Crooked River Burning (book)

My city was dead before the day I was born.

Mark Winegardner’s 2001 novel Crooked River Burning weaves a love story through the most tumultuous years in the history of Cleveland, from its final arguable peak in 1948 (date of our last successful World Series appearance – as with everything in this city, success is defined by sports) through its 21-year descent into 1969. Dead city, dead river, dead lake.

I was born in 1968, not in Cleveland though everyone in the Cleveland area claims to be “from Cleveland.” Reaching the nadir does not necessarily mean we are now on the way back up. It just means we are at the bottom, and we may be here for a while. Perhaps forever.

I contacted a local historian about life in Cleveland in the Fifties (you didn’t know I was also researching the Fifties, did you) and she demurred, saying she was a suburban East Side girl and wouldn’t have anything of value to share about the City. She did recommend this book, among others. It has taken me about a week and half to read. I have for the most part been loathe to set it down.

At the start, I was worried that Winegarder’s trick – threading the true lives of historic figures from Cleveland’s past into his fictional narrative – would be daunting to me, because I had planned something similar. It is not a unique technique … but it is Cleveland … but seriously, this is not my play. Teamsters and City Council and Shaker Heights the halls of Cleveland are not my area of focus. Instead, it was inspiring to read, and fun. And as someone raised here (around here) in the Seventies and who never left, I found it hilarious and heartbreaking. (Insert Cleveland comparison here.)

There is a scene near the end, a wedding anniversary in the mid-60s spent catching a first-run movie at the Palace. It made me cry. His description of this 2,700 seat vaudeville theatre built in 1922, in its crumbling death throes, a dozen people in the house to gaze at a torn screen, the balcony and historic boxes condemned, was truly shattering.

I work here in the middle of Playhouse Square. I took my children to see The Muppet Movie in the Palace last Sunday, with a full house of families taking advantage of the five-dollar summer movie series. Many were in the restored balcony. My son complained there were no cup holders, but really, look around. The Palace is beautiful. It was saved. But only just in time. It had closed in 1969, and would not reopen for almost twenty years.

The things have without question improved in the past forty years ... or perhaps they are merely different.

Where our story ends, white people had stopped taking Hough Road to get downtown, speeding down Chester instead. On Sunday night I read the chapter on the Hough Riots. Yesterday I drove Hough Road, to see where it had all happened. My window was open. This is not 1966.

The wife used the word “race” at dinner the other night. Noticing the unusual use of a word he thought he knew, the boy – age 5 – asked “what is race?”

With a little confidence I said, “It is a word people use when they want to describe people who share a common origin or background. It is a made-up word. It doesn’t actually mean anything.” He was satisfied with this answer and dinner continued.

I am from Bay Village, a safe little homogenous bedroom community on the lake. No matter where I have been, I will always think of myself as a white kid from an middle-to-upper-middle class suburb. But my children are from the Heights.

What is better, what is worse, is subjective. The only thing certain is change.

When Roosevelt Is Dictator - And How!

What I had hoped would be a mcguffin has turned into a red herring. What a boondoggle.

Headed back from NYC, I chronicled my success in finding a rare and unusual artifact in the microfilm stacks at the NY Public Library. Entitled When Roosevelt Is Dictator - And How! (A Fascist Prophecy) and published in January 1936, I thought I had found a document which would clue me into the left-wing school of thought that FDR was not only not the Socialist he was accused of being, he was actually a little Mussolini, seizing unparalleled power from the other branches of government.

I don’t actually need a pamphlet to spell out how that thinking might go. But a period expression of such anxiety, coming as I thought this would as a frantic screed on the subject … well, I was giddy at what it might contain. It’s brief, I had it photocopied because I did not have time to look it over right there in the library.

Well. You can see where I am going, this was not the discovered I had hoped for. In fact, I am still not sure what it is. The piece was written by James Francis Thierry, and the only other item I can find from him from anywhere is the short story The Adverntures of the Eleven Cuff-Buttons, a parody of Sherlock Holmes written eighteen years earlier, in 1918.

The fact that the protagonist of Cuff-Buttons is named Hemlock Holmes should give you an impression of the overpowering wit of Mr. J.F. Thierry.

Subtitled A Reply to “Red” Lewis’s Novel “It Can’t Happen Here” the pamphleteer describes in ludicrous detail exactly how FDR plans, following his reelection, to kick out most of his cabinet, replace them with Commie apparatchiks, and order the U.S. Military to shut down Wall Street, drag certain well-known moguls out into the street (naming names - Morgan, Hearst, &c.) line them up against a wall and SHOOT THEM (his emphasis, not mine) and basically single-handedly take over the nation by force.

From the prose, which is full of MOCKING CAPITALIZATIONS, weerd sperring, and by punctuating the description of certain acts of terror with the refrain, “Ain’t we got fun?” (he uses that phrase so many times for comedic effect he sounds like a vindictive nine year-old with ADD) you can be sure this is meant to be a hilarious piece of satire.

But what is his point? By continually referring to “Red” Lewis you would think he were a Republican, except for 1) the contempt with which he obviously holds Republicans, too and 2) the fact that he can’t possibly believe FDR would do any of what is being described. So he thinks “Red” Lewis did write his book about FDR, and that his plot is too tame and not what a true despot would actually do - which was already made clear by Mussolini and Hitler up to this point in history.

Is that it? He’s an FDR supporter, who does believe Sinclair Lewis is a Communist suggesting FDR is the dictator represented in his novel It Can’t Happen Here.

Or maybe he’s just a scattershot satirist, with no point at all except making fun of everybody. And like most satirists with no point of view … it’s obnoxious and not very funny.

The New York Spaghetti House

The great, hideous, vacant Cleveland Trust Office Tower was built in 1971 (not to be confused with the majestic and sadly neglected Cleveland Trust Rotunda next to it on the corner of East 9th & Euclid - more on that someday) and my father worked in foreign exchange on the 27th floor. I won't get into the history of that awful, obsidian atrocity, with its hermetically sealed bathtub-like windows, home to the largest spiders I hope I never see again.

The reason I mention it is that on those occasions I would visit my father in his place of work, he would usually take me to lunch at the New York Spaghetti House, just a walk up the street across from what is now Gateway.

Source: Fresh Water Cleveland

The New York Spaghetti House was established in 1927 by Mario Brigotti at 2173 East 9th. The design was very much inspired by a warren-like New York bistro, taking up a less-than Cleveland-sized footprint, with a intimate dining rooms available by walking down stairs into a sub-level.

The building itself was constructed in 1870 as a parsonage to an adjacent church. According to their own website, Mario and his wife Maria were the entire staff in the early days. And during the 30s, as legend has it, they might accept unusual items in lieu of payment. A "life-size" plaster Indian hung from a wall in the bar for 60 years.

My strongest impression of the place (which I last visited in 1992 or 1993) was always the fact that the meat sauce was kind of beige. The family now bottles the sauce for supermarkets, the restaurant closed in 2001.

Source: The New York Spaghetti House website (defunct)

UPDATE: 12/16/2015 (Photo: Bud Hilf)

Little Orphan Annie

My earliest experience with Little Orphan Annie was the 1977 Broadway musical. I saw a touring production (at the Hanna?) in the late 70s, a copy of the soundtrack shortly followed. The second time the tour came through I saw it then, too - I asked to. I am not saying this as an excuse, but I was only ten or eleven years old at the time.

>When the movie came out in 1982, like most people, I despised it. As a fourteen year-old this should not have been a surprise, finding something I liked as a kid to be cutsey and obnoxious, though I had developed an air for British actors and so convinced myself I was there only to see Albert Finney (because I was rakish and classy) and Tim Curry (because I was underground cool.)

What I knew I disliked at the time was how long it was, how boring it was, and how they changed the ending so much. Well. A couple years ago when we found ourselves with an evening in New York City and two very small, tired children on our hands (it was Easter evening, we had been parading all day) my wife slipped out to pick up something, anything at Border’s, and brought back that for the kids to watch on her computer DVD player.

If she had asked, I would have let her know about the 1999 for-TV version Disney made which is by all accounts superior. But today I learned something new about the original comic strip I did not know which throws a few things into perspective.

The 1982 version is the "Reagan" version, because it de-emphasizes the poverty, the Depression (like the Disney version, they cut the Hooverville song, which makes sense as it is the only song that is sung by an ensemble, and not by any of the main characters) and basically gives Warbucks’ grotesque wealth nothing to stand in contrast to.

One obnoxious added gag involves a “Bolshevik” attempting to throw a cartoon bomb into Warbucks’ mansion. After the bomber is dispatched (we won’t get into Punjab, who was at least an actual character in the strip, if not the musical) Annie asks Miss Grace why anyone would hate Mr. Warbucks.

Miss Grace sighs condescendingly and says, “He's living proof that the American system really works and the Bolsheviks don't want anyone to know about that.”

More glaring to me than that, when placed side-by-side with the Disney version, is how much the 1982 film wants to ignore New York City. You can’t even tell that’s where it’s set, it looks like California. When Warbucks decides to take Annie on the town, instead of singing a lovesong to “NYC” they sing an extended and wearying song (found only in this film) about how great the movies are, and he rents out Radio City for them to watch (get this) Camille.

And then (get this) we get to see a condensed, but not condensed enough, edit of Camille! Alone. In Radio City Musical Hall, all alone. An example of wealth and influence, but it looks cold to me.

The Disney version features Victor Garber singing (because Albert Finney really can’t) NYC and we get the whole thing. I mean, I get it, Disney bought Times Square and has been pushing the place ever since, but this is a pretty classy way to do it. And the 1999 version is a lot more sincere, less sloppy. The girl playing Annie is charming in her ordinariness, not obnoxiously optimistic like the freakishly freckled kid in the 1982 film.

And then there’s the matter of FDR, who is a honest-to-goodness superhero in the musical, as you know, he was in real life. In 1982 we do the FDR thing (including a hideous Eleanor impersonator who appears in no other version) but makes it clear he’s not relevant and we don’t see him again. In 1999 he’s front and center, the New Deal is the savior of the nation - and he even appears at the end, like Eliot Ness, with his G-Men blocking the door so the crooks can’t escape!

Now. The irony. Let us go over a brief history of Little Orphan Annie, the comic strip.

Created in 1924 by Harold Gray (following a number of “Little Orphan” variants by Gray and other cartoonists, ragamuffins with names like Little Orphan Otto and Little Orphan Rooney) creates an orphan girl with a doll named Emily Marie for a companion who escapes from the orphanage and survives in the street by sheer pluckiness.

A year later she meets Mr. - and Mrs. - Warbucks. Warbucks takes a shine to the little girl, and almost immediately urges her to call him “Daddy.” Mrs. Warbucks is a snoot who does not like the little girl, which eventually leads to Annie running away. Mrs. Warbucks eventually sees her selfish ways, apologizes … and then disappears from the strip, never to be mentioned again, as if she never existed.

Warbucks is the perfect picture of well-functioning capitalism. He despises snobs, treats his employees well and they all apparently adore him. It is this kind of world that Harold Gray approved of - one where those who were less fortunate would get ahead if they only applied themselves, and could one day be rich beyond their wildest dreams and perpetuate the cycle of endless prosperity.

He also approves of vigilantism and people getting what they deserve. As many storylines required getting in and out of scrapes with shady characters, Warbucks (and soon enough, Annie, too) would prefer to let criminals suffer any kind of grisly fate or terribly violent death than turn them over to the authorities.

Gray also made it clear through the comic that he despised the New Deal, FDR in particular, and the rise of the labor movement.

The 1977 Broadway musical, coming as it did during a bleak period in American history, was written to intentionally draw parallels between that time and the Depression, but to also offer optimism, and in the 30s a great deal of optimism arose from the promise of a “New Deal for Christmas.” Harold Gray luckily had passed away in 1968, or 9 short years later he surely would have heard that song and shot himself.

In 1936 the radio serial of Little Orphan Annie would broadcast a 15-minute episode on the Blue Network six days a week at 5:45 PM. It was the first children’s radio serial and wildly popular. The program was sponsored by … oh come on, you know who the sponsor was.

It Cannot Happen Here

“Written? Too mild a word. The play was created by polygenesis.”
- Hallie Flanagan, Arena
Telegrams …

Denver: WHERE IS REVISED VERSION ACT THREE LEWIS PLAY RUSH IMMEDIATELY.

Chicago: NEW ENDING REVISED ACT THREE LEWIS PLAY DOES NOT MAKE SENSE PLEASE ADVISE

Tampa: SPANISH COMPANY RESTIVE CANNOT LEARN LINES BY OCTOBER 27 UNLESS RECEIVE FULL TEXT PLAY IMMEDIATELY

San Francisco: OBJECT TO CUTTING WHITE HOUSE SCENE ONLY GOOD SCENE LEWIS PLAY

Nebraska: PERSON IN HIGH PLACE CONSIDERS WHITE HOUSE SCENE QUOTE ILL-ADVISED UNQUOTE LETTER FOLLOWS

Los Angeles: MAKING SUPERHUMAN EFFORTS TO MEET OCTOBER 27 LEWIS PLAY STOP IMPERATIVE HAVE NO MORE REVISIONS STOP STOP

William Watts, San Francisco production director …

The chief obstacle was the script itself - because of its hurried and superficial writing.

Orders from Washington to all productions …

… avoid all controversial issues - political angles of any degree - special appeals - racial or group appeals - or inferences in any of these directions, since Federal Theatre is interested only in presenting good theatre, neither adapting nor assuming any viewpoint beyond presenting a new and vital drama of our times, emerging from the social and economic forces of the day …

Also forbidden in most positive terms are any references to any foreign power, any policy of a foreign power, the personalities of any foreign power or government; any comparison between the United States and any specific foreign power, system, personality, etc. Our business is with a play of our time and country by a great writer of our time and country and our job is wholly a job of theatre.

A phone call from Sinclair Lews on the morning of October 25 …

I haven’t slept all night - for the matter of that as yiou know I haven’t slept for weeks. Nobody can say I haven’t given everything to the Federal Theatre … Now it is all terrible - everybody has gone into a coma … I want you to get right on the train and come to New York and postpone the play a week and get new people to do everything, or do it yourself. It is all terrible. It is all a failure.

Dorothea Lynch, Florida Project director …

We didn’t have the last act until it was just about the time to start. Then it came, without who was to say what.

Telegram evening of October 27 …

Cleveland: RESPONSIVE AUDIENCE KEYING UP FOR PERFORMANCE APPLAUSE AFTER FIRST ACT TREMENDOUS

The Plain Dealer - October 28
Sometimes it moves slowly, but it moves. On the whole it is a satisfactory production of a propaganda play that is worth doing.
- William McDermott

Sources:
Arena by Hallie Flanagan (1940)
Showtime In Cleveland
Free, Adult, Uncensored

Mulatto (play)

The New York Evening Post - November 11, 1935

Item: Langston Hughes, the short, smiling, eyebrow-mustached brown man who wrote MULATTO, a play which is right up there fighting with TOBACCO ROAD for the higher percentage of shock content, places the thoughts of this play back ten years and a thousand miles up the Niger River to Africa.

Hughes was working on a boat that stopped at a little town called Burutu. A mulatto there, the son of a native woman and an English banker who had returned to England, often came to the boat to talk to the dailors. No one else in town would have much to do with him, neither the black natives in their huts nor the pale Europeans in the English compound. Hughes went away and ever saw him again, though often wondering what had become of him.

The tragedy of the person of mixed race stayed in his mind more vividly after that experience and some years later he wrote it, though in a different land and with different characters.

...

The New York Times - October 25, 1935
Race Problems in the South the Theme of MULATTO, a ‘New Drama’ by Langston Hughes
By Brooks Atkinson

After a season dedicated chiefly to trash it is a sobering sensation to sit in the presence of a playwright who is trying his best to tell what he has on his mind.

...

The Brooklyn Daily Eagle - October 25, 1935
MULATTO: A Play by a Negro Poet about the Tragedy of Being Colored in the South Comes to the Vanderbilt Theatre
By Arthur Pollock

A good deal of warmth of feeling and sincerity has gone into the writing of “Mulatto,” the play that came to the Vanderbilt Theatre last night, but Langston Hughes is not adept in getting his ideas into shape for the theater and as a result the play is frail. MULATTO cannot expect to get much attention from the public, a fact which will no doubt not surprise the author.

...

The New York Daily Herald - May 9, 1936

Item: MULATTO the Martin Jones production of Langston Huges drama, will close tongiht at the Vanderbilt Theater and re-open Monday at the Ambassador, where the producer expects to continue it through the summer.

...

The Cleveland Press - Friday, October 16
Hughes Entertains Cast of MULATTO

Item: Langston Hughes, Cleveland poet, novelist and now a playwright, may not attend his first nights but he has no objections to throwing a party for the people who speak and act out the lines he has written.

Last night Hughes took the cast of his play “Mulatto” now at the Hanna, on a midnight junket into the local Harlem. The party included all the performers and such Harlemites as were attracted by the smell of grease paint and tagged along to join the fun.

Two Very New York Performances

Magdalyn Donnelly, Jeffery Querin
"My Name Is Ruth"
34West Productions (2010)

Incredible. Last night and this afternoon I caught two plays which could not have stood in greater contrast to each other as re: how two people can behave in a relationship.

It Was A Set Up, written by Kirk Wood Bromley in collaboration with Leah Schrager was performed in a Brooklyn living room by two extremely driven, high-intensity performers exploring a relationship in total free-fall. The husband, Tim (played by a guy named Tim) a 30ish artist of questionable professional ambition and his writerly wife Charise (played by Charise) have ceased to communicate - I mean, they communicate, all the time, their hearts and desires are on their sleeves, their faces, their everything, holding nothing back only it has been a long time since either of them have been able to provide the other with anything they want.

Only I don’t think that’s fair to her. I see him no longer interested in her and her being understandably angry because this isn’t what she asked for. Making matters worse is his one-night, flirtatious but otherwise non-actually-fucking encounter with a woman ten years his junior named Juliet (played by - wait for it - a woman named Lucy, who I found an incredibly watchable dancer.) The introduction of the presence of the memory of this woman makes what was merely a dysfunction relationship now non-functional.

She says, “Look at me,” and he says, “All I see is Juiet.” Actually, they never say those exact words, they say words much more inspired. But that’s what they mean.

Witnessing the sad disillusion of a once loving (?) partnership, with a glass of whiskey in your red, plastic tumbler (ice slowly melting, neglected) in an actual living room, right in your face, as they say, was not merely some theatrical trick. It was something I want to have happen again.

This afternoon I watched the Magdalyn, whom I adore, inhabit the Ruth in My Name Is Ruth, an unflinchingly sweet, mid-20th century retelling of, well, The Book of Ruth. Props to the other actor in the production and co-creator of the show Jeffery Querin (sorry I had to run guy, I wanted to shake hands!) who moved into and out of a number or supporting characters, including Ruth’s befuddled, sweaty, painfully adorable romantic interest Boaz.

I have seen Magdalyn play bloodthirtsy Lady Macbeth in close, urban classrooms. I have directed her as both the plotting, Lady Macbeth-like Peggy Shippen and the goofy, pint-sized Lord Cornwallis in Kirk Wood Bromley’s The American Revolution. I have worked alongside her performing Neo-Futurist plays in the scene shop of CPT for an audience of ten, crammed into a freight elevator. I do not believe I have seen Magdalyn play a character who at once is as earnest, unironic, rock-steady and true, and yet pulls it all off with a silly Minnesotan accent. Magdalyn Donnelly iz tha beez neez.

It Was A Setup, in its inaugural run, closed last night. My Name Is Ruth, in its New York premiere, opened this afternoon. And I got to see both. I love live theater!

UPDATE: "My Name is Ruth" by Stephen W. Baldwin received an award for Overall Excellence in Playwriting at the 2010 New York International Fringe Festival