ROLDO: Roldo’s Unforeseen Journey

By Roldo Bartimole

As I reach the age of 80 it is hard for me to believe that my life has taken roads that I would never have foreseen. It has been an unexpected life journey. So I take liberty now to speak of it.

Never would I have believed as a youngster that I would become a radically different person than I ever could have imagined of myself. I am timid, if anything. Truth is, early in life, I had no special expectations for myself. No great or even strong goals. I took the most general of subjects in high school. I could have anticipated life as a clerk, having worked in my dad’s butcher/grocery store. Only because of the GI bill did I even think of college. After two years in the Army, I entered business school at Northeastern University, hardly a choice I would have made years later.

It was 50 years ago my path changed. What I saw and experienced did it. I was working at the Bridgeport Sunday Post, my hometown paper. I had worked sports for the morning edition in 1959, left for a news position in Haverhill, Mass. I was lured back months later with an offer to be an assistant to the Sunday editor.

In January, 1963 the New Yorker magazine published a historic piece by Dwight McDonald entitled “Our Invisible Poor.” It was a book review of Michael Harrington’s “The Other America – Poverty in the United States.” Together these writings prompted (or shamed) President John F. Kennedy’s War on Poverty.

Similarly, the times prodded me. I looked at the 1960 U. S. Census of Bridgeport, Conn. And I was on my way to change. I saw too much to be a mere bystander. I chose three of the poorest census tracts to examine.

My travels showed me the location of the worst poverty and housing in my home city. I hadn’t known.

I began to walk those streets. And enter those buildings. I was shocked by what I saw and heard. I learned what real poverty was.

I’ll never have to wonder why some children don’t/can’t learn. I visited “apartments” where ill-vented space heaters, feet from the beds of children, sucked the oxygen from the room and their lungs. You can’t inhale fumes that dull your brain for years and succeed academically.

I have the news clipping of an attic room with newspapers and cardboard on the walls and ceiling, crude attempts to keep the cold out. A child stands next to an open space heater, the only heat. The reaction of public officials: I had torn some cardboard from the unfinished roof to make the scene appear worse. Just pathetic thinking.

Worse, you can’t survive fire in crowded rooms with few escape options.

Five children died in one tenement I had visited and written about in the paper. It was devastating. A civic leader spoke the truth: They were “expendable.”

Expendable children?

Soon the powers that be – a mayor and editors – got very nervous. This continuous exposure of deadly housing didn’t look good for City Hall. Or for the city of Bridgeport.

Shit was getting disturbed. Some reacted.

In June 1963 I was honored by a host of citizens: “Roldo Bartimole who in his newspaper reporting has had the wisdom of seeing clearly and the courage of speaking that which has seen” from “his many friends of Bridgeport’s civic and social agencies.” It was an honor I treasure. It wasn’t a journalism award. It was from citizens, including the president of the NAACP.

My employers didn’t quite see it that way.

I was told what every aggressive reporter will eventually hear: STOP.

No more stories about dilapidated, over-priced and dangerous housing. Let’s not concentrate public discussion on dispensable children.

Yes, life had changed. I too had changed too. You can’t un-ring a bell.

I did stop doing housing articles. Or any others. I was stubborn. Brash. (Stupid?). Potential story ideas given to me went into a bottom drawer.

I was soon gone.

But happily so. There was another Bridgeport paper, the Sunday Herald. Owned by Leigh Dannenberg. He was labeled a communist by the right-wing Hearst columnist Westbrook Pegler. He telephoned me and asked me to see him. I did. I hear you’re gagged over there, he said. Want to come here? Yes. And I did.

Eventually, I made my way to Cleveland in 1965. To the Cleveland Plain Dealer, as it was known then. To a city in racial turmoil.

At the PD I learned more about how things work. How power operates. For whom it works. For whom it does not work. I had many lessons from the beginning. Jack Reavis of Jones, Day, Reavis & Pogue, explained to the U. S. Civil Rights Commission, how power worked in Cleveland. Talking of corporate efforts to deal with racial problems, Reavis said, “… I secured a pledge from the editors of the newspapers (PD & Press) that they would give us no publicity except as we asked it because everybody in the group thought we could work better privately.” Well, of course. That’s really how it works. In the back rooms. Censorship by corporate and editorial collaboration. Plain and simple. Blatant when required.

Soon again I left the newspaper. I went to work in the poverty program in Summit County.

Just as in Bridgeport, I was lured back to the paper by the offer of the welfare beat. To me this was where I belonged. Writing about urban problems, especially poverty. Poverty was a leading Cleveland commodity in 1967.

Again, the inability to write it as I saw it became a problem. I had to slip in what I thought I’d get away with to tell truth. A reporter at the Wall Street Journal who covered urban issues here was leaving. Dave Vienna suggested to his boss, Clayt Sutton, bureau chief of the WSJ, that they hire me. And the Journal did.

I lasted some eight months.

On April 5, 1968 I arrived full circle on my unexpected life journey. Incidentally, it was my 35th birthday. The day after the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. A bitterly sad day.

I attended a conference at the Aurora Inn that day. Professors, as I remember it, from state colleges all over Ohio were meeting.

It was a historic day. Riots had broken out in many cities the previous night. Urban American was burning.

The main speaker at the conference was a black man. George Wiley, a chemistry professor turned activist. He headed the National Welfare Rights Organization in D. C. He told the all-white audience he would no longer plead with whites for understanding. That, however, was what he was doing. Trying to tell how it felt to be black on that dismal day.

The reaction he got was distressing. The audience of educators was reproachful, bemoaning the civil strife and the rioters. The shock of Dr. King’s killing for African-Americans seemed not to matter. It seemed inconsequential. How could this be?

These experiences and the times – anti-war protests and civil rights conflict of the 60s – indicated to me – by no means a courageous person – that life had changed. I must, too. I quit my job at the Journal and started a small newsletter – Point of View – in May of 1968. I charged $3 a year and had a mere 300 subscribers by the end of the year. It was a start. This task lasted 32 and a half years.

Those issues of inequality remain today. Maybe more acutely. Because who cares now about injustice?

My unexpected journey continues. Who knows for how much longer?

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The photo accompanying this piece shows a young girl, Kim, standing next to a dangerous space heater. It sits a few feet from her bed. I wrote, “The room is an ideal example of what a child’s bedroom should not be like. It might be considered a classic example of a fire hazard. There is no insulation between the cardboard (ceiling) and the roof. The ceiling is about eight feet from the floor. The floor has weak spots which have been bolstered by odd pieces of wood.”

 

 

 

In 1991 he was awarded the Second Annual Joe Callaway Award for Civic Courage in Washington, D.C. He received the Distinguished Service Award of the Society of Professional Journalists, Cleveland chapter, in 2002, and was named to the Cleveland Journalism Hall of Fame, 2004. [Photo by Todd Bartimole.]

 

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