Nothin' but Blue Skies

by Edward McClelland

  “The early and middle seventies—what a lonely, awful time for me!” wrote Pekar, who was between wives during those years. “It seems like it was always snowing and I was always looking out the window by myself.”

  As businesses let themselves out Cleveland’s back door, Perk became so desperate for revenue he sold the city’s sewer system and tried to sell its power company, Municipal Light. Peddling public utilities to big business sounded like a campaign issue to Cleveland’s young, ambitious, populist clerk of courts. So Dennis Kucinich announced his candidacy for mayor.

  Kucinich was only thirty years old, but he was already the most polarizing politician in Cleveland. In newspaper headlines, he was simply “Dennis.” Cartoons caricatured the dark forelock that, as the crown of a five-foot-seven-inch, one-hundred-thirty-five-pound body, made Kucinich look like a teenager.

  Kucinich had been raised on the West Side, beneath the bell tower of St. John Cantius, one of the monumental brick churches that define Cleveland’s ethnic neighborhoods. He was the oldest of six children in a family so poor they sometimes lived in a car, or were shunted off to an orphanage when their truck driver father couldn’t find work. Young Dennis caddied at a country club to pay his way through Catholic school, where he was third-string quarterback on the football team and wrote a John F. Kennedy–inspired essay asserting, “My main ambition is and will be a career in national politics and I am going to aim for the very top.”

  He decided to start at city hall.

  “Dan,” he boasted to a boyhood friend, “I am going to be mayor of Cleveland by the time I’m thirty years old!”

  When Kucinich filed to run in his first election, a city council race against the Ukrainian machine politician in his ward, he was not even old enough to vote. Roldo Bartimole, a Wall Street Journal reporter who’d gotten to know Kucinich when the young man was a copyboy for the paper’s Cleveland bureau, went door-to-door with him during that first campaign.

  “You know, if I win this, I could go all the way,” Kucinich said.

  “Dennis, what do you mean by that?” Bartimole asked, although he knew.

  “Forget about that,” Kucinich said, catching himself.

  There were no limits to Kucinich’s ambition, only limits to how much he was willing to reveal. Kucinich lost his maiden election, but two years later was elected to Cleveland city council by nineteen votes. At twenty-three, with seven years to make good on his first political goal, he was inside city hall.

  After Kucinich went to Congress, and campaigned for president with a promise to establish a Department of Peace, and became a vegan, and told Shirley MacLaine he’d seen a UFO, East Coast journalists were puzzled that a politician who seemed to have purchased his persona from the Whole Earth Catalog was so popular among Cleveland’s blue-collar voters.

  Dennis Kucinich may have begun his political career in the late 1960s, but he did not learn his politics from the antiwar or the civil rights movements. His idol was Tom L. Johnson, Cleveland’s Progressive Era mayor, who built playgrounds in slum neighborhoods, fought the streetcar monopoly, and established Muny Light. Kucinich was no liberal. He was an urban populist who exploited the racial fears of his Slavic constituents to win elections. Among its other disreputable functions, the Cuyahoga was (and still is) a liquid frontier between the East Side’s blacks and the West Side’s whites. As a city councilman, Kucinich sponsored an antibusing resolution, opposed gun registration, and spoke out against “spreading out public housing into just any areas.” During a run for Congress, in 1974, he attacked his primary opponent for voting in favor of a Martin Luther King Jr. holiday in Ohio. (Kucinich lost that race.) He tried to defeat a woman running for city council by circulating a photo of George Forbes, the black city council president, staring at her picture. The tag: “What’s going on here?” The copy: the woman was a pawn of Forbes and elements of “east of the river.” The implication: interracial romance. The result: the woman won. Forbes, who would later become Kucinich’s nemesis during his mayoralty, called him “a racist, a man who lacks core passion and a political opportunist who will do anything to further his career.”

  But Kucinich also saw himself as the champion of lower-class Clevelanders who’d been left behind when their wealthier neighbors and relatives moved to Parma or Shaker Heights. He sponsored a bill for free rapid-transit rides and fought utility rate increases. His campaign literature, with its condemnation of “fat cats” and “bosses,” could have been written by a Wobbly pamphleteer.

  When Kucinich announced his campaign for mayor (his ninth political race since his twenty-first birthday), he promised to stop the sale of Muny Light; promised to end a tax abatement for National City, Cleveland’s largest bank; promised to clean up the river; and promised to stop mobsters from car-bombing each other in pursuit of Cleveland’s vacant boss-ship. (The underworld violence was even worse in Youngstown, which was too small to support its own mob but halfway between two cities that could. Warring hoods from Cleveland and Pittsburgh blew each other up with such frequency that a car bombing became known as a “Youngstown Tune-up.”)

  “It is ominous that the mayor of our city would remain silent while our city becomes a bomb-scarred battleground of the underworld,” Kucinich said at his first press conference. “The people desire some action before innocent people are killed by the mob’s bombers.”

  Then, in a phrase no Clevelander can read now without grimacing, Kucinich said, “We cannot allow Cleveland to become a national joke. We cannot wait until the ‘for sale’ sign is planted in front of city hall. The city is not for sale. The people are not for sale. And they will not be sold out.”

  The Rust Belt’s economic distress is a problem too deep for any mayor or governor to solve, but mayors or governors who can’t solve it get fired anyway. Mayor Perk didn’t even make the runoff, finishing third in the primary. Kucinich’s opponent was another thirty-year-old, state representative Edward Feighan. Kucinich beat up Feighan for supporting National City’s tax break, swept West Side ethnics while losing badly among East Side blacks, and became the youngest big-city mayor in America.

  Kucinich wasn’t just called “the Boy Mayor” because he looked like an urchin from the chorus of Oliver! He behaved like an adolescent, too: petulant, impressionable, inflexible, and envious of anyone who received more attention. As his first police chief, Kucinich hired former San Francisco County sheriff Richard Hongisto. Three months later, Kucinich fired Hongisto during a press conference on live TV—while the chief was standing right beside him. Hongisto, Kucinich claimed, had accused his administration of ordering the police to perform “unethical acts,” such as cutting off services to a ward represented by one of the mayor’s enemies. But the chief had provided no proof. A Cleveland Press cartoon illustrated the real reason: Hongisto was popular with the cops and the newspapers, because he personally led late-night manhunts. The drawing depicted a cowboy Kucinich, in a ten-gallon hat marked “D,” yanking off Hongisto’s star, telling him, “This town isn’t big enough for the two of us, chief.”

  Jim Rokakis, a newly elected twenty-two-year-old councilman from a Polish, Italian, and German ward, was the first member of city council to support Kucinich’s recall, a campaign that began immediately after the police chief’s firing.

  “There were a lot of young people elected to city council that year,” Rokakis said. “There was all this anticipation, because Dennis was a real vibrant guy and he was very exciting. The wheel came off almost immediately. Within days. He was combative. He had surrounded himself with people who were like him: they were all difficult. They were angry. It was them versus the world. You had to take sides and if you didn’t, you were trampled. There was any number of times I was forced to choose, and I typically was forced into the camp that was anti-Kucinich.”

  Kucinich’s service director was nineteen. His safety director was twenty-three. A week before the recall election, the mayor and his staff stormed out of a city council meeting. Council pres
ident George Forbes had cut off the mayor’s microphone because the mayor wouldn’t stop ranting, “This is a crooked contract!” after the council overrode his veto of a dock lease for Republic Steel.

  Kucinich won the recall election by 216 votes, out of 120,000 cast, but by the end of the year, he had the city in another crisis. Cleveland’s bankers hated Kucinich’s populism. They could not defeat him at the polls, but they did hold $15.5 million in municipal loans. The banks threatened to seize the city’s assets unless Kucinich sold Muny Light to the private Cleveland Electric Illuminating Company. Kucinich refused. He’d won the mayor’s office by promising not to sell city assets—especially the utility. Giving in to the banks would have ruined his image—public and self—as the Tom L. Johnson of the 1970s, the mayor who fought for “the poor and working people” against “the business elite.”

  “The so-called default was as phony as a three-dollar bill,” recalled Roldo Bartimole, who by then was publishing a newsletter on Cleveland politics. “The banks had been rolling that money over every two years, but they didn’t do it for Dennis.”

  If Kucinich didn’t sell the utility or cough up the money by midnight on December 15, 1978, Cleveland would become the first American city to default since the Depression. Reporters flew in from all over the country to watch Cleveland go broke. Kucinich, who was learning that celebrity follows confrontation, argued his case on ABC’s Good Morning America. NBC late-night talk-show host Tom Snyder interviewed Kucinich at Tony’s Diner, his favorite West Side restaurant. The police and garbagemen threatened to strike if Kucinich went ahead with layoffs to raise money for the loan payoff. This line appeared in the newspaper: “What’s the difference between Cleveland and the Titanic? Cleveland has a better orchestra.”

  Five days after the deadline—after the bankers had presented their notes at the city’s treasurer’s office and CEI had tagged water trucks for seizure—Kucinich and the council agreed on a compromise that satisfied the banks: a public referendum on selling Muny Light and raising the city’s income tax from 1 percent to 1½ percent.

  Kucinich won on both issues. Clevelanders voted to hang on to Muny Light and raise their own taxes. But they were also sick of Dennis, whose two years in office would earn him seventh place in a historians’ poll of worst mayors in American history. (For an “abrasive, intemperate, and confrontational populist political style, which led to a disorderly and chaotic administration,” the citation read.) In November 1979, he was defeated by Republican George Voinovich, a square, polka-loving Serb who would parlay his dull sobriety into three terms as mayor, two terms as governor, and two terms as senator.

  “The world settled down,” Rokakis said. “The people [Voinovich] brought in were by and large professionals. The city was in default. We went to Columbus and we got a package that got us out of default. I’m not sure Dennis would have done that. He’d taken the ‘one against the world’ stance. Voinovich was collaborative. He brought people in and over the course of the next eight to ten years, it was a time of peace and harmony.”

  Kucinich had kept his promise not to sell Muny Light but broken another that Clevelanders held even more deeply: he’d turned the city into a national joke. The Boy Mayor’s temperamental brinksmanship was the final embarrassment in a demoralizing decade that began with the Cuyahoga River fire and ended with Cleveland nicknamed “the Mistake by the Lake.” The Cleveland Plain Dealer tried to lift the city’s morale with a bumper sticker slogan: “New York May Be the Big Apple, but Cleveland’s a Plum.”

  Rock musician Michael Stanley tried to lift his city’s morale, too. Cleveland’s rock and roll history goes back to the early 1950s. Rock was not invented on Lake Erie—that happened in the Mississippi Valley—but WJW disc jockey Alan “Moondog” Freed coined the term “rock’n’ roll” to describe the black music he was playing for teenage ethnics. His “Moondog Coronation Ball” at the Cleveland Arena is considered the first rock concert, even though opening act Paul “Hucklebuck” Williams finished only one song before the fire marshal cleared out the brawling, dancing crowd of twenty thousand.

  Thirty years later, Cleveland’s musical avatar was Stanley, whose trademark vest and permed hair made him look like the prom king who doffed his tuxedo jacket and bow tie so he could get down to rock. The Michael Stanley Band’s “He Can’t Love You” was the forty-seventh video to air on MTV’s first day of programming. (“They didn’t have a lot of shit to play,” is Stanley’s explanation.) Stanley made hit records without moving to New York or L.A. That meant a lot to Cleveland, which had been big-timed by John D. Rockefeller, Time magazine, Alan Freed, and even Martin Mull, whose Fernwood 2 Night, a satirical TV series about a smarmy local talk-show host, was yet another Cleveland joke. Michael Stanley was Cleveland’s version of Rust-Belt rockers like Bruce Springsteen (Asbury Park, New Jersey), Bob Seger (Ann Arbor, Michigan), John Cougar Mellencamp (Seymour, Indiana), John Hiatt (Indianapolis, Indiana) and Billy Joel, a Long Island saloon singer sponsored for membership by Allentown, Pennsylvania. Those musicians had grown up listening to two-minute songs about surfing. Without a Pacific Ocean to inspire the next “Fun, Fun, Fun,” they composed laments about the Midwest’s deepest and most endless characteristic: unemployment. In moaning odes such as “My Hometown,” “Makin’ Thunderbirds,” “Scarecrow,” and “Allentown,” these heartland rockers—and those wannabes who wished they could have smelled sulfur wafting through the windows of third-period band, from the steel mill they were pounding the piano to stay out of—discovered blue-collar work as a lyrical topic at the exact moment Americans stopped doing it.

  When Stanley’s band began writing its album You Can’t Fight Fashion, Ohio’s unemployment rate was 14 percent, and the record company insisted on an anthem. So Stanley decided to write a song not just for Cleveland but for Erie, Flint, Gary, Youngstown, and every other town that was losing its auto plant/steel mill/oil refinery and all the drive-ins/ bowling alleys/taverns said industrial concern supported.

  “The whole Rust Belt situation was bottoming out at that point,” Stanley said. “From a civic standpoint, things were pretty lousy. But if something has to be anthemic, it has to cross as many boundaries as possible. It was the whole thing about civic pride, even if there doesn’t seem to be anything to be that proud about. Proud of the fact that, if nothing else, you’ve survived what was going on around you. People always say, ‘That’s a Cleveland tune.’ That says nothing about Cleveland in the song, other than the reference to East Side, West Side, which is how Cleveland’s divided up, but I’m sure there’s many like that. The whole thing was to keep it as non-Cleveland-centric as possible. It was obvious there were a lot of places going through the same sort of situation we were.”

  So here’s what Stanley sang:

  This town is my town

  She’s got her ups and downs

  But love it or hate it—it don’t matter

  This is my town

  The lyrics may not have mentioned Cleveland, but the video was a montage of Clevelandiana. Steaming steel mills. The Russian Orthodox church featured in The Deer Hunter. Black lace railroad bridges. A declining orange sun, glowing like a yield signal through smoky clouds as it set beside Terminal Tower, the brick syringe whose needle point is a peak of Cleveland’s skyline. Dressed as greasers, the band drove a convertible to the drive-in. (Drive-ins and classic-car shows are to the Midwest what Civil War reenactments are to the South: remembrances of the region’s last glorious era.) They walked up to an abandoned factory, where Stanley stuck a “SOLD” sign on the fence and broke the chain with a bolt cutter.

  Musically, “My Town” was defined by chugging guitars and brassy, surging saxophones, as much a part of the proto-MTV sound as gelled hair and skinny ties were of its look. Stanley’s anthem hit the Top 40 but has not endured as well as Springsteen’s wistful “My Hometown,” a more evocative industrial-belt anthem released the following year. It’s still popular in Cleveland, though, and so is Stanley, who worked a
s a disc jockey after retiring from rock and roll. A few summers ago, his band headlined Taste of Cleveland. Under a white big top by the river, they played for a thousand or so middle-aged Clevelanders, who sat at picnic tables with Styrofoam plates of pierogi and kolache. Of course, they saved “My Town” for the encore.

  “Every once in a while, you try to be a smart-ass and stick it in third. You can see them: ‘I don’t want it yet. Save that, will ya?’”

  A FRIEND FROM CLEVELAND once asked me, “Which city has a better chance of coming back? Cleveland or Buffalo?”

  “Well,” I responded, “if you put a random group of people in each city, I’d say Cleveland. But since Cleveland is populated by Clevelanders, I’d have to say Buffalo.”

  This same friend cursed her husband for persuading her to leave New York City for their native Cleveland. In two years back, she had not been able to find a full-time job. Instead, she worked as a bookstore clerk and an archivist for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, which Cleveland swiped from runner-up Memphis by stuffing the ballot box in a 1986 USA Today vote. Hoping a bomb will fall on her house so she can leave town, she is either a depressed person who happens to live in Cleveland or a person depressed by living in Cleveland. Whichever, she embraces the pessimism that has defined the Cleveland attitude since the 1970s. One of Cleveland’s problems is that Cleveland spends far more time worrying what the rest of the nation thinks of Cleveland than the rest of the nation actually spends thinking about Cleveland.

  “I think Clevelanders are very sensitive,” Michael Stanley says. “They have a very thick thin skin. It goes back to when Kucinich was mayor and the city went into default. That’s when it all sort of started.”

  How defensive are Clevelanders? They make a Cleveland joke before anyone else can make a Cleveland joke—even though no one else was going to make a Cleveland joke. No comic would riff on a topic as stale as the Cuyahoga River fire. But the Great Lakes Brewing Company, located across the street from Cleveland’s meaty West Side Market, produces Burning River Pale Ale. Type “Cleveland” into YouTube and the number one result is “Hastily Made Cleveland Tourism Video,” with over four million hits. (Forty times as many as “My Town.”) Shot by local comedian Mike Polk, it features scenes of people wandering alone downtown in the middle of the day, and these lyrics: “Here’s the place where there used to be industry / This train is carrying jobs out of Cleveland / Cleveland leads the nation in drifters.” It’s not a parody of Cleveland, but a parody of how Clevelanders feel about Cleveland.