Читать книгу Summer of Shadows - Jonathan Knight - Страница 8

The image of Cleveland, Ohio, as a great American city—one once known as “The Best Location in the Nation”—died at four minutes before noon on a cool, overcast Sunday morning in June.

There had been no catastrophic natural disaster, no legal declaration. The city would continue to appear on maps, and its citizens carried on with their lives. But the shining image of Cleveland as a full-color postcard of a grand dominion on the waterfront—which had gradually been curling at the edges and deteriorating for a decade and a half—literally went up in flames on June 22, 1969. In that moment, the Best Location in the Nation was blasted to smithereens and blown away in the winds whipping off Lake Erie. Cleveland became just another American city limping through a tumultuous decade.

It had been a quiet morning, the dew from the crisp summer night not yet fully evaporated by the warmth of the day. The fiery days of the season were still weeks away, and June remained, as it usually did, Cleveland’s finest month of the year.

Outside the city, the day would prove historic for other reasons. Judy Garland would die that Sunday. After sixteen historic years on the bench, Earl Warren would spend his final day as Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court before officially stepping down the following morning. The nation would cautiously maneuver through another day of conflict and turmoil. Having endured the stunning assassinations of three iconic political leaders in the past six years, the United States was being torn apart from the inside out, its ideals clashing in a cultural civil war. Major cities had become battlegrounds for race riots. Dinner tables were divided in the debate over whether or not the United States should remain embroiled in the Vietnam War. In less than two weeks, San Francisco would be introduced to the Zodiac killer, who would terrify northern California for the next decade with random murders and taunting letters to the police. The most infamous episode of the era’s madness would soon hit frighteningly close to Cleveland, at Kent State University, less than forty miles away, where four students would be shot and killed by members of the Ohio National Guard during a weekend of anti-war protests the following spring.

But on this Sunday morning in June, Cleveland was quiet, the wailing of its own racial confrontations now nothing more than chilling echoes. Yet the peaceful mood of the morning vanished when the seemingly impossible occurred. To anyone standing alongside the Cuyahoga River at the foot of Campbell Road Hill just outside of downtown, the vision appeared almost biblical—a snapshot from the Book of Revelations.

The river was on fire.

Technically, what was burning was a large slick of oil waste floating along the Cuyahoga. In the aftermath, no one could determine what caused the fire. Likely there’d been some sort of spark or fallen shrapnel from any of the waterfront industries that had created the slick in the first place by dumping their chemical extract into the river. Perhaps it was nothing more than a smoldering cigarette butt flicked away by someone who had no idea of the magnitude the action would carry.

Reaching as high as five stories, the flames floated along with the sludgy current of the river. As the slick slid beneath a pair of railroad trestles, the flames licked the weathered wood above and ignited it. The intense heat began to cook and warp the rails. Joining the sour smell of burning chemicals, great black plumes of smoke whispered through downtown Cleveland.

The response was fast and efficient. Sirens wailed throughout downtown. In less than twenty-five minutes, the fire was out. A fireboat that performed daily patrols on the river looking for just such types of oil slicks was joined by three fire battalions, and the flames were extinguished. The fire caused roughly $50,000 in damage—nothing really, compared to several of the other times the river had caught on fire in years past. The worst was in 1953, when a similar outbreak caused nearly a million dollars of damage.

But this time the damage wouldn’t be solely monetary.

The fire, at first, drew little attention. The Plain Dealer ran a photograph of the flames on the front page of Monday’s edition, but the corresponding story—just a few paragraphs long—was buried deep within the paper. The Cleveland Press, more attuned to what its subscribers wanted to read than what they should, also ran a front-page photo on Monday afternoon, but no story. An afterthought Press editorial on Tuesday sighed with fatigue and made a case that the city’s industries should be encouraged to stop dumping wastes into the river.

It should have ended there. By the summer of 1969, fifteen years after its apex, Cleveland’s reputation as a noble lakeside metropolis was terminal, and its death was inevitable—not unlike those of a handful of other blue-collar industrial burgs in the Midwest. But that Cleveland’s came in such a publicized fashion was nothing more than a stroke of incredibly bad timing. If only man hadn’t walked on the moon, Cleveland may have been spared decades of agony.

Exactly four weeks after the improbable occurred along the Cuyahoga River, America witnessed the impossible. With the landing of Apollo 11 on the moon and Neil Armstrong’s first steps on that alien surface, one of the most significant moments in the history of the world played out before a live audience watching on television sets glimmering blue in the darkness of a July night. In the days and weeks that followed, news coverage of the moon landing was immeasurable as the American public fed its hunger for more information about this achievement.

Serving as the unofficial national recorder for this event was Time magazine, which sold millions of additional copies of its subsequent issues examining the Apollo 11 mission. And in the middle of one of those issues was an unremarkable environmental article on the Cuyahoga River fire. But because that issue of Time was examined by millions more readers than a typical one, the Cuyahoga River fire became a national story. Or rather, a national punch line.

“Some river!” Time guffawed. “Chocolate-brown, oily, bubbling with sub-surface gases, it oozes rather than flows.” It even cited a joke passed among Clevelanders about the state of the river: “Anyone who falls into the Cuyahoga does not drown. He decays.” It went on to outline the horrifying condition of Lake Erie, clogged with wastes from Detroit’s automobile empire, Toledo’s steel mills, and the paper plants of Erie, Pennsylvania.

The article went on to describe the efforts Cleveland had made in the subsequent weeks to clean the river and ensure that its industries shaped up. In the months to come, Time would describe the conception of the Clean Water Act, set in motion by the Cuyahoga River fire, which eventually led to the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency and a new commitment to purified air and water. “The accomplishment, huge as it is, only fixes the price of optimism,” Time explained. “Unfortunately, water pollution knows no political boundaries. The Cuyahoga can be cleaned up in Cleveland, but as long as other cities keep dumping wastes upriver, it will remain exactly what it is today—an open sewer filling Lake Erie with scummy wavelets, sullen reminders that even a great lake can die.”

From there, the Cuyahoga River fire took on a life of its own. Johnny Carson made it—and Cleveland—a recurring joke in his Tonight Show monologues. Randy Newman would set the fire to music in his 1972 satirical tune “Burn On.” And from coast to coast, Cleveland’s nickname had been changed. Known as the Best Location in the Nation little more than a decade before, it now became the “Mistake by the Lake.”

That afternoon, with the burned railroad trestles still smoldering, the last-place Cleveland Indians committed five errors in a miserable 6–0 loss to the Baltimore Orioles. Like their hometown, the Indians of 1969 were a shadow of what they once had been.

And 120 miles to the south, one of Cleveland’s most infamous former citizens was busy preparing for a defining moment in his life. Once one of the most promising young doctors in Cleveland, handsome and athletic with a beautiful wife and vibrant son, Sam Sheppard had captured headlines throughout the country fifteen years earlier in a murder case that, even now, sparked debate. Now he was just over a month away from making his professional wrestling debut.

His wrestling career would begin on a steamy Saturday night in August in the cracker-box gymnasium at tiny Waverly High School just south of Chillicothe, where Sheppard defeated Wild Bill Scholl, a lolling walrus of a man, before a modest crowd of 1,500. When Sheppard entered the gym wearing a red-hooded sweatshirt and black tights, a cascade of boos flooded from the fans, who had paid two dollars for entry, with the proceeds benefiting cancer research. The loudest came from the women in attendance. They knew exactly who he was and, fifteen years ago, what he had done.

Though utterly inexperienced and outweighed by nearly a hundred pounds, Sam Sheppard won the scheduled twenty-minute match in a mere seven minutes, unveiling a move he’d invented himself. Drawing upon his medical training, when the opportunity arose, he stuck three fingers into Scholl’s mouth and pressed on the mandibular nerve at the base of the tongue. The pain was excruciating. Scholl immediately screamed “Quit!” and would later challenge Sam to a fight in the locker room, calling it a dirty move. Sam claimed not only was it clean, but it was reflective of the intellect he brought to the match. “As a doctor, I had an advantage over Scholl,” he said, “and the hold was not illegal.” Several of the nation’s top wrestling promoters were impressed. They’d come to the backwaters of Ohio to give Sam Sheppard a once-over on this summer night, and Sam had known it. In the early moments of the match, he tangled Scholl in a head-lock and held firm the pose, smiling at flashing cameras ringside.

Afterward, reporters gathered around Sam in the locker room to ask about the match, but even more about how this career shift fit into the bizarre landscape his life had become over the past fifteen years. He was asked about his new medical practice—operated out of a narrow bunker of an office in Gahanna, just outside of Columbus. Most of his patients were Medicare cases or referrals from county welfare programs. “I’m doing a lot and not getting much for it,” Sam said with a chuckle.

Before the serious questioning could begin, a roar echoed from the gym, and Sam rushed back out. His trainer and partner, George Strickland, who was wrestling in the second match of the evening, a tag-team event against a group called the Iron Russians, was in trouble. Ignoring the rules of the match, the Iron Russians were sending both wrestlers into the ring at once to fight Strickland. Sam charged into the ring to aid his friend, pulling one of the opponents out of the ring and throwing him to the floor, then kicking him. The doctor then chased him around the ring as the fans cheered hysterically.

Like the city he’d once lived in and the baseball team he’d once loved, Sam Sheppard was a different entity in 1969 than when his name was in the national spotlight in 1954. And eight months later, his death was as little a surprise as that of Cleveland’s prominence itself. What made it notable was the old debates it stirred back to life—ones involving the murder of his wife and whether or not he’d done it. “He was a very tragic figure,” his second wife said the day he died. “He was a victim of everything that has happened to him for the past sixteen years. He just wasn’t strong enough to face up to what had happened to him.” She sighed and added, “His turmoil and misery had finally ended.”

“The friends of Sam Sheppard’s youth and the members of his family will continue to reflect on what might have been,” the Cleveland Press predicted, “and to wonder why such a promising life turned, instead, into a classic American tragedy.”

This is the story of three American tragedies that intersected over the course of one golden, yet haunted summer. This tale recalls the triumphant hour of an empire just before its fall, the dominance and grace of a star-crossed group of warriors, and the result when the mesmerizing allure of mystery is combined with the terrifying power of fear.

This is Cleveland, 1954.

The Best Location in the Nation.