llynn66's review against another edition
4.0
This book moved me to tears. Granted, it does not take much these days. But I was not expecting the emotional impact. I already know that a lot of readers will think this is a Sam Sheppard book and will be distracted and bored by all of the baseball. Others will think this is a baseball book and will wonder why Sam Sheppard keeps interrupting the play-by-play. In reality, this is a Cleveland book. And it might take a Clevelander to appreciate it. However, I believe that readers who are intrigued by the decline of the American industrial corridor and the rise and fall (and potential re-awakening?) of the American city may find this book compelling.
Jonathan Knight tells us the story of The Best Location in the Nation during the long strange summer of 1954. The narrative is not exactly linear, but I felt that the construction of the time frame was effective. Even the most casual baseball fan is aware of the Cleveland Indians tragic modern history and I am confident that there are no spoilers about the outcome of the 1954 World Series.
To be a Clevelander is to inhabit a very peculiar psychology. For most of my life (I am approaching 50) we have been regarded as a national joke. Johnny Carson, most famously, made a meal of our hapless status on late night TV right around the time my memories begin. I have never known what it feels like to live in a place that is not seen as a miserable and ugly place by outsiders...and casually derided by people who have never set foot within 500 miles of the city limits. Once when my husband and I were going through airport security, a wise cracking security guard looked at my husband's ticket and noted that we were flying from Chicago to Cleveland. "Who's sending you to hell?" he asked. "Oh." he paused and looked more carefully...'you live there.'
Wink wink. Sardonic grin. We are used to it. There is a bumper sticker that is popular here. "Cleveland. You gotta be tough."
Knight writes in the opening paragraphs: "The image of Cleveland, Ohio, as a great American city--one once known as The Best Location in the Nation-- died at four minutes before noon on a cool, overcast Sunday morning in June. There had been no catastrophic natural disaster, no legal declaration. The city would continue to appear on maps, and its citizens carried on with their lives. But the shining image of Cleveland as a full color postcard of a grand dominion on the waterfront-- which had gradually been curling at the edges and deteriorating for a decade and a half--literally went up in flames on June 22, 1969. In that moment, the Best Location in the Nation was blasted to smithereens and blown away in the winds whipping off Lake Erie."
We are, of course, speaking of the infamous conflagration in the befouled Cuyahoga River...the river so polluted that the surface of the water, slick with industrial waste, caught fire and became a symbol of urban decay. This is the story Johnny Carson grabbed hold of and ran with on national TV. Soon Cleveland jokes became a staple of pop culture. This became the backdrop to my own childhood in the 1970s. I experienced the typical young person's dissatisfaction with place and status. "Why do we live here?" I would wonder. I would dream of leaving the Cleveland area and travelling the great cities of the world -- the Londons and the Barcelonas and the Romes -- places where a citizen could his head high and know that he was the envy of tourists world wide. Not like we in Cleveland who were compared unfavourably with hell...and Newark.
And what of Newark? And Gary, Indiana? And Flint, and Buffalo and a dozen other municipalities that were equally dismal and crime ridden and plagued by weather unfit for human habitation 5 months out of the year? I knew there were places that were equally miserable because I had been through them on family car trips throughout the Rust Belt and the industrialized North East corridor in my childhood. Why was Cleveland selected for the bulk of the derision?
Possibly because of how far we have fallen. Have you ever read old fairy tales about the boy (or girl) who is born of noble parentage...but then bewitched and cursed to live as a detested pauper for an interminable length of time before the spell is broken and his (or her) rightful place is restored? It is hard to be born lowly and miserable and looked down upon by those more fortunate. It is, perhaps, even more pathetic to have tasted the good life and then been cut down to the level of the beggar. This is the pathos of Cleveland.
Cleveland was known as the Sixth City once upon a time...the Sixth largest city in the nation. Home to 'Millionaire's Row' spanning the length of Euclid Avenue, Cleveland was once home to the largest number of millionaires, not just in the United States, but on planet Earth. Had Cleveland miraculously maintained this eye popping collection of mansions sheltered in park like grounds along a dappled, tree lined avenue, it is a guaranteed certainty that Cleveland, Ohio would rank as a national tourist destination. It says a lot about the powers that be in our beleagured city that, one by one, these priceless historic estates were razed for parking lots and mundane commercial blocks. By the time my dad was a boy, the once magnificent street was just another urban throughway, littered and populated by Hoovervilles.
The city was not yet done, however, during the Depression and the War Years. Downtown remained a central hub for those who worked and were lucky enough to have money to spend. The Theatre District attracted A List celebrities and the multiple down town department stores were resplendent with the trappings of the mid 20th century Good Life. A bit further out, in the industrial flats, the factories hummed -- belching out their effluvia. I remember the sight and the smell of the factories and mills. It was, to my eye, an ugly and almost dystopian sight. It was also representative of a time when a lot of people here still had jobs that were solid enough to support a family.
1954 might mark a high water point for many Americans -- at least in the blinded eye of nostalgia. Safely past the twin demons of the Great Depression and World War II...and Vietnam, the oil embargo and Watergate still lying ahead in the vast unknown, America was a comfortable and complacent place if you were caucasian, Christian and hetero.
The scene is set on page 99: "After splitting a pair in Baltimore, the Indians returned home to start a fourteen game home stand with three against the Yankees, who were in fourth place during their own sluggish start. They arrived in Cleveland on Monday for the stadium's first night game of the season and a special atmosphere filled the lakeside air. In neighborhoods around Cleveland, the sweet scent of blooming lilacs wafted through the streets. As the sun nestled into the horizon, the sky turned purple and soft. Mothers took children for walks along the sidewalks. Fathers sat on front stoops and back porches, enjoying a Chesterfield cigarette or a vodka tonic, perusing that afternoon's Press while half listening to the Indians on a crackling radio set up next to a nearby window. And in backyards and grassy alleys, children played with a new sense of freedom, liberated from their thick winter coats and the onset of pre dinnertime darkness. Their playful cries and laughter, the eagar conversations of mothers taking place over back fences and laundry lines, and the constant hum of the ballgame on the radio all combined to create the pulse of a city celebrating the arrival of spring, which already teetered on the edge of summer. Cleveland's life cycle was gradually revving up again."
And the summer that approached would usher in two national news stories that would put the Cleveland area on center stage. The Cleveland Indians would play a remarkable...almost magical...season. So much luck and skill would accrue to the Tribe that summer that they would be spoken of as the greatest baseball team since the 1927 New York Yankees (of Ruth and Gehrig fame). And, as the team was making history on the diamond, a well respected Bay Village family would be put under another sort of spotlight when Marilyn Sheppard was found violently bludgeoned to death in her bedroom and her husband, Young Doctor Sam, became the prime suspect. -- This murder case was so gleefully taken up by local and national media alike that the nation probably saw nothing similar until we were all glued to a 'low speed chase' on the LA freeways some 40 years later during the O J Simpson circus.
Knight quite simply yet very movingly narrates the events that take place in Cleveland during that fateful summer and how the city seemed to falter and never quite regain its footing again. There are a lot of pages about baseball games. A reader who is not familiar with the game (or very interested in baseball) may find this tedious. However, I myself do not follow the game and I still found these sections interesting because I grew up with the names of the players floating around me and I found the history of this storied 1954 team to be fascinating. The 1954 Tribe was a very diverse group of guys for the era and, typical to Cleveland, many of their stories were melancholy.
So sure of success were the citizens of The Best Location in the Nation...so confident in their team and in the stature of their town. It is truly remarkable in the most tragic way how quickly the fates turned. After winning 111 games in the summer of '54 -- shattering the record held by the 1927 Yankees -- and winning the American League pennant the Indians were meant for an amazing reign at the top of their sport. Yet Clevelanders (and anyone who follows the game) are aware of what happened...and Knight writes a passage that stands out in its understated poignancy.
"And on Monday night, September 27, the greatest team in American League history once again returned to Union Station and boarded a train to New York, this time to face the National League champion Giants in the World Series, which would begin at the Polo Grounds on Wednesday afternoon. The collection of fans that had gathered to send the team off was puny compared to the massive gatherings that had welcomed them here a week before and at Hopkins Airport on Labor Day night, not to mention the historic parade six days earlier. It was just the Indians making another road trip to face an inferior team. When they returned to Cleveland on Friday to wrap up this magnificent season over the weekend, then there would be another reason for thousands to come together and celebrate. The few fans who waved good-bye to the Indians that night assumed they would only have to wait a couple of extra days before participating in another massive civic celebration. They had no way of knowing that a half-century later, they would still be waiting. -- The players boarded the train and shortly after, with a blast of steam and a shriek of a whistle, it began rolling forward toward New York. On track thirteen. The train burst through its own plumes of smoke and steam and vanished into the autumn night. -- The summer was over."
Meanwhile, Sam Sheppard would experience his own bizarre and oddly 21st century fate as he was tried and convicted in the court of public opinion. Sam would go on to be a broken down oddity and his name would forever be tarnished with the stain of suspicion.
And thus Cleveland ushered in its New Era: and era where it became known for pollution and economic collapse...serial killers and losing sports franchises. The Best Location in the Nation was closed for business. The 'Mistake on the Lake' was born.
In the nineties there was a blip on the city's flatline. For awhile it felt like the Tribe was coming back and that the city could hitch its wagon to that renewed force. The Indians were back in the World Series and, this time, they faced off against the Florida Marlins. In typical Cleveland fashion, the Series was a slug-fest and the teams battled it out, picking up 3 games a piece. Thus, it was down to game 7 and the Indians, finally, had the World Series win within their grasp. Even the most sports-apathetic and hardened cynic (read: me) couldn't help but catch the wave of...dare I say it? Hope? -- I called my dad, brimming with anticipation. He was in his sixties at the time and I wanted him to see a Big Win. But, he put me in check. "Maybe they'll take it all the way." I opined. "Nah." he said. "I should live so long." -- I should live so long.
About ten years later my mom and dad sold their home and moved out to Bay Village to be closer to us (and their only grand child) They ended up renting a home on Lake Rd -- not that far from the former Sheppard home (which had been razed in the nineties). My dad said, at the time, that if anyone had ever told him back in the 1950s that one day he would be living in Bay Village...on Sam Sheppard's street along the lake front, he would have reacted in disbelief. A city boy like him? No money? It would be more likely that he would end his days on a Martian colony. But we would walk past the building where the old Sheppard hospital was located and look at the stately homes and, slowly, my mom and dad became a part of that neighborhood fifty years after it had become so infamous.
Today would be dad's 80th birthday, if my mom and dad would have survived to see it. They passed away, 3 weeks apart, this summer. They lived long enough to move together from East Cleveland (now a failed state of a community that has known nothing but poverty and corruption and crime since the year of my birth) into the near east side suburbs and then into the far east side exurbs...then across town to Bay and, finally one more move to another well heeled west side suburb. Their generation made unheard strides in terms of economics and social class. Cleveland, itself, ticked away -- always 10 or 20 miles down the road from wherever they were living. Cleveland was written off by the more fortunate residents of N E Ohio. It was great while it lasted but it was over now.
Presently, I live about 3 miles from the Cleveland border. This is our choice. My husband recently took a new job which is located over an hour away. But we are not moving. Neither one of us would contemplate it. We love our old Cleveland Classic (a fixer upper we are remodelling at a snail's pace). We love sitting out on our porch and watching our daughter run and up and down the sidewalk or ride her bike with her pals until the shadows grow long and the street lights come on. It takes us back to a place...the earliest sparks of memory...when we played on similar streets in the dying days of a great city. We sit in lawn chairs on the driveway, as Clevelanders do, and talk with our neighbors about all the trendy new places to eat that are springing up around our inner ring community. I do property research for an environmental company and we have lately had some banner work years as banks continue to turn over commercial properties all over the region. I am often down town for work and the place is more lively than I have seen it in my nearly fifty years of life here.
My dad and I spent the final year of his life driving back and forth together between the suburbs and the Cleveland Clinic, which has taken over much of the once majestic Euclid Ave. Now a different breed of millionaires dwell on Euclid. They are involved in the medical game and the rest of us end up flocking to them in our later years, trying to broker deals for a few more years of life. As I would drive us through the city, dad would point out buildings and lots of vacant lots. He would tell me what used to be there and a story connected to the place. But he would also marvel at stories he was beginning to read in the paper about young people moving back in to Cleveland. Today there are more residents in down town Cleveland than there have been in 65 years.
My parents are gone and I am turning into a sentimental fool. So much of my former life has already disappeared. Places I have lived and schools I have attended are torn down. Neighborhoods that were once 'nice little places to live' are now battered and frayed around the edges. It makes me melancholy. But when I consider my own neighborhood and our choice to remain in it...and when I think of the new crowds of young people I see down town, I cannot help but hope. Like all Clevelanders say, 'there's always next year'...
Jonathan Knight tells us the story of The Best Location in the Nation during the long strange summer of 1954. The narrative is not exactly linear, but I felt that the construction of the time frame was effective. Even the most casual baseball fan is aware of the Cleveland Indians tragic modern history and I am confident that there are no spoilers about the outcome of the 1954 World Series.
To be a Clevelander is to inhabit a very peculiar psychology. For most of my life (I am approaching 50) we have been regarded as a national joke. Johnny Carson, most famously, made a meal of our hapless status on late night TV right around the time my memories begin. I have never known what it feels like to live in a place that is not seen as a miserable and ugly place by outsiders...and casually derided by people who have never set foot within 500 miles of the city limits. Once when my husband and I were going through airport security, a wise cracking security guard looked at my husband's ticket and noted that we were flying from Chicago to Cleveland. "Who's sending you to hell?" he asked. "Oh." he paused and looked more carefully...'you live there.'
Wink wink. Sardonic grin. We are used to it. There is a bumper sticker that is popular here. "Cleveland. You gotta be tough."
Knight writes in the opening paragraphs: "The image of Cleveland, Ohio, as a great American city--one once known as The Best Location in the Nation-- died at four minutes before noon on a cool, overcast Sunday morning in June. There had been no catastrophic natural disaster, no legal declaration. The city would continue to appear on maps, and its citizens carried on with their lives. But the shining image of Cleveland as a full color postcard of a grand dominion on the waterfront-- which had gradually been curling at the edges and deteriorating for a decade and a half--literally went up in flames on June 22, 1969. In that moment, the Best Location in the Nation was blasted to smithereens and blown away in the winds whipping off Lake Erie."
We are, of course, speaking of the infamous conflagration in the befouled Cuyahoga River...the river so polluted that the surface of the water, slick with industrial waste, caught fire and became a symbol of urban decay. This is the story Johnny Carson grabbed hold of and ran with on national TV. Soon Cleveland jokes became a staple of pop culture. This became the backdrop to my own childhood in the 1970s. I experienced the typical young person's dissatisfaction with place and status. "Why do we live here?" I would wonder. I would dream of leaving the Cleveland area and travelling the great cities of the world -- the Londons and the Barcelonas and the Romes -- places where a citizen could his head high and know that he was the envy of tourists world wide. Not like we in Cleveland who were compared unfavourably with hell...and Newark.
And what of Newark? And Gary, Indiana? And Flint, and Buffalo and a dozen other municipalities that were equally dismal and crime ridden and plagued by weather unfit for human habitation 5 months out of the year? I knew there were places that were equally miserable because I had been through them on family car trips throughout the Rust Belt and the industrialized North East corridor in my childhood. Why was Cleveland selected for the bulk of the derision?
Possibly because of how far we have fallen. Have you ever read old fairy tales about the boy (or girl) who is born of noble parentage...but then bewitched and cursed to live as a detested pauper for an interminable length of time before the spell is broken and his (or her) rightful place is restored? It is hard to be born lowly and miserable and looked down upon by those more fortunate. It is, perhaps, even more pathetic to have tasted the good life and then been cut down to the level of the beggar. This is the pathos of Cleveland.
Cleveland was known as the Sixth City once upon a time...the Sixth largest city in the nation. Home to 'Millionaire's Row' spanning the length of Euclid Avenue, Cleveland was once home to the largest number of millionaires, not just in the United States, but on planet Earth. Had Cleveland miraculously maintained this eye popping collection of mansions sheltered in park like grounds along a dappled, tree lined avenue, it is a guaranteed certainty that Cleveland, Ohio would rank as a national tourist destination. It says a lot about the powers that be in our beleagured city that, one by one, these priceless historic estates were razed for parking lots and mundane commercial blocks. By the time my dad was a boy, the once magnificent street was just another urban throughway, littered and populated by Hoovervilles.
The city was not yet done, however, during the Depression and the War Years. Downtown remained a central hub for those who worked and were lucky enough to have money to spend. The Theatre District attracted A List celebrities and the multiple down town department stores were resplendent with the trappings of the mid 20th century Good Life. A bit further out, in the industrial flats, the factories hummed -- belching out their effluvia. I remember the sight and the smell of the factories and mills. It was, to my eye, an ugly and almost dystopian sight. It was also representative of a time when a lot of people here still had jobs that were solid enough to support a family.
1954 might mark a high water point for many Americans -- at least in the blinded eye of nostalgia. Safely past the twin demons of the Great Depression and World War II...and Vietnam, the oil embargo and Watergate still lying ahead in the vast unknown, America was a comfortable and complacent place if you were caucasian, Christian and hetero.
The scene is set on page 99: "After splitting a pair in Baltimore, the Indians returned home to start a fourteen game home stand with three against the Yankees, who were in fourth place during their own sluggish start. They arrived in Cleveland on Monday for the stadium's first night game of the season and a special atmosphere filled the lakeside air. In neighborhoods around Cleveland, the sweet scent of blooming lilacs wafted through the streets. As the sun nestled into the horizon, the sky turned purple and soft. Mothers took children for walks along the sidewalks. Fathers sat on front stoops and back porches, enjoying a Chesterfield cigarette or a vodka tonic, perusing that afternoon's Press while half listening to the Indians on a crackling radio set up next to a nearby window. And in backyards and grassy alleys, children played with a new sense of freedom, liberated from their thick winter coats and the onset of pre dinnertime darkness. Their playful cries and laughter, the eagar conversations of mothers taking place over back fences and laundry lines, and the constant hum of the ballgame on the radio all combined to create the pulse of a city celebrating the arrival of spring, which already teetered on the edge of summer. Cleveland's life cycle was gradually revving up again."
And the summer that approached would usher in two national news stories that would put the Cleveland area on center stage. The Cleveland Indians would play a remarkable...almost magical...season. So much luck and skill would accrue to the Tribe that summer that they would be spoken of as the greatest baseball team since the 1927 New York Yankees (of Ruth and Gehrig fame). And, as the team was making history on the diamond, a well respected Bay Village family would be put under another sort of spotlight when Marilyn Sheppard was found violently bludgeoned to death in her bedroom and her husband, Young Doctor Sam, became the prime suspect. -- This murder case was so gleefully taken up by local and national media alike that the nation probably saw nothing similar until we were all glued to a 'low speed chase' on the LA freeways some 40 years later during the O J Simpson circus.
Knight quite simply yet very movingly narrates the events that take place in Cleveland during that fateful summer and how the city seemed to falter and never quite regain its footing again. There are a lot of pages about baseball games. A reader who is not familiar with the game (or very interested in baseball) may find this tedious. However, I myself do not follow the game and I still found these sections interesting because I grew up with the names of the players floating around me and I found the history of this storied 1954 team to be fascinating. The 1954 Tribe was a very diverse group of guys for the era and, typical to Cleveland, many of their stories were melancholy.
So sure of success were the citizens of The Best Location in the Nation...so confident in their team and in the stature of their town. It is truly remarkable in the most tragic way how quickly the fates turned. After winning 111 games in the summer of '54 -- shattering the record held by the 1927 Yankees -- and winning the American League pennant the Indians were meant for an amazing reign at the top of their sport. Yet Clevelanders (and anyone who follows the game) are aware of what happened...and Knight writes a passage that stands out in its understated poignancy.
"And on Monday night, September 27, the greatest team in American League history once again returned to Union Station and boarded a train to New York, this time to face the National League champion Giants in the World Series, which would begin at the Polo Grounds on Wednesday afternoon. The collection of fans that had gathered to send the team off was puny compared to the massive gatherings that had welcomed them here a week before and at Hopkins Airport on Labor Day night, not to mention the historic parade six days earlier. It was just the Indians making another road trip to face an inferior team. When they returned to Cleveland on Friday to wrap up this magnificent season over the weekend, then there would be another reason for thousands to come together and celebrate. The few fans who waved good-bye to the Indians that night assumed they would only have to wait a couple of extra days before participating in another massive civic celebration. They had no way of knowing that a half-century later, they would still be waiting. -- The players boarded the train and shortly after, with a blast of steam and a shriek of a whistle, it began rolling forward toward New York. On track thirteen. The train burst through its own plumes of smoke and steam and vanished into the autumn night. -- The summer was over."
Meanwhile, Sam Sheppard would experience his own bizarre and oddly 21st century fate as he was tried and convicted in the court of public opinion. Sam would go on to be a broken down oddity and his name would forever be tarnished with the stain of suspicion.
And thus Cleveland ushered in its New Era: and era where it became known for pollution and economic collapse...serial killers and losing sports franchises. The Best Location in the Nation was closed for business. The 'Mistake on the Lake' was born.
In the nineties there was a blip on the city's flatline. For awhile it felt like the Tribe was coming back and that the city could hitch its wagon to that renewed force. The Indians were back in the World Series and, this time, they faced off against the Florida Marlins. In typical Cleveland fashion, the Series was a slug-fest and the teams battled it out, picking up 3 games a piece. Thus, it was down to game 7 and the Indians, finally, had the World Series win within their grasp. Even the most sports-apathetic and hardened cynic (read: me) couldn't help but catch the wave of...dare I say it? Hope? -- I called my dad, brimming with anticipation. He was in his sixties at the time and I wanted him to see a Big Win. But, he put me in check. "Maybe they'll take it all the way." I opined. "Nah." he said. "I should live so long." -- I should live so long.
About ten years later my mom and dad sold their home and moved out to Bay Village to be closer to us (and their only grand child) They ended up renting a home on Lake Rd -- not that far from the former Sheppard home (which had been razed in the nineties). My dad said, at the time, that if anyone had ever told him back in the 1950s that one day he would be living in Bay Village...on Sam Sheppard's street along the lake front, he would have reacted in disbelief. A city boy like him? No money? It would be more likely that he would end his days on a Martian colony. But we would walk past the building where the old Sheppard hospital was located and look at the stately homes and, slowly, my mom and dad became a part of that neighborhood fifty years after it had become so infamous.
Today would be dad's 80th birthday, if my mom and dad would have survived to see it. They passed away, 3 weeks apart, this summer. They lived long enough to move together from East Cleveland (now a failed state of a community that has known nothing but poverty and corruption and crime since the year of my birth) into the near east side suburbs and then into the far east side exurbs...then across town to Bay and, finally one more move to another well heeled west side suburb. Their generation made unheard strides in terms of economics and social class. Cleveland, itself, ticked away -- always 10 or 20 miles down the road from wherever they were living. Cleveland was written off by the more fortunate residents of N E Ohio. It was great while it lasted but it was over now.
Presently, I live about 3 miles from the Cleveland border. This is our choice. My husband recently took a new job which is located over an hour away. But we are not moving. Neither one of us would contemplate it. We love our old Cleveland Classic (a fixer upper we are remodelling at a snail's pace). We love sitting out on our porch and watching our daughter run and up and down the sidewalk or ride her bike with her pals until the shadows grow long and the street lights come on. It takes us back to a place...the earliest sparks of memory...when we played on similar streets in the dying days of a great city. We sit in lawn chairs on the driveway, as Clevelanders do, and talk with our neighbors about all the trendy new places to eat that are springing up around our inner ring community. I do property research for an environmental company and we have lately had some banner work years as banks continue to turn over commercial properties all over the region. I am often down town for work and the place is more lively than I have seen it in my nearly fifty years of life here.
My dad and I spent the final year of his life driving back and forth together between the suburbs and the Cleveland Clinic, which has taken over much of the once majestic Euclid Ave. Now a different breed of millionaires dwell on Euclid. They are involved in the medical game and the rest of us end up flocking to them in our later years, trying to broker deals for a few more years of life. As I would drive us through the city, dad would point out buildings and lots of vacant lots. He would tell me what used to be there and a story connected to the place. But he would also marvel at stories he was beginning to read in the paper about young people moving back in to Cleveland. Today there are more residents in down town Cleveland than there have been in 65 years.
My parents are gone and I am turning into a sentimental fool. So much of my former life has already disappeared. Places I have lived and schools I have attended are torn down. Neighborhoods that were once 'nice little places to live' are now battered and frayed around the edges. It makes me melancholy. But when I consider my own neighborhood and our choice to remain in it...and when I think of the new crowds of young people I see down town, I cannot help but hope. Like all Clevelanders say, 'there's always next year'...
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