Sad Times in Slavic Village

If you’ve been with me from the start of Ted Landphair’s America, you’ll remember that I began with some memories of a pleasant childhood in the first suburb to the west of bustling Cleveland, Ohio. When I was a lad of 8 in 1950, the big city next door was at its apogee – pushing a million in population and humming with smoky industry.

Since then, Cleveland has lost most of its industrial muscle and half its population. More than 100,000 people have died or left since 2002 alone. Only New Orleans, Louisiana, which was slammed by an epic, deadly hurricane, has shed more population since 2000.

Hurricane Katrina was a natural disaster. Cleveland’s disaster, just as tragic though more elongated, is manmade.

You may know the term “perfect storm.” It’s taken from a 1997 book by Sebastian Junger, later made into a movie starring George Clooney, about the fluke convergence of three storm systems in the North Atlantic that doomed a Massachusetts fishing trawler and its crew.

Cleveland has been slammed by a devastating convergence of economic and demographic storms.

Cleveland rocks! At least at this popular museum

As I said, Cleveland was rocking in 1950. That’s not a reference to what is now the city’s most famous tourist attraction, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, which arrived several decades later.

But in the 1980s, Cleveland’s steel industry virtually collapsed, a victim of widespread inefficiency in its aging mills and aggressive price competition from foreign steelmakers. With it went hundreds of smaller factories that fed the mills, and thousands and thousands of jobs. Giant ore-carriers that once tied at the city docks on Lake Erie rarely called. As poor African Americans moved into neighborhoods abandoned by “ethnics,” as they were called, who had worked the mills, “white flight” to the suburbs became a stampede. That left Cleveland a largely poverty-stricken, crime-ridden, industrially fallow shell of its former self. Like its cavernous, creaky, pigeon-filled downtown stadium that people called “The Mistake by the Lake,” Cleveland became a synonym for crumbling Rust Belt. “You’re from Cleveland? outsiders would say when they met people from the region, as if they were miraculous tsunami survivors.

In a way, they were.

The Comeback City

The Terminal Tower was my idea of a skyscraper until I made a high-school trip to New York and, mouth open, stared up at those in Manhattan

Yet a decade later, Cleveland fooled everyone. Mills reopened as specialty operations, making things like aircraft landing gears. “Urban pioneers” of all races took advantage of bargain housing prices and repopulated many depressed neighborhoods. A huge skyscraper, the first to ever compete with the city’s 65-year-old iconic symbol, the 52-story Terminal Tower, in Public Square, rose downtown. Economists marveled, and reporters poured in to get a look. Even Cleveland’s usually inept baseball team, the Indians, got a new, downtown stadium, Jacobs Field – puckishly dubbed the “Jake by the Lake” – and won four division titles in the 1990s, another in 2001, and appeared twice in the grand World Series.

Cleveland made magazine covers as America’s “Comeback City”!

This sign in Slavic Village translates as, “Little Warsaw”

And Slavic Village, a compact neighborhood south of downtown in a sooty industrial valley, was a microcosm of it all, including the manmade disaster to come.

A home that was demolished stood next to this duplex

Textile and steel mills once thrived in the heart of Slavic Village. Polish and Czech immigrants, who had followed a generation of Welsh and Irish blue-collar workers, toiled in the mills, walking from their tiny, crowded cottages to work each day. Many of their homes were duplexes housing two families, or two generations of a single one, in just 90 square meters of space.

This is the doorway to “Saint Stan’s” ─ properly Stanislaus ─ the biggest church in Slavic Village

There was a rejoicing air about Slavic Village from the mingling of accents and strains of polka music, the smells of cabbage and kielbasa sausage, filled dumplings called pierogi, and rich pastries produced by more than 20 bakeries in the neighborhood. Eight large Catholic churches, including St. Stanislaus, the shrine and mother church for Poles throughout the region, filled the pews on Sunday and the streets on numerous festival days. Polish and Czech were spoken in banks, craft shops, restaurants, and other mom-and-pop stores throughout the neighborhood.

Everyday Supermen

This is Tony Brancatelli ─ in front of a genuine Polish bakery in the neighborhood

Anthony Brancatelli – like his Italian father and Polish mother – was reared in Slavic Village. Educated there, too, until he went off to college out of state. But he would return with the wave of third-generation Americans who took a chance on life in a warm but challenging neighborhood where the average annual income – about $27,000 today – barely exceeded the national poverty level.

For a decade, Brancatelli would lead the community development agency that has tried, like the little Dutch boy with his finger in a leaking dike, to stem an economic torrent that I will shortly describe.

There are problems, but still plenty of pride, in Slavic Village. This is the Polish imperial eagle

Four years ago, Brancatelli ran for City Council, representing the ward whose footprint covers Slavic Village, and he won. Since then, he, Cuyahoga County Treasurer Jim Rokakis, Housing Court Judge Raymond Pianka, and a few other city officials have almost matched the mythic hero Superman’s exploits, battling for “truth, justice, and the American way” against real estate swindlers and predators. Along with further declines in the neighborhood’s industrial base, an increase in crime, the aging of an ethnic population that hasn’t the education or youthful vigor to slide comfortably into the 21st-century Information Age, these unscrupulous “subprime” lenders would prove to be a killer tempest in Cleveland’s perfect storm.

This house has been burned as well as ransacked

Brancatelli doesn’t come across like a hero or an oily politician. Remarkably self-effacing, a mid-level executive by training who’s had to learn the handshake-and-a-beer ethic of ward politics, he never once used the word “I” in our two hours together in the village. Instead, it was ‘we” who faced off against mortgage brokers, foreclosure agents, and scavengers who have turned three or four (or more) of the little houses in nearly every block into boarded-up open invitations to squatting, vandalism, drug dealing, and arson.

What they brought, too, was a prelude to a foreclosure firestorm that would sweep across the nation.

Scamming, Selling, Scavenging

Freelance mortgage brokers for banks, which could deny culpability since they didn’t directly employ these people, swooped into Slavic Village and offered cheap refinancing rates to homeowners, many of whom had lost jobs or insurance at an age when they could not keep up with expensive medical bills. “This was not some cycle of greed, with homeowners looking to make a fast buck as their properties appreciated,” Brancatelli told me. “They were good but gullible people, unschooled in even basic economics. They did not grasp that low payments that helped them out one day would balloon beyond what they had any chance at all of paying.” Many times, the councilman told me, flimflam agents would get their victims to sign the last page of a sheaf of quite legal documents, then switch all but the signatory page to paperwork filled with hopelessly unachievable payment terms.

Two of the “dots” on Cleveland’s foreclosure map

Unable to keep up, these people would be kicked out of what for many had been the only homes they’d known, forced to move in with relatives or leave Cleveland for good. They left behind so many red dots on a map of neighborhood foreclosures that, as an incisive New York Times investigation revealed, the map looked like it was splattered in blood.

Every Monday downtown, the Cuyahoga County sheriff would sell these foreclosed properties, most of which were scooped up by speculators, to be “bundled” and sold to another layer of speculators. Investors out of state bought them sight-unseen, and why not? Who could resist 100-year-old homes on the market for $10,000, $15,000, when some housing prices nationwide were doubling and tripling in value in a matter of months?

Sometimes the investors put the proverbial “lipstick on a pig,” sending out crews to slap on some paint and straighten loose boards, expecting to “flip” the properties for quick profit. Other times, long-distance buyers trusted that they could simply “hold the paper” and wait for even richer returns as the properties appreciated in value.

The scavengers have left nothing of value in this foreclosed, and stripped, Slavic Village home

Little did they realize that in home after home, scavengers – or “midnight plumbers,” as Michael Schramm, an analyst at Case Western Reserve University’s Center on Urban Poverty & Community Development on Cleveland’s east side, calls them – were prying loose the plywood and stripping the places nearly bare, carting off every fixture, length of copper pipe, and fireplace. Scrapyards, paying good money for these stolen remnants, popped up all through the shadows of Slavic Village. That left some blocks looking like the aftermath of Katrina, without the hurricane.

Tearing Down American Dreams

This would be the fate of many homes that many people far away thought might make a tidy investment

Some home purchasers who sincerely thought they were getting a bargain and would fix up a place to live in found the destruction so complete, or the back taxes and cost of correcting housing-code violations so steep, that they write the whole experience off as a loss. Each time, that left one more empty house of horrors on one more block.

Citywide, the sheriff sold about 2,000 foreclosed homes in the year 2000. According to Michael Schramm, almost five times that many “sheriff’s deeds” were recorded each week in 2007, the last year for which numbers are available. Overall this decade, more than 1 in every 12 residential properties in the county has ended up in the sheriff’s hands.

The bulldozer is about to take the last bite out of an abandoned home

And, Schramm says, the city is tearing down about a thousand “O.V.V.’s” a year – sometimes blocks at a time. O.V.V. is short for “open, vacant, and vandalized.” “They’d like to ‘mothball’ more of them,” he says, keeping them intact until the economic malaise passes and the homes can be refurbished. But the scavengers are ripping apart abandoned houses beyond salvation.

Sometimes the foreclosed family itself wreaks the destruction, out of fury and spite, or just to pull a fragment of value out of their ill-fated home.

Meanwhile, mortgage predators took advantage of a federal voucher program intended to give poor, often African-American, people a shot at home ownership. The government paid a good chunk of the cost to get voucher recipients into homes that they simply could not afford. These voucher recipients, like older white “ethnics,” became easy pickings for the pack of real estate wolves.

In the last, interim census count, Slavic Village, was 30 percent African-American. Brancatelli figures it will be 50 percent black, 15 percent Hispanic, and just 35 percent non-Hispanic white when figures roll in from the 2010 census. The total population, if the number of abandoned houses – “dead carcasses,” Tony Brancatelli calls them – and churches that are closing (three of the eight big Catholic ones) are an indication, is sure to be way down.

Cries For Help Fall on Deaf Ears

This home won’t be fixed any time soon

The Cleveland police cannot keep up with the vandals and scavengers. In a perverse irony, they have had to release many of those they caught because no bank or mortgage agent would claim ownership of the property. “That’s [banks’] mantra, Judge Pianka told the New York Times. “‘We don’t own it.’ It’s handy for them to say, ‘Oh, it’s not us.’ It’s part of this big shell game they’re playing.”

The original homeowner was long gone, so there was no one left to press charges. The only crime for which the scavengers and squatters could be charged was trespassing, a trivial misdemeanor.

And thus “a cycle of abandonment” would blight a proud but already fraying old neighborhood.

Even the “good guys in the white hats” like Brancatelli’s former redevelopment agency, inadvertently contributed to that cycle by paying top dollar for properties on which they would build new homes and condo developments. That boosted valuations of the entire neighborhood, including distressed and empty houses, making them even more enticing to quick-sell property buyers called “flippers.”

This butcher shop is one of many in Slavic Village that have sold their last kielbasa

Cleveland prosecuted many predatory speculators, driving some companies out of town. The FBI and federal housing authorities raided the offices of mortgage agents and real estate appraisers, some of whom had been complicit in grossly inflating paper value of modest homes and lots throughout the city. Brancatelli and others even testified in Congress and got strong anti-predatory-lending legislation passed in City Council. But in an atmosphere in which home values were still skyrocketing nationally and President George Bush was extolling the free market and home ownership, Ohio’s State Supreme Court struck down the Cleveland law. As County Treasurer Rokakis would tell the U.S. Congress in testimony early in 2007, when Fleet Avenue – one of Slavic Village’s main thoroughfares – cried out for help, no one listened. But when Wall Street screamed from the pain of the housing crisis, and massive foreclosures hit neighborhoods in fashionable California and Florida and Nevada, the nation and its government sprang into action.

A family once loved this humble place they called home

“Selling somebody a loan they don’t need or can’t afford should cost mortgage brokers their license,” Rokakis told the lawmakers. And when a family cannot make the payments loses their home, “you will never be able to put a dollar amount on the heartbreak, pain, and distress – never.”

"We Love This Place"

Surprisingly, you don’t see many “FORECLOSED” signs in Slavic Village. In fact, Carol and I found not a one. What’s the point, Tony Brancatelli told me. Everybody knows those boarded-up homes have been foreclosed. Instead, you see signs that say, “We Buy Cheap Houses,” or “$750 Flat Fee, We’ll Sell Your Home.”

This new development took the place of ruined and foreclosed homes

In Slavic Village, the City Council, and the nonprofit redevelopment agency are doing what they can to keep up appearances and spirits. “We’re revising the neighborhood,” Brancatelli says. The city is demolishing house after derelict house, replacing them with new one-family homes, blocks of condos, and clean, modern senior centers. They’re clearing out boarded-up homes next to factories that are still viable, offering the companies attractive rates to expand. They’re putting in parks and football fields, running trails on old rail spurs, and starting urban gardens. And where a gutted house stands between two that are intact and occupied, they’re sometimes even tearing down the eyesore and deeding half of the newly vacant property to each of the two neighbors for free.

This year, for the first time in most people’s memories, there won’t be a Polish Festival in Slavic Village. It’s not so much because of the foreclosure crisis or demographic stresses, Brancatelli says. “We have peacefully integrated.” The problem, he says, is that these events are beginning to cost too much to put on and to insure. And besides, there aren’t many carnival-type vendors of good quality left that will bring their rides and game booths into small neighborhoods.

This is Carnegie Avenue, a block off the heart of downtown Cleveland, an hour or so before what would be a nonexistent weekday afternoon “rush hour”

The city as a whole was a shock to me. The heart of a large American city at 4 o’clock on a weekday afternoon should be frantic with activity and honking horns. That was certainly my memory of Public Square and surroundings long ago. The adjacent photograph shows a hardly occupied Carnegie Avenue, one block off Public Square, on a Monday at 4 today. Not yet tumbleweed territory, but a sad reflection of urban distress. The department stores of my childhood are empty or occupied – ground level only – by tacky nightclubs, cheap wig shops and the like. We counted just one big ship in port. Only the outlines of once-regal bank names appear on what were thriving bank branches.

This is a piece of a truly grand Soldiers’ and Sailors' Monument on Public Square. It’s a vestige of days when no P.R. campaign was needed to describe the city some called “The Greatest Location in the Nation”

A lot of people in town think it’s time for a new civic-pride campaign to perk up a city that is depressed physically, economically, and psychologically. No matter one’s own circumstances, just living next door to a gutted house where a vibrant family once cut the grass and brought over some beer for a cookout or flour for a recipe is daunting. And just as a rising tide lifts all boats, a falling one in the form of abandoned houses all around you lowers your property value and your spirits, no matter how well you keep your own place up.

I can’t see people in this gritty city embracing hollow public-relations sloganeering. Already, save for the government and hotel workers and those who work in the few banks and stores that remain, many Clevelanders and most suburbanites had stopped going downtown. There are pockets of life in the old, industrial sector called the “Flats” along the lake, which is now an entertainment district popular with young people and tourists. And the ballpark and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame get respectable traffic from locals and tourists.

Slavic Village, far from the tourist district, struggles on as boards cover so many home windows, and heavy brown paper the windows of so many stores. Resolve, rather than optimism, defines the neighborhood mood. Tony Brancatelli says, “We love this place too much to give in.”

A Breeze

Over the dozens of times I’ve headed northwest out of Washington, D.C., including this time on my trip to Cleveland, I’ve passed through and marveled at a little town called Breezewood in the middle of Pennsylvania.

I say “town,” but it’s a one with no downtown, no Main Street, no hardware store or small-town grocery store, not even a mayor. Yet it’s pulsing with activity 24 hours a day!

Breezewood is a crossroads. Not the old, countrified kind with a gas station and a little store on the corner, but a point where two mighty interstate highways converge. They are the east-to-west Pennsylvania Turnpike, which crosses that state, from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh and beyond toward Ohio, and Interstate 70, which begins at Breezewood and winds south to Baltimore, Maryland, with a spur to Washington. Wikipedia says a “breezewood,” in “road geek,” is a place where two big highways meet, though I’ve never heard it used that way. Since I-70 does take travelers southward out of the Appalachian Mountains and into lower and warmer climes, Breezewood is sometimes called the Gateway to the South.

This is not-so-beautiful “downtown” Breezewood, which doesn’t have a downtown at all

But it has another, more apt nickname: the “Town of Motels.” I’d lengthen it to read “Town of Motels and Countless Gas Stations and Lots of Fast-Food Restaurants and Plenty of Cheap Souvenir Shops and Noisy Truck Stops and Not a Whole Lot More.”

But that wouldn’t all fit on the Welcome sign.

You name it. If it has a Pittsburgh Steelers’ football insignia on it, you can probably get it here

The location has long been an east-west stop, first for Ohio-bound stagecoaches, then buses and adventuresome auto enthusiasts traveling U.S. 30 – the Lincoln Highway – and finally, for millions of Americans traversing the Pennsylvania Turnpike. In 2003, when a Pittsburgh newspaper came up with the last estimate I’ve seen, 3.4 million vehicles exited the turnpike through Breezewood. These days, even with travel reduced a bit during the economic slowdown, probably 4 million or more drivers and their passengers take a food, gasoline, and bathroom break each year in this notch in the mountains.

This is one of the newer hostelries in the City of Motels. Note the farm just behind it. You’re in the country ─ and in a maze of commercial places beckoning tourists ─ all at once in Breezewood

Carol and I were two of them, and she snapped a few photos. Looking at them, I think you’ll concur with a New York Times description of Breezewood from almost 20 years ago: It is, said the Times – and it goes double today – “perhaps the purest example yet devised of the great American tourist trap . . . the Las Vegas of roadside strips, a blaze of neon in the middle of nowhere, a polyp on the nation’s interstate highway system.”

A “polyp on the highway” that’s also plenty good for business in Bedford County, Pennsylvania.

TODAY'S WILD WORDS

(These are a few of the words from this posting that you may not know. Each time, I'll tell you a little about them and also place them into a cumulative archive of "Ted's Wild Words" in the right-hand column of the home page. Just click on it there, and if there's another word in today's blog that you'd like me to explain, just ask!)

Apogee. Informally, the word is used to mean the high point of something. Technically, it’s the point at which a moon or artificial satellite is at the most distant point in its orbit from the earth’s center.

Extol. To praise or laud someone’s virtues, sometimes lavishly.

Flimflam. A swindle, especially one that convinces others to buy worthless or overvalued property.

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Featherisms

The other day I needed an aphorism, a nourishing nugget of wisdom, ideally couched in wry wit. I found some by the usual suspects:

• In this world, nothing can be said to be certain except death and taxes, by the brilliant statesman Benjamin Franklin, who slipped apt adages into his yearly Poor Richard’s Almanack.
  
• Always tell the truth. That way, you don’t have to remember what you said the work of legendary homespun humorist Mark Twain.

Then, to my astonishment, I came upon an entire column of zingers by a fellow whom I once knew (through his work), and whose droll contributions to American letters I had completely forgotten.

Here’s our mystery man. He cuts a dashing figure, eh?

But I remembered now. This man could, it seemed, churn out twinkly maxims as easily as you and I tie our shoes:
Nothing makes us so sleepy as the bell of our alarm clock.
A good time is seldom had by all.
Flattery must be pretty thick before anybody objects to it.
The most difficult jobs look easy until you try to do them.
Experts never seem to tell us what we’re up against until we’re up against it.

• Let’s not have any more wars to end all war. And
• A tinfoil wrapper doesn’t make a bum cigar taste any better.

Just who was this fellow who could so effortlessly pluck the essence from everyday daily life? I’m here to tell you!

Philosophy by Placemat

When I was a lad, my mother would treat me to lunch at a prim restaurant in our hometown, adjacent to Cleveland, Ohio. We never lacked for conversation topics, for staring up at us, right from our paper placemats, were more of this man’s epigrams, updated monthly.

• Wives who quickly forgive and forget the follies of other women’s husbands might have been one of them. (How would Mother have explained that?)

Or

• When the gardeners are praying for rain, the picnickers are praying for sunshine. So what is the poor Lord to do?

What this mother did for my 18th birthday was to present me with an entire book of our mystery man’s pithy philosophisms. (I made up that word up and rather like it. Philosophisms!) The book was The Business of Life, a fitting title, since the author - also a Clevelander - had made his mark as America’s “business philosopher.”

His name was William Feather.

“Anyone who can think clearly can write clearly,” Feather wrote in The Business of Life. “But neither is easy.” That’s for sure. It’s akin to wringing an ocean out of a washcloth. (That’s my own weak attempt, miserably short of a Featherism.)

A Keen Eye on the Human Condition

Feather had all of Franklin and Twain’s power of observation:

• A single fact will often spoil an interesting argument.
• Many of us are dull, but not as dull as the grandchildren think we are.
• The kindness lavished on dogs, if evenly distributed, would establish peace on earth.

Did I catch you nodding in agreement?

But Feather also had an edge to his writing that was indicative of the, shall we say, less-enlightened times. When he wrote The trouble with a man who takes his time is that he takes your time, too, for instance, he reflected the custom - as old as “all men are created equal” in our 1776 Declaration of Independence - of lumping the entire female sex into “mankind.” Nonetheless, he was a distiller of the human foibles the likes of which I have not found in a generation.

Reporter, but Hardly an Ink-Stained Wretch

College kids like Bill Feather, circa 1909, were a more distinguished bunch than today’s hang-loose generation. At least Feather certainly was.

This Feather fellow’s father was an English millworker who ended up as a traveling wool buyer, based in Cleveland. His son, our man William, was a voracious student and dapper dresser who breezed through Western Reserve University and then honed his writing as a Cleveland Press reporter. And not on the overnight crime shift. As another Cleveland daily newspaper, the Plain Dealer, would report half a century later, Feather “established a lifelong habit of mixing with important people by capturing most of the assignments to interview visiting V.I.P.s.” He accomplished this simply “because he was better dressed than most reporters in those days.” Clothes were making our man!

Feather trotted down to Dayton, Ohio, where he spent an unhappy year at the elbow of a very, very important person, John H. Patterson, the egomaniacal titan of the National Cash Register Co. Of Patterson, for whom he tried to craft public-relations campaigns, Feather would write, “Visitors were often aghast at [his] seeming extravagance, which was exactly the impression he desired to make upon them. . . . His expense accounts sent needles into the spines of minority stockholders.”

William Feather and his son, William Jr., partnered for years after the older man turned mostly to writing. Junior had the business acumen, even though Senior wrote about business.

Tossed aside by the “cash register king,” Feather hightailed it back to Cleveland, where, with money borrowed from his wife, he bought part interest and then full ownership in a printing company. Feather had craved a sole proprietorship, growling that minority partners only “attempt to protect their own little corners of the business in an effort to take as much money out of the company for as little effort as possible.”

William Feather knew next to nothing about printing, and never really learned. He relied on trusty subordinates, including his son, William Jr., who one day would take over and build the business into Cleveland’s largest commercial-printing operation. Early on, the company’s first big job - a 16-page booklet titled Hints for Store Clerks - netted William Sr. all of $150. “I had never made so much money in my life for so little work,” he said.

Wisdom of the Month

The William Feather Magazine had a following of its own, but it reached its greatest circulation via other companies’ in-house magazines, which appropriated Feather’s contents and paid him handsomely for them.

Once a month for an incredible 75 years, the Feather Co. turned out the tiny William Feather Magazine.

Each was the size of a paperback book and, at just 24 pages, no thicker than your big toenail. That was plenty of space for Feather’s touches, such as A clear conscience doesn’t mean anything if you haven’t any conscience.

Companies across America soon paid the wily printer handsomely to slap their own covers on the Feather Magazine. Eventually 300,000 copies of these “house organs” made their way around the country each month. Apparently placemat-makers liked Feather’s work, too.

Feather was a bit of an imp, linguistically. The more someone or some group took umbrage at what he wrote, the more he poured it on.

Once he was wealthy and secure, William Feather provoked paroxysms of outrage by writing about women, whom he delighted in aggravating. He’d had plenty of practice at home, having married Ruth Elizabeth Pressley, a demonstrative actress and suffragette (the accepted term today for those who fought for women’s right to vote is “suffragist”). She could not have been more different from her aloof and aristocratic husband, and after 29 years of marriage, the couple separated. “It’s just a matter of temperament, I guess,” Feather said. No doubt his daggers like these hadn’t helped:

• A girl may have a mind as keen as a razor’s edge, but if her stockings wrinkle at the ankles no one will listen to her.
• Before speaking to your wife, ask yourself, “Will I regret what I am about to say?”
• The trouble is that women want to keep what they’ve got and make the men give up what they have.

Keep Up the Good Work

Everybody at the Feather Printing Co. knew William Feather, and he knew them, even though the printing business had mostly moved on to huge jobs far more complex than his little magazine.

Each day for 35 years after his son took over the business, the elder Feather still toddled into the office. With the bearing of a suave English actor - he was tall and trim like George Sanders - Feather arrived about 11 a.m., ever natty in suit and tie, thrusting his walking stick.

First thing, he’d stroll through the plant, greeting each worker (his assistants kept an updated cheat sheet with their names). Then he’d retire to his office to compose a few dollops and short essays. Later, others would type the pearls onto small index cards and file them by subject in a large wooden cabinet from which the contents of the William Feather Magazine would be selected.

Sometime after noon, Feather’s driver would whisk the old man to the Union Club downtown, where he would take lunch at the same table with the same cast of companions for as long as they lived. All were well to the right of him politically. On a Monday, say, over martinis, Feather would passionately argue one side of an issue. On Tuesday, with a glint in his eye, he’d espouse the other side with equal conviction, just for the devil of it.

Back home at his apartment in leafy Shaker Heights, he would take his evening meal prepared by a housekeeper, and then read philosophers of the ages and thoughtful magazines of the day.

Get to the Point, Then Leave

The master epigrammist to whom you have now been introduced was an accomplished, if impatient, listener. Feather’s grandson, William III, who would one day sell the printing business and is now a general contractor, remembers family gatherings at the old man’s apartment. “Half an hour in, he’d say to all of us, ‘It would not displease me if you left now.’” This was not the crotchetiness of old age. Years earlier, when he and Ruth were throwing cocktail parties, William Sr. would place an alarm clock on the mantel and set it to ring loudly, precisely at midnight.

On his farm outside Cleveland to which the family would repair more than 15 summers, Feather drew this conclusion:

• After a man has tried to lead a calf he has more patience with human beings. And on 10 trips to Europe and two across America, he took mental notes on the human condition. Dreams are fine, Feather concluded.
• But bread must be baked today, trains must move today, bills must be collected today, payrolls must be met today. Business feeds, clothes and houses man. (There he went, mankinding again.)

Feather loved to make mischief. He once wrote a Cleveland paper, suggesting that pigeons on the public square be shot and fed to the poor. The response, he reported with glee, was “instant and devastating.”

A close friend of the acerbic Baltimore newspaperman H.L. Mencken, William Feather noted in The Business of Life that “readers of plain writing say they could have written that themselves, and belittle it. Fancy writing fools the highbrows, even the editors. None understand the stuff, but all insist it sounds profound and must be superior.”

Business in His Blood

Feather’s son wrote that William Sr. was not a church-going man but had strong beliefs. “His religion was anchored in the law of compensation,” William Jr. wrote in 1981. “Capsulated, the law holds we receive from life in exact proportion and kind to what we put into it.”

William Feather became a Cleveland “man about town” – a celebrity in refined circles. He even got a lot of ink when he was named foreman of a grand jury that was looking into corruption in city government.

William Feather died that year at age 91. But he had thoughtfully written his own epitaph - half a lifetime earlier, in 1934! Never comfortable talking about himself, he wrote it in third person. The advance obituary read, in part, “He was known to some people as a writer. In his writings he espoused thrift, industry, promptness, perseverance, and dependability. . . . As far as was possible, the subject of this sketch practiced what he preached. Some of his enemies point to this trait as his foremost weakness.”

The latest Feather, William III’s baby son “Little Bill” (William IV), knows nothing of William Feather Sr., of course. Nor do many others any more. But Little Bill will at least have drawers full of William Feather Magazines to get a feel for the man, and his uncanny ability to wring truisms out of daily life, when William IV grows up.

***

William Feather might be called the 20th century’s Benjamin Franklin. What do you think of him and his modern proverbs?

TODAY'S WILD WORDS

(These are a few of the words from this posting that you may not know. Each time, I'll tell you a little about them and also place them into a cumulative archive of "Ted's Wild Words" in the right-hand column of the home page. Just click on it there, and if there's another word in today's blog that you'd like me to explain, just ask!)

Crotchetiness. Ill temper and crankiness. The word is often applied to old, eccentric men, in particular, for reasons that escape me, since I’ve known lots of old, eccentric women as well. Note that the root word, “crochet,” is identical to the hook or barb on the instrument that one uses to crochet – pronounced cro-SHAY rather than CROTCH-it – a sweater. The connection may be the barbed, prickly nature of a crotchety old fellow.

Dapper. Up to date in dress and manners. And there’s an extra quality to the word, too, a sort of jauntiness or even raffishness, reminiscent of the movie star Cary Grant. A dapper fellow – and the word is more often applied to men – is not just well appointed. He’s a sauve charmer.

Pithy. To the point. Getting to the heart of the matter in a few words. The word comes from nature. Pith is the central core of a plant stalk. You may have heard of a “pith helmet” – the lightweight, bowl-like headgear that African explorers wear in the movies. It’s sometimes made from pith.

Toddle. To walk with short, slightly unsteady steps. Infants and old folks toddle. And what do we say to an oldster who’s about to toddle off? Toodle-oo! Toodle, not toddle!

Zinger. A “gotcha” or “ouch” line or retort. A zinger is pointed, like the tip of an arrow that’s humming toward an unsuspecting target. Often everyone in the room, except the zingee, laughs when a sharp zinger strikes home. (Don’t search for “zingee.” I made it up. But that’s how words like “zinger” get started.)

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Bloggin' in...

Here and now, Ted Landphair, who writes twice-weekly Only in America essays on VOA’s American Life page, begins a blog designed to connect your curiosity about the United States with his experiences, insights and quirks gained from forty years of reporting.

World, meet Ted, whom we affectionately call “Mr. America Without Muscles.”

This was my humble childhood abode. It looks a lot more imposing in this close-up view taken recently

Radio and newspaper assignments have taken me to every state, some of them many times. But you won’t find the roots of this new undertaking in my resume or travel vouchers. They trace, instead, to a wee but well-kept house just west of sooty Cleveland, Ohio, where I spent my formative years.

There, for an only child like me, imagination was a magical mystery ship. On the front porch glider, I read and daydreamed and -- often alone -- played “The Game of the States.” It described the industries, products, and key cities of every U.S. state. I soon knew all the capitals -- still do; you can test me! This gave me a certain suburban street cred.

When storms swept mayflies that we called “Canadian soldiers” off Lake Erie, I would picture Great Lakes ore boats, three football fields long, bucking out of the waves and turning into that wind. When thunderstorms and blizzards bore down, I conjured Oklahoma’s “Tornado Alley” and a North Dakota valley I’d read about called “Ice Box Canyon.” I wondered who would live in such places, and why.

A limited worldview

Mother was a beauty as a young woman. She was also a firm and dedicated teacher whom her little students loved.

My mother, a teacher of small children whose homework papers I helped to grade, raised me with stern assistance from my pious grandmother. They rode buses and streetcars everywhere -- my mother to and from school; Gramma, night after night, back and forth to a Pentacostal church on the East Side. Neither drove a car even once. Mother was scared of automobiles; Gramma said they were the devil’s tool.

So we did not go far. But in my mind, I went everywhere.

I, too, rode the streetcar, past the Hungarian church (and wondered about Hungary), through a Ukrainian neighborhood (and wondered if my hockey player idol lived there), and over a high bridge above Cleveland’s “Flats,” where acrid smoke from steel mills and breweries below billowed into our railcar. I wondered about what went on down there, too.

This is a 1953 view of one of the streetcars on the Madison Avenue line that I rode all the time. “P.O.C.” on the beer billboard stands for “Pride of Cleveland.”

The only trip we took beyond town was an annual visit “over the mountains” -- the ancient Alleghenies -- to my uncle’s fishing cabin in Pennsylvania. “The cottage,” we called it, though the spiders and blacksnakes and outhouse thereabouts were hardly refined. Mother and I would ride two streetcars to Shaker Heights, where my garrulous Uncle Robert, taciturn Aunt Edna, and irritable teenage cousin Bob would meet us in their Olds 88. Off we’d go, I wide-eyed, Mother terrified of each hairpin turn. Gramma stayed home to watch my cocker spaniel and to pray.

Pennsylvania roots

Uncle Robert and Mother, who were raised in abject poverty, would tell me about earlier trips to market over a single mountain from their meager, rented Pennsylvania farm to a shabby coal town. They would take the better part of a day on a horse-drawn buckboard. Rolling along in the Oldsmobile, I thought of the pioneer families who walked those hills, of Pennsylvania’s strange place names like “Riot” and “Scalp Level,” and of the Great Johnstown Flood of 1889, when a wall of water and debris twelve meters high roared down a valley like the one I was eying out the window.

I was younger than four here (I'm bad at guessing ages in photos), and a lot cuter then than now.”

Mother, Taffy the spaniel, and I had made one other trip, by rail, all the way to Colorado, in a failed attempt to reconcile with my father. I was just four, but I remember a surprising amount: sneaking Taffy from the baggage car into our compartment; a gruff cop in sweltering St. Louis, ordering us to “remove that hound” who was coolly dog-paddling in the train terminal fountain; the exotic smell of fresh corn muffins as we crossed the Kansas prairie; goats high in the Rockies and bison low in the meadows; angry, stinging fire ants in my father’s scrubby yard; and my first encounter with live chickens, many of which became dead chickens when I loosed Taffy into their coop to “play.”

The jackalope is a rare and elusive creature, but this postcard company's photographer managed to catch one in a meadow.”

The wonder of America for me began in such small things. Why did my father wink when he described a hunt for the elusive “jackalope?” Why did his town of Pueblo have white fire engines? Fire engines are red. Why did Ohio, and not Colorado, have such a large lake?

(Did you, too, ever develop a burning curiosity about your nation or the world around you? I’d be especially interested in hearing about any fascination with America or some part of it. Perhaps I can write about that place here sometime.)

America through a viewer

We came home from Colorado without my father but with a set of “View-Master” wheels containing 3-D pictures of Indians of the Southwest, the then-treacherous road up Pikes Peak, and red-rock formations in the “Garden of the Gods.” I pushed the little spring that advanced the photos so many times that the viewer broke before we reached the Mississippi.

Downtown Cleveland today has cleaner air, since most of the factories and mills in the “Flats” (foreground) have been razed or turned into night spots.

Late nights listening through the medium-wave static to Cleveland Indians’ baseball games played in exotic Chicago or Philadelphia further stoked my imagination. Save for that Pueblo journey and a class trip to New York City, I would not travel farther east than the Indians’ ballpark, south than the Cleveland zoo, north than Lake Erie’s shore, or west than a municipal park next door until I left for college.

That’s all right. Ideaphoric -- an aptitude-test word that would one day put a name to my curiosity -- I wandered every part of our land through a new View-Master viewer, in our cheap and condensed encyclopedia, and on television in black and white.

Later I would be fortunate to live and work in memorable places: New Orleans, Los Angeles, the red-dust country of North Texas, and here in Washington. And it would be a fortuitous and delightful development to marry and travel with Carol M. Highsmith, who has become one of America’s eminent photographers. You see a bit of her work here and will enjoy, I hope, even more of it in the weeks to come. As Carol and I have traveled and published photography books, we have come to appreciate the old-- she calls it “Disappearing America” -- the new, the obscure, and the celebrated parts of our land.

Roadmap to our nation

If you would like to hop aboard this expedition, check back. Please have a United States map at hand if you can. Touching a finger to each place that we go will enhance your enjoyment. The one to which I’ve linked will enable you to zoom in on detailed maps of any state we visit. By your leave, I’ll throw in some U.S. history (on which I also spent a lot of glider time) and a profile or two of some interesting, if little-known, American characters.

Not all of our land is “America the Beautiful.” Some of it has never seen a tourist, except maybe Carol and me. But if you pack your imagination, we’ll go there together.

(They tell me the success of blogs depends upon interaction with those who read them. So please tell me about the places in America that you’d like to hear more about, and if you happened to visit the country and have your own story to tell, please share it.)

TODAY'S WILD WORDS

(These are a few of the words from this posting that you may not know. Each time, I'll tell you a little about them and also place them into a cumulative archive of "Ted's Wild Words" in the right-hand column of the home page. Just click on it there, and if there's another word in today's blog that you'd like me to explain, just ask!)

Conjure. To make things -- even ghosts, spirits, and the devil -- materialize, especially using chants or incantations. Magicians with this talent are sometimes called "conjurers." We often stick an unnecessary "up"* after this word, as in "conjuring up an excuse."

*As a bit of a grammatical stickler, born under the fussy sign of Virgo, extra "ups" bug me. Most grating of all to my ear is a request to "call me up" when just calling you would suffice. I'm always tempted to reply, "OK, Up " . . . as in "Call me a taxi." "OK, you're a taxi."

Glider. My kind of glider is not an unpowered airplane. It's a porch swing that looks like a living-room couch, hanging from a low frame. But it doesn't swing in an arc. It slides forward and backward gently without upsetting one's stomach. Combine that lazy to-and-fro motion with comfy glider cushions and a summer breeze, and you have a mesmerizing invitation to take a nap!

Mesmerizing. Since I just used that unusual word, I'd better explain it. It means hypnotizing, usually without a hypnotist present! A really good lecture can be mesmerizing. So can a song or a repetitive motion. You're not just interested in a mesmerizing performance or object, you're locked in, spellbound. The term appeared in the nineteenth century in reference to the work of one Franz Mesmer, an Austrian physician who developed a theory of animal magnetism that's so strong, it can hyptnotize people.

Taciturn. This is a word that I learned a long time ago from a challenging little book called 30 Days to a More Powerful Vocabulary. It describes not just quiet behavior, but deliberate, calculating silence. Someone who is taciturn wants to say very little -- and does. "The silent type," we sometimes call taciturn people.

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