Creature Features

Biologically inspired robots. Yikes. When asked to write about one of the more exotic undertakings of Case Western Reserve University's School of Engineering, I was reminded of those gloriously tacky "sci-fi" movies of the 1950s. So that's the direction I took "Creature Features."

Get yourself a greasy tub of popcorn, sit back and enjoy my "bug" article. It appeared in the Fall, 2005 issue of Case Engineering.

David Searls


They creep, crawl, slither, climb, scuttle and squirm. Some take wing. But don’t worry. They don’t knock down tall buildings like the irradiated ants of the 1950s sci-fi film classic Them! These creepy-crawlies don’t even have flesh and blood and muscle except in the most bio-mechanical sense. They move pneumatically. They’re robots. Feel better now?

Dr. Evil

The critters clattering metallically across the floor and lumbering up and down stairs or flying low overhead in their own brief videos, or looking like small, dead, mechanical versions of the baddies in Aliens, actually come from Dr. Roger Quinn’s Biologically Inspired Robotics Lab at Case School of Engineering.

The school’s biorobotics program began in the 1980s, by Drs. Randy Beer and Hillel Chiel. Quinn established the biorobotics lab in 1990 with Chiel and biologists Dr. Roy Ritzmann and Dr. Mark Willis. Mechanical engineering professor Dr. Malcom Cook guides students through the actual design and fabrication of the beasties.

The neatly bearded and unfailingly cheerful Quinn knows how his life’s work comes across to the general public, and he has fun with it. Why else would one of his campus email monikers be Dr. Evil?

The not-so-sinister professor can’t hide his enthusiasm. “I talk with generals and I talk with fifth-graders and they all say, ‘When can I get ahold of this?’”

“This” is any of the many versions of the creatures making the reputation of the school’s bio-robotics team of mechanical engineering and biology professors, and graduate students in both disciplines. Some of the multi-legged wonders resemble cockroaches. Some bring to mind crickets, while others could be the vaguely anthropoid nasties that lonely old prospectors keep running across on late, late night TV. And moth-, fish- and even tumbleweed-inspired models are taking early shape in the fertile collective imagination of this creative crew.

Think about the slow, humanoid robots that populated early sci-fi and even George Lucas’ modern mind. Now get rid of those images. They’re passé. Twenty-first century bots don’t look like us because they’re designed to accomplish tasks we’re, quite frankly, not very good at.
Sure, we’re the smartest critters out there (aren’t we?), but not the toughest or most mobile. We don’t fit in the tightest spaces. We can’t fly or swim underwater for long, and we don’t have much in the way of sniffers or…well, the list goes on.

Anyway, who’s up to crawling through smoke-filled rooms in search of survivors? Or waltzing down suspicious streets in hostile territory looking for IEDs before they find the undercarriage of personnel carriers? And do you really think you’re qualified to spend the rest of your life rolling around the super-hot plains of Mars?

Invasion of the Robo-Critters

Biorobotics is a field devoted to the design of mechanical devices that either “mimic” or are “inspired by” the movements and skills of their biological counterparts, and can be programmed to do tasks we can’t train the real deal to do. Why?

Imagine a war of the future where the military drafts bio-robots with sensors, rudimentary decision-making skills and miniature camera lenses. Your mechanical soldiers look and move like tiny insects. They fly behind enemy lines and park themselves on walls at the enemy high command and sends back film.

Another unit is composed of mechanical amphibians packed with explosives and released to swim underwater until they hit the beach. Think about the American lives saved had that been the first wave of attackers on D-Day.

It’s no wonder that an alphabet soup roster of military organizations and defense researchers, including NASA, the Office of Naval Research (ONR), the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and Eglin Air Force Base have lined up to sponsor the university’s efforts and use or further advance whatever they like.

But it’s not all about war-making. The team is studying the flight patterns and scent skills of moths in an effort to come up with a robot that can take to the skies with chemical sensors to find explosives or gases.

“Dogs do it now, but they require a long period of training,” Quinn explains. “They have a shorter life span and can’t sniff out ordinance on the upper floors of buildings. And there’s an emotional impact when a dog is killed doing its job.”

Not so with a few twists of metal and electronic sensors.

Some of the smaller, handheld bugs in the lab look, well, cute. The Mini-Whegs™ is only three inches long, with combination wheels and legs for climbing stairs and perambulating a swift ten body lengths per second. Remember all those fifth-graders? Hold a Mini-Whegs for awhile and you can imagine someday seeing it in a Toys R Us near you. Who says all these bad boys have to save the world?

Or even work on it. Quinn’s team is also focusing on a cylindrical device that might someday roll with the wind on Mars, or any other planet where we can simply dump it. Rather than attempting to remotely control a single expensive vehicle on rugged alien real estate, release a bunch of these relatively cheap “tumbleweeds” and let ‘em go where they go, snapping pictures along the way.

As otherworldly as the potential, the school’s efforts are still fairly grounded. The “brains” of the creatures are offline while researchers focus on continuing to upgrade the mechanics of movement. Since cockroaches are pretty good at getting around—crawling, tunneling, scampering, turning on a dime—they’re a pretty good starting point.

You can sense Quinn’s frustration as he compares his decades-long effort to simulate the behavior of what most of us would incorrectly consider a pretty simple creature. Nature, it seems, has put to good use its 300-million-year head start.

“Real roaches have millions of sensors on board and they make intelligent decisions and make them rapidly,” says Quinn. “Each antenna alone contains 100,000 sensors. We’re so far from (the humanoid robot played by Will Smith in) I, Robot, it’s not even funny.”

Take leg movement. Each roach limb is jointed for “seven degrees of freedom” for maximum mobility. When on smooth surfaces, the legs move in a tripod formation, two on one side in association with one on the opposite. The gait changes when taking a hill. The legs now work in horizontal pairs, the front legs pulling. Meanwhile, antennae whipsaw through the air, touching approaching obstacles and sending electrical impulses to the brain for nearly instantaneous feedback.

How do Quinn and his people know so much about the creatures? That’s where the inquisitive biologists enter the story.

The Bug People

Alan Alda’s camera crew set him up. They had seen the cockroach room before the host of PBS’s Scientific American Frontiers. So they caught on film his expression—and an outtake utterance you wouldn’t expect from the quintessential sensitive male—at his first sighting of the thousands of inhabitants of the big plastic garbage cans in a backroom of the university’s DeGrace Hall.

Dr. Ritzmann loves telling the story. Alda, filming a segment of the show on biologically inspired robotics that aired in 1999, had just met Blaberus gigantius. Lots of them, actually, and the "gigantius" part didn’t sit well with him.

But there’s more to cockroach-wrangling than making TV hosts squeamish.

“The idea,” says Ritzmann, who heads the biology team with fellow professor Willis, “is to learn from the animals how to build robots. But, since I’m not a particularly altruistic person, I want to learn from the robots what the animals are doing.”

Together, the two disciplines study and imitate, study and imitate. The roaches spend a lot of time in glass display cases and on see-through treadmills with high-speed cameras capturing every nuance of movement.

Researchers continually ponder how the deceptively complex creatures always find a way over, under or around obstacles, regardless of terrain. Not out of mere curiosity. Robots with treaded footing were used in the futile search for survivors immediately after 9/11, and failed miserably.

“The camera operators couldn’t see in the smoke and dust, and the robots were unsteady in the rubble,” says Ritzmann.

What was needed was greater mobility on unstable ground and semi-autonomous decision-making skills. Meaning, says Ritzmann, that “the operator could tell the robot where to go, but not how to get there.”

The Case Engineering team has responded, through the years, with the progressively more advanced Robots I, II and II. Then came Whegs™, the grandparents of the bugs the kids like so much. The further evolved Whegs II™ resembles insect life in general, but no species in particular. The mobility innovation of wheels and legs, all running on a single motor, gives the creatures speed without loss of footwork on inclines.

Even more importantly, Whegs II can “decide” for itself whether to crawl over or tunnel under an obstacle, depending on how the sensors on its antennae hit the obstruction. It’s a thrill to see footage of it striding purposely forward, confronting an obstacle with its metallic antennae, breaking stride, considering its options and either rearing up—thanks to the team’s invention of a hinged flexion joint that lets it bend its back so it won’t overbalance when rising—or bend to crawl under if higher ground is unattainable.

The Biologically Inspired Robotics Lab always has a ways to go. Like the life form that serves as its inspiration, the program stubbornly finds its way around every blockade, through every seeming dead end. Right now it’s power.

“The batteries are just killing us,” says Quinn. “A real cockroach lives on garbage”

As for the grad students in both disciplines, they have their own varied motivation. Nicole Kern practically stumbled into the robotics lab by accident. The mechanical engineering major wants to design a leg brace that, through functional electrical stimulation, will help the paralyzed walk again. She found that “human biology and robotics are paralleling. Getting a person to walk is, in some ways, like making a robot of them. The control system is the same.”

Like a real-life Robocop, minus the arsenal. Sometimes science keeps pace with the filmmakers.

THEY'RE OUTTA HERE!

To commemorate the tail end of a Cleveland Indians season best forgotten, I'm posting one of several baseball features and brief pieces I wrote for the Plain Dealer Sunday Magazine. Ever wonder how many balls a team goes through over the course of a game or a season? So did I, which is why I pitched this piece that ran in the summer of '00.

David Searls

Kenny grabs an inning-ending pop fly and flips it to an imploring fan. Manny drives a hanging curve over the left field wall. Nobody on the Indians staff knows more about how quickly major league baseballs disappear than equipment acquisition/distribution manager Jeff Sipos. It’s the 17-year vet’s responsibility to keep the team stocked up—a real challenge when balls leave the playing field at the rate of about one every four or five pitches. And that’s not counting batting practice.

"(Former manager) Hargrove liked to have his players hit only new balls during b.p.," says Sipos. "Charley (Manuel) will use older ones as long as they’re not too dinged up."

Six or seven dozen dazzling white balls are rubbed up and given to the umpires before every home game. They go fast, what with Jacobs Field’s cozy dimensions and the Herculean efforts of Ramirez, Thome and friends. Plenty more leave the game as foul balls or via the tosses of generous coaches and ballplayers. And when a ball exits the field of play, it never returns.

“Can you think of any other sport where they give the equipment away to the fans?” Sipos grumps.

He also points to umpires as big offenders for the way they reject balls for even the slightest imperfections. Not without good reason. "You give a sneaky pitcher a dented ball and he can make it sing."

Batters can get in on the act too, requesting that umpires pull balls they judge to be a little too worked over. Not surprisingly, Sipos nominates mercurial ex-Indian Albert Belle as the pickiest ball hitter.

Those Tribe baseballs that don’t end up in the appreciative grasp of fans continue a life of sorts even after their brief major league careers are over. The path to retirement takes them to batting practice, then to the indoor batting cages and on to the team’s minor league affiliates. Sipos freights two boxes of about seven dozen balls each to all of the six minor league clubs every month for batting practice. The final stop from there is often to local Little League teams throughout the farm system.

All of which means that the Tribe goes through 1,000 dozen balls in spring training and 2,700 dozen during the season. That totals over 44,000 balls at the rock-bottom cost of about four-and-a-half bucks apiece, or some $200,000 a year. That’s not even counting the post-season or the new-ball needs of all the minor league teams. Think about that the next time you beg first base coach Ted Uhlaender for the foul ball snagged near the box.

LIBERTY REMEMBERS

This cover story appeared in the May/June 2007 issue of PaintPRO Magazine. Unfortunately, this attractive trade pub was discontinued in 2008 or early 2009. I still do a lot of work for several other publications from the parent company, Professional Trade Publications.

David Searls

The blue-skied autumn morning began as many that year, with Eric Grohe up on a crane amidst brushes and paint cans, working away at a wall of an old brick building in Bucyrus, Ohio. The paint on his brushes and jeans came from Keim, an all-natural German brand valued for its outdoor durability.

Kathy Grohe interrupted her husband mid-morning with a strange bit of news she'd picked up, something about a plane having crashed into a building in New York City.

Grohe went back to work. Exterior muralists savor balmy weather like politicians before attentive, deep-pocketed crowds. It was much later that evening that the artist felt the full, awful impact of September 11, 2001. At that moment, his already epic project, Lady Liberty, achieved even deeper meaning for Grohe. Without even fully understanding what he was doing, he scribbled a hurried message on a large sheet of butcher paper and hoisted it high on his unfinished canvas.

“Her torch still shines, her flag still waves,” he'd written above the in-progress painting of Lady Liberty lifting a dying warrior to his eternal reward.

The next day, the flower bouquets began showing up at the base of the building.

Leap of Faith

Ask Deb Pinion, director of the Bucyrus Area Chamber of Commerce, where her little town is situated and she mention its proximity to Mansfield, a somewhat larger city in north-central Ohio, and home to a looming, shuttered prison that incarcerated Tim Robbins, Morgan Freeman and other Hollywood types during filming of The Shawshank Redemption.

Bucyrus itself is a farm field-surrounded community of narrow Victorians and weathered frame homes. The downtown, like many in these Wal-Mart years, especially in hard-hit Ohio, needed...something. It looked somewhat forlorn with its derelict movie theater and empty storefronts amidst a liberally zoned accumulation of lawyers' and doctors' offices, real estate agencies, fast food joints, banks, auto parts dealers, chainr retailers and, nearby, the ornate courthouse and sky-high steeples of churches built during more prosperous times.

“We had a vacant lot on a town square, a gravel parking lot for the last twenty years,” Pinion recalls of the starting point of her envisioned revitalization. Bordering one end of that nook was an exterior wall of The Amish Vault Furniture Store. That's where she set her sights on a mural of the likes she'd seen in Steubenville, Ohio. They were created by Eric Grohe, found easily enough on the Internet.

Grohe and Kathy, his then-fiance, paid a visit and the result was 1999's American Crossroads, a truly epic view of nineteenth-century Bucyrus.

“It was entirely privately funded,” Pinion points out. As were the three Grohe murals that would follow, including Liberty Remembers.

“There are a lot of walls here,” she recalls Grohe saying while on his initial assignment.

He had his eye on the brick side of one particular building housing an Edward Jones investment branch and overlooking an ice cream stand. Nothing special, but the artist told Pinion, “I knew I was going to paint it when I left Vietnam. I just didn't know where I was going to put it.”

Now he had a place for his mind's image of Liberty Remembers.

Grohe is a gentleman, in the most literal sense, of about 60. Born in New York City, he served a tour of duty in Vietnam and eventually made Seattle his home—more or less. Most of his and Kathy's time is spent working on public projects that take up to a year to complete.

Though soft-spoken and friendly, the muralist knows when to put his foot down. One town wanted him to paint a bridge scene to honor the structure that marks its identify. Great idea, except that the project would be painted three blocks from the real deal. Why would he simply replicate the view?

“What I do isn't just a pretty picture slapped on a wall,” he explains. Some images “look good on a postcard, but don't create monuments.”

Grandeur in weather-resistant paint is what Grohe, with the help of his graphic artist wife and small teams of local art-school assistants, has created in communities throughout the U.S. And in South America and Malaysia. Communities like Bucyrus.

But while Grohe was eager to start Liberty Remembers, Pinion had only found partial funding by 2001. The artist started anyway in what Pinion calls “a leap of faith.”

They were in a “stage agreement,” and Grohe was in the second of four payment stages when 9/11 hit. The well ran dry while townspeople opened their wallets to the same sort of tragedy-related charities as did the rest of the nation.

Then a school-aged girl contributed ten dollars as a way of honoring her grandparents. After Pinion took the story to the Bucyrus Telegraph-Forum, “the checks started pouring in.”

They Were Soldiers

Stepping back from the work one day, Grohe's critique of Liberty was that “it was nice, but it wasn't connecting with the people. It was a political message with national meaning, but no local significance.”

The solution, he decided, would be to add busts and a few full-body portraits of Crawford County's own warriors. Once Grohe had figured out room for 75 or 80 memorialized veterans, Pinion went back to the town's newspaper, this time soliciting photographs of area vets.

Afterwards, “I opened the door and went, 'Oh my God.' People had brought in bomber jackets, canteens, letters, photo albums...”

Trying to turn down as few loved ones as possible, Grohe found space for 284 soldiers up and down and alongside the vertical pillars. He painted veterans of the Civil War, Spanish-American War, both world conflicts, Vietnam, Desert Storm—even the RevolutionaryWar. The bluecoat had, of course, served long before the invention of the camera, but his image was captured at the age of 103.

Kathy scanned and printed each photo to a height of about eight inches. Then, using a pontillist technique, Grohe outlined facial features by poking holes into a fine mesh fabric. Through the fabric he poured powdered chalk, leaving a blue outline on the wall. With this as a guide, he painted about a dozen portraits a day.

Grohe can be unapologetically sentimental. Among the 284 Liberty faces is one young Vietnam casualty extending a Purple Heart. It's for his mother, who never received his medal through a falling out between widow and immediate family. There's also Nemo, a famous Vietnam War canine courier who completed a final mission despite losing an eye to gunfire. Nemo's handler lives in the area and submitted the photo with the comment that the dog had “saved more men than I did.” Careful viewers will also spot a horseshoe in recognition of the memorably courageous mount of a local Revolutionary War general. (“After having to turn down so many soldier photographs, I couldn't justify painting an actual horse,” Grohe explains.)

The community introduced itself as though for the first time through Liberty. “There were submarine soldiers living next door to one another who didn't know it,” Grohe recalls.

As Pinion proudly states after mentioning inclusion of an area boy who was the last Marine killed at Iwo Jima, “We were patriotic before patriotic was cool.”

Thanks to Eric Grohe, that fact will be apparent to generations of residents and visitors to Bucyrus, Ohio.

WALKING IN THE MINDFIELD

I read online about forensic psychologist and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) expert Dr. John Wilson, and decided to learn more. The resulting feature article ran in the October, 2000 issue of Cleveland Magazine. I love the title, though I can't claim it. An editor brainstormed that one.

David Searls

After his first few visits, the crisply dressed doctor was shown a way around the interminable line of black, Hispanic and poor-white visitors queuing for a few minutes with fathers, sons and lovers. Once inside, he’d trudge with briefcase and files to an eight-by-ten room with concrete walls, a government-issue desk, two chairs and a door with meshed-glass observation window. Here he’d be joined for hours at a time—some 300 of them altogether—by a polite young man in orange jumpsuit carrying his own clutch of files.

“Eric was in turns sensitive and reflective. He’d cry. He’d tell me what a great man his father was. He was confused, but incredibly sharp.”

That’s Dr. John P. Wilson’s recollection of his many L.A. County Jail visits with Eric Menendez, who, along with his older brother, Lyle, shotgun-blasted their dozing parents in the family room of a sprawling Beverly Hills mansion on August 20, 1989, then hustled to their car for more shells to finish the job before their mortally wounded mother could crawl away.

Wilson, Professor of Psychology at Cleveland State University, is one of the nation’s foremost forensic experts on post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). It’s this diagnosis that he spent months exploring and two weeks trying to help sell to the second Menendez jury as some sort of mitigating explanation for the horrific events that would have constituted the pop crime sensation of the last decade if O.J. Simpson hadn’t run with that ball.

Wilson, who’s also founder and president of the Cleveland Heights-based Forensic Center for Traumatic Stress and Posttraumatic Stress Disorders, describes PTSD as “a condition of prolonged stress response in reaction to a traumatic event.” Those prolonged stress reactions have kept Wilson busy for the last quarter-century, providing fodder for eleven academic books and a slew of professional monographs. He’s hit the trouble spots of the world to set up treatment centers on behalf of the United Nations Office on Humanitarian Affairs and The World Health Organization, testified before the U.S. House and Senate Committees on Veterans Affairs and earned a Presidential Commendation from Jimmy Carter. He’s interviewed serial killers, helped save the life of a notorious terrorist and lent his expertise to abused spouses, haunted combat vets, air crash victims, war refugees, international torture and Holocaust survivors, haunted firefighters, police-battered citizens and stressed-out cops. Along the way, Wilson has taken part in such headline-grabbing criminal and civil cases as the William Kennedy Smith rape trial, the Exxon Valdez environmental disaster, and the third Sam Sheppard courtroom spectacle.

John Wilson, 54, is a soft-spoken man who’s described by Dr. Thomas A. Moran, the chief operating officer of Wilson’s Forensic Center, as “a consummate professional and one of the most sensitive and friendly people I’ve ever worked with.”

He was born and raised in Columbus, Ohio by a banker father and a mother who headed the local chapter of the American Heart Association. Initially, Wilson went to George Washington University and Baldwin-Wallace College with the intention of becoming a neurosurgeon, but his fascination with the brain’s quirky software package—the mind—steered him toward a doctorate in Psychology from Michigan State University.

Wilson’s demeanor suggests nothing more than affable fascination with the topic at hand even when painting such emotionally draining word pictures as this, concerning a much younger Eric Menendez’s relationship with his father, Jose: “When he was being sodomized and he’d cry out because it was painful, he’d get smacked and (told by Jose), ‘if you cry you’re not a Menendez, and if you keep crying I’ll have to kill you.’”

Or when relaying this impression of the boys’ mother: “Kitty knew what was going on because Eric always threw up afterwards, and then he’d shower. She’d come to him if he was sick in the night with the flu, but never after his sessions with Jose. She knew the difference.”

Sometimes Wilson inserts a mild profanity or vulgarity in his narrative, but so casually it’s almost missed: “On more than one occasion Lyle peed his pants for fear that his father was coming to admonish him.”

Wilson can just as calmly describe a fatal torture sequence in the killing fields of Cambodia as seen through the eyes of a prison camp survivor who would, years later, bumble an attempt at revenge by successfully tossing a gasoline bomb at the wrong man. His depiction of the sound of a man’s skull breaking when hitting pavement from a shove by an overzealous security guard as heard by a traumatized wife can make listeners squirm—but not him. He’s equally unruffled while voicing his suspicions that a surprise office visit from IRS agents has more to do with testimony unfriendly to the government’s case against a homicidal Palestinian hijacker and mass murderer that it does to any taxing matters. And yet, there’s something in the precision with which he recounts the ghastly details of his patients’ past that shows how deeply they’ve worked their way into his own mind.

The spacious Cleveland Heights colonial Wilson shares with his wife, Diane, and their blended family of four twenty-something children hardly serves as the proper setting for his foreboding tales. Diane Wilson’s talents as an interior designer and artist come to play in the way the natural wood, Oriental rugs and stylish, comfortable furniture make the place as tastefully relaxed as the doctor.

“Invariably when I ask Holocaust survivors whether they’d prefer to meet at one of my offices or at the house, they always choose the house,” says Wilson. “Always. Medical buildings carry lots of baggage for them.”

“People with PTSD persistently re-experience the event in at least one of several ways: recurrent distressing dreams; recurrent recollections of the event, a sense of reliving the experience (flashbacks); and intense distress at events that symbolize an aspect of the event (such as anniversaries).” From the National Center for PTSD website.

PTSD was considered little more than a last ditch effort for bleeding heart lawyers until 1980, when Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder finally became an official classification of anxiety disorder by the American Psychiatric Association.

The symptoms of PTSD were known in earlier days, but the disorder wore such jaunty labels as shell shock or combat fatigue. According to Wilson, Dr. William Neiderland made a name for himself years ago in New York City by treating thousands for “concentration camp syndrome.” In the 1960s Neiderland took on the case of a Polish-American Jew arrested and diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic for throwing bricks through plate glass windows. The doctor found that when his patient was nine and living in Warsaw, the invading Germans demolished the family’s shop and took away both of his parents, never to be seen again. As an adult, the man reenacted the symbolic and literal destruction of his family on the anniversary of Kristallnacht (“The Night of Broken Glass”), when Nazi-orchestrated German mobs looted and burned the homes, shops and synagogues of Jewish citizens.

PTSD came into the public consciousness as defense attorneys bandied it about in the seventies to explain—or justify, depending on one’s point of view—the exploits of Vietnam vets or knocked-around wives who’d finally had enough.

Although only a small percentage of PTSD sufferers commit crimes, they’re the ones that get the ink. Attorneys try out mental state defenses by presenting their clients as burdened with repressed memories of war, torture, childhood physical or sexual abuse, or other acts of long-term or sudden violence. The defendants are shown to have experienced years of nightmares and traumatic memories; anxiety, sadness or anger; avoidance or denial of the memories, sometimes to the point of amnesia; and histories of “hypervigilance”—behavior of extreme or unrealistic precaution. But as deep as the memories might be buried, explain sharp defense attorneys, they can worm their way back up through flashbacks that initiate what Wilson and other psychologists call “parallel reenactment” of the underlying cause of anxiety. One example from Wilson’s own case files is Louisiana v. Heads.

Charles Heads was an ex-Marine and Vietnam vet who shot his good friend and brother-in-law to death during one incredibly hot August night. It was the weather conditions as well as the night terrain that provided Heads with the “environmental cues” that triggered the fatal flashback, says Wilson.

The defendant had spent the night traveling from his home in Texas to Shreveport in a frantic search for his wife and kids, who’d left him. This act of perceived abandonment was a parallel reenactment of when, as a child, Heads had witnessed his mother being shot and killed by his father, who was subsequently arrested and taken from him.

Heads told Wilson that he remembered little after arriving at the home of his brother-in-law except for an orange flash from the barrel of a gun that was supposedly held by the other man, but which never actually existed. His response to this imaginary threat was to blow a hole in his brother-in-law’s chest.

When Wilson showed black-and-white photos of the field and treeline surrounding the murder house to the former members of Heads’ platoon, each and every one identified it as the Vietnam landing zone where Heads had been evacuated after getting seriously wounded during a night ambush.

“So you had a tired, stressed-out vet with untreated post-traumatic stress who can’t find his wife and kids, so now this abandonment issue kicks in,” says Wilson. “And it all takes place on the anniversary of the night Heads was shot in Nam.”

Wilson’s testimony helped convince a jury to return a verdict of Not Guilty by Reason of Insanity (NGRI).

“When I treat veterans,” says Wilson,” I ask them if they have a gun. Lots of times they’ve got one under pillows, locked and loaded. Having a weapon is literally a security blanket.”

Some of his patients have been known to “patrol their perimeters” at night, sometimes sleeping in trees armed to the teeth. That’s an example of hypervigilance, as is the tendency of concentration camp survivors to avoid uniforms, guard dogs and even concrete barriers—all potent reminders of camp conditions.

“You can’t just say, ‘stop doing that, you’re safe now.’ Because that’s not their reality. The world’s not a safe place.”

Dr. Wilson’s first inkling of the as-yet unnamed disorder came in observing the returning Vietnam vets in his CSU classrooms in the early 1970s. “They were so different from my other students. They sat in the back of the room, by the door. They wore their field jackets, and they were angry."

His pilot study of war vets in 1973 created enough of a stir to earn Wilson a research grant in 1977 that “gave us a good snapshot of what was really happening.” His estimate of 500,000 vets nationwide suffering the effects of PTSD came within a couple percentage points of the 480,000-victim figure reached by a more extensive government study fifteen years later.

Wilson’s courtroom reputation was made in the precedent-setting case of U.S. v. Tindall. He was able to prove to the 12-0 satisfaction of the jury that Michael Tindall, a highly decorated Vietnam War chopper pilot, was suffering classic symptoms of PTSD while smuggling 7,000 pounds of hashish from Morocco to Boston. The NGRI decision was the nation’s first successful use of the defense in federal court.

The NGRI decision was a rare one since the standards of proof are so high, but Wilson is proud to have so far helped send four clients to psychiatric care rather than prison. He responds crisply when the question is raised as to whether some defendants have gone too far to warrant his assistance. “If you understand the individual as a human being,” he says, “you wouldn’t see him as without redeeming social value.”

This attitude even extends to Omar Rezaq, the Palestinian terrorist who contributed to the deaths of sixty airline passengers and Egyptian security personnel when a hijacking went awry. As the lone surviving gunman, Rezaq took it upon himself to shoot five passengers at close range, one by one, before being overpowered. While he was convicted in federal court on all charges and sentenced to life in prison, Wilson’s testimony helped the Palestinian avoid execution.

“When I’m on a case, I’m there because of my expertise,” says Wilson. “I’m looking for the motivation, and whatever I personally think of the defendant is irrelevant.”

He’d tried unsuccessfully to gain a NGRI in Cuyahoga County three years before the Tindall decision, when an armed and troubled Vietnam medic named Ashby Leach briefly held the Terminal Tower to publicize his grievances with Chessie Systems, his employer, and draw attention to the G.I. Bill of Rights. Leach was convicted of assault, extortion and possession of criminal tools—but found not guilty of the most serious charge, kidnapping.

“In Ohio, PTSD is an all-or-nothing defense,” says Cuyahoga County Chief Prosecutor William Mason. “Either the defendant is not guilty by reason of insanity, or he’s guilty.”

While in some states the disorder can allow a jury to convict on a reduced charge—such as second-degree rather than first degree murder—Ohio juries don’t have that flexibility. But according to Mason, defense lawyers often use mental defense testimony to “soften a jury” during the trial or to evoke sympathy during the penalty phase.

Wilson first came to the attention of the chief prosecutor during the final Sheppard case that, in effect, put the Cuyahoga County prosecutor’s office on trial. “His demeanor was forthright, and he was immensely qualified to speak on the issue,” says Mason, “but we had difficulty accepting his conclusions.”

According to Mason, the bulk of Wilson’s two or three hours on the stand was spent in rebuttal of an eyewitness and ink and handwriting experts, all testifying that Sheppard had scrawled the margin note “Yes!” in an autographed copy of his book, Endure and Conquer. Wilson, according to Mason, tried building a case for Sheppard being so wracked with PTSD as a result of the Bay Village attack, the loss of his family and reputation and years of false incarceration, that his behavior in the last few years of his life was too erratic for rational conclusions to be drawn.
Mason shrugs off with a smile the attempt at diagnosing a psychological disorder without the benefit of actually meeting the patient. “Obviously the jury had problems with it, too.”

The mere mention of the chief prosecutor causes the normally unflappable psychologist to shift uncomfortably. His cheeks flush and his mouth sets. “That’s not true,” he says when given Mason’s description of Wilson’s purpose for taking the stand. “The book was a very minor part of it. I was simply explaining a forensic PTSD diagnosis based on conclusions I could draw from Sam Sheppard’s biography and discussions with other family members, including his brother and former wife. That’s all I had to work with.”

Wilson, by the way, insists that he’s virtually certain Sam Sheppard didn’t kill his first wife.

“I was looking nationally for an expert, when we found Dr. Wilson in our own backyard,” says Cleveland attorney Richard Herman, a civil attorney who frequently takes on cases involving police brutality and traumatized immigrants. “Despite his international reputation, he’s worked with us on many cases where money just wasn’t widely available.”

Many of Wilson’s pro bono cases have involved combat vets, a group of which he says he’s never charged a penny. That sense of commitment has earned him honors from veteran groups across the nation and led to his President Carter commendation. He points to the needs of this community when asked his motivation despite the fact that he never served in the military.

“When Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan came out, the Veterans Administration got so many calls—thousands a week—from untreated World War II vets that they had to set up a 1-800 number,” he says. “Those are men still seeking treatment for experiences of half a century ago.”

The first Menendez brothers trial had ended in a hung jury. For the second go-around, celebrity criminal lawyers Leslie Abramson and Barry Levin worked hard to establish a defense based on PTSD, but the presiding judge wasn’t buying it.

In California, as in the rest of the country, battered women can present a case for “imperfect self defense” if they kill while in fear of eminent threat. If successful, the defense removes the factor of premeditation which is necessary to establish a verdict of first-degree murder. One problem for the Abramson team: While there was plenty of trial precedence for battered wives and battered children, there was nothing for battered young men.

“But,” says Wilson, “Leslie’s argument was, ‘if you’re battered, you’re battered.’”

So Abramson brought in the good doctor. Besides spending those 300 hours in the infamous Los Angeles County Jail with Eric, Wilson chalked up 20 more with brother Lyle, and interviewed teachers and Menendez extended family members from both sides.

But the trial judge would only let Wilson testify to events within a week of the murders. With such a gag in place, Wilson took the stand for two exhaustive weeks and tried to tell the jury and the world that Eric Menendez suffered from PTSD as a result of physical and sexual abuse at the hands of his father. Abuse that started at the age of five and was to continue virtually to the day that Eric and Lyle stormed in on their parents for the final time.

“The prosecutors objected about every ten minutes,” Wilson says.

Much of his prepared testimony was ruled inadmissable, and the media and public had a field day envisioning the two hardy young men—both champion tennis players—being beaten up and raped, by a successful, middle-aged father who was determinedly heterosexual—and had the wife and succession of mistresses to prove it.

Wilson’s time with the two defendants and other family members dismissed whatever doubts he might had harbored.

“Eric showed me the scars on the inside of his thighs,” Wilson says. “He described the games his father would play. Eric had names for them, names like ‘Weird’ and ‘Kneel.’ And the nieces witnessed Jose sexually assaulting Lyle when he was about seven.”

Wilson also saw a snapshot taken by Kitty, of Jose hanging a pre-school-aged Eric by his arms on a workout bar and walking away to leave him up there, screaming. The object of such stunts was to toughen the kids up, make them strong.

Wilson interviewed a former co-worker who told him that Jose had “gotten a young boy” during a business trip to Mexico, and teachers in the Princeton, New Jersey school system that Lyle and Eric had attended before the family moved to the West Coast. The teachers said that they always knew there was something wrong in that family.

“They asked for a psychological evaluation of Eric when he was fifteen. He always looked dazed, disoriented, and he drifted,” explains Wilson. The younger Menendez brother would “zone out” even in the middle of a tennis match. “What was happening,” says Wilson, is that Eric was experiencing flashbacks.”

Jose Menendez’s response, the Princeton teachers told Wilson, was to have a family lawyer write a contract specifying that Eric could be tested for learning disabilities, but could be given no psychological testing. “It was unprecedented. The school had never heard of such a thing, but Jose obviously wanted to make sure that nothing came out that he didn’t want anyone to hear about,” according to Wilson.

“The boys definitely suffered years and years of abuse—especially Eric.”

It’s easy to think of Dr. John Wilson as a defense lawyer’s best friend. “John is an excellent witness, very impressive on the stand,” says local attorney Gordon Friedman. “He’s been vital, absolutely critical to some of my cases.” Wilson’s patients on behalf of Friedman have included Vietnam vets and plaintiffs in civil cases alleging the trauma of police brutality.

But despite his apparent affinity for defendants, Wilson has turned down many cases that he didn’t feel fit the framework of PTSD.

For instance, he interviewed one former vet charged with dealing cocaine in Miami. “He said he’d been traumatized from seeing napalm burns, but he couldn’t name his outfit or identify anyplace he’d been in-country.” Even more suspiciously, the defendant’s cell was full of books on PTSD, as though he were boning up for a test. “I later found that he’d been in the service, but had never left the States.”

Another turned-down patient was Ward Weaver, a Bakersfield, California serial killer whom Wilson calls, “one of the most severely disturbed individuals I’d ever met in my life.” As Wilson explains, “Weaver had a horrible history of child abuse. And when he was drafted he was made, of all things, a demolition expert in Vietnam.”

Despite what would be a stressful situation for most, Weaver got along just fine in Southeast Asia. “He was a happy camper,” Wilson says. “He enjoyed blowing up bridges and doing things to the Vietcong.”

The difference between the Bakersfield serial killer and a legitimate PTSD sufferer was that Weaver was never operating in a disassociative state after the war. He knew exactly what he was doing as he roamed the country picking up unlucky hitchhikers as a long-distance trucker.

An entire group that didn’t fit Wilson’s definition of PTSD sufferer were the residents of Prince William Sound in Alaska who were solicited by lawyers following the infamous Exxon Valdez oil spill. Newspaper ads ran seeking locals who were experiencing the symptoms of post-traumatic stress as a result of the accident, and thousands turned out. Wilson examined the questionnaires filled out by untrained decoders and found what he viewed to be irregularities in the time devoted to each interview. Among other things, he testified that a full psychological evaluation could not be made in such short order. The mental disorder cases were thrown out of court.

“It’s important for me to defend the integrity of the diagnosis. It trivializes PTDS to say you can get it from seeing oil mess up birds and get on the sand. What’s next—grease in the driveway?” Wilson shakes his head slightly. “Come on, you’re going to put this person in the same category as a torture victim or Holocaust survivor?”

Wilson worked hard with defense attorney Abramson in that second trial to make the point that Eric Menendez and his brother perceived their father to be almost supernaturally powerful. When the boys finally decided to break away, it was because Jose was insisting that Eric, though accepted at UCLA, spend a couple night a week at home in order to stay on top of his homework. Eric told Wilson that he interpreted that to mean that he wasn’t going to escape his father’s advances after all. For the first time, he and his older brother flatly refused to obey. They even subtly implied that they might spill their family’s horrible secrets if forced to.

To this, Eric Menendez quoted his father as coolly replying, “Okay, you’ve made your decision. Now I’ll make mine.”

If Eric was experiencing PTSD, as Wilson believes, the trigger would be this show of ruthless and unyielding power from a figure of indescribable dominance: “Now I’ll make mine.”

On the night of the murder, the brothers told their parents they were going to the movies, but Eric was told to stay home and to go to his room. “This had never happened before, where they were refused permission to go out for the evening, and they saw it as further confirmation that they would soon be killed.”

Unless they acted first.

The jury didn’t buy it. Lyle and Eric were castigated for besmirching their parents’ reputations even after the deaths brought on by them, and both were given life sentences. As a final punishment—one perhaps harsher than the sentence itself—the brothers were split up and sent to separate penitentiaries. It’s probable that they’ll never see each other again.

“I hope, if nothing else, that this case shows that the abuse of children is not limited to the stereotypes,” says Wilson. “The brothers came from an upper middle-class and horrifically dysfunctional background. That’s obvious if for no other reason than the fact that healthy children don’t murder their parents.”

He pauses. “What went wrong?”

It’s a question that goes to the heart of Wilson’s career.

KING OF THE ROAD

I've never failed to be charmed by the men and women I've interviewed and profiled for Super Lawyers and other publications. My feature article, King of the Road, appeared in Ohio Super Lawyer in about 2004. In all, I've so far written about a dozen features and columns for the magazine's statewide editions in Ohio, Upper New York, Oklahoma and elsewhere.


Michael Leizerman had an inkling that he’d discovered an intriguing career direction after the Toledo personal injury lawyer took on the case of a trailer-truck driver who’d rear-ended another eighteen-wheeler. It wasn’t his client’s fault, he was ready to tell a jury. The other truck’s brake lights were out.

“Of course, my guy’s brakes weren’t working,” Leizerman concedes.

It made the young lawyer think. Was it really some giant coincidence that those two dangerously un-roadworthy behemoths had found each other in a grind of chrome, metal and glass? Or was it remotely possible that there were a number of big rigs out there with inadequate signals and braking systems? Trucks weighing a hundred thousand pounds and more, barreling down on the family minivan at highway speeds of sixty, seventy miles an hour, pads worn, lighting iffy.

Indeed it was, and mechanical failure was only the first detour on the road to safe driving.
There were, as Leizerman would learn, trucking firms that bullied drivers into overtiming well into the No-Doz hours. Ambitious drivers who falsified logs to shave hours behind the wheel. Truckers who shouldn’t have earned their Class 8 commercial license in the first place operating heavy metal like some nine-year-old who’s found his father’s handgun stash.

Take the wild-ass big-rig driver from the Ukraine Leizerman put in the crosshairs of a lawsuit. After the guy ran a light to plow into a middle-aged deli counter worker. Leizerman found that his injured client hadn’t been the hasty trucker’s first victim.

“In the five years since he’d come to the States, he’d had at least three prior hit-and-runs after disregarding a traffic sign,” he says.

Leizerman’s client ended up with a rotator cuff injury that precluded her from operating the cheese and meat slicer.

“We settled for around a half-million dollars.”

There are some 500,000 truck accidents a year in the Unites States. A hundred thousand involve casualties, including about 5,000 fatalities. And over a five-year period culminating in the year 2000, only four states had more fatal truck-involved accidents than in Ohio.

Leizerman, who also practices in Michigan and Tennessee, had found a crying need. He took on more and more truck cases in the late 1990s. He formed and still runs a truck litigation committee within the Association of Trial Lawyers of America (ATLA). He invested in an expensive website called http://www.truckaccidents.com/, runs phone directory and newspaper ads and TV spots in several cities, bylines legal articles and recently signed a contract to write a 1,000-page treatise on his favorite topic. Oh, and he went to truck driving school, earning all of his certification and passing his exam for a Commercial Drivers License in his first attempt. Just curious to see what it’s like behind the wheel.

“I want to be the national truck accident attorney,” Leizerman states flatly.

It’s not an entirely altruistic goal.

Doctored Logs and Paperwork Forests

“Mike is very cerebral, and he’s a good businessman,” says Steve Gursten, a Southfield, Michigan lawyer who has referred truck accident cases to Leizerman, and tried other cases in association with his Ohio counterpart.

Leizerman was happy to redirect his attention from the mostly routine auto accidents that hit his desk at E.J. Leizerman & Associates, his uncle’s firm and young Leizerman’s sole workplace since his recruitment as a seventeen-year-old file clerk. Leizerman, who grew up in the Detroit area with two younger brothers, went right to work here as an attorney upon graduating from the University of Toledo Law School and passing the bar exam, in late 1994. The firm specializes in personal injury cases involving railroad workers, as well as larger car accident cases.

“I wanted to stop taking car cases because many of my clients could have done as well without me and wouldn’t have had to split the settlement,” he says.

Meaning that when a policyholder is clearly at fault, auto insurers are eager to settle for up to the coverage limit. Since the faulty drivers seldom have much additional money to chase, there’s a fairly low settlement ceiling and rather uncomplicated process to get a check cut.

Truck cases? Different story. And much more of the challenge Leizerman relishes.
In the first place, there’s the forest of documents to wade through. Among the myriad laws established by an alphabet soup of federal and state regulatory agencies, commercial drivers must keep written journals, or logs, of their driving activity. That’s to ensure that the drivers of freight-transporting commercial carriers not exceed eleven hours of service without twelve consecutive hours of downtime. Driver fatigue, though usually hard to prove, is suspected as at least an underlying factor in many road accidents. So there are credit card receipts and cell phone records to go through to see if everything meshes with the documented activity.

After all, says Leizerman, “If drivers are falsifying their hours, who cares what the laws are?”

There’s also bill of lading paperwork, which can indicate excess cargo weight or load-shifting. There are alcohol and drug test results. And, since many trucking firms have in-cab satellite communications systems, incriminating messages can be found here.

Which is exactly what happened in a case handled by Leizerman. “It was right there in the messages picked up by the driver while offloading. He told the company he was at his service limit, and they sent him back out anyway.” And put it in writing.

In addition to the challenge, the payoff is better than car accidents. Minimum insurance coverage on commercial carriers starts at a million bucks and can work all the way up to $5 million on rigs carrying certain classes of hazardous materials. Lawyers might also go after the relatively deep-pocketed trucking firms that negligently hired or contracted with or overworked the driver, or inadequately serviced the vehicle.

Leizerman felt needed. “There’s almost never a million-dollar settlements without a lawyer,” he observes.

He’s won several seven-figure sums for his clients and firm, which earns about $10 million a year in total settlements. “The average is about $200,00 per case today, when ten or fifteen years ago it was maybe $15,000,” he says. “And the little cases take just as much time to do right as the bigger cases.”

The Young Tractor-Trailer King

Michael Leizerman hesitates when the question of age comes up. It’s not an unusual response from anyone being interviewed for publication. “Well,” he finally responds, “I’ll be thirty-five by the time this comes out.”

The problem, as it turns out, isn’t vanity. Quite the contrary, it’s his relative lack of years that concerns him. “It’s hard being taken seriously by a plaintiff on a million-dollar case when you’re twenty-eight,” he observes. “But I guess I’ve done this long enough now that I’ve built up some credibility…”

With his neatly trimmed salt-and-pepper beard and thinning hairline, Leizerman looks somewhat older than his birthdate. He’s a small, sober-looking man whose quiet but friendly mannerisms suggest nothing along the lines of what you’d expect from a trial lawyer dubbed “The Tractor-Trailer King” by his peers. No ten-gallon cowboy hat, snakeskin boots or trophy third wife on display here.

Leizerman’s office at E.J. Leizerman & Associates LLC, which occupies its own modest building on the outskirts of downtown Toledo, is as well-kept as the man. It’s a large-enough room done up in lawyerly fashion: cherry desk and credenza, rich green carpet, jet black leather sofa and guest chair, textured wallpaper the muted color of oatmeal. His desk holds a few razor-sharp stacks of paper and case files and little else. The credenza is stuffed with law books. An easel exhibits the self-portrait woodcut of his wife, Julie, an amateur sculpture, part-time bookkeeper at the firm and full-time homemaker.

His conversation ranges from his career and caseload to his obviously welcome home life. He’s the father of sons Kegan, 10, and four-year-old Daniel. He plays the piano for relaxation, enjoys cooking and even confesses to caring for twelve chickens and torturing the accordion.

Most importantly: “No matter how busy it gets, I get home most evenings,” he says.

“Home” is in Swanton, a toney suburb where he and his family own a home and 14 acres of gardens, scrubby woods and, apparently, free-ranging fowl.

Yes, he’s home most evenings, but not always “there,” insists Julie. “His office is in this little hiding place off of the kitchen. I’ve learned to look for him there first. He’s just always working or thinking about some aspect of work. But I suppose if he can mow the lawn while thinking about his cases, he’s multi-tasking.”

Gursten, his Michigan-based occasional partner, appreciates his friend’s effort and attentiveness. As he sees it, “The biggest reason people hate lawyers is their lack of responsiveness. But Mike is one of those rare lawyers who actually calls people back.”

Which is important to Gursten because some of his clients have suffered traumatic brain injuries.

“If they get ignored, they take it harder than someone else might.”

The phone calls don’t necessarily stop once the case is over. Leizerman won a $2.5 million settlement on behalf of Toledo tire salesman Richard “Willie” Lauffer in late 2003. He had suffered multiple fractured and become permanently disabled when a truck backed into him while he stood on a curb.

“That guy’s first class, more like family than a lawyer,” says Lauffer. “He still calls me once in a while just to say, ‘Hey, how ya doin’?’”

Road-Safe in ‘04

As he enthusiastically discusses advancements in truck safety, Leizerman almost sounds like he wouldn’t mind being put out of business. He chats about his favorite technology: electronic logs and satellite-positioning systems that can’t be falsified, in-cab satellite communications, and collision-avoidance systems.

“It’s radar that scans forward and on the sides,” he explains. “You get a siren when someone’s in your blind spot and the monitor graphs out the positions of all vehicles around the rig. Drivers can see what’s going on, and trucking firms can use it to preemptively examine the tailgating practices of drivers and send them back to driver simulation school if needed.”

Pretty cool. But couldn’t widespread adoption of the technology force him give up his crown and title of Tractor-Trailer King?

No matter, he says. “The hope is that there really is an increase in safety on the road.”

Worst case scenario, it just gives Mike Liezerman a little more time for accordion lessons and poultry breeding.

TINY'S BIG IDEAS

After nearly a decade in hiding, the truth can finally be told: I am Pat Halstead. I profiled multi-award-winning advertising copywriter Erin Pollock for the October, 2000 issue of The Plain Dealer Sunday Magazine. But at the time, I was working for another Cleveland ad agency and didn't think my superiors would think much of the publicity given a competitor. Hence, my one and only (so far) pseudonym. The last name comes from back a ways in my family ancestry on my dad's side. The first name, "Pat" was craftily designed to further confuse the reader by even muddling the gender. I'm devious when I have to be.

David Searls

“Anyone interested in a lesbian cruise? Besides every heterosexual male on the planet?”
Ad for Green Road travel Agency promoting lesbian vacation packages

Black on black is the fashion statement of the evening, the men in buttoned-to-the-throat shirts sans neckties, the women decked out stylishly or hip, depending on age or outlook. Stones glitter from earlobes of both genders and the sprinkling of round, horn-rimmed glasses puts one in mind of a Woody Allen movie. The account people work the room while the creatives hang back with their own kind, looking vaguely uncomfortable. After dinner and cocktails, the hosts dim the lights and steer the crowd to another room with another bar, and usher the attendees into chairs set before a stage.

Welcome to the Cleveland ADDYs, the annual Cleveland Advertising Association-sponsored award show which in 2000, as well as other recent years, seems to have been called to order predominantly to honor a tiny, tiny young woman in black leather pants and matching top. Erin Friedman—now Pollock, due to her recent marriage to Adam, a pediatric dentist—will be photographed receiving an award more than thirty times this evening, her exuberant grin never slipping into boredom or self-satisfaction. The girlish copywriter gleefully pops up to take home almost half of the first-place Golds and about a third of the Silvers. She nabs three out of four of the Judges’ Choice Awards, and, as a sort of industry coup d’ etat, earns the one and only Best of Show, an honor that must seem anticlimactic after she’s swept everything else.

In all, Pollock walks away this March evening with 25 of 66 top awards along with fourteen certificates of merit. To add insult to everyone else’s injury, several of the honors she doesn’t pick up are in such word-free categories as logo design or still photography.

“I’ve seen the judges’ reactions, and her work obviously lights up their eyes,” says Lane Strauss, a copywriter from Wyse Advertising who’s nabbed more than his share of ADDY recognition over the years, including seven of the major awards at the 2000 show.

Pollock’s accomplishments are the equivalent of Mark McGwire hitting not 70 homers a year, but 80 or 90 or a hundred. While she probably weighs as much as one of the famed slugger’s thighs, she’s obviously got the mental heft needed to have risen to the top of her profession in less than a half dozen years. At the tender age of 29, Bill Brokaw Advertising’s Erin Pollock stands as tall as any copywriter in Cleveland.

Ad agency folks love awards shows. Account people drag along their clients to prove what brilliant accomplishments have been made on their nickel. Winning writers and designers subtly lobby for more bucks or better jobs (as industry recruiter Laurie Mitchell phrased it in her ad in the last ADDY program, “You win. We place.”) or simply preen before peers. And everyone thinks the plaques and trophies look cool in the agency lobby.

Among such back-patting shows, the local segment of the American Advertising Awards—or ADDY—is a major draw as the first of three steps, followed by districts and nationals, to top-of-the-profession acclaim. The winners gleefully accept their plaudits while the losers are left to ponder the shortcuts that certain agencies might have taken to nab their victories.

Ad people whose clients manufacture camshafts or promote funeral services, for instance, might dwell on what they could do if given free rein to create posters for divorce lawyers or small-space ads for pet-sitting services or lesbian vacation packagers. Yes, Bill Brokaw Advertising has been known to snag such delightfully quirky clients with shoestring ad budgets that contribute little to the agency’s bottom line, but yield opportunities to create attention-grabbing messages that run on just enough of a media schedule to qualify for show entry.

In typically irreverent fashion, Pollock once addressed this controversy head-on when assigned to write copy encouraging agencies to submit work to the Cleveland ADDYs. “Hey, if it ran once, it ran,” read one award-winning poster. Another enthused: “Your cousin’s wife teaches naked yoga. Can you say poster campaign?”

But Pollock silences the naysayers in a bigger way, by also winning on behalf of such all-business and potentially mind-numbing clients as manufacturers of pressure-sensitive adhesives and sewer pipes. For the latter, for instance, she wrote a direct mail seminar invitation promising free sewer pipe design software. The kicker came in the subhead: “(You’ll just have to sit through some crap first.)”

“Going to the Van Halen concert tonight? Something tells us you’ll have the munchies.”
Ad for Mel’s Grille

“I’m not a writer,” Pollock proclaims with a shrug. “I’m a concepter."

Or at least not a writer like her classmates at The Portfolio Center in Atlanta, an intensive two-year copywriting training program, where she went after earning a journalism degree at The Ohio State University.

“A lot of them really wanted to do something more literate, and were writing copy as a means of getting paid,” says Pollock. “But for me, advertising is all I ever wanted to do. Journalistic writing is too much correct grammar and spell-checking.”

Words are not highly valued by volume in advertising. It’s a craft, not an art, the object being to cajole reluctant consumers into stopping, engaging, consuming. At The Portfolio Center, Pollock learned such golden rules as KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid) and ROI (Relevance, Originality, Impact). Steadily she nurtured her talent for the amusing headline and succinct few lines of copy.

Having grown up in Mayfield Heights, the only child of Ella and Joel Friedman, it was to the Cleveland area she returned during one semester break, with resume and school samples in hand. “Everywhere I went, they took one look at my portfolio and said I should take it to Brokaw,” she says.

This was 1995, and Bill Brokaw Advertising was in the early stages of establishing its reputation as a youthful shop creating sassy ads for clients willing to have a little fun, take a few risks.
Bill Brokaw—the man, not the agency—felt that the young writer now known agency-wide as Tiny would fit right in “She’s quick and bright and her ability to hit the nerve of her audience is very sharp.”

Initially, the nerves hit hardest by Pollock’s work were her own. “I’d be up at three in the morning writing down ideas. I used to freak out. I’d cry, like I wasn’t going to be able to come up with anything.”

The worst is when she gets a poor reaction for a new-business pitch. “A client will give you another chance if they have a history with you, but when I let down a prospect who doesn’t know me I feel so bad. It’s like I dropped the ball.”

Her daughter struggles this way with everything, according to Ella Friedman. “Erin’s got a Type A personality, and she’s always been hard on herself. At first, she was convinced she wasn’t even going to be able to get a job in Cleveland.”

Pollock says that she learned to fight the stress by keeping things fun and by trusting her gut reaction. As at many agencies, Pollock works in tandem with an art director, most frequently and successfully with low-key but humorous Steve McKeown. They’re about the same age, and have virtually the same start date at Brokaw. They work so well together, spinning ideas back and forth, that Pollock claims it’s hard to remember who came up with a good one.

“I scribble stuff down, and Erin makes fun of it,” McKeown jokes in explaining their easy work habits.

Pollock’s trademark irreverence isn’t just saved for agency clients. According to co-worker and fellow copywriter Chris Viola, “Erin will say stuff that everyone else thinks, but won’t say.”

In other words, Tiny is a bit profane?

“Oh God, don’t say that. My mother will read this,” Pollock wails. After a pause, she adds with a smile, “I’m outspoken, not profane. And I don’t have the best ‘edit’ button in my head.”

Mrs. Friedman’s feelings aside, Pollock fits right in at an agency with a cluster of photos of everyone who a staff amateur photographer could, over time, convince to pose in oblivious proximity to a phallic symbol sneaked somewhere onto the scene.

Conversation spills from Pollock in quick bursts. Then she stops and second-guesses everything she’s just said. Her most frequent target is herself: she’s not that good, she’s not really a writer, she gets an awful lot of help from the geniuses around her.

“Everyone I work with is funny but me,” she insists. “I’m funny in my obnoxiousness, I guess, but not really funny.”

While Pollock professes repeated disbelief that anyone would want to read about her accomplishments, her “You wanna talk to me?!” routine seems genuine rather than coy. After all, she doesn’t even let two of her biggest supporters go to the ADDYs.

“She says it’s queer if your parents go,” according to her mother.

Despite her rising profile in Cleveland, Pollock throws credit around as liberally as a summer intern hoping to get hired on fulltime. She seems to mention everyone in the creative department as an inspiration, but saves her highest praise for Creative Director Greg Thomas.

“He can fix anything. He’ll change one word and suddenly my headline’s working,” she says. It’s Thomas she credits for pushing her to work on her “voice,” the tone she assumes with each message. “You can’t be too irreverent or edgy if you’re working with a hospital,” Pollock admits. “At first it was hard for me to work in voices other than humor, but it’s getting easier.”

Respect is a two-way street between Pollock and her creative director. “Erin has an uncanny ability to cut right to the meat of the issue,” says Thomas.

The best example of that might be his favorite Pollock creation, a mailer promoting the services of a laser vision surgical center. Through the blank vellum cover a single word can be seen as no more than a blur. Only when the cover page is turned does the reader discover the word is “After.” As in: Before—blurry…After—clear. It might take the reader a second or two, but the payoff precisely hits the main selling point of laser surgery. Or at least that’s the way the American Advertising Federation saw it in awarding the agency a national Gold ADDY for the mailer.

“Hey, Sparky, you’ve just won 114 races, what are you going to do now?”
“I’m going to the incinerator!”
Poster for Greyhound Adoption

You’ve “met” Erin Friedman Pollock if you’ve turned on the tube and seen that series of Bryant & Stratton commercials featuring oddballs who are looking into admission to the small business school for all the wrong reasons. There’s the girl whose stated ambition is to be homecoming queen, and the slacker whose only questions are “Do I have to go to all my classes?” and “Do you have gum?”

Pollock also wrote the “Be a Moover” radio spots for Smith Dairy, like the one with the chatty Valley Girl who does her part for humanity by saying hi to a socially inept classmate spotted gulping milk from a carton rather than the client’s cute portable bottle.

Despite Pollock’s burgeoning—and award-winning—experiences with broadcast advertising, print is where she still feels most comfortable. After all, how could the magic of television improve upon the wry simplicity of designating a client restaurant and bar “The Official Celine Dion Concert Husband Drop-Off and Pick-Up” spot?

Naturally, Tiny won an ADDY for that one.

A MARKET FOR MERRIMENT

While working as a copywriter for Adcom Communications in downtown Cleveland in the late 1990s, I had the pleasure of doing lunchtime business with the delightful Catania brothers. I pitched an idea for a feature article to the Plain Dealer Sunday Magazine, and the following ran sometime in about 1998.

David Searls


Tommy’s in high gear by the time the lunch crowd strolls in—the construction workers, administrative assistants and executives who pick up to-go orders of pasta and Sammy’s "seven layers of love" eggplant, or grab one of the few kitchen-type tables by the window of the Cleveland Warehouse District’s Sixth Street Market.

"Take ‘em, take ‘em," Tommy, 40, the youngest and heftiest, Catania brother, shouts to one and all regarding a seasonal candy display. "My kids need food and my mistress wants a new car."

When a customer shows interest in an Italian sub piled so high it’s safer deconstructed and eaten with a fork, Tommy insists, "Go Italian and you’ll never go back. That’s what my third wife used to say."

Sammy Catania, the oldest brother at 46, doesn’t try to keep up with Tommy’s non-stop patter, but occasionally chimes in with "Lane thirteen now open, no waiting," while manning the store’s second of two cash registers.

Ross, 42, with half the girth of either of his brothers and none of the outrageousness, mostly keeps to the command center of the wholesale and retail liquor operation, in the basement. When he hustle to the front for one reason or another he looks mildly distracted, as if trying to mentally calculate profit/loss figures. Ross was, for twenty years, one of the best medical malpractice court reporters in Cleveland, according to his brothers. Attention to detail is everything to him, which cements his place in the family operation.

"We’re three legs of a stool," Tommy explains. "Sammy’s the creative, flamboyant one (though an outsider might assign that personality trait to Tommy himself), Ross is the methodical thinker, and I’m the hard-edged one. I do the books."

"Yeah, we can’t afford a Girl Friday," says Sammy, "so we put a blonde wig on him at five o’clock."

Now that’s a scary thought. Tommy is an immense, well-fed man who could arm-wrestle steers. He’s got a tiger tattoo sprawled over one massive forearm and a dragon on the other, a menagerie in honor of his two kids that must have deprived the parlor of a month’s supply of ink. But you could get the wrong idea about Tommy’s background from his appearance. He used to be vice president of an engineering firm before trading in his suits and ties for a white butcher’s apron and undershirt.

Back then, he’d spend months of the year in Asia, selling vehicular emissions testing equipment. "When I got back, my kids’d be two feet taller. Now, if I want to take the afternoon off to go to my son’s wrestling tournament, I go."

Despite the banter about mistresses and wives, Tommy’s been married to his high school sweetheart for 21 years, virtually the same amount of time brother Sammy’s spent wed to his own high school girlfriend.

"Rossie met his wife in a bar," Sammy cackles, to Tommy’s delight at the incongruity of the levelheaded brother having the raciest love life. Then Sammy feels compelled to add, "She’s a teacher, teaches handicapped kids. Great lady."

The Sixth Street Market sprang into existence as the result of three brothers growing up in a big, noisy household with five other siblings in Garfield Heights and threatening for years to go into business together. "I worked my entire career for brothers who made lots of money, so why shouldn’t we?" is how Tommy puts it.

The type of business was determined, more than anything else, by the background of the oldest of the three, the namesake partner in the legendary Sammy’s in the Flats. After selling out of that partnership, Sammy co-owned Cuisines at Playhouse Square and ran catering companies, commissaries and a restaurant consulting firm. With food serving as the backdrop to Sammy’s life, perhaps it was inevitable that he and his brothers would see untapped potential in the rapid residential expansion going on in the Warehouse District by the mid-nineties.

The 3,000 square-foot market is the closest the district has—and probably ever will have—to a supermarket, given the limitations of commercial space. But it’s a whole lot more than merely an oversized convenience store, with its tiny commercial kitchen in back and the catering and wholesale liquor operation and the coffee kiosk they just opened in the Bridgeview Building on West 9th.

Tommy gleefully points out that their place of business was a 30-booth porn shop before they took over. "This is where you used to come all the time," he bellows to an unsuspecting customer in a ballcap. "I got you on tape." Then he punctuates his comment with an obscene thrust of his ample hips, just in case he’s been too subtle.

The man at least has the presence of mind to mumble, ""So how’d you know I was there?"

The good-natured abuse is, according to Sammy, what keeps customers coming back to the Sixth Street Market for their breakfasts, deli sandwiches and entrees, fresh fruits and vegetables, beer, wine, liquor, household cleaners, lottery tickets, and even to drop off their dry cleaning.

"We crack a few jokes, have a little fun," he says. "Our parents taught us to smile. Whoa! What a concept."

But that doesn’t mean business has been full-time chuckles. Tommy admits with uncharacteristic seriousness, "It was a nightmare for the first two years."

The brothers found that the neighborhood was too transient to build an ongoing trade back in ’96. Executives relocated for a few weeks or months in the various corporate housing units scattered in the area were instantly smitten. The market reminded them of neighborhood places back home in Boston or New York, but there weren’t enough of the out-of-towners, and each would eventually leave. As for the locals, the Catanias couldn’t even attract many residents of the 94-unit Grand Arcade condominium that shares their building.

They sent our fliers, asking their neighbors what they needed in a market.

"For one lady we even carried a specific brand of dog food for her poodles," says Sammy. They’ve also been known to open early or close late to accommodate customers. "And we haven’t raised coffee prices in four years," Sammy adds.

While they don’t expect to turn a profit until next year—their fifth in business—the Catanias are at least starting to smell the French bread at the end of the tunnel. The gradual turnaround is due to a little creativity in product offering. When the State of Ohio got out of the liquor business in 1997, the brothers got a vendor license and filled their back shelves and 3,000 square feet of basement with beer, wine and the harder stuff. Today, they’re one of the largest liquor wholesalers in northeast Ohio, with a customer list that includes the Cleveland Browns and the Cavs. They also cater meals right to the departing charter planes of visiting professional sports teams, and last Christmas they prepared 4,000 corporate gift baskets. All through word of mouth. When they added a couple tables and some chairs to the front of the store and started putting tables out front during the mild months, they attracted dine-in customers they hadn’t had before.

Things are different, now. The brothers have steadily developed a stable of regulars, including Suzanne Drake of Shaker Heights who works at the Employers’ Resource Council on West 9th.

"These guys treat us like family," says Drake. "We make office runs every day because they’ve got the best food in the entire district."

All of those office runs keep the brothers and their five full-time and two part-time employees busy. "The sandwich god of downtown," as Tommy’s known to brother Sammy, spends an hour and a half in the morning and just as long in the afternoon to keep the sandwich case filled. All of the brothers get an early start. "If we get in at five, that’s late," says Tommy.

Fan favorites include the meatloaf, the eggplant and the two-inch-thick pork chops for five bucks. As for the chicken broccolini, "We’ve had customers send couriers from Westlake and Beachwood to pick it up," says Tommy.

Success, the brothers are learning, is really quite simple. According to Sammy, you just have to "give a valued product for a fair price, and they will come. I think Moses said that."

CADE'S PARTY

The following piece was the result of a particularly frazzling day with my five-year-old version of Evan. It ran in a 2000 issue of Cleveland Magazine.

David Searls

You won’t find mug shots of Evan and me on those ubiquitous coupon postcards under the heading, “Have You Seen Us?” Unlike the kidnapping parents who glare back at me from my mailbox, I haven’t the slightest notion that my five-year-old would flourish in a solo parenting environment. Experience teaches me daily that to have anything resembling a normal life, Evan desperately needs the contributions of my right brain and his mother’s left.

Last summer was at its height when I got a call from Laura. “I just got off the phone with Cade’s mom,” she said, sounding just a bit perplexed.

“Uhhh huh,” I replied slowly as I turned her words over and over in my head: Cade’s mom . . . Cade’s mom . . . Somewhere in the darkest, bleakest recesses of my consciousness, a bell almost went off.

“She’s wondering if Evan’s coming to Cade’s birthday party. She hadn’t heard from us, and it’s this Saturday.”

Ah, that Cade’s mom. The one whose son is in Evan’s pre-kindergarten class. I latched onto the distant memory of an invitation arriving by mail and a quick glance at a calendar telling me the date was a weekend Evan would be with me. There’d be no need to tell Laura. I could handle the situation myself. All I had to do was RSVP, but there’d be plenty of time for that.

“Uh, right,” I said to my ex-wife. “Cade’s birthday party. You’re sure it’s this Saturday?”

She was sure. “Since you didn’t respond, Cade’s mom was following up.”

“We’ll be there,” I said in a voice that I hoped conveyed breezy confidence. My mind tried picturing potential scheduling conflicts, but drew a blank. Not that that’s unusual.

“I suppose you don’t have a gift yet,” Laura said. A statement, not a question.

“Well, I was thinking . . . ”

“Don’t worry, I’ve got one from a party we had to skip. It’s wrapped and everything.”

As parents, we each have our talents. I tell our son stories and read to him and take him on outdoor adventures. We play ball, dig for worms, turn burps into phrases, and re-enact Star Wars scenes with cardboard giftwrap tube light sabers. We overrun bedtimes, ride bikes in the rain and occasionally forget birthday parties.

But that’s alright, because part of Laura’s job description is to remember bath schedules, gage fevers with the palm of her hand, combine clothing articles into outfits and relay the number and frequency of tablespoons (or is it teaspoons?) when medicine must be doled out. All of which she does with aplomb. If she believes I need more supervision than our child, she never says so. Not to my face, anyway.

“Don’t forget, swim class starts at 9:05,” she reminded me when she called that Friday evening. It was a new class at a new time and location, and I masked my irritation at an event that had to start five minutes after the hour just to rattle me. “Cade’s party’s at ten,” Laura continued. “They’ll be playing in the sprinkler, so I‘ll bring along an extra pair of swim trunks and we’ll change him in the locker room. You might be a few minutes late, but I’ve already told Cade’s mom and it’s not a problem.”

Then came detailed directions to the Y in the Cleveland suburb where the class would be held the following morning, and the best route to Cade’s house, which was in my suburb, but on a nearby street I’d never heard of.

“Are you writing this down?” she asked.

“Yep,” I said, wondering where I’d find a pen.

After breakfast on Saturday, I gave Evan the bath I’d obligated us to the night before, but there’d been ice cream and a rocket ship ride on the porch swing that lasted past bedtime. Although he was on his way to what amounted to a huge, chlorinated bathtub, I realized that his mother would know if I took such a shortcut. She’d just know.

So the morning bath set our schedule back a half hour, and my heart skittering at my first premonitions of trouble as we raced to the car with less than fifteen minutes until splashdown. Seven minutes later I was, miraculously, at least in the right 'burb, but wondering which of the three choices of exits Laura had directed me toward.

“Oh God,” I muttered.

“Are we lost?” Evan asked cheerfully.

“Of course not,” I replied. Information like that has a way of getting back to Mom.

Then I remembered that, although this was Evan’s first class, he and his mother had gone swimming at that YMCA before. “Hey, Ev,” I asked as casually as I could under the rapidly deteriorating situation, “do you remember what your swim class building looks like?”

“Um, no. Are we lost?”

I mumbled something that made me feel as reassuring as Amelia Earhart’s navigator. Then another thought struck like a wet towel—an appropriate simile.

“Ev, the last time you went here with Mom, did the people who work there give you a towel?”

“No.” Then the full ramifications of my question apparently set in. “We don’t have any towels?”

“I can’t talk right now. I have to drive.”

Laura met us at the door with a big, fluffy towel. Classes were running late and we were on time.
Afterward, as we dried Evan’s hair and got him changed into dry swim shorts, Laura shoved her regifted party gift into my hand and made me repeat the directions she’d given me the night before.

I rolled my eyes. “West 140th Street exit to Warren Road, left on Warren.” Then I went on to recite in perfect detail the route to the party.

How hopeless did she think I was?



“Are we lost?”

“Of course not,” I said.

The party was in Lakewood, my own neck of the woods, Cade’s house less than five minutes from my own. How could we be lost? I took the left on Warren, then another at the very next street. Only, that second left had dumped me onto a road with a name unlike the one in the directions still coursing through my head. Still, I found the right house by weaving in and out of residential streets until I ran out of wrong addresses.

It was off Alger, not Warren, I smugly told myself.

“Cool. They got Chief Wahoo!” Evan cried as our eyes tracked the crudely drawn birthday party signs tacked onto telephone poles to what was, presumably, Cade’s driveway. At the top of the drive stood a cardboard cutout of the Cleveland Indians’ mascot.

Which wiped the smug smile clean from my face as one small and foreboding detail of the invitation tickled my mind. It was to be a theme party, guests wearing their favorite Tribe clothing or at least something sporting the red, white and blue team colors. I turned to my son in back and my glance fell morosely to his green t-shirt and khaki shorts.

“Where are we going, Da?” Evan wondered as our car lurched forward, leaving Cade’s home and Chief Wahoo in the dust.

“We’ll be right back,” I promised with as much jauntiness as I could muster. Back home, I grabbed two officially sanctioned team ballcaps of widely contrasting sizes.

“Ouch, you’re hurting my head!” Evan complained as I tried to squeeze his skull into the smaller one.

Funny, it had fit him fine when he was two. My second choice settled around his eyebrows, drawing yet another complaint from my irritable offspring. There had been another cap which had fit him perfectly the day we lost it. I hadn’t had Evan’s head with me when I went shopping for its replacement, but I’d figured that if the new cap was a little big he’d grow into it someday.

Someday had not come. My son would be the party oddball, inappropriately clad, and clutching a hand-me-down gift that I could only hope would befit a five-year-old male.

“Alright, Evan,” I sighed, defeated, “let’s go to the party.”

Maybe I could make it look like I was taking a stand with my son’s attire, refusing to denigrate Native Americans with the buffoonish team caricature and politically incorrect nickname. My only hope, it seemed, was as an activist party pooper.

Laura would have committed the invitation to memory. She would have laid out his outfit the night before. She would have bought Cade’s gift the previous weekend, and mapquested her course before backing the car down the drive. Of course, if my ex hadn’t misdirected me onto Warren Road rather than Alger I might have had an extra minute to paw through Evan’s dirty clothes for something red, something blue.

My spirits picked up at the party . There were others as out-of-theme as Evan, and none of his friends seemed to know or care what anyone else was wearing. Cade loved all of his gifts, including ours—whatever we got him—and Evan and I left tired and sweaty and wet and satisfied with the day.

Until I checked my voice mail. Laura had apparently called soon after we’d left swim class.

“It just dawned on me that when you were going over the directions to Cade’s house you said you’d take the first left onto Warren. But it’s Alger, not Warren. I hope you find it alright.”

Which is why you’ll never see Evan and me among the missing on those postcard mailers. Unless we innocently lose our way to swim class one morning.

EVAN'S PLAYGROUNDS

As a professional writer with thirty-odd (occasionally very odd) years of experience, I've decided to showcase some of my favorite magazine essays, articles and columns. Many of my self-proclaimed best are among my most personal. These brief glimpses add up to a lifetime stew of emotions: joy, grief, humor, fear, poignancy, love and regret.

I'm leading off with Evan's Playgrounds, which appeared in the August, 1998 issue of Cleveland Magazine. My son being three at the time, I'd rediscovered with him the joys of neighborhood parks and playgrounds. The idea I'd pitched my editor was a review of some of the hot local play spots, but as I worked on the piece, it become something altogether different.

My editor loved it. Hope you do, too.

David Searls


It's a long, grassy patch of land at the corner of Bunts Road and Merl Avenue in Lakewood that someone stuck a couple of swing sets and slides on and forgot to even give a name.
My son and I know it as the Train Park.

Its setting, amid rows of houses, along its namesake tracks and across the street from a supermarket parking lot, won't win the Train Park any urban design awards. The place was a bit fancier when Evan was a baby and it included a climbing-crawling-jumping off-sort of thing made of timber planks as thick as telephone poles. But the wood had rotted and the whole structure disappeared one night about a year ago, leaving only holes where the foundation posts had been. It was as if the town's lawyers had carted it away before the lawsuits piled up.

That's okay, because the climbing-crawling-jumping off thing was never the Train Park's main attraction. It got its name and popularity in the Searls household by its proximity to those train tracks, with only a chain-link fence to keep the steel and smoke monsters from barreling right down on us.

As soon as Evan hears the train whistle, we have to dash for the baby swing he's getting too old for—but its the swing nearest the tracks. It took me awhile to realize that you can hear the whistle blasts from Cleveland or Rocky River, so there's really no need for dashing. But try convincing Evan of that. Once he's locked in position, I push him hard and high enough that he can peer down at the monster as it roars past, shrieking in futile competition with the sound-storm.

I've rediscovered trains for myself these last couple years. They used to be on this planet to annoy me, to clog intersections and make me late for work. But now I watch and listen even when Evan isn't there, and, by God, they really are amazing creatures!

The years will pass and the thunder-and-fire ambiance will become as wearisome to my son as the music he'll hear while on hold waiting to schedule a dentist appointment. But I think that on rare occasion when all-grownup-Evan has time to stop and really listen to the whistle's distant wail he might momentarily flash back to the days when his old man helped him fly high over the screaming monsters at the Train Park.

That would be a fine way to be remembered.



The playground in Baltic Park, at Baltic Avenue and West 110th Street in Cleveland, is brand-spanking-new. And not your grandfather's playground. That's what you notice as soon as you catch sight of the jungle gym that's like nothing you've ever seen before. Its daring, colorful loops and twists make it look less like play equipment and more like the kind of modern outdoor sculpture people admire but secretly hate. It's a tubular affair painted fluorescent red and purple and lime green, and I can't imagine what material it's composed of, but I'm guessing vinyl or some patented compound impervious to ice, rain, sun and vandals. One thing I know for sure: it doesn't sit as high as it appears and I keep smacking my head as I chase Evan under it.

The ground beneath us is covered with some kind of corky substance laid over tire strips, something that puts real spring in your step. I could pass out after rapping my head once too often on the op-art contraption above me and not break anything on the fall.

The first thing that catches your attention on this new slip of land, even before the artsy head-banger, is the sign by the curb that takes up more square footage than the entire playground. More, it seems, than the front yards of the modest wood-frame homes closing in. The sign is one of those temporary things politicians make contractors put up to show citizens that their tax dollars and votes are hard at work. This one proudly proclaims that the brand-spanking-new Baltic Park was erected, or excavated, or whatever, under the direction of the City of Cleveland, and it lists a whole inventory of commissioners and directors and city planners to thank.

Evan is not impressed.

They seem to have run out of money before they got to the swings. The op-art framework is in place and ready for action, but there are no swings in the fames, so Evan urges me to reroute our outing to the Train Park.

Too bad, because there's this blond woman here with her own young son, and she's so easy to talk to. I assure myself that she's not this friendly with just anyone, and she must have noticed I'm not wearing a wedding ring. I, by the way, have noticed that she's not wearing one either. She laughs and lightly touches my elbow as she points out something cute her boy is doing, and it's been a long time since a woman has lightly touched my elbow like that.

Let's go, Da. No swings.

Thanks to the politicians and bureaucrats who blew their budgets on self-congratulatory signs as broad as barns, I must leave this playground and this interesting blond-haired woman just when things are getting interesting. Leave her before I can work up the courage to ask her name. So I shrug and move off, convinced that she touches everyone's elbow like that.

But as we leave she smiles and waves and says maybe she'll see us again here sometime.

Months later, on a hot, summer day, I read about the Baltic Children's Park being officially dedicated, which entailed the mayor dropping by to pat sweaty little heads. The full-color, front-page photo is of a clown with a child on his lap. They're sitting on a swing.

Slightly creepy, but thought provoking. It might be time for Evan and me to experience a red, purple and lime-green playground again.



There's this school at Lake and Whippoorwill avenues in Lakewood. It sits right across from a congregation of tall brick homes that might be a bit cramped for mansions, but you wouldn't complain. I don't even know the school's name, but there's a playground in front of it. It's the playground where I broke my son's collarbone.

Evan had turned two that month, which was the month my wife moved out of our home, and we had an arrangement by which we shared overnight custody until we could work out something more permanent. I had Evan alone with me at one playground or another many times before, but this was the first outing of our new arrangement.

The playground includes a dignified wooden platform with a shaky bridge and a ladder and a railing that goes most of the way around it, except at the top of that ladder. I felt sanctimoniously good about having joined my two-year-old up on the bride on that crisp, late winter morning since I'd often seen younger fathers smoking or reading the newspaper or staring off into the distance while their children played alone.

Not me. I was right up there in the thick of things, climbing and crawling and straddling the top strut of that bridge, and leaping from it to land in front of my son and surprise him.

Which it did.

Chuckling, Evan took a startled step backward, where the top of the ladder was but the railing wasn't—which any responsible father would know. I watched as, in slow motion, my son disappeared from view. I heard him land a moment later like a sack of cement.

I don't remember climbing down from the platform, so maybe I jumped, but there he was on the ground, staring up at the cold sky and crying. His heavy coat had cushioned some of the impact, but when I gently picked him up, I could see that he was holding his arm funny.

No, not funny.

At Lakewood Hospital's emergency room, the admitting nurse asked me careful questions at first, but smiled when she saw a 40-year-old man fighting back tears, and said that everything would be fine. We were ushered in quickly and I sat holding Evan's hand and wondering how things had gotten this way so quickly, my marriage as broken as my son's collarbone.

The doctor told me that collarbone fractures are among the most common injuries to young children, and no one blamed me. Not even my wife who rushed to the hospital, sobbing, from her new home on the first day of her new life.

No one blamed me. Certainly not Evan who, by lunchtime, had forgotten about his fall. He only had to wear a harness for a couple of guilt-inducing weeks before healing completely. Young children are like that, the doctor said. They heal fast.

But we don't go to that playground anymore.



You're not supposed to notice, but Lakewood Park at Lake Avenue and Belle Road is where the Arab women take their children. I certainly don't point this out to Evan, who, despite being a three-year-old who notices everything, overlooks the inescapable fact that many of the women among us are adorned in flowing gowns and heavy veils that cover their faces against the day's warmth. I have no opinion of this, it's just an observation on a perfect late-spring afternoon.
Lakewood Park is everything the Train Park isn't. It's spacious, scenic and chock-full of whatever kind of equipment you can imagine for climbing over, crawling through and falling off of.

Evan's first stop is always the swings. His advanced age and size notwithstanding, he still prefers the baby swings. That's fine with me except when I notice other fathers pushing sons Evan's age or younger on the big-boy swings. What I want to do when I see that is to sit my boy down next to them and prove we're only hanging out at those other swings by choice, not because we have to. Fortunately, the urge passes.

The park sits on an expanse of land big enough to host picnics, softball games and kite flying all at once. It's even got its own lake, for God's sake. And I'm not talking some overgrown puddle, but Lake Erie, sitting out there vaster and more permanent than many nations. On nice days, the sky merges with the water to form a hazy backdrop of blue, the sea gulls screech low overhead, begging for picnic leftovers, and you'd swear you were elsewhere. Someplace where postcards come from.

I wonder about those Arab women sometimes, whether they've ever seen so much water before. Maybe that's what drew them here. Or maybe, I remind myself, they were born in Lakewood and, like me, haven't seen a desert except on TV.

While I mull over my complicated thoughts on culture and competitive fatherhood, all Evan does is swing, calling for my renewed effort on the pushing when my attention wavers. We make a game of it, Evan telling me he wants to go higher and me asking whether or not he's sure. The game requires me to put just a tinge of alarm in my voice, as if he should very carefully consider his answer before committing to such dizzying heights.

But he's always sure. I don't know what he's thinking up there. Maybe nothing at all. Maybe he's just enjoying the way the clear sky and the blue water come together while the gulls screech for food.

Life's perfect when you're three and can almost touch that sky.