DICKENS PUB: GREAT EXPECTORATIONS

The  first question to be asked is why  anyone would open an ersatz English pub in the most god-forsaken neighborhood of a chronically depressed Appalachian town? Dickens’ Pub may be the  most  harebrained entrepreneurial venture in Portsmouth’s history.  A more appropriate name for it would have been (with apologies to Toro Loco) Dickens Loco. If  the  three most important things in  real estate are location, location, location, then why the dickens would anyone open a pretentious pub in such a  desolate, déclassé neighborhood, in the shadow of the Mitchellace building, a hulking,  sorrowful reminder of Portsmouth’s industrial, prosperous past. Once the biggest and busiest shoelace factory in the world,  Mitchellace is now the ugliest and emptiest building in Portsmouth.  It is not surprising that in a short time, in a matter of months after the opening of the pub—after extensive and expensive renovations—a Brush Realty For Sale sign  went up.  Dickens’ Pub was  throwing in the towel before even working up a sweat. But no one was foolish enough to take if off their hands, not at an asking price of $79,000. If Bauer or Kalb were still mayor, the city might have taken it off their hands and for much more than $79,000.

The other question that should be asked about Dickens’ Pub is who owns it? According to records at the Scioto County Auditor’s office, the owner appears to be BOB DICKENS  of Franklin Furnace.

But when a business is registered with the state, the names of the owner or owners must be listed. The owner(s) can’t hide behind pseudonyms or clever anagrams. The records in the Ohio Secretary of State’s office reveal that B.O.B., with the periods in place, is an anagram for the initials of the last names of the three partners:  David Basham (the father); Vicki O’Bannion (wife of silent partner, high school English teacher/part-time preacher Jerry O’Bannion); and Nicholas Basham (Third Ward councilman and obstreperous son of David).

The discrepancy between the County Auditor’s and the Secretary of State’s websites may simply be a consequence of  the high school literary allusiveness that has been typical of the Dickens’ Pub from the beginning. It  is also possible that BOB DICKENS was an  example not only of literary allusiveness but also of an Appalachian elusiveness whose purpose was to  provide a degree of cover for the owners.  Teachers and preachers  understandably might be hesitant to publicize that  they are in the booze business. “Oh, what a web we weave when the name of our pub we  first conceive.” Dickens’ Pub is a knock-off, if not a rip-off, of the Port City Café and Pub, where Jerry O’Bannion was not too long ago the  Orson Welles  of  the Port City Players and the Billy Graham of Bible study nights. But the scuttlebutt is  he  had a falling out with his partners at the Port City Pub. Whatever the reasons, O’Bannion moved on. Whether financial irregularities  had anything to do with his having to move on  only his former  partners know for sure, but as recently as November 2009 he was taken to court  by Capital One Bank for an unpaid debt of $1,871. After failing to appear for the first court hearing, he subsequently settled out of court. The settlement was “without prejudice,” meaning Capital One Bank could take him to court again on this matter if he reneged on the settlement. It could be O’Bannion was a silent partner in Dickens’ pub to prevent his creditors from taking legal action against the new pub.

Since it appeared he  owned the intellectual property rights to the Port City Pub, which became a social, cultural, and political center where the likes of recalled ex-mayor Bauer had a ball, O’Bannion’s being  banished from it might have been traumatic. He wrote the play, so to speak,  and was the star player in it.  Rather than being a  silent partner at Port City, O’Bannion was the master of ceremonies,  conducting Quizzes and Bible study sessions. And then, suddenly, he was out in the cold. But he soon came in from the cold. Through his wife Vicki, the pub-less O’Bannion silent-partnered with David and Nicholas  Basham and opened  Dickens’ Pub. Having to settle for an English  pub had to be a comedown for a hardcore Hibernian, but there  is room for  only one ersatz Irish pub in Portsmouth. Along with Nicholas Basham, O’Bannion  counts himself a member of an imaginary “Irish Mafia.” Not to be confused with the  I.R.A., the  Irish Mafia is more Walter Mitty than Bobby Sands, more Private Tussie than Sergeant York. The fantasy life of frustrated public school teachers in Appalachian Ohio is poignantly made up of equal parts moonbeam and moonshine. 

Scrounging for Customers

  The dead-end location of Dickens’ Pub meant that from the start it had to scrounge for customers. One of the first groups it tried to attract was Shawnee State students. It  tried luring them by hosting a quiz contest between Shawnee State students and faculty. What a gripping, absolutely ripping attraction that must have been! We’re talking Shawnee State, people, not Oxford. A wet tee shirt contest would have been more appropriate.

One of the first Dickens’ Pub flyers

    Next. the pub latched on to the Recall the Mayor crowd, which consisted largely of disgruntled city employees who were afraid of losing their jobs. Instead of a quiz contest between the employees and the Mayor, the pub offered city employees half-price drinks. The pub was crowded but how do you turn a profit selling drinks at half price? Even David Malone, the mathematically challenged President of City Council, could tell you that doesn't add up. And are the proprietors of Dickens’ Pub  aware  the Port City Pub lost a number of patrons because of its polarizing politics and its proselytizing? The only  thing worse than having to listen to Sue Lonney karaoke would be to listen to Jerry O’Bannion explain the gospel. 

A notice posted on the Dickens’ Pub website

    The recent announcement of the  addition  of a Juke Box, a symbol of popular American culture of the 1940s, as well of NFL TV happy hours on Sundays and Monday, is evidence that those who foolishly opened an English pub in Portsmouth’s industrial wasteland  now realize that Guinness Stout and the Union Jack are not going  to do the trick. Marley’s ghost has to move over and  make room for the ghost of Howard Cosell, and Guinness has to bow to Budweiser.

A flyer recently put on the windshields of vehicles in Kroger’s parking lot 

    The latest word is that there has been a falling out among the Bashams and the O’Bannions, or a falling off since a ladder may have been involved.  Falling-outs, or falling offs,  seem to be endemic to ersatz pubs. An announcement recently appeared that there is a “new” Dickens’ Pub, and David and Julie Basham (David’s wife and Nicholas’ mother) are the “new” proprietors.

Give Me Some Men Who are Stout-Hearted Men

    As a sign of just how  desperate Dickens’ Pub has become, the most recent group  it has tried to attract  is the Shawnee State University Retirement Association, even inviting that gray haired group to hold their meetings in its premises. If the retirees accept, that would probably be  the first time any people in a bar have  followed Robert’s Rules of Order.  “I move we have another round of Guinness.” “I second the motion!” 

A recent notice in the Shawnee State University Retirees Association Newsletter

   An “Under New Management” sign can give the public hope that a faltering or failed business may be replaced by one that’s better managed. But is this really a change in management at Dickens’ Pub? Isn't it  still Bashams as usual? And won’t Nicholas be a  silent partner, even if, in his case, “silent partner” sounds like an oxymoron. The Secretary of State’s website still lists Basham, O’Bannion, and Basham as partners, and the Auditor’s still misleadingly implies BOB DICKENS is  the owner. Maybe the websites will be updated. But in the meanwhile the depressing  possibility  is that Nicholas Basham might someday end up as  mayor,  continuing the tradition of mayors Bauer and Kalb, those klutzes, who  drifted into politics after failing as a graphic artist and grocery clerk, respectively, and then served as the tools of our few multimillionaires, who have succeeded  like Wall Street bankers by capitalizing on Portsmouth’s poverty. The only thing I’m aware Nicholas ever was successful  at was suing his employer, the Northwest School District, where he is no longer employed. And now he is presuming  to suggest ways to  reorganize the health department and resolve the city’s budget crisis, bringing his experience at the badly mismanaged Dickens’ Pub  to bear on public policy? 

     Are we talking about a  bar or a loony bin? Will they next be inviting Seventh Day Adventists to hold services at the “pub”? If only there was a real Bob Dickens who could write a novel  about all this. Since it is the age-old  tale of  human folly, Bob Dickens might call the novel Nicholas Nicklepate, or, because it leaves such a bad taste in the mouth, Great Expectorations. 

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The Mayor's Not for Burning

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No Ire-ish Need Apply

Shawnee State University is currently looking for a new Security Chief. Twenty years ago, you could be pretty sure the job would go to some local white male with political connections who had the support of at least a few influential members of the Board of Trustees. At that time, Shawnee State was viewed as a Rife pork project whose most important function was to  provide jobs and contracts for  people in the Portsmouth area who had political connections, and the Board was the agency that dispensed the jobs and the contracts. For all I know, that is still the case, and who will get the Security Chief position may have been decided even before the search committee was formed. I   hope that is not  now  the case, and for purposes of argument I will assume that it is not.  If it is no longer the case,  I suggest the  search committee  exclude from consideration any applicant from the Portsmouth area who is Ire-ish.

Back in the nineteenth century, when Irish immigrants were as welcome as the measles in many cities in the northeast, Help Wanted signs would sometimes add “No Irish Need Apply.” I think SSU should have put up a Help Wanted sign that said “No Ire-ish need apply.” The word “ire” is a synonym for anger, so by Ire-ish I mean anyone who is in anyway involved in Portsmouth politics because you can’t be involved in Portsmouth politics without being, or becoming, very angry, without  becoming  very Ire-ish.  If I wasn’t Ire-ish when I arrived in Portsmouth twenty years ago, I sure as hell am now.  

Any applicant from local law enforcement agencies should be carefully scrutinized because those agencies are   extremely politicized  and the  chances applicants from them will  be Ire-ish are very high. Whatever advantages a member of a local law enforcement agency might have for the job  over outside candidates are far outweighed by the disadvantages. The political baggage that local Ire-ish candidates will bring with them will be so heavy that it will crush anyone it falls on. Ideally, a law enforcement agency should be free of politics. Unfortunately, that is not always the case. The Portsmouth Police Department in particular is more political than the Republican, the Democratic, and the Tea Party combined.  The Ire-ishness that infects the Portsmouth Police Department  will quickly infect the Security Department  at Shawnee State. Up to now, as far as I know, the Security Department at Shawnee State has not been political, but put an Ire-ish cop at the top and within a year, if not a month, it’ll be an Ire-ish  tag-team  that will make the Fighting Irish of Notre Dame look like Hare Krishnas.

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From the Ku Klux Klan to the Ku Klutz Klan

The Grand Klutz

What does the Portsmouth mayoral election way back in 1923 have to do with the current effort to recall Mayor Murray? Another way to pose that question is, “What does the Ku Klux Klan have  to do with the  Ku Klutz Klan, or the Grand Dragon with the Grand Klutz?” 

The Ku Klux Klan

In the fall of 1923 the incumbent, relatively young Mayor of Portsmouth, William N. Gableman, was running for a third two-year term. He had the endorsement of the Portsmouth Daily Times (PDT) which praised him for restoring the city to fiscal stability. His commendable handling of the city’s budget was  all the more impressive  because he  was opposed every step of the way, the PDT  reported,  by the  City Council, which  wanted to return to the  previous spoils system under which people were rewarded  with city jobs and contracts for their  political support.

How did the Ku Klux Klan figure in the 1923 election? Not long before the election the Klan  had applied to Mayor Gableman for a permit to  march to the cornerstone laying of the First Lutheran Church, at the corner of Grandview and Grant Street. The  Klansmen wanted to march to show their support for a new white Protestant church. If it had been  a new black church or a new Jewish temple, the Klan might have marched in protest. There was no indication in the news reports that the Lutherans had invited or would welcome the  Klan.  What the Klan  hoped to get by marching to the First Lutheran Church was some respect,  such as the Masons got when they marched to cornerstone laying ceremonies for public buildings. But like other  public officials at the local, state and national level,  Gableman considered the Klan to be an un-American organization that preached hatred and practiced violence, and he did not want to lend them legitimacy by granting them a permit to parade through the streets of Portsmouth in the ghostly hoods and robes that the Klan had  adopted during Reconstruction to frighten Negroes.

The  Ku Klux Klan  wanted to march to the First Lutheran Church in 1923

By the 1920s the Klan had become a powerful political force in Portsmouth and in many other cities in Ohio and across the nation.  The Invisible Nation, as the Klan  was then known, was at its pernicious peak in the decade, capitalizing on whites’ fears   of blacks.   In denying  the Klan a marching permit, Gableman incurred the  wrath of the Klan and their sympathizers in Portsmouth.  It is also possible the Klan and others spread the rumor that Gableman was Jewish, which he wasn’t:  he was Presbyterian. Whether or not anti-Semitism was a factor in the election, racism definitely was, and  Gableman lost  by an almost two to one margin. The Klan was victorious in   Portsmouth, Youngstown, Cleveland and other  Ohio cities,  as well as in states as far away as Oregon.   On the day after the election the PDT reported on the front page, “Ku Klux Klan Generally Victorious.” 

Remnants of the Ku Klux Klan are still in Portsmouth.  As recently as 1994, an estimated 400 people attended a KKK rally behind the Municipal Building. But the rally was a far cry from the 1920s. Of the estimated 400, some attended the rally  out of curiosity; some out of opposition to the KKK; but only  a small minority because they liked  the KKK’s message that only White Supremacy can save America.

 Ku Klux Klan Rally: Portsmouth, May 1994

Ku Klutz Klan

We know what the Ku Klux Klan is, but what is  the Ku Klutz Klan? Klutz is a  Yiddish word meaning a clumsy and stupid person. By the Ku Klutz Klan I mean those incompetent and intellectually challenged individuals, obvious failures in their chosen trades or professions,  who have gotten  elected or appointed to city government in the last thirty years or so,  and who, acting as the political puppets of the wealthy clique that controls the city economically and politically, have criminally misgoverned  Portsmouth and brought it to the verge of bankruptcy. The latest estimates from the mayor’s office is that Portsmouth  could be in a $5 million deficit by next year, leading the state to declare the city in a fiscal emergency and put it in virtual receivership, as it has already the county.

The Ku Klutz Klan includes the last two mayors, the failed businessman Greg Bauer and  the failed  grocery clerk, the clueless Jim Kalb, who was the reigning Grand Klutz prior to finishing third in the last mayoral election. The ranks of the Ku Klutz Klan also include, from my perspective,   City Clerk Jo Ann Aeh, whose husband Roy was a member of the Ku Klux Klan;  City Auditor Trent Williams, CPFA; Police Chief Charles Horner; City Solicitor Michael Jones; Ward Five councilman John  Haas; Ward Three councilman Nicholas Basham; recalled council woman Carol Caudil;  former indicted City Auditor Tom Bihl;  and current county  employee Larry Mullins, the sometime backup  to WNXT Motormouth Steve Hayes. The Ku Klutz Klan has diehard supporters outside of city government, such as Tim Arms, proprietor of the Ye Olde Lantern Restaurant; the kooky Ku Klutz  Karaoke Queen Sue Lonney who ignores Kroger’s no soliciting rule by pressuring elderly women in the parking lot to sign her   petitions; and of course the ex-mayor’s wife, who regularly receives a check from the state for a psychiatric disability, “crazy money,” as it is sometimes called, which makes doubly ironic the sobriquet that the  Ku Klutz Klan has come up with for  the gainfully employed Mayor Murray: Crazy Jane.

Determined to save America from Negroes and mongrel immigrants, the Ku Klux Klan targeted “Niggers, Jews, Catholics, and Puerto Ricans,” to quote the 1978 letter the Grand Dragon of  the Ku Klux Klan sent to Jo Ann Aeh’s  husband Roy,  welcoming him to the “brotherhood.”  Determined to “Save Our City,” urged not to be “screwed by strangers,” the Ku Klutz Klan targets Concerned Citizens, “domestic terrorists,” gays,  CAVE People, and the first female mayor of Portsmouth. The feelings of the Ku Klutz Klan are complex, including economic, social, and sexual anxieties that were bluntly summed up in the yard sign that warned during last fall’s mayoral campaign,  “Don’t be Screwed by a Stranger.” The corollary of that sign would be one that said,  “Keep It in the Family.” All the klutzes in the county are currently collectively engaged in an attempt to recall Murray for taking on   Portsmouth’s corrupt, incestuous political culture and for sounding the alarm about the possible impending financial implosion, an implosion  Tom Bihl laid the groundwork for  as City Auditor when he began  a system of borrowing-from-Peter-to-pay-Paul bookkeeping. 

 Totaled Recall

 Bihl is the klutz who, when he was chief of police, totaled two parked vehicles on Offnere Street and badly damaged a third before he was whisked away by two officers on the force without being given a breathalyzer test. The Scioto County Board of Elections on September 7 invalidated Bihl’s first petition drive, no pun intended. Having, in effect, totaled one petition drive,  Bihl is now working on totaling a second. It makes you wonder if  the Board of Elections should  give a breathalyzer to those taking out petitions, particularly since those involved  spend so much time drinking at Dickens Pub and the Lantern Restaurant. Maybe it would save the taxpayers of Portsmouth  money if Bihl was given a breathalyzer before he did anything. This second petition drive, in the unlikely event it is successful, will require a special election for which the  taxpayers will foot the bill.  As a klutz whose foot doesn't know the difference between  a clutch and a brake, Bihl's motto could be, “Damn the deficits! Full speed ahead!”

The Recall Murray campaign is being fueled by alcohol, with Basham providing drinks at half price  to city employees and Tim Arms reportedly fueling the petition drive with alcohol at the Lantern. It is fitting  that the campaign headquarters of Bihl’s Recall Murray campaign  is  Basham’s bar, but  booze is not the  antidote for Portsmouth’s  notorious drug problems. The war on drugs is not going to be won by half-intoxicated, half-assed  klutzes.

The Ku Klutz Klan has gotten not one but two permits for public rallies. The most recent rally, the second of its kind, was held at Tracy Park.  The weather was great but the rally fizzled, as will the attempt to recall Murray if it ever gets on the ballot. Whatever mistakes Murray has made, and whatever her limitations may be, she is not a klutz, as she proved in the successful race she ran for mayor against two klutzes,  and as she will continue to prove as Portsmouth’s day of fiscal reckoning approaches. The Ku Klux Klan succeeded in defeating Mayor Gableman in 1923, but I predict the Ku Klutz Klan will not succeed in defeating Mayor Murray,  because she’s an intelligent tough lady and this is 2010, not 1923.

Having fun at the fizzled Ku Klutz Klan rally at Tracy Park,
with Bihl holding a paper and the kooky Karaoke Queen to his left.





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The Dragoness: City Clerk Jo Ann Aeh

   Concerned Citizens Group president Jerry Conkle and CCG member Jim Wilson have told me that it is their clear recollection that on Wednesday, July 28, 2010,  Portsmouth City Clerk Jo Ann Aeh told  them, in her office in the Municipal Building, that  the deadline for them to return the  petitions to recall Ward Three councilman Nicholas Basham was August 20. It is possible there was a misunderstanding and that Conkle and Wilson misinterpreted what Aeh said, or that she was confused rather than  attempting to mislead them. It is possible, but in light of Aeh’s track record in regard to recall petitions and of her long standing, obstructionist  role in city government,  it is  more likely, in my opinion, that she deliberately  mislead Conkle and Wilson, and through them the other members of the CCG, by making them think they had a week less than they actually had to collect the required number of  signatures to put the recall of Nicholas Basham before Ward Three voters. The City Charter stipulates they should have had thirty days from the time they took out the petitions, which would have meant that she should have told them they had  until August 27 to return the petitions. For the aging and physically challenged members of the CCG, the lost week was a handicap they were not able to  overcome and they suspended their efforts shortly before what they believed was the August 20  deadline. In spite of being handicapped and having to walk with a cane, Jerry Conkle collected almost fifty signatures in the record heat wave. Jim Wilson, as a result of working many years installing and repairing heating and air conditioning  systems, has Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease, which requires him to always carry an oxygen supply, but he  did his best in the limited time Aeh led him to believe he had to collect signatures. 

What motivation would Aeh  have for  impeding the recall effort by Conkle, Wilson, and other members of the CCG? As City Clerk, Aeh serves at the pleasure of the city council, which can fire her whenever it chooses. A city clerk's employment depends directly upon the support  of members of city council, which puts anyone who occupies the office in a potential conflict of interest in handling petitions to recall council members. Aeh and every city clerk who succeeds her will continue to be in a potential conflict of interest until the charter is changed to insulate them from pressure from members of city council and other elected officials who are subject to recall efforts. In the past, Aeh did her best to bend the rules in favor of  council members Jim Kalb, Ann Sydnor, and David Malone, her political allies, when they faced recall. Aeh did for Kalb, Sydnor, and Malone, what she may recently have tried to do for Nicholas Basham: trying to protect his hide to save her own. As long as she is beholden to the city council for her livelihood,  such situations will likely occur. As Teresa Mollette wrote on PortsmouthCitizens.info, “The city charter needs to be revised to take the power of approving petitions out of the hands of the city clerk. This is a job for the county Board of Elections.” 

Judging by the website of Dickens Pub, Jo Ann Aeh has become a frequenter, if not a  habitué, of the pub, which Basham owns. Basham  offers reduced prices for drinks to those customers who can prove they are city employees by producing  their health insurance cards.  The irony of that little detail about health insurance is that  Murray has raised the hackles of city employees by calling attention to the high costs of their generous health benefits, which should serve as a reminder of the generous health insurance benefits the city council voted themselves back in 1990  (Ord. 1990-106), which caused one of the most bitter recall campaigns in the history of Portsmouth. If the term of office for council members was two years instead of four, there would be much less need of  costly and bitter recall campaigns. If  the term of office for the city clerk was not an open-ended, possibly life-time appointment, as it has been for Aeh,  but was rather fixed and not dependent on the city council’s approval,  then perhaps there would not have been so many shenanigans  over the  long period of time Aeh has been city clerk. There is a sign on the wall of Aeh’s office that reads, “Lord, Help me hang in there,”  but  some people might  feel  that  she has not so much been hanging in as hanging on. 

   Section 7 of the Portsmouth City Charter briefly states the ostensibly limited duties of the city clerk:  “The Clerk shall attend the Council as its secretary, shall keep its journal and other records, and make an annual report, giving a summary of its proceedings and shall perform such other duties as are given him by this Charter or which may be prescribed by ordinance.” Doesn't sound like much, does it? But the “other duties” assigned by the Charter include those related to recalls, which are stipulated in Sections 151-153 of the Charter. Those “duties" give the city  clerk a lot of opportunity for mischief, which Aeh has made the most of. It may be those “duties" that have enabled her to hold her job longer than any other city employee. Through manipulation, if not  malfeasance, she has, in my opinion, helped keep corrupt political officials in office by obstructing citizens’ attempts to remove them by means of the recall. Would she have been collecting a paycheck  for a quarter of a century without conducting a kind of protection racket for corrupt cronies, and especially for those members of the city council, without whose good will she would long ago have been replaced? The political life of  most public office holders in Portsmouth, especially with all the recalls, has been as short as a fruit fly’s, but  for Aeh it has been as long as a turtle’s.   

Aeh’s Illegal Removal of  Names from Recall Petitions 

   Aeh’s abuse of the office of city clerk was evident in 1996, when she illegally removed names from petitions whose purpose was to recall First Ward council woman Ann Sydnor and Fourth Ward councilman Jim Kalb. In a decision handed down on  September 11, 1997, the Ohio Supreme Court ruled that “Aeh had clear legal duty under Sections 151 and 152 of the Portsmouth Charter to certify as sufficient the recall petitions relating to the First and Fourth Ward council members. The petitions had the requisite number of signatures to be sufficient. Aeh was not entitled to remove signatures from the petitions after filing. In addition, relators have established a clear legal right to this certification, and they have no adequate remedy in the ordinary course of law. Based on the foregoing, we grant a writ of mandamus compelling Aeh to certify the recall petitions seeking the removal of First and Fourth Ward Council Members Sydnor and Kalb as sufficient and to notify these council members pursuant to Section 152 of the Portsmouth Charter. In addition, we grant relators’ request for attorney fees and order relators’ counsel to submit a bill and documentation in support of the request for attorney fees, in accordance with the guidelines set forth in DR 2-106” [italics added]. Aeh was caught in the act and the city  had to pay for it. 

   More recently, it was  not just the recall of Basham  that Aeh may have helped sabotage by supplying misinformation to Conkle and Wilson. She has also either deliberately or, perhaps as a consequence of her advancing years, inadvertently made a mess of  the public records she has the responsibility for creating, keeping track of, and  preserving. Legal action soon may be initiated against her and other city officials for their failure to produce public records requested by citizens. The fines mandated by state law for failing to produce each public record can really add up, so the cost to the city for Aeh’s failure to create, preserve, and produce public records requests  could run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines. The Columbus Dispatch carried a story recently about huge financial penalties being imposed on public officials in northern Ohio who failed to comply with requests for public records. With all its other financial problems, Portsmouth may be furthered burdened with having to pay large penalties for the failure of Aeh and other officials to comply with requests for public documents. Possibly, some  records cannot be produced  because they have been destroyed, in violation of state law.

  

      On August 30, Corey Columbo, an attorney from the Columbus-based  McTigue Law Group,  representing Mayor Murray, filed a challenge to the petitions that have been filed with Aeh for the recall of the mayor. McTigue himself  represented Damon Fite and  the Concerned Citizens who successfully challenged the legality of Aeh’s removal of signatures from recall petitions back in 1996. Just as Aeh can abuse the powers of her office to frustrate those seeking to recall  her political cronies, she can abuse those same powers to abet petitioners who are trying to recall a political enemy from office, in this case Mayor Murray.  Whether or not she shortchanged Concerned Citizens a week, she extended the time the Recall Murray Campaign had to collect signatures, as she is allowed to do by the Charter.  Columbo has compiled fifteen objections to the petitions for the recall of Murray, most of which appear to put Aeh right at ground zero of the legal mess that is unfolding over the recall of Murray. Columbo explained that the McTigue Group deals almost exclusively with election disputes, and it was evident at the Election Board meeting on August 30 that the recall of Murray looks very shaky legally. In spite of bluster from the Election Board chairman Rodney Barnett, the rest of the Board seemed chastened by Columbos’ remarks to the board, and Sayre, the attorney from the Country Prosecutor’s office, admitted he was unfamiliar with protested recalls and would need to do a quick study of the subject, which, given the time frame he has to operate within, will have to be really quick.  All the confusion is not surprising given the twelfth-hour timing of the Recall Murray Campaign, which began when former indicted City Auditor Tom Bihl threw his hat in the ring, or rather, more accurately, put  his head  in the wringer when no one else had been brave or foolish enough to do so. Because of the half-assed, half-gassed way in which the Recall Murray Campaign has proceeded, with the Dickens Pub serving as unofficial campaign headquarters, it is not surprising that there are at least fifteen reasons why the State Board of Elections may rule the recall petitions invalid. I have seen McTigue perform before the Ohio Board of Elections, and I would not want to be in Aeh’s shoes, or Tom Bihl’s either, if and when they testify  before the board. 

Where Southern Hostility Begins

The snarling Aeh at a City Council meeting

   

Aeh became involved in city politics back in the early 1980s, when the city was in turmoil over the recall of three members of city council who were vilified and demonized because they were allegedly against a shopping mall, just as Mayor Murray is being vilified and demonized now because she is allegedly against just about everything she can be accused of being against. The hatred being whipped up in the campaign to recall her is reminiscent of the hatred stirred up in the South and Midwest against Negroes by the Ku Klux Klan. As recently as the late 1970s, the Klan had a presence in Portsmouth, and some first-hand observers thought the movement to recall the three councilmen in 1980 had the characteristics of a KKK rally. Marchers did not carry a burning cross but they did carry  a casket with the picture of one of the councilmen, Harald Daub, as I wrote about previously in “The Mauling of Harald Daub.” Daub is still the target of hate mongers. His house and automobile were pelted by eggs late one night not long ago, perhaps by those who had been drinking firewater earlier at a Happy Hour at the unofficial headquarters of the Recall Murray Campaign.

   Jo Ann Aeh’s husband Roy was reportedly active in the Klan in the late 1970s, and was said to be recruiting for the KKK among the employees at the state prison in Lucasville. In a letter dated April 29, 1978, the authenticity of which has not to my knowledge been disproved,  the so-called Grand Dragon of the KKK, David Duke, welcomed Roy Aeh as a new member and invited him and his wife  to a KKK national convention in Jackson, Mississippi, where there would be seminars on “how to stop the rising tide of the forces that mean to end White Supremacy.” The Grand Dragon concluded the letter to Aeh by writing, “You and your wife JoAnn are cordially invited to be with us in this great crusade.” The letter specifies who the great crusade was against:  “Niggers, Jews, Catholics, and Puerto Ricans.”   I am not suggesting Jo Ann Aeh was a member of the KKK or that she championed White Supremacy. But of her political activities since 1980 it can be said, on the basis of the available evidence, that she is a supporter of the Southern Ohio Growth Partnership, the SOGP, which has had,  under several names, a stranglehold on the economic and political life of Portsmouth for the last thirty years. It is not the KKK we need to worry about: it is the SOGP, a so-called Community Improvement Corporation, and it is no secret who the “Grand Dragon” of the SOGP is. “Portsmouth: Where Southern Hospitality Begins,” one of the city’s slogans, perhaps should be changed to, “Portsmouth: Where Southern Hostility Begins.” 

   The hatred being generated in Portsmouth today is not against “Niggers, Jews, Catholics, and Puerto Ricans.” The hatred today is against “domestic terrorists” and “CAVE People,” that is,  against the community activists who serve as the watchdogs of local government; but the hatred is directed above all against Mayor Murray who has challenged the corrupt status quo as perhaps nobody has in the history of Portsmouth, with the possible exception of  the three councilmen of  thirty years ago. That was when  Aeh, not coincidentally,  began her political career, a career she continues to carry on, having been  transmogrified into something of a snarling, fire-breathing Grand Dragoness who not only illegally alters recall petitions but  who has become increasingly unwilling or unable to carry out her record keeping responsibilities as required by the City Charter. She has reportedly become irate when asked for minutes of various public meetings and contemptuous of the principle of open public records, or at least of those who approach her with public records requests. It remains to be seen how much snarling and fire breathing she will do before the Ohio Board of Elections, if and when she has to testify about the recall petitions. It remains to be seen also whether northerners will get a better idea of what it’s  like to live in the Deep South of the Grand Realm of Ohio.

Letter from Grand Dragon inviting Aeh and her husband to KKK Convention


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Update:  1:45  Tuesday, September 7, 2010

I attended the hearing this morning at the County Court House, where Jane Murray's attorney Corey Columbo made a thorough, meticulous, and convincing  case that the recall effort against the Mayor should be invalidated for numerous violations, particular and procedural.  The Scioto County Board of Elections agreed, so the campaign to recall her has failed. Let us hope this is the last recall over which Aeh will ever preside. 

Mayor Jane Murray: The Lady’s Not for Burning

Recently, I realized how far the hysteria about Portsmouth mayor Jane Murray had gone when I overheard an educated,  usually  mild-mannered Portsmouth gentleman who lives on the Hill blurt out angrily, “She’s a witch!” I thought, “Has it come to this, when not just the peasants on the floodplain  but the patricians  up on the Hill are out for blood?” 

Historically, those  who were accused of witchcraft  were almost always women, who  were believed to be  the accomplices and  sexual partners of  the devil, who gave them the supernatural  power to cause pain, injury, and distress by casting spells, performing rituals or simply giving somebody the evil eye. The belief in witches and the evil eye was carried by the Scotch Irish to America where it persisted in the hollows and hills of Appalachia. Vestiges of it can be found in Appalachian  Ohio and even, apparently, in cities such as Portsmouth, and not only among the uneducated. A woman with a history of mental illness, a  protégée of the ex-mayor’s mentally disturbed wife,  went around accusing another woman, a   critic of Kalb, of  being a witch. A friend of mine recalls seeing someone on on of the chat rooms call for the mayor to get her broom and fly out of town.

Puritan Massachusetts

Witch hysteria doesn’t arise in a vacuum. It doesn’t arise when things are going well. Things were not going well early on in the Massachusetts  Bay Colony, in the 1630s, when the conservative and radical Puritans struggled for control of the colony. The leader of the radical Puritans was a woman, Anne Hutchinson,  who challenged the Puritan patriarchy by questioning  the authority of the ministers, all of whom were males. Hutchinson was not accused of being a witch, but she was suspected  of a terrible sin characteristic of witches:  she was believed to be having a sexual relationship with the devil.  When she had a miscarriage that  resulted in a deformed fetus, that was all the evidence the  Puritan patriarchy  needed, for  “monstrous” miscarriages were believed to be common among witches.  A follower of Hutchinson, Mary Dyer, also had a miscarriage that resulted in a “monstrous” miscarriage, or devil's spawn, that was seen as  further proof  the two troublesome women were the devil’s disciples.

Banished from Massachusetts after being found guilty of heresy, Hutchinson  went to Rhode Island where she helped establish a new settlement, which they named Portsmouth. The  “Portsmouth Compact,” which called  for the separation of church and state and greater freedom of conscience, was a milestone in the evolution of American democracy. Hutchinson later moved to Long Island, in what is now New York, where she and her family were  murdered  by Indians. When he heard of her bloody death, the  Massachusetts  governor  saw it as God’s punishment of a wicked woman.  Mary Dyer, who had gone her separate way, converting to Quakerism, was  later hanged by the Puritan patriarchy  for her persistent heresy. In expiation, the Massachusetts government subsequently  placed statues of Hutchinson and Dyer outside the statehouse in Boston, where they were seen as martyrs to freedom of conscience.

Statue of Anne Hutchinson outside the statehouse in Boston

The radical spirit  of Anne Hutchinson lived on in the Puritan  colony. Historians speculate that the witchcraft hysteria that arose in Salem and other towns in Massachusetts early in the 1690s was a panic reaction by the  Puritans, who felt they were losing control of the hearts and minds  of the younger generation, who were espousing radical notions, such as rationalism and democracy.  New ideas were infecting New England, ideas of the European Enlightenment, which  challenged the blind faith of the first generation of Puritans in  everything in  the Bible, including the belief in witches. The  so-called  Salem witch hysteria was centered not in what we know as the seaport of Salem, but inland, in a rural conservative farming community, then called Salem Village,  now called Danvers, which was the Appalachia of  Essex County. Danvers was later  chosen as the site of the State Lunatic Hospital, which  had the  dubious distinction of being  the place where the frontal lobotomy operation originated.

Appalachian Ohio

Witches tend to pop up  when things are going badly, and things have been going badly  in Portsmouth for at least a half century. Mayor Murray is now accused of being a witch, but she was viewed as a witch even before she was elected, when  she was characterized  as a threat to “our town,”  as the  political sign on Kinney’s Lane (shown below) warned, even before she allegedly went on to  do such terrible things as ask for a renegotiation of public employees contracts. Most recently, Murray is  being accused of dissing  one of the most influential and tightly knit groups in Portsmouth, the bikers. The motorcycle panel  on the Flood Wall, from my observation,  attracts more tourists, on  motorcycles naturally, than any other single panel, so slighting bikers is akin to a Catholic spitting on the image of the statue of the Virgin or a Muslim hawking hotdogs on the Hajj.  

The  hysteria surrounding Murray is a reaction to the changes that  are  taking place not just  in southern Ohio, but throughout our  financially imperiled nation.  Many Americans  fear that outsiders will or already have taken over the country and destroying what  they believe God intended to be a white, Christian nation. The Tea Party movement is fueled by some of the same  distrust that is fuelling the Murray hysteria. SAVE OUR TOWN is the local version of SAVE OUR COUNTRY.  The distrust of outsiders in Appalachia is legendary, and the   incestuous character of Appalachian  politics only intensifies this distrust. The anti-Murray lawn sign that appeared during the last mayoral campaign nailed the  nativist  sentiment exactly:  “Don’t Be Screwed by a Stranger.” Though Murray is a native of the area, she is viewed as a stranger, as an outsider, having spent part of her career elsewhere, where she acquired strange attitudes and ideas, such as balancing a   budget instead of  robbing Peter to pay Paul.

 To put the  the current  controversy  about Mayor Murray in perspective, we need to go back to 1980, when Portsmouth was in the throes of a similar political hysteria.  The culprits back in the 80s  were three male council members who were accused of standing in the way of a new mall and the prosperity it was supposed to bring.  The precursor of the SOGP, with lawyer Clayton Johnson in the picture, had used the media to mobilize most of the town, even school children and ministers,  against the three councilmen, who were called many names, but because they weren’t females, nobody called them witches.

If  Murray is recalled, next in line to become mayor, in the  corrupt line of succession  the SOGP has arranged, is an evangelical serial adulterer who is a wizard with  figures. But, unfortunately for the fiscal future of the city,  they are figures of  the wrong kind. With his notion that Portsmouth can pray its way to prosperity, the next-in-line is more like the Wizard of Ooze than Moses. Last year, twenty  local governments in Ohio, and one county, Scioto, of which Portsmouth is the county seat, were on Ohio's fiscal emergency list and were being supervised by state-run commissions. Will Portsmouth become the twenty-first? What the media and the Portsmouth Daily Times  in particular is performing, with the assistance of a couple of public school teachers, is the  frontal lobotomy of the public so they won’t be conscious of the city’s severe financial crisis.  Alcohol, the anesthesia for the operation,  is being supplied by the teachers at a bar—oh, excuse me—a pub on Portsmouth’s blighted East Side. Once the lobotomy is completed, they will try to burn, i.e.,  recall,  the mayor. Where else but in Portsmouth could this happen? The hysteria that has been whipped up against Murray  may result in her recall, but the fiscal crisis  she insists on calling the public’s attention to  won’t go away, even if she does.

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The Problem of Portsmouth's Public Employees Unions

The flyer (shown above) that our heavily leveraged Portsmouth City Solicitor Mike Jones circulated during his campaign for that office shows him standing tall with representatives of the fire, police, and sheriff department. Jones stood  tall and proud for the public employees unions during the campaign, but he has stood shamefully small for the public, showing himself, in my view, a tool of the SOGP,  and a tool of the public employees unions,  as well as  a thorn in the side  of Mayor Murray, whose resignation he has called for. Jones is one of those city officials who it is not clear whether  it is his incompetence or his dishonesty that best explains his behavior in office.

It is unfair but  public employees everywhere, and not just in Portsmouth,  are stereotyped as  being overpaid and underworked. But with the likes of Jim Kalb toddling off on long weekends  when he was mayor to  motorcycle races in the Carolinas for senior citizens, leaving the city and its financial problems untended until he returned with another trophy of a third place finish to put in the display case in the mayor’s office (I am not making up the display case), what were the  residents to think of Portsmouth public employees if not that they were shortchanging the taxpayers  who were  paying their salaries? It did not help the public’s perception of Bauer and Kalb that their limited acumen—in Kalb’s case terminally limited acumen—was rumored to be further impaired by cocaine and weed: “Cough! Cough!”

There is no  denying that in the current economic crises there is a serious problem across the country with public employees and public employees unions. In Portsmouth, the  problem is even worse  because of the  relationship between our  public employees and our  corrupt politicians. To get reelected,  Portsmouth politicians have catered to public employees. They want to stay in public office and out of the private sector, where too many of them had proved to be failures, such as  the two previous mayors, Kalb, the  goof-off   grocery clerk, and Bauer, the out-to-lunch graphic designer. As mayors, both Bauer and Kalb had  been in  a  mutually beneficial, you-scratch-my-back-and-I’ll- vote-for-you-relationship with public employees.  Instead of serving as a serious negotiator, the city government, at least under Bauer and Kalb, had  rolled over  for  the public employees unions, making concessions that have now come home to roost. Because the city government is  restricted by law from how much it  can tax property owners, it has steadily raised water and sewer rates to help pay the generous  wages and benefits  it has provided public employees. Portsmouth  politicians have  been robbing the public to pay for  public employees. Because the  city does not have to get voter approval to raise water and sewer rates, those rates have served as a cash cow, or  ATM, to help pay for salaries and benefits  of city employees, even though state law mandates that that income should not be used to pay general operating expenses.

I am sympathetic to public employees. I was a union president for state employees when I taught at Shawnee State University, and I don’t agree with the view, especially among conservatives,  that only people in the private sector earn their keep because the private sector is competitive and depends on the profit motive. The view that employees in the public sector have little incentive to work hard because they  are not competing with anybody and are not making profits,  is not a view I share. I believe  public employees do the often  hard, sometimes dirty, and sometimes dangerous work that keeps our towns and cities functioning. (The military, incidentally, are also public employees who do dirty and dangerous non-profit work for relatively low pay.)  Public employees are the ones who have to deal with the the trash and  crime, as well as the  occasional calamities, such as forest fires and floods, tornadoes and hurricanes, and  they do it for wages that will never make them rich, in sharp contrast to  the denizens of  Wall Street who are paid very generous and sometimes exorbitant  salaries and bonuses without necessarily doing anything useful and sometimes doing things that are very harmful to the public employees whose  pension dollars they gamble with as if it were Monopoly money. The police and fire departments are to cities what the army and navy are to the nation: we could not live without them. But given the current economic crisis, which may continue for another five and possibly even ten years, can we afford to live with them?

The Reckoning

Because Mayor Murray has dared to put the contracts with public employees unions on the negotiating table and taken the position that there may have to be a reduction or at least a freeze of wages and benefits for public employees, she has been vilified in local chatrooms and insulted at City Council meetings. But other cities have already gone  much farther than she has.  A  recent survey by the National League of Cities found that  51 percent of the cities reported  they had cut or frozen salaries of city employees; 22 percent said they had revised union contracts and  reduced wages  and benefits; and 19 percent said they had resorted to  furloughs. Local and state government contribute to these grim statistics. As a state, Ohio  has a projected gap of $577 million in its 2011 budget. Cities in Ohio towns and cities are making or have already made drastic cuts in even the most essential of public services, such as the police and fire departments. Early in July 2010,  the mayor of Chillicothe announced five day furloughs as a measure to help with the budget crisis. Six years ago, even before the current recession,  five Chillicothe firefighters lost their jobs in an economy move. In 2009,  Columbus firefighters agreed to a wage freeze  and so did firefighters and police officers in Lancaster. “Every city of size, even if you're a city of 10,000, you're facing budget problems. The problems are pretty universal,” John Mahoney, deputy director of the Ohio Municipal League, told the Columbus Dispatch in December 2009. Last year, twenty  local governments in Ohio, and one county, Scioto, of which Portsmouth is the county seat, were on Ohio's fiscal emergency list and were being supervised by state-run commissions. Unless Portsmouth   takes corrective action, unless it takes its head out of the fiscal quicksand, it too  may join the other twenty towns and cities whose finances are being supervised by state-run commissions. In March 2010, an official at the Ohio Office of Budget and Management told  the Columbus Dispatch  that in spite of  isolated instances of theft in public office, the financial problems in Ohio communities are  more often the result of the financial incompetence rather the dishonesty of  public officials. We only wish that were the case in Portsmouth—that we only had to worry about   the incompetence and not also the dishonesty of our public officials.

New York Times columnist Bob Herbert has called the current economic crisis, and accompanying grim unemployment picture, “The Horror Show,” but Portsmouth public employees and their relatives party at the Dickens Pub, owned by Portsmouth city councilman Nicholas Basham,  like drunken passengers on the  Titanic, or like those partying  characters in Poe’s macabre story “Masque of the Red Death” who think they can escape the plague, the “red death,”   as  long as they don’t stop dancing. That’s like the public employees at the Dickens Pub thinking  they  can escape the unemployment line as long as they don’t stop drinking.

Guerilla Warfare

Because she has taken  on the public employees unions, Murray  has become the target of disgruntled  city employees. Encouraged by their  political allies in city government—council members John Haas and Nicholas Basham; City Solicitor Michael Jones; and City Clerk Joanne Aeh—disgruntled city employees are waging a kind of guerilla warfare against her.  They are sniping at her on local websites and spreading  lies and attempting to sabotage municipal services and functions. Just try to get a response for a public records request from City Solicitor Jones. I wrote in an earlier blog about  SLAPPING,    an acronym standing for  Strategic  Litigation Against Public Participation, or “How to Silence Your Critics by Using the Threat of Lawsuits.” Mike Mearan  attempted to silence me by initiating legal action he never intended to follow through on. Murray’s disgruntled public employees are engaged in a form of SLAPPing, bringing as many lawsuits as they can  to overwhelm he r with legal problems and prevent her from making the personnel cuts she thinks are necessary for the city to avoid bankruptcy. If all else fails, they hope to drive her crazy. 

The health benefits and retirement packages for public employees can be an even bigger financial burden for city governments than wages. The  costs associated with police and fire departments are among the biggest drain on city budgets nationwide. Fast-rising pension and health costs are making benefit costs grow more rapidly than wages. Some cities are taking drastic steps where fire and police departments are concerned. Oakland, California,  one of the most dangerous cities in the country, laid off eighty police officers as recently as  April 2010; and in San Jose California, on July 29, 2010, fifty-one firefighters  turned  in their badges and gear after negotiations with the city failed and they lost their jobs. The city had asked for a ten percent reduction in their pay as well as increased health care co-pays and premiums and other health care coverage reductions,  but the firefighters union  would agree to no more than a five percent reduction in their wages, but the San Jose  mayor said these concessions were not nearly enough to balance the budget. In Maywood, California, a densely populated, blue-collar suburb of Los Angeles, almost all city employees, including  the police department, were terminated. Maywood city services have nearly all been outsourced. The Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department has a contract to provide law enforcement for the community,  at a big  saving to Maywood, which no longer has to pay wages, health insurance, and other benefits to local police. Chaos was predicted when Maywood let go about sixty public employees, taking the axe to everybody, including the police department, but the chaos and crime wave did not materialize. The headline of the story on Maywood in the New York Times was, “A City Outsources Everything. Sky Doesn’t Fall.” Sounds crazy, doesn’t it, doing away with almost all public employees?

As recently as August 3, 2010, the New York Times reported that more and more public employees  are being pressured to accept pay cuts rather than furloughs, which is a euphemism for  mandatory unpaid vacations. The mayor of Albuquerque  said, “When you’re trying to lower the cost of government while maintaining services, furloughs don’t do the trick.” The Times also reported that pay cuts are appearing most frequently among state and local governments, which are under extraordinary budget pressures and have often already tried furloughs, but have found, like the mayor of Albuquerque, that they are not enough to solve the financial dilemma. Mayors and governors across the country are pressuring public employees to accept a cut in pay and benefits, but nobody is calling their sanity into question as public employees and their allies are calling the Portsmouth  mayor’s  into question.  All of the financial crises in Ohio and the nation seem to have little effect on the public employees of Portsmouth. They want to help drive her out of office and replace her with someone who will continue to deny financial reality, and with the assistance of City Solicitor Jones, who is acting like the public employees’ puppet, those unions just might succeed. Who is the crazy one in  this situation, the mayor or the public employees unions?

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