IDEASTREAM’S RICK JACKSON, PROMINENT VOICE IN CLEVELAND MEDIA FOR 20 YEARS, WILL RETIRE IN JUNE

IN RICK JACKSON’S 45 odd years in TV and broadcast journalism, his voice — buttery lilt reminiscent of Brokaw-era broadcasters — has brought news both local and national to listeners.

Jackson has helped contextualize gubernatorial debates and led City Club talks. He’s provided updates on murder trials in Mississippi and interviewed a half dozen Presidents. He’s covered three national political conventions and taped explainers for Cleveland middle schoolers.

But come June 2, after some 20,000 interviews and 20 years as an Ideastream journalist, Jackson plans to retire, at 67, from the industry.

“It’s just time,” Jackson said sitting in a green room at Ideastream. “There’s no real magic to that number. But a lot of people seem to have left Ideastream at 67 over the past few years.” (David C. Barnett, a senior reporter, left last year at Jackson’s age.)

Defined by many of his colleagues as a generalist, Jackson seemed to thrive off his adaptability, especially when he returned to Cleveland in 1999. Although Jackson had cut his teeth in his twenties and thirties working at TV stations in six different states, it was the second half of his career, at WOIO or Ideastream, where he seemed to settle smoothly into his jack-of-alltrades work.

And it’s served Jackson well. Along with his six Emmy wins, Jackson’s work has garnered him Best Anchor honors from the Associated Press, two wins from the Ohio Society of Professional Journalists and an induction into the Ohio Broadcasting Hall of Fame in 2001.

Late last year, after a “bloodrelated” health scare that put Jackson out of commission for five months, he was inducted into the Press Club of Cleveland’s Journalism

Hall of Fame.

A voracious reader in Mr. Rogers-era Pittsburgh, Jackson grew up influenced by his teacher mother’s knack for language and his construction worker father’s love of work. (He went to middle with Fred Roger’s son, James.) He took his interest in storytelling to Bethany College around 1975, where he became the school station’s first news director, working alongside future luminaries like NBC Today’s Faith Daniels, CNN’s Toria Tolley and Dave Sims, the future play-byplay commentator for the Seattle Mariners.

After graduating in 1978, Jackson entered what would be 20 years of station-hopping. He worked radio at WKEE in Huntington, WV, then Wheeling, where he met his now wife of 41 years, Brenda Cain. (Cain is a reporter for the Plain Dealer.) After two and a half years in West Virginian television, he and Cain

After stints at a startup NBC affiliate in Charlotte, NC, and working briefly at ABC, Jackson got a call from WOIO in Cleveland. He had alway respected the city’s love of news, and its culture of light worship of the newsman. He turned down jobs in Atlanta and elsewhere. “WOIO called,” he said, “and I said, ‘Let’s go home to Cleveland.’”

In 2003, Jackson joined Ideastream, a byproduct of the merger between WVIZ and WCPN. His voice soon became a mainstay on a TV show called Village America, a nationally syndicated public affairs series, then at Morning Edition, then Sound of Ideas. In 2005, he began lending a hand at News Depth, the daily digest for middle schoolers, a program running today that still seems inseparable from Jackson’s egoless journalism.

Mark Rosenberger, chief content officer at Ideastream who’s worked with Jackson his entire tenure in the Idea Center in Playhouse Square, said his colleague’s humility and innate talent were what gave Jackson his Swiss Army-knife reputation.

“It’s not only his skill level, but just it’s kind of both his aptitude and his attitude,” Rosenberger told Scene. “I mean, the guy is just unflappable and always kind and generous. I’ve never honestly seen him ever lose his cool. I never have. I’ve asked him, and he says, ‘It’s how I’m stitched together, man. This is who I am.’”

On a quiet Thursday morning, Jackson walks around Ideastream’s second story office space in a canary yellow shirt and a black facemask. (Doctors told him his immune system is still recovering.) Seeing Jackson stride and talk shop with fellow producers and reporters, those he’ll say goodbye to soon, is when one sees how blurred the line between the on-air performer and the reliable colleague is.

“Rick is just great,” Rachel Rood, a supervising producer, said. “He’s not a diva. He’s a total team player. When you work for other stations, you run into egos. But with Rick? It’s different.”

But will Jackson ever return to storytelling? Will his travels lead to—as colleagues predicted—a podcast series? Will he write a book, or even a documentary, about his career in TV or radio?

“There’s a pleasure in being a general assignment reporter because I could dip my fingers into anything. I mean, I’m just as comfortable reporting at NASA as I am reporting in Glenville or Twinsburg,” Jackson said. “I pride myself on being able to fit in, understand and comprehend everything about this region.”

Jackson rested his hands on his lap in the green room. He smiled as a wave of nostalgia came over him.

“Man,” he said. “You’re making me think I’m going to miss this.”

– Mark Oprea

An arbitrator has awarded a former Avon Menards employee more than $342,000 for lost pay, emotional distress and punitive damages in her lawsuit alleging the home improvement store ignored escalating sexual harassment from a customer that forced her to leave her job.

The employee, who started as a part-time cashier at a Menards in Avon in 2019 when she was 18, was harassed and threatened by a customer in April and May of 2020.

Although she reported incidents to higher-ups, the employee said the company failed to take action.

Throughout the ordeal, the customer reportedly told her, “I’m going to come back to see you at the same time every day,” and, “If not for the six-foot rule, I’d be all over that,” referencing Covid-19 social distancing protocols. But despite these protocols, he did get within six feet of the employee, touching her arm.

The customer also told her he would “lay his hammer” on her, that “he’d love to stalk her,” and that he was “going to take her out and do whatever he wanted to her, whether she liked it or not,” and threatened to use a gun in incidents speaking with other employees, according to the arbitration verdict. He also appeared to have known and memorized the employee’s schedule.

“It is my determination that [the employee] has met her burden and established that the harassment was sufficiently severe and pervasive to alter the conditions of her employment and created an abusive working environment,” wrote arbitrator Peggy Foley Jones.

Despite the customer’s escalating and distressing pattern of behavior, the employee says Menard, Inc. failed to take adequate steps to protect her.

After one encounter with him, the employee asked a coworker to call the police. But when she went to write a statement for the police, she says the store’s general manager sent her to the Garden Center, an area she’d never worked before. Because of this, the employee felt her manager was trying to interfere with her talking to the police.

In a different incident, another employee asked management to pursue a trespassing charge against the customer, but the general manager “would not because [he] was a good customer and spent a lot of money in the store,” according to the arbitration ruling.

The same employee asked management to call the police but was told they couldn’t, leading him to call the police and make a report himself. After multiple incidents with the store, police recommended Menards make a trespassing complaint against the customer if he persisted.

Unsurprisingly, the employee targeted by him, “felt that Menards would rather lose an employee than lose a customer who spends a lot of money in the store.”

Although the company claimed it wasn’t aware of the allegations for weeks and that the targeted employee failed to personally make management aware of her complaints, the arbitrator sided with the employee, writing that Menards, Inc. knew or should have known about the harassment earlier and launched an investigation sooner.

According to Foley Jones, it “does not seem credible or reasonable that…the top managers at the store, were not aware of the police coming to their store or what information was disclosed in those police reports.”

After leaving her job in the middle of the Covid-19 pandemic for fear of her safety, the employee struggled to find work and left another job nearby out of concern that the customer would find her there. Based on salary projections, the arbitrator determined that, in addition to backpay losses, the employee would be making more money had she been able to stay at Menards than she does at her current job, making her eligible for front-pay as well.

‘Menards violated its own policy by not documenting interviews with witnesses, failing to timely follow up with [the employee] after she was asked to provide a written statement, failing to inform HR about the investigation, and failing to file a final report of the investigation…[the employee] was upset and isolated, but Menards never assured her of her safety or protection,” Foley Jones wrote.

“Additionally, they did not trespass [the customer], which was appropriate based on past experience, their own policy and based on the recommendation of the Avon Police Department. Beyond factors such as reckless indifference and malice, punitive damages may be predicated upon showing that the employer lied and covered up the discrimination.” –

Maria Elena Scott

Brian Gerhard officially took over as the police chief of the embattled and beleaguered East Cleveland force in October.

He’s now in charge of a department where nearly one-third of his officers have been indicted in Cuyahoga County for a range of offenses including bribery, civil rights violations, and assault.

While change is slow to come to Cleveland’s east side neighbor, beset by financial and political troubles for years, Gerhard has promised to usher it in, and, to be more transparent.

“I’m very blunt about stuff,” Gerhard told Scene early April, sitting back in his office chair. “I don’t have nothing to hide. You’re not going to read about me in the newspaper that I have seven women that I got kids with, and I’m not paying child support. You’re not going to read about that about me because, well, I’m very boring away from here.”

Gerhard believes that he can improve the department’s image, and make it more boring, by tightening hiring protocols and severely adjusting its chase policy—two of the central reasons, he said, for the current officer indictments.

A 2021 Cleveland.com investigation found East Cleveland had been engaging in almost neardaily police chases that often led to damage or injury, that often far escaped the boundaries of the tiny suburb, and that disproportionately involved minorities being chased on minor charges.

Following a promise made in an August press conference last year, Gerhard amended several internal policies on chases, including the usage of pit maneuvers—turning a car to spin it out—and curtailing the reasons for which an officer can begin a chase. Petty reasons, he said. (The department follows chase recommendations by the International Association of Chiefs of Police, a common practice.)

“The second thing I put in there is that [officers] are not to go after anybody for stupid shit,” Gerhard said. “The stupid shit is tinted