Five Generations by Bob Gries

FIVE GENERATIONS 175 Years of Love for Cleveland by Bob Gries

FIVE GENERATIONS 175 Years of Love for Cleveland

by Bob Gries

Published by Bob Gries.

For more information please contact info@braungroupllc.com.

Book design by Ben Small of Live Publishing Co., Cleveland, Ohio. ©2014 by Bob Gries First printing, November 2014 Printed in the United States of America All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—including electronic, mechanical, photocopy, and recording—without the prior written permission of the publisher.

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Contents Introduction

v

THE PIONEER

The First Generation

Simson Thorman

Sock Weaver

Cleveland

Regina Klein

Hides & Furs

Social Fabric

Endings

5

6

13 15 18 21

25

THE ENTREPRENEUR

The Second Generation

Kaufman Hays

30

Opportunist

Lizzie Thorman

Banks & Clothes

Haysmar

32 39 43

49

THE RABBI & THE MERCHANT

The Rabbi

56

Moses Gries

Frances Hays

Change Agent

Haysmar Again

Departure

72

The Merchant

82

56 58 64 70

Bessie May Braham

May & Merchandising

Home Life

96

Beautiful Mountain

Letters

111

Philanthropist

85

114

103

88

The Third Generation

iv

LIVING LARGE

The Fourth Generation

Robert Hays Gries

Lucile Dauby

May Company

Cleveland Rams

Origin of Cleveland Browns

Discrimination

Musical Departure

SALLY AND I

126

128 134 138 150 153

The Fifth Generation

Robert Dauby Gries

May Company

Philanthropy

Cleveland Browns

Civil Rights

Social Change

Lawsuits and the Move

Love

161

161 164 174

177 181

197

Sally Proudfoot Gries

Childhood

Career

Philanthropy

Conclusion

Acknowledgments Index

215

Endnotes

183

218

199

202 206 213 214

199

143

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Introduction hy have I spent the time and effort to write this book, and for whom? Basically so that my children and grandchildren will know their family’s history in Cleveland

and its love for and contributions to their city. Sally and I are the fifth generation of the family, starting in the 1830s, to live here. There are eight members of the sixth generation living here and nine members of the seventh generation (most in their teens) growing up here. The sixth generation all have involvements with various organizations in the city, but their stories have not been included in this book because they are only halfway through their adult lives. When they reach their twilight years, or the fourth quarter as I call it, they can add their chapter to this book, which with digital technology should not be difficult. I fervently hope that at least one of my grandchildren will be inspired to settle in Cleveland and carry on the family traditions.

Does this history offer anything unique? Certainly there are a number of families who can celebrate five generations or even more in our city. But I think it is a rarity when each of the generations has made a significant impact on a city. This book is not a chronological family history, and not included are those who moved away or did not impact Cleveland in some important way.

Who is included?

1. Simson Thorman—a poor 18 year old from Unsleben, Bavaria, who set out for the New World, became the first Jewish settler in Cleveland in 1837, founded a thriving business as well as the first Jewish temple and cemetery, became the first Jewish councilman and was a guard of honor for President Lincoln’s funeral procession, and Regina, a true frontier woman who arrived in 1839 and bore Simson 11 children. Not too shabby for two poor immigrants.

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2. Their son-in-law Kaufman Hays, who came to the US in 1852 from another Bavarian town, Storndorf, with less than fifty cents in his pocket. Kaufman was a quintessential entrepreneur who founded businesses and banks. In the late 19th century when the treasurer of Cleveland absconded with the city’s funds, he was asked by the mayor to save the city from bankruptcy, and he did.

3. Kaufman and Lizzy’s daughter, the beautiful Frances (a student at Oberlin College in the 19th century) who married Rabbi Moses Jacob Gries from Rahway, New Jersey. Rabbi Gries was a genius who at age 13 entered college, was the immensely popular rabbi of Temple Tifereth Israel for a quarter century, and founded numerous organizations in Cleveland in the early 1900s. He also built the largest Sunday school in the world.

4. Nathan L. Dauby, whose mother died while giving birth to him and who quit school at age 14 to go to work. He later built the May Company in Cleveland into the largest downtown department store in Ohio and was one of the city’s leading philanthropists and businessmen.

5. Robert Hays Gries, who married Lucile Dauby and was a significant philanthropist, a renowned collector (my parents’ 1,500 pieces of Oriental Export porcelain was the second largest in the US), and was one of the founding partners of the Cleveland Rams in 1936 (now the St. Louis Rams), as well as of the Cleveland Browns in 1946.

6. And we don’t want to exclude Commodore Beaumont, an uncle of my grandmother’s who lived in Cleveland from 1899 into the early part of the next century, and at his death in 1943 left Cleveland a foundation with $16 million, the largest local general-purpose foundation of its time. When Uncle Lou was 69 years old,

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he married his 32 year-old-lover. They lived on the French Riviera and entertained royalty, movie stars and their neighbors, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway.

7. Lastly Sally and I are the fifth generation of this family. I can’t begin to claim equality with these ancestors, who were mostly born in poverty and became giants in their fields. I was born in the lap of luxury. But I have had some impact in a number of philanthropic and civic endeavors, and Sally started the first female-owned investment management company in Ohio, which just celebrated its 35th anniversary. She also has significantly impacted several non-profit boards.

So on with the story! —Bob Gries Shaker Heights, Ohio 2014

THE PIONEER The First Generation

Cleveland in 1834, around the time Simson arrived. (“From the Court House Looking West,” a hand-colored etching by Thomas Whelpley. Photo courtesy Cleveland Public Library Digital Gallery.)

After establishing himself in America, Simson encouraged 19 others from Unsleben to follow him to Cleveland. As a parting gift, Rabbi Lazarus Kohn gave the travelers a letter addressed to Moses and Yetta Alsbacher. Now known as the “Alsbacher Document,” Rabbi Kohn implored the immigrants not to neglect their traditions, religion or culture as they assimilated to life in America.

(Photo courtesy Western Reserve Historical Society (WRHS))

Simson and Regina Thorman, c. 1855. (Photo courtesy WRHS)

Simson, c. 1860s.

(Photo courtesy WRHS)

Regina Thorman, mother of 11, c. 1880s. (Photo courtesy WRHS)

As a city councilman Simson was a guard of honor at the Cleveland stop of President Lincoln’s funeral procession in 1865. (Photo courtesy Cleveland Public Library)

In 1937 the Cleveland Railway Company issued tickets with Simson’s picture on it, celebrating him as the first Jewish Settler in Cleveland. (Courtesy WRHS)

The Pioneer | 5

I

Simson Thorman

n 1832 my ancestor and hero, Simson Thorman, 21 years old, stepped off a steamer docked in Cleveland, Ohio, at the confluence of the Cuyahoga River and Lake Erie. The river’s source was

east from which it wound 85 miles into Lake Erie, the shallowest and southernmost of the Great Lakes. With his two friends, Moses Fraley and Al Levey, Simson walked along a dirt road away from the busy port toward the town center. They passed wooden warehouses that stored goods ready to be loaded onto ships, a maritime infrastructure that they noted quickly gave way to a more rural setting of small family farms.

Soon they reached Superior Street. Cleveland, in the Western Reserve of Connecticut, was no metropolis, counting a population of 1,075, but it was growing and was the central point in a county comprised of ten or more towns that also were growing (i.e., Cuyahoga County’s population was much larger). As the three men walked down the dirt road flanked by wooden, two-story storefronts and houses, horsedrawn wooden buggies passed by, kicking up swirls of dust in their wake. Closer to the town’s center, women and children tending vegetable gardens glanced at the newcomers and then returned their eyes to the soil and vegetation that needed their attention.

The trio reached Cleveland’s center, which consisted of a couple dozen stores that sold food and beverage staples such as flour and beer as well as dry goods like paper and books. These welcome signs of civilization made clear the town was shedding its mantle as frontier outpost and becoming a city (which it would officially become in 1836). The Ohio and Erie Canal had recently been completed, a commerce route that was bringing visible growth and signs of modern industry: a new steam flourmill, an air furnace, steam engine factory, dry dock, paper mill, printing offices and brewery.

6 | Five Generations

The sun began to set, and I imagine the men looked for room and board. Simson had little money, and what he had was probably brought over from his hometown of Unsleben, a Bavarian village a little smaller than Cleveland proper (Unsleben’s population was about 900). Or perhaps he earned the money in the time between his immigration to America and his arrival in Cleveland. In any case they probably weren’t able to use their money for lodging that night because Cleveland’s rapidly growing population meant a shortage of rooms for rent. Simson and his traveling companions may have been required to do what others coming to Cleveland did—shelter in a barn or other makeshift lodging on their first nights. Because the canal and lake were impassible in winter, the men must have arrived in spring or autumn, times of temperate weather.

Simson apparently liked what he saw and quickly became convinced that this growing town on the lake was the best place for him to settle.

He purchased land at Erie Street (now called E. 9th Street) and Kinsman Road (now called Woodland Avenue), and he made his transaction official at the newly built Cuyahoga County courthouse, a formal, twostory, federal-style building whose architecture announced its importance with large windows, six columns, a cupola and dome.

P

Sock Weaver

urchasing land must have been deeply satisfying to Simson.

Only three years earlier he had been trapped in a life in which being Jewish meant he would never have the freedom or eco-

nomic means to own land. He was predestined to spend his life as a sock weaver, making footwear for residents of the town of Unsleben.

The work paid serf’s wages, but there were not many jobs for Jewish people and he was lucky to work at all. From sunrise until sunset

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he wove “weft” sheep’s wool threads through “warp” (stretched) threads. When he finished weaving the sock, he sewed it together by hand. And then he went to the loom and wove another and sewed it together. And then again and then again still, whether or not he desired to do this work.

Simson lived with his parents, Samuel and Bunla Thorman, in a tiny abode attached to a barn and located inside the village’s medieval walls. His older siblings, Meyer and Simila, and his younger ones, Abraham and Ramle, also lived at home. With seven people in the structure and numerous animals in the attached barn, it was crowded and odiferous. As he trudged down the lane to his loom each day (except for the Sabbath), Simson must have been frustrated about living in the crowded house and working day and night for serf’s wages, which were the entirety of his world. In winter the oppression must have seemed particularly brutal, with February bringing snow and winds that whipped down from the Rhön Mountains and into Unsleben. (The Bavarian spring was fine and summers were temperate, but to add insult to the injury of winter, farm animals were brought inside homes to keep the beasts alive for the killing, and their smell was unbearable.)

As small and crowded as it was, this life was not as bad as it could be. Unsleben was a community of 140 families, and about 40 of them were Jewish. Some of Simson’s Jewish friends lived with five families in one home outside the town’s walls—a miserable existence. Inside or outside the walls, they all shared the reality that because they were Jewish, none would ever be allowed to own land, and most of them would not be permitted to marry. The Christians of Bavaria did not want an increase in the population of Jews, and the Bavarian government heeded its majority constituents by limiting the number of Jewish marriages—only the “eldest son in a family was allowed to

8 | Five Generations

marry.” This would limit the number of Jewish children, and over time, the Jewish population.

Unsleben had a village castle with towers and doors at its entrance, built so the town’s noble family could protect its people from invaders, a concept that was a relic of the past. A new notion of the freedom of all human beings (i.e., freedom, not protection) was irreversibly present throughout French and Bavarian lands. In France, which bordered Bavaria, the Jacobins—academics, painters, farmers and others—had forged a revolution before Simson was born. The French Revolution had freed France and Bavaria from the arthritic grip of the Holy Roman emperor and the Catholic bishop, replacing hierarchy with the sinewy notions of civic government and “liberty, equality and fraternity.”

Increased freedom and egalitarianism made Simson’s generation relatively dismissive of the concept of being protected by walls and a nobleman. Yet at the same time, no one knew precisely what freedom was, how to implement it (from the government’s side), and how to take advantage of it (from the people’s side). First of all barons, bishops and kings stuck around, even in places like Unsleben, force of habit keeping them hanging on for power. Secondly “liberty, equality and fraternity” did not apply to Jewish people in the same way as it did to Gentiles. Some of Simson’s Jewish friends had moved to Paris, Stuttgart and other cities in hopes of the better life the Revolution promised, but statistics show they had little luck making money and often returned home. If they stayed they mostly took jobs prescribed to them—merchants, peddlers—different jobs but not much better than those they had performed in their villages. They reportedly existed alone amongst a sea of Catholics and Protestants who merely tolerated them.

“Tolerated” is the key word—in general they were not respected

The Pioneer | 9

or liked by the state, or fully free in the sense that they could do anything they wanted. Simson could follow in their footsteps, but he decided that this was not the best path. He knew he would always be a lower-class Jewish “intruder” (this word was used) in a European city that “tolerated” (ditto) him. His life would continue to be narrow and restricted.

And then there was the New World. Everyone was talking about it. Many books were published about it, and thousands of letters from American immigrants were pouring into Europe, all carrying the message that America was a place of unfettered economic opportunity, lacked the restrictions of class structure, and offered equality under law and religious freedom. Like Bavaria and France, America was formed by revolution. Educated citizens led a rebellion against a distant English king and established a new and brilliantly conceived government. Only the citizens in its post-revolutionary period seemed much freer, and the society seemed much more open than post-revolutionary Bavaria. In America letters showed that people could marry whomever they wanted, practice whatever religion they wanted, work in any trade they chose and travel freely. It was a frontier land, though it should be noted that there were few reports about how America’s rapidly growing population treated its Jewish immigrants.

At some point Simson decided he would leave his family and embrace the unknown: he decided to go to America. He needed to make his way to a ship and pay for passage. The Transatlantic journey would take about two months (or more if they encountered stormy weather) and would carry a risk of death from disaster or disease. It was unlikely he would ever return to his homeland. He would say good-bye to everything and everyone he knew.

Around 1829 when Simson was eighteen years old, he and two

10 | Five Generations

friends, Moses Fraley and Al Levey, began their trip. My research shows that the Unsleben community probably gathered to send the boys off, a ritual undertaken in many communities prior to emigration. On the eve of their departure, they probably enjoyed a meal such as broth with noodles, meat pie, kugel (a sweet noodle pudding) and a stein of beer. The next morning as was the ritual in those emigrating days, friends from the village hugged each adventurer and offered parting words.

With that Simson, Moses and Al were off, moving away from the Rhön Mountains, a low range thick with fir, pine and beech trees, leaving for good the forests that stretched hundreds of miles over undulating hills and became anemic as they ebbed into higher peaks. At 5'6" tall and with a low forehead, long nose and blue eyes, Simson had a compact stature and a seriousness of purpose that would serve him well for the journey ahead. He didn’t have much money and would need to find work quickly in America to survive.

The men travelled northward up the Elbe River to Hamburg and boarded a ship bound for the port of New York. Their Transatlantic passage was spent aboard a schooner, which was a multi-masted, highly maneuverable wooden boat. None of them had been on a boat before, and they were almost certainly stricken with seasickness.

Eventually the three young men felt healthy enough to socialize with other passengers and pass the days playing games. After about two months at sea the ship sighted land, and Simson, Moses and Al arrived in New York, a city of 250,000 that was increasingly important in the US. The Statue of Liberty had not yet been donated to the US by the people of France—what they spied were low, flat islands and a mainland plus small, wooden buildings and bustling streets that were barely visible until quite close to shore.

The activities of these young men in their early days (up to about

The Pioneer | 11

two years) in America are unknown, but it is clear that around 1832, they decided to go west. They made their way along the Hudson River to Albany by steamboat and arrived in New York’s capital city located where the Adirondack and Appalachian mountains meet.

Once there the men traveled 300 miles along the Erie Canal by line boat, a special boat built for the canal. A team of horses pulled the vessel by rope and walked along a dirt trail next to the canal. The cost of passage was 1 or 2 cents per mile (totaling about $1.50), and included food and a bunk bed in a small, communal passenger cabin.

These line boats were uncomfortably cramped (about 15 feet wide), noisy, and crowded. They occasionally hit rocks in the 4-foot-deep canal, lurching to a stop and springing a leak, which forced the passengers to disembark. There were 36 locks from Albany to Buffalo, each one slowly filling with water and emptying again, and passage was an act of slow, careful going. Still this river passage was superior to traveling by stagecoach because outfitters packed people in the coaches even more tightly, and muddy roads often became impassable by horses, causing frequent delays. The Erie Canal’s crowning achievement was to decrease travel costs by 95 percent, and the line boat versus stagecoach was a prime example of how such great efficiencies were gained.

At 363 miles long the canal was constructed by (mostly) Irish immigrant workers, and its completion in 1825 ushered in an era of trade and prosperity along western Massachusetts, upstate New York, northern Pennsylvania and Ohio. A new travel guide, Pocket Guide for the Tourist and Traveler, Along the Line of the Canals, and the Interior Commerce of the State of New York, was so popular that it’s reasonable to assume the men had a copy as they made their way to Buffalo at the Eastern edge of Lake Erie and the mouth of the Niagara River. From there it was three days by steamer to the mouth of the Cuyahoga River.

12 | Five Generations

This is where the story returns to the three men walking into Cleveland and bedding down somewhere on their first night. Simson purchased land, and with this down payment on his life in Cleveland, he, Moses and Al headed southwest toward Missouri. The men journeyed hundreds of miles to Doniphan, Missouri, the southernmost portion of that state in the heart of the Ozark foothills.

The foothills were famous for their trade in primarily beaver pelts plus the occasional otter, deer and buffalo hides. The fur trade in these days was fueled by an American and European desire for top hats made from felted beaver fur. These hats kept the head warm, were attractive, and were worn by the upper, middle and working class (e.g., policemen) alike. To supply the masses trappers and traders had established numerous encampments to use as their home bases. Simson was presumably not familiar with trapping, but he picked up the knowledge required to treat beaver furs and pelts. Plus his traveling companions had been peddlers and wholesalers in Unsleben and knew the business of trading. The three men probably spent their days setting steel traps (the Western way), or when these were in short supply (which was common), using the Native American method of snares and deadfalls. They treated the beaver skins by stretching them and allowing them to dry, then compressing the pelts in a fur press. They wrapped up the pelts, received payment for them, and left it to others to transport them east.

It was a boom and bust business though. On the demand side the fur-lined top hat began to decline nationally—top hats were still popular, but the lining of choice soon became silk instead of fur. On the supply side relations with Native American tribes in the area began to break down in those days, and the Osages and others began to refuse to trap for and trade with white men. This sharp decline in the profitability of trapping and fur trading began in the 1830s and

The Pioneer | 13

continued for over a decade. After spending five years away from Cleveland and although he had bought land in Doniphan, Simson bid adieu to the Ozarks and his longtime traveling companions. He returned to Cleveland where he settled on the banks of the Cuyahoga River. Moses Fraley went to St. Louis, and Al Levey went to Indiana.

I

Cleveland

n returning to Cleveland Simson was an urban pioneer. He was not the first Jewish person to live in Cleveland. That distinction belongs to Dr. Daniel Peixotto, a physician from New York who

taught at the medical school of Willoughby University (which later became Case Western Reserve University Medical School) from 18351841. In 1841 Peixotto returned to New York, which makes him a one-time resident rather than a permanent settler. His son Benjamin Peixotto chose to return to Cleveland as a grown-up, where he studied law and wrote for the Plain Dealer. In the 1860s Benjamin became president of a Cleveland chapter of B’nai B’rith and was instrumental in the founding of the Jewish Orphan Asylum. His family remained involved in Cleveland and Jewish life for generations to come.

The Cleveland to which Simson returned was a small town that was becoming a city. Its 1830 population was 1,075, but a better number was the population of Cuyahoga County, which totaled 10,373 because it included the townships of Bedford, Brecksville, Brooklyn, Chagrin Falls, Cleveland, Dover, East Cleveland, Euclid, Independence, Mayfield, Middleburg, Newburg, Olmsted, Orange, Parma, Rockport, Solon, Strongsville and Warrensville. This “greater Cleveland” population was growing because it was at the center of geographic connections. The completion of the Erie Canal between Cleveland and Portsmouth (on the Ohio River) connected the Atlantic Ocean to Lake

14 | Five Generations

Erie and then additional canals were built southward, linking Cleveland to Columbus, Kentucky and Tennessee. Simson was in the middle of a global, water-based trade route that began in Europe and extended to the Gulf of Mexico. Cleveland was flourishing. Steamships and schooners traversed the Great Lakes, and the city itself now had a courthouse and a town newspaper. For Simson these transportation advances and democratic institutions were worlds apart from living within Unsleben’s castle, walls and restrictions.

Simson’s new home had a climate that was strikingly similar to that of Bavaria. Its snowfall and winter temperatures, as well as its summer heat and humidity, were akin to those in Unsleben. The primary difference was that Unsleben was in the foothills of the Rhön Mountains so its weather was heavily influenced by mountain ranges, whereas Cleveland was at the edge of Lake Erie and its local weather patterns (for example, lake-effect snowstorms) were heavily affected by the massive fresh-water lake.

During this wave of central European immigration to America, immigrants commonly wrote letters home about the magnificence of America. Once settled Simson likely wrote a letter to family and friends in Unsleben noting how good his life in Cleveland was. He was in his mid-twenties and there were no marriageable prospects for him in Cleveland, as no single Jewish woman lived in the area as far as he knew—he may well have exaggerated the town’s virtues to encourage immigration, especially of the fairer sex.

His letter did the trick. Nineteen members of the Unsleben community were inspired to come to America. They took a three-day trip by stagecoach to Meiningen, a gathering point for many emigrants from Bavaria and Saxony. From there they travelled up the Elbe River to Hamburg where they boarded the Howard, a ship sailing to New York. When they arrived on July 12, 1839, they were greeted by Sim-

The Pioneer | 15

son, who had voyaged back to New York in order to help the group make its way inland. As they traveled they saw the stunning feat of American industry, the Erie Canal, and it must have given them great optimism (Europe had canals, but much smaller). When they finally reached Cleveland after several months of travel during the dog days of summer, they immediately began organizing themselves into a structured community.

According to the Talmud ten people comprise a minyan, which is the minimum number required for most religious obligations and ceremonies, including public prayer. Cleveland had its minyan. For commerce and making a living, it included a farmer (brother, Simon Thormann, which was the Bavarian spelling; it was shortened when they arrived in America), shoemaker, cloth dyer, weaver, trader, saddler (brother, Meyer Thormann) and butcher. For religion and building a community, it included a mohel to perform circumcisions, cantor to lead the Jewish prayer services and shochet, who was responsible for the ritual slaughter of animals for food.

I

Regina Klein

n this group there also was a wife for Simson—Raichl had been sent over to be his bride. She had a round face, brown eyes and long black hair. She wore brightly colored woolen frocks with

puffed sleeves and thick stockings with clogs, the traditional sartorial choice for Bavarian women. She wore her hair up, and as was custom in the mid-19th century, she did not smile for pictures because that would have revealed missing teeth.

She was a hearty woman, strong and healthy, and Simson clearly found this very appealing. A frontier man in these parts needed a woman who could withstand the physical demands of being a pio-

16 | Five Generations

neer and could bear many children for the new community. Immigrant women in general, and in particular, those who traveled further inland toward America’s rugged western frontier, were a rare breed. Although Cleveland was more a growing small town than a western outpost, its inhabitants (especially its women) needed to possess strength, adventurousness, toughness and commitment. On the Western Reserve of Connecticut women had little help and were accustomed to doing most things by hand, such as spinning thread and making clothes.

They performed hard labor as well. They faced insects and cholera epidemics and lived with men who were often gone for weeks or months trying to eke out an existence. They left everything behind, first shedding most of their worldly possessions as they left Bavaria and then shedding even more as they found that the horse-drawn wagon or line boat taking them inland from the East Coast had room for almost none of their belongings. They arrived in towns where there was little or no medical care available, gave birth without the aid of medical advances emerging on the East Coast and in Europe, and frequently died in childbirth. The average life expectancy for a woman outside city centers was 40 years.

Raichl changed her name to “Regina,” which means “queen.” Simson asked her to marry him soon after her arrival, and she agreed. She was 23 and he was 28, and they immediately began building a family.

She gave birth to Samuel in 1840, the first Jewish child born in Cleveland. Then came ten more children: Esther, Elizabeth, Laura, Rebecca, Fanny, Abraham, an unnamed child, Judah, Frank and Simon. Esther and Elizabeth were twins, as were Abraham and his unnamed twin, but the latter set of twins died in infancy. Having this number of children was an expression of freedom in itself because for Jewish people in Unsleben, it never would have been allowed.

Simson and Regina initially lived on Merwin Street in the Flats on

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the banks of the Cuyahoga River, and Simson ran a store on Ontario Street. The famous second cholera pandemic spread from Europe to the American East Coast in the late 1830s. Cholera’s primary symptoms were diarrhea and vomiting that caused dehydration and resulted in a 50 percent mortality rate. Entire wards were set up where individuals and families went to die on floors covered with sheets, and this pandemic claimed the lives of 150,000 Americans over the course of eight years.

The cholera did not stop at the East Coast. With so much trade and immigration, the disease continued inland to Ohio and Cleveland, probably traveling with immigrants who came through the Erie Canal and across Lake Erie. In addition to the threat of cholera, the Flats had become a noisy, dirty place inhabited by roustabouts. By the early 1840s Simson was doing well enough to move his store and home to an area where the air and water were considered cleaner than in the lower-lying Flats. He bought a large brick house at Cross and Orange Streets (now East 9th Street and Woodland Avenue). His home in this tree-lined neighborhood southeast of the city center was spacious and was a marked difference from his crowded Unsleben life from a decade earlier. Simson was confidently staking his claim to the American way: he had exercised the freedom to marry whom he wanted, and now he was making a living how he wanted and residing where he wanted. The official address of the Thorman residence became 227 Woodland Avenue, and the intersection came to be known about town as Thorman’s Crossing.

18 | Five Generations

I

Hides & Furs

n my own lifetime since the age of 51, I have completed 102 adventures in 42 countries on every continent from mountain climbing to ultra-marathon running to endurance cycling, but

none of those compares to the lifelong adventure of my great, great grandfather and grandmother, Simson and Regina. Simson left home not for a three-week adventure but for a new world and for good when no one knew what the New World really was, and Regina also left for good, albeit with some information provided in advance by Simson. I consider myself only a modest adventurer, partially because I know that Simson was a true explorer and pioneer and Regina was a frontierswoman. He went where he didn’t know what to expect and she had no one to do her work for her. (I have sherpas and others to help me during my adventures.) I have often thought about them as I crossed desserts in Mongolia and climbed mountains in the Arctic and Antarctic regions . . . about how different these adventures would be if I were never returning home, if I were going to a new world about which I knew nearly nothing, in short: if I were an explorer like them.

In the first years of his marriage, Simson regularly traveled southwest, usually to St. Louis to trade hides and furs with the Indians.

Within a decade he ended these business trips and began building a career in a combination of “dry goods,” wool and hides. The hides and fur industry was in decline and may have no longer profited him, or maybe he felt a need to be home for his growing family or the physical demands of working as a traveling trader for years may have taken their toll. I don’t know, but in one picture, he looks tired and serious—a deep frown on his face, bags under his eyes, gray hair, and sideburns. He was intense in his manner and dressed in both the draped coats worn by European businessmen and the suits that were

The Pioneer | 19

worn by Americans. By his appearance and what I imagine to be a thick accent, one could easily discern he was a foreigner.

In 1846 when Simson and Regina had numerous children (but not yet ten), he became the proprietor of a dry goods and grocery store.

He was successful enough that he started a second store, and then when he was 47 years old, he and another Jewish immigrant, Simon Newmark, formed Thorman & Newmark, dealers in hides, wool, pelts, calfskins and furs. Although fur and hide trading and sales were declining nationally and gold rushes were reaching a crescendo in the West, Simson established this shop at 25 Ontario Street. He knew textiles and believed that despite changing supply and demand dynamics, he could make a living in the industry. He was mostly right. As a senior member of the firm, he grew his asset base so that by 1860 he was worth $20,000 (approximately $560,000 in 2014 dollars). This made him, in addition to being the first Jewish person to settle in Cleveland, among the wealthiest Jewish people here.

Simson and Newmark had a parting of ways that led Simson to open a new wool and hide store at 121 Water Street called S. Thorman & Company, and he brought in new business partners: his son (Samuel) and two sons-in-law (Kaufman Hays and Edward Budwig).

The men acted as commission merchants, holding sheep skins, calf hides, tallow and other items in their store without taking on the liability of owning these items (i.e., the items were on consignment).

Once the items sold S. Thorman & Company paid to the supplier the amount received minus a small commission. Sometimes S. Thorman & Company advanced cash to the supplier before selling the item, subtracting that from the amount returned to the supplier. In every case it was primarily high-end items that required extensive customization before they were ready to wear. This product focus contrasted with the less expensive, cotton “ready-to-wear� clothing

20 | Five Generations

business that was experiencing a steady increase in demand. Simson’s strategy was an interesting, contrarian (or stubborn) choice considering that the signs pointed to a growing US middle class eager for cotton ready-to-wear clothing. Simson seemed comfortable being a different and independent thinker, and his business focus was well aligned with his background, skills and personality.

On the eve of the Civil War, Simson simultaneously started a cattle yard and slaughterhouse on the outskirts of Cleveland. He again chose co-founders, this time his brothers Meyer and Simon, as well as Bavarian Jewish immigrants Isaac Hoffman, Abram Klein and Frederic Goldsmith. The operation spanned three acres at Croton Street and Case Avenue (now E. 40th Street) and served to supply Simson’s clothing store and others with cattle by-products. It also provided kosher meat with Isaac Hoffman serving as butcher, and Isaac’s father, Simson, serving as Cleveland’s first shochet (in charge of the ritual slaughter of meat).

This was a good venture for the men. Cattle dealing was one of the most common Jewish occupations in Bavaria, and consolidated cattle yards—rather than each family owning its own cattle—were beginning to form in the American Midwest. For example the Union Stockyards in Chicago, which would soon become the largest meat processing plant in the US, was founded in 1865. With his cattle yard partnership, Simson was more aligned with trends in US business, especially retail, and the country’s growing middle-class demographics than he was with his clothing outfit.

The Pioneer | 21

F

Social Fabric

or centuries, first under the Persian and then the Holy Roman Empire, European Jews were required to form their own corporately organized, legally autonomous communities. This

organizational structure enabled them to govern and police themselves, fulfilling as a group their responsibilities toward the empire.

Leaders of these formally organized groups also ensured that individual members lived up to their Jewish obligations, requiring them to pay into communal coffers, appropriately recognize Jewish authorities, and abide by the legal system of the rabbinate.

When Jewish people first came to America in the 1600s, their organizational structures were very handy. America’s settlers required Jewish immigrants to commit that none of their people would become public charges, and the Jewish people fulfilled this requirement by forming the tight-knit communities they had formed in Europe.

Their longstanding tradition of operating as an independent, capable and cohesive group abiding by its own rules and religion while also living under the rules of a national or federal government, served them well in America. Shortly after they arrived the small group of immigrants gathered in the modest home of Simson Hoffman. Their purpose was to recreate the Jewish way of life they had known for years, replicating the corporate and religious structures that Jewish communities had formed for centuries throughout central and northern Europe. They called their religious group and social construct the Israelitische Society, and they stated its purpose in an elegantly simple way: “To worship God, to unite the living, to care for the sick and poor, and to bury the dead.� Hoffman was the spiritual leader and Simson was chairman.

The Israelitische Society was motivated in spirituality by Lazarus Kohn, their rabbi in Unsleben. Rabbi Kohn had provided a farewell

22 | Five Generations

gift in the form of a letter he had addressed to Moses and Yetta Alsbacher. Moses was a dyer who had organized the emigration of the families, and Rabbi Kohn implored Yetta and him and the rest of the “Alsbacher party” not to neglect their traditions, religion or culture as they assimilated life in America. The rabbi’s letter served as a steady guide for Cleveland’s fledgling Jewish community.

As chairman of the Israelitische Society, Simson led the creation of a cemetery. He put in a bid on land, was turned down, put in a second bid (in the summer of 1840) and was successful. For $100, the Israelitische Society became the owner of the Willett Street Cemetery located on the West Side of the Cuyahoga River in Ohio City. (Today it is just north of I-90, where Fulton Road and Monroe Avenue intersect.) He then donated the land to the city, a gift that ensured that Jewish people in Cleveland had an official, government-approved location where they could be buried.

The Israelitische Society quickly began to experience division within itself, in all likelihood, relating to the degree of assimilation versus traditionalism (e.g., keeping kosher, Anglicizing names). Simson remained leader of Israelitische Society when an offshoot group, Anshe Chesed (“Men of Kindness”) formed and worshipped independently for a few years. Then on a cold night in the middle of February, disaster struck. Electric lights had not yet been invented to replace oil lamps and candles, and the fire sprinkler had not yet been invented to put out fires, so fires were common. The Israelitische Society’s synagogue caught fire and burned down with only the Sepharim (manuscript copies of law) saved.

A newly “merged” synagogue was formed—the Israelitische Anshe Chesed Society of Cleveland. Simson led this group and also connected nationally with other Jews by founding a B’nai B’rith chapter, an organization founded in New York City and dedicated to helping

The Pioneer | 23

bring Jewish people up from the “deplorable condition” in which they lived as new immigrants in the United States. The organization created an insurance policy that awarded $30 to the widows of its deceased members so that grieving families could pay for funeral expenses and issued a stipend of $1 per week for the rest of the widows’ lives. Each child of a deceased male also received a stipend and assurance that he would be taught a trade.

With actions like this Simson was shepherding the local Jewish community toward a social safety net, weaving a social fabric and doing so with speed and conviction. It’s worth reflecting on his extraordinary founding and building influence. He arrived in America as a teenage sock weaver seeking freedom and hoping to make a living. He traveled with his two friends to lands fraught with danger.

(Native American territory was dangerous in itself, not to mention the risk posed by animals, bugs and illness.) His gritty, independent, pioneering nature then became religious and civic as he became the leader and adapted to the weight of responsibility. His actions demonstrate that despite having ten children for which to care and incredible obstacles to overcome, he bore his responsibilities well in establishing a new community. He remained the leader of the congregation for years.

That he managed his responsibilities with something approaching grace or calm can be inferred from the fact that he then ran for city council. Though he was a minority Jew in a boomtown of Christians, on April 3, 1865, he won the election by a landslide: 492 to 166.

He would be city councilman representing Ward 4. Within two weeks of Simson’s election, a stage actor, John Wilkes Booth, shot President Abraham Lincoln, and on April 19, President Lincoln’s body was brought in a funeral train procession 1,700 miles from Washington, D.C., to Springfield, Illinois. Along the way, the train stopped in cities

24 | Five Generations

where Lincoln’s body could be viewed, including Cleveland. Simson in his elected position was selected by the Lincoln Funeral Committee as one of the first guards of honor. He stood in a place of honor as the late US president was brought by: At 7:00 A.M. the train arrived at Euclid Street Station in Cleveland.

The coffin was transported by hearse to Cleveland’s Public Park and placed in a pagoda in Monument Square; only in Cleveland was the public viewing done outdoors. Thus the other cities’ problems of cramped quarters and thousands left in line were avoided in Cleveland. In 15 hours, 150,000 were able to pass by the coffin. At midnight the Lincoln Special departed Euclid Street Station in Cleveland destined for Columbus via the Cleveland, Columbus, and Cincinnati Railway (a 135-mile trip). (Norton)

This honorary role indicates how much freedom and respect Jews were able to find in the United States within one generation versus in Europe, where for hundreds of years they had been considered intruders and were taxed and treated differently. In Unsleben Simson was unable to marry and destined to remain a sock weaver. But in Cleveland within a generation, Jewish people were part of the governance structure and held enough status as long as they worked hard and contributed to society—the implicit, American social contract— that they could be part of the official funeral procession for the revered head of state, the democratically elected president.

By no means was life perfect. Making a living was (very) hard.

Many Jewish and non-Jewish people in Cleveland may have enjoyed less economic and social protection than in Europe—there were no walled towns or minor monarchs supposedly shielding people—but the flip side of this was astonishing, unprecedented freedom and opportunity (although this freedom and opportunity did not extend to Negro people, including free Negroes). Simson was one among many

The Pioneer | 25

who flourished in this new world. He was similar in many ways to thousands of Jewish immigrants but exceptional in the fact that he was first to settle in Cleveland, and this aloneness led him to bring others to him and to lead them socially, religiously, economically and politically.

Issues Simson cared about during his two years of service on city council were mostly pragmatic elements of building a safe city— crosswalks, the laying of gas and water mains, and street lighting, a technology that later was improved by a fellow Clevelander Charles Brush. Simson also advocated larger issues, such as the adoption of a new metropolitan police system, which ended up becoming law. It’s not that police officers wouldn’t have existed without his advocacy, but the early actions of people like him ensured that Cleveland was on the front lines of committing to safety and rule of law.

N

Endings

ine of Simson and Regina’s children lived past childhood

and chose to make their homes in the region, some in Cleveland and others throughout Ohio, Pennsylvania and Indi-

ana. Simson and Regina enjoyed spending time with them when they were adults. At age 69 Simson died suddenly and left behind his wife and grown children as well as many grandchildren. As he breathed his last breath, one wonders if he knew how many firsts were linked to it.

He was Cleveland’s first Jewish settler; his son, Samuel, was the first Jewish child born in Cleveland; Simson himself was the first Jewish councilman; and he founded several of Cleveland’s first institutions. In 1881 immediately after his death, the Cleveland City Council adopted a resolution, showing “their appreciation of [Simson’s] services and character,” calling him a “prominent citizen and business man. . . .”

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Decades later in 1937, the Cleveland Railway Company issued tickets with Simson’s picture on it, celebrating him as the first Jewish settler in Cleveland. Collectively his adaptation to an extraordinarily diverse set of circumstances throughout his life, his apparent energy level, his gravitas and his vision for a new community of American Jewish people were remarkable achievements.

The thoughts and actions of women in these days are lesser known.

Their place was in the home and their activities were rarely a matter of public record. But I estimate that Simson’s marriage to Regina was stable and firm, and her ability to raise their many children and serve as a matriarch in their busy home was a boon to him. While I don’t know the degree of sentimentality or love in the marriage, there was clearly strength and endurance. She was the right woman for his immigrant life. She died four years later in 1885 in Cleveland, Ohio. She too was 69 years old when she died.

THE ENTREPRENEUR The Second Generation

Kaufman Hays, c. 1890s.

(Gries Private Papers).

Lizzie Thorman Hays, c. 1860. (Photo courtesy WRHS)

A $5 bill from Euclid Avenue National Bank, signed by Kaufman Hays, vice president. A National City Bank representative found this bill in the bank archives and gave it to the Gries family in the 1980s. Euclid Avenue National Bank was acquired and changed names several times, and it was likely absorbed into National City Bank (now PNC Bank). (Gries Private Papers)

The Jewish Orphan Asylum, c. 1888. Lizzie and Kaufman Hays were both founders of the asylum and cared deeply about its cause.

(Photo courtesy WRHS)

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I

Kaufman Hays imagine Kaufman Hays didn’t have to think long before accept-

ing the clerk position that opened up at Simson Thorman’s hides and furs business in 1860: it was a coveted job. First cotton from

the South might not serve the northern population well in winter, so animal furs and hides could still be good business. Second Simson was the established leader of the Jewish community in Cleveland, a community of about 1,200 people of mostly Hessian and German origin. The elder statesman could be a mentor for Kaufman. Third Kaufman was a natural salesman who worked hard—he could help Thorman grow his business. And fourth Kaufman had his eye on the second oldest of Simson’s five daughters, Lizzie.

Kaufman had traveled far to reach the point where he would be offered a plum job like this. He had been born in Storndorf, part of the Hesse-Darmstadt region which later became Germany. When he was nine years old his mother passed away leaving behind six children—Kaufman, a brother, Joe and four sisters. Rosa, the oldest among them, was 18 when their mother died, and she had taken it upon herself to keep house for the family.

From his first days Kaufman prized work over academia. He left school at a young age and went to work for his cousin in the cattle business. His sister, Rosa, headed to America, her extended family providing her with money for passage and expecting her to send for more family members as soon as she could. She did this well and sent home enough earnings that Kaufman could join her. At age 17 he journeyed westward to Hainz (probably Heinsburg today) where he boarded a boat that made its way to the Rhine River, then he went to Rotterdam and finally traveled the Thames River to London. There he boarded a ship headed to New York.

As the ship ploughed through the cold waters of the North Atlantic

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off the English coastline, Kaufman noticed the cook had slaughtered a sheep for dinner but was inexpert at butchering and dressing it.

“Here, let me do it,” Kaufman said. He had worked in the cattle industry, and he took over the process.

The ship’s captain was astonished at Kaufman’s expertise and willingness to lend a hand and praised the Bavarian’s work. He rewarded Kaufman with a bottle of wine and fresh milk from the cows on board the ship.

“Take any provisions you desire,” he said, gesturing broadly to make his point (they did not speak the same language).

Kaufman subsequently dressed a sheep every day for their 45-day transatlantic voyage—food and provisions and the currency of shipboard life were tremendous motivators to him. Once in New York Kaufman wasted little time. He headed straight to a train station and boarded a train that steamed north along the Hudson River to Albany and then turned west to Buffalo. In taking this route Kaufman benefited from the many advances the dawn of the Industrial Age had brought to the United States versus the agrarian era of Simson’s arrival over twenty years earlier. The locomotive steam engine had been developed, and by the early 1850s, entrepreneurs were buying rail lines and connecting them. Railroads were rapidly displacing horse-drawn carriages and canal boats, and train was a common way to travel.

In the booming steel town of Buffalo, Kaufman boarded a steamboat, probably either the Hercules or the Walk-in-the-Water, two early passenger steamships on Lake Erie. This also was a difference from twenty years prior when sailboat was the only way to get across the lake. Hercules steamed west across the lake to Cleveland and delivered Kaufman to his destination in late September 1852.

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A

Opportunist

s he disembarked with a pack on his back and half a dollar (a 20 franc piece) in his pocket, he walked into the center of a city marked by solid infrastructure. Cleveland had its

own courthouses, newspapers, mayors, street lighting, nascent police system and other foundations of civic safety, stability and strength. In particular Cleveland offered opportunity, which was precisely what Kaufman needed. He was impatient, driven and goal-oriented and was very quickly hired by Sam Loeb, a clothier. He boarded with the Loeb family and practiced his English with them but soon came to have a business disagreement with his host. He left Loeb’s and spent six weeks peddling goods in the country. This was brutal and unrewarding work that required him to walk miles on dusty roads under the scorching sun from farmhouse to farmhouse, occasionally taking a train to travel from one village to the next. For days at a time Kaufman was away, selling his wares and inquiring for a place to stay overnight or a bite to eat, sometimes in exchange for his goods.

He did not like the work but was reportedly an honest traveling salesman and popular among his customers. He made enough to live on but decided to switch to new, less physically demanding jobs working at clothing and grocery businesses. He finally landed a decent job in the silk and millinery departments of the City Mills Store. He was creative, doing things like minimizing waste by cutting up faded and fraying fabrics and selling them as “remnants.�

Customers loved it and his bosses had never seen scrap used in this way before. During his seven years working there, he did this type of thing frequently and created as many opportunities as possible for promotions and raises.

Kaufman befriended the Thormans and began courting their oldest daughter, Lizzie. During this courtship, Kaufman landed the coveted

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job with Simson, and he was hired as a clerk on March 1, 1860.

Compared to his boss Kaufman was the dashing, assimilated young man. He had wavy hair, a beard and thick mustache (which were in vogue), wore American business suits, shaved his sideburns (unusual for a Jewish man) and shunned the yarmulke that many men he knew wore. Six months into the job, Kaufman was dismayed to find that Simson was planning to make his eldest son, Samuel, an equal partner in the business. He objected on the grounds that Sam had precious little capital to invest but Simson overruled him. Kaufman continued to work at the firm and married Lizzie. He was now Simson’s son-inlaw. This made no difference in his vision for the company. Kaufman was impatient with the family business and wanted it to grow faster and in a different direction than Simson was taking it.

Within a couple of years in 1863, Simson asked another son-in-law, Edward Budwig, who was married to Lizzie’s twin, Esther, to join the company as an equal partner as well. Kaufman again objected to this move because Edward also did not have enough capital, and further, Kaufman believed that Simson didn’t yet know enough about Edward’s character. Just because Edward had most recently held a job keeping books for a clothing store did not mean he had the right traits to be an equal partner in the business.

Simson ignored his son-in-law’s objections again, patiently explaining to Kaufman that, “he expected to treat all the children alike.” This fell on deaf ears. To Kaufman Simson seemed to value family over profit in the business realm, an orientation with which Kaufman disagreed. Kaufman was an instinctual businessman who wanted to make money more quickly, believing business was first and foremost about the numbers and was secondarily about forging social constructs and transmitting family values. After four years in 1864, Kaufman left the business more than a little bit frustrated with his

34 | Five Generations

father-in-law’s take on how to do business.

The US was about to enter what would become known as the Gilded Age, and all around Kaufman, American businessmen whose families hailed from Europe had made, were making or were on the verge of making fortunes—Cornelius Vanderbilt in the railroad industry, John D. Rockefeller in oil, Andrew Carnegie in steel, John Pierpont Morgan in finance, and John Jacob Astor in furs and real estate. It didn’t matter whether Kaufman made a direct comparison of himself to these men—the fact that matters, I think, is that these tycoons were modernizing business, distancing it dramatically from European patriarchal and hierarchical business methods and Americanizing it. This was the context Kaufman liked and understood.

Kaufman convinced his younger brother Joseph, who was the same height as Kaufman and reportedly had the same “high forehead,” to go in with him on establishing Hays Brothers. This was a wholesale goods store located at No. 155 Water Street, just a few buildings down from his father-in-law’s business. On March 1, 1864, they went to New York City to buy their initial inventory—“general notions, furnishing goods and watch materials.” Kaufman priced his items at the lowest market rates around, placed a few small ads in the Plain Dealer, and found that selling as a wholesaler was good business. His stock sold quickly and the store thrived. He immediately began making more money than he had at Simson’s S. Thorman & Company, and he and Joseph traveled regularly to New York to acquire the latest fashions and goods.

Kaufman had an eye for business trends and took advantage of these more quickly than his father-in-law Simson did. In particular Kaufman focused on the rapidly growing ready-to-wear clothing industry. The Civil War was being waged, and northerners en route to and from war needed new clothes. Soldiers were measured for

The Entrepreneur | 35

uniforms, and a system of measurements for men’s ready-to-wear clothing became standardized—a relatively rare instance in which men drove a major clothing trend. (Later women, who became consumers en masse, began to drive clothing industry trends.) The readyto-wear industry would receive another boost after the depression of 1873 during which many businessmen wanted clothes that were less pricey than custom suits.

Also Cleveland already had transformed from outpost to city and was on its way to becoming an industrial giant. Workers were constructing viaducts and bridges, laying sewer systems and installing streetcar lines. Throughout the Lake Erie coastal area, factory owners were operating at capacity making railroad iron and gun carriage axles for the war, feverishly trying to expand to meet demand. Marine designers and builders were pumping out cargo and naval vessels for sailing on the Great Lakes. And oil tycoons were making the city a center of refining. J.D. Rockefeller founded Standard Oil and set up his offices in the Flats area of the city. The Greater Cleveland area possessed a critical mass of people (population of about 100,000), skills, infrastructure and geographic assets, making it a top urban center within the United States.

This rising tide lifted the boat of Kaufman and Joseph’s business, and within two years by 1866, it was doing well enough that Kaufman invested a large sum of money to help his in-laws’ business, S. Thorman & Company, get through a period of financial difficulty. The investment by Kaufman helped but not enough: within a short time, Simson was forced to mortgage his property to support the business and take out a high-interest loan. Still his merchandise business failed. While Europe had laws that punished those whose businesses did not succeed, the United States implemented laws beginning in the early 1800s to ensure that those whose businesses failed—which

36 | Five Generations

included a number of members of US Congress—were not severely punished. Simson’s custom-wear business may have flagged toward the end, but he did well for quite a while, especially with his slaughterhouse, and he retired with enough money to be considered a wellto-do man.

While running his own wholesale goods business with his brother, Kaufman co-founded Teutonia Insurance Company of Cleveland. His leadership at Teutonia vividly illustrates the characteristics that made him a successful businessman. First of all he had skill, especially in the form of an uncanny sense for numbers, and this translated across industries. In his spare time he had devised a new way of financing insurance companies, and he had co-founded Teutonia for the purpose of testing his hypothesis. The Ohio Secretary of State became so impressed with Kaufman’s financial insight that he recommended that the state legislature pass Kaufman’s recommendations as law.

Also Kaufman loathed being bossed around, and he was creative, confident, decisive and good at influencing people. One anecdote (among many) demonstrates these traits. Teutonia hired an agent, Herr Von Kern, to represent the company in Chicago. Polite and suave, Mr. Von Kern soon was believed to be embezzling funds from the company. Two of Teutonia’s top executives took the train to Chicago to put an end to Von Kern’s shenanigans, but Von Kern smoothtalked them and they ended up not resolving the matter.

“Von Kern received them very nicely, wined them and dined them, and sent them back with notes but no money,” Kaufman wrote in his brief autobiography.

When the pilfering continued the directors sent Kaufman to Chicago to sort it out. Kaufman set to work to get the facts, and within a short while, he figured out exactly what Von Kern owed and induced the thief to give him every penny. Kaufman also wanted the com-

The Entrepreneur | 37

pany’s books because they had the records of Chicago-area customers. As Kaufman stood in Von Kern’s office and demanded he turn over the books, Von Kern refused, claiming they were his. Von Kern wanted to solicit from these customers, and Kaufman’s request was to him an outrage!

Kaufman must have expected this reaction because he brandished the papers proving Teutonia’s corporate rights to the books by virtue of company ownership.

“If you would like to make this affair public, Mr. Von Kern,” Kaufman said, “the constable is outside and is prepared to do his duty.”

Wordlessly Von Kern reached down, opened a drawer in his desk, pulled out a revolver and pointed it at Kaufman.

Kaufman grabbed a heavy book to shield himself.

A tense moment passed.

Then realizing the gun was not causing Kaufman to flee, and probably noting that murder was a worse charge than being a thief, Von Kern placed the revolver back in the desk and handed Kaufman the books. Kaufman took them to the chamber of commerce where he immediately contacted policyholders to tell them not to make payments to Von Kern in the future.

With this affair over Kaufman decided on behalf of the board that the Chicago territory was not right for Teutonia and they would exit that geography. His decision did not stick. Soon enough Teutonia’s board decided it was interested in buying the Merchants Insurance Company in Chicago. To add insult to the injury, the company’s officers wanted Kaufman to be the one who conducted due diligence on this acquisition. Kaufman refused. After the Von Kern incident, he had told them he was done with Chicago and the company ought to be as well! Out of seventeen directors Kaufman was the only one

38 | Five Generations

to vote “nay” on the transaction. He additionally required that the secretary of Teutonia’s board make his dissent eminently clear in the minutes of the proceedings. Afterward he visited his doctor (for his longstanding rheumatism).

“Kaufman, you are a stubborn man,” his doctor who knew him well said. “You made a mistake not to make the vote unanimous.”

Kaufman completely disagreed about making a mistake, but he did admit to his doctor, presumably with a smile, that he was indeed “a stubborn son of a gun.”

Teutonia ended up re-entering the Chicago market against Kaufman’s wishes. The summer of 1871 was particularly dry and a fire started southwest of the city. Winds blew the flames into the center of the city so that almost every structure within a several-mile radius burned down. Over 300 people died and more than 100,000 lost their homes. This was the Great Fire of Chicago, and the Teutonia policyholders, many of whom had businesses and homes in the city, experienced losses totaling $2.5 million.

According to the laws of Ohio, shareholders of Teutonia were liable for the full amount of the losses. Limited liability as a concept was taking root across the US, but in the early days, the law of limited liability was implemented unevenly and applied differently to insurance companies. Again Kaufman was sent by the nearly panicked board of Teutonia to Chicago to sort out the situation and get the directors out of their dire financial straits.

He arrived while the fire was still burning, set up an office and told policyholders to speak with him there. He was brutally forthright with them about the specifics and numbers with which they were dealing. He coughed his way through the transactions, smoke blanketing the Chicago air, and he eventually settled with all the stakeholders: he made policyholders whole and ensured shareholders were

The Entrepreneur | 39

off the hook, in terms of being liable for every single dollar. The company survived but just barely. It was in tatters, reduced to nearly no assets. When many of the shareholders suggested the company reorganize and grow anew, Kaufman angrily refused to be part of their efforts.

He was an entrepreneur, investor and financier who consistently, almost innately, understood where opportunity was ripe for the taking and where a risk was too large for its potential reward. His burden was that the people with whom he dealt—some of them magnates in their own right—had less of this sense, and they consistently needed him to bail them out. He bore the burden well, albeit with frustration, and it brought him much respect—bordering on worship—and wealth.

W

Lizzie Thorman

hile Lizzie Thorman’s mother, Regina, was the classic pioneer woman—stalwart and with the characteristic dress of her Bavarian homeland—Lizzie was different.

Regina and Simson’s third child was thin, pale and light-haired, almost delicate looking. It would be fair to say she was a very pretty young woman. As Kaufman spent time with the Thormans in his first decade in Cleveland, Lizzie began to take note of him. Four years her senior, Kaufman was short (5'4"), stout, well-dressed, confident and charismatic. In 1861 when she was 19 years old, she and Kaufman wed.

In Cleveland German Jews and Eastern European (Polish, primarily) Jews cultivated separate communities. The German Jews were of better financial means and moved away from neighborhoods inhabited by the Eastern Europeans. German Jewish immigrant families lived in the upper part of the Woodland neighborhood. It was characterized by mom and pop stores, butchers, grocery stores and bak-

40 | Five Generations

eries, and its sizeable homes were shaded with towering oaks, elms and maples. Numerous Jewish Institutions like the Jewish Orphan Home and the new Temple-Tifereth Israel were built there throughout the 19th century. The lower end of Woodland was where newly emigrated Eastern European Jews lived, and at the time of Lizzie and Kaufman’s wedding, it was approaching shantytown status. Oncegrand wooden houses were dilapidated, zoning was non-existent so that too many establishments crowded each block, and most homes swelled with three or four new immigrant families. A survey of the area in the early 1900s showed that for a population of nearly 7,800 people, there were only 83 bathtubs.

As newlyweds Lizzie and Kaufman chose to live on Woodland Avenue on the edge of the two Jewish immigrant neighborhoods at or near Thorman’s Crossing where she had grown up. Lizzie gave birth to four girls: Belle, Rolinda, Henrietta (“Nettie”) and Frances (“Fannie”). In 1866 when Belle and Rolinda were young, Kaufman went to Europe for six months. He had two reasons. First he wanted to improve his chronic rheumatism, and the thinking went in those days, at least among the wealthy, that it could be cured through spending time on the Mediterranean. Second he wanted to buy toys for Hays Brothers to sell. His in-laws Simson and Regina joined him while Lizzie remained home to care for the girls. The voyage with his in-laws did not improve his health, and he continued to visit his stateside doctor on a regular basis. He was thereafter “on account of his ill health” required to do more deskwork than he would have liked, and he continued over the course of his adult life to seek respite from the general “ill health” and bouts of rheumatism that plagued him.

In the ensuing years after Lizzie gave birth to their two younger daughters, she spent time attending to the Hays’ children’s needs, providing them with a proper education and training them in man-

The Entrepreneur | 41

ners and domestic arts. The house was filled with hobbies (music was one), laughter, and the occasional rivalries of the four girls. A coterie of household servants maintained a clean and orderly home, and Lizzie enjoyed having visitors stop by frequently as well as getting outdoors to do some gardening. The strawberries she nurtured grew to twoand-a-quarter inches in circumference, large enough that they were exhibited at a local strawberry festival that benefited charity. On weekends Lizzie dressed the girls in fine clothes, and they rode by carriage to Tifereth Israel, a Jewish temple that was progressive in many ways, including holding services on Sundays instead of Saturdays.

While Kaufman worked hard and traveled frequently, Lizzie still found time amidst the child rearing to involve herself in charities.

She was a co-founder and lifelong supporter of the Jewish Orphan Asylum, located in a four-story brick building surrounded by trees and constructed on seven acres of land in the center of their beloved Woodland neighborhood. With this refuge she and her husband (who was also a co-founder) as well as a number of other co-founders had the idea that they could help German and Eastern European Jewish orphans assimilate and build productive lives in America. Kaufman, who was growing several businesses at this point, probably liked the fact that by bringing young Jewish people to a growing Cleveland, the asylum served as an effective recruiting mechanism. Lizzie had a particular passion for the asylum’s mission. She was known for her natural way with people of need and reportedly became a devoted friend to the children. She maintained a long interest in the asylum, serving (along with Kaufman) as a member of its board from 1868 until her death in 1907, a time when few women served on boards.

In 1886 the Hays home’s activity-laden atmosphere changed because the two oldest girls, Belle and Rolinda, wed and moved away.

Kaufman and Lizzie moved successively into two other houses, both

42 | Five Generations

on Woodland Avenue, and when they became empty nesters near the turn of the century, they moved in with Belle and her husband Martin Marks at 316 Amesbury Avenue. Martin was a giant in the Jewish and business communities. He was born in Madison, Wisconsin, and met Belle while he was in Cleveland on business. They married in 1885 and a year later moved to Cleveland. Like Kaufman Martin had broad-ranging interests. He was part owner of wholesale clothing firm A. Marks & Son and an executive in the insurance industry.

He was a director of Cleveland Worsted Mills Company and served on the board of directors of First National Bank and Guardian Savings and Trust Company. He was president of Tifereth Israel and the first president of the Educational League to ensure higher education for orphans. He was prominent in the chamber of commerce and the chair of its Committee on Benevolent Institutions. He helped establish the Federation of Jewish Charities in 1903, was active in B’nai B’rith, and was appointed to the board of trustees of the Jewish Orphan Home in 1885. He also was, according to almost all reports, a heck of a nice guy! He and Belle lived in the heart of the Glenville neighborhood of upper Woodland close to theaters and home-style restaurants.

Lizzie joined and became actively involved in the National Council of Jewish Women’s Cleveland chapter, founded in 1894 by her sonin-law, Rabbi Moses Gries, with the idea of helping East European Jewish immigrants settling in the lower Woodland neighborhood.

The NCJW Cleveland chapter offered these immigrants great assimilation programs including English and citizenship classes. In addition Lizzie served for a short while as a volunteer in the Cleveland Public Schools to “teach Cleveland youth how to be good citizens.” It seems she inherited from her father, Simson Thorman, a commitment to building social infrastructure.

The Entrepreneur | 43

F

Banks & Clothes

rom early on Kaufman was well aware that he was in the right place at the right time and at an intersection of trends that created huge opportunity. He had made enough money from his

and his brother’s modern business practices at Hays Brothers Clothing that by 1868, he had the cash to begin amassing significant shareholder positions in banks. In the 1870s there were scores of banks in Cleveland because banks were not behemoths. They were mostly small, community-centered institutions where people united by geography, religion or ethnicity, could deposit their money. This situation of mom and pop banks on the brink of modernization captivated him as much as similar trends in the clothing industry.

He purchased stock in Citizens Savings & Loan Company, a community bank, and then City National in 1870. He became a director of Citizens and agreed to serve on its finance committee. He encouraged Citizens to grow in a way with which the president of the bank, John Whitelaw, did not agree. Kaufman decided he was too independent to give in. He decided to start a new national bank, and he and other coinvestors formed the Euclid Avenue National Bank in 1886. It’s worth commenting on a few of Kaufman’s collaborators, co-investors and co-founders at Euclid Avenue National Bank.

One co-founder was Myron T. Herrick, who joined the bank’s board of directors with Kaufman and sat on its finance committee with him as well. Herrick later became governor of Ohio with Warren G. Harding (who would later become president of the United States) as his lieutenant governor.

Co-founder Solon Severance was named the bank’s cashier. He was a private-school boy from a well-to-do family, a man who worked hard to add to his family’s wealth. He made his career in banking, working his way up the ranks, and leading and co-founding a cou-

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ple of banks. He also held varied cultural interests such as traveling, religion and philanthropy, having founded the Woodland Avenue Presbyterian Church. His nephew would later fund the creation of Cleveland’s famous Severance Hall, home to the world-renowned Cleveland Orchestra.

Then there was Charles Brush who was named president of the bank. He was an inventor and entrepreneur who was growing his own company, Brush Electric Company. In 1876 he had patented an open coil-type dynamo, which used a horse-drawn treadmill as its power source and was a predecessor to the modern generator. There were other generators but Brush’s was considered to be the most efficient. In 1878 he invented the arc light, which used the dynamo as its source of power and was much brighter than any prior lights. Arc lights were installed in Cleveland’s Public Square in 1879, and by 1882, these lights (also called “Brush lights”) achieved widespread use. Brush Electric began to design public lighting systems, and by the time Charles became involved with the bank, his public lighting systems were illuminating the streets of Philadelphia, San Francisco, New York, Boston, Baltimore, Montreal, Buffalo, Cleveland and more. He was a successful inventor and businessman, and banking was a moonlighting activity. While he was involved in the bank and running Brush Electric, he also invented an improved storage battery (in 1886) and the first windmill for generating electricity in 1888 (which he used to light his Euclid Avenue mansion). Even after Brush Electric was acquired in 1889 and merged into General Electric, he remained an inventor at heart, not a banker.

Among the Euclid Avenue National Bank co-founders or executives, Kaufman was different because he was both Jewish and an immigrant. Yet beyond being accepted into the broad Cleveland business society, Kaufman quickly became a leader in it. Jewish and Christian

The Entrepreneur | 45

business people occasionally came together for purposes of business, especially when there was as much opportunity as there was in Cleveland, so Christian and Jewish people doing business together was not unprecedented. However it was rare. The extent to which Kaufman was an accepted leader among a group of prominent American businessmen stands out. He saw opportunity and embraced it time and time again with a skill, speed and results orientation that evidently made his religion and background a moot point to those who might otherwise not have been inclined to do business with him. He was as natural a capitalist as ever there was. ||| Kaufman also was an unlikely politician. In 1886 the same year he was co-founding Euclid Avenue National Bank (and still serving as an investor or board member for other banks), Kaufman was elected to Cleveland City Council from Ward 11. He was a Republican, the party of late President Abraham Lincoln that had advocated most heavily for abolition thirty years prior. Republicans in his era were keenly interested in deficit and debt reduction, and building railroads and international trade. They were committed to fiscal discipline and infrastructure development for America’s growth. They were also strict constitutionalists, believing that the federal government should have limited reach and power.

These were important issues to Kaufman, yet he was much more a man of local action, and issues in Cleveland demanded Kaufman’s time. He quickly became chairman of the city council’s finance committee and then was elected as vice president of the council. Graft and greed being endemic to politics since time immemorial, soon enough the city treasurer, Thomas Axworthy, fled across the Atlantic to London with about $200,000 (in 1888 dollars) and left behind a

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half-million dollar shortage. This was a debacle—the man in charge of funds was gone and the city’s credit was in jeopardy! Cleveland had almost no money for its daily business.

The mayor and city officials—Republican and Democrat alike— knew they needed to restore confidence in city government. At an embarrassing and fragile time like this, they needed the most honest and capable man they could find to take over the task of restoring the city’s financials.

“Kaufman, will you do the job for us?” one of them asked him in an urgent meeting. He was a successful entrepreneur, incredible with numbers and sorting out financial situations, committed to Cleveland but respected on a national scale.

Kaufman said he would help. He was brought in as acting treasurer and had little time to straighten out the city’s finances before bankruptcy loomed. He got to work and soon enough it was widely reported that Kaufman Hays had single-handedly saved the city’s credit and reputation.

Frequently it seems, he was at the convergence of opportunity and responsibility, generosity and fiscal restraint. By 1893 Kaufman was elected as vice president of Euclid Avenue National Bank. The bank merged with Park National Bank to become Euclid-Park National Bank, where Kaufman remained a vice president. With deposits of $14 million, the newly merged Euclid-Park was the largest national bank in Cleveland (there were about 100 banks in Cleveland, and not all of them were national banks), and Kaufman became one of a handful of Cleveland leaders in the national banking industry. He took the train to San Francisco and attended the American Bankers Association annual meeting. He noted that other towns had larger banks, so he was happy when in 1905 Euclid-Park merged again, this time with First National Bank, which was about half of its size. The

The Entrepreneur | 47

new bank, named First National, took over office space on Euclid Avenue near Public Square, and Kaufman became a member of its executive committee. ||| While numbers and banking indulged his skill with numbers and made him money, the clothing industry may have been closer to his heart (and it made him money, too). The same year he was elected vice president of Euclid National Bank, he was enmeshed with Turner Manufacturing Company, a large clothing producer started by Joseph Turner. It had failed and George Hodgson, an Englishman by birth, was leading an effort to reorganize the business. He brought on a president for the company, and knowing Kaufman to be able to rescue companies and cities from almost any situation, asked Kaufman to become the company’s secretary. Kaufman agreed to the job and invested in the company as well. The men capitalized the firm at $100,000 ($2.5 million in today’s dollars) and reconstituted it as the Cleveland Worsted Mills Company.

The men knew the firm had not failed because of demand issues— the need for cloth was growing. The Civil War had given rise to a standardized system of measurements for men’s clothing and retail and distribution systems for the ready-to-wear clothing supply chain were being established. Women were slower to lose the feeling of individuality that they felt custom wear clothing offered, but the price of a tailor to make their clothes was high, and their desire for more time to work or enjoy themselves was changing their attitudes.

Ready-to-wear clothing was continuing its steady rise in popularity among men and women, and Cleveland Worsted Mills could serve that demand.

Kaufman’s actions show that he determined that poor operations,

48 | Five Generations

not demand issues, had been the culprit of the company’s failure. The management team and board of directors agreed that they needed to upgrade the mill’s equipment and improve its manufacturing methods. They wanted to ensure Cleveland Worsted Mills could fulfill all aspects of treating fabric—workers scoured incoming wool, and then sorted, processed and boiled it. They made changes in human resources too. They hired more Poles, Czechs and Lithuanians because they believed these immigrants had a strong work ethic. With these changes the company developed the capability to handle the growth of the ready-made industry. Within a few years Cleveland Worsted Mill’s capitalization had grown to $4.5 million (approximately $125 million in today’s dollars), and over the course of a couple of decades, it became one of the largest producers of woolen cloth in the country. It had a plant in Cleveland, two in Ravenna, and others in Ohio, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, New York and Rhode Island.

Cleveland Worsted Mills would go on after Kaufman’s era to employ 2,500 people, adapting to changes brought by the Great Depression and World War II. As industry changes took place the company would retain the ability to invest. For instance it would develop a capability to make luxury serge and gabardine fabric when this became important to a higher-end ready-to-wear customer base. But numerous decades after Kaufman’s time and World War II, intense competition from the South and the beginnings of massive foreign competition would decimate the northern textiles industry. With a higher number of educated workers, the North would switch to industries that made higher value-added goods. Workers would express their frustration with bitter strikes, and many northern textiles manufacturers would shut their doors. Cleveland Worsted Mills would be no exception. It would close its doors in 1956.

The Entrepreneur | 49

A

Haysmar

s a venture capital investor for more than thirty years, I backed many entrepreneurs and found that only a few were as driven and successful as Kaufman. To me he was the quintessen-

tial entrepreneur: brilliant when it came to numbers and accounting, skilled in decision making and stubborn as can be. He was opportunistic, knew what he wanted and what was right for a company, and became surly when others could not see this. In short he was a dream for a venture capital investor who wants the person running the company they invest in to be strong-willed, skilled and smart.

At the same time Kaufman’s sense of responsibility to the world and his community was great. Eleanor Roosevelt once said, “The price of greatness is responsibility,” and it strikes me that this applied to Kaufman. He was constantly called on by leaders in Cleveland and beyond to help when they were in a fix. He seemed to have a Midas touch. He helped his father-in-law rescue his own clothing company while ultimately retaining strong relations with him. With his brother he started his own clothing store and sold it. He next used his uncanny knack for numbers to found and save Teutonia and then co-founded and/or served on the boards of three banks. He turned around and built a clothing company. When called upon he dropped everything to save the city of Cleveland from bankruptcy.

But that’s not all, folks. Philanthropically he founded the Hebrew Benevolent Society and was extremely involved with the Jewish Orphan Asylum that received so much of Lizzie’s attention. The latter organization asked him to be its treasurer, and he readily agreed, committing himself to the most disenfranchised members of society—immigrants who were orphans and members of a minority religious class. He remained treasurer of the Jewish Orphan Asylum for over 30 years, which I think shows that this was, for him, more than

50 | Five Generations

a passing interest or obligatory commitment.

Kaufman Hays was a busy and engaged man who had as many excuses as anyone to forego time with his family and friends. In his autobiography he recalled with great detail and fondness his longago reunion with his sister, Rosa, when he arrived in America, noting that she ran to him and how happy the meeting was. When he peddled goods in those early days, he made many friends and some treated him almost as family. One woman (for instance) brought him pumpkin pies each year. He was respectful of his father-in-law and refused to take his share of profits in the business they owned together when he left.

“I would take none of it,” he wrote, “as things might change and it had better be held for a rainy day.”

He and Joseph helped take care of Simson when he was older and lived in a house owned and paid for by Kaufman. And of course he spent ample time with Lizzie and their four daughters and many grandchildren. The couple traveled together (Florida and Cuba were two destinations) with some frequency, occasionally announcing their vacations in the Plain Dealer so that they could be found during the social season.

In 1907 when she was 65, Lizzie developed heart problems and six weeks into her diagnosis, she died at home. The obituary headline said she was one of Cleveland’s best-known residents, but as Kaufman delivered her to her resting place at Mayfield Cemetery, he likely reflected on only one thing—that this second daughter of patriarch and pioneer Simson Thorman was the love of his life, the woman whose beauty and grace had smote him back in 1860 before the Civil War. As he stood at the cemetery, I am sure he had no Midas touch, no aura of greatness, just sadness and loneliness.

A few years after Lizzie passed away, Kaufman bought lakefront

The Entrepreneur | 51

property at 10305 Lakeshore Boulevard in Bratenahl, which was 10 miles east. Wealthy industrialists built summer residences there and eventually some families, escaping problems creeping into urban Cleveland, began to live along the Bratenahl lakeshore yearround. Kaufman’s property had a long, double house that was split in the middle to accommodate three families, and behind this main house were two additional homes where the extended family lived.

The land was on a bluff overlooking Lake Erie where low pigboats passed by carrying iron ore, as did steel steamers with dark hulls and wide smokestacks traveling east from Cleveland to Buffalo or Erie.

A nautical highway system was arising between Buffalo, Detroit and Cleveland. It connected suppliers and users of steel for the automotive industry.

Kaufman called his mansion Haysmar, which combined the two family names of Hays and Marks (Lizzie’s eldest daughter, Belle, married Martin Marks). There were few Jewish people residing in Bratenahl, so the Hays family lived among mostly Protestants and some Catholics. (Farmhands and railroad workers from northern Europe lived in surrounding Glenville, Collinwood and Euclid, but not in wealthier Bratenahl.) The Hays family regularly traveled the short distance south or west to Cleveland and its near suburbs to go to work and attend services at Temple-Tifereth Israel.

Kaufman was the patriarch of Haysmar, and while residing there with three of his daughters and their families, he maintained his positions on the boards of banks and the Cleveland Worsted Mills. He celebrated his 81st birthday with friends, family and business associates. At the party he was presented by members of the Citizens Savings and Trust Company with a silver cup in token of friendship.

About a month later on April 12, 1916, he died suddenly at Haysmar.

At the time of his death, he had nine grandchildren and four great

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grandchildren—a testament to his richly lived life. He was still vice president of the Cleveland Worsted Mills Company, a director at the First National Bank and the Citizens Savings and Trust Company, and treasurer of the Jewish Orphan Asylum. Because of his great skill with numbers, extraordinary commitment and work ethic and instincts for making money, he was the wealthiest Jewish person in Cleveland. His son-in-law Rabbi Moses J. Gries performed family services, and Kaufman was buried next to his wife in a private mausoleum at Mayfield Cemetery.

Some years ago an executive at National City Bank contacted me because the bank had a five-dollar note issued by Euclid Avenue National Bank and signed by Kaufman Hays. The bank Kaufman founded was, I inferred, somehow over the years of mergers and acquisitions, subsumed by National City, which now is PNC Bank.

THE RABBI & THE MERCHANT The Third Generation

Rabbi Moses Gries and Frances Hays, married in 1898. (Photos courtesy WRHS)

Frances and Robert Hays Gries, c. 1900. (Photo courtesy WRHS)

Tifereth Israel at E. 55th St. and Central Ave., where Rabbi Gries served from 1894 to 1917. (Photo courtesy WRHS)

Congregants packed Temple Tifereth Israel to hear Rabbi Gries give his farewell speech on June 3, 1917. (Gries Private Papers)

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The Rabbi

I

Moses Gries

n 1892 Rabbi Gries ascended the double stairway leading to the heavy wooden doors of Tifereth Israel, the temple whose congregation he was being recruited to lead. It was a brick building with

simple architecture, symmetrical lines and a steep roof with doors that opened underneath a flower-shaped stained glass window. As he let the door shut, Rabbi Gries left behind the cold and noise of Cleveland’s Huron Road: a brick-paved street filled with daytime horseand-wagon traffic, lined with mom-and-pop stores, and lit by modern, electric lights. On his side of the doors, the temple had high ceilings and bands of windows that issued natural light into the rows of pews.

Being a scholar Rabbi Gries had done his homework and knew the outlines of Tifereth Israel’s history. He knew it extended back to the original Unsleben group that arrived fifty-five years earlier in 1839 and to that group’s Israelitische Society, founded by Simson Thorman.

He also knew it extended back to the Israelitische Society’s offshoot congregation, Anshe Chesed. He knew fire had struck Israelitische’s synagogue so that subsequently the original and offshoot congregations reunited as Anshe Chesed, comprised of 62 members. These early Anshe Chesed congregants commissioned the creation of a synagogue and agreed to have sermons in German and prayers in Hebrew. In 1850, Anshe Chesed hired a rabbi, Isidor Kalisch, and this was when the second rift was created in Cleveland’s tiny Jewish community.

Rabbi Kalisch was a Polish journalist and “radical” who had been involved in the Revolution of 1848 during which Europeans had demanded greater rights and freedom for all classes. Jews had called for political emancipation and freedom from their ghetto life, which they had briefly won (their rights were retracted after two years). Many of

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Anshe Chesed’s congregants made clear that noble as he was in his cause, he was too radical for them. After a few months on the job, the rabbi— Cleveland’s first—was asked to leave. He did but not in defeat. He took with him 47 families, and in 1850 they formed Temple-Tifereth Israel.

Standing on the steps of the temple that Tifereth Israel’s congregation had commissioned six years after its founding, Rabbi Gries reflected on Rabbi Kalisch’s early roles. The rabbi had set a precedent by assuming multiple responsibilities at the temple, including being cantor during services, teaching in its religious school and leading its Saturday services, although the temple did employ its own shochet.

He worked mostly as a one-man band because the congregation always was small and financially struggling. At one point its cash reserves were so low, it could not pay him. Rabbi Kalisch announced his resignation and left for a different synagogue in Wisconsin.

Three successors had followed Kalisch between 1855 and 1867.

After the Civil War Rabbis Jacob Mayer and Aaron Hahn had presided over the congregation for twenty-five years from 1867 to 1892, and they had instituted more reforms. They had allowed men and women to sit together in pews during services, created a choir and dropped Hebrew from its Sunday school classes. Then Rabbi Hahn had quickly announced his resignation (there is no evidence of a dispute) and had departed in February 1892.

The Huron Road synagogue in which Rabbi Gries was standing had been sold and was being rented back by the congregation on a temporary basis while they awaited both the completion of their new facility at East 55th Street and Central Avenue and the arrival of their new rabbi.

That rabbi is me, Moses Gries must have thought, because by all accounts he acted like a man who understood this congregation whose founding premise was to blend modernity with tradition and active assimilation with proud identity.

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R

Frances Hays

abbi Gries possessed a charisma that did not go unnoticed

by Frances Hays, the youngest daughter of Kaufman and Lizzie. Fannie had inherited her parents’ intellectual energy,

and this took the form of a precocious, progressive woman who enjoyed studying music theory and going to the health spa in Saratoga, New York. Saratoga was well known for its mineral springs, which were said to help the skin, digestion and blood. She also enjoyed volunteering at community organizations and attending synagogue.

She had fared well at Central High School, particularly enjoying English literature, and then in an unusual move for a woman in the late 1800s and with her three sisters all married, she had attended college.

She had chosen Oberlin, a liberal arts school in the flat, agrarian expanses of western Ohio where she surrounded herself with intellectuals and musicians. Amongst the corn and wheat fields, the institution was known for pioneering coeducation and supporting abolition. It had been a well-known stop on the Underground Railroad and had produced the first Negro woman to earn a college degree.

It had subsequently graduated women who had become doctors and reformers. Also it had developed distinctive assets—its music conservatory was the oldest in the nation, the only one in the nation connected to a liberal arts college, and its wealth of resources made it if not the best in the country, then certainly among the top several. As a result, Oberlin College nearly demanded that its students have an appreciation for music.

Sitting in the pews of Tifereth Israel listening to the choir, Fannie observed the confident new rabbi. I imagine she paid close attention to his sermons because they were captivating, each one seeming better than the prior one. His sermons were earnest, eloquent and energetic, and partly through them, Fannie was drawn to him.

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He was tall and dark-haired, and had a thin, angular, clean-shaven, handsome face. He was well dressed too, eschewing the robes and black hat of Orthodox rabbis in favor of a dark suit and white collar.

Fannie’s family played a special role in Jewish life in Cleveland and at Tifereth Israel specifically. Her grandfather Simson Thorman was the first Jewish settler in Cleveland and was a leader in the Israelitische Society and Anshe Chesed, which had in some ways given rise to Tifereth Israel. Simson’s brother Meyer had been among the congregants who had chosen Tifereth Israel. Fannie’s father Kaufman Hays had served as president of Tifereth Israel right after Rabbi Kalisch had departed and the new rabbi had joined (another example, by the way, of Kaufman coming in at a time of crisis). Kaufman’s brother, Fannie’s uncle, also had split off from Anshe Chesed to join Tifereth Israel. And Fannie’s brother-in-law Martin Marks was the president of the congregation of about 125 people. In fact it was Marks who had prompted the hiring of Rabbi Gries. Gries had visited to officiate a handful of temple ceremonies, and Marks had been so impressed by Gries that he had immediately and heartily recommended him for the position of rabbi.

Fannie’s family was enmeshed in Temple-Tifereth Israel, and she herself was delighted with the changes Rabbi Gries had made to the temple in the short time he had been there. Within a year of taking the job, he had overseen the congregation’s long-planned move from Huron Street into its newly built temple on a tree-lined street at the intersection of two streetcar lines (Central Avenue and East 55th Street, aka Willson Avenue). The new Tifereth Israel was splendid, truly a mark of the growth of Cleveland’s Jewish community and a symbol of its soul. With a combination of Second Empire and Romanesque architectural styles, it featured turreted towers and graceful stone archways on the outside. Its interior was lavish with marble

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wainscoting, a choir loft, pipe organ, temple library and enough seating for 800 people.

Rabbi Gries didn’t engage in a honeymoon period before he set to work forging a temple marked by what he called Liberal Judaism (now called Classical Reform Judaism). He was determined to lead his congregation toward a religious life that was differentiated by its active push to modernity and assimilation. He suffered a spat with his board of trustees because he wanted to leave the Torah ark and scrolls out of the new synagogue altogether. He compromised by allowing in an ark, but it remained closed with the scrolls inside during services; it was mostly symbolic and he read the Torah from a book.

He created a temple library—a mark of his intellectualism—and moved services from Saturday to Sunday, which was a break with a Jewish tradition that had existed for thousands of years. He felt that integrating and adapting to US culture was important enough to Jewish success in America that he was willing to make this radical move.

One prominent rabbi called his move, “a downright hypocrisy and lie.” No matter—holding services on Sundays allowed congregants who were businesspeople to keep their doors open on Saturdays and align their work week with the rest of the population. This was important to the rabbi’s vision for integration.

Rabbi Gries kept going with his slate of changes. He opened services to non-members and to Gentiles. Dozens of non-temple members came to his Sunday morning sermons, and the congregation had grown to the point that people almost had to elbow their way into the pews. Congregants of all ages were permitted to enter the building bareheaded (previous rabbis had moved away from the tradition of requiring yarmulkes for men and head coverings for women), so the appearance of this congregation struck an observer as totally different from an orthodox congregation. He began to conduct services

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in English (not Hebrew), which made Tifereth Israel one of a few Cleveland-area temples to make the change.

Rabbi Gries was creating a synagogue “center” more than a synagogue, a transformation that only a few temples across the country were attempting to make. Frances had thought her own father was progressive, but he did not approach the level of Rabbi Gries’s progressiveness. Tifereth Israel was more like Oberlin than a temple in some ways—a place of openness and acceptance, a center of communal life more than religious life alone, a center filled with music, thought and activity as well as, of course, spirituality. People responded, and the congregation grew. It had been 125 congregants when he started in 1892 and was well on its way to reaching 595 members in 1910.

Fannie realized that this rabbi was her kind of man! He was brilliant, progressive, driven, committed and pious. Even her father, the hard-headed entrepreneur, liked, nay, adored him. As she spent time with him outside of services, she fell in love with him. He also became smitten with her. What wasn’t to like? She had a marvelous, confident, charming personality. Her parents had raised her to be understated, giving, driven and smart, and in these things she had excelled. She was a fine musician, well-versed in literature and poised.

Also there was the matter of her beauty, which the rabbi could not ignore. She had short brown hair, a face of soft features, and a look best described as “modern,” marked by a visible energy and intelligence. Her eyes spoke volumes.

At 30 years old, the rabbi, not a young man, especially considering that he had attended college and rabbinical school starting at age 13, fell in love. He did not wait long to ask for Fannie’s hand in marriage. She said yes, and on a Saturday evening, the trustees of the temple called at the Hays home and congratulated the couple on their

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engagement. Six years after Rabbi Gries moved to Cleveland with his vision for change, and nine months after his engagement to Fannie, he became her husband.

The Frances Hays and Rabbi Moses Gries wedding in 1898 was everything one might expect. It was a standing-room-only event, and police were present to help manage and direct the large numbers of attendees. A total of 5,000 roses adorned the inside of the new Willson Road temple for its first wedding. Nine ushers lined up next to the groom, and eight bridesmaids attended the bride, who was modest and understated amidst the fanfare and luxury. She wore a silk and lace gown adorned with a diamond “sunburst” brooch her fiancé had given her.

After the wedding was a rich reception at the Kaufman and Lizzie Hays residence at 216 Amesbury Avenue in the upper Woodland area. There at Fannie’s parents’ home, the newlyweds received gifts such as silver, crystal, rare books, and then they departed for their honeymoon. They traveled on a St. Lawrence River riverboat to the East Coast and enjoyed a sojourn that lasted all summer, likely discussing in their lighter moments the type of home they would like to purchase upon their return.

In the autumn Fannie and Moses purchased a home at 45 Oakdale Avenue. This was half a mile away from her parents’ home and in the Glenville neighborhood where well-to-do German Jews had been residing for many years. A year and a half after their marriage, Fannie gave birth to a boy, whom they named Robert, which has German origins and means “glorious and bright.” And then there was Lincoln, born five years after Robert and named after the American president. A picture of the Great Emancipator’s childhood log cabin hung on his bedroom wall. The boys crawled and then ran around the house, playing with cousins and friends.

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Fannie read books to the boys: Beatrix Potter’s Peter Rabbit books were popular and may have populated their bookshelves. She read novels, probably books such as Mary Johnston’s best-selling To Have and To Hold, which had started as an Atlantic Monthly serial that featured love, piracy and colonial rule. Also popular was Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes novels and anything by Edith Wharton. She traveled occasionally with her husband or mother, upstate New York (Saratoga) still being a recurring destination, Europe, another, and she enjoyed returning from her across-the-pond trips with antiques, china and other treasures.

Fannie seemed constantly to be active in social causes. She was a leader at the Council Educational Alliance. This organization was started in 1899 by Jewish-German women and located in a small facility on Woodland Avenue. It served as a community center for Eastern European Jewish immigrants with the mission of helping them assimilate and “Americanize.” It offered night classes (e.g., English, American history and “the uses of soap”), provided daycare, served as a settlement house, had a gymnasium and served as a public commons where immigrants could meet. Judging by the amount of time she spent there, this connection to immigrants must have fulfilled her.

Maybe her father Kaufman and grandfather Simson had told stories about being immigrants, and maybe she deeply felt that heritage. Or maybe she simply liked helping her neighbors.

Fannie also was interested in the idea that women might influence society beyond their own homes—a feminist notion of rising importance in America. Colleges were accepting more women, suffrage was beginning to take root, and as companies began to centralize their operations and mom-and-pop stores began to decline, women were becoming a consumer class. Fannie participated in Tifereth Israel’s Temple Women’s Association, which was started in 1897 by

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her husband Rabbi Gries. Its purpose was for women to “further the religious, educational, civic, philanthropic, cultural and social activities of the temple.”

I

Change Agent am intrigued by the idea that when Fannie sat in the congrega-

tion admiring the growth Rabbi Gries brought to Tifereth Israel (before she married him), she witnessed only a small part of a

plan that had taken root in Rabbi Gries at a young age. The rabbi came to Cleveland already imbued with a strong, compelling vision, and he planned from his first days to be a change agent. He firmly believed that if Jewish people were going to succeed in America, they needed to adapt to the country’s customs, and although this vision was simple in its essence, it wasn’t easy to implement. He (and his board) knew it would take consistent, all-consuming effort to forge a culture and community of congregants who observed Judaism in a new, more modern way than Jewish people had observed for hundreds of years in Europe. The principles and practices he embraced came to be known as Classical Reform Judaism.

Rabbi Gries’s background had prepared him to be an extraordinary practitioner of Classical Reform Judaism in Cleveland. He was born in Rahway, NJ, to Jacob and Cathy, immigrants from Eastern Europe (Austria-Hungary and Bohemia). Jacob and Cathy had seven children, of which five were older than Moses and one younger. The extended family owned and operated Gries Brothers Clothing Store. Jacob died when Moses was three years old, and then four years later, Cathy died.

Moses and his siblings were scattered among a combination of relatives and boarding houses. For example Bernhard and Herman were together in one household for a while, with Bernhard working as a

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plumber’s apprentice, and Moses boarded in the Goldbacher household, which had two children, one older than him and one younger.

Orphaned and separated from his siblings, Moses’s mind, which was prodigious from a young age, may have become the source of his energy and happiness. He knew this and at age 11, he applied to Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, a new college that was the first institution of higher Jewish education in the United States. Its admissions committee rejected him on the basis that he was too young. He wanted this badly, though, and two years later in 1881, he applied again. This time, Hebrew Union’s admissions committee saw fit to accept him. At age 13 he left New Jersey and traveled west to Ohio so he could study to become a rabbi.

Moses spent eight years at Hebrew Union, and I have no idea whether he received a scholarship or how he paid its tuition. The college was founded by Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise, who also was the founder of American Reform Judaism, a modern approach to Judaism and Jewish tradition that would influence Moses tremendously.

Simultaneous to his studies at Hebrew Union, Moses attended Hughes High School for four years, received his diploma and then attended McMicken College (now the University of Cincinnati) for another four years. In 1889 he completed his rabbinical training, was ordained and received his Bachelor of Letters degree from McMicken.

This was an incredible achievement and made clear to the world that Rabbi Moses Gries was much more than an orphan. He was a genius, really, and his mind was complemented with a level of maturity that made him, at age 22, a wise man.

Rabbi Gries had no intention of spending his days in solitary study because he was inclined to seek out community. He always viewed his studies as offering him the knowledge that he needed to serve people. As soon as he graduated, he left for Chattanooga, Tennessee,

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a southern transportation hub that had a small Jewish population.

He launched his rabbinical career at Mizpah Congregation, a Classical Reform temple founded about 25 years prior (just after the end of the Civil War) and that had close ties to his alma mater. At age 22 he became its first paid rabbi.

Gries stayed at Mizpah for a little over two years, then he was recruited by Martin Marks and the board to be the rabbi at Tifereth Israel in Cleveland. He had lived most of his life for that moment when he walked up the curved steps and through the heavy doors of the Huron Road temple, and he brought with him the intensity of someone who knew it. He was honest, straightforward and direct as he undertook his reform plan. Rabbi William Rosenau, a national leader of Reform Judaism, later described Rabbi Gries in an essay published in the Central Conference of American Rabbis: He knew how to handle the most difficult situations. He never lost his head. His quiet bearing during heated debate was nothing short of phenomenal. . . .

Having the proper respect for the intelligence of his audiences, he never spoke without preparation. . . . He was systematic and precise, not only in his work, but also in his recreation . . . Sincerity marked his every act, look and word . . . what Gries practiced he preached, and what he preached he practiced. . . . He did not compromise with the truth. He never minced words. He had no patience with pretense. . . . Gries felt deeply. He was markedly emotional. He worked indefatigably. When he saw a duty he performed it. . . . All that Gries evidenced in life, he exhibited also in his literary style. His diction was clear. His sentences were terse and trenchant. He knew how to put things. One always knew where Gries stood on any issue. . . . He was neither ambiguous, verbose nor pompous. (Rosenau)

Rabbi Gries developed a large following. He continued to make

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changes unabated, all of them true to the theme of encouraging a wide variety of people to become more involved in Judaism. He led an initiative to place women on the temple’s board of trustees in 1914, rendering Tifereth Israel one of the first congregations in the country to permit this. He helped found and was first president of the Cleveland Council of Jewish Women, the social-welfare agency that aided East European Jewish immigrants who were settling in the Woodland neighborhood and that his mother-in-law Lizzie Hays, came to love. It was a forerunner of the Jewish Community Center (JCC). He formed The Temple Society, a non-denominational committee that organized lectures for Jews and Gentiles. Congregants and the community at large attended these events in great numbers, and its season tickets infused steady cash into the synagogue’s coffers.

Children were a very important constituency: they represented the future of Judaism and the temple. Rabbi Gries oversaw the construction of a gymnasium in a new wing of the temple, and the children flocked to it. They could wrestle, use the stationary rings, horizontal bars, parallel bars and pommel horse, and then change for services in its gleaming locker rooms. If children were drawn to the gym for the camaraderie and fun of sports, the reasoning went, they would also build a love for and connection with their temple.

And it worked. By 1902 a decade after Rabbi Gries joined the Tifereth Israel temple, the 80 children in Sunday school had grown to 764. They were diminutive proof that some, or many, Jewish people in Cleveland viewed Reform Judaism as a positive force for the future. By 1917 when the rabbi had been at the temple for 25 years, Tifereth Israel’s nearly 900 student Sunday school was believed to be the largest in the country, if not the world. Its growth was driven by a couple of factors. First Cleveland’s Jewish community numbered about 75,000 (compare this to 85 years prior when Simson Thorman

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was one of only two or three Jewish people in Cleveland). Second Tifereth Israel’s Sunday school welcomed non-Jewish children. Third it offered all kinds of activities for kids. In addition to the gym, a Boy Scout troop took root at the temple, which by 1913 was the largest Boy Scout troop in the city. Here was a rabbi who never really knew his mother and father and never had his own true childhood and who was deeply intellectual and driven—experiences and traits that would lead most people to believe he couldn’t relate at all well to children. That he brought many hundreds of children into the life of the temple each year is a testament to the extraordinary breadth of his capabilities.

It seems hardly a day went by that Rabbi Gries was not infusing his mission into each nook and cranny of spiritual life. When he became involved in an activity, he almost always rose to a leadership position. Whether or not he wanted to be a leader, he was so driven by his sense of mission and change that he ended up as one.

He became a charter member of the Central Conference of American Rabbis (CCAR) and soon enough became its president (1913-1915), a national honor. Locally he was a founding trustee of the Federation of Jewish Charities, formed by nine people in 1903 to be the central policymaking and fundraising agency for Cleveland’s Jewish community. Their bright idea was that by centralizing the difficult task of fundraising for charitable organizations, the federation would allow individual agencies to concentrate on what they did best—fulfill their missions and deliver programs. In its first campaign in 1904, the Federation of Jewish Charities raised $41,350, and today as the Jewish Community Federation, it raises amounts of approximately $30 million annually. Also locally Rabbi Gries sat on a committee of civic leaders (The Committee of Fifty) who formed the founding board of the Citizens League of Greater Cleveland, a group determined to

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make Cleveland a place with less political corruption and more civic action. Among other things this group gathered and published information and recommendations about political candidates. And relatedly, Rabbi Gries was a co-founder of the City Club.

By middle age, the rabbi was if not the acknowledged leader an acknowledged leader of the German Jewish community, and he also was involved in the Cleveland business community. He was a director of Citizens Savings and Trust Company, founded by Jeptha Wade and among the largest and most established banks in the Midwest. His father-in-law Kaufman Hays was a shareholder and former director, as was President James A. Garfield. And Rabbi Gries was a director of Cleveland Worsted Mills Company, the clothing company Kaufman Hays and several colleagues had taken over and turned around.

Above all as one person said of him, Rabbi Gries preached what he practiced. His exquisitely structured sermons, often delivered in a series that developed and built ever-deeper thematic elements, sought to connect contemporary American life with the Jewish religion.

Cherishing our history is important, his sermons made clear—we stand on the shoulders of the giants of our past—but Jews must add a strong, constant habit of looking toward a future, successful life in America. This forward-looking mentality was at the core of integration, happiness and success, he believed.

He didn’t shy away from politics if that was relevant to his point.

As World War I was being waged on the European front and US servicemen were preparing to go to war, he said in 1915 in his president’s address at the Central Conference of American Rabbis: Let us be driven not to despair, but to searching inquiry. What are the fundamentals of human society? Are there no ethical obligations of man to man, and nation to nation? Have the Commandments been repealed? What is the goal of the human race? Is it

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power and world mastery—or is it justice and freedom and human happiness? Never has it become more clear [sic] that the world cannot be guided by the doctrine of might, nor ruled by force of arms.

(Gries, Moses)

This is just one sermon—almost all of them were original creative, and direct. One of my great loves in high school was belonging to the debate team. I really enjoyed learning how to prepare and present both sides of an argument. Our team did well, including during my senior year when we went undefeated against our preparatory school opponents but did incur one loss (2-1) against the Yale freshman team. Yale’s team captain was, I wrote in a letter to my parents, “a paratrooper who had been dropped behind enemy lines and had talked the Germans who found him into surrendering. It’s pretty hard to out-talk a guy like that!”

Through my high school’s debate team, I developed an idea that I wasn’t too bad at public speaking, but after reading my grandfather’s sermons, which sit in boxes at the American Jewish Archives in Cincinnati, I realized I could never begin to speak like he did. His orations came alive, they were informed and inspiring, and his words revealed a man with deep skill in weaving together rich, complex topics in ways that were simple yet not simplistic. He understood humanity, it seemed to me, and I saw that he articulated his understanding of humanity in ways that made the world better.

I

Haysmar Again

n 1911 Rabbi Gries and Fannie moved from their Woodland Avenue home to Haysmar, the family compound Kaufman Hays had built in Bratenahl as a lakeside retreat. Robert and Lincoln spent

their adolescence surrounded by parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, three cousins (ages five through nineteen) and servants. Several acres

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of lawn leading to a bluff overlooking Lake Erie provided ample space for hide-and-seek and snowball fights. Indoors, the boys might have waged war with tin soldiers and constructed cities with Tinker Toys.

The family lived in a waterfront compound that was a Camelot.

The boys didn’t know this then, but later Rabbi Abba Silver, their father’s successor at Temple-Tifereth, would live in one of the Haysmar houses. Another part of the Bratenahl compound, the Marks home, was purchased by Eliot Ness, the famous prohibition and gangster investigator, in 1947, the year Ness ran unsuccessfully for Cleveland mayor. Years after imposing justice on bootlegger, murderer and mafia leader Al Capone, Ness retired as the safety director for Cleveland; he met and married his third wife, and they fell in love with the Marks’s lakeside sanctuary.

Outside this storied compound still inhabited by her elderly father, Fannie became involved in the World War I effort, serving with the Bratenahl division of the American Red Cross in its canteen service, which offered meals and a place of rest to troops en route to and from camps and points of embarkation. Several times a week Fannie donned her white dress, white shoes and a white apron with a red cross on the bib and put on her white hat and blue veil with the Red Cross shield on it. Women working at the canteen were instructed to smile and help the men preparing for war—the rules were that they must be “. . . always kind, smiling and cheerful with these men, encouraging them to converse.” I’m sure Fannie did this very well.

Further, she was not allowed to wear any jewelry or makeup and absolutely no perfume. Neatness, tidiness, professionalism and readiness to serve were paramount!

She and all women working at the canteen were told that canteen service was about more than food or drink. The majority of the men were aged 18, 19 and 20. Typically they wanted friendship, comfort

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and some mothering as they left their homes for uncertain futures.

Fannie’s own sons were teenagers, and it’s likely she couldn’t help but think about them as she went about her volunteering. After all, the war was lasting much longer than anyone had anticipated, and Robert was now of draft age. She must have hoped quite desperately that President Wilson would figure out a way to end American involvement in the European conflict.

I

Departure

t seems that during these years leading up to America’s entry in World War I, the weight of the world fell upon my grandfather’s shoulders. He could oversee a funeral, counsel a troubled soul,

deliver a deeply felt sermon, write a compelling white paper, build a world renowned Sunday school and reform the practices and beliefs of a congregation and community. Men who have this level of genius and leadership rarely take the opportunity to relax and cultivate a side of themselves that appreciates things smaller and simpler than changing the world. Rabbi Gries had precious little time to spend at home with Fannie and their teenage boys, which bothered him. His own childhood was cut short, and now maybe he wasn’t even enjoying his own children’s childhoods. Plus his father-in-law and unclein-law, Kaufman Hays and Martin Marks, with whom he and Fannie lived at Haysmar, passed away in 1916. They were great friends and colleagues to Moses, in addition to being family members. He oversaw their funerals, and their deaths were a blow to him. To add to this burden, Moses said several times that he felt helpless about the goings-on of World War I. Although the US would not formally enter the war until April 6, 1917, it already was wreaking political chaos and carnage worldwide. For example in 1915, Germany torpedoed

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passenger ships Lusitania and the William P. Frye, which took many American lives. War loomed on the collective mind.

I don’t know exactly what was on Rabbi Gries’s mind in 1916, but he shocked Tifereth Israel’s executive board with a letter he read out loud to them on September 27, the eve of Rosh Hashanah, and then later to the congregation: I have resolved, at the end of this twenty-fifth season’s service with The Temple, to retire from The Temple pulpit and from the ministry.

Holding sacred the memory of the first religious service following the dedication of The Temple, namely, the Confirmation and blessing of your children, it is my desire to end my public ministry on next Confirmation, with the blessing of the children. (Gries, Moses)

He said he would retire in June 1917. In his written announcement he didn’t offer a reason for his impending departure, but the record shows he might have suffered from burn-out. He needed more time with his wife and children away from the public eye.

The important tasks and the epochal development of the immediate future will demand from your Rabbi increasing labor and undiminished strength. . . . Twenty-five years I have lived a public life and for the public, with little thought of self and family. Now, in justice to myself and in fulfillment of my duty to my wife and children, it is wise that I choose a life less public. It is imperative that I secure freedom from the drive, pressure, and tension of my present life, and particularly from the strain and excitement incident to the enthusiasm of preaching, and the earnestness of public address. (Ibid)

Moses, the man, had spent nearly every moment since he was 13 years old either studying to be or serving as a rabbi and working the unrelenting hours required to be a great leader and reformer, healer, preacher, friend and administrator. He was spent. His mind still great

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but in need of downtime to relax at home on a weekend or weekday with his family. He had known only one state of mind, and that was to be intellectually intense. He was tired of working himself into the ground. In his late forties, he felt his own mortality. Kaufman and Martin Marks were gone. He himself had been orphaned. He needed to be with his family.

On May 20, 1917, he preached his last sermon before an audience that filled the temple to its doors. The fighting in Europe was reaching a bloody climax, and the US had formally entered the war. The people seated in Tifereth Israel’s wooden pews were questioning the existence of God and the purpose of religion, and Rabbi Gries, as he always did, addressed these issues head on, giving voice to the questions of how so many men could kill each other, where God was in the time of killing, and how it could be that “religion seemed to have failed so completely.”

He agreed religion was inadequate in explaining this level of cruelty and viciousness, but he said he still believed.

Our Judaism has always refused to believe in the doctrine of the fallen human race . . . It is not a part of my religion! I do not believe it! I believe in the perfectibility of the human race.

I believe no human beings are all bad, that even in the worst of them there is something of good. . . . I believe in righteousness. . . . I believe in the doctrine of human brotherhood—not as a lip service, not a phrase to sound beautifully through the world—but I believe in human brotherhood uniting men with men and nations with nations around the whole globe. And if there be one thing magnificent and outstanding in our own human life, it is that our America has stood as the teacher that nations might live side by side peacefully with one another. . . I have had faith in human brotherhood. . . . Nations must be free. Not for strife or mastery; not for war and subjugation, but nations and peoples must be free to utilize the blessings and resources of the earth upon which we live,

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and to develop the nobler gifts and higher purposes of our human life. There can be no true freedom until all our nations are free. . . I am ashamed to believe that evils are inevitable and unconquerable. . . . No! I have abiding faith, however dark the world may seem, however overwhelming the evidence and the testimony to the contrary—I have abiding faith in the cumulative human power of the conscience of the whole people—in the cumulative human power and in the cumulative conscience of mankind; that if we individuals and the nations of the world will be loyal to the higher life and to true standards of success . . . that within the time of our own life experience we may revolutionize the world and solve the problems which have perplexed mankind through the ages. . . There is hope for redemption, if we can believe in the goodness in every person, if we utilize our free will and reach out a hand to help those in need. Justice and brotherhood are what separates men and women from animals and from machines—it is where the divine spark is revealed. True empathy and brotherhood is what will save mankind in this hour of need, and will heal the wounds of the Great War. (Gries, Moses)

A few weeks later on June 3, Rabbi Gries ended his rabbinical career. Temple-Tifereth held a farewell testimonial service for the rabbi.

An honor guard of children and Boy Scouts was formed, original poems were written and recited, songs were sung and tributes were delivered.

He quickly withdrew from active rabbinical life, and shortly afterward, his successor, Rabbi Abba Silver, preached his first sermon as new rabbi of the temple (he had delivered a guest sermon once before). Like Rabbi Gries, Rabbi Silver was a great orator. Interestingly his background as a Zionist and hailing from a village in Lithuania was completely different from that of Moses. Despite their differences, the board and Rabbi Gries had the foresight to select a replacement that would serve Cleveland and the international Jewish com-

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munity well into the future. Rabbi Silver made a name for himself, including having significant influence in creating the State of Israel.

True to the Reform Movement’s precepts, it seems that Tifereth Israel rarely shied away from the opportunity to embrace change and new directions.

Fifteen months after his last sermon in 1917, Clevelanders learned that Rabbi Gries had died. He had suffered an attack of intestinal trouble on a Wednesday morning and had been taken to the East 55th Street Hospital. By nighttime on October 31, 1918, he had passed away, 50 years old, leaving behind Frances (42), Robert (18) and Lincoln (13). In their eulogies of him, people reflected that during the quarter-century of his tenure, temple membership had increased 500 percent.

I like to think that his humanism passed to future generations of Grieses. One thing that heartens me on this account is the story I was told by Anna Brown, who worked for the City of Cleveland in the 1980s and 1990s. She was responsible for fostering programs for the city’s elderly, but she happened to grow up in Rahway, New Jersey, the birthplace of Rabbi Gries. When she met me and heard my last name, she spontaneously told me about a kindness the Gries family showed to her grandfather, who was the first Negro person in their community to be accepted to and attend college. The Gries family had a clothing store in Rahway, she told me, and when the Grieses heard about the man’s acceptance to college, one of the Grieses called him.

“You need to have a ‘Sunday go to meeting suit’ for college,” this Gries said and invited Anna’s grandfather in to the store where he was measured and fitted for a nice suit. Anna said that her grandfather had recounted many times over the years that instead of going off to school in a pair of overalls, he went in a new suit.

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||| After her husband died and the Great War ended, my grandmother Fannie remained at Haysmar with her elder sisters’ families and her own boys. She kept busy with hobbies, such as attending lectures on musical appreciation at the Cleveland Institute of Music (CIM), and with volunteerism. Eight years after Moses’s death when Fannie was fifty years old, she fell in love with a man who was very bright and business-oriented. She married Dr. Leon Watters, a scientist and entrepreneur, and Rabbi Abba Silver performed the ceremony at Tifereth Israel.

Leon had started his career as a professor of chemistry at the California Institute of Technology and was a close friend of Albert Einstein. He had tried to bring the famed German physicist to Caltech, but another man, a Caltech professor and Nobel laureate, had objected, and that’s why Einstein ended up at Princeton. Leon also had founded the first US company to make x-ray machines, the Watters Lab and Hospital Supply Company, and because this growing company was based in New York, he had given up his post as a professor in California.

Fannie moved to New York City, and she and Leon lived in Manhattan together. She became active in the Jewish Federation in New York and seems to have become quite interested in the development of modern science, probably influenced by her husband. She was enjoying New York life and marriage to Leon when she suffered a heart attack. Leon and her sons raced to the hospital to be with her, but once there, they realized there was no hope for recovery, and they took her to her New York home to die. The next day, on Thursday, June 8, 1933, at age 56, she passed away. Her husband and sons decided they wanted gifts to be given not in the form of flowers but in donations toward a laboratory room and set-up. It was a progressive

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and intelligent use of funds; she would have been proud. I was only four when she passed, and because she lived in New York, I have no recollection of this remarkable grandmother, beautiful, brilliant, and having been married to two geniuses. I have often wished I could have known these grandparents, the brilliant Moses and remarkable Frances.

Nathan Louis “NL” Dauby, who dropped out of school to work in 8th grade, c. 1887. (Gries Private Papers) NL in May 1963, on the occasion of his 90th birthday: “Philanthropist, Merchant Prince, Civic Leader, still enjoying the fruits of a successful life.” (Gries Private Papers)

Bessie May Braham, who wed NL in 1901.

(Gries Private Papers)

Bessie graduated from Denver High School in 1898.

(Gries Private Papers)

Danny Dauby, c. 1932. (Gries Private Papers)

NL donated his Euclid Avenue mansion to the Cleveland Hearing and Speech Center in 1952 in memory of his son, Danny.

(Cleveland News, December 15, 1952)

The May Company store on Euclid Avenue in 1924.

(Photo courtesy The Cleveland Press Collection, Michael Schwartz Library, Cleveland State University)

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D

The Merchant

avid Dauby was a Civil War veteran who had fought as a private in the 23rd Regiment. This regiment went to Maryland and participated in two battles. First there was

South Mountain (September 1862), which yielded a Union victory, and three days later came Antietam, the bloodiest single-day battle in American history. The North presented over 75,000 troops, and the South, around 38,000, and by the end of the day, the combined total of dead, wounded and missing was nearly 23,000. Two years later David Dauby’s regiment was involved in a series of battles that helped end the Civil War. First in August 1864, there was Summit Point, West Virginia, then a month later, Berryville, Virginia, and then Fisher’s Hill, also in September. Finally in October came the most decisive battle, in Cedar Creek, Virginia. This was the battle for which General Sheridan won lasting fame. His troops rebuffed the Confederacy’s last major attempt to move north. The success of this battle helped President Lincoln win reelection.

After two years of battles, David Dauby’s regiment returned north counting a third of its men as dead (from both disease and battle).

Upon his return, David and Lena Loeb married and started a family, giving birth first to Jerome and two years later to Nathan Louis (1873). During the second birth, Lena died, and by necessity, David and his sons moved in with Lena’s sister (Caroline Wolf) and her three adult daughters. This provided stability for the boys while their father worked selling clothes at Nussbaum & Strauss. Their father remarried, but that union ended in divorce, and he seems not to have fared well enough financially that he was able to afford his own home.

David and Lena Dauby aren’t central to our story except to il-

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lustrate the immense sacrifices of the parents of those covered in this book. Fifty years prior in the 1820s, Simson Thorman’s parents accepted his desire to search for his dreams, although it meant they might never see him again. And 20 years earlier in the 1850s, Kaufman Hays’s parents allowed him and his siblings to come to America so they might forge a new future. It’s fitting here to honor David Dauby’s Civil War service as a gift as great to future generations as were the gifts of Simson’s and Kaufman’s parents. Further though each woman covered in this book gave birth to a future generation, no other died in childbirth, so I wanted to honor Lena’s sacrifice by acknowledging her death. Women like Lena gave birth in conditions that made bearing children quite dangerous—there was a 1-2 percent chance of death from each childbirth in the 1800s, and most women had multiple children (including Regina Thorman, who bore 11).

Nathan Louis (NL), second son of David and Lena, was poor and without a mother. He probably would have preferred to work over going to school from his earliest years, but new compulsory education laws required children to attend grammar school. Congress had decided that reading, writing and mathematics were needed so that immigrants could assimilate and the nation’s industrializing workforce could develop skills. Still while most children attended grammar school, only an elite few (under 7 percent) of youth attended high school. Ninth through twelfth grades were seen as preparation for college and professions such as medicine or law, which most immigrants, farmers and urban poor were not contemplating. They stopped their education at eighth grade so they could work in mines and factories, mind their parents’ stores, sell newspapers or do some sort of apprenticeship to learn a trade.

NL completed his obligatory grammar school education, quit

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school and got himself a full-time job. Within a year or so he was selling boots and shoes for R.H. Fetterman, and a year later, he was offered a job as a manager of Star Shoe Company. He managed Star Shoe for six years, where he performed well and gained hands-on experience buying merchandise. In 1899 he partnered with Emil Strauss to open Dauby & Strauss.

Dauby & Strauss was a shoe store strategically located on the corner of two iconic Cleveland streets, Huron and Ontario. This location was its first advantage. Its second advantage was that it featured set prices. Normally consumers bargained for a price on goods, and haggling was a skill consumers took quite seriously. There was another set-price store in town, but it didn’t sell shoes. Setting up a shoe store that had set prices provided the shoe buyer with a new retail experience. Gaining customer acceptance could be a challenge. NL knew this, and to gain their confidence, he told customers to look elsewhere to see if they could get a comparable value. Consumers soon figured out that Dauby & Strauss had indeed set its prices so low that they could forego bargaining.

Consumers came to trust the bargains Dauby & Strauss offered, and its shoes and boots sold like hotcakes. NL’s father had been a salesman, and either from this experience or through natural instinct, NL was a natural retailer. He knew how to locate his business well, buy the right shoes, price effectively, market goods, sell quickly and make rapid decisions about upcoming fashions. NL loved this business! He disagreed with Emil Strauss on pricing policies and advertising tactics, and he took the opportunity to buy him out. Here he was, in his mid-twenties (1899) and already successful. Meanwhile some of his classmates from grammar school a decade prior were only just commencing their post-collegiate legal, medical, and other careers.

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W

Bessie May Braham hen people met Nathan Louis “NL” Dauby, they quickly discerned that he was a man destined for success, and Bessie Braham was no exception. NL was short, bald

(from an infectious disease that he contracted in his mid-20s) and wore glasses. His eyes were expressive—notable for the inner energy and intelligence they seemed to emit—and Bessie’s family waxed eloquent about his remarkable skill in marketing and selling shoes, which was not so exciting to some people, maybe, but her family’s take on NL was about more than shoes. He was decisive and had an innate business sense. Not quite 20 years old and living with her family in their grand Cleveland home, she must have thought about how different her own background was from NL’s.

Bessie had been born in 1880 in Leadville, Colorado, which was at 10,000 feet elevation the highest city in the United States. Thanks to the discovery of silver there, it was transforming from a raw frontier town and mining outpost into a place of rapid riches. Bessie’s mother, Hattie Shoenberg, had been born in California and had married an English immigrant, Louis Braham. Louis had taken Hattie to Leadville where he became involved in business with David May, who owned a clothing store there. In this high mountain town, the nouveau riche flaunted their silver lode wealth partly with their clothing.

Men who by day wore overalls (they literally shoveled silver out of the ground) and thick woolen overcoats (which protected them from the sub-arctic temperatures) dressed altogether differently at night, attending events on the arms of attractive ladies with silk gowns, ornate jewelry and fur coats.

When the silver boom ended, David moved his operation to Denver. Louis Braham, the native Englishman, followed David and took his family with him. Bessie May Braham graduated from East Denver

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High School in 1898. David May subsequently acquired stores in St. Louis and Cleveland, and when Bessie was 19, her father, continuing to work with May’s company, moved the family from Denver to 1044 Willson Avenue in Cleveland. Two servants made sure the house operated well under the firm direction of Bessie’s mother. Because he worked so hard for the thriving clothing business, Bessie’s father was rarely home, and when he was home, he spoke a lot about business.

David May was not living in Cleveland, but her uncle, Louis Shoenberg, lived with them and also worked at May Company. Louis Braham and Louis Shoenberg discussed the drivers of May Company’s growth, constantly talking about modern retailing concepts such as merchandising, marketing, customer service, setting prices and other ideas that were unique to the American consumer experience. Bessie’s father presumably had a British accent that rang aristocratically in the sitting room while her Uncle Louis, who was originally from Dayton, interjected and added his own thoughts on May Company and the retailing industry.

Bessie’s life and comportment reflected her family’s success. She was proper and well-dressed, as well as girlish. She understood from an early age how women in the upper echelons of society should carry themselves and was naturally inclined to make friends with nearly everyone. This included NL Dauby. There may have been a wide difference in the background and heritage of Bessie May Braham and Nathan Louis Dauby, but there was unity in their prospects.

They fell in love.

On October 21, 1901, when Bessie was 20 years old and NL was 28, a small group of friends and family made their way to the Colonial Arcade, a landmark in downtown Cleveland. They filed through the brick front entrance of the arcade’s Colonial Hotel and then through an ornate entryway to a room marked by elegant gold-and-

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crystal chandeliers, wood paneling and large windows that let in an abundance of natural light. There Rabbi Moses Gries, the brilliant rabbi who headed the Tifereth Israel temple, officiated at their wedding. It was a Monday night and President McKinley had recently been assassinated, but Rabbi Gries was happy for this couple who was only a few years younger than his wife Fannie and him.

As Bessie walked down the aisle on her father’s arm, there was a marked similarity between the two of them. She had dark hair, fair skin and a seriousness to her that was belied this day by a faint smile.

She often wore her hair in a large, loosely pinned bun, and for her wedding, she added feathers to the bun, a delightful flourish. She wore simple jewelry, only a diamond fleur-de-lis brooch that NL had given to her for the occasion. The Plain Dealer social reporter in attendance noted that Bessie’s wedding gown was custom-made of embroidered chiffon over white satin. She carried white roses that, along with the white flowers adorning the hotel’s columns, created a pristine and almost heavenly feel. The centerpieces at the dinner tables were also made of white roses and maidenhair fern. Bessie’s cousin Vivian Shoenberg was maid of honor and wore a white and pink dress, while NL’s older brother Jerome was the best man.

This was a small, quiet wedding with a pristine, feminine feel to it, just as Bessie wanted, and afterward, she and NL set out for their cosmopolitan honeymoon trip through Washington, DC, New York and Boston. When they returned, they purchased a house at 1946 E. 73rd Street, located in an urban neighborhood just west of today’s Cleveland Clinic main campus.

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I

May & Merchandising

n 1902 shortly after NL married Bessie, the May Company leased its shoe department to him. This was a great partnership—the innovative shoe merchandiser meets the thriving department

store company. David May had long had an entrepreneurial spirit that was similar to NL’s, and his entrepreneurial background is worth explaining. David had initially traveled to Leadville to improve his health (the town was considered “the world’s sanatorium”), and shortly afterward had joined a mining party. He had quickly realized that there was more consistent money to be earned in the business of selling to the miners than there was in exploiting the mines themselves, which was a great insight. He and two friends began selling clothing out of a tent in Leadville. Their start-up, Holcombe, May, & Dean, Dry Goods and Clothing Merchants, offered a huge selection and did well. After twelve months in 1880, David May wanted to create a permanent structure. His colleagues didn’t, so David bought them out and established a permanent store on the spot called The Great Western Auction House and Clothing Store. He brought on Moses Shoenberg as his partner.

As it goes with mining towns, Leadville mined its silver until nearly nothing was left, and its population and wealth declined almost as rapidly as it rose. Sometime during these years, the partnership between Moses Shoenberg and David May ended amicably. Around 1889 David visited Denver (the nearest city) and came across a store that was folding. He bought it that day for $31,000 and created a new company, the May Shoe and Clothing Company. He restocked the merchandise and hired a brass band to play in the revamped store’s doorway. He thought this might draw in customers, and he was right. Within a week, he had sold all of the new merchandise.

Surmising he had a successful store on his hands, David invited the

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Shoenberg brothers to leave Leadville and join him in the growing store. This invitation made the company a family business. Why? Because David had married Rosa Shoenberg, who was Moses Shoenberg’s sister. Rosa and Moses had three other brothers: Joseph, Lee and Louis Shoenberg, and a sister Hattie whose husband was Louis Braham—Bessie’s father. It’s complicated, but the point is that all of these men were involved with the company from its earliest days, and this period in Denver is when David May’s store became a family enterprise. It was named May Shoe & Clothing Company and was mostly owned by David May but also partly owned and operated by various Shoenbergs and Brahams. Bessie’s uncles Joseph and Louis Shoenberg worked in the store with David, and her grandfather Elias, who had fought in the Mexican war in the 1840s, worked as cashier.

David May used a motto that other rising department store magnates used: “Give the customers what they want.” He took pains to be friendly with the store’s employees and seamlessly combined family, friendship and business. All five of the family-member executives (David May, the three Shoenberg brothers and Louis Braham) loved the business of clothing and saw huge opportunity in the industry, especially in being at the leading edge of national trends moving away from mom-and-pop shops and toward larger, national systems of purchasing, distribution and management. They developed a strategy to acquire stores and run them in “the May way,” which meant buying varied inventory, pricing low, marketing heavily and following local trends.

In 1892 they acquired two stores in St. Louis, the Famous Clothing Store and then The Barr Dry Goods Company. Their idea was that St. Louis was a burgeoning city and a point of convergence for adventurers heading west for silver, gold and other fortunes. It was the fourth-largest city in the United States after New York, Philadelphia

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and Chicago, and more railroads met at St. Louis than in any other city in the nation. David liked this situation and he made St. Louis his company’s new headquarters, keeping May Company in Denver as a store location. Bessie’s uncles Lee and Moses Shoenberg both moved to St. Louis to run the Famous-Barr store with David, while Uncle Joe moved to New York City to oversee business there.

The men next acquired a store in Cleveland in 1899, the E.R. Hull & Dutton Company, for $300,000 (about $8.5 million in today’s dollars). Louis Shoenberg agreed to oversee the Cleveland store as president, along with Bessie’s father, who became the store’s secretary and treasurer. The May Company acquisition plan—running acquired stores in the May way—and the growth strategies employed by the increasingly seasoned management team proved successful, and the company became the embodiment of modern retailing. It bought merchandise in bulk, offered deep discounts to sell goods quickly, advertised robustly and experimented with new locations.

Their branding strategy was different. Sometimes the stores they acquired took on the May Company name; other times, they didn’t.

The executives made the branding decision based on whether they thought local customers would be more comfortable with the name they always had known than with the new May name.

Every store under the May umbrella thrived, and the Cleveland store was no exception. Its two leaders, Louis Braham and Louis Shoenberg, proved to be excellent co-conspirators. In the early 1900s they renamed Hull & Dutton to May Department Store and expanded it to a five- or six-story building so it spanned the entire intersection of Ontario and Euclid Avenue near Public Square. It had a new three-story glass façade, bright flags atop its roof, was well lit inside and featured patterned tin ceilings and clean hardwood floors.

On the ground floor, its center aisle was flanked by waist-high cases

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displaying clothes and items for sale. Other goods were kept behind long wooden counters that resembled bars with stools for customers to sit on while they made their buying decisions. Service was extraordinary with the store’s managers instructing saleswomen to smile as they helped customers. The company hosted outdoor band concerts on the third-story balcony on Saturday nights, and crowds gathered in the street below.

Business was going great, but the two Louises who managed Cleveland knew they needed more talent. They could see from Dauby & Strauss’s success that NL had a marketing mind to rival their own, a prodigious work ethic and a winning attitude. They knew he was the man for the job. They leased him the shoe operations, and he thrived in this role. Within a couple of years, the shoe department he ran was earning the most money of any department at any May Company store anywhere in the country. May Department Store continued to expand, purchasing additional buildings and giving the store more frontage on Euclid Avenue. Its floors were full of silk coats; lawn shirts; patent colt-leather oxfords; claw-footed, white oak china dining tables; heavy wooden buffets with French mirrors and more. The management team celebrated the store’s success in ways beyond expansion. In 1906 the company declared a “May Company Day” and shuttled hundreds of employees by way of a streetcar parade to a picnic at Luna Park at Woodland Avenue and East 110th Street, where they played games and competed in fun contests.

In 1906 with several store expansions completed, NL’s in-laws asked him to run the whole Cleveland store. Louis Shoenberg, the existing head of the store, wanted to retire to France. To encourage NL to take the job, his in-laws offered him a very attractive salary.

To their great surprise, he refused. He explained to them that he instead wanted only a cut of the store’s profits. He saw himself not

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as a shoe salesman who purveyed footwear but as a businessman whose job was to produce profits. If the company wasn’t profitable, he shouldn’t get anything either. If it did well, he wanted his rightful piece of the action.

His in-laws must have asked themselves, “Was he crazy? Did he really want to do this?” They probably respected his belief in being paid only if successful, and then being paid handsomely at that. But there were downsides to the risk he wanted to take. He and Bessie had a daughter, Lucile, and although NL had thrived in his career so far, he had grown up so poor. His overconfidence and naiveté could be a major mistake. Why put his family’s livelihood at risk when he was being offered a respectable salary? Did he not understand that a comfortable salary represented the stability and status he had worked obsessively hard to achieve and that he needed to support his family?

Apparently he didn’t understand this. He wasn’t wired to be a salaried man without a sense of ownership and economic upside in what he did. He was wired to make money and confident he could do so.

His in-laws agreed to his request (it was more of a demand actually).

NL penned a deal in which he would get 10 percent of the store’s profits. If the store didn’t make a profit, then NL wouldn’t get paid.

If it made a large profit, he would be wealthy.

This action effectively made him a co-owner of May, and it turned out to be one of the most important decisions of his life. The early years of the 1900s were a time of volatility in the economy. In 1907 a panic triggered a crash on Wall Street and a run on banks across the country. At the same time, there was tremendous prosperity driven by railroads, steel, oil, automobile companies and more. In this environment, NL didn’t panic. He focused on what he could control.

He steadily used the May Company’s strategies of buying a wide va-

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riety of merchandise in bulk, advertising heavily and achieving quick turnover.

It was as if he had a sixth sense for how to be a clothing merchant.

Sometimes he walked outside the store in the evening and looked up Euclid Avenue. If he saw no potential customers on the streets, he closed the store for the night. He wanted to let employees go home early to rest for when they were busy. When times were busy, he did the opposite, making people work overtime. He was known as a fair but tough boss, immensely respected. When he took his full walk through the store, which he did twice every day, the sales clerks and others used a signaling system to let each other know that the boss was coming around. In fact a lot of people were terrified of him because, for example, if he saw a customer who was not being waited on or merchandise that wasn’t displayed well, he was not at all tolerant. He could and did let loose on people—it was said that when he got excited, the top of his head turned red—but he never publicly admonished them, waiting instead to take them aside and do this.

No matter what NL worked harder than anyone. Early on he set the tone by remaining behind at the store most nights to “do the books,” and he went home in the wee hours to sleep for a bit in preparation for the next day. As he managed the operations, he had no computers or calculators to run his numbers, no scanners and inventory-tracking software to tell him what to buy and when, no modern supply chain management techniques to help him understand when to remain lean on inventory and when to stock up, and only a fledgling retail industry association for the sharing of knowledge. He didn’t need these things. What he did was innate. He could walk into a warehouse of goods, peruse a floor filled with shoes (and other items), make an offer, and have the merchandise shipped to Cleveland where he set the prices. Sometimes he marked above cost,

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and other times he priced an item as a “loss leader.” He was decisive and personable, which endeared him to various suppliers. He also was right most of the time in his choices of what would sell and how to price items.

“If 10 percent of your buying decisions aren’t mistakes, then you’re not doing the right thing. You have to take risks,” he used to tell buyers and merchandise managers at the store. This should have been good news to them—a relief to know that the boss encouraged a mentality of experimentation. However he put a limit on his comment by adding, “But, don’t make 11 percent mistakes.”

That 90-percent-right formula was enough for him. He was one of the great buyers of his time, and although he reached the level of manager and executive, relying mainly on others to do the buying for May, he had a knack for hiring buyers with the same abilities. He grew the business faster than its co-founders imagined. The happy result for NL was that his idea to forego a steady salary for 10 percent of the store’s profits was exactly right. By 1910 NL was appointed a director of May Company’s national operation, and in 1911 the company went public (New York Stock Exchange). Sales for the nationwide chain that year were $14.8 million, and it had net profit of $1.5 million. By 1918 NL was a vice president of the company nationally (beyond the Cleveland store), and his father-in-law was a director of the company.

NL was confident that Cleveland would continue to grow and support a much larger May Company. Despite doubts that May harbored about another expansion, he implicitly trusted NL’s judgment and knowledge of the local market.

“I’m not sure I agree with you, but go ahead with it,” May said.

In 1915 NL completed a massive new building of 800,000 square feet on Public Square that cost $2.5 million and included a play-

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ground for kids and parking garage for patrons. The luxuriously appointed store was said to be the third-largest retail store in the country. The women’s shoe department felt like a salon with large leather chairs, burled wood paneling and young shoe salesmen dressed in fine dark suits. The millinery department was huge and inviting with hats displayed like art in a gallery within a long, uncluttered room. In total May Department Store went through ten expansions between 1900 and 1940 so that the store eventually took up a million square feet and was the largest department store in Ohio.

By the roaring 1920s, NL was in his 50s and on his way to being among the top five highest-paid retailers in the country. His earnings eventually reached at least $187,000 (in 1938), which is the equivalent of $3.1 million in today’s dollars. His salary was at the top of the department store field, and in 1941 he was noted as the fifth highest-paid executive in the retailing field after CEOs of Montgomery Ward, Hecht Company, Lord & Taylor and R. H. Macy & Company.

His skill, growth mentality and directness were complemented by a strong sense of empathy. Once a clerk was crying on the May Company selling floor because her pay had been stolen from the locker room. NL gave the department buyer a like sum and instructed him to give it to her as if it were from him (the buyer) rather than from NL himself. Another time, years later, he was in the hospital attending to his dying wife when he inadvertently came across a May Company salesperson. She was crying in the hospital corridor because her mother needed oxygen to stay alive and her family couldn’t afford it. NL arranged for oxygen to be delivered and he paid for it, a fine gesture made finer considering his own wife was dying.

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O

Home Life

n the personal front, in 1911 NL and Bessie built a new

home. They purchased an undeveloped half-acre lot at 11212 Euclid Avenue and hired the famous architects

Meade and Hamilton to build a 15-room mansion. By the time Bessie and NL moved into their new home, they had two children, Lucile, age 8, and an infant, Danny. Three Hungarian servants took care of the home, and Bessie’s mother, Hattie, moved in with them after Bessie’s father passed away in 1916. Bessie ran a fine home and combined the self-sufficiency of a girl from a mining town with the giving, selfless character of a woman raised to support her successful husband. She satisfactorily directed the people and personalities in the house and rarely raised her voice, creating a home marked by gentleness and caring.

The area where the Dauby family lived centered on the thriving intersection of East 105th Street and Euclid Avenue and was called the Wade Park Manor neighborhood. This was thought to be the cultural hub of Cleveland. In addition to museums, it had five movie houses and an ice rink considered to be the “largest undercover rink” in the world. The Wade family was developing land into residences with homes often built or purchased by the people who owned or had contributed to Wade Park institutions. As Lucile and Danny grew older, high-rise hotels began to be constructed nearby so that by the 1920s, there were five hotels: the Wade Park, Park Lane Villa, Fenway Hall, Sovereign and Commodore. During the Dauby’s time there, Case Western Reserve University’s medical school was constructed, and then The Cleveland Orchestra’s Severance Hall opened in 1931. The area also changed names from Wade Park Manor to University Circle.

Lucile and Danny enjoyed going to the Oakwood Country Club, a Jewish country club that their father had helped found in 1905, where

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they played croquet and other popular summer sports. The Daubys enjoyed the country club so much that although their primary residence remained in University Circle, they commissioned the construction of a second home at 1610 Oakwood Drive located in Cleveland Heights and abutting Oakwood Country Club’s golf course.

Locating near the country club was a wise real estate move. In the early 1900s not being accepted at gentile country clubs, German Jews in America were building country clubs and golf courses. They wanted to take advantage of the country’s enthusiasm for athletic competition. In Chicago on the shores of Lake Michigan, the elite German Jewish community spent $750,000—a huge sum—to build the Lake Shore Club, which promoted the creation of summer colonies nearby. The man said to be the wealthiest in Chicago, Julius Rosenwald, the owner of Sears, Roebuck & Company, was a member, as were many Jewish men. German Jews in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Los Angeles and Atlanta were doing similarly, creating and enjoying their own clubs.

Oakwood was Cleveland’s first major Jewish country club, and it quickly became, as its founders had envisioned, the metaphorical front porch for Cleveland’s German Jewish population. Spread across 19 acres and with an elegant veranda along its length, it included a nine-hole golf course, a grill room, a men’s locker room, a large living room, a dining room and a ladies’ parlor. Members could swim, socialize, drink and engage in the activity author Mark Twain dubbed “a good walk spoiled” (golfing). The Daubys maintained their Euclid Avenue residence mostly as a weekday residence for NL (it was closer to the May Company), but Bessie and the children also spent much of their time at their Oakwood Drive suburban home—summers, long weekends and likely many a weekday too. The Daubys’ Oakwood Drive home was almost as large as their Euclid Avenue mansion, and

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Bessie and Nate came to love the neighborhood. The peace and quiet was a respite from industrial Cleveland, and the country club served many a social and athletic need.

When Bessie and NL built their second home, Lucile was 15 and Danny was 7. Lucile was very content with a simple life, and from an early age, she put tremendous energy into being a good friend to people. For her making a friend and being a good friend were where the joy in life lay. Danny was different. He had incurred a forceps injury at birth, which left him deaf and with only one working lung.

In those days being deaf and having a major health issue meant he was very restricted—he would never hold a job and probably would never marry or have children. His parents knew he would always be dependent on them. They dedicated their efforts to helping him come as close as possible to a comfortable life.

There are blessings to handicaps, and with Danny’s, there were a few. First his mind was sharp. He mastered his multiplication tables with ease, memorized numbers and facts to an astounding degree, and poured over Cleveland Indians box scores in the newspaper as soon as he learned to read, memorizing the entire Indians’ statistics book. He was so numbers-oriented that if he were alive today, he could probably have worked in computer science, accounting or bookkeeping. Second he was sociable. He was a handsome, vibrant boy with a twinkle in his eye. He played with toy guns, teased his older sister, Lucile, as frequently as possible, and loved sitting on his mother’s lap looking at picture books and photo albums. And third he was not unambitious. He became a Boy Scout, a pastime that became hugely popular during WWI. With patriotism sweeping the country, joining the Boy Scouts was a way for many youth to do their part and contribute to war efforts. The goal of the Scouts was to teach boys to live useful lives, which was a goal many thought

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might be unattainable for a handicapped boy. But Danny was able to accomplish it in spite of his limitations. Wearing the newly designed Boy Scouts uniform of a button-down shirt and shorts, he worked as hard as any kid to earn merit badges for things such as lifesaving, art and scholarship.

Danny’s greatest limitation was that he could not communicate well. He had never heard the spoken word, and yet he wanted to speak so badly that he tried as often as he could. His interlocutors could not comprehend him, and in the 1920s there were no emails, text messages, interactive voice response systems, audio-visual impaired translations or text-to-voice technologies. Speaking (not typing; not signing) was critical to being heard. Danny learned how to use sign language, but no one else in his family knew it, so he read lips. Lip reading is not straightforward or easy, and even the best lip readers find it exhausting. Some words are impossible to distinguish from others, so a deaf person must use external cues to understand.

Another limitation, for lack of a better word, was that he had such great mental faculties that he understood deeply what normalcy he was missing. The Daubys could afford plenty of help for Danny, and so his constant companion, Earl, cared for him and took him wherever he wanted to go. Danny was obedient and lived a much subscribed life, but he occasionally expressed melancholy over needing constant supervision and knowing he wouldn’t ever have a girlfriend or wife.

He would always live with his parents. He didn’t show outward devastation, but the silent weight of always being reliant on family was with him.

These limitations and dissatisfactions are not surprising; the surprise was in how contented and normal was his life. I was 20 years Danny’s junior, but I could understand him better than most and we formed a close bond. In 1939 when I was 10, I went with Uncle

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Danny and Earl by train to Cincinnati for the final two World Series games, Cincinnati Reds against the New York Yankees, and the Yankees swept Cincinnati to win their fourth consecutive World Series title. With the staunch support and love from his family, he seemed to me to lead a life that was not unhappy. He attended Indians games with many people, frequently attended popular silent movies like Pollyanna, and traveled occasionally with his sister or parents. He grew into a handsome young man—tall, thin, with a charming grin, thick wavy hair, excellent taste in clothing (e.g., three-piece suits) and an occasional pipe or cigar in his mouth. He attended the Clarke School for the Deaf, a boarding school in Northampton, Massachusetts, one of the best schools for deaf people in the country, and was there from age 9 to 20.

NL was very committed to his two children, but when he wasn’t working or spending time with family, he could be found attending board meetings for non-profit organizations or social events at Oakwood Country Club. He was a staunch advocate of the well-dressed man because for a department store executive like him, dressing well was step one in being a good salesman. He also developed a yen for automobiles. Over the course of a decade, cars progressed from top speeds of 20 miles per hour to 45 miles per hour. Henry Ford and his burgeoning company were doing amazing work in Detroit, especially with their Model-T Ford. Nearly everyone had a car, and Cleveland was a hot spot for the massive industry. “More automobiles are owned by individuals in Cleveland, in proportion to population, than to any other city in the world, and most of these are Clevelandmade,” wrote one Cleveland newspaper, the Cleveland Leader, in the early 1900s.

Driving had its downsides though and required hardiness and mechanical skills. Cars were not very comfortable because they lacked

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suspension, and the rules of the road weren’t yet perfectly clear or widely understood. Starting the car using a crank was difficult and became more difficult, bordering on dangerous, as engines became more powerful. The force of the pistons coming to life could jam the crank suddenly backward. Broken thumbs were the most common injury, and broken wrists and arms were not uncommon. To avoid injury, motorists were advised to hold the cranks palm-up with all of their fingers on one side (instead of wrapping the thumb around the other side like you would when holding a baseball bat). Hand cranks also meant that you had to have a certain amount of physical strength to operate an automobile. One morning in all likelihood hurrying to get to work, NL broke his arm turning the crank on his car. He rushed to the doctor’s office to have his arm set, and to his immense displeasure, arrived at work two hours late, said to be the only time he was ever late for work in his fifty-year career.

Commodore Beaumont (aka Louis Shoenberg), with his son, Dudley, in a car made by French manufacturer Panhard et Levassor (one of the first car manufacturers in the world), c. 1905. (Photo courtesy WRHS)

Commodore Beaumont and his wife, Helene Thomas, at their home, “Eilenroc,� on the coast of France, c. 1931. (Photo courtesy WRHS)

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N

Beautiful Mountain

L and Bessie Dauby were inextricably entwined with the Shoenbergs. There were six of them in Bessie’s mother’s generation. There was Hattie, married to Bessie’s father,

Louis Braham; and Rosa, married to David May; and then there were four brothers, namely Lee, Lou, Moe and Joe. They were involved with May Department Stores and helped bring NL into the business after he married Bessie. One of them in particular was immensely influential on NL Dauby’s life: Louis Shoenberg, the uncle who lived with Bessie Braham and her parents when she was growing up. Louis Shoenberg was a mentor to NL, bringing him in to lease the shoe department and then encouraging him to move up the ladder and replace him in the role as general manager. Philanthropically he and NL became equals who worked together to give back to many organizations.

Indisputably Louis Shoenberg was from early on in their marriage very important in the lives of NL and Bessie, and he eventually became one of NL’s closest friends. Louis was born in Dayton, Ohio, in 1857, about 15 years before the Wright boys, the fathers of flight, were born there. (As already mentioned after high school, Louis, two of his brothers and their father went west to Leadville, Colorado, and joined May in his new clothing store operations, the May Shoe & Clothing Company.)

Louis Shoenberg married Flora Rothschild, had a son, Dudley, in 1885 and then moved to new geographies as the May Company moved: first from Leadville to Denver, and then from Denver to St. Louis. In his personal life, he met with tragedy. His wife contracted tuberculosis and passed away when their son Dudley was six years old, and then Dudley contracted tuberculosis. The reason tuberculo-

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sis was called “consumption” was that sufferers became pale and lost a lot of weight as the disease “consumed” them. Wealthy victims of the disease often exiled themselves to sanatoriums where they could breathe fresh air, rest and eat healthy food as they tried to delay a likely death. Dudley ultimately died of tuberculosis.

Louis moved to Cleveland in 1899. His job was to oversee the newly purchased May Company of Cleveland, and he did this for seven years. He spent $35,000 to purchase a Pullman automobile, the largest car in the world. In fact it was more like a personal train with three sections, including sleeping car berths, a dining room, kitchen and cupboards, and was lavishly furnished in mahogany and leather.

His purchase made national headlines, and he toured New York and attended the St. Louis exposition in his new Pullman, inviting friends to join him along the way.

He was having too much fun to continue working unabated, and NL was doing a fantastic job to boot. He asked NL to take over as general manager in 1906 so Louis could semi-retire. He and his brothers were opportunists though, and the next year, the panic of 1907 presented them with a great opportunity. People started withdrawing their money from banks, forcing the banks to close and creating a scarcity of credit. One of Louis’s friends, Henry Ittleson, realized that there was no better time to start a company to extend credit and make investments. Ittleson approached Louis, two of his brothers and David May. The novel concept appealed to them, and each put up $25,000 in capital and took 20 percent of the company as founding investors. The remaining one-fifth went to Henry Ittleson, the founder. This venture capital-type transaction was innovative.

The business model they financed also was innovative. The Commercial Credit and Investment Company opened its doors for business in St. Louis in 1908. The company created the first car-financing

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program in the United States, partnering with Studebaker, the automobile company, to create a new program in which buyers could put down one-third of the cost of a car and then pay the rest in eight monthly installments. The auto industry was in a huge boom, and this auto financing program was a big money maker. Within three months of opening, the company had 22 new clients, marking the beginning of a phenomenal growth streak. By 1915 the company was so large, it needed to move to the center of finance in the United States, New York City, and it renamed itself Commercial Investment Trust or CIT. CIT later (in 1924) went public, and then much later, by 2013, it reached yearly revenues of nearly $5 billion, employed 3,700 people worldwide and was ranked 489 of the Fortune 500.

At age 55 because of May Company’s and CIT’s success, Louis Shoenberg was truly ready to move on to new things. In 1912 he retired from work life and chose to move to Antibes Juan-les-Pins, France, a Mediterranean town being modernized by the American billionaire Frank Jay Gould. It was rapidly becoming a favorite winter playground of writers and artists. Painters Pablo Picasso and Claude Monet spent much time there, as did novelists F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway. When WWI was raging and Louis was in France with his markedly Germansounding name, his name became a liability. France was at war against the German and Austro-Hungarian Empires, and he knew his name was a danger to him. He needed to change it.

Shoenberg is a compound noun in which “schoen” (or “shoen”) means “beautiful” and “berg” means “mountain.” In French, beautiful is “beau” and mountain is “mont.” By the laws of linguistics, Louis Shoenberg became Louis Beaumont. As a matter of history across the allied nations in both world wars, many thousands of people changed their names, and many hundreds of words were changed out of fear, allegiance or nationalism. In the United States, the city of

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Berlin, Michigan, was changed to Marne, Michigan. Chicago German Hospital became Grant Hospital, and Germania Life Insurance Company became Guardian. Orchestras replaced music by German composers with French or other ones. German was not allowed to be spoken in schools. In France considering its invasion by German forces in 1914, the charge of being of German heritage and possibly loyal to the Germans was far more serious. Many thousands of French civilians were accused of being traitors and executed. A German name could certainly be cause for a charge of treason. Beaumont was a grand man who took his name change in stride, but it was no light decision at the time.

In Antibes Juan-Les-Pins, he bought a yacht joined a yacht club and became its commodore. As he walked the grounds of the yacht club, neatly mustached, impeccably dressed and wearing a nautical hat to cover his bald spot, members naturally called him “commodore.”

People agreed that this term of address suited him so well that even outside the rarified air of the yacht club they would call him Commodore Beaumont. The moniker stayed with him the rest of his life.

Louis Shoenberg was now Commodore Beaumont.

In Antibes Juan-les-Pins, Commodore Beaumont fell in love with a woman scandalously younger than he was, in fact, less than half his age. Helene Thomas was a one-time opera singer—curvaceous, blonde and single—and spent her time at cocktail parties thrown by the who’s-who of France’s stunning Cote d’Azur. He was content to remain lovers with this younger and taller woman, but Helene would not have it. According to family lore, she issued him an ultimatum to marry her or go their separate ways. He was getting quite old and felt he might be afforded ever fewer opportunities to court lovers in the future, and with that general line of reasoning, he agreed that they would marry.

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By this time the company he had co-founded, CIT, was a large, growing financial services company. Seven years before his marriage, the company had reached over $10 million in assets. Three years prior to his marriage (in 1926), it had gone public. Between CIT and May Company, Louis had a lot of money. He required an “antinuptial” agreement with Helene before he married her, a copy of which I have. In this he stipulated that Helene would in any and all cases receive 5 percent of the trust he had set up (he also set up a philanthropic trust, which will be covered shortly). If she was not cohabiting with Louis at the time of his death, then that would be all she received. If she was co-habiting with him, she would receive much more. Commodore Beaumont may have had a weakness for boats, cars, trains, airplanes and women, but he was no dumbbell!

As if they were movie stars, the plans for their marriage and wedding were kept secret, and in London in 1926, when he was 69 years old and she was 32, they wed. Helene adored jewelry and one ring was not enough—on their wedding day, the Commodore also gave her a necklace worth 25,000 British pounds (about 1.23 million in today’s British pounds or about $2 million). Money matters aside, they likely did love each other, as evidenced by the fact that they remained married until he died 15 years later and were a draw to many friends for years. People loved spending time with them. Helene lived for another forty-eight years after her husband’s death and never remarried. I think they were pragmatic, decisive and prone to showiness, and also quite in love.

The newlyweds purchased a 19th century villa, which they named Eilenroc (this is the maiden name of the original villa owner’s wife, Cornelie, backwards). Eilenroc was an enormous, white neoclassical structure with Corinthian columns whose splendor was surpassed only by its setting at the southernmost tip of the Cap d’Antibes. Ei-

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lenroc’s land featured a pine grove, olive grove, orchards of apples, citrus and exotic fruits, and a superb rose garden, all of which extended down to the sea.

In this home the Beaumonts became leading socialites in the Riviera scene, decorating the home mostly with furniture they purchased from the sale of the Rothschild estate in London: American businessman Louis Beaumont bought the property in 1927, and his wife Hélène, an elegant woman of great beauty, spent the next three years redecorating the villa in purest Art Deco style, working with celebrated interior designers. All was comfort and luxury, and coal-fired central heating was installed.

A much-loved hostess, Mrs. Beaumont welcomed maharajahs, kings and European royalty, including Grand Duke Nicholas of Russia, as well as stars such as Greta Garbo and Rudolph Valentino. The Fitzgeralds were also regular guests at her house parties and lavish receptions. (Levison)

The year they married and purchased the house was around the same time that Ernest Hemingway and the F. Scott Fitzgeralds were sharing the Fitzgerald villa right nearby. Fitzgerald had become quite famous the year before, which is when he published The Great Gatsby, his masterpiece, and had started work on Tender is the Night in Juan-les-Pins. Hemingway meanwhile was carrying on a torrid affair (his wife was back in America) that met the disapproval of his friend, F. Scott. The lifestyle was good for Hemingway’s career, however, as presumably some combination of the romantic confusion, Mediterranean sun and absinthe (an anise-flavored liquor) fueled the writing for one of his best novels, The Sun Also Rises.

The Beaumont couple was well known and liked by the princes, princesses, bankers, millionaires, authors and painters that frequent-

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ed the French Riviera. When Helene sold the villa many decades later, the town of Antibes purchased it and turned it into a tourist attraction, advertised typically as “famed Eilenroc.” Her jewelry was acquired by Sotheby’s auction house, which compared its magnificence to the collection of the Duchess of Windsor in its sales literature. As World War II approached, the couple moved to the United States and inhabited large and beautifully decorated homes in Palm Beach, Florida and New York City. I remember visiting Commodore Beaumont in Florida in the early 1940s when he was 85 years old and I was 12, and even then, he struck me as a very dapper guy, a man with charisma and someone who made an impression. ||| In his post May Company years, which were many, he committed himself to a number of causes. He became avidly philanthropic about places that meant something to him. Having been born in Dayton, Ohio, one of his causes became aviation. The two Wright brothers were tinkering with flying machines in his birthplace around the turn of the century, and in 1903, they “invented” the airplane. Beaumont couldn’t have been more excited. He became a member of the board of governors of the Aero Club of America and one of the foremost figures in the promotion of aircraft production and development in the United States. As a leading promoter of an around-the-world air course, he traveled from Paris to Shanghai to Manila to map and station a course that circumnavigated the globe. He did not get paid to do this; indeed, he paid his own way.

When World War I broke out, he believed that he could help through his passion for airplanes. He financed and formed the Allied Aviators Club, which had two locations: one on the Champs-Elysees in Paris and another at Colombey-les-Belles on the American front

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in northeastern France. These were locations where aviators could socialize and discuss matters related to aviation so the Allies could use aviation to their advantage. What’s more he paid to have a monument built for Wilbur Wright in Le Mans, France. He wanted to celebrate aviation and build a greater culture and basis of knowledge around it.

Also in France (in Neuilly-sur-Siene), Beaumont supported the American Hospital, which was created in 1906 to give expatriate Americans a place to receive medical treatment in their own language. (It is a state-of-the-art facility still in operation today.) To honor his son, Dudley, who died from tuberculosis in his twenties, Louis donated money for the creation and ongoing operations of the Dudley C. Shoenberg Memorial Farm, which provided food to a local hospital for consumptives. The farm was built on 70 acres in Denver, Colorado, and included a residence, barn, milk and ice houses, a herd of Holstein cows and 3,000 chickens. At the time nutritious food was considered vital to treating TB, and the farm provided an abundance of fresh eggs, milk and cream to the patients of the hospital. When the farm later became cost prohibitive and not modern enough for the hospital’s needs, he donated most or all the money the hospital needed to build a nurses’ home in 1922. Louis additionally donated the Joseph Shoenberg building to support Denver’s National Jewish Hospital (for tuberculosis). The Denver press described him as “multimillionaire, merchant, prince, philanthropist, aviation enthusiast and co-founder of the May Department Stores company.”

Cleveland was the place where he had spent nearly a decade of his life, including some of his most productive years in terms of earning money and building a company. He donated generously to the laboratory and work of a physician-scientist at Mt. Sinai Hospital,

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Harry Goldblatt, whose research as the director of Beaumont Research Laboratories led to the discovery of the cause of primary hypertension. The Goldblatt unit became an international standard of measurement for levels of human renin (which is a cause of hypertension), and Goldblatt received many awards.

Louis became a patron of the arts as well. In 1939 he gifted a significant painting to the Cleveland Museum of Art, entitled La Danse Dans un Pavillon by Jean Antoine Watteau, a work of art described as “one of the most outstanding ever received” by the museum. It was valued at $110,000 at the time and still is on display today. He also donated to the Cleveland Orchestra, Mt. Sinai Medical Center and the City Club.

However his largest philanthropic contribution, that of the Beaumont Foundation, was yet to come.

B

Letters

essie Dauby long suffered from “general miseries,” which was a term for any number of chronic illnesses that were not understood or diagnosable at the time. In those days of health

care as compared to today, a person was expected to live as best they could with what ailed them, and instead of taking pills or consulting doctors, they usually were advised to rest and get a “change in air.”

Because of her condition, Bessie expected and prepared for an early death. In 1919 she wrote her estate executors requesting that certain relatives jointly “advise as to my children’s upbringing. . . . I ask this great favor of these dear friends, knowing they will do their best by Lucile, who is now 16 & will for several years need womanly care & advice & for Daniel who is now 9 & who is handicapped by lack of hearing will require love and motherly care probably all his life.”

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She wrote her children that same year from “The Country House,� which most likely was their Oakwood residence: My dearly beloved children, May God grant you always health, happiness and contentment! My faith in the Hereafter is firm and I feel we shall meet again! So do not grieve for me but if when you read this your dear father also is no longer living, try to emulate him, to be always honorable, kind, good and generous! Enclosed is a crude request to dear friends and relatives to try to take the place of your father and mother. Having no near relatives, it has worried me as to your welfare after our deaths. These dear friends, I am sure will do their best by you, so heed them well. For each other, I hoped you will always have the sisterly & brotherly love and devotion that father and I could wish to see, had we lived. . . . Good-bye, my darlings. Mother (Braham)

Five years later, on Sept. 1, 1924, she wrote a letter to Lucile: Be the fine woman I should like to see you being to your father, brother & husband all a daughter, wife & sister could be, nobly fulfilling your duty, being as unselfish as possible. . . . Please assure Daniel of my everlasting love & affection & try to give him what his affectionate nature will lose by my being gone—unbounded love & affection and attention. . . . (Ibid)

In 1927, she wrote on the back of the original 1919 letter an additional handwritten note: In the years that have passed since writing, Lucile has married & is now a mother & perhaps may not require the counsel before requested, but Daniel, although seventeen is still such a child & many difficult problems confront us. May I then ask the able counsel that I feel sure these dear friends will give willingly and lovingly. (Ibid)

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And on Oct. 7, 1927, she wrote a letter: Darling Lucile, Today is Yom Kippur & not feeling very well. I have not gone to Temple but have just finished reading the always to me heartbreaking but consolatory Memorial Service, the more so because of dear Uncle Dave’s passing a few months since and the never healing wound of my dear mother’s passing. I am not destroying the enclosed farewells to you because they almost express what I most wish to say to you now. God has seen fit to restore me to health and to permit me to see your happy marriage and to know our adorable Betty Frances. For these and many more blessings I fervently thank Him and beg Him to bless you, Bob, Daniel, Betty and your unborn children with his choicest blessings. May you teach your children to love, honor and believe [in] dear God, whom I know will one day reunite us. Mother. (Ibid)

Bessie was quite prepared for death, and she must have felt quite ill, having none of the modern diagnoses or medicines we take for granted today, especially with world-class health care institutions like Cleveland Clinic and University Hospitals so close. If I experience any problem, I can be fully diagnosed and treated, and quite pain free within days. Yet Bessie lived with some chronic, undiagnosed condition for years. Finally nine years after that last letter in 1938 when she was 59 years old, she passed away from unknown causes.

She had been a quiet, generous woman by NL’s side, an able manager of domestic affairs, a wonderful mother to Lucile and Danny, and she had always reserved her greatest joys and sorrows for her son.

Danny’s capabilities astounded NL and her, but the boy’s health had always worried her deeply.

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F

Philanthropist

our years after Bessie’s death, NL met with deep sadness again.

As his son, Danny, approached his thirties, Danny spent a few winters in the dry, desert climate of Arizona trying to overcome

a chronic condition that left him ill for many years. In 1942 while in Tucson, he contracted pneumonia and was brought to Cleveland and put under an oxygen tent, his one lung literally working its life out to support the body it inhabited. On his 32nd birthday his lung failed completely and he died. He was buried near his mother, Bessie.

Upon the reading of Danny’s will, NL discovered his son had made a move several years earlier that some might find to be gutsy but NL thought was just plain stupid, and I can’t say I disagree with him.

Before she died Bessie had directed that her money go to Lucile and Danny with the understanding that they both would put the money into a trust fund and would use NL’s best friend, the great lawyer, Edgar Hahn, to help them establish the trusts. These trusts were supposed to preserve the principal, but in a surprising move, Danny had amended his so that his nieces and nephews (Lucile’s children) would receive their entire principal at age 21.

NL raced to find Hahn. He asked his lawyer and best friend what in God’s name had happened. Hahn explained that Danny had asked him not to create a trust and to change his will to reflect this. NL knew about the thought Bessie had put into making sure her children were well cared for throughout their lives. He thought it wasn’t Hahn’s place to allow for changes in Bessie’s desires, and he let him know this. Hahn explained to NL that Danny was a grown man who had a right to change his will, and that as a lawyer with the obligation of attorney-client privilege, he could neither prevent Danny from doing so nor inform NL of Danny’s actions.

NL was furious. He wasn’t upset simply because he had been over-

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ruled by Danny on a major decision (although that might have been part of it). NL did not believe his grandchildren should inherit funds outright at age 21, and he did believe that the lack of a trust set up a situation for squandering. Although I was a beneficiary of Danny’s changes, NL was absolutely right, and some siblings handled their good fortune inappropriately. To Danny however, it was the opportunity to exercise in death the independence he never fully had in life.

Prior to Danny’s death, NL had provided substantial monies to the Cleveland Hearing and Speech Center, a place that became quite dear to our family. A decade after Danny’s death, NL donated his Euclid Avenue mansion to the Cleveland Hearing and Speech Center in his son’s honor. My mother (Danny’s sister, Lucile) served on the Hearing and Speech Center’s board, as did I. In the 1960s I led a campaign for a new facility (NL’s mansion was no longer serviceable).

When that newer facility at the intersection of Euclid and 117th Street no longer was sufficient, I co-chaired another campaign in 2010 to build new facilities. There was also established in 2006 the Daniel D. Dauby Award in memory of my uncle and the contributions my family made over the years to the center.

The same year Danny died, Commodore Beaumont passed away, and this is where Commodore Beaumont and NL, who were uncle and nephew, business partners and friends, intersected in a way that tangibly benefited Cleveland for the next 35 years. The two were different in style—Beaumont was showy and gregarious, whereas NL was modest and quiet. In fact NL once wrote to a university president, “Throughout my career I have avoided publicity, in fact, I might say I am allergic to it. If I have made any contribution to the welfare of the Community of Cleveland, I would prefer not to have it publicized for it would take away the pleasure of doing things if I could not continue to do them behind the scenes, and I would like to

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spend the balance of my life in the same manner.”

But NL and Commodore Beaumont were very similar in their philanthropic visions. They had come up with the idea of forming a foundation that would commence upon Commodore Beaumont’s death.

When the commodore died Nathan became a founding trustee of the Beaumont Foundation, capitalized with $16 million, a sizeable fortune in 1942, all of it Beaumont’s. First and foremost Commodore Beaumont and NL believed in giving away money to those who needed it when they needed it rather than building up assets. They set up the foundation so that it must, by its articles of incorporation, give away all of its money within 35 years. “Leave an impact now,” was their line of thinking, not a hundred years from now.

NL Dauby, the commodore’s successor at May Company and good friend, was a founding trustee and president of the foundation, and NL’s friend and lawyer, Edgar Hahn, was a director. Under NL’s leadership, the foundation provided grants across a variety of social needs. The Beaumont Foundation was for many years (from 1943 until 1978) the largest general-purpose private foundation in the city, its value rising by 1970 to $34 million (equivalent to about $200 million today). Nearly every year the Beaumont Foundation could be counted on to provide millions of dollars in grants to select health care, education and performing arts organizations. These two men and their energetic goodwill enhanced the missions of scores of Cleveland organizations, and in turn, the lives of thousands of Clevelanders.

I remember the last year of the Beaumont Foundation’s existence—1978—and thought my grandfather would be pleased to know that it had remained true to his and Commodore Beaumont’s wishes by giving away all of its money: it distributed nearly $7 million to about 300 organizations, with Case Western Reserve Univer-

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sity receiving one of the largest gifts at half a million dollars. In 1978 35 years after it was created, it had executed its grand finale and was shut down.

The grand finale and shut down of the foundation were years later, but with his work at the Beaumont Foundation in the 1940s, NL was busy. He “retired” from May Company in 1945 at age 72. He continued to go to the office each day, but his new hours were 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.—at 30-40 hours per week, much shorter hours than he had put in during the prior forty years. In his “retirement,” he continued to be a force to be reckoned with and maintained his notoriously active presence in the store, touring regularly and wielding his supervisory authority when merchandise or customers were not handled correctly. Because he was “retired,” he of course took no pay for his labors. He also worked vigorously on his philanthropic endeavors. He created the Beaumont Scout Reservation: 1,260 acres of forests, fields, wetlands and lakes to be used for camping by Boy and Cub Scouts and their families. And he served as a trustee of the Jewish Orphan Asylum, the organization Lizzie and Kaufman Hays had cared so much about.

He maintained this schedule for 15 years until 1961 when he was 88 years old, and he stopped going to the May Company each day, choosing instead to take an office at the National City Bank building a few blocks away from May. Against the advice of others who thought he would be wise at age 88 to make short-term financial commitments, he signed a three-year lease on the office space. He filled his work week with matters related to the Beaumont Foundation, working assiduously to give money away to those who needed it. He had an absolute mission to get money out to the community, and his days were spent meeting with people who came to his office seeking a grant from the Beaumont Foundation. Not only did

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he never tire of these meetings, but he was fueled by them. He had grown up poor and had gone to work young—he understood and respected the humility required to request money. Being unschooled put him in a league with many of his grantees and was a major difference between him and most people with whom he dealt in the business world. This letter illustrates the extent to which he always held a place in his heart for those who grew up poor: January 17th, 1961 From Mrs. Marietta Jones Trumbo 10010 Ostera [sic] Avenue, Cleveland, OH To Mr. Nathan Dauby in reading about your retiring as May Co. Exec. I began thinking of the old Ohio or Cleveland familiar family name of Dauby and I would like to know if this Dauby Family is the family which had the shoe store on the north east corner of Ontario and Euclid Avenue. About 1900 my brother Samuel Jones secured his first job at the Dauby and Strauss located at that place.

We lived in Corlett Place a short court running east from Erie Cemetary [sic] and if so thanks again for [the] shoes [you] gave to my widowed Mother and her three children including me. We all attended Brownell School. God Bless you in your work.

Marietta Jones Trumbo. We are colored. (Trumbo)

Remembering that he was unschooled, Nathan refused to accept any of the honorary doctorate degrees offered to him (John Carroll University tried to offer him degrees twice, in 1949 and 1955, and others also were offered). Honorary doctorates were not unusual for people who held high positions and had donated money. The normal response when offered one was to graciously accept. But NL felt that never having made it past eighth grade, he didn’t have the education to merit a doctorate degree, even if it was only honorary. He would not accept them.

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NL lived through the three-year lease at the National City Bank building, and at age 90 he renewed it for another three years. He died at age 90 in 1964, and he left one-third of his estate to charity. He was driven, energetic, gutsy and generous. He had a brilliant merchandising mind. He was a good friend and great husband. But of all the words that could possibly make up NL Dauby’s epitaph, “modest” might be the most fitting. Louis Seltzer, the head of the Cleveland Press, was a close friend and wrote of him on his 90th birthday celebration: But Greater Cleveland in the main saw little of Nathan L. Dauby.

He preferred it that way. The newspapers made few references to him. He preferred it that way. There were few “state” occasions fixed up in his honor, although there were innumerable reasons for doing so. He again preferred it that way. . . . That’s the way it has always been—no parties, no banquets, no big occasions. . . . He is a great man. He is a man of character, of integrity, of modesty, of warmth, of understanding, of deep devotion to family, to friends, to community, to country. (Seltzer)

LIVING LARGE The Fourth Generation

Lucile Dauby, age six, 1908.

(Gries Private Papers)

Robert “Bob� H. Gries with his father, Rabbi Moses Gries, in Bratenahl, c. 1905. (Gries Private Papers)

Three generations. Back row, standing, from the left: Robert Hays Gries and Rabbi Moses Gries.

Sitting, from the left: Kaufman Hays, Lincoln Gries, and Fannie Hays, c. 1913. (Gries Private Papers)

Lucile Dauby married Robert Hays Gries in June 1924. (Gries Private Papers)

Robert Hays Gries and Lucile Dauby Gries in Atlantic City in 1924, the year they married.

(Gries Private Papers)

Robert Hays Gries in WWII. (Gries Private Papers)

Robert and Lucile at home in their “china room� in 1964.

(The Cleveland Press)

Owners of the Cleveland Browns, 1961: (left to right) Arthur Modell (chairman of the board), Robert Gries (treasurer), coach Paul Brown, Dave Jones (president), and Rudy Schaefer (vice president).

(AP Photo/Julian Wilson)

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A

Robert Hays Gries

s World War I was raging and his mother was volunteering at the canteen in Cleveland, my father, Robert “Bob” Hays Gries, entered Case School of Applied Science. (In this

book, I’ll refer to him as “Bob” when he is interacting with others and “Dad” when he is interacting with me, and I’ll do the same when referring to my mother, Lucile Dauby.) The engineering school was located in Cleveland only a few miles from his family home.

Bob’s father, Rabbi Moses Gries, had passed away a year earlier; his grandfather, Kaufman Hays, less than two years earlier; and Martin Marks, his uncle, in the period between those two deaths. All had lived in Haysmar, and now his mother was there no longer surrounded by the men in her life. Case School of Applied Science was several miles from Haysmar, and proximity to his mother may have been a good thing for both of them.

During his freshman year, Bob applied to and was accepted at Yale University, a reverse commute from that of his ancestor, Simson Thorman, who came to Cleveland via the Erie Canal and Lake Erie in the 1830s. Bob was ambivalent about his field of concentration.

When he had been an upper school student at University School, a private school, his father had told him that a man who had options should aim to enter the fields of medicine, law or business, each one a generally respectable career choice. Don’t squander the gift of education was the general idea Bob inferred.

But Bob had told his father that none of those fields appealed to him. They were too traditional. He was a big thinker who loved reading, especially history. He wanted to embrace everything the world had to offer. In the United States, people were inventing engines, automobiles, electric lights and airplanes. Hearing of this interest from his son, Rabbi Gries had told Bob that if he didn’t want to enter one

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of the three major professions, and if he wanted to be a success in life, he should concentrate on engineering. It was a little more plebian than law, medicine and business, but acceptable. So in a compromise, Bob chose engineering at Yale. While he devoured history books in his spare time, his days in New Haven were replete with applied math problem sets and sessions using a drafting compass, wing divider and other technical drawing instruments.

My father later told me about his choice of major: “The problem was,” he said, “I couldn’t draw a straight line.”

He was intelligent enough to be an engineer, and inventions of modern engineering were interesting to him, but he was mostly a right-brained thinker—big picture, able to synthesize disparate pieces of information—with some left-brained tendencies, and he probably would have made short work of philosophy, international affairs or the social sciences. But the mathematical precision of drawing a series of straight lines was mentally taxing and quite boring to him.

Compared to his peers he took a lot of time to complete his engineering drawings, and for a guy who loved life and achieving things, this was dispiriting to him. He spent two years at Yale, working hard (as far as I know) and yet harboring ambivalence about his choice of major and future. The only thing his mother saw for her son’s efforts at the end of each semester was a report that showed grades that if not poor, certainly weren’t great.

After his sophomore year, Bob returned to Haysmar where his mother was living, and he knew then that he wasn’t returning to Yale. July and August were lovely in Bratenahl, temperatures in the mid-80s most days, tempered by Lake Erie breezes. World War I had ended a year earlier, and the hemisphere was at peace. In autumn Bob landed a job working for the esteemed Joseph Laronge, owner of Cleveland real estate development firm and builder of the theaters

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that comprise what is today known as Playhouse Square. Aged 21, he arrived at the Laronge offices in the 17-story Williamson building on Public Square every weekday and performed a variety of basic tasks.

For Bob’s ancestors, great grandfather Simson Thorman and grandfather Kaufman Hays, there was an inexorable pull toward the clothing industry, and he too seemed to have responded to this pull—he soon left his entry-level real estate position and began work at Joseph and Feiss Company, a men’s clothing company run by his uncle Siegmund Joseph. This industry and job held sway with him. Compared to studying technical drawing and demonstrating the focus required to hand-calculate a number to the tenth decimal place, he was getting things done (one of his skills was hammering away at things until they got done), earning decent money and carrying on in the family trade. For several years he undertook this apprenticeship, learning about modern clothing manufacturing processes and technologies.

He also learned about the more mercurial elements of retail success.

For example, Joseph and Feiss sold a $15 blue serge suit. Because it was advertised as the “Model T” of suits for men, it sold like hotcakes.

M

Lucile Dauby y mother, Lucile Dauby, was a college drop-out too.

The daughter of Nathan Dauby and Bessie Braham was unpretentious, straightforward and happy, and she had

thought she would love attending Smith College. It was one of the Seven Sisters (the top handful of colleges for women) and was the sister school to Yale University. There were many women’s colleges to choose from because demand for post-secondary female education had skyrocketed over the thirty years prior to 1920. Women were

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finally considered smart enough to be given the right to vote, and this development had taken place just weeks prior to Lucile’s first day at Smith. This 19th amendment passed by a vote of 56 to 25 in the all-male US Senate, represented the culmination of seventy years of effort, and its passage was the result of the suffrage movement. In 1868 men had been defined as citizens and given the right to vote, no matter their wealth or societal status. In 1870 Negro men had been defined as citizens. But women had always been much less popular as a cause, not considered intelligent or independent enough to warrant a right to vote.

Smith, in Northampton, Massachusetts, was one of the country’s best and most liberal women’s colleges. Students had recently pushed the administration to relax the rules about socializing with men so that for the first time in its history Smith’s female students were allowed to attend social events that included men. In pursuit of this newfound freedom, “Smithies” typically traveled a few hours southeast to Yale and Harvard for football games and parties, meeting up with Ivy Leaguers who were in some cases back from war and in most cases eager to spend time with modern women.

Although their classroom attire was conservative, the women’s sartorial choices on these extra-curricular trips were typical of the era: dropped-waist dresses, short skirts, cloche hats (fitted and bellshaped), long beaded necklaces and high heels. Ostrich-feather dresses were in vogue, and Lucile sported hers at several events—she and her fellow students wanted to copy the flapper fad sweeping the nation. Many women smoked too despite a campus ban on the habit (it was not yet associated with lung cancer, just with sexuality).

Studious spinsters no more, modern educated women could drink, smoke (which Lucile did, as an adult), dress fashionably, and flaunt their independence and intelligence. Lucile attended Smith for two

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years, and then for some reason I have never known or found out she didn’t return to college. At home Lucile spent time with her friends from East High School, the Cleveland public school from which she had graduated. The fact that she was the daughter of one of Cleveland’s most successful businessmen and was the wealthiest among her peers by a wide margin was never a consideration in her mind.

She was totally unassuming and unpretentious, something NL Dauby had thought to be incredibly important. He wrote the following letter to her and her brother Danny years later, but it’s indicative of how he raised his children: Dear Lucile and Daniel:A few lines to tell you both that in the long run of your life you will find that you will get the most pleasure out of what you do for others. I have put in many years of hard work when perhaps I could have taken it much easier if it were not for my desire to make money in order to help others and that probably has been one of the greatest pleasures in my life.

If you are in a position to do likewise, I hope you will never forget your responsibility and obligation to your fellow-men, and one thing I would like to have you bear in mind, that is, never to brag about your good deeds.

With much love from Your Father (Dauby, NL)

Lucile took his advice in spades and was modest and generous to a fault. One of her favorite things to do was to have her close-knit group of girlfriends over to look through her closet and borrow any clothes they wanted (including fur coats). Mickey Joseph was among this small group of close friends, and the two spent as much time together as they could. (They talked every single day of their grown-up lives unless one of them was traveling abroad.) At home Lucile en-

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joyed herself and was involved in several civic and artistic activities.

At age 22 in January 1924, she supported her temple women’s group by playing a role in Mary the Third, a comedy about the contemporary life of a young girl. She was small (five feet tall) and light as a feather, which made her quite a good ballroom dancer, and she could manage any number of intermediate pieces on the piano.

One gentleman who came into her orbit became enamored and asked her father for her hand in marriage. Lucile’s father, NL, rejected the gentleman’s request. And this is where Robert Hays Gries entered. Maybe he had noted her amongst friends or admired her years earlier at Temple-Tifereth Israel where they both had attended the same Sunday school (though he was two grades ahead of her).

She was single, having had her suitor rebuffed by her father; attractive, with short, dark hair, a ready smile, and an easy grace; stylish in her modern 1920s clothes; and welcoming and cordial. She was fun and didn’t put on airs despite growing up in a Euclid Avenue mansion and an airy summer place right next to Oakwood Country Club.

Bob Gries always went after what he wanted, and soon after Lucile completed her erstwhile role as the flapper in Mary the Third, he asked her father for permission to marry. NL agreed, and when Bob asked Lucile, she accepted. They enjoyed a three-month engagement, with NL and Bessie organizing a small engagement party at their Euclid Avenue home. On the last day of June 1924, Bob and Lucile wed.

Rabbi Abba Silver of Tifereth Israel officiated at the wedding ceremony at the Excelsior Club, an elite Jewish club on Euclid Avenue near University Circle. Lucile had eight of her closest friends as attendants at the 250-guest affair, and Bob’s best man was his brother, Lincoln. While Bob’s father, the late Rabbi Gries, was no longer alive to perform the ceremony, the rabbi had in fact seen Lucile in a similar white dress seven years earlier—he had confirmed her and 80 other

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14-year-olds at the last confirmation service before his retirement.

Close family friends Mr. and Mrs. Adolph S. Ochs, the owner and publisher of The New York Times, knew of Bob’s love for reading and gave the bride and groom three books on the history of the European war. As the newlyweds sailed to Europe for their grand honeymoon tour of the United Kingdom, France, Belgium, Holland, Germany, Italy and other countries, Bob devoured these books to better understand the places they’d be visiting. He was extremely well read and loved books on psychiatry, arcane history, scholarly Jewish topics, and really any topic he could get his hands on. He always had piles of books around him.

The early days of their marriage were less happy than one might have hoped or imagined. Bob wasn’t thrilled with how he was treated by Lucile’s father. NL was displeased that Bob had decided on such a luxurious honeymoon—Bob had racked up an obscene bill of expenditures and purchases on this honeymoon. NL had never had the luxury of gallivanting about foreign countries like this, and he showed his annoyance. Meanwhile Lucile was no more enamored early on with her situation. She and Bob moved into the Gries family compound in Bratenahl so she lived amidst Bob’s extended family. Because she had been raised with maids and servants and was never taught domestic skills, and because her primary interests were friendship and fun, she brought to her new family no talents in cooking, sewing or other domestic arts. She felt the disapproval of Bob’s elderly aunts every day. A new wife in the modern era was different from those in previous generations: there was no war for which to volunteer, she hadn’t completed college, and she didn’t work. The Haysmar atmosphere was less than welcoming to her.

In 1926 while still living at Haysmar, Bob and Lucile had their first child, Betty Frances. They decided to move into their own residence,

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and they chose new construction. With Lucile’s growing unhappiness at Haysmar, the reader can be assured that no couple building a home ever wanted one to be completed faster than these two. Finally in 1927, three years after their wedding, they moved to 3021 Attleboro Road, a spacious Tudor home in the growing and affluent Cleveland suburb of Shaker Heights where they would live for the next four decades. Established in their home, they could be the married couple they wanted to be. A second child, a son named Robert Dauby Gries (me), was born in 1929.

Lucile liberally used the services Bob thought were important: he wanted her to have the amenities required to live a big life. She had baby nurses and governesses, which were typical for wealthy new mothers. She also maintained her close friendships, often inviting over her small, loyal clique of high school girlfriends to play mahjong or just spend time with each other. Other times she played a few tunes on the grand piano on the main floor of her house. In the basement she played the spinet (an upright piano) as musical accompaniment for children’s dance classes taught by one of her friends. She taught me how to ballroom dance when I was nine, and she enjoyed skating at the Cleveland Elysium, a popular winter spot amongst Clevelanders.

When Betty and I were in school full-time, Lucile had another baby, Tom (1935), and a year later another, Ellen. Bob ensured the house had a full complement of help—Lucile oversaw a cook, butler, downstairs maid, laundress, chauffer and upstairs maid, as well as a governess who set the rules and boundaries for the children. This was a household of 13 people, and Bob was determined to have it revolve around adult needs, not those of children. Lucile likely had some ambivalence about the size and formality of the household.

On one hand, it was an age of inexpensive immigrant labor—they

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needed jobs and a place to live, and she held no skills in the domestic arts and enjoyed having people around. On the other hand all the people created a formality and structure that were inconsistent with Lucile’s desire for simplicity. In fact when the children were young, Bob gave Lucile the gift of a two-week vacation “free from all housewife worries,” which sounds amusing considering her large staff, but the worries of managing a staff and four children were real to her.

With Bob’s gift she went with her mother and brother Danny to Los Angeles, California. Bob stayed at home with the children for those two weeks.

My father came home from work at 7 p.m. most nights, and then my family had a formal dinner in the dining room. We didn’t like this at all—while we were practicing good manners at a late meal, our friends were listening to great radio programs. When we were at school amidst kids talking about all the shows they had listened to, my siblings and I were unable to contribute because we had been sitting around the table in our nice clothes listening to our parents talk about Dad’s work, civic issues or philanthropy.

B

May Company

ob Gries left his uncle’s west-side, mom-and-pop clothing

store shortly after marrying Lucile and began work in an operations role at May Company Department Stores, where

Lucile’s father was the chief executive. In 1931 Bob oversaw a building expansion that included a two-story addition to the May Company’s well-known storefront. This made the store, at eight stories high and one million square feet, the largest department store in Ohio.

NL and Bob were optimistic about Cleveland’s economic future and a national return to prosperity. Bob ensured that the main floor

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of the building was renovated as well so the new floors didn’t outshine them, and he had the construction firm build wider aisles, airier showcases and new elevators. He managed the expansion so well that the executive team held a banquet as a way of thanking him.

Seventy guests came to the Hotel Cleveland to honor Bob’s success, and Bob himself did something he had rarely done so far: he gave a speech. Bob had not inherited his father’s stunning way with words, his ability to move people through a sermon, and this really frustrated him. In some ways children become their parents, and in others they go the exact opposite way, and Bob’s interlocutors would say he was a case of the latter. At the Hotel Cleveland however, he managed to make some brief but well-received remarks about his work at May Company. Soon enough Bob was promoted to assistant store manager and vice president.

Bob enjoyed the work and was good at it. He was driven downtown in his car by a chauffeur each morning, and during the ride he read the paper. As soon as he reached his office, he was barraged with tasks and meetings. He worked hard (over 60 hours per week) and gained increasing responsibility, becoming by 1936 store manager.

He was a smart businessman, diligent, made the numbers he needed to make and earned the respect of employees. With his new position as store manager, he became responsible for store policy, building maintenance, public relations and dealing with day-to-day issues for a staff that numbered 3,500.

Bob didn’t have a great relationship with the boss, his father-inlaw, NL. As an example Bob loved deep-sea fishing and took annual fishing trips with May Company executives. In Bimini one year Bob caught a 400-pound blue marlin and had the massive fish mounted and installed behind the desk in his office. Below it was a caption: “If I’d kept my mouth shut I wouldn’t be here.”

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NL didn’t appreciate the humor in that. The fact was NL and Bob were very different from each other, and they occasionally got into heated debates that resulted in outright animosity. NL had grown up as a poor boy and worked hard all his life. He was restrained, unassuming and a rock-ribbed Republican, a conservative who believed in helping people improve their stations in life. Having been born as a common man, he knew that getting a job, working hard and prudently managing one’s money were the best ways to achieve upward mobility. People didn’t need to be patronized; they needed to be incentivized. And avoiding debt was especially important to him.

At the start of the Depression, he (temporarily) lost 80 percent of his assets during the stock market crash, but having no indebtedness, he rode it through and rebuilt.

Meanwhile Bob was a staunch Democrat who was sympathetic to the plight of the common man. He believed everyone had character flaws and imperfect behaviors, but while those things often didn’t damage the economic prospects of people with upper-class background, they could preclude poor people from upward mobility. Bob proudly carried a union card and was perfectly fine with the idea of taking on debt. Money was meant to be enjoyed—you couldn’t take it with you in the afterlife so it was best to use it in this life.

Personality-wise he was completely different from NL. He was a totally unrestrained person who had a desire to live life on a grand scale and did everything to excess. I remember when I was seven years old and Republican Alf Landon was running against incumbent Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the 1936 election. My father, the liberal Democrat, and grandfather, the conservative Republican, were at loggerheads. On the night of the election, they had a discussion that was so impassioned that it made an impression on me. The next morning I came down to breakfast, and the headlines announced that FDR

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had won by a landslide. He had carried 46 states, and Landon only two. The electoral vote was 523 to 8—the largest number of electoral votes ever recorded at the time.

“If Roosevelt is so terrible, how can he win by so much?” I asked my mother.

I wondered how my grandfather could be so wrong, and then I realized that he wasn’t wrong, he was opinionated, as was my father. They were opinionated and different, one from the other, in every way.

My father had prodigious energy. He rarely slept. He traveled everywhere. He drank (too much; scotch and martinis). He swore (too much; like a sailor in fact). He collected things (to excess). He wasn’t satisfied with a small group of friends (he wanted to know everyone).

He wanted the big life (every part of life; the best of everything).

For her part Lucile listened to the complaints of each man about the other without too much distress. She knew they had disagreements and had decided to not let their issues affect her. She too was totally different from her husband, and that difference was probably what had attracted one to the other. Lucile was content to socialize with her small group of friends, equally as happy with or without the luxuries of her life and somewhat careful about her spending. Bob spent but not on selfish things. He spent money on others, a sable coat for Lucile, fine china, global travel (no place was too far or exotic) and great parties. I remember the Metropolitan Opera came to Cleveland annually up until the 1980s, and my father threw at least one of the after parties each year. The opera singers and stars showed up at our house around midnight—people like famous soprano Roberta Peters and tenors Robert Merrill and Jan Peerce. Everyone from Cleveland’s artistic and philanthropic scene was there. All the revelers drank, talked, danced and sang until about 6 a.m.—a fantastic party that everyone loved, no one more than Bob.

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I

Cleveland Rams

n the 1800s, American football was invented as an outgrowth of rugby and began to be played at a few East Coast colleges and secondary schools. In 1902 the first professional teams were

formed, but three years later, injuries claimed 18 lives and football became known as a violent sport. President Teddy Roosevelt was a fan, and he called for rules that could make it safer. The National Collegiate Athletic Association responded by adding a neutral zone on the line of scrimmage, and NCAA teams began to use forward passes (developed and popularized by Knute Rockne and Gus Dorais). These changes plus some others made football more structured, less chaotic and safer. By the 1930s football was a popular collegiate sport, and during the Great Depression era the collegiate Orange, Sugar, Rose, Cotton and Sun bowls were created.

Professional football was just beginning though. In 1936 some Clevelanders tried to put together a professional team. They wanted Cleveland to be represented in the brand-new eight-team American Football League. They needed $10,000 to procure a franchise license and $25,000 of additional cash (in total, about $600,000 in today’s dollars). Bob saw this as an opportunity to help Cleveland. He and twelve other men anted up $53,000, the founding capital for the Cleveland Rams. Every Monday post-game in the first three seasons, Bob hosted the founding investors for lunch at May Company. Together the men added up what they owed players that week, maybe $25 for this player’s salary and $50 for another, up to $100 for some, plus a laundry bill and coach salary. Each man kicked in money to pay the week’s expenses.

The Rams played in the American Football League in 1936, and the next year they switched to the National Football League. Bob loved watching the new team play. He attended every home game

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and took his family with him, a ritual he felt was important to show his family’s civic pride. He had a box where he hosted friends and colleagues, watching intensely while occasionally socializing. But about five years into this gig in 1941 Bob’s shares and those of the founding investors were bought by Dan Reeves and Fred Levy. ||| By 1941 Dad had other things on his mind. His mother had helped with the canteen effort in World War I and his father seemed from his sermons to have been deeply affected by that war. My father admired Franklin Delano Roosevelt because he had a commitment to the common man, was seemingly intelligent about how to bring America out of the Great Depression, and showed a balanced stance for when and how to enter World War II. There was ample talk in the United States of Jewish men, women and children being deported en masse from Germany with reports stating that they were being killed. When Dad was at May Company in the 1930s, he did a lot to employ some immigrants who made it to the United States from troubled Europe.

Dad didn’t know (and never found out) that the Jewish population of Unsleben, homeland of his great grandfather Simson Thorman, was reduced to zero during the war. During the November Pogroms of 1938, the Unsleben synagogue was defiled and the town’s Jewish families were murdered or forced to emigrate.

When President Roosevelt came to Cleveland in November 1940 for a stop on his campaign tour, Dad wanted to attend the event at Public Auditorium in downtown Cleveland. At nearly 6 feet and 170 pounds, my father was tall and thin, and he had dark, neatly trimmed, black hair. He often smoked a mahogany pipe, which he probably did on this day in the auditorium. In his prime seat near the stage (Reserved Section #1), Dad chatted among the members

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of Cleveland’s political and business elite waiting for President Roosevelt to make his appearance. After the crowd of nearly 12,000 stopped cheering and sat down, President Roosevelt made the final speech of his third presidential campaign. He spoke about the long journey Americans had made coming out of the Depression, and how as the new leader of the industrialized world, America needed to continue on its path of democracy and peace. He spoke for the cause of the common man, the plight of America’s workers, and the social services that made America a great place to live.

Roosevelt handily won reelection against Republican Wendell Wilkie (the electoral vote was 449-82). In March of 1941 it was becoming clear that the United States would not be able to steer clear of the war unfolding in Europe. Roosevelt and Congress enacted the Lend-Lease program, providing Great Britain, the Soviets and other Allied nations with billions of dollars’ worth of military supplies.

Nine months later came Pearl Harbor, and this prompted Dad and millions of Americans to feel the call to service. He spent the better part of a year trying to get into the military, but he was 41 years old and his bad back was cause for the Navy and Marines to reject his bid. He eventually received an appointment to the Army’s Exchange Services department (PX, for short). During World War I military leaders had realized too late that basic material comfort could make a big difference in alleviating the suffering of soldiers, and PX was their answer. It had been formed to provide large-scale distribution of morale-boosting items and a place for soldiers to unwind. It provided soldiers with as many goods and services as possible to make their war experience more humane, to the extent this was possible.

Dad was made a captain in the PX, and he didn’t hesitate to resign from his position at May Company. When that was done he wrote letters to the numerous boards on which he served, informing them

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he was stepping down to serve the war effort. May Company held a going away party for my father. He deeply believed in the war cause and respected May Company, so he would make remarks if they were required. However he hated public speaking and hoped he would not have to do so. He and my mom ascended Hotel Cleveland’s marble and gilt staircase and smiled politely as they entered the crystal-chandeliered ballroom to cheers and camera flashes, surrounded by May Company men and women in formal wear. Dad figured out he wouldn’t be called upon to make any remarks, and with this he sat back, martini in hand, and enjoyed the toasts and friendly jokes in tribute to his 18 years of service to the May Company. Four days later on a cold January day in 1943 with his trunk packed and ready, he said goodbye to us and headed out on a train for Princeton, New Jersey.

The PX required my father to take a course in accounting—a ridiculous requirement for a man who had overseen accounting, finance and operations at May and who had served on finance committees for various organizations. But this was the Army after all. He dutifully completed the work, and on graduation day he and other graduates were called into a room where each man was handed a piece of paper with information on his new station. This was a big moment because even if a PX man was assigned to sell candy bars, soap and cigarettes, the stations were located both on US soil and the front lines abroad so whatever station was typed on that paper could mean life or death. Bob quickly scanned his paper, his eyes landing on the word “Tampa.”

Could this be Tampa, Florida?

He re-read the letter more carefully and realized it said “Pampa,” not “Tampa.”

But where in the world was Pampa?

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Pampa was not a far-flung atoll in the Pacific theater or a village on Italy’s Amalfi Coast. It was a dustbowl town in Texas, 60 miles from Amarillo, 10,000 residents strong most of whom were wheat farmers. The Pampa Army Airfield, a hastily constructed airfield at 35.5380° N, 100.7493° W, was the precise location of Dad’s posting.

Post Exchanges were designed to be for-profit entities in which business skills were in high demand. Dad would be running a store on the Army base and creating a space where soldiers could build relationships with one another, feel comfortable and relax. These places were responsible for creating an atmosphere that transformed the horrific and disillusioning experiences of Army recruits in WWI for the more humane (and as it turned out, triumphant) experiences of US soldiers in WWII. Wanting to remain with my father, my mother prepared to move to Texas. She didn’t want me educated at Pampa’s public schools, so when I was 14 she sent me to Taft, a boarding school in Connecticut. My older sister, Betty, was a senior at Walnut Hill, a boarding school in Massachusetts. Mom took our younger siblings, Tommy and Ellen, who were in second and third grades, to Texas. No servants, maids, chauffeurs or governesses joined Mom on the journey.

Surrounded by scrubland, managing the household in a simple and utilitarian way on her own, Mom was the happiest she had ever been she later told me. (She called it “the loveliest time of my life.”) She had always wanted a simple uncomplicated life, but while forces in Shaker Heights sometimes conspired against this vision, Pampa enabled it. I have read my mother’s love letters to my father during this time, and it certainly was her most happy time. She was needed.

On my father’s end, he found deep satisfaction in committing to the war effort and using his business skills to support soldiers. He never had a chance to play a more direct role in the war effort, which disap-

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pointed him, but he made light of it.

“The most dangerous thing I ever did during the war was fly in a plane during a storm to resupply the alcohol for the base and the commanding officer,” I heard him dryly tell people a couple of times.

He returned from Pampa in 1944.

T

Origin of Cleveland Browns

he Rams won the NFL championship in 1946, beating the Washington Redskins 15-14. A year earlier Cleveland resident Arthur “Mickey” McBride had decided to start a

football team that could play in the new All-America Football Conference (AAFC). Rams owners Reeves and Levy had no interest in dealing with two teams in the same town because this caused too much economic competition. Reeves and Levy weren’t from Cleveland and had no emotional ties to the city. They moved the Rams to California where they made Los Angeles the first West Coast city to host a professional football team. (Later the LA Rams moved to Anaheim and then to St. Louis, Missouri).

McBride was a tough Irishman who had started Yellow Cab Company. Yellow had bought Zone Cab Company, owned by Dan Sherby, with the result that Mickey McBride and Dan Sherby had become business partners and friends. Sherby said something like, “I have a friend, Bob Gries, who was an investor in the Rams. Maybe it would help us if we had someone with NFL connections.”

“Okay, sure,” Mickey reportedly said, and this is how Dad became involved with football again after returning to Cleveland from war service in Pampa. Dad initially owned about 5 percent of this new team, the Cleveland Browns, which was named after the team’s first coach, Paul Brown, a man many consider to be the father of modern football.

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The Browns quickly became a dynasty, winning four straight championships in the AAFC. Then in 1949 the AAFC folded because of the Internal Revenue Service’s “Hobby Loss” rule, which stated that an investor could not lose money for five straight years and deduct the losses against regular income. The fifth year of losses would make all previous losses re-taxable. It was also known as the Louis B. Mayer Law. AAFC team owners all were taking losses and deducting losses, and they weren’t willing to suffer a fifth year of losses that would erase the deductions for that year and the prior four years.

Instead three AAFC teams, Cleveland, San Francisco and Baltimore, switched to the more established NFL. Coincidentally in that last year in the AAFC at a game during which the Browns were playing the Buffalo Bills, my father became ill. He contacted the team’s physician, Dr. Victor Ippolito, who upon examining Dad, had him sent immediately to St. Vincent’s Charity Hospital. Doctors confirmed that at age 49, my father had survived a heart attack.

For the NFL’s opening game that next year (September 1950), the league pitted the veteran Philadelphia Eagles, two-time defending NFL champions, against the Browns, who had been champions of their now-defunct league. This was a big game because the NFL was the superior league (it had been around longer, it had survived, etc.)

The general thinking was that the Eagles would show the Browns who was boss. The Associated Press hyped it as “the most talked-of game in the National Football League’s history.” I traveled from New Haven where I was a student at Yale to Philadelphia for the game, and Dad and I sat with a small group of Cleveland fans. That day Philadelphia Municipal Stadium, which previously had never attracted more than 38,230 fans, hosted a record-setting 71,237 spectators waiting for the slaughter.

Dad knew the odds were against the Browns. In fact since the two

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teams had never played before it could be a complete blow-out.

The Eagles defense was the Rock of Gibraltar (solid) and its offense consisted of all-stars that attacked relentlessly. The NFL had always put down the AAFC. In prior years when the AAFC was getting started, NFL Commissioner Elmer Layden had said dryly that the AAFC should “first get a ball, then make a schedule and then play a game.” This insult was not forgotten—the Browns in their new league had an ax to grind. And grind, they did. They demolished the Eagles, 37-10.

A few months later on Christmas Eve of 1950, the Browns played against the LA Rams (formerly the Cleveland Rams) in the NFL’s championship game. In a nail-biting matchup, Lou Groza made a last-minute field goal to give the Browns the win, 30-28. For the next five years, the Browns made it to the NFL championship games, and they won the last two years (1954 and 1955). The team from Cleveland was a dynasty, but they were a dynasty that lost money every year. My father carried tickets in his pockets and gave them away to people. His desire was to build interest in the sport. He was philanthropic about football, not mercenary, and his support of the team was a civic deed, a show of pride for Cleveland.

In 1953 Mickey McBride, the majority owner, sold the team for the exorbitant (in those days) sum of $600,000. The acquirers were Saul Silberman and Ralph DeChiaro of Miami, who purchased a halfinterest in the franchise, and a group of Cleveland investors that included Homer Marshman, Dave R. Jones, Ellis Ryan and Bob Gries.

Dan Sherby, McBride’s partner in the cab business, didn’t want to sell his interest, but he felt he had to be dutiful to his business partner.

Dad bought an extra 5 percent, which he secretly carried for Dan. In 1955, Bert Bell the NFL’s commissioner, came to the Cleveland investors and told them they needed to purchase the franchise from

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their partner, Saul Silberman. If they didn’t, the league would revoke the Browns’ franchise rights. Bell explained that Silberman, a racetrack owner by profession, was allegedly betting on the games. The Cleveland group bought out Silberman for $600,000—double what he had put in two years prior. In 1961 Art Modell, an advertising salesman from New York, put together a group to purchase the team for $3,925,000 ($1 million in stock and the remainder in bonds or debt). Art bought 25 percent of the stock and had an investor lined up for another 25 percent; together, they would own a controlling stake. Dad bought 17 percent plus some of the bonds. On the Friday night before the Monday closing, the deal almost fell apart when the purchaser for the other 25 percent of the stock pulled out. In 48 hours Jack Wells, the Browns’ New York attorney, convinced Rudy Schaeffer of Schaeffer Brewing to put up $250,000 in cash for 25 percent, and the deal closed on time. Another Cleveland investor interested in buying the team had dropped out of the bidding at about 10 percent below the $3,925,000 price. ||| Dad did many things beyond being a part-owner of the Browns.

After returning from Pampa he didn’t return to May Company but instead bought Morgan Steel Products Incorporated, founded by English native James Morgan in 1933. My father ran the company until 1964. He also co-founded a temple along with about 40 members of Tifereth Israel who had become concerned that it was growing too large and impersonal and was moving away from Classical Reform Judaism. They presented their concerns to Rabbi Abba Silver, who listened but explained to this small group of members (Tifereth Israel had about 2,000 members) that he would run the temple the way he saw fit. He suggested that they might want to start their own temple

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to test their ideas. This got them talking amongst themselves, and they agreed maybe they would.

None of these forty-or-so members had the slightest idea how to start their own temple. Tifereth Israel and Fairmount (also known as “Brickner’s Temple”) were large reform temples, and they wanted to be different by being small. They wanted one rabbi who knew all the members well and wanted no assistant rabbis. With this broad outline they co-founded Suburban Temple. They limited its size to “large enough to meet your needs and small enough to know your name,” and they tried to bring in the best of the reform practices from around the country. They initially hired Norman M. Goldberg as rabbi, but his tenure was very short and they replaced him with Myron Silverman, who served for 26 years. He held services at Ludlow Elementary School just around the corner from us in Shaker Heights until the founding families raised enough money to build a temple on an 8-acre parcel of land in Beachwood (in 1953).

By being part of this group of Suburban Temple co-founders, my father was continuing his own father’s practice of change and reform combined with pragmatic, business-minded thinking. In fact Dad dedicated the library at Suburban Temple (the Gries Library) to the memory of his parents. He was no longer the young man who lived in the shadow of his genius father, had dropped out of Yale or had worked for his father-in-law for 18 years. He was a man who invested in successful new ventures, paid honor to his country through military service, ran a company, served on more than 30 Cleveland non-profit boards, and co-founded religious institutions.

My father’s excessive personality also took flight in those years. He compulsively collected many hundreds of newspaper clippings, letters, photographs and other documents about his interests, hobbies, family and friends for years. He sat some days and many nights la-

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boriously pasting articles about wine, pictures of his great grandparents, information about the Great Depression, reviews of restaurants he liked and other topics into his scrapbooks. At his death he left over 100 large scrapbooks, which after being stored in my attic for almost half a century became a source for this book (without them I wouldn’t have attempted to write it).

He collected Chinese export porcelain from the 18th and early 19th centuries, a hobby that began in the 1930s with a visit to Alfred Farber, a prominent Cleveland art dealer. He and Mom became smitten with the art of porcelain. Some people might collect 50 or 100 pieces and consider it done, but not Dad. My parents took many international trips to collect new pieces and eventually amassed 1,500 pieces. Many were displayed in the “China Room” at our home on Attleboro. Their collection became famed for its variety. It was second in number of pieces only to the Woolworth collection (4,000 pieces), but Sotheby’s considered it to be equal in value because while the Woolworth collection consisted of many dinner services, my parents’ collection had only one dinner service and the rest was individual pieces, none similar to the other, all specially designed and unique.

Pipes were interesting to Dad and he collected many. He collected over a thousand rare books, including exclusive pornographic books penned by renowned English authors (using pseudonyms) in numbered copies for their friends. My mother insisted that he keep them locked in the attic, and I didn’t find the key until I was 14. He had the third-largest collection of rare books and prints on tobacco in America, over 1,500 pieces spanning four centuries, which later was given to the Cleveland Public Library. He collected many prints and drawings, including several Rembrandts, which he gave to the Cleveland Museum of Art. He also collected Jewish etchings. He assembled an impressive collection of Paul Storr silver that included candlesticks,

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teapots, dishes and other items.

He gardened to excess, finding few things more satisfying than spending eight hours on a Saturday or Sunday cultivating the flora on the 2 acres around the house. He found peace and relaxation in spending time in the gardens.

He cursed to excess. I think he was always frustrated at being unable to articulate like his father, which is why he couldn’t give speeches to big crowds.

And he drank to excess (not uncommon in the Prohibition era, and in the 1930s and 1940s). Every evening at home consisted of martinis before dinner, wine with dinner and stingers after dinner, and evenings out often involved scotch as well. He said whatever came into his mind with a few drinks in him. Mom regularly sent flowers to people with whom he had been too honest. Mom wasn’t thrilled with this gruff aspect of his personality. She and Dad disagreed and argued quite a bit, but she always came back to the fact that though he really was not easy to live with, she loved him and his desire to live every day to the fullest. She also understood him and his commitment to community and family. I think she thought he was well worth the imperfections—she was the simple yin to his complicated yang.

I recall my father’s excesses well because they were the overarching theme of our home when I was a young man and present in almost every interaction with him, even after I moved out of the house. When I was married to my first wife Joan and was working at May Company, I planned a vacation. I hadn’t taken a vacation for several years, so we decided to take a three week trip to Egypt, Greece, Turkey and Israel. I was at my parents’ house telling them about our upcoming trip.

“Do you want to join us?” I asked my father.

“Sure,” he replied, and then without skipping a beat: “When do we leave?”

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That was Dad. He did not need to think for one second because it was his gut instinct to do this type of thing.

“Well let’s think about this,” Mom said. She was more rational.

She wanted to see what plans we had. But not Dad. He was ready to go. So they joined us, and next thing I knew, Dad took over the trip.

He set us all up to spend a day with Teddy Kollek, the mayor of Jerusalem, and a day with a general in the Israeli army. He had a guide take us through Turkish museums where we saw extensive collection of yellow porcelain, which my dad of course loved. While Joan and I had thought our vacation might be relaxing, Dad ensured that we enjoyed no such thing as relaxation. We were on the move all the time.

About halfway through the vacation, my mother said, “Will you please take an all-day trip with your father, Bob? Joan and I want a day off.”

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Discrimination y father also was frustrated by the limitations of discrimination. There were interactions between Jews and non-Jews during business hours and on some non-profit

boards and civic ventures but not socially in the evenings. Occasionally a civic event like the opera party Dad gave or an occasional benefit had mixed company, but these were few. The Union Club, the primary men’s business club, was not open to Jews during Dad’s lifetime, and there was no mixing at country clubs.

When Dad built his home in Shaker Heights in 1927, there were no restrictions, but later prompted by the Van Sweringen brothers, Shaker and further east changed: until 1949, anyone who wanted to sell a home in Shaker Heights had to get approval for the prospective buyer from the two houses adjacent to them plus one of the two directly across the street. This policy was tacitly understood to be a

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way of keeping undesirable people from overtaking Cleveland’s eastside neighborhoods. Mt. Sinai Hospital was built in the early 1900s because Jewish doctors (during Dad’s lifetime) could not get jobs at the other main hospitals in Cleveland. And numerous elite universities—many or most of the Ivies—had quotas on the numbers of Jewish students. For instance Yale had limited Jewish students to 10 percent of the class. In 1986 author Dan A. Oren learned about what was known as Yale’s “Jewish problem” while he combed through the school’s archives. Amongst the many anti-Semitic documents was a 1944-1945 board of admissions report warning that “the Jewish problem . . . continues to call for the utmost care and tact. The proportion of Jews among the candidates . . . for admissions . . . has somewhat increased and remains too large for comfort.”

My father had a great life. He had grown up in a mansion in Bratenahl and had attended University School and Yale. He lived in a large house in Shaker Heights and recognized he was fortunate to live in America, where people had opportunity available to them unlike anywhere in the world. Jews did business with non-Jews, and they intermingled in philanthropic circles. He didn’t feel sorry for himself.

He didn’t think he had a tough life as a Jewish person. But he saw how socializing went on in a segregated way and how business, philanthropy and civic leadership were often conducted in segregated ways, some of which affected him directly and others of which affected society more broadly, and he absolutely despised this reality.

He wanted to live larger. And he couldn’t. And that frustrated him.

He suffered from insomnia for most of his adult life and frequently went into the den to read. As I got older we often talked into the wee hours of the night, and one thing we discussed was the limitations placed on Jewish people and the specific restrictions that prevented him from living his life at the grand scale he wanted. He shared that

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frustration privately, but in public he showed none of it and only committed himself to the vision of building a better, more integrated world.

He deeply believed in the mission of Vocational Guidance and Rehabilitation Services (today known as Vocational Guidance Services or VGS). VGS provides job training to individuals with physical and mental disabilities. He served on its board for 30 years. He served many years on the board (as finance director) of the Greater Cleveland Council of The Boy Scouts of America, an organization committed to “producing men of character.” Dad admired the good citizenship that scouting promoted and saw the power of the organization not only for the current boy members but also for graduates. In 1939 he was in charge of the largest scouting alumni reunion ever held in the country where former scouts were called upon to rededicate themselves to scout oath and law. He served on the boards of the Cleveland Metroparks Zoo, the Society for the Blind, the Musical Arts Association (which supports The Cleveland Orchestra), and for nearly 30 years, the Cleveland Institute of Music. He also co-founded the Cleveland Friends of Music (CFM). Dad helped CFM raise money to give aspiring new artists a chance to perform in several free concerts and charity events each year. He wasn’t very knowledgeable about classical music, and I don’t think he had a love for it. I think that because he worked incessantly, was constantly full of energy and slept little, when he went to a concert or symphony, the music relaxed him so much that he dozed off. ||| My mom enjoyed classical music and remained awake for concerts. She enjoyed sitting in seasonal box seats at Severance Hall on opening night concerts of The Cleveland Orchestra and supporting musicians. In honor of the orchestra’s 40th anniversary, she made a

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major donation so the orchestra could commission new symphonic works. She loved attending events of the Metropolitan Opera when it came to town. She served on the board of the Cleveland Hearing and Speech Center, Mount Sinai Hospital, Hill House (a mental health services organization, now known as the Magnolia Clubhouse), the Cleveland Mental Health Association, and led a campaign for the Cleveland Jewish Welfare Fund Appeal. The Radcliffe College Club, the alumni club for Radcliffe College, asked if she would host a house tour and she agreed. The Chinese export porcelain collection and other art and antiques my parents had acquired during their travels were of such interest that 500 people purchased tickets for the chance to tour their house.

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Musical Departure hen he was 62 my father became ill with cancer. He had chemotherapy, radiation and surgery, and the cancer went into remission. When he was 64 the cancer

returned. He had an operation, chemo and radiation again. On his 65th birthday, his brother, Lincoln wrote him a letter: I am terribly proud of the position you have made for yourself in the public life of Cleveland. I never realized until I read the many newspaper articles and particularly editorials recently, the warm regard and deep respect held for you by your fellow Clevelanders.

The name of Gries is a proud one in Cleveland today and you have done it. (Gries, Lincoln)

Lincoln had run the May Company’s Akron store and had risen up the ranks to become a vice president of May Department Stores. My father and uncle were very different—Lincoln had none of the exces-

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siveness or obsessions Dad had, but they got along well as grownups. They respected each other’s differences, and the letter meant a lot to my father.

Though very sick with cancer, my father did not slow down and planned to live fully. At the time of his death, he had plane tickets for himself and Mom to go on yet another trip abroad. Instead of boarding the plane, he passed away in 1966 at age 65. At his funeral members of The Cleveland Orchestra played the slow movement of the Mozart Dissonance Quartet at Suburban Temple, and just as he had slept through many of the concerts he attended, he “slept” through this one. If someone were making a short film of his life it would show a man with a rich, do-everything life in full color. He could jump on stage and two-step with an Egyptian belly dancer, as well as co-found a new temple and run a company during the day, and then take his weekend time to cultivate the flowers in his garden and travel in lavish fashion, as well as serve on boards to help the poor and needy.

He was buried in the Hays Mausoleum at Mayfield Cemetery, and shortly afterward VGS, the organization that helped the poor, handicapped and needy and that Dad had deeply supported for years, dedicated its new rehabilitation wing to his memory. His book collection had been given to the Cleveland Public Library in 1940, and the majority of his prints and drawings had been donated to the Cleveland Museum of Art in 1939.

Six months after Dad’s death, Mom became ill with ovarian cancer. While talking one day, she mentioned the foundation her father had established upon his death and I suggested she do the same. She looked at me dumbfounded. Like many women of her generation, she had never been educated about handling money and didn’t believe she could create such a foundation. When we had it completed, she was delighted.

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Mom died on March 5th, 1968, only two years after Dad’s death, and the Dissonance Quartet also was played at her funeral. Suburban Temple’s Rabbi Silverman presided over the services (as he had for my father). In 1969 the Western Reserve Historical Society exhibited the 1,500-piece porcelain collection she loved. After the exhibit we offered pieces first to the Cleveland Museum of Art and then to the Metropolitan Museum in New York. Each selected five pieces, which would be on permanent display. The Americana portion, about 50 pieces, went to the US Department of State as decoration for rooms in its Harry S. Truman headquarters building. The Western Reserve Historical Society received about 150 pieces as well, and the remainder was sold by Sotheby’s in 1970. The proceeds were put into her charity fund.

SALLY AND I The Fifth Generation

Sarah “Sally” Proudfoot and I (Robert “Bob” D. Gries) at the Metropolitan Opera in Cleveland, 1984.

(Photo courtesy The Cleveland Plain Dealer)

Sally and I surrounded by Browns memorabilia in my office, c. 1980.

Sally loves horseback riding (she is pictured here with Count Sinclair, a Dutch Warmblood stallion with whom she achieved her bronze medal status in dressage in 2014), and I love mountain climbing, but skiing is a sport we enjoy together.

Sally presenting at the Society of Industrial and Office Realtors, 1990.

Sally in 1996.

Sally and I with members of the sixth and seventh generations, 2011. From left, top row: Chuck Arnold, Carolyn Arnold, David Cole, Bob Gries, Jr., Sally Gries, Robert D. Gries, Michael Wager, Donald Gries. From left, middle row: Jacob Gries, Annie Gries, Peggy Wager, Jamie Cole, Lynn-Ann Gries, Eric Arnold, John Arnold. From left, front row: Susie Wager, Jane Arnold, Lizzie Cole, Carrie Wager, Lauren Cole, Zoe Gries. Bob Gries, Jr. and Zoe are the only ones not residing in Cleveland.

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Robert Dauby Gries

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May Company

y life began with an auspicious birth. On May 15, 1929, a fire broke out in a Cleveland Clinic x-ray film laboratory, producing a highly poisonous gas and explosion

that killed over 100 patients, doctors and nurses—the scene of the dead was gruesome and compared in one news report to gas deaths during World War I. Fortunately for me, I was a few hours old, lying in a bassinette up the street at University Hospitals.

I grew up in the home my parents built on Attleboro Road in Shaker Heights surrounded by servants and a governess. My father had a good job at May Company, so I experienced little of the Depression.

I went to Hathaway Brown for preschool and attended Malvern, a Shaker Heights public school, through third grade. In fourth grade I started at Hawken, a private school, and was the only Jewish student at the time. Six years later when I went to prep school, Hawken had five Jewish students.

When I finished eighth grade, my father received his WWII Army post in Texas. My mother decided that an Army base in Pampa wouldn’t be the best place for me to receive a high school education and sent me to Taft School in Connecticut, a then all-boys school founded by Horace Taft, the brother of President William Taft. I liked Taft because of its great educational opportunities, and I also did well in athletics, earning five varsity letters (in football, wrestling and track). I went on to Yale University where I majored in history.

When I graduated in 1951, I was ambivalent about my future.

On one hand I wanted to be a criminal lawyer. On the other hand there was the family business, May Company, where my father had worked for 18 years and where my grandfather in his 80s still had an

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office. I took the latter path and started at May as an assistant buyer of housewares, soon enough rotating into the ready-to-wear department and the basement store. During those days I was introduced by my grandfather to the inner workings of philanthropy and civic involvement in Cleveland. When he didn’t feel like attending civic meetings, he sent me as his delegate. Being a 20-something in meetings with city leaders who were several decades older was awkward for me. I knew that I knew nothing, and I kept my mouth shut. For the most part people accepted my presence, and some of them were very helpful to me.

After a couple of years I became more involved in these meetings, occasionally voicing ideas and opinions, but my professional life at May was still center stage. After four years of rotating through positions, a period during which I also married Joan Selig from Atlanta, I began working as an assistant to the store general manager, which was a position my father had previously held. At May I had a chance to see how the top merchandising buyers did their craft. Like other buyers of that era, my grandfather relied on his mind because there were no Excel spreadsheets or electronic calculators. He walked into a building with six floors of shoes, visually assessed the merchandise and negotiated a single purchase price. He shipped the shoes back to May and set individual prices. He might set one type at $8 and another at $.50, and he knew if he paid $2 per pair on average that he would somehow end up with a profit.

There was no mathematical formula for pricing—it was intuitive and experience-based. Buyers specialized in different items, such as women’s coats or men’s accessories (e.g., ties and socks). They bought huge quantities—a thousand dozen in some men’s furnishing items. I was amazed to see how these buyers managed vast amounts of information without computers, buying merchandise seemingly a

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sixth sense to them. They had little or no formal education but had great minds and a knack for the value of goods.

I was on the rise at a growing business and my responsibilities were increasing. May was the largest store in each of the cities where it had a presence, and it also had three large, successful branch stores in Los Angeles and two in St. Louis. Management wanted to build more of these major branch stores, including in Cleveland where it had acquired land (a defunct nine-hole golf course at the intersection of Cedar and Warrensville Roads). After I visited the Los Angeles and St. Louis branch stores, I returned to Cleveland and helped launch the new Mays on the Heights branch store, opened to the public on November 1, 1957.

I was offered the job as general manager of the new branch and I took it. This was a full-fledged department store with 300,000 square feet and about a thousand employees at peak season—at age 28 I found this to be an exhilarating experience. During my five years as the branch general manager I came to realize that change was afoot in the department store business, and to advance my career I would have to do rotations, not in various departments, but instead in different locations where May operated (Sioux City, Denver, Baltimore, Los Angeles, Cleveland, Akron and Youngstown). I also figured out that I’d eventually land in St. Louis because that was May’s headquarters city. I had no intention of leaving Cleveland because I felt that my destiny was to carry on my family’s traditions here, and in fact my own family and commitment to Cleveland was growing.

Joan Selig and I were busy with a large, lovely house located on the same block where I had grown up and had young family life. Our son, Bob Jr., was born in 1958, and then came daughter, Peggy, in 1960, and son, Donald, in 1961.

In 1963 after 12 rewarding years with May and motivated by my

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desire to pursue a career in Cleveland, I left the department store and entered the venture capital business. This was exciting and challenging partly because no books or industry schools for learning how to finance small or start-up companies existed in the early 1960s, and I was figuring it out as I went. However I did find a few people in New York and Chicago doing the same thing, and I began sharing investments and ideas with them.

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Philanthropy hile I spent one-half of my work time on venture capital, I spent the other half on civic and philanthropic activities. My father and grandfather, who both lived

another 15 years or so after I finished college, taught me most of what I knew about civic and philanthropic matters. My father gave me the appreciation for what various non-profit organizations could do for Cleveland. His service on many boards, along with my mother’s service, was an inspiration to me. For instance I have served on the board of the incredibly effective Vocational Guidance Services (VGS) for 48 years. My father had served VGS for 30 years until his death. Although he served on several dozen philanthropic boards, as have I, it was the only one at which I chose to directly follow him.

I want first to write about my mentors in philanthropy. Beyond my father and grandfather, I consider three people to have been my mentors. The first was Huey O’Neill. With his two brothers Huey owned and successfully grew Leaseway Transportation Corporation, which specialized in vehicle leasing and distribution. Huey was committed to philanthropy and asked me when I was young (in my 20s) to join the board of Saint Ann Hospital. This was a wonderful little hospital on the former Leisy estate on Fairhill Road, but it was so overcrowd-

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ed that women were giving birth in the hallways. Huey put me on the finance committee and asked me to do an analysis about how much money we could raise for a new building costing $3 million. Huey worked with me on this project, and he was one of the kindest men I’ve ever met. I figured out that we could raise $2.25 million, leaving us about 25 percent short of our needs.

I asked my father what to do about this projected shortfall.

“Go on and build the darned thing,” he said. “No one forecloses on hospitals. Someone will die and leave money to it, and you’ll be fine.” That was Dad. We raised the $2.25 million I had projected we could raise but not more.

Then Huey died and left a significant gift to Saint Ann, which provided the additional capital needed—it turned out that Dad was right (which was frequently the case). In fact Saint Ann earned and raised enough money over the ensuing years that it added a fourth floor and eventually was sold for $8 million, money that became the basis for the Saint Ann Foundation.

Huey initiated my 50-year interest in hospitals and health care in Cleveland. I was asked to be on the Mt. Sinai Hospital board (which I sat on for nine years) and the University Hospitals Case Medical Center board in 1977 (where I served for 38 years and am now a life trustee). Because of Huey’s early mentorship I have enjoyed over a half-century on hospital boards and seen fantastic changes as Cleveland became one of the top cities in the United States for health care.

My next mentor was Dolph Norton. In 1971 he asked me to join the board of the national Council on Foundations. Dolph was a great civic organizer, and I had served on a committee of an organization he had previously run called the Greater Cleveland Associated Foundation (“Associated”). We had enjoyed working together and when

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he was chairman of the nominating committee for the Council on Foundations, he submitted my name for inclusion on the board. He invited me to the meeting in Montreal where he was going to present his proposed slate of new board members. In addition to me the slate included several other people, including two African-Americans. At the meeting, Jim Joseph, an African-American minister (and later an ambassador to South Africa), stood up, objected to Dolph’s slate and proceeded to propose his own slate. Taken by surprise Dolph adjourned the meeting until the next morning.

As I walked out of the meeting I was cornered by colleagues of Jim Joseph who wanted to vet me.

“What have you done that you ought to be a board member?” one of them asked.

“Well I was the treasurer of Carl Stokes’ campaign,” I replied (more on that later in this book).

“Okay,” they said, and moved on to the next candidate. Apparently those were golden credentials.

With Dolph’s help I joined the Council on Foundations board at age 43, which made me at least a decade younger than most of the leaders who served. Jim Joseph and I became good friends and often were the ones pushing the council to new ideas. I eventually became the membership chairman for five years. In this role I gave speeches to foundations nationwide. This was work that I loved and Dolph knew it. I served on the board for six years (1971-1977) and remained active with the Council on Foundations for decades longer.

The Associated Foundation, the organization Dolph headed in Cleveland, merged into the Cleveland Foundation, the oldest community foundation in the country. The reconstituted Cleveland Foundation now had a board of trustees of eleven people, and in 1972 I was invited to join it. Dolph always seemed to believe in me and

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nominated me for several committee roles. During my ten years of service the foundation’s strategy was to take a more proactive role in its grantee organizations: it started the Cleveland Ballet, which lasted twenty-four seasons, the Cleveland Opera, Leadership Cleveland and became very active in civil rights and emerging women’s rights issues. It also was several times the salvation of Playhouse Square. My proudest achievement was to limit board service to a maximum of ten years. This was a major battle because some members wanted to serve for a lifetime. They believed they should serve two terms take a year off, and then be able to serve again for two more five-year terms, until death did they part. My belief was that a city like Cleveland needed new ideas, new energy and new people to remain vital. After a multi-year battle, I prevailed. (I’m not sure it’s a legal requirement, but the ten-year maximum is still in force decades later.)

When my terms ended I continued to work closely with the foundation on projects—they provided the funds and I chaired the effort. In our first project we decided that foundations of Northeast Ohio needed more communication and cooperation, and we organized them into a new Grantmakers Forum. Because the foundations shared a location (Cleveland) and some interests, this organizing role was not too difficult. Our next effort—to create an annual, statewide conference called the Ohio Foundation Conference—was the real challenge. We experienced good success in Columbus, and a little success in Toledo and Dayton. Cincinnati on the other hand had little interest in foundation goings-on elsewhere in Ohio; its non-profit leaders cared more about happenings across the river in Kentucky. As a result only three Cincinnati foundations joined the first year. Over the years the idea worked, our local and statewide groups merged and after several more iterations, a strong organization called Philanthropy Ohio came into being. We next created the Cuyahoga Plan to

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deal with housing problems and discrimination. The Cuyahoga Plan lasted about 15 years, and I was chairman for the first eight. Did we solve the problem? Of course not (it’s not solvable), yet I think we made some impact in certain areas.

Bill Treuhaft, founder of Tremco, which made asphalt and asphaltbased sealants, was my third mentor in philanthropy. His special impact in my life was his focus on Jewish philanthropy. First of all he was a pioneer in setting up philanthropic funds for the Jewish Federation of Cleveland (previously known as the Jewish Community Federation). Secondly Bill created his own Treuhaft Foundation, which found creative ways to intertwine the Jewish and Cleveland communities. The way he used money and grants to infuse education and culture with Judaism was brilliant and effective. He taught me so much about structuring charitable funds that I referred to him in many ways for years. When I chaired the same Jewish Federation committee he had started, I frequently found myself trying to find materials from his days and conjuring up memories of his strategies. And when I later created new funds for Jewish philanthropy, the memory of his powerful approach to funding Jewish issues was a boon to me.

For example in the 1970s, Judah Rubenstein, the historian at the Jewish Community Federation, mentioned to Howard Berger, a senior staff member, the idea of creating a Jewish archive at the Western Reserve Historical Society. Howard came to me with the idea, and I went to see Al Ratner, whose family is the most generous Cleveland Jewish family in the 20th century. Our families shared the costs for the first six years, then brought in a few other leading citizens, and eventually the Jewish Community Federation took it over. Over four decades later we participated with others in an endowment to create a permanent archivist.

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In the 1990s the Gries family created an endowment at the Jewish Community Federation, which each year honors an individual who has demonstrated significant leadership in both the Jewish and Cleveland communities. We believed that a religious community can only be strong if the general community prospers. Our hope has been that the 18 award winners to-date have become role models for upcoming generations. ||| To me as a career philanthropist giving away money has never been only about writing checks to organizations that make requests, and I sometimes tried to take philanthropy in new directions. I believed philanthropy could be risk-taking, could sometimes accomplish much with small amounts, and could be used for purposes one rarely would expect. One example is very personal to me. On Sally Gries’s 50th birthday (I married Sally after Joan and I divorced, and Sally will be covered extensively later in this book), I wanted her to receive a special present, something more than a beautiful piece of jewelry or an exotic trip (not that she’s been deprived of either). My criteria were that it had to be beautiful, it had to get better each year and it had to be long-lasting. I thought for a long time and then it came to me. I knew that she often went to the Holden Arboretum to hike the trails and enjoy the trees and flowers.

On Sally’s birthday we took a ride to Holden where I had arranged for a small group of friends and Holden trustees to be waiting. They were at the appointed time and place, and they dedicated the entrance gardens in Sally’s name. Shortly after this moving event she was invited to join the Holden board, and a few years later, was elected chair of the board for a five-year term.

I had occasion to surprise Sally again, years after my sister Ellen

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and I had endowed a forum at Cleveland’s City Club in our parents’ honor. The forum brings in a speaker annually on the arts. I established a new forum in Sally’s name for Women of Achievement. She later gifted me a forum on Inspiration.

Usually when members of a younger generation mature they sit on the board of their family foundation, but there’s a problem with this approach. My travels around the country and meetings with foundations convinced me that this can work, but a person shouldn’t rely on it working smoothly. Often the next generation has different interests, which means they are left wondering when the family leader will retire or die, offering them their own chance to make funding decisions. I believe these generational differences are good because people will spend more energy and money on areas that ignite their passions than on areas someone else thinks are important. This is why Sally and I decided to fund a Generation Six Foundation over which the next generation would have total control. On my 70th birthday the Generation Six Foundation surprised me by funding an endowment at the Cleveland Foundation to bring in the speaker for the annual meetings. This was creativity in the next generation—generation six!

And I can truly say that no gift I have ever received has brought me more pleasure. I can take no credit for that gift in my name except maybe for having brought up good kids with the right values.

Then there is the creativity of making small gifts that have a big impact. I could mention many of these, but I won’t because my primary point is that small gifts allow you to have a mentality of “some don’t work out, but that’s okay because you can’t win all the time.”

The most unusual small gift I made in my philanthropic career may have been in the arts. Ray Shepardson with a small group of friends was trying to save a Euclid Avenue theater from being demolished.

They had no money, and we gave him a foundation grant that was

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small in size but major because it was the first one he received. He used the funds to clean a part of a ceiling of years of grime and dirt, showing the beauty underneath. Subsequently the Junior League and then other funders provided more substantial money. I was involved in several vigorous debates at the Cleveland Foundation in the 1970s about continuing funding for a money-losing organization that was not professionally managed. Fortunately funding continued and Playhouse Square is now one of Cleveland’s great assets.

One of my favorite examples of having fun with philanthropy was an event that became known as the Ethnic Extravaganza. In 1988 a bunch of former trustees for the Neighborhood Centers Association were called back to listen to plans for a 25th anniversary celebration.

This group included about eight prominent business people and philanthropists, including Lainie Hadden (among her many civic roles were to head the Junior League and the Playhouse Square Association, and serve on the board of Case Western Reserve University) and Dick Pogue, managing partner of Jones Day law firm. The event organizers announced that they planned to host a black-tie dinner at a downtown Cleveland hotel.

“Oh, no,” I said aloud and somewhat obnoxiously because I thought it was so inappropriate.

“What’s the problem? What’s the matter with that?”

“Well first of all the last thing this town needs is another ball at a downtown hotel,” I explained. “And secondly what relevance does a black-tie gala have to neighborhood centers? It’ll be a one-shot thing that no one will remember, and not repeatable.”

“Okay then what do you have in mind?”

I was on the spot, and I needed to think of something real quick.

I remembered University Hospitals had just put on its first five-star extravaganza, bringing in chefs from all around the country and even

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abroad. The event was great, and so it flashed through my mind.

“What would be appropriate it seems to me would be to get together a great group of ethnic restaurants from Cleveland and have an ethnic extravaganza.”

This idea made up on the spot caught on.

“Will you run this benefit?” someone asked.

“I don’t run benefits,” I replied, “but I will volunteer to organize the food.”

Oh my God, what did I get myself into? I thought as I left the meeting.

I immediately called the head of the Nationalities Service Center (now called International Services Center).

“I need a favor,” I said. “Can you give me a list of all the ethnic groups that exist in Cleveland?”

Then I called the food editor at the Plain Dealer.

“Can you give me a listing of all the ethnic restaurants in Cleveland?”

These phone calls evolved into what I called the ad hoc food committee, going with the food editor to restaurants to test more than a dozen different items at each one. Our task was large because the event would have about a dozen restaurants, each serving about four different dishes to many hundreds of people. We had to pick the menu and ensure the restaurants had portion control. I challenge anyone to go to an Eastern European restaurant and tell them they have to serve small portions. There also were other challenges. I remember testing one dish and thinking it was great.

“What is this?” I asked “Tripe,” came the response. Tripe is offal from the stomachs of farm animals.

“Okay,” I responded, “if we write that on the sign, then no one

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will eat it. Just write ‘tripe’ in your native language, and if people ask you what it is, tell them it’s not translatable.” It was the first item to run out.

The whole effort for this event was worth it because the net result was one hell of a show. The Ethnic Extravaganza went far beyond food and included ethnic entertainment and music. I had asked the restaurants to make sure their servers wore ethnic costumes and some even came in wedding dresses. This event ran for more than a dozen years from 1988 to 2000, usually at a different locale each year, and raised a lot of money for the neighborhood centers.

Finally another event I loved was the Ohio Sports Festival, which I chaired four times in the 1990s. With the great help of Buffy Filippell, founder of the festival (and the first female sports agent at IMG), and Baldwin Wallace University as a location, we put on an olympics for the State of Ohio, opening with parachutists and fireworks, and hosting all the sports events we could possibly accommodate. ||| I have served on at least 40 civic or philanthropic boards. In my philanthropic career I mostly wanted to make an impact, have fun and carry on the family tradition of giving back. When it comes to cradle-to-grave giving and family traditions in philanthropy, University Hospitals may be an example. My siblings and I were born at UH. My mother died of cancer two years after my father died of cancer, and both of them were treated at University Hospitals. Because of our great experiences with UH my sister, Ellen, and I established the Lucile D. and Robert H. Gries Fund in Cancer Research in 1969.

In 2007 Sally and I created the Lucile and Robert H. Gries Center for Cancer Drug Development, headed by renowned researcher, Dr. Afshin Dowlati. By the way this came 50 years after Dr. Harry Gold-

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blatt conducted his important research on high blood pressure in the Louis D. Beaumont Memorial Research Laboratories at another Cleveland medical institution, Mount Sinai Hospital.

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Cleveland Browns y father was committed to football as a civic and social cause more than he was committed to it as entertainment or sport. When I was 17 years old I spent time at

the Browns training camp in Northeast Ohio. The players lived on the third floor of the dormitory, and coaches lived on the lower floors and were allowed to go up to the second floor only. I was standing outside the dormitory one day when I noticed smoke pouring out of a third floor window.

Oh my God, it’s a fire! I thought. But when I ran up to assess the situation I was surprised to find a bunch of men playing cards and smoking cigars and pipes. I realized at that moment that these players were more than professionals on a field—they had a good time on weekends and off hours. On the following Saturday night this realization set in when I saw a group carrying an inebriated colleague back into the dorm. They dumped him into the shower with all his clothes on and this was riotously funny to them. I was fascinated by this because I saw up-close the difference between their intensity on the field versus their horsing around and letting off steam off the field.

Paul Brown, the first Browns coach, was a phenomenal coach as nearly everyone knows, and was known to be a disciplinarian. For me his practical approach to handling this challenge was intriguing. As an example at the end of the team’s first year in 1946 as it was preparing for the championship game, the Browns captain and two teammates had an altercation with the police and were arrested.

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Football squads were much more limited in those days, and players sometimes played both offense and defense. If all three of these key players had been suspended, the likelihood of Cleveland winning the upcoming championship game would have plummeted. Paul wisely fired the team captain, and he was quoted in many articles as saying that the captain had “a special obligation to be exemplary in his behavior.” The other two players played, and the Browns beat the New York Yankees (New York had a football and baseball team with the same name for a few years) for their first championship.

For me the entire training camp experience was a great way to learn about football life, and at one training camp I was introduced to a Browns player who taught me a lot about football and life and helped me become deeply interested in social justice. Bill Willis, who played on the defensive line, was my favorite player of all time. He was small for a lineman (about 210 pounds), but he had reflexes like a cat. I learned from him how not to be where opponents expected me to be. He taught me how to move so they couldn’t get a block on me, line up so I could (try to) shoot through a hole, and discern whether a lineman was pulling out or blocking straight ahead. I was only 150 pounds, not fast and with no great skills, so I feel confident in saying that what I learned from Willis at Browns training camp (more than anything else) enabled me to earn two football letters as a running guard at Taft.

Willis’s rise in football is interesting. He was a native of Columbus, Ohio, and he went to Ohio State University where he was supposed to be a track star. Paul Brown was coaching at OSU and when he saw a fast, tough guy on the track, he recruited the runner to the football team. Willis began playing for OSU as a sophomore in 1942.

Then Brown coached Willis at Great Lakes Naval Station in 1944, so when Brown was hired as coach of the Browns, he naturally recruited

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Willis (1946). He also recruited Marion Motley who was raised in Canton, Ohio, and was a former player at the University of Nevada.

Both men were Negro and experienced a tremendous amount of discrimination. My father once told me about a meeting where Mickey McBride, the team owner, went to the AAFC league meeting in Chicago in 1946. At the meeting a few teams objected to the Browns wanting to play Negroes. But Mickey was a stubborn Irishman and he would have none of it.

“We are going to play Motley and Willis,” he said basically (I’m paraphrasing). “And if you don’t like it, I’ll tell you what you can do with your team.”

The Browns had a lot of credibility with the other teams—Paul Brown had come on board early and made it his job to prepare his team noticeably and significantly better than other teams. This meant that as team owner Mickey was taken very seriously. He broke the color barrier in football.

The next year Jackie Robinson made his breakthrough in baseball. Discrimination against Robinson was real, especially the verbal abuse from fans and players, but baseball is not really a contact sport and so Robinson didn’t endure the type of physical abuse Bill Willis and Marion Motley did.

Coach Brown reportedly said to Willis one day, “Bill, they’re going to gang up on you. They’ll have three men coming at you. That’ll leave us a big hole, and we’ll take advantage of it.”

“Okay Coach,” Bill said with his big smile, his point being that he could handle it.

And handle it, he did. In old films of games you can see that Motley’s leather helmet was regularly pulled off during plays, and opposing players kicked him in the head and piled onto him. Bill Willis was a lineman and every time he lined up across from the opponents,

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they insulted him and ganged up on him. These two players were “accepted” onto the field, but they took a lot of abuse and they never publicly spoke about this. As a result people don’t give them enough credit for dealing with discrimination for years and breaking the color barrier in sports.

Willis played through the 1953 season, and of all the Browns that ever played, he was my true hero. He was one reason along with Marion Motley that I developed a deep interest in social causes like racism.

B

Civil Rights

y the time I started at the May Company in 1951 after gradu-

ating from Yale, I was interested in issues of race. Very few Negro people worked at May Company, and because we were

the biggest department store in town, we knew we needed to set a tone of change and integration. In the housewares department where I was assistant buyer, we hired a Negro woman to wrap packages behind a desk. This was so unprecedented that three salespeople in housewares refused to hand their packages to the woman and instead indignantly walked off the job.

“Go ahead and leave,” I said to them.

Two were never heard from again, and one came back three days later and asked for her job back.

In the 1950s and in the United States broadly change came at a glacial pace, and Cleveland was no exception. But the 1960s were different, and the much greater speed of change in that decade energized me. I joined the board of Karamu House, a community center for the arts. It was founded as a settlement house in 1915 by a couple, Russell and Rowena Jelliffe, who were Oberlin graduates. They had

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developed a progressive vision for Karamu: create a place “where people of different races, religions, social and economic backgrounds could come together to seek and share common ventures.” They believed the arts were a perfect way to fulfill their ideas, and people of all races were welcome to practice their crafts at Karamu. Their vision for unity and commitment to civil rights were inspiring and strengthening, and I was on the board for six or seven years.

Then Cleveland held its own civil rights march. On July 14, 1963, 15,000 people marched in a “mass demonstration for racial equality,” and 10,000 people watched. Starting at East 13th Street and Chester with “Battle Hymn of the Republic” and “Onward Christian Soldiers” playing, I marched the two rain-soaked miles to Cleveland Stadium where I participated in a rally with 25,000 people. It displeased my grandfather, NL, aged 90, not because he was a racist but because he had never approved of wearing one’s beliefs on his or her shirtsleeve or of any kind of showiness. Modesty was a virtue, anonymity was good, and he reasoned why did I need to make a public display in order to make progress?

But I had learned from my father during our many long conversations that every person should have a chance in life. I saw change happening, and I felt great inspiration for a better world, so much so that I felt compelled to join. Every movement takes its own path and sometimes a movement reaches a point when supporters are no longer willing to follow. Marching down Euclid Avenue was that point for some people who were passive or light supporters of civil rights.

But for me, the Euclid Avenue march was just the beginning.

In 1967 Carl Stokes, who had been a state legislator, ran for mayor of Cleveland. I thought it was important for Cleveland to have an African-American mayor, because until then people would hypothesize that such a leader would either be the ruination or the salvation

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of the city. I believed neither to be the case and I wanted to be proven right. I knew Carl from his days in the state legislature. Arnold Pinckney, the chair of Carl’s campaign and one of Cleveland’s great assets with whom I would work a number of times over the next four decades, made me treasurer of the campaign.

One day during my treasurer stint FBI agents entered my office unannounced. They were looking for anything they could find against Stokes. They wanted the names of everyone to whom we had written asking for money.

“My understanding in this situation is that I am legally required to reveal everyone who donates to the campaign and that information will be published. But I’m not so sure about having to give you a list of everyone we solicited.”

They threatened me with a subpoena but never came back.

Carl was a likeable guy and very charismatic. He was elected in November 1967, making him the first African-American mayor of a major US city. Carl was reelected in 1969 but he didn’t serve long enough to accomplish many of the things people had hoped he would. He went on to be a lecturer, news anchor, lawyer and judge, and one positive outcome of his being mayor was that his brother, Lou, got into politics. Lou was elected to the US Congress and was a great administrator and fine Congressman for 30 years—a great credit to Cleveland and one of our city’s outstanding persons for over a half-century.

In the early 1970s I became involved with a committee for small businesses in Washington, DC, and was eventually asked to chair the committee. I had every plan of doing this until I received a terse, impersonal letter thanking me for my service and informing me that not only was I not to be chairman, but I was in fact no longer on the committee. I called my colleagues in Washington to find out the reason for

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being rejected, but no one could provide any information. I decided to ask Jack Wells, the Browns New York attorney who was a Republican leader and prominent Wall Street lawyer, what had happened.

After a three-week delay he called me to ask if I had been involved with Carl Stokes. When I told him I had, he explained that someone had informed Nixon’s two-man committee-vetting team, and they had found this to be an unacceptable experience. I tell this story because considering future events in the Nixon administration, I have always considered it a badge of honor to have made his sh _ _ list.

In 2000 I was honored that I was given an opportunity to lead another area of social change. Barbara Byrd-Bennett, the new CEO of Cleveland Public Schools, and Mayor Michael White asked that I co-chair a citizens committee to improve the Cleveland Schools. Two decades earlier when Al Tutela had been superintendent of the Cleveland school system, I had chaired a committee that recommended how they should spend and invest $56 million. Unfortunately our recommendations were rejected by the elected school board.

Our new millennium committee visited schools to understand their conditions. The buildings were in terrible shape. A roof at John Hay High School had collapsed. Windows were broken. The bathrooms stank. The electrical and heating systems didn’t work. Classrooms were brutally cold in the winter. Computers were non-existent. The Cleveland Public School system was a disaster, and it was no place for students to learn. I know I couldn’t have learned in such an environment. Massive repairs and upgrades were needed.

Fortunately decision-making this time around was much more streamlined compared to my 1980s experience because Byrd-Bennett was made CEO of the school system under mayoral control, and the school board was appointed, not elected. At the end of six months the committee proposed a bond issuance of $335 million to

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be matched two-for-one by state funds. We were told we were wasting our time, that the issue would go down 60 to 40. Voters went to the polls on Tuesday, May 8, 2001, and Issue 14 on the ballot stated the money raised by the bond issuance was for “renovating, rehabilitating, constructing, furnishing, equipping and otherwise improving school facilities and acquiring and improving their sites.”

Constituents approved the bond issuance and tax levy 60 percent in favor and 40 percent against. In addition to the $335 million, the state offered its significant matching funds. That meant we had a lot of money for improvements. The first $350 million or thereabouts was spent on making the schools warm, safe, and dry, and this was carried out effectively. The remainder was supposed to go to repairing and building new schools, but this ran into a relentless series of snags. The school district enrollment began to decline. It went from 73,000 in 1998 to 58,000 in the 2005-2006 school year. (More recently, it has dropped to around 41,000.) The State of Ohio decided it didn’t want to fund investments in a rapidly shrinking school district. My role had been to organize the citizens committee, make a recommendation and help get out the vote for the election; I was uninvolved in the state’s decision. I wish for Cleveland’s future that it had decided otherwise.

M

Social Change y father dealt with many restrictions placed on Jews.

Early on I experienced similar restrictions, and then happily the world changed and the restrictions eased

significantly. At Hawken School I was the only Jewish person for a while, and during my early career, corporations employed Jewish people in law or accounting roles but not much in sales or executive

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positions. Many non-profit charitable organizations were restrictive about Jewish activity and membership, and the social interaction between Jewish and non-Jewish people was similar to that in my father’s era—it took place from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. but not in the evenings. In fact in my first decade after college, there was no interaction at private parties. In the 1960s a Jew could eat at the Union Club on the second floor in a private dining room if an organization to which they belonged was holding a meeting there. However a Union Club member could not invite a Jewish person to be his guest in the main dining room for a meal.

Then in the civil rights era, these barriers began to break down. In 1968 a prominent lawyer, Allen Holmes, broke an unwritten rule by taking a Jewish person as a lunch guest into the main dining room at the Union Club. Four years later in 1972 the first Jewish persons were invited to become members of the Club.

In the 1970s when Sally and I were first married, we often went out to parties on weekends. On one night I was often the only Jewish person in the room, and on the other night she was the only Christian. In the 1960s Lainie Hadden, head of the Junior League, and her husband, Dr. John “Nicky” Hadden, as well as Gwill Linderme York Newman (Lainie’s predecessor at the Junior League) were the first to my knowledge to invite Jewish persons to their social parties.

Starting with Gwill and Lainie little by little over three decades I saw social life in Cleveland begin to open and integrate.

Since the mid-1990s, the impact of this steady opening up of society in Cleveland has become visible everywhere. Jews have chaired the Musical Arts Association, the Cleveland Museum of Art and the Cleveland Foundation (three times), and have been operating heads of many of Cleveland’s major institutions. It pleases me greatly that today’s Jews are more than tolerated—they are sought after because

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people know they give generously of their time and resources. Major gifts made recently to the two major Cleveland hospital systems are a couple of examples, among many. Major Jewish donors to the Cleveland Clinic with named buildings include Al and Norma Lerner, Jeffrey Cole, Barbara and Carl Glickman, Sam and Maria Miller, and Sydell and Arnold Miller (heart hospital). At University Hospitals and Case Medical Center, they include the Lerners, Jane and Lee Seidman, Iris and Bert Wolstein, and the Risman family.

Each year I give a talk to a group assembled by the Diversity Center on the subject of the changes that have occurred in just one lifetime.

It is important only because younger generations look at all the problems we still have and think we have not done very much. Actually the change has been dramatic and was unforeseen a half-century ago.

Today there is open accessibility to all organizations, and that’s the way the world should be. Sally and I can and do select our friends based on common interests, which often means participation in activities of Cleveland institutions. It’s the world my father so wanted to live in, but he was a generation too early.

F

Lawsuits and the Move

ootball teams weren’t a profitable investment in the 1940s or 1950s, and valuations of teams were modest (e.g., the Browns were sold for $600,000 in 1953, and that was considered a high

price). Only with the advent of television in the mid-1960s did owning a football team begin to become a profitable undertaking. When the Browns were sold for $3,925,000 in 1961, it was the highest price ever paid for a pro team; valuations were starting to increase. The first TV contracts were forged in the early 1960s, and the viewing audience expanded dramatically. Team values began to escalate as the TV

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audience rose. While you could get 80,000 people to attend a game in person, you could get millions of viewers to watch the game on TV. By the late 1960s teams were being valued at up to $16 million.

In the mid-1970s, Art Modell formed Cleveland Stadium Corporation (CSC), a company that leased the Browns stadium (Municipal Stadium) from the city and charged the Browns rent. This meant that now there was inter-dealing between the Browns and CSC, both majority-owned by Art. By this time we owned over 40 percent of the team. Dad had initially had a 5 percent interest in the original team.

He increased that in the 1953 sale then doubled it in the 1956 sale and eventually reached 17 percent in 1961. My brother-in-law and I each bought 4 percent at that time (in 1961), giving the family 25 percent ownership. Subsequently mostly in the 1970s, I worked our 25 percent up to 44 percent because Art redeemed portions of his equity stake to generate cash, and we agreed to be the buyers of the equity stake. My father got sick with cancer in 1964 and he died in 1966, at which time my siblings and I inherited his interest.

I represented our family in the Browns, in part because two of my siblings lived out of town. For a long time after my parents were gone my sister, Ellen, went with me every Sunday to Browns games. When she was getting her Master’s degree at Case, she sat in our box seats studying. One day, I turned to her and said, “Ellen, if you’re going to read a book the whole game, why do you even bother coming?”

“You mean I don’t have to?” she asked.

She had always felt it was just part of what our family did so she didn’t have a choice in the matter, even long after my parents had died. After we talked about it—the obligation of going to football games having gone away with my father’s passing—Ellen never went to another Browns game.

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As part of my job handling the family’s ownership stake in the company, I served on the Browns board of directors. In the mid-1970s the setting up of CSC presented a legal issue, namely something called “corporate opportunity.” Art and I had our differences on this legal matter, but we negotiated successfully and we were granted a percentage ownership in CSC. Then CSC went into other business dealings. Art had personally purchased a 192-acre parcel of land in Strongsville for $625,000 in 1973 so he would have a bargaining chip with the city of Cleveland.

He could potentially put a new stadium there. He had CSC purchase this land for $3 million two years later. CSC also used $1 million to invest in a downtown hotel, the Inn on the Square (now the Renaissance Hotel). He also invested in a radio station. When Arthur was under what some in the press called “crushing” amounts of debt, he decided to generate cash by having the Browns buy CSC for $6 million. In this transaction Arthur valued the Strongsville land, which he had purchased for $625,000 and sold to CSC for $3 million, at $3.8 million. This land was overvalued. I discussed this with the smartest real estate person I knew who suggested to me that its value was $335,000, under 10 percent of what Arthur said it was worth.

I went to see Art and tried to negotiate a better situation. I had spent years in venture capital doing dozens of deals and had never been unable to come to some amicable solution. I had never even considered court action. I tried everything including valuations based on future results, but he was stubborn and unyielding and we didn’t arrive at an amicable solution. That was Art—colorful and a lot of fun. He contributed in positive ways to Cleveland—he was on the board of directors for National City Bank, Ohio Bell Telephone Company and Higbee’s, and was a trustee of the parent organization of The Cleveland Orchestra and of the Cleveland Clinic Foundation.

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But he had limited business experience, never having run a business before buying the Browns.

On our end the Browns were now a major family asset in the range of tens of millions of dollars, and our interests in that asset had to be protected. I had never been to court before but filed suit, spurred on by the overvaluation of the Strongsville land. The basis of our first suit in 1982 was that CSC, now valued at $6 million, was overvaluing its land holding. Without that overvaluation, CSC was worth much less.

The Cleveland media was all over this suit. Arthur was used to dealing with the press and media—he had spent his career before football in advertising and seemed to think he could trample all over us from a media and publicity perspective so we would crumble. My experience with media was very limited; I was advised to be honest with them and answer the questions they asked. Some would write a good story and some wouldn’t, and that was that. That’s about how it turned out—Arthur tried to trample us but he didn’t, and overall the media were very fair in how they played out the story over the years.

No other investors joined us in the lawsuit because there weren’t others of any size. Arthur owned 51 percent and we owned 44 percent. A handful of investors owned very small percentages of the team, 1 or 2 percent each. We were represented by Marvin Karp of Ulmer & Berne, an outstanding lawyer who still is practicing today, and the case came to trial in 1984. The opposing attorney was Pat McCartan, who later became managing director of the Jones Day law firm. Being questioned in the courtroom by Pat was a challenging experience, but I want to say that despite his stern demeanor, he always was the consummate gentleman and I grew to respect and like him, which is more than I can say for some others involved in

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the case. The experience of being questioned is somewhat like a chess match in which you have to think three moves ahead to figure out where the questions are leading. There were 17 days of testimony, 20 witnesses and 180 exhibits. Finally we won. The judge required that Art purchase back CSC from the Browns.

The case was then appealed to the Supreme Court of Ohio and in 1986, the Justices found in our favor: In the instant case, no arm’s length negotiations as to price, terms, the elements to be included (or not to be included), or any other aspect of the proposed acquisition ever took place between the Browns and CSC. The $6,000,000 price was arrived at by Messrs.

AMA [Modell], Bailey and Poplar in the Fall [sic] of 1981, prior to any disclosure to plaintiffs of the possibility of such an acquisition, and never changed despite plaintiff’s objections and despite the valuations furnished the defendants by plaintiffs. The manner in which the subject transaction was initiated, structured, negotiated and disclosed to plaintiffs therefore did not satisfy any reasonable concept of fair dealing. (Ohio Supreme Court)

Meanwhile Art tried to remove me from the board, and so we had to file a second lawsuit to prevent him from doing this. We prevailed and this case also went to the Supreme Court of Ohio. We won again.

There was a third lawsuit over expenses. We settled that lawsuit, and in 1986, after four years of lawsuits and publicity, it was over. We did apply however for our legal fees, prompting an all-day (12-hour) court hearing. We were reimbursed for over 90 percent of our nearly $1 million of legal fees. The irony is that the Browns’ fees were $4 million, so their assets were reduced by that amount, of which we owned 44 percent. That was unfortunate, but it’s the way the legal system works.

The lawsuits were over, but our relationship with Arthur was no

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longer pleasant to say the least. Although I had in the 1960s and 1970s enjoyed spending time with him and his wife, Pat, we were not socially friendly after the lawsuits. We had business meetings together, and for the sake of the business we got through them. ||| Then came the stadium issue and the departure of Arthur and the Browns. Cleveland Municipal Stadium was built in 1931 for $3 million, and by 1994 it lacked luxury suites and other modern amenities.

It was in desperate need of renovation. The Browns had run losses most years, and the team didn’t have money to make the needed renovations. It also had no borrowing power because Art had run up the debt on the team to $37 million, which was beyond the league limit. There had been considerable discussion for several years about the Browns and the stadium, and a civic committee had been appointed chaired by Dave Hoag. Their conclusion was that a new stadium must be built because the cost of repairs was beyond the value of the old structure. But Art kept insisting that he wanted to repair the 1931 building. Why I don’t know, but perhaps it was because he controlled the existing stadium through CSC, and a new one would change that dynamic.

In the spring of 1995 Art called city officials and said he would not speak to them anymore about the issue during the coming season. He then told the media that current plans for the stadium were financially insufficient, and he would go broke unless he moved. Was this correct? Let’s put it in perspective. Unlike most other owners, Art had no substantial assets other than the Browns. He had three options: he could sell the team for well over $100 million and become one of the richer men in Cleveland (hardly going broke). Or he could run the team like the Bengals. Cincinnati, a team in which the owner-

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ship also had no other substantial assets, ran a thrifty operation. In the previous dozen years, it had made money while building a team that went to the Super Bowl. Technically he could run the Browns as an expensive operation that had more coaches and non-football personnel than did the Bengals, but from a practical standpoint this was only an option if he attracted outside money. This meant his remaining pragmatic choice was moving the team.

In summertime as the stand-off between Art and the city continued, Mayor Mike White tried to get ahold of me. He called my office, and my assistant told him I was out of the office for a couple of weeks.

“Can you reach him and have him call me?” the mayor asked.

“No, sir, we can’t do that.”

“What do you mean? He must be reachable.”

“He truly isn’t reachable, sir.”

“Everyone is reachable,” the mayor said, or something like that, I was later told.

“Sir, Mr. Gries is riding a bike across the Gobi Desert from Mongolia to China, and he truly cannot be reached.” (Unfortunately this was before the days of cell phones.) I was away on another athletic adventure. After my 51st birthday, the inhaler for asthmatics was brought to market, which meant that at mid-life I had become fanatic about doing things that as an asthmatic I previously had been unable to even think about. I had subsequently dedicated myself to athletic adventures like ultra-marathons, mountain climbing and endurance cycling trips.

By the time I finally returned from this adventure the city had an emergency on its hands, and I received a note to see the mayor as soon as possible. Mayor White explained that Arthur was dissatisfied with the deal on the table in which the city committed to make

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renovations to Municipal Stadium. Arthur refused to clarify what he wanted and had cut off all negotiations.

“Bob, what’s it going to take to keep the Browns happy?” Mayor White asked.

“Look, all these stadium deals in the league are public. Get ahold of the figures for these deals. Don’t look at the most recent deals because cities with new teams did deals that were out of sight. Offer something that is better than the median deal on the list because if you don’t, by the time the stadium is renovated, the relative position of the deal will have sunk down to 15th or 20th. Try to come up with a deal that will put the city, after all’s said and done, around the 6th- or 7th-best deal for a team.”

There were around 30 teams in the league, so having the 6th- or 7thbest deal would be reasonable.

“Okay I’ll do that,” he said.

He and his team started to work on an analysis, and the mayor put together a $175 million stadium renovation package for the Browns.

The city announced it was going to ask voters to approve a ten-year extension of the city’s “sin tax” on alcohol and tobacco products (what would become Issue 5 on the November 1995 ballot) so that Cleveland could fund a renovation of the stadium. Then halfway through the season I went to a supposedly routine Friday board meeting. The 1995 season had been tough so far—we came off a 1994 season in which we had been 10-6 and lost to Pittsburgh in the playoffs. We started 1995 by winning three of four games, and losing the one on a very questionable decision. Then the team started to fall apart, and there was a lot of dissension within the ranks. I was thinking about this as I went into the meeting, but my mind quickly switched to other topics because Art began the meeting by announcing he was moving the team to Baltimore. He went on to say the deal needed to close on

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the following Wednesday, which was five days later.

“There’s no way I can vote for this,” I said immediately.

Art tried to tell me going to Baltimore was going to be much more profitable than staying in Cleveland. Baltimore was offering a $200 million stadium deal that would increase the value of the Browns a great deal. He was right, but my family hadn’t gone into our Browns investment to make money; we had gone into it as a civic gesture.

My father had been a founding investor in the Rams and the Browns, and there was no way I would be part of moving the team from Cleveland. The problem was that the deal had been negotiated in extreme secrecy, and Art correctly pointed out that if I did anything to publicly screw up the deal, I could be liable for the difference in value of the Browns in Baltimore versus the value of the Browns in Cleveland. His projections showed a clear difference, and they were probably accurate. If I screwed up a deal for shareholders that valued the company more highly than its existing value, then I could be in big legal trouble. That’s the law.

I knew I had a real predicament. The meeting ended on Friday afternoon, October 27, 1995, and kicked off the most highly pressured four days of my life. As a general rule I don’t believe in stress. I grew up in a generation that experienced the Great Depression and WWII, but nobody talked about stress. The word was rarely heard then.

Today everyone obsesses about it. My philosophy has always been: “Life is not what happens to you, it’s how you deal with it.”

But I was stressed. I knew I had to get someone to buy my and our family’s stake in the Browns because I was not going to have us be part of a deal that took the Browns from Cleveland. I didn’t know how the hell I was going to make this sale of our stake happen. I went home and called my lawyer at Ulmer & Berne, but he was out of town. I was scheduled on Monday to drive to Detroit to give a big speech on

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a philanthropic matter unrelated to the Browns, which meant I had to get this Browns situation taken care of over the weekend. There was no one but Sally with whom I could discuss the matter.

I couldn’t call Arthur because it would have taken about five minutes for us to end up in a screaming match. That left me with Al Lerner, who was on the board of the Browns and had been a friend since shortly after he had come to Cleveland. He and his wife lived two houses from us for many years, and I had invested in a number of his early real estate deals. Al was an honest guy who I trusted to negotiate on behalf of the board, and I knew Arthur did too. My thought was that Al could be a go-between for us.

I didn’t sleep on Friday night and first thing Saturday morning, I called Al and proposed that he buy out the Gries ownership stake in the Browns. He said he wasn’t interested in that. He also confirmed that Art didn’t have enough money to buy out my stake.

“Well then maybe the team ought to acquire my interest,” I said, “because there’s no way I’m going to vote for this, and I don’t want to be any part of it.”

He said the team couldn’t do that because it was in so much debt.

“Look if we can arrive at a fair price, then I’ll take the money over ten years. I don’t need it now.”

Al didn’t react to my proposal to be bought out by the team immediately and to be paid over ten years. But I knew he would convey it to Arthur.

I didn’t sleep Saturday night, and then Sunday came with no response.

What the devil am I gonna do? I thought. Time wasn’t on my side.

I needed to be out of the Browns investment very soon.

I was tired, frazzled and alone. I couldn’t tell my siblings, who were part of our shareholdings. Maintaining the confidentiality of

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any Browns deal was my legal board obligation, and that confidentiality holds even when friends and family are involved, and especially when so much money is at stake.

Sunday afternoon came.

Well, I’ve got one ace in the hole, and this is the time to play it, I said to myself. I called Al. “Al you know I’m in a predicament. You know I can’t be part of this move. I know why my father went into this investment originally, and I’ve explained that I cannot and will not be any part of moving the team.”

This was my preamble before I brought up my ace in the hole.

“Al over the past few years, there’ve been four people—two outof-towners and two from Cleveland—who have told me that if I ever wanted to sell my interest in the Browns, they’d be interested.”

This was true. I’d had extensive conversations with one of them to ascertain how real their interest was and to work out some parameters in case I ever did need to sell. I had never planned to sell, but it’s always good to understand your options.

“Al you and I know I can’t do anything to screw up the deal, but it’s time for me to call these people today. I will of course express to them that they can’t say anything. . . .”

This was the piece I knew would get a reaction. We both knew that even with confidentiality in place, these other parties might not care that much about whether this deal got publicized or not.

“I’ll swear them to secrecy and try to get them to sign a confidentiality agreement,” I added. “But I’m a minority shareholder, and you’re not giving me enough time to arrange the appropriate meetings . . . so I just need to tell them I might be selling my interest and ask them if they are interested.”

This got the desired attention. Al listened carefully and within a

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couple of hours I got a call back. First they were very worried that my telling others, regardless of any confidentiality agreements that were signed, would publicize the deal, which they absolutely couldn’t risk. Second they were very worried (I later learned) that if there was anything less than unanimous approval, Baltimore might not accept the deal. Baltimore didn’t want the possibility of minority shareholder lawsuits hanging over their heads. They were concerned that if I didn’t sell my stake and vote to approve the deal, they could lose the deal. Baltimore had another team waiting and had other options if the Browns didn’t accept. And if I did sell my stake over the next few days, that process could somehow leak to the press accidentally and blow up the deal.

They finally figured out that they had to take me seriously, and they did.

“What kind of price are we talking about?” Al asked me when he called back.

Al was an outstanding businessman, got right to the point and was easy to work with. Within a couple of hours we worked out a price that had a ten-year payout to it. On Monday October 30, I went to Detroit as scheduled and was unavailable. I came back Tuesday, and Sally and I met at noon at the Browns offices at the stadium. The lawyers for both sides were there, as was Arthur and Al was there for part of the time. We sat as our lawyers argued over this word and that word.

Some of the people at the meeting wanted to go to the Indians game that night, and when one of them began to question some wording, I said, “Stop arguing and sign the thing! Then you can go to your game.”

At 10 p.m. I walked out of the office, our 50-year interest in the Browns contractually gone. I never could stop the move, but I did

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make sure my family wasn’t complicit in it. All was quiet for ten days until the following weekend when the doorbell rang at 7 a.m.

A Plain Dealer reporter wanted to ask me some questions—the deal had finally gone public.

I explained to this and other reporters that I had sold my family’s interest in the club, that I couldn’t do anything to stop the move, but I wasn’t going to be part of it either. I told them that indeed I could never be part of moving the team out of Cleveland, and that I hadn’t sold my interest in the team on the same terms as Baltimore had valued the team (I had sold it based on what it was worth in Cleveland).

I now also had to explain all of this to my family. For instance they read in the paper that the team was worth a certain amount and wanted to know why we hadn’t received that amount (once I explained the situation to them, my siblings accepted it). We did receive a lot of appreciation from Cleveland sports fans.

The Browns moved in 1995, and we received the first payment of the ten years of payments due to us on schedule around 1997. The next year the year when the second payment was due, I was on a cruise ship to Alaska with Sally when I received an urgent call on the ship-to-shore radio that Art wanted to talk with me. He said he wanted to subordinate our payments.

“We’re borrowing some money and . . . the bank wants to put their payments ahead of yours. . . .”

“Look Art,” I said, “I’ll be home in ten days and we can discuss this then.”

I called my lawyer on a ship-to-shore and asked him to get in touch with the Modell organization while I was in Alaska. By the time I returned they had come up with a plan to pay us out entirely in one lump sum. Our lawyer probably suggested we would not support being subordinated without putting them through a rigorous negotia-

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tion. Whatever the case we were paid out.

I have mentioned that football was a civic cause, and I’m pleased that integration occurred in football during the years of my involvement in the sport. When Bill Willis and I had lunch in the autumn of 2000 after Lou Groza’s funeral (Lou was a tackle and an incredible kicker and had kicked the field goal in the 1950 championship game), I thought about how much the discrimination situation had changed for African-American players. When Willis started he and Motley couldn’t even stay at the same hotels or eat at the same restaurants as the other players—they had to stay in private homes when the Browns played the Miami Seahawks. These days the league has about 68 percent African-American players.

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B

Love

y way of introducing Sally Gries more fully to my story, I am going to go back in time. At the end of 1970 I attended an office Christmas party in downtown Cleveland. I couldn’t

help but notice the prettiest woman at the party. I was in the process of getting a divorce, and she was recently divorced. We talked briefly and she told me her name was Sally Proudfoot. Later that winter a horrendous snowstorm caused a closure of downtown Cleveland’s streets, and no one could get out of the city. For dinner that night the staff at Prescott, Ball & Turben, where Sally worked, went to the Theatrical Grill, a popular downtown restaurant with good food and a huge bar. Hundreds of people had the same bright idea and the place was wall-to-wall people. The good news is that I ran into Sally again. We spoke for a while and then a few months later in April, I called to ask her out.

“Are you married, separated, divorced or single?” she asked.

“Divorced,” I replied.

“When did you get divorced?” she asked.

“This morning.”

“I’ll call you back,” she said and abruptly hung up. That afternoon she called back.

“You’re an honest man,” she said. She had checked with the county courthouse. Now I knew she was not only beautiful but smart.

Within a few months we were going out steadily. We married the next year in 1972 on Sally’s birthday, June 15th. When you marry a much younger woman, marry her on her birthday so that you have only one date to remember.

This now is where I turn my story to Sally. In addition to being the love of my life, she is a wonderful peer (philosophically not chronologically) to frontierswoman, Regina, the beautiful Lizzie, the pro-

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gressive Fannie, caring Bessie, and the friendly Lucile. She makes me proud beyond belief. Not only is she beautiful and brilliant, but she is kind and takes wonderful care of me.

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Sally Proudfoot Gries

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Childhood

n June 15, 1945, Sarah “Sally” Louise Proudfoot was born in Wauwatosa, Wisconsin, a suburb of Milwaukee, and was baptized as a Lutheran. It was wartime and as men returned

from the victorious European front, Sally’s father, who worked for Cutler Hammer, was transferred to the company’s western New York location. The Proudfoots settled in a small ranch-style home with a large pond filled with frogs and fish and surrounded by working farms in Williamsville, not far from Buffalo. They had two dogs and a cat.

Sally and her older sister, Bonnie, who attended a one-room schoolhouse, enjoyed the pond where they caught pollywogs and frogs in summer and ice skated in winter. The Proudfoots had the first TV in the neighborhood in 1948, and the girls’ friends often crowded around the large console with the small, black-and-white screen.

At age three Sally rode a horse and she loved it, igniting a lifelong pastime and passion. However around this time Bonnie developed terrible allergies and hay fever, so the family gave away its pets and moved to Buffalo, where Sally attended kindergarten.

Cutler Hammer engineered, produced and sold electronic controls.

It was growing rapidly, and when Sally was six, her father was transferred to Cleveland to manage the regional office. The family moved to Rocky River, and Sally attended Rocky River schools through tenth grade. At this point her dad was national sales manager for Cutler Hammer and traveled constantly. Both parents were spending more time in Florida, tending to the family-owned orange and grapefruit business in Lakeland and enjoying the weather. Bonnie was in college. Because Sally’s mother wanted to travel more, joining her father on more of his trips and taking her own trips to Europe and

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elsewhere, the Proudfoots decided to sell their house and send Sally to boarding school. Although Sally wasn’t pleased by her parents’ decision, she made the best of it by selecting a school, Ferry Hall (which later merged with Lake Forest Academy) that met her criteria of having fewer rules than other girl boarding schools. Being close to Bonnie and Chicago was an added plus.

The Math Department at Ferry Hall was quite strong. Sally loved math and was interested in investing. When she was sixteen her father gave her a Wall Street Journal for her birthday along with some money to invest. He instructed her to do research and come back to him with a recommendation, which she did. She went to the library and looked through the Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s analysts’ reports but kept coming back to how hard her dad worked at Cutler Hammer. After she read the company’s annual report and learned how fast it was growing, she told her Dad she wanted to invest in that company. He was pleased with her research process and conclusion.

“You are investing in what you know,” he said, and that statement started her lifelong love for investing.

Sally expanded her knowledge about companies and capitalism, supplementing her Wall Street Journal habit with Ayn Rand’s novels and tours of factories. She loved touring manufacturing plants, and innovation caught her sense of adventure. Capitalism was a perfect fit for her independent-mindedness, desire for minimal rules, interest in innovation and love for numbers. Her first year at Ferry Hall was her junior year, and that winter one of her teachers approached her with the idea of skipping her senior year and going to college.

“Sally, you’re taking all senior-level classes except English,” the teacher said. “You’re going to have to go to college or a transition boarding school like Northampton,” where you can take more advanced placement classes.

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Encouraged by other teachers and her parents, Sally made an appointment with the dean of students at Northwestern University. At that meeting she explained her situation, and the dean told her that she would be admitted as a freshman the following September conditioned on two things—she must score well on her SATs and she must get an “A” in senior English over the summer. On its part Ferry Hall agreed to give her a high school diploma upon her successful completion of her freshman year at Northwestern. She accomplished all of the above.

Sally’s sister, Bonnie, was a junior at Northwestern University and a member of the Delta Delta Delta (Tri-Delta) Sorority when Sally entered as a freshman. At the beginning of her first semester, Sally pledged Tri-Delta. Six weeks later the Delta Tau Delta Fraternity sponsored a campus-wide annual pajama race in which all of the fraternity men raced in pajamas and named a Pajama Queen, traditionally the outstanding girl in the freshman class. Sally was honored and delighted to be named the Pajama Queen that year. In one year she had gone from being a rather reluctant student in an all-girls boarding school to being a college freshman in the limelight at an outstanding co-ed university.

She has told me, reflecting on that time, “Life was great!”

Sally entered Northwestern University as a math major. Shortly into her freshman year, her guidance counselor persuaded her to change her career goal of working on Wall Street and her math major.

“Investment firms don’t employ women brokers or analysts,” he said flatly.

She was extremely disappointed to learn this. No one had ever told her she couldn’t have a career in investments where she could use her math skills.

“If you want a career, look into teaching or social sciences,” her

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guidance counselor advised, explaining that those were the fields for career-oriented women.

It was 1962 and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 had not been passed yet. Feeling that she had no other options, Sally took his advice and majored in psychology with a plan to pursue her Master’s if she liked working in that field. If she didn’t the skill set would be applicable in any other job. Northwestern had an excellent behavioral psychology department, and she enjoyed the major. She did not however enjoy working in the field after graduation.

S

Career ally married her college sweetheart during their final quarter at Northwestern in 1966, and they moved several times as his employer transferred him to different cities. This was

a difficult period for Sally. She lost her infant son to Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS), a condition that she had never heard of before, and found that working in the field of psychology was not what she wanted to do. She decided to pursue her dream of a career in investments and landed a job with Goodbody & Company, the second-largest Wall Street firm in the 1960s. They took her in as a management trainee under their Affirmative Action program, which was inspired by the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

She was one of only two women in the program, and it wasn’t easy going. The company had her sign a letter that guaranteed that she wouldn’t get pregnant. She signed, grateful to have the opportunity, but inwardly she was highly amused: how are they going to stop me? Furthermore their request was against the law, which meant they couldn’t enforce it. While male trainees did one rotation of six months in the back office and a second rotation at the New York

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Institute of Finance, Sally and her female colleague weren’t allowed to attend the institute. Their manager thought that they might be “distracting” to the men.

Although she took the institute classes by correspondence, Sally received the highest score in the company’s history. Unfortunately she was denied the pleasure of sharing and celebrating this good news with her colleagues because her manager thought better of it.

“It would bruise their male egos,” he said.

Sally continued with new rotations and learned that she didn’t like being a stockbroker (selling stocks) but did like investment banking and municipal bonds (analysis). When her husband was transferred to Cleveland in May of 1969, she was very disappointed to learn that the municipal bond departments there were “open to men only” during her job search. However she was delighted to be back in Cleveland where her parents kept an apartment and her sister lived.

Refusing to be discouraged by not being allowed to work in bonds, she went to work for Prescott, Ball & Turben, a prestigious regional broker-dealer where she assisted the senior partners in analyzing deals and developed a client base as a broker. She wasn’t satisfied with this job and moved on to other analytic jobs in investment banking and venture capital as she sought her career path. After a particularly bad day of gender discrimination at the office, she decided she wanted something that symbolized her determination to succeed in a maledominated system, but this representation had to be subtle. She had always been irritated by the plethora of “Wall Street jewelry” for men while there was none for women. She asked a jeweler to make an 18-karat gold ring that had a bull and a bear on it with the stock market going up and down behind these figures. She has never taken it off.

Meanwhile, the sadness over the loss of her son never left her. Her marriage deteriorated and ended in divorce in November of 1970.

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She and I married one and a half years later.

I had three children, and she has always said about our union, “I got a bonus of three instant stepchildren.” She adored them. Bobby, the oldest (aged 14 when we married) chose to live with Sally and me, and Sally took a sabbatical to spend time at our new home in Cleveland getting to know her stepchildren better, Bobby in particular.

After a year Sally was ready to resume her career. She worked in various capacities at brokerage firms and gained keen insight into how deals were structured to the advantage of the firms and disadvantage of clients. These questionable ethics of the brokerage industry were intolerable to Sally, and she sought a better way to help people invest.

She had a strong investment background but needed to gain knowledge in financial planning. She took classes and received her Certified Financial Planner designation in 1978. In August of that year she started Gries Financial LLC, an independent, fee-only, multi-family office and wealth-management firm, and the first female-owned registered investment advisory (RIA) firm in Ohio.

I was a supporter and client, but her first real client was Dick Tullis, CEO and chairman of the Harris Corporation, one of her mentors. Dick was an innovator and visionary who recast Harris Intertype, a print typesetting company, as a communications company, transforming an obsolete business into a cutting-edge company in global and space communications. Dick thought Sally’s ideas about providing objective, fee-only financial planning and investment management were right on. He helped her refine her business model and enthusiastically endorsed it. He became so pleased with her work for him and his family that he told everyone, and the firm has grown through client referrals ever since.

Sally’s reputation as an astute chief executive of a growing busi-

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ness attracted the attention of the CEO of TransOhio Savings Bank, a publicly traded company that was the largest savings bank in Ohio and one of the largest in the country. Sally joined its board at the age of 36, achieving one of her career goals: to be on the board of a publicly traded company before she was 40.

As her firm grew in assets and stature, large institutions were attracted to its stock-picking performance and Sally turned to David Morgenthaler, the founder of Morgenthaler Ventures and one of the top venture capitalists in the country, for advice on how to position the firm for these larger clients and grow the firm. He helped her strategize and adjust her business model over the years.

As the investment world evolved, so did Gries Financial to meet the needs of clients. Initially stocks and bonds were managed in-house by a team of highly qualified investment professionals. In addition Sally formed another firm, Fieldstone Associates, a real estate investment advisory firm, to source private real estate investments for her clients. Over the years as other specialized investment strategies evolved that could be beneficial to clients, Gries Financial transitioned to an investment advisory role. Its goal was to achieve preservation of principal and growth through an investment approach that focused on asset allocation, and strategy and manager selection. Because of its size, reputation and relationships, Gries Financial had access to outstanding managers that added value for its clients. Diversification was an important source of return and risk management, which helped clients and the firm weather the volatility over the years and meet their financial goals. By 2014 Gries Financial had clients around the world, offices in Cleveland and Cincinnati, and oversaw more than $1 billion in investment assets.

Sally’s profile was national in scope. For instance in 2012 Sally was selected to be a member of the advisory board for Pimco (Pacific In-

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vestment Management Company), a global investment management firm with nearly $2 trillion in assets under management. Pimco was led by Bill Gross and Mohamed El-Erian, and Sally is the only person from Ohio on this registered investment advisor’s board. She also initially was one of only two women on the 11-person advisory board.

S

Philanthropy tarting at age 12 when she was a “candy striper” at a local hospital, Sally volunteered generously with her time. In college she tutored in some of Chicago’s poorest neighborhoods.

But during her year-long sabbatical in the early 1970s, she found increased time to dedicate to civic involvement and charitable activities, and from there her commitment strengthened progressively over the years.

She had experienced gender discrimination in her career, and among the first activities with which she became involved at the outset of this period of building her philanthropic activities was promoting women’s rights in the workplace. She joined the board of Women’s Equity Action League, a national non-profit member organization that sought equal opportunity for women in education, economics and employment. She served as its president in 1971 and enjoyed the good fortune of working with such outstanding women as Bernice “Bunny” Sandler, a women’s rights activist who was so instrumental in the creation of Title IX that she has been referred to as the “mother of Title IX.” In 1972 Women’s Law Fund was founded, and Sally joined its board. It was a non-profit that funded precedent-setting genderdiscrimination employment litigation, including the LaFleur v. the Cleveland Board of Education case that won rights for pregnant

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schoolteachers at the Supreme Court of the United States. Another precedent-setting case was striking down the height and weight requirements of police and firemen so women became eligible for these high-paying jobs. Sally served as treasurer for several years, as well as president, of Women’s Law Fund. It was in this capacity that she also had the pleasure of working with Ruth Bader Ginsberg, a brilliant lawyer who later became a Supreme Court Justice.

In 1975 she was on the board and treasurer of the International Women’s Year celebration in Cleveland, a three-day conference attended by about 75,000 people. First Lady Betty Ford was the keynote speaker. It was the largest and most successful celebration in the United States. A decade later something happened that linked Sally’s activities with women to mine with Jewish integration. A group of business leaders were going to lunch with Karen Horn, head of the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, and they were embarrassed when she had to walk around to the rear entrance of the Union Club. That was quickly changed. Today the Union Club has been remodeled, modernized and has all kinds of networking opportunities, a liberal admission policy, a diversified board, women members and the pictures of two female presidents on its walls. Quite a change! ||| Sally’s and my philanthropy began to intersect in wonderful ways.

When Sally became Bob Jr.’s stepmother, she was invited to join the board of Hawken School, his private co-ed day school. She served on this board for many years and became a life trustee.

At one point during a strategic planning process, Scott Looney, the head of the school, asked the board, “How can we enhance learning?” The board conversation turned to Hawken’s founder, James A. Hawken, a disciple of John Dewey’s experiential learning method.

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It was at this board retreat that Bob Bruml ’72 remarked that if the school was really committed to the principles of real-life learning and involvement with the greater Cleveland community, “. . . we would be at University Circle.”

University Circle is a center of cultural and educational activity, a home of world-class institutions and nearly unrivaled brainpower. It features eight educational institutions, fifteen cultural organizations, four medical centers, seven health and social agencies, and draws over two million people each year. Bruml’s idea was that by partnering with these institutions, Hawken could engage its students in authentic, relevant learning experiences. One of Sally’s biggest beliefs is that experiential learning in diverse settings is important to a good education. She has long been a fan of learning by doing and ensuring that students pursue a wide variety of interests beyond textbooks and the classroom—some students need experiences that better draw out their talents.

Sally liked the idea so much that she came home and suggested that we support it more fully. We knew this was different: experiential learning takes place at universities and some high schools, but we were unaware of any K-12 school that featured it. We began a discussion with Hawken about being more involved, and as a Hawken trustee, Sally spearheaded an initiative that led us to our most significant grant. We established the Sally and Bob Gries Center for Experiential and Service Learning at University Circle, which opened September 7, 2010. The idea took a few years to develop partly because the Hawken curriculum changed in order to make best use of it. All Hawken students now spend time in a lab or health care setting or at a museum or university, and they learn to do the job of a research doctor, museum curator or non-profit executive director.

The experiential and service learning that takes place has surpassed

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all expectations. Student testing and faculty and student assessments show that students of the center learn faster and more deeply, and their retention is much greater because of their interaction with doctors, curators and others in University Circle. Applications to Hawken have skyrocketed. Recently we attended the closing session of a course on entrepreneurship in which students worked with a small company trying to grow. I was amazed! The research, analysis and presentation was better than anything I had seen in the venture capital industry when I was last active in it 20 years ago. ||| Sally’s board work at Hawken and her own boarding school enhanced her awareness of how vital and transformational a good education could be. Early on in her Hawken experience in 1991 she decided to redouble her commitment to education, and she joined the board of Case Western Reserve University (CWRU).

One of her core beliefs was that great cities have institutions that provide people with a spectrum of educational possibilities and that Clevelanders need to develop a mentality of lifetime learning. As Cleveland’s top private research university, CWRU could be a core provider in this lifetime learning strategy. The board has worked hard on this, and Barbara Snyder, who became president of the university in 2007, has simultaneously strengthened the university and increased public awareness of CWRU globally.

President Snyder also has moved the university toward corporate partnerships and important collaborations. Student applications have soared. Sally is excited that her dream for CWRU to help drive Cleveland’s renaissance is being fulfilled. We have been so heartened by the progress that we are funding a program (in Sally’s honor) for The Milton and Tamar Maltz Performing Arts Center at The Temple-

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Tifereth Israel, the new home for Case Western Reserve University’s dance, music and theater programs. This temple served the congregation that Rabbi Gries led for a quarter-century, another linkage that means a lot to us. ||| In 1988 as Gries Financial was approaching its 10th anniversary, Sally was stricken with a bleed in her brain while attending a loan committee meeting at TransOhio. She was making a comment on a loan and found that she wasn’t as articulate as she could be. Then she felt a warm shooting pain down her right arm and as she listened to the director on her left, she thought his speech was garbled. As she looked around the room, she realized that everyone but her could understand what he was saying. She felt very warm. She looked at her watch. It was 3 p.m., the departure time of a plane that she should have been on but that her husband had canceled earlier in the day, due to his heavy schedule. More pain. She looked up and couldn’t recognize the people around the table or the room she was in. She wondered if she was having a heart attack then quickly realized it was her brain.

Am I having a stroke?

3:08 p.m.—She began to understand what people were saying. But then her right arm felt very warm and she felt very weak.

3:10 p.m.—The comments had gone around the table and it was her turn to say something again. She decided to see if she could talk.

She spoke up and was coherent. Thank goodness!

It was a massive bleed that was caused by an arterial venous malformation (AVM). Fortunately it was a slow bleed, and she had survived it. This was a life-threatening situation however, and after she reached the hospital in Cleveland for treatment, I never left her side.

Following surgery her room in the intensive care unit was tiny and

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packed with life monitoring equipment, leaving no room for visitors.

I brought in my sleeping bag and slept under her bed. Thanks to great doctors, Sally had a full recovery.

She had a great team at her office, and Gries Financial never missed a beat. In fact while she was recovering in the hospital, her surgeon engaged her in conversations about financial planning and investment management and hired her to work with his family and the neurological surgery foundation! Most especially Sally was impressed by the outstanding care given by the nurses at University Hospitals and interested in their research on the brain and healing. Together she and I established the Sally Gries Nursing Endowment Fund that recognizes individual nursing achievement, initiative and performance in neurological patient and family care. Later Sally became a founding member of the leadership council of the new neurological institute at University Hospitals.

I have already mentioned Sally’s leadership at Holden Arboretum, an organization whose research and findings have enabled Cleveland to be part of the national dialogue about sustainability. After her surgery Sally’s doctors instructed her to engage in brain activity that was not work-related. Per her doctors’ instructions Sally took flower arranging and horticulture classes, and to gain strength, walked the trails of Holden.

During this difficult and beautiful time of walking the Holden grounds, I saw her passion for trees, plants and a sustainable environment flower. (It already had taken root in her childhood in western New York where she fell in love with horses and the great outdoors.)

The Holden Arboretum’s outstanding collection of trees and woody plants across 3,000 acres, its scientific research and educational programs, and its nationally recognized leadership in sustainability captivated her, and she has been smitten ever since.

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||| In 2012 Sally was invited to join the board of the Cleveland Foundation, thirty years after I left the board. (I was on the board from 1972-1982.) Sally was enthusiastic about joining because she felt that her past experience of serving on about 25 boards and even more committees had provided a good base for understanding the general community, its challenges and its potential. Most importantly she believed that the Cleveland Foundation was best-positioned to help Cleveland and Cuyahoga County achieve their potential. It was the first community foundation in the country, it was experienced (celebrating its 100th birthday in 2014), it had unrestricted endowment dollars, and it had outstanding staff and leadership.

These things render the Cleveland Foundation deeply impactful.

It does nothing lightly and everything for a reason, and it influences almost every area that matters—children, education, neighborhoods, homelessness, sexual orientation, economic development, arts, energy and the environment. Its giving strategies are split evenly between two types of grants. The first is community responsive grants, and the second is board-directed grants that are based on thoughtful and strategic planning. Ronn Richard, the head of the foundation, his associates and the board play a leadership and collaborative role in fostering sustainable and meaningful change for all Clevelanders. Further they are not an island; they collaborate with people and organizations constantly so together they can build programs with enough scale and scope to make a difference.

The Cleveland Foundation was Sally’s most recent major commitment in terms of time to philanthropy in Cleveland, and I have a feeling it will not be her last. Sally’s philanthropic efforts in Cleveland were recognized by the Women’s Community Foundation in June of 2007 when they awarded her their Creative Philanthropy Award.

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M

Conclusion y life has been a delightful and exciting journey. I was blessed with incredible ancestors. In the Jewish religion there is one prophet, Hillel, who said it all in two sen-

tences: “If I am not for myself, who will be? But if I’m only for myself, what am I?” I believe that all the generations of my family adhered to this while doing positive things for their beloved city, Cleveland. As I move through the twilight years, I feel contented that my mission is complete, having carried on the best that I could the enormous legacy of my family’s preceding four generations. I am happy to have had the opportunity to positively impact some lives along the way and to leave Cleveland a little better place. In my remaining years I want only to spend as much time as possible with my incredible Sally, to see my children succeed in their endeavors, and to see my grandchildren through high school and college, chasing their dreams.

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Acknowledgments y goal was to write this book so that my ancestors came alive, and I knew this would require assistance. First my gratitude goes to the staff at the Western Reserve

Historical Society and to Sean Martin, the director of the American Jewish Archives there. Secondly my thanks to John Grabowski, an author of the Encyclopedia of Cleveland History and Associate Professor in Applied History at CWRU, for his review of early Cleveland history, and to Rabbi Richard Block of The Temple-Tifereth Israel for his help regarding Rabbi Gries and his service at The Temple.

Finally I thank Becca Braun, Stacy Goldberg and the team at The Braun Group. They were my partners in organizing, researching, writing, editing and producing this book. Despite my father’s 100 large scrapbooks, this book could not have been produced without their great guidance.

Index | 215

Index Alsbacher party, 22 American Football League, 138

Cleveland Foundation, 166, 170, 171, 182, 212

American Jewish Archives, 214

Cleveland Friends of Music, 152

Anshe Chesed, 22, 56, 57, 59

Cleveland Hearing and Speech Center, 81, 115, 153

B’nai B’rith, 13, 22, 42 Beaumont Foundation, 111, 116, 117, 118 Beaumont Scout Reservation, 117 Beaumont, Commodor and Beaumont, Louis, See also Louis Shoenberg, 102, 105-110, 115-117, 174 Bell, Bert, 145 Boy Scouts, 75, 98, 99, 152 Braham, Bessie 79, 80, 85-90, 92, 96-98, 103, 111-114, 128, 131, 198, 230 Braham, Louis, 85, 86, 89, 90, 103 Brown, Anna, 76 Brown, Paul, 125, 143, 174, 175, 176

Cleveland Institute of Music, 77, 152 Cleveland Mental Health Association, 153 Cleveland Museum of Art, 111, 148, 154, 155, 182 Cleveland Orchestra, 44, 96, 111, 152, 154, 185 Cleveland Public Library, 148, 154 Cleveland Rams, 138, 143, 145, 191, 237 Cleveland Stadium, 178, 184-188, 190 Cleveland Worsted Mills, 42, 47, 48, 51, 52, 69

Brush, Charles, 25, 44

Commercial Credit and Investment Company, See CIT

Byrd-Bennett, Barbara, 180

Council on Foundations, 165, 166

Case Western Reserve University, 13, 96, 117, 171, 209, 210, 214

Daniel D. Dauby Award, 115

Central Conference of American Rabbis, 66, 68, 69

Dauby, Daniel, 80, 96, 98-100, 111-115, 130, 134

CIT, 104, 105, 107

Dauby, David, 82, 83

City Club, 111, 169

Dauby, Nathan Louis “NL”, 79, 81-98, 100, 101, 103, 104, 113119, 128, 130-132, 135, 136, 178

Classical Reform Judaism, 60, 64, 146

Dauby & Strauss, 84, 91

Cleveland Browns, 143-146, 174-177, E.R. Hull & Dutton Company, 90 183-196, 238, 241 Eilenroc, 102, 107, 109 Cleveland Council of Jewish Women, Ethnic Extravaganza, 171, 173 67

216 | Five Generations Euclid Avenue National Bank, 43-46, 52

Groza, Lou, 145, 196

Federation of Jewish Charities, 42, 68

Hahn, Edgar, 114, 116

Filippell, Buffy, 173

Hawken School, 161, 181, 207-209

Generation Six Foundation, 170

Hays Brothers, 34

Goldblatt, Harry, 111, 173

Hays, Frances, 40, 54, 58, 59, 61-64, 70-72, 76-78, 87, 123, 198, 226

Greater Cleveland Associated Foundation, 165 Gries Financial, 204, 205, 210, 211 Gries, Betty Frances, 113, 133, 142 Gries, Donald, 163 Gries, Ellen, 133, 142, 169, 173, 184 Gries, Fannie. See Frances Hays Gries, Lincoln, 62, 71, 76, 123, 131, 153, 154

Hadden, Lainie, 171, 182

Hays, Joseph, 30, 34, 35, 50 Hays, Kaufman, 19, 28-52, 58, 59, 62, 63, 69, 70, 72, 74, 117, 123, 126, 128, 221 Haysmar, 49, 51, 70-72, 77, 126, 127, 132, 133, 224 Hebrew Union College, 65 Herrick, Myron T., 43, 223

Gries, Lucile Dauby, 92, 96, 98, 111-115, 122-125, 128-134, 137, 142, 148-150, 152, 154, 155, 161, 173, 198, 236

Holden Arboretum, 169, 211

Gries, Peggy, 163

Jewish Orphan Asylum, 13, 29, 40-42, 49, 52, 117

Gries, Rabbi Moses J., 42, 52, 54-63, 64-78, 87, 122, 123, 126, 131, 162, 164, 210, 225 Gries, Robert Dauby, 18, 70, 76, 100, 115, 133, 134, 136, 137, 142, 144, 148-150, 158-198, 204, 208, 209, 211-214 Gries, Robert Dauby, Jr., 163, 204, 207

Jelliffe, Russell and Rowena, 177 Jewish Community Federation, 68, 168, 169

Kalisch, Rabbi Isidor, 56, 57, 59 Karamu House, 177, 178 Karp, Marvin, 186 Klein, Regina, 3, 15-19, 25, 26, 39, 40, 83, 197, 220 Kohn, Lazarus, 21, 22

Lerner, Al, 183, 192-194 Gries, Robert Hays, 54, 62, 70, 76, May Company, 81, 86, 88, 90, 113, 122-128, 131-155, 161, 162, 103-105, 107, 109, 110, 116, 117, 164, 165, 173, 174, 176, 181-183, 134, 135, 138, 139-141, 146, 149, 184, 191, 193, 236 153, 161-163, 177, 237, 240 Gries, Sally Proudfoot, 158-160, 169, May, David, 85, 86, 88-90, 103, 104 170, 173, 182, 183, 192, 194, McBride, Arthur “Mickey”, 143, 145, 195, 197, 198-213 176 Gries, Tom, 133, 142 McCartan, Pat, 186

Index | 217 Modell, Art, 125, 146, 184-192, 194, 195

Snyder, Barbara, 209

Morgenthaler, David, 205

Suburban Temple, 147, 154, 155

Mt. Sinai, 110, 111, 151, 153, 165

Taft School, 142, 161, 175

National Council of Jewish Women, 42 National Football League, 143-145

Temple-Tifereth Israel, 40-42, 51, 55-59, 61, 64, 67, 68, 71, 73-77, 87, 131, 146, 147, 210, 214

Ness, Eliot, 71

Thomas, Helene, 102, 106-109

Newman, Gwill Linderme York, 182

Thorman & Company, 19, 34, 35

Northwestern University, 201, 202

Thorman, Lizzie, 28, 30, 32, 33, 39-42, 49-52, 58, 62, 67, 117, 197, 222

Norton, Dolph, 165, 166 O’Neill, Huey, 164, 165

Stokes, Carl, 166, 178, 179

Oakwood Country Club, 96, 97, 100, 131

Thorman, Simson, 34, 5-10, 12-26, 30, 31, 33-36, 39, 40, 42, 50, 56, 59, 63, 68, 83, 126, 128, 139, 218

Ohio Sports Festival, 173

Truehaft, Bill, 168

Playhouse Square, 127, 167, 171

Tullis, Dick, 204

Proudfoot, Bonnie, 199-201

Ulmer & Berne, 186, 191

Ratner, Al, 168

University Hospitals, 113, 151, 165, 171, 173, 183, 211

Richard, Ronn, 212 Rosenau, Rabbi William, 66 Saint Ann Hospital, 164, 165 Sally Gries Nursing Endowment Fund, 211 Sandler, Bernice “Bunny”, 206 Schaeffer, Rudy, 146 Severance, Solon, 43 Shepardson, Ray, 170 Sherby, Dan, 143, 145 Shoenberg, Louis, See also Louis Beaumont, 86, 89-91, 103, 105, 106 Silberman, Saul, 145, 146 Silver, Rabbi Abba, 71, 75-77, 131, 146 Silverman, Rabbi Myron, 147, 155

Unsleben, 6-8, 10, 14, 16, 17, 21, 24, 56, 139 Vocational Guidance Services, 152, 164 Watters, Leon, 77 Western Reserve Historical Society, 155, 168, 214 White, Mayor Michael, 180, 189, 190 Willis, Bill, 175, 176, 196 Wise, Rabbi Isaac Mayer, 65 Women’s Law Fund, 207 World War I, 71, 72, 98, 105, 109, 126, 127, 139, 140, 142, 161 World War II, 48, 109, 139, 142, 161, 191 Yale University, 126-129, 144, 147, 151, 161, 177

218 | Five Generations

Endnotes Much of the information in this book came from my personal experiences and the stories I heard in my youth and adulthood, and this type of information is not cited or end-noted. The below endnotes provide citations for researched items. Additionally, some endnotes include an explanation of my stance on points that have conflicting or disputed facts, as well as select stories and family tales that don’t relate directly to the main story of Five Generations.

Simson Thorman In 1832: Sources vary about the date of Simson Thorman’s arrival in Cleveland.

I chose 1832 based on several secondary sources, including the Encyclopedia of Cleveland History and the American Jewish Archives. Sources agree that Thorman was naturalized as a US citizen in Sept. 1842.

Simson Thorman’s name and birthdate: The last name was “Thormann” in Bavaria, and in America, it changed to “Thorman.” “Thormann.” JewGenPedia: The Jewish Genealogy Encyclopedia, n.d. Web. Oct. 2013. Thorman’s date of birth is cited as 1811. “Thorman, Simpson.” The Encyclopedia of Cleveland History (ECH), n.d. Web. Oct. 7, 2013.

The trio reached Cleveland’s center: Description of Cleveland in 1832 is derived from two sources: Becker, Thea Gallo. Images of America: Cleveland 17961929. Arcadia Publishing: Chicago, IL, 2004, 26. Print; Chapman, Edmund H. Cleveland: Village to Metropolis. The Western Reserve Historical Society and the Press of Western Reserve University: United States, 1964, 46, 52. Print.

Simson had little money: Beatrix Jessberger papers, Western Reserve Historical Society (WHRS). Box 1, Golder 2, “Index of the Jews who emigrated 1830-54 from the communities of Adelsberg…with a note of their capital and the cause of their emigration.” shelter in a barn: “There is not even a room to be rented and families have been compelled to take shelter in barns.” Cleveland Herald, Oct. 1831: n.pag. Print.

Sock Weaver the town of Unsleben: Most information on life in Unsleben comes from two sources—Beatrix Jesselberger papers, WRHS. Box 1, Folder 2, 6. Print; Gartner, Lloyd P. History of the Jews of Cleveland. WRHS in cooperation with the Jewish Community Federation of Cleveland, 1987. Print. as a sockweaver: Beatrix Jesselberger papers, WRHS. MS 4889.

Only the eldest son: “Bavaria.” Jewish Virtual Library. n.d. Web. Aug. 5, 2013.

Depiction of Jewish life in France and Jews in Unsleben: Shurkin, Michael.

“French Jewish History, 1650-1914.” My Jewish Learning. n.d. Web. Oct. 7, 2013; and “History of Jews in Unsleben” and “Judische Geschichte.” Unsleben. n.d. Web. Oct. 7, 2013.

Endnotes | 219 The Transatlantic journey would take about two months: Bergquist, James M. Daily Life in Immigrant America: 1820-1870. Greenwood Publishing Group, 2008, 13. Print.

Simson had a compact stature: A physical description of Simson is provided in his Feb. 28, 1886 passport application. Ancestry.com U.S. Passport Applications, 1795-1925 [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2007.

The men traveled 300 miles: Based on description of Alsbacher party’s later journey. Gartner, 10. it is clear that around 1832, they decided to go west: Kelly, S. J. “Simson Thorman, the First Cleveland Jew,” Plain Dealer May 17, 1938. Print.

These line boats: “Packet Boats on the Erie Canal.” The Erie Canal. n.d. Web. Oct. 8, 2013. trade in primarily beaver pelts: “Trapping History.” Trapper Gord. n.d. Web. Oct. 7, 2013; and Dove, Gentle. “Mountain Men: A Historical Background of the Men of the American Frontier.” The Green Mountain Council Boy Scouts of America. 2008-2013. Web. Oct. 7, 2013.

It was a boom and bust business: “History of the Fur Trade.” Montana Trappers Association. n.d. Web. Jan. 17, 2013.

Native American tribes: “American Indians in Missouri.” Native Languages of the Americas. 1998-2011. Web. Jan. 17, 2013; and “American Indian Tribes of Illinois.” Illinois State Museum. n.d. Web. Jan. 17, 2013.

Five years away: “Biography of the Thorman Family.” The Ohio Library and Information Network (OhioLINK). n.d. Web. Jan. 17, 2013. bought land in Doniphan: This property remained in the family for 150 years. In the 1970s, my Aunt Sophia Thorman tried to sell the property, a difficult job that required locating all possible heirs through six generations. She finally prevailed, and in 1985 I received a check for $414.09, which I shared equally with my siblings.

Moses Fraley went to: Szold, Henrietta. American Jewish Yearbook. The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1907, 235; and Second Conference of Jewish Charities in the United States. Detroit, Mich. May 26 to 28, 1902. Cincinnati, Ohio. C.J. Krehbiel & Co., 1902, 39. Print.

Cleveland Peixotto, a physician: “Peixotto.” Jewish Virtual Library. n.d. Web. Oct. 7, 2013.

His son Benjamin Peixotto: “Obituaries: Benjamin F. Peixotto.” New York Times Sept. 19, 1890: n.pag. Web. July 25, 2014.

220 | Five Generations Nineteen members of the Unsleben community: According to research by N.E. Schwartz and S. Lasky, 19 people left Unsleben for America, and 15 ultimately settled in Cleveland. Perhaps another 10 came between 1839 and the Civil War. Schwartz, N.E. and Lasky, S. “Jewish Cleveland before the Civil War.” Marc Lee Raphael, ed. American Jewish History, An American Jewish Historical Quarterly Publication. 82, 1-4. Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1994. Print. A translation of the Alsbacher Document shows the company of emigrants included 18 adults and a child. “Translation of the Alsbacher Document” Jewish Community Federation of Cleveland Records, Folder 17 Container 5, WRHS. Print. the Howard: Schwartz, N.E. and Lasky, S., 97-122, 388.

It included a farmer: Names and professions for the Alsbacher party are listed in the ship manifest for the Howard, as reproduced in Allan Peskin’s book, This Tempting Freedom: The Early Years of Cleveland Judaism and Anshe Chesed Congregation. Cleveland, 1973. Print.

Regina Klein Raichl had been sent: Peskin, 2.

She gave birth: Stern, Malcolm H. First American Jewish Families: 600 Geneologies 1654-1988. Cincinnati: American Jewish Archives, 3rd ed., 1991, 293. Print. lived on Merwin Street: Sources conflict on where Simson Thorman lived at this time. According to the census data and property transfer information, it appears that there were many properties owned and transferred among Thorman family members and members of the Alsbacher party. It was common for several people to purchase property jointly, and later individuals bought neighboring parcels of land. For this reason, it is possible that different members of the Thorman family lived at several addresses: Cross Street/Orange, 9th/Woodland, 227 Woodland, Garden Street, and Water Street. I believe the most credible location to be Merwin Street, based on information from the 1937 article, “City’s Jews to Hail Century of Cultural March Here” The Cleveland News, Thorman Family Papers, I Folder 1 Box 1, WRHS. Print.

Hides & Furs had numerous children (but not yet ten): Regina gave birth to 11 children, but one died in infancy. “Thorman, Simpson.” ECH. Web. Oct. 6, 2014. dry goods and grocery store: Gartner, 17.

He was worth $20,000: The 1860 Federal Census listed Simson’s personal estate as $10,000 and his real estate as an additional $10,000.

121 Water Street: Cleveland City Directory 1861 (on microfilms at WRHS); Judah Rubinstein Photographs (1839-2003), WRHS Container 2, Folder 221.

Microfilm. at Croton Street and Case Avenue : Gartner, 17, 38-39.

Endnotes | 221 Social Fabric The Israelitische Society quickly began to experience division: Weimik, Peter.

The History of the Jews in America: From the Period of the Discover of the New World to the Present Time. Jewish Press Publishing Co., 1912, 141. Print.

The Israelitische Society’s synagogue caught fire: “Conflagration of the Synagogue at Cleveland, Ohio.” The Occident and American Jewish Advocate n.d.

Web. Oct. 7, 2013. he won the election by a landslide: Mellow, Jan, “Cleveland’s 1st Jewish Settler Born 150 Years Ago in Bavaria,” Plain Dealer n.d. Print. a 135-mile trip: “Abraham Lincoln’s Assassination.” rogerjnorton.com, n.d.

Web. July 25, 2014.

Did not extend to Negro people: In the time period up to the 1960s in this book, I refer to African-Americans as “Negroes” because this was a socially acceptable term of the time. For events that took place after the 1960s, I use “African-American.” elements of building a safe city: Kelly, S. J. “Simson Thorman, the First Cleveland Jew,” Plain Dealer May 17, 1938. Print.

Endings chose to make their homes: US Federal Census records, Kelly, S. J. “Simson Thorman, the First Cleveland Jew,” Plain Dealer May 17, 1938. Print. Several Thorman children obituaries from the WRHS “Thorman Family Papers” I, Folder 1, Box 1, Jan. 24, 2013. Print. adopted a resolution: Information about the city council resolution and the Cleveland Railway tickets with Simson’s picture are from Abraham Nebel’s collection of documents at the WRHS, Box 1, Folder 39. Print.

Kaufman Hays I imagine Kaufman Hays: Details of Kaufman’s life are derived from two main sources: “Autobiography of Kaufman Hays,” Gries Private Papers, March 9, 1910; and “Autobiography of Joseph Hays,” Cleveland, Ohio, 1916. WRHS, Pam H518. Print.

Rosa, the oldest among them: Kaufman’s and Joseph’s autobiographies chronicle their sister’s story. In Storndorf while working presumably as a servant, Rosa met a man from New York who often came to Europe to buy merchandise. He encouraged her to go to America. With the money her family saved and at her father’s urging, Rosa left for America in 1850. After arriving in New York, a friend convinced her to go to Cleveland, where she worked for Mr. Lowentritt (of the Alsbacher party). Kaufman says, “In due course of time [Rosa] sent me a small sum of money.

With this money and what money I had managed to save, [I] started for America. . . .” Eventually Rosa and Kaufman sent enough money that their siblings could emigrate to America, and Rosa married a grocer named Loeb.

222 | Five Generations Opportunist a pack on his back: “Kaufman Hays Is Removed by Death,” Plain Dealer April 13, 1916. Print.

He boarded with the Loeb family: “Jewish Pioneers Came From Few Bavarian Towns,” Cleveland Press Oct. 26, 1951, 32. Print. his younger brother: Avery, Elroy McKendree. A History of Cleveland and Its Environs: Biography. Cleveland: Lewis Publishing Company, 1918, 120. Print.

Other details about Joseph Hays are culled from his passport application and the 1910 Federal Census. Joseph told a story that is documented in his autobiography that offers insight to his character: “One day when I was about 17 years old, I sold a farmer a calf, and after he had gone, I found that I had given him the wrong change. The farmer had been away some hours, but I knew where he lived and started on foot for his home. I traveled ten miles that same night in order to pay him the few cents which I unknowingly had short-changed him.”

This was a wholesale goods store: Gartner, 68.

Rapidly growing ready-to-wear clothing industry: Rubinstein, 12; and “Garment Industry.” ECH. Web. Oct. 7, 2013.

Cleveland had already gone from outpost to city: Rosenberg, Felix, City of Cleveland Pictorial Guide and Map. Cleveland, Ohio: Cleveland Print & Publishing Co., 1888. Print. its population about 100,000: Burdick, Ronald and Baughman, Margaret, Historic Photos of Cleveland. Turner Publishing Co., 12-13. Print. cofounded Teutonia Insurance Company of Cleveland: Autobiography of Kaufman Hays,” Gries Private Papers, March 9, 1910, p. 5. Print.

Lizzie Thorman Four years her senior, Kaufman was short: “Memorandum and Account Book of Kaufman Hays,” 196-197, Container 1, Folder 2 Mss. 3756, Moses J. Gries Family Papers, 1860-1955. WRHS. Print. cultivated separate communities: Rubinstein, Judah. Merging Traditions: Jewish Life in Cleveland. Kent: Kent State University Press, 2004, 29-31. Print.

Numerous Jewish institutions: Gary Edward Polster. Inside Looking Out: The Cleveland Jewish Orphan Asylum, 1868-1924. Kent: Kent State University Press, 1990, 57. Print. there were only 83 bathtubs: Grabowski, John. “A Social Settlement in a Neighborhood in Transition: Hiram House, 1896-1926.” Cleveland: Case Western Reserve University, 1976, 127. Print.

Endnotes | 223 at or near Thorman’s Crossing: Cleveland city directories and US censuses show that Lizzie grew up at 228 Woodland, that she lived nearby at 299 Woodland when she was a teenager, and then later in 1870, Lizzie and Kaufman lived at 228 Kinsman (which is Woodland).

The strawberries she nurtured: “Mammoth Strawberries.” Plain Dealer June 17, 1863. Print.

Lizzie still found time: Lizzie’s “. . . name was connected with every work and every organization of charity and philanthropy.” Her philanthropy is noted in two sources: “Simson Thorman.” Cleveland Jewish History, n.d. Web March 13, 2013; and Wolfstein, S. “Fiftieth Anniversary of the Jewish Orphan Asylum, Cleveland, Ohio, 1868-1918.” Cleveland: Brandeis University. Web. March 13, 2013. a four-story brick building: Much information on the Cleveland Jewish Orphan Asylum can be found in Inside Looking Out: The Cleveland Jewish Orphan Asylum, 1868-1924, History of the Jews in Cleveland, and Gries, Rabbi Moses.

“The Jewish Community of Cleveland,” 1910. Print. along with Kaufman: Polster, 7, 63.

Martin was a giant: “Marks, Martin A.” ECH, n.d. Web. Aug. 7, 2013. a heck of a nice guy: “Obituary: Martin A. Marks,” Bulletin, National Association of Wool Manufacturers. Boston: The Rockwell and Church Press, 1916, 46, 373. Print.

National Council of Jewish Women: “National Council of Jewish Women, Cleveland Section,” ECH, n.d. Web. Oct. 12, 2013.

English and citizenship classes: “National Council of Jewish Women.” ECH, n.d. Web. Oct. 12, 2013. a volunteer in the Cleveland Public Schools: “Teachers,” Plain Dealer, n.pag.

June 13, 1894. Print.

Banks & Clothes Kaufman’s co-founders and collaborators: “His [Hays’s] major role began in 1886 when he was among the organizers of the Euclid Avenue National Bank.

In 1903 it merged with Park National Bank to form the Euclid-Park National Bank; ultimately, as the First National Bank of Cleveland, it became the city’s largest banking institution. A founder, lifelong director, member of the Finance Committee and vice president, Hays from 1893-1905 collaborated with men like…Herrick…Brush…Severance.” Gartner, 75.

One co-founder was Myron T. Herrick: Herrick would later serve as the US ambassador to France and host Charles Lindbergh after his famous flight from New York to Paris.

224 | Five Generations Co-founder Solon Severance: “Severance, Solon Lewis.” ECH, n.d. Web. Oct. 12, 2013.

Then there was Charles Brush: That Charles Brush was president of the bank is noted in an online brochure entitled “Charles Brush,” Euclid Bicentennial Celebration 1809-2009. Euclid Public Library. Web. Oct. 12, 2013. his own company, Brush Electric Company: “Brush, Charles Frances.” ECH, n.p. Web. Oct. 12, 2013. he invented the arc light: La Favre, Jeffery. “Charles Brush and the Arc Light.”

Charles Francis Brush. 1998. Web. Oct. 12, 2013. with about $200,000: “Ex-City Treasurer Axworthy Dead.” New York Times Dec. 6, 1893. Print.

He was brought in as acting treasurer: “Thefts Made Good—Axworthy Surrenders $132,000.” The Huntsville Daily Mercury, Dec. 23, 1888. Print. single-handedly saved the city’s credit: “Hays, Kaufman.” ECH, n.d. Web. Oct. 12, 2013.

This bank merged with Park National Bank: As documented in “Proceedings of the 29th Annual Convention of the American Bankers Association, October 20, 21, 22, and 23 of 1903,” in The Bankers Magazine, Bradford-Rhodes & Company, 1903, 67. Print.

Euclid-Park merged again: Gartner, 75; and “Cleveland’s Big Bank Consolidation,” The Bankers Magazine, Jan. 1921, 102:1, 126-131. Print.

George Hodgson, an Englishman by birth: Orth, Samuel Peter. A History of Cleveland, Ohio: Biographical. Cleveland: S.J. Clarke Publishing Co., 1910, III, 322-325. Print. the Cleveland Worsted Mills Co: “Garment Industry.” EHC, n.d. Web. Aug. 8, 2013; and. “Cleveland Worsted Mills Company Records.” Ohiolink. n.d. Web. Aug. 8, 2013.

They hired Poles, Czechs, and Lithuanians: Rose, William Ganson, Cleveland: The Making of a City, 1950. Cleveland: World Publishing Co., 1950, 428. Print.

Largest producers of woolen cloth in the country: “Cleveland Worsted Mills.”

Welcome to the Slavic Village Historical Society. n.d. Web. Aug. 8, 2013; and “Cleveland Worsted Mill Co.” EHC. n.d. Web. Aug. 8, 2013.

Cleveland Worsted Mills would go on after Kaufman’s era: Ibid.

Haysmar Philanthropically, he founded: Gries, Rabbi Moses. “The Jewish Community of Cleveland.” Gries Private Papers. Print.

Endnotes | 225 Kaufman and Lizzie traveled: “In and Out of Town,” Plain Dealer July 22, 1900. Print. where low pigboats passed by: “Fr. Edward J. Dowling, S.J. Marine Historical Collection.” University of Detroit Mercy Research Library Special Collections. n.d. Web. Nov. 11, 2013.

Farmhands and railroad workers: Tittle Diana. A Place Apart: Bratenahl Ohio.

Bratenahl Historical Society, 2007, 16-17. Print. while residing there: “Memorandum and Account Book of Kaufman Hays, 1916-1917.” Container 1, Folder 2, Mss. 3756, Moses J. Gries Family Papers, 1860-1955. WRHS. Print.

He celebrated his 81st birthday: “Kaufman Hays is Removed by Death,” Souvenir Album of Robert Gries, 1915-1917, Container 1m Folder 6, Mss. 3756, Moses J. Gries Family Papers. WRHS. Print. wealthiest Jewish person: Polster, 58.

Moses Gries he was being recruited: Dancyger, Ruth. The Temple-Tifereth Israel One Hundred and Fifty Years 1850-2000. Epstein Design Partners Inc., 1999, 7. Print. modern, electric lights: “Street Lighting.” ECH. n.d. Web. Nov. 11, 2013. temple had high ceilings: Rubenstein, 11.

Tifereth Israel’s history: Gartner, 30-33; and “Origin and Progress of the Israelitish Anshe Chesed Congregation of Cleveland, Ohio.” Jewish-history.com. The Occident and American Jewish Advocate, n.d. Web. Nov. 11, 2013. offshoot congregation, Anshe Chesed: The Advocate: America’s Jewish Journal, Volume 59. Chicago: 1920, p. 327.

Rabbi Kalisch was: Rubenstein, 9.

47 families: That Kalish formed Tifereth Israel with 47 families is confirmed by Rabbi Richard A. Block, Senior Rabbi of The Temple-Tifereth Israel and also is documented in The Temple-Tifereth Israel’s archives, Series A: Temple History, Container 1: History (1893-1910, Folder 1). March 13, 2013. Print. they formed Temple-Tifereth Israel: “The Temple-Tifereth Israel History.” The Temple-Tifereth Israel. n.d. Web. Nov. 7, 2013.

Rabbi Kalisch’s early roles: Peskin, 14; Gartner, 31-36; “The Temple-Tifereth Israel History.” The Temple-Tifereth Israel. n.d. Web. Jan. 10, 2013; Olitzky, Kerry M, The American Synagogue: A Historical Dictionary and Sourcebook.

Greenwood Publishing Group, Jan. 1, 1996, 285-286. Print. arrival of their new rabbi: Dancyger, 6-7.

226 | Five Generations Frances Hays Saratoga, New York: “Society’s Doings. Movements of People in and about Cleveland.” Plain Dealer July 22, 1894; and “Active Saratoga Mineral Springs in Saratoga County.” Saratoga.com. n.d. Web. Aug. 8, 2013. an unusual move for a woman: “Early College Women: Determined to be Educated.” American Association of University Women, St. Lawrence County Branch. n.d. Web. Nov. 7, 2013.

Fannie’s family played a special role: Archives at The Temple-Tifereth Israel, Series A: Temple History, Container 1: History. 1893-1910, Folder 1. March 13, 2013. Print.

The new Tifereth Israel was splendid: The temple on Willson Avenue is described in detail in two articles: Campen, R.N. “The Temple’s Past on E. 55th Street.” Plain Dealer; and “Splendid. The New Jewish Temple is a Model of Architecture.” Plain Dealer Sept. 22, 1895. Print. leave the Torah ark: “CJH—Confirmations—Generation One.” Cleveland Jewish History. n.d. Web. Nov. 12, 2013. moved services from Saturday to Sunday: Raphael, Marc Lee. Abba Hillel Silver: A Profile in American Judaism. Holmes & Meier Pub., May 1989, 22. Print. a downright hypocrisy and lie: Olitzky, Kerry M. “The Sunday-Sabbath Movement in American Reform Judaism: Strategy or Evolution?” and “The American Jewish Archives Journal.” American Jewish Archives. n.d. Web. Nov. 12, 2013.

He began to conduct services in English: Raphael, 22. Peskin, 20. a place of openness and acceptance: Kaufman, David. Shul With a Pool: The “Synagogue-Center” in American Jewish History. Waltham: Brandeis University, Jan. 15, 1999, 37. Print. the congregation grew: Gries, Moses. “The Jewish Community of Cleveland,” 1910. Print. standing-room-only event: “June Weddings.” Plain Dealer June 16, 1898. Print. purchased a home: various locations of the Gries family homes are derived from information available in the US Federal Census, property deeds, and marriage licenses.

Council Educational Alliance: Polster, 68.

Tifereth Israel’s Temple Women’s Association: It is still in existence today.

“Temple Women’s Association (TWA).” Temple-Tifereth Israel. n.d. Web. Nov. 8, 2013.

Endnotes | 227 Change Agent Classical Reform Judaism: What is now referred to as “Classical Reform Judaism,” Gries called “Liberal Judaism” in his 1911 sermon entitled, “The Opportunities of Liberal Judaism in America.” Rosenau, William. “Moses J. Gries.”

Annual Convention - Central Conference of American Rabbis Yearbook, 1919, 29: 163, Gries Private Papers. Print.

Jacob and Cathy: Moses Gries parents’ names and birthplaces are listed in the 1870 US Federal Census. had seven children: The Gries children (and dates of birth) are Sigmund (1858), Joachim (1860), Aaron (1860), Sarah/Sally (1864), Bernhard (1866), Moses (1868), and Herman (1871). Sources for the dates of birth and whereabouts are: 1870, 1880, and 1930 US Federal Census records and Gries Family Tree documents in Gries Private Papers. Print. completed his rabbinical training: “Finding Aid to the Moses Gries Papers.

1850-1934 (bulk 1890-1930).” American Jewish Archives. n.d. Web. Jan. 15, 2014. he was inclined to seek out community: Rosenau, 160. Rosenau said of Gries: “He was an excellent student, but never strove for scholarship as such. All Jewish knowledge he acquired was by him regarded merely a mental discipline, the better to prepare him for the many-sided communal tasks the American rabbinate is called upon to perform. . . . Gries had an exceptionally analytic mind. . . .

He was in the habit of making an abstract of everything he read and everything he said.” he became its first paid rabbi: Gries, Caroline. “Mizpah 1st paid Rabbi.” MyHeritage. n.d. Web. Aug. 8, 2013. he was neither ambiguous, verbose nor pompous: Rosenau, 157, 160-162. place women on the temple’s Board of Trustees: Dancyger, 10-11. the Cleveland Council of Jewish Women: “National Council of Jewish Women, Cleveland Section.” ECH. n.d. Web. Nov. 8, 2013.

The Temple Society: Dancyger, 10.

Children were a very important constituency: Rosenau, 167. the construction of a gymnasium: Gurock, Jeffrey. Judaism’s Encounter with American Sports (The Modern Jewish Experience), Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1 ed., Aug. 2005, 40. Print. the largest in the country, if not the world: The number of children in the Sunday school is based on information from several sources: Gries, Moses. “The Jewish Community of Cleveland,” 1910, 6; Campen, R.N. “The Temple’s Past on E. 55th Street.” Plain Dealer Sunday Magazine n.d., Gries Private Papers. Print; “Tenth Anniversary Celebration in honor of Rabbi Moses J. Gries.” Nov. 23, 1902, Gries Private Papers. Print; and Fechter,

228 | Five Generations Claudia Z. “A Bridge Across Two Centuries: The Classical Reform Rabbinate of Moses J. Gries.” The Temple Times, Temple-Tifereth Israel, June 1995. Print.

That the Sunday school was the largest in the world was noted by Fred Abel, chairman of the Sabbath School, in his article, “The Sabbath School,” printed in 25th Anniversary-Testimonial 1892-1917, p. 80, Gries Private Papers. Print. numbered about 75,000: Gartner, 113. Gartner derives this number from the Bureau of Jewish Statistics and Research, American Jewish Committee. Using a number of sources, he estimates Cleveland’s growing Jewish population as follows: 1905-25,000, 1906-35,000, 1907-40,000, 1910-45,000, 1911-50,000, 1912-60,000, 1917-75,000. the largest Boy Scout troop in the city: “Praise Activities of Jewish Women,” Plain Dealer Nov. 23, 1913. Print. it raises amounts of approximately $30 million annually: Annual funds raised is noted in the Centennial Report on Grantmaking 2003, 2. Press and Publications. Jewish Federation of Cleveland. n.d. Web. Nov. 8, 2013.

Committee of Fifty: Citizen Participation: A Publication of the Citizens League of Greater Cleveland. March 1996, Gries Private Papers. Print.

Citizens Savings and Trust Company: Avery, Elroy McKendree. “Citizens Savings and Trust Company.” A History of Cleveland and Its Environs: Biography, 1918, 1. Print.

Cleveland Worsted Mills: “Cleveland Worsted Mill Co.” ECH, n.d. Web. Nov. 1, 2013. “Cleveland Worsted Mills.” Slavic Village History, n.d. Web. Nov. 1, 2013. preached what he practiced: Rabbi Gries’s sermons may be found in several sources: Moses J. Gries Family Papers 1860-1955, Container 1, Folders 5 and 6. Print; “Souvenir Album of Robert Gries, 1915-1917,” WRHS. Print; Gries, Rabbi Moses J. “The President’s Address to the Central Conference of American Rabbis.” Twenty-Sixth Annual Convention, At Charlevoix, Mich., June 29th, 1915. WRHS, G196. Print; Gries, Rabbi. “Message of hope.” Feb. 12, 1908, Gries Private Papers. Print; and Moses J. Gries Papers, American Jewish Archives, May 20, 1917. Print. nor ruled by force of arms: Gries, Moses. “The President’s Address to the Central Conference of American Rabbis.” Charlevoix, Mich., June 29, 1915, p.15, Gries Private Papers. Print.

Haysmar Again American Red Cross in its canteen service: The details of Frances’s canteen volunteer service are inferred from details of other canteen volunteers, such as the description of a Kansas canteen: “Candy, Coffee and a Smile.” National WWI Museum. n.d. Web. June 1, 2013.

Endnotes | 229 Departure with the blessing of the children: “Rabbi Gries’ Letter of Retirement,” 25th Anniversary Testimonial—The Temple 1916-1917, 8, Gries Private Papers. Print. and the earnestness of public address: Ibid, 8-9. heal the wounds of the Great War: Gries, Moses. “My Religion—God and Man (Farewell address to the Temple),” Moses J. Gries Papers, American Jewish Archives, May 20, 1917. Print.

By nighttime on October 31, 1918: “Rabbi M. J. Gries Dies In Cleveland. Pastor of The Temple for 25 Years and a Leader in Jewish Ministry Expires at 50.”

New York Times Nov. 2, 1918. Print. lectures on musical appreciation: Curtiss, Cornelia. “Plan Music Lectures at Institute of Music.” Plain Dealer April 25, 1923. Print.

Leon had started his career: “Dr. Leon Watters, Scientist, Dies in New York; Wrote on Utah Jews.” JTA. The Global Jewish News Source, April 20, 1967.

Web. Feb. 27, 2013.

Leon Watters: he also was very interested in Jewish history and published a book on the first Jews in Utah, The Pioneer Jews of Utah. she suffered a heart attack: “Mrs. Watters, 56 Dies in New York.” Plain Dealer June 9, 1933, 17. Print.

The Merchant David Dauby was a Civil War veteran: Information about David Dauby’s war service is based on several sources: David Dauby’s citizenship papers and a photograph of his regiment with Teddy Roosevelt. Gries Private Papers. Print; “US Civil War Soldiers, 1861-1865, David Dauby.” National Park Service; and U.S. Civil War Soldiers, 1861-1865. Provo, UT. n.d. Web. Feb. 8, 2013. father worked selling clothes at Nussbaum & Strauss: Dauby’s whereabouts based on US City Directories for Cleveland, 1891. a second marriage that ended in divorce: Details about Dauby’s second marriage noted in his military records at the WRHS. There was a 1-2% chance of death: Maternal mortality was not well documented, but estimates put maternal mortality rates in the 1800s at 1-2% of all births, giving us a sense of how common it was. Loudon, I. “Death in Childbed from 18th Century to 1935.” PubMed. Med History, 1986. Web. July 25, 2014. new compulsory education laws: The first Ohio education law required children ages 8-14 to attend grammar school at least 12 weeks a year, but it was easy for a child to skip school if he was needed to support family (or among other reasons, if the school was more than two miles from his home). Loughran, Miriam E. The

230 | Five Generations Historical Development of Child-labor Legislation in the United States. Pittsboro: Catholic University of America Press, 1921, 64. Print. got himself a full-time job: NL’s early career path is based on information from two sources: “Dauby, Nathan L.” ECH, n.d. Web. Nov. 17, 2013; and Cleveland City Directories from 1891, 1892, 1894, 1898, 1899, 1900, and 1904.

Print.

There was another set-price store in town: Faircloth, Christopher. “Taylor, Kilpatrick and Company made history with its one-price, no-haggle policy.” Cleveland’s Department Stores. Mount Pleasant: Arcadia Publishing, 2009, p.9. Print.

Bessie May Braham When people met Nathan Louis “NL” Dauby: Bessie Braham’s family name was originally “Abrahamson.” This was changed to Abraham and then to Braham before she was born. NL Dauby’s family name was originally “Daube.”

When NL’s father, David Daube, mustered out of the Army in the Civil War, an illiterate soldier wrote the name as “Dauby” instead of “Daube.”

Bessie’s mother, Hattie Shoenberg: Note that “Shoenberg” also is sometimes spelled as “Schoenberg.” Hattie Shoenberg’s headstone spells her name without the “c,” so that is the spelling used in this book. Hattie Shoenberg was born in California and lived from 1852-1923. Louis Braham lived from 1854-1916 (according to their headstones located in Mayfield Cemetery, Cleveland Heights, OH).

Bessie graduated from East Denver High School: “20th Year Reunion of the Class of 1898 of East Denver High School.” Gries Private Papers. Print.

On October 21, 1901: Date of the wedding is on the invitation, Gries Private Papers. Print.

Plain Dealer social reporter: “Society.” Plain Dealer Sunday Magazine Oct. 27, 1901. Print.

May & Merchandising David May: Abrams, Jeanne. “David May (1848-1927).” Immigrant Entrepreneurship, German-American Business Biographies. March 30, 2012. Web. Aug. 12, 2013.

David invited his brothers-in-law: The brothers-in-law were Joseph and Louis Shoenberg.

His wife, Rosa, had a sister, Hattie: Rosa was the youngest of Eli and Fannie Shoenberg’s children. Their names and dates of birth are based on the ages recorded in the US Federal Census of 1870 when they were living in Dayton, Ohio: Hattie (1850), Moses (1852), Joseph (1854), Lee (his name appears to be Leebold or Leibold, 1855), and Louis (1857).

Endnotes | 231 Worked as cashier: Letter from H.P. McCain, adjutant General, Washington, D.C., June 4, 1915, citing record of Elias Belmont in War with Mexico, Gries Private Papers. Print.

Give the customers what they want: In the Gries Private Papers, there is an anonymous newspaper article, “David May’s First Store Beat New Century into Cleveland,” unknown newspaper, 1960, that credits the saying to David May. This saying also is attributed to Marshall Field.

He took pains to be friendly: “David May True Business Pioneer: Merchant to be buried Tuesday, made friends of his employees.” Plain Dealer July 23, 1927.

Print.

Bessie’s Uncles, Lee and Moses Shoenberg: Information about employment and residency from the US City Directories 1821-1989 for St. Louis, Denver, and Cleveland. acquired a store in Cleveland in 1899: “We Pay Tribute.” Inside Business, Great Lakes Publishing Co., Oct. 2000. HighBeam Research. Web. Nov. 15, 2013.

Louis Shoenberg agreed to oversee the Cleveland store: “Beaumont Rites to Be Held Today.” Plain Dealer Oct. 2, 1942. Print. This article notes that Louis Shoenberg (Beaumont) was a co-founder of May Department Stores and lived in Cleveland from “1898 until 1905 and gave much of his time during these years to the supervision and development of this store. He was succeeded by Mr. N. L. Dauby.” He is listed as president of May Company before 1913 and vice president afterward. Shoenberg moved to France sometime after he left Cleveland, probably around 1912.

May Department Store continued to expand: May’s downtown expansion is noted in several sources: Rose, William Ganson. Cleveland: The Making of a City. Kent: Kent State University Press, 1950, 599. Print; “Kaufmann’s, A Division of the May Department Stores Co.” EHC, n.d. Web. Nov. 15, 2013; Faircloth, Christopher. Cleveland’s Department Stores. Mount Pleasant: Arcadia Publishing, 2009, 12-13. Print; “The May Co.” The Department Store Museum. n.d. Web. Nov. 16, 2013; Cleary, Jack. “Strictly Business.” Publication unknown, 1948, Gries Private Papers. Print; “May Stores: Watch Them Grow.”

Article from unknown magazine, 1948, 156, Gries Private Papers. Print; and O’Donnell, Doris. “He’ll Be 80 Sunday. Nathan L. Dauby Is Mr. Charity.” Publication unknown, 1953, Gries Private Papers. Print. full of silk coats, lawn shirts: This description is based on a May Company advertisement, Plain Dealer Aug. 14, 1904. Print.

May Company Day: “The May Company’s Day.” Plain Dealer May 11, 1906.

Print.

Looked up Euclid Avenue: I heard this story from my grandfather and other family members.

232 | Five Generations He was known as a fair but tough boss: Mishnes, Merle H. “Nathan Dauby, Profile of a Top Retailer,” probably published in 1943 around the occasion of NL’s 80th birthday, publication unknown, Gries Private Papers. Print.

But never publicly: “Nathan Dauby’s Birthday Today, May Co. President Shuns Spotlight at 80.” Article from unknown newspaper, 1953, Gries Private Papers.

Print.

But don’t make 11 percent mistakes: Buyers and merchandise managers told me this about my grandfather when I worked at May in the 1950s. it had net profit of $1.5 million: “Gale Directory of Company Histories: The May Department Stores Company.” Answers. n.d. Web. Nov. 15, 2013. his father-in-law was a director: Louis Braham was listed as a director of The May Company in The Manual of Statistics, Stock Exchange Handbook, 1917:39, 642. Print.

I’m not sure I agree with you, but go ahead with it: “May Stores: Watch Them Grow.” Article from unknown magazine, 1948, 156, Gries Private Papers. Print. a massive new building: The depiction of the new May Company building and its interior are based on images in “May Company.” Cleveland Historical.

Cleveland State University. n.d. Web. Nov. 15, 2013. That the building was completed in 1914 is noted in a Nov. 25, 1948, article by Jack Cleary, “Strictly Business. May Co’s N. L. Dauby Sights Record Christmas Trade,” newspaper unknown, Gries Private Papers. Print.

May Department Store went through ten expansions: The expansions are documented in several sources, including: Rose, William Ganson. ECH, Web; “Cleveland: The Making of a City.” Kent: Kent State University Press, 1950, 599. Print; Cleary, Jack. “Strictly Business.” Publication unknown, 1948, Gries Private Papers. Print; “May Stores: Watch Them Grow.” Article from unknown magazine, 1948, 156, Gries Private Papers. Print; O’Donnell, Doris. “He’ll Be 80 Sunday. Nathan L. Dauby Is Mr. Charity.” Publication unknown, 1953, Gries Private Papers. Print; and “The May Co.” The Department Store Museum. n.d. Web. Nov. 16, 2013. among the top five highest-paid retailers: Information about NL’s salaries is noted in Women’s Wear Daily (1934, 1936, 1937, 1938, 1941, 1941), Gries Private Papers. Print. strong sense of empathy: Mishnes, Merle H. “Nathan Dauby, Profile of a Top Retailer.” Probably published in 1953 around the occasion of NL’s 80th birthday, Gries Private Papers. Print.

Home Life an undeveloped half-acre lot at 11212 Euclid Avenue: That their home was located in an upscale neighborhood is based on stipulations of the deed. Dauby property records are found on the Cuyahoga County Recorder’s Office website.

Endnotes | 233 The Dauby house was built next to what is now known as the Garfield House, which was in use as the School of Architecture for Case, then later, the headquarters for the Cleveland Hearing and Speech Center. “Garfield House.” Case Western Reserve University Archives. n.d. Web. Nov. 20, 2013. marked by gentleness and caring: In the eulogy, “Words Spoken in Memorial Tribute to Mrs. Nathan L. Dauby” in the Gries Private Papers, Bessie is described as “. . . among the quiet builders of the spirit. Her life’s architectonic [sic] was of a spiritual design. She built it with love, solicitude, sacrifice and calm courage . . . there was a rare sweetness about [her] life . . . She had very many friends and no enemies. She had very many friends because she was always interested not in herself, but in others. Her life was centered in her husband, her children, her family, her friends . . . her judgments were never harsh. Her speech was always soft . . . she had a deep quiet faith.” cultural hub of Cleveland: Theiss, Evelyn. “Wade Park Manor was crown jewel of city’s ‘Second Downtown’: Elegant Cleveland.” Plain Dealer March 14, 2009. Print.

The Wade family was developing: The ECH notes: “Between 1900-18, the Wade family developed their remaining land into a residential area. Many of the people who moved to the area were trustees of Circle institutions and generous benefactors, which was perhaps the most important factor in the development of the Circle’s unique character.” “University Circle.” ECH. July 23, 1997.

Web. Nov. 20, 2013. a Jewish country club: Busta-Peck, Christopher. “What Lurks Behind The Trees? The Oakwood Golf Club.” Cleveland Area History. Oct. 6, 2011. Web. Feb. 15, 2013.

Wearing the newly designed Boy Scouts uniform: It is known that Danny was a Boy Scout because of photographs of him wearing the Boy Scout uniform described.

Pollyanna: Kenny, Kim. “The History of Silent Films.” Suite 101. n.d. Web. June 11. 2013. was there from age 9 to 20: Clarke Schools for Hearing and Speech annual report archives indicate Danny attended Clarke from 1919-1930 and that his parents were involved donors.

Cleveland was a hot spot for the massive industry: Levenson, Roberta Malbin.

“Automotive History Rooted in Cleveland.” Cleveland History Lessons. Aug. 17, 2010. Web. Feb. 15, 2013.

NL broke his arm: That NL broke his arm on a hand crank is noted in a letter from Buster May to NL in 1961, Gries Private Papers. Print. (David May had a son, Morton May, and his son, Morton May Jr., was called “Buster.”)

234 | Five Generations Beautiful Mountain Louis Shoenberg married Flora Rothschild: Information on Louis Shoenberg’s first marriage to Flora Rothschild is documented in the US Consular Registration Applications, 1916-1925. His passport application describes him as a “widower. Was married to Flora Rothschild born Little Falls, New York. Deceased New York City, September 1891.” had a son, Dudley, in 1885: “Died.” New York Times Jan. 7, 1910. Print. his job being to oversee the newly purchased May Company: Cleveland City Directory, 1907. Print.

He spent $35,000 to purchase a Pullman: The Clothier and Furnisher, 1904: 64, 85. Print. ranked 489 of the Fortune 500: “Fortune 500: 489. CIT Group.” CNN Money. n.d. Web. Nov. 15, 2013. it was no light decision at the time: Commodore Beaumont changed his name for legitimate reasons, but he had a relative who chose Beaumont as a name for an altogether different reason. Vivian Shoenberg was the niece of Louis Beaumont. Vivian’s father was another of the founders of the May Company, and she inherited his fortune. Her second husband’s last name was Allen. A family story has it that Governor Rockefeller of New York called Vivian Allen for a Lincoln Center fundraising campaign, and in 1952 she wrote a $3 million check in support of the theater. Because of her generosity they offered to name the theater after her, and although she was never a Beaumont, she reportedly asked them to name it the Vivian Beaumont Theater, not the Vivian Allen Theater.

Commodore Beaumont fell in love with a woman: Helene’s life is described in The Magnificent Jewels of Mm. Helene Beaumont. Sotheby’s, Geneva, 1994.

Print. (Her jewels were auctioned by Sotheby’s.)

CIT, was a large, growing financial services company: Details about CIT are from several sources: “A New Venture (1908-1924).” CIT. n.d. Web. March 26, 2013; “David May,” Immigrant Entrepreneurship n.d. Web. May 26, 2013; and New York Legislative Documents, One Hundred and Forty-Fifth Session, Albany: J. B. Lyon Company, Printers, 1922, 640. Print. in London, in 1926: “Louis D. Beaumont Weds in London.” New York Times March 9, 1926. Print.

1.23 million British pounds: The value of 25,000 British pounds today was found by using the UK’s Retail Price Index (RPI) calculator. Converting this to US dollars was done using the exchange rate for Jan. 2014. which they named Eilenroc: “Villa Eilenroc and estate, Cap d’Antibes.” VirtualTourist. June 25, 2011. Web. Feb. 26, 2013.

Endnotes | 235 house parties and lavish receptions: Levison, Jill. “Villa Eilenroc opens to the public.” The Riviera Times, n.pag. March 23, 2012. Web. July 22, 2014.

Fitzgerald had become quite famous: Bruccoli, Matthew J. “Scott and Ernest.

The authority of failure and the authority of success.” Fitzgerald.Narod. n.d.

Web. Nov. 15, 2013. a monument built for Wilbur Wright in Le Mans, France: “Unveiling of the Monument to Wilbur Wright.” Flying, Flying Association at the office of the Aero Club of America, 1920: 9, 590. Print.

Beaumont supported the American Hospital: “Our Status.” American Hospital of Paris. n.d. Web. March 15, 2013. the Dudley C. Shoenberg Memorial Farm: “Shoenberg Farm.” Westminster Colorado. n.d. Web. Aug. 12, 2013. the farm provided an abundance of fresh eggs: “A Run for the Border.” Denver Westword News. Sept. 6, 2007. Web. March 25, 2013.

Goldbatt received many awards: “Goldblatt, Harry.” ECH. July 16, 1997.

Web. March 25, 2013. he gifted a significant painting: “‘La Danse Dans Un Pavillon’ By Jean Antoine Watteau. Gift of Commodore Louis D. Beaumont.” The Bulletin of The Cleveland Museum of Art, Feb. 1939: 26, 2, 16. Print.

Letters Good-bye, my darlings. Mother: Braham, Bessie, letters to various family members, 1919, 1924, and 1927, Gries Private Papers. Print.

Philanthropist trying to overcome a chronic condition: “N.L. Dauby’s Son, Daniel, 32, Dies.

Succumbs Here to Illness of Many Years.” Plain Dealer June 8, 1942, 17. Print. never fully had in life: I heard this story from family members. monies to the Cleveland Hearing and Speech Center: This, too, comes from stories from family members. donated his Euclid Avenue mansion: “Dauby House.” Plain Dealer Dec. 16, 1952, 18. Print. a founding trustee of the Beaumount Foundation: Information about the Beaumont Foundation and the $16 million with which it was established is based on several sources including: “Louis D. Beaumont Foundation.” ECH. Aug. 30, 2010. Web. May 5, 2013; and Wadovick, J.A.; “May Company’s Dauby is 90 Tomorrow.” Plain Dealer May 30, 1963. Print.

236 | Five Generations giving away all its money: “The Louis D. Beaumont Foundation Report on Examination of Financial Statements and Additional Information, Nine Months Ended September 30, 1977 and Twelve Months Ended December 31, 1976.”

Touche Ross & Co., Gries Private Papers. Print. which contained 1,260 acres of forests: “Beaumont Scout Reservation.” Greater Cleveland Council B.S.A. n.d. Web. March 12, 2013. a trustee of the Jewish Orphan Asylum: Polster, 169.

We are colored: Trumbo, Marietta Jones, letter dated Jan. 16, 1961, Gries Private Papers. Print.

He would not accept them: Letter to NL from F. E. Welfle, S. J., president, John Carroll University, Feb. 2, 1955, Gries Private Papers. Print. NL responded to Father Welfle on Feb. 4, 1955, and said, “I fully appreciate the significance of the honor which you wish to bestow upon me…yet I regret I must decline the same. Throughout my career I have avoided publicity, in fact, I might say I am allergic to it.” he left one-third of his estate to charity: “Estate Placed Over $10 Million.”

Steubenville Herald-Star March 16, 1965. Print. This and other articles state that he left an estate that totaled after taxes $5.68 million, of which $1.9 million went toward gifts and charity, and $3.7 million went to heirs in the form of trust funds.

But Greater Cleveland in the main: This article, titled, “A Friend Turns 90 and Tribute Must Be Paid,” was signed by “L.B.S.” The Cleveland Press editor for decades and during NL’s lifetime was Louis B. Seltzer. He goes on to say, “In all of our long friendship NL Dauby has expected me to do what my obligations as a newspaperman called upon me to do, even when it involved and it did on some occasions, his own business.” Newspaper clipping, 1963, Gries Private Papers. Print.

Robert Hays Gries entered Case School of Applied Science: Bob attended Case from 1917-1918.

National Cyclopedia of American Biography, manuscript, Gries Private Papers.

Print. in the period between those two deaths: Kaufman Hays died April 1916; Martin Marks died August 1916, and Moses Gries died Oct. 1918. the esteemed Joseph Laronge: Bob worked for Laronge sometime between 1919 and 1924. Details about Laronge are based on two sources: “Joseph Laronge, the man behind Playhouse Square.” And The Cleveland Memory Project. n.d.

Web. May 7, 2013. Avery, 351-352.

Joseph and Feiss sold a $15 blue serge suit: “Joseph & Feiss Co.” ECH. July 30, 2012. Web. June 3, 2013.

Endnotes | 237 Lucile Dauby the women’s sartorial choices: Horowitz, Helen Lefkowitz. Alma Mater: Design and Experience in the Women’s Colleges from their Nineteenth Century Beginnings to the 1930s, University of Massachusetts Press, 1985. Print; Lowe, Margaret. Looking Good: College, Women and Body Image, 1875-1930. JHU Press, Dec. 29, 201. Print; and Kendall, Elaine. Peculiar Institutions, An Informal History of the Seven Sister Colleges, Putnam, 1976. Print.

Your Father: Dauby, NL, letter dated October 24, 1933, Gries Private Papers.

Print. by playing a role in Mary the Third: “Has Part in Play to be Given by the Temple Women’s Association.” Plain Dealer Jan. 20, 1924, Gries Private Papers. Print. his last confirmation service before his retirement: “Confirmation Service,” program from May 27, 1917, Gries Private Papers. Print. their grand honeymoon tour: Countries of destination for the honeymoon are found in Robert’s 1924 US passport application. skated at the Cleveland Elysium: “Elysium.” ECH. March 27, 1988. Web. May 5, 2013. gift of a two-week vacation: “Wife of May Co. Director Leaves.” Undated and unnamed California publication, Gries Private Papers. Print.

May Company Bob oversaw a building expansion: Monnett, Jr., James G. “May Co. Will Add 2 Floors to Store. Expresses Faith in Future by Plan to Increase Space to 25 Acres.” Plain Dealer Jan. 19, 1931, 1. Print. he gave a speech: “Store Executives Fete ‘Bob’ Gries, Hail Him as Builder.”

Article from unknown newspaper, Gries Private Papers. Print. The article says, “Mr. Gries made one of his rare speeches. . . .” over 60 hours per week: 1930 US Federal Census said over 50 hours per week, but my experience is that it was over 60 hours. becoming, by 1936, store manager: Bob’s promotions and positions at May Company are detailed in two articles from Gries Personal Papers: “May Co. Makes Staff Changes in Cleveland.” Women’s Wear. Feb. 14, 1936. Print; and “On the Way Up!” (an undated clipping from an unnamed newspaper), Gries Private Papers. Print.

With his new position as store manager: Details of Bob’s job are documented in an untitled biography dated July 1942 from Gries Private Papers (likely an application for his post in the Army). Print.

238 | Five Generations Bob caught a 400-pound blue marlin: Gray, V.B. “Robert Gries Wins Battle With 400-Pound Blue Marlin. Not Satisfied, He Will Go to Nova Scotia to Tussle Tuna.” Rod and Gun. n.d., Gries Private Papers. Print.

Cleveland Rams Knute Rockne and Gus Dorais: Cross, Harry. “Inventing the Forward Pass.”

New York Times Nov. 1, 1913. Print. less chaotic, and safer: Meyer, Nick. “How the Advent of the Forward Pass in College Football Saved Lives.” Yahoo Voices. Sept. 12, 2007. Web. June 10, 2013; Bodanza, Mark C. 1933: Football at the Depth of the Great Depression. iUniverse. Web 2010; Dominitz, Nathan. “Learn from history, make football safer.” Savannah Morning News Feb. 8, 2013. Print. founding capital for the Cleveland Rams: Yelsky, Milton. ”Pros Assured of $50,000 Backing. Rams’ Syndicate Raises Funds for National League Team.”

Undated newspaper article, Gries Private Papers. Print. were bought out by Dan Reeves and Fred Levy: Peters, George. “Billy Evans Engaged as General Manager by Rams’ New Owners.” Plain Dealer June 12, 1941. Print.

Jewish men, women, and children being deported: Novick, Peter. The Holocaust in American Life, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2000. Print; “The United States and the Holocaust.” The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. June 10, 2013. Web. June 10, 2013.

He spoke for the cause of the common man: Peters, Gerhard, and John T. Woolley. “Franklin D. Roosevelt. XXII President of the United States: 1933-1945.

132—Campaign Address at Cleveland, Ohio. Nov. 2, 1940.” The American Presidency Project. n.d. Web. May 17, 2013. a place for soldiers to unwind: Cooke, James J. Chewing Gum, Candy Bars, and Beer: The Army PX in WWII, Columbia: University of Missouri Press, Nov. 1, 2009, 7. Print.

It was a dustbowl town: Anderson, H. Allen. “Pampa, TX,” Texas State Historical Association. n.d. Web. May 14, 2013. returned from Pampa: Bob was relieved of duties and returned to inactive status in a letter from Major Bernard Ramsey, Army Air Forces, April 22, 1944, Gries Private Papers. Print.

Origin of Cleveland Browns because of the IRS’s “Hobby Loss” rule: MacCambridge, Michael. America’s Game. Random House LLC, Nov. 26, 2008, 59. Print. my father had survived a heart attack: “Robert H. Gries Is Taken to Hospital from Stadium Box.” Plain Dealer Dec. 5, 1949, 1. Print.

Endnotes | 239 the most talked-of game: Bostrom, Don. “The ‘first’ Super Bowl; Eagles vs.

Browns, Sept. 16, 1950.” The Morning Call Oct. 24, 2004. Web. The Eagles vs.

Browns game on September 16, 1950, was the first matchup in the NFL against a team from the former AAFC. first get a ball: Shuck, Barry. “Another Pro Football League?” Bleacher Report.

June 1, 2011. Web. April 6, 2014. betting on the games: Silberman’s gambling on Browns games is noted in several sources, including in Moldea, Dan E. Interference: How Organized Crime Influences Professional Football. Morrow, 1989, 81-88. Print. Moldea says that Silberman “. . . was forced to sell his interest in the team after the 1953 season because of his gambling activities. ‘[H]e used to call me for information on our upcoming games,’ wrote Browns head coach Paul Brown, ‘and I never understood why until I found out that he was betting on football games, forbidden for all owners by the NFL constitution. . . .’” they co-founded Suburban Temple: “History of Suburban Temple.” OhioLINK Finding Aid Repository. n.d. Web. Nov. 15, 2013; “New Temple in Shaker Sets Installation Rites for Friday.” Plain Dealer Sept. 18, 1948, p.8. Print.; and “Beachwood Temple Plan Draws Little Opposition,” Plain Dealer Sept. 15, 1953. Print. small enough to know your name: “Welcome to Suburban Temple-Kol Ami!” SuburbanTemple. n.d. Web. Nov. 20, 2013.

Bob dedicated the library: Rabbi Silverman’s eulogy for Robert Gries, June 16, 1966, Gries Private Papers. Print. over a thousand rare books: His library of over 1,000 rare books, publications, and other documents dating back to the early 16th century in various languages was gifted to the Cleveland Public Library in 1942-1953. Warfel, Jack. “Gries Tobacco Lore Is Gift to Library.” Undated newspaper clipping from Gries Private Papers. Print. Warfel noted that Bob’s collection of [tobacco] books was the “third largest in the country, Harvard University and the New York Public Library owning slightly larger collections.”

Including several Rembrandts: “Prints and Drawings Collection of Robert Hays Gries,” Gries Private Papers. Print.

Paul Storr silver: “Antique Silver by Paul Storr,” Gries Private Papers. Print.

Discrimination the Jewish problem: Laymon, Brent. “Book tells of ‘The Jewish Problem’ at Yale.” The Hour Feb. 24, 1986. Print. largest scouting alumni reunion: “City’s Scouts to Call Alumni Roll: Cleveland Will Be Pioneer in National Rededication.” Plain Dealer June 4, 1939, 6. Print.

240 | Five Generations co-founded the Cleveland Friends of Music: Boros, Ethel. “Dr. Jerome Gross Is Real ‘Friend of Music’.” Plain Dealer Sept. 6, 1965. Print. sitting in seasonal box seats: Davis, Louise. “Start of Symphony Season Strikes Gay Note, Fashions Competing with Beethoven.” Plain Dealer Oct. 9, 1953.

Print. she made a major donation: Elwell, Herbert. “Audiences Now Want to Hear New Works.” Plain Dealer Oct. 27, 1957. Print. the Metropolitan Opera: Bellamy, Molly. “Young People Get Opera Patron Bid.” Plain Dealer Aug. 26, 1963. Print. chance to tour their house: Alge, Marjorie. “Tour Is Treasure Hunt.” The Cleveland Press May 11, 1964, B2. Print.

Musical Departure The name of Gries is a proud one in Cleveland today and you have done it: Gries, Lincoln, letter, 1965, Gries Private Papers. Print. dedicated its new rehabilitation wing: “Rehabilitation Wing Dedicated.” Plain Dealer Nov. 9, 1966. Print.

Given to the Cleveland Public Library: “The Gries Tobacco Printed Works, Manuscripts and Artifacts Collection.” Cleveland Public Library, April 9, 2012.

Web. March 5, 2014. donated to the Cleveland Museum of Art: Receipt for the prints and drawings that Robert Gries donated to the Cleveland Museum of Art is dated Dec. 18, 1939, Gries Private Papers. Print. she was delighted: “Lucile Dauby and Robert Hays Gries Charity Fund.” ECH. March 4, 1998. Web. June 4, 2013. we offered pieces first to: Boros, Ethel. “Antique Lore.” Plain Dealer Sept. 20, 1969. Print; and “The Lucile and Robert H. Gries Collection. Chinese Export Porcelain.” and Part One and Two, Parke-Bernet Galleries, Affiliated with Sotheby & Co., London, 1970, Gries Private Papers. Print.

May Company a fire broke out: “Cleveland, OH Clinic Explosion and Fire, May 1929.” GenDisasters: Events That Touched Our Ancestor’s Lives, Nov. 12, 2007. Web. Aug. 22, 2013.

Philanthropy wonderful little hospital: “Births & Re-births, The Story of Saint Ann Hospital and Saint Ann Foundation.” Sisters of Charity Foundation, May 10, 2006, 1011. Print.

Endnotes | 241 Dolph Norton: I met Dolph through PATH, Plan of Action for Tomorrow’s Housing. In the late 1960s I joined the board of PATH. Dolph’s organization, Associated Foundation, had funded PATH. the Greater Cleveland Associated Foundation (“Associated”): Associated received operating funds from the Cleveland Foundation, more specifically, from a special line item from the Hanna Foundation that provided operating funds for Associated. It also received funds from the Ford Foundation. Tittle, Diana.

Rebuilding Cleveland: The Cleveland Foundation and its Evolving Urban Strategy. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1992, 109. Print. including two African-Americans: Prior endnote describes my use of the terms “African-American” and “Negro” in this book. created his own Treuhaft Foundation: “Treuhaft, William C.” ECH. n.d. Web. Nov. 17, 2013.

Cleveland Browns a special obligation to be exemplary: Piascik, Andy. The Best Show in Football: The 1946-1955 Cleveland Browns—Pro Football’s Greatest Dynasty. Taylor Trade Publications, 2010, 61. Print.

Coach Brown reportedly said: This dialog was relayed to me by my father.

Civil Rights Karamu House, a community center for the arts: “A Rich History.” Karamu. n.d. Web. Aug. 24, 2013.

I participated in a rally for 25,000 people: Melnick, Norman. “25,000 Rally for Equality.” Plain Dealer July 15, 1963. Print. the state offered significant matching funds: “Cleveland Passes Issue 14; A Bond To Fix Crumbling Schools.” CapitalWords May 9, 2001. Web. Nov. 17, 2013.

The first $350 million or thereabouts was spent: O’Donnell, Patrick. “Cleveland schools’ bond issue eroded by spending on necessary repairs.” Plain Dealer June 9, 2012. Print.

Social Change the first Jewish persons were invited to become members of the Club: several sources document that Jews could not be members of the Union Club, including ECH, which says that the Excelsior club (a Jewish Club) was established in 1872 partly in “reaction to Jewish exclusion from such clubs as the Union Club of Cleveland.” In addition, in a book called Jews and Baseball: Volume 1, Entering the American Mainstream, 1871-1948 by Burton A Boxerman, Hank Greenberg is quoted in the New York Times in 1951 as saying, “even in Cleveland, I refused to have a board of directors meeting at the Union Club because . . . no Jews were allowed there.” (p.182)

242 | Five Generations Lawsuits and the Move Art redeemed portions of his equity stake to generate cash: This was called “disproportionate redemption.” the Inn on the Square: “Bitter end: How Art Modell’s on-again, off-again love affair with Cleveland finally ground to a halt.” Plain Dealer Sept. 13, 2012.

Print. under “crushing” amounts of debt: King, Peter. “Down . . . and Out. Citing his crushing debts, Art Modell is taking his Browns to Baltimore.” Sports Illustrated Nov. 13, 1995. Print. nearly $1 million of legal fees: Bartimole, Roldo. “Roldo: Art Modell—What It Means to Lose Political Pull.” CoolCleveland Sept. 6, 2012. Web. Nov. 17, 2013; and Munson, Lester. “A Busted Play.” Sports Illustrated Vault Dec. 4, 1995. Web. Nov. 17, 2013. increase the value of the Browns a great deal: Harris, Rich. “Voters Extend ‘Sin Tax’ to Rehab Browns’ Stadium.” Associated Press News Archive Nov. 8, 1995.

Web. Nov. 17, 2013.

68% African-American players: Rogers, Dexter. “NFL, NBA, MLB: The White World of Sports Journalism.” Bleacher Report n.d. Web. Jan. 3, 2011. no arm’s length negotiations as to price: Ohio Supreme Court. “Gries Sports Enterprises, Inc. et. al., appellants, v. Cleveland Browns Football Co., Inc., et. al., appellees.” 26 Ohio St. 3d 15 (1986). No. 85-704. Web. Jan. 15, 2014.

Philanthropy now spend time in a lab: The idea of the Gries Center took years to develop, and the entire school’s curriculum has changed and become integrated. As an example, fourth graders receive the book Where Did I Come From? This book and its question kick off a week of experiential, exploratory learning that starts with a hands-on artificial dig in the backyard of the Gries Center and a visit to the Museum of Natural History to see “Lucy” and learn about the origins of humanity from the curator. When one little girl showed the curator her plot graph, they both had an “Aha!” moment when he exclaimed that that is exactly what he does on a dig. The students went on to the Cleveland Museum of Art where a curator taught them about ancient humanity through Egyptian art before ending the week with a walk to the Western Reserve Historical Society where they learned about American and Cleveland history.