Abstract
Edward J. Fritz of the Shaker Lakes Nature Center discusses his involvement with the Center beginning in the late 1970s. Fritz was involved with a number of maintenance and improvement projects at the Center, which he discusses in detail. Also discussed are educational programs and fundraising campaigns, volunteerism, deer population control, lake dredging, staffing issues, and cooperation with adjacent city governments. A lawsuit filed by the East Cleveland Farmers Market against the Nature Center is also discussed, as is the battle against highway development through Shaker Lakes, the Cuyahoga Valley National Park, and a number of additional environmental issues.
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Interviewee
Fritz, Edward J. (interviewee)
Interviewer
Bifulco, Anthony (interviewer);Sack, Mark (participant)
Project
Shaker Lakes Nature Center
Date
7-6-2006
Document Type
Oral History
Duration
56 minutes
Recommended Citation
"Edward J. Fritz Interview, 6 July 2006" (2006). Cleveland Regional Oral History Collection. Interview 902009.
https://engagedscholarship.csuohio.edu/crohc000/205
Transcript
Anthony Bifulco [00:00:01] Okay, it’s Thursday, July 6th, about approximately 11:30 in the morning, and we are interviewing Ed Fritz. First question, when and where were you born?
Edward Fritz [00:00:14] October 1936.
Anthony Bifulco [00:00:19] Where?
Edward Fritz [00:00:20] Newark, New Jersey.
Anthony Bifulco [00:00:24] What in your youth or background, if you can take a second to think about, led to an interest in nature in general?
Edward Fritz [00:00:34] I suppose being a Boy Scout and having parents who were gardeners and generally made sure I was exposed to the out of doors. I grew up in an environment where all the empty lots hadn’t been built on yet and there was still plenty of place for kids to roam.
Anthony Bifulco [00:00:58] You’re saying even in Newark, New York.
Edward Fritz [00:01:00] And also before television, before the media took over.
Anthony Bifulco [00:01:07] When did you move to. When and why did you move to Cleveland area?
Edward Fritz [00:01:12] I came to Cleveland in the fall of 1959 to work for what was then a DuPont plant in Cleveland.
Anthony Bifulco [00:01:20] What did you do for DuPont?
Edward Fritz [00:01:22] I’m a chemical engineer. I did process work.
Anthony Bifulco [00:01:29] Now, once you got to Cleveland, would you be able to discuss a little bit what your first impressions of Cleveland were? Cleveland area when you moved here in 1959?
Edward Fritz [00:01:47] I sort of had decided I was going to stay in Cleveland. My parents had been moved around a few times and I don’t think I wanted that. And I was just going to make it home. I’d grown up in New Jersey and Michigan and I settled on Cleveland in between and got a job here.
Anthony Bifulco [00:02:12] What sort of life did you have in Cleveland in terms of your family?
Edward Fritz [00:02:17] Well, I was a bachelor when I came here in 59. I got married in 66. And still married.
Anthony Bifulco [00:02:26] Was a woman from Cleveland?
Edward Fritz [00:02:27] No, she was from South Africa. Met her at a beach party in Timberlake on Lake Erie.
Anthony Bifulco [00:02:36] Okay, so did you have kids?
Edward Fritz [00:02:39] No, no kids.
Anthony Bifulco [00:02:42] From there, when and how and why did you eventually get involved with the nature center here at Shaker Lakes?
Edward Fritz [00:02:53] I just had a great- And I got into volunteering. I came from a- My mother was big on volunteering and I just gradually got into various volunteer activities. And I didn’t get involved with the Nature Center until the late ’70s or more into the ’80s. I was not involved in the initial establishment of the nature center. I was living a few blocks away. But I was largely unaware of the Clark Freeway controversy.
Anthony Bifulco [00:03:33] Where did you- Where were you living? Or we can back up. When you did move to Cleveland area, where exactly did you move to?
Edward Fritz [00:03:40] And then Shaker Heights, Buckeye area, and then Cleveland Heights, East Cleveland for a little while. And then I settled in Cleveland Heights.
Anthony Bifulco [00:03:53] And you mentioned that you’ve always been interested in volunteering. That came from Your mother? What?
Edward Fritz [00:04:01] Yes.
Anthony Bifulco [00:04:01] In what other areas did you volunteer before you got involved with the Nature Center?
Edward Fritz [00:04:08] Oh, largely at church, I think. I think that was mostly what I did.
Anthony Bifulco [00:04:17] Well, I guess that leads to. You said by the late 70s you got involved with the Nature Center. What sparked that involvement? What happened to get you to come in here and start to volunteer?
Edward Fritz [00:04:32] As I recall, I started coming here, I think- I’m not even sure when I joined, but it was sometime in the ’70s. And I got to know Rich Horton, who was director. And it was fairly obvious that he was having a dreadful time with the heating system in the building. It was hot, cold, hot, cold. And he had a little loyal corps of volunteer, mostly women who were being fried and frozen alternately on about a half-hour cycle. And I think I had had some experience with doing home energy audits and with heating and cooling and HVAC in general. And I said, Rich, maybe I can do something about this. He’d exhausted, you know, the commercial people weren’t able to do anything. So I took it upon myself to examine the system real closely. Look at the furnace, look at the controls. There was no air conditioning. It was just a heating only system. I think I talked to the manufacturer of the equipment. I found some things I didn’t like about it, the way it was set up and the hardware involved, and was essentially told, God, you got a bummer for that year and we can’t do anything about it. Of course, their implication was put a new furnace in, which they certainly didn’t want to do. So I think as a result of my energy audit work, I knew a contractor who I got involved here who was willing to actually make some changes to the controls on the heating system. And he did, he did what I asked him to do. And he had some input into it too. And the problem went away. It got a lot better. I think that was my initial involvement. I looked at some old notes and files and that’s what pops up from there.
Anthony Bifulco [00:07:10] How long was that whole process of repairing the heating system take?
Edward Fritz [00:07:15] Maybe a year. I don’t really- And I started doing other little mechanical things around the building. I don’t fully remember what anymore, but fixing things, that’s my mainstay. Every place that I volunteered. I typically make things work.
Anthony Bifulco [00:07:43] What is it about the Nature Center here that really led you to really long-term, long-term involvement? Because you’ve been involved, you still are. We walked in today, you’re fixing things.
Edward Fritz [00:07:57] That’s a good typical example. I’m fixing door closers that bang and I looked through their file. There was very little on how to adjust them. I called a distributor who the manufacturer, and they sent me a fairly inadequate one page sheet on how to adjust the particular model door closure we have. And I’ve got one of them a lot better than it was if it stays that way. So I don’t know, I tend to get involved with somebody and stay with it.
Anthony Bifulco [00:08:41] Have you used the Nature Center and Shaker Lakes for recreation?
Edward Fritz [00:08:46] Oh, yeah. My wife and I come here regularly. We’ve had wedding anniversaries here and come to a lot of programs here, even done a few programs.
Anthony Bifulco [00:09:03] What kind of programs have you done?
Edward Fritz [00:09:06] They have a brown bag luncheon once a month and I did one on deer problems. Particularly it’s involving the national park and the Metroparks. Typically I get interest like this. I do a lot of research on it and don’t really do much with it. I gave a talk to the ladies at the Brown Bag concert. So typically this would involve you talking to 15 or 20 people who aren’t going to go out and shoot any deer or, you know, make any particular waves. But the Shaker Cable company decided, I guess running a cable operation, it’s hard to fill those hundred and some odd slots. They showed up with a big truck sitting out here and, you know, three or four of you guys with video cameras and they recorded the thing. And it turned out it was used over and over again. I’ve never heard it, but used over and over again as far south as south of Columbus. So it must have gone by satellite back and forth. And it was- So that’s one example I can think of.
Anthony Bifulco [00:10:47] Well, speaking of that example, you said you spoke about deer problems and you.
Edward Fritz [00:10:53] Did a lot of research in order.
Anthony Bifulco [00:10:54] To put the talk together. What sticks out in your mind about some of the deer problems here at the Nature Center in Shaker Lakes?
Edward Fritz [00:11:05] I haven’t heard much specifically about problems here yet. I mean, there’s some people around who get their shrubbery- I mean, they’re trying to keep this place wild and natural. So so far I haven’t heard any real problems. But there are problems in the area with people’s shrubbery being eaten up. There are problems in the Metroparks and particularly the national park, which I also helped. I got involved in helping to get the national park established in the early ’70s. And I figure that’s one of my big accomplishments in life. And there, because of the animal rights people, they focus on one animal. They won’t let them have controlled hunts or, you know, various means of killing, keeping the deer population within reason, and they’ve really wrecked a lot of the ecosystem. But that has not happened around here, from what I hear.
Anthony Bifulco [00:12:31] Can you offer any reasons why it hasn’t become the kind of problem that it’s been in other places?
Edward Fritz [00:12:38] Time, maybe. And maybe it’s sufficiently wooded. This- I’m just speculating here, hadn’t really thought about this matter. It’s wooded enough that the deer population is fairly under control. The trees are big and they’re not hurt by the deer, whereas in the national park they have more open areas and it’s more susceptible to deer damage. And they’re also trying to restore old ecosystems that, you know, had gone by the wayside and they’re trying to establish more diversity and the deer interfere with that.
Anthony Bifulco [00:13:32] And you’re talking about the national park.
Edward Fritz [00:13:33] Yeah, the Cuyahoga Valley National Park.
Anthony Bifulco [00:13:36] Okay, okay. What other kinds of things have you and your wife done with the Nature Center in terms of recreation? You said you frequently- You come here all the time.
Edward Fritz [00:13:53] I mean, we came over here and had a picnic. A great place, you know, 10 minutes from where we live. And we walk the area, come to programs, volunteer. She doesn’t volunteer here. She does a lot of volunteer work, but she wants someplace where she can just be.
Anthony Bifulco [00:14:26] What kind of programs have you guys been that comes to mind that you guys have attended?
Edward Fritz [00:14:33] Oh, mainly the brown bag lectures and a number of special lectures that were sponsored by the Nature Center or the or jointly with the Shaker Historical Society.
Anthony Bifulco [00:14:53] Have you learned through some of these lectures and again, your involvement with very close involvement with the organization here about the history of the Nature Center?
Edward Fritz [00:15:06] Yeah, I’ve got a pretty good idea what happened, even though I was not involved at the time when it happened.
Anthony Bifulco [00:15:15] Okay. Would you be able to speak about that? About what they had the freeway fight actually talking about. And when the Nature Center first started, which came out of the freeway fight.
Edward Fritz [00:15:27] Yes. It was the only freeway, throughway, interstate that was actually stopped anywhere around. There were just enough rich, influential people, I guess, who had enough clout to make it not happen. And Albert Porter was absolutely determined to. He denigrated this whole area, duck pond, and he really pushed it.
Anthony Bifulco [00:16:01] You said he denigrated the whole area of the duck pond. In what way?
Edward Fritz [00:16:06] Oh, just as not a resource that needed saving. I forget his exact words, but he said some really nasty things about the lakes and the environment and what have you.
Anthony Bifulco [00:16:23] And you mentioned some, you said some wealthy, influential people who were able to bring pressure to bear on stopping a thruway.
Edward Fritz [00:16:34] That’s my impression.
Anthony Bifulco [00:16:36] Who are some of these rich influences? Bunch of people that were able to.
Edward Fritz [00:16:39] I don’t want to use names because I just don’t have firsthand information that I can vouch to. It wasn’t something that was necessarily real public, and I don’t have any firsthand information.
Anthony Bifulco [00:17:00] And we’ll get- I’d like to just ask some more questions about, you know, you’ve absorbed a lot of history over the years since your involvement of the Nature Center of Shaker Lakes. What sticks out in your mind or is most compelling or interesting about the history you’ve learned of the Shaker Lakes?
Edward Fritz [00:17:21] Of the Shaker Lake Nature Center, or of the Shaker…
Anthony Bifulco [00:17:25] Or Shaker Lakes in general?
Edward Fritz [00:17:28] Well, I’ve been fascinated by Shaker history. I haven’t really gone into that deeply. But the fact that this utopian community existed here for 50 or 70 years and left unfortunately, very few relics. And those that they did leave, typically the old mill that was down opposite Roxboro School was blown up as a Fourth of July stunt in 1889. Then the city of Cleveland Heights wrecked some more stuff over by the spillway. And it’s just an extremely attractive place. It’s a park, but it’s not all manicured and, you know, paved and full of swings and-
Anthony Bifulco [00:18:33] What else? Let me kind of look down here and find myself listening and find some of the questions I meant to ask. How much time, you know, since the late ’70s, early ’80s, regularly would you spend volunteering at the Nature Center?
Edward Fritz [00:19:01] It varied all over the place. I typically do not volunteer on things that I come in every Tuesday and fold envelopes or give lectures to school kids, work on projects. They have a problem. Either I see it or they tell me about it, and I try to do something about it. Nobody asked me to fix these doors, but I just like doors that bang, bang, bang.
Anthony Bifulco [00:19:45] How has in your mind, through your involvements, due to what you’ve noticed, how has the Nature Center organization changed over the years since your involvement over the last 25 years, if you’ve noticed, it’s.
Edward Fritz [00:20:01] Gone up and down in terms of directors and how the staff, the morale of the staff and, you know, it’s certainly grown in the last few years in terms of staff, since they rebuilt the facility. And they had some pretty rough periods when they hired directors who didn’t work out very well, who alienated the staff. But that’s why, really, when I see you interview Rich Horton, he was really a good director. And of Directors, I think of Nancy King Smith and Rich, and of course Steve. So far, he’s still new at it, but he’s doing very well. The others, I can only think of one, who happened to have been a friend of mine who really screwed it up.
Anthony Bifulco [00:21:12] In what ways?
Edward Fritz [00:21:13] Oh, she came in and tried to remake the place in her own image. She brought too much ego into it and had grandiose like this guy who was president of the university down here, who had his vision, which he couldn’t communicate to anybody else or pay for. And she was somewhat like this and was really bad. Then they had some other people whose names I don’t even recall, who just didn’t make much impression on me, or else I wasn’t around during that period. I may have gone for several years at a time with not doing anything. So all my volunteer work was sporadic. Did the heating thing. And then in the 90s, there were a couple of things. I did the dredging. I worked a lot when they were dredging or there was some capital improvement money to use for dredging the lake out here. It was really somewhat token in terms of what was really needed versus what money they had. But nobody had a clue about how you hire a dredging contractor and what dredging was all about. And for my work, I knew something about it. Just even the different methods of doing it and the problems involved. So I gave them a lot of assistance on making that project, getting the most for their money.
Anthony Bifulco [00:23:14] What did the dredging involve? I mean, if you can explain just a little bit about in what ways did you advise them about the dredging? Why were they dredging?
Edward Fritz [00:23:27] Oh, because the duck pond in particular up here was just plain filling in and what had been. They wanted to maintain a fairly diverse ecosystem, which means open water and some deep. Deep might be 6ft open water near the Nature Center. So it wasn’t just wall to wall monoculture of cattails. And it would be nice to do a lot more dredging, but it’s expensive when you don’t have a place to dispose of your dredgings locally, which they do in, say, Lakeview Cemetery. When they dredge those ponds, they can just spread the muck on the hillside and replant it and never know it was there.
Anthony Bifulco [00:24:22] Where did they put the dredging when they did it?
Edward Fritz [00:24:29] They hauled them away to some dump site. And I don’t remember if I even knew where. And I got some people in who ended up not getting the contract because I think Shaker Heights was in charge of the contracting and the little bidder may not have been the best deal. They had a great big drag line sitting out right next to the viaduct here, the culvert on Larchmere. And the culvert fell over. I mean, not culvert. The drag line fell over. And so I think the people they hired had their learning curve too, but it ended up being pretty good. I think I helped shape what they actually did and where they did it. But there are a lot of people involved.
Anthony Bifulco [00:25:44] So what have been the environmental or ecosystem effects of the dredging? In what ways do you see that it’s impacted things? First of all, when was it dredging approximately?
Edward Fritz [00:25:59] Middle to late ’90s.
Anthony Bifulco [00:26:03] Okay. And then from there, what kind of effects did it have, immediate or long term?
Edward Fritz [00:26:07] You’d have to ask the people here. Couldn’t see any difference. But that doesn’t mean there wasn’t, you know, in terms of the muskrats. And it’s still a pretty polluted creek because of the runoff. And I still have some puzzlement about. I’m an amateur ecologist, and I still puzzle over why there’s not more cattails, why there’s enough shallow lake out there that it could be all cattails and emergent vegetation, and it’s not. I don’t know why. I’ve never. I’ve asked biologists and they never really have any answers. And the diversity out here is very low. You see a lot of turtles and creatures, but there’s not a lot of different ones.
Anthony Bifulco [00:27:18] What- You mentioned turtles. You mentioned, did you say catfish?
Edward Fritz [00:27:23] What? Catfish. Oh, did I say catfish? Carp. Carp. Maybe a catfish too but-
Anthony Bifulco [00:27:29] What are some of the other wildlife you see now? Because you have mentioned diversity of wildlife. That’s always a goal. I mean-
Edward Fritz [00:27:38] Oh, you see muskrats, lots of birds. Great birding area. No beavers. Possums, raccoons. You know, they’re around. Whether you see them or not, it’s another matter. But again, I talked to the naturalist about what’s actually out here.
Anthony Bifulco [00:28:14] That was interesting. I just want to circle back a little bit to some of the heads of the Nature Center, Rich Horton being one, Nancy King Smith being another. What was it about Rich Horton, for example, that kind of set him apart or made him successful or effective?
Edward Fritz [00:28:35] He had very good people skills with his little subset of volunteers, you know, a very loyal little crew of volunteers. And I think he just an effective administrator and got along with his board and with his money sources. And for these people.
Anthony Bifulco [00:29:04] Do you remember in particular the kind of improvements or changes Rich Horton was able to bring to the Nature Center at Shaker Lakes.
Edward Fritz [00:29:16] He kept it going, you know, at a time when they didn’t have the funding and they weren’t. Didn’t have the support. I mean they had the support, I think, but I think things were a lot tighter and I think he probably developed the programs with the schools. But again, I wish you’d get this from Rich, not from me because I really wasn’t involved much with his administrative side of it. I just worked on things that maybe will save you some money and make you more comfortable.
Anthony Bifulco [00:29:57] You did kind of mention that there’s been an increase in funding over the years and things have. At least the impression is things have improved noticeably. Where’s the funding? Why do you think there’s more funding now? Where is the funding coming from as far as you know?
Edward Fritz [00:30:16] You know, I don’t know that just outside of, I mean they have like a two or three person development department and that’s where Steve came from. He was the development officer. And for a little organization like this they spend a lot of effort raising the money, operating funds and also I think trying to put together a decent endowment. Endowment funds, which in Rich’s day, I, I don’t know what. I didn’t attend annual meetings and things back then. We do now, but I don’t know, I didn’t. I was younger and I just didn’t feel that comfortable with some of the big wigs.
Anthony Bifulco [00:31:08] It did say in the information that you were inducted into the Nature Center Volunteer Hall of Fame?
Edward Fritz [00:31:15] Yeah.
Anthony Bifulco [00:31:16] Would you be able to explain a little bit about that, the ceremony, the reason?
Edward Fritz [00:31:21] Well, they just recognized, I think that I’d been around longer than anybody else of the… That’s not true. There’s still people around who were here at the- They were founders Marge Drollinger and people like that. Jean Eakin of course, passed away. But I guess probably what caught their attention was my latest project was after this building was built or they expanded again. They had heating and ventilating problems. And this time the thing is so complicated and involved and technical that I don’t think it was. It wasn’t done very well. They just over-designed it. And you can use heat pumps. Okay. But I’ve seen some other heat pump operations at a nature center out in Geauga park system that is a lot simpler. It doesn’t need a computer that we don’t have to operate the thing. So I’ve been trying to, and this is ongoing, help them rationalize the system and make it both more comfortable. Some rooms are good. Some rooms are too humid, too hot, too cold, too variable, too hard to adapt to visitors coming in or to rental groups. And then I had this problem. We have two electric services, one for electric space conditioning, which we get a sweetheart rate during part of the year. And the other is everything else. Small general service. These bills just- I started plotting the electric consumption. See, we’re not using gas anymore. I finally got a eureka moment. I said, bills are just reversed from what they should be. What small general service is high in the wintertime and low in the summer on something that. I mean, the lights and everything are the same year around the space conditioning, which should vary somewhat with the seasons. Practically flat. So I puffed and puffed for quite a while. We finally got CEI. I got an electrician in here. We took some panels off. We traced out the system. And yes, you’re probably reversed. The billing is reversed from the meters. Then we got CEI guy in here. That took a month or so. He confirmed it, and now we’re waiting to see what they can do for us.
Anthony Bifulco [00:34:51] So that should save costs.
Edward Fritz [00:34:54] My calculation was $1,200 a year, which, you know, if I gave him a $1,200 check, you know, and said, well, you’ll get this every year, they’d be pretty happy. That hadn’t happened yet. But we’re waiting just very recently. Another thing I worked on with the new building was the sewage pump. We’re in a low area here, and you can’t have gravity flow of your wastewater to the sewer system. So they have sump pumps out here, and they had odor problems. Actually, I did have some involvement with the new building construction. Not a lot. And I actually said there was a question, should the sewage pumps be indoors or. Or outside? And there wasn’t room outside in that walkway around the side of the building. And I agreed it should be inside. It may not have been a good idea in retrospect.
Anthony Bifulco [00:36:18] Why is that?
Edward Fritz [00:36:19] What?
Anthony Bifulco [00:36:20] Why is that?
Edward Fritz [00:36:20] Because of the odors. And again, we don’t know why. And I actually took the cover off the sewage pump and checked if it was. I actually had some background in sewage treatment, so I not unfamiliar with it. We eventually got the fourth main cleaned, a big pipe that pumped the sewage up South Park to where it can dump into the gravity city system. And it probably better than it was. But the problem hasn’t totally gone away, though. I worked on sewers, electricity, undoubtedly other things that don’t jump into my head right now.
Anthony Bifulco [00:37:15] How much of a problem is sewage runoff? You talked about the gravitation gravity runoffs.
Edward Fritz [00:37:25] To your knowledge, they’ve closed up most of the combined sewer overflows, where the sanitary sewer drains into the storm sewer, either by- Because there’s not two systems or they’re just broken and interconnected because they’re typically in the same trench in the street. And I think they’ve. The cities have taken care of most of that in this watershed. But just the urban runoff, even if there’s no toilet flushing out, the system is pretty damn polluted. And then you add in all the lawn care products and all the ways that we poison ourselves. It’s not a nice brew. I’m always pleasantly surprised at how much I see living out here, but it seems to reach a plateau and it’s not getting much better. That’s my opinion.
Anthony Bifulco [00:38:44] But you have seen, I’m guessing, in your 25 years of involvement, an increase in wildlife, diversity of plant life or no?
Edward Fritz [00:38:56] The coming of the deer is the big thing that’s happened. And overall increase in wildlife. You’d have to talk to the bird watchers who do their yearly bird count. They’re out here looking all the time. They could give you a better picture of that. As far as the stuff in the creatures in the lakes, there may be some data, but I don’t know what it is.
Anthony Bifulco [00:39:36] You were talking about the construction of the new building. When did the building go up? The new building?
Edward Fritz [00:39:46] 2002. They occupied it, say in March or February of 2003. So we essentially have data now for three, four years.
Anthony Bifulco [00:40:00] A couple questions. It’s come to my attention that it’s. I could have my terminology wrong, but.
Edward Fritz [00:40:05] That the building’s a green building or greenhouse green building. Yeah.
Anthony Bifulco [00:40:11] What exactly does that mean? What sets a green building apart from a non-green building?
Edward Fritz [00:40:20] It’s a building that tries to use less energy in its operation and I think in the embodied energy of the materials that are used to construct it. And that waste. They tried to minimize waste in the construction process by reusing doors and stuff that was redundant from the old building. And this must have driven the contractors up the wall and down the other side because they’re used to putting old stuff in the dumpster and bringing in new stuff and not trying to fit because carpenters don’t do carpentry anymore. They install things. That’s a little unfair. In a nutshell, that’s save energy, reduce waste, reduce the energy cost of running the building.
Anthony Bifulco [00:41:40] Just kind of a general question. What, if you look back on your 25 or longer years of involvement, what would be your fondest memory of your involvement with the Nature Center?
Edward Fritz [00:41:58] Okay. I think just the problems that I solved, the particularly the heating system problem with Rich Horton when he was here. And I hope this CEI thing turns out the way I have calculated it will. And I still have hopes of helping them figure out a better way to run and maintain the present geothermal heat pump system. You know, it doesn’t use any gas, but it sure uses a lot of electricity, which I’m not sure is a good trade off. I mean, depends on what you pay for gas, what you pay for electricity, how available they are in the future, and a lot of factors there. But I’m appalled at the amount of energy it takes to run the system.
Anthony Bifulco [00:43:11] Can you think right now, just off the top of your head, some ways that they can reduce the amount of energy?
Edward Fritz [00:43:20] I don’t know. That’s a big, big question that I’ve- That’s why I got into this CEI billing problem, because I couldn’t make any sense out of the electric bills. And it turns out they weren’t making much sense. They were backwards, essentially. He was paying for your electric bill and you were paying for his. You had different lifestyles, different bills.
Anthony Bifulco [00:43:58] What is it about? You volunteered, obviously, extensively with the nature center. And your belief in volunteerism came from your mother. That leads me to the question of what value do you think the Nature Center and the Shaker Lakes and this nature preserve hold for the immediate community, for Shaker Heights, for Cleveland Heights, for the area? You know, in your words, what’s the value? Why is this a valuable place for this area?
Edward Fritz [00:44:29] It’s a big lot of open space near where a lot of people live, has a lot of diversity of nature and facilities that people can use, not overdeveloped. I just think it’s a huge amenity for the area. And they’ve done the reconstruction of the bridge down here. I had some reservations about it. It proved to be completely wrong.
Anthony Bifulco: What were your reservations about the bridge again?
Edward Fritz: I thought that when they took the old bridge off that 1898 bridge, which I sort of hated to see go, just because it was 1898, I thought they’d get an unbelievable growth of algae and stuff on the spillway. Again, probably for the same reason that you don’t get all the emergent weeds, weeds in the lake. There hasn’t been a problem.
Anthony Bifulco [00:45:44] And you, like you said before, you’re not sure why.
Edward Fritz [00:45:46] I don’t know why. I mean, I’ve seen other places were in a sort of a stagnant situation like this. You get terrible filamentous algae and weeds and stuff that smell bad and are unsightly. And one little thing I did a few years ago, and this was after. I think it was after they put the bridge in. The new bridge. The weed trees, the sumacs and all were growing up out of the rocks in the abutments in the center pier of the bridge. You know where I’m talking about Lower Lake here. And I could see that these things were pushing the big stones apart. And I fussed a bit, tried to get Shaker Heights or somebody to cut them out, and nothing happened. This doesn’t fall in anybody’s job category. So I enlisted a couple of friends and we went on a Sunday morning and cut the trees down. And my friends stayed on the bridge and explained to people what we were doing. And the police didn’t show up, so. But it needs it again. And people I worked with have gotten old and decrepit and it’s a big problem. The pool of volunteers is not expanding. It’s just the younger generation is either too busy or too engrossed in watching 156 cable channels are too wired or something. But my wife has been in several organizations that have just run out of volunteers. The people just got old, died, got too decrepit, moved away. And it’s harder and harder to keep a pool of volunteers on any organization.
Anthony Bifulco [00:48:23] And you’re not sure why you’ve noticed a generational change in volunteerism. Can you maybe speculate.
Edward Fritz [00:48:30] Well, in a general sense, I just said that there are so many other distractions and people just become harder to… More rules and regulations and lawsuits and bad press. And I got sued for along with a whole board for an organization that I was helping keep running, running. Somebody wanted to take it over. And a dissident board member. Is lawsuit still going on?
Anthony Bifulco [00:49:13] What was that? What board? What organization?
Edward Fritz [00:49:17] East Cleveland Farmers Market, Coit Road Market. So there’s a book out which I have not read, called Bowling Alone, which deals with this very thing, which probably states the reasons. And I think if I remember from a review, his conclusion was television was the big culprit. And we watch 15 hours a month of public television and that’s about it. We’re just not television media oriented, my wife and I.
Anthony Bifulco [00:50:16] Is there anything that I haven’t asked that came to mind that you would have liked have explained?
Edward Fritz [00:50:23] There probably is, but let me look at my- Through this and dredging and- Oh, Jan calls on me when there’s some mechanical physical problem. ’96 to ’98 was a Shaker Lake dredge. Old files here. Yeah. I helped review that bridge project which wasn’t strictly speaking a Shaker Lake Nature Center - Nature Center at Shaker Lake, they changed their name a few years ago - project but they had quite a bit of input into it. Here’s all my old logs for gas consumption in the old building. It seems so modest by present day standards. Trying to think what else. It’s been a very satisfactory experience.
Anthony Bifulco [00:51:53] Mark, do you have any questions that came to mind the course of the interview?
Mark Sack [00:51:57] Just one. You had mentioned earlier about your biggest accomplishment being connected to the establishment of a national park.
Edward Fritz [00:52:04] Yes.
Mark Sack [00:52:05] Could you share some additional details about that?
Edward Fritz [00:52:10] Okay. Then I got- I came to Cleveland. I spent the first 10 years chasing women I guess until I got married. And then Earth Day came along about 1970 and I had- Vietnam War was winding down we thought and I used to go down to the Cuyahoga Valley and I was fascinated by the old canal and my earliest vision of it is the big piles of foam at the locks where the water drop through it from the non-degradable detergents. There was a group formed, had already formed - the Cuyahoga Valley Association - that had grown out of an earlier effort to save some old buildings in Peninsula. I joined this very- I’m actually one of the, considered one of the founders of the park because I was a member at the time that the park was established in 1973. And that was a long, hard process to get enough people on board to convince the Park Service that they wanted this park. They weren’t into urban parks yet they were their idea of parks where people came to them, not where they were people all around to begin with. And I guess I was very influenced by Congressman John Seiberling and just learned more and more about it and. And gave talks and did research and particularly made the connection. The thing we weren’t sure of was whether the- If you’re familiar with it, from Tinker’s Creek to Rockside Road, there’s that corridor through Valley View and Independence and Brecksville could have easily been left out because that involved a whole lot of additional communities and mayors and contractors who wanted to fill the floodplain. CEI wanted to put in power lines. And I really pushed hard to make sure that people in Seiberling’s office and Park Service were aware of what- To tie Cleveland into the park, you needed that strip up to Rockside which has now been extended to Harvard Avenue and by the Metroparks with Canalway, so it fit in perfectly with the canal corridor project. So it was a real cliffhanger. And of course, we had to keep people out, people with dump trucks and what have you, until we got the park established. So we did a lot of rear guard fighting. Local historical societies and small group of people who had an interest from the different local communities and other than development oriented activities.
Anthony Bifulco [00:56:14] Thank you. Is that it, Mark? Okay. Yeah. Thanks a lot.
Edward Fritz [00:56:21] Okay. It was great fun.
Anthony Bifulco [00:56:22] It was great. I learned a lot.
Edward Fritz [00:56:23] I’m sure there’s a lot of things I could have if they- [recording ends abruptly]
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