Abstract
Norma Rodgers of Shaker Lakes Nature Center discusses her work at the Center. Major topics include the early history of the Nature Center, public and educational programming, organizational management and strategic planning, budgetary issues, and cooperation with other governmental bodies and civic and educational organizations. Rodgers was also a member of the Shaker Heights City Council and the Joint Committee on Doan Brook, which are both discussed in some detail.
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Interviewee
Rodgers, Norma (interviewee)
Interviewer
Sack, Mark (interviewer)
Project
Shaker Lakes Nature Center
Date
2006
Document Type
Oral History
Duration
64 minutes
Recommended Citation
"Norma Rodgers Interview, 2006" (2006). Cleveland Regional Oral History Collection. Interview 902011.
https://engagedscholarship.csuohio.edu/crohc000/241
Transcript
Mark Sack [00:00:01] Okay. Good afternoon. My name is Mark Sack. I’m with Tony Bifulco. We’re both teachers at Cleveland Heights High School. And as part of our connection with teaching American history, we’re here today with Norma Rodgers. And on behalf of the Nature Center at Shaker Lakes, we’re going to have a conversation with Norma and get some insights and background into her history and connection with the Nature Center. Good afternoon, Norma.
Norma Rodgers [00:00:25] Good afternoon.
Mark Sack [00:00:26] Okay, we’ll start out with some basic questions. Where were you born?
Norma Rodgers [00:00:31] I was born in Barberton, Ohio.
Mark Sack [00:00:33] Okay, and did you grow up in that area?
Norma Rodgers [00:00:35] No, I grew up in Cleveland, actually, on the east side, out in Collinwood, and graduated from Collinwood High School. Then I went to Hiram College, if you want to know that, which is also in Ohio, not too far away, and only lived then at home after that on summers and so on, because I went on from Hiram College to a special year at University of Oklahoma. I wasn’t a graduate student as such, but I was working with graduate students and the YWCA and Interreligious Council and so on. And then I went on to the University of Chicago for my master’s degree.
Mark Sack [00:01:23] What area, if I may ask?
Norma Rodgers [00:01:24] Well, I was in the Divinity School at the University of Chicago in a very broad master’s program, Master of Arts program. And having met my husband at University of Oklahoma, and since he came to the University of Chicago thereafter to get his PhD, I was then married while I was at the University of Chicago.
Mark Sack [00:01:46] And you came back to the Cleveland-
Norma Rodgers [00:01:48] No, we did not. And I did not expect to be back in the Cleveland area. My family was here and we came often to visit, but we were at Chicago until my husband finished his PhD. I finished my master’s and worked for the YWCA there. And then he finished his PhD in 1953 and we went to California since we were footloose and fancy free. And he had an internship at the University of California. And Berkeley. Well, no, it’s connection with Stanford to be with the VA there as a postdoctoral internship in clinical psychology. So we were out in California and then he was on the faculty and I was in Berkeley, both at Stanford and Berkeley. I was on the counseling center staff and working with students. Then our first daughter appeared on the scene in 1959 while we were still at Berkeley. We moved on in 1960 to UCLA where Dave was at the Brain Research Institute on a special fellowship, and then to La Jolla, California, which was wonderful for five years. And Dave was at the Scripps Clinic and Research foundation there. And our second daughter arrived while we were there. It turned out, quite surprisingly, that in 1966, some of the clinical faculty were very unhappy at the Scripps Clinic. Dave and his boss, who was a psychiatrist, decided they would like to move on and looked around. And all of a sudden I heard that they were interviewing at the Cleveland Clinic. So we came back here. My family was a little shocked when they heard, but pleased I- [laughs]
Mark Sack [00:03:56] So it wasn’t the snow that brought here, it was the Cleveland Clinic.
Norma Rodgers [00:03:59] That’s right. Although when my children heard we were coming — they were 5 and 7 at the time - they were looking forward to stairs and snow. [laughs] So here we are. We’ve been here in Shaker Heights since.
Mark Sack [00:04:14] Wow, that’s a very interesting story. I’m going to ask if your children ended up settling in a cold area with snow and stairs, but that’s another-
Norma Rodgers [00:04:25] [laughs] Well, yes. Well, I was glad to come back here when they were so young, because I knew that the youngsters out there, as they went up through the high school and so on, were afraid oftentimes to come back east. Not all of them, of course, but many went out of their way to stay in California. So we got back here before the kids realized that that was paradise out there and so on. Although I have one daughter in Arizona, but our other daughter’s here.
Mark Sack [00:04:57] Okay, very nice. Okay, Norma, we’re going to take you back a little bit, maybe to your childhood, either in the Collinwood area or in Barberton. But we’ve been asked to inquire as to some type of early memory of an outdoor experience that really sticks out in your mind.
Norma Rodgers [00:05:19] Well, I always liked being outdoors, although I was never inclined to go into environmental studies as such. But I used to ride my bike out into the wilds of Belvoir Boulevard, for example, [laughs] where you got very far out and you were out in the boondocks, no housing and so on. And we used the Cleveland Metropolitan Parks extensively, both through my girl scouting, in beautiful areas. We’d use the metropolitan parks or we’d go out into Bratenahl where there were lots of greenery and the lake and so on. So it was. I always liked, enjoyed being outdoors. And then, of course, as we traveled, we loved the national parks since we were out in the west. Why, we saw as much as we could camped in Yosemite when we were in California and the Sierra, all the Sierras, and up in Lassen [Volcanic] National Park, and so on. We were- We went whenever we could into the parks.
Mark Sack [00:06:35] So a rich and varied exposure to nature?
Norma Rodgers [00:06:38] Oh, yeah. I was never an authority on nature, but I loved it. And I thought it was terribly important for people to be able to get out into the parks and just enjoy the green world and the natural world.
Mark Sack [00:06:56] Well, this segues perfectly into our next question. I think I know part of the answer, but when and how did you first get involved with Shaker Lakes or the Nature Center or this area?
Norma Rodgers [00:07:09] Well, we came kind of naturally into it because we arrived here in 1966. We were- I don’t think we knew before we came. We knew we wanted to live in Shaker Heights. And the school system was very, very good. And it was a very beautiful community. We had not heard of the Clark Freeway and the Lee Freeway proposals. We were just utterly appalled as we moved into our house on Carleton Road in Shaker Heights. Couldn’t believe hardly that anybody would think of building freeways through this community and felt it would just absolutely destroy the entity which was this very beautiful and very special planned community of Shaker Heights. So we were very interested in that. Discovered almost immediately. Well, we came in mid ’66. Nature Center started in 1967, 40 years ago. We were aware that there was a staff person provided at the beginning by the Cleveland school system. I think his name was Jim Eicher, who came and was leading summer hikes for kids. So the very first in ’67, my children were hiking with Jim Eicher. And I continued to do things that were offered as the Nature center began to grow. Jim didn’t last too long because Cleveland schools couldn’t afford him. And so other staff people came. And so we kind of followed first just because the girls enjoyed it. And I thought it was important for them to learn. Just as we took them to Thornton park for swimming lessons, we brought them here for the programs. I wasn’t very involved directly personally, but was always aware of the Nature Center. Thought it was a wonderful organization to be developing. I got very involved in the community with the League of Women Voters. And by 1973 and 1970, well, ’73 to ’75, I was president of the League here. We were very aware of all the resources of the community and of course, felt very supportive of the Nature Center because it was providing a wonderful resource. By this time, they had active programs here for students, elementary students in both Shaker Heights and Cleveland Heights. And I thought that was marvelous, et cetera. So when they asked me to become onto the board of the Nature Center in 19, right after I was president in 1976, I said yes. I thought that would be very interesting and very important thing to do. And I’ve been extremely involved with the Nature Center ever since I was an active member of the board, the voting member of the board for 21 years. So that’d be ’76 to ’97 I think. And then as was very appropriate, the board was beginning and it needed to. To turn over and broaden its membership. It always had had new members, but I think the- It became very obvious that there needed to be a consistent planned turnover and so on. So they did conceive the idea that some people who’d been around and were still very interested might become advisory members of the non-voting members of the board. So I have been that ever since. Although those people too need to move off the advisory group. But I’ve been so involved that so far I haven’t. I probably will soon, but I, I don’t know how much you want me to go into things, but yeah.
Mark Sack [00:11:21] To you said you sort of. You insinuated you fell into the atmosphere of the freeway fight.
Norma Rodgers [00:11:29] Yes.
Mark Sack [00:11:31] Can you comment briefly as some observations or ways that you directly or indirectly participated in that whole process or just some observations?
Norma Rodgers [00:11:42] Well, we were very interested to follow every development that appeared in the paper and so on. And as I became involved with the League of Women Voters we were following this too very carefully because we were extremely concerned. And I am very hopeful in that things kept being put off and turned around a bit. I was very interested when I became president of the league that a then member of council who was chairman of the mayor’s transportation advisory committee, that was Steve Alfred at the time. And Steve asked me if I would come in and join this transportation advisory committee. I had done some observation and study of the regional transit authority. So I was kind of also a bit of a- Had more knowledge than most on transportation and so I was delighted. And that brought me in contact with some of the lawyers and men in the community, I think chairman of the hold and Trust. I heard about some of the agencies and organizations that were involved. It was just fascinating to hear them talk about particularly the political aspects of stopping the freeway. They were still concerned that although not nothing had moved forward, that the little dotted lines on the maps where the freeways were projected to run were still there and they wanted those off. Definitely. Absolutely. And finally I think it was that same time that some of the people had contact with the governor of Ohio and got him to really be appalled too at this and agree that this should never happen. And eventually the dotted lines went off the maps. This was not any longer a project that the state or anyone else should be. And that’s when the freeway fight really stopped. And we were all terribly relieved. But it’s very interesting that through all the. I know that I think it was. Jean Eakin talked at one point about leading the department of. The director of the Department of the Interior at the time around through the park system and so on. And I’m sure got the. Understand, you know, his and other people’s sympathy about it, but it wasn’t until they got to the Ohio governor that it really stopped happening in Ohio. So that was fascinating. And I didn’t have much to do with how it came out, but I was terribly interested. It’s a fascinating story all the way through. I know I’m also involved with the Shaker Historical Society, and I was just noticing yesterday that we have a big book of clippings from all of the history going back into the early ’60s and on through articles in the newspaper that I’d never seen. I didn’t have time to look at them yesterday, but it’s a long and very fascinating story.
Mark Sack [00:15:34] Right. And we’ve- Tony and I, in our interviewing with folks, have heard different perspectives.
Norma Rodgers [00:15:39] Yes.
Mark Sack [00:15:39] And it’s just fascinating to hear how people view the process and who and what forces impacted-
Norma Rodgers [00:15:50] Right.
Mark Sack [00:15:51] Different decisions that were made all along. So it’s- It’s been very fascinating for us. We’re both history teachers and- And everyone-
Norma Rodgers [00:15:57] So that’s great. Yeah.
Mark Sack [00:15:58] Everyone sees their slice of the truth and reality a little bit differently, but it’s been fascinating for us.
Norma Rodgers [00:16:05] Right. Well, I had heard the stories from Betty Miller and a number of other women about the reactions of the garden clubs and some other groups to this and how hard they worked to get to spread the word and so on. So it was a long and complicated process, thank goodness.
Mark Sack [00:16:29] But a successful one. So you’ve had a deep history and involvement with the Nature Center. What changes have you seen over the years in the operations, the functioning, the public image of the Nature Center since you first became involved in it? And it can be both positive and it could be some not so positive.
Norma Rodgers [00:16:52] Well, as a result of planning to do this, I’ve been thinking about the Nature Center and its history. And at the time, of course, we just thought, oh, it’s a great idea. It’s a nice thing to have, and these nice programs with the schools are great, and so on. I think we were very lucky, as I look back, that that happened in retrospect, that something stimulated us to start A nature center here at the time, because we were a little ahead of the curve that if you look around in the country now, there are many, many nature centers all over. There is a much broader education for naturalists, and there are many more naturalists than potential people who can direct nature centers and so on. And this has just been happening, I’m sure, very much stimulated by the whole environmental movement. But we were kind of in the environmental movement, was certainly going. And many of us were members of the Sierra Club and all kinds of other environmental groups for many years. But I think we were lucky to have the nature center here at this earlier point so that it too has reflected the development of the environmental movement. We started out here with the school programs, with programs for children, summer programs, discovered, gee, you can even do preschool programs. And some of these things were like new. People around the country were surprised and came and looked at our preschool programs because they were creative and different and proved to be great. So. And I think we have been. I personally feel the nature center has been a wonderful organization from the beginning. It has certainly changed and developed, but that’s what you want groups to do. I think we’ve been very lucky in many respects. Of course, there’s a lot of volunteer leadership in this community that is really helpful. And so between the volunteers who appeared to lead groups themselves and, you know, lead tours in the parks and so on, and who came onto the board and provided all kinds of leadership there, and the staff we had, which I’m not sure when Rich Horton started, but he was here for 14 years at a relatively early point in history, and led the beginning or the development through quite a period in a very helpful way. And we then went through a process of some changes and had a very long time with Nancy King Smith, who’s just retired. And I think that we have been able to develop in a great many ways that have been very valuable. We started much more with the local program and education of children and so on, and have moved much more into participating in the environmental movement. I think of educating an environmental bag lunch thing once a month, which started during Nancy King Smith’s time here, that has provided times for really bringing in people who are seriously involved with all kinds of the management of resources and water and building houses, the green movement and so on, all these kinds of things into our awareness here, just for volunteers and people in the community. So I think we have come a long way. There’s still all kinds of opportunities out there for greater education and. And so on. But we have rain barrel workshops and things now that weren’t even conceived of at the earlier time. So I feel the board, too, was probably much more very local. It has broadened out. We’re very much an interracial board and a board with a number of. Of technical people and so on, who know about some of the environmental issues as well as about education and children. So I’ve seen this kind of development, and I think it’s been great.
Mark Sack [00:22:02] What about some of the challenges that the Nature Center faces today and in the future? What do you perceive as some of the more significant?
Norma Rodgers [00:22:15] Well, there are always particular special challenges when you have kind of been successful because it’s easy to sort of just build on your popularity or support. I think for that reason, the Nature center has gone through several different processes of strategic planning, thinking about the future and trying to think about what the challenges for the future are of this organization. We’re not a huge. We’re not a natural history museum, and we shouldn’t try to be. And we’re not just an arm of the schools, teach elementaries, students about being outdoors. I think that the environmental emphases which are now in our culture in many, many areas, including, you know, fuel. How do we support ourselves as a nation with the needs for fuel and the problems with oil and all of that? Probably one of the challenges, it will always be how to be an educational institution along the line of our, let’s say, fuel resources or our water resources, the development of our cities and land use, keeping our country part of our country and farms and so on. These kinds of issues which become sometimes very politically loaded. How to be a good educational resource in these areas and help our population, both youngsters and adults, to look at them without becoming so much of an advocate of something that we damage our potential for education. So you have- I mean, how not to go too far, because you are a community institution and you’re an educational institution without backing off and refusing to meet the challenge of what do we do about issues that are often very, very political. So you have to keep that, keep that balance.
Mark Sack [00:24:55] And in terms of that question that you raise, I guess the board and the director perhaps are the two most powerful forces that define the character.
Norma Rodgers [00:25:11] Yes, that’s absolutely right. So that the board needs to be very aware of what the Center is doing and of what the issues are out and about and how we’re promoting them and so on. There’s. We are in an interracial community. That’s one of our challenges. We’ve, I think, always, well, For a very long time, we’ve been very committed to being an interracial organization, although it’s been very. It’s hard sometimes to get the numbers of African American, for example, members of the association that you might wish you had. The board has now represents a much more interracial board, which has been very good. And we have had a wonderful young man, David. David, who has been a very great leader in terms of developing programs with the children in the Cleveland schools. And we’ve done a lot to find money to help provide programs in the Cleveland schools and so on, because they have been. As we all know, the school system in Cleveland is strapped for money. Even Cleveland Heights and Shaker Heights have had some problems when they go out after levies. To have money enough to continue to pay for our programs here, which is very important to the nature center because you always need more money than you have to run the good center. So there’s always the challenge of how to raise enough money to run the program. I think that’s going to be one of the problems here since we’ve expanded enough so it’s more expensive to run this program than it used to be. And the challenges. There are always potential for new programming, but you have to have a good staff to do that. And you have to have a good director who brings you. Who helps stimulate the creative ideas you need for the future. And then you have to have support from your board for continuing. So it’s a. A constant communication problem. And keeping the board and staff and the programs kind of in sync, I think has been a problem, or not too much of a problem in the past. I mean, I remember many times when Rich Horton brought us programs like the ones they were preparing for the students and so on. And a point at which the board wasn’t too sure that some of these programs were just right. And there was some controversy. And then some of us who were board members got involved in looking at those programs in more detail and so on, and trying to get a path down, which we can agree. Okay. And Rich was helpful and tried to be open to some changes in their programming, so on. And that will occur in the future too. I know.
Mark Sack [00:28:38] Sounds like an active board as opposed to some institutions that have a more passive, rubber stamp type board.
Norma Rodgers [00:28:47] Right. That’s very important. And I know there are several things going on right now with the board that are board members who are trying to ensure greater participation from board members in the planning and in the knowledge about what’s happening. And that’s a very, very good sign for the future.
Mark Sack [00:29:11] Let’s shift directions slightly here. You spoke of different types of changes and developments in the programming. What about the landscape, the wildlife, the planned life? You’ve been involved here for 40 years. What types of changes in those areas may have you observed?
Norma Rodgers [00:29:31] Well, I think the whole issue of land management and what is happening to this land and the whole park system in relation to other parks and so on is a very. It’s been a very important issue. And I’ve been very involved in what has been called a joint committee on the Doan Brook, which you probably have heard about and been aware. And one of the reasons that I was thinking that it was very desirable that we were Nature Center was here as of 1967 is that by 1970 we became a number of citizens became very aware and very concerned about water purity in relation to the land here. They began to agitate the cities of Cleveland Heights and Shaker Heights, thinking there’s raw sewage coming into our waterways and so on. I guess at some point the city people weren’t too eager to hear that kind of story and thought that wasn’t that bad and so on. So one of the apocryphal stories which you may or may not have heard but probably should somewhere along the line because I wasn’t involved in this. But I understand that some of the ladies in the community thought we’re going to prove to the city people that there is raw sewage coming through, that we’re getting. Some of our sanitary sewers are coming into the lakes. So. So they colored ping pong balls and flushed them down their toilets and they appeared in the lakes. So there wasn’t much basis for argument. Now, I think that was either the late ’60s or the early ’70s. And if you interview Kathy Barber at some point she may know herself or she may have been a part of that. I haven’t asked her recently and I can’t think of the name of the woman that I knew earlier who I knew was involved in that. She’s not been in the community for a long time. But by 1970 there was a committee. They called themselves first the Joint Committee on the Doan Brook Parklands. Then in about 1978 there was a shift and this committee became the Joint Committee on the Doan Brook Watershed that began to focus on the watershed which included the land and the streams of our Doan Brook. About that time I decided in 1979 I was going to run for Shaker Heights City Council. And I did. And then I was on the council for 12 years when I was going to be on the council, since I was a nature center board member and obviously interested in nature and interested in this joint committee, which I think I’d been to a couple of times. But I talked to Kathy Barber about it, who was very instrumental in starting this committee. And they had already discovered that it was very important to have representatives from the cities, both the city of Cleveland and Shaker Heights, and Shaker and Cleveland Heights, on this committee, because the role of the committee needed to be advisory as to both the land management and the water quality. Of course, Rich Horton from the nature center was involved in the committee already, Although it was started with citizens chairing the committee. You get to the point where, well, nobody wants to be the chair for next year, that sort of thing. At the time that I began to attend meetings in 1979, while I was running for city council, I think Rich himself was chairing the committee for a while. And then the representative from Cleveland Heights, Betty. Oh, I’ve forgotten her name for the moment, but anyway, she. Marjorie Wright. Marjorie Wright from Cleveland Heights was chairing the committee. Then when I actually went on to council and became the city’s official representative to the joint committee on the Doan Brook. And what occurred then was that we decided, well, it’s not a bad idea, since the representatives from the two cities are kind of captive audiences on this committee, to have them chair it on an alternating basis. And when Joanna Bryan came on within the next year as the Cleveland Heights representative, because Marjorie had gone off of the Cleveland Heights council, Joanne and I alternated year by year in chairing the joint committee. So I got very involved with it. And we worked all the time with Rich Horton, the nature center director, to. In terms of planning agendas, the committee met once every three months, so four times a year. And we became very. Rich was developed in the process of developing a land management plan for the parks. And so that committee became the one that he worked with in developing the land management plan. You may or may not have interviewed Linda Johnson as yet or Billy Smith, but they were ardent members. I think Billy acted secretary for that group for about 15 years. Linda was very involved with the land management plan because she was very knowledgeable, much more than I with land management. All the plants and what was native and what was not, and what were plant problem plants and so on. I learned a great deal in this process of being involved with a nature center that I didn’t know in terms of practical knowledge about the land and the water, But I found it very, very Fascinating. We brought in experts. We didn’t have any money to hire experts. The nature center didn’t, and the committee didn’t have much money. We assessed the organizations, people who came a little bit to pay for postage and all that kind of thing. We didn’t have any real money. So we would get somebody from the state natural resources person to come and maybe look at our lakes and give us some advice and so on. And the cities too, because began to have their engineers look at various problems like the structure of the dams and so on, and got really in the ’70s then into some real technical issues and some rebuilding of dams and some dredging of the lakes and so on. The joint committee was a very good avenue for cooperation. And I became very, very devoted to it as a way for the cities and the nature center to communicate about all of them, about what they thought the problems were and communicate with citizens. Because we had a number of very fine citizen members who were very knowledgeable, like Lyndon Johnson, for example, on the joint committee. So that there was an opportunity for interchange in a rather benign setting. And for the committee then to make recommendations to the cities about what they thought ought to happen when the city’s gardeners got overeager and mowed down what some of the folks around the nature center thought was a lovely prairie beginning along some part of the park system. Why, there was a way of saying, oh, wait a minute, don’t mow that down. It really isn’t necessary. If you want a little edge along the street, do that for a few feet. But then leave some of the natural prairie so that you’re not mowing through the bunnies that have their nests in the grass and all of this. So there a lot of that. And what our citizens would say, what are you doing? You’re dumping all that material that you’ve dug out of someplace where you’re doing some building down. At one point, down at Coventry and North Park Boulevard was one of the places where they were covering up some of the ruins of the old mills and so on that had been there when the shakers in the 19th century had built them and so on. So it’s been a very valuable interchange. And that committee was a very valuable one. And it has now morphed into. Developed into. I should really. An official 501c3 organization. The Joint Committee on the Doan Brook as a citizens committee stopped when we came to have the Doan Brook Watershed Partnership. And so we now have an official organization which does the same kind of communicating, but can. Is as a 501c3 can go after funds and has gotten funds. And although we can only afford a part time director, but the cities are contributing. The Nature center has often contributed more in non. Well, Nature center has contributed partly by getting some of the monies that have contributed to waste management issues and so on and have a staff member. Tory Mills has been a staff member here for some time because NSB is a real expert in the kinds of issues that the partnership now deals with. And in the process, after all the times we struggled over financing, in what Was it about 1999, we suddenly discovered that the sewer district had $2 million to study the Doan Brook watershed. You know, we were still struggling with a few hundred dollars or a few thousand dollars that could maybe do some dredging or something that needed done. And I couldn’t believe my ears when we said $2 million. And that was wonderful because that was the time when they came to the joint committee, they had always participated in it anyway and they began to do research and then to educate all of us on the nature of some of the problems and come up with wonderful materials and so on that we never had had before. Of course, their study took two or three years and helped formulate what might be really led to the Doan Brook Watershed Partnership because they were able to define some of the problems and enable people to write grant proposals and so on along lines that we just did not have the resources to do earlier. So it’s been a very. Land management and water management and long term is critical. I mean, you never end, you never have the final answer or get a lake into the final condition because it changes all the time and so on. And in this process, Case Western University and its programs, water purification programs, they’re technical biology type programs, have gotten involved and they help do some of the research on water quality and so on. So it’s been a very. It’s been a wonderful process. And that has been one of the critical things, one of the great values. But it’s been kind of a side value that from the nature center’s point of view that probably many people on the board and so on haven’t been very aware of, they periodically are because you get reports. But I think having seen the process that having the nature center here to work with the two cities and to work with the sewer and to have this community, this entity that was also partly volunteers who were many of them very knowledgeable and where a volunteer engineer or something who got very concerned about an issue, whether it was overuse of salt on the city streets, or whether it was the lack of dredging in the lakes or the water quality or whatever. Could come into this committee and report and talk about it. Where he might have had a hard time gett
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