Abstract
Jack Ulman of the Shaker Lakes Canoe Club discusses the origins and history of the Club, which dates back to the early years of 20th century but which ceased to exist by the end of the 1970s. Ulman recalls his early experiences at Shaker Lakes, reminisces about boating on the Lakes, describes the wildlife and botanical variety of the nature preserve, puts the Lake in the context of Cleveland's outdoor recreational assets, and recounts the grassroots battle to stop encroaching highway development in the Shaker Heights-Cleveland Heights area.
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Interviewee
Ulman, Jack (interviewee)
Interviewer
Sack, Mark (interviewer);Bifulco, Anthony (participant)
Project
Shaker Lakes Nature Center
Date
7-11-2006
Document Type
Oral History
Duration
36 minutes
Recommended Citation
"Jack Ulman Interview, 11 July 2006" (2006). Cleveland Regional Oral History Collection. Interview 902007.
https://engagedscholarship.csuohio.edu/crohc000/232
Transcript
Mark Sack [00:00:00] Okay, Good morning. Mark Sack here with Tony Bifulco, two American history teachers at Cleveland Heights High School, working with Cleveland State University on the oral history project. And we’re with Mr. Jack Ulman, whose name was provided to us by the Shaker Lakes Nature Center folks. Good morning, Jack.
Jack Ulman [00:00:19] Good morning.
Mark Sack [00:00:20] A couple quick questions to get some background on you. Where were you born?
Jack Ulman [00:00:24] Born in Cleveland, St. Luke’s Hospital, not far from here.
Mark Sack [00:00:27] Okay, so should we assume that you grew up in the area?
Jack Ulman [00:00:30] I did. When I was five years old, I moved to East 127th Street, about three or four blocks into Cleveland from here.
Mark Sack [00:00:36] Okay, so not too far. Not too far at all. One of the things we’re interested in is if you could recall an early memory of an outdoor experience that may have had some type of long term impact.
Jack Ulman [00:00:49] Well, as I mentioned to the person I spoke to initially, my first early childhood memory was falling into Shaker Lake. And I was probably two and a half at the time, or a little less than two and a half. And I remember being very- It was very pleasant. I fell in and I was looking up and could see the waves and little wavelets. And then people grabbed me and pulled me out and there was a lot of shouting and yelling, and that scared me. And then I started to cry. But I remember my mother was very angry that I had fallen in the lake. And from that point on, I was watched very carefully that day. But I was in school constantly in psychology. And they always would ask for your earliest childhood memory. That was a big common thing. So that’s the memory that comes all the time. That was the earliest thing I remember in life.
Mark Sack [00:01:30] So was your family were they frequent visitors of the Shaker Lakes facility?
Jack Ulman [00:01:32] My dad was one of the original members of the Shaker Lakes Canoe Club around 1910. And as a single man, it was all single men at that time. They traveled a great deal and they took their canoes all over Pennsylvania and Ohio. And my parents didn’t marry until roughly 1940, 1943. So he was single for a long period of time, as were most of the members. But then as they married, course, the club became a family club. But initially it was all single men.
Mark Sack [00:02:04] And they would canoe onto Shaker Lakes from time to time all over the country.
Jack Ulman [00:02:10] There was originally a boathouse on the other side of the lake that was kind of a ramshackle boathouse, and it burned down. And then during the Depression, Shaker Heights’ mayor, and I don’t remember his name, was able to get money from the WPA or one of the make-work programs that the government operated. And with $30,000, they built the clubhouse that existed on the other side of the lake. A huge building, really, four pillars of tree trunks that were used for the main porch and a large dance floor. Upstairs, a den, the kitchen, and then downstairs, the canoe storage and the restrooms. So pretty big building.
Mark Sack [00:02:48] And it was a private club or?
Jack Ulman [00:02:52] Private club rented, I believe, for $1 a year. The building was rented for $1 a year. But Shaker was interested in getting make-work projects, and so they were glad to take this opportunity.
Mark Sack [00:03:03] Can you tell us more about the history of the canoe club?
Jack Ulman [00:03:06] Well, as I say, it was, I think, a pretty wild group of men who drank and chased women, basically, and loved canoeing. And they traveled a lot with their boats. And then when they had the opportunity to build this clubhouse, the club got more centered and attracted more families. And then, of course, many of them were married and having children themselves. So it became a family club. And it was the center part of my life because my parents divorced when I was younger and I loved boating and I loved water. So it’s the place that my dad took me to eight months a year. We would canoe in the fall and the spring, Then even in the wintertime, There was an oil furnace in the place, as well as a beautiful fireplace upstairs. So we would go up and talk and watch television and things like that, even in the wintertime. So it was the center part of my childhood, really, with my dad.
Mark Sack [00:03:55] And it existed until when?
Jack Ulman [00:03:58] It was the early 1970s. And there were a number of police problems that happened there, and the place was broken into periodically. It was not- We did not have a caretaker or anyone staying there, and we had pretty strong security. But nonetheless, people pried off boards and got in that way. And there was some violence there, apparently. A woman, I believe, made a charge that she was attacked there. There were all sorts of things that happened. In fact, one night we were having a meeting, it was in the middle of winter, and all of a sudden we heard steps coming up the stairway into the dance floor area where we were meeting in the den. And four policemen came with their guns drawn, which was really pretty scary, you know. And we were there, five of us, probably four or five of us, just officers of the club having our monthly meeting. And somebody had called in and said there was action down at the club and probably something was going on. And so they came down to investigate, but they took it seriously enough that they had their guns out and somebody had forgotten to lock the door. So you know, that could have been criminals as well. We were very fortunate, I guess, in that regard. The police had more and more calls down there. They became more frustrated with it. It was a private club existing in a place that really didn’t have room for a private club. The biggest thing also is we had no plumbing. We had no water coming in. We had no toilet going out. We had a septic tank. And one of the jobs of the Commodore was to empty out the heads, you know, and take them over and dump them. And that became increasingly not acceptable in Shaker Heights. So the fact we had no water coming in made it a fire hazard. The fact that we had no plumbing going out made it a sanitation hazard as far as the city was concerned. So they became more and more aggressive. In the ’70s, we could no longer fight. We had three or four attorneys in the club who were battling it continuously for free, all pro bono. But, you know, eventually a warrant was made for my arrest by the fire department. That was the scariest part of the whole thing. And I was a schoolteacher at the time, a young beginning school teacher. The idea of being arrested was not a good idea. It was pretty frightening experience all the way around. So at that point we gave up, dissolved the club. We continued to meet. We had a nice treasury. So we continued to meet for free dinners, annual dinners for probably 10, 15 years after that. Then the money finally ran out and most of the men, frankly, by that time were gone. You know, I was the youngest by far.
Mark Sack [00:06:19] And the building, the structure itself was-
Jack Ulman [00:06:23] Used as a fire department practice. And not very well done. It didn’t catch on fire very well and they had to restart it. And I wasn’t there for it, but I saw slides of it and they couldn’t get the thing to burn was the problem, I guess. And so it was all. It just looked terrible at the end. You know, the porch sloped down where one structure had gone, but the rest were all still intact. And it was a very sad demise. I’m glad I didn’t see it.
Mark Sack [00:06:50] That’s interesting. It’s a little piece of history of this area that Tony and I had not heard of at all.
Jack Ulman [00:06:57] Well, this area where we are right now, I came over to frequently as a child. We used to look for snakes here, snakes and turtles. And this was all just a marsh. There’s no building here, obviously. There’s no park, just woods and swampy mush, gray clay-based marsh. And we always thought we would find snakes and turtles here. I’m not sure we were very successful. It smelled bad, and there were a lot of insects. A lot of- Just a horrible amount of insects. But when this place was built, it scared the canoe club because it was all of a sudden another institution on the lake and one that had, obviously, public support. So. Yeah.
Mark Sack [00:07:29] And did you become connected with eventually with the Shaker Lakes Nature Center in any way, shape or form?
Jack Ulman [00:07:37] No, there’s no connection between the two institutions at all.
Mark Sack [00:07:39] You personally, though?
Jack Ulman [00:07:40] Oh, no, never. No, not until many years later, you know, many years later. And that’s because I knew people who worked here, and my church had some meetings here. Other than that, I’d never been here.
Mark Sack [00:07:52] Okay. Is there any- Has there been, over the years an official connection or with this entity?
Jack Ulman [00:08:00] Never.
Mark Sack [00:08:00] Nature Center?
Jack Ulman [00:08:01] Nope.
Mark Sack [00:08:02] So you come, use it as a recreation center?
Jack Ulman [00:08:04] Oh, yeah. Oh, yes. I belong to a seniors group. We’ve been here twice for programs, and my church has had two programs here. So I visited and often thought about joining the photography group here. I think they have an excellent nature photography group, and I would like to know more about that. I’m a journalist and a professional photographer doing weddings, but I know very little about nature photography, and some of the work I’ve seen here is really good. So I thought about joining, but to date, I haven’t yet, so.
Mark Sack [00:08:30] Okay. Well, actually, that sort of changes the direction of the interview process here.
Jack Ulman [00:08:34] If anything, there’s a fear of this agency, of this institution in our group, you know, because all of a sudden it was, you know, as government was coming in officially, there’s going to be something here that would be certainly classy and have water and toilets and everything else. And so I think we viewed it. Most of the members viewed it as a negative that was happening in the area for us.
Mark Sack [00:08:59] Okay. In terms of the freeway fight, the famous freeway fight, obviously you were at least an observer of the processes that took place. Could you share a little bit from your perspective how you saw the process unravel?
Jack Ulman [00:09:19] There were a number of people with the Canoe Club who were politically connected. One was Dan Moore, and that name still remains a big name in Cleveland. His son, of course, was a candidate for mayor not too long ago and very much involved in the Wendy Park, Whiskey Island property downtown. So a name that’s in the news a great deal. Well, Dan was a member. Then there were two others who were engineers at Case Western Reserve who were connected with the county engineer, and they seemed to have a lot of inside information. And I remember that there was great fear that if the freeway came through, the Canoe Club would Be gone. The Shaker Lakes would be gone. And then also remember, I lived on 127th Street, which is where Our Lady of Peace was, one of the largest Catholic parishes on the east side at that time. And Nancy King Smith and I have had this discussion. I believe that they were probably the most powerful entity in fighting the freeway, the church. The church. Saint Our Lady of Peace. Excuse me, Our Lady of Peace. It was a huge parish and a very successful parish. And it would have been lost. The freeway was just going to cut right down its side. And they were the best organized that I knew of. Now I know later in seeing slide presentations from this institution, there also were some very sophisticated resistance that was formed here. The Canoe Club was more a backdoor thing. They were talking to people on the back door. There were so few members, 40 or 50 members, that we didn’t constitute any kind of real political organization. We had some well placed people. And so I know that they were also fighting it because it would have been the end of the Shaker Lakes as we knew it.
Mark Sack [00:10:47] So if I’m hearing you correctly-
Jack Ulman [00:10:50] Yeah.
Mark Sack [00:10:53] Each interest group on its own was attempting to serve primarily their self interest of preserving their institution, their organization.
Jack Ulman [00:11:04] Exactly, exactly.
Mark Sack [00:11:06] Are you suggesting that collaboratively the work of all these different entities, including the folks here, the folks in church, and your entity in Cleveland Heights, people, collectively, the effort-
Jack Ulman [00:11:21] Yeah, collectively, but not necessarily collaboratively. I don’t remember anybody ever sitting down and saying, okay, you represent this. Let’s have a meeting of all these forces. And Nancy and I have talked about this at some depth. She was unaware of Our Lady of Peace’s efforts, but they were a well-connected Cleveland political church. I mean, there were councilmen and others who worship there. And it was a powerful entity at the time. So I really think that they were a major force. And she doesn’t see that at all. But you know, at the time she didn’t recognize. Exactly, exactly. So. And the Canoe Club, as I say, would not have been a political force number wise. And it was always our policy to stay out of the news. I mean, one day Kenny Gaskell got on the cover of the Sunday Magazine, you know, sailing down the Shaker Lakes. And we were pleased to see that. And I got on the cover once myself with a Jewish college, had a big sailboat race in the Flats. And they knew of us from that Plain Dealer article. And so we organized a race on the Flats, which we were completely outgunned. All the real racers showed up and we couldn’t do anything. None of us were racers, but it was a heck of a good time. And that was the other time we got on the magazine section. Other than that, we tried to stay a low profile. It was not our desire to have a great deal of interest in the club, especially since we were a private organization in public land. You know, it’s always an iffy kind of situation. So it was a quiet, quiet kind of thing. And I don’t think we ever did anything except backdoor politics on that. I know that people were quite upset about it, but I wouldn’t have been privileged at that time. I was a young man, probably 10 or 12 years old, and while I was aware of all those things, I wasn’t a part of it.
Mark Sack [00:13:01] Right.
Jack Ulman [00:13:01] Yeah.
Mark Sack [00:13:02] Okay, that’s interesting. May I ask, do you have family?
Jack Ulman [00:13:07] No, I don’t. I’m divorced and my father passed away years ago. My mother passed away, so I have no family left to it. I have any memory of this.
Mark Sack [00:13:14] Okay.
Jack Ulman [00:13:15] Yeah.
Mark Sack [00:13:19] Thank you, Chris. Pause. All right, Jack, we’ll spend a few minutes talking about the landscape and physical environment. Can you describe the Nature Center grounds and trails prior to some of the development in more recent years?
Jack Ulman [00:13:40] Well, before the Nature Center came in, as I mentioned, this was just a marsh area, wooded marsh, a lot of insects, a kind of a gray clay-based muck. We used to come over here to see if we could find snakes and turtles and frogs and things like that. My memories of it though, are that it was really hard to get through any area, that it was very muddy, very difficult to find anything, and that the insects were devastating. So we didn’t spend a lot of time here. We walked around the lakes a lot, and the area between this and Shaker Lake was a bridge, and people liked to fish off that bridge at the time for little perch and sunfish. And also as a way we’d walk around. You had to walk over the bridge in order to get to the other side of the lake. That upper part of the lake was fairly deep at one time, but then storms in the 1950s, I believe, washed a lot of soil in there and it became very shallow. So it was difficult to canoe except in a very specific path. And in fact, a small island formed right in the middle of the upper part of the lake. The area was rich with turtles, especially snapping turtles. And one of our members, Elmer Luehring, got a big picture in the paper once because he caught a turtle that had about a two-foot shell on it and many pounds, and he made turtle soup out of it. But he used a particular contraption to collect turtles. And there were a lot of snapping turtles in the lake. We used to hunt them with nets and go around in the canoe and try and catch them as they basked in the sunlight on hot stones and sticks and twigs, logs that were falling in the water. There are a lot of fish in the lake. Sunfish, goldfish, enormous population of goldfish, some carp. And we fished in it illegally. It was always illegal to fish on the lake. In fact, once we bought a new rod and reel and it had a casting plug on it. And we were casting, practicing, and the police came down and told my father, so there’s no hooks on it. He can’t catch anything. Maybe he’d hit a fish in the head with it or something. But they had allowed nothing like that. But there always were people fishing, especially my first experience with African Americans on the lake. They would fish for carp. On the other side, there was a point directly across from the Canoe Club, and they would use dough balls and fish for carp and sunfish. And used go over and talk to them. And it was an interesting, interesting place then. The goldfish were huge. The population was very large. And off the Canoe Club there was a small point a little to the left of it, which would be west of the clubhouse itself. And my dad and I used to take a big rake and pull in the seaweed, very rich, thick seaweed. And in the seaweed would be small sunfish. A lot of crayfish. There were a lot of crayfish. We used to take those, and I’d take them home. They looked like little lobsters. And they could grow to a pretty decent size, actually, freshwater crayfish. And then we had a microscope, an old brass microscope that I still had that had 20, 40 and 60 power magnification. And we would look at the water, and of course, it was teeming with one cell life, amoebas, and paramecium and all those things that I was just fascinated by. So it was a wonderful experience. Microscope was very poor quality optically, but it just opened a whole new world for me. Another problem around the lake was rats. There were a lot of rats. And once a guy who was a friend of a friend in the Canoe Club got permission from the police department to shoot them. So we went out on a Saturday morning, about 5 in the morning with a .22-caliber rifle and me in the canoe and I did the canoeing and we went around the lake. And he probably killed 40 or 50 rats that day, including a couple of muskrats in the water, but the place was teeming with them at that time. There was a couple of sewer lines that came in, and it was an ideal place for rats to live. And so they were probably pretty dangerous, too, for people who were walking along the edge of the bank or anything. So I always wondered how legal that was, But I was told it was legal. And I did the canoeing, and he did the shooting and got a lot of rats that day. Then, of course, there were always feral animals, cats and dogs. You assume they were feral. You sure didn’t want to get around them anywhere, because they’d be around the lake periodically, because, again, there were, I guess, sources of food there from people who picnicked or whatever and left over and open trash and garbage. And we had a big garbage can at the top of our parking lot that raccoons got into regularly and other animals. So those are my memories of some of the wildlife that was there and some of the fish. I never saw any snakes in the water, but I did see frogs and just a ton of turtles. That was probably the biggest population. What else? Squirrels. Chipmunks. We had chipmunk homes built into the clubhouse itself. You know, they would find ways to get in for the wintertime. And so there were always chipmunks all over the place and ways to feed them peanuts and stuff. I mean, they were almost like pets. Yeah.
Mark Sack [00:18:27] Okay. Can you comment about maybe the diversity of the plants and the shrubs? Any insights on things?
Jack Ulman [00:18:33] My dad was quite good at that. He was really a naturalist, and he used to point things out to me. And I’m sorry to say that I wasn’t as interested in those as I was in the turtles and the other things that you could actually hunt. There’s a garden behind the club, and there was an attempt to keep a nice balance of spring, summer, and fall flowers in the garden. There were peonies and daisies and roses, but the roses died off because nobody really took care of them. We had a big spring cleanup day sometime in April, and people would come down and go through the garden, get all weeded and new stuff planted and all the rest. And then some would work on the inside, and I would work on the dock area, usually go into the water and dig out the mud to make room for the docks. We had three docks, basically, one launch area and two holding areas on either side. They’re still there. They’re not completely collapsed. The patio and the main cement structure were never, never destroyed. So they’re still there. I’ve gone down a couple of times. Very sad for me to go down there, of course, but, you know, that’s still around. The plants that were there, I know they were. Queen Anne’s lace was a big one, and dragonflies were all over that. I was fascinated by dragonflies. There was a milkweed of some kind, some berry plants, but nothing that was edible that I know of. In fact, some that were poisonous. I can’t think of any wildflowers, although I know there were a lot of wildflowers. My dad pointed them out regularly to me. I just don’t remember them very well.
Mark Sack [00:20:04] So, going back to the, you know, the docks and capacity for possibly having canoeing on the lakes. Have there been attempts over the years, I mean, where to utilize-
Jack Ulman [00:20:20] My understanding is it’s illegal. It’s illegal to launch a boat on the lake, on that lake. Now, whether it is on Horseshoe or not, I don’t know, but my understanding is that it is illegal. And we would get calls periodically from people who had just bought a canoe and wanted to come down and launch it and wanted to use our dock. And we said, sure, go ahead, you know. But we don’t know what the legal status of it is. And none of our boats are licensed or anything. We didn’t have Ohio licenses or numbers on them or anything like that. So at that time, I think it was questionable, the legality. Now, I’m sure it’s quite illegal for a couple of reasons. One is that there’s no- There’s no one to watch if any of you got in trouble or if someone drowned or anything. There’s no guard there. There’s no police that patrol the area. At one time, the Shaker Heights Police Department put an old retired policeman up in that parking lot all summer long. And he used to come down and get a Coke from us or listen to a little of the Indians game or something like that. A lot of pictures of my dad took with me and the old policeman, you know. But now there’s nobody there that I know of that ever patrols the area. So I think that any boating or swimming on the lake would be pretty dangerous. So I don’t think it’s allowed at all. It’s too bad, too, because it’s a beautiful resource. It’s a wonderful lake and nice breeze through and nice vegetation. And it’s like a little oasis in the middle of a lot of big traffic from the park drives and all the rest. And it’s a shame that it can’t be utilized by more than the walkers and joggers. It’s nice when you go around to see people walking their dogs or young families with their children in little carriage type things. But it still would have so much more value if they were more used to it. There’s no picnic area, for example, on that lake. There are no benches or any place for people to sit and look at it or talk or anything else that I know of. I walk it probably once a year. A lot of the paths have gone to ruin. You know, they’ve eroded on down. You can see water rivulet, erosion. And so I don’t think it’s safe for a lot of people who are older or who have again, little baby paramblers or anything like that, they could have trouble getting through. And it is a shame because it’s such a beautiful asset in the area. But I think that really there’s probably the people who live in the area discourage the development of it because it would just mean, you know, crowds of people coming up to picnic and scrap paper blown all over the place and so on and so forth. I think there’s been a real attempt to discourage that development. That’d be my opinion.
Mark Sack [00:22:42] And if it was in your hands, let’s say?
Jack Ulman [00:22:43] Oh, I would like to see it opened up. Yeah, I would like to see some nice benches, a couple of picnic tables, maybe an area off of the parking lot where picnic right now that’s used as it seems like mostly a distribution of wood chips. There are huge mountains of wood chips there that the city brings in after they do their clearing of woods, twigs and all the rest. And that’s about all I ever see in that parking lot. So I’d love to see some place that people could actually benefit from it as they do at Horseshoe and other places on the lake. It’s a nice walking path, but it does need work. You know, it’d be nice if they put new cinders out and leveled it and repaired those areas that have been damaged by erosion. Be nice if they put up some signs indicating trees or vegetation or, you know, things that exist there. There’s still places where you can see turtles on the lake. So it’d be nice to get a little turtle observing spot, you know, where there are logs in the water and turtles often sun themselves. Be nice if there’s some natural, you know, naturalist signs up. You know, this type of ivy grows here or watch for this kind of bird population here. Maybe there would be a natural organization that would put up some bird feeders and draw the birds back, you know, that have gone there. Certainly were some beautiful water birds that were there at one time. I never see those, but then again, I’m not on the lake every day or anything, so I really don’t know as much as I did when I was younger. It’s another asset in Cleveland that you just feel is underutilized. You know, I’m a sailor now on the lake, and it’s just discouraging to see all this beautiful land that could be developed that’s used for virtually nothing. And Wendy Park is a perfect example. Whiskey Island, a city that’s desperate for revenue from condominiums and restaurants and all the rest. And what we have are six picnic tables and two volleyball courts on dozens of acres of beautiful lakefront land. It’s just pathetic. And the Shaker Lakes, I think, could be much more utilized than they are. It’s a real asset in the area. This is a beautiful facility, and it does a land office business. For every time here, there’s a crowd, but the rest of the lakes don’t seem to be as prosperous.
Mark Sack [00:24:50] Is there any other topic or area that you feel you’d like to discuss, share with us that sort of connects with your personal history or-?
Jack Ulman [00:25:02] Well, the only area that I have bad feelings about in the Shaker Lakes Canoe Club is - this was the 1940s and ’50s that I was predominantly a member of, so, you know, I remember when I was commodore, we had Jewish members. We never had an African American member. We did have Jewish members, but I gather in the 1950s, that was very controversial. Shaker Heights was a Jewish population. There were those who expressed an interest and they were dissuaded, discouraged. And as I say, there’s never an African American approached us, but I think that that would have also caused major alarms. And so the sociology of the 1950s in ethnic northeastern Ohio, Cleveland area, I think, are discouraging, you know, And I’m happy to say that I think that’s all pretty much gone by the boards now. If the Canoe Club existed today, I think it would be open to everyone. But at that time, I remember there was one controversy, and I later learned that it was because one of the members had a neighborhood party and a number of the people attending the party were Jewish. And that caused quite a stink. I don’t know when this was. I was a child at the time. It wasn’t until I was an adult that I heard the whole story. But those things discouraged me because I always looked at it as a real open club, inexpensive. You didn’t have to be wealthy to join. You know, there were all kinds of people. There were physicians and bus drivers and, you know, it was just all real interesting mix of people and just a lot of nice folks. My childhood memories are extremely positive. Picnics and parties and regattas and all sorts of things like that. A beautiful patio and a porch overlooking the lake where we had my 21st birthday party there, you know, and other things that are really good memories.
Mark Sack [00:26:33] Is there a documented history of the-?
Jack Ulman [00:26:36] Well, unfortunately, yes, there was very sophisticated documented history, especially photographs. In fact, my father was a glass plate photographer, many, many years ago. And all of his pictures were in a collection. All the pictures that I know were in a collection that was eventually given to George Exline. And he was a historian who lived in Hudson. And he was married in a second marriage and had children and then his wife died and he died and apparently all of that stuff was thrown out. I’ve tried to reach the son, George Exline Jr. And I’ve not been able. He’s never returned a call to me. When I made a presentation at Shaker Heights Historical Society, I’d hoped to get some of the memorabilia from the club. They’re beautiful albums of photographs. Again, really early photography stuff that just as a photographer, are fascinating to look at, you know, let alone all the implications of the development of the lake area. But I believe he’s discarded all of it. I think the property was all sold in Hudson to tracts of land for development. Extremely valuable property. I’m sure all George did was raise corn there, you know, and I’m sure that it’s much more profitable. And I think George Jr. Has no interest in it at all. Had no interest in the club. And I believe all that’s discarded. I haven’t been able to find any of it. There’s one album of pictures that was given to the Shaker Lakes Historical Society, Shaker Heights Historical Society by Burt Pickford’s family when he died. And I’ve gone through those pictures there. My dad’s in a lot of them and- And they start. The first trophy that I have at home is a 1922 trophy. So I have three pieces of memorabilia, two trophies. One was done by a world-famous sculptor. He was not famous when he was here. He taught at Case Western Reserve, Western Reserve actually, at that time. But my dad posed for that. And so when the club disbanded, the club gave me the brass trophy. I also have an oil painting of the clubhouse and all three of those pieces. I’ve asked the executor of my estate to give to this center or to the Historical Society, whoever has an interest to do with as they please or discard. I just hate to see them discarded if they have some value. They’re beautiful pieces. They were beautifully engraved. And, you know, the oil painting’s quite nice. I hope that somebody will have a use for them.
Mark Sack [00:28:47] Has the Shaker Historical Society reached out to this family in Hudson or just in a personal-?
Jack Ulman [00:28:52] That was just my own personal. When I was asked to speak there, I called everyone I could, and most, of course, are dead. One man in his 90s had real memory confusion, so I couldn’t use him. And his wife became quite upset that I was even talking to him about this stuff. Then one of the other fellows was anticipating surgery. He would have been a very good asset. He was a lawyer, so he understood all the legal ramifications of the club’s demise as well as he was a young family man. During the ’50s, when I was just a child, I used to play with his daughter, as a matter of fact. So we running out of space there. Okay, so at any rate, Art Battles is his name. And I tried to get him. This time I wasn’t able to reach him. And then Elmer Luehring would be the youngest of the people who served with me. He was my secretary for the three years that I was commodore, and he still lives in the area. And I did talk to him, and he did attend the Shaker Heights Historical Society night, but he had very little to say. He’s not a real talker. So, you know, that wasn’t part of what he wanted to do. So most of the records, as I say, were all went to Exline when the clubhouse closed. And it’s very sad because there’s some beautiful things there.
Mark Sack [00:30:05] I was wondering if the Shaker Historical Society itself would make any formal requests to the family.
Jack Ulman [00:30:12] Maybe I’d be glad to give them the name of the phone number and all. And I did. In the course of my calling, I never did reach him directly, but I did talk to neighbors of his who were close friends. And ironically, he. Frankly, he was in jail at the time. But it was. It was a strange thing. He had been attacked, accused of some kind of spousal abuse and a nasty divorce. And so he’d been picked up on that. And it wasn’t a criminal or anything like that. But nonetheless, he wasn’t eager to talk to me. Apparently never returned any of the calls. And the neighbors, you know, asked him several times. So I assume that everything’s gone because that’s you know, the way it is. So. Yeah.
Mark Sack [00:30:49] Okay, Tony.
Anthony Bifulco [00:30:51] I was just kind of curious about the Shaker Heights Historical Society contacting you to organize and deliver a talk on the Canoe Club, the history of the Canoe Club. Why do you think they contacted you? And then after they contacted you, how did you go about putting the talk together?
Jack Ulman [00:31:14] Okay, good questions. I was shocked when it came to me, but I believe it was probably Nancy King Smith or Mike Luton, who are both active in that organization. And Nancy’s, of course, active right here. And Michael I know from church, and they’re very much involved in the history of the area. And they both know that I had this connection with the Canoe Club. And I had mentioned to both of them that I was leaving these artifacts to the nature center and Historical Society. So then the director called me and asked if I would do a program called Canoeing on the Shaker Lakes. And she showed me an article that they were going to base it on that appeared in Shaker Life years ago. And it quoted Bob Pico, who was a hardware store person. He owned like three or four hardware stores and nice family. I remember them quite well. So I tried to call him and found out that he had passed away. Talked to his daughter. Then, ironically, the whole family showed up that night, except, of course, for Bob. But he was quoted extensively in the article, and I was quoted in the article as well. So that’s how they got the name, and either through the article or through Nancy King Smith. And then they also had the Burt Pickford picture album, and they put all that out, and I brought what I had in. And then a fellow from the area here had pictures of them burning the building down. So he also showed up that night. Then there was a bird watcher from the area who knew the Shaker Lakes rewild. He also made comments about the, you know, the flora and fauna of the area. It was a real interesting evening. First of all, I had no idea that Shaker Lakes has this whole rich history, especially with the high school kids. You know, it was apparently a tradition that the year after you graduated from high school at Christmas time, you’d show up at the lake to go ice skating. And there are hundreds of people who had this memory of the first year after college getting out of Shaker Lakes and ice skating and having a bonfire and talking about the good old days, you know, and their teen years and the rest. So a whole bunch of people who were there who are much older now, in their 60s and 70s, talked about that, and they were all curious about it because they had these very rich memories that I was not a part of at all. So the bottom line is a huge crowd showed up. Huge. From my perspective - I’m a trustee in the Bedford Historical Society - if we get 40 people for a program, we think we’re doing pretty well. And then every room, nook, cranny, up the staircase, out the front door, there were people everywhere. They’d taken out every folding chair. They had nothing left. People sitting on the floor. I remember starting my speech base thing. If I didn’t know it was going to be this popular, I would have charged something. And that got a little laugh. And then we got into the whole idea of the canoe club. But it was really quite a wide response because people have this memories of the lake area. And we’re curious about the club itself. And some old members showed up. Elmer Luehring and the Pico family and couple of others. So that’s- I assume that’s how they found out about me. I was also quoted in the article about the canoe race on the Cuyahoga River. So I was the organizer of that. In essence.
Mark Sack [00:34:06] I think that’s it. I think we’re good. This has been very fascinating.
Jack Ulman [00:34:09] Well, good. Thank you. I appreciate that.
Mark Sack [00:34:11] We’re gonna do what we can to track down Art Battles and-
Jack Ulman [00:34:14] Yep. Elmer Learning, Luehring and. I’m not sure how he spells it, L, U, E or L, E, U. But I don’t think it’s L, O, R and Elmer. And I’m sure they’d be- They can talk as adults. The time period when, 1950s, when I was just a young child. I became a member when I turned 21, which was 1966, actually. 19- Yeah. December of 1966. I became 21. And then I was- I joined immediately. And then I was elected Commodore about a year later. And the last years of the club, I remained as the Commodore. There’s one other thing I do want to tell you. There was a very rich social calendar. It started with the Commodore’s brunch, which would be usually in April, and the Commodore organized it, and it was a little bit of a fundraiser. And families would get together and they’d talk about what happened in the wintertime and all the rest. And then there were regattas, the Fourth of July, Memorial Day, Labor Day. Those were huge days down there. And we would have crowds because people would bring their friends and guests. And there would be, you know, tables laden with picnic food and the rest and really a good time. A lot of children in the area. A fellow named Emil Sprock, who used to help us make sculpture out of the mud from the lake. We would dig out mud. He was an interesting guy. There were a lot of interesting people. And I have very positive memories of those times. And the dirtiness of the politics at the end and the death of the clubhouse and all the rest is all sad. But I have rich memories of wonderful social and good families and lots of fun as a child. So that’s why I was so eager to share this.
Mark Sack [00:35:47] Thank you very much.
Jack Ulman [00:35:48] You’re welcome. Thank you. My pleasure. Good seeing the new technology, too.
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