The Golden Dream

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  While Levittown looked to the future, Hudson looks to the past. And the pretty little town—perfect in every detail that meets the eye, a little jewel—has been so admired that the experiment is being tried elsewhere. Eight miles west of Hudson is the little town of Peninsula, which, during Prohibition, was where all the local brothels were. Peninsula has old houses too, which had become run down. Now Peninsula is being restored, renovated, redecorated, and New Englandized—with quaint little Old World shops (a glass blower’s shop, for example)—under the supervision of a young interior decorator whose work has found much favor with members of the Firestone family. The object is to turn Peninsula into another Hudson. Already people are saying, “Isn’t it cute?”

  But at least anything is better, as they say in Hudson, than living in Cleveland, a city that has become virtually unlivable—or Akron, for that matter. In Hudson, the trees are big and leafy, the fields are green and rolling, the houses are freshly painted, and the air is sweet.

  Today, among other disasters in faraway Cleveland, the Republic Steel Company throws out iron oxide particles from its great smokestacks in such quantity that an entire stretch of Interstate 77, for miles around the intersection of 480, has been stained a bright, angry red.

  Poor Cleveland.

  5

  Company Town

  When the residents of Indian Hill—which, though some would argue the point, is generally conceded to be Cincinnati’s most elegant suburban address—were meeting a few years ago to discuss plans for a new village church (Protestant Episcopal), it was assumed that there would be the usual heated arguments over design, choice of building materials, interior details, landscaping, and so on. To everyone’s surprise, the proposed plans for the new church were quickly approved, with no serious objections from anyone.

  Next on the agenda came the matter of the church burial ground, and suddenly the meeting was in an uproar. To some people it was inconceivable that a new cemetery should even be considered. As one resident put it, “We already have a cemetery. Everyone who is anyone has always been buried at Spring Grove.”

  Spring Grove Cemetery, located many miles from Indian Hill in a not particularly fashionable part of town, is one of Cincinnati’s most enduring symbols. Furthermore, it is not a symbol of death but a symbol of substance and permanence. The reluctance to supplement—or, God forfend, part with—Spring Grove Cemetery is not an example of this conservative city’s unwillingness to change, either. It is more an example of Cincinnati’s fierce insistence on preserving the things it considers beautiful and unique and redolent of tradition.

  Spring Grove was conceived as much more than a cemetery. It was to be a botanical and ornithological garden, complete with lakes, ponds, winding lanes, hilltop vistas, and all manner of trees and flowering shrubbery. English nightingales and other exotic birds were imported for Spring Grove (only the waterfowl survived), and the vast acreage was laid out with the attention that might have been given to a great park. The imposing obelisks and mausoleums of granite and marble are arranged like pieces of monumental sculpture. In spring and summer, when Spring Grove is at its pruned and flowering best, it is one of the city’s sights that Cincinnatians take out-of-town visitors to see.

  Just as the city’s famous Union Terminal, with its vaulting Art Deco façade and fountained avenue of approach, was designed to inform the arriving passenger that he was coming to a Very Important City, Spring Grove was designed to remind the departing Cincinnatian that he was leaving a Very Special Place. Within Spring Grove, there are divisions of class and money that are just as strictly maintained as within the city beyond. Old wealth is contained in one section, newer money in another. The city’s German burghers, who were among the early Cincinnati settlers, have their own place, the German Protestants carefully separated from the German Catholics, as they were in life. The mausoleums of the best families have the hilltops with the best views, while modest graves of ordinary folk are confined to the less conspicuous slopes. The conscientious zoning of Spring Grove makes it quite literally a suburb for the departed.

  Somewhat like “Proper Bostonians,” with whom they are sometimes compared, the residents of Cincinnati are often called “The Serene Cincinnatians,” and nowhere in the city can the serenity be better sensed than along the shaded gravel pathways of Spring Grove or along the dark, narrow, and spooky lanes that wind wealthily through Indian Hill. Of course, some things ruffle Cincinnati’s composure slightly—such as when outsiders occasionally confuse it with Cleveland, or liken Indian Hill to Shaker Heights. As far as Cincinnatians are concerned, there is Cincinnati, and then there is the rest of the state. It also irks Cincinnatians when people—especially Easterners—mix Cincinnati up with Keokuk, Peoria, Muncie, or any other sprawling Middle Western metropolis. Cincinnati does not sprawl. It sits, sedately and complacently, in the basin that seems to have been carved out for it at the riverport, surrounded by green hills. Cincinnati, furthermore, does not like to think of itself as Middle Western. “I might call Omaha Middle Western,” says one resident, “but after all, we border on Pennsylvania. Would you call Pennsylvania part of the Middle West?” Emotionally, Cincinnati feels much closer to New York and Europe than it does to Chicago. And, next to clerks at Fifth Avenue stores who have difficulty spelling “Cincinnati” and routinely add an extra t when Cincinnatians use their New York charge accounts, the people who annoy Cincinnatians the most are those who telephone from the East and say, “What time is it out there?” “The same as in New York,” is the tart reply. “We have always been on Eastern time.” (Some forty miles west of Cincinnati, to be sure, the country goes on Central time.) If “serenity” can be envisioned mixed with a certain amount of edgy, chip-on-the-shoulder defensiveness, that would seem to sum up the city’s overall mood.

  Nowadays, with Union Station closed and obsolete—while the city struggles to find some use for the building, which is considered an architectural prize—the commonest approach to Cincinnati is from the airport. And to the first-time visitor, the physical appearance of the city often comes as a distinct surprise. All at once, around a hilltop curve and through a deep cut in the highway, the city’s skyline presents itself, across a series of graceful bridges, as a cluster of solid, yet oddly delicate, spires and towers. The first thing one notices is that there are relatively few new high-rise buildings of steel and glass. The Cincinnati skyline has the appearance of having been there a good long time, which much of it has; it has a finished look. No booms from construction derricks slash across the sky. Cincinnati has had most of this skyline, pretty much as it is today, for the better part of fifty years, and it is in keeping with the city’s nature that it sees no reason to alter, amend, or edit what is there. The new Kroger Building is an exception and, looking as though it had been built with squares of blue and white poster board and assembled by a kindergarten class, it is an embarrassment. Its design so offended the city fathers that Kroger, a supermarket chain, was forced to place its building several blocks away from the center of town.

  Downtown Cincinnati is a tidy rectangle of no more than a dozen square, walkable, tree-lined blocks containing most of the city’s shops, department stores, hotels, and restaurants. Roughly at the center sits Fountain Square, another of the city’s proud symbols, with its elaborate Tyler Davidson Memorial Fountain, a forty-three-foot-high monument of ornamental bronze and porphyry, topped by “The Genius of Water”—a draped figure with arms outstretched in an attitude of invocation, from which the fountain’s waters cascade. (Cincinnatians feel as strongly about Fountain Square as they do about Spring Grove Cemetery, and a suggestion several years ago that the fountain be moved elsewhere brought forth a great public outcry.)

  Fountain Square is where downtown, daytime Cincinnati strolls and sits in the sun, where secretaries take their paper-bag lunches, where every important civic rally and demonstration takes place. It is Cincinnati’s Hyde Park Corner and Place de l’Étoile. When streaking was in vogue several summers ago
, Cincinnati’s first streakers streaked shamelessly across Fountain Square. Fountain Square is the heart of the city, and it may be the single reason why the core of the city has not deteriorated as the centers of other cities have done. And yet, after five o’clock, Fountain Square and the streets surrounding it are almost deserted. Cincinnati is a town where almost everybody sleeps in one suburb or another.

  As is the case in many cities, Cincinnati’s best suburbs lie to the east, where commuting motorists will not have to face the sun when they drive to and from work. Here, in areas like Mount Lookout and Hyde Park, Cincinnati becomes a city where thousands of antique gas lamps still illuminate the streets, a city of large parks and splendid houses that perch on bluff tops and hillsides overlooking expanses of lawns and gardens, with sweeping views of the curving Ohio River. Cincinnatians take great pride and a not inconsiderable amount of pleasure from the river, along whose shores their city and its suburbs nestle. For here—at times, at least—the Ohio is still clean enough to be swimmable and the scene of boating and sailing parties. Mrs. Fred Lazarus III, the wife of the department store executive, and her friends can often be seen skimming up and down the river on water skis, or leaping from the decks of the Lazaruses’ cabin cruiser into the cloudy water.

  In Hyde Park, it is important to have a river view, and it is a great point of argument whether a downriver or an upriver view is better; some people, of course, manage to have both. Cincinnati’s views may not be quite so arresting as those of San Francisco (like San Francisco, Cincinnati claims “seven hills”), and its grillwork may not be as elaborate as that of New Orleans, but it is certainly true that Cincinnati’s suburbs must be counted among the prettiest in America. This is one reason why Cincinnatians—who admit that their summers are hot and muggy, that their winters are icy and damp, and that their springs are fraught with tornado warnings—insist that they would not live anywhere else. In fact, Cincinnati is so pleased with its suburban existence that even those who could well afford to do so rarely travel elsewhere. According to the Summer Social Register, only seventy-seven “social” families in both Cincinnati and nearby Dayton have summer homes or addresses elsewhere, the smallest number of any of the cities the Register registers. “When a Cincinnatian travels,” as one woman puts it, “he is always looking forward to coming home.”

  Cincinnati, meanwhile, like Atlanta, is in many ways a one-company town. And just as Coca-Cola money rules along Paces Ferry Road, Procter & Gamble is the éminence grise of Cincinnati. Which suburb one chooses often depends on where one stands with P&G. If a man, for example, is in what P&G calls “middle management,” he will likely live in Wyoming (no views). Higher Procter & Gamble executives will be found in Hyde Park, with views. The highest executives of all will be found in Indian Hill, where Procter & Gamble president Edward G. Harness lives in a large house, with a separate listing for “children’s residence.” People “waiting to get into Indian Hill” tend to wait in such cozy, folksy communities as nearby Terrace Park or “the perfect planned community” of Mariemont, a 423-acre development of look-alike Cape Cod houses designed, more or less, to create the atmosphere of an English Village, with a central green, winding streets, and Georgian Colonial shops with mullioned windowpanes. Mariemont looks as if it had been built all at once by a little old lady who liked chintz—which, indeed, it was: by the late Mrs. Mary M. Emery in 1922.

  Glendale, however, is a suburb that has become almost exclusively Procter & Gamble, and Glendale people tend to see a great deal of one another and very little of the rest of Cincinnati. “Glendale,” says one woman, “is a world unto itself.” William Cooper Procter, the founder of Procter & Gamble, lived in Glendale, and ever since, the citizens of Glendale have been regarded collectively as “the Procter & Gamble people.” The Procter & Gamble people, as far as the rest of the city is concerned, have no names. As one P&G executive, who, typically, refuses to be named, explains it: “At Procter & Gamble, there are no heroes. There is only the company itself. It is an unwritten rule that individuals are never singled out for attention or publicity. The individual is merely part of the team.”

  But at Procter & Gamble it goes even further than that. Not only are names and individuals underplayed, but the company itself does its best to keep its name out of the limelight. Reticence is the unspoken corporate motto. The job of Procter & Gamble’s publicity department appears primarily to be to prevent publicity about the company. Old Mr. Procter, it seems, believed that corporate publicity was not just a waste of time, but actually dangerous. “Advertise the products,” he used to say, “not the company that made ’em.” To this day, the word “TIDE” blazes from the orange-and-blue detergent box, but only in the tiniest print can be found the words “Made by Procter & Gamble.”

  Cincinnati people are curiously ambivalent about what is called the “Procter & Gamble Presence.” On the one hand, most Cincinnatians are glad to have the company headquartered there. Many of the city’s greatest fortunes, though technically rooted in other forms of commercial endeavor, from broadcasting (Tafts, who started in newspapers) to machine tools (Emerys, who started as candle merchants, were substantially helped along by early investments in P & G stock. “On my grandfather’s deathbed, he said, ‘Never sell your Procter & Gamble,’” declares one woman. And certainly Procter & Gamble fits Cincinnati—a smooth, conservative, understated corporation which is run as efficiently and anonymously as the entire nation of Switzerland. P & G offers the safest of investments; throughout the Depression, it never passed a dividend. As an employer, it provides the safest of jobs. Once hired, a P&G person is seldom fired except for gross, repeated malfeasance. Just as there are no heroes at P&G, neither are there villains.

  On the other hand, it is easy to laugh at Procter & Gamble, and there is a tendency to speak disparagingly and condescendingly of socially inbred and insulated little Glendale. “I don’t know anybody there,” says one woman, implying that Glendale people are not only faceless but not very interesting. Certainly, on the surface, Glendale is an unremarkable-looking township with not much in the way of beauty—or even beautiful houses—to recommend it. It has a bland, self-satisfied look, not unlike the bland façade of Procter & Gamble’s downtown corporate headquarters—a low, flat, white stone rectangle that has been compared to a large cake of Ivory soap lying on its side—facing the blandest of little parks. It is easy, too, to poke fun at P&G’s folksy, down-home, small-town ways. Though it is a multinational corporation, it still holds regular family picnic outings for its employees and their families and, each Christmas, delivers a gift basket of chicken and other goodies to each and every person on the payroll. At the same time, the company’s influence on the city’s life is vast and pervasive. If, for example, Procter & Gamble is unhappy with a school superintendent, it has ways of seeing that he will be replaced. The two wary newspapers, the Post and the Enquirer, are careful not to tread on Procter & Gamble’s toes. Not long ago, a local magazine, Cincinnati, purchased an article that, in part, was critical of Procter & Gamble. When the article was published, the offending material had been mysteriously excised.

  The influence of Procter & Gamble on the city has not always been benign. Several years ago, the company decided that it wanted to tear down the old Wesley chapel on East Fifth Street to make room for its private park. As is usual when anything of historic worth in Cincinnati is threatened, Cincinnatians were up in arms. The Wesley chapel was the oldest religious building in Cincinnati, and had been in continuous use since 1831. President William Henry Harrison’s funeral services had been held there, and John Quincy Adams had stood in the chapel’s pulpit. When Procter & Gamble’s demolition plans were announced, a group of citizens formed and obtained an injunction to provide a stay of execution. As the date of the expiration of the injunction drew near, a second injunction was sought and its supporters felt sure it would be forthcoming. Then, on midnight of the date of expiration, in a display of high corporate arrogance, Procter & Gamble sent in
wrecking crews. In the morning, Cincinnatians woke to find their lovely old chapel gone.

  Others have learned that dealing with Procter & Gamble can be frustrating. Lawyer Sidney Weil finds it off-putting that when the “Procter & Gamble people” go out, they never go out alone. “Whenever you have business to conduct with the company,” he says, “you can never seem to deal with one man. There are always two—a second guy to back up the first. You feel hedged in a two-against-one situation.”

  Perhaps because of local attitudes like this toward the company, there is a noticeable ambivalence, too, in the way the Procter & Gamble people feel about themselves—a rueful smile when they identify their employer, as though it were necessary to apologize. To be sure, there is nothing particularly chic or glamorous about being in the soap business, and Procter & Gamble people tend to describe their jobs in terms of “market research” or “product development” or “regional sales.” “Try to pin him down on what he really does,” says one man, “and a P&G man will rattle off corporate sales figures. He just won’t tell you what he does. Sometimes I wonder if he really knows.”

  And perhaps this is why middle-to-upper-management Procter & Gamble people have gravitated to the suburb of Glendale—like the company, a prosperous but hardly glamorous community. There, in the shadow of their late founder’s house, they can mingle with each other, forget about what the rest of Cincinnati thinks—or doesn’t think—about them, and console and comfort one another for the well-paid, job-safe anonymity of their collective lives.

  6

  Small Town

  For years, Mr. William Cooper Procter’s company was noticeably non-Semitic, if not anti-Semitic, and even today, few Jews are found on high rungs of the corporate ladder. (In the company’s early days, no blacks at all were employed except as janitors and messengers.) At one point, so a favorite Procter & Gamble story goes, the company was about to launch a new laundry product which, after much market research, it planned to call Dreck. Advertising plans, layouts, and schedules were drawn up to present Dreck to the American soap-buying public. Only at the last moment—and in the nick of time—was it discovered that dreck is a Yiddish word meaning “dirt.” Hastily, the name of the new soap powder was changed to Dreft.