Hatcherville

Neal Hatcher's Campus View, known as Hatcherville

While the Marting’s rip-off has gotten most of the attention in the last couple of years, another real estate shenanigan has taken place over in the 3rd St. area, which residents of that neighborhood have cynically nicknamed “Hatcherville.” The shenanigans in Hatcherville make the $2 million Marting’s deal on Chillicothe St. look like small potatoes. When it comes to the properties in Hatcherville, the relationship between the city of Portsmouth, the developer Neal Hatcher, and Shawnee State University is as shadowy as a midnight drug deal in an alley on John Street. 

A student housing contract Neal Hatcher has with SSU stipulates a value of $2.5 million on the first two of his 3rd St. Campus View buildings (Campus View I) and $3 million on his third and fourth buildings (Campus View II), with those figures increasing by 3% each year, plus abatements that stretch from ten to fifteen years. So $5.5 million, which increases 3% each year, is what SSU would have to pay Hatcher if it wanted to buy Campus View I and II from him. Hatcher has since built two more buildings (Campus View III) and he has plans and approval for constructing three more buildings in the area for a total of nine. Using the prices established for Campus View I and II in the contract as a guide, I estimate that the value of the nine units could be at least $13.5 million. If the inflationary increase of Campus View II over Campus View I in the contract with SSU is applied, his nine buildings might be worth about $15 million.

Hatcher would not have been able to pull off this land grab, including the sweetheart abatements, without the collusion of the City Council and of ex-mayor Greg Bauer in particular. City Council ordinances passed in 2002 gave Bauer the authority to act on his own in acquiring and disposing of properties on 3rd St., properties that the 2002 ordinances treat as “blighted” and “deteriorated.” Ordinance 2002-79 authorized the mayor to enter into an agreement with Campus View Associates (Neal Hatcher) to obtain private property for the purpose of erecting student housing. Far longer and murkier, Ordinance 2002-36 repealed Chapter 151 of the codified city ordinances and enacted a new one, called simply “Urban Renewal.” The new ordinance begins, “It is hereby found and determined that there exists within the City blighted, deteriorated and deteriorating areas of the nature defined in this chapter which substantially impair and arrest the sound growth of the community . . .”

Treating the 3rd St. area as “blighted” was part of the scam, because the blighted tag on the neighborhood may have put the deal in compliance with legal guidelines for abatements and it may also have enabled Hatcher, working closely with Bauer, to hold the threat of eminent domain over the heads of any property owners who resisted his scheme. The City Council was the Cosa Nostra and Mayor Bauer the godfather of Campus View. Bauer was empowered by the ordinances to acquire and transfer property without any accountability. For example, properties on the northwest corner of 3rd and Waller Street, which the City had acquired from Todd and Julia Ramey and Julian Mohr, were transferred by Bauer, acting for the City, to Hatcher. Normally, I was told, an ordinance by City Council is required for the City to acquire property. The 2002 ordinances, if I understand their murky language, authorized the Mayor to acquire property without an ordinance from the City Council.

I tried to find out from city officials at the Municipal Building why and how Bauer, acting on behalf of the City, had become the intermediary in this transfer of private property from the Rameys and Julian Mohr to Hatcher. I asked first City Clerk Aeh and next Mayor Kalb and then City Auditor Trent Williams if they could tell me why. They could not. The City Auditor did say he knew that the City was not involved financially in the transfer, that it paid out no money, because if it had his office would have known about it. This only further mystified the transfer of the property from the Rameys and Julian Mohr to the City and from the City to Hatcher. The City Auditor suggested I ask City Solicitor Kuhn if he could clarify the City’s role in the transfer of the property. So I emailed the Solicitor and requested under Ohio’s open records law if he had any documents that might explain why the City acted as intermediary. In his response to me, he wrote, “ Your 2/11/05 communication recited that it is ‘a request under Ohio's sunshine laws on public documents.’ Please be advised that the City Solicitor's office has no documents relating to the transaction described in your message. As City Solicitor, it [is] not my responsibility to determine ‘why’ the City does things. Rather, it is my responsibility to render legal advice to the City, and that advice is privileged and confidential between attorney and client.”

I was struck by how little city officials apparently knew about city business. Their responses reminded me of the hear-no-evil, see-no-evil, and speak-no-evil monkeys, although since we are talking about Porksmouth we might substitute three pigs (pictured below) for the three monkeys.

Below is the front page of the warranty deed recording the transfer of the property from the City of Portsmouth to Campus View Associates.

The second page of the deed below shows that the only City official whose signature is on it, authorizing the transfer, is Mayor Bauer. The only other signature is that of Stephen L. Oliver, Clayton Johnson’s partner, who prepared the document.

What the rigmarole of the 2002 ordinances did was lay the groundwork for Neal Hatcher to acquire property on 3rd Street that was not only not blighted or deteriorated but that should have increased in value because of its proximity to the university. Because 3rd Street between Bond and Waller was treated as a blighted neighborhood, Hatcher was able, with the connivance of the City Council and Mayor Bauer, to acquire potentially valuable property for much less than he would have otherwise have had to pay for it. This is another instance in which the so-called free market is replaced in Portsmouth by the pork market, in which those at the top are able to exploit those below them and squeeze some public dollars from the government in the bargain. "This little piggy went to market . . ."

Because Hatcher’s Campus View properties on 3rd St. are abated, he pays no taxes on them, and because he pays no taxes on them the records at the County Courthouse list no sale price. When a property is abated and off the tax-rolls, the County has no interest in what it sold for or what its value is. County records do show that the City acted as the intermediary in the transfer of the property on the northwest corner of 3rd and Waller to Hatcher. Julian Mohr transferred one parcel to the City and Todd Ramey transferred the other. The City then transferred those properties to Hatcher and Campus View. I have been told that some of the property owners on 3rd Street were surprised to find out that they had sold their property to Hatcher, because they had thought they were dealing with the City. So they were curious why the City did what it did. I continue to be curious as well, and it is not just idle curiosity.

I can think of one possibility why the City acted as intermediary. Possibly the City had to be involved in the transfer of the property from private citizens to private developer, even if just nominally, to provide Hatcher with the legal cover he needed to back up his eminent domain threats and to justify the abatements and other financial advantages he might qualify for under the ordinances. Just as money can be laundered so, apparently, can property. We don’t know what Neal Hatcher paid the Rameys and Julian Mohr in particular, because the financial figures for those transactions are not matters of public record. We don’t know whether Hatcher in this instance used the threat of eminent domain to deprive them of a fair price, or whether he may have had reason to reward one or more of them with a high price as a reward for political favors rendered. We don’t know because we all live in Hatcherville, not just the people on 3rd St., and where real estate deals involving Hatcher are concerned we are all in the dark.

A Good Man is Hard to Find

Andrew O. Clausing, circa 1980

Andrew O. Clausing (1922-2002) was a controversial political figure in Portsmouth, but on the basis of research I have done, I believe he was an honest man who was mauled by the Portsmouth media and the monied class back in 1980. But unlike Harold Daub, the subject of my previous blog, Clausing did not live to see his vindication. He did live long enough, however, to see that the huge corporate computers by which he had once made his living as a programmer and about which he had mixed feelings, become small and cheap enough to be, literally, in the hands of ordinary people, who have created a revolution in communications. Although he passed away as recently as 2002, Clausing probably could not have imagined that just three years later he would be resurrected in online newspapers and forums, and in blogs (short for weblogs), which reach thousands of readers through cyberspace in the rapidly evolving phenomenon called the internet. (See my archived 29 July 2004 blog, “Digital Revolution.”)

If you controlled the Portsmouth media back in 1980, you could control the minds, emotions, and perceptions of many people, as the demonizing of Clausing, Daub, and Mark Price that took place illustrates. Back then the Portsmouth Daily Times and the radio stations WPAY and WNXT could get people to believe almost anything, such as the lie that Clausing, Daub, and Price were anti-Semitic and anti-Catholic. In a WPAY editorial (broadcast 3 February 1980), the general manager Tom Reeder asked whether Clausing, Daub, and Price “HAVE THE GUTS TO GIVE THE REASON [WHY THEY FIRED CITY MANAGER BARRY FELDMAN], WILL THEY OPENLY SAY THEY ARE AGAINST JEWS AND CATHOLICS?” Not only were they accused of being against Jews and Catholics, they were also accused of being enemies of all the residents of Portsmouth, where they supposedly pursued their goal of ruining the city.

The media campaign against the three councilmen was so effective that Clausing found people he had known all his life believing what they were reading in the newspaper and hearing on the radio about him. He was even compared to Hitler. Twenty-five years later there are still people on the Hill who believe he was a petty dictator. Having been a young Marine who fought in the South Pacific in the Second World War, Clausing knew what it was like to be under attack by the enemies of freedom, but he hardly could have anticipated being attacked as an enemy of the people whose freedom he had once risked his life defending. But would Vietnam veteran and triple amputee Max Cleland have ever thought he would lose his congressional seat because he would be accused of being unpatriotic?

As an example of the kind of media attacks against Clausing I am referring to, days before the election in 1980 in which Clausing would be recalled from office, a vitriolic editorial in the Portsmouth Daily Times (31 Oct. 1980) claimed that “the government of Portsmouth practically has been held hostage” by three councilmen whose malicious willfulness threatened the “survival of the city itself.” The councilmen were not only against the mall, the editorial claimed, they were threatening the city itself, a charge as vague as it was preposterous. The editorial was unsigned but may have been written by Don Smith, the editor, or possibly Paul Penix, the publisher. But whoever wrote the editorial may have consulted a thesaurus for additional terms of abuse to heap upon the three councilmen. The editorial called the actions of Clausing, Daub, and Price illegal, hateful, shameful, disgraceful, and contemptible. The editorial called on voters “to end this reign of arrogance, cowardice, incompetence and neglect.”


Clausing criticizing publisher Penix in Daily Times, Jan. 23, 1980

If you accept the editorial’s argument that Clausing, Daub, and Price were determined that a mall would never come to Portsmouth, what were their motives supposed to be? In any crime, that is the first thing a detective looks for – a motive. Neither the Daily Times editorial or anything else I have read about the 1980 events ever attempts to explain what the motives of Clausing, Daub, and Price were in their alleged opposition to the mall. Were there financial and political advantages they could gain by opposing the mall? Hardly. Did they harbor implacable grudges or were they victims of their own blind political partisanship? Not that anybody knew of. Instead, the editorial settles for characterizing them as “willful” and “obstructionist” and implying that they were bad people. The councilmen were demonized. If they were demons, then the editorialist didn’t need to attribute specific motives. The councilmen were simply bad men who were simply out to ruin the city. “Councilmen Clausing, Daub and Price have used their time in office,” the Daily Times editorial claimed, “not to construct the future of Portsmouth but to attempt to ruin much of what has already been built. The voters cannot afford to stand by and let this malice go unchecked.” Malice? Was that the only motive the Daily Times could come up with for Clausing’s alleged opposition to the mall? Malice is not a political or an economic but a theological explanation.

To understand the bitterness and viciousness associated with the 1980 mall controversy, to understand the crosses and the casket and the purported bed-sheeted figures, we need to understand that the editorial spokesmen in the pay of the overprivileged of Portsmouth had adopted a strategy of harnessing the religious fundamentalism that is so strong in southern Ohio and turning it against the three councilmen, who never knew what hit them. My dictionary defines malice as a “deep-seated often unexplainable desire to see another suffer.” But the word also has religious connotations. Malice is a word with biblical, New Testament lineage. In his First Letter to the Corinthians, Paul says followers of Christ must throw out the old teachings, which he says is the “old leaven, the leaven of malice and evil” and replace it with “the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.” Whoever wrote the Daily Times editorial was attributing the leaven of malice and evil to Clausing, Daub, and Price, casting them as unchristian miscreants, thereby bringing the wrath of righteous but misled Christians down upon them.

Thirty-one local ministers and priests signed a public letter protesting “actions of certain councilmen which have been damaging to the life of our community.” The thirty-one called on Clausing, Daub, and Price, by name, to apologize to City Manager Mark Feldman (for having tried to fire him), and to city employees and to “the citizens of Portsmouth for their recent actions.” The Ohio Supreme Court subsequently ruled that the City Council had the right to fire the City Manager, but the clergy like most of the rest of the citizens had been persuaded by Feldman’s supporters and by the media that the City Council did not have that authority. The minister of the First Churh of the Nazarene later sent a letter to Clausing apologizing for signing the petition. “I think some of us," he wrote, “were misled.” The sheet of signatures is separate from the letter itself, so some clergymen may have signed up on the basis of what they were told the letter would say.

The demonizing of the three councilmen took place in the context of Portsmouth’s chronically depressed economy and steadily shrinking population. From 1920 to the 1930, Portsmouth was the fastest growing municipality in Ohio, increasing from 33,011 to 60,080 in population. [I have since seen statistics that indicate it was Scioto County, not Portsmouth, that had about 60,000 in population. R.F. 24-2-05.] But it shrank steadily after that, and it is now down to about 20,000. Somebody had to be held responsible for a depressed economy and dwindling population. The putative opponents of the mall were convenient scapegoats to explain why the city was in such bad shape, why it was a pathetic panhandling city that always had its hand out for government money. Portsmouth was in pathetic shape, the Daily Times was implying, not because of the failure of the business and professional classes, but because malevolent people like Clausing were spitefully preventing economic development.

Clausing, who was 58 in 1980, and who also happened to be president of the City Council, was viewed as the ringleader of the ungodly trio. Daub was only 29 and Price even younger. They were all from working class backgrounds, without the connections and the influence that the monied class of Portsmouth enjoyed. They didn’t know how the game was played. They hadn’t gone to the schools or moved in the circles where one learns how to play the game. Above all, they didn’t have control of the media. They were set up like ducks in a shooting gallery. In fact, Clausing said he was being followed and even speculated that he or one of the others might be murdered. His view was that since the 1960s many millions of public relief dollars had being siphoned off by the overprivileged of Portsmouth, and anyone who tried to bring this misuse of public monies to light was in danger of being eliminated. But the monied classes did not have to kill Clausing; they merely had to kill him politically, which they did in 1980 when they put him in the cross-hairs of the media they controlled.

One passage from the Oct. 31 Daily Times editorial deserves to live in infamy for its hypocrisy, written as it was by someone in the pocket of the overprivileged of Portsmouth. “We urge the citizens of the First, Third and Fifth Wards not only to recall Andrew Clausing, Harald [sic] Daub and Mark Price, but to do so with such a massive outpouring of votes that never again will any elected official so brazenly seek to steal the government of this city away from the people it is to serve.”

This outrageously insincere rhetoric on behalf of the people and on behalf of honesty in government is from the same newspaper that has historically winked at white collar crime and corruption and more recently editorialized against the recall of Mayor Bauer, who was the front man for one of the most corrupt administrations in the history of the city. The media’s support of Bauer and of the Bauer campaign’s characterization of the recall movement as a criminally led enterprise did not work in 2004. It was Bauer who was turned out of office, by a two-to-one margin. The days when the Daily Times could get away with its editorials going unanswered are over. Websites, online forums, and blogs have helped knit an angry community of citizens together. As a result of the electronic revolution, the people of Portsmouth can recover their hidden heritage, of which honest men like Clausing are part. The Chamber of Commerce would never find a place for his likeness on the porkish Floodwall murals, but his portrait on a blog like this can be easily pulled up on any connected computer in the city or around the world.

Clausing’s widow still lives in the house on Ruhtman Ave. where, twenty-five years ago, about 70 to 80 people, according to her estimate, some dressed in bed sheets, according to Daub, demonstrated at about ten o’clock at night. She still lives with the newspaper clippings, the memories and the scars from the past. Unfortunately for those who would like us to forget the past or who want us to believe the Daily Times version of the past, she has kept the files of material on the events of 1980, when her husband, along with Daub and Price, were vilified as city wreckers. Her files document a shameful chapter of Portsmouth’s history. Like the infamous Black Friday, in 1830, when most of Portsmouth’s African-Americans were expelled from the city, the funeral march down Chillocothe Street and the late night demonstrations in front of the homes of Clausing and Daub will not be depicted on the Floodwall murals, not as long as the Chamber of Commerce has anything to say about it.


One night in 1980, Mallers demonstrated in front of Clausing home

The good men do is oft interred with their bones, Shakespeare wrote. But as we recover the past, the good that one person did, or tried to do, can serve as a model and an inspiration for those who might feel that the corruption in Portsmouth has run so deep for so long that there is no use fighting city hall. But the good fight is always worth fighting, even against overwhelming odds, and especially against big money, for the love of money, as the Bible says, is the root of all evil. Money, incidentally, is the only motive you need to explain why the monied class demonized Clausing, Daub, and Price. Those three lost in 1980, but out of yesterday’s defeats come tomorrow’s triumphs, provided we learn from the defeats. Twenty-five years after he was recalled and three years after his death, Clausing’s spirit lives on. What ever his limitation as a politician, or what ever his flaws as a person might have been, he was a good man and a good man is hard to find, especially in Portsmouth politics.

The Mauling of Harold Daub

A 1980 photo of Daub before the "mauling"

I recently had a long talk with Harold Daub, who once was and has recently become again, at least temporarily, a central figure in Portsmouth’s political history. A nearly forgotten victim of a “mauling” by the Chamber of Commerce crowd twenty-five years ago, in which the Ku Klux Klan may have played an important role, he and two other former councilmen, now deceased, have reemerged as political heroes who stood up to those who were then – and some of whom still are – running and ruining the city.

Twenty-five years ago, in 1980, the Chamber of Commerce crowd portrayed Daub as one of the three villains who had aborted “the Portsmouth Mall” before it had even been born. The three councilmen – Daub, Mark Price, and Andrew Clausing – were accused of having killed Portsmouth’s prospects for prosperity. The Chamber of Horrors crowd claimed there was just this one window of opportunity for a mall and the three councilmen had closed it. Yes, we are supposed to believe that chance could never come again, even though the three councilmen were recalled after only six months in office and replaced by pro-mall members and a pro-mall city manager, Richard Roberts. A casket with Daub, Price and Clausing’s blown-up photographs on it was carried down Chillicothe Street. Mark Price charged that the photographs of the councilmen had been supplied to the demonstrators by the Portsmouth Daily Times, where JoAnn Aeh, according to several sources, was employed. Whether she was or not, she was active in the movement to recall the three councilmen. Her husband Roy Aeh was active in the Ku Klux Klan, which may have something to do with the casket being adorned with crosses, a favorite KKK symbol, with the word ”Murderers” scrawled on one of them. Later, a group of figures with bed sheets over their heads appeared outside the homes of Daub and Clausing at night, Ku Klux Klan style, to deliver a message of hate.

Mark Price wrote a letter-to-the-editor of the Portsmouth Times in 1987, when Feldman’s successor as City Manager, Richard Roberts, was forced out of office. Price wrote, “The uproar over Barry Feldman resulted from the chase of an elusive dream. Feldman and his supporters led everyone to believe that he was going to deliver a $50-million downtown mall. The truth is that no mall was ever going to be built. There is proof of that now. The whole idea was just a scheme to keep Feldman in office and possibly to enrich some landowners at the expense of taxpayers.”

I asked Daub if in the last quarter of a century he had ever thought of moving away from Portsmouth. He said he had, many times. One of those times may have been when his son was discriminated against in school. An unforgiving mother allegedly baked cupcakes for everyone in his class except him. He was denied a cupcake because he was the child of the notorious Mall-Killer. Even though Daub never got over the sense that he was a marked man, and that there were still people in the city who had never forgotten or forgiven him or his family, he remained in Portsmouth, because that’s where his roots are.

Harold Daub in 2005 with his wife Darlene

Daub told me the Mall was only “a smokescreen.” (Several well-informed conservative senior citizens I know who still remember the 1980 events share that view.) What they were really after, Daub told me, was not a mall but a public university. The crooked crowd who controlled the city would have preferred both a mall and a university, but there was not enough room in downtown Portsmouth for both, and a mall would require private capital, which Portsmouth with its shrinking population and depressed economy would have a hard time raising. Federal money would be available, of course, but it alone would not be enough to build a mall. Persuading a major department store chain to provide an anchor store for a Portsmouth mall would have been almost as hard as persuading the Detroit Lions, who had started out in Portsmouth in the 1930s, to move back and play in Spartan Stadium.

Daub told me he traveled to Cleveland to talk to the developer of the proposed mall, and he came away from that meeting convinced that this particular mall was not going to be built, that what Riffe and the Chamber of Commerce crowd were really doing was laying the groundwork, literally, for a public university, which would be a more effective engine for urban renewal than a mall because the state government would pay for almost all of it. What with abatements and an ordinance that authorized the taking of property by eminent domain to make way for the university, a lot of money could and eventually was made by those dealing in real estate in the downtown area. Why enter a fiercely competitive market like retail merchandising when the Speaker could deliver a pork project for Portsmouth?

Daub insists he, Price, and Clausing were not opposed to a mall, per se. They were opposed to the phony mall that was being used as a smoke screen. But the city manager, Barry Feldman, didn’t see it that way because he was, in Daub’s view, a tool of the Chamber of Commerce. In his letter-to-the-editor, Mark Price characterized Feldman as someone who had a “gift for glib gab, [but] had no idea how to conduct Portsmouth municipal government.” Under the city manager form of government, which was then in place, the City Council had the power to fire the City Manager, and that’s what the City Council did, voting 4-2 against Feldman. But Feldman remained in office. The Citizens for Good Government, whom Price called “political gangsters,” saw to that. The City Manager form of government is as corruptible by the Chamber of Commerce crowd as the mayoral system.

Because Feldman was Jewish, one of the charges made against Daub, Price, and Clausing was that they were anti-Semitic. Two Portsmouth radio stations aired editorials that strongly implied that the councilmen opposed Feldman because he was Jewish. Mark Price told a Portsmouth Times reporter that his opposition to Feldman had nothing to do with his being Jewish but everything to do with his failed policies and incompetent style of management. Daub’s ancestors had been in Portsmouth for hundreds of years, but because they were part of Portsmouth’s German-American community, Daub was especially vulnerable to the charge of anti-Semitism, particularly when some of those making the charge included prominent Jewish members of the community. Daub claims he had no idea that Feldman was Jewish until he was accused of anti-Semitism.

One of the great ironies of the anti-Semitism charge (and the charges of being anti-Catholic and anti-Black) was that JoAnn Aeh, one of those active in the campaign to recall Daub, was married to a Ku Klux Klan member, Roy Aeh, according to a copy of a letter from the KKK to Aeh that Daub has had in his possession for a quarter of a century.

The Ku Klux Klan had swept across the country in two waves. In the first wave, from shortly after the Civil War to about the late 1890s, the KKK was a tightly controlled, hierarchal, extremely influential and secretive organization operating largely in the South. The first wave of the KKK was determined to stop Catholics, Jews, and above all Negroes, from polluting white Protestant America. The second wave of the KKK, which arose in the early 1900s, was loosely organized, fragmented, less influential, and increasingly focused on Jews as the main threat to White Anglo-Saxon Protestants, known as WASPS.

One of the most notorious leaders of the second wave of the KKK was a Southerner, from Louisiana, David Duke, but the states which the second wave of the KKK washed over were in the Midwest. Indiana was one of those states and Ohio another. The KKK was apparently active in Ohio in the late 1970s. Daub and others I have talk to recall the KKK demonstrating in downtown Portsmouth around 1978. Whether JoAnn Aeh’s husband was a demonstrator, or whether he was one of those recruited by the KKK demonstrators, perhaps only she and her husband can say. In any event, David Duke sent a letter to Roy Aeh (29 April 1978) congratulating him on his induction into the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. Duke wrote, “I know you share our fear that our beloved nation is slowly being brought within the grasp of the Niggers, Jews, Catholics and Puerto Ricans.” In closing his letter, the Grand Dragon extended an invitation to the Aehs. “You and your wife JoAnn are cordially invited to be with us in this great crusade,” the Crusade for White Supremacy.

David Duke campaigning for Congress and for White Supremacy

I recently twice visited JoAnn Aeh at the City Clerk’s office trying to clear up the murky real estate collaboration between the city and Neal Hatcher on the Campus View housing units. On my first visit she said the City at no time had title to any of the land on which Campus View housing had been built, even though I told her records at the County Courthouse showed that the City had. She made a quick search of her records and said she found no evidence of such a connection. I then went back to the Courthouse and obtained photocopies of deeds that showed the City had acquired property on the northwest corner of 3rd and Waller on December 2, 2002, and transferred it immediately to Hatcher. She acknowledged that the county records proved my point, but she confessed to feeling somewhat mystified since she could find no ordinance that showed the City had ever acquired the property. She quipped as I left her office, “Please let me know if I can not help you again.” She was kidding, of course, but John Welton has said that getting information from JoAnn Aeh about anything is very difficult, if not impossible. However, her and her husband’s connection with the Ku Klux Klan is no joking matter. And she should make a public explanation. Not only Harold Daub and his family but many others in Portsmouth deserve an explanation. African-American and Jewish citizens in particular deserve to know.

What was JoAnn Aeh’s role in the past? What did she and the Ku Klux Klan have to do with the mauling of Harold Daub, Mark Price, and Andrew Clausing, and, more importantly, what is her role now? In most communities outside of the deep South, a letter like the one the Grand Dragon David Duke sent to the Aehs would kill anyone’s chances of a political career or even government employment. But she was appointed to the City Council, in 1983, representing the 2nd Ward, and continued in that position in 1984 and 1985, and she was subsequently hired as City Clerk, a position that was changed from part-time to full-time and which she has held for many years. Instead of being held accountable for her association with the KKK, she has possibly been rewarded for her valuable services to the Chamber of Commerce crowd, one of which services may be stonewalling those looking for information about city real estate shenanigans and another of which may have been the 1980 mauling of Harold Daub.

Student Housing Shenanigans at SSU

Student Housing Shenanigans at SSU

Hatcherville

On John Street, prostitutes and drug dealers may have helped Neal Hatcher trash the neighborhood and drive property values down to make way for his proposed shopping center. On that stretch of 3rd Street that abuts Shawnee State University, working with his lawyer Clayton Johnson, Hatcher could count on not prostitutes and drug dealers but the threat of eminent domain to drive property values down and residents out to make way for his Campus View student dormitories.

Some angry homeowners on 3rd Street protested at a City Council meeting in May 2002, claiming that the Council had colluded with Hatcher to drive them out of their homes. According to the minutes of that meeting, a woman who lived on 3rd Street said she “was not so stupid that she could not recognize a done deal when she sees it.” She said she wanted Council members and others who were present “to know how outraged the residents are at the tactics in which this was done.” Another angry resident of the neighborhood said, “This has been going on for twenty years with everybody being told that they have to do the right thing for the college. He said he grew up on Second Street and asked if anyone remembers some of the methods used to obtain some property and the way the people were treated. He claimed that people who did not want to leave were basically kicked out of their property.” (You can read more protests from 3rd Street residents in the minutes of that Council meeting, which are online at http://www.ci.portsmouth.oh.us/government/minutes/05-13-02.pdf) [This link is no longer alive; in the past few years the city government has done what it can to obliterate the past, as least as regards online access to city council records.]

At least in May 2002, 3rd Street homeowners believed they were being forced to accept low appraisals based not on the potential value their property had as the site of future dormitories but on Portsmouth’s chronically depressed real estate market. Those homeowners were not sitting on gold or oil; but everyone by then knew Hatcher’s plans for 3rd Street were well along, which should have increased the value of their properties. One homeowner told me that the property he had sold to Hatcher was worth more than ten times as much to Hatcher, but he could not do anything but accept Hatcher’s offer, because if he didn’t, his house could be taken by eminent domain, in which case he might get even less.

The 3rd Street residents could not win against the combination of an unscrupulous real estate developer and a corrupt Mayor and City Council. Hatcher stood to make a lot of money for a long time by housing Shawnee State students; consequently, well-maintained 3rd Street homes and a healthy neighborhood were torn down in the name of progress, which is the way “profits” is spelled in Portsmouth. SSU had unoccupied land on which dormitories could have been built, but that would not have been as profitable or convenient to Hatcher, who wanted both the land and the dormitories.

To justify bulldozing the neighborhood, the claim was made that that area of 3rd Street was rundown, which was not true. Responding to these charges, 3rd Street residents pointed out that their homes were in much better shape than many of Hatcher’s run-down properties throughout the city. City Council president and current mayor James Kalb responded, “Mr. Hatcher does have some property around town that needs attention,” but Kalb went on to say that he wanted “everybody to also take into consideration the fact that Mr. Hatcher could take his money out of town and get a lot better return on it.” Oh? Just where could Hatcher get a better deal than the one he and Clayton Johnson arranged for 3rd Street? Where else could Hatcher find more obliging city officials than Kalb and the others on the City Council who rolled over for him just as they rolled over for Johnson on the Marting building?

A Hatcher property on John Street

In what town other than Portsmouth could Hatcher have received millions of dollars in abatements under the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA), which was passed by Congress in 1977 to encourage banks to loan money for projects in poor neighborhoods. The stretch of 3rd Street Hatcher had targeted for “redevelopment” was not a poor neighborhood, but he and the city suggested that it was not only to justify their bulldozing it but also to justify Hatcher’s receiving abatements under the provisions of the CRA. For as long as ten years in the case of Campus View I and fifteen years in Campus View II, Hatcher does not have to pay any taxes on the dormitories, taxes that otherwise would have gone to help pay for schools and public services.

The way things are done in Portsmouth makes a mockery of the notion that risk is an inevitable part of doing business competitively in America. In getting in and out of business, “entrepreneurs” in Portsmouth can count on the government, at every level – city, country, state, and national – to reduce risk to negligible levels. If you are starting a business in Portsmouth, there is pork in the form of abatements (Hatcher got some $3.7 million of them), grants, and sweetheart deals. If your business fails, there are other kinds of pork – the government allows tax write-offs for virtually worthless assets, as was the case with Travel World, and complicit politicians are willing to take empty stores and houses and rental properties off your hands and recycle them as public buildings or student dormitories.

Hatcher rapidly built his latest dormitories, Campus View III, buzzing around the construction sites last summer on a motor scooter like a bee in clover, for time is rent where dormitories are concerned and a fresh batch of students were arriving in the fall. The millions in abatements Hatcher received on the supposition that 3rd Street was a run-down neighborhood was not the only shenanigan he and Johnson pulled. In the contract they negotiated, or dictated for Campus View I, II, and III, SSU is obliged to market Hatcher’s dormitories to students, and also to provide Hatcher as landlord with both the student-tenants and the resident hall advisors, one of whose responsibilities is to prevent those student-tenants from damaging his property. The twelve resident advisors at the Campus View dormitories receive board and room for their services. From figures I obtained from SSU, I estimate that the cost to the university for the twelve resident advisors at the Hatcher’s dormitories for three quarters is approximately $74,000. Protecting Hatcher's property is not the only service the resident advisors provide, but from Hatcher’s point of view it is their most important one.

In addition to marketing Hatcher’s dormitories to students and supplying the student-tenants and the resident advisors, SSU is also responsible for collecting the rent from those student-tenants. SSU has to return 93% of the rents it collects to Hatcher for Campus View I, II, and III. But the provision of the contracts for Campus View I and II that would make any landlord envious is the one that guarantees that if occupancy in them ever falls below 92%, then SSU must make up the difference to Hatcher.

For how long does the contract bind Hatcher to the contract? If I understand the tortured legal language of Provision 6 of the contracts for Campus I and II (“Right of First Refusal”), Hatcher can sell the property tomorrow, if he wishes. All he is obliged to do is give SSU the right to match whatever offer he might get for the properties. For Campus View III, either side can end the arrangement upon one-year’s notice.

For its marketing the properties and supplying the student-tenants and the resident advisors and collecting the rent and guaranteeing 92% occupancy, and taking 100% of the risk, does SSU and the state get anything more than 7% of the rent? There is a provision in the contracts for Campus View I and II that allows SSU to buy the dormitories from Hatcher, if SSU ever wishes to do so, but the agreed upon price the state would have to pay for Campus View I and II, the first four dormitories, would be $5.5 million dollars, with that figure increasing 3% each year. If SSU ever does buy him or his heirs or assignees out, it would more likely be in ten or fifteen years when his abatements are scheduled to end and when those properties would begin to show their age. I estimate that in 15 years the cost of buying the six dorms would be about $14 million, so it does not look like SSU’s buyout option offers it much advantage.

And Mayor Kalb says we should be thankful that Hatcher does not take his business to some other town, where he could get a better deal. We are asked to believe that it is Hatcher’s love of Portsmouth, his hometown, that prevents him from getting fed up with his critics and investing elsewhere. What did the people of Portsmouth ever do to deserve such a philanthropic developer?

Perhaps I am being unfair. He told me by putting a shopping center in the John Street neighborhood he would be performing a useful public service by ending the prostitution and drug-dealing in the area. Because they are viewed as greedy enemies of tradition and the environment, real estate developers are unpopular everywhere. But without developers, it could be argued, communities could not grow. Developers do the dirty work of tearing down the old so that they then can build up the new. In their tearing down role, developers are like undertakers – unwelcomed but necessary. I tried thinking of Hatcher in that light, but it didn’t work, because an undertaker who poisons prospective clients, even if they are getting along in years and are a little the worse for wear, such a developer is not an angel of mercy. When Hatcher buys properties in a Portsmouth neighborhood, a skull and crossbones should be pasted on every house in it, because that neighborhood is marked for death. Mayor Kalb sees Hatcher as a something of a philanthropist; I see him as the Dr. Kevorkian of Portsmouth’s realtors, but perhaps that is unfair to Kevorkian, who killed patients only after they begged him to. In collusion with the city government, Hatcher drew up his plans to destroy 3rd Street even before residents were aware of it. They had no idea what was going on until they saw surveyors and began asking questions. The city government at first would not answer their questions, stonewalling the citizens as long as possible.

The folly of SSU’s contract with Hatcher for the 3rd Street dormitories is that SSU, or its predecessor, Shawnee State Community College, had entered into a similar one for dormitories with a private developer from Cleveland, back in 1985, and lived to regret it. (The lawyer who represented Shawnee State in that lamentable contract was Clayton Johnson.) From the complaints made by SSU administrators in the early 1990s, I gathered the Cleveland developer had SSU over a barrel. The lease of the contract for Celeron Square (which has since been renamed University Townhouses) was for forty-five years, but less than ten years into that agreement SSU sued the Cleveland developer for not living up to the contract. SSU wanted to take over ownership and operation of the complex, but they had to pay through the nose to do it. SSU finally agreed to pay the Cleveland developer $1.26 million to acquire the Celeron Square property. In a memo dated 13 August 1997, SSU Facilities manager Dave Gleason summed up a housing meeting by saying, “The history lesson was quite explicit regarding SSU Celeron Square,” but just a couple of years later that "explicit lesson" would be forgotten or ignored when SSU agreed to an even worse arrangement with Hatcher. Hatcher owns not only the dormitories on 3rd Street but also the land on which they sit; the Cleveland developer owned only the dormitories.

I don’t not know whether these student housing shenanigans violate any laws, but I do know there is something criminal about the way in which the Campus View dormitories were built where they were, with little regard for the safety or peace of mind of the hundreds of Campus View students who would live in them. Each day and night, Campus View students have to cross 3rd Street to get to and from classes and other campus activities. 3rd has become a busy street, second only to Route 52 in the amount of east-west traffic that speeds along it. Route 52 at least has a number of lights to regulate speed. The one traffic light, at 3rd and Sinton, does not begin to meet the safety needs of students and others who are constantly crossing 3rd between Gay and Waller Streets.

[Student on Cell Phone Negotiating Traffic on 3rd Street: photo missing]

Not only students but most people who cross 3rd do not take the time to go to the several crosswalks, including the one at the single traffic light. Like most Americans, they are in a hurry and take shortcuts, sometimes while talking on a cell phone. The erection of a scrolling marquee at 3rd and Gay Street only added to the distraction and the danger. Drivers should be watching out for pedestrians darting across 3rd Street, not trying to read on the scrolling marquee such crucial information as the 2nd Annual Ebby Glockner Roast taking place on January 29. What Hatcher and SSU have created on 3rd Street is a hazardous obstacle course that students have to run many times in the course of a year. If there is ever a death or serious injury on 3rd Street, it will not be Neal Hatcher but SSU and the state that will be roasted.

SSU Scrolling Marquee: A Dangerous Distraction on 3rd Street

When I think about why SSU finds itself year after year at the very bottom of the college rankings in US News, in spite of the expenditure of many millions of public dollars and in spite of the creative efforts of some dedicated and talented people over several decades, I only need to remember the presidential and student housing shenanigans at Shawnee State to realize why it has such a terrible reputation and low academic ranking in the state and nation. From its inception, the university was viewed locally as another public trough in which the over-privileged of Portsmouth could stick their snouts. Until such time as SSU and other public institutions in Portsmouth are liberated from the political control of the over-privileged of Portsmouth, who pose as philanthropists and Good Samaritans, the city will remain a hodge-podge of scandalous pork projects and sweetheart deals mixed with chronic unemployment and poverty.

"A-Marting We Will Go!"

What does this house have in common with the Marting building?

We should add a new word to Portsmouth’s lexicon, “marting,” meaning “to purchase, at inflated prices, with public monies, white elephant properties from the politically well connected.” Properties were being “martinged” in Portsmouth prior to the purchase of the Marting building, the purchase of which was just the two-million-dollar gorilla that broke the camel’s back, to mix metaphors. Someone who is a student of ethics told me that corruption is so pervasive in Portsmouth that those who behave unethically by "marting" their property really don't think they are doing anything wrong. That's just the way things are done locally and that's the way they have been done for a long time. It's discouraging to think that might be the case, that we are dealing not only with a culture of dependency but with a culture unconscious of its own corruption, that from the cradle they are taught to tap into public monies when they are in a real estate pickle:

A-marting we will go, a-marting we will go,

Heigh-ho the dairy-o, a-marting we will go,

A-marting we will go, a-marting we will go,

We’ll sell our house to some old souse

Or to the public-o, or to the public-o.

The trustees of Shawnee State University have “martinged” property more than once. In 1999, John W. Thatcher, a local attorney, and his wife Jo Ann Thatcher, a former SSU trustee who was active in Republican circles, were having trouble selling their empty, dowdy 82-year-old house at 1828 Franklin Boulevard, pictured above. There are some lovely old houses on Franklin; the stolid Thatcher house was not one of them. The Thatcher house does not even have a front entrance. People visiting it for the first time sometimes circled the house, trying to figure out where to enter. The first time I visited the Thatcher house, I like others had trouble finding the entrance. Rephrasing Falstaff’s words in “Henry IV, part 2, I said to myself, “It’s neither fish nor foul; a man knows not where to enter it.”

Most owners have difficulty selling their property in Portsmouth’s chronically depressed real estate market. Sometimes it seems as if property in Portsmouth is as hard to sell as stinking mackerel, to use a Shakespearean expression. But most people don’t have the political connections the Thatchers have to get their mackerel properly “martinged.” Former Ohio Attorney General and present state Auditor Betty Montgomery was among the Republican bigwigs who reportedly knew where to enter the Thatcher house. Just as the Portsmouth City Council would later bail out Clayton Johnson and the Marting Foundation, and just as Portsmouth Murals, Inc., would bail out George Clayton by paying him $350,000 for his empty properties in Boneyfiddle, the SSU trustees bailed out the Thatchers with public monies, paying them $230,000 in June 1999 for an empty house that was appraised for $163,340. In a chronically depressed real estate market, the Thatchers were paid some $65,000 above the appraised value for a piece of property the university did not need. I was told by a high administrator at the university that state law did not allow property to be purchased by the state at more than 10% of its appraised value. If that was the law, the Thatcher house could have sold for no more than $179, 685. Certainly if the purchase of the Thatcher house was illegal, then the Attorney General at that time, Betty Montgomery, would have disallowed it. Wouldn't she? Anyway, the SSU trustees bought the Thatcher house as a temporary residence for President James Chapman and his wife, even though the Chapmans would have preferred other living arrangements.

The trustees “martinged” the Thatcher house by paying way too much for it as a temporary residence for a president who did not want to live there. At the trustees meeting at which the purchase of the Thatcher house was approved, one trustee is on record as saying the purchase was a good deal for the university, which would have no trouble getting its money back on the property once a permanent house could be found for the president. That president would not be Chapman, who, because he would not play ball with some of the trustees, was not rehired.

3060 Camelot Drive, another "martinged" property

Finding a permanent house for the next president involved more “marting” of property. The trustees hired an architect to design a new house for the SSU president, to be located on campus, as Chapman had recommended; but after a year of planning and expense they thought better of wasting money that way, fired the architect, got rid of Chapman, and purchased another empty house, miles away from campus, on the Hill, for $412,000, paying the doctor who owned it well above any 10% limit. The appraised value of 3060 Camelot Drive was $365,140. George Clayton, who was then chairman of the SSU trustees and who can “marting” with the best of them, engineered that sweetheart deal, bailing out a doctor who had left town and who was having trouble selling 3060 Camelot Drive.

When the time came for SSU to sell the Thatcher house, it naturally had trouble doing so. The unoccupied house was on the market for some time. The university finally sold it, in December 2002, like distressed merchandise, 3 1/2 years after purchasing it from the Thachers, for $180,000. In other words, SSU sold the house for $50,000 less than they paid the Thatchers for it.

In a pontifical letter-to-the-editor in the Community Common (2 January 2005), the same John W. Thatcher, whose Franklin Boulevard house had been martinged, defended the city’s purchase of the Marting building, claiming that it will save money in the long run. Oh, sure, the purchase of the Marting building will save money, just as the purchase of Thatcher’s house saved money. Oh, sure, the purchase of the Marting building was a good deal, just as the purchase of Thatcher’s house was a good deal, even though the Marting building is as unsuited for a municipal building as the Thatcher house was as a residence for a university president. Why waste public money to build a new house for the president or a new municipal building, designed for the specific uses to which it would be put, and in the best location, when a “philanthropic” foundation has an empty downtown store with neither a parking lot or a future, and a politically connected couple have an empty house on Franklin Boulevard, and a doctor who moved has a house on the Hill he could not sell? Those properties needed to be taken off the hands of the politically well connected, and off the tax rolls, and the public needed to pay for it. That’s the way property is “martinged” in Portsmouth. And the experts at "marting," who write letters to the editor defending it, are the same people who want us to believe they are dedicated public servants and philanthropists.

High on the Hog: Jesse Stuart's Ohio

“I have never seen a city as original and friendly as my beautiful Portsmouth.” Jesse Stuart (1906-1984)

Jesse Stuart’s feelings about Portsmouth, Ohio, and about his native Kentucky, were much more ambivalent than the Chamber-of-Commerce sounding quotation on the Floodwall mural would ever begin to suggest. He was too passionately honest a writer to ignore or gloss over what he considered to be the hoggishness of human nature, even among those he felt a kinship to, such as the people of eastern Kentucky and southern Ohio.

It is true that when he was writing about the landscape of Kentucky, Jesse Stuart could be reverent and even rapturous, which is what he is mainly remembered for now, but when he wrote about the people who lived on that land, he could be very critical. Some of his novels and stories about Kentuckians focus on hoggishness. Taps for Private Tussie, for example, is a masterful satirical novel about a hoggish, mooching Kentucky clan, the Tussies, which is all the more unusual because it was published in 1943, during the Second World War, when young Americans from every ethnic group and region, including Appalachia, were being depicted in the media as willing to make the ultimate sacrifice for their country. What Jesse Stuart writes about in Taps, by contrast, is the heavy-drinking, wife-beating Private Kim Tussie and his lazy relatives who squander the money his wife was awarded by the government, which had mistakenly reported he had been killed in action and shipped somebody else’s body home for burial. Only after most of the money is gone does Private Tussie show up, in the flesh, proving that the corpse in the casket, as at least one of his conniving kin probably well knew, was not his.

Not surprisingly, on the basis of books like Taps for Private Tussie, some Kentuckians looked down on Jesse Stuart as “the man who ruined Kentucky.” From what an Ohioan old enough to remember has told me, Jesse Stuart himself was once looked down upon in southern Ohio as the man who had dissed the Buckeye State. As a transplanted Kentuckian points out in the novel The Land Beyond the River (1973), a sequel to Taps for Private Tussie, the buckeye is a completely worthless tree that produces only a “pizenous nut.” The transplanted Kentuckian is not just talking about trees, he is also talking about people; he is not just talking about poisonous buckeyes but some hoggish Buckeyes as well.

In The Land Beyond the River, Stuart did for Ohio what he had done for Kentucky in Taps. Unlike the disreputable Tussies, the Perkinses start out as a poor but proud and resourceful Appalachian family. But three years on a government free-food program in Kentucky had drained them of a lot of their initiative and independence. After listening to his relatives praise Ohio as the Promised Land, “Poppie” Perkins decided it was time for a change, a change not to less government dependency but to more. “I want Social Security or welfare and old-age pensions which are all better in that wonderful state [Ohio],” he says at the beginning of the novel.

The political message of The Land Beyond the River is that as corrupting as government assistance programs were in Kentucky, they were even more so in Ohio, as the pious Free Will Baptist and staunchly Republican Poppie gradually realizes after he moves his family to the river city of Agrilla, the seat of Landsdowne County, in southern Ohio. (Agrilla is Stuart’s fictionalized Portsmouth; Landsdowne is his fictionalized Scioto County.) The Land Beyond the River, published thirty years ago, may help us understand the situation we are in today in Portsmouth, where public monies and governmental assistance are like a drug on which not just the poor and the unemployed but the well-to-do and over-privileged are hooked.

The trail north from Kentucky had been blazed by Poppie’s relatives, like Uncle Dick, who had worked hard and succeeded in Ohio but then had become bitter because the government, in his opinion, overtaxed him to pay for welfare and food stamps for the undeserving poor. “It pays to be poor, especially in Ohio,” is a critical refrain in the novel. “It’s our Government’s fault – making cheats, liars, and lazy people out of good working people,” says Joshua Herbert, the self-made millionaire businessman who had migrated from Kentucky to Ohio. His son Jim tells Poppie’s teen-aged sons, “You’ll understand some day what a joke this welfare is! It’s made liars and cheats of nearly a fourth of this country.” In what strikes me as a foolish and cynical strategy, Uncle Dick and the Herberts decide the only way Uncle Sam can be made to stop robbing the rich to pay for the poor is to bankrupt the government by encouraging everyone to tap into welfare system. If Uncle Sam is so eager to provide handouts, then even the well-to-do should hold out their hand.

That is the advice of the hoggish businessmen in the novel, advice that some businessmen in Portsmouth appear to have been following for at least the last thirty years. If it pays to be poor in southern Ohio, it pays more, much more per capita, to be rich. God helps those few who help themselves, but for everyone else in Portsmouth, especially the rich, there is the federal, state, county, and city government, and the Southern Ohio Growth Partnership, the Marting Foundation, and the Chamber of Commerce. Forget the traditional Republican goals of competition and profit; the Portsmouth economy is based heavily on collusion and pork.

It would not be unusual if a conservative Republican writer, which is what Jesse Stuart was, thought that the chief casualties of President Johnson’s War on Poverty in the 1960s were the poor themselves, because they became trapped in the welfare cycle, growing more dependent on the government from one generation to the next. What is unusual about The Land Beyond the River is that it points out that good Republicans, traditionally associated with rugged individualism and strive-and-succeed, were also being turned into cheats, liars, and lazy people, and not by food stamps and welfare checks but by other forms of assistance from federal, state, county, and city government. The over-privileged of Portsmouth have been subsidized, granted, abated, bailed out, and “porked” in the last thirty years to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars.

Jesse Stuart suggests in The Land Beyond the River that rich Republicans of southern Ohio are no better, and in some respects are worse, than poor Democrats. For one thing, rich Republicans are becoming barren. Unlike the poor, who reproduce like rabbits, rich Republicans bear few children. Instead of character being the measure by which they judge a person, they come to believe fashionable clothes make the man and the woman. They also become decadent. The over-privileged rich stray far from their fiercely independent teetotaling Kentucky Free Will Baptist roots and into the arms not of only of the welfare state but also into the genteel denomination Stuart hints is best suited to hypocritical, scotch-drinking Republicans – namely Presbyterianism.

The decadent trend among well-heeled Republicans in The Land Beyond the River is most evident in the childless rich businessman-turned-gentleman-farmer Mr. Koniker, who devotes himself to his fashionably old-fashioned unprofitable farm, the losses on which he is able to write off on his income taxes. Koniker is a character who, in real life, with his effete antiquarianism and carnal knowledge of tax write-offs, would not be out of place on the board of the Marting Foundation. His unprofitable and obsolete farm is the Marting building of its day – yes, the Marting building, a remnant of Portsmouth’s good old downtown days, hanging on as a window-dressed basket-case that the City Council is determined to put on the publicly funded life-support system the sponging Marting Foundation has devised for it. Transfusions of municipal money and municipal employees will keep the Marting building breathing, if only in a comatose state, for as long as there are public funds to pay for it.

The Land Beyond the River offers insights into the behavior of Portsmouth’s over-privileged and perhaps into human nature itself. In one scene on the Ohio farm on which they are living rent free, Poppie’s family watches a half dozen pigs feeding on the corn that has just been thrown in the pen. Poppie’s oldest son, the narrator of the novel, says, “We stood a minute watching them pushing and shoving over the corn when there was plenty on the ground for them. ‘You see how some people are hoggish and want it all,’ Mommie said. ‘Right in this pen is the example.’”

The name Jesse Stuart gave to the Ohio river city Poppie’s family lived near was Agrilla, but he might more appropriately have called it “Porksmouth.” As Poppie’s family throws corn to the pigs, the federal, state, county and city governments throw pork to the over-privileged of Portsmouth, further accentuating the political divisions in the city, and exacerbating the long-standing bitterness between classes. If, along with everything else, the hoggish did not pose as philanthropists, perhaps they wouldn’t be quite so hard to take. Stuart expressed his revulsion with such selfish businessmen in lines in the next to the last sonnet in “Man with a Bull-Tongue Plow,” lines that the Chamber of Commerce would not allow on the Floodwall in a million years:

. . . I found some merchant men
Like hogs for corn, lived for profit and gain.
They were like white maggots in a rotted hen
And tramp them in the mud they’d rise again.

Portsmouth's Red Light District

Law offices of Clayton Johnson, downtown Portsmouth

“And the Marting Foundation said, ‘Let there be lights downtown,’ and there were lights downtown, red lights.”

     According to lawyers for the Richard D. Marting Foundation, who read a prepared statement to the Portsmouth City Council, on December 13, 2004, the Foundation was established for the most Biblical sounding of reasons, “to keep the lights on in the heart of downtown Portsmouth.” If you believe these lawyers, the current name of the Foundation does not begin to suggest the enormous amount of good it is bound and determined to do for the people of Portsmouth. If you believe these lawyers, the Foundation should be renamed the Richard D. Magnanimous Foundation.

I disagree with these lawyers. I say that the Foundation’s sale of the Marting building to the city was not to keep the lights on but to keep the public in the dark. I say the sale was not an act of benevolence, “A Measure of Grace,” to cite the title of a Daily Times editorial, but a scheme to cut the losses of yet another failed downtown business and unload its virtually worthless property off on the public. I say downtown Portsmouth is the city’s red light district, where lawyers, real estate developers, politicians, and kept newspapers practice the world’s second oldest profession – screwing the public. The lawyers representing the Marting Foundation called for an end to the “fighting” and the spreading of “rumors and partial truths” about the sale of the Marting building. I say this “fighting” is really “struggling” for honesty in government. I say partial truths are better than lies. I say these lawyers are geese fronting for a fox and a weasel.

Marting’s lawyers appeared before the Council to promote the idea that the Marting Foundation was established in the spirit of Mother Teresa and Santa Claus. Marting’s lawyers appeared before the Council to promote the idea that in keeping with the charitable spirit of the Christmas season, the Foundation is offering to donate to the city “both the Marting’s properties and the balance of the net sale proceeds,” whatever that balance might end up being, with strings attached. I say this is more Marting Foundation flim-flam and that the Marting building, the outrageous $2,000,000 sale of which Clayton Johnson, Mayor Bauer and the City Council arranged out of the light of the Sunshine law, was worth just what the Foundation is now asking for it – nothing. The city should not accept the Marting building, certainly not with the strings the Foundation is seeking to attach to it. The city should demand all of its money back and not under terms dictated by the Foundation.

Marting Building. "It ain't worth anything." Marty Mohr, June 2004.

I say the last thing the Foundation wanted was to have this white elephant back on its hands. I say what the Marting Foundation is trying to do is get the city to accept the Marting building as a gift, so the Foundation will then at least be able to reduce its losses through a tax shenanigan. I pointed out in an earlier blog that several years ago Clayton Johnson was able to show Frank Waller and Michael Warsaw of Travel World how donating “the assets” of their defunct travel agency to the Ironton branch of Ohio University could be turned into a tax write-off. If Johnson can get the city to accept his white elephant, will he then be able to arrange a much bigger tax write-off for his Foundation?

At the December 13th Council meeting, the Marting lawyers were not the only ones who praised the philanthropy of Clayton Johnson and the Marting Foundation. Councilman Marty Mohr praised Johnson and the Foundation to the skies. He called the Foundation’s offer “A lifetime’s opportunity that we cannot let us pass by.” This is not too surprising, for Mohr was first for, and then against, and is now again for the Marting building, just as he was first against and then for the recall of Mayor Bauer. He told a Columbus Dispatch reporter last June, “At first, I didn’t think (the recall election) was a good idea. Now after several months of continuing lies and deceit, yeah, it needs to be done. It needs to be done in the worst way.” About the Marting building, Mohr told that same reporter, “It ain’t worth anything.” Why is he enthusiastic about the Marting building again? After sessions with attorney Clayton Johnson in the last several weeks, Mohr declared he has seen “the light at the end of the tunnel,” to quote the phrase he used at the Council meeting to describe what he said was an “extremely generous,” a “monumental” offer by the Marting Foundation. Is Mohr like a leaf in the wind, who goes in whatever direction the wind happens to be blowing, or is that too flattering a characterization? Mohr’s meetings with Johnson represents an egregious misunderstanding, if not a flagrant betrayal, of a council member’s ethical responsibility during this period of legal confrontation between the city and the Foundation. The light Mohr sees at the end of the tunnel may be another legal train heading toward the Council in the form of an injunction to stop them from conducting the same kind of out-of-the Sunshine meetings that led Judge Marshall to invalidate the Marting’s deal.

Milking a Dead Cow

To listen to the Marting lawyers at the December 13th Council meeting, the philanthropy of the Marting Foundation knows no bounds, for the Foundation is recommending that some of the city’s money it is so generously offering to return to the city be used to renovate the former Adelphia building so that it can become the new Portsmouth police station. The contagiousness of the philanthropy practiced by the Marting Foundation is infecting everybody. The current owner of the Adelphia building, Herbert Singer, of Los Angeles, acting through real estate developer Neal Hatcher and shyster lawyer Mike Mearan, has offered to donate that building to the city, provided the city accepts it very soon, presumably so he can claim the tax write-off his gift would qualify him for. Even a dead cow can be milked one last time, but Singer still owes back taxes on the dead cow. He failed to pay some $18,425 in taxes this past year. That tax matter, I was told, is now in the hands of a bankruptcy court.

The Foundation’s lawyers said the “revitalization of the Marting properties” and the “redevelopment of the Adelphia Building” is “in the best interest of everyone.” I say using public funds to take empty buildings off the hands of their owners, and off the tax rolls of the city, may be in the best interest of those owners, but it is not in the best interest of the public, which has to pick up the tab for the City Council’s complicity. If businesses were being brought into the downtown, calling it “revitalization,” to use the lawyers’ term, might be justified. But moving government agencies around like checkers, from square to square, or from empty old building to empty old building, is not revitalization. I have not seen such economic stagnation since 1971-1972, when I taught in communist Poland for the State Department, under the Fulbright exchange program. Not since communist Poland have I seen people so lacking in entrepreneurial spirit and so dependent upon the government for handouts. In Poland, “ministries” doled out government money; in Porksmouth it is not only federal and state agencies that dole out the funds – it is also “foundations” and “growth partnerships.” What we have in Portsmouth is a pervasive culture of dependency where even over-privileged people with empty buildings can count on an obliging city government to take those buildings off their hands and fill them with city employees. Yes, the lights would be on in downtown Portsmouth, but the public would be paying the light bills.

If the money is available, it should be used to build new structures designed to meet the present and future needs of the public agencies that will use them, not hand-me-down buildings with no architectural or historical value, buildings that will require extensive alterations and still not be well-suited. A former department store for a city hall? A former cable office for a police station? I am sorry to tell you, Virginia, that Santa Claus and Mother Theresa are not on the board of the Marting Foundation. To characterize the Marting proposal with the word “Grace,” as the Portsmouth Times did editorially, should be viewed as profanation by those who view this as a holy season. We are not blessed with enlightened and philanthropic civic leaders. We are cursed with sly lawyers, greedy real estate developers, a corrupt City Council, and two newspapers that try to outdo each other in prostituting themselves to the Chamber of Commerce. If any lights should be kept on in downtown Portsmouth they should be red lights because there are more prostitutes in downtown Portsmouth than there ever are up on John Street.

The Unsinkable Molly Williams: A River Tale

Some years ago, in the Fall following her summer stint as an intern for the Judge, the young woman who would later be known as the Unsinkable Molly Williams was back teaching social science at the high school. She was afraid she was pregnant, but she couldn’t be sure because her menstrual cycle had often been irregular. A doctor had even warned her she might not be able to have children. So she waited two months, and by then she was fairly certain she was pregnant, but she waited a third month before she finally told the Judge. Too embarrassed to face him in person, she called him at his office on the phone

“Are you sure?” he asked guardedly when she told him.

“Yes,” she replied in a troubled voice.

“How can you be sure?” he asked. “Have you been to a doctor?”

“No,” she said.

“I’ll make an appointment for you to see my brother.” The Judge’s brother was a prominent doctor in the city and the favorite gynecologist of women on the Hill.

“What will I tell him?” she asked.

“Don’t worry,” the Judge said. “He won’t ask embarrassing questions.”
Molly wondered how much the Judge’s brother or anyone else in his family would know about what had happened. She had heard her preacher father say more than once there was a streak of deviltry in the people on the Hill, and especially in the Judge’s influential and quirky family. “Woe to those who are at ease in Zion and who feel secure on the mountain,” Molly’s father would say, quoting Amos, the prophet he was named after. But Molly’s father, nicknamed “Amos Hollerer,” had been an old-fashioned, fire-and-brimstone preacher. Growing up, she had been embarrassed by him and hadn’t put much stock in anything he said.

The Judge's brother confirmed to Molly that she was pregnant. “I foresee no complications,” he told her. He was speaking medically, of course, because in every other way Molly could see nothing but complications.

On the following chilly weekend she took a walk on the river embankment. Stopping for a minute, she stared across the river at the leafless hills on the other side. Her back was turned on the river city where she had grown up, with its church spires and the courthouse rising above the old commercial warehouses and stores, a number of which were empty and becoming dilapidated. She knew what some women would do in her situation, but she refused to consider that option. She wanted a baby, just not this way.

When she returned to her apartment, not far from the courthouse, she sat in a chair by the window and cried, something she had done often in the past few months. Her father used to tell her to turn to the good book for guidance in time of trouble, which she had never done before, partly because she didn’t believe in it and partly because she had never been in serious trouble. As a teenager, she had smoked for several years, wore her hair like a boy, and lost her virginity at sixteen, and occasionally cussed like a sailor, but she got through those experiences without feeling any need to turn to the good book. Now things were different. Picking up her father’s old Bible, she was not sure where to start, so she turned to the Book of Amos. Instead of pacifying her, the prophet's anger revived her own. “But you have turned justice into poison and the fruit of righteousness into wormwood . . .”

The following Thursday, she got a call from the Judge, who told her to come over to the courthouse the following evening at five thirty. Molly understood everyone would be gone by then. She didn’t want to be alone with him, especially in his office, after hours, because that had been her downfall, but she felt she had no choice. She was three months pregnant and had to do something.

At five-thirty Friday, the lights were off in the probate offices, where many thousands of records were deposited in row after row of green metal file cabinets — the births, the marriages the deaths — the most important events in everyone’s life. She could make out the shadow of the tall thin figure inside, who had been waiting for her in the darkness, like an impatient spider, between the rows of file cabinets. He quietly opened the glass door. Nervously, she followed him into his office, where he sat down at his large desk. It was cleared, except for a big black book. She sat in the same chair in which she had sat in June, when he had interviewed her for a summer internship.

“Miss Hollister,” he addressed her matter-of-factly, as he had in the June interview, “I need some information.”

“Information?” she asked.

“For a marriage license.”

“A what?”

“You’ll need one – and a husband. I think a soldier makes the most sense. That way I can waive the three-day waiting period and you can get married tomorrow, up in the capital, and he could leave for overseas on Monday and be killed in action somewhere in a month or two.”

She sat silently, trying to take in what he had just so matter-of-factly said. She was finding it hard to believe any of it was real – the courthouse, the summer internship, the sex in his office, the pregnancy, and now the “marriage.”

“Yes, I’ll put down ‘soldier’ as his occupation, and I’ll list his place of birth as New York City,” the Judge said. “He’ll be one of six million.” He paused, tilting his head, studying his penmanship. “Now, we’ve got to choose a last name.” He put his hand on the thick black book, as if about to swear on the Bible. “It’s all in here, however unreliable it may be. Data from the last census, including the most common names.” He put down the pen and opened the book. “We should give him a common name, to make it harder for anyone trying to track him down.”

“Who would track down somebody who doesn’t exist?” she asked, not sure she wasn’t just imagining it all, not sure she wasn’t losing her mind, like her mother had.

“You never know. Someday somebody might be snooping around,” the Judge said. He thumbed his way into the book. “Smith’s the most common name. Trouble is it’s too common, too suspicious sounding, under the circumstances. The same thing with the next one, Johnson. I suggest we use the third—Williams . . .” He paused, waiting for her to say something, but when she didn’t, he picked up the pen. “Yes, let’s name him Williams. There are probably a thousand Williamses in the state, and even more in New York City . . . What do you say?”

“I . . . I don’t know,” she stammered, confused. Brides don’t usually get to choose the name of their husbands.

He wrote down the name Williams on the license. “Now, what would you like for his first name? Let’s see . . .” He ran his finger down another list in the black book. “James is the most common first name. Yes, let’s call him James. If it’s a boy, you can name him James Williams, Jr., after his father.”

She protested, “But you’re the father!”

“I know, I know,” he acknowledged. “but we can’t name the baby after me, can we.”

The first name she thought of was her father's. “Amos?” she suggested.

Frowning, the Judge ran his finger down a list. “Amos. It’s pretty rare,” he explained, tapping the name on the list with his index finger. “It’s the 496th most common name. I don’t think we want to go with that.”

She summoned up what little resolution she had. “If I have a husband, I want him to be named Amos. And if I have a son, I’ll name him Amos.”

“Amos?” The Judge repeated the name, unhappily. “Amos. It will look peculiar on the license, your husband and father both having such an unusual name.”

“Amos was a prophet,” she reminded him. “It wouldn’t be an unusual name in a religious family.”

“Is your husband also a Preacher’s Kid?” the Judge quipped sardonically. She found nothing amusing in his remark, and he saw he was not going to change her mind. “’Amos’ will have to do,” he said. He glanced at his watch. Molly imagined his wife waiting for him at home. She was developing a resentment as deep as the Grand Canyon for his wife, and everyone else on the Hill.

“Now,” he continued, “let’s come up with names for your in-laws.” The Judge consulted the book, and, while she looked on incredulously, he created in-laws for her and even a fictitious minister who would perform the imaginary ceremony the next day up in the capital.

“And the Judge begat James and James’s father John and James’s mother Mary, and the Judge begat the minister, the Reverend Michael,” she mumbled as he wrote.

“What? he asked, looking up from the license.

“Nothing,” she said.

“Would you sign for the minister, here,” he said, pushing the license across the desk. “Try to change your handwriting,” he said, “as I did for your husband’s signature.” Within fifteen minutes, the last “t” was crossed and the last “i” dotted, and her imaginary marriage was documented.

“In ten days I’ll deposit this in one of the file cabinets and nobody will be the wiser.”

“I can’t believe it,” Molly said.

‘What?”

“Is this how people on the Hill deal with problems?” she asked.

“If you look at the history of any family, you wouldn’t believe how much alteration of the official record there is from one generation to the next. People wouldn’t believe how much false information is out there in those files. If you could know everything about your own family for a couple of generations back, you might be very surprised.”

“The past is all lies?”

“Not all of it. Only what needs to be, which is much more than people would like to think,” he said.

She took the license from him and stared at the forged document. At that moment it occurred to her that he had not only made her pregnant, he was making her an accomplice in a crime, thus guaranteeing her cooperation. Holding the license in her hand, she could have quickly torn it up, which is what she wanted to do, but then what would she do, being three months pregnant? She handed it back to him.

“Drive up to the capital tomorrow,” he said, taking money out of his billfold. “Just as if you’re going to get married. Take in a movie or museum.” She kept her fists clenched. Taking money from him was even harder than giving him back the license.

“I’m going to help you and the child in any way I can,” he promised.

“Can you forge me a court order to that effect?” she asked bitterly.

The Judge winced. “Molly, you’ve got to accept some responsibility for the situation we’re in.”

Half his age and with none of his influence and authority, she was infuriated by what she saw as his attempt to make her a co-conspirator. “What you and the other hypocrites on the Hill are doing is screwing people like me. That’s how you get to be on the Hill and that’s how you stay on the Hill. Screwing people like me.”

“Please, Molly. Don’t indulge in this self-righteousness. You’ve got to consider what’s best for the child,” he added. He waited for her to regain her composure before offering her the money again. Under the circumstances, seeing no way out, she took it, crumpling it in her hand. Then he told her, “It would be better if you left first.”

Though it was cold and dark as she walked away from the courthouse, she felt that she could see clearly for the first time. She agreed with the Judge about one thing. She had been naïve, but tears had washed away her blindness. In spite of the difficulties she saw looming ahead, she was determined not to give up her job or flee from the city. She would bear the child and the shame, under the documented cover story the Judge had concocted. But having seen what she had seen, and learned what she had learned, she was no longer the person she had been. She felt reborn, and she resolved she would not let them get away with it. She walked away from the courthouse with her father’s favorite passage from the Book of Amos echoing in her head. In the future, it would become her mantra. Surprising an old woman waiting for a bus under a streetlamp, Molly stopped and shouted it aloud, as if she wanted to be heard all the way up on the Hill. “Woe to those who are at ease in Zion and who feel secure on the mountain . . .” The old woman looked around uneasily. Molly nodded, to reassure her she was not crazy, and marched resolutely homeward.

From that day onward, Molly became the hair shirt and the self-appointed conscience, the Amos and the Jeremiah, of the community. Because she believed the local Daily Bugle was nothing but a publishing prostitute for the people on the Hill, she founded an alternative weekly, The Clarion, for which she and her daughter dug up all the news that the Bugle would not have printed even if its reporters had been capable of digging it up. “The records in the Probate court are the Gospel compared to the stories printed in the Bugle,” Molly would say, but she would say no more than that. The over-privileged people on the Hill said she was a crazy, slanderous witch, and a cocaine-sniffing lesbian to boot, but she stuck to her guns and brought down a number of crooked politicians and public officials. She never said a word about the Judge, and he went to his death, years later, without more than a couple of people knowing what role he had played in the career of the woman the underprivileged, underemployed, barely literate, but very grateful people of the city nicknamed the Unsinkable Molly Williams.

Pork

Thomas Gainsborough, "Girl with Pigs"

In a poem he wrote in 1854, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow dubbed Cincinnati the “Queen City,” and the nickname stuck. But because of the importance of pigs in Cincinnati’s economy, the "Queen City" city in the 1800s was also sometimes derogatorily called "Porkopolis."

There is another kind of pork. On an interesting Cincinnati website, Porkopolis.com, this other kind of “pork” is defined as “a government project, appropriation or appointment that yields jobs or other benefits to a specific locale and patronage opportunities to its political representative.” The process of funneling government money into local pockets is called “porkbarreling.”

The most notorious example of porkbarreling in Portsmouth’s recent history is the City Council’s expenditure of $2,000,000 of public funds to purchase the Marting’s empty white-elephant department store. But $2,000,000 is no big deal by Portsmouth's standards. The City Council and former mayors have granted over $27,000,000 in property abatements, which is a considerable perk.

The most recent instance of “porkbarreling” was when Republican Representative Rob Portman traveled from Cincinnati to Portsmouth, just before November’s election, bringing a check for $300,000 made out to Portsmouth Murals, Inc. Portman’s delivery of pork was timely because Portsmouth Murals, Inc. had previously spent $350,000 to purchase another empty department store from retired portly Portsmouth businessman George Clayton. Should Clayton thank Rob Portman or Rob Porkman?

The biggest dispenser of pork in Portsmouth is the S.O.G.P., the Southern Ohio Growth Partnership, alias Southern Ohio Great Porkroll. The Sentinel claims the SOGP was supplied with nearly $300,000,000 of pork, and the Sentinel further contends that under the government formula that guides these disbursements, the worse conditions got in Portsmouth, the more pork the SOGP received. So it was in the interest of Portsmouth's overprivileged to run the city down. A real estate developer, Neal Hatcher, makes millions out of trashing neighborhoods. To help him run down the city, the city of Portsmouth has given him over $3,700,000 in pork-abatements.

Considering the importance of “pork” in Portsmouth’s economy, shouldn't its nickname be Porksmouth?