Abstract
This 2004 interview with Ed Pershey of the Western Reserve Historical Society deals with the Dr. Pershey's education, including firsthand recollections of events at Case Western Reserve University, and goes into detail about programming at WRHS, in particular an exhibit about Carl Stokes and Louis Stokes.
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Interviewee
Pershey, Edward (interviewee)
Interviewer
Nazelli, Alisa (interviewer)
Project
St. Clair - Superior Neighborhood
Date
6-21-2006
Document Type
Oral History
Duration
51 minutes
Recommended Citation
"Edward Pershey interview, 21 June 2006" (2006). Cleveland Regional Oral History Collection. Interview 903006_807007.
https://engagedscholarship.csuohio.edu/crohc000/802
Transcript
Edward Pershey [00:00:00] So you shouldn't feel bad. Okay. All right. Okay.
Alisa Naselli [00:00:03] I'll start exactly from the top. Thanks again for coming in.
Edward Pershey [00:00:06] You're welcome.
Alisa Naselli [00:00:07] Good to see you again yesterday. We really enjoyed hearing about your experiences here in Cleveland. And I missed where you grew up and where you're from. So can you tell me a little bit about that?
Edward Pershey [00:00:19] I was born and raised in Joliet, Illinois. It's a town about 40 miles southwest of Chicago. It was an industrial steel town. That's had a big influence on the way I think about things. But that's where I was born and raised.
Alisa Naselli [00:00:31] In what sense did it have a big influence?
Edward Pershey [00:00:33] I've always been appreciative of the industrial landscape and the importance of hard-working people and labor relations and industrial strength in the United States. It's always been kind of in the background. I've always appreciated that.
Alisa Naselli [00:00:48] You were going to school at Case or Adelbert College at a really interesting, interesting time. Can you discuss a little bit about your educational journey?
Edward Pershey [00:00:56] I came to Case in 1966 when it was still Case Institute of Technology as an astronomy major because I was interested in science and astronomy. And I lasted about two and a half years in that program and then ended up with an undergraduate degree in science in general science. So I could teach science. And I taught high school science for one year at St. Ed's High school here in Cleveland in Lakewood. But in the meantime, undergraduate, I had taken a course, an elective course in the history of American astronomy with a professor in a program called the history of science and technology, a small field, a subset of history which had been started at Case in 1959. And I took a course with him. And it was a full professor and me. It was the whole course. It was a wonderful opportunity for an undergraduate student. And I read a book a week in the history of American astronomy. And it would come in and sit with the professor for an hour, hour and a half. And I would have a book report and we would talk about the book. And he guided me in this, and it was absolutely marvelous experience. So after I had been out of school for a year, I went back to grad school at Case in that program with an idea of getting a doctorate in the history of technology, which was really very unusual and specialized. It lasted one year. And then, things being what they are, I got married and a couple kids. And I fell out of academia for a couple years. And then in 1977 returned to grad school with a family. Was unusual, but an opportunity that was special to me. It's a long story that goes back to my high school days in the astronomy club. At high school in Joliet, all right, every year the astronomy club took a field trip. We timed it so that it coincided with the auto show in Chicago. So we'd get to the auto show to ogle the women that they always had selling cars. But the first place we went to was southern Wisconsin, of all places. And this is where the University of Chicago had the Yerkes Observatory with one of the largest telescopes of its kind in the world. And we kind of made a pilgrimage there every year. Just great opportunity for a young nerd who was interested in astronomy to go there, but was fascinating. I remember this clearly. It was this large telescope. It was a 19th century instrument, a huge, big telescope. But on the maker's plate on the pedestal on this large instrument, it said, built by Warner and Swasey of Cleveland, Ohio. I knew nothing about them. When I came to Cleveland, I started to learn a little bit more about them. Warner and Swasey was a machine tool company in Cleveland who at the end of the 19th century, built the largest telescopes in the world. And so when I went to grad school at case, I decided that's what I was going to do my dissertation on. I was one of those rare grad students that wants to get a doctorate and knows exactly what they're going to do dissertation on. There wasn't any question. And so I built my career towards that. And that's what I ended up doing my dissertation on and getting my doctorate, officially I think it was in 1982, and I did my dissertation on the early telescope worker Warner and Swasey. So that's how I guided myself in the process of getting the doctorate. I had to get a job, of course, eventually, because I didn't have a family. And I remember my history professor saying, well, there's one thing we can guarantee if you get a doctorate in history of technology that you'll have a job. That sounded great. And so one of you had to take four fields of specialty for your doctorate at case at the time. And one of the fields that I was able to take at Case because they had a museum studies program in the history department. And so I was able to qualify for my doctorate by taking museum studies as one of my fields, specialty fields. And so that led me into working in museums. That was also a reinforcement of what I had grown up with, because growing up in Joliet, my dad and mother, who only went, who never even went to high school, they only went to 8th grade. Family outings, treats for me, were to get in the car and drive to Chicago and go to the great museums of Chicago, the Field Museum, the Museum of Science, the Adler Planetarium, the Shedd Aquarium. These were meccas, these were destinations. We would spend all day there. And I found out now I was, by the time I was in grad school, got my degree, I was 32. I found out you could actually, somebody would pay you go to a museum every day and go to work. That's a pretty good deal, right? So that's what I've been in. So since. Even before I got the doctorate at Case, I went to work at the Dittrick Museum of Medicine. I did an internship there working essentially for free. Amanda knows about that. And while I was there, the director retired, the curator moved up to the directorship, a small museum, and there was an opening for kind of an associate curator position, and they gave me the job. Didn't pay anything, really, but it paid something and allowed me to have my first job as I worked towards the end of my doctorate. And then a real great opportunity occurred in 1980, a former professor from Case of mine who I had worked with had left Case Western Reserve, left Cleveland, had gone to New Jersey to become the editor in chief of a new project that was being jointly funded by the National Park Service and Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. And this was a lengthy project, which is still going on, to publish a microfilm and printed editions of the papers of Thomas Edison. And his name was Professor Reese Jenkins. And Reese, Professor Jenkins was in New Jersey and the chief curator position at the Edison National Historic Site, a National Park Service facility in West Orange, New Jersey, came open. And the timing was just perfect for all of this. The Park Service had always hired from within, it promoted from within. This was a relatively high level job for the park service. It was a GS-11. If you know anything about the grade service, it was a GS-11. And they would typically have brought in somebody from within their own ranks, but they were professionalizing their museum services in this early part of the 1980s, and they were trying to bring in, in fact, looking for people with degrees in museums and in history from outside the park service. They were trying to seed the upper levels of these professional grades with people from the outside. And I just was at the right place at the right time. I applied for that job, and with Reese being there, admittedly gave me an inside track. And they hired me in 1980 to be the supervisory museum curator at the Edison National Historic Site. So in January 1, I think it was, or second of 1981, I was in New Jersey, and with a new job, and I was in charge of all of Edison's stuff, tens of thousands of artifacts, including all of his inventions, the first phonograph, the light bulb, motion pictures, storage, batteries, telegraph apparatus, all of his buildings, the labs at West Orange building, a lab complex with about a dozen buildings, his home that he lived in from 1886 until his death in 1931, all of his furniture, all of his clothes, his underwear. He and his wife were buried in the back of the house. We had his graves. So it was really a great opportunity. And I worked there through most of the– from '81 until fall of '87. So that was a wonderful opportunity. Some great, great things there. So, fortunate.
Alisa Naselli [00:08:34] Good. Yesterday you mentioned something about a specific museology course that inspired you or that you found particularly interesting, and I was wanting to find out what that course was.
Edward Pershey [00:08:53] In museology. Patsy Gerstner, who was the curator and then became the director, Dittrick really taught me, really what it was to run a museum. It was a small museum, and that's where I cut my teeth. And I think I've taken that experience into all of my jobs, that running and working in museums is– It's not like academia in a lot of ways, where you can kind of focus on, you have you focus on research and teaching museums. You have to do that. You have to do research, you have to do teaching, but you also, you know, quite literally have to sweep the floor and put things in boxes, and you have to do a lot of grunt work. And I've always done that regardless of what positions I've been in. I've had directorships along the way. So I think that's the biggest influence along those lines. You just have to have a love of history and a love of stuff when you're a curator. I always call it stuff. My colleagues often cringe when I use that term, but it is just so much stuff, and it's just so much junk, really, if you think about it. But it's only the value we place on it in terms of historical value. But as you know, these chairs or that tape recorder of the computer, it's just so much plastic and metal. You know, ultimately it's going to go away. So there's no inherent value in anything. So it's only the relative value we put in things. And that's the one great thing I've learned.
Alisa Naselli [00:10:16] Good. I want to talk a little bit more about your educational experiences, but in a sense, a different vein. Can you describe for us or talk a little bit about the political climate on campus during your–
Edward Pershey [00:10:34] Oh, back in my undergraduate days? I was a freshman at Case in February of 1967 and had already been immersed in the Case traditions. And our bitter enemies were– We were the Plumbers. That was our nickname at the time. And the Poets were across the street at Adelbert College, and that was. The Adelbert-Case football rivalry was the second oldest football rivalry in the country after Yale-Princeton. And the Case-Adelbert, Case Western Reserve football games used to be played at Cleveland Municipal Stadium with crowds of people. We woke up in February 1967 and found out that because of largely financial pressure from the federal government, that the two universities, Western Reserve University and Case Institute of Technology, had been merged into Case Western Reserve University. We woke up that morning and it was like gaga land and didn't know what to do with it. Of course, that was in the middle of the fact that this was the Vietnam War and the protests of the Vietnam War, the drug culture, the hippie culture. It was a strange time to be on any college campus. Case Western Reserve was probably pretty mild compared to most campuses when it came to protests, but it was there constantly, and then to overlay that was this the combination of the university that was more critical to us in that period in the sixties than I think the antiwar thing became in a lot of ways. I was a freshman at Case, and even before that happened, and the campus organization would come around and try to recruit freshmen to join their groups. And the Case Tech, which was the newspaper, came around to interview freshmen. I remember this was in the lounge at the dormitories up on Murray Hill. And so we're sitting around in a lounge like this. We're sitting here, and the editor was there and the assistant editor and so forth, and going around the room, and what would you guys — It was all guys - and what do you guys want, you know, what do you want to do? And these are all. Remember, these are engineering students for them, almost totally. So what do you want to do? Photography. Photography. Photography. Photography. And he pointed to me and I said, well, I thought I might like to write a little bit. [laughs] And three guys jumped on me, dragged me out of there because nobody else wanted to do any writing. And I ended up writing. I was a reporter for the Case Tech my freshman year. By sophomore year, I was the assistant editor, and by the end of my sophomore year, I was the editor of the Case Tech. And this is in the middle of the merger of the two schools, and, well, I was uncontrollable by the dean in those days. I would write these vitriolic editorials condemning the merger of the two schools and trying to hold out for Case Tech. And the dean would call me in on Monday, after the paper was published on Fridays, and he'd call me in and say, you can't do that. I say, yes, dean, yes. And I go back and write another one. And so at one point, though, it became obvious that we were going to have to merge. There was the Case Tech, and there was the Reserve Tribune. That was our. They were still publishing two newspapers. So it was time to finally merge these things. So the two staffs get together, and the editor of the Reserve Tribune was Doug Smock. That's how I remember his name, Doug Smock. So he gets his staff and my staff, and we meet at an off campus apartment over on East 115th street somewhere in an apartment building. So we get together and we got wine and cheese and, you know, beer. I don't know. We're sitting around talking about this thing, and. And I got my staff there, and his assistant editor gets up and starts the meeting by saying, essentially saying that no case student will ever be editor of a combined paper because we're nothing but a bunch of Techies. And the writers are over on the Adelbert side, on the humanities side. So I looked at my staff, looked at them, I says, if that's the case, then we're not merging the papers. And we walked out. And that decision, somehow somebody reported that to the Cleveland Press newspaper, and they ran a feature article about how the two papers were not going to merge because, relating what happened at this meeting. And they had headshots of Doug Smock and me. And so they had Doug Smock, and they had, under his picture, they had Doug Smock, editor of the Reserve Tribune, yada, yada, yada. Okay? But under my name. They started off the caption with Bucks Merger, comma, Ed Pershey, the editor of the Case Tech, refused. So I walked in the next day in my office at the Case Tech offices, and my nameplate that Ed Pershey, Editor, they had pasted over Bucks Merger. So that became my. What's a nom de plume? I began signing all my editorials, Bucks Merger. And that just infuriated the dean even more, you know, so this was first semester, junior year. This is all happening. And then my grades weren't doing well because I was spending more time writing the newspaper than I was studying. And so that's when I had a change my major from astronomy to this degree in science. And to do that, I had to leave Case Institute of Technology within the university and transfer it to Adelbert College. [laughs] And so I had to go over to the dark side, so to speak. And that meant I had to give up the editorship of the Case Tech. But I stayed on as a reporter, and I was the only Reserve student ever to work on the Case Tech. And then senior year, then with that happening, my assistant, err, became better of the Case Tech, who was a more logical, nice guy. They eventually formed the Case. What is that called now? I forget what. The Observer, the Case Western Reserve Observer. And I was the managing editor. They gave me the job of managing editor, which was doing the layouts and everything at the Observer. So I was on the first staff of the Case Western Observer, that was my undergraduate experience in terms of the university, in terms of war protests, that was a difficult time. I was in the first draft lottery that was held in the fall of 1969, if I remember right. Well, I should know that better, shouldn't I? And this is where they put all the birth dates in a big jar. And then the first one pulled out was one. And depending on. And then that was your priority assignment. And I remember on campus that night, it was extremely quiet, and you can listen to. It was broadcast on radio, I think it was on television. I remember listening to it on radio. And it was dead quiet around campus, because our fates were in the hands of this lottery. And I remember that as the number, especially the low numbers one, two through ten, and 25. This meant you were definitely going to get drafted. You were going to go regardless. And there would be cries of anguish. And just. I know that we all after that went out and just got totally obliterated on alcohol or whatever drugs were handy. My number came up 126. And they were drafting to 225 that year. So it looked like I was probably good to go, so to speak. But a strange thing happened halfway through my senior year, I slipped on the ice one winter and fell. Long story to that, which I won't go into the details, but I snapped my left arm up here right in half, and ended up in University Hospital for a day or two while they patched that up. So they, my draft board, I graduated with the cast was off by graduation, but that was still mending. So they couldn't call me for. If they'd called me for a physical, I wouldn't have passed it. So they held off. I sent them a letter from the hospital and they said they would expect about a year later, they would call me up for that. And I went to teach at St. Ed's, and I got a letter from my draft board. And the principal at St. Ed sent a letter, although theoretically there weren't teaching deferments by then. He sent a letter anyway, so we kind of waited and see what happened. By the time they got around in the late spring of 1971, this was by then, by the time they got around to finally going to call me up that year, they were drafting to number 125. And so I was reclass- I still have my draft card. Reclassification home was reclassified 1-H, which meant I had number too high and I wasn't called, so I didn't have to go to Vietnam. But I had friends who got conscious objector status. I had another friend from Joliet who was a really smart guy who had a low number. He simply enlisted in the army, and by enlisting, he ended up going. They sent him to Germany. He didn't go to Vietnam. So there were lots. Some guys in the- I was in a fraternity case, and some of the guys who got low numbers, who had been saving money to go to law school because the draft lottery was held, like, in November of '69, went home at Christmas, came back with new cars because they just really weren't going to law school, stuff like that. So it was. And then May of 1970, when we were about ready to graduate semester, when Kent State happened. And I had a part time job by then off campus. And I remember I was coming back from Severance Mall at the time, and I was on the bus, and the bus came. Came down Mayfield, where Mayfield hits Euclid and makes that, you know, the number nine bus, I guess, makes that. That left turn onto Euclid. And there was all these people on the street, what the heck's going on? You know, all these traveling people. And I look out and get off the bus, and there's a Cleveland policeman on horseback along Euclid Avenue, and they were charging after students, charging with horses, riding into Thwing Hall. And you know what's going on? That's what we found out about Kent State. They had the option. They closed the university, essentially, and you could. No, you could- You could continue to take classes if you wanted to, but you didn't have to. You could opt for a pass-fail on your course if you wanted to. Just stop right then. Graduating senior, I didn't need, the grades didn't matter. So I just, I stopped taking classes and took pass-fail and end of the semester that way. And then the graduation ceremony was in Severance Hall. And I remember I hadn't been an active anti war activist though I did participate in the marches that. Around the Kent State events and candlelight marches. But I had not been a fan of the war, to say the least. But we all wore peace armbands at graduation, and there was a. I remember it was the Adelbert graduation goes by colleges and Severance, and a group of the school allowed a group of antiwar students to put on an antiwar play, a little thing up on the stage. And in the midst of doing that, several parents in the auditorium got up and were shouting them down and calling them traitors. And it was. It was an interesting- I found it- I thought it was pretty funny, but it was- That's what graduation was like. And I didn't know what- My parents there, they kind of went with the flow. But I think that was a shock to them to see that all going on. But. So that's what happened. Yeah, those were interesting times.
Alisa Naselli [00:21:46] In addition, you were also on campus living in Cleveland in 1967.
Edward Pershey [00:21:52] Yes. Oh, Carl Stokes. I remember that there had been, of course, the Hough riots in '66. Right? And I was in the fraternity that was on a Magnolia down by where, the Western Reserve Historical site, which is kind of on the, one of the far ends of campus. And I remember that I didn't follow Cleveland politics very much - [as an] undergraduate from out of town, you really didn't pay much attention, to be honest - but I can remember talking amongst the guys in the fraternity where we were paying close attention to that election, because we knew that if Carl Stokes didn't win, if Seth Taft won mayoral race, we fully suspected that the Hough riots were going to be inflamed again. We were very concerned about that being that end of campus, we were concerned about our own safety. And so we were much relieved and very, very pleasantly surprised when Carl won that mayoral. I remember that election from a personal standpoint, but it was a- It was an issue and one that- That's what went through our minds.
Alisa Naselli [00:22:57] So then did the climate in Cleveland change before and after Stokes was elected?
Edward Pershey [00:23:04] That's the only thing I remember about that. And. And I think there was a. I think there was a different feeling on campus, but, you know, we just weren't. We were more embroiled then by then in Vietnam, in our own university. Universities are insular little places, you know, and we were more concerned about. I know there were students, students involved with getting Carl elected. There was a group of students who did that, but I wasn't involved with that.
Alisa Naselli [00:23:32] What do you recall about the Glenville riots, if anything?
Edward Pershey [00:23:38] I don't remember anything, no.
Alisa Naselli [00:23:39] So you and your peers really didn't talk about that?
Edward Pershey [00:23:42] No. I don't remember being much concerned, other than in the context of the election, hoping that they wouldn't reignite.
Alisa Naselli [00:23:52] What do you know about the Cleveland NOW program?
Edward Pershey [00:23:55] Well, that was started by Carl, and again, I was, late sixties, I was involved in school. And then the early seventies, I was still in Cleveland, and I was teaching at St. Ed's, and I was working in downtown Cleveland part-time at Cleveland Stadium. I eventually took a job when I left grad school, I took a job with a realty company called Associated Estates Corporation. That was Carl Milstein, major Jewish developer in Cleveland. And I worked for his company for three years. And so I was in and around Cleveland economy and downtown a lot, and so pretty much paying attention to what was kind of going on downtown and watching the local news and so forth. Yeah. And the success of mayoralty cabinets in city hall. The one that I remember the most, after Carl, of course, everybody remembers Ralph Perk, but the one that I remember most is Dennis Kucinich at the end of the seventies. And in 19. That was '78. Summer '78. I had a, I did a summer project for the national, essentially the National Park Service. Then it was a separate agency, the one I worked for, but it was called the Historic American Engineering Record. And I did a- I was hired. I did histories of Cleveland Harbor and Cleveland Airport and Cleveland water supply system and the Shaker rapid transit for the Historic American Engineering Record. And we had offices at city hall. And remember, we used to ride the elevator once in a while with Dennis Kucinich. And it was interesting to watch Dennis's very leftist Democratic politics run up against the Republican right-wing business climate in the city at the time. And the part I remember most was something Dennis wanted to hold on to. Muni Light, it was called at the time, Municipal Light and Power, and the public utility wanted to take that over, CEI. Carl Stokes, one of his election campaign promises was he suggested that the city should have, back in 67, should have sold Muni Light. They would have made more money by selling Muni Light to CEI. It was interesting to listen to that because Dennis fought hard to keep Muni Light controlled by the city. And his successor, the Republican, Voinovich, followed up on that and champion that. And that turned at the time. And since then, I think, has turned out to be a wise decision for the residents of the city. Cleveland Public Power has been able to hold in check some of the rates that are charged for electricity in the city of Cleveland and in northeast Ohio. So that's the part that most I remember are those battles over Muni Light. Mainly because I was historian of technology, I was interested in electric light and power. So I was interested to watch that. It mirrored, in many ways the battles in the early 20th century over public transit and the control of public transit by either municipality or private interest. And that's continued to be a battle in this country. The way that our basic utilities and services are controlled by the people through various agencies and how much they are controlled by private industry, often in the guise of a public utility, which is kind of a privately held public utility, is like an oxymoron of the greatest of mine. It's Looney Tunes is what it is, but historic. And that has continued to play out in Cleveland. And so that's been an interesting thing to watch.
Alisa Naselli [00:27:42] Where did your ideas for the Stokes exhibit come from? What inspired this?
Edward Pershey [00:27:49] Well, a couple of things inspired it. I wish I could take claim for inspiring it at the beginning. In the end of 2004, I was given a new position at the Historical Society. Director of Museum Services, essentially took over the exhibit program, and we had a number of things on the books that the trustees were not happy with in terms of exhibits, traveling exhibits that they didn't feel were directly related to the mission of the historical society. So in October of 2004, I kind of grabbed that schedule and ripped it apart and put it back together and started slotting in exhibits like Millionaire's Row that just came down in May that are more directly related to the history of Cleveland and northeast Ohio. One of the topics that was bantered about at that time, and it was suggested by our executive director, doctor Pat Raymond, and by people out of our library, John Grabowski, and our curator of African American archives, was to look at Stokes brothers. A couple reasons we had Carl's papers, his personal papers, and his mayoral papers are at the Western Reserve Historical Society, and we had just received, when Lou retired from, Louis Stokes retired from Congress in 1999, his papers came to the historical society. So we had this great treasure trove, huge collection. We knew it was very rich in information. And now that Louis Stokes had been retired, we felt it was a good time to maybe do a retrospective exhibit on the careers of these two very important Clevelanders. Carl Stokes getting elected in '67 changed the way that African Americans in this country participated in city governments across the country. There's no doubt about that. And Louis Stokes, certainly not the first African American to serve in Congress, nor the last, nor even the earliest or anything like that. Nonetheless, he was an important player in Congress, distinguished career in Congress. And both of these gentlemen had grown up in Cleveland, in essentially in Cleveland's and some of the nation's first and Cleveland's first federally funded public housing in the 1930s, and what we would call today the projects. And we thought here was an opportunity to the careers of two very important people who came from relatively humble, humble surroundings. And from the perspective of nowadays, say somebody's grown up in the projects, you write them off, and we do it mentally, we write off. And now that's not true.
Alisa Naselli [00:30:08] Do you see the exhibit having the ability to change these sorts of perceptions?
Edward Hershey [00:30:13] Well, hopefully, I think we'll challenge people to- I think that- I don't think it'll be as hard to challenge people on that as it would have been even ten years ago or 15 years ago. I think people are ready to have their perception change, but I think you're gonna- We know that some, we know first that some people will not come to that exhibit because it's about two black guys. They just won't. And that's a disappointment. And so we have to think about that. And that's a huge disappointment because these are two great Clevelanders and two great Americans whose stories couldn't be more interesting or touch on more aspects of American life, societal issues and personal stories. They're just some great stories. You know, you hear me tell stories. These guys got better stories than I got. So it's just great American history. I think that it's an opportunity. I see it as an opportunity. I don't know that I'll change old people's way they think. Nobody can change the way I think, probably. But we have an opportunity to reach young people and to challenge young people's view of the way the world works. And here's an opportunity to reach young people of all kind. I hope to, to reach outreach to a lot of young people and show them that regardless of where you stand in society, that you have an opportunity to change the way the world works. And here are two guys that did it, and this is how they did it, and this is why they did it. And you can do that, too, that you don't. I don't care. You know, don't tell me that you're- That you're poor. You don't have any resources. That's not going to fly because these two guys were poor. They don't have any resources. Nothing. There's no excuse. You've got no excuse. Or if you're rich, that's also- There's no excuse not to do something good for the society simply because you're rich. Yeah, you can go and do whatever you want. And these guys had an opportunity to become rich off of their fame, and they continued to help people. And I think that that's really important. So that's what I see as an opportunity, as well as an opportunity just to look at a great, important part of Cleveland history that's more recent, the last 40 years of Cleveland history as a community. And as we plan to do with the conference we hope to hold in 2008, look at the way that American urban politics has changed, because that is something which really need to look at.
You look at the most recent elections in this country, and you used to be able to point to cities like Cleveland and say, city, Cleveland's going to go Democrat, right. In a national election. No doubt about it. That's not as true anymore. The face of urban politics is changing dramatically with issues such as gay rights, gay marriage, abortion. These kinds of issues are not dividing under the old left-right, Democrat-Republican chasms any longer. And those are the issues that I would hope the conference will address, as well as the issues of economic development in cities and the role that various ethnic groups and minorities, African Americans, Hispanics, play in urban politics. That's what we hope to look at, and we hope that the exhibit will be a forum for a stepping- Not a forum, but a stepping-off point for that. Now, there you got me talking about things that are way out of my area of expertise. But I think what I said is correct, and we hopefully will get people on a national scale to come in and say, listen, this is the way it used to be. This is the way it is now. But this is the way things could be. This is what needs to change, and that could be an engaging and a wonderful opportunity.
Alisa Naselli [00:33:39] When visitors leave this exhibit-
Edward Pershey [00:33:41] Proselytizing. That's not good. Get on my soapbox, huh?
Alisa Naselli [00:33:45] I like that vision quite a bit. Okay. When visitors leave this exhibit, what do you want them to know about the Stokes?
Edward Pershey [00:33:53] Well, what I want a couple of- First off, when anybody goes to an exhibit at museums, we know they're not going to leave remembering more than one or two things. It just isn't going to happen. For young people in Cleveland. They know the Stokes name and they know it. Why? Because there are buildings with the Stokes name, but they don't know who Carl and Louis Stokes are as people. And I hope the one thing we can accomplish is to reintroduce Carl and Louis Stokes to a new generation of youngsters. That's the one thing I hope can happen, and I hope for anybody who walks in that they can see that they take back some of the personal stories of Carl and Louis Stokes and see how wonderful the two guys were and to see the critical role that Cleveland played in national politics over the past 40 years. I think that's a point of community pride that we can look at as well as all the other things we talked about. But those are the things I think when they see, when they come out of the exhibit one, they'll feel good about Carl Stokes. Hopefully they'll feel better about their community, and hopefully they'll come away with saying, you know, shame on me for not doing more. I don't know. How's that sound? The chances of that, I don't know. You never know, right?
Alisa Naselli [00:35:08] What particular stories about the Stokes that you're going to use that you think will help visitors walk away with that understanding?
Edward Pershey [00:35:17] We- There's a couple of things. The exhibit starts off very strongly by looking at their relationship with their mother. They grew up with- Their father died early, and so they grew up. She was a single mom in the projects. Does that sound like an American story right now? In Outhwaite, it was called, that was the housing. And we have photos of Outhwaite. We're going to talk about the way the family, and of course, Outhwaite, the first federally funded, was a huge improvement over the living standards of people on Cleveland's east side, African Americans particularly. And so we want to look at that story. We have some great images of the family there. And then we look at the way that the two, they were born in the 1920s, so they come into as young adults. They're in their late teens and late 1930s, an interesting time in America, to say the least. And there's some just, Carl was a boxer. He loved to box. He was an athletic boxer. And some wonderful pictures of Carl as a boxer. And we take that motif of Carl in the boxing ring as kind of a, as a template, as a, not really even a motif, but just a starting point saying, look, here's Carl, young man struggling. Who is he? Who is he is an African American young man in Cleveland, in a city that at the end of the depression looks like it. And he takes his energy into the boxing ring. That's a boxing ring is a tough fight, but it has rules and it has a defined boundary. You can go in there and you can win a boxing match. Right? I think what we see is that both Carl and Louis Stokes do the same thing when they go in to law and to politics. That's where they want to do the good fight. There's an arena there are rules. And you can go in and you can win particular battles, you can win elections, you can get people elected, you can change laws. And I think that's what I see. And so we- And who are the great heroes for those two guys? Not only for African Americans, but all Americans at the time, Jesse Owens and Joe Louis. And so the two Stokes guys talk about this. We have great pictures and movie footage of that. And so we show that these were great American heroes at the time. They were probably some of the first African American heroes that whites would look up to and spoke about. There's no doubt about that. So that was a change in tempo. And there's been some recent scholarship on Joe Louis, particularly, which can be drawn on along those lines. But anyway, that's what we see. And the rest of the exhibit is about how these two guys took their fight and learned how to be lawyers, learned how to be politicians, and structured their struggle to achieve good things. And I think that's what the exhibit's about. And they did, what's great is they did it successfully, you know? And they weren't perfect. Neither guy will say they're perfect. And, but there are some great- What's neat is, for instance, and the exhibit has stuff that refers back on itself. And the one little piece that we just found the other day, really thanks to an intern from Cleveland state here, Amanda, who found this piece, Carl Stokes, in the late seventies, went to New York City and was a news broadcaster at WNBC-TV in New York, not a national broadcaster. He was on the local affiliate news, and he was a, you know, he did stories on NBC-TV in New York. And one of the story clips that he did, he won an enemy for one story about Paul Robeson. But he went to Gleason's gym in New York City and was aspiring and talking with young people and a picture of himself as a boxer and was talking to him. And what a great, and we have video of that. There's a video clip, and what a great reference that is from the end of his career back to his days as a youngster here in Cleveland. I mean, that's just- When you plan an exhibit, you can't plan that kind of, you find these things, and that's what's so rewarding about doing exhibits and doing that kind of history is you find those self-referential things. So we don't have to interpret Carl as a boxer. We've got Carl in 1978 interpreting Carl Stokes as a boxer in 1938. I mean, you can't ask for anything better than that. So that's the exhibit's going to be full of those kinds of references, and I hope people will find those fun and cool.
Alisa Naselli [00:39:16] How do you think the successes and/or failures of Carl Stokes apply to the city today, and what do you think he would say about Cleveland right now?
Edward Pershey [00:39:26] Well, I think he - and some people say this indicates that maybe Carl wasn't successful, I disagree with him - but I think a lot of the issues that he faced, economic development with Cleveland now, housing in Cleveland for working-class people, are two of the key issues which remain at the forefront in Cleveland today, and education, public utility, you name it. Right? Everything his administration tackled remains the key issues in the city of Cleveland. There have been successes along the way. There have been failures along the way. There's no doubt about it. Carl didn't solve everything. He would be the first to admit that. But those issues remain there, and there are issues that are, have to be addressed by administrations, and the community has to address successfully. That's what I think he would say. I can't speak for Carl Stokes, but I think that's what I would expect him to say. And I think most people come to exhibit would say the same thing. The city now is facing severe economic. I heard this the other day on CPN, a discussion of the local economy of Northeast, the economy elsewhere in the country seems to be picking up a little bit concerns. Is Northeast Ohio picking up at the same pace? Are we getting left behind? What are the issues about this? And so that is maybe a little different. Carl was mayor just when the Rust Belt was being formed, when the old industries were beginning to show their rust. And now we're in a city that's well, after that, the rust belt is long gone, and we know that there are, that some of that was a fallacy. For instance, you're talking about the Rust Belt. Right now, steel, for instance. People think the steel industry is dead. Not in Cleveland. We have the world's most efficient steel mill in the Flats in Cleveland, Ohio. We are making as much steel at Mittal Steel in the flats just south of downtown than was ever made in this city. They're doing with fewer people. They're doing with newer technology. But it's not dead and gone. It's different. And so I think that's little things like that. I think the city and the community have to look at what is the economic strength in northeast Ohio? Biggest employer is Cleveland Clinic, in the state, isn't it? And so we have to look at those kinds of issues. So, boy.
Alisa Naselli [00:41:40] Are there any final thoughts that you have that you'd like to share either about the exhibit or your experiences here in Cleveland?
Edward Pershey [00:41:49] Well, experience in Cleveland, but the one part about my career that affects, and you've heard me talk about this already, is that part of my career we didn't talk about was I became very interested that children learn in museums. And I was a director of education, the Western Reserve Historical Society, put together a whole museum in Massachusetts that was just about teaching children about history. And I think that there is no more important role that museums can play in the society than reaching out to young people. And if we don't do that successfully, I don't care how good a museum we are, I don't think we're doing our job. And so that's why I talked a lot about what I hope to do with the Stokes exhibit, to outreach to young people in Cleveland, because if we don't do that, I don't care how much people enjoy, the adults enjoy the exhibit. If we don't successfully reach youngsters, then we didn't do our job well. And that's really important. There's no better museum feeling than to come into work or be at my office at Western Reserve Historical Society and hear the school groups, the children talking and laughing and learning. I don't like when children in the museum have told to shush. I hate that you can't learn if you're quiet. Give me a break, you know? And so I've always enjoyed hearing, hearing children in museums, and I know that people, that they're learning something, that they're enjoying themselves and are going to walk away with a positive learning experience. So that's what's critical. That's what's critical. And anybody who disagrees with me at that, I disagree with them.
Alisa Naselli [00:43:13] All right. Excellent. Thank you so much.
Edward Pershey [00:43:16] You're welcome.
Alisa Naselli [00:43:19] [inaudible] Stokes as mayor changed your experience in the city. What was good about him as a leader?
Edward Pershey [00:43:24] Yeah, I think that you're going to want, you may have people, I'm going to guess that one or two people worked on his campaign. They're going to be interviewing. So you're going to ask there, particularly if they did work on the campaign, I would really appreciate questions directly. What did you do in the campaign? What was it like? Were you there? Where were you the night he won? Those kind of questions. Were you in the room with him? You know, what did he, what did he say? What did you do? How did you celebrate? [inaudible] Right. Right. You may get some of that. And then, of course, he went on after he was mayor, he was a judge here. Some people may know him from them. I don't know. I don't have any feeling for his tenure as a judge. And I know, we know what he did in New York, but I don't know whether anybody's going to be able to speak to that. Probably not, because he wasn't on tv here then. He was in New York, and then he- But he came back here and he was- He had some- At the end, he had some unpleasant experiences, if I remember, in the press. I don't know whether anyone will want to speak to that, but if they do, I wouldn't stop 'em, but I wouldn't necessarily ask about that unless they bring it up, because I don't think, from what I understand of that part, it really doesn't say anything about either him or his career, so it doesn't do much good. And, of course, that's Carl, but a lot of people are going to talk about Lou, Louis Stokes, and what's interesting about Louis Stokes is how much he just admired his brother. Admired Carl. He just. I think from Louis Stokes' point of view, this exhibit's about Carl. Of course, we. That would be disingenuous to just do Carl Stokes, I think. But. But it. I'm sorry, yeah?
Alisa Naselli [00:45:14] I was just telling them earlier what a gentleman Louis Stokes is.
Edward Pershey [00:45:19] He's just. He's just. He's just a fine human being. He is just. It's so neat. I just ran into him. You run into him at some event, and it just. You know, he has no airs whatsoever, but he's so. He's such a gentleman and he. I don't know what to say. Right. You're absolutely right. Now, I never get it. I never had a chance to meet Carl Stokes, so I've never had a chance to talk with him, so I don't- But I. Him, from my understanding, he was a little different than his brother. A little more. But I don't know anything about that. And that might be. People who can speak to that might be interesting, but I never had a chance to. Obviously, I saw him on TV, I saw him as mayor and so forth, but I don't have any personal. Whereas I've had a chance a couple of times to talk with Louis Stokes and he's a gentle gentleman. A gentle gentleman. Right? Is that a good way to put it? And just smart. Just. Yeah. Impressive guy. Yeah, it's very cool. Nice to be able to meet people like that. You don't get to meet too many.
Alisa Naselli [00:46:16] I mean, they must just- How do you feel when you drive up Stokes Boulevard knowing that street is named after you? And that your brother has a brand new courthouse?
Edward Pershey [00:46:27] Well, one would hope that, I would think they have a lot of. How do you. Is there such thing as humble pride? But they should be proud, but for the right reason.
Alisa Naselli [00:46:38] Or the Lou Stokes Library.
Edward Pershey [00:46:39] Yeah, sure. If I were Lou Stokes, I think the one that I would most- Well, he might argue at the VA Hospital is probably extremely important, too. Veterans, veterans benefits. But I think personally, if they named a library after me or a museum, then I'd be happy, you know? Heck, what a street! [laughs]
Alisa Naselli [00:46:58] But a museum.
Edward Pershey [00:46:59] You're right. I don't know if that'll ever happen. Yes. The place that I developed in Lowell, Massachusetts, was the Tsongas industrial hit center, named after former senator Paul Tsongas, who ran for president. But Paul Tsongas was alive in Lowell when they built that, when I developed that, because he was supposed to have died, non-lymphoma cancer, and he was supposed to have died, then he didn't. And so they named this thing after him. Then he survived and he lived. My wife and I lived a block away from Paul Tsongas's house. And so I got to know Paul Tsongas. That was really cool, especially when I ran for. I knew somebody ran for president. That was pretty cool. But what was even cooler, we got there in the fall of '87, and he had been sick and he was- Well, he was getting better. And then because he had been sick, his wife, Nikki Tsongas, had been going to law school because she thought he was going to die. And so she needed- They had kids. I mean, she was going to become a lawyer, practice. Well, he gets better and she gets finished up law school. So they were, he was like Lowell's favorite son. He's Mister Lowell, Massachusetts. Right? And they had regularly entertained at their home, but they hadn't entertained for a couple years because of he'd been sick and she had been in law years school. So he very graciously said that he was going to have an open house at their home in the spring of '88, and to welcome me and my wife to Lowell, because I was now, I was the director of the Tsongas Industrial History Center, to officially welcome us to the city, he wanted- And because that was the first time they had entertained in a couple years, everybody who got the invitation accepted. And so my wife and I walk into Paul Tsongas's house in Lowell, this nice, big house,Alisa Naselli you know, beautiful house, and everybody who's anybody is there. It's nice, it's full. And Paul Saungus introduces me. You know, I was just. There's a former us senator who was introducing me, and I was just that was just talking about, you know, heady, but was even better, I figured this would go on for what, an hour, two, right? And everybody would go home. Well, no, because they entertained. Everybody stayed, and some people left, but it stayed, and we went, and we ended up around the kitchen table until two in the morning with Paul Tsongas and other people just swapping stories and Paul Tsongas talking about his career. It was absolutely- I walked home, because we could walk home. We were a block away. I walked home. I don't think my feet touched the ground. They just didn't touch the ground. I just. Here's a guy from, you know, my dad and I never went to, you know, from Joliet, Illinois, and I got a senator throwing me a party like that. I was like, that was pretty cool. So that was the other person I got. I got to know Paul Tsongas a little bit. There was a city park near where we lived, a city of Lowell park. It was just a little park, and it had flower beds, and Paul Tsongas had kind of adopted that personally. And I'd be at home on a Saturday morning, the phone would ring, and it would be Paul Tsongas. He says, get on your work clothes and meet me at the park. And I'd go. And we'd be cutting grass and pulling weeds and planting flowers with Paul Tsongas. That's the way he was. So when he ran for president and then won the New Hampshire primary, gee, I'm thinking, wait a minute, I got a chance that I'll be able to, if this happens, I said, I'll be able to call the White House, and the president will take the call. Right? And I remember that the night after he won the New Hampshire primary, I'm out walking our dog in our neighborhood, you know, I'm walking the dog, you know, and two guys come up to me in black suits, and they go, who are you? I looked around, I said, what do you mean, who the hell are you? You know, this is my neighborhood. I lived down the street. It was Secret Service, because he'd won the new amateur primary. He got Secret Service coverage right away. So that was pretty cool. Yeah, that was neat. That was fun. That was fun for a while. While it lasted, right? He told some, Paul Tsongas told some great stories about the debates. Debate. You know, they used to have the televised debates with all the democrats going for the stories about the other candidates, how nasty they were. [laughs] [recording ends abruptly]
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