Via Mano Singham… more: How it all went down, The morning after and Words fail me.

And more from Saagar Enjeti and Krystal Ball at The Rising: Trump Incites Riot At US Capitol In Shameful Day Of US History, Glenn Greenwald REACTS: Twitter, Facebook SUSPEND Trump Accounts, Philip Wegmann: Inside The War Between Trump And Pence and finally: far too little and far too late. History will speak.

Bonus No. 1: Now the rats are finding a conscience?

Bonus No. 2 It’s not just newspapers anymore Milo.

Bonus No. 3: Daring Donald and the Election-Fraud Space Monsters.

Astute readers of Have Coffee Will Write in general and Readin’ Roldo in particular will notice a change in the bug at the left. Beginning with Volume 2, Number 10, Roldo Bartimole gave Clevelanders a holiday present: The Scrooge Awards (later, The Scroogies.) Not to worry, the schwa returns tomorrow, but today is a bit of fun.

In his 1 December 1969 issue of Point Of Viəw (volume 2, number 10), Roldo introduces the inaugural awards:

Over the past year-and-a-half we’ve exhibited a little animosity and ill-will toward certain individuals and institutions that we’d like to continue in this season of manufactured ‘good will’ with gifts. No returns please.

Here are the first half-dozen awards:

To Pat Gerity—Free tuition to sensitivity training.

To Howard Metzenbaum—A new name for the next year: Sweenibreeze.

To Bishop Issenmann—Honorary membership in the Fraternal Order of Police.

To Charles Laurie—A painting of the Black Jesus from Stan Toliver.

To TRW—A new war to cash in on. And,

To Downtown Cleveland—A $32,000,000 appropriation to put off-duty policemen every three feet to encourage downtown shopping.

There are dozens more. Enjoy.

The issue is not all fun and joy, however. On the back page, Roldo offers a special gift to Cleveland’s morning newspaper:

We’re not the only ones talking about the Plain Dealer. The following is from The Straus Editor’s Note which goes to news editors around the nation:

Newsmen at Cleveland’s Plain Dealer feel they’re getting lost in the shuffle. In 1967 when Sam Newhouse bought the newspaper, Tom Vail stayed on as editor and publisher. Vail, whose family once controlled the paper, is a Cleveland blueblood and member of the city’s power elite. After the Newhouse takeover, Vail spread the word that he wanted to attract to the paper a young, aggressive staff. Great things were to happen at the PD, but they haven’t. Staffers complain that Vail doesn’t devote full time to his job, and that editors fear to offend when he’s away. Reporters say their stories are managed to conform to Vail’s social, political and business friendships. (Their gripes: key advertisers can influence assignments; staffers were kept away from what became Life’s scoop about Gov. Rhodes’ finances [The Governor and the Mobster 2 May 1969, JH]; important elements of a racial story involving a local McDonald’ hamburger franchise that the PD didn’t print, showed up later in the national press.) Newhouse interests would like to oust young Tom Vail and unveil a new boss at the PD; but they fear to offend Cleveland’s aristocracy—and they hesitate to expose themselves to charges of meddling absentee ownership. Meanwhile, the paper—which could be great—merely marks time.

That, of course, never changed, as the paper’s inability to win a Pulitzer for actual news reporting illustrates.

In his 29 December 1969 issue of Point Of Viəw (volume 2, number 11), Roldo leads with the headline: Pollution for Profit: The SEWERMEN. This was the last issue of 1969 and Roldo could not know that what he characterized as anti-pollution forces were about to explode in the nation’s consciousness as the new environmentalists created a movement and the first Earth Day on 22 April. As has often been demonstrated, Roldo was ahead of the curve. He ledes:

We are told that some Ohio corporations are polluting the air we breathe and the water we drink. But corporations are such faceless creatures.

We believe it is necessary to take a close look at the individuals who make the decisions to pollute.

Therefore, we take a look at the Corporate Sewermen.

And we shall show that they are closely linked, indeed, in most cases the same Sewermen benefit directly from the pollution of a variety of companies and industries.

The federal government recently called to task four large steel companies for pollution in Ohio. Three—Jones & Laughlin (J&L dumps solids, iron, oil, sulfates, ammonia and acids into Lake Erie.), Republic Steel (accounts for 14.9 percent of total industrial waste in Lake Erie.), and Interlake Steel—are Ohio companies. The fourth is U.S. Steel of Pittsburgh.

We want to show that the Sewermen who run those corporations are close business associates who know each other well and depend upon each other to compile personal and corporate wealth.

Starting with five Cleveland banks—Central National, Cleveland Trust, National City, Society National and Union Commerce—Roldo begins to connect the dots like an ace detective, identifying what he calls interlockings among directors sitting on bank and corporate boards. He writes:

Before any dismiss the interlockings as natural and insignificant, we’d like to take a look at a method used to move into the steel industry. James Ling of Ling-Tremco-Vought, was aware of the value of interlockings, using what he called a ‘common denominator,’ who turned out to be Jack Reavis, to get into the steel industry.

Using Reavis as his common denominator, Ling follows the gold brick road to Youngstown Sheet and Tube to Jones and Laughlin to Lehman Brothers to LTV Steel to Mellon National Bank and even, wait for it: Hanna Mining and Consolidation Coal. Roldo continues:

An indication of the thinking of these Sewermen is revealed by Consolidation Coal vice president James D. Reilly:

They (conservationists worried about strip mining) are stupid idiots, socialists and commies who don’t know what they are talking about. I think it is our (coal mining companies) bounded duty to knock them down and subject them to the ridicule they deserve. (Pittsburgh Press, 8 May 1969.) [I think John Prine knew about the Paradise he sang about. JH]

There are numerous other interlockings that reveal the incestuous relationships that ensure cooperation, to say the least, in opposing even moderate changes in anti-pollution efforts.

Follow the money is always good advice in solving any mystery and Roldo has clearly identified where that money will take any reporter or environmental activist. His advice is just as valuable in 2021 as it was in 1969.

Finally, Roldo finishes up the year with a look at the inner working of Cleveland government, specifically, the relationship between Mayor Carl Burton Stokes and City Council President James Vincent Stanton. Roldo begins with a word that will ring across the next 30-plus years in Cleveland: Gateway. He writes:

Probably the best indication of the way things will be for the next two years was displayed on 24 November at an afternoon meeting and regular Council meeting that night.

That afternoon the administration presented the council with plans for its Gateway project on the lakefront, asking for about $4.5 million in city funds to match the same in federal aid to prepare the site for private commercial development. [I would suggest that Clevelanders observe a moment of silence every 24 November, perhaps at 2 p.m., to contemplate what we lost at that meeting. JH]
…
Stanton, despite an antagonism to the money boys and certain wheeler-dealers, remains their servant. He’ll be obstructionist and divisive on issues of importance to low-income people. Otherwise, there will be, as there has been, unity.
…
It doesn’t take much imagination to see why the mayor and council can get together on these issues, as both did during the first term on such matters as a Port Authority, hiring special consultants to push the $40 million expansion of Cleveland Hopkins and other matters.

Meanwhile, on the most important issue for those who gave the Mayor his victory—the police—it’s business as usual.

This is precisely the dynamic that Roldo’s elites, or Bernie’s 1 Percent, want most in government: partisan bickering and rancor for the 99 percent and bi-partisan unity for themselves.

See here for a bibliography of books and other materials mentioned in this series.

Previously while Readin’ Roldo…

Bonus No. 1: Comparing Republican with Democratic Party Energy Levels—No Contest.

Growing up in Marietta, one of my favorite teenage (public) activities was wandering the street with my best friend Don Ritenour. On 6th street, behind the Mound Cemetery, there was a house with a four-foot by eight-foot billboard in the front yard damning the United Nations and praising the virtues of the John Birch Society.

There was never anyone outside and Don and I never thought to knock on the door to learn more, but in subsequent years I’ve come to realize that not doing so was a mistake. I knew—from the sign and other reading—what the home owner was mostly about, but still, the conversation might have been interesting.

In his 3 November 1969 issue of Point Of Viəw (volume 2, number 8), Roldo Bartimole touches on the society in
Propaganda Peddlers. [Much of the information in this issue, Roldo notes, comes from Overcharge by Lee Metcalf and Vic Reinemer.] He writes:

The Educational Research Council of America debacle raises the question of corporate pumping of right-wing literature to the public, especially children.

It is only one of the “educational organizations” supported by Cleveland industrialists to spread right-wing literature.

It’s not surprising that a principal backer of ERCA was Ralph Besse of Cleveland Electric Illuminating—Cleveland’s ‘liberal businessman.’

CEI and other investor-owned utilities plow funds, at the cost to the consumer, into a number of organizations that produce propaganda endorsed by the John Birch Society.

I would strongly suggest that Besse was to the John Birch Society in 1969 as Charles and Koch were to the TEA Party in 2009. Roldo continues:

For example, the Foundation for Economic Education, which publishes The Freeman and has more than half of its 80 books “approved by the John Birch Society,” has been the beneficiary of CEI and Toledo Edison’s charity.

America’s Future—an offspring of the Committee for Constitutional Government, described as the grandfather of several extremist groups—had 16 “leading educators” to evaluate textbook materials, more than half of them affiliated with the JBS and two other similar organizations.

Republic Steel and Youngstown Sheet & Tube contributed to America’s Future and CEI availed itself of AF’s literature.
…
When ERCA got its image dirtied by the Plain Dealer articles, which showed that racist material was being produced by the non-tax front set up by Cleveland industrialists, it turned to Salvage, Lee & Howard, a public relations firm owned by Salvage & Lee of N.Y. and Edward Howard of Cleveland to repair the damage.

Salvage & Lee has lent support and comfort to utility-backed right-wing organization The American Economic Foundation, which also has material reprinted by the John Birch Society. Salvage & Lee helped AEF pay its office rent and aided in fund-raising.

Salvage, Lee & Howard offer a curious combination [Emphasis mine, JH] of right-wing and liberal public relations work.

Ed Howard, for example, helped formulate Richard Nixon’s ideas on black capitalism. In Cleveland, his liberal hand represents the Hough Development Corp. and Warner-Swasey’s Community Products Co., a corporate sop to the black community.

I didn’t find the combinations at all curious. I recall the first day of Journalism Ethics at Ohio University. The course was required for all Journalism students regardless of their sequence. The professor stood at the front of the class and asked:

How many of you are newspaper students? How many of you are magazine students? How many of you are radio and television students?

Each time a portion of the class raised their hands (I was in the magazine sequence.) When he came to a final group, we got a surprise.

If you are in the public relations and advertising sequence, don’t bother to raise your hands. What we are going to discuss over the next 10 weeks has absolutely nothing to do with your chosen profession. You shouldn’t even be in the Journalism School. You belong in the business school. I know that you’re required to be here and I’m sorry about that, I didn’t make the rule.

And the class went on.

The professor’s point was that advertising and public relations has nothing to do with journalism, facts or truth. They are all about selling a product and the professionals in those fields will sell damn near anything for the right fee. Roldo, in Lindseth-CEI’s Welfare Recipient continues with exposure of another elite leech. He writes:

While instilling in young Americans the importance of self-reliance and the free enterprise system, Elmer L. Lindseth, former board chairman of the Cleveland Electric Illuminating Co., gleefully participates in a private welfare scheme at the public’s expense.

…Lindseth rants: “This cold war against freedom of enterprise here in America is being waged without let-up. It is our prime example to hold the line against further socialization of the electric light and power business…

“The remedy to creeping socialism lies in a fully informed citizenry, alert to the facts and their implications,” he says.

Poor threatened Lindseth.

Between 1962 and 1967, the CEI exec received more than one-half million dollars from CEI and Cleveland electricity users.

But that wasn’t enough. Through a stock option gimmick, where CEI execs can buy stock at a low price, then sell it when it rises, Lindseth picked up a windfall of $225,000 over the same 5-year period.

Mr. Lindseth is a major welfare recipient of CEI’s consumers.

In his catchall Thru The Grinder section Roldo adds another brick in the Glenville Shoot-out story. He writes:

A SPECIAL SICKNESS: 19-year old Lathan Donald will wait 20 years longer to become eligible for parole because of Judge John J. Angelotta’s “value system.”

Donald, convicted of the same charges as Ahmed Evans, but with the jury’s mercy, could have been sentenced to concurrent or consecutive life terms by the judge.

If Angelotta had made them concurrent, the 19-year old would have been eligible for parole at 39.

The judge has said privately to friends that he wanted to make the sentences run concurrently and that the decision was extremely difficult for him. But he chose to make the terms run consecutively, thus Donald would not be eligible for parole 40 years.

The reason: Donald made a short speech about black nationalism and raised the clenched fist. He didn’t show remorse. That’s what Angelotta wanted for 20 years.

Finally, under the headline,The Press Too Roldo notes that:

The Cleveland Press has a problem with racism too.

Although several Press reporters were upset that Joseph Kowalski, who defeated Henry Matt for Cleveland Council, used racism as his main campaign tactic, the Press editors found it easier to duck the issue.

The Press ran a story about Matt’s charge of racism but conveniently relieved the story of a slogan reported by Press writers: A vote for me is a vote against that nigger (Mayor Stokes).”

Press editors explained to reporters, they say, by such excuses as, ‘we don’t want to bring race into the campaign,’ and ‘we might get the Polocks upset at us,’ and ‘we’re going to have to live with Kowalski for the next two years.’

What a load of fetid dingo’s kidneys.

In his 17 November 1969 issue of Point Of Viəw (volume 2, number 9), Roldo Bartimole poses the most important question any journalist can ask:

WHY?

Vern Stouffer and his wife gave $9,250 to United Appeal this year.

This may seem like a healthy contribution. In fact, it reveals the hypocrisy of the United Appeal drive. Hypocrisy, indeed, is the wrong word. Executive gangsterism is better.

First, I would draw the reader’s attention to the amount the Stouffers’ gave. How did they arrive at $9,250? Why not a round number? They are not unique in this oddity as readers will find when they go down the list of donations in Roldo’s analysis. Is there some secret elite code involved here? Or, perhaps, was that just what happened to be in the checkbook at that moment?

Using Stouffer as the model, Roldo sets up his analysis:

Vern Stouffer owns 109,000 shares of Litton Industries stock. (Stock figures quoted throughout are from the Securities & Exchange Commission reports during 1969.) Litton is selling at $56 a share (prices throughout are taken from late October listings of stock exchanges). This indicates holdings of $6,104,000 for Stouffer.

If we consider a 6 percent return as an average expectation from stock-holdings (as we will throughout), Stouffer’s return from Litton, of which he is a director, would be $366,240.

Roldo then asks readers to assume that this $366,240 is Stouffer’s sole source of cash. Consulting the United Appeal’s schedule of giving he determines that, according to the schedule, Stouffer and his wife ought to have given $16,631, meaning that, according to UA standards, the pikers shorted the charity $7,381.

Roldo then proceeds to perform the same type of calculation on a number of other Cleveland leaders and found the following:

George Dively, board chairman of Harris-Intertype—donated $2,300 though his tax-free foundation, that is far short of the $13,261 indicated by the UA schedule.

Richard B. Tullis, president of Harris-Intertype—gave $2,000, less than one-third of the $6,182 indicated by the UA schedule.

Harry Stone of American Greetings gave $1,350 when the UA schedule called for $10,000.

Irving Stone, also of American Greetings, gave less, $1,250, than his brother, when the UA schedule expected him to donate $6,282.

John Kemper of Scott-Fetzer gave $800, about 6.1 percent of the UA schedule’s $13,000 plus.

Cyrus Eaton, gave $4,350. The UA schedule lists $25,000 for someone in Eaton’s bracket.

Roldo’s point here is that those with the most to give, give little while those living paycheck-to-paycheck are expected to cough up their fair share. Roldo continues:

Some have said that the $18 million [1969 campaign goal] of UA is a mere pittance and those attacking it are wasting their time. If the attack were merely on the $18 million it would be.

But the attack is on the perpetration of the fraud that says $18 million purchases solutions to the gamut of social ills, on the mentality and greed that produces the UA concept, on the capitalists who use even charity to make a profit.
…
The same men who want to pretend to attack city ills with pennies are those dipping into the public coffers for millions.

Roldo concludes:

Indeed, the men who use UA as a symbol of their concern are the same men who depend upon ‘corporate socialism’ for profits. They are the same men who control Ohio’s Corporate Legislature and Governor who in turn keep programs of welfare, education, mental health and the range of people-orientated service at a minimum. They are the same men who pollute the air and water for profit.

And they create United Appeal of Cleveland Now and similar ‘charity’ gimmicks as a means of revering themselves as honorable men in the public eye.

They are simply gangsters in business suits.

See here for a bibliography of books and other materials mentioned in this series.

Previously while Readin’ Roldo…

Bonus No. 1: Georgians—Go Vote for a Long Overdue Raise!

Bonus No. 2: Ted Rall tells us that he told us so.

When On 1 April 1985 I joined the staff of Home And Auto (soon to become Aftermarket Business) as an assistant editor, I was yet too poor to be giving money away. I had moved to Cleveland Heights the previous November and just paying for rent, utilities, insurance and food from my freelance work and National Guard pay took nearly all that I had.

When I landed the job with a regular paycheck, one of my first acts was to subscribe to Roldo Bartimole’s Point Of Viəw. I had been reading the copies at the Coventry Library on the corner, but I wanted my own It was like taking a graduate seminar on independent journalism.

I don’t recall from which issue I first learned about the role of The United Way in Cleveland; I do recall that I was sufficiently convinced of the ongoing scam to ignore the pleas for my contribution at my publishing house: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. I caught a little flack and I vaguely recall getting a few words from higher ups—there was pressure for top executives to deliver 100-percent participation—but I was too stubborn, or too clueless—to go along and the matter was dropped.

Because I was new to Cleveland, I had no idea how deeply this culture was embedded in Cleveland business. Before there was United Way, there was United Appeal and in his 6 October 1969 issue of Point Of Viəw (volume 2, number 6), Roldo Bartimole delivered a master class on this mother of all grifts. Writing in United Appeal—Art Of Extortion, he ledes:

Multi-millionaire Cyrus Eaton and his wife gave $4,350 to United Appeal.

The billion-dollar Cleveland Trust contributed $80,000 to UA.

A worker earning $4,800 gives, according to UA schedule, $56.

Thus Eaton, if we use a very minimum of $5 million gross income, gave 100th of 1 percent of his income to UA.

Cleveland Trust, with gross income of $123 million, gave some 6,000th of 1 percent to UA.

The worker gave 1.2 percent of his gross income.

Why does the worker, who can claim only about 10 percent of his contribution as a tax deduction while Eaton and Cleveland Trust deduct about 50 percent, have to give thousands of times more to UA than the very rich?

The answer: Because United Appeal represents a major flim-flam game. The joke is on the ordinary citizen who pays the bill while the elites preserve their millions.

As only Roldo can do, he carefully lays out the numbers indicting Cleveland’s wealthiest citizens in these acts of con artistry but I found one example—the UA’s association with the American Red Cross to be instructive. He writes:

The Red Cross, which gets nearly $12 million from Cleveland UA, appeals for more on the basis that it needs “15-cents for one washcloth for servicemen in Vietnam; 80-cents for chess or checkers… to the 3rd Field Hospital in Tan Son Nhut, Vietnam; 11-cents each for a service star for car or home, requested by 40,000 area families, to display while a family member is in military service.”

With an $80 million military budget are we saying that the Red Cross is needed to provide washcloths for GIs? While the blood flows, should the Red Cross be concerned with providing stickers for cars? This has to be the ultimate in mental illness.

And don’t get veterans—like my paternal grandfather who served in the U.S. Army during The Great War—started on the doughnuts. (I find it odd that NPR pegs this story to WW II and 1942, 25 years after my grandfather enlisted.) Roldo continues:

Now the Red Cross also provides blood and disaster aid. But does it seem reasonable in a nation with an annual gross national product of $300 billion that a man ripped apart in a car accident has to depend on volunteers for blood or a community ripped apart by nature depends on volunteers to set up a soup line? It’s like asking everyone to collect some pebbles and stones around his house because the nation wants to construct an interstate highway.

The main reason for this boosterism which infects Cleveland and Ohio greatly stems from industry’s desire for profits, profits and low taxes.

Roldo was not the only one asking these questions. A committee of the Welfare Federation, lead by Ralph L. Gillen, wanted much the same answers. Roldo continues:

…[T]he Gillen Report—written non-polemically—represents a dynamite issue to UA and the Welfare Federation. It really says to them, “You’ve been giving the money to agencies which refuse to deal with major social issues of urban life.”

The Gillen Report was the result of a study made to determine policy guidelines of volunteer agencies, including policies to be used in funding decisions.

If recommendations were followed, the funding process would be turned upside down. Red Cross, Y’s and a host of other agencies which receive the bulk of the funding would take deep cuts and groups such as the Welfare Rights Organization, which receive no funds, would rate the big money.

The report gave the Welfare Foundation guidelines for funding, saying it “must set an example for its constituent agencies and accept the risks involved.” The Welfare Federation response was to ignore and bury the report just as it did with a similar report which made the same criticisms in 1965.

The guidelines ought to make welfare bureaucrats queasy.

Of course they would. Such changes would severely jeopardize their ability to fund their lifestyle. Roldo concludes:

Those who care about pollution, mental retardation, crippled children, welfare recipients, the mentally and physically ill, and other poor services from the prisons to family aid, are directly contributing TO THE PROBLEM when they contribute to United Appeal.
…
Anyone who gives a penny to United Appeal is not only a damned fool but will contribute to the very problems he or she desires to solve.

Paying others to solve problems is, at best, risky. Who can you trust? Where does your time, or your money go? Better to get involved locally than to outsource globally.

In his 25 October 1969 issue of Point Of Viəw (volume 2, number 7), Roldo takes a very different tack, turning over nearly the entire issue to other writers: Donald Bartlett and Terrence Sheridan, both reporters for the Cleveland Plain Dealer. Roldo ledes:

The Cleveland Plain Dealer has censored the crucial part of its own exposé of the Educational Research Council of America. ERCA, a tool of industry and foundation elites, pours racist and right-wing propaganda into the public school textbooks under the guise of a legitimate education research organization.

The PD has printed seven articles dealing with the bizarre behavior of ERCA, apparently believing that once the elites realized what was going on they would dismiss ERCA’s executives.This didn’t happen because brainwashing of children is what the elites were purchasing and expected from ERCA.

This suppressed story, however, panicked Tom Vail and his editors. For it shows how the elites finance their little conspiracy with tax-free foundation funds. ERCA corporate conspirators reads like a Cleveland Who’s Who. When it became apparent that elites like Ralph Besse and George Karch were perpetrators, not the dupes of a ERCA scheme, Vail chose again Freedom to Repress.

In a note to city editor Bill Treon, one of the reporters told the editors the next story of the series was about the “interlocking directorships between ERCA and the foundations, which have put about $3 million into the council. There are eight or nine cases of trustees holding dual positions—a rather clear-cut case of self-dealing.

The underlining above was made on the note by Tom Vail, publisher and editor, who added in writing: “What’s wrong with this?”

Vail could be this stupid. He may believe the Karchs and the Besses should be allowed to brainwash children. Either way, Vail is too dangerous to be allowed to decide what Clevelanders will or will not read.

For these reasons we print in full what the PD censored:

By Donald Barlett & Terence Sheridan (c) 1969, The Plain Dealer

A close-knit band of Ohio Foundations that have poured nearly a million tax-free dollars into the Educational Research Council are tied directly to the controversial council through interlocking directorships.

That’s the lede. While you should certainly go read what scared the bejeezus out of Tom Vail here are just three brief highlights that grabbed my attention:

ERCA has had at least one trustee serving with the Cleveland Foundation every year since the council was created a decade ago, and has received money from the foundation annually.

There have been as many as three ERCA officers and trustees associated with the foundation at one time. When the foundation gave $88,600 to the council in 1966: [Triax President Raymond Q.] Armington was on the distribution committee, [Cleveland Trust President] George Gund was chairman of the trustee committee and [Union Commerce Ban President] Harry F. Burmester was a member of the trustee committee. All were ERCA board officers.
…
To most every businessman, company and foundation that contributes to ERCA goes a letter from the council’s most ardent advocate, Dr. George Baird, co-founder and president.

Whether writing to a donor or prospective donor, Baird usually relies on one of two patented themes in selling the council’s work:—Uprisings and disorders in the cities will end if all children can read. Or, children must be taught values by the schools.

What Barlett and Sheridan don’t write is that Baird’s message requires that only the correct texts and correct values may be taught if uprisings and disorders are to be prevented. I am reminded here of the message—one I have often repeated to my own students—expressed by Malcolm X in his autobiography. While in prison Malcolm recognized his own shortcomings in reading and writing and acquired a dictionary, a pad of paper and a pencil and proceeded to copy the dictionary, page by page. That education did little to quell any urges for uprising and disordering he felt. Barlett and Sheridan continue:

…[I]n a letter to the Oglebay Norton Foundation, [Baird] observed:

Your contribution is helping us bring thousands of youngsters under a curriculum that communicates values while it makes them competent citizens.

The latter view has stirred considerable controversy among educators, many whofeel it is not the responsibility of schools to instill values.

They argue that the schools do not have the right to select a particular set of values and then impose them on children who come from a variety of family backgrounds.

Yesterday, while driving to Wooster, Ohio, I listened to Who Is Us: Defining American Identity on WCPN/WKSU. What Baird and ERCA were trying to peddle was very much on the minds of host Rupert Allman and his guests: Caroline Hopper and Ashley Quarcoo. Though the 1 percent would very much like to control the message, the 99 percent is not willing to give that up.

Finally, a brief concluding piece that surprised me. Migrant farm workers walked out of the vineyards around Delano, California and called for a national boycott of table grapes. The response was very positive except, Roldo tells us, in Cleveland, Ohio, where labor leaders gave the farm workers nothing but raspberries. Roldo ledes:

“Liberals” in the Cleveland food industry, with the tacit approval of top AFL-CIO labor officers are keeping grapes in the supermarkets.

Not only did they keep the grapes in the produce sections, they actually increased sales of the fruit. How’s that for stomping on farm worker’s grapes?

See here for a bibliography of books and other materials mentioned in this series.

Previously while Readin’ Roldo…

When I first saw the headline—DR. SAM MUST GO FROM CWRU CAMPUS—on Roldo Bartimole’s 8 September 1969 lead story for Point Of Viəw (volume 2, number 4) I wondered why Roldo was putting Dr. Sam Sheppard back in the news. I knew of Sheppard, not because I was a Clevelander—I wouldn’t be until 1984—but from my Journalism Law class.

No, Roldo was writing about another Dr. Sam: Dr. Samuel Gerber, and as his headline and lede indicate, Roldo had very strong opinions on the Cuyahoga County Coroner. He wrote:

Sam Gerber must go.

He must go as acting leader of the Cuyahoga County Democrats. As County Coroner. And as a faculty member of the Case-Western Reserve University.

Dr. Gerber, as assistant clinical professor of legal medicine of the pathology department at CWRU, is a member of the academic and medical community of the university and derives benefits from this association.

Why was Roldo so adamant? Because Gerber and CWRU were entwined in the Glenville shoot-out and murder of James Chapman. Roldo continues:

The university, like it or not, is inextricably bound up in the Glenville shoot-out and the relationship of Dr. Gerber to CWRU only makes the involvement messier. The university, its faculty and trustees seem only eager to take the privileges and benefits of academic life and hide from the responsibilities.

But the university, its faculty, students and trustees have an unmet responsibility to see that the decisions of the county coroner’s office relating to Glenville are thoroughly investigated. The roles of faculty members and the coroner’s office are intertwined. One or the other from time to time enjoys benefits from this association. Thus, the university cannot tolerate its use for political purposes. Nor can either escape the responsibility.
…
The medical profession, much of it centered at CWRU, has allowed political control of the coroner’s office to exist. Ohio counties deserve reliable medical examiners, not political hacks.

The publicity-directed inquest of Dr. Sam Sheppard by Dr. Gerber should have been solid enough reason for the medical profession to be aroused. Now Cleveland has another Sheppard case with the county coroner’s office and the university right in the middle.

I confess some satisfaction to discover that Roldo got around to this brief mention of the other Dr. Sam and I felt mildly vindicated for my first assumption. Roldo gets down to brass tacks, however, writing:

Ironically, after Glenville the rumors of police drinking spread among reporters, but apparently their closeness to the county coroner’s office didn’t pay off here. Fraser Kent did get autopsy reports and wrote a story. But it was killed by William Ware, executive editor of the Plain Dealer.

Much more on this below.

There are four major areas of concern relating to the coroner’s office and Glenville.

First, the death of James Chapman. Despite the autopsy report’s declaration that ‘abundant powder residue’ was present on the skin, suggesting a close-up shot, Dr. Gerber in his official verdict followed the police story of Chapman being shot by a sniper.

Roldo provides ample evidence for all four of his points and you should read them all, but here are the high points:

Second, why were the lab tests showing police were drunk handled differently than normal practice? Dr. Gerber decided they would be.

Third, the autopsy of Lt. Leroy Jones raises further questions. The defense suggested strongly that he among other officers were killed by police.15

Finally, Dr. [William ]Hoffman [a CWRU faculty member], testified that 0.19 percent of alcohol in the blood of one officer didn’t make him intoxicated.

In 2021, a blood-alcohol content of 0.19 percent would have been 2.4 times the legal limit of 0.08 . More importantly, however, in 1968, the BAC limit was .15 (this was reduced to 0.10 in 1982) so the police officers were legally drunk at the times of their deaths. I know that public drunkenness was looked at differently then, that some people proudly held their liquor better than others, but if we’re to believe the law-and-order advocates, drunk is drunk. Roldo continues:

Dr. [Cyril] Wecht [an eminent forensic pathologist] suggests that law students could examine similar testimony by Dr. Hoffman to see if it compares. Dr. Hoffman should read Dr. Gerber’s book on the legal problems of proving drunkenness—it stresses that alcohol even in small amounts is hazardous. The .19 percent is the equivalent to 10 ounces of hard liquor, taken one on atop another. Indeed, .18 percent, according to a CWRU book made in cooperation with the county coroner’s office, puts one in a “stage of confusion, acute intoxication…”

Roldo concludes:

Students and faculty have a responsibility to make CWRU responsible to the Cleveland community. It’s quite apparent that the officials are unwilling or unable to do so.

The county coroner’s office sits between the law and medical schools at CWRU’s campus. It’s time the faculty of both took a look away from their books and at the real world.

In his 22 September 1969 issue of Point Of Viəw (volume 2, number 5), Roldo returns to a favorite topic: the nefarious role of foundations in Cleveland. Under the headline—May Co., Lawyers Sit On $30,000,000—he ledes:

Greater Cleveland has “some wonderful people, but they don’t want to give up their nice things.”

So says the perceptive attorney-banker-businessman Edgar A. Hahn. And he should know.

Hahn is a trustee of the secretive Louis D. Beaumont Foundation of Cleveland which has assets of more than $30 million and apparently little idea of what to do with it.

Hahn is the one of the two named partners—along with Irwin N. Loeser—of the law firm Hahn and Loeser and, as Roldo notes: the Louis D. Beaumont Foundation paid the firm $6,000 a year for rent—presumably space in a filing cabinet—in the firms office at 800 National City Bank-East 6th Street.

Roldo continues that there is a sell-by date on the foundation’s funds; they must be given away by 1977. But why wait, Roldo wonders.

Tremendous pressure should be put upon the Beaumont Foundation trustees and the May Co., department stores, which retains control through the president, to use the entire $30 million to meet the real needs of poor people in Cleveland. That’s where the money came from, that’s where it should be returned.

A good place for the entire $30 million would be to the County, earmarked strictly for health and welfare. This would meet the crucial needs of handicapped and poor and relieve the worker of a substantial tax burden.

Indeed, when this money is finished, we could begin on the Gund Foundation millions which again rightly belong to the citizens.

George Gund, the late chairman of the board of the Cleveland Trust Bank, left an adjusted gross estate of $25,037,371 for federal inheritance tax purposes. Typically, of that $24,565,763 was deducted from the taxable total for a ‘charitable deduction.’

The $24.5 million charitable deduction was added to $13.3 million Gund had given to his foundation earlier. That’s some $38 million that rightly belongs, not to the Gund family of Cleveland, but to the people.

Roldo is spot on when he writes that the money ought to belong to the people from whose labor the wealth is derived and elites benefit in at least three ways when they choose to parcel out foundation funds in dribs and drabs.

First, they get to enjoy the prestige associated with their faux largesse.

Second, they get to provide a stable income to those entrusted with distributing those funds. Roldo writes:

In 1965 and 1966 the trustees—Hahn, Loeser and May Co. president Morton J. May—recieved some $30,000 compensation from the Foundation for helping give money away. The three had other expenses of $6,000 and the Foundation lists another $38,000 for ‘miscellaneous expenses.’

If they were to have depleted the fund in 1969 they would have been out a collective $592,000 by the 1977 scheduled end of the fundi.

Third, they would have also lost all, or possibly a large part, of the tax write-offs associated with the charitable giving of the fund. See what you elites can do with dribs and drabs?

Next turns to another evergreen theme: the Plain Dealer in—Memo: Tom Vail. Roldo writes:

The world came to Tom Vail and the Plain Dealer this summer.

Eight summer interns—college students working as reporters—left a five page memo to Tom Vail, editor of the PD on “What’s Wrong with the PD.”

[Roldo notes later that he received no less than four copies of the interns’ letter in his mail.]

They say: “The most important problem is that of racism. Some undoubtedly have been unintentional. Other examples are more blatant.”

And they give examples. For instance, Bill Ashbolt, chief of photography, disturbed that a photo didn’t tell the story it should have, is quoted saying, “Who wants to see a bunch of niggers dancing.” The photo was of Mayor Stokes and four black children at a pool dedication.

Further, “James Hatch went out of with (an intern reporter) on a story about children’s moon toys. He waved black children out of the picture.”

Another reporter reporting on a man-on-the-street poll, was told she had done enough after interviewing two blacks. She felt it was because she interviewed the blacks, that the photographer reacted as he did.

“The question is: if the interns ran across such episodes in only three months, how many similar encounters have occurred with regular staff over the years?” they ask.

If that is the reality at Cleveland’s No. 2 paper (the Press still had the larger circulation), then how could Clevelanders be expected to trust their news? Did they even care? In an editor’s note to the story, Roldo adds:

EDITOR’S NOTE: There is a virtual rebellion among Cleveland policemen at present. Not only has the PD but every other media pretends it’s not there. Norm Mlachak of the Press is the only reporter to slam at this. Meanwhile, a PD reporter recorded several police cars from several districts parking for lengthy stays while on duty. City Editor Bill Treon was given information on police earning $55 a day who spend much of their time downtown in the movies. Police on the West Side tell residents that it will take weeks to get junk cars picked up because “of the nigger downtown.” But the PD and the rest of the media won’t report what amounts to a revolt. And then they say their interest is for law ‘n’ order.

Lazy reporters live on stories fed to them by sources. Good, regular access means you don’t nearly have to work at all. Reporters with access don’t want to kill the golden goose and actually have to get out on the street and do some real reporting. This is just as true today as it was in 1969. Reporters, like detectives, should live by the rule: GOYAKOD (Get Off Your Ass and Knock On Doors.]

Finally, two items in Roldo’s THRU THE GRINDER section caught my attention. He writes:

LAKES DON’T DIE, THEY AGE AWAY—That’s Republic Steel’s answer to Lake Erie pollution. “All lakes—even those untouched by man—go through [an] aging process,” say Republic Steel. Further, “We might conclude that, yes, Lake Erie is aging.”

Republic Steel is just hurrying it along a bit.

The company, a leading polluter of both the lake and our air, doesn’t like people protesting against pollution.

And, in Close To Home, Roldo asks:

Who said it?

The truth of the matter is that the Negro does not want the white man to do it for him. The Negro does not desire to be the beneficiary of a white man’s handout. Handout has been the story of his life in the United States. White man’s charity, whether through the church or otherwise, is not what is needed. What is required is the creation of a climate in which the Negro can achieve his own salvation. He wants to stand on his own feet. He wants to achieve self respect. In these senses, he, most legitimately, seeks to achieve Black Power. —James C. Davis, an address to the Cleveland Bar Association.

Davis is an elite lawyer for Squires, Sanders and Dempsey.

Davis now represents McDonald’s against Operation Black Unity.

In the March 1967 speech, Davis blamed white ethnics solely for the racial problem in Cleveland.

But Davis now shows us which side he’s on and where the main problem is. For now it’s Davis and the elites, not only trying to divide the black unity they saw as so important when it was directed at white ethnics, but struggling hard to manipulate public opinion so the efforts of blacks appear to be against whites, not as it is, against the money-grabbing capitalists, like Davis himself.

All over a few Micky D’s? As an aside, the only McDonald’s franchise I’ve ever known—I’m sure there are others, but not many—any that failed was located on Lee Road, adjacent to the Cedar-Lee Theater, in Cleveland Heights.

See here for a bibliography of books and other materials mentioned in this series.

Previously while Readin’ Roldo…

Bonus No. 1: US Attorney for North Georgia abruptly resigns…

Bonus No. 2: His end times strategy does need work.

Bonus No. 3: Carl Bernstein: This is the ultimate smoking gun tape.

Bonus No. 4: Things will definitely get better in 2022! I’m sure of it!

In his third special issue—The Masotti Report Or ‘Neville’s Novel’—Roldo Bartimole details how university and government officials perversely gutted a more than 400-page factual report for the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence by Case-Western Reserve’s Civil Violence Center to produce a 126-page piece of fiction.

But first, Roldo makes the case that Mayor Carl Burton Stokes was headed for a second two-year term in office. In his 1 August 1969 issue of Point Of Viəw (volume 2, number 3), Roldo, in A Forecast—Stokes Election Pick With Backing of Elites, begins with a comparison of Stokes with Cleveland’s 47th mayor: Frank John Lausche. Roldo writes:

As Stokes was the ‘Negro legislator,’ Lausche was the ‘Slovenian jurist.’ As Stokes was the great grandson of slaves, Lausche was the ‘son of humble Slovenian immigrants.’

As Stokes was the victim of white racism, Lausche complained “The professional politicians began to send out bitter barbs saying that my wife could scarcely speak English, that I was born in Europe and that only foreign-born and communists were backing me.”

Before going further, let’s state that there is recognition that white racism differs in intensity and quality when compared to the prejudice against immigrant groups. But there are similarities and one important one is the desire and method elites use to control one group by playing it off against another.

Playing one oppressed group against another is not a new game. When, for example, James Davis, elite lawyer for Squires, Sanders and Dempse, attacked ethnics in Cleveland for their racism, it was not, whatever he thinks, a matter of his finally speaking out in outrage against oppression of blacks. If it had been then he would have had a better target since he was speaking to the Cleveland Bar. He was merely pitting ethnics against blacks to escape his judgment and deflect attention from the elitists.

A method that our soon-to-be former president—with the assistance of the lizard-spawn Stephen Miller—has wielded with some bad effect for certainly the last five years of his political life and all of his private life. Roldo continues:

With the above in mind, what follows is an attempt to analyze the 1969 mayoral campaign. Hedging political bets is wise, but we will avoid it because it requires such caution it becomes unfair to the reader. Though we try not to hedge, we warn that this sometimes leads to over-simplification.

Our prediction is that Carl Stokes will be re-elected.

He was, of course correct, but his reasoning still contains much value. Roldo continues:

Stokes supporters fret about the problem of voter registration. The enthusiasm of a ‘crusade’ so evident in 1967, is gone. In 1969, it is a political campaign.

As of August 1, there were some 4,600 new registered voters and nearly 12,000 had transferred or re-registered. In pro-Stokes wards there has been a drop of 10,000 voters. In anti-Stokes wards there has been a 5,000 increase. In toss-up wards, the registration is stable. Thus there is a deficit of some 5,000 voters, a problem for Stokes unless his voter registration program produces good results.

In his first mayoral campaign Stokes got lots of help in that task:

…[T]rough the foundations, voter registration was spurred in the black community and black militants were paid to keep it cool during the summer of 1967. The funding of the project ended the weekend before the Democratic primary, indicating that the businessmen were more anxious to get [Ralph Sidney] Locher out than make Stokes mayor.

But that has changed. And the main reason for thinking that Stokes will win stems from his establishment backing, along with other obvious assets—the large black vote, control of city hall and the political ability of Stokes.

Is there a conspiracy to re-elect Stokes?

No, not in the conventional sense of the word. Elites are merely acting out of self-interest.

Roldo goes on to provide several illustrations of where that self-interest lies, but I was taken by this example:

Although there is a necessity for some white Democrats to remain out of the Stokes orbit, there are compelling reasons for others to play ball. Jim Carney, a Democratic party boss, not only a political figure, but a businessman, lawyer, developer and banker. Carney has attempted, and apparently succeeded on the surface, of convincing county party leaders that the party needs Stokes more than [Stokes] needs it. [Emphasis mine, JH]

There is much more there—so much so that Roldo carried the story over to the next issue—to read. You should do so.

In his 11 August 1969 issue of Point Of Viəw (Volume 2, Special 1), Roldo continues in his coverage of the aftermath of the Glenville shoot-out. Roldo ledes:

The sentence that blames the Glenville shoot-out on black militants was the invention of a writer hired by the President’s Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence, not the staff report.

The sentence—“A Small, well-equipped army of black extremists was responsible for the bloodshed (whether or not they fired the first shot)”—was NEVER the the judgment of the study staff, nor was it written by any of them.

It was the creation of Anthony E. Neville’s imagination, as was much of the rest of the report.

Indeed, those who worked on the report call it “Neville’s Novel.”

Two questions popped into my head as I read those four paragraphs. First, who was Neville? I found a copy of the report online where Louis H. Masotti writes:

…we had the invaluable editorial assistance of Anthony E. Neville, a professional writer. Gradually what had begun as a report, a document with no greater ambition than to be factual, thorough, and useful to a special audience, took on the aspects of a book, structured and phrased to inform the general public.

Second, was Tricky Dicky a player in all this? The report was commissioned on 10 June 1968, only four days after the assassination of Senator Robert Francis Kennedy—then considered to be the front-runner for the Democratic Party nomination—by then President Lyndon Baines Johnson. (Johnson had already announced 31 March that he would not seek reëlection.) Richard Milhous Nixon would become President in the new year and I the report was not finalized until 16 May 1969. I have to wonder if somehow the law-and-order president was involved in the insertion of Neville into the process and redirecting the report’s message. Roldo continues:

This conclusion is brought home by Mrs. Yoram Papir, a staff member of the Case-Western Reserve Civil Violence Center which did the work.

Mrs. Papir is one of four staff members singled out in the preface of the report for special commendation.

Mrs. Papir writes:

Sometime after the report (then more than 400 pages) had been submitted, the task force was informed that the Commission had engaged a professional writer to POLISH the report.

As it turned out, Mr. Anthony Neville, whom the Commission employed, did considerably more than that. He rewrote the entire report, and completely altered the tone of it if not the substance.

He took what had been an attempt at serious social research and transformed [it] into a literary work.

She goes on to say that Neville “Had a COMPLETELY DIFFERENT perspective of the event than the task force members did and he wrote with HIS PERSPECTIVE, not theirs.”

My question now is: Did the change happen before or after Nixon was sworn in as president? Roldo continues:The President’s Commission, [Papir] says:

Refused to release the original report as a government document and publishing companies indicated that Mr. Neville’s version would ‘sell’ while the other would not.

Sell to whom? Law-and-Order politicians and fund raisers? Of Neville’s fictional sentence, Papir says:

…[T]he disastrous appearance of a sentence at the end of the book which placed the responsibility for the shoot-out on the black militants—a conclusion directly opposite to everything else in the original report which indicated that it could not be ascertained definitely who had begun the incident—but (was) in perfect accord with Mr. Neville’s viewpoint since he wrote that sentence.

All of that is just the first page of Roldo’s six-page special issue. I’ll be writing more, but I need to put my investigative reporter’s hat on and burn some [virtual] shoe leather.

Meanwhile go, read the whole issue and tell me what questions you have.

See here for a bibliography of books and other materials mentioned in this series.

Previously while Readin’ Roldo…

Bonus No. 1: President Donald John Trump could be impeached twice.

Bonus No. 2: Glenville Shootout 50 Years Later: Student Activism At Case Western.

Bonus No. 3: Shoot-Out in Cleveland: Black Militants and the Police.

Two politicians, both Republicans from California are credited with politicizing the phrase: Law and Order. Ronald Wilson Reagan, who would become governor of California in 1967 and Richard Milhous Nixon, who would become president in 1969, played on elites’ fears of Black men with guns to raise money. The tool was quickly adopted nationally.

In his 14 July 1969 issue of Point Of Viəw (volume 2, number 1), Roldo Bartimole—under a Law-N-Order headline—ledes:

In the last few months we’ve had a good taste of the perversion of justice through law-n-order, a special brand of law enforcement used on certain people for certain ‘offenses.’

There are a number of elements necessary for a good law-n-order epidemic. One is an official, ostensibly non-political tool that can be used politically—the Grand Jury. Another is a supposedly objective, neutral instrument that can be used to reinforce and legitimize injustice—the news media.

The discriminatory use of both the media and the Grand Jury, has been obvious: the refusal of the media to take a look at what really happened in Glenville (it dismissed the Masotti report in a day); the selective feeding of headlines and the broadcasts, for example, the ‘extortion’ hearings of City Council; the failure of NBC-TV (Channel 3) to bring charges in the brutal beating of cameraman Julius Boros by police, as outlined in the Masotti report, while it allows Paul Sciria nightly time to play to the law-n-order crowd.

The refusal of County Prosecutor John T. Corrigan, son of a policeman, to pursue charges of police crime at the Lakeview Tavern after his office conducted a racist trial to convict Ahmed Evans and a political vendetta in the Civil Services case. Mayor Carl B. Stokes too has weakly given in to the police on the Civil Service issue; by not releasing the disputed tapes of police obscenities; and by failing to bring charges against police, despite the law directors personal knowledge of the death of a black man probably at the hand of the police.

All of that is damning and well known, but what caught my eye in Roldo’s reporting was his writing about what he characterized as “The Civil Service mess.” As civil servants, police officer are required to take and pass ostensibly objective exams. Roldo wrote:

The Civil Service mess, involving the dumping of a police promotion and entrance exam, has resulted from the commission’s clumsiness, in part. But the media has conveniently overlooked the basic cause of the commission’s problems; a reactionary police resistance to any change in civil service that might allow blacks on the force and that might break-up the games of officials of the department play with tests. And their hatred of a black mayor.

All of that was to be expected in 1969, but Roldo’s penultimate sentence in that paragraph revealed what had been a tipping point for the police. He writes:

Police were angry they had to read the Kerner report and [horrors of horrors, JH] Malcolm X and the FOP went to court. The test was thrown out by a small town judge filling in here.

Ironically, the one police officer to speak in favor of the new promotion test method was the now chief, Patrick Gerity, who testified at a public meeting of the commission before he became chief.

Roldo returns to the subject of the Grand Jury, looking in particular at the Grand Jury’s role in the case of Ahmed Evans. He writes:

It was the GJ that indicted Ahmed Evans and four others on conspiracy charges; that labeled the Hough riots (thanks to foreman Louis Seltzer, former Press editor) a Communist conspiracy, thus not the fault of community. It was the GJ which blamed protests against Hough conditions on trouble-making clergymen. All these ridiculous findings happen to coincide with conspiracy hallucinations of police and county prosecutor’s office.

Next under Roldo’s magnifying glass for their complicity are Cleveland’s newspapers. He writes:

The mass media play along with this make-believe justice. They so pollute the mind, it becomes impossible to see reality, or for that matter, see the need for some old fashioned law-n-order where it is really needed.

The Plain Dealer sets the tone for journalism in Cleveland and Tom Vail, who claims the motto the ‘Starter’ for the PD, usually steers the newspaper to follow the easiest road. If the trend is liberal, then PD will, as it did a few years ago, will appear progressive. If the swing is right—and Vail, as suggested by a recent column ‘Thunder On the Right,’ feels it is—the PD will right-wing it. In either case, image-making is the policy.

Of the other paper, Roldo writes: The Press is looking for the big headline, that’s all.

Returning to his suggestion of a need for some old fashioned law-n-order where it is really needed, Roldo details five Law-N-Order cases (four in this issue and the fifth in the next) that fit his bill. You should read them all, but No. 4 was of particular interest to me. Roldo writes:

“The level of sulfur dioxide in Cleveland is starting to be at the point where it is dangerous to health…” says a city pollution official.

Actually, the U.S. Protection and Environmental Health Service says people’s health may be affected when the level gets to .02 parts per million. The city’s average last year was double that.

The new city air pollution code would limit the sulfur dioxide content of coal used to .02, but council is having trouble passing the legislation…

One reason, of course, is reaction from corporate interests. Two giant Ohio Corporations would be hurt particularly hard.

Oglebay-Norton and Pickands-Mather supply coal to industry and the city. Indeed, O-N has $287,000 and P-M has $184,000 in coal contracts presently in the city.

But if the .02 content of sulfur dioxide were law, neither company would get any more city business since they supply only Ohio coal, which has .04 to .08 content, dangerous to one’s health.

This was of particular interest to me because I grew up about a mile away from a Union Carbide plant on the Ohio River that was infamous for burning high-sulfur content Ohio coal. The basic chemistry is this: when you burn such coal you produce sulfur dioxide gas that when exposed to water, produces sulfurous acid, better known as Acid Rain. If you breathe the gas, the acid forms in your throat and lungs. Not good.

The Union Carbide plant was so bad that when William Doyle Ruckelshaus became the first administrator of the new Environmental Protection Agency in 1970, his first target, under the Clear Air Act, was that plant. Coal miners suffered, but the lungs of myself and my friends got a break.

Many years later I interviewed Ruckelshaus when he was CEO of Browning-Ferris Industries and at the end of our conversation, I thanked him for what he did. He said I was the first to ever do so on such a personal level.

In his 28 July 1969 issue of Point Of Viəw (volume 2, number 2), Roldo profiles a man who, before he became a running joke on Seinfeld, was a Man On The Make. Roldo ledes:

One of Cleveland’s young businessmen on the make is George M. Steinbrenner, III, who, according to a business associate, “reeks of glamour.”

He says of himself, “I’ve got to be where the action is.”

Steinbrenner is chairman and executive officer of American Shipbuilding Co. But like many corporate elites these days he know the ‘action’ is in the pretense of dealing with society’s deep, unresolved social ills.

So Steinbrenner now steers Cleveland’s Urban Coalition, despite its rudderless appearance. He also headed a Cleveland Now fund drive for Mayor Stokes (Business Week says: he’s closest of all businessmen to the mayor); chaired a recent national Democratic Congressional dinner committee, and in 1966 started Group 66, supposedly a group of young, enlightened businessmen.

All from the goodness of his heart, right? Roldo says, not so fast. He continues:

Last year, Cleveland, under rather peculiar circumstances, gave the exclusive use of Dock 32 to Great Lakes International Corp., of which Steinbrenner is chairman. The Dock 32 deal became a court issue and the judge in case implied that the city’s port director had acted in bad faith in giving the contract to Steinbrenner’s company.

Steinbrenner’s American Ship also is actively pursuing recovery of $9 million from the federal government. The company built some ships for the Coast Guard, lost money and now wants the taxpayer to make it up.

“Frankly, it continues to mystify your management why it should be necessary for American companies to suffer multi-million dollar losses doing business with the U.S. Government…,” Steinbrenner moaned to stockholders.

It’s a shame how the American government treats civic-minded industrialists.

Finally, what I’m sure is a rare promotional occurrence in Point Of Viəw, Roldo has been recommending two other—reliable, informative publications—to his readers: Hard Times, a weekly out of Washington on what’s relevant and NACLA, essential for those, he writes, interested in Latin America. Sadly Hard Times is no more, but NACLA is still going strong.

See here for a bibliography of books and other materials mentioned in this series.

Previously while Readin’ Roldo…

Bonus No. 1: Gunfire and Crashing Cars… ‘We’re Losing Our Grip.’

Bonus No. 2: Too little, too late…

Roldo Bartimole received, as anyone would expect, mail; some from fans and some, not. His targets probably considered his little rag beneath their notice. But what to do when an actual stockholder includes a copy of Point Of Viəw along with a signed proxy statement? Stockholders, at least important ones, could not be dismissed out of hand.

Such was the conundrum faced by TRW flack, er, public relations man, William Moran when Volume 1, No. 18—TRW mentally unfit to cure city’s ills—was plopped on his desk like a flaming bag of canine bowel movement. Mild Bill had to respond, of course he did, but he didn’t have to like his task and, can’t you just hear the sneer, he wrote:

When you returned your signed proxy statement, you attached a copy of the 18th issue of “point of view,” a 4-page pamphlet that says some nasty and irresponsible things about TRW, its business interests and its management.

The author of the pamphlet is, of course entitled to his “point of view,” no matter how
distorted or malevolent it may be. We have not responded to it, and, as of now we do not intend to respond to such warped interpretations of TRW’s business interests and activities. [Emphasis in the original, JH]

There is more, and you should go read it for the entertainment value alone. I’m sure that Roldo had more than a small chuckle when Moran’s fan mail was forwarded to him.

In his 3 June 1969 issue of Point Of Viəw (volume 1, number 23), Roldo moved his sights to academia in: 1-3 CWRU Trustees Directors of Banks. He wrote:

Neutral, according to Webster, means “not engaged on either side.”

That’s sort of what we thought it meant until listening to Case-Western Reserve University President Robert W. Morse neutralizing his students by convincing most of them that the university is a “politically neutral” zone in Cleveland.

The president-student discussion arose out of the conviction of Ahmed Evans for murder and the fact that the university’s center for the study of violence produced and examination of the Glenville shoot-out, but it remains private information.

Judging from the encounter with the students, Morse would make a good straight man for a comedy team.

Any student could take a 10-minute look at the CWRU board of trustees and know that the university has a distinct political ideology and allegiance, based simply upon the interests of those who rule it.

One simple calculation, for example, shows that one-third of the board of trustees is made up of directors of four Cleveland banks, with National City Bank dominating. [Emphasis mine, JH]

But Morse would have his students believe in make believe—the university as a garden of neutrality.

He would have them believe, for example, that Dow Chemical should be allowed to recruit on the “politically neutral” campus as a matter of a new administrative crutch, “academic freedom.”

[Damn, does that ring across the decades to the likes of Milo Yiannopoulos] Roldo continues:

But what Morse didn’t tell his students was that he sharedFsick directorship on the National City Bank of Cleveland board of directors with Carl A. Gerstacker.

Gerstacker happens to be chairman of Dow Chemical Co. He is a Morse business associate.

Abbie Hoffman once told me during a very brief conversation at Ohio University in the early ‘80s to never trust conspiracy theorists because they were all in it together, but Roldo continues to make the solid case that power and money are far more incestuous than any group like QAnon. Roldo continues:

Presumably, Morse and the trustees have interchangeable minds. To the university in the morning, Morse carries his “politically neutral” mind as university decision-maker and at lunch with the directors of Harris-Intertype or Clevite or Cleveland Electric Illuminating, Morse as director, inserts his “de-neutralized mind.”

Morse is in with the heavy-weight class of exploiters.
…
There are other matters that make the university “neutrality” a rather shady concept.

For example, what was the “neutrality” that allowed University Circle Development Foundation, an arm of the university, to financially support the operation of a helicopter to patrol the ghetto?

The Cleveland Press reported on 7 November 1966, that “using tactics borrowed from Vietnam,” private sources, including the UCDF, financed the airborne patrol of the black community.

Hough is the University’s Vietnam.

Now that, for any student, would be a very chilling image. In the second piece of the issue, Roldo continues with matters-CWRU. Under the headline CWRU Hiding Another Report, he writes:

AIM-Jobs’ record is about as good as the Cleveland Indians.

That’s what a $100,000 Case-Western Reserve Study, finished months ago but never released to the public shows.
…
The unpublished report shows that only 18 percent of those going to AIM-Jobs were employed six months later. Another 14 percent, the reports says, were in training for employment.

That means that 68 percent were sent back to the street.

If I had a 68 percent failure rate, I might be inclined to bury the data as well, but what do you do when your own report calls you out?

[According to the report: The Aim-Jobs Governing] “board members did not seem to have a detailed understanding of the AIM-Jobs operation.” Some didn’t even know that AIM-Jobs provided training through other employment programs.

Despite the board members’ apparent ignorance of their own operation, all felt that AIM-Jobs was doing a “good job.”

The whole thing is a sick joke.

Finally, in CWRU’s Link To Urban Spying, Roldo writes:

In 1956 Case Institute was among five universities that founded the Institute for Defense Analysis as a nonprofit research corporation.

Although the Columbia University uprising, partly because of that university’s involvement in IDA, [I still have Kunen’s Strawberry Statement on my shelf, JH] the consortium was dissolved in 1968. But it merely became an independent corporation with a self-perpetuating board of trustees.

Case-Western Reserve University is represented on that board by John A. Hrones, provost for science and technology at CWRU.

What comes next really grabbed me because it answers one of my long running questions: at what point did the U.S. military begin to integrate with domestic police forces? I have long said that demilitarizing the police is more important than the now popular idea of defunding the police (although doing so would make less money available to SWAT teams, &c.). Certain aspects of the police—rank structure, uniforms, salutes, &c.—have always been lifted from the military, but changes in my lifetime, and particularly post-911, increased use of military weapons and vehicles in domestic confrontations. People like police Lt. Howard Hunter do want to play with their toys. Roldo writes:

[M]ore recently, the institute has been commissioned by the federal government to turn its systems analysis to work for the suppression of urban disorders in the U.S.
…
One of the recommendations was to use military counterinsurgency systems [in] domestic police operations, and particularly to anti-riot operations.

Well, there we have it. In his 16 June 1969 issue of Point Of Viəw (volume 1, number 24), Roldo continues his Foundation theme, but with a very dark twist under the headline: Foundation tie, too STOKES PULLS LOCHER STRATEGY ON STANTON.

Council President Jim Stanton’s moral stand against the Greater Cleveland Associated Foundation and Dolph Norton rings hollow. Indeed, it was downright ungrateful of the West Side Councilman.

Apparently Stanton forgot he’s been the recipient of the results of questionable payments by the Greater Cleveland Associate Federation to high officials of Cleveland’s poverty program.
…
Stanton, indeed, has been the beneficiary of the actions of poverty officials. When neighborhood poverty programs organize to bring pressure, it’s often the councilmen who feel the sting. The practice has been that the councilmen run to Stanton with their woes.

One such incident resulted in the resignation of a West Side poverty worker, Ed Marcus. Marcus provoked Ward 8 Councilwoman Margaret McCaffery, a close Stanton ally. McCaffery cried to Stanton and the word went out to cool Marcus.

Usually, that works, but in this case Marcus fingered Stanton publicly in the Plain Dealer for interference. That Stanton didn’t like.

At the poverty board meeting following the resignation, Stanton, holding the newspaper clipping of the attack by Marcus, said, “We’ll get these bastards, one at a time.”

Roldo goes on to detail what Stanton did, but I found what followed in the second act of the story far more fascinating. I doubt that any Cleveland Mayor got along particularly well with any Council President, but Mayor Carl Burton Stokes, as the first Black mayor of a major American city, had a particularly hard row to hoe. How he handled Stanton, rewrote Cleveland’s—and probably the nation’s—political play book. Roldo writes:

The foundation funding got itself caught in the middle of a fierce political battle between Stokes and Stanton over an administration desire to build low-income housing, mostly one family, in a middle-class area. The black councilman in the area objects, as do many residents. Council tradition dictates that when a councilman so objects, the rest of council defers, expecting the same courtesy someday. Stanton thus has blocked legislative hearings necessary for the project, called Lee-Seville.

But more than council tradition is involved. Indeed, it’s more likely Lee-Seville has become a No. 1 political issue because Mayor Stokes shrewdly saw it as a powerful weapon to divide council, erode Stanton’s power and stature and enhance his own re-election plans.

Stokes has set up a battle that he wishes to fight, on grounds of his choosing and under the conditions he wants. Stanton and council have fallen into the trap. [Emphasis mine, JH]

Roldo goes on to detail just what Stokes planned and executed: With remarkable finesse and contrary to mass media interpretation. He continues:

But Stokes had a secret weapon. He knows white politicians as only a black can. He understands that inbred white racism affects the decision-making of white politicians.

Thus he chooses issues that inevitably force the white politicians to make decisions based on race when they would otherwise obey better political instincts.

Stokes anticipates the reaction of his enemy because he know racism will play an inordinately large part in the decision.

He used this insight before.

The Stokes forces set up Mayor Locher in 1965 when black ministers tried to meet with the Mayor but were spurned and eventually jailed for a sit-in. The group included the minister of the church of Councilman Charlie Carr, then a powerful Locher ally. Carr sat the [mayoral] race out and Stokes almost won. But in 1967, Locher fell for the same ploy, this time refusing to meet with the late Rev. Martin Luther King, labeling him an “extremist.”

Stanton, we feel, fell for the same trap in the Lee-Seville issue.
…
It has been a “non-political” means of marshaling Stokes forces for the coming election. Having lost or alienated many who helped him in 1967, the issue re-calls loads of individuals and liberal do-good organizers back to battle. The Call & Post, often overlooked by the white media, but still a potent political ally, is fired up over Lee-Seville, as are the “little people” of the black community, another group overlooked by the white media. And the black minister is the best voter registration organizer. These groups make up a combination that raises funds and more importantly, sets the proper pre-election atmosphere in the black community.

Roldo concludes:But as it stands, the Silverman episode may be a thorn in the Mayor’s side, but that’s a spear protruding from Stanton’s stomach. The Mayor put it there—and it hurts.

This post marks another milestone in Roldo’s journey: the completion of Volume one that included 24 regular and two special issues. I’ll begin with Volume 1, Number 2 tomorrow.

See here for a bibliography of books and other materials mentioned in this series.

Previously while Readin’ Roldo…

Bonus No. 1: Matt Taibbi’s wokest new stories of 2020.

Bonus No. 2: Biden should end pretence over Israel’s ‘secret’ nuclear weapons.

Bonus No. 3: Facts won’t fix this: how to fight America’s disinformation crisis.

Bonus No. 4: Ted Rall—My To-Do List for the first two-thirds of 2021, in Order.

Bonus No. 5: Anti-maskers and anti-vaxxers getting even more aggressive.

The old saw tells us that the very rich are not like the rest of us by virtue of them having more money. But the bromide ends before getting to the reason the very rich have more money: money begets more money. There are many ways that that happens, but none quite so insidious as the amazing profitability of a part-time job in big-money philanthropy.

In his 6 May 1969 issue of Point Of Viəw (volume 1, number 21), Roldo Bartimole begins beneath the headline: ‘Self-Dealing’ ‘Double Dealing.’ He ledes:

We hope that Dolph Norton of the Cleveland Foundation and the Greater Cleveland Associated Foundation won’t mind us using a phrase of his to describe what Cleveland foundations are all about.

That phrase is “self-dealing.”

We consider the Cleveland foundation gang rather adept at self-dealing to the detriment of the Cleveland community.

The kind of self-dealing implicit in three trustees of the Leonard C. Hanna fund paying themselves more than $500,000 for “part-time” charity work for the foundation is one example.

In this case, John C. Virden, chairman of the board of Eaton, Yale and Towne and a former leader of the Cleveland Foundation, was paid $161,642 from Sept. 1958 through January 1963. Harold T. Clark, another trustee got $201,393 in the same period and Lewis B. Williams received $207,893. Both Clark and Williams are dead.

That’s nice money for “part-time” charity work.

Clearly, when you count yourself among the powerful—as I’m sure Virden, Clark and Williams in their day did—working pro bono is for chumps. And even when they work for a symbolic dollar a year, there’s like a non-monetary payout expected up front, or sometimes, down the road. The kind that Roldo writes about in this issue involves social control. He writes:

To help see the nature of the social control argument one need look at the type of funding Cleveland foundations are into. For example, PATH and PACE are both citizen-type groups formed largely to pressure public policy. They don’t have that much success, of course, but they aren’t meant to. Primarily their task is to direct frustration into proper, unrewarding, channels.

Yet, you would never see Cleveland foundations putting large sums of money into citizen’s campaigns, for example, on pollution or health, both certainly acute problems here.

Why, because citizen’s groups on pollution would have to attack the policies of major Cleveland corporations. And a strong health organization would have to be turned loose on the elite medical profession. Both are financial supporters of the foundations.

So the foundation social-concern money goes largely to projects that can be manipulated and controlled, that can confuse issues and divide people.

Projects that can be manipulated and controlled, that can confuse issues and divide people. That sounds an awful like politics in 2020. So, how did the powerful go about this? Through the creative use of foundations. Roldo continues:

Let’s look at one of the instruments supported financially by Cleveland foundations and how it has used its “charitable” nature to destroy the very people it supposedly was helping.

The institution is the Cleveland Development Foundation. It recently was merged with the Greater Cleveland Growth Association whose directors rule both.

The CDF state that its purpose as a non-profit, charitable corporation under Ohio law was the “elimination and prevention of slums and blight in Cleveland.”

It has had remarkable success promoting exactly the opposite.

Most people blame the Locher administration for the incredible debacle of urban renewal here. Indeed, it deserves blame, but not nearly all it got. The greed of the business community via CDF was an equal partner.

In a study of private development funds, made with Ford Foundation money, the greed charge is given credence. The study said, “…there is no way of telling what other affects such action (funding of projects by CDF) inspired. It is likely, however, that CDF activities permitted the continuation of a redevelopment program FAR GREATER than the portion of the program in which the foundation was initially involved and in which it made its early investments.”

When I moved to Cleveland in the fall of 1984, my only experience with Urban Renewal had been on the West Coast, in Washington State and California. Cleveland was a whole other beast, and, as Roldo writes, intentionally so:

A good example of the blatant self-dealing of CDF was its behind-the-scenes manipulation of downtown renewal.

The CDF in 1959 gave $50,000 to the City Planning Department to produce a Master Plan for downtown Cleveland. While the city planners were playing with their plans, the CDF, through its director Upshur Evans, was meeting in secrecy to plan Erieview, the downtown urban renewal plan that made the Master Plan obsolete and unnecessary before it was completed.

It took CDF with its friends in urban renewal, 30 days after the plans were completed to get full city council approval of the multi-million [dollar] program that 10 years later is still stumbling along. When the boom lowered on Locher, Evans blames incompetent staff, poor financial management and lack of any clear cut goal for the renewal problem.

Yet, while Hough was dying and the CDF was supposedly renewing old housing, it was, in fact, giving money to the University Circle Research Center Corp. to take 65 acres of land, with much good, solid housing, away from the ghetto housing supply to turn it into research facilities for industry. Meanwhile, it hadn’t renovated a single apartment in Hough.

[Lest anyone believe this is all ancient history and that Cleveland needs to move on, I would remind you of the irony in Cleveland’s Opportunity Corridor.]

But Hough can die and so can Glenville, the near West Side, Central, Mt. Pleasant, Norwood and most of the rest of the city as far as CDF and its more than 80 industrial backers are concerned.

Because now its major concern is getting federal funds released for still another urban renewal project—to build Cleveland State University into an education factory for Cleveland industry and as a spur for downtown Cleveland.

In italics, Roldo concludes:That’s essentially how the game works. You give funds to your own organization to do what you want it to do for your profit and get paid a fee.

They call it philanthropy.

On the back page of the issue, Roldo included this tidbit:

FOOTNOTES ON REAVIS, ET. AL.: Jack Reavis this week was elected a director of TRW, Inc., an appropriate marriage considering Point Of Viəw Vol. 1, Nos. 18, 19 and 20. Also we missed the little fact that the father of John Little, the mayor’s executive assistant, is also a member of the establishment firm of Jones, Day, Cockley and Reavis.

The circle jerking Cleveland around just gets tighter and tighter.

In his 19 May 1969 issue of Point Of Viəw (volume 21, number 22), Roldo answers my question about from where came the hints of trouble cited by police? In The ‘Conspiracy’ Of White Justice he writes:

The key figures in the “conspiracy” case against Fred ‘Ahmed’ Evans and four others are Sgt. John Ungvary, head of the Cleveland Police Subversives Squad and Walter Washington, a teenager.

It was Ungvary who went to City Hall July 23rd with the story of an impending conspiracy by black nationalists, allegedly recently returned from Detroit, Akron and Pittsburgh with weapons. It was Walter Washington, who, after the Glenville gun battle, claimed to be privy to the planning of an ambush of police on July 23rd in Evan’s apartment.

So, Washington was likely the confidential informant, but what was his motive? More on that below. Meanwhile, Roldo reveals Ungvary’s possible motives.

Conspiracy has been Sgt. Ungvary’s job for nearly 30 years as head of the subversives squad. You might say it’s an obsession with him.

Two year ago, he testified before Mississippi Sen. James O. Eastland’s Internal Security Subcommittee that “What we need is a law that would let us charge them all (black nationalists) as conspirators… before an overt act is committed. Wouldn’t this be far better than to wait for the overt act?”

[It might be if we lived in the universe of Philip K. Dick’s Precrime Division in Minority Report; George Orwell’s thought police in 1984 or our nations’ own Orwellian Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act.]

Black nationalism per se is conspiracy to Sgt. Ungvary. The purchase of weapons by black nationalists then becomes a conspiracy to murder.

This was a year after the passage of the Mulford Act, so Ungvary was not alone in the land of the vaunted second amendment. Roldo begins asking some questions of his own:…[W]

as the Glenville shoot-out the result of police acting out a self-fulfilling prophecy based on their assumption that black men with guns had to be up to something illegal and why not, as Sgt. Ungvary reasoned get them before an overt act.

Indeed, the police had done it before with less tragic results. In 1967, after Ahmed told the Wall Street Journal that an eclipse of the sun on May 9th would signal an eruption of violence in Cleveland, police burst into Ahmed’s astrology shop with shotguns at stomach level on that otherwise uneventful day. The best charge they could come up with that time was a charge of “housing violations.”

The police raided an astrology shop? What next? Investigating UFO victims? Roldo continues:

The key witness that Ahmed had been conspiring against the police was 17-year-old Walter Washington, a most unbelievable witness.

Walter Washington, who testified he was a Black Panther and described the Panthers as a “social group,” was an accused thief, arsonist and murderer. When he was arrested earlier this year, the Cleveland police charged him with terrorizing residents and merchants in Glenville.

That was January. In April he testified against Ahmed. By May he was free from all charges. Today he is in the U.S. Army.

The discrepancies in chronologies, evidence and testimony are legend in the story of the Glenville shootout, but Roldo next drills down on one the most central questions: how did events get so out of control so quickly? He writes:

It is likely that the tactical unit which was carrying out the surveillance failed, either intentionally or because it operated on a different radio frequency band, to alert all patrol cars to the start of [the Glenville] hostilities. Not until the tow truck was fired upon did the alert go out to the regular police patrols. When they responded they did not know that hostilities had been under way for some time.

Why would the tactical squad intentionally fail to report a gun battle? Possibly because it had disobeyed orders by making contact when ordered out of the area. Or possibly because it felt it could handle the job alone.

What Roldo wrote about next floored me:

The evidence showing that two of the three dead policemen were drunk also was handled in an unusual manner by the coroner’s office.

[The following exchange is the questioning of Ahmed’s defense attorney of William Hoffman,.]

“In every (homicide) case in which you and I were involved, wasn’t the laboratory report contained on the report of the autopsy…” the defense asked [William] Hoffman, [assistant professor of forensic pathology at Case-Western University and a member of the County Coroner’s staff] who answered, “Yes, that is right.”

But in the case of the drunken policemen, the report was kept separate. Why? the defense asked:

“Some time back and I don’t recall the date, [County Coroner] Dr. Gerber asked that these reports be submitted on separate sheets; this is within his purview not mine,” Hoffman answered.

“It wasn’t because of the alcohol found in the blood and urine of these officers, was it? the defense asked.

“I have no idea why he had it put on separate sheets,” Hoffman replied.

Is it possible that this whole tragedy was the result of PWI (Policing While Intoxicated)?

Roldo finally circles back to the matter of authorized and unauthorized firearms and what was used to kill James Earl Chapman:

The autopsy report on Chapman states that “abundant powder residue” was found in the forehead defect. Dr. Cyril Wecht testified for the defense that Chapman was shot from within “six inches.” It is the prosecution’s contention he was killed by long-range sniper fire and therefore not by the police.
…
Another factor that has been woven into the conspiracy theory was the use of high-powered weapons by the Nationalists. The police consistently claim to have had no such weapons in Glenville.

But this is hard to believe. There is a police rule that officers are to use only their issued weapons. But in 1966 during the Hough riots, former Police Chief Richard Wagner took his personal “hunting” rifle into the riot area, hardly an example for his officers to obey a ban on personal weapons.

And a short time after the Glenville shoot-out, NBC filmed police officers with unauthorized weapons. Reporters were told by police on the scene that many officers carried high-powered weapons in the trunks of patrol cars.

Despite all the questions, the jury found Ahmed Evans guilty of murder, but Roldo concluded: The jury verdict of murder in the Ahmed Evans case is unacceptable. Mississippi justice in Cleveland must be reversed. The first step is a new trial for Evans.

About that jury, Cleveland juries have a reputation—see Shepherd v. Maxwell—Roldo, in a sidebar on page for of the 19 May issue with the headline: Jurors Dined at Plain Dealer During Trial, writes:

Though the court has stringent rules to guard against mass media influence upon the jury, members of the jury ate lunch at the Cleveland Plain Dealer during the trial [of Ahmed Evans] and at the Rockwell Inn, a hangout for reporters and lawyers.

One jurist admits jury members watched coverage of the trial on television too.

Gee, did they get special tickets to a Klan rally too?

See here for a bibliography of books and other materials mentioned in this series.

Previously while Readin’ Roldo…

One of the characters I used to hang with at Arabica on Lee Road was a semi-retired gentleman who would regale me with stories of his heyday in Cleveland. One tale I remember involved Oris Paxton and Mantis James Van Sweringen, or, The Vans. There came a time, my friend said, when the brothers decided to hire one of those newfangled Public Relation people.

They made discrete inquiries and found just the man they wanted and hired him on the spot. The fellow went to work as best he could, but when he was, three months later, summoned to the brother’s offices in Cleveland’s Terminal Tower, he was worried that he was about to be fired. But went he did and when he stood before the brothers they both smiled and praised the wonderful work he was doing. “You know we have not seen a single mention of our name anywhere since you began to work for us,” said the elder brother. “That’s absolutely true,” agreed the younger. “In recognition of your good efforts we’re increasing your salary,” The flack, as his slimy kind would come to be known, thanked his employers and went back to work.

The moral of the story is that the truly powerful never want any attention unless they decide they want attention and in his Point Of Viəws for this month, Roldo Bartimole gives the kind of attention the powerful hate to two of Cleveland’s powerful.

In his 7 April 1969 issue of Point Of Viəw (volume 1, number 19), Roldo begins with the headline: Vern Stouffer Top Welfare Recipient. He ledes:

The current “Welfare Recipient of the Month” is Vernon Bigelow Stouffer. Never let it be said that the dole hurt the initiative of our welfare recipient.

Rather let it be said that the more given, the more sought. That’s initiative. And so successful has he been that our welfare recipient is a millionaire.

Stouffer is the director of several corporations with total assets of more than $6 billion. Profits from these firms last year totaled more than $750,000,000.

The corporations are: Litton Industries, United Airlines, Republic Steel, Society National Bank, Security National Bank of Denver, Midwestern Corp. Consolidated Natural Gas (of which East Ohio Gas is a subsidiary), the Cleveland Indians and the Pioneer Steamship Corp.

Stouffer doesn’t receive a monthly check from County Welfare and has no use for food stamps, but subsidized he is and we believe that he has just as much right to our award as any member of the Welfare Rights Organization. He is no less a recipient.

The powerful hate being reminded that they are the true welfare babies in any Capitalist economic system and Roldo provides plenty of evidence for how Stouffer would never have gotten anywhere without the largess of the Government teat, beginning with Stouffer’s connections to United Airlines. Roldo writes:

In Cleveland, where public transportation could be effectively replaced by three-legged horses, $18.5 million was spent to construct a rapid transit primarily for airport users. Although this is not a direct subsidy, United benefits. Indeed, someone coming to Cleveland via United can eat downtown at a Stouffer Restaurant. Vern gets you coming and going.

The city also spent $6.5 million for boarding ramps. United will use 11 of the 18. And in the not too distant future, taxpayers will build a $1.2 billion lakefront airport with fancy facilities, probably including a Stouffer restaurant. Gov. Rhodes blessed the plan and offered state financial help.

The secret, of course, is to pick up a buck wherever you can to survive. So for those who don’t fly much, but use rapid transit, don’t worry, you’re helping old Vern. Because Cleveland Transit System [The precursor to the present-day Rapid Transit Authority, JH] buys those rapid transit cars made by Republic Steel. And Vern’s a director of that too.

So, if you catch a rapid to a United flight, Vern’s got you both ways.

Stouffer could be the model for Hollingsworth Hound in Ruben Bolling’s Lucky Ducky cartoons.

Roldo continues a piece he began on the back of Volume 1, Number 18 under the headline: Science War Combine For TRW Profits. Roldo takes the story to TRW’s own exercise in flackery to convince college students that war and death weren’t all that weird. Roldo writes:

With the growing distaste among students who somehow are saying they don’t like the TRW choice of dying and being killed in Vietnam or staying home and producing more sophisticated murder weapons for others to use, TRW came up with a plan to humanize itself.

To do this, TRW financed a tour of a one-character drama of George Bernard Shaw, “By George.”

As director-scientist-industrialist Simon Ramo of TRW put it: “Our primary purpose is to extend TRW’s dialogue with the nation’s college campuses. Hopefully, we will dramatize to students and faculty alike that a modern corporation like TRW is interested in and concerned with the cultural aspects of the society in which we live.”

Anyone who buys that will be comforted with TRW’s cash register view [LINK] of life.

When you learn to combine mass murder techniques and weapons with George Bernard Shaw, you’ve arrived as a billion dollar, diversified, technically orientated growth corporation. And you get listed on the Big Board.

I am reminded here of the Campus protests against Dow Chemical for its creative invention of Napalm which gave us this famous picture of Phan Th? Kim Phúc OOnt. American companies—like DuPont, with its Better Things for Better Living…Through Chemistry. and its signature product Teflon—deserve the outing of their outrageous and destructive behaviors committed in our good names.

In his 21 April 1969 issue of Point Of Viəw (volume 1, number 20), Roldo names another infamous Clevelander—John Wallace Reavis—in his top headline: Many Roads Lead To Jack Reavis. Roldo writes:

As a public service and to spotlight the Cleveland NAACP’s disgusting tribute to its Human Rights award to Jack Reavis, Sunday, April 27, Point Of Viəw zeroes in on Jones, Day, Cockley and Reavis.

Reavis is a senior law partner of JDCR of Cleveland, and Reavis, Pogue, Neal and Rose of Washington. More than 100 lawyers scurry about for this firm. Although the NAACP is honoring Reavis, the lawyer-businessman with world-wide connections has been unable to find a “qualified Negro” for his law firm. Reavis must be looking at the Union Club where “they” aren’t allowed except in waiter’s uniforms.

“I’ve always wanted to stay in the background,” said Jack Reavis. [Remember the Vans? JH] And we don’t blame him.

To the NAACP and Cleveland newspapers, Jack Reavis may be worth heroizing, to anyone who takes a good look, Reavis is another fat cat living off the poor.

For example, the Plain Dealer editorially patted Reavis for his role as head of the Businessman’s Interracial Committee in establishing the Port Authority. Presumably this will help Negro employment.

Or might there be another reason for Reavis’ interest in the Port?

The Reavis firm has ties to the iron ore, coal and shipping interests of Hanna Mining [There’s Marcus Alonzo Hanna’s legacy again, JH] and the steel industry. The firm represents Hanna Mining and has connections with other Hanna interests: National City Bank, Chrysler and Cleveland Cliff, for example.

But even more direct, H. Chapman Rose, a Reavis partner, helped George Humphrey set up the multi-million dollar iron ore development of Iron Ore Co. of Canada, a firm owned by Hanna Mining (27 percent), Republic Steel (20 percent), Armco Steel (10 percent), Youngstown Steel and Tube Co. (10 percent) and Wheeling Steel (8 percent).
…
The Iron Ore company worked out a cheap tariff, one-to-seven cents a ton, thus making exploitation of the Quebec mines attractive to American steel interests. “Hard Times” a Washington weekly, recently reported that in addition to the low tariff, there are other attractions, “like the availability of an unskilled labor force… to work in the alternatively ice-caked and mosquito-infested mine pits, and a colonial economy with the resources to make use of the iron deposits by itself.”

It goes on: “If you stand on the banks of the St. Lawrence Seaway at Montreal, you can see the fruits of U.S. plunder of Quebec’s resources passing by in low-slung, heavy-ladened ore boats.”

Sure, Reavis is interested in the development of Cleveland ports to help Negroes.

There are times that even the powerful of men must step, briefly, from the shadows and Reavis knew when and how to handle such exposure. Roldo continues:

It was 1964 when Jack Reavis first began a role in the businessman’s volunteer fireman on racial unrest. Reavis, along with the help of James ‘Dolph’ Norton, who also tends to feel secure behind the scenes, called top business and black leaders to sit down and reason away problems of city schools.
…
But cooling out the black community on the school issue was not enough. It was obvious by 1964, that the schools were to be a continuing source of irritation to the establishment and instability to the city. Thus Hugh Calkins moved into Cleveland, ran and was elected to the school board as the shining liberal. Calkins too is a partner of Jones, Day, Cockley and Reavis.

Thus we have a situation in which the superintendent of schools, Paul Briggs, is strongly supported by Jack Reavis, the liberal community is counting on Calkins, a Reavis underling, to “reform” the schools.

If the public has trouble understanding the school crisis as it is developing, Reavis is a good one to blame. In 1964, he secured “a pledge from the editors of the newspapers that they would give us no publicity except as we asked for it.” [Emphasis mine, JH] How’s that for a free press and a reading on Reavis’ power.

This news ban extended to Briggs, as Reavis felt school problems could be better worked out “privately.”

To those black leaders now involved in trying to redress the school mess, Reavis’ congratulations to Negro leaders who helped sweep problems under the rug five years ago, should serve as an apt warning. Reavis said of them, “The Negroes on this committee have behaved magnificently.”

To the powerful like Reavis, the leaders of Cleveland’s Black community were no more than pure breeds at the annual Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show.

Reavis and his committee managed to keep Cleveland Cool until the summer of 1966. Roldo continues:

In 1966, the lid was off again and the Hough riots made it necessary to create another “communications device” to get people talking, not acting. Attempts prior to this to get Reavis to act on white gangs causing trouble in Hough were unsuccessful. Now the Inner City Action Committee, another control mechanism, was born with Ralph Besse, chairman of the Cleveland Electric Illuminating Co., as its head. Reavis was its first member.

The Besse committee served a dual purpose. First, it was a mechanism to cool out the black community again; secondly, it served as a political mechanism to further undermine the weak [Mayor Ralph Sidney] Locher administration.

Locher was primaried by Carl Burton Stokes in 1967 and Stokes went on to famously become the first Black mayor of a major—sorry Gary, Indiana—American City. The machinism and social engineering of Reavis continued as Roldo details:

The Reavis firm keeps its tentacles in other parts of the elite’s social control mechanism. Carter Kissell, for example, headed the last United Appeal drive; Calkins, Alexander Ginn and A.C. Holmes, among others, are Reavis partners in the Welfare Federation apparatus. Reavis and [Seth] Taft represent the firm on the Greater Cleveland Growth Association board of directors. [Taft would lose to Stokes in the next election. JH]

Reavis, we’re sure, believes he knows what is best for others. When the Council of Churches in 1967 made contact with Saul Alinsky, Reavis said it would be a “tragedy” if Alinsky were to come to Cleveland. Then he added a financial threat to the Council if it dared bring Alinsky. It did not.

When he was still a Plain Dealer reporter in 1967, Roldo wrote about Alinsky and the buying of the Council of Churches. Fifty years later, on 1 September 2017, he would revisit that vote in IT IS JUST THE SAME OLD STORY—SELLOUT! Were it not for our elders and their cultural/institutional memory we would miss connections like this. Roldo continues:

A couple of years ago when Carl Stokes was pushing a fair housing law in Columbus and all the fair housing groups were kicking their heels, it wasn’t until Jack Reavis, asked for help by Stokes, went down to Columbus to “urge” the appropriate persons to “put this law through,” that it was passed. And when a movement of real estate interests throughout the state—not exactly a group with League of Women Voters power—started to bring the law to a referendum vote, Reavis stepped in, talked with Gov. James Rhodes and the realtors, squashing the referendum idea.

Reavis obviously represents the type of interests that make governors listen, then act. Strange then that Mayor Stokes didn’t let Jack Reavis go down to see the Governor to get higher welfare payments.

One can only look at the Mayor’s trip to Columbus as a “political” trip for the fans at home.

But this is the type of response welfare recipients can expect. Reavis said it plainly himself: he responds only when not responding means trouble.

“It was the violence that really caused us to try to establish lines of communications,” he said of the formation of the Businessmen’s Committee.

Nearly at the end of his piece, Roldo touches on Reavis’ roles in Banking—remember, if you want to get rich, don’t rob banks, own one—citing a report from the House Financial Services (also referred to as Banking) Committee chaired by Congressman John William Wright Patman (D-Texas). Roldo noted that:

Wright Patman’s subcommittee said that the pattern of bank stock ownership and control in Cleveland was “the most alarming” of the cities studied by him. Three of the top banks, two of which have directors from the Reavis law firm, hold 71.7 percent of all commercial bank deposits in the Cleveland area (1966 figures).

Roldo finishes with: By the way, we hope after the NAACP dinner the hosts don’t expect Old Jack to take them by the Union Club for a drink. It’s not permitted, you know.

See here for a bibliography of books and other materials mentioned in this series.

Previously while Readin’ Roldo…

If there is one word that I would select to describe the journalism of Roldo Bartimole I would pick tenacity. Roldo latches onto a topic and refuses to let go, in the face of all institutional inertia and entropy until there is a right and acceptable outcome. One of those topics that he holds onto like a pit bull is jobs for the hard-core disadvantaged.

In his 10 March 1969 issue of Point Of Viəw (volume 1, number 17), Roldo, beneath the headline—AIM-JOBS Subverted By Cleveland Industry—ledes:

The National Alliance of Businessmen recently announce plans to “find 5,000 permanent jobs for the hard-core disadvantaged” this year. That’s the public image sector of the business community talking straight propaganda.

When it comes to reality, the Cleveland business community’s posture toward the depression-level unemployment among poor people is one of “let them eat cake.”

For almost two years Cleveland’s business image-makers have been crowing about the success of AIM-Jobs and their sincere involvement in this “hard-core” employment program.

The crowing is about to stick in their craw.

Better than involvement, Cleveland’s business leaders have virtually ignored the depression in the poverty areas, while living fat from the prosperity of a war economy.

As an yet unreleased study made by the Case-Western Reserve University for the U.S. Labor Dept. labels the involvement of Cleveland industry in AIM-Jobs as “RELATIVELY INSIGNIFICANT.”

The AIM-Jobs program was another gimmick by Ralph Besse’s Inner City Action Committee.

Besse, of the Davis-Besse Nuclear power plant upwind from Cleveland, was the chairman of the Cleveland Electric Illuminating Company. Cleveland was in desperate need of more than a gimmick. Roldo continues:

A study done for the Welfare Federation on all job training programs in Cleveland showed such dismal results that the Welfare Federation took the report out of circulation and killed it.

So another summer approaches. The unemployment rate in poverty areas remains at above-depression levels of 15 percent and more than 50 percent for youth. The NAB, aware that it will do little, already cut its goal to 2,000 from 4,200 last year when it achieved about 30 percent of the goal.

What is needed, Roldo argues, is not the top-down solution of business interests, but rather a bottom-up approach:

What’s needed are 2,000, 3,000 or 4,000 high school students at the doorsteps of the Cleveland Growth Association on the day school lets out this spring. And the same number of unemployed people.

The Association says it wants to get involved in the crucial urban issues of the city.

It’s about time those crucial social issues came to the door of the Union Commerce Building where the Growth Association resides.

Then instead of Job Corps there should be Job Commandos to get to the major business firms in Cleveland and demand the jobs promised in press releases.

People needed to make some noise. How that might have worked can be seen in the peaceful demonstration of the past summer. History will get the final say, but I expect the lasting legacy of the single term of President Donald John Trump will be that his outrageous behavior and blatant self-dealing pissed off more people and encouraged them to refuse calls for calm and patience and instead to take to the streets. My major fear is that this coming summer, those same people, soothed into complacency by the a Harris-Biden administration, will stay home.

They should not, they must not.

Roldo took a bit of a different turn in two stories in this issue of Point Of Viəw writing: COMPUTER DID IT!, an imagined Associate Press story dated 17 July 1976; and No Ugs in UGS, suggesting that what America needs is the Universal Garbage Service.

In his 24 March 1969 issue of Point Of Viəw (volume 1, number 18), Roldo tackles the insanity of allowing a major player in the Military Industrial Complex—Cleveland’s own TRW—to solve the city’s ills. For years (decades) we have heard Conservatives call for the running of the government like a business. Well, we’ve seen how that works over the past four years, but in 1969 TRW wanted to use Cleveland for its own test case. Writing in TRW Mentally Unfit To Cure City Ills, Roldo ledes:

TRW, Inc. as many other corporate buzzards, smells the scent of profit in the misery of the cities. This odor of gain has lured the war-profiteers in to a probe of possible booty from the decay of urban centers.

TRW is a $1 billion plus a year corporation fattened on space, missiles and undersea war contracts, now looking (with Aerojet-General, Litton Industries, Lockheed, GE and IBM) for new government subsidies in the city.

The Greater Cleveland Growth Association invited TRW to use its merchant of death systems analysis on Cleveland, supposedly to breathe life into the city.

The mentality of TRW’s scientists and executives can’t be trusted to create anything that in any way has anything to do with life.

Roldo takes about half of the front page to detail just a few of the products TRW produced while sucking at the Defense Department’s teat, to illustrate why having the war profiteers ought not to be allowed near Cleveland’s streets. He writes:

Rather than invite TRW into Cleveland to study the problem, the firm should be thrown out, thus solving one problem.

And this is the corporation that the Growth Association wants to advise us about the best way to save Cleveland.

TRW is a corporation whose top official boasts of having “made the scientist realize that it’s fun to make a profit.”

One has to have some second thoughts about whether an institution that ‘teaches’ scientists the fun of making profits from human misery can be trusted to relieve the misery in someone else’s poverty.

One questions too, how much concern there is on the part of a firm, headed by a man whose guide of what is important to him and his corporation is thus stated:

If we are going to produce something, it first must have a market growing faster than GDP and we must have an opportunity to dominate in that market. The fellow with a tiny market share can’t spread his overhead. —John D. Wright, chairman of the board of directors of TRW.

…
TRW’s mentality can probably be best exposed by its approach to is scientist employees. Showing its true nature, TRW hooked a cash register to a mock satellite to remind its scientists how much money it was making as the satellite, still in orbit, made its flight.

For each mile the satellite travels, the cash register rings up a penny for the ‘glory and profit’ of TRW. The satellite is expected to stay in orbit for years.

Do we dare put the human problems of Cleveland into the hands of a corporation that hooks a cash register to a mock satellite to ‘teach’ scientists what they are all about? Do we dare trust scientists that submit to this?

I am reminded here of Kurt Vonnegut’s cautionary industrial tale: Player Piano. Vonnegut is best remembered for his Slaughter House Five published in 1969, but he began in 1952 with Player Piano. I have no doubt that both Wright and Simon Ramo would be quite at home in Vonnegut’s novel. Roldo continues:

Dr. Simon Ramo, vice-chairman of the TRW board of directors and a “leading scientist-industrialist,” according to TRW, gleefully predicts that the U.S. will spend more than ONE TRILLION DOLLARS by 1977 to help those “complex social and economic problems of our urban society.

And the Cleveland Growth Association tells us that TRW out of the goodness of its corporate heart spent $50,000 to produce a systems analysis of Cleveland problems and didn’t charge the city a penny.
…
Simon Ramo calls the TRW approach to problems in cities “automated common sense.”

Anyone with common sense knows it’s nothing more than automated nonsense.

TRW’s $50,000 study, as might be expected, concluded that the Greater Cleveland Growth Assn. be the instrument to undertake the major task—coordination.

Coordination of what?

TRW must assume that solving city problems is something like getting a satellite into space. Even in traditional terms this has to be nonsense.

When one launches a spaceship into orbit, all those doing the launching want the ship to get into orbit. When one want to solve the problems of a city one must assume—if coordination is the big problem—that everyone wants to solve the problems of the city.

And that’s utter nonsense, as TRW should well recognize because it certainly doesn’t want to solve city problems. It only wants to solve them if the ‘price is right’ and its view of the world prevails.

And if the price were right now, TRW wouldn’t be saying, “TRW continues to provide trajectory analysis and other mission planning support for the Apollo moon-flight program under a multi-million dollar contract.”

Finally, TRW must assume that we all want a city and world as envisioned by it and the Cleveland Growth Association. And that mistake is the fatal one.

I have no doubts.

See here for a bibliography of books and other materials mentioned in this series.

Previously while Readin’ Roldo…

This is just one case, and we don’t know what is going to happen when the Police Union protests—as it will—or how the rank-and-file of the Columbus Police force is going to react, but we can still celebrate for a moment in the right and timely response of Ned Pettus Jr, the director of Columbus public safety. From the Associated Press:

A white Ohio police officer was fired on Monday after body-cam footage showed him fatally shooting Andre Hill, a Black man who was holding a cellphone, then refusing to aid him for several minutes.

Columbus police officer Adam Coy was fired hours after a hearing. His firing was announced in a statement from Ned Pettus Jr, the director of Columbus public safety.

“The actions of Adam Coy do not live up to the oath of a Columbus Police officer, or the standards we, and the community, demand of our officers,” the statement read. “The shooting of Andre Hill is a tragedy for all who loved him in addition to the community and our division of police.”

Coy remains under criminal investigation for last week’s shooting.

This isn’t over, not by a long shot. There will be police protests across the country. There will be attacks of the Blue Flu. Protesters will take to their gas-guzzling pickup trucks to chant “Blue Lives Matter!” But we should let them and meet their protests with peaceful responses, dwarfing theirs affirming that Andrew Hill’s life mattered; that Black Lives Matter.

Andre Hill is only one murdered man among thousands that have unjustly died at the hands of police. We can stop, take a breath, and then get back at it. The AP reporter continues:

“The decision came after Pettus concluded a hearing to determine whether the actions taken by Coy in the moments before and after the fatal shooting of Hill on Tuesday were justified. The public safety director upheld the recommendation of the police chief, Thomas Quinlan, who made a video statement Christmas Eve, saying he had seen enough to recommend Coy be terminated.

“This is what accountability looks like. The evidence provided solid rationale for termination,” Quinlan said after Coy’s termination on Monday afternoon. “Mr Coy will now have to answer to the state investigators for the death of Andre Hill.”

Members of the local Fraternal Order of Police attended the hearing on behalf of Coy, who was not in attendance, according to a statement from Pettus’s office.

“Officer Coy was given the opportunity today to come and participate,” Brian Steel, vice-president of the police union, told reporters. “He elected not to participate. I do not know why I would have liked to have him here, but it’s his decision.”

We can only hope insist that safety directors and chiefs of police follow the right actions of Pettus and Quinlan. This is what Justice looks like. The AP concludes:

In addition to an internal police investigation, the Ohio attorney general, Dave Yost, was appointed a special prosecutor in the death of Hill.

“We will do our duty based on the facts and the law,” Yost said in a tweet. “Whatever the outcome, someone will be angry – but the decision will be objective.”

The US attorney’s office and the FBI are also participating in a separate investigation.

Damn straight.

Bonus No. 1: Go…! Go…! Go Bernie…!

Bonus No. 2: Tom Tomorrow boldly takes This Modern World to the future…

Bonus No. 3: Trump is Still Plotting a Possible Coup.

Bonus No. 4: Not a snowball’s chance in hell, but force the vote anyway.

In his 24 February 1969 issue of Point Of Viəw (volume 1, number 16), Roldo, under the headlineTruth A Victim In Glenville—carries on his reporting from that stricken Cleveland neighborhood. He writes:

Even the official version of Mayor Stokes’ chronology of events is largely dependent upon the police because the department has refused pertinent information and evidence to both the mayor and city safety director.

Can’t you just hear Colonel Nathan R. Jessep screaming: You can’t handle the truth! I confess that I don’t fully understand how dysfunctional Cleveland must have been that the police force would treat their bosses—Mayor Stokes, whoever was the safety director and the citizens they supposedly serve and protect—with such contempt. Roldo continues with the question:

Is there a reason to believe the police version incorrect?

Not only may it be wrong, but there is reason to believe that rather than an ambush by black militants, the gun battle that took the lives of 10 persons, three of them policemen, was the result of provocative acts by the Cleveland Police tactical unit—acts that backfired.

That may account for the reluctance of the President’s Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence, headed by Milton Eisenhower, to release a report on the disorders here. The Commission undoubtedly with the approval of the Nixon administration, appears ready to suppress the Glenville report. It was compiled here by the Case-Western Reserve U. Violence Center by Louis Masotti.
…
Already the Violence Center report has gone through the usual high-level process of cooling homogenization.

Is there basis for the theory that militants—rather than initiating the battle—reacted to provocation of the police?

The answer to that question lies partially in the answers to two other questions: What were the police supposed to be doing there? And what time did the shooting begin?

First, the tactical unit was in the area because of hints of trouble. [Hints of trouble? From whom? JH] Specifically, their orders were to maintain a ‘mobile’ and ‘inconspicuous’ surveillance of a black militant headquarters.

Yet two tactical unit cars were parked, hardly a ‘mobile’ watch; and in each car were four white plainclothesmen, hardly ‘inconspicuous in the all-black area.

What about the time element?

The official chronology of events released by Mayor Stokes Aug. 8, says that the shooting started at 8:25 p.m. It states: “8:25 p.m. Shot fired but police do not know where or at what.”

It follows: “8:25 p.m. Wm. C. McMillan, tow truck driver wounded by sniper fire at E. 123rd and Beulah.”

Thus, 8:25 has been set as the start of the violence.

But there are inconsistencies.

First, the Plain Dealer in its day-after story says: “The shooting broke out about 7:30 p.m.” The PD also says that the two truck, which McMillan was driving, was fired upon shortly BEFORE 8 p.m. The Press places the vehicle there at nearly 8 p.m.

A half- to one hour time discrepancy in a story of this nature would be a significant error.

As Roldo noted in Who Did Kill James Chapman? missing time is central in trying to understand what happened that night.

As a follow up to Crime In The Cathedral on the back page of the 24 February issue, Roldo notes:

Episcopal Bishop [John Harris Burt] Burt apparently wants to give Bishop Issenmann a race for the irrelevancy award. The bishop is on a crusade against discrimination in private clubs. Success would mean opening the clubs to a handful of Negroes with money to join. Meanwhile, some 50,000 kids in his diocese don’t know where their next meal will come from. Naturally, the good bishop’s name is affixed to the Mayor’s Commission on the Crisis in Welfare document as a member.

Feeding 50,000 kids,that’s hard. Getting a Black man with the cash to pay the dues into an exclusive club, difficult but a whole lot easier, and, in terms of influence, far more rewarding.

See here for a bibliography of books and other materials mentioned in this series.

Previously while Readin’ Roldo…

From time to time Roldo Bartimole saw fit to publish Special issues containing particularly significant and time-sensitive stories. His first special, published on 22 December 1968, was the transcript, with a brief introduction, of his City Club Talk. His second, however, scooped both the Cleveland Press and the Cleveland Plain Dealer.

The story was simple, and explosive: James Earl Chapman was not shot by a sniper.

In this, his second, special issue of Point Of Viəw, published on 10 February 1969, Roldo asks in his headline: Who Did Kill James Chapman?

Abundant powder burns—though never mentioned publicly—were found in the fatal wounds of James Earl Chapman, a finding which destroys the popular version—advanced by the police and the mass media—that the 22-year-old black man was killed by a sniper’s bullet while trying to assist police during last summer’s Glenville disorders.

The finding, first revealed here, suggests that Chapman may have been the victim of a close-range “execution,” rather than being shot by a “high velocity missile” fired by a sniper at some distance, as the coroner’s verdict says.

Powder burns, according to pathologists are found when a shot fired at almost point-blank range.

This is, of course in 2020, a fact known by anyone who watches any of the plethora of police procedurals on television that feature coroners or crime-scene investigators. Roldo continues:

The burn description, though never revealed publicly, was made on July 24, 1968, in the official autopsy of the Cuyahoga County Coroner’s office.

Despite this finding the coroner’s verdict concludes that:

Death in this case was the end result of gunshot wound sustained during racial disturbances [What does that have to do with the price of tea in China? JH] and was homicidal in nature.

The verdict, signed by Sam R. Gerber county coroner, then fails to mention the powder burns found in a microscopic examination of Chapman’s wounds. Why?

Why the fuck, indeed. Roldo goes on to cite (but not name) a well-known forensic pathologist, a medical physician with special expertise in the legal aspects of medicine. The doctor, Roldo writes: [C]oncludes that Chapman was killed by a shot fired not more than three feet distant.

So, not a sniper. There was also extensive confusion over supposed shotgun wounds on Chapman’s body.

The first reports in the newspapers say that Chapman was killed by shotgun. Later, quoting police, the newspapers drop the report of his being killed by shotgun, but police say Chapman’s shoulder bore wounds made by a shotgun.

The coroner’s report makes no mention of shotgun wounds on Chapman’s body.

Then Roldo drops the other shoe:

From the beginning, there have been rumors in the black community that Chapman was “shot by the police.” on July 27, the Call & Post a Negro-owned newspaper reflected that concern, reporting that it had talked with a detective in the homicide department in an attempt to find out if Chapman was “shot by snipers or police”

It pointedly said in the article that when information was released about Chapman’s death, the Call & Post was not invited to the press conference.

As a journalist, I find that last puzzling. If I had been the editor of the only Black newspaper in Cleveland I would have thought invitations be damned. The Call & Post should have had reporters camped on the offices of police, city hall and the coroner’s office. Waiting for an invitation (or more likely a notification) would just not do. Roldo continues.

It is well to remind readers that during this time feelings in the community over the open gun battle and resulting deaths are running at fever pitch. The media, displaying its brand of “concerned responsibility” [Read “puckered lips firmly attached to officials butts,” JH] would be and is quick to seize upon the “hero” story [That Chapman was assisting an injured police officer, JH] that indicates that this was not a
battle between white and black or community and police, but the act of crazy men. They “prove” this, of course, by having a black man help a white policeman. This also refutes the charge that Chapman might have been a police victim.

But the questions remain. On Aug. 10, the Call & Post questions the now-accepted version that Chapman is a “hero” and not the victim. In an article headlined, “Who Killed James Chapman?” the Call & Post says, “The circumstances surrounding his death are very mysterious and subject to much speculation.”

Chapman would be named as one of 128 such heroes awarded Carnegie Medals in 1968.

The Call & Post concludes that “even the most basic facts surrounding his death are either questionable or unknown. No one saw Chapman fall. [Emphasis mine, JH] Who did kill James Chapman?

Roldo continues in what I think might be the most telling question:

The time of death also remains unclear. The mayor’s chronological report places Chapman’s death at 9 p.m. But others say that he was alive a half hour later. [Emphasis mine, JH]

If so, it would place the time of death at 9:30 p.m in front of the Lakeview Tavern. The Lakeview Tavern at that time is the location of a police incident under FBI investigation now. Police allegedly tear gassed patrons, shot a customer (at 9:30 p.m., according to the mayor’s chronological report) [Wait, what? Who do the police say they shot there? JH] and “searched women’s undergarments for weapons.”

Roldo concludes:

The changing versions of Chapman’s wounds and how he was killed, as printed in the media, also invite investigation.

James Earl Chapman was killed by someone not more than three feet away. How do you kill someone accidentally at 3 feet? This suggests that the shot was deliberate, if not premeditated.

We can only raise these serious inconsistencies. We cannot provide the answers necessary to clear the air. But it is clear that the inconsistencies are serious and demand answers.

Mayor Stokes, we believe, it is your responsibility to the community, to the family of James Chapman and to justice that the Chapman case be honestly, publicly and immediately the subject of a thorough investigation, probably by the U.S. Justice Department.

James Chapman was murdered on Tuesday evening, 23 July 1968. Here Roldo, writing in late January, early February, six months later, is still asking important questions for which there are no official answers that a reasonable citizen might intelligently accept. I think we can expect to see much more on Chapman in the coming months from Roldo and his Point Of Viəw.

The regular issue scheduled for 10 February 1969 was published and mailed along with the Special issue above. In Point Of Viəw (volume 1, number 14B), Roldo’s top story is: Crime In The Cathedral. He ledes:

It took what only can be described as a mild act of protest—saying mass at St. John’s Cathedral in Cleveland—to reveal in all its nakedness the illegitimacy and bankruptcy of the Catholic Diocesan spiritual leadership and the relative ease with which the Cleveland Police Department—its officers dragging priests from the altar during mass—can be used for purely political reasons.

Two Catholic Priests—Fr. Robert Begin and Fr. Bernie Meyer—“took over” the cathedral to celebrate mass to “expose the dichotomy between the words and the actions of the churchmen of our diocese.” They couldn’t have proven it more solidly. Some 30 Cleveland policemen formed a mini-vatican militia—directed by frenetic chancery sycophants—broke up the mass and arrested the priests. The charge: trespassing in the cathedral!

I thought the Catholic Church had Ecclesiastical Courts to handle this sort of thing. (You know like the Sharia Courts—and don’t get me started on the Halachic Courts—we’ve been getting all upset about here in the 21st century.) But I digress. Roldo continues:

[Bishop Clarence Issenmann’s] flunkies piously defended themselves, saying they wanted to prevent “a riot” and in “consideration of the sacredness of the cathedral” and for their “reverence for the holy sacrifice of the mass.”

For this they brought some 30 cops armed with billy clubs into the cathedral, threatened people with arrest, dragged priests from the altar, spilled the host and labeled it all in the routine service of God.

Roldo uses the incident to further spotlight the church’s, and Issenmann’s many roles in Cleveland. He writes:

What the priests and their followers must learn is that Issenmann, like the chairman of the board of GE, IBM or Dow Chemical, has more problems to worry about than the moral issues of Vietnam, racism and poverty.

There’s a business to run.

When Dow is challenged on producing napalm, it answers with a responsibility-shifting form letter, “Simple good citizenship requires that we support our country with the things it needs both in peace and in war.” When challenged by the dissenters, the Catholic bureaucracy respond similarly, shifting responsibility from itself to its critics. “I believe they (the priests) have done great harm to the causes to which they say they dedicated. The labors of those Christians committed to building bridges of understanding in these areas of concern will be much more difficult as a result of this irresponsible action,” says an auxiliary bishop.

Both statements could have been written by the same public relations firm.

Yeah, that’s some serious flackery there. Readers might want to look at what Jorge Mario Bergoglio was doing in 1969 and how he spent his early years as a priest in Argentina. I doubt that Issenmann would have approved. Roldo gets down to the bigger picture:

For the Catholic and non-Catholic citizens of Cleveland the most serious problem arising out of this confrontation is the use of police in a church political struggle

Annddd… Roldo’s off digging into Mayor Carl Stoke’s relationship with the city’s police force in general and Chief of Police Patrick Gerity in particular. Go. Read. The learning is, as always, worth your time.

See here for a bibliography of books and other materials mentioned in this series.

See here for a bibliography of books and other materials mentioned in this series.

Previously while Readin’ Roldo…

Bonus No. 1: Bad Day In Cleveland.

Bonus No. 2: From The Cleveland Police Museum.

Roldo Bartimole starts the new year—a momentous 1969 where Richard Milhous Nixon becomes president, Neil Armstrong walks on the moon, 350,000 find three days of peace and music at Woodstock, the first Boeing 747 enters service and Senator Edward Moore Kennedy wishes he’d driven a Volkswagen—with more of the games charities play.

Roldo was doing the work described by Thomas Frank in his The People, No: A Brief History of Anti-Populism, reminding us of connections; acting as a sane version Glenn Beck with his chalkboard.

In his 13 January 1969 issue of Point Of Viəw (volume 1, number 13), Roldo—beneath the headline CHARITY GAMES BY PD, CHANNEL 8—ledes:

“Now that Hartzel Mayle is buried in the mine, his wife Juanita makes sandwiches with one slice of meat instead of three.”

So begins one of a long series of articles in the Cleveland Plain Dealer imploring its readers to give contributions to support the 200 dependents of the 78 miners who died in the Mannington Mine disaster.

Channel 8 TV, in its hurried spasm of seasonal goodwill, beseeches those “good people” out there to respond to a clothing drive to help all those welfare families they slowly murder during the rest of the year.

Apropos of probably nothing, but still curious, is that Channel 8 would become the Fox News channel of Cleveland in 1994. I’m just saying. Back to Roldo:

What are we to think of these seasonal mass media promotion drives, for that’s what they are—not meaningful attempts to help, but self-seeking promotions. Even worse, they are subtle attempts to deflect attention from a system that makes charity necessary. They are despicable.

Let’s take a look at both.

I am reminded here of the role that Charles Dickens played as The Man Who Invented Christmas (oh yeah, there was a book first. We get the idea from Dickens’ A Christmas Carol that Scrooge went forth and sinned no more, but does anyone really believe that? Is there any evidence that our modern-day Scrooges both in 1969 and 2021 might be reformed by their charity? Roldo continues:

Is the problem one of charity in the face of multi-millions in profits? The PD would have us believe so.

So while the company pockets a billion, the Mayle family of 15 cuts from three slices of sandwich meat to one. And the PD says nothing of the company, but hoodwinks the public.

A bit of serendipity here: a few weeks ago I sent Roldo a section of Frank’s book that told the story of Marcus Alonzo Hanna and his vital role in the election of Ohioan William McKinley to the White House. As Roldo details in this piece, Hanna Mining—formed in 1840 as M.A. Hanna Mining and the source of the Hanna family fortune—connects Cleveland to Mrs. Mayle’s deprivations. The final connection that Roldo makes has to do with why none of this might have made it on to the pages of Plain Dealer. He writes:

Both [George, president, and Gilbert, board chairman of Hanna Mining] Humphrey], are members of the Union Club and the Kirkland Country Club, along with [PD Publisher] Tom Vail. They also share hometowns, Hunting Valley. So we suspect that the reason the Humphrey name never came up in the series wasn’t because it was unknown.

What happens in Hunting Valley stays in Hunting Valley, most of the time. Roldo wraps up:

The rationalization, of course, is that civic elites, working quietly by clothing drives and such, will make more gains than disruptive tactics. History has proven that rationalization devoid of truth.

This would become a theme that Roldo could never let go of. It is a theme—alongside his crusade against über wealthy businessmen buying sport’s franchises and then milking the public to build (and pay for) elaborate team palaces—that speaks to his demands that we seek Justice, not Charity, for the least of us. Finally, in more of the Cleveland City Club saga, Roldo addresses an invitation from James Naughton to accept the City Club’s first Pull Us Together award. He writes:

What you don’t understand, Jim, is that I really do think the City Club is a waste of time. My being on the platform committee wouldn’t change that any more than Hubert H. Humphrey being president in place of Nixon would change anything. It’s the nature of the beast that matters, not the mask it wears. A political writer, specially, should know that.

Moving on. In his 27 January 1969 issue of Point Of Viəw (volume 1, number 14A), Roldo continues with his charity-as-corporate-looting theme in Retarded Growth. He ledes:

It its annual meeting is any indication, the Greater Cleveland Growth Association ought to replace the word ‘Growth’ with ‘Retarded.’

Two days after the meeting, William Adams, Association president, told the Rotary Club that business has to become involve in social problems.

But his constituency—corporate leaders—apparently think Mr. Adams will take care of that involvement by making speeches.

However, when asked the position of the Association on the issue of 100 percent welfare payments, George Grabner, chairman and chief executive officer and a director of Weatherhead Co., an arms maker, [I have to wonder if the students in Case’s pretty Frank Gehry building are aware of that tidbit. JH] fumbled through his slick copy of ACTION 70s booklet, put out by the Association, to find out where in the hell it said anything about welfare. It does. Right under No. 4—entitled, “Justice and Order, Public Safety, Health and Welfare.” A strange heading, but there.

Grabner couldn’t answer on the Association’s position. When reminded that the
Association was able to take a position in favor of the $759 million Ohio bond issue last November—and didn’t represent a similar type issue—he still could not answer.

He was able to indicate that ‘study’ of the issue was necessary before any Association commitments could be made. When reminded that the issue of inadequate welfare was a decade old, he still could not respond.

When asked if the media could expect the Association to make a decision on the question of welfare and make it known publicly, the answer was a tacit no.

So all this talk about involvement in the problems of the urban community by business is all just that—talk.

Talk, and of course, further tax breaks.

Let’s get our facts straight. First, [United Appeal] was established for one major reason: the burden of charity, business leaders felt, was getting too heavy. So they decided a method was needed to “share the burden.” To do that they established a vehicle to collect from all people, thereby avoiding getting his themselves.
…
United Appeal is a very well thought-out scheme to avoid corporate taxes. It is a tax dodge, pure and simple.

Because it is labeled charity, it draws many well-meaning people to it. But that doesn’t change its true nature one bit. It merely makes it more difficult to unmask.

Like any respectable journalist, Roldo always follows the money: in business and politics. On the back page of the issue. Roldo fires a warning shot across the bow of Congressional Representative Charles Albert Vanik. In Vanik Watching, Roldo quotes the congressman:

“In city after city across the country, dusk brings a curfew to honest citizens who are afraid to venture out at night, who are afraid to ride the buses, and who are afraid of every stranger on the street and every knock on the door”

“We bemoan the fact of crime, but in 1965 the per capita expenditure for all law enforcement agencies was a mere $14.20. We spent $4 billion on law enforcement last year…. (but) more than $4.8 billion on cosmetics.”

“The lawfulness of police order or directive must be questioned in the courtroom and not on the streets.”

“The police and the courts are the machinery of Justice.”

“Law is what the people have decreed for themselves and for each other. Order is their response.”

I especially find Vanik’s genuflection to police in the third quote vomit-inducing. Of course, Kwame Alexander’s litany of names, and those the have followed since, would never get a day in court.

This concludes my first week of deep diving into 50 years of Point Of Viəw by Readin’ Roldo.

One down, 51 to go.

See here for a bibliography of books and other materials mentioned in this series.

Previously while Readin’ Roldo…

Bonus No. 1: One of my favorites from Derf…

Bonus No. 2: By 34 votes? Can that be true…?

Bonus No. 3: The problem with the future is that it keeps turning into the present.

When I was executive editor of GIE’s Recycling Media Group I became a member of Cleveland’s City Club and regularly attended the Friday forums. The food was OK and occasionally the speakers were interesting, but I doubt too many people were there for either. Like me, I suspect, there were there to see who else was there and to be seen by those in attendance.

This was a weekly networking luncheon and the membership—I forget how much that was back in the early ’90s—was well worth both my time and money. Not much, if anything, had changed since Roldo Bartimole took a dive into one of the nation’s great free speech forums. In his 6 November issue of Point Of Viəw Roldo Bartimole tackles this very-Cleveland institution in City Club Forum, Freedom of Prattle.

Roldo ledes:

This is a time as never before when institutions are being challenged to live up to rhetoric of their image and traditions. It is a time when the facade of tradition is being peeled away from the most venerable of institutions.

However, sometimes it isn’t the action of protestors that betray the gap between image and reality. Sometimes it’s the members of the institution themselves. When it is, the betrayal is by chance, not choice.

That’s why the questions asked of the two senate candidates—[Republican William Bart] Saxbe and [Democrat John Joyce] Gilligan—at the recent City Club Forum debate reveal more of the City Club forums than members should like.

I can toss a softball as well as any journalist, but those questions out to be the purview of staff and flacks, not journalists tasked with informing a public about the true nature of a topic or person. That has gotten harder as first soundbites and now tweets have allowed politicians and civic leaders to circumvent the tough questions and answer their own softballs; to stage their own awesome fest. Roldo thought people deserved more:

Free speech at the City Club has come to mean a debate between the Democratic and Republican candidates for some political office or other. The local shrine of free speech too often takes on the aura of the local ward club.

This year the City Club has had a parade of politicians from Eugene McCarthy to Adrian Fink. Not only is this a debasement of the idea of free speech, it is a fraud.

For the public can and does get the line of all these public personalities ‘for wholesale’ via radio, television, newspapers and the paid propaganda of each.

It doesn’t take the ‘bastion of free speech,’ as the City Club likes to be called, for the public to hear the views of these individuals. Indeed, the public hears too much of them.

Amen to that. A bastion of free speech ought to air that which people find objectionable, words that make people uncomfortable. I don’t buy all the can’t-we-all-just-get-along/civility crap. I’m part of a tiny minority that thinks the first presidential debate between President Donald John Trump and Candidate Joseph Robinette Biden was the best in a long time. Not because either candidate said much of any substance, but rather that the gloves came off and a few people gained some insights into each candidate. We need more of that. We need to hear that which makes us squirm in our seats, not what makes us feel all warm and fuzzy. Forums like the City Club set standards. How good a standard can be questionable. Roldo continues:

As an institution that is revered in the mass media here, it sets a tone for the city. Free expression becomes measured by it. Thus the tone of expression in Cleveland is dull, pretentious and stifling. At a time when issues of great importance threaten to engulf this and other communities, the City Club Forums deal in personalities, not issue.

And, of course, times when issues of great importance threaten to engulf this and other communities. are always right here, right now. Roldo makes the case that the City Club has exchanged free speech for free propaganda. He writes:

“The best test of truth is the power of the thought itself to get accepted in the competition of the market,” says a City Club official. [That has to be the most bullshit definition of truth I’ve ever read. Truth, with apologies to Philip K. Dick, (like reality) is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away. JH] How is that possible when the City Club supposedly offers that market but allows it to be used to present only certain idea? What new truths have the opportunity to birth at the City Club?

Another City Club fund-raiser says that in an affluent society, we ought to be able to afford free speech. It is more crucial that in this Arrogant Society, we seek out the unpopular individual, rather than the conventional propaganda.

As it is now, the City Club forums are a community narcotic, lulling people into thinking that it has a forum for free expression when it does not.

So, how does the City Club of 2020 compare to that of 1968. That is a question worth asking. Roldo continues:

Maybe the tradition of the City Club as a free speech forum is invalid. Tom Campbell wrote in his biography of Daniel Morgan that “Morgan’s image was carefully considered when the City Club of Cleveland was founded in Oct., 1912. The decision to make Morgan the first president of the City Club was based on the fact that he was regarded as a ‘conservative progressive’ whose presence would not alienate the more substantial citizens of the community.”

It appears that the same gauge is used today by the City Club when it chooses its speakers.

The word Prattle in Roldo’s headline raised a few hackles, but instead of a public shaming—Roldo reminded me—the City Club offered him their podium and he accepted addressed the Forum on 20 December. The Cleveland Memory Project has both the recording and the transcript of that presentation.

I have listened to a few forums in the last quarter century—and I thoroughly enjoyed the recent virtual forum with Eric Foner, I have not attended a forum since I let my membership lapse around 1993 or so. But I have listened, and many, many times called in, to what I think as a worthy successor: WCPN’s Sound of Ideas. I think I began listening to the show around 2007—I can’t find an exact date online—and met host Dan Moulthrop at the Lee Road Phoenix Coffee House around the same time. I thought his show was some of the best public radio I’d heard and I told him then that I expected he’d be leaving Cleveland and going national in the not too distant future. Well, I was wrong, he didn’t leave town, but he did shift jobs in 2013 to become Chief Executive Officer of the City Club. The first two (virtual) forums up for 2021 are: The Road to Revitalization: Economic Inclusion and America’s Legacy Cities and More than a Paycheck: Reducing Inequality through Summer Jobs. You can evaluate the City Club’s choices for 2020 here.

The second forum—in light of Roldo’s own examination of the challenge in 1968—could be interesting. If you’re going to watch, as I am, then be sure to read Roldo’s Summer Jobs Fail Again.

Roldo carries on his coverage of United Appeal in $17 Million Split In Back Room. He writes:

Those committees that divvy the United Appeal dollars are now in the their dark holes making decisions. All the interest shown by the mass media during the money milking time has strangely vanished now that the polite heist has been accomplished. The media thinks collecting money is important, but how it’s spent is none of the public’s business.

And therein lies the danger of elites collecting funds from the pubic and then arriving at ‘gentlemen’s agreements’ to benefit who they think is worthy of there decisions. Seldom is what happens in private ever in the public’s best interests. But as Roldo writes: The name of the game is play it safe and be quiet. Roldo was never quiet. We ought not to be either.

In his 4 December issue of Point Of Viəw Roldo Bartimole strikes a seasonal note with: BUY, BABY, BUY SEASON’S HERE featuring the heyday of a mall so sad that even Walmart moved out. He ledes:

The legal looting season is in full swing. It’s called Christmas shopping, America’s number one cultural bask. It’s as American as violence, to borrow a paraphrase.

The Egyptians buried their greats with a collection of worldly wealth to make things pleasant for them in the next world. If the same were done for the average American, one could brick up the entrances to Severance [Mall] and let it go at that. For there is entombed America.

The creation of Severance shopping center took the same mental genius that creates ‘virgin nylon’ and expounds the virtues o ‘genuine imitations.’

Severance is a tomb dedicated to our unique national culture, the cult of consumption.

The tomb is, well, sealed but here in the present we have seen where that cult of consumption has gotten us after very smart geniuses at very good companies figured out how to outsource the actual making of what American are led to believe they must buy and just focus on selling cheap plastic crap from China to each other.

Years from now, I expect that economists and historians will study 2020 as the year consumerism crashed.

Finally, below the fold , Roldo pulls back the curtain on Cleveland’s own Ministerium für Staatsicherheit in SECRET POLICE CLEVELAND STYLE; shines the light on still more Ceremonial Democracy in PUBLIC HEARINGS, PRIVATE REASONS; shows readers how the Plain Dealer made two paragraphs disappear from a New York Times story on the Glenville Shootings; and performs a real act of public service by listing the businessmen who had the final say on Cleveland Now expenditures.

Roldo ended the year with his first Special issue, printing the transcript of his speech before the City Club of Cleveland.

I just want to highlight three bits from the end of his talk First:

The mass media and major institutions in this society are not dedicated to the United States but to the “American Way of Life”. Therefore, it is encumbent upon them not to question very closely the actions of a host of American institutions, and especially not to question the values or motives of those institutions.

Second:

Institutions may be criticized, but the real sin is questioning the value system or motives of the major institutions. Students may protest bad [inaudible] when they begin to question the very nature of the university. Well, then that’s enough.

For example, when was the last time you saw anywhere a critique of such Cleveland institutions as the Businessmen’s Interracial Committee, the Cleveland Development Foundation, the Greater Cleveland Growth Association, the Greater Cleveland Associated Foundations, the PACE Association, the PATH Association, the Cleveland Board of Education, the Citizens League, the United Appeal, University Circle Foundation, Group 66? Yet some of these organizations have immense power over what happens in Cleveland. And they themselves claim to be heavily involved in the life of the city. These institutions have to be demythologized. They are not basically and inherently good. And their motives don’t necessarily have to be good and certainly they must be open to question. Are we afraid to ask those questions publicly?

And third, Roldo concludes:

We talk of the problem of law and order, but our problem is one of excessive order and the encrustening and hardening of institutional bureaucracy and unbecoming values.

Not included in the Special Edition of Point Of Viəw, but available in the City Club transcript—where you can also listen to the full audio—is the question and answer portion so important to the City Club Forum format. I’ll pick just the second exchange because Roldo’s response so perfectly speaks to what his is about. You should go read the rest:

Member: I have a question. It’s a two-part question. I’d like to ask what one think is the government doing that would meet your approval. I’d like also to ask what one thing is the news media doing that would meet your approval.

RB: Well, I’ll tell you, uh. You know you can always find something that’s going on that’s good. And I don’t think we ought to spend our time saying what’s good when there’s so much that’s wrong. I don’t care whether the media does something nice. You know a lot of people get excited because the news media, for example, the Plain Dealer has a something on the miners. Well, you know, so what? So, so they get a thousand dollars per family. So, what, what does that mean? I don’t think there’s any meaning in pointing out what’s good about the media because it’s – if they’re doing their job, their supposed to do it. We should be critical of things when they’re not doing what they want. The government’s doing a lot of good things. But most of them are outweighed by what it isn’t doing.

The fun, and learning never stops in Cleveland and the Point Of Viəw.

See here for a bibliography of books and other materials mentioned in this series.

Previously while Readin’ Roldo…

Bonus No. 1: Bernie never gets any respect.

Bonus No. 2: How The Political Class Has LIED About Deficits.

The Union Block building on Front Street in Marietta, Ohio, made No. 6 on selected photos in this morning’s photo essay on The Guardian: Small-town US after dark—in pictures.

Criss-crossing the US, covering 25,000 miles and 22 states, the British photographer Daniel Freeman has captured the nocturnal life of small town US. He meanders across states with no planned itinerary, and his photographs capture the timeless quality of the country. Midnight on Main is published by Hatje Cantz.

I’ve been in all three retail spaces over the year—the stores have periodically changed—but I immediately recognized the Union Block building when I scrolled through the photographs.

Bonus No. 1: The true meaning of Christmas.

Bonus No. 2: What he’s saying is kind of ??? crazy.

Bonus No. 3: Glenn Greenwald—Media’s WORST Failures Of 2020.

In his 9 October issue of Point Of Viəw Roldo Bartimole takes a short step away from politics to our own profression—journalism—to examine the lenses that Cleveland’s newspapers (with special attention to his former employer, the Cleveland Plain Dealer)—use to write about the Glenville Shootout and its aftermath. The view is clear, but it ain’t pretty.

Using a style the PD had recently employed in a series under the banner: Cleveland Police, What’s on Their Minds Roldo talks with his former colleagues in: PD Reporters, WHAT’S ON THEIR MINDS. Roldo found this central concern among reporter:

In the bitter words of one of its veteran reporters, words that utter from a deep well of your pride, “They don’t trust us. Tom Vail (publisher and editor, RB) calls us his ‘tigers’ but they don’t trust us. When we come back with the truth but it doesn’t fit certain preconceptions, it doesn’t get into the paper.”

This reporter’s words are not alone. They are backed by a flood of remarks from reporters. They come from a city room filled with restlessness.

Almost to a man, they agreed: We need leadership.

I was in journalism school at Ohio University in the early ’80s and I have to wonder how many of my fellow students might have chosen other majors if they’d had Point Of Viəw on the rack in the lobby of the school. This points to one of the rude awakenings budding journalists quickly learn once they start work: Freedom of the press has nothing to do with reporters, that freedom applies to the people who own actual presses, or in this modern age an electronic—radio, television, internet—platform to broadcast their message on. As long as advertising funds the media, business will have a stranglehold on the news, irregardless of high-minded assertions and a separation of church and state.

Publishers want the cash, but they also want the accolades, and that is a tough wire to walk. Roldo continues:

Like the point of a sharpened pencil, many of them are more direct.

“They won’t let us do our job. Vail covets a Pulitzer prize, but doesn’t want to upset certain people.”

Yes, the allusive Pulitzer. Employees have won two in the newspaper’s 178-year history. The first came in 1953 when editorial cartoonist Edward Daniel Kuekes won for his cartoon Aftermath More than half a century would pass before a second Plain Dealer writer would score a Pulitzer when Connie Schultz would take the honor for her pungent columns that provided a voice for the underdog and underprivileged.

There is a lesson there and more than a little irony in that Schultz would be lauded for the kind of stories reporters wanted to but were blocked because management didn’t want those stories. In late July of this year, Roldo continues:

…A team of PD reporters were assigned to do an in-depth interpretive report on the Glenville shootings.

The stories never appeared. Even the carbon copies and notes were taken from reporters. All the hard work of compiling and writing, gone. The pain and anguish was heightened when reporters were told why the stories would be sacked. They weren’t competent and hadn’t done a good enough job, they were told.

That was, of course, horseshit. While Roldo didn’t say so in so many words, I’m confident that he would have agreed privately in 1968. Such editorial kowtowing to the business side has a chilling effect on reporters and the news they cover. A reporter told Roldo:

That’s the way it goes. Too often when we report something controversial, all it takes is a telephone call from the person who might get hurt. That’s especially true if he has some standing in the community. They’ll believe him before us.

No, they’re just following the Golden Rule as understood by Johnny Hart. Returning to Connie Schultz for a moment, consider, Schultz joined the Plain Dealer in 1993 and married then Ohio congressional representative Sherrod Campbell Brown in 2004. While I won’t take anything away from Schultz for her excellent writing, you have to wonder how editors—and publisher viewed her work after she married a rising star—Brown became one of Ohio’s senators in 2006—in Ohio politics. Schultz resigned from the Plain Dealer in 2011, writing:

[I]n recent weeks, it has become painfully clear that my independence, professionally and personally, is possible only if I’m no longer writing for the newspaper that covers my husband’s senate race on a daily basis.

(Brown won reëlection to a second senate term the following year.)

Roldo closed his lead story with:

Yes, reporters opened up, talked, complained, wondered, worried. The big view: When will we have other than scarred kittens editing copy, relieving it of the truth? When will we be able to give Clevelanders the truth they need?

And at night, when the reporter gets home, switches on his TV and watches the Johnny Carson show in his lonely room, he says, almost to himself, “Will they ever let us tell it the way it is?”

The answer, with rare exception, is no. Media are businesses with a need to attract cash. The solution is far more difficult as Roldo can certainly attest: If any reporter wants to write—without interference—the truth as they understand it to be, they have to go independent. With blogs and platforms such as Substack the leap is far easier than the process Roldo had to go through in 1968, but it can be done.

Roldo continue on his theme of the Plain Dealer in his 23 October issue of Point Of Viəw There Roldo ledes—in Plain Dealing From Bottom—

Point Of Viəw, issue 9 was completed before the latest Plain Dealer absurdity regarding the police was printed: “CORE ‘bodyguards’ Freed by City Hall in Gun Case.” It’s apparent that they Plain Dealer is willing to play Russian roulette with this city. Therefore, this issue attempts to to further analyze the PD’s motives and coverage of the most sensitive issue facing Cleveland.

Roldo carefully lays out the facts of the story, but what I found fascinating was his forensic examination of why the newspaper printed on 16 October: the story… on page one with bold black headlines, accompanied by four page one photograph, as if the story were a new revelation and the most important story of the day the report of events that occurred on 4 April? Did the paper run the story, as Roldo suggests in his subhead: To Get Mayor? The mayor in question, of course, was Carl Burton Stokes. The first Black mayor of a major American city. Roldo writes:

As a former PD reporter I know the methods used by newspapers to keep a story going, especially the methods of “helping” public officials to decide to take further action to keep the story alive. It may mean calling an official daily for a statement. A newspaper can make it embarrassing for a public official who may not think it necessary to bring charges.

If not conspiracy, the evidence points too clearly to a form of collusion among the PD, police and other groups.

Anger in the black community against the PD is at a fever pitch. This was clear last week at an all-day “mass media and race relations conference.” Three militants walked out of one session with a PD official. For hours the debate centered principally upon the PD‘s racist attitudes.

For blacks the issue centers on the premise that the PD is out to get Mayor Stokes. That all the negative stories are the result of a plot by the PD against the mayor is too simple an explanation.

The better explanation is that the PD is warning the mayor to purge himself of black militants. This echoes the Fraternal Order of Police exactly. It is calling upon the mayor not only to the nationalists, but to repress them—or better yet—allow the police to do the job. [Emphasis mine, JH]

Damn! Does that ever sound familiar in light of the police murders—carried out not only here in Cleveland with the shooting death of Tamir Rice, but also the hail of 137 police bullets that butchered Timothy Russell and Malissa Williams as if they had been Bonnie and Clyde but across the country—giving rise to the Black Lives Matter movement and large demonstration in American cities the like of which have not been seen sine the ’60s.

This is why Roldo an Point Of Viəw are vital. Roldo is Cleveland’s elder, serving in the role of storyteller to teach us and remind us that we are part of a history and that we ought to learn from what those before us experienced, else we will just continue in the same wash-and-repeat loop.

See here for a bibliography of books and other materials mentioned in this series.

Previously while Readin’ Roldo…

Bonus No. 1: I hope you’re having a Merry Christmas…

Bonus No. 2: History, sooooo much History… and good ol’ Fess…