The Cleveland of England?

Since my sister lives in England and I visit with some degree of regularity (or at least I ought to), I've been trying to figure out what the Cleveland of England must be. Surely there must be an old industrial town that's been bleeding population for decades, where the people wear permanent frowns and peer suspiciously at the future from behind their rusting chain-link fences.

Maybe it's Liverpool. As I learned from watching Time Team this morning, Liverpool peaked hard, growing from a 7-street town along a muddy riverbank to a seaport city of over 70,000 in just a few short years. (Sounds familiar.) Here's some more from the Shrinking Cities website:

[Manchester and Liverpool] are long-standing rivals. Manchester was a prominent centre of world trade, whilst Liverpool, with its docks, was the logistical centre for the region's textile factories. Later on, they sought to outdo each other with their football teams, their music scenes and their cultural institutions.

With the disintegration of the textile industry in the county of Lancashire, Manchester und Liverpool experienced a severe decline from 1950 onwards. Around 1930, both boasted approximately 850,000 inhabitants; today, only about half as many people live within the city boundaries of each. In both places, extreme de-industrialisation and suburbanisation went arm-in-arm with growing poverty among the working class and an increasing rate of population loss. The nadir of decline was marked by violent riots in Manchester's Moss Side and Liverpool's Toxteth districts in 1981.

Change a few details (and substitute "Cleveland and Pittsburgh" for "Liverpool and Manchester") and the story sounds even more familiar!

Why people don't shop local

I don't usually read the fashion and style section of any newspaper, let alone the PD, but this caught my eye this morning.

I'd add one more reason: because we've forgotten where to buy certain things. The big box stores have got us all conditioned to think they're our main supplier. I mean, where do you buy sheets and pillows if not at Target or Bed, Bath, and Beyond? Where do you buy curtains and blinds? An air mattress? A lawnmower?

Things my house has taught me, II

1. When you are a homeowner, an empty bottle of malt liquor on your treelawn brings out something fearsome in you. Something that could never come out of you back when you were a (pff) renter. It makes you want to charge down the street after the culprit like a kwyjibo on the loose.

2. For the love of God, don't paint over wallpaper!

3. Like it or not, you will start getting to know the former owners of your house just about as intimately as you know your own family members. You know how there are some family members who you wish you weren't related to? Mmm hmm.

Cleveland Nostalgia Video 2

One thing I've discovered in talking to my fellow age cohorts about nostalgia is that television plays a key role in what we remember fondly from our youth.

Specifically, TV commercials.

Sure, the Baby Boomers have a lot of TV memories, too. But whereas the Baby Boomers huddled around the one TV set on the block to gaze slackjawed at the test pattern, Gen X and Gen Y came of age alongside a veritable cornucopia of TV stations -- and, therefore, a staggering array of consumer product advertisements.

And in these days of TiVo and YouTube and Hulu, we might be the first and last generations to fondly reminisce about the TV commercial.

So for this week's Cleveland Nostagia Video, here's a selection of commercials and bumpers that ran during a made-for-TV movie on WUAB-43 in June 1980. This is part 1 of 3 and contains the most local content (gotta love John Lanigan's sexy 80s mustache), but I encourage you to watch parts 2 and 3 for their historic value (as well as local news coverage from the Plain Dealer, which was a much different paper back then).

Enjoy!

Not Very Important

The Ohio Historical Society is also cutting hours and reducing staff.

It just depresses me to think about the lowly status we've bestowed upon our own history.

One thing I will never be nostalgic for....

....is Chief Wahoo.

I know there are people who argue that Chief Wahoo is meant as a positive depiction of "fighting spirit." I know these people mean well, but this idea has always sat uneasily with me. I hadn't quite put my finger on why, however, until I watched We Shall Remain, Episode 4: Geronimo.

An excerpt:

Narrator: In a few short years [after his surrender], Americans came to view Geronimo in an entirely new way. When he had first arrived in Florida, crowds gathered at the prison to gawk at “the wickedest Indian who ever lived.” Eight years later, as Geronimo was being taken from Alabama to Oklahoma, crowds gathered again. This time they came to cheer a national hero. What had changed was America itself: Geronimo’s surrender had ended the Indian wars that had raged for nearly three centuries.

Phil Deloria, historian: Once that moment is perceived to be over, there’s an almost immediate turn to a kind of nostalgic sensibility. “Boy, you know, those were the days, right, when we faced off against these, you know, these challenging dangerous Indian opponents. Gosh! I miss those times.” Once the despised savage, Geronimo was now the valiant warrior who had held out against impossible odds.

David Roberts, writer: By the 20th century, Geronimo comes to stand for some of the values we hold most dear in America. The lone battler, the champion of his people, the guy who never gives up, the ultimate underdog. He becomes an icon, a sentimental icon of what was once a real enemy. And there’s something amazingly American about that transformation. [emphasis mine]

In other words, when we "celebrate" the "fighting spirit" of the Indians, we're not really doing that. We're celebrating our own superior strength to conquer them.

Score One for the Librarians

CPL librarian Christopher Busta-Peck broke this story on his blog last week, and now it's in the PD.

Excerpt:

A house where writer Langston Hughes lived during high school -- a time when he was developing his famously poetic voice -- was sold at a sheriff's auction in February.....

In a city pummeled by foreclosures -- there were 7,100 filings in 2008 alone -- this one might have escaped particular notice but for a librarian who wanted to make local history come alive for kids.

"If you show them these important people lived in the places they live in, it makes the history more real," said Christopher Busta-Peck, a youth-services librarian at the Hough branch of the Cleveland Public Library.

So Busta-Peck went sleuthing with the help of some library colleagues, who found a two-volume biography on Hughes that listed five Cleveland addresses where over two decades the writer lived for varying periods between stretches in New York and elsewhere.....

Continue reading "House where Langston Hughes lived in Cleveland is foreclosed on, sold at sheriff's auction"

A New Avenue for the Locavores

When are locavores going to start getting interested in local history?

Maybe local history isn't sexy enough. Maybe it doesn't have the same down-home, back-to-the-earth appeal as growing cabbages in asphalt lots. History isn't sexy, right? History is inherently boring.

There are a lot of boring parts of history, sure. But take a look at the popular history programs on PBS that have taken off in the last few years: History Detectives, Time Team America (both from Oregon Public Broadcasting, because the Pacific Northwest is where the sexy educated people are, right?) Even Antiques Roadshow has acquired a kind of nerd chic -- last night when I tuned in I saw Kevin Bacon telling me how excited he got when he watched old grandmas learn their tchotchkes were worth big bucks.

There will always be those who believe that any kind of popularization of a scholarly subject -- like history -- is just "pandering to the public." I'm well used to the anti-pandering elitism because apparently there are still librarians who want to get rid of computers and DVDs.

Because I'm such a snob, I should also be against pandering to the public. But to steal a thought from Neil Gaiman, anything that gets you interested in history is a good thing, and anything that serves as a barrier between you and history is a bad thing. Including the idea that history is boring, stuffy, stodgy, and suitable only for people wearing thick glasses and white gloves.

Which parts of history get you salivating, and why? Or what made you hate history altogether?

Cleveland Nostalgia Video 1

The theme for this summer (or at least until I find myself gainfully employed again) is nostalgia. Every Monday I'm going to post a video that takes me back to my formative years in the Cleve.

This week's selection is...SuperHost:



I especially loved Marty Sullivan's weird, froggy voice. This particular video has added historical value because it shows him going through all of the community event notices, which he did every week.

What are your favorite Cleveland TV memories from the 70s, 80s, and 90s?

Staycationing

I just got back from 5 days' worth of staycationing on Kelleys Island and in Akron.

Although my linguistics background tells me that this is just how new words get formed, the word "staycation" still rankles me. Probably because of the sickening cutesy-cleverness of it, sort of like the unnecessary bows and ruffles often on women's clothing.

(Also, we Clevelanders already have a phrase for not doing very much during one's vacation: it's called a one-tank trip.)

Nearly all of my childhood vacations were spent semi-staycationing. There were only two trips (our last two family trips, unsurprisingly, the ones where my sister was deemed old enough to opt out and I was deemed old enough to decide where we were going) when we went somewhere that was not attached to a Great Lake.

I understand now, of course, that my dad dragged us around Michigan and Ontario because he knew that this was the only way we were going to get any appreciation for our Great Lakes heritage. Because in Cleveland, we essentially turn our backs to the lake. There's always been a spooky part of me that thinks the lake spirits are mad about this, and that's why we as a city keep rolling the boulder of economic development up the hill, only to get perpetually clobbered in the end.

But anyway. What I want to know today is where you went on vacation as a Cleveland kid. Did you stick around the Lake Erie shoreline? Did you venture out of the Western Reserve? What are your best Great Lakes/Ohio/Upper Midwest vacation memories?

And now for a little free association....

I mentioned yesterday in an email to Bill Barrow that there are certain iconic Cleveland images and places that mean different things to different generations. (I specifically mentioned Coventry as an example.)

He then sent me the following list of possible "candidates for study."

So...how old are you, and what comes to mind when you think of these Cleveland people, places, and things? And are you originally from Cleveland, or are you a transplant?

You can comment or email me at christine [at] christineborne [dot] net. (You don't have to provide an answer to all of them.)

• Terminal Tower complex
• Lakefront
• The Flats
• Dick Goddard
• Big Chuck
• Jim Brown
• The Browns, Indians & Cavs
• Downtown
• Dennis Kucinich
• George Voinovich
• George Forbes
• The Cleveland Clinic
• Ohio City & Tremont
• The PD

Three things you should do while you're out of work

1. Read biographies of people whom you admire - as trite as it sounds, these people probably overcame some kind of adversity, just like you're doing right now. At the moment I'm reading a biography of Dorothy Fuldheim, my first childhood hero (excluding Miss Piggy). Dorothy used the first money she ever earned to buy French perfume and a fancy hat. In that spirit, I am going to use my first book advance to buy a room-sized Persian rug. (My rooms aren't very big, but that will probably wipe out the entire advance.)

2. Do something that is regularly scheduled and gets you out of the house. Preferably something you pay for, whether it be a yoga class or a continuing ed workshop, so you won't blow it off.

3. Every day, do something with tangible results (that others can see). It's important that others can see them, I think - I can show my husband the three pages I wrote when he gets home, but three pages of fiction doesn't look like much, given all the brooding and wondering that went into it. My suggestions: bake some bread, weed the garden, or paint a wall. (That's what I've been doing, at least.)

The Library Situation is Dire, Folks

We talked to a friend of ours last night who is the director of a small public library in Northeast Ohio.

Our normally jolly friend had just had to lay off four of his employees.

Now of course Jim and I had been aware that Ohio libraries are in critical condition, but our friend has doubts about whether they'll make it through the night. Rumor has it that big systems like Dayton and Cincinnati are going to start closing branches.

(In the public library world, closing branches is a big, big deal. It's kind of like when terminally ill patients start to give away their most prized possessions.)

Afterwards, Jim said, "Great. Now Ohio libraries are just going to be like libraries in any other state."

In other words, the rich are going to have nice libraries and the people who need libraries the most are going to have shitty, understaffed ones with outdated technology and books that ought to have been thrown out years ago but haven't been because there's no money to replace them with better ones.

Or, more likely, no libraries at all.

I won't reinvent my own wheel here, but instead redirect you to my Epic Library Post of 2005 so you can read about why public libraries are great, why Ohio libraries are great in particular, and why public libraries are necessary. (Sorry that some of the links don't work anymore. You can probably look up the articles using one of the many subscription databases available @ your library.)

Also, here is an excerpt from my letter to Governor Strickland (and anyone else who would listen):

As a former public librarian, I can tell you that public library service during a recession is absolutely essential. I have helped hundreds of people look for jobs online - a very daunting prospect for people who have been laid off after 20+ years, or who have never used a computer. I have helped people create resumes, apply for public assistance, shop for low insurance rates, find continuing education opportunities, and learn how to use word processing, spreadsheet, and other computer programs that are necessary to know in today's workplace.

Cutting public library funding in Ohio, especially when our unemployment rate has now exceeded 10%, is an economic disaster waiting to happen.

One final note, though: to anyone who is thinking about going to library school, DON'T DO IT. I've said this in the past, but really, now is not the time. Maybe in ten or fifteen years when we all start to realize that taxes pay for the things that make life worth living, but not now, or not at least until Ted Strickland grows a spine. I wish I could tell you the future was in plastics, or some other tangible, reassuring thing. But as far as I'm concerned, we're all living on the edge of a cliff right now.

The Going Back to School Option

There really is no worse time to be a laid-off librarian in Ohio. The economy wasn't great when I was in library school, but the Cleveland Area Metropolitan Library System (CAMLS, now NEO-RLS) used to consistently have around 15-20 job postings listed at any given time. Now there are usually 1 or 2.

I hate the idea of going back to school. I wrestled with it before, the last time I was out of work. I really don't want to learn a whole new set of written and unwritten rules for another profession, but I wonder if I'll have to.

So here are some educational avenues I could pursue:

Cleveland Marshall College of Law. I think I would find law school interesting and pleasantly challenging, but my magic 8 ball (aka the Occupational Outlook Handbook) says that for lawyers: average employment growth is projected, but job competition is expected to be keen. Not too promising, given that the OOH also says the job prospects for librarians are expected to be favorable.

Mandel Center for Nonprofit Organizations. The Mandel School offers a Certificate in Nonprofit Management or a Master of Nonprofit Organizations (how's that for impressive-sounding). Honestly, part of me has had it up to my eyeballs with nonprofits, but at the same time, I hate to just throw out all those years of experience. And the larger question is, do I really want to manage anything? Sometimes I do. Sometimes I don't.

Maxine Goodman Levin College of Urban Affairs. This is where my intellectual proclivities lie, but I have serious doubts about actually getting a job afterwards. I can see myself exactly where I am now, only with a degree (MUPDD) that's pronounced "Muppet."

Some sort of continuing ed in database development, technical writing, web design, etc. As you've probably noticed, my web design skills haven't been updated much since about 2002. If there's anything off of this list that I choose, it's probably going to be continuing ed. I just don't know if I have it in me to do another degree program.

Who knew I would miss getting up on Monday mornings?

Three things to keep me upbeat during my first full week of unemployment:

1. I can now shop at the West Side Market on Monday, Wednesday, or Friday - no terrible, crowded Saturdays for me anymore.

2. I don't have to take time off to have the electrician come over and fix some stuff (all of my time off was unpaid).

3. Hey, I get to see the sun, rather than being stuck in the basement all day!

(Some days, it's just the little things that keep you going.)

What Cleveland Cultural Institutions Need to Succeed

This excerpt from Charles Michener's opinion piece in today's PD is absolutely eerie, in that it echoes almost word for word what I said in our staff meeting last Tuesday:

"[T]he event that may have done more to lift the spirits of this town than any other in recent memory was the "Summer Solstice" party the Cleveland Museum of Art threw on June 20 to celebrate the opening of its new East Wing of impressionist, modern and contemporary art....

...Cleveland's leading cultural institutions have not been exactly renowned for festive spirits....when was the last time you heard of anything festive happening at the Museum of Contemporary Art, the Western Reserve Historical Society, PlayhouseSquare or the Cleveland Institute of Music?" [emphasis mine]

Indeed.

What Freedom Means to Me

Since last July 4, I have taken part in two things that have come to define the American Experience: buying a house and losing my job.

I have always had a keen sense of place. As I was telling Bill Barrow at the Cleveland Memory Project on Thursday, there has never been any doubt in my mind that I am a Clevelander. In fact, the earliest memory I have of being a Clevelander is watching my mom and dad, with a chuckle, hang up their new Cleveland's a Plum bumper sticker in a place of prominence on our dining room wall in West Park. I didn't exactly understand what was so funny, just that Cleveland was obviously a weird place and I was from there.

However, I've had a harder time placing myself as an American. I know it's supposed to be something about freedom. But what does that mean, exactly?

Thanks to the work I did at the WRHS over the past year, I know what freedom meant to the late U.S. Senator Howard Metzenbaum; to Samuel Austin, founder of the Austin Company; and to the entrepreneur and philanthropist George Gund. From the vantage point of my backyard, I can hear that for one of my neighbors, freedom means opening all of your windows and playing your stereo with the bass cranked. I can smell that for another, freedom means the exuberant consumption of grilled, spicy meat.

To me, though, freedom just doesn't seem like the key value we should be embracing right now. When I think about my role as a U.S. citizen, the word that comes to mind most often is not freedom, not liberty, not independence, but responsibility. For the most part, we've gotten the hang of the other three things, and we don't really evolve as a nation by simply invoking them ad infinitum.

I always tell people there are two things that make me feel patriotic: standing in front of Washington Crossing the Delaware at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and paying my taxes.

My wish for America this 4th of July, then -- when we're struggling to ensure that there's health care for all, when funding to public libraries in Ohio is in mortal jeopardy -- is that more of my fellow citizens come to understand just how crucial that last bit is. Washington and the founding fathers paid for independence of our country with their lives; we've got to be responsible and pay with our wallets.

Because like it or not, taxes pay for the things that allow people to dream.

On the (Cleveland)-Plus Side

It's now been a week since I got laid off. I've been measuring it in these terms, just like I remember measuring time elapsed after a devastating breakup -- e.g., "at this time last month, everything was fine...."

So I'm going to try and end this week on an upbeat note. In the spirit of Clare's Three Beautiful Things (Clare is, coincidentally, also out of work right now), here are some advantages to my situation:

1. I now know what time the mailman comes, as well as the garbage truck. Added bonus: I've gotten a feel for who's home on my street during the day, based on whether or not they've brought their garbage cans back in. Turns out there are a lot of folks around, which is always a good thing.

2. Whenever they ask me for money, I always tell panhandlers "Sorry, I can't help you. I just lost my job." Now, I'm not lying to them. (Everyone knows it's bad luck to lie to bums and hobos.)

3. I can start to systematically go through the list I used to keep on my desk titled, "Things I would be doing if I wasn't at work." One of those things is to explore each floor of the Cleveland Public Library downtown, particularly Foreign Language, so I can do some comforting left-brain stuff like boning up on a few of the many languages I can read marginally, like German, Italian, Russian, and Dutch.

4. I am going to be doing some pro bono work with the Cleveland Memory Project. This is, essentially, crossing enemy lines. But frankly, my vision for connecting Cleveland to its past (and thus, enabling it to reach its future) is much, much more in line with Bill Barrow's than with the methods of my former employer. And I've just got to use what I've got to do right by Cleveland.

5. I can bake bread every day, if I want to. When I feel untethered, this is what I always go back to. Because jobs come and go, but bread is forever.

Unemployment, Part I

I spent over an hour on the phone with the unemployment office today. Most of that was spent on hold, of course, but the stressful part came with the actual human interaction, which kind of took me by surprise.

I have a crap ton of sympathy for public servants, particularly those who are dealing with people in the midst of crisis. Often, in the public library, I dealt with people who had been shuttled back and forth between various agencies and saw the library as their last resort, the one place where they couldn't be turned away. You can imagine, then, what state they were in by the time they got to me. Barely coherent, stoppered with rage, foaming at the mouth, frustrated and angry and ready to unleash all of it on some poor unsuspecting cog in the bureaucratic machine.

I only exaggerate a little.

So obviously I try not to be one of those people. I try to be nice and act grateful and apologize, even when it's not strictly necessary.

When I applied for unemployment last week, there wasn't even a little part of me that was ashamed. I chalked this one up to fate, bad luck, and the lousy economy. I shrugged a typical Gen-X shrug and forged ahead.

Today, though, I felt ashamed. It was something about holding the actual letter from ODJFS in my hands. Even the acronym -- ODJFS -- makes me feel like someone who's "in the system," someone who has failed.

It's really disconcerting for me to realize just how much of my identity had been wrapped up in my pay stub. As ridiculous as it sounds, I was cleaning the kitchen today and happened across a a stack of Jim's old pay stubs. And I actually got kind of choked up.

But if I'm really honest with myself, underlying that is a simple unwillingness to acknowledge my identity as a writer, a profession that requires you to rely on uncertainty, that asks you to do work based on speculation and not on actual hours logged. Writers can't rely on safe, practical totems like time sheets and monthly reports. You've got to be a risk-taker, and frankly, my elementary school report cards always showed an "N" for "Needs improvement" in that category.

At any rate, I'd made a few errors on my application that needed to be corrected. I made the errors because the process is terribly convoluted and confusing. particularly to someone who's not in their right frame of mind because they've just been given the ax. And this is coming from someone who's relatively educated and articulate -- i.e., I know how to ask the appropriate questions. I have an adequate vocabulary to express my needs and uncertainties.

The person I talked to was understanding about errors 1 and 2, but error 3 involved me entering the wrong date of eligibility. (I put June 30 when I should've put July 1 -- or vice versa, I can't remember which.) At this point, her entire personality and attitude towards me changed, and I could tell that she thought I was trying to scam the system out of a few extra bucks.

That was the worst part. The most humiliating part.

The second-worst part was when I got off the phone, and started thinking about how much worse I would've felt if I hadn't formerly been a public servant. If I had thought that she meant it personally. If I hadn't been smart enough and experienced enough to know what was going on.

It was a very, very draining day. Welcome to America in the 21st century.

Ground Rules

Today is my first day of being unemployed. Based on what I learned the last time I was out of work, I've set down some ground rules:

Ground rules for being unemployed

1. No television between 9 am and 5 pm. I may watch 2 hours of television on Friday afternoon if I have completed everything on my agenda for that week. I may watch films and documentaries from Netflix or the library in the name of fiction research, but only one per day.

2. I must take a shower as soon as I get up, or at least shortly after eating breakfast.

3. I must eat breakfast.

4. Every Sunday evening, I will write up a daily schedule for the upcoming week.

5. Things that MUST get taken care of every week: sending writing goals to my writing buddy, revising Novel 2, researching and writing Novel 3, researching and writing Would-Be Magnum Opus, looking for and applying for jobs, professional development, work on the house.

6. I will shop for groceries at the West Side Market every Monday or Friday, and I will make large batches of things from scratch to freeze.

7. I will volunteer one day per week, preferably at the Cleveland Memory Project.

8. I will blog every day.

9. I will get out of the house and use my bus pass every day, Monday-Friday.

10. There will be no tears or despair. I have over the years become as tough as a mummified old boot. This is an opportunity to write, one that I have thrown away time and time again. I might not get a fifth chance.

11. I must write fiction for 2 hours every day. This does not include blogging, revisions, or research.

12. No drinking during the day, except during the course of a business lunch. I may drink during the day on Friday while watching Judge Judy, however, provided that I have accomplished everything on my agenda for the week.

13. I must not “let myself go.” I’m not allowed to wear anything that I wouldn’t wear to work (except for when I’m mowing the lawn. My former coworkers thought it was hilarious to watch me operate a pallet jack; they should see me with the lawnmower). I must keep getting regular haircuts, or a the very least, avoid looking like a crazy old hobo.