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Children's Shows

10/5/2014

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The author, Calvin Rydbom, is an archivist and VP of Marketing with Pursue Posterity.
I can't imagine how much fun every day would be if I got to do something new and different. If it works, I might do it again tomorrow and if it doesn't, just try something else. Even if it worked, I still might try something else. Orson Welles described coming to Hollywood and being let loose to make a movie much like being a kid in a candy store. I'm guessing, maybe even hoping, that being told you get to create whatever television program you want and then broadcast it over the airwaves to anyone who had a television was a pretty similar sensation. It must have been a hoot to be a player in television’s infancy.   

A lot of those television pioneers had movies, stage, or even variety shows to use as a jumping off point. This wasn't all that true for the performers whose job it was to entertain children in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Arguably, it was the folks who created programs aimed at children who had the largest throw it against the wall and see what sticks way of doing things. Programs designed for children in Cleveland were not all that unique when compared to the rest of the country. But they were our shows, Cleveland shows. And they were shows hosted and often created by performers who are still considered iconic in our region's history.

That first group of performers aren't quite what you'd call iconic, in fact they are largely what you'd call forgotten. I'd like to talk a little about them though, and a little about how they paved the way for those who came after them.

I doubt very few of its participants, if any, thought of television as an art form worth preserving in the late 1940s. Very little effort was made to save those early television programs, and children's programming was no exception. Knowing who they were, where they came from, or how they came up with what they did wasn't information worth saving in their minds, I suppose. Very little footage or records exist unfortunately. Most of the shows from that era exist only in the memories of those who were there.

Cleveland television officially began in October of 1947 when WEWS became our region's first broadcast station. Not long after WEWS' debut, Uncle Ed's Magic Farm, sponsored by Weather Bird Shoes, started a two year run from 1948 to 1950. The main occupant of the magic farm was named Skeeter Scarecrow, and he is certainly one of those performers lost in the past, at least for the time being. Who knows what is out there still waiting to be found in someone's attic.

The first big television star among Cleveland's children was Jim Breslin, who spent years as a director at WEWS. He was better known those days as Texas Jim. Much like other shows of the era, little or no footage remains of the Texas Jim television show. The only footage I've been able to locate thus far is from a 1956 WEWS promo, and it's wonderfully entertaining. You can certainly see why Texas Jim was a favorite of area tykes. Later on, Breslin appeared as Professor Yule Flunk alongside Captain Penny, who was one of the more iconic hosts that followed on the heels of the original bunch..

Another program to make its debut in 1948 on WEWS was Uncle Jake's House. Gene Carroll, who had significant success earlier as a radio & stage comic and radio disc jockey, appeared as Uncle Jake. The pairing of Carroll and WEWS was a good match as he hosted a program on the station up until his death in 1972.  Most Clevelanders old enough to remember Carroll probably remember him more for his Sunday morning talent show which was more or less America's Got Talent for Cleveland, although the talent level might not have on the level of the shows that dominate network prime-time today.

You know the old gag where you walk behind a couch, crouching down more and more so it looks like you are walking down stairs? Carroll did a variation of that on his show when he had the kids crouch down so it seemed they were going downstairs on Uncle Jake's elevator. Early technology at its finest.

After a three years stint at a Toledo station, Mary Ellen Colchagoff hosted Fun Farm on WEWS. And Linn Sheldon, who later found fame as Barnaby, had a practice run of sorts as Uncle Leslie.

Although very little exists of these early WEWS shows they certainly paved the way for Captain Penny and Barbara Plummer, the host of Romper Room, to become stars in the late 1950s, and stay local celebrities into the early 1970s. I was never much of a Romper Room fan as Miss Barbara never viewed Calvin in her magic mirror when she seemingly saw so many other kids. But I can still remember Captain Penny telling my five year old self at the end of every show “You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can't fool Mom. She's pretty nice and she's pretty smart. If you do what Mom says you won't go far wrong." Strong words and sage advice for a five year old to contemplate. Plus he introduced me to The Three Stooges, something any boy would thankful for. It wasn't til years later I wondered why a train engineer was called Captain.

The second television station in the Cleveland market debuted in October of 1948. Originally called WNBK, it went through a couple call letter changes before settling on the WKYC we're now familiar with. As opposed to its competition WNBK  waited a few years before entering the competition for younger viewers.

The first show for children on WNBK, or at least the first that had any sort of lasting impact, was Captain Glenn's Boarding House. Starting in the summer of 1953 the program starred Glenn Rowell, who had been Gene Carroll’s partner in radio and stage for many years, and a puppeteer named Cy Kelly. The show itself was really just a copy of previous show called Captain Glenn's Bandwagon , which Rowell had been hosting in Cincinnati before deciding to try his luck in Cleveland.

Right around that same time someone at WNBK decided that perhaps they could keep kids entertained by showing silent films with a narrator and some music. And so Noontime Comics with Joe Bova appeared on Cleveland airwaves. Bova also wound up hosting Tip Top Clubhouse, which had a just out of his teens sidekick named Dom Deluise.  Years before he became a star handling the comedy relief in the 1970s Burt Reynolds films, Deluise started his career with Bova in Cleveland before following him to New York in the mid 1950s. They tried to make a go of Tip Top Clubhouse in New York but had little to no success. Bova did stay a fixture on New York television for years though using essentially the same format while giving the show numerous names.

In 1956, the station, by then called KYW, got pretty creative with Morning Surprise hosted by Tom Haley and his robot sidekick Mr. Rivitz. What made the show different was it not only aimed itself at preschool age children but at their mothers as well, as it mixed interviews that might interest adults in with the cartoons and comedy interplay between Haley and Mr. Rivitz.

Around the same time KYW secured the rights to Popeye cartoons with the idea they could be a show in their own right. Luckily for Cleveland children during the next few decades they decided to find themselves a host instead of just showing the cartoons. Lin Sheldon showed up for his audition in a variation of the costume he had worn while playing a Leprechaun in Finian's Rainbow. A friend at the station had tipped him off that all the hopefuls the previous day had shown up in sailor outfits. Sheldon decided if he could stick out and be unique his chances of landing the job might be better. And so we have Barnaby, who taught us "If anybody calls, tell them Barnaby said hello. And tell them that I think you are the nicest person in the whole world... Just you."

Cleveland's third television station got started a little later than the other two, debuting in December of 1949 as WXEL before eventually becoming today's WJW.  King Jack's Toybox got things rolling there,  with Bogo Heath, Wally Sanford and Pat Ryan as King Jack and his loyal subjects, which of course included court jesters to handle the laughs Pat Ryan also co-hosted The Play Lady along with a Frog Puppet. By far the longest running show to debut on WXEL was Dave Herbert's Mister Banjo. Unfortunately for WXEL, Herbert's almost two decade run as an iconic children's television host happened after he left Cleveland for Miami, Florida on Banjo Billy's Fun Boat. Red Goose Merry-Go Round with Walk Kay, as Kousin Kay, stuck around for a while but WXWL/WJW was never able to create a popular host as its two competitors had for several years.

In the early 1960s they even attempted a Bozo the Clown program, but it really didn't click with Cleveland the way the character did in Chicago, where to call Bozo beloved would be a bit of an understatement. It wasn’t until 1964 when they brought in Ray Stawiarski and his Franz The Toymaker character from Columbus that they found a character whose popularity could hold it's own against Captain Penny and Miss Barbara of  Romper Room over on WEWS and Barnaby on WKYC.

I would imagine that having so many programs being offered on the Cleveland stations, Akron’s WAKR never felt the need to develop its own children’s programming.  Program listing from the 1950s do list a childrens program called Hinky Dinks, which is just as lost to the past program as any of its Cleveland Counterparts.

Sadly, almost all programs broadcast before the early 1960s were lost to us. If anyone out there has some fond memories of these programs I'd love to hear from them.

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Archiving Cain Park (part 3)

8/26/2014

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Sean Dolan is a student in the MLIS and IAKM programs at Kent State University.  He possess a BA in History from Cleveland State and a great deal of respect for the events of the past and what they can teach us.  He is completing this Cain Park Theatre digital web exhibit on the Cleveland Memory Project as a Practicum under the instruction of Preserve Posterity.
The final phase of my Practicum, in which I have endeavored to tell the story of Cain Park's early history through a web exhibit on the Cleveland Memory Project, has proven to be far more difficult and time-consuming than I ever could have imagined.  Each and every step of the process- selecting materials, digitizing the materials, digitally cleaning up photographs using Photoshop, creating PDFs of playbills using Adobe Acrobat, uploading all the items, and adding their metadata to Content DM- involves numerous steps of its own.  For a variety of reasons, it was not possible to begin actually using the ContentDM software to upload items and metadata to the Cleveland Memory Project website until July 17th.  This was the day when I was given my training session at the Cleveland State University (CSU) Special Collections Department.  Joanne Cornelius, Digital Productions specialist, and Marsha Miles, Digital Initiatives Librarian (both at CSU's Michael Schwartz Library) provided much-needed information about CSU's standards for digitization and metadata, respectively.  Up to this point I had been working off of guidelines provided by my Practicum advisor, Calvin Rydbom of Pursue Posterity.  While these instructions provided a good starting point for my digitization efforts, it was not until my ContentDM training session at CSU that I finally felt that I really had a firm grip on what exactly would be required to complete my Practicum.  


I had already spent all of June scanning playbills, documents, and some of the hundreds of photographs in the Cain Park collection housed in the basement of the City of Cleveland Heights Department of Planning and Development.  Fortunately, because I followed the guidelines that Calvin had provided, roughly ninety-percent of what I had scanned was usable for the Cleveland Memory Project website.  However, because of instructions that were unclear, absent, or which I had misinterpreted, I had to go through the tedious process of reformatting, resizing, and renaming a large number of files.  Although annoying at first, this gave me a valuable opportunity to use aspects of programs I had never had need for before, such as batch processing.  A lot of these skills I picked up will undoubtedly save me a significant amount of time on future projects.  Once this was done, I was able to begin using Photoshop to digitally "clean-up" the images on these files.  Having never used Photoshop before, I had to learn how to crop, rotate, adjust brightness and contrast, and perform several other operations as I went along.  This was actually a rewarding experience, with the added bonus of having yet another skill to add to my resume, but the process took a lot of time.  Finally, I was ready to actually begin uploading the items and adding metadata using the ContentDM program.  This was the part of the Cain Park project that had interested me in the Practicum in the first place, because two of the focuses of my studies at Kent State University (KSU), in both the Library and Information Science (LIS) and Information Architecture and Knowledge Management (IAKM) programs, have been content management and working with metadata.  

The learning curve for ContentDM was not very steep, because the program is very straightforward and intuitive. Plus, my courses at KSU had thoroughly covered subjects like metadata and Library of Congress Authority Headings for names and subjects.  Of course, I made mistakes, but I found that it was most often the result of carelessness as I rushed to enter data, knowing how many items have yet to be entered with only a short window of time remaining.  Marsha reviewed some of my early entries and pointed out the instances where I had deviated from CSU's "best practices" in my entries.  However, it was Calvin who, as my Practicum adviser, has been tasked with reviewing my entries and approving them before they go up on the Memory Project website, who caught and corrected the majority of my aforementioned errors.  As with the Digitization and Photoshop stages of my project, there were technical bumps along the road with ContentDM as well.  I discovered that about twenty-five percent of the playbills I had digitized had resulted in PDF files too large for the normal ContentDM admin page to handle.  This meant that I needed to download and learn to use the Project Client, which allows you prepare a large batch of items ahead of time and upload them all at once (in addition to handling large files).  I wish I had tackled learning the Project Client sooner, but I am also glad I did not save it for the very end.  The reason for this is my discovery, just this morning, that the Project Client also allows you to create "metadata templates" for different types of files, such as PDFs or JPEGs.  Once you have created a template, the Project Client automatically fills in all the metadata fields for which you have provided a default value- for every item you have added to your project queue.  This wonderful feature eliminates a whole lot of repetitive typing in a project where a good number of fields have the exact same value for every item that needs to be added to the collection.  With the number of photographs and documents I have left to enter in the next two weeks, I am profoundly grateful for this discovery.  


It is a great example of how automation, putting machines to work to eliminate the need for human beings to do unpleasant "drudge work", is not just a 20th Century, "Industrial Age" concept.  As we advance further into the 21st Century and its "Knowledge Economy", the informational professionals and knowledge workers of the future may find that the way they work is changed not just by software that allows for automation and batch processing, but also semantic analysis tools that "outsource" lower cognitive functions to machine agents.  It is expensive to pay human beings to locate, compile, and synthesize information- once we have the ability to do so, why not allow the computers to do this work and free human beings to the critical thinking, analysis, and decision-making tasks of which only we (so far) are capable?  These are the sort of topics that interest me professionally, and they are the reason I chose a dual major in both Library and Information Science (LIS) and Information Architecture and Knowledge Management (IAKM).  The former still focuses mainly on the traditional work of information professionals such as archivists, librarians, and museum curators.  The latter focuses on bringing new management philosophies and technological innovation to an economy that will require the vast majority of professionals, no matter what their field, to work with and manage vast quantities of data, information, and knowledge.  I believe there is a great deal of potential for overlap between the MLIS and IAKM disciplines, and I am glad that Kent State has had the foresight to recognize this as well.  

I am also grateful to Pursue Posterity, for giving me this opportunity to combine my first academic love, history, with my current pursuits.  I might have looked for a Practicum opportunity in a more "corporate" setting and spent the summer working with data that was a lot less interesting- inventories, cost and sales figures, SKU numbers, who knows . . . . Instead I was able to delve into the fascinating history of a historic theater venue that, despite living within thirty miles of it my whole life, I knew absolutely nothing about.  It is my hope that when the Cain Park Collection is viewable on the Cleveland Memory Project website, others will find the story of how a high school drama teacher from Cleveland Heights High School helped build the first outdoor community theater in the country as interesting as I did.  Rising out of the Great Depression, Cain Park Theatre not only survived, but thrived throughout the 1940's, outlasting a World War and drawing huge audiences even with competition from the Golden Age of Hollywood.  Dr. Dina Rees "Doc" Evans and a whole cast of players, both on the stage and behind the scenes, built something that endures to this day.  It has been a pleasure working to preserve memories from those "Halcyon Days" in a digital format, so that they will endure even after the last of those captured in so many black and white photographs has passed on.



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Forming Little Italy (part 2)

7/18/2014

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Bekah Swope is an MLIS student at Kent State currently completing her work on her practicum. Her project: to digitize subsets of the 1930s and 1960s real estate appraisal cards housed at the Cuyahoga County Archives pertaining to Little Italy's Murray Hill and extrapolate statistics on the streets evolution. In the end, her practicum will involve a collaborative effort between Pursue Posterity, the aforementioned Cuyahoga County Archives, and Cleveland State University.
Paesani. Fellow countrymen; fellow villagers.
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Alta House being torn down in December 1980 Courtesy of the Cleveland Memory Project
            Change is a constant in our world—something that is often feared or thought of as a cause for concern. When we consider change as an opportunity to bring about new successes and triumphs, it can become a more welcoming mechanism, though it still can conjure hesitation. We rely on the past to mark notable changes of ourselves, our surroundings, and the greater world. We try to preserve that past from the constant movement of modernity and contemporary change, but a balance must be made for society to function and change as it always will. The past becomes symbolized and condensed, holding memories, stories, emotion. When those living representations of memories are threatened, they can trigger emotions and sentiments of preservation in the name of future generations. As professionals in the memory, history, and information realms, finding a balance and helping to strengthen, recreate (reinvent/reawaken/rediscover), and preserve those links to the past—all the while making them accessible—are our challenges.

            As part of this project covering Little Italy, I wanted to focus less on prominent or notable people of the area and dig deeply into the community of Murray Hill. Though the scope of this project is focused from the 1930's to the 1960's, the permeation of time and history forces onlookers to remember to consider things that have happened before a focal time period as well as the subsequent effects. The following snapshots of Murray Hill businesses and organizations not only emphasizes the community that developed after the immigration and establishment of Italians in this Cleveland neighborhood, but it also gives an insight into the skill-sets, professions, and work that the everyday people of Murray Hill did.

        The above interactive chart offers us a great deal of information in a condensed form. We can see the changes in businesses that have both sprung up and became discontinued as well as the evolution of the title or type of business occupying an address. Murray Hill School is a constant across this short spectrum of time as is St. John's Beckwith Memorial Church, later St. John's Beckwith Memorial Presbyterian Church*.  Murray Hill Hardware & Plumbing Company is followed up by Murray Hill Hardware Company which later houses Pipp's Hardware & Appliance Store, and then Pipp's Hardware & Appliance Company—which comes to occupy two property lots. The Murray Hill Social Club becomes the Italian Social Club. Vitantonio's Funeral Home in the 1950's becomes Vitantonio & Son Funeral Home in 1960's. The Mesi Brothers Bottling Company building in 1940 holds the Tri-County Beverage Distributors Incorporated by 1950, but is no longer listed by 1960. The graph also shows us an increase in the number of businesses and/or organizations during 1960 which is more than double that of the previous years.                                                                      
                The chart allows us to see the variety of businesses and organizations in a specific cross-section of time as well as when it is taken altogether. From these pieces, we can develop an understanding of the evolving community year-to-year and over time. The daily needs of the people of Murray Hill are met by the department stores, grocers, bakers, and barbers, junior orchestras and fine art studio. Restaurants and funeral homes, clubs and churches, beer wholesalers and dry cleaners all offer an insight—and, perhaps, a link—between the daily lives of the past and ourselves.

* In 1963, shortly after the time span of this chart, the church property is sold after a final dissolved session.

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Archiving Cain Park (part 2)

7/1/2014

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Sean Dolan is a student in the MLIS and IAKM programs at Kent State University.  He possess a BA in History from Cleveland State and a great deal of respect for the events of the past and what they can teach us.  He is completing this Cain Park Theatre digital web exhibit on the Cleveland Memory Project as a Practicum under the instruction of Preserve Posterity.
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Courtesy of Cleveland State University, Special Collections, Cleveland Press Collection.

As difficult as it was for me to narrow down the focus and scope of the Cleveland Memory Project  exhibit for Cain Park Theatre, selecting which objects to digitize for the site has proved almost as challenging.  This is my first experience working on a large archival project, so I have no basis for comparison, but I suspect that not every collection of materials is as expansive as what has been preserved from Cain Park over the decades.  Even by narrowing my focus to the “Halcyon Years” of the historic Theatre, the amount of material to sift through still included over a half dozen boxes of documents and clippings, over eighty programs from individual productions, and hundreds of photographs and slides.  Consulting Pursue Posterity Project Manager Calvin Rydbom confirmed  my instinct that a web exhibit should be highly visual in nature, so I plan to include the majority of photographs and slides that my predecessor Emily Smith has already scanned.  There are a lot of high quality pictures of plays as they were being performed, as well as rehearsal and “behind the scenes” shots of the casts and crews.  In an era when cameras were not nearly as cheap, portable, or ubiquitous as they are now in our always connected, social media-oriented society, these are very precious artifacts.  This was the easiest decision to make regarding content for the web exhibit.  

I also decided early on that I wanted to accomplish more than showcasing how prolific Cain Park Theatre was in its early days and providing a visual record of all the great times that were had there.  In addition to these goals, I also have in mind providing a useful resource for the actors that played on the stage of Cain Park's amphitheater, as well as their children, grandchildren, and other descendants.  To accomplish this will mean entering in a lot more metadata into the content management software, but the end result will allow users to not just browse through digitized programs, but search the cast listings for their own names or those of their family members.  The nature of Cain Park, by many accounts the country's first municipally run outdoor community theater, seems to demand this type of treatment.  Although there were several famous names in theater that graced the stage over the years, the majority of those who took part in the productions at Cain Park were amateurs. Many either had strong ties to Cleveland Heights to begin with or developed them after spending several summers working and studying here.  So, I guess deciding to digitize all eighty of the programs from 1938 to 1950 (and make the cast lists searchable) wasn't really all that difficult either.  It just required a commitment on my part to doing more work to achieve a more meaningful result.

The documents have been a different story entirely.  It appears that nearly every record kept and piece of correspondence generated during the daily operations of Cain Park, at least during this early period,  was boxed up and stored away for safekeeping.  These documents range from the mundane to the historic.  There are annual reports, budgets, records of ticket and refreshment sales, list after list of committees and their members, and class rosters from the Children's School of Theatre.  There are invoices and receipts for everything from makeup to stage light bulbs to sheet music and costumes.  There are letters from students seeking to join the cast or crew of the Theatre for the summer, letters from  young men and women seeking to teach drama or dance classes, and letters to and from Doc Evans (founder and director of the Theatre during this period) regarding every possible detail of running a “little theatre”.  

Some of these correspondences are simply amusing, others are quite interesting as conflicts and controversies arose over rights to perform certain plays, royalties due, artistic liberties taken with original works, and whether hiring additional guild actors during busy seasons would designate Cain Park a “professional” theatre.  World War II brought more poignant letters as young men who had worked with the theatre went overseas to fight and the directorship struggled to define the proper role of a community theatre in wartime.  At one point, the Office of War Information contacted the Theatre about staging a play to tell the story of the Jack & Heintz plants, where airplane parts were made during the war.  With so many different types of documents to choose from, but limited time and resources to digitize, add metadata, and upload them all to the Cleveland Memory Project web exhibit, it has been quite a challenge to decide what “makes the cut” and what doesn't.  I have tried to select some items which simply represent the joys and challenges of the daily operations of a community theatre, but I have also endeavored to highlight the most interesting personalities and situations.  Of course, the items from the World War II era will be especially prevalent because this is such a significant period in our nation's history, one of almost universal interest to those who will be visiting the web exhibit.  This brings me to the next stage of the project: uploading all of the objects, now numbering in the several hundred, to the Cleveland Memory Project site.  I look forward to learning to use the content management software, working to add all the necessary metadata to make the site usable, and ultimately producing a page that will tell the story of Cain Park Theatre's glory days.

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Forming Little Italy

6/28/2014

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Bekah Swope is an MLIS student at Kent State currently completing her work on her practicum. Her project: to digitize subsets of the 1930s and 1960s real estate appraisal cards housed at the Cuyahoga County Archives pertaining to Little Italy's Murray Hill and extrapolate statistics on the streets evolution. In the end, her practicum will involve a collaborative effort between Pursue Posterity, the aforementioned Cuyahoga County Archives, and Cleveland State University.
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Little Italy in Cleveland, Ohio is one of the earliest and longest lasting Italian communities in Cleveland. When we look at the microcosm that is Little Italy, we can see an establishment that informs us that early Italian immigrants managed to move inward from the coast early on. Records repeatedly give the impression that, while Cleveland's Italians had their share of hardship and stereotyped suspicions given to them, they managed to have much better quality of life and social acceptance than those Italians in other cities.

“Even though some individuals of Italian descent in Cleveland were involved in crime or were implicated in anti-social behavior, the city's Italians rarely brought disgrace upon themselves, their city, or their newly adopted country. As a group they had possibly the lowest crime rate for Italians of any major city in their country. Statistically, Cleveland's Italian population was consistently ranked among the lowest in terms of welfare relief among all groups, native and foreign born” (Gene P. Veronesi, Italian Americans and their Communities of Cleveland, p. 168-169).

When compared to accounts of the Italian immigrant in general, there is an obvious distinction:

“[Italians] performed the lowliest tasks for meager wages and lived in clannish isolation, with standards of sanitation that were shocking, to say the least, to their more fortunate neighbors. The second generation, born and reared in such environments and under great economic stress, broke with many of the old traditions, and their names began to appear on the lists of criminals and delinquents. Crimes ranked especially high among them. […] In New York, Italians lived for a time at a density of 1,100 to the acre […]. The disease and death rate from tuberculosis was especially high. […] The padrone system, by which boys were imported illegally to work for their employers under conditions suggesting feudal serfdom, aroused great antagonism, and immigration officials found it difficult to break up the practice.” (Carl Witted, We Who Built America, p. 437-440).

Italian immigrants in the United States were not as numerous before 1880 and it may come as a surprise, but more Italians immigrated to South America in the 19th Century than to North America. Hundreds prior to the 1861 Risorgimento were political exiles. As for Cleveland Italians, the 1870 census lists 35 Italians in Cleveland, but it must be noted that the Cleveland City Directory 1864-1865 already had over 20 Italian surnames listed. This makes the data from appraisal cards for Italian communities and, the focus of this project, Little Italy, more coherent.

Data below shows that the center of Little Italy—Murray Hill Road—already had parcels of land being built upon as early as 1850 and having a large number of constructions during the 1880's.
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Note: Little Italy also includes Mayfield Road, but the focus of this research centers on the “heart” of Little Italy—Murray Hill. Data presented here only takes into account those parcels located on Murray Hill Road.
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Note: Data provided in the above graph does not include 85 parcels that had no remodeling date on appraisal cards.

The “transformation” period (1930-1945) saw a great influx of Italians to the Cleveland area. Seven Italian neighborhoods eventually were established and typically were differentiated by occupation. Little Italy's Italians become known for their stonecutters (Lake View Cemetery providing great opportunity for work) as well as gardening and tailoring. Remodeling dates offer a look at how Little Italy expanded upon property following this period and can be attested to the strong community network made possible through hometown societies and settlement houses.

Suggested Links:
The Encyclopedia of Cleveland History – Italians :http://ech.case.edu/cgi/article.pl?id=I7
The Encyclopedia of Cleveland History – Little Italy: http://ech.case.edu/cgi/article.pl?id=LI1
Italian Americans and their Communities of Cleveland - http://site.ebrary.com/lib/clevelandstatedr/docDetail.action?docID=10395171
Risorgimento - http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/504489/Risorgimento
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A Brief Glimpse Into a Long Life

6/11/2014

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Thomas Kubat is the President & Archivist for Pursue Posterity as well as the co-author of 2 books for Arcadia Publishing. In his spare time he is a novice ventriloquist.
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In 2013, Pursue Posterity was provided with the opportunity to create an extensive inventory and physical exhibit of artifacts pertaining to the history of The Lincoln Electric Company. Lincoln Electric is a multi-billion dollar corporation located in Euclid, Ohio and the “global leader in the design, development and manufacture of arc welding products robotic arc-welding systems, plasma and oxyfuel cutting equipment and has a leading global position in the brazing and soldering alloys market” (http://www.lincolnelectric.com/Pages/lincoln-worldwide.aspx?locale=1033).

There are a plentitude of perks pertaining to my profession: preserving and promoting history, access to rare and valuable artifacts from the past and being afforded the opportunity to meet unique and extraordinary individuals. The Lincoln Electric project afforded me the chance to experience all of the aforementioned perks. My greatest pleasure however was derived from meeting a unique and extraordinary individual named William Isaac Miskoe. He was the longest tenured employee in the year history of The Lincoln Electric Company, having worked there in a variety of capacities in his 61 years of invaluable service to the company.

In 1933, he embarked on his illustrious career at Lincoln Electric, after many years of studying engineering at the University of Virginia and John Huntington Polytechnic Institute. He started his lengthy tenure as a Sales Engineer in Illinois and retired as the International Vice-President. As per the philosophy of the founders, John C. Lincoln and James F. Lincoln, salesmen at Lincoln Electric were expected to do more than simply schmooze a customer and close the deal. That was how William Miskoe was taught and that was how he conducted himself when on a sales call. “Now in welding,” he emphasized, “it’s always been said that it can’t be sold by talking. It’s sold by showing.” Every time he went on a sales call he would pack his gloves, welding helmet, and coveralls in his car so that he could showcase the superiority of Lincoln Electric arc welding products via a live demonstration. His exemplary work ethic and dedication helped advance his career and quickly lead to him securing a position as branch sales manager in Peoria, Illinois and soon thereafter a lucrative promotion overseas.

The Lincoln Electric Company had an extremely gradual shift from simply a domestic manufacturer to an international enterprise, spanning the globe. Founded in 1895, it wasn’t until 1938 that the company ventured outside of North America with construction of a plant in Australia. In 1940, Mr. Miskoe went to Australia to manage the plant, whereupon he introduced the concepts of piecemeal for production jobs and an annual bonus. When he first arrived in the land down under the total number of employees at the plant was a paltry fifteen, but due in large part to his diligence and determination it rose to one hundred and fifty. Despite Australia’s reputation as one of the most pro-union nations, Miskoe’s early implementation of the work incentive program proved extremely advantageous for the initial employees and their endorsement encouraged future hires to accept the program as well.

For 28 years, from 1940-1968, he was the face of the Australian subsidiary acting as chairman and managing director. Under his superlative supervision the Australian subsidiary competed with its’ American counterpart in sales to world markets. In the 1940s, Mr. Miskoe was responsible for starting their export operations. This was groundbreaking for Australian manufacturing as Mr. Miskoe observed in an interview with The Sydney Morning Herald: “Lincoln Australia can claim to be one of the pioneers in the export of Australian manufactured products,” ( http://goo.gl/T8iyMD).

After 28 years in the Outback, Miskoe returned to the United States in 1968 as the newly crowned international vice-president. He spent his final twenty-six years of service with Lincoln Electric stationed in the U.S., but traveled much for work and pleasure. During his travels he helped broker a deal for the Australian subsidiary to be responsible for marketing Lincoln products to Singapore, Indonesia and Malaysia.

Mr. Miskoe led an incredible life peppered with a vast array of achievements, adventures, travels and travails. One such adventure occurred while journeying from Australia to the United States in 1943 on what should have been a relaxing cruise with his beloved soul mate and wife, Dorothy Lee, a fire ignited creating the necessity for ship to be evacuated. Always fast on his feet, Miskoe leapt from the fiery Swedish motor ship with the aid of rope into a nearby raft whereupon he briskly maneuvered it to the side of the ship. He then helped numerous injured passengers from the burning vessel into the safety of the raft. Luckily there were no casualties in the fire due to the quick and heroic responses of men and women such as Mr. Miskoe.  

On March 2nd, 2014 William Isaac Miskoe relinquished his mortal coil after 101 years brimming with adventure, and equal doses of devotion to his family and career.  A life he once declared during his later years was filled with nary a regret. My major regret in the context of completing our project with Lincoln Electric was missing out on the opportunity to conduct an oral history with Mr. Miskoe, for he passed away prior to the details being worked out. The legacy left behind by Mr. Miskoe is vast, and it is unlikely that The Lincoln Electric Company could have gained such a strong global presence without his ambition and tireless work ethic.



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Archiving Cain Park

6/4/2014

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Sean Dolan is a student in the MLIS and IAKM programs at Kent State University.  He possess a BA in History from Cleveland State and a great deal of respect for the events of the past and what they can teach us.  He is completing this Cain Park Theatre digital web exhibit on the Cleveland Memory Project as a Practicum under the instruction of Preserve Posterity.

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I recently began the daunting task of creating a digital web exhibit for the Cain Park Theatre which will, when completed, be available for the public to view on the Cleveland Memory Project website.  The Cain Park Theatre has a long and storied history, one which the city of Cleveland Heights, Ohio has been inspired to tell by the 75th Anniversary of the venue this past summer.  Any institution which has been in near-constant operation for that many decades will have collected an abundance of documents, records, photographs, slides, press clippings, and assorted ephemera.  Therefore, I was not surprised when Kara O’ Donnell, City Planner at the Department of Planning and Development, led me into the basement of Cleveland Heights City Hall to see a long row of shelves lined on both sides with boxes.  It quickly became apparent that some of these containers had been well-organized, whereas others had only the vaguest of labels to guide me.  It would take me my entire first day just to pull all of the boxes down from the shelves and quickly browse through their contents in order to try to understand what materials were available for me to work with in developing this project. 

A few months previous, I had met with Kieth Peppers, Calvin Rydbom, and Thomas Kubat of Pursue Posterity to discuss the project.  At that time, gave me a book to look over entitled Cain Park Theatre: The Halcyon Years, by Dr. Dina Rees Evans.  I had also done some research online, so I had a basic idea of the history and timeline of events surrounding the venue.  However, seeing actual letters composed by manual typewriter on onionskin paper dating from  the World War II era conveyed a much greater sense of meaning.  This is what draws people to archival work, the opportunity to work with primary source materials, preserving and organizing them in a way that allows others to experience the same joy of discovery.  I soon realized that my first challenge with this project would be deciding which of the many stories of Cain Park I wanted to tell with my limited time and resources.  

As I looked through box after box of materials, I realized that a large portion of them were from the “modern” era of Cain Park, the 1990s-2010s.  Almost immediately, I decided that this material was too current to be of historical interest, and also in such good condition that it was not a high priority for immediate preservation.  These boxes could afford to wait for the attentions of a future archivist.  Moving down the shelves, I also found that the late 1970s and 1980s were fairly well-represented.  As child of the 1980’s, it was tempting for me to want to go through and work with the material of that time period, but I decided that the general public might not find it quite as interesting as me and my fellow Gen X-ers.  These boxes, too, could wait.  The chronologies of Cain Park had prepared me to expect a notable gap of boxes from the 1960s and early 1970s, a period during which the Park was mostly not in operation. 

Finally, I located the oldest collected materials which represented the first twenty years of the theater venue, 1938-1959.  I was both pleasantly surprised and a little intimidated by the volume of materials from this era.  Fortunately, I soon learned that I would not have to start my project from scratch.  My predecessor, Emily Smith, spent the summer of 2012 organizing a good deal of the material from this time period.  Unlike the materials from the other eras of Cain Park, the photographs from this period were organized by year, production,and personnel.  Where it was not possible to be this exact, they were  placed in general folders by decade.  Emily also organized the scrapbooks by year, scanned a lot of photos into the computer in JPEG and TIFF formats, and organized the program booklets by year and decade.  It appears that she did not have the time to work the boxes containing other written materials, such as inventories, attendance and box office records, and correspondence. 

The work Emily had done allowed me to quickly see that this early period of Cain Park, particularly the 1940s, was the most well-represented, both in terms of quantity and quality of materials available.  However, even this narrow window of time presented numerous compelling stories to tell. 

The historical narrative of Cain Park begins in the mid-1930's, as the country struggled to emerge from the Great Depression.  This is when Mayor Frank Cain and Captain Harvey Hecker (of the Cuyahoga County Soldiers and Sailors Relief Commission) built the park with the labor of disabled veterans, funds from the Works Progress Administration (WPA), and donations from individuals such as John D. Rockefeller, Jr.  Around this same time, Dr. Dina Rees Evans (the first person in the country to earn a doctorate in Theatre Arts), began to envision Cain Park the perfect location for an outdoor civic theater.  A drama teacher at Cleveland Heights High School, Dr. Evans would serve as director of Cain Park Theatre for several decades.  It is hard to imagine how large her influence must have been on our nation's drama programs through her work in the classroom as well as the summer Children's and Youth Theatre programs at the Park.  The success of Cain Park's Theatre's adult productions during this era is also remarkable, considering that the population faced the trials of war and the theater directors had to compete for an audience's attention with no less a rival than the “Golden Age” of Hollywood.  The 1940s were by far the most active period of Cain Park Theatre, with an amazing 80 plays staged (more than a third of total productions over the entire history of the venue).  In addition to being prolific, the Theatre also turned a profit every year.

When I told Calvin, who is advising me on this project, what materials I had discovered and the various stories I would like to tell on the Memory Project exhibit, he cautioned me about trying to tackle too much.  While I was a little bit reluctant to narrow the scope of my project, I recognized that it would be necessary in order to make sure I would be able to complete it by the end of the summer.   I also realized that this approach would allow me take more time and show greater respect for the materials and era which I chose to focus on.  After some thought, I decided to focus on the time period from 1938-1950, with special emphasis on the mid-1940s and WWII.  I have also decided to focus on the adult theater productions, because of the quality of the photographs and programs which Emily had already started to organize.  These are the materials that are of the greatest historic importance and widest interest to the public and, as the oldest materials in the collection, represent a high preservation priority.  For now, the story of the Children's Theatre and the 1950's will have to wait for the next student looking for an internship in archival work.

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Pursue Posterity to be on WKYC

7/28/2013

1 Comment

 
Thomas Kubat is the President & Archivist for Pursue Posterity as well as the co-author of 2 books for Arcadia Publishing. In his spare time he is a novice ventriloquist.
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Calvin Rydbom and Thomas Kubat will be appearing on WKYC’s local morning news and entertainment program Live on Lakeside on August 7th to promote their newest local history book, Cleveland Area Disasters. The show is hosted by the delightful duo of Hollie Strano and Michael Cardamone and is broadcast every weekday at 11 am. They greatly appreciate the opportunity to discuss and promote their latest literary endeavor on the popular local news program.

Their appearance on Live on Lakeside will be followed up the ensuing day, August 8th, with a presentation for the Friends of the Cleveland Public Library. The authors are sure to enthrall the captive audience with their tales of local terror and woe. A question and answer session will follow the presentation providing the attendees with an opportunity to further probe the minds of the affable authors.

Mr. Kubat is President and Archivist for Pursue Posterity while Mr. Rydbom is a contributing Archivist for the organization. This is the second book that these two local literary stalwarts have co-authored. Both authors have a keen interest in history evidenced not only by their published works but also through their tireless work in preserving historical artifacts and documents as a part of Pursue Posterity.


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A New Staff Publication

6/27/2013

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Thomas Kubat is the President & Archivist for Pursue Posterity as well as the co-author of 2 books for Arcadia Publishing. In his spare time he is a novice ventriloquist.
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Thomas Kubat and Calvin Rydbom, esteemed members of the Pursue Posterity team, recently completed work on their second book, Cleveland Area Disasters, for Arcadia Publishing. This historical tome will be released at bookstores everywhere in Northeast Ohio on July 22, 2013. Previously Mr. Kubat and Mr. Rydbom co-authored a book detailing the storied history of Burton, Ohio in words and photographs. That book, Burton: Images of America, is currently in its second printing.

What led Mr. Kubat and Mr. Rydbom to embark on this literary endeavor? Both have had a lifelong fascination with history and catastrophes. This fascination with history has played a major role in their joining forces with CEO and founding father of Pursue Posterity, Kieth Peppers, and now it has culminated in the creation of this exciting new book. Cleveland Area Disasters is rife with rare photographs and intriguing details regarding notorious tragedies such as the Collinwood School Fire and nearly forgotten cataclysms including the West 117th explosion; an industrial waste fueled detonation that almost waylaid an entire city block.

Other disasters discussed and photographically chronicled include the Waterworks Tunnel Disaster, the Lorain Tornado of 1924, the East Ohio Gas Explosion, the Cleveland Clinic fire and the Thompson Trophy crash. There are incredible images of the Beguine, the plane piloted by Bill Odom, right before it torpedoed into a suburban home and of the house engulfed by flames merely moments after impact. Every chapter is packed with startling images and interesting facts about a different disaster. Whether you are a local history buff, a disaster junkie or just someone longing for a good read this book should suffice.



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