtracted one basic figure that produced a wrong answer.\r\n\r\nTen years later, it was the Litronix 2230 which could instantly do the basics, with a square root function, a memory function and an error function. Some of the cheaper hand-helds with basic functions cost only $20 each ($100 in 2020), within the budget of some of the wealthier schools in the area. Shaker Heights\u2019 Dad\u2019s Club bought $500 worth of six-digit calculators for the school system\u2019s 6th graders which spent two weeks at each of the city\u2019s nine elementary schools. Candy sales at Mooney Junior High in Cleveland bought 24 calculators at $28 apiece.\r\n\r\nThe arguments were building for and against. \u201cGenerally, they should not be used by youngsters who still do not understand why the calculator does what it does\u201d, the head of the Ohio Council of Teachers of Mathematics, told me.\u00a0\u201cIn Junior high I think they should be used as soon as they are fair to all kids. By the ninth grade all students should be required to use them\u201d.\r\n\r\nIn October my mother came to visit our new house in South Euclid. \u201cMUCH better than that flat,\u201d she said. We went off traveling:\u00a0 via York, Pennsylvania where, of course, I took a picture of Mom standing next to the York sign so she could show it to her friends and family back in York, England. Not exactly a suitable response to her gift to us of a large, limited-edition encased ceramic plate marking the 1700th year of York\u2019s founding by the Romans.\u00a0And then to Gettysburg, to Washington DC, and Jamestown, Virginia where, besides copies of the original ships that crossed from England in 1607, we discovered the still-new concept of \u2018factory outlets,\u2019 retail stores which were just a shade below top-quality, and thus attractively cheap.\r\n\r\nThen on to North Carolina\u2019s Outer Banks, where we discovered The Wind which helped the Wright Brothers get their Flyer into the air at nearby Kill Devil Hills.\r\n\r\nWe camped at Pea Island, my mother lying between Anna and me in our sleeping bags as the wind shook our tent all night and where, in the morning, Mum was filmed briskly trying to catch the wind-caught cornflakes as they were poured from box to bowl -a futile endeavour.\u00a0 We were grateful that the wind had dropped considerably when I put her into our Sea Eagle inflatable canoe and I pushed her out to sea for her first-ever paddle. Fortunately, only Anna ever knew of my mounting panic as she started drifting away.\r\n\r\nThe next month came a reminder that wind and sea disasters are not exclusive to oceans like the Atlantic, but can reach deep inland to the Great Lakes.\u00a0 <\/strong>\r\n\r\nOn Nov 10, a month after Pea Island, the 26,000-ton iron ore carrier Edmund Fitzgerald sank in a ferocious storm on Lake Superior. All 29 of its crew died.\u00a0 It was not the worst disaster of the Great Lakes (that was undoubtedly the sinking of the SS Eastland in 1915, which rolled on its side while docked on the Chicago River, killing 848 passengers and crew). But the Edmund Fitzgerald is much more remembered because the wreck lay undetected at the bottom of Lake Superior for many years, because none of its crew were recovered, and mostly because of a haunting song: The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, by Gordon Lightfoot.<\/strong>\r\n\r\nhttps:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=K6DUFPNILvM\r\n\r\nhttps:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=K6DUFPNILvM<\/a>\r\n\r\nIt\u2019s a long, toughly-emotional folksong that echoes a saying of Lake Superior\u2019s Chippewa tribe:\r\n\r\n\u201cThe legend lives on from the Chippewa on down<\/em>\r\nOf the big lake they called Gitche Gumee<\/em>\r\nSuperior, they said, never gives up her dead<\/em>\r\nWhen the gales of November come early.\u201d<\/em>\r\n\r\nAnd its connection to Cleveland? The Edmund Fitzgerald called on Cleveland and most of the Great lakes\u2019 steel-making ports (despite what Lightfoot sings, however, it was NOT headed for Cleveland on Nov 10,\u201975 but to Detroit). It was owned by the Cleveland-based firm Oglebay Norton and about a third of the crew came from the Cleveland area, including its senior officers.\r\n\r\nAnd for one newly-naturalized English Clevelander five years later it would be known as the tune to rewritten lyrics by Bobby Sands, a leader of the Provisional IRA who died on hunger strike in the Maze prison, Belfast, in May, 1981, a major moment of the barely-settled multi-generational Troubles between Catholic Irish and Protestant Ulsterman and women. Sands\u2019 song: \u2018Back Home in Derry,\u2019 described the voyage of Irish convicts to Australia after the rebellion of 1803.\r\n\r\nhttps:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=iheirlzWZuY\r\n\r\nhttps:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=iheirlzWZuY<\/a>\r\n\r\nAlmost nothing was said at his death about what he was convicted for. <\/strong>\r\n\r\nBut I knew what Sands had done, because I was there three hours after he and his gang blew up the storeroom of the Balmoral Furniture Co in Dunmurry, Northern Ireland in October, 1976, almost a year after the Edmund Fitzgerald. My story that Nov 8 was the lead on Page 1 of the Cleveland Press, the first of a six-part series I wrote for the paper at what was to become known at the peak of The Troubles.\r\n\r\nIt was also a memorable moment for Anna, who was in a bedroom of a Dunmurry hotel \u2013 trying to catch an escaped parakeet and awaiting my return from a flak-jacketed patrol with the British Army \u2013 when the explosions shook her window and soldiers ran across the neighboring golf course in pursuit of what turned out to be Sands and his IRA gang.<\/strong>\r\n\r\nAt his death in May, 1981 The Press re-ran that story of 1976, describing for all suburban housewives how Mrs Agnes Nicholls, \u2018a homey, middle-class woman living in a semi-detached house in a suburb, has just discovered that she lives in a war zone.\u201d\u00a0She had been upstairs making beds when she heard sharp cracks outside, watched police and soldiers running and shouting and shooting \u201cbang, bang, bang, very fast\u2019.\u00a0A man lay wounded by her front gate, she found the gun he threw away, then the bombs went off. The four others, including Sands, were caught in a car shortly afterwards.\r\n\r\nThat\u2019s the thing about terrorists: you never know where and when they will strike<\/strong>.\r\n\r\nMore about The Troubles in the next chapter.\r\n
\r\n

Memory Flash: S. Belvoir Blvd, South Euclid, Xmas 1975<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/header>\r\n

\r\n\r\nWe\u2019re having a house-warming party, proudly showing off the stressed late-medieval heavy dark oak hutch and extendable solid oak dining table with Windsor chairs that we bought new from Higbees store downtown.\u00a0And the new carpeting and neat low circular table in the living room. And all our little knick-knacks brought over from England, including the set of lovable little Golliwogs. <\/em>\r\n\r\nLittle WHAT?\u00a0 <\/em>\r\n\r\nGolliwogs. To quote from Wikipedia[footnote] \"Golliwog.\" Wikipedia. April 4, 2022. https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Golliwog<\/a>[\/footnote]: \u201cThe\u00a0golliwog,\u00a0golliwogg\u00a0or\u00a0golly\u00a0is a doll-like character \u2013 created by cartoonist and author\u00a0<\/em>Florence Kate Upton<\/em>\u00a0\u2013 that appeared in children's books in the late 19th century, usually depicted as a type of\u00a0<\/em>rag doll<\/em>. It was reproduced, both by commercial and hobby toy-makers, as a children's toy called the \"golliwog\", a\u00a0<\/em>portmanteau<\/em>\u00a0of\u00a0golly\u00a0and\u00a0<\/em>polliwog<\/em>\u00a0and had great popularity in the UK and Australia into the 1970s. The doll is characterised by jet black skin, eyes rimmed in white, exaggerated red lips and frizzy hair, a\u00a0<\/em>blackface<\/em>\u00a0<\/em>minstrel<\/em>\u00a0tradition\u2019.<\/em>\r\n\r\nAnna\u2019s mother had made them for her when she was a child. She played with them and slept with them, along with her teddy bears and other dolls. They were well-established in British culture, written in the Noddy children\u2019s books of Enid Blyton and appearing on every jar of Robertson\u2019s jam. The firm would even send you a Golliwog brooch. I had one once. <\/em>\r\n\r\nWe never thought anything of it \u2013 until that day in our own house when we saw a few of our black friends standing close together and looking with serious expressions at our Gollies. They said nothing to us, but smiled politely. It was only later that we learned these little dolls were offensive to people of color in America. <\/em>\r\n\r\nTo quote Wiki again: \u201cThe doll is widely recognized as racist. While some people see the doll as an innocuous toy associated with childhood,\u00a0it is considered by others as a\u00a0<\/em>racist<\/em>\u00a0caricature of black Africans alongside\u00a0<\/em>pickaninnies<\/em>,\u00a0<\/em>minstrels<\/em>, and\u00a0<\/em>mammy<\/em>\u00a0figures. The\u00a0<\/em>Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia<\/em>\u00a0described the golliwog as \"the least known of the major\u00a0<\/em>anti-Black caricatures<\/em>\u00a0in the United States\"<\/em>\r\n\r\nOh dear. We\u2019re not in Kansas any more, Honey Bun, I thought as I prepared for the New Year and more months of school desegregation court battles.\u00a0 \u00a0<\/em>\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>","rendered":"
\n
\n

Memory Flash: Ninth District Federal Court, Cleveland<\/em>, Nov 24, 1975<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n<\/header>\n

\n

Opening day of Reed vs Rhodes, the Cleveland schools desegregation case. (<\/em>An end of the year start).\u00a0And I am shocked. Truly shocked. <\/em><\/p>\n

Nathaniel Jones, lead prosecutor for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), has just begun to recount how we got here, via the first desegregation trial of national significance: Brown vs Board of Education, Topeka, Kansas, 1954. <\/em><\/p>\n

He tells us of a young black girl, perhaps five or six, in the witness box in that case, who was handed two dolls, one white and one brown, and was asked: \u201cWhich is the good doll, and which is the bad one?\u201d\u00a0 <\/em><\/p>\n

The girl pointed to the white doll as \u2018good\u2019 and the brown one as \u2018bad.\u201d Jones presented testing evidence that this was a common response from young black children. <\/em><\/p>\n

As a white boy growing up in England with no exposure to the emotional depths of racial segregation I had never considered this aspect of the vestiges of slavery:\u00a0the sense of inferiority from the color of a person\u2019s skin. And that it could have had such an effect on a child so young.\u00a0 \u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

There was more, but I was not aware of it until much later. The NAACP lawyers in Brown were using ground-breaking studies done in the early 1950 by black husband and wife New York psychologists Mamie and Kenneth Clark into the long-term pernicious effects on society of racial segregation in the US. (They had to paint one of the white dolls brown because manufacturers did not make any brown or black dolls then).\u00a0 <\/em><\/p>\n

Shocking as the \u2018good\u2019 and \u2018bad\u2019 dolls were they also asked the kids which dolls looked most like them. Some of the children cried and ran out of the room because they did not want to identify with the brown dolls. They looked at TV and wanted blue eyes and blonde hair \u2013 and white skin. <\/em><\/p>\n

The Clarks were so upset they delayed publishing their conclusions.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/em><\/p>\n

In 2010 the US TV news channel CNN commissioned a reproduction of the studies with 133 children, from a mix of racially segregated schools, this time including a substantial number of white kids. The results, reportedly, were strikingly similar. The white children maintained an intense bias towards whiteness. The black children, fortunately, had a more positive view of the dolls of their color. <\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Was that my highlight of 1975, starting at the end? Hardly, because the city was being prepared for school desegregation from March onwards by outsiders from cities who were already doing it. \u201cDesegregation will come to Cleveland, city leaders are told<\/strong>\u201d was one headline on a story I wrote. In order to make it work peacefully, the outsiders said, Cleveland\u2019s leaders should start to plan for it now.<\/p>\n

The message was given to business, church, education, news media and labor leaders by the police commissioner of Boston, the deputy superintendent of Detroit schools, an official of Memphis schools and an Ohio State University professor, invited to Cleveland State University by a Cleveland churches council. They heard from Ohio State University representative Prof Charles Glatt that Cleveland was one of the most segregated cities in the country and that blacks were trapped economically within the city, requiring an income of at least $10,000 a year to move to the suburbs.<\/p>\n

I got a further taste of desegregation planning – or lack of it – from Miami Beach the next month, at a convention of some 20,000 school board members, including about 100 board attorneys. (And no, I didn\u2019t actually get on to the beach in warm Miami. The meetings were all inside a convention center).<\/p>\n

What I learned from Cleveland schools lawyer William Lahman and a couple of other board members was that they were not preparing any detailed busing plan and hoping instead to expand the \u201cmagnet school\u2019 concept of city-wide students already attending the Aviation High School, Martin Luther King Vocational High Schools, Max Hayes and Jane Addams schools. Or even working up alternative schools in which youngsters spend part, if not all, the school week in a racially-mixed city-wide school in specific programs.<\/p>\n

What I wondered about was the instability that was growing year after year on Cleveland schools and nationwide that were chicken and egg. Which came first, instability from vandalism, violence and lower standards in schools, or planning for racial desegregation that was encouraging richer white parents and their kids to move out of city schools by the thousands? The school board members at the conference wanted to deal with vandalism, which was rife and worsening by the day, more than busing.\u00a0 An educator from Chicago said she had told her superintendent she had not yet seen one of the system\u2019s new schools. The superintendent told her: \u201cYou had better hurry because the place will be torn to the ground by the kids before you get there.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the big world outside Cleveland\u2026. Inflation in the UK hit 24%; Bill Gates and Paul Allen started Microsoft; Patty Hearst, the kidnapped daughter of newspaper magnate Randolph Hearst, was caught in San Francisco; Muhammed Ali beat Joe Fraser in the \u2018Thrilla in Manila\u2019;\u00a0 Teamster boss Jimmy Hoffa disappeared; Spanish dictator General Franco died; and the Vietnam War ended with that humiliating spectacle of the last Americans being helicoptered off the roof of the US Embassy in Saigon, with the victorious N. Vietnamese at the gates<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

Oh yes, and at the movies we had the brilliant Godfather, Part 2<\/em><\/strong>; Peter Sellers\u2019 hilarious Return of the Pink Panther<\/em><\/strong>; and Jaw<\/em>s<\/strong>, the shark movie in which just two musical notes would forever denote something sinister.[1]<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

Two notes that changed the film world: John Williams’ theme for “Jaws”<\/a><\/p>\n

https:\/\/youtu.be\/lV8i-pSVMaQ<\/p>\n

https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=lV8i-pSVMaQ<\/a><\/p>\n

John Edward Gallagher was a 22-year-old in a hurry when he was voted onto the Cleveland School Board in November, 1973, the youngest board member ever, I believe. He was an outsider, a graduate of Catholic schools and, as the vice president of a west side premiums and promotions firm (his father was president) he said he was \u201cnot tied to a desk and certain hours.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"JOHN
JOHN EDWARD GALLAGHER Jr,
businessman and upstart young Cleveland School Board member \u2013 and the author\u2019s best source.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I got on well with him from the start.\u00a0We were on the same page in bringing news to the public and light to the darker corners of Dr Brigg\u2019s fiefdom, and he wasn\u2019t afraid to question and stand up for the \u2018little guy,\u2019 who was more inclined to be a Press reader than a Plain Dealer one. He was one of my main sources on the board. \u201cPeter the Leader!\u201d he would embarrassingly answer when I called him at 7.30am on Monday board meeting days, and then lay out for me all the main issues and decisions due to be taken that day. I had the best stories in the paper by noon, which the PD could rarely match.<\/p>\n

Except once (that I know of).\u00a0My PD oppo once wrote about the time he thumbed through the voluminous agenda of a meeting and saw the board was hiring a laborer who had the same name as a board member, ie the board was hiring the son of a board member when it was cutting teaching positions. I, apparently, was staring at the ceiling. \u201cThe Press reporter told me that I got him in big trouble because he had missed it,\u201d\u00a0later wrote the PD man of his own experiences.<\/p>\n

Well, bully for you, Dick. If I got into trouble it was because it was such a rarity. The main schools stories were almost always in the Press before the PD. The editor kept me on the schools beat for six years.<\/strong><\/p>\n

I bet my story about Breaux Palmer beat your laborer, though.\u00a0Septuagenarian Palmer was head of security for Cleveland public schools; utility man, \u201cBest-dressed Negro man in the world\u201d (a title he cherished), and Supt Briggs\u2019 bodyguard. And with almost $30,000 a year the fifth highest-paid employee in the school system. I wrote about him on Page One of The Press on Feb 26 \u201975 as part of a series about the cash-strapped school system\u2019s top earners; custodians, principals, teachers and tradesmen.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe walks into a school in sartorial perfection. Polished shoes, neatly tailored slacks and jacket, silk shirt, natty bow tie and his ever-present black wig of Chinese hair,\u201d was my lede.<\/p>\n

Palmer claimed 2000 hours of overtime – about 38 hours a week \u2013 and received $5,328 for 35,500 miles he travelled annually on his mobile-phone equipped car, most of those miles within Cleveland.\u00a0With 115 security people under his control he was often seen late at night at the scenes of break-ins, school fires, and disturbances. \u201cI will start my day at about 8.30am and many mornings I have to be in court giving evidence to the Grand Jury about various people,\u201c he told me. \u201cWe get eight or ten arrests a week for things like robberies, arsons and rapes.\u201d In the afternoon he might go to a school to check out a security guard, and at 4.30pm go home for an hour to rest.<\/p>\n

Then he\u2019s out again, \u201ca sort of cruising batman, waiting for trouble to hit one of the system\u2019s 179 schools,\u201d <\/strong>I wrote.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Palmer carried a weapon: a silver, two-shot Beretta pistol which he pulled from his back pocket when I interviewed him. At nights he carried a 38-calibre police special revolver. He\u2019s a \u2018special sheriff\u2019s deputy\u2019, badge No 2006, with powers of arrest.\u00a0 He was on call 24 hours a day and, when I talked to him, had spent six weeks night and day at racially-fractious<\/p>\n

Collingwood High. \u201cI remember one Sunday morning at 7 o\u2019clock I had to go out and get sandblasters to remove a sign on a school wall that said \u201cKill all Niggers.\u201d<\/p>\n

Yes Breaux, but still\u2026 Those overtime records?\u00a0 Do you not spend a lot of time at night at an East Side bar, claiming this as overtime?<\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s Lancer\u2019s Steak House, 7707 Carnegie Ave,\u201d he replied. \u201cI\u2019m in there every night. I go in about 10.30 and leave about 11.30. \u00a0You see, one of my jobs is snooping. Most people there think because of the way I\u2019m dressed I\u2019m some kind of racketeer. I get all kinds of information. For instance, once we had a piano stolen from a school. I got it back from information obtained there.\u201d<\/p>\n

That, according to Palmer, was genuine overtime.<\/p>\n

So, how old was he really?\u00a0 Either 62, 64 or 73 according to three job application records over the last 30 years that I dug out. \u201cWell, the truth is, I really don\u2019t know how old I am,\u201d he said. \u201cI think I\u2019m 62 but let me check\u201d.\u00a0 He didn\u2019t have a birth certificate.<\/p>\n

He went to the telephone, dialled a number to the school system\u2019s personnel office and to the amusement of office girls, said: \u201cThis is Breaux Palmer. Would you check my application and tell me how old I am.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

A little bit of digging around and I came up with 73 as most likely.<\/p>\n

Second in my series was about individual, named school employees who also made a lot of money, but below the $44,540 Briggs made in 1974. \u201cHighest paid teacher was Edward Katz, who covered several elementary schools teaching music, paid a total of $22,502 on a $16,871 salary, the balance being work as a musical instrument repairman for the schools.<\/p>\n

Third in the series was \u2018How a custodian makes $27,000 a year\u2019<\/strong> -partly because of the square footage of the school, partly because vandalising students make him work overtime, and partly because they are solid union guys who know how to work the angles..<\/p>\n

\n
\n

\u00a0 Memory Flash: Newsroom, March \u201875<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n<\/header>\n

\n

Sometimes you just have to run a story EXACTLY as it was published. This one Is a celebration of the bizarre and ironic, that might be called a \u2018drooper\u2019 in the sex business<\/p>\n

Headline:<\/em><\/p>\n

“British Queen’s subject is sex”<\/p>\n

By Peter Almond <\/em><\/p>\n

One of the facts of life being an Englishman working for an American newspaper is I get stuck with every Limey who walks into the office. <\/em><\/p>\n

There were the two fellows who had just rowed across the Atlantic; the chaps promoting Transcendental Meditation; the engineer who built an exact replica of the first railway engine. <\/em><\/p>\n

The other day I got the prize fellow countryperson to date \u2013 a porno star. <\/em><\/p>\n

It was the day gunman Eddie Watkins was threatening to blow up himself and six hostages in a West Side bank. <\/em><\/p>\n

Half the staff seemed to be out on the story, leaving me, the education writer, to write up all the other traffic fatalities, armed robberies and suchlike. <\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a0Then the city editor walked over with a tall, slim girl wearing the most violent shade or orange hair I\u2019d ever seen, a see-through dress and black fingernails. <\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cPeter, I\u2019d like you to meet a fellow country-woman,\u201d he said. \u201cTuppy Owens is her name and she\u2019s a porno star.\u201d <\/em><\/p>\n

I was caught by surprise. Sex was not on my mind that crime-ridden morning and I\u2019m afraid I said: \u201cOh yes, that\u2019s nice.\u201d\u00a0 He arranged to have her photo taken and left me to interview her, I assumed. <\/em><\/p>\n

It was not an easy interview.<\/em><\/p>\n

I mean, how much can one ask a porno star for publication in a family newspaper?<\/em><\/p>\n

So I asked where she came from in England. <\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cCambridge,\u201d she said.\u00a0 <\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cOh, really?\u201d said I. \u201cI went to school there for a while. I used to catch the 105 bus out of Drummer Street to Queen Edith\u2019s Way.\u201d <\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a0Her demeanor visibly changed.<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cI used to catch the 103 bus out of Drummer Street,\u201d she said, unenthused.<\/em><\/p>\n

It turns out she is the daughter of a wedding photographer in Cambridge who sent her to the Perse School, the best grammar school in town. As I was the same age as her (29) I was therefore her contemporary, a fact she did not relish. <\/em><\/p>\n

It took a little time, after she had said her elder brother was a vicar, to figure out she was a raving exhibitionist.<\/em><\/p>\n

She won a Bachelor of Science degree at Exeter University in Zoology, went to Africa and Trinidad for a while, and in 1971 turned to pornography with a photo book on love positions. <\/em><\/p>\n

Finding that she could make money out of her favorite hobby she wrote a couple more books – both soft-core because hard-core pornography is outlawed in England. Then she wrote her most successful book, \u201cThe Sex Maniac\u2019s Diary, a Glossary of things sexual.\u201d\u00a0The diary includes information on the sexiest clubs in the world. There\u2019s even a selection on Cleveland, stuck between Casablanca and Copenhagen.<\/em><\/p>\n

Strangely, she rates Cleveland sexier than any of those other cities, naming a place the Vice Squad would love to hear about. Her information, she added, comes from journalists. <\/em><\/p>\n

Her main interest in Cleveland, though, was to promote a porno movie in which she \u2018performs\u2019. It is a $25,000 production made in Holland called \u2018Sensations\u2019. <\/em><\/p>\n

And that\u2019s about all I can write for publication.<\/em><\/p>\n

Except that she was actually embarrassed for me to interview her. <\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cA porno queen embarrassed?\u201d I asked her.<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cWell, yes,\u201d she replied. \u201cI can\u2019t help thinking if we had met in Cambridge 15 years ago what a strange interview we would think this is.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

I couldn\u2019t help thinking what a perfect subject she would be for a group of psychiatry students.\u201d <\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

I am genuinely sorry about that last sentence. It was a throwaway, an unintended insult, and one I regret. It says more about me than it does about her.<\/p>\n

Because sex remained Rosalind (Tuppy) Mary Owens\u2019 main occupation for the rest of her working life, in a vitally humane direction. In 1979 she started the Outsiders Club for socially and physically disabled people to find partners; she trained as a sex therapist in the U.S. gaining a diploma in Human Sexuality in 1986; chaired the Sexual Freedom Coalition in the UK and won several international awards for research and response to the poorly-recognized sexual needs of the disabled, disadvantaged, and lonely.<\/p>\n

Almost 50 years later I wish I could find her to say sorry. (I keep doing that now I\u2019m in my dotage). <\/strong><\/p>\n

Back to schools:\u00a0Lack of money, in practice, remained THE big issue for almost all Cleveland area schools in \u201875. Voters had turned down more than half of the tax levy issues in the county the year before. The federal government was struggling with inflation. The only possible source was the state of Ohio. \u201cIf school superintendents in the Cleveland area start replacing their office photos of President Ford with that of Ohio Gov. James Rhodes the reason will soon become clear to the voters,\u201d I wrote on Jan 14.<\/p>\n

\u201cGov Rhodes, they believe, is either going to save their schools from economic disaster or education in 1975 is likely to suffer.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ohio was already known throughout the country as one of the worst in terms of state funding for schools. But would they budge for Cleveland, the state\u2019s biggest and most troubled school district, with more students per teacher than any of the nation\u2019s 20 largest cities – especially with Rhodes now named as the main defendant in the pending Cleveland schools desegregation case?<\/p>\n

At the practical level at least enrollments were up at the area\u2019s Catholic schools, mostly as some 5,000 children were taken out of the city\u2019s public schools last year \u2013 providing additional tuition.<\/p>\n

The only bright spot seemed to be a dramatic drive to improve the reading capabilities of Cleveland school children, following recommendations of a three-man panel of experts who recently examined the problem.<\/p>\n

\n
\n

Memory flash: South Euclid, May \u201875<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n<\/header>\n

\n

We\u2019ve bought our first house, a \u2018Country French\u2019 design up the hill from Collinwood on South Belvoir Blvd, South Euclid. It has three bedrooms, a warm living room with a big picture window overlooking a steep, tree-filled 50-foot deep ravine where a tiny stream starts. To the side is a patio where I can build a tree-seat. To the front a long driveway and an expansive lawn on which there are 15 fully-grown trees. The garage has room for two cars. Anna can drive to work at her hospital. <\/em><\/p>\n

After five years in a semi-basement flat we\u2019re excited. We\u2019ve bought an English Springer pup, named him Douglas (officially Sir Douglas Merriweather), and we\u2019ve got a mortgage!\u00a0 <\/em><\/p>\n

Or do we?\u00a0We need to have a new thing called Flood Insurance, mandated to bank lenders by the government under a 1973 act which was still being rolled out across the country after some disastrous floods in Pennslyvania. Our new house was on the inside of a line drawn on a new map. The house next door was on the other side of the line. <\/em><\/p>\n

This was going to cost us $100 for absolutely nothing, because we were up a hill where a flood couldn\u2019t reach us.\u00a0 <\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s no way this house is going to flood,\u201d says a bank official who sent out two assessors to check the property. \u201cThe whole city of South Euclid would have to be under water before it reached the doorstep. But we have to follow the dimensions prescribed on this flood hazard map before we can give you a loan. And that house is within the flood hazard boundary.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

He produced Federal Insurance Agency Map No. H39 035 7670 01, a map of half the city of South Euclid, pinpointing our house exactly on the inside of the designated flood hazard area. <\/em><\/p>\n

Perhaps its just as well I\u2019m a reporter. I have a nose for pettifogging officialdom.<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cI didn\u2019t put those measurements in there,\u201d says Stephen Hovancsek, South Euclid\u2019s City Engineer. \u201cThis isn\u2019t my map. The map I sent the Federal Insurance Agency had many more areas shaded in where there have been large numbers of flooded basements. This was supposed to be just a preliminary map, before a more detailed study could be made. It was supposed to allow people to buy flood insurance if they wanted it. I had no idea this map would cost people money.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

Who overrode the recommendations of the city engineer?\u00a0 I tracked the culprits to engineers for Gannett-Fleming-Corddory Inc, of Harrisburg, Pa, one of two companies in the U.S. assigned to the Federal Insurance Administration to prepare flood hazard maps.\u00a0 An engineer there admitted that the flood maps were drawn sight unseen, and based on topographical maps, using straight lines that run parallel to roads.<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cIt does look in this case it would take a lot of water to reach the top of the ravine,\u201d he admits.<\/em><\/p>\n

You\u2019re not kidding!\u00a0 Another engineer, to whom I paid $25 for a letter to go to the bank says: \u201cTo reach your house the water would have to be half way up the Terminal Tower downtown.\u201d\u00a0ie the entire city of Cleveland under water. I wrote about this in the third person, revealing in the last paragraph that we were the couple in my story. \u201cAnd we\u2019re pretty mad about it!\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

We got the mortgage, sans flood insurance<\/em>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

School desegregation was a close second to Money, although everyone knew busing would cost a lot. I wrote hundreds of thousands of words about Reed vs Rhodes, the federal court case, between March 19 and Dec 26: forty three stories, most of them between Nov 13 and Dec 26.<\/p>\n

I have them all before me, neatly photocopied and set out in a thick folder by someone on the Press staff for to be sent off to several national journalism awards contests under \u2018breaking news.\u2019<\/p>\n

\u201cThis subject, which could have the most significant effect on Cleveland in its history, was given concentrated attention by Almond,\u201d says the introductory blurb, which I didn\u2019t write. \u201cIt is continuing with greater intensity into 1976.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

My words won a Special Citation from the Education Writers Association in 1976, with the addition of a long interview I did with the man who ordered busing, Federal Judge Frank J. Battistsi\u00a0 (more on that later).<\/p>\n

Frankly, it gives me a headache to read through it all. I spent too many hours in court,\u00a0talking to lawyers and writing it up \u2013 often updating it edition by edition as the case progressed each day. If it wasn\u2019t for this folder I would have forgotten most of it, in detail anyway. I can\u2019t even remember when the name of the case changed from Reed vs Gilligan (the former governor of Ohio) and Reed vs Rhodes, the name of his successor under whose name the case would forever be known.<\/p>\n

I do remember the plaintiff, however, Robert Anthony Reed III. <\/strong>He was 17, had a large Afro, and was the first of 14 names on a list of plaintiffs put together by the NAACP. I interviewed him and brother Darryl – similarly tall and slim and also a plaintiff – at his home\u00a0 in Garfield Heights, a suburb but part of the Cleveland school district. With them was their mother Wyona Reed Willis and NAACP lawyer James Hardiman, who ensured they didn\u2019t stray into any legally-tricky comments before the case had even started.<\/p>\n

\u201cNeither of them, \u201cI wrote, \u201dgave any appearance of being militants, or anything else that might give satisfaction to ultra right-wing separatists. Indeed, Robert answered a question on former Black Panther leaders Eldridge Cleaver and Bobby Seale by asking \u201cwho?\u201d He said he did not agree with the aggressive philosophy of Malcolm X.<\/p>\n

I kept my opinions to myself, though, when Robert said his current hero was General George S. Patton, the World War II hero, who was white and came from a privileged background, especially after Reed and his family had made it clear he was himself the product of an all-black society and an all-black school. \u201cI used to think all white people were middle class or rich,\u201d he said. \u201cI could see them on TV. It was like they were in another world.\u201d<\/p>\n

But more recently, he said, he had been working in a pancake house, with white kids his age \u201cand they\u2019re not so different to us.\u201d<\/p>\n

All very nicely presented as just normal black people who are no different to white people.<\/p>\n

But the appearance was not the reality. Cleveland\u2019s black leaders were far from satisfied they wanted the NAACP to take the desegregation case to court at all<\/strong>. As late as November, \u201975, just one week before the start of the case in federal court, the city\u2019s black leaders, led by City Council President George Forbes, were worried about the possibility of blacks being pitted against blacks in a long court battle. They knew their constituents liked neighborhood schools and feared busing.<\/p>\n

So 30 of them came together in the top-floor Summit Room of William O. Walker\u2019s Call and Post newspaper building to thrash it out with NAACP attorneys Nathaniel Jones, James Hardiman and Thomas Atkins, led by the Rev Austin Cooper, president of the Cleveland branch of the NAACP.\u00a0It was a no-holds-barred meeting that dragged up the very basics of racial segregation. A meeting, I wrote, the likes of which has seldom been seen in Cleveland.\u00a0It ended four hours later with an almost complete transformation of attitudes.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen the history of Cleveland\u2019s school desegregation efforts is finally written a significant section might well be entitled \u201cThe day the NAACP won over the Black leaders,\u201d <\/strong>I wrote.<\/p>\n

The meeting nearly collapsed before it started. Everyone there was black except for one, NAACP researcher Terry Demchak. There were whisperings, a few glances, and publisher Walker said: \u201cThis is a meeting for black folks. What we got to talk about is just between us.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWell, that\u2019s too bad,\u201d said NAACP leader Jones. \u201cShe\u2019s part of our team, If she goes, we all go.\u201d<\/p>\n

As they prepared to leave George Forbes said: \u201cYou\u2019re nothing but a bunch of phonies. Leaving? We figured you weren\u2019t serious anyway. If you go, everyone in town\u2019s gonna know the NAACP refused to sit down with Cleveland\u2019s black leaders.\u201d<\/p>\n

All the NAACP team left the room, leaving a cabal of leaders huddled in conversation around Walker and Forbes, deciding this was not the time to get hung up on black ideology over the presence at a \u2018blacks only\u2019 meeting of one white woman. Jones and Cooper came back to present the NAACP\u2019s case. School Board President Arnold Pinkney asked why the NAACP was using \u2018outsiders\u2019 to try to turn Cleveland into another Boston, where busing was wrecking the city\u2019s school desegregation.<\/p>\n

\u201cOutsider? There\u2019s no way you can call me or the NAACP outsiders in Cleveland!\u201d said an outraged Jones who, until he became national general counsel for the civil rights organization was a United States attorney in Cleveland. \u201cThe NAACP has worked for blacks here for more than 50 years.\u201d<\/p>\n

Political posturing, replied Pinkney, implying that some in the NAACP had grudges against him. Going to trial to justify national policies and recoup its legal costs, said someone else. But when asked if the case could still be settled out of court Jones said it had already gone too far, there were constitutional violations that need to be corrected, he said.\u00a0But when someone said: \u201cForget the courts and all this trial business,\u201d the NAACP\u2019s Rev Cooper exploded in fury.<\/p>\n

\u201cForget the law?\u00a0Forget the law?\u201d he cried. \u201cThat makes me sick. Don\u2019t you ever say that in my presence again. I come from a part of the country where black folks had their butts kicked all over the countryside and we had no recourse. But here we\u2019ve got the law, and the court, to protect us, to assert ourselves\u201d.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Jones talked about the history of desegregation and the kind of evidence used elsewhere, or manipulation of boundaries, transfer of teachers, construction of school buildings. \u201cCleveland is no different from elsewhere,\u201d he said to a now-quieter audience.\u00a0But still the images of busing remained. Jones kept hammering the point:\u00a0 \u201cYou\u2019re talking about the remedy. Always the remedy. You can\u2019t even reach that stage without having a declaration that what the School Board has been doing is in violation of the rights of every black child in this city. If you give up your rights and responsibilities to go to court on this subject, if you cop out in this area, you trade off your rights in other areas. You seal your doom in other areas.\u00a0This thing is much bigger than a school bus.\u201d<\/p>\n

One by one people began to leave. The meeting ended on a somber note. The black leaders realized there was no turning back from the trial. George Forbes, the man who had expressed greatest hostility at the start, thanked Nate Jones for staying through the meeting.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was looking at some of the expressions on the faces of people here,\u201d said Forbes. \u201cNot only has my mind been changed, but I think a lot of minds have been changed.\u201d \u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

For some reason I now forget, this story did not run until the day after Judge Battisti ruled against the School Board ten months later, Sept 1, 1976. And then it was the paper\u2019s main story.<\/p>\n

\n
\n

Memory Flash: Cleveland Municipal Stadium, June 14, \u201875 <\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n<\/header>\n

\n

So I said to Charlie as loud as I could: \u201cHow are you enjoying Cleveland so far?\u201d <\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cGreat,\u201d said Charlie, twisting his drumsticks around his fingers as he lounged on a sofa. \u201cA great city.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cDid you know this is the town that came up with Rock \u2019n\u2019 Roll – the NAME \u2018rock \u2018n\u2019roll\u2019?\u201d I shouted, unable in all the bedlam to think of something witty, sharp, amusing or truly engaging. Not even \u201cDid you know your car is on a double yellow?\u201d would do it.\u00a0 <\/em><\/p>\n

Charlie looked a bit surprised and said \u2018Oh.\u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n

Then a Roadie stepped in to say something to him, and together they turned to examine a drum, and that was Charlie Watts of the Rolling Stones lost to me.\u00a0 <\/em><\/p>\n

I only had five minutes with the Greatest Rock Band in the World, about to perform a massive gig in the raucous, packed-out 82,000-seat stadium, one of only two press reporters given access to the Stones in their dressing room beneath the building (the other, probably, being the legendary Jane Scott of the Plain Dealer – the\u2019 oldest rock critic in the world.\u2019 I had The Press slot because I had already declared in print my affection for the band from its earliest days, and because I was English the newsdesk thought I might wheedle a little more out of them than Jane, or own Bruno Bornino.\u00a0 <\/em><\/p>\n

But it was bedlam both outside and inside the stadium, including the dressing room. Mick Jagger was in intense conversation with a woman about microphones. Bill Wyman was curled up in an armchair, his eyes closed and plugs in his ears; Ronnie Wood, newest Stone, wasn\u2019t interested in anything but tuning his guitar; and Keith Richards wasn\u2019t anywhere to be seen. When my five minutes was up Ms PR escorted me out of the stadium.<\/em><\/p>\n

T\u2019was ever thus. I had interviewed the Stones eight years earlier, in 1967, backstage at the Odeon Theatre in Leeds, England, and it wasn\u2019t much different then. That time I found Keith Richards to be boring, Brian Jones (who drowned, accidentally, in a swimming pool) missing, Charlie Watts downright insulting and Mick Jagger drunk and truculent and sporting a forehead cut inflicted the night before by a \u2019fan\u2019 who threw a beer can. \u201cThe only one still retaining a shred of civility,\u201d I wrote for the Yorkshire Evening Press at the time, \u201cwas Bill Wyman, who seemed the least affected by the international fame.\u2019\u00a0 <\/em><\/p>\n

This time, and again without satisfaction, I faded away back to the paper on nearby E.9th St. <\/em><\/p>\n

The next morning only my description of the Stones\u2019 preparations made it into the paper (the latter part was put on a page filled with three large schools stories by me, as if the Rolling Stones somehow had a direct connection to Cleveland schools). Anna and I did get to see the show, however, and it was as good as we expected (although she\u2019s not really into Heavy Metal). <\/em><\/p>\n

After the Ten Cent Beer night at the stadium a year earlier, police were massed in considerable numbers for days before the event, 40 police officers alone dealing with ticket scalpers, 110 off-duty police assisting the stadium security, 79 dealing with illegal parking.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Even so, I remember two young lads died when they fell of the stadium\u2019s external structure.\u00a0\u00a0 <\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

A lot of the youngsters at that Stones concert had finished school for the year barely a week earlier, ending a school year marked for its unparalleled lawlessness across Greater Cleveland. A five-part series on it started on June 9 and declared that thousands of teachers and administrators were \u2018counting the cost of one of the worst years of violence and vandalism in the nation\u2019s history.<\/strong>\u2019 In Cleveland 40 students had been expelled for carrying -and sometime using – guns, knives and other weapons, \u2018more than the schools expelled over the last 30 years combined.\u2019<\/p>\n

Herman Imel, properties control supervisor of Cleveland\u2019s public schools, said that already by spring vandalism was up 25% over last year. \u201cI am discouraged,\u2019 he told me. \u201cIf this is any indication, we\u2019re in for a very bad summer. As the days get longer, vandalism gets worse\u201d.<\/p>\n

Our photographer Herman Seid took a heartbreaking picture of students at Adlai Stevenson elementary school hunting through a pile of damaged pictures ripped from walls, trying to see if their own artwork was damaged. Seven boys, aged 10 to 16, were arrested after they smashed windows, ransacked five classrooms and destroyed artwork.<\/p>\n

Across Cuyahoga County increasing numbers of children were simply leaving their desks and walking out \u2013 or not going to school at all. A teacher at Cleveland Heights High said she was a substitute who came to teach a class and several students just walked out. \u201cThey saw I was a substitute so they decided to walk out,\u201d she reported. \u201cI told them I would report them to the principal. They just laughed. They could care less.\u201d<\/p>\n

On one recent Monday at Glenville High School in Cleveland 667 of the school\u2019s 2300 students \u2013 almost 30% of the total \u2013 were marked absent. Almost any spring weekday could find hundreds of youths who should be in school picknicking in Greater Cleveland\u2019s Metroparks.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m sorry to say that today the kids are looking jaded even in kindergarten,\u201d Mrs Muriel banks, a learning disabilities teacher at Gilbert Elementary school, told me. \u201cI don\u2019t know what\u2019s wrong. It\u2019s rough. Even in kindergarten kids are rude, their language is terrible. All grades have kids who miss school or walk out of a classroom without being dismissed.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

What\u2019s the answer?\u00a0 Big, controversial question. I spent a lot of time asking experts from across the country for their recommendations. Some said they should do as Catholic schools and return to dress codes, even if only a couple of days a week when they are required to wear school uniforms. Some said the school leaving age should be lowered from 18 to 16, or even 14. Corporal punishment wasn\u2019t an alternative, although some Ohio schools still used it.<\/p>\n

Ohio was one of only five states in America that had compulsory school attendance until 18. The others were Hawaii, Oklahoma, Oregon, Utah and Washington state; none with big city problems comparable to Cleveland. David Moberly, former superintendent of Cleveland Heights schools, who moved to head Evanston school district in suburban Chicago, said: \u201cI feel that if the kids here were forced to stay in school until they were 18, like we had in Cleveland heights, we would really have to fight a battle.\u201d\u00a0But with few jobs to go to at 14 or 16 would these dropout kids be targets for troublemakers and criminals?<\/p>\n

Personally, I thought that the sheer size of most high schools \u2013 2,500 to 3000 students, while providing wide-ranging and cost-effective facilities \u2013 made American high schools too impersonal, and too formulaic. But what sort of an expert was I, from a foreign country?<\/p>\n

\n
\n

Memory flash: \u00a0Walhonding, Ohio.\u00a0 July 1975<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n<\/header>\n

\n

We\u2019re back at one of our favorite camp sites, next to the Mohican River. The six of us \u2013 Anna, me, Jim, Marcy, Al and Nancy, have had a delightful day slowly paddling downstream for 15 miles, looking out for the Sparrow Hawks, finches, Egrets and, of course, the state bird of Ohio, the Red Cardinal. We\u2019ve grounded a couple of times, trailed our fingers in the water, eaten our sandwiches and listened to the quiet. <\/em><\/p>\n

Now we\u2019re sitting around a campfire eating marshmallows, drinking wine and someone is reading a creepy story aloud. If Daniel Day-Lewis doesn\u2019t leap out of the darkness with a blood-curdling scream I wouldn\u2019t be surprised. <\/em><\/p>\n

But what IS that noise?\u00a0A slight hissing from the darkened river. <\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cCan you hear that noise?\u201d\u00a0say I.\u00a0 <\/em><\/p>\n

Someone points a flashlight towards the river.\u00a0There are MILLIONS of white-looking flying bugs streaming down the river.\u00a0\u00a0 <\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cFireflies!\u201d says Jim, our expert for all things outdoors (since he is, indeed, The Press\u2019 Outdoors Writer).\u00a0 <\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ll turn a headlight on them,\u201d say I, thinking we could see this annual migration\u00a0better.\u00a0 <\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cNO! Don\u2019t!\u201d says Jim. \u201dThey\u2019ll turn this\u2026.!\u201d\u00a0 <\/em><\/p>\n

He didn\u2019t get to say \u201cway\u201d!\u00a0 because they were already doing it. Attracted by my car headlights the mllions of fireflies automatically turned left towards the brightest light, which happened to be adjacent to our campfire. Argghhh! I quickly turned off the headlights and the fireflies- after some flappy confusion that seemed to involve marshmallows –\u00a0 rediscovered their original march upriver. <\/em><\/p>\n

Another narrow escape for Yours Truly.\u00a0 Phew!<\/em><\/p>\n

\"WALHONDING
WALHONDING SIX. Yes, you\u2019re laughing now, but you weren\u2019t last night when the fireflies came! Press reporters Almond, Dudas and Thompson \u2013 and their wives – canoe-camping on the Mohican River, central Ohio, in 1975.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

One thing about being an education writer in the 70s was that it suggested my education included a significant understanding of science and mathematics. It doesn\u2019t, and it certainly didn\u2019t in March, 1975, when I was asked to write a piece about the new phenomenum of calculators in schools.<\/p>\n

Hand-held calculators had only become available in 1972, when they quickly became popular with businessmen on airplanes, housewives in supermarkets, taxpayers at home. But for sixth graders (11-year-olds) at schools?<\/p>\n

Driven partly by a report by the quasi-government National Advisory Committee on Mathematical Education (NACOME) eighth graders and above across the country were recommended to have access to calculators for all classwork and exams.\u00a0This caused ructions in American schools and with parents. Kids being told they can use a MACHINE for the four basics: add, subtract, multiply and divide?\u00a0 How is THAT going to help children\u00a0 whose brains can barely add 10 and 5 together?<\/p>\n

But slowly, school district by school district, Cleveland area children had started to get them, on the principle that they help you get over the basics and on into more advanced math much quicker and with fewer mistakes \u2013 30 seconds for basic calculations against several minutes working it out on paper, with a chance of getting it wrong.\u00a0I remember at school in the 60s that I failed an exam involving quadratic equations because I had mentally added or subtracted one basic figure that produced a wrong answer.<\/p>\n

Ten years later, it was the Litronix 2230 which could instantly do the basics, with a square root function, a memory function and an error function. Some of the cheaper hand-helds with basic functions cost only $20 each ($100 in 2020), within the budget of some of the wealthier schools in the area. Shaker Heights\u2019 Dad\u2019s Club bought $500 worth of six-digit calculators for the school system\u2019s 6th graders which spent two weeks at each of the city\u2019s nine elementary schools. Candy sales at Mooney Junior High in Cleveland bought 24 calculators at $28 apiece.<\/p>\n

The arguments were building for and against. \u201cGenerally, they should not be used by youngsters who still do not understand why the calculator does what it does\u201d, the head of the Ohio Council of Teachers of Mathematics, told me.\u00a0\u201cIn Junior high I think they should be used as soon as they are fair to all kids. By the ninth grade all students should be required to use them\u201d.<\/p>\n

In October my mother came to visit our new house in South Euclid. \u201cMUCH better than that flat,\u201d she said. We went off traveling:\u00a0 via York, Pennsylvania where, of course, I took a picture of Mom standing next to the York sign so she could show it to her friends and family back in York, England. Not exactly a suitable response to her gift to us of a large, limited-edition encased ceramic plate marking the 1700th year of York\u2019s founding by the Romans.\u00a0And then to Gettysburg, to Washington DC, and Jamestown, Virginia where, besides copies of the original ships that crossed from England in 1607, we discovered the still-new concept of \u2018factory outlets,\u2019 retail stores which were just a shade below top-quality, and thus attractively cheap.<\/p>\n

Then on to North Carolina\u2019s Outer Banks, where we discovered The Wind which helped the Wright Brothers get their Flyer into the air at nearby Kill Devil Hills.<\/p>\n

We camped at Pea Island, my mother lying between Anna and me in our sleeping bags as the wind shook our tent all night and where, in the morning, Mum was filmed briskly trying to catch the wind-caught cornflakes as they were poured from box to bowl -a futile endeavour.\u00a0 We were grateful that the wind had dropped considerably when I put her into our Sea Eagle inflatable canoe and I pushed her out to sea for her first-ever paddle. Fortunately, only Anna ever knew of my mounting panic as she started drifting away.<\/p>\n

The next month came a reminder that wind and sea disasters are not exclusive to oceans like the Atlantic, but can reach deep inland to the Great Lakes.\u00a0 <\/strong><\/p>\n

On Nov 10, a month after Pea Island, the 26,000-ton iron ore carrier Edmund Fitzgerald sank in a ferocious storm on Lake Superior. All 29 of its crew died.\u00a0 It was not the worst disaster of the Great Lakes (that was undoubtedly the sinking of the SS Eastland in 1915, which rolled on its side while docked on the Chicago River, killing 848 passengers and crew). But the Edmund Fitzgerald is much more remembered because the wreck lay undetected at the bottom of Lake Superior for many years, because none of its crew were recovered, and mostly because of a haunting song: The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, by Gordon Lightfoot.<\/strong><\/p>\n