Abstract
Sherril Paul Witt moved to Cleveland at an early age and as she grew up began to volunteer leading walking tours around Cleveland's Playhouse Square theaters. In 1982 she bought Best Conventions, a company that did walking tours and bus tours around Cleveland. She raised money to buy Lolly the Trolley's and in 1985 Trolley Tours of Cleveland began. In this 2005 interview she describes the process of starting the company and what they do for the city now. She also recounts some of her favorite experiences running the tours. She also mentions the changes in the city and how that has affected the tours.
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Interviewee
Paul Witt, Sherril (interviewee)
Interviewer
Kiehl, Nicole (interviewer); Souther, Mark (facilitator)
Project
History 311
Date
11-21-2005
Document Type
Oral History
Duration
58 minutes
Recommended Citation
"Sherril Paul Witt Interview, 2005" (2005). Cleveland Regional Oral History Collection. Interview 311011.
https://engagedscholarship.csuohio.edu/crohc000/192
Transcript
Nicole Kiehl [00:00:02] Okay, can you please state your name for the record?
Sherril Paul Witt [00:00:05] My name is Sherril Paul.
Nicole Kiehl [00:00:06] Alright. And can you tell me a little bit about yourself, like where you’re from and your childhood and stuff like that.
Sherril Paul Witt [00:00:14] I was born in Montreal, Canada and I came down to the United States when I was quite young. I was six. So I’ve really lived the greatest portion of my life in the US and actually in the Cleveland Akron area. I grew up in the Cleveland Akron area, went to Brecksville High School, went to Ohio Wesleyan University. I was a journalism major there. And then out of college I got into a series of sales jobs, some retailing, some other things, personnel. And really like a lot of entrepreneurial spirits, couldn’t hold a job. So I, in probably 1980, I lost my. Lost my last job or was fired. And in ’81 I began to work for the phone company. [00:00:57] And that was my last big company that I worked for. I was terribly unhappy, of course, working for the largest corporation in the world. And I had been doing volunteer work as a guide here at the Playhouse Square Theaters. That was my volunteer fund job. And I had always wished that I could turn that into something full time. I met a lady one night who did walking tours and bus tours of Cleveland. She asked me if I wanted to come work for her company and I said no, I have a fabulous high paying job with the phone company. Couldn’t do it. And about probably six months later I could see that I was not going to be able to stand staying at the phone company. [00:01:33] And I went to a meeting and found out that this lady, due to personal problems, was selling her company. So I took my best friend, we went to talk to her. My stupidity saved me because she really wasn’t making much of anything in the way of money. And I bought her company. So I bought a company that did walking tours and bus tours of Cleveland called Best Conventions. We took over at that time and it was In February of 1982, I believe all of her employees quit and I had to find new employees within just a few weeks. And we just went on for the next couple of years. I did walking tours and bus tours of Cleveland using other people’s vehicles. [00:02:12] And in 1983 I went up to Boston, Massachusetts, where I’d lived in the early 70s and went to a wedding up there, my husband and I. My husband at the time and I road Lolly the Trolley in Boston. And I said, wouldn’t this be a great thing to have one of these in Cleveland? [00:02:26] Because not everybody wants to do a walking Tour. So I said, maybe if we could just get one of these, we could keep it busy. So I came back to Cleveland and I began to look into trying to get these vehicles. And I found out who made them. Called the gentleman, told him I wanted to do it in Cleveland. And he said, you know, I don’t really know that this is a smart idea. Cleveland, Ohio. Who wants to take a tour? So I also talked to some people in Key West, Florida. And the guy down there, he goes, honey, he says, if you don’t have four, you can’t be in business. I said, four? I said, I could never have four trolleys in Cleveland, Ohio. So began a long process of trying to raise money. I called on over 300 people to try and find funding for the company that I was starting, called Trolley Tours of Cleveland. I mortgaged my. My husband and I mortgaged our house and put everything we had down as a down payment for two trolleys that we had ordered. And we thought we could get the company up and running. About six months after we’d gotten back and almost two and a half years later, in 1985, in April of 1985, 20 years ago, we opened the doors to Trolley Tours of Cleveland with one trolley. And there are all kinds of stories that go along with it, but we started, and it has been a wonderful adventure.
Nicole Kiehl [00:03:44] Great. What do you like most about the trolley itself?
Sherril Paul Witt [00:03:50] I think that we have changed hundreds of thousands of people’s opinions about our city, including those of Clevelanders. Some people will say, well, I know everything there is to know about Cleveland. I don’t need to go on your tour. And I always promise them that there’ll be at least two things that they’ll learn on the tour that they didn’t know. And it always happens. I like the fact that we impact young people. And I’ve been in business long enough now that I meet adults like you who say, oh, I was on the trolley when I was in third grade, and they’re adults. And it’s really. It makes me feel very, very old. And we’ve been part of people’s weddings. We’ve married over 3,000 brides since we’ve been in business. We have just been part of the fabric of Cleveland’s population.
Nicole Kiehl [00:04:38] I remember I went to my senior prom on Lolly, the trolley.
Sherril Paul Witt [00:04:44] What high school?
Nicole Kiehl [00:04:45] Padua.
Sherril Paul Witt [00:04:46] Yes. Okay.
Nicole Kiehl [00:04:47] Back in 1999.
Sherril Paul Witt [00:04:49] Very good.
Nicole Kiehl [00:04:51] What other besides, you know, proms and weddings, what other type of events has the trolley gone to?
Sherril Paul Witt [00:05:00] We. Let’s see. I opened I-480. We went through a barrier, crashed a barrier for the governor then. And I think that was Celeste in 1985 or 1986. We’ve been part of the Republican National Convention meetings. We’ve been part of the Democratic National Convention meetings when they’ve had, you know, caucuses here in Cleveland. We were part of the last election. We were part of Project Act to get people to go vote. And it was very interesting. I drove part of the time and we picked up homeless men from the shelters and took them out. And they were paid $75 a day to go into neighborhoods. And it was really something because you got to meet and talk to homeless people. And they’re all. Many of them are very well educated and you just wonder what happened in their lives. The other things we do, I work with a Cuyahoga County Planning Authority and we take people on tours to show them about Cleveland. We don’t do the tours, the Planning Authority does, but they’re fascinating. It’s all about what’s going to be happening or what is happening in Cleveland. We are part of the third grade curriculum for the State of Ohio. And when kids study my community, they come down to the trolley to learn about the city. So we’re making future, hopefully future passengers out of them. We do community events. We’ve been to Columbus for Labor Day events. We have gone down to West Virginia for parades. We really. We do everything. We do this is your life parties. When someone has an older person in their family. We came up with this many years ago. You can call us and rent the trolley and we’ll take you out. And then you have to work with your family and you have to find all the places that mom and dad or somebody lived and worked and where they went to school. And we drive by those places and sometimes the neighborhoods aren’t the nicest, but we had one instance that I can recall, and I’m sure it’s happened more than once. We were in, I think it was Glenville or Hough, and we stopped the trolley in front of a house because this man had grown up there. And the people came out and said, why are you here? And they said, well, we’re here because my dad grew up in this house. So they asked everybody off the trolley, they took them in the house, they showed them around. It was a wonderful experience. So we really, you know, we create memories for people. We do corporate transportation. We do Christmas parties. We do anything that requires transportation. The thing that we won’t do. And this is one of my personal philosophies. I don’t allow any alcohol on the trolley because I just don’t approve of people being on moving vehicles and being drunk, especially people in wedding parties. You shouldn’t show up to your wedding drunk and you know, you really shouldn’t even show up to your reception drunk. So we, if somebody wants to do that, they go somewhere else. We also kind of, as part of our philosophy is, you know, mom, apple pie and the flag. So that’s who we are.
Nicole Kiehl [00:08:00] Wow, that’s very nice. There are special tours like for specific reasons that have to do with different parts of history.
Sherril Paul Witt [00:08:11] Right, like that.
Nicole Kiehl [00:08:13] Can you tell me a little bit about those special tours that you have that focus on one specific event or person or.
Sherril Paul Witt [00:08:21] We do. And it all comes about because people ask. And that’s how a tour gets, you know, gets to be. We, we do a tour that is Lakeview Cemetery in Little Italy. And that was because a lady out at Lakeview, Kathryn Cole, who is no longer working there as community relations, came to me many, many years ago, probably the first or second year we were in business. She said, we want to expand the community’s attitude about Lakeview Cemetery, that it’s not just a place for the people to die and be buried. And Lakeview is a fabulous, fabulous resource if you’ve never been there. So we developed and taught our people how to do Lakeview Cemetery tour. And the people there are fabulous, really surprising people. The only player to be killed during a major league baseball game is buried at Lakeview. And people leave mitts and gloves and bats by his grave and old baseballs and baseball cards and hats and it’s kind of a tribute to him. Elliot Ness, of course, is buried or sprinkled, shall we say, at Lakeview. President Garfield is there, John D. Rockefeller, of course, and his family are there. And the Rockefellers do come on a very low key basis to Lakeview Cemetery to visit the, the grave site. So it’s a wonderful resource. We do an Elliot Ness tour that came about in probably 2000, I think, or 1999, when the Cleveland Playhouse did a new play which wasn’t terribly successful, called Elliot Ness in Cleveland. And it was about his time in Cleveland when he was our safety director. And they came to us and we developed a tour so that people would take our tour, go to dinner and then go to the play. And I think we took eight or nine hundred people on in a six week Spanish on these Elliot Ness tours, which we still do. [00:09:59] Let’s see, we do an ethnic markets tour and people just love to go shopping. So we came up with an ethnic markets tour of Cleveland. And then that has dropped down to the grade school level. And sixth, seventh and eighth graders are brought on our ethnic markets tour because they need to learn about diversity. Not every grocery store is Topp’s and they’re not all clean and they don’t all smell nice and they don’t all have the same food. So we take kids on diversity tours and it really is an eye opener for them. We do church tours. Those are probably the most difficult tours to do because it’s hard to get access to the churches and you know, people get married so you can’t go on Saturdays. And there are funerals and other sorts of things that prevent us from getting in. But it’s still a very interesting thing. So we’ll do a tour of anything. We did design an African American tour many years ago and I had people working on it a long time and we put a lot of money into it and it didn’t turn out to be at all successful for us because. It’s very interesting. African American people were uncomfortable having African American history given to them by a white person. And my white drivers were uncomfortable doing a little bit uncomfortable doing the tour because there was a little bit of resentment. So it was an unusual situation. And unfortunately, the qualifications that you need to work for us as a tour guide are the very qualifications that if any, you know, if an African American has those qualifications, they can get a much better paying, full time job somewhere else. So it’s very, you know, it’s very hard. We have several African Americans working for us on a part time basis. And so that’s another tour. But we have other tours that we’re working on. A movie tour, movie sites tour, because many movies and TV shows have been shot in Cleveland. So we’re working on that. I’d like to do a women’s history tour of Cleveland, keying in on all the famous women who are from our city or what they’ve contributed to our city. So we have lots of things yet to come. And also a Tremont, Ohio City tour, which I think I can throw together for the spring, hopefully.
Nicole Kiehl [00:12:10] Who writes the scripts?
Sherril Paul Witt [00:12:12] Me.
Nicole Kiehl [00:12:12] You do?
Sherril Paul Witt [00:12:13] Yes, yes. And my background is writing. It always has been since I was a tiny child. And I’ve won little writing contests and that sort of thing. And being a journalism major kind of honed my skills a little bit. But I am very, very particular. Many cities that you go to in the United States, they simply give A book of facts to the tour guides and then tell them to kind of do their own thing. And it’s obvious in the quality of the tour that you often get. We have been told by journalists, because most journalists who come to Cleveland take our tour and by people who travel the world, that our tour is one of the best that they’ve ever taken. And I am very, very picky about who works for me and how they do the tour. They have to follow the script. They have to memorize 60 pages of script. The other tours I’m a little more relaxed on because it’s not quite as particular. But if you don’t do the script in the correct order, the places don’t show up on time and you don’t want to go. And I’m sure you’ve been on tours too. They go over there or back down the block or over there. You. You just don’t do that as a tour guide. So we are very professional and we are known for it.
Nicole Kiehl [00:13:21] So what makes the script kind of unique compared to.
Sherril Paul Witt [00:13:25] It’s well written and it uses good English. That’s more than most people I think are capable of these days. Our script has facts that people don’t know about Cleveland. It reaffirms good things about the city. We try to never have a negative viewpoint. And it’s odd, whenever I get a phone call with a complaint, it’s because somebody has varied from the script and thrown in something they want to talk about, and it’s usually either offensive or wrong. So, you know, stick to the script people.
Nicole Kiehl [00:14:00] Right. So every tour that they do, every specific tour you do.
Sherril Paul Witt [00:14:04] Every city tour, the one hour and two hour tours we do are scripted, and that’s a quality control issue for us.
Nicole Kiehl [00:14:18] So how far, like with the city tours, how far does the trolley actually go?
Sherril Paul Witt [00:14:23] Where? The vicinity around Cleveland.
Sherril Paul Witt [00:14:25] On a normal two hour public sightseeing tour, we cover 20 miles and probably maybe 100 to 200 points of interest. We go as far west as Ohio City, as far east as University Circle.
Nicole Kiehl [00:14:40] Okay. And you go down Euclid and everything.
Sherril Paul Witt [00:14:43] We try desperately these days to go down Euclid Avenue. It’s a horrid experience, it really is. But our tour basically covers the Flats downtown, the Warehouse District, Ohio City, Gateway, Playhouse Square, anything between Playhouse Square and University Circle, be it the Clinic, Dunham Tavern, whatever, and then University Circle, the upper level of the Cultural Gardens, heading out to the City Greenhouse. We stop at the City Greenhouse for about 10 minutes and then move in along the Shoreway coming in through North Coast Harbor.
Nicole Kiehl [00:15:17] Can you comment on the Playhouse Square as a tourist attraction for people?
Sherril Paul Witt [00:15:23] Playhouse Square is an essential tourist attraction in Cleveland. When it started out and when I was doing tours, all the theaters were in shambles and they had the all night strut basically to keep it going for Jacques Brell. So there was really nothing here. The Hanna was an operating theater at that point in time. And it was really the only, you know, good operating theater. Playhouse Square is our jewel. It is the second largest performing arts center in the United States outside of Lincoln Center in New York. I believe it is. And it is just. It is a jewel. The stories that go with the theaters are just wonderful. The theater restoration work, of course, is superb. And it is, it is one of the little heartbeats of Cleveland. There are places that are just part of Cleveland’s soul and its spirit, and Playhouse Square is certainly one of those areas.
Nicole Kiehl [00:16:16] As a child, do you have any memories of the Playhouse Square area going to any of the theaters or anything like that?
Sherril Paul Witt [00:16:23] I remember going there for a movie. I never, you know, never went to live theater that I can recall. I would go to the Hanna more often than I would go to the Playhouse Square theaters. I haunted Playhouse Square as a young adult going to the bars. And none of the bars that were there when I was, you know, a young adult in my 20s are still, are there now. They’re all gone. So it was. That was really what we would do, you know, that. That was in my 20s, very bad date in high school. I had to go to, I think. Was it. What was the ice cream place? I want to say Mary Coyle, but I think that’s down an Akron. There’s an ice cream place on the south side of Euclid Avenue where Hickerson’s was and where. But anyway, bad high school date went there, yuck yuck.
Nicole Kiehl [00:17:14] Okay. Do you remember the specific bars that you used to go to?
Sherril Paul Witt [00:17:16] Oh, sure. We went to the Elegant Hog. We went to the Pewter Mug. We went to the Last Moving Picture Company. We went to the Sweetwater Cafe, which is where I found my husband, my first husband. And those are really the primary bars that we went to that were in Playhouse Square. There was one that Pat Daley used to play at that is. Was in the standalone building that was on the south side of Euclid Avenue too. And I think the building might still be there. I also remember going into what was the old WJW, I think it was, or WEWS. There was a TV station on the south side of Euclid Avenue. And somehow I made some contacts with some people and they had to go clean out the building. So I went in and we just went through just tons of junk. It was amazing, all the things that were in there. I think maybe it was the Phoenix Theater Company, something like that. But I found a chair, and it had to have been Channel 5, because I found a chair, which I have at home, and I’ll probably put it up for the WVIZ auction next year. That had a piece of paper that had been glued on the back said Dorothy. And I’m quite sure it was one of Dorothy Fuldheim’s chairs when she was there. So that was. That was fun. And I would say mostly my twenties was when I haunted Playhouse Square, and then of course, later when I was doing the tours.
Nicole Kiehl [00:18:39] So you spent a lot of time in that area in your 20s?
Sherril Paul Witt [00:18:43] Fridays and Saturdays, sure.
Nicole Kiehl [00:18:44] Every Friday and Saturday.
Sherril Paul Witt [00:18:46] Pretty much. Pretty much.
Nicole Kiehl [00:18:51] Back to the trolley. How many are there?
Sherril Paul Witt [00:18:55] Right now I have nine trolleys and Gus the Bus.
Nicole Kiehl [00:19:02] Is there any significance with the color?
Sherril Paul Witt [00:19:05] Well, the trolleys when they first came, were green and red. The top half was green, the bottom half was red, and they were made out of metal. And Cleveland has a lot of salt and a lot of corrosive materials on its streets. So over the years, we learned how to rebuild our own vehicles. And in doing the rebuilding, it was just easier to have the man who did all the castings and moldings in fiberglass just to do red. So he did trolley red. And so we just made them all red. And that was how they got to be that way. But they were red and green when they first came.
Nicole Kiehl [00:19:35] Now, how did Gus the Bus come about?
Sherril Paul Witt [00:19:39] Lolly needed a boyfriend. And so we. We bought Gus the Bus because we felt that there was a need for a non trolley vehicle for corporate use.
Nicole Kiehl [00:19:50] So how many, does that do tours as well?
Sherril Paul Witt [00:19:52] It can. Most people prefer to be on the trolley.
Nicole Kiehl [00:19:57] Now. The trolley can be in use all year round, too.
Sherril Paul Witt [00:20:00] Mm. It is heated in and closed. And we’re going into what we call the holiday light season. And so we take people out for holiday lights rides, but there are no holiday lights to see anymore. When we started out in 1985, we started in April. And about September of ’85, we knew we were going to run out of money in the winter. And so someone came to me and said, so what are you going to do for Christmas this year? And I went, well, what do you want to do for Christmas? Because we had nothing in mind, they said, well, you can take people out to see the. The Christmas lights, can’t you? And I went, yeah. I said, how much you’ll be willing to pay? So person gave me a figure and I went back to the office. I said, we’ve got a gig, you know. I said, let’s find some Christmas lights and figure out what’s going to be going on. Well, that was the first year that they totally redid Public Square and they had the Care Bears and the whole big thing. [00:20:50] And there were thousands and thousands of people coming downtown to do this. So we took our trolleys and advertised holiday lights and we had, I think, two trolleys, maybe, maybe four by that time. We had two used ones that we got in that summer and they didn’t have any heat in them. So these poor sweet people would get on the trolleys and my very brave, intrepid drivers would go out and we’d drive to. We’d drive to Shaker Square and we’d drive to Nela Park and we’d drive around downtown. And of course, if you breathe in a vehicle that is not heated, your breath goes on the windows and then it freezes. And it was a very cold winter, so we’d get somewhere and then we’d tell everybody to take out their least used credit card and they’d have to chip the ice off the windows and have to wipe it off and look out and see what was out there. And then we’d go to the next place and they’d chip off the ice. And it was really. It was something. It really was. And there are people who will tell me I was on that first year, you know, and they remembered being on the first year with us. So we just took what the public asked for and gave it to them and we built it up. Because there were lots of things from 1985 through about 1992, 93, things were rocking and the lights were good. Downtown, they do all the trees, they do up and down ninth street in Superior, we had the skating rink in Public Square. It really. It looked good. And there was a man in Cuyahoga Heights about 15 minutes down 77, who would do his entire house up with over 200,000 lights. And it was a huge attraction. So that was part of our lights ride. And then the zoo began to let us drive through to do holiday lights. Well, about three years ago, the gentleman with the house in Cuyahoga Heights, you know, said 20 Christmases was enough. He was done. So he closed down, sold his stuff. The zoo bought part of it and we started, you know, we’ve been doing zoo lights probably six years maybe the zoo closed down and they’re not doing lights anymore. So that’s gone. We did Malley’s for a couple of years. Malley’s had their little thing you could go see out at the Malley’s factory with some windows. They closed down. There’s nothing to see. And we don’t want to drive out to Nela park because Nela Park’s like two minutes of lights. And so, I mean, there’s nothing to see. And it’s really quite grim. And people keep coming back anyway, not in the droves that they used to. I mean, we used to do thousands of people. It used to be December was one of my biggest months, and it used to give us the money to get through the winter. This is going to be the worst December probably in 20 years. So it’s going to be terrible, just awful. Nobody wants to do any lights.
Nicole Kiehl [00:23:27] What would you describe as, you know, your average passenger on Lolly the Trolley?
Sherril Paul Witt [00:23:32] Birth to death. I am all ages, all kinds of people, all nationalities. We really are. We appeal to everyone. I mean, if you don’t smile when you see a trolley go by, there’s really. There’s definitely something wrong with you. So we. My average. There is no average passenger when I’m doing, you know, eight or nine thousand school kids during May and early June. Then it’s school kids when I’m doing my average weekend customer who is, you know, coming in for whatever reason is usually a suburbanite between maybe around 45 probably and 75, and they’ve got somebody visiting and so they bring them down. Some people have been on the trolley 10 times because every time someone comes in, they come down and ride. So our average customer could be a corporation with international visitors. Our average customer could be. We do all the orientation. Well, we do an awful lot for Cleveland State, I think we do most of the freshman orientation. We do all of the student orientation for the parents at Case and at John Carroll. So we do a lot.
Nicole Kiehl [00:24:49] Anything else for Cleveland State besides the orientation?
Sherril Paul Witt [00:24:52] We do the education department teacher training. And then we fortunately get those ladies back and gentlemen back when they’re teaching and they have to come up with a field trip and they call us. So we’re breeding, you know, future business that way. We do the international students here, both the English as a Second Language international plus the regular international students. [00:25:18] So that’s Pradnya Sakpal, I think, and her folks. So we do a lot.
Nicole Kiehl [00:25:25] Do you ever drive the Trolley yourself.
Sherril Paul Witt [00:25:29] Usually in the spring when we’re short drivers for the school tours because we might have eight or nine trolleys out, people bring us 200 kids at a time. So if I’m short people, I’ll hop on, do a one hour tour for the kids. Or if somebody doesn’t show up on time, which rarely happens. The profile of my average driver is 55 to 75 years old. Most of my drivers are over 60 and most of them have been with me for probably anywhere from 10 to 20 years. The whole time. They’re all experienced and they’re all very loyal and they love what they do. They really love what they do. [00:26:09] How many people clap for you when you’re done? They don’t clap. They probably don’t clap for you at the end of class. But it’s a very interesting job. And there’s a philosophy that some people have said that, you know, that I hire birds with broken wings. And it’s adults who are going through some trying times in their lives, perhaps a divorce, perhaps the death of a parent, whatever it would be. And somehow they find their way to trolley tours and we enable them to have a little transformation by becoming a different person and by doing something that really empowers them and we create differences in their lives. So it’s a good thing.
Nicole Kiehl [00:26:52] So you’re located in the Flats?
Sherril Paul Witt [00:26:55] We’re in the Flats. Our public boarding station is at the Powerhouse at Nautica, but we are not there day in, day out. Our actual trolley administrative center is on Columbus Road in the Flats in an industrial area between the Columbus Road bridge and the Flatiron Cafe.
Nicole Kiehl [00:27:13] So do you have a garage there where you store the stuff?
Sherril Paul Witt [00:27:14] We used to have a garage and the man who owned the building wanted his garage back. So we store the trolleys outside now and we have a garage where we can pull in and do work on them.
Nicole Kiehl [00:27:28] Now as a business owner, can you offer any words of advice for an aspiring entrepreneur?
Sherril Paul Witt [00:27:35] For an aspiring entrepreneur, you just really have to have your dream. You really have to believe in it. You can’t surround yourself with people who are negative because they would love to see you fail. You have to keep going no matter what. And you have to understand that if you’re an entrepreneur, you will pay an enormous price for your success. In my case, it cost me my marriage. My ex-husband is my business partner and I see him every day and we are both remarried. But it’s still a very sad and very kind of. I guess there’s an unhappy part of me that that had to happen. But my theory was that we had always put so much time into the business that we didn’t really put much time into our marriage. And that being the case, when the time came and things began to get rocky, we decided to save the business instead of our marriage. And it’s hard. It’s very hard. Even though we’re both married again, it’s still hard to see each other every day. On a bad day. On the good days it’s just fine. But on a bad day it’s particularly difficult. But for an entrepreneur, if you’re going to start a business, it’ll always take twice as long and cost twice as much money as you think. You always have to have the correct legal and accounting help. If you ignore those two factors. A lot of businesses try and use the money they should be paying for taxes or unemployment or workers comp. They use that to run the business and the government will close you down before you can even blink. So you can’t screw with the government. You really have to be out there. If you’re not a salesman, you really shouldn’t be an entrepreneur. There are a lot of people who are technically capable at what they do. People who can bake pies or people who are good scientists and they think they can start a business and they can’t. You have to read a book called the E Myth and it’s the myth of the entrepreneur. People who think they can do something well think that they can also start a business. If you do something well, you need people to sell it for you. Most people who do something well, technical are terrible salespeople. And if you can’t sell, you, you just can’t be in business because that’s all you’re doing from morning to night is you’re telling people who you are, why you’re in business, why they should buy from you. And you have to give absolutely incredible customer service. And that’s a dying art.
Nicole Kiehl [00:30:06] With Lolly the Trolley. What is your most memorable experience like the one that just sticks out.
Sherril Paul Witt [00:30:13] Good or bad? I’ve got good and bad. The good experiences I think are probably, I think just the things that we’ve done, I mean just a little odd stuff. You’re making people really happy. People telling you that you’ve made a difference for them. We took a group of Alzheimer’s people out one time and it really meant a lot to them to hear about old time things and it helped them because that’s the memory you have. The long term memory is the one that stays with you when you have Alzheimer’s. And it helped a lot of them. It made them feel good because here was something they could see, they could grasp onto. They did know what it was. And when you’re in Alzheimer’s, you’re constantly juggling, trying to remember who you are, where you are and what’s going on. So to see something that, you know, is really critical. We did a, when we were first in business. We did a transvestite convention. And it was really incredible. I mean, we did these huge men dressed as women coming on the trolley. And of course, transvestites aren’t gay. They just like to dress in women’s clothes. So they had their wives with them and all kinds of things. Like, it was really. It was a hoot. We’ve done a lot of gay things. A lot of. We did a gay commitment ceremony that was just delightful. The guys were wonderful. And we’ve done female commitment ceremonies. We’ve done, you know, religious things. We’ve done Boy Scout dedications. We’ve done lots of things to be the fabric of Cleveland. And we have become kind of generic, like Kleenex. Almost all kids know Lolly the Tr
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