Abstract
Kathleen Barber of the Shaker Lakes Nature Center describes her involvement with the Center beginning with the battle to protect Shaker Lakes from highway development in the 1960s. Barber describes this activist campaign in great detail, discussing the proposed route of the highway, the role of County Commissioner Albert Porter, the strategies employed to stop the highway, and the parts played by numerous individuals and activists - particularly women, whose role, according to Barber, was very much related to their role in the greater U.S. society. Barber used this activist experience to move forward as an instructor at John Carrol University, a Shaker Heights City Councilperson, and a member of numerous volunteer and non-profit organizations. Additional topics include regional government (regionalism), state and local politics, and cooperative arrangements between inner ring suburbs as a means to combat urban sprawl. Also mentioned are the Kingsbury Run Murders of the 1930s, during which several bodies are said to have been dumped at Shaker Lakes' Southerly Park.
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Interviewee
Barber, Kathleen L. (interviewee)
Interviewer
Smith, Nancy King (interviewer);Eakin, Martha (interviewer)
Project
Shaker Lakes Nature Center
Date
6-20-2006
Document Type
Oral History
Duration
54 minutes
Recommended Citation
"Kathleen L. Barber Interview 20 June 2006" (2006). Cleveland Regional Oral History Collection. Interview 902002.
https://engagedscholarship.csuohio.edu/crohc000/231
Transcript
Justin Hons [00:00:01] Whenever you’re ready.
Nancy King Smith [00:00:03] Okay. Well, thank you, Kathy, for coming. You’ve met Justin, and you know that Martha is here to assist in the interview. This is Kathleen Barber, and this is June 20, 2006. Now, you just told me you were born in Canton, but when did you come to the Cleveland area?
Kathleen Barber [00:00:24] My husband and I moved to the Cleveland area in 1955 with three children and then promptly had a fourth. So we’ve been. I’ve been in the Cleveland area ever since.
Nancy King Smith [00:00:36] Did you settle in Shaker Heights right away?
Kathleen Barber [00:00:38] We did. We knew when we moved here that we were going to because we were told that was the school system to move to. So we bought a house in Shaker, and we lived in Shaker for almost 40 years.
Nancy King Smith [00:00:49] Wow. To go back in time from when you got to Cleveland, do you have a particular memory of an early outdoor experience that comes to mind?
Kathleen Barber [00:01:00] Well, the one I always think about in connection with the Nature Center is that my father, who was a farm boy and grew up in southern Ohio, became a professional and worked for a textbook company. But he always took us looking for wildflowers in the spring in the woods, and we always hiked in the woods, and we’d go back to see his father on the farm, and we’d go down to what was called the Lower Place and look for the buzzard’s nests and the eggs and the wildflowers, the bloodroot, the hepatica, the things that we had to find when they first came out. So I think that’s what orients me to it today. In Columbus, it was a park along the Scioto River where we would go looking for wildflowers in the spring.
Nancy King Smith [00:01:44] When you moved to Shaker, what are your memories of what the Shaker Lakes were like in that, in the area where the Nature Center is?
Kathleen Barber [00:01:52] Well, they were very nice. We hiked in them a lot. We were not very good birders, but we liked the fact that the birds had places to be. My memory of them is largely shaped by Bicycle Jungle, where everybody went to look for stolen bicycles. And Bicycle Jungle is now called Southerly Park, which I think I suggested at a council meeting when we were trying to think how to get rid of the name Bicycle Jungle. And I sort of said, you can’t beat something with nothing. So how about Southerly Park? Because it was south of the main part of the natural area, it was known for that. It was also rather famous because of the Kingsbury Run murders. People always thought the bodies ended up in the Shaker Lakes woods, and indeed, the Police did find bodies there from time to time during the Prohibition era.
Nancy King Smith [00:02:47] When were they, the Kingsbury murders?
Kathleen Barber [00:02:49] In the 1930s.
Nancy King Smith [00:02:53] Wow. Huh. Let’s think about your-
Kathleen Barber [00:02:59] Or twenties. I’m sorry, I’m a little bit vague. [crosstalk]
Nancy King Smith [00:03:07] Talk about your first involvement with sort of knowing about the freeway fight and what was happening in the community and how you got involved.
Kathleen Barber [00:03:16] Well, I was aware that freeways were being built because Eisenhower had sponsored this big interstate freeway program that passed Congress in 1956 with tons of money. When you couldn’t get money for a lot of things I did believe in, there was lots and lots of money for interstate highways. In Cleveland. There was an old Romanian neighborhood on the west side, the near west side, that was bisected by I-71. The reason I remember it is that they built a pedestrian bridge over it because there was a Romanian grocery store that carried special foods on one side of it and the main Romanian population on the other side of it. And sometimes you’d be driving out I-71 and like to Columbus, and there would be this little old woman in a babushka crossing that pedestrian bridge with her bags, her net bags of groceries. And I thought that was kind of terrible, but I didn’t think about it applying to me. It was just something that was out there. And then, of course, word came about the Clark Freeway and the Lee Freeway that they were going to be built, that the state wanted them built, and that the county engineer was going to decide where they would go. The county engineer at that time was Albert Porter, who was also head of the Democratic Party in Cuyahoga County. So he was a very powerful elected official. His political base was his own. He didn’t owe his being there to anybody except his own political base. And because he was county engineer, he had loads of jobs to fill, and he had the power to tell them they didn’t have to work on election day. They could do more important things like getting out the vote.
Nancy King Smith [00:05:08] Were you involved in League of Women Voters or where were you in your own career?
Kathleen Barber [00:05:15] Yes, at that time I was working with the Shaker League of Women Voters. I think we had a committee that was looking at infrastructure. And I don’t remember that we were looking at interstate highways in particular, but it certainly floated before our eyes. We were aware of it.
Nancy King Smith [00:05:33] And how did you then specifically get involved?
Kathleen Barber [00:05:38] I’m not sure quite how, but I can tell you that when the specific plans were proposed and it was clear that they had chosen to go through the woods and the lakes instead of through houses, citizens were mobilized. I mean, we mobilized ourselves, but basically a bunch of people in Shaker came together and said, we have to do something about this. And Alan Holmes became chairman of the Clark Freeway Committee and he was a Republican. And Brad Norris became the co-chairman. He was with Han Lozier and he was a Democrat. And it was very important to us from the beginning to be bipartisan because we felt that the whole thing was very political and that we had to have support on both sides of the partisan aisle, so to speak. So that was a group that came together, it might have been a voluntary group that met at Shaker Heights City Hall. And I must have gone because I wanted to do something about it. And I’m sure I left the first meeting as secretary because that’s what I did. That’s what women usually did on committees in those days. You ended up being the secretary. But that was all right because I learned that writing the minutes I could be sure that the important points were made in the minutes. And I would think that in the minutes we have all these important developments documented because I know I covered pages of single space typed paper.
Nancy King Smith [00:07:12] And those would all be with your papers at Western Reserve?
Kathleen Barber [00:07:15] I think they are. And if they’re not with my papers, they should be with the committee papers.
Nancy King Smith [00:07:22] You mentioned when we talked on the phone that those meetings were held on Sunday mornings?
Kathleen Barber [00:07:26] At 9 o’clock. It was the only time in the week that everybody was free. So we met at City hall at 9 o’clock and we did that for months. And it was a very dedicated, hard working committee. One of the aspects of the plan that was most helpful to us was that they were not taking out a lot of houses. They had figured out that the statistics of opposition would be how many houses are being taken of these powerful people that live in Shaker Heights. So we don’t want to take houses of powerful people. So if we go through the park, we won’t take many houses. So Porter was very proud of the fact that they would only take a few houses on South Park. It was maybe five or six of the big houses on south park that were going to go. And because they were big houses, that wasn’t going to be a big political issue. There would only be two voters in every house. So that was sort of the beginning of it. The competition to get the money meant that. Well, at first the committee worked with. Our strategy was to work with the bureaucrats, the people who were planning highways, the federal Department of Highways and the state Department of Highways and our county engineer. We thought that that’s where the plan had to be stopped or altered drastically. We weren’t getting anywhere. It made no difference to them that these folks in Shaker Heights were upset. So they were full steam ahead. And that’s when we decided that our strategy had to get more political. And that’s when we started trying to connect to our members of Congress, our state legislators and the governor. And that’s why the strategy from then on became specifically not only political, but partisan. So that Alan Holmes would lead a few Republicans to Washington to talk to Republican Congress members and Brad Norris would lead a few Democrats to talk to Democratic members of Congress. And Alan Holmes worked mostly with the governor, who was Republican, Governor Rhodes. So we were really trying to use the strategies that might have the most impact because electoral fortunes were the only thing that seemed to matter. So that was the way we did it. Governor Rhodes definitely wanted to build both the Clark and the Lee Freeways. And you know, the Lee Freeway was north, south, and it was going to intersect with the Clark at Shaker Boulevard and South Park, where the then Kaufman House, now Bergholtz House, you know, that corner, it was going to be multi acres, I want to say 100 acres, but. But I don’t remember the exact number. It was a huge interchange and it would have taken out Southerly park and part of the woods north of Shaker Boulevard as well. So that was just an extremely important focus of our opposition to get the opposition organized around stopping both freeways. It wasn’t going to work to just stop one freeway. So we did work with the Cleveland Heights Freeway Committee. And I can’t tell you anything about the Cleveland Heights Freeway Committee because I don’t remember our interaction with them. I know we offered to join committees and they felt they had to do their thing because there were some different issues. The Lee, primarily the Lee Freeway. Yes, because it was going to go right through the middle of Cleveland Heights and East Cleveland and up to meet I-90. That would connect the Clark and I-90. Of course, the Clark was going to connect I-71 and I-271. People thought it was much too roundabout to have to go from 71 up to 90 and around to 271 or down to 480 and across. I don’t even remember if 480 was there then or was it just 80? It might have been just 80 at that point. The idea being to connect 80 and 90 at this east side juncture by the Lee Freeway. So we never did combine committees. We continued to pursue our own strategies. The other major group that was fighting the freeway, both freeways was the garden club women. And I don’t know too much about them, but I know that the Shaker Lakes Garden Club was very important. There were other garden clubs, the Village Garden Club. There must have been others that I was not aware of. But the late Mary Elizabeth Croxton was, I think, chairman of the Shaker Lakes Garden Club at that point. I could be wrong, but that’s my memory. Park Conservation Committee sounds right. Yes. And the other person who was so important at that time besides Jean Eakin, was Kay Fuller. And Kay Fuller is the only one who’s still alive. She lives at Judson Park. She’s just been down at the Manor for a few weeks recovering from surgery. But she’s at the Manor now. She’s gone back to the park now. She was in rehab at the Manor, but she’s gone back to the park. But those three women were just so important. And we coordinated with them, but we didn’t really share trips. We knew what they were doing and they knew what we were doing. And we sort of went our own ways because they were totally non partisan. And we were fiercely partisan, bipartisan, because we felt that that was our strategy.
Nancy King Smith [00:13:24] How did you, kind of, mobilize citizens?
Kathleen Barber [00:13:28] Well, interestingly enough, that’s a great question. Albert Porter did it for us because he had an interview with the Plain Dealer which appeared on the front page of the Plain Dealer, in which he said he didn’t see why people were so upset about this rinky dinky duck pond that if a freeway could be built, about 100,000 people a day would see it on the bridge going over it. They would be able to look down from the bridge and there would be the lake. The Shaker Lakes would be down there for all to see. Well, that was wonderful because Rinky Dinky duck pond became our slogan. It became the slogan of the opposition. So in a sense, to have an easily identifiable enemy was a great boon to our efforts. And there were so many people who were offended by that description of the Shaker Lakes area that it helped our cause. So the League of Women Voters of Shaker, the League of Women Voters of Cleveland Heights, I don’t know. There were just a lot of groups that said, we want to stop this thing too.
Nancy King Smith [00:14:40] What are your memories of sort of the devolution to the point in 1970 when Rhodes did agree that it wouldn’t happen?
Kathleen Barber [00:14:53] Well, the first thing that I was aware of happening as a result of all the work was that progress in quotation marks, progress on the Freeway plan slowed down, and people began to worry that they weren’t making progress toward getting these freeways built. And that sounded like a very good sign to me to slow down. That progress meant eventually we might have time to stop it. And so eventually their efforts ground to a halt. And that was a result of Congress beginning to back off from the funding. And, of course, we did have both Republican and Democratic contacts in Congress. We had Charlie Vanik, who represented the 22nd district, who was a Democrat. And I’m trying to remember who would have been the Republican they were talking to. I’m not sure because those weren’t my contacts. But anyway, the funding began to kind of get dissipated and funds would get allocated to other projects. And every time something like that happened, you know, we felt we had triumphed. It was another step ahead on our road of stopping the freeway.
Nancy King Smith [00:16:12] Was there ever sort of a, wow, let’s celebrate, it’s over, or-
Kathleen Barber [00:16:16] Oh, yes. When Governor Rhodes took the freeway off the state freeway map, we had a party at the Norris House to celebrate. Yes, they lived on Southington Road in Shaker, and we had a great party. And it was in the kitchen of the party that Brad turned to me and said, all right, Kathy, now we’re going to do public radio. At that point, Cleveland was one of the last two cities in the country to get public radio, National Public Radio. So that began a whole new phase of my life. We both went on to the effort to get public radio in Cleveland to get a license for a public radio station. But, I mean, there were loose ends to tie up. Of course, we did that for months and months, but eventually the fight was over by that time.
Nancy King Smith [00:17:08] Meanwhile, the Nature Center folks were getting going, and you were on the founding board. What was your relationship?
Kathleen Barber [00:17:18] I don’t remember a whole lot about it, except that first we got the environmental landmark designation. And of course, it helped that we had been talking to our members of Congress, both Republican and Democratic, about how important this area was. And the women who had made these wonderful scrapbooks full of pictures of the Shaker Lakes area, and they had flown those scrapbooks to Washington and had shopped them around the congressional offices were in a wonderful position to talk about the environmental value of these landmarks, the landmark value of the area. So they were extremely important in getting the landmark. And so when the landmark. That was like the next step with the landmark, then we could think about, how do we institutionalize this? And the Nature center just developed, it seemed the way to go to make it available for children, maximum activity but maximum preservation of the natural area. So those were the two elements of it that were in tension with each other. But with the horror of the freeway out of the way, we could sort of dream and plan. And that part was pure fun.
Nancy King Smith [00:18:32] In addition to getting public radio going, you were also pursuing your own political future. Can you talk a little bit about what you moved from freeway fight and so on and doing and getting involved in Shaker politics?
Kathleen Barber [00:18:51] Well, I was appointed to the Shaker Council. I think probably that was Walter Kelly. And you probably know that Walter was the lawyer for all of this effort. He was a volunteer lawyer for the whole effort of fighting the freeway and starting the nature center. So he was very important in terms of institutionalizing something and helping us figure out how. And he was also on the board and very important to the Nature Center.
Nancy King Smith [00:19:33] How long did you serve on city council?
Kathleen Barber [00:19:36] I was on the city council for two terms since Walter appointed me. It was actually that David Blauschild moved out to Pepper Pike. So there was a vacancy about six months after he was elected. So it was almost a full term. I served that term, and then I was elected to a full term in ’75. So I was two terms on really, in effect, two terms on the Shaker Council.
Nancy King Smith [00:20:02] And was there. The nature center was getting going as a not for profit. Was there any- Do you remember anything from your council experiences in terms of the parklands or the nature center that you were particularly involved with?
Kathleen Barber [00:20:19] Well, yes. We formed a Doan Brook Committee of the Shaker Council, the Cleveland Heights Council, and the city of Cleveland. And the city of Cleveland was represented by the head of the parks department, whose name eludes me at the moment. I knew it well. Yeah. But Cleveland Heights was just as interested as we were. So it was a joint committee of the three cities. The Doan Brook Committee met at the Nature Center. By that time, we had a building, and the Doan Brook Committee met there. And the Doan Brook Committee tried to program things that would keep all three cities involved in what needed to be done, like tracing the brook and where its sources were and where it came out. I mean, we only learned then about the Doan Brook coming out through Dike 14. Up until then, we didn’t know that, so it was very educational. But I did help to start an environment committee of the council. It had never had an environment committee. And I was interested in it because I was appointed to the sewer committee, which was fine, because I knew that the sewer committee was critical to cleaning up the environment. We had so much work to do. Actually, it might have been called water and sewer because we also worked on the water pipes. I know when I ran for reelection in ’75, I asked Bernie Reif to cut a section of the pipe. Water pipe out for me that I could carry around to meetings. And so he cut a nice section out of the water pipe. I don’t know if you know this, but a house burned down on Cortland Boulevard. It was Jack Lample’s mother’s house on Courtland Boulevard. Beautiful house at the corner of South Woodland Road. It burned to the ground because when the fire department got there, no water came out of their hoses when they attached it to a hydrant. And so the city began to look at its pipes. And many of the pipes were very much encrusted on the inside. I mean, there was a lot of crud on the inside of the water pipes. In some places, you could just barely see through them, a little bit of light. So that’s why I got a piece of pipe. That was my prop for my council campaign. So no wonder I ended up on the sewer committee. And, of course, we were planning to spend a lot of money on water and sewer, and we did, because the county would only do the large pipes. The small pipes were the ones that were really a problem or a bigger problem, because the small pipes would go to the house. So when you needed water to go from the main pipe to the house and put out a fire, that’s why you couldn’t get any water on Courtland Boulevard. Sometimes it takes a horrifying event, and that fire was a pretty horrifying event. So I felt that there were a lot of environmental issues that the water and sewer committee couldn’t deal with because we had to deal with contracts and the companies that did the work. And I don’t know, it was just a very technical committee and the environment committee. I thought we needed an environment committee to look at the whole range of environmental issues in the city, from recycling, including the care of the woodlands. There were just a lot of things. We had quite an agenda to follow. So I think the environment committee was recently phased out. I heard they felt they didn’t need it anymore. I am not involved in Shaker politics anymore, so I don’t know the whole story about that, but I don’t think it exists.
Nancy King Smith [00:24:18] What were some of the things in terms of the parklands and so on? Do you have much in mind of the kinds of either laws that were enacted or policies or so on that had to do with sort of park preservation?
Kathleen Barber [00:24:36] Well, a little bit. We argued that recycling would get the cans out of the parks. And so we put a big emphasis on recycling. And it did. I mean, if you recycle, of course, we couldn’t do. We never could get the bill passed by the Ohio legislature. We worked on that too. To try to get a bottle bill through the Ohio legislature in ’79, I think, was when it was finally gotten to the floor and then it was defeated by one vote. That would have put a 10 cent fee on, I mean, a reward on every bottle brought in. I think it was 5 cents for a can and 10 cents for a bottle or something like that. I’m not sure of the details, but it finally came to a vote. Vern Reif had kept it from coming to a vote, by the way, a Democrat from southern Ohio, he was the speaker of the House and he was from Gallipolis down on the Ohio River. And his campaign, because he was the speaker, he got a lot of money from Procter and Gamble. And he recontributed the Procter and Gamble money to people who were running for House seats, Democrats mainly, who would support him on the bottle bill. So it was a neat little circle of Procter and Gamble not wanting to have a fee put on the bottles and cans. So that was a very major issue that we were involved in that involved statewide efforts, you know, New York and Maine and Massachusetts and, well, there are about five or six states that did manage to overcome. But I guess the home of Procter and Gamble, it couldn’t be done.
Nancy King Smith [00:26:31] Meanwhile, you were also raising your family?
Kathleen Barber [00:26:35] Oh, yes, I was going to school too. [crosstalk] I went back to school to get my graduate work done and went on to teach at John Carroll, Political Science.
Nancy King Smith [00:26:48] And your degree was from-
Kathleen Barber [00:26:50] Case Western Reserve.
Nancy King Smith [00:26:53] And did your family use the nature center and the parks and so on?
Kathleen Barber [00:26:59] Oh, yes. We always walked and hiked in the parks. We loved the parks. So the family was out there. I can’t say anything specific other than that we used them. We took picnics to Horseshoe Lake and certainly walked in the other parks.
Nancy King Smith [00:27:17] How did John, who’s now president of the board of the Nature Center, get his love of nature?
Kathleen Barber [00:27:27] Well, it might have something to do with all that, I don’t know. He majored in Biology at Earlham, but of course by then he was pretty committed to it. He worked on the bottle bill when he was in high school. I know he was very active with a student group that was promoting the bottle bill. I guess you’ll have to ask him that question. But he did go to Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana, and had some wonderful friends there who were birders and who were into the environment in major ways. Professors as well as fellow students. And so I think it got confirmed there. When he graduated from Earlham, he went to work for the Defenders of Wildlife in the Aravaipa Canyon of Arizona. Has he ever told you that story?
Nancy King Smith [00:28:15] Not a lot, but go ahead though.
Kathleen Barber [00:28:18] Well, he was perched for a year with a camera in the trees of the Aravaipa Canyon, documenting the mating life of black hawks. He also documented some important cactus species and wrote articles for biology journals on cacti and on black hawks. At the end of that year, actually, he lived in an old ranch house in the bottom of the Aravaipa Canyon, pretty much by himself. The end of the year, needing some human companionship, he went to Washington and worked for the Smithsonian in the bird division. His main job there was to put the bird collection on computers. Computers were just coming into their own. When he got the bird collection on the computer, they said to him, all right, John, now the egg collection. And he realized at that point, after he got the egg collection computerized that people who were coming in to work at The Smithsonian had PhDs in biology. And he had been just out of college with his biology major, so he needed to have a PhD or go into something else. He was pretty hooked on computers by that time. So he went to work in a computer-related job in the insurance business. And he never went back to the environment professionally. He’s just always been. It’s always been his love.
Nancy King Smith [00:29:53] Any other stories about the Nature Center and activities there, ways in which, as a council person or anything that come to mind?
Kathleen Barber [00:30:07] Well, I think there were some difficult issues about the use of the Nature center by Cleveland, Cleveland Heights and Shaker Heights, which was a very important issue because Cleveland owned the land and we only had a lease on it. Walter Kelly kept our noses to the grindstone on that issue, never to forget that Shaker did not own that land. It was very important to have Cleveland involved. Of course, Cleveland Heights bordered the Nature Center, so that was equally important. Nourishing the Doan Brook Committee of the Nature center was a very important activity to keep the Parks Department of the City of Cleveland involved, which wasn’t easy because they had much more difficult issues to cope with than the Shaker Lakes. But we did manage to keep them involved and that was, I think, very important. And it still is. But once the children of the Cleveland schools started using them, I mean, I assume they still are, that that’s part of the program. I think that’s just been an essential component of the success of the program.
Nancy King Smith [00:31:24] Do you remember any particular disagreements or times when there was really not, besides the freeway fight itself, where there were difficulties in terms of either direction of the Doan Brook Committee or the Nature Center?
Kathleen Barber [00:31:48] The only issue that I can think of, and it was a fairly minor issue, was that our director of the service department, Bernie Reif, whom we all loved dearly, had been there for years and years and years, felt that his job was to keep the parks well manicured. And so if a tree fell, or if it was about to fall, he wanted to cut it and clear it. The Nature Center people felt very strongly that it should be a natural place and that the fallen trees should be allowed to deteriorate and become nurse trees. I was walking in the Nature center the other Sunday afternoon and I came across some of those huge nurse trees with little plants growing up out of them. I thought, oh, Bernie, I hope you’re watching this from wherever you are. So that was something of an issue, but that level of issue was only a mild one.
Nancy King Smith [00:32:47] Is it still back now as how much management of all the invasives and all those kinds of things?
Kathleen Barber [00:32:52] Yes, I’m sure the issues will come back and they’ll come back in a different form.
Nancy King Smith [00:32:58] As far as the physical landscape, have you noticed change of the parklands and the areas around the lakes?
Kathleen Barber [00:33:09] Well, not very much, except in Southerly Park where the exercise equipment was put in. But, you know, I think that’s fine. I don’t object to it. I think it’s wonderful to bring people into that area because it’s going to be a safer area if people are using it. And because I have this image in the back of my mind of when it wasn’t exactly a safe area, I feel good about having people come in and use those exercise facilities. I hope they are using them.
Nancy King Smith [00:33:42] At least it’s safer. Well, let’s see. I’m going to turn to Martha and see if anything has come to your mind while I glance and see if there’s anything I’ve missed.
Martha Eakin [00:33:54] I was wondering. We talked a lot about the freeway and then there was the Nature Center. Were you involved in deciding about, well, we’re going to have a building and we’ll have classes, or were you involved in.
Kathleen Barber [00:34:10] Well, I was at the beginning, but since I went on the council in 73, I began to have so many other concerns. I didn’t stay really involved in detail because the board was wonderful. It was a Wonderful board. Our first director. Tell me his name.
Nancy King Smith [00:34:31] The first director. Not Rich Horton.
Kathleen Barber [00:34:35] Rich Horton. There was somebody before Rich Horton. Yes. But anyway, we began to have such good direction and the board was so good I didn’t feel needed at that point. I felt more needed in my new council capacity. So I guess I shifted my focus because I only had so much time and because such good people were doing things and the citizens of Shaker and Cleveland Heights were using the area more and more, walking in it and basically appreciating it. Because of the nature center that it became almost self perpetuating.
Martha Eakin [00:35:15] Do you remember who. Who it was? You may know the end, but who said, let’s have a nature center or we should have an environmental education center? I mean, were people sitting around like you described? You know, the party in the kitchen where you said, okay, now we’re going.
Kathleen Barber [00:35:28] To work on public radio? No, I don’t remember when we did that. I mean, I remember the discussions, but I don’t remember a setting or a cast of characters. It just sort of evolved, as far as I know, out of a lot of informal conversations among people who had worked so hard to get it done, to get it saved.
Nancy King Smith [00:35:49] Did you get involved in the fundraising at all?
Kathleen Barber [00:35:51] A little bit. Again, because of going on with the council, I just was not deeply involved, but I certainly did some of it at the beginning.
Nancy King Smith [00:36:03] Some of were warning a bit about that it wasn’t the areas around Our lady of Peace and also further south on Harvard and Lee and so on, those communities were also feeling very affected. Were they involved in the political side?
Kathleen Barber [00:36:27] No, they weren’t. I know that Brad Norris tried to get the people in the parish, Our lady of Peace in that parish involved and I think it was difficult to identify people who wanted to work on that. But that’s again, a rather hazy recollection. I just don’t remember. We were also working at that time on Shaker Square. And of course Shaker Square is a connector to Our Lady of Peace Parish. And it was a pretty big issue about Shaker Square at that time. What were we going to do to save Shaker Square? So all those issues blended together and I can’t remember how the cast of characters worked. I wish I still had my files.
Nancy King Smith [00:37:23] With looking forward. Some of the same issues do seem to be around. What’s your sense of the whole viability of Shaker Square, Shaker Heights, Nature Center and so on. Where do you see things going into the future?
Kathleen Barber [00:37:43] Well, I think that the whole urban sprawl movement, the anti-urban sprawl movement is beginning to pay off. I think people are beginning to say, and the price of gas is helping. I think people are beginning to say, I don’t have to abandon these wonderful areas, that maybe we should have dinner at Shaker Square. Maybe I should think about shopping at that Dave’s. I think it’s going to slowly work to the advantage of the inner areas. The consortium of the inner ring suburbs, I think is extremely important. And that was just beginning to come together when I left the council in 1980. 1980? Yes, 1980 was when I left the council and that whole idea of the inner-ring suburbs working together was beginning to gel. And I think that’s an extremely important thing because now it’s institutionalized too.
Nancy King Smith [00:38:49] You worked on regionalism and trying to get the political structure reorganized for the county. Where do you see the whole regional effort, regionalizing effort going now?
Kathleen Barber [00:39:05] Well, when I heard Mayor Frank Jackson use the word regional in a positive sense, I felt we’re making progress. This is going to happen someday. That because of economic pressures, not because of any theoretical advantages, but because of economic pressures, the communities are going to get together and they’re going to share services. And every once in a while now I hear somebody else saying, oh, why don’t we think about tax-based sharing? You know, I’ve been saying tax-based sharing. Tax-based sharing for years. I taught my students and I taught a course in intergovernmental relationship, and I always had a unit in the course on tax-based sharing where we studied the Minneapolis-St. Paul plan and tried to apply it to an area. And they could choose. They could do the Cincinnati regional area, they could do Detroit, or they could do Cleveland or, you know, I wanted them to choose the area they were interested in looking at, but figure out what difference it would make if tax based sharing could be used and new development, the value of new development, the taxes generated by new development would be shared among the entire community, not just the single community where the new development happened. I mean, I think that’s been the key to Minneapolis’s revival and its continued success. And I think now people are beginning to say, why don’t we do something like that? You know, it makes sense.
Nancy King Smith [00:40:38] Just say a little bit about the committee you chaired and what happened with all that with the county regionalizing.
Kathleen Barber [00:40:46] Well, it was my friends Tim Hagan and Mary Boyle, who were county commissioners, who asked me if I would chair a committee to work on reforming county government. It was not a regional plan, it was the county only. And so I helped them figure out who would be good people on a committee, a committee for county government reform. And we chose Democrats and Republicans, four of each. Three of each and six. Yes. And a seventh person whom we could not find out a party affiliation for. He denied a party affiliation. He insisted that he was a pure independent. And of course, we harassed him a little bit about. There are no pure independents. That’s all. That’s just a smokescreen. But he finally persuaded us he was indeed an independent. So we had a great committee, and we interviewed all the previous county administrators and the current county administrator, and we had a very elaborate plan to study county government, the various offices and what they did, the seven separately elected officials and what they did and how much it cost and how many jobs they had under their control. And we came up with our plan. And I still think it’s a great plan for the county. It doesn’t address regional issues, but I do think that county government reform would be a good first step. There are 60 communities in this county, and it’s ridiculous. But also, the seven separately elected offices are ridiculous. So we tried. We handed our great plan to the county commissioners and they said, that really is great. And they turned around and there was a shelf right there handy.
Nancy King Smith [00:42:50] Well, let’s see. Ramp up here with a couple of things. How has the Nature Center, the parklands, the freeway fight impacted your life?
Kathleen Barber [00:43:05] It showed me how to be political without being necessarily a candidate for public office. Without necessarily being. Well, I won’t say that I’ll back away from that because I found that partisanship was so important. You just have to have both parties if you’re going to accomplish anything. But it certainly propelled me into the political arena in a way I hadn’t been before. I’d been on a lot of League of Women Voters study committees. I had fought the Bricker Amendment. I tried to get the United States to recognize Red China. I mean, I did all those things, but in terms of accomplishing something in the community, this was a very important experience to me. I got to know a lot of people. I learned a lot of strategies. I learned some political skills from Alan Holmes and Brad Norris that I wouldn’t have had any way of learning if I hadn’t been sitting at tables with them and hearing them argue their cases. So it was very important to me.
Nancy King Smith [00:44:13] Anything you’d like to add that I haven’t asked about from all of this spectrum of things we talked about?
Kathleen Barber [00:44:21] Well, I went on. And actually, I went on after Shaker Heights Council. I went on to the Gun foundation board, which Gave me an opportunity to get much more involved in the nonprofit sector. And the experience of funding nonprofits was quite wonderful. I learned a huge amount about the community that I hadn’t learned in these other more political fights. And so when I went off the Gund Foundation board, then I felt I was equipped to carry on. I mean, you just do so much in the community that makes you feel you can do more. So when we moved to Bratenahl and we didn’t like the. The village government, we didn’t think it was a very responsible village government. My husband and I and some other citizens in the community started Bratenahl Concerned Citizens. We were both retired by that time, so we had time to worry about our village. So that went on for a few years. So, yes, it had an impact.
Nancy King Smith [00:45:26] That’s great. Anything else you want to cover?
Martha Eakin [00:45:32] We could ask about people that we, you know, if there are people, particularly in the early beginning of the Nature Center, that you think would be helpful for us to interview. I mean, we put together a list, but every once in a while somebody mentions someone, we all go, oh, we didn’t know. There was a name in the Cleveland Plain Dealer the other day that I think that’s. I noticed that it said she’d been involved in the freeway fight. And I thought, gee, I don’t know that name at all. So if you might just mention.
Kathleen Barber [00:46:04] The trouble is they’re dying, you know, like Mary Elizabeth Croxton and Brad Norris and Kelly Adams was involved and she died. And so it’s a long time ago.
Nancy King Smith [00:46:21] Well, at some point, we might just run the list that we have by you just to see if there’s anybody else that we’ve missed.
Kathleen Barber [00:46:30] It would be interesting to talk to Pat Kelly. Pat’s on Cape Cod now, but she’ll be back sometime in July, and she lives at 13800 Shaker. Not Shaker, Fairhill, in the South Park Manor. And I know she would. I think she might have some memories of that time. Although I have to say that Walter was not only doing all that he was doing for Shaker Heights and for the freeway fight, he was also the city attorney for about five other communities. And he went to meetings night after night after night. And Pat was raising five children. So she might say, oh, no, I can’t tell you anything about that. But she’s somebody who’s still around that it occurs to me she was at least knowledgeable about what was happening. If I think of anybody else, I’ll call you. But right now.
Nancy King Smith [00:47:29] Well, this has been wonderful. Thank you very much.
Kathleen Barber [00:47:30] Well, it’s been fun for me to think about all of that, and I’m just sorry that my facility with names has not st.
Martha Eakin [00:47:38] It’s been an education for me.
Kathleen Barber [00:47:41] Okay.
Nancy King Smith [00:47:41] Well, thank you.
Kathleen Barber [00:47:42] Okay.
Justin Hons [00:47:43] Actually, would you mind if I asked a couple of questions?
Nancy King Smith [00:47:45] Please. Right. [crosstalk] I forgot.
Justin Hons [00:47:46] No, it’s fine. Just talk into the mic normally. Well, one thing I wanted to ask was it seemed that at the time of the freeway fight that a lot of women were very involved in opposition to the freeway. And I wanted to ask why you thought so many women got involved in that issue and why women seem to be, from the stories I’ve heard so far, really at the center of opposing the freeway.
Kathleen Barber [00:48:15] Well, let me go back to the groups that I talked about. The garden clubs were all women. I mean, that’s what women did. We cooked and cleaned and took care of the garden and raised the children. So there were very few men who were active in the garden clubs. There was a men’s garden club, actually. I don’t know whatever happened to it. Maybe it still exists. But the other group that I talked about, the Freeway Committee, was headed by two very powerful men who were both very powerful in their law firms and their law firms were very powerful in politics. Brad Norris and Alan Holmes. So on the committee that I was working on, they were mostly men. So men were involved. Men saw the economic side of it perhaps more clearly than the women did at that time. But you’re right. But then, women have always been involved in community issues. The women are in their homes at that time. Women were in their homes most of the day and walking their baby carriages and walking the dog. And they were in the community, so they were more likely to be active in community concerns. And the men would come home from work, having worked downtown. They would come home from work and want to spend time with the children and not have time for committees the way the women had spent their days. So I think that’s the way I would explain it. If it were to happen today, it might be different. In fact, one of the things that I grieve about, there are some downsides to all the progress we’ve made in terms of gender roles. And one of them is there aren’t many women with time to do League of Women Voters types of things anymore. So many of the women who staff the League of Women Voters with volunteer hours are working full time, and they can’t spend the time that we did in the ’50s and ’60s. So I guess that’s my answer. Change in culture.
Justin Hons [00:50:25] I also wanted to ask you about your- If you could maybe reflect a little bit on your overall participation in electoral politics and what you felt were overall the benefits and maybe some of the limitations that you see now kind of looking back on your participation, electoral politics, because you kind of talked a little bit about how the freeway fight was different.
Kathleen Barber [00:50:52] One of the things, I mean, I did learn a lot about partisan politics in the freeway fight through Brad and Alan and their work with the members of Congress and with the governor. But I went on to become more active. I became a precinct committee person and I went to two Democratic conventions, national conventions in the 1980s, because I saw how important it was to work in partisan ways. And I went on the Cuyahoga County Executive Committee, Democratic Executive Committee I worked for. I was a Udall delegate in 1980. Did you ever hear of Mo Udall? No. He faded into history. He was the best environmentalist that ever ran for president. He was a senator from Arizona. And at a Democratic national convention with 5,000 delegates, there were 354 of us, I think, who were Udall delegates from around the country. And the environment was our main set of issues. So I did go on in partisan politics. I got more active in partisan politics and through the ’80s and I was teaching, of course, started teaching in 1968, full time. I taught political science at John Carroll and I taught political parties. I always had to be non partisan in class, but in my private life I was very partisan because I felt that it was important to me. But I always urged my students to go out and look at their precinct, first of all, and see if they had a precinct committee person, because four out of every five precincts in the country is unstaffed. So I tried to get them to go out and run for precinct committeemen and get active in their political party. I have a lot of students who’ve run for office, especially women running for judges. At one time I had six former students on the Cuyahoga County bench who were women apart from the men. They really did go out and run for office. But then there is a- I mean, we were building on a tradition in Cuyahoga county, which was that you could go to Cleveland State or John Carroll and run for judge if you went to Cleveland State Law School. You know, that was a pretty common path to the bench in Cuyahoga County. And if you went to John Carroll, especially because you were likely to have an Irish name. In those days, an Irish name was good for being a judge. There are a lot of competitors now. A Slovenian name is just as good. And there are a lot of other names that compete now, but there was a time when an Irish name and a John Carroll, Cleveland State Law School background was a great path to the judiciary. I don’t know if that answers your question.
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