I was a relative short-timer at The Plain Dealer, from the end of 1963 to the beginning of 1970, and when I left, editors celebrated. So did most of my coworkers. The truth of the matter: I was an insufferable pain in the ass.<\/p>\r\n
The days of typewriters, pencils and paste pots.<\/p>\r\n
Take, for example, 1968, the year The Plain Dealer hired five women in a group, the renowned \u201cClass of \u201968,\u201d all of whom went on to be excellent reporters and editors.<\/p>\r\n
One of the young women, straight out of The College of Wooster and lovely in tartan skirt, sweater and Peter Pan collar, was doing rookie grunt work, writing obits a few desks from mine. The desk chairs were on rollers so I rolled over and asked \u2014 50 years before \u201cMe Too\u201d and \u201cTime\u2019s Up\u201d \u2014 \u201cAre you a virgin?\u201d<\/p>\r\n
She should have stabbed me in the eye with a pencil. Instead, she blushed and typed even faster, sympathetic words about the recently deceased. She was the daughter of a Pennsylvania judge and a Christian. She forgave me, and subsequently did monumental typing at her breakfast table in Gates Mills.<\/p>\r\n
I had written a long piece in pencil on legal pads about a precocious politician, Dennis Kucinich, and she typed it as fast as I could read it \u2014 the cover story for the inaugural issue of Cleveland Magazine, April 1972.<\/p>\r\n
The 60s. What a decade. What a time to be in the newspaper business.\u00a0John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and Malcolm X assassinated; John Glenn in orbit, Cuban missile crisis, civil rights and voting rights, U.S. cities on fire, Vietnam on fire, Neil Armstrong on the moon \u2014 a decade ending with Woodstock, anti-Vietnam War demonstrations and news of the My Lai massacre.<\/p>\r\n
On Oct. 6, 1968, The Plain Dealer officially became Ohio\u2019s largest newspaper and readers were greeted with: \u201cYou meet the nicest people when you\u2019re Number One!\u201d and some stats: 409,414 daily, 545,032 Sunday.<\/p>\r\n
The PD could have been, should have been, the best paper between the coasts. The newsroom was loaded with young talent. Unfortunately it didn\u2019t bewitch the editors, far too many of them semiliterate archivists promoted for loyal time served and given an impressive title and a paltry raise.<\/p>\r\n
Even with honorable old gents who had paid their dues and earned their stripes there was time warp in a wild decade.<\/p>\r\n
Here\u2019s dialogue with one of them in the paper\u2019s elevator. He was running the show in 1965, the year before he retired, and 30 years before the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame opened in Cleveland:<\/p>\r\n
\u201cWhat do you think of these ridiculous names rock and rollers give themselves? The Animals, Lovin\u2019 Spoonful?\u201d<\/p>\r\n
\u201cI like it,\u201d I said. \u201cWhat do you like?\u201d<\/p>\r\n
\u201cI think \u2018Four Freshmen\u2019 has dash.\u201d<\/p>\r\n
The city was beginning to decay from the inside out but high-ranking editors were curiously indifferent.<\/p>\r\n
Four days before Armstrong walked on the moon, July 20, 1969, I walked around a Hough neighborhood that had been ripped by riots, fire and fury in July 1966, chatting with residents who believed that Hough, ravaged real estate controlled by absentee landlords, needed a whole lot of fixing before we messed with the moon.<\/p>\r\n
One of them was a mother of four who lived in a top-floor apartment with a leaky roof and rats in the hallway. The moon shot? \u201cI don\u2019t know nothin\u2019 about that,\u201d she said. \u201cBut I have plenty of mices and I can\u2019t keep flour for the roaches in it.\u201d<\/p>\r\n
\u201cI don\u2019t know why we\u2019re running this,\u201d an editor said, shaking his head. \u201cIt\u2019s like insulting the moon story.\u201d<\/p>\r\n
This was a man who fervently endorsed a grand jury report defining social and racial unrest in Cleveland as being \u201cCommunist inspired,\u201d five days of looting and arson and confrontation between armed black militants and Cleveland police that left seven dead (three policemen, three \u201csuspects,\u201d one \u201ccivilian\u201d) and 15 wounded. The \u201cGlenville Shootout\u201d in July 1968.<\/p>\r\n
Still, I was fond of my battered steel desk in the big, sprawling, loud, smoke-filled city room. There were ashtrays, and cigarettes in the ashtrays.<\/p>\r\n
To my left was Roldo Bartimole, before he departed to do his own thing as the muckraking publisher of an annoying newsletter, Point of View. In time, I\u2019d refer to him as\u00a0\u201cthe poor man\u2019s Tom Paine\u201d and \u201cthe conscience of Cleveland.\u201d<\/p>\r\n
To my right was Joe Eszterhas, a onetime Hungarian refugee. He was just a kid but a bear for work, and it wasn\u2019t all fiction. Fame and fortune in Hollywood were in his writing future, 19 movies, or thereabouts, and eight books. Who can forget \u201cBasic Instinct\u201d?<\/p>\r\n
On Nov. 20, 1969, the Plain Dealer published pictures that shocked the world, gruesome\u00a0images of\u00a0Vietnamese civilians massacred in March 1968 by American soldiers in a 50-man unit armed with automatic rifles, machine guns and grenade launchers \u2014 \u201cclumps of bodies.\u201d (Eventually the Army set the number at 347, although the Vietnamese claim 504.)<\/p>\r\n
The pictures were taken by former Army photographer Ron Haeberle and buttressed by an exclusive eyewitness account written by Eszterhas. A Fairview High School\u00a0<\/strong>graduate, Haeberle called the Plain Dealer because he recognized Eszterhas\u2019s byline. They had attended Ohio University at the same time and Joe was a writer and editor at the school paper.<\/p>\r\n Straight ahead was the rewrite desk where the laidback aces, Bob Daniels and Al Wiggins, were always laughing about something as they banged away, making the unreadable lyrical, or at least readable.<\/p>\r\n But they didn\u2019t screw around when rewriting. Perhaps you were calling in a story and you had a word like \u201cCourvoisier.\u201d You\u2019d start to spell it and one or the other would snap, \u201cGo on with the fucking story.\u201d<\/p>\r\n Another way of saying, \u201cI know how to spell, genius.\u201d\u00a0 They believed in short sentences, active verbs, and getting to the tavern on time.<\/p>\r\n Try to sneak jargon or clich\u00e9 by them \u2014 junk like today\u2019s iconic, surreal, on the ground, end of the day, begs the question, first and foremost, at this moment in time, impacted, or \u201cliterally\u201d this and \u201cliterally\u201d that \u2014 and they might hang up on you.<\/p>\r\n It was said that each time Daniels was sent out of town, he came back with a wife. I didn\u2019t believe it. Maybe two spouses. Three at most.<\/p>\r\n Wiggins had only one wife, but he was a poet. At first glance, no big deal, since nearly everyone in the city room except editors was a poet. Even the copy boys (no copy girls) were poets.<\/p>\r\n Speedy Kucinich, for one, would zip by, deftly depositing his latest work on your desk. The difference was that Wiggins was published with actual poets. When I had something in a coffeehouse rag, he had something in a book.<\/p>\r\n Nonetheless, many think one of his finest lines was his resignation on a postcard after leaving town in hurry, deeply in debt to two bookmakers and one very angry restaurant owner: \u201cBy the time you receive this comma I will have resigned period.\"<\/p>\r\n Me, I argued incessantly with editors about items large and small. I thought it great that Muhammad Ali changed his \u201cslave name\u201d and turned his back on war (\u201cNo Viet Cong ever called me nigger\u201d), and that for sure a family newspaper should have room for a feature story on a stripper who read Walt Whitman and used a boa constrictor in her act.<\/p>\r\n One editor was confused but sincere when he blurted, \u201cNegroes are now blacks?\u201d \u201cSeems so, sport,\u201d I said. \u201cAsk McGruder, the tall Negro who works for us.\u201d<\/p>\r\n Under the circumstances, I should have been given a pass for doing mad things.<\/p>\r\n For instance, the day I cut Bob McGruder\u2019s phone line with my penknife because I was tired of waiting for him to go to lunch. At the time, McGruder, the\u00a0Plain Dealer\u2019s first black reporter, was talking to Carl Stokes, Cleveland\u2019s first black mayor. But I didn\u2019t know that.<\/p>\r\n Rev. King had a dream; writer James Baldwin had a prophetic spiritual (\u201cGod gave Noah the rainbow sign\/ No more water, the fire next time\u201d), and McGruder, who would go on to be executive editor of the Detroit Free Press, had a lunchtime story: stopped again by police while driving through a white neighborhood at night \u2014 another DWB, Driving While Black.<\/p>\r\n But no one dreamed that the 44th President would be black man, or that a birther-crazed real estate mogul who spent years claiming 44 was illegal (not born in the United States) would be the 45th President.<\/p>\r\n McGruder was one of two friends I had at the PD. The other was Don Barlett.\u00a0 The three of us had lunch daily. Later, McGruder would become the PD\u2019s managing editor. Later, Barlett would win two Pulitzer Prizes working for the Philadelphia Inquirer. Later, the PD would ask me to go to its bureau in Lake County and work for an editor who thought \u201cpenultimate\u201d meant beyond \u201cultimate.\u201d<\/p>\r\n The paper made it clear that it didn\u2019t want Barlett working with me. I think they were afraid I might corrupt him. A box-like figure who wore button-down J.C. Penney shirts, a beige raincoat, and a dark beret atop a bald dome, he neither drank nor smoked and spoke barely above a whisper.<\/p>\r\n We fooled them just once, together writing a series about the city\u2019s business elite bankrolling a reactionary ploy to get \u201canti-Communist\u201d tripe into Cleveland\u2019s public schools. When the PD killed the series, we sold it to Nation magazine.<\/p>\r\n It became kind of a joke when we got an award for investigative reporting from the Cleveland Press Club, for the first part of the series, the weakest part.<\/p>\r\n Admittedly, I had a bad attitude. It began at the Alliance Review and continued at the Akron Beacon Journal, where Barlett and I were assigned to the sticks \u2014 Barlett in Portage County, me in Wayne County.<\/p>\r\n They gave you a Rollei twin-lens reflex camera, paid for your gas, and you filled an entire page: pictures, news, features and a column. You learned to write swiftly but day became night mighty fast.<\/p>\r\n John S. Knight, legendary editor and publisher of Knight Newspapers, had an office in the newsroom. I\u2019d go in and drink his whiskey and smoke his cigars. He was never there at night.<\/p>\r\n I certainly didn\u2019t expect him the winter night I was sitting in his chair, my feet on his desk, a glass of aged scotch in one hand and a Cuban cigar in the other, when, suddenly, there he was, the great man himself, hanging up his hat and coat and saying quietly, very quietly, \u201cMind if I use my office?\u201d<\/p>\r\n That\u2019s all he said, and if he told anyone else, I never heard about it.<\/p>\r\n After a year glittering as a reporter in the PD\u2019s Akron bureau but failing as a collegial co-worker (I called the bureau chief an \u201casshole\u201d because his idea of journalism was to clip Beacon stories and rewrite them), I was eager to star in the PD\u2019s windowless old hulk at E.\u00a018th and Superior.<\/p>\r\n I was stunned when informed that they first wanted me to serve a tour in the suburbs. I sulked until I was assigned to Criminal Courts.<\/p>\r\n Now we were cooking. This was the place for me. Good guys and bad guys, though you sometimes needed a program to tell them apart. Every day was\u00a0drama, with someone doomed to get it in the neck unless a crafty defense lawyer intervened.<\/p>\r\n The lawyers starred but others made it work, the people who didn\u2019t get their names in the paper \u2014\u00a0<\/strong>clerks, bailiffs, parole officers and court stenographers.<\/p>\r\n Need to check your courtroom notes? Run down to the basement and an affable stenographer would consult his or her machine and make you whole.<\/p>\r\n A grand jury clerk would tip you off to what was coming and you had a scoop. A parole officer would let you peek at a report disclosing hilarious dialogue between members of an incompetent gang drilling a safe in a jewelry store, and you would get a laudatory note from the PD publisher, dapper Tom Vail, the prince of Hunting Valley. (Vail\u2019s notes were commonly known as \u201cSnowflakes\u201d and nearly everyone got at least one.)<\/p>\r\n After the hardnosed Newhouse family acquired the 125-year-old PD in 1967, it kept the well-bred Vail, born rich, in place.<\/p>\r\n He was a bright shining bauble with the right high-society business and social connections. But they sent in one of their own men to keep an eye on the bottom line.<\/p>\r\n In 1965, Newsweek described Vail as appearing \u201cmore like an F. Scott Fitzgerald hero than a publisher,\u201d which, I guess, made him our Gatsby, while we were his \u201cyoung tigers,\u201d according to Newsweek.<\/p>\r\n You were sadly out of luck, however, if you were an old tiger, such as Bob Manry, a 46-year-old copy editor who was turned down when he asked the paper to sponsor his proposed voyage across the Atlantic in a tiny boat.<\/p>\r\n Bob said \u201cbye\u201d the day before his 47th birthday and pushed off in a 13-foot sailboat, Tinkerbelle \u2014 78 days from Falmouth, Massachusetts to Falmouth, England, where he was greeted by massive crowds and a flotilla of large and small boats on Aug. 17, 1965.<\/p>\r\n Meanwhile, small scoops for me,\u00a0days when there was a feisty rival, the Cleveland Press. One afternoon a court clerk nodded toward a stack of books on the counter, journal entries made by judges. Just a nod.<\/p>\r\n But in one of the books was a judge\u2019s journal entry reducing Don King\u2019s sentence of second-degree murder to manslaughter, shortly after a jury convicted King, a hot-tempered numbers honcho, of second-degree murder for kicking to death a lightweight former employee in front of Art\u2019s Seafood House at Cedar and E. 100th.<\/p>\r\n I had covered the trial and it took the jury only four hours, counting lunch, to find the burly defendant guilty of murder.\u00a0Sam Garrett, stomped and pistol-whipped, owed King $600.<\/p>\r\n Years earlier, in 1954,\u00a023-year-old \u201cDonald the Kid,\u201d as he was known,\u00a0 killed a man who was trying to rob one of his gambling joints, shot him in the back, which was ruled \u201cjustifiable homicide\u201d \u2014 a shootout involving three hoods from Detroit and King returning fire with a Russian pistol.<\/p>\r\n I got a Snowflake for the journal-entry story, the judge\u00a0got re-elected, and after nearly four years in prison, Cleveland\u2019s Don King got New York City, where he\u00a0 grew his hair incredibly high and became the pre-eminent boxing promoter on the planet \u2014 \u201cRumble in the Jungle\u201d (Ali-Foreman), \u201cThrilla in Manilla\u201d (Ali-Frazier), plus promoting the fights of Larry Holmes, Mike Tyson, Roberto Duran, and Evander Holyfield, among many other champions, with enough energy left over to vigorously battle lawsuits filed by various boxers alleging he had stiffed them.<\/p>\r\n In 1992, he took the Fifth when questioned about alleged connections to Mafia boss John Gotti.<\/p>\r\n In any event, when the trial of the decade rolled around, the retrial of Sam Sheppard in 1966, I was ready.\u00a0Sheppard, a former neurosurgeon, had\u00a0spent 10 years in prison after being convicted of second-degree murder in the bludgeon death of his wife, Marilyn,\u00a0<\/strong>in their Bay Village home in July 1954.<\/p>\r\n A federal judge granted Sheppard a retrial on the grounds that the \u201ccarnival atmosphere\u201d of the first trial had made a \u201cmockery of justice.\u201d Put that on the afternoon Press, which lasted until 1982 but was now being trampled by the morning Plain Dealer.<\/p>\r\n Sheppard\u2019s young attorney from Boston, F. Lee Bailey, dazzled with a mix-and-match defense that combined a left-handed mystery intruder with mathematically intriguing blood spatters. After 12 hours of deliberations, the jury returned a verdict of \u201cnot guilty.\u201d<\/p>\r\n The city was packed with out-of-town reporters but the PD did not embarrass itself. Its art, sidebars and main stories were on the money, as was the verdict story, written on deadline, in which I noted that minutes before the jury returned Sheppard removed his wallet and slipped it to Bailey under the table.<\/p>\r\n Right-handed Sam, who testified in the first trial but not the second, thought he was going back to the slammer.<\/p>\r\n I got a raise (five bucks), a Snowflake, and a happy new job, general assignment. The paper sent me everywhere. Montreal, New York, Los Angeles, New Orleans, Chicago, Miami. One month here, the next there.<\/p>\r\n Hey, Norman Mailer is running for mayor of New York. His buddy, Jimmy Breslin, is running for city council president. Why don\u2019t you take a look?<\/p>\r\n See where this is going? This a confession, a long epitaph for a guileless but arrogant loser. If the editors were idiots, how was I getting plum assignments,\u00a0from\u00a0homicidal maniacs to U.S. presidential candidates? The fact is, all the editors weren\u2019t idiots, and even the idiots were not idiotic all the time.<\/p>\r\n The fact is, I was not a nice person and, in many respects, quite dense.<\/p>\r\n A touch over 5-10 and 145 pounds, I had a history of shooting off my mouth, out of my weight class, and finding barroom floors. As someone said somewhere, I wasn\u2019t tough when I was tough.<\/p>\r\n All the same, in a matter of weeks I called an assistant desk editor a dope and asked another colleague to step outside. This was a mistake. No one told me he could fight and he kicked hell out of me. However, inside I caught him coming out of the men\u2019s room and punched him.<\/p>\r\n Regrettably, an editor witnessed it and didn\u2019t believe me when I said we were just fooling around.<\/p>\r\n In addition, editors didn\u2019t believe me when I denied carnal knowledge of a secretary or that she was giving me copies of management memos, several of them Tom Vail\u2019s omnipresent Snowflakes, including one to me. And yet they seemed ready to cut me even more slack.<\/p>\r\n A meeting was set with the executive editor. I prepared by drinking lunch. When he asked if I wanted a raise, I said yes. He asked how much and I said I wanted to make what he was making. He accused me of drinking and I said he would have made a terrific reporter.<\/p>\r\n That did it. The wee man, who had not distinguished himself as a reporter, told me I was going to Lake County and I resigned, with two weeks notice.<\/p>\r\n Say goodbye to Cleveland bars and hello to the bucolic delights of Lake County?\u00a0 Lake County when I was begging to go to Vietnam? Not a chance.<\/p>\r\n But the bosses knew that and I ended up muttering to myself something along the lines of: \u201cWell played, motherfuckers.\u201d<\/p>\r\n Then something terrible happened. On Dec. 31, 1969, at about 1 a.m., three killers shot to death Joseph Albert \u201cJock\u201d Yablonski, 59, his wife Margaret, 59, and his\u00a0 daughter Charlotte, 25, in the family\u2019s 200-year-old house in Clarksville, Pennsylvania. The bodies weren\u2019t discovered until five days later.<\/p>\r\n Yablonski, an official of the United Mine Workers of America, a dissident reformer, had been challenging William Anthony \u201cTough Tony\u201d Boyle, president of UMWA, for the top job.<\/p>\r\n All roads, from D.C. to the hills and hollers of Tennessee, led to Cleveland, where three hillbilly hitmen were presently living.<\/p>\r\n One of them, an unemployed housepainter, was the son-in-law of the president of the 75-member UMWA local in LaFollette, Tennessee, a low but key link in the dippy Boyle scheme\u00a0to murder Yablonski, financing the hit with $20,000 in embezzled union funds.<\/p>\r\n And I had most of it.\u00a0 Before the murder, during the murder, and after the murder. Who said what to whom, and where they tossed the guns (the Monongahela River); how they didn\u2019t have the heart to shoot the friendly family dog that didn\u2019t bark, Rascal, and how the plot soon went to pieces because Yablonski, the son of Polish immigrants, had noticed the dummies scouting his house and wrote down the license number of their car.<\/p>\r\n Moreover, before driving back to Cleveland, they left fingerprints behind. They were arrested three days after the bodies were discovered.<\/p>\r\n It was all sources. A federal agent, a bondsman, a federal prosecutor, a defense lawyer. They wrapped it up, put a bow on it and dropped it in my lap.<\/p>\r\n While out-of-town reporters hunkered down waiting for federal grand jury indictments, the PD was good to go, a copyrighted story below a banner headline and my byline.<\/p>\r\n Afterward, I went to Tennessee and paid a young guy $50 to drive me around. Home brew, biscuits, red-eye gravy, and Merle Haggard on the jukebox (\u201cOkie from Muskogee\u201d), genuinely tough people, some of them living on the edge in the natural beauty of LaFollette\u2019s Campbell County, coal and iron ore distant memories but high hopes for tourism.<\/p>\r\n They condemned the murders but didn\u2019t condone a Yankee sticking his nose in their business. They were courteous only because my driver was kin to most of them, and we traveled hospitably with a bottle of bourbon and a case of beer.<\/p>\r\n A week later I took a half-bottle of scotch out of my desk drawer and put it beside my typewriter. McGruder and Barlett had done all they could, knocked on doors, pleaded, promising I wouldn\u2019t do it again, but in their hearts knew I would.<\/p>\r\n And to the men at the top (no women), my resignation was treasure. When I left, I didn\u2019t say anything to anyone and no one said anything to me.<\/p>\r\n I didn\u2019t leave crying but I wasn\u2019t laughing either. It\u2019s too late, not to mention absurd, to say \u201csorry\u201d to the dead. But I will admit to the living that my years at the Plain Dealer were the time of my life.<\/p>\r\n ","rendered":" I was a relative short-timer at The Plain Dealer, from the end of 1963 to the beginning of 1970, and when I left, editors celebrated. So did most of my coworkers. The truth of the matter: I was an insufferable pain in the ass.<\/p>\n The days of typewriters, pencils and paste pots.<\/p>\n Take, for example, 1968, the year The Plain Dealer hired five women in a group, the renowned \u201cClass of \u201968,\u201d all of whom went on to be excellent reporters and editors.<\/p>\n One of the young women, straight out of The College of Wooster and lovely in tartan skirt, sweater and Peter Pan collar, was doing rookie grunt work, writing obits a few desks from mine. The desk chairs were on rollers so I rolled over and asked \u2014 50 years before \u201cMe Too\u201d and \u201cTime\u2019s Up\u201d \u2014 \u201cAre you a virgin?\u201d<\/p>\n She should have stabbed me in the eye with a pencil. Instead, she blushed and typed even faster, sympathetic words about the recently deceased. She was the daughter of a Pennsylvania judge and a Christian. She forgave me, and subsequently did monumental typing at her breakfast table in Gates Mills.<\/p>\n I had written a long piece in pencil on legal pads about a precocious politician, Dennis Kucinich, and she typed it as fast as I could read it \u2014 the cover story for the inaugural issue of Cleveland Magazine, April 1972.<\/p>\n The 60s. What a decade. What a time to be in the newspaper business.\u00a0John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and Malcolm X assassinated; John Glenn in orbit, Cuban missile crisis, civil rights and voting rights, U.S. cities on fire, Vietnam on fire, Neil Armstrong on the moon \u2014 a decade ending with Woodstock, anti-Vietnam War demonstrations and news of the My Lai massacre.<\/p>\n On Oct. 6, 1968, The Plain Dealer officially became Ohio\u2019s largest newspaper and readers were greeted with: \u201cYou meet the nicest people when you\u2019re Number One!\u201d and some stats: 409,414 daily, 545,032 Sunday.<\/p>\n The PD could have been, should have been, the best paper between the coasts. The newsroom was loaded with young talent. Unfortunately it didn\u2019t bewitch the editors, far too many of them semiliterate archivists promoted for loyal time served and given an impressive title and a paltry raise.<\/p>\n Even with honorable old gents who had paid their dues and earned their stripes there was time warp in a wild decade.<\/p>\n Here\u2019s dialogue with one of them in the paper\u2019s elevator. He was running the show in 1965, the year before he retired, and 30 years before the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame opened in Cleveland:<\/p>\n \u201cWhat do you think of these ridiculous names rock and rollers give themselves? The Animals, Lovin\u2019 Spoonful?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI like it,\u201d I said. \u201cWhat do you like?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI think \u2018Four Freshmen\u2019 has dash.\u201d<\/p>\n The city was beginning to decay from the inside out but high-ranking editors were curiously indifferent.<\/p>\n Four days before Armstrong walked on the moon, July 20, 1969, I walked around a Hough neighborhood that had been ripped by riots, fire and fury in July 1966, chatting with residents who believed that Hough, ravaged real estate controlled by absentee landlords, needed a whole lot of fixing before we messed with the moon.<\/p>\n One of them was a mother of four who lived in a top-floor apartment with a leaky roof and rats in the hallway. The moon shot? \u201cI don\u2019t know nothin\u2019 about that,\u201d she said. \u201cBut I have plenty of mices and I can\u2019t keep flour for the roaches in it.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI don\u2019t know why we\u2019re running this,\u201d an editor said, shaking his head. \u201cIt\u2019s like insulting the moon story.\u201d<\/p>\n This was a man who fervently endorsed a grand jury report defining social and racial unrest in Cleveland as being \u201cCommunist inspired,\u201d five days of looting and arson and confrontation between armed black militants and Cleveland police that left seven dead (three policemen, three \u201csuspects,\u201d one \u201ccivilian\u201d) and 15 wounded. The \u201cGlenville Shootout\u201d in July 1968.<\/p>\n Still, I was fond of my battered steel desk in the big, sprawling, loud, smoke-filled city room. There were ashtrays, and cigarettes in the ashtrays.<\/p>\n To my left was Roldo Bartimole, before he departed to do his own thing as the muckraking publisher of an annoying newsletter, Point of View. In time, I\u2019d refer to him as\u00a0\u201cthe poor man\u2019s Tom Paine\u201d and \u201cthe conscience of Cleveland.\u201d<\/p>\n To my right was Joe Eszterhas, a onetime Hungarian refugee. He was just a kid but a bear for work, and it wasn\u2019t all fiction. Fame and fortune in Hollywood were in his writing future, 19 movies, or thereabouts, and eight books. Who can forget \u201cBasic Instinct\u201d?<\/p>\n On Nov. 20, 1969, the Plain Dealer published pictures that shocked the world, gruesome\u00a0images of\u00a0Vietnamese civilians massacred in March 1968 by American soldiers in a 50-man unit armed with automatic rifles, machine guns and grenade launchers \u2014 \u201cclumps of bodies.\u201d (Eventually the Army set the number at 347, although the Vietnamese claim 504.)<\/p>\n The pictures were taken by former Army photographer Ron Haeberle and buttressed by an exclusive eyewitness account written by Eszterhas. A Fairview High School\u00a0<\/strong>graduate, Haeberle called the Plain Dealer because he recognized Eszterhas\u2019s byline. They had attended Ohio University at the same time and Joe was a writer and editor at the school paper.<\/p>\n Straight ahead was the rewrite desk where the laidback aces, Bob Daniels and Al Wiggins, were always laughing about something as they banged away, making the unreadable lyrical, or at least readable.<\/p>\n But they didn\u2019t screw around when rewriting. Perhaps you were calling in a story and you had a word like \u201cCourvoisier.\u201d You\u2019d start to spell it and one or the other would snap, \u201cGo on with the fucking story.\u201d<\/p>\n Another way of saying, \u201cI know how to spell, genius.\u201d\u00a0 They believed in short sentences, active verbs, and getting to the tavern on time.<\/p>\n Try to sneak jargon or clich\u00e9 by them \u2014 junk like today\u2019s iconic, surreal, on the ground, end of the day, begs the question, first and foremost, at this moment in time, impacted, or \u201cliterally\u201d this and \u201cliterally\u201d that \u2014 and they might hang up on you.<\/p>\n It was said that each time Daniels was sent out of town, he came back with a wife. I didn\u2019t believe it. Maybe two spouses. Three at most.<\/p>\n Wiggins had only one wife, but he was a poet. At first glance, no big deal, since nearly everyone in the city room except editors was a poet. Even the copy boys (no copy girls) were poets.<\/p>\n Speedy Kucinich, for one, would zip by, deftly depositing his latest work on your desk. The difference was that Wiggins was published with actual poets. When I had something in a coffeehouse rag, he had something in a book.<\/p>\n Nonetheless, many think one of his finest lines was his resignation on a postcard after leaving town in hurry, deeply in debt to two bookmakers and one very angry restaurant owner: \u201cBy the time you receive this comma I will have resigned period.”<\/p>\n Me, I argued incessantly with editors about items large and small. I thought it great that Muhammad Ali changed his \u201cslave name\u201d and turned his back on war (\u201cNo Viet Cong ever called me nigger\u201d), and that for sure a family newspaper should have room for a feature story on a stripper who read Walt Whitman and used a boa constrictor in her act.<\/p>\n One editor was confused but sincere when he blurted, \u201cNegroes are now blacks?\u201d \u201cSeems so, sport,\u201d I said. \u201cAsk McGruder, the tall Negro who works for us.\u201d<\/p>\n Under the circumstances, I should have been given a pass for doing mad things.<\/p>\n For instance, the day I cut Bob McGruder\u2019s phone line with my penknife because I was tired of waiting for him to go to lunch. At the time, McGruder, the\u00a0Plain Dealer\u2019s first black reporter, was talking to Carl Stokes, Cleveland\u2019s first black mayor. But I didn\u2019t know that.<\/p>\n Rev. King had a dream; writer James Baldwin had a prophetic spiritual (\u201cGod gave Noah the rainbow sign\/ No more water, the fire next time\u201d), and McGruder, who would go on to be executive editor of the Detroit Free Press, had a lunchtime story: stopped again by police while driving through a white neighborhood at night \u2014 another DWB, Driving While Black.<\/p>\n But no one dreamed that the 44th President would be black man, or that a birther-crazed real estate mogul who spent years claiming 44 was illegal (not born in the United States) would be the 45th President.<\/p>\n McGruder was one of two friends I had at the PD. The other was Don Barlett.\u00a0 The three of us had lunch daily. Later, McGruder would become the PD\u2019s managing editor. Later, Barlett would win two Pulitzer Prizes working for the Philadelphia Inquirer. Later, the PD would ask me to go to its bureau in Lake County and work for an editor who thought \u201cpenultimate\u201d meant beyond \u201cultimate.\u201d<\/p>\n The paper made it clear that it didn\u2019t want Barlett working with me. I think they were afraid I might corrupt him. A box-like figure who wore button-down J.C. Penney shirts, a beige raincoat, and a dark beret atop a bald dome, he neither drank nor smoked and spoke barely above a whisper.<\/p>\n We fooled them just once, together writing a series about the city\u2019s business elite bankrolling a reactionary ploy to get \u201canti-Communist\u201d tripe into Cleveland\u2019s public schools. When the PD killed the series, we sold it to Nation magazine.<\/p>\n It became kind of a joke when we got an award for investigative reporting from the Cleveland Press Club, for the first part of the series, the weakest part.<\/p>\n Admittedly, I had a bad attitude. It began at the Alliance Review and continued at the Akron Beacon Journal, where Barlett and I were assigned to the sticks \u2014 Barlett in Portage County, me in Wayne County.<\/p>\n They gave you a Rollei twin-lens reflex camera, paid for your gas, and you filled an entire page: pictures, news, features and a column. You learned to write swiftly but day became night mighty fast.<\/p>\n John S. Knight, legendary editor and publisher of Knight Newspapers, had an office in the newsroom. I\u2019d go in and drink his whiskey and smoke his cigars. He was never there at night.<\/p>\n I certainly didn\u2019t expect him the winter night I was sitting in his chair, my feet on his desk, a glass of aged scotch in one hand and a Cuban cigar in the other, when, suddenly, there he was, the great man himself, hanging up his hat and coat and saying quietly, very quietly, \u201cMind if I use my office?\u201d<\/p>\n That\u2019s all he said, and if he told anyone else, I never heard about it.<\/p>\n After a year glittering as a reporter in the PD\u2019s Akron bureau but failing as a collegial co-worker (I called the bureau chief an \u201casshole\u201d because his idea of journalism was to clip Beacon stories and rewrite them), I was eager to star in the PD\u2019s windowless old hulk at E.\u00a018th and Superior.<\/p>\n I was stunned when informed that they first wanted me to serve a tour in the suburbs. I sulked until I was assigned to Criminal Courts.<\/p>\n Now we were cooking. This was the place for me. Good guys and bad guys, though you sometimes needed a program to tell them apart. Every day was\u00a0drama, with someone doomed to get it in the neck unless a crafty defense lawyer intervened.<\/p>\n The lawyers starred but others made it work, the people who didn\u2019t get their names in the paper \u2014\u00a0<\/strong>clerks, bailiffs, parole officers and court stenographers.<\/p>\n Need to check your courtroom notes? Run down to the basement and an affable stenographer would consult his or her machine and make you whole.<\/p>\n A grand jury clerk would tip you off to what was coming and you had a scoop. A parole officer would let you peek at a report disclosing hilarious dialogue between members of an incompetent gang drilling a safe in a jewelry store, and you would get a laudatory note from the PD publisher, dapper Tom Vail, the prince of Hunting Valley. (Vail\u2019s notes were commonly known as \u201cSnowflakes\u201d and nearly everyone got at least one.)<\/p>\n After the hardnosed Newhouse family acquired the 125-year-old PD in 1967, it kept the well-bred Vail, born rich, in place.<\/p>\n He was a bright shining bauble with the right high-society business and social connections. But they sent in one of their own men to keep an eye on the bottom line.<\/p>\n In 1965, Newsweek described Vail as appearing \u201cmore like an F. Scott Fitzgerald hero than a publisher,\u201d which, I guess, made him our Gatsby, while we were his \u201cyoung tigers,\u201d according to Newsweek.<\/p>\n You were sadly out of luck, however, if you were an old tiger, such as Bob Manry, a 46-year-old copy editor who was turned down when he asked the paper to sponsor his proposed voyage across the Atlantic in a tiny boat.<\/p>\n Bob said \u201cbye\u201d the day before his 47th birthday and pushed off in a 13-foot sailboat, Tinkerbelle \u2014 78 days from Falmouth, Massachusetts to Falmouth, England, where he was greeted by massive crowds and a flotilla of large and small boats on Aug. 17, 1965.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, small scoops for me,\u00a0days when there was a feisty rival, the Cleveland Press. One afternoon a court clerk nodded toward a stack of books on the counter, journal entries made by judges. Just a nod.<\/p>\n But in one of the books was a judge\u2019s journal entry reducing Don King\u2019s sentence of second-degree murder to manslaughter, shortly after a jury convicted King, a hot-tempered numbers honcho, of second-degree murder for kicking to death a lightweight former employee in front of Art\u2019s Seafood House at Cedar and E. 100th.<\/p>\n I had covered the trial and it took the jury only four hours, counting lunch, to find the burly defendant guilty of murder.\u00a0Sam Garrett, stomped and pistol-whipped, owed King $600.<\/p>\n Years earlier, in 1954,\u00a023-year-old \u201cDonald the Kid,\u201d as he was known,\u00a0 killed a man who was trying to rob one of his gambling joints, shot him in the back, which was ruled \u201cjustifiable homicide\u201d \u2014 a shootout involving three hoods from Detroit and King returning fire with a Russian pistol.<\/p>\n I got a Snowflake for the journal-entry story, the judge\u00a0got re-elected, and after nearly four years in prison, Cleveland\u2019s Don King got New York City, where he\u00a0 grew his hair incredibly high and became the pre-eminent boxing promoter on the planet \u2014 \u201cRumble in the Jungle\u201d (Ali-Foreman), \u201cThrilla in Manilla\u201d (Ali-Frazier), plus promoting the fights of Larry Holmes, Mike Tyson, Roberto Duran, and Evander Holyfield, among many other champions, with enough energy left over to vigorously battle lawsuits filed by various boxers alleging he had stiffed them.<\/p>\n In 1992, he took the Fifth when questioned about alleged connections to Mafia boss John Gotti.<\/p>\n In any event, when the trial of the decade rolled around, the retrial of Sam Sheppard in 1966, I was ready.\u00a0Sheppard, a former neurosurgeon, had\u00a0spent 10 years in prison after being convicted of second-degree murder in the bludgeon death of his wife, Marilyn,\u00a0<\/strong>in their Bay Village home in July 1954.<\/p>\n A federal judge granted Sheppard a retrial on the grounds that the \u201ccarnival atmosphere\u201d of the first trial had made a \u201cmockery of justice.\u201d Put that on the afternoon Press, which lasted until 1982 but was now being trampled by the morning Plain Dealer.<\/p>\n Sheppard\u2019s young attorney from Boston, F. Lee Bailey, dazzled with a mix-and-match defense that combined a left-handed mystery intruder with mathematically intriguing blood spatters. After 12 hours of deliberations, the jury returned a verdict of \u201cnot guilty.\u201d<\/p>\n The city was packed with out-of-town reporters but the PD did not embarrass itself. Its art, sidebars and main stories were on the money, as was the verdict story, written on deadline, in which I noted that minutes before the jury returned Sheppard removed his wallet and slipped it to Bailey under the table.<\/p>\n Right-handed Sam, who testified in the first trial but not the second, thought he was going back to the slammer.<\/p>\n I got a raise (five bucks), a Snowflake, and a happy new job, general assignment. The paper sent me everywhere. Montreal, New York, Los Angeles, New Orleans, Chicago, Miami. One month here, the next there.<\/p>\n Hey, Norman Mailer is running for mayor of New York. His buddy, Jimmy Breslin, is running for city council president. Why don\u2019t you take a look?<\/p>\n See where this is going? This a confession, a long epitaph for a guileless but arrogant loser. If the editors were idiots, how was I getting plum assignments,\u00a0from\u00a0homicidal maniacs to U.S. presidential candidates? The fact is, all the editors weren\u2019t idiots, and even the idiots were not idiotic all the time.<\/p>\n The fact is, I was not a nice person and, in many respects, quite dense.<\/p>\n A touch over 5-10 and 145 pounds, I had a history of shooting off my mouth, out of my weight class, and finding barroom floors. As someone said somewhere, I wasn\u2019t tough when I was tough.<\/p>\n All the same, in a matter of weeks I called an assistant desk editor a dope and asked another colleague to step outside. This was a mistake. No one told me he could fight and he kicked hell out of me. However, inside I caught him coming out of the men\u2019s room and punched him.<\/p>\n Regrettably, an editor witnessed it and didn\u2019t believe me when I said we were just fooling around.<\/p>\n In addition, editors didn\u2019t believe me when I denied carnal knowledge of a secretary or that she was giving me copies of management memos, several of them Tom Vail\u2019s omnipresent Snowflakes, including one to me. And yet they seemed ready to cut me even more slack.<\/p>\n A meeting was set with the executive editor. I prepared by drinking lunch. When he asked if I wanted a raise, I said yes. He asked how much and I said I wanted to make what he was making. He accused me of drinking and I said he would have made a terrific reporter.<\/p>\n That did it. The wee man, who had not distinguished himself as a reporter, told me I was going to Lake County and I resigned, with two weeks notice.<\/p>\n Say goodbye to Cleveland bars and hello to the bucolic delights of Lake County?\u00a0 Lake County when I was begging to go to Vietnam? Not a chance.<\/p>\n But the bosses knew that and I ended up muttering to myself something along the lines of: \u201cWell played, motherfuckers.\u201d<\/p>\n Then something terrible happened. On Dec. 31, 1969, at about 1 a.m., three killers shot to death Joseph Albert \u201cJock\u201d Yablonski, 59, his wife Margaret, 59, and his\u00a0 daughter Charlotte, 25, in the family\u2019s 200-year-old house in Clarksville, Pennsylvania. The bodies weren\u2019t discovered until five days later.<\/p>\n Yablonski, an official of the United Mine Workers of America, a dissident reformer, had been challenging William Anthony \u201cTough Tony\u201d Boyle, president of UMWA, for the top job.<\/p>\n All roads, from D.C. to the hills and hollers of Tennessee, led to Cleveland, where three hillbilly hitmen were presently living.<\/p>\n One of them, an unemployed housepainter, was the son-in-law of the president of the 75-member UMWA local in LaFollette, Tennessee, a low but key link in the dippy Boyle scheme\u00a0to murder Yablonski, financing the hit with $20,000 in embezzled union funds.<\/p>\n And I had most of it.\u00a0 Before the murder, during the murder, and after the murder. Who said what to whom, and where they tossed the guns (the Monongahela River); how they didn\u2019t have the heart to shoot the friendly family dog that didn\u2019t bark, Rascal, and how the plot soon went to pieces because Yablonski, the son of Polish immigrants, had noticed the dummies scouting his house and wrote down the license number of their car.<\/p>\n Moreover, before driving back to Cleveland, they left fingerprints behind. They were arrested three days after the bodies were discovered.<\/p>\n It was all sources. A federal agent, a bondsman, a federal prosecutor, a defense lawyer. They wrapped it up, put a bow on it and dropped it in my lap.<\/p>\n While out-of-town reporters hunkered down waiting for federal grand jury indictments, the PD was good to go, a copyrighted story below a banner headline and my byline.<\/p>\n Afterward, I went to Tennessee and paid a young guy $50 to drive me around. Home brew, biscuits, red-eye gravy, and Merle Haggard on the jukebox (\u201cOkie from Muskogee\u201d), genuinely tough people, some of them living on the edge in the natural beauty of LaFollette\u2019s Campbell County, coal and iron ore distant memories but high hopes for tourism.<\/p>\n They condemned the murders but didn\u2019t condone a Yankee sticking his nose in their business. They were courteous only because my driver was kin to most of them, and we traveled hospitably with a bottle of bourbon and a case of beer.<\/p>\n A week later I took a half-bottle of scotch out of my desk drawer and put it beside my typewriter. McGruder and Barlett had done all they could, knocked on doors, pleaded, promising I wouldn\u2019t do it again, but in their hearts knew I would.<\/p>\n And to the men at the top (no women), my resignation was treasure. When I left, I didn\u2019t say anything to anyone and no one said anything to me.<\/p>\n I didn\u2019t leave crying but I wasn\u2019t laughing either. It\u2019s too late, not to mention absurd, to say \u201csorry\u201d to the dead. But I will admit to the living that my years at the Plain Dealer were the time of my life.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":106,"menu_order":13,"template":"","meta":{"pb_show_title":"on","pb_short_title":"","pb_subtitle":"","pb_authors":["tsheridan"],"pb_section_license":""},"chapter-type":[47],"contributor":[62],"license":[],"class_list":["post-5","chapter","type-chapter","status-publish","hentry","chapter-type-standard","contributor-tsheridan"],"part":510,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.ulib.csuohio.edu\/plain-dealing\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapters\/5","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.ulib.csuohio.edu\/plain-dealing\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapters"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.ulib.csuohio.edu\/plain-dealing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/chapter"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.ulib.csuohio.edu\/plain-dealing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/106"}],"version-history":[{"count":38,"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.ulib.csuohio.edu\/plain-dealing\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapters\/5\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2858,"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.ulib.csuohio.edu\/plain-dealing\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapters\/5\/revisions\/2858"}],"part":[{"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.ulib.csuohio.edu\/plain-dealing\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/parts\/510"}],"metadata":[{"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.ulib.csuohio.edu\/plain-dealing\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapters\/5\/metadata\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.ulib.csuohio.edu\/plain-dealing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"chapter-type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.ulib.csuohio.edu\/plain-dealing\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapter-type?post=5"},{"taxonomy":"contributor","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.ulib.csuohio.edu\/plain-dealing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/contributor?post=5"},{"taxonomy":"license","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.ulib.csuohio.edu\/plain-dealing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/license?post=5"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}