Event Recap - Discussion with Ambassador Gina Abercrombie-Winstanley, October 25, 2022

The Club met (virtually) with Ambassador Gina Abercrombie-Winstanley on October 25. The Ambassador spoke from her office on the 7th floor of the State Department.

Ambassador Abercrombie-Winstanley grew up in Cleveland Heights and graduated from Cleveland Heights High School. She became interested in the Foreign Service after taking a Hebrew language class at Heights High. That led to an interest in foreign cultures, eventual study abroad in Israel, the Peace Corps where she was impressed by U.S. diplomats, and in due course the Foreign Service Exam. “When I grew up Cleveland Heights was a very diverse community,” she said, “and for me that led directly into Foreign Service.”

She said that her current position – Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officer at the State Department – was a creation of Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who established the office because he felt so deeply about diversity and wanted it as part of his legacy. “Making the State Department reflect America has many advantages,” she said. “For one, it will help women and minorities advance in good and highly useful careers. It will also help our foreign policy because persons in other countries will understand that in the United States we have persons of their cultures also, persons in positions to affect American decisions. That will strengthen our foreign policy and our effect abroad.”

“In addition, the world is changing,” she said. “The United States does not have the clout it did in the period up to the 1960s, so the art of diplomacy is more important than ever in bringing others to our point of view, of being able to meet foreign leaders at their levels of cultural and historical perceptions and thereby hold a better chance of having them understand our viewpoint and why it should benefit them.

“And in yet another way, American women and minorities have a special role to play,” she said. “They have a history in this country of not coming to issues from positions of strength, that is, of being able to impose their perspectives on others – instead, American women and minorities have a history of working at persuading others of the rightness of their positions not because they can impose it but because they have made the case.”

Abercrombie-Winstanley stated the senior level at the State Department is 84% European and more than 60% male. At lower ranks, the Department is more representative of American diversity, “so we have a retention problem,” she said. “We have to demonstrate that anyone here can rise with talent and effort rather than by whom a person knows. For example, we recently changed how a senior level position was filled, not by appointment, but by advertisement – now everyone knows when that position is open and can make the decision to apply. We are moving to a more diverse, inclusive and representative Foreign Service.”

She added, “The Department is working harder to promote talent and capability wherever we find it. For example, there is no requirement for a college degree; you can have a high school education and do well here – persons who work here have. Many people know facts, and our excellent Foreign Service Institute can teach facts. We look beyond that. We look for cultural competency, discernment, thoughtfulness, flexibility in approaching issues and emotional intelligence. There are different ways of acquiring these, not necessarily in college or elite schools.”

Abercrombie-Winstanley was in Cleveland recently working with its Sister Cities program. Several years previous she also served as diplomat-in-residence at Oberlin College, teaching students and helping raise awareness in the Midwest of Foreign Service careers. She noted that Ohio has the highest number of foreign students after New York and California, a statistic she welcomed because part of American international relations is having foreign students study here and taking their impressions back home. She also discussed the advantage of lay persons performing acts of diplomacy by joining trade delegations, science panels, international health organizations and the like. “This type of sub-national foreign policy is very important,” she said. “Ohio and Cleveland have a great base for offering many of these things.”

The Ambassador told Club members that she expects many of the reforms in the State Department during her tenure will endure no matter the presidential administration or the Secretary of State. She concluded by saying she hoped to see Club members in the future at face-to-face events.

Event Recap - Meeting with Jules and Fran Belkin, March 15, 2022

The Cleveland Club visited with Jules and Fran Belkin on March 15. Jules and his late brother Mike were the greatest Rock & Roll producers in Cleveland from the 1960s to the year 2000.

Jules related how he and Mike got into the business rather back-handedly. They worked in clothing store in Ashtabula. The owner liked to bring in bands as store promotions. When the owner tired of it, he handed the work over to Mike, who was told no one was seriously promoting rock & roll music in Cleveland. So he tried it, and the first show featured the New Christy Minstrels. It wasn’t a runaway success, but it was a start, and after thoughts of giving it up for concentration on the retail clothing business Mike and Jules kept at concert-making. Soon the two were renting the likes of Public Auditorium and selling tickets by the tens of thousands.

For example, they sold 84,000 tickets for the Rolling Stones concert in Municipal Stadium in June 1975. Janis Joplin and her audience shook the floor so badly in 1968 at Public Hall that Katherine Hepburn performing a play adjacent in the Music Hall sent a message to tone it down.

Jules and Mike organized concerts at the Front Row Theater and the Allen Theater. This is when, paraphrasing Jules, the Allen was a wreck, but the ticket sales were so good that the concerts’ successes paved the way for saving the Allen from demolition and Playhouse Square for its dramatic revival.

The impresario business, of course, was fraught with peril. Some rock & roll bands cancelled at the last minute; others behaved badly. Some British acts wrote into their contracts they would accept no American-made beer. Kiss once demanded a certain wine, for which concert aides scoured Cleveland wine shops in vain. The type did not exist; it was a Kiss prank.

Jules and Mike liked to make tee-shirts for performing groups and ordered embroidered ones for Bruce Springsteen only to be told later that he really did not like to be called “The Boss.”

Although Mike died in 2019, Jules keeps ties to the music business alive by remaining on the Board of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. He explained to the Club how voting for Inductees works: Most weight for votes coming from a list of 600 industry leaders; lesser weight from the members of the Hall of Fame Board; and only a slight weight from fans. Induction ceremonies now divide between Cleveland and New York, with an occasional nod to Los Angeles. Cleveland offers a far larger hall – Rocket Mortgage Fieldhouse -- than New York can and last year’s celebration in Cleveland with an astonishing array of rock & roll celebrities was particularly notable.

Jules and Mike sold the impresario business 20 years ago, but Fran recently ran across boxes of memorabilia from the Belkin rock & roll era. She assembled them and stories for a book she published in 2018 called Rock This Town.

Event Recap - Meeting with John Grabowski, February 9, 2022

On February 9, Professor John Grabowski of CWRU and a nationally recognized expert on the history of Northeast Ohio, gave a lively talk to and entertained a spirited discussion with Club members on the history of Cleveland.

Professor Grabowski came reinforced with several dozen illustrations, the first of which showed Cleveland shortly after founding by Connecticut pioneers settling on land set aside for their state’s excess population. “They were looking for good farmland,” Grabowski said, “and meant the settlement to be a market center for farmers. In true New England fashion, the first thing they did was lay out a public square for the town,” the square taking a prominent place in the 19th-century sketch and still at the heart of Cleveland.

Two important developments changed Cleveland from the envisioned market town to an industrialized city, Grabowski said: the canal system linking Lake Erie to the Ohio River, and the discovery of minerals in Michigan and Minnesota, namely copper and iron ore. Somewhat later, the discovery of petroleum 130 miles east along Oil Creek in Pennsylvania opened the opportunity for Cleveland to become a refining and shipping hub, an opportunity extraordinarily exploited by the young accountant and commodities trader John D. Rockefeller.

Other interesting facts about Cleveland noted by Professor Grabowski:

• Rockefeller established the Standard Oil Company along the Cuyahoga River about where Kingsbury Run enters the river today.

• Location made Cleveland a good center for iron and steelmaking: iron ore came down the lakes; coal for blast furnaces was abundant from Pennsylvania; and there was plenty of water.

• Extraordinary fortunes were made. Mansions were so grand on Euclid Avenue that England’s Baedeker guide to America suggested people see it. The fortunes made during the Gilded Age in Cleveland laid the foundations of the Cleveland Clinic, the Art Museum and more.

• Ohio City on the west bank of the Cuyahoga River was not originally part of Cleveland. It developed independently and was a separate city until the 1850s.

• Ohio City and the Tremont area to its south are now popular neighborhoods for young people desiring the benefits of downtown. Tremont, named for the Boston street and normally pronounced TREE-mont, is now sometimes humorously pronounced as it might be in French – TRAY-mon – for its rising status.

• Irishtown Bend on the Cuyahoga was so named on account of Irish there loading and unloading lake boats. It is now being developed as a park, and the Cuyahoga itself has become the center of recreation in the city.

• Immigrants developed their own communities, the original names of some still in use: Poles named their neighborhood Warszawa after Poland’s capital; and Czechs named theirs Praha (Prague) and Karlin.. Little Italy on the East Side was the most concentrated of ethnic neighborhoods; it got its start with Italian stone carvers working on monuments for Lake View Cemetery.

• Downtown has been attracting significant numbers of young people. Nine stories of the Terminal Tower are being converted to apartments, and condominium projects are popular. The near West Side is rapidly changing, as is University Circle on the East Side.

Professor Grabowski, who has authored and co-authored books about Cleveland has supplied a bibliography of Cleveland history, which is available on our website here.

Event Recap - Meeting with Luke Epplin, November 30, 2021

Luke Epplin on November 30 reported to the Club on four exceptional persons of the 1948 World Series Champion Cleveland Indians.

These four compose the essence of Epplin’s recent book Our Team: The Epic Story of Four Men and the World Series That Changed Baseball. The four are: pitcher Bob Feller, center fielder Larry Doby, pitcher Satchel Paige, and owner Bill Veeck.

Epplin told the Club he grew up a St. Louis Cardinals fan and was researching the old St. Louis Browns team along with its owner Bill Veeck when he became intrigued with Veeck’s previous tenure as owner of the Indians. “Veeck was years and years ahead of his time,” Epplin said, “not only as an owner who could generate excitement about a baseball team but also as a man devoted to bringing talented Black athletes into the all-white (save for Jackie Robinson) Major League teams.”

Epplin spent months in a rental apartment in Cleveland in order to research the book, mainly working in the Cleveland Public Library with copies of four Cleveland newspapers and several sports magazines. Epplin also traveled the nation tracking down descendants of the four protagonists as well as persons who knew them. The depth of research and the accomplished style of the story-telling have been noted in many reviews of the book. Epplin told the Club that the film rights have already been sold and a screenwriter hired to work on a script.

Epplin said each of the four men was intriguing in his own way and each brought a different story to the 1948 Indians. Feller was a Depression-era prodigy, a Navy veteran and one of the most famous persons in America. Paige was a rare combination of exuberant personality and astonishing athlete, already a legend from the Negro leagues and the oldest “rookie” – aged 42 – ever signed by a Major League club. Doby was almost the opposite of Paige – a generation younger and restrained to the point of being shy – but a spectacular athlete and, more importantly, a patient and stalwart man who could face the difficult trials of being the first Black player in the American League. Veeck was a kind of hell-on-wheels owner who with bottomless energy, outrageous imagination, and fierce determination within two years turned a middling team into a World Series Champion – as well as flinging wide the Major League doors to African-American baseball players.

Epplin said that Cleveland sportswriters were generally kind to Veeck’s efforts at integrating baseball and to Doby in particular. He said the Cleveland fans were of like mind – the more Doby proved himself an outstanding baseball player, the more accepted and popular he became.

Persons interested in buying a signed or inscribed copy of Our Team can do so through Astoria Bookshop at Astoriabookshop.com. Alternately, you can email Luke Epplin at lepplin@gmail.com and request a signed bookplate, which he will mail free of charge for you to place in your copy.

Thanks to Club Member Tom Steich for suggesting that Luke Epplin would be an outstanding guest for the Club. Also of note: During the course of the meeting, Chuck Clinton revealed that in 1950 as a boy in Rocky River he discovered that Bob Lemon had moved in across the street; Chuck soon was cutting his lawn. Then Early Wynn and Joe Gordon moved in around the corner, leading to autographs and special visits to the ball field. In addition, Myron Belkind mentioned he was chosen by his elementary school to be among those allowed at the East Cleveland train station for greeting the 1948 players returning from Boston after its victorious World Series final game.

Event Recap - Meeting with Niv Shah, September 28, 2021

Niv Shah, the developer of the popular fantasy baseball site, Ottoneu, discussed both fantasy and real baseball with the Cleveland Club on September 28

Niv Shah, the developer of the popular fantasy baseball site, Ottoneu, discussed both fantasy and real baseball with the Cleveland Club on September 28. Shah developed an attachment to the Cleveland Indians while a high school student. He watched the Indians at Jacobs Field and played crude fantasy baseball with his high school friends. After college and a stint as a software developer in Silicon Valley, he began a fantasy site that more realistically duplicated what Major League Baseball (MLB) general managers do to build a winning team over time. This means studying player statistics and then buying or trading for them – within a salary cap – with other GMs who are working just as hard to develop their own winning teams. Shah’s site – ottoneu.fangraphs.com – creates 12-, 14-, and 16-team leagues composed of real players with their attendant real statistics that update with every real game those players play. Teams have as many as 40 players and each Ottoneu GM creates a lineup for the day, including a pitching rotation and player positions. Teams rise and fall within their leagues based on real-time statistics of the players who compose the separate teams. An inspiration was the Michael Lewis book (and subsequent movie) Moneyball. Unlike some other games that dissolve their teams at a season’s end, Ottoneu teams trade and buy through the winter just as their real counterparts do in hope of emerging with a winning combination as the spring season starts. People who have played Ottoneu have moved on to front office jobs with MLB teams. Ottoneu now has 4,000 GMs playing in 370 leagues.

Shah told participants that a friend put him in touch with Indians’ GM Mike Chernoff, who has admired the site and given advice, as well as watched games with Shah.

Asked which real MLB teams Shah thinks will be strong in the post-season, he named the White Sox and the Astros, and called the Dodgers a great team.

Asked about this summer’s pitching substance abuse issue – MLB cracked down on substances pitchers sometimes worked onto the balls they were pitching in order to increase the ball spin rate -- Shah said it had an effect on real pitchers, whose statistics then sank and thus created consequences on Ottoneu teams as well. He surmised that pitching injuries would be on the rise in the coming year on account of trying to compensate by attempting to throw the balls faster.

Shah said in his opinion the Indians have been quite astute in their trades in recent decades, including moving on from Corey Kluber and Trevor Bauer at the right time. He also pointed out that the Indians use their farm system differently than, say, the Yankees -- the Indians try to develop talent for the long haul whereas the Yankees look to purchase super stars once they have developed.

You can learn more about Ottoneu at ottoneu.fangraphs.com and more about Niv Shah from the April 13, 2021 article in the Washington Post.