Abstract
Mary Rose Oakar, the first Democratic female to be elected into Congress from Ohio, details her family and life events. She discusses her upbringing growing up in Ohio City and her work in Congress. She also details her work with the ADC (American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee) and stories of discrimination she witnessed against Arab Americans.
Interviewee
Oakar, Mary Rose (interviewee)
Interviewer
Assily, Rania (interviewer)
Project
Arab Community in Cleveland
Date
8-30-2016
Document Type
Oral History
Duration
72 minutes
Recommended Citation
"Mary Rose Oakar interview, 30 August 2016" (2016). Cleveland Regional Oral History Collection. Interview 345010.
https://engagedscholarship.csuohio.edu/crohc000/908
Transcript
Rania Assily [00:00:02] Okay, here we are in Cleveland, Ohio, with Mary Rose Oakar, the honorable Mary Rose Oakar. This is Rania Assily doing the Cleveland State University digital history project, and we’re very happy to have Mary Rose on board with us today. So thank you for being here, Mary.
Mary Rose Oakar [00:00:22] Rose, happy to be with you, and I’m glad you’re doing the project.
Rania Assily [00:00:26] Thank you. The first question I wanted to ask you, Mary Rose, is, well, what is your full name and who named you and why?
Mary Rose Oakar [00:00:43] My full name? You don’t want my full, full name. My name is Mary Rose Oakar. Two words. My mother, I think, had a lot to do with my name. I actually was born on Jay Avenue in a house because my mother’s mother had died at Lutheran hospital, and she didn’t want to have her last child at Lutheran hospital. She had died on the operating table. So my mother had a phobia. So the doctor said, we’ll come to you. So I was born in the home on Jay Avenue before they moved to West 30th. When she had my brother Jimmy. I don’t know if you want to know this, but when she had my brother Jimmy, I’m the youngest of five kids. When she had my brother Jimmy, he was born on October 7, and she thought she had a baby girl, and it’s the feast of the holy Rosary day, and she named my brother Jim Mary Rose. And then woke up and found out he was a boy and said, well, everybody needs a sunny Jim. So my sister, who already had three brothers, now really wanted a baby sister. So my mother and dad had another child. That was me, and that’s how I got my name. And she always said, you know, I was named after the prettiest flower and blessed mother and all that. But nonetheless, I think it had something to do with my brother Jim’s birthday, which was a feast of the holy of the rosary. So that is how I got my name.
Rania Assily [00:02:25] Where did you grow up, Mary Rose?
Mary Rose Oakar [00:02:27] I grew up in the near west side, which is now called Ohio City all of my life, and went to school in the neighborhood and so forth in Cleveland, Ohio. I was born in Cleveland on Jay Avenue, and one of the most diverse, most fabulous neighborhoods anybody could want to grow up in.
Rania Assily [00:02:48] Now, why did your mother and father, why did they choose this area?
Mary Rose Oakar [00:02:54] I think they chose this area because it was affordable. They were first renting because, you know, they were married in 1931. I’m the youngest of five, and they first lived in Amherst, Ohio. Even though my father was fairly educated, like a lot of people from the old country or different countries, they don’t really get the kind of jobs that they’re really qualified for. So my dad probably wanted to teach and so forth, but didn’t get to do that. They came to Cleveland. He had a sister here and a brother in law, and my mother and he met each other in Cleveland, although my mother was born in Pennsylvania. But when her real father died, Salem Ellison was her maiden name. Ellison when she was five. And her two little brothers were my uncle Lou and uncle Uncle Tom. She, you know, it was very, very poor times. So my grandmother remarried a widower with a son, my uncle Tony. And then they had two kids. So she had five brothers, you know. And ultimately, because they didn’t have much work in Connellsville or Uniontown, Pennsylvania, outside of Pittsburgh, they moved to Cleveland and lived in Tremont for a while on Howard Avenue.
Rania Assily [00:04:35] Now, I’m sorry to interrupt your mother. Her family is from. Her family came from where?
Mary Rose Oakar [00:04:41] Her real father came from a village called Khafrun in Syria. And her mother came from what I found out to be when I went there, a very sophisticated family in Homs. They had been ambassadors and spokes, Swahili and all kinds. I mean, it was really amazing. You know, you always think, oh, we’re probably a little bit better educated now. When I went over there, all my cousins on both sides were very, very sophisticated and had some real talent in education.
Rania Assily [00:05:17] Wow. And so what brought your mother’s family here to Cleveland?
Mary Rose Oakar [00:05:22] I don’t know why they came. They didn’t go to Cleveland. They went to Pennsylvania. But I’m not sure I know that. I wish I did know that, probably because they saw that the steel industry was there and so forth. But actually, my grandfather, her real father, and my mother’s uncle, her mother’s brother, were in business together, and they were very successful. They owned car agencies and department stores and all kinds of stuff. And then he died of the flu epidemic that took a good number of people during World War one. And so my grandfather, my real grandfather died, and my grandmother was a widow with three children, my mother being the oldest of the kids. And then she married a widower who they met in Pennsylvania. And then they moved to Cleveland because there were a lot of people from Connellsville and Uniontown live in Greater Cleveland. I found out when I ran for office because they thought there were more jobs there, manufacture of cars, so on and so forth. And my step grandfather was not a businessman. He was a laborer. And so the times were really tough in those days for these people. My parents met each other in Cleveland. She was born orthodox and he was a Maronite. And it was very interesting. They fell in love. She worked for Higbee’s and was going to go to New York to be a seller of some kind of sweaters or something. And they fell in love and wanted to get married. And her stepfather, who was very strict, did not want her to marry one of those horrible Maronites. So they had to. My grandmother and her mother gave permission for my mother to marry my dad. They liked him very much. And she was really more or less raised Catholic because in Connellsville, Pennsylvania, where she grew up, before the 9th grade, they didn’t have an orthodox church, so they went to the Catholic Church. You know, it’s somewhat similar. And she went to catholic school for the first three years and then to a very fine public school. She always talked about her teachers in the public school in Connellsville and how terrific they were. So they ran away and got married and took half their relatives. And can you imagine this? In 1931, he picked her up from Higbee’s and they. They took off to Detroit. And my cousin Esther, my dad’s niece, who now is 102 years old and still alive and fabulous woman, went with them, among others. And they got married at Maronite church in Detroit, Michigan. And then my mother, when she died, we didn’t know she had this, but there was only one sacred thing she had in her life that was private, and that was her cedar chest. And when she died, my brothers said, you and Helen, my sister Helen, go and look at mom’s cedar chest. And we found a diary there. Our first communion pictures, our report cards, all kinds of pictures of me campaigning and stuff like that. Unbelievable stuff that we never knew was in there. And in her diary, which we finally scanned, one of my nephews scanned it, you know, because it was fragile. And it says, my dad’s best man says, joe, Margie’s stepfather is coming from Cleveland. Take this. And he hands him a little pistol, and my father puts that in his pocket. Never used it. And my mom said, he walked down the aisle with a gun in his pocket. So, you know, you think today, true love right there. Yeah, true love. Well, we see people today where religion is important, but it’s not anything like that. But, you know, now, you know, we see Muslims marrying Catholics and Jews marrying Catholics and so on, but it’s not totally common, but it still happens. But my parents, just because of the fact that she was orthodox or born that way, she had to run away, isn’t that amazing that they were that daring.
Rania Assily [00:10:36] They were able to come together.
Mary Rose Oakar [00:10:39] Oh, yeah, they worked it out afterward. You know, they always worked it out. And. Yeah, but it was that they were adventurous. I mean, you have to admit it, that was pretty good.
Rania Assily [00:10:52] And do you think that had to do with the times, too? People were really, you know, people were. Maybe they felt like, you know, we don’t know if we’ll live to see tomorrow, so might as well do what we have to do, you know, in hard times.
Mary Rose Oakar [00:11:05] Well, I think that one of the things that’s true strikes me about the music and my parents and others was that they were very optimistic. And if you. My mother loved music, and so my dad had all his little Arabic records and stuff, but she loved, you know, she was sort of a, you know, flapper, you know, as they call those kids in those days. And so, you know, like, they. She taught my sister, and I knew all these songs from the twenties and thirties and forties because of my mom. You would sing them, like, one song goes, keep your sunny side up, up, you know. You know, it’s always optimistic, and I think that the one thing that I can honestly say about my parents was that no matter what the times were like, and they were tough times with all those kids and, you know, the post depression era and World War two and so forth, they were always optimistic, and they instilled that optimism in us, I think the five of us, and a sense of self confidence. That was one thing that I will value, that my parents gave me. And my sister used to say, mom overdoes it. You know, Helen was very good in art. And my mother would say, you know, you’re better than Michelangelo, Helen. And Helen would say, now she goes a little overboard, don’t you think? I said, well, I don’t know, but I like the fact that she tells us we can do anything. But anyway, that’s just a little bit about my parents. But they were definitely loved their Arab American culture. They didn’t call it Arab in those days, but they called it Syrian or whatever.
Rania Assily [00:12:58] Your father is from Syria?
Mary Rose Oakar [00:13:00] Yeah, he was born in Syria in a beautiful little village called Khafrun. It’s one of the most beautiful villages in.
Rania Assily [00:13:09] Is it a valley?
Mary Rose Oakar [00:13:11] No, no, that’s Lebanon. No, you’re thinking of Lebanon. Beka is Lebanon, but we have relatives. The irony is that it just kills me when people are saying, oh, I’m Lebanese, I’m not Syrian, and all that crazy stuff, because I have first people who are first cousins in Lebanon with their same last name. As mine only spell a little different. Go to Syria when there’s problems and the people in Syria go to Lebanon, and all you do is go over a mountain and they’re all related. And it’s so, you know, it was all Syria and it was all, you know, the, the culture was there. Nobody, you know, it’s the French and the English that chopped up all those countries. I mean, we just had Kuwait. Kuwait was made a country in 1961, you know, so the way they colonized those countries and certainly took advantage of separating the people, which I think is wrong. So that’s why it doesn’t bother me if they want to call me Lebanese. I don’t care, because to me, they’re the same people as my own people and I don’t correct them. But that’s really my background and all of it. I’ve met many relatives in Lebanon and Syria. In fact, in Lebanon, there’s two villages in Lebanon in the north, beautiful area in the north called Beit Awkar, which is the way you would pronounce it in Arabic. And, you know, house of Oakar (Aoukar/Awkar). And then near Beirut, there’s another Beit Awker, and that’s where the American embassy is. And it’s right near a Jesuit and Maronite seminary. And, you know, my father’s brother was a Maronite priest. His uncle was a bishop and all that, so, and my mother was orthodox, but her great great uncle was the patriarch Arida (Anthony II Peter Arida) of the Maronite church. I saw his picture in Jounieh. You know, it’s fascinating. They used to call him the traitor because he converted to be a Maronite from being orthodox, and he became the patriot of the Maronite church. So anyway, so interesting. Yeah, it is. It’s fascinating to know your stuff about your family.
Rania Assily [00:15:46] Mary Rose, can you tell us about your childhood growing up here in this particular neighborhood? What was your childhood like? What was, what did your father do for a living? What did your mom do? And what did you sort of do with your brothers and sisters growing up?
Mary Rose Oakar [00:16:01] Well, I was lucky. I always feel I was spoiled because I was the youngest and I liked being spoiled, and I learned a lot from my brothers and sisters. So grade school was kind of easy for me, you know, because I knew, you know, numbers and different things that my mother read to us every night. So we really, she was pretty good in English, even though she had a 9th grade education. But in Pennsylvania, they used to, by heart, knows Shakespeare. I mean, it was unbelievable stuff I learned in graduate school. She learned in grade school. So it was terrific. Growing up, I had a very happy childhood. I honestly feel, and I’m not trying to be idealistic about it. I did. I was the youngest of five. I had, my sister was seven years older than me and three brothers older than me. And this was a very diverse neighborhood. We had people who were Syrian who lived down the street, people who were Irish, who certainly were around here. Italian? Oh, everybody. Sure.
Rania Assily [00:17:14] Did everyone try to get to know each other?
Mary Rose Oakar [00:17:16] Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Well, just to give an example, my mother learned how to make Syrian bread and kibbe and stuff from her grandmother. And she didn’t know how to cook too well when she first got married, but her grandmother was still living, and her mother was deceased, unfortunately. But she pitched in and showed her how to make all this stuff delicious. And yet we still had meatloaf and scaled potatoes and hot dogs. And like everybody, all the American families, these Irish kids would come to pick up my brothers to play baseball, you know, the Chambers and the Colder kids, and they’d say, my mother would be making hamburgers on Syrian bread, she called it. And they’d come in and they’d smell this bread and was out of this world, and they’d say, misses Oakar, tell Larry and Jimmy, two of my brothers, that you need us to help you bake and let them play baseball. You know, they wanted to have the food. And my mother would say, nah, Jackie. Nah. Go Chambers, we called them. You guys go play baseball, and you all coming over here to eat afterward. So, yes. Did we have friends of all backgrounds? Yep. And we had a lot of slow, wild kids who went to St. Gwendolin’s. We had a lot of kids who were Protestant who went to different Trinity Lutheran Church or United Church of Christ right next to St. Patrick’s on bridge. I went to St. Patrick’s grade school and Lourdes Academy, which used to be on 41st and bridge, where I taught as a lay teacher. All the subjects I wanted to teach, drama and English and speech and directed all their plays.
Rania Assily [00:19:18] Did you always want to be an English teacher?
Mary Rose Oakar [00:19:20] Did you know from a young age.
Rania Assily [00:19:22] Or did you just develop that through time?
Mary Rose Oakar [00:19:23] No, I probably wanted more to be an actress or something crazy. I see you doing that.
Rania Assily [00:19:30] I can see you doing that, actually, you’re very good.
Mary Rose Oakar [00:19:31] Well, probably. Well, you know, when I was speech in drama major at Ursuline, where I went to college, undergraduate school, they let me take extra courses. So I had a double major, never any charge, I mean, and I actually did not want to go there. I wanted to go to Marquette, but my brother Jimmy was going to law school, Georgetown. Larry just came back from the navy, and he was going to Cleveland state, which was Fenn, I think, at that time. And Helen was taking some classes in art. And, you know, my father just wasn’t able to send me off to Marquette, so I was going to work a year. And then the nun, at Ursuline, called me and said, you would come down here and visit the school. What are you going to do? And it was August. I said, sister, I’m going to wait a year and work and save money for a tuition to go to Marquette. She said, Mary Rose, I have news for you. You probably won’t do that if you work a year. And she said, why don’t you come to Ursuline? And she said, it’s not very expensive. And it wasn’t. And so I did. And I had wonderful experience there, not because of, you know, anything, but I was president of my class three years in a row, and then I was student government president. And if you were student government president in the sixties, they gave you a stipend to travel to other colleges because of the sixties and all the movements going on. And they called it SGA, the Student Government Association. And I traveled to different campuses. I would never have had that experience if I went to Ohio State or Marquette or something. But because of that small institution, and I think because it was a women’s college, what they really believed in was to develop a female intellectually, socially, morally, and physically to your fullest capacity. That was drilled into us, and I think that that ironically, Mary McCarthy wrote a book about women in Congress, and when I was in Congress, most of us went to women’s colleges. Barbara Mikulski, Jerry Ferraro, Barbara Kennelli, etcetera. We all went to women’s colleges, and it was kind of interesting that she figured that out. So…
Rania Assily [00:22:17] I want to ask you, did your parents, did they instill in you this sort of activism or something? Did you or did, were all of your siblings like that? They kind of went into fields that were more about, you know, social activism or at least something, you know, being aware of politics, being. Were you raised with that, or do you think you just sort of fell into it?
Mary Rose Oakar [00:22:36] Well, you know, I read my mother’s diary, and she said, joe and I voted a straight democratic ticket. Well, to put that in a diary, you know, they were Roosevelt people, I think. Although my father did vote for Dwight Eisenhower. He really liked Eisenhower. But no. Well, my mother was a precinct committee person only because she was a homemaker. My dad did not want her to work, and she was raising five kids, and I’m glad she was home, to be honest. Although she could have gone on and probably could have finished school and so on. She was pretty bright, but self taught. A lot of our people are self taught, you know, and they both read a lot. And I do think the reason they asked my mother to be a precinct person was that she was the one that if there was no light on West 30th, she would be the one to ask for a light on West 30th. Or if the garbage people would call her and say, Misses Oakar, why don’t you call city hall and say, we need to have our garbage picked up? So she was pretty active, even though she was home a lot.
Rania Assily [00:23:54] What got her that position, though? Did she want to be in that?
Mary Rose Oakar [00:23:57] Well, no, the councilwoman, who I later ran for council myself and against her, although she gave up her seat and I ran against somebody else. She asked my mother to do that because she knew my mother would be active and be helpful, but she just had it in her. She liked people, and I think people liked her. I remember one time in the sixties, I was teaching a new teacher, and I was supposed to teach at West Tech. I had a contract, and I was offered a job at Lourdes when I went there to speak about Ursuline. But they let me teach the classes I wanted. West Tech wanted me to teach freshman English. I wanted to direct plays and teach senior English literature and stuff. And so the principal offered me this spectacular curriculum to do, and that’s just what I wanted to do, to use my double major. And so my father, before he passed away, way gave me the advice to teach as a lay teacher at the school I went to, which I loved, was a wonderful Catholic school. They should never have closed it. It was the best school, outgoing and very diverse. But I do think there was a sense of activism in our family. I mean, a lot of the immigrants, whenever they came here, they would come to my father, who could write in Arabic and read in Arabic. And my mother was very good in writing for whatever, if they needed something and they needed somebody in English to do it. My mother knew Arabic fluently. She learned it from her mother. And as a little kid, she knew Arabic. And so they were always people that people came to who were new or had a problem or whatever and needed somebody who could translate or whatever.
Rania Assily [00:26:15] Were there a lot of Syrians in this area that needed help?
Mary Rose Oakar [00:26:19] I think there were a lot of people, period, who needed help, but a lot of them, they come from the old country and, you know, they didn’t have a job. They didn’t know how to apply. They didn’t have a biography, a resume. They didn’t. You know, and my dad would help them, and my mother would, too. And I’m not saying they did that full time because they had their own family to take care of, but I do think that because of their…his ability in reading and writing in Arabic, in hers, in reading and writing, understanding Arabic and reading and writing in English, a lot of people came to them. They were a little more contemporary, in a way, than some of the people just coming over, even though if they were younger. But I do remember that. And then we lived across the street from the Jesuits. They used to come over our house just to get away from each other because they lived in the tower. And, you know, my father would host the priests, and he thought it was really beautiful that they wanted to come. And one of the Jesuits used to, who knew Arabic, got ahold of some of my father’s books, and they were in Arabic. They were Aristotle and Plato translated in Arabic, said, is my dad really reading that? I’m just taking these philosophy courses. You know, I didn’t, you know, we never knew as much. You don’t appreciate, I think, some of the things about your parents until you learn about it later. But, no, they were very good, and they were very active in both St. Patrick, St. Maron’s, a little bit in St. George’s, because my mom knew the former. What was his name that just died, that became the head of the whole church. His first mission was on West 14th street, but they were looked upon as a sense, a little bit leadership. And my father knew the liturgy of the Maronite church because his brother was a priest and he had been an altar boy. So in the old days, there’d be a man there. They didn’t have older boys. They’d have a man there responding to the priest at the Maronite church, St. Mary’s.
Rania Assily [00:28:54] So both your father and your mother, they were active in their churches?
Mary Rose Oakar [00:28:58] Yeah, they were. My mother was active in the. Well, not the orthodox. No, my mother became catholic. She always felt she had been raised catholic. She was more catholic than anything else. But we were very ecumenical when I was growing up. We did not. My father, he used to say that the thing that’s very important about the three great religions, you know, the Muslim religion, the Christian religion, and the Jewish religion, is that they had a belief in one God very fundamental, and that should have made them closer together. And I think that was disappointing that it didn’t always so. But anyway, I went on a little bit too much, but go ahead.
Rania Assily [00:29:51] No, you did just fine, Mary Rose. No, this is. I want to ask you, too. What would you say was the best part of being the product of immigrants, and what would you say was the hardest part about being a product of immigrants?
Mary Rose Oakar [00:30:05] Well, my mother wasn’t an immigrant, first of all. Right. But. But my father. You’re talking about my dad, although she was first generation.
Rania Assily [00:30:16] Did you ever feel kind of like, what was your experience, sort of going to school, sort of everyday life? Did you ever feel different or did you always feel accepted? Was there ever a time…
Mary Rose Oakar [00:30:28] Well, we were very diverse in this neighborhood to begin with, but I do think that when I was growing up, Tony, wouldn’t you say? When we were growing up, it was predominantly Irish, wouldn’t you say? And Hungarian? A lot of Hungarians around here. She grew up around here, too, and went to St. Pat’s and Lourdes. Yeah. I mean, you know, I love St. Patrick’s Day. And my father would say, now, don’t you worry when those Irish kids say, you’re not Irish. Of course, I know all the songs better than they do. He’d say, Patrick means “patriarch”. He was from the old country. That’s what my dad would say. He was from the Middle east. So he said, you tell them he’s not Italian. He’s not this. He’s not that patriarch. That’s what he means, Patrick.
Rania Assily [00:31:25] Wow.
Mary Rose Oakar [00:31:26] Well, he might have been, you know, you never know, because when you look at Gaelic, which is not like English at all, there is some similarity to the Arabic writing. And.So.
Rania Assily [00:31:42] So, you know, even during the time when they were translating, the monks, the Irish monks were translating. Like, some of them had to learn Arabic to do that.
Mary Rose Oakar [00:31:50] That’s right.
Rania Assily [00:31:52] There were some like that.
Mary Rose Oakar [00:31:53] And if you look at, there’s a guy in some town in West Virginia, two of the guys that worked in our office when I was head of ADC (Arab American Anti-Discrimination Committee), Kareem Shora and his brother Nawar, who are Syrian Muslims. Their father’s a doctor, and one of the best schools for training doctors is the University of Damascus. In fact, Cleveland clinic, they wanted to hire me to recruit doctors from Syria and Lebanon and Palestine, et cetera. 56 doctors at Cleveland Clinic are Arabic, and probably most of them immigrants and heads of departments and everything at the clinic. And same is true at University Hospital. Some of their best doctors happen to be from the Middle east. But this guy from Kareem’s father and his partner, his partner had this museum in one of the larger towns in West Virginia where these kids grew up. And he has the original book written in Arabic. He has all these ancient things plus contemporary things about healthcare and what they used. And he had. I have to call you back. Thanks. Yeah, so.
Rania Assily [00:33:25] So he had this book that was.
Mary Rose Oakar [00:33:27] All in Arabic, and it was. What is the. The first doctor was Hippocrates. Yeah, Hippocrates. Yeah, Hippocrates. It was Arabic, and then they translated it to Greek. That’s what he said. So I don’t know. But he had all these ancient Arabic books all about medicine. All about medicine. And I really do think that is, you know, the origin of culture is from that region of the world. You know, the Alphabet and the numbers. I mean, you know, there’s nothing we should be ashamed of in terms of our culture, that’s for sure.
Rania Assily [00:34:07] Mary Rose. So I take it then, you always felt like, because you’re in this area, it was very diverse. Did you ever come across anything different than that, where you felt.
Mary Rose Oakar [00:34:20] No, I really didn’t. No, I didn’t. When I ran for city council, this neighborhood has people very loyal to each other. I don’t know of any other place like it. And when I ran, a lot of the people I grew up with lived in West park and here and there. But they’re very loyal, and they helped me. A lot of my classmates from grade schools, too, my best friends, most of them are Irish kids, and they’re not kids at heart. Yeah. Yeah. Well, that’s how I think of them. But no, I never felt inferior to anybody because that was not instilled in me. On the other hand, I knew that, you know, I was a little unique in my class because. But we did have diversity. We had Hungarian kids. We had. Who came during the Hungarian revolution and went to St. Patrick’s. And we had people who were Italian living in our neighborhood. We had lots of Irish kids living in our neighborhood. Some were poor, some were not so poor. And we had a lot of people from the Middle east who lived in our neighborhood, and other Appalachians and Hispanics later came in, and African Americans. So I felt somewhat unique because of my ethnic background. But I don’t think I felt in any way inferior. In fact, I knew that in many ways, my friends love coming over to my house. I don’t think I should print this. I would want this printed. But when my friends visited me in Washington, when I was in Congress, nine of my girlfriends from grade school and high school came to Washington. We had so much fun they were still my good friends, and we were talking about our backgrounds. Every one of them had alcoholic parents, and I didn’t have that. The only time my father drank was at Christmas, and they would bootleg arak because they didn’t sell it in stores, and they’d have Kibbe nayyeh (raw kibbe) or something. This. And that was the only time. And my mother never drank, so that was the only time my parents drank. Oh, dear. Okay, Tony, keep that email from Mark George.
Rania Assily [00:37:13] Okay, I did.
Mary Rose Oakar [00:37:15] Okay.
Rania Assily [00:37:15] Mary Rose, can I ask you, what kinds of struggles do you believe Arabs and Arab Americans face today from your own experience working with them, working with organizations, organizations that protect their civil rights, have you noticed anything recently, or do.
Mary Rose Oakar [00:37:33] You think things are getting better?
Rania Assily [00:37:34] I mean, I just.
Mary Rose Oakar [00:37:35] No, I don’t think they’re better. I mean, they’re different.
Rania Assily [00:37:38] What sorts of things do they face?
Mary Rose Oakar [00:37:40] Well, I think they face terrible things. And when you hear political candidates talking so outrageously about immigration and about Muslims and about whoever, and a presidential candidate talks that way, police. And it’s not partisan with me. If Hillary Clinton talked that way, I’d feel the same way about her. And in fact, my favorite candidate in some ways was Bernie Sanders because I thought he was the most fair minded about, of the Middle east. But anyway, what would you say are their struggles? Oh, their struggles are. After 911, it was bad enough for some of them because there’s a new wave. You know, there was a wave of immigration around the turn of the century, you know, and it was mostly Christians who were trying to escape the ottoman empire. And even Muslims faced from the Middle east faced the same prejudice in some ways, you know, so we’re not just talking about Christians because they were pretty bad to the, the Palestinians, Syrian, whoever, Iraqi people who lived by the Mesopotamian river. They were pretty prejudiced toward Muslims, too, and made them join the army and all that. Today, after 911, especially at the airports, just about everywhere, they have a double standard in evaluation. Now, it is true that the so called terrorists, although we’ve had terrorists in this country, too, in Montana, floating around against the government and all that, white supremacists and all that, and Ku Klux Klan in the past and the way they treated blacks and so forth in different areas. So we’ve had to deal with all that. But the fact is that to categorize a whole group of people because of a few idiots that are terrorists is disgraceful. You cannot take away a person’s civil rights and due process. And when you take away which is constitutional, it’s against our constitution. And I felt very, very strongly even before 9–11, as I mentioned to you over the phone, when I asked my former head of immigration, who did my casework on that, who was an expert, Trish Cooney. What were the two groups who had the hardest time getting a visa or coming to this country? Middle Eastern people and Irish, because they thought the Irish were terrorists trying to, you know, bring in weapons or something. It was real hard for them to come in. Mostly Christians and Middle Eastern people had a harder time even then to come, even though the laws had changed and it depended on who was head of immigration. We have an immigration office. I swear, I think the guy head of it is somewhat prejudiced. I did not think that Mister Brown, who used to be, was fabulous because he was very balanced and fair minded. Did he want people to come who could be suspicious and all? Of course not. On the other hand, he had a sense of compassion and he was equal about everybody. And we don’t see that all the time. And after 911, it was even worse. You know. You know that the new mosque, somewhat new mosque in Parma, kid was drunk and crashed into it. We had, when I was head of ADC, we helped the Sikhs who wear turbans and they thought they were Arab or something, and they were getting shot up in New York City. And we helped them form their own organization so they could fight for their rights. And we made the Justice Department, when they had meetings with us about civil rights, invite different groups that forced prejudice to the civil rights division of justice. We work very closely with.
Rania Assily [00:42:20] When I was having, too, with the Refugees, the whole ISIS thing happening too nowadays.
Mary Rose Oakar [00:42:23] Well, nowadays, nowadays. I just heard that he’s finally letting 10,000 refugees come in from Syria. The president, and I must say, I’m a Democrat, but I’m very disappointed in some of the foreign policies of President Obama. I can say I like some of the things he did, but I expected more of him because of his own background. It’s a product of an African Muslim. Whether he is or not doesn’t interest me. But to.
Rania Assily [00:43:04] Not to deny people the legal entry into the country.
Mary Rose Oakar [00:43:09] That’s right. And to, you know, you can certainly vet the people. I can understand where they have to be vetted properly, but we do this. But it’s not just these people. I remember going to Puerto Rico with my friend, Congressman, who wanted me to come and see the way they were treating the Haitians. They had them locked up in cages like they were animals. They didn’t want the Haitians to come in, but they let the Cubans come in, you know, who swam across the Gulf or something to get in, you know, or Miami, because the Cubans were, you know, very pro whatever. And, but Haitians, they were black. Nah, they wanted to get away from the same restrictions some of the Cubans had, but they weren’t allowed. So, I mean, I do think that this has happened, and I do think 9–11 at the airports, and I can understand at the airports why there’s more scrutiny. On the other hand, we had countless cases of people being held for hours and so forth and days because they wouldn’t let them in this country. I had experiences. I remember once one of my friends, I won’t mention his name, who was a very popular state rep, had a family reunion. He was Irish, and his cousin was coming in who was a folk singer from Ireland. And he calls me on a Sunday, he said, they’re letting my cousin in. He’s 19 years old. He’s got his guitar or whatever he had. And they’re holding him up in Canada because he was on an Air Canada flight that went to Toronto first or somewhere first and then Cleveland. And he said they’re holding him up because they said he might be related to the Irish, you know, terrorists. And so I had to call, you know, and get that. And we got him in, but he was delayed a day. We had cases in ADC where parents were going to a wedding. They were Egyptian. The mother was an American citizen. The father had just gotten, he was a naturalized citizen. The kid’s name was Mohammed Mohammad. He was five. So they said to the parents, you can go, but he has to stay. You know, we said, what? Well, they were members of ADC, and they called our office, fortunately, and they had to stay overnight. They missed the wedding, but they did get first class seats. They apologized to him for keeping a little kid because his name was Muhammad Muhammad. So we faced that. I had catholic nuns that they kept in prison without due process. So please, who are Lebanese? You know, it’s not just Muslims, but Muslims have a little bit harder. But it was Christian…anybody who was a little darker. I mean, Syrian Jews used to come to our office for help because they were prejudiced against. At the airport, in fact, there was an ambassador who was the ambassador of Bahrain, and she was an Arab Jew. Her family had lived in Bahrain for generations. They were Jewish, she practiced her religion, and they made her an ambassador, and she came to me. Ambassadors, you know, they have immunity from just about everything, and they don’t. You got the ambassador’s passport. They don’t hold you up well, they would hold her up all the time. So she came to ADC. I got to be a friend of hers, and she. One of my guys handled it for her so that that never happened again. But here she was, the ambassador, you know, because she was an Arab Jew, you know, held up. So she. She couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t either. But anyway, that. Yes, I think there’s terrible things, and I think refugees today, what I think should have happened is that there should have been an attempt by our country and others, the Russians, to have reconciliation in Syria, because there’s no question that Christians like Assad because he was fair to Christians, fairer than the other countries. In fact, most of the countries don’t even have a Christian church. On the other hand, some of the bloodiness of both sides and others in our own country, giving weapons to people, you know, what is this? Try to make them sit down and talk to each other. It was an incident that spurred the whole thing with graffiti or something. It’s stupid. I have found both in the Middle east, in Palestine and Israel and so on, I see all these people meeting privately, you know, but the leaders are the ones that fought. And my judgment, I mean, you cannot take that away from some of them.
Rania Assily [00:48:34] Some of the best things happening are things happening behind closed doors.
Mary Rose Oakar [00:48:37] Exactly. Yeah, but our country has a congress that. When I would go on trips to the Middle east as a member of Congress, you know, all my. I’ll tell you a quick, cute story about that. First time I ever went to Jerusalem, which I’m staying at the King David Hotel. We’d just gotten there. We traveled through war-torn Lebanon, through the south of Lebanon, into Israel, and we were exhausted. And they put us up at the King David hotel, and they had these big window shades. And I look out the window and there’s Jerusalem all lit up. It was like all the Bible classes I ever took, you know, pictures of it, and I said, holy Toledo! It really does look like that. So the next day, Teddy Kollek was the mayor of Jerusalem at the time, the first time I was there, and he said, you know, you’re on a busy schedule. I know you don’t have time to do everything we want to show you in Jerusalem, but. So we’re going to go to the Wailing Wall. And I said, okay. And I was the only woman, of course, because there were only 16 or 17 women at the time, and out of 435 house members at the time. So I was very often the only woman in a delegation. And he said, and then we’re going to take you to, you know, some mountain, some, somewhere. I said, well, I have to go. I want to see the mosque and I want to see St. Helens church. And because I can’t not go where Christ is buried, apparently. And Teddy says, I said, I’ll meet you at the Wailing Wall. You know, how long are you going to be there? So I said, I think I know where it is. And so he says, oh, no, no, no, you can’t do that because we don’t have the time. I said, I have to do it. You know, I just can’t not do that. So here, all the other guys, you know, these other cowardly Congress members teasing, said, well, we want to go see where Christ was buried in the mosque, too. And then Teddy Kollek says, of course you do. We’ll go to all three. So, well, they always, never met with the Palestinian people. I’d go off and meet with, like, the academics who are Jewish and Palestinian, talking together about how can we reconcile this and that? Not always perfectly, but they were at least talking to each other. And these guys would go flying in f-16s that we paid for. I mean, it just extraordinary. They’re not as bad as they used to be, but I felt it was extraordinarily prejudiced.
Rania Assily [00:51:39] And so when you went then to see the church and everything, did it move you?
Mary Rose Oakar [00:51:43] Did you feel, oh, my God, it was magnificent. I really.
Rania Assily [00:51:48] I am sure your colleagues thanked you for mentioning it.
Mary Rose Oakar [00:51:50] Oh, they sure did. Well, another time I went to Palestine, you know, they went and met with all these generals and all. I said, I’m going to Ramallah. I would like to meet with the people. So I’ve been invited to meet with the people. So, you know, I’d split with them. I’d say that with those guys, you know, I’d meet with all. Begin, Prime Minister Begin, and all these different people and go to the meetings like everybody else. And it was interesting, and I should do that. But I wanted to meet some of the Palestinian people, too. Besides the Israelis. I don’t call them Jews, they were Israelis. And so I go to, I go to Ramallah, and they make the best arak in Ramallah of any place, they say. So they had these tiny bottles of arak, and they gave me a case of it. And we were on our own plane, one of these big tabalaries, cargo planes, so we could bring extra stuff on the plane. So I met them, you know, and they met me and so on. And I have all this arak, and these guys said, Mary, where did you go? I said, well, I went to Ramallah. You guys went and met with flying your f-16s. You could do that in the United States since we gave it to them. And I said, and, you know, I just felt I had gone to all the meetings, the formal meetings, and I wanted to meet with real people. And they. They said, what’s in that case? I said, little bottles of arak, you know, and they said, can we get some? I said, no, you didn’t want to go. You know, I gave them some, but I said, you didn’t want to go to Ramallah. And they wanted me to have this. And I said, okay, I’ll give you each a little small. It was like a small little cylinder bottle. All these little bottles. And so they all got, you know, because they didn’t know what the hell it was, these guys. Yeah, yeah. Oh, it’s very strong if you’re not eating it with kibbe or something, or grape leaves. But anyway. But I do think that, you know, in Lebanon was occupied. A third of it was occupied for 20 or more years. I mean, who else goes through this stuff, you know? And that doesn’t mean, I think, myself, that if the Palestinian people, they had, what is his name? He used to speak at our convention. Isn’t that terrible? He went to. He was a professor at Columbia University. Palestinian…
Rania Assily [00:54:39] Khalid Rashidi?
Mary Rose Oakar [00:54:41] No, no…
Rania Assily [00:54:42] James Zogby?
Mary Rose Oakar [00:54:43] No…no not James Zogby.
Rania Assily [00:54:45] Oh! Edward Said.
Mary Rose Oakar [00:54:47] Said. Edward went there. They kicked him out. But he preached nonviolence. And I think that retaliation for the way you’re treated is so tempting, particularly with the wall and this and that, you know, taking your homes away and all that stuff. But, you know, Martin Luther King and Gandhi said. And that’s how Edward Said wanted to do it. And he was getting a real following in Palestine for nonviolence, in protesting the way they were treated. And I must say this, that most people don’t know this, but when I was at ADC, I would get reports from the Israeli civil rights organization there is fabulous. And they would be the most critical about what was going on. Fantastic people. And so maybe the professor would know who I’m talking about. And I have some of their reports and all that in some box somewhere. But they were fantastic. I couldn’t believe it. And I wanted to meet with them. And also the Friends, you know, the people who are. What do they call the Friends? Quakers. The Quakers, yeah they would get me into prisons to meet with people I couldn’t get in. I wanted to meet with people who were unlawfully prisoned in Palestine. And the Quakers would get me in. So. But I do think that we’re a failure as a country in our leadership. And there are so many people who are thoughtful Jewish Americans and Arab Americans who want to get together and try to get together about Palestine. But on the question of Syria now, some of my Jewish friends are saying, oh, my God, we’re always against to Syria and all that. And it was the only country that had religious freedom in many ways, and Lebanon had it, too, but they didn’t have any synagogues. When Mike Wallace went to Syria and the Jewish Americans were saying, they’re so prejudiced towards Syrians, Jewish Syrians, he went there and found that was just the opposite, and he reported that way. Mike Wallace spoke at our convention twice, and he was. They were ready to lynch him, and he was Jewish because he came back and said what I was told wasn’t true. They’re treated very well, and they have their synagogues and they have homes and they pray and, you know, like everybody else does there. I don’t say it’s perfect, but I think it was more perfect than most places. And I think our country could have preached reconciliation. And I do think that the leadership of all the groups didn’t try. And then you had the intrusion of the Saudis and so on and so on, so forth. That could have been helpful, but wasn’t.
Rania Assily [00:58:02] Well, I would like to thank you, Mary Rose, for your time, your stories, so interesting, your family life, your growing up here, and all of the wonderful things that you’ve done for this community, for all people in this community. Thank you for your time, and thank you for this interview.
Mary Rose Oakar [00:58:23] Well, I want to say one quick thing about running for Congress, if I can.
Rania Assily [00:58:27] Oh, absolutely, if you could yes.
Mary Rose Oakar [00:58:28] No, because we didn’t cover that. No, you didn’t cover that. I just want to say that when anybody ever wins for an election, you don’t win on your own. And you can win with a lot of money sometimes and lie about people or something. But I won because I had a lot of volunteers, and I had people I grew up with. I had students, former students. I had neighbors, I had friends, I had cousins, and that’s how I won. We didn’t have a lot of money. You know, in this case, I ran against some people with lots of money.
Rania Assily [00:59:08] What brought you into running for Congress? What made you do that? Did you do it on your own, or did you feel people were encouraging you?
Mary Rose Oakar [00:59:15] Well, I was a councilwoman, and 16% of public housing is on 25th street going towards Lakeview. And Riverview going down, and that’s a federal program. And women, there were no locks on the doors. There was drug addiction in some of the family units. And on two tracks of land they put, it’s really against the Fair Housing Act, two tracks of that all sandwiched in all these people. And I wanted to help them, so I’d go to the city. Well, no, that’s a fairy federal program. We cant put locks on the door and I’d say, well, can we get police protection? No, we cant because they have, CMHA has their own police force. And so we had, it was a federal program. So I went to Washington with some of my constituents. I was a councilwoman trying to get some help for these people. And they were seniors, they were families, kids. And I brought a senior, I brought a nurse who had a little health clinic in one of the high rises. And she called me once and said, what are you doing about this? The lady was killed, was hurt, beaten up for seven cents. And she’s in the, she’s a senior and she’s in the hospital with broken ribs and everything. And so I said, well, come with me to Washington. I’m trying to find out what to do. I’m trying to get some federal them to do something about it. So we went to Washington and it was like talking to a telephone pole. And they said, well, you know, and three of the people that ran CMHA in the city went to jail. You know, they opened, I mean, it was unbelievable, the corruption. So I decided that I was just, I was a councilwoman, couldn’t do anything about, I decided I was going to run for Congress. Jim Stanton, who was the congress member, was given up a seat to run against Howard Metzenbaum. And I thought, I’m going to bring this issue up, you know, and I can do it because it’s a federal office. And so I decided to do it with a lot of encouragement. And George Forbes even was the council president, who was very, very helpful to me in his own way. And I’m going to tell that story in my biography, but I don’t want to tell it now anyway. So I, so once I start running, I realized there was Social Security was an issue, peace in the Middle east was an issue. And, you know, I was targeted. I mean, they raised tons of money against me because of my ethnic background and, you know, but I was that.
Rania Assily [01:02:12] Like, the first time you felt like, okay, yeah, this is when I’m being attacked?
Mary Rose Oakar [01:02:16] Like, that was the first, yeah, that was the first time I really experienced prejudice and money, I mean, really a lot of money. And I ran it against people like Tony Celebrezze and people like that, whose father had been a federal judge and he was mayor of Cleveland, and his father, nice guy, by the way, who was HHS secretary under Kennedy. So he had tons of money. All of them did, except me, because I was a teacher, you know, but I had more volunteers than they did. And we had these little rose pins. I don’t know if one’s in here. Here it is. Here’s one of them. They were red. And see, maybe it was for Congress. And I could get in places. My mother named me Mary Rose. I used to go by Mary because people would confuse my name. And we called Mary Mary Rose, Rose, Mary. And it was the best thing I ever did to use Mary Rose because I had. Yeah, well, one of my classmates from Ursuline thought of it, and we handed out these rose pens, and I could get in anywhere with them. And in fact, one of them is in the Smithsonian institution as a gimmick that won. And so that worked. And the guys would come in with their literature, my opponents, and they couldn’t get in different places, but everybody wanted the rose pin, among other things. But I just wanted to say that about Congress, because we’re under the impression that money, money, money, when I ran, it wasn’t money. I don’t think we raised more than $40,000 and others raised millions. But I had the volunteers, and I was a councilwoman who got on television a lot because of what we were doing, you know, and trying to get rid of arson and stuff like that. So I did get some good publicity, television publicity, but that was free. But I, they were on it all the time on television with ads. And I was on, I think, two week, one weekend or something. I had a few dollars. But anyway…
Rania Assily [01:04:39] So the money that’s poured into, into political parties now, it’s not like it was when you were running. Are you saying that it’s changed?
Mary Rose Oakar [01:04:45] No, no, no, it hasn’t changed. I think it’s worse now. But if you have the money, I mean, I can tell you that if you look at my race, Tony Celebrezze must have been on television 24/7. And I’m not criticizing him for that. He had the money. He had money from all over. And there was money targeting me as an Arab American, and what would I do? And my father said, you know what? My father, I remembered something my father said, and he was not living then, but he said, what’s right for the United States, would be right for the Middle east. And we have not followed that. And, you know, of course, he. He had more to say than that. But anyway, the volunteers that we had and the ability to really like campaigning and going out and meeting people and having people that would work for you. And my oldest brother Bernie was my best volunteer. He was the salesman of the year, you know, always. And he would say, you don’t know Garfield Heights, right? And he said, I’m going to go out there next day. You’d say, I got three different places you have to go in Garfield Heights, dying to meet you, you know. And so he was.
Rania Assily [01:06:13] He was like your right hand man.
Mary Rose Oakar [01:06:15] He was one of the right hand men. But he was. He was just fabulous. But he did something.
Rania Assily [01:06:23] So your family was involved in a lot of.
Mary Rose Oakar [01:06:25] Oh, my. Well, well, my. My brother Jimmy, I used his phones. We had people who would make phone calls, and he was a lawyer, and so he had a few lines. They were somewhat involved. My sister, you know, they were encouraging. And my mother, you know, my mother was very sick at the time, and unfortunately, she had been hit by a drunk driver, and it spiraled a little problem. And, you know, when they interviewed my mother after I won, she said, well, everything my kids do, I’m proud of. And I was proud when she was directing plays at Lourdes Academy, you know, and she was proud that I won. But unfortunately, she died about a month and a half after I took office, so she never got to see. See me there. But she did go to Washington with my dad and me to visit my brother when he was at Georgetown. So they had gone to Washington at least once. But no, I think the thing about our people. I just want to say this last thing. Our people always said this. My dad was born on the 4 July, literally, not a bunch of baloney. And he would, you know, so when I came to this country, I thought everybody was celebrating my birthday, you know? But I do think. I do think that our people believe. They believe in God, in their church or their mosque. They believe in their families. They want the best for their families. And I believe very strongly that our people have a love for this country and their roots. And you can’t. You can’t. You can’t explain to others how important those values are. And to make our people look like we’re devils or terrorists or something is obnoxious. Do we have a few people who prostitute the integrity of their religion or whatever? Yeah, I think those people are creeps. On the other hand, they’re taking advantage of some of the injustice and hyperbolizing it in their way. And it’s really a shame that they have done that and have followers, because peace is the only, you know, if you, if you ask women all over the world, what are the three most important issues a woman will say in polls taken? Civil rights. Yeah. Economic security. You want to be paid fairly. You want to have clean water if you’re African or whatever. And number one issue is peace. We have peace. We have enough money for all this other stuff anyway. That’s what happens when you have, and you need more women in public life who are thoughtful. So.
Rania Assily [01:09:38] And you were one of the first, right? You were one of the first.
Mary Rose Oakar [01:09:41] I was the first democratic woman in Ohio. And Francis Payne Bolton, her husband died, and then she ran. She was a great gal. You know, she did a lot for nurses in the military. Military. But she was way ahead of me. I mean, she was like in the forties and then all the way to the sixties. And I called her and, you know, she wanted to meet with me because I was only the second woman to win and the first Democratic woman, she was a Republican. And I didn’t sort of inherit it. I mean, I didn’t, it’s not a political name or anybody else’s name. And so I was supposed to meet with her, and then she died, and I went to her funeral at Old Stone Church.
Rania Assily [01:10:30] Wow.
Mary Rose Oakar [01:10:31] Didn’t get to meet her.
Rania Assily [01:10:32] But she handed the baton to you, though, indirectly.
Mary Rose Oakar [01:10:35] Well, she was very happy to hear from me. I wanted to meet her because she was the only other woman who had ever served and Margaret Chase Smith. If you read the way those women were treated in Congress, it’s unbelievable. It was bad enough when I was there. It’s like a plantation in the beginning, but I’m just telling you that, you know, they would, they were, you have to read that. If you ever do a real paper, do it on congresswomen from the beginning, and you’ll see in the record, because Congress takes all the words down. And the way they were treated was, and we were treated great in the beginning. That’s why I love Tip O’Neill, who, by the way, his favorite daughter in law is Lebanese. And so he knew a little bit about our culture, but he was very fair to women and more than fair. And he’d say, okay, all you guys. And some of the women say, why does he call us guys? I said, I don’t care, as long as he puts me on the committee that I want. There you go. So that’s enough of me.
Rania Assily [01:11:43] Thank you, Mary Rose. Thank you so much for your time. And thank you.
Mary Rose Oakar [01:11:49] Well, good luck. This is a great thing.
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