Abstract
Martha Eakin of the Shaker Lakes Nature Center describes her involvement over the years with Shaker Lakes and the Center. Martha's mother, Jean Eakin, was a major figure in the battle against highway development through the Shaker Lakes in the 1960s, and Martha has continued to be involved since. Biographical information about Jean and Martha is included in this interview, as is the rationale and timeline of events leading to the organization of political action against highway development, and the subsequent founding of the Center. Martha Eakin shares her insights on the preservation of historical and natural landscapes, and public and family memory, and describes changes at the Shaker Lakes since the 1960s.
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Interviewee
Eakin, Martha (interviewee)
Interviewer
West, Julie (interviewer)
Project
Shaker Lakes Nature Center
Date
6-5-2006
Document Type
Oral History
Duration
40 minutes
Recommended Citation
"Martha Eakin Interview, 05 June 2006" (2006). Cleveland Regional Oral History Collection. Interview 902001.
https://engagedscholarship.csuohio.edu/crohc000/223
Transcript
Anthony Bifulco [ 00:00:01 ] [noisy background] Okay, we introduced ourselves, and I’m Tony, this is Mark Sack. And just to kind of start off, we just signed on to this topic yesterday and we got a little bit of background information about you. Very little about the Shaker Lakes Nature Center from Mark Tebeau. But Mark and I both don’t know a great deal about the topic just starting off. So the more you can say the better off we are, the more informed we will be as we kind of embark on launching other interviews. So you are going to be our main starting source. And so in other words, if you can kind of help us with a narrative of events before we launch into questions about the Shaker Lakes Nature Center. And I guess before we get involved, if you can. They told us to do this in the beginning. If you can sign interview subject. If you can put your name, signature.
Martha Eakin [ 00:01:06 ] Okay.
Anthony Bifulco [ 00:01:07 ] Address.
Martha Eakin [ 00:01:07 ] Okay. So this is like the release for the information that you might be using sometime? Okay. Okay. Yes. So I’m Martha Aiken and it’s the 21st already, which is horrifying and sorry.
Anthony Bifulco [ 00:01:46 ] Okay, thank you. And in practicing this, I have noticed myself sometimes, between questions, pausing to gather my thoughts. So if I pause for 10, 15 seconds, I’m gathering my thoughts to launch the next question.
Martha Eakin [ 00:02:02 ] That’s fine. And if I’m telling you too much, because I like to talk, you can just say, that’s enough now.
Anthony Bifulco [ 00:02:08 ] Okay, we’ll start with a pretty easy question. When and where were you born?
Martha Eakin [ 00:02:15 ] I was born in Cleveland, Ohio, [in] 1948.
Anthony Bifulco [ 00:02:23 ] So the next question is, where did you grow up? You were born in Cleveland, Ohio-
Martha Eakin [ 00:02:28 ] Just because-
Anthony Bifulco [ 00:02:29 ] Where around about Cleveland, Ohio, did you grow up?
Martha Eakin [ 00:02:31 ] I grew up in Shaker Heights and I lived actually just one house away from the park that’s along the Doan Brook valley and where the Shaker Lakes Nature Center ultimately ended up. So I’m like five minutes, maybe a ten-minute walk, because across the creek you have to walk a little bit the long way and then turn back. So that’s where I grew up.
Anthony Bifulco [ 00:02:56 ] Would you be able to describe the community when you grew up, 1950s and ’60s - correct? - in that area?
Martha Eakin [ 00:03:07 ] The community I grew up in? Well, partly being old enough to have traveled a bunch of different places and then you can compare back. I think one of the neatest things about the place where I grew up is that it had sidewalks. I mean, like I roller-skated with the kind of roller skates that you buckle onto your shoe and you have a little key to tighten them up to size it just right. You could roller-skate around on the sidewalks. That way it encouraged you to go places, you know, on foot or on your bicycle in a kind of way that I ended up living in a community in Massachusetts that was pretty. But you had to walk in the street. So, you know, there are times when you don’t want to walk in the street or it’s not safe. I mean, there have been people that were hit in my- So I grew up in Shaker Heights and I lived for over 30 years in the Boston area. And I came back here and I’m living in the same house that I grew up in, presently. But so the community was friendly to people who weren’t in cars. It had lot of big trees, which I think is also another thing that makes for a nice area. My husband is from Southern California and the first time he visited, he was just amazed at how lush, just in general, northern Ohio is. He just said, my gosh, there’s just all this greenery, which is pretty amazing. So, I mean, we had- When I was growing up, my school was within walkable- It happened to be- The local elementary school was at the end of my street, so I could walk down there. There was a crossing guard. We had an hour off for lunch, so we came home for lunches. So it was a friendly and easy place to live. I’m not sure what other kinds of information you like about them. Anyway, you could- There were- My dad took the transit downtown to work, so that was easy for him. My mom worked for a while and then I would say she continued to work, but she wasn’t- It was volunteer work as opposed to, you know, being paid. But that was another convenience that you could take the transit. My community- You got any other sort of questions that might?
Anthony Bifulco [ 00:05:27 ] That was good. I’ll just kind of ask you the next question. I was wondering if you could- You started to talk a little bit about- You mentioned your mother, mentioned your father. Would you be able to speak a little bit more about your family about- Did you have siblings?
Martha Eakin [ 00:05:42 ] Yeah, I had, I had three older brothers. And then there was 10 years and then there was me. I was supposed to be David, but I turned out to be Martha. I wasn’t- I’m sure I probably was an accident, but they were glad to have a girl after all that time. So it might have been a surprise, but it was a pleasant surprise at least. So they said it was like growing up in a family of adults because by the time I was 5, my youngest brother was 15 and my oldest brother had gone off to college and then he was drafted and was in the Korean War. So it was, you know, not like growing up with brothers and sisters that you might quibble with in the same sort of way. Let’s see, my dad worked, as I said, Downtown. He was also- He had Parkinson’s disease starting at an early age when he was 47. So over his lifetime he became less and less able to do many things. A lot of people, I think now get Parkinson’s as a- Not that they’re- I think it’s Michael Fox who has Parkinson’s and he’s young. But often people, it’s like an older age, you know, they say syndrome. Well, he had full-blown. So it was, you know, growing up with somebody who ended up in a wheelchair and had, you know, I’m sure that had a big effect on how my family did things. What else you asked me about siblings in my family and my mom worked at the Holden Arboretum. he taught. She was. When she was growing up, she lived in Mansfield, Ohio. But her dad liked to fish. And what- I don’t know why they fixed on Maine. I’m not sure what the connection was, but they used to travel to Maine in the summer for a vacation. I think it used to be a couple weeks. And maybe as he got older, it was a longer time. But she went to a summer camp and she worked at camps that were. I don’t think they were Girl Scout camps, but there was something that she had incredible stories of being the nature counselor at these summer camps in Ohio. But she also worked at a camp in Maine and she was the naturalist at these camps, although she didn’t have any. It was self taught training. But she ended up, you know, I’d say she did a pretty good job of teaching herself because she ultimately became after she worked in social work, but when she stopped working as a social worker, she had this job at the arboretum where she taught classes on wildflowers and nut bearing trees. And then she started a project there to reintroduce the bluebird because a lot of bluebirds require a certain habitat that there was less and less of. So they had a program to try to encourage bluebirds to come back. And she actually ended up knowing enough about birds that she got a federal bird bander’s license and worked with Cornell on migration studies. So although her college training wasn’t in ornithology, she must have learned enough to get the approval to pass the test. And she actually wrote a paper which the Natural History Museum published on bluebirds, which is a. I mean, if you wanted to know about bluebirds. You could look up and you’d find that there was this paper and you could read more than you want to know about bluebirds. So whatever.
Anthony Bifulco [ 00:09:19 ] And that kind of leads into the next question, and that is your mother’s- What was your mother’s connection to Shaker Lakes? Now, you guys grew up right there.
Martha Eakin [ 00:09:29 ] We grew up right there.
Anthony Bifulco [ 00:09:30 ] Describe your mom’s background interest in nature if you can, explain more about her connection to Shaker Lakes and eventually the Nature Center.
Martha Eakin [ 00:09:38 ] She, as I’ve said, liked the out of doors and thought that it was- I think it was so important to her that she felt it should be important to everybody. My dad was the son of a minister, and he had to go. He was from a small town in Pennsylvania, western Pennsylvania. And in fact, they met because his dad then became the minister of the church in Mansfield, Ohio, where my mom lived. And somebody said, oh, you should meet the minister, son. And my mom’s like, no, thanks. I don’t need people to tell me who to meet. But she did meet the minister’s son, and she said, gee, you know, he’s not so bad after all. But anyhow, he felt that he’d had enough church to last a lifetime because he had to go to church every- I mean, there was Vespers on Wednesday night. There was plenty of church. So my mother said, well, she thought that it was also equally sort of respectful, or however you want to put it, to spend time outdoors. So we used to go on Sunday morning instead of going to church. And I think partly dad didn’t want to go to church in a wheelchair. We would go more often, not right just over the Shaker Lakes. We used to go out to the arboretum or to the different Chagrin reservations that, you know, some of the Metroparks. And we would cook out and we would go hiking. But we also went hiking, not with my dad, but with my brothers and sometimes just me and my mom in the local parkland. And I wish now, of course, I think you often do that I paid more attention. But even then she would be saying, okay, this is Doll’s Eyes, this plant here, See these little, you know, you can tell. And this is this kind of fern. And if you turn it over, you can look at the spores underneath the leaves. And she just knew a lot about things like that. And my- We had a sort of a neighborhood gang is the wrong word. But we played hide and seek together. We played sardines together. We did, you know, we caused trouble together. And we regularly hung out over at the Shaker Lakes. And I think mom and, you know, the other parents also checked it out enough to say, we are comfortable with our kids being over there. And so we were allowed sort of free run to go down. Once we knew how to cross the street by ourselves, we could go in groups and instead of, I mean, I think kids now. My mother was always amazed in the last, like in the ’90s and into- She died in 2003, how quiet it would be on weekends.And she said, when you and your brothers were growing up, it was noisy outside because kids were always playing. I mean, into, you know, it’s summer till 9 o’clock because it was light out. And she said, now, Saturday morning, Sunday morning, it’s quiet. Nobody goes outside. She said, I guess they’re all in- You know, they’re watching cartoons or they’re on their computer, whatever they’re doing, but they’re not outside playing, which is what we were doing. So I think, you know, when she heard and I actually, if I go through notes, I might know what it was that alerted her. But somehow, you know, the word got out that Albert Porter was planning to- The county engineer. They had a freeway that was planned to come through the Shaker Lakes. And the plan was on the books. You could go look at it. It showed a cloverleaf. Because she joked with a friend of hers about how if they weren’t able to stop this freeway, but she was determined that they would stop it, that she might have a diner. And she said, I’m not giving up the house. We’ll have a diner, we’ll sell. People will get off at this exit and they’ll come to our- Because supposedly there was going to be a cloverleaf not far from where we lived. But she was determined that there was not going to be a freeway. And she and a couple other friends that were equally horrified at the thought decided that they were going to do something about it. And they said, well, who do we know? They said, well, we know church groups, we know garden clubs. They tried to think of any groups that they knew. And they said, okay, we’re going to go- We’ll begin by talking to these people. And they said they got some responses which were, oh, you know, you can’t do anything. Once people say this, what can we do? And they said, well, you know what we can do is say, we don’t want it, we don’t need it, we’re not having it. That’s what we’re going to do. And my mother was- She was an only child. I don’t know if that’s what made her so determined. And I know she also grew up wishing that she was a boy. And actually, she told. Just before she died, she told my middle daughter a neat story about how when she was little, when she fell asleep at night, her wishes. She was supposed to say prayers or whatever, but her wishes were that when she woke up in the morning, the clothes laid out at the end of her bed would be for a boy, not for a girl. They never were for a boy. They were dresses. Because back then, girls didn’t wear pants. In fact, my husband Jeff got her her first pair of blue jeans in the ’70s. She’d never had a pair of blue jeans. My dad didn’t think they were very becoming. But she decided that since she was a lady of the woods, she could have blue jeans. So, anyhow, that’s an aside. She and her friends. There was Mary Elizabeth Croxton, there was Kay Fuller, there was Betty Miller. You know, I could go back in her notes and find a list of people. But they decided that they were not going to. This was just not going to happen. And so they went to their various groups and they made presentations and they ultimately did the thing. You know, it’s not a Xerox machine, but you had the things with the carbon paper and you could crank out. You guys are probably too young to know. But anyhow, you could crank out copies of things. And they decided that they were going to make flyers among other people. I mean, she worked with a couple lawyers. There was Burt Griffin, I think there was somebody named Brad Norris. And we would get regular phone calls. Our dinner hour became, you know, what was Mom doing about the freeway that day? And she was often gone at meetings. In fact, she had a friend who would come in and help make. I mean, I was perfectly common to cook for my dad, but to help do things for my dad because he did need more and more assistance. But she was going to be gone at these meetings. And, you know, they went door to door, handed out flyers. Now, why, it’s funny, because I had my kids going door to door handing out information for Carrie. Why my mom didn’t have me passing out stuff, I don’t know. But I know I wasn’t asked to pass out things, but they did. They covered every block in Shaker Heights. They covered every block in Cleveland Heights, leaving things in the mailboxes. And they were saying there were going to be public meetings at the schools. The dates. And they got huge turnouts at these meetings. And I think that was When Porter and the road builders, whoever they would be, and people in Columbus realized that this wasn’t just going to be a shoe in. People weren’t going to say, oh, great, few houses lost, goes through the parks, cut down the trees, no problem, Perfect. We’ll get to be able to go wherever we’re going faster than- In fact, the people in Shaker Heights and Cleveland Heights, they liked their parks, and they didn’t want to have a freeway that they could just jump on and go somewhere. They wanted the park. And, you know, ultimately that’s how it turned out. And then the Nature Center itself was part of the reasoning, I think, and the idea behind how people saying, what if we stop the road? What could we do? You know, the more they were looking, they were saying, gee, that was about the time I went to graduate school in environmental education, and I started in 1970 when I was looking for schools in the late ’60s from my college. There was the Yale School of Forestry. That was sort of it. I mean, now almost anywhere you go, you can take environmental studies, but it wasn’t. That wasn’t a topic then. So the idea of having an environmental education center was pretty new. It was a new idea, but they realized they needed to do something to sort of hold the parks. Because somebody pointed out, they said, just because they say they’re not making the freeway now doesn’t mean that it’s off the books. And in fact, you know, I think it was Mary Elizabeth who went on a trip down in Columbus. She said, you know, it’s not proposed. There’s no money been set aside, but it’s there. You know, the Clark Freeway, which is what it was called, it’s still in the book of, you know, proposed how are we going to help transportation in Ohio? And at a certain point, I’ve heard people say, and I know my mom said, that it was actually taken off the books, and we’ve discussed that recently, and none of us know exactly when that happened. And we haven’t found the document that says, yes, it was abandoned, period. You know, it wasn’t just, you know, there wasn’t funding, but when there’s funding, we’ll do it. But I think that the Nature Center was devised as a way to sort of put a permanent thing in the parks that would prevent future land grabs. You know, you can’t put in a cemetery, which is pretty good at keeping roads out, you know, a Nature Center, teaching people about the area and then saying, okay, you know, anything you tie in with the schools. That’s usually an easy way to get people to support it, say, oh, look, we can teach about it. And in fact, obviously, if you want to have a park system, you have to be a steward for that park system, and we can teach about being stewards. So those ideas evolved gradually. So first there was just the let’s stop this road. And then there was the how are we going to keep it stopped? And that’s where the Nature Center came in, I think.
Anthony Bifulco [ 00:19:20 ] Okay. About the effort and the activism that went behind preventing the building of the road, you mentioned a number of things. Groups that got involved and then meetings that grew and became more frequent. I was wondering if you can explain more about and remember more about some of the groups that actually did get involved and allied themselves with your mother and the other group of women that launched this activism. And what were some of the factors, some of the main factors that really did achieve the success that your mother was going through?
Martha Eakin [ 00:20:02 ] Well, I think part of it was just sheer determination on the part of not just my mother, but a number of people to say, you know, we are- You know, it’s the we, the people. We are the people, and if we don’t want something, we don’t have to accept it. And I think a number of these, at least the ones that I met and that I continue to know, were educated people who I think, in a way, this was an opportunity to jump. Just an interesting aside, but that I think it fits, is that as my dad became sick, my mother became less the wife of a prominent business person and more her own person. And although she liked social work, you know, the fact that she had this history of being involved with nature and got herself the bird banner’s license and went over and was, you know, banning birds and catching them and mist nets and that she had an opportunity to, you know, delve deep into what she was really interested in, which wasn’t having dinner parties for people who might want to, you know, use my dad as their investment bank or whatever. I don’t think she found those. Not that those people weren’t all uninteresting, but she said there was the typical, you know, if you had a, quote, dinner party, which ladies back then did now, I mean, I think people just sort of, you know, you have your friends over and you just cook it all together in the kitchen. But anyhow, they had official things where people sat at places, because I remember those from when I was little, and they were often friends of my dad’s or acquaintances from business, but they weren’t really people that I think my mother really felt she shared that much in common with. And I think working on the freeway for a lot of these ladies was a chance to say, hey, we’re educated. You know, we went to school, we know how to do things, and we’re going to do them. And she always said to me, one of the- ’Cause she didn’t think of herself as somebody who was a garden club person. I mean, she said, you know, I don’t know how to make a beautiful. She said, I like gardens. And her mother had a nice garden, but had a similar attitude. You know, I just- If you want to have a flower arrangement, you cut the flowers and you put them in a glass and the flowers are pretty and so they look good. And obviously there is a talent to make, I mean, you know, like the Japanese. I mean, there’s talent to doing that. But I think these people were determined. I think, as I said, they- It was an opportunity to do something. And I was starting to say about the garden club that she always said it was their form of networking. Now, you know, they have meetings where you go, and the first hour is where, you know, you’re sort of exchanging business cards with people saying, what do you do? Oh, you could work with me, you know, about recording. I need a recorder. That type of. I mean, they network, but they didn’t call it networking. And I’m not sure that any of them had had much of an example of saying, gee, this is the garden club. But it is a group of 50 people and I’m going to talk to them about this thing that’s important to me. I’m not going to tell them what fertilizer to use and how to make an arrangement. I need them to help me save the parkland. And I’m going to try to convince them because they respect me as a person. Like she belonged to a book club. And they just- I think that was their own personal continuing education thing. And so she talked to me and it was. I think it partly worked on the factor. I think there’s someone who’s written a book within the last year about, or maybe it’s two years about that. We have too many choices nowadays, and it’s hard to make choices. So sometimes if you’re going to get a new sound system, you might say, God, I don’t know anything about that. So I’m going to consult Justin because he knows about sound systems. So you believe in the things that your people that you respect believe in. So she counted, and she and her friends count on the fact we’re going to use our groups and they’re going to say, I respect Jean Eakin. I know Betty Miller is, you know, she’s a sensible person. So if she says this is besides their sort of, what would you call it, charisma or whatever, that this might be contagious, there was- These people are bright, they’re informed. And so if they say this is important and it’s doable, I’m going to believe. And so I think that, I don’t know, it seemed to work. I probably got off track. But anyhow, that’s-
Anthony Bifulco [ 00:24:29 ] Besides the garden club. And I know you mentioned some other groups that your mother knew about, was involved with and that seems to me what kind of spearheaded, got the activism kind of grand grow. Was there anybody in Shaker city government, Cleveland Heights city government that also kind of got involved in the efforts to prevent the thruway?
Martha Eakin [ 00:24:55 ] Well, I listened. I mean, this is- I mean, I listened to a lady yesterday who was very involved in the freeway fight, but from a political end of things. So yes, there were. And I know that my mother was a friend of Walter Kelly, who was the mayor of Shaker Heights, because I was married by Walter Kelly. So I know they were friends. When we were trying to figure out how we could have a wedding at home because my dad couldn’t get out of the house, my mom said, oh, Walt Kelly. She said, we’re friends from way back, you know, when we were fighting the freeway. She said, I know him from, you know, early morning till late night. I mean, there were phone calls. I mean, people were on the phone about this from seven in the morning till, I mean, it was a constant, you know, we’re not going to say die until we’ve really got done. And my mother was somebody who wrote letters to the editor. If she thought there was, she was, I suppose it would have been called outspoken. But I mean, if she thought something needed to be done or taken care of, she would try to take it to the person. So she was focused. I don’t think it ever occurred to her to run for city government. But she was connected to people who were involved with city government because she saw them as people who could work for you, could work with you. And in terms of like, the what and interesting. I mean, through the freeway fight she met people. And Walter Kelly was one of the people who would say we have to work with the other towns because the park isn’t owned by Shaker Heights, it’s actually owned by Cleveland. And so the park workers might or might not be familiar with, you know, are we going to go in and mow all the grass? Well, no, my mom wanted to keep the grass there because there are certain birds that nest in the grass. Then there are the people who say, oh, no. Well, they’re. The joke in our family was they were called. This isn’t- Well, I won’t use it because I suppose it could be an offensive term. But, you know, people that hide in the bushes, that would be negative people. And there are people who wanted, you know, we got to go in and cut down all the undergrowth because there would be these weird people who could be hiding in the undergrowth. And my mother was like, you know, the percentage of times there’s going to be somebody negative hiding in the bushes to get you is, you know, way overshadowed by all the good you do of leaving the bushes so that the animals and the birds and whatever can nest in them. But that was always a running battle between the utilities or the people who did the park’s maintenance. You know, whether it was snow plowing, you know, tree cutting, replacing the sidewalks. There are a lot of huge oak trees, not just in Shaker Heights, but around town, that were called the Moses Cleaveland trees. And they’re- Actually, there’s- You can go online and find a map of where they are, because there are a number of them that are still alive. And, you know, they would go in to replace the sidewalk and they’d cut off the root of the tree. And my mom would be on her, you know, run back home, you know, and call up, you know, whether it was Bernie Rife or somebody else saying, you got guys out here and they’re replacing the sidewalk and they’re cutting off the tree roots. They need to move the sidewalk. The tree’s been here, you know, the Shakers planted it. It’s been here for 150, however many years. We need to save the tree and move the sidewalk, not move the tree and put in the sidewalk. So there definitely were connections with city government. Although, as I say, I don’t think my mom. I don’t remember her working on people’s political, you know, like somebody running for mayor, whatever. If she did, I mean, she voted for whomever she thought was the best person. But I don’t political came. See, my dad was very conservative. My mother was not at all conservative. And their deal was, you know, you believe in your person, and I believe in my person. And you can’t put, like, you couldn’t put a sign in the yard. That was always, I was told years ago when I was working for McGovern. That’s fine, but you cannot put a sign in the yard because dad would have had a heart attack. So I think mom maybe worked on political campaigns, but I think she knew that that would not have been a welcome thing in the house. Dad just liked to be sort of under the radar. And my mom was like, if it needs to be over the radar to get it done, then she would be over the radar or above the radar. I guess that’s how you say it.
Anthony Bifulco [ 00:29:19 ] I was wondering if you could say something about what, you know, about Albert Porter, especially in regards to this freeway fight.
Martha Eakin [ 00:29:32 ] I know what Albert Porter looks like. I learned that from- You know, I did attend some meetings with my mom, and he was very dismissive of- I mean, I think he thought that- I think he way underestimated both the political situation and saying no to this freeway. Well, both freeways, the Clark and the Lee Freeway. And because the cloverleaf was going to be the, you know, where the two- Not only could you just get off to go into the communities, but you could somehow switch from one- Like, you can go from 77 to 70, you know, so it was going to move you from one east-west way to a north-south way. But he was dismissive, and he was- Mom made, you know, a number of trips to Columbus for hearings about the freeway, and she said he was almost disrespectful because he just couldn’t believe or he didn’t- He seemed unable to believe that these groups weren’t just misguided and they just didn’t understand what he was trying to do. And I remember her saying. Also, she said, clearly, you know, engineers think roads are beautiful. And she said, just like I think the woods is beautiful. They look at a cloverleaf and they go, wow, look at- You know, it’s curving, it’s banking. It does this. It feeds in- It’s a- It’s a- You know, that’s what they learned how to do in, you know, wherever they were trained. And he clearly thought he was doing something that would be constructive for Ohio. I mean, it wasn’t for his glory, but he was- He thought- And that these ladies were sort of foolish. And yesterday, when I listened to someone talking about the freeway fight, there was the phrase rinky dink, something about the Shaker Lakes. Because a lot of the people in the Shaker Lakes, I mean, they’re the big fancy houses that literally overlook the lakes. And then they’re. The house. I mean, they’re just. We walked. We don’t overlook a lake, but we were able to walk near one. And it was neat to be able to walk near a lake. And I thought my mom said that Albert Porter called it a two-bit duck pond, but he might have called it rinky dink and two-bit. But I think she and her friends were irritated that he referred to their- It wasn’t just and who’s to scoff at mallard ducks. But it wasn’t just mallard ducks, as my mom knew. Well, there are all sorts of amazing birds. I mean when the migrations happened, you would be, if you knew anything about birds, you would be impressed at the number of birds that go right through the Shaker Lakes here in this. I mean back in the ’70s, who knows if there were fewer more. There may be more now because there are fewer green space so they’re jammed into, you know. But I mean the variety of birds that you can find. Right, right there is just, it’s amazing. And I think that was like throwing down a gauntlet. I think when Albert Porter made comments like that, I think if anything that just galvanized people saying, hey, you know, you think it’s two-bit? Well, we don’t think it’s two-bit and we’re going to show you. And I think that was a- They not only did show him, but I think his inability to actually respect their point of view. I think they had some, I mean as my mother describing how he must think it’s a. That his freeway design was good, they didn’t have any return, their vision had some merit. He missed that completely. And I think you can often manipulate, if you wanted to manipulate people, which I believe nowadays ODOT is better at manipulating people and I think they’re doing it and we’re in trouble. But if he’d known how to show some respect for the park, he might have gotten away with more because they would have thought he was a better person. And the fact that he was dismissive made them say, hey, you know, we’re going to show you. I’ve repeated myself.
Anthony Bifulco [ 00:33:42 ] But anyway, when did this freeway fight take place exactly?
Martha Eakin [ 00:33:50 ] It started because I graduated from high school in ’66 and it was happening while, you know, when I was home and because, you know, when I was in college through, I graduated in ’70, but I was home frequently and I was hearing about the freeway fight when I was. In fact, maybe that’s why I didn’t go door to door because I wasn’t there to go door to door because I still can’t. That could Be the only really good explanation. I should go back. I wrote actually in graduate school, I wrote a paper about the freeway fight for my sort of political science environment class. And I had to take classes at the law school at the University of Michigan also that were environment related. And I would probably have all the exact dates in that. I still have that because I was going to give it to the. Nancy King Smith said, we don’t know where to keep it at the Nature Center, so don’t give it to us. I was just saying because I’d asked my mom details. It might have helpful details in it, but- So it was happening in the late ’60s. And I think that the idea for the Nature Center was pre ’70. I think they were talking about something before 1970. And I know that there was a whole sort of different group of people that were interested in creating a nature center. And there were a lot of, just like, there were disagreements about- I think there were a lot of, you know, what people envisioned a nature center. You know, some people, like garden clubs would think, oh, great, we can go in there and plant wildflowers. And there are other people saying, you know, we don’t want- If you want to plant wildflowers, we’d like to have labels, but we want, you know, the wildflowers that naturally grow. They’re not wildflowers that you’ve decided, you know, are nice, but they’re really from Kansas or something, you know, whatever. So that’s a time frame as late, I would say late ’60s.
Anthony Bifulco [ 00:35:55 ] When did your mother. When did your mother get involved with. I guess she was involved early on with the garden center, but I guess first question is, when exactly was the Garden Center created? And then what role did your mother play in the creation of the Garden Center?
Martha Eakin [ 00:36:10 ] And then afterwards, well, it’s a garden. It’s a garden club. It’s not a garden. Garden Center. Are you meeting Nature Center or you mean- Okay, okay, okay. No, that’s fine. I just, I was- That makes sense. Okay. She was involved with the Nature Center because she’d been, you know, she was interested in environmental education. In fact, she’d been doing environmental educational agents wasn’t called environmental education. So she was involved with the whole. I mean, my dad became more and more a limit on her time, but she was involved with the people who met to try to figure out what would, you know. I think now everybody says, you know, you have a vision statement and you have a mission statement. I don’t know if it was that. That seems to be the sort of, you Know if you were creating something, now you go, okay, well, we need a vision statement, we need a board of directors, we need. It wasn’t that obvious then, I think just what you needed to do. But they used the same lawyers that they’d known from the freeway fight to help them, you know, do the legal side of, you know, what, what do you need to do to. And, and there were complicated dealings because the park was owned by Cleveland. The land on which the Nature Center is built is still owned by Cleveland. So there’s a lease. It’s not just an every year lease, but it’s leased. So there’s, you know, they’re complicated issues. So there was, I think Walt Kelly, who was the mayor of Shaker Heights during a of this period. He was, I think his background might be legal, but I don’t know, that would be easy to find out. But there were people who advised about the legal aspects of it. There were people who were saying, I mean, one of the reasons that I think the Cleveland leasing the land to Shaker rights was the pitch that there will be environmental education classes there and school bus loads of kids can be brought out from the inner city to the not country. But to, you know, that it can be used actively so that people can come and, you know, and kids can come and, you know, have their little wading boots and go out and catch frogs or do what, you know, whatever you do in land like that. When the Nature Center was first built, actually I was looking at a picture of it just yesterday when we were trying to fade. There’s a, it’s a picture, an old, well, oldish photograph of the ribbon cutting for. Because after they built the building. Okay, this is the building. See this? I have to correct my timing because the building must have been finished somewhere around 1970. So the freeway fight had to have finished at some point before that. And again, I’d have to go back and look and I’m sure there’s newspaper articles about it. But my husband, before he was my husband, when I was in school in Ann Arbor, he was living with my family. And part of the way he earned his keep staying with him is that he helped build the first nature trail at the Nature Center. Because there was no actual trail through the woods. The building sort of looked like a ranch house. The original Nature Center looked sort of like somebody’s, you know, like two level ranch house in the woods. And my mom used to talk about how some people, she said, you think some of these ladies are just building another house and they’re all excited about building a house. And this isn’t going to be a house, it’s going to be a teaching center. So that some of how it was first built and that they corrected when they rebuilt it was that it wasn’t always that easy to get whole groups of kids. The kids would come in buses and what the- The parking lot was landfilled. It was dredge that Cleveland wanted to get rid of. That’s where the parking lot came from. And that was a concern. I mean, like my mom was saying, you know, when you get to be. You’re putting fill in what was part of the lake. When you look at the old maps of the Shaker Lake, the lower lake is a big. There’s Horseshoe Lake up here and then you follow Doan Brook down. And the lower lake, where there’s now a bridge here is a small lake. It’s a long oval at one side and over where the Nature Center is and there’s a marsh. It was more of a little lake. And there was a skinny place that a bridge, a road went through. And the fill that is now the parking lot was just dumped in the marsh. And that was the kind of thing where my mother was weighing and saying, well, the Nature Center is a good thing and you do need to bring buses in, but filling in the marsh isn’t a good thing. And it’s continued to be a problem because both from just more and more building, there’s more silt that comes down the brook and it deposits. And so they have to dredge every once in a while just to open it up. So it continues to be a marsh. And I think they found that, you know, after building the trail and building the building that there continue to be. Once you mess with things, you gotta keep messing with them. You’re never done once you’ve, I mean you can’t sort of say, oh well, let nature take its course because you’ve already injected yourself in a pretty big way. So then you’ve got an ongoing maintenance problem. So but date wise, if my husband was building a trail in ’70, ’70, ’71 and into ’72, then the building had to be there. So the freeway fight had to be not finishing around ’90. The freeway fight had to be finishing more like ’68. That’s all it’ll be in newspaper. I just remember I’m almost 60, so I’m forgetting all this.
Anthony Bifulco [ 00:42:03 ] When did you become involved? You were in Ann Arbor. You said you lived in California for a while. When did you end up getting involved.
Martha Eakin [ 00:42:11 ] At the Nature Center? Well, through my mom, I was involved just because she kept me up to speed on things that were happening there. And I would hear about, you know, the naturalists that were really good, and the naturalists she thought were taking things a direction she didn’t think was so good. So, I mean, I got- Because she was. Continued to be on the board, you know, sort of forever and ever until she died. So I kept up that way. Jeff was intimately involved because he and my mom laid down and made Jeff [unintelligible] laid the trail. So I certainly. Because I continued to always visit, I was very close with my parents. So I continued to come home on a regular basis. We always spent Christmases together, and I would be there at some time in the summer. And sometimes just to give my mom a little bit of, you know, like, so she could go visit her cousins or whatever. When my dad was really not well, I used to. I might take off from work and spend a couple weeks at home so that my mom could go, you know, be somewhere else. And so then I would be around. But they actually went. Working at the Nature Center or volunteering I didn’t do until I came back recently in, like, ’02. And then I just volunteered over there because, you know, because I felt closely connected to it, and it seemed like a constructive thing to do.
Anthony Bifulco [ 00:43:32 ] I understand you’re in the process of writing a history. A group of you are writing a history of the Shaker Lakes Nature Center, Doan Brook. Would you be able to explain some of the reasons why, at this point you want to write a history?
Martha Eakin [ 00:43:49 ] Well, we put together a history committee that somebody suggested I might be interested in. And I said yes, I was both because the Nature Center is coming up this fall on its 40th. Well, that will give you the date. So we’re in ’06, so ’66. So if the 40th anniversary is in the fall of ’06, there’s your date right there. So we just have to move backwards a little in time for when these things were happening. And so we’re being very organized under the leadership of Julie west, who trying to put together some booklet in honor of the 40th anniversary, which would be mostly pictorial, just old pictures with a little bit of quotes of things happening. But aiming actually that would be like pieces that we’ve gathered and are able to put together this September, but aiming for a complete history by the 50th anniversary and partly just realizing that already people are no longer living that can tell us how it happened. So both for our, you know, or our meaning the Nature Center’s edification, you know, and keeping it. How did it come about? You know, different people have, you know, one person will say, oh, I think, you know, it happened because thus and such and somebody. They actually already have. What I would say is a pretty neat video that’s of my mother and Betty Miller. They’re down and they’re sitting on a boardwalk. They have an all people’s trail that you can go on with a walk or a wheelchair, whatever. And there’s a part that extends down into the marsh and has a sort of a square deck place. And they often have like the class with little kids will be sitting down there, whatever. And it’s a video of my mom and Betty Miller reminiscing about how, you know, what they did. And it has some good details in it and it’s fun to see the two ladies talking. And I know that it has made an impression on people who visit. You can see it on a little, just like a do it yourself screen. You know, if you’re interested in frogs, you can click on frog. And if you’re interested in history, you can click on history. But this was, I think our goal was to add to that and try to put our, you know, people leave papers, people leave newspaper articles, but to sort of put it in order because when you started to sort of. There’s a lady, Isabella, I can’t think of her last name, but she’s volunteered to go through the documents because that’s been something she’s done in her work life and knows how to preserve things. And she said, you know, some of our newspapers are already torn and they’re, you know, she said, we need to put this together. So it was, I think, a. An effort to get it down before we miss the opportunity to get it down. Right. So it’s putting our house in order. And also there are a lot of photographs. People would say, oh, these are of the Nature Center here, give them to the Nature Center. Well, there are boxes and boxes of photographs and we’re sort of like, oh my goodness, these need to be, you know, we need to scan them. We need to make an organized thing so that both. They’ll be useful to the Nature Center because it may say, gee, we’re trying to get a grant to do whatever. We need a picture of a kid catching a frog, kid with frog or whatever. So we’re trying to put the pictures in order and we’re trying to get our, you know, our. What do you call it when you, when you found an organization the articles of incorporation, all that stuff, try to get it. And not that we know where that is, but to put it all together in a very understandable, accessible form. And I believe it was Tori Mills, who’s a naturalist now, who somehow got connected with Mark Tebeau and his Euclid Corridor project. And they said, wow, this dovetails nicely. You know, you’re trying to do Euclid Quarter.Tori’s worked on the Doan Brook, trying to go down through Rockefeller park and make the brook more accessible so that the two sort of history findings fit together. And the idea of an oral history was, gee, here’s an opportunity for us to learn how to do this. And actually, you know, whether we have to go to Judson or, you know, reach out into the community and talk to the children of people who were involved with this, with the founding, let’s meet them and ask our questions and see if we can put together. And I’m not sure whether we’re thinking that the history in the 50th anniversary is going to be a CD that people would get. Someone was actually supposed to present a report yesterday that would be dealing with it, but somehow I don’t. She didn’t appear. So I can’t tell you exactly what our vision is, but the information, whether it ends up being written information or part of the ultimate goal, is just that it will be documented and archived so that whether we decide we’re going to pass out CDs, we want to make a movie, whatever we want to do, we have the information before the informers have dispersed and we can’t reach them.
Anthony Bifulco [ 00:49:17 ] Is there anything that you’d like to add before we turn the tape off?
Martha Eakin [ 00:49:23 ] Well, just. Oh, well, I’ve just. In turn, I don’t know that you’d need to get it on tape, but I think when I was talking with Nancy King Smith yesterday about, you know, other people, and we were saying that in some ways, probably people unconnected from the Nature Center may ask more pertinent questions than we might think of to ask just because you’re interested. And we think we already know the answer, but just because we know it doesn’t mean we don’t want to get somebody to discuss it on tape. So that would be good. And she said, but we should make sure that people realize that certain people, which you’ll get as soon as you ask when they became involved, have been intimately involved, but only from, say, 1990 on or 1980 on. So what they know is we’re still interested in. Because also, besides documenting the founding and the reasons for the founding and the mission then and the mission now. We’re also interested in the different directions that the Nature Center has taken under different leadership. Because this director of the Nature Center thought, you know, we really should focus on, you know, people who have some sort of, you know, hearing impairment or they can’t see or, you know, we. I just wanted this all people’s trail so I can get all these people in. And I know, like my mom thought, all people’s trail. My goodness. We first we put dredge in the marsh, now we’re putting a, you know, piles to put a trail on. You know, we’re doing. If we build more trails where the first trail was, pretty soon there’s going to be so much trail. There isn’t nature anymore. So how do you get people to see? And then the next director would say, oh, no, I. You know, you can’t build too much. I think it’s really important for people to, you know, spend the night in the woods. I want to have people having camping trips to the. To the wood. I mean, it’s just. They’re different stories. So partly we want to get down how. How those, you know, are there people wishing we were back toward director number three, who was here in the ’80s, or are they really glad we aren’t doing that? When we want to understand because there were some hard times or just difficult times where the board didn’t agree with the director, didn’t end, those are sometimes difficult to talk about. But in fact, people who aren’t intimately involved might be able to better ask those questions than somebody who isn’t intimately involved. But we’d like to understand how those things were resolved, how they happened, what went wrong. Because you can better run your organization when you understand what went wrong. I don’t know if the current director would agree with that assessment or not, but that’s what I think.
Anthony Bifulco [ 00:51:57 ] Well, thank you, very much.
Martha Eakin [ 00:51:58 ] Okay.
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