Shady Acres

Before there was the Marting scam there was the Route 23 Viaduct scam. The Route 23 Viaduct consists of 7.868 acres located west of the Chillicothe St., which the city owned back in 2000. The property and money involved in the Route 23 Viaduct scam puts Marting’s in the shade; but the Viaduct never got the notoriety it deserved. Speaking as a private citizen before the City Council on 12 July 2004, Bob Mollette urged City Solicitor David Kuhn and County Solicitor Mark Kuhn to investigate the sale of the Viaduct property, but they did not and neither did local media. With the exception of Mollette and his wife Teresa, people who are well informed about Marting’s often know little or nothing about the Route 23 Viaduct property. What follows may be news for some of them. 

In the Beginning

According to a November 13, 2000 statement from the firm of Johnson and Oliver, which was in the thick of the Route 23 Viaduct scam, the city sometime prior to November 2000 advertised that the Viaduct land was for sale but received no bids. No bids on potentially valuable property that was located next to Route 23, the main road through south central highway? Why not? Because, according to Chief of Police Charles Horner, who did an investigation of the sale, Mayor Bauer and the developer Elmer Mullins conspired to keep rival bidders away by spreading rumors that the land was contaminated and that the Ohio EPA had mandated a cleanup. In fact, as Horner pointed out and as the OEPA confirmed to me, the OEPA has never done a soil analysis of the Viaduct property and never mandated a cleanup. Horner’s investigation, incidentally, was done not so much for the sake of justice as to save his own job, since it was known that Bauer was on the verge of firing him. Once Bauer was recalled, the Viaduct became a dead issue for Horner, just as the Marting scam did. 

The city put the Viaduct land up for sale a second time, placing an official notice in the Portsmouth Daily Times, on 18 November, 2000, calling for bids and setting a minimum of $60,000 for the nearly eight acres. The city was offering the land on the condition that within eight months the purchaser would construct a ten-thousand-square-foot building that would hire two hundred full- and part-time employees. Bauer even pronounced publicly there would be four hundred employees. The notice did not specify what the ratio of full-time to part-time employees would be, a glaring loophole, especially since the business that eventually occupied the building hired a lot of part-timers. The notice included boiler plate language that the employees who would work in the new business would not be discriminated against because of race, color, religion, sex or national origin. It might also have stipulated that employees with criminal records would not be discriminated against, either, because I have been told the business hired more than its share of shady characters with records. If a felony was not a requirement for working in the new business, it apparently was not a hindrance either.

Cleaning Up

Most importantly, the 18 November 2000 notice in the Daily Times further stipulated that “the buyer of the property shall accept all responsibility for any environmental cleanup of the site or the obtaining of clearance from Federal or Ohio EPA which may be required [italics added], and must indemnify and hold the City of Portsmouth harmless from such liability.” No stipulation in the notice would become more controversial than the one related to the issue of contamination.

Several questions should have been but weren’t asked about the city’s official notice, which incidentally has some glaring mistakes, including a sentence that asserted the city would sell the land to the lowest bidder! Why was the city trying to sell property that might be contaminated? Why didn’t the city test the soil or better still why didn’t it ask the Ohio EPA to do it? Why leave it up to the purchaser to make the determination of whether a cleanup or OK from the OEPA “may be required”? Why leave so vital a question to be answered by a private party? Why let the two hundred, or four hundred, employees in the ten-thousand-square-foot building and hundreds of potential employees in other establishments work on a site that might be contaminated? The answer, Chief Horner said, was that Bauer and Mullins sought to discourage other buyers from bidding on the property by spreading the rumor it was contaminated and that the OEPA had ordered a cleanup. By spreading the rumor, Bauer made a sweetheart deal possible for Mullins, who ended up paying the minimum dirt-cheap price of $60,000 for the potentially valuable land. The Ohio EPA never mandated a clean up of the Viaduct, but Mayor Bauer had mandated that Mullins would clean up financially.

One of the striking similarities between the Marting and the Route 23 Viaduct scam was the way in which Bauer hurried up the sale of the property on the grounds that there was an emergency. In a memo dated 2 March 2001, Bauer asked the City Clerk to call a special meeting of the Portsmouth City Council so that it could grant him the authority to sell the Viaduct land, declaring that sale “to be an emergency.” The memo does not explain what the emergency was, but it was probably Bauer’s need to close the deal before the public learned he was in the process of committing the first of the two real estate frauds for which his administration would become infamous, the second of which, the sale of the Marting’s building to the city, would lead to his being recalled from office by a two to one margin.

Anchor Business

The requirement that whoever bought the nearly eight acres would build a ten-thousand- square-foot building for an anchor business that would provide two hundred jobs was the equivalent of requiring a prospective mall developer to provide an anchor store. Failing to find an anchor store for the proposed 1980 Mall was one of the things that put the kibosh on that project. The city should have required that Mullins bring in a business that provided good jobs, in manufacturing or retail, but it didn’t. In a revealing comment at a Portsmouth City Council meeting on 21 Sept. 2004, councilman Howard Baughman, the mayor-in-waiting, said about the proposed Aluminastics company plan for building a plant near Route 23 that it was “not anything like the viaduct property.” The Aluminastics plan, Baughman explained, unlike the Route 23 Viaduct, was “not a developmental venture for entertainment, restaurants and other things. This is about manufacturing jobs which any city in the Midwest would drool over with jobs that would be quality pay.” In other words, after Route 23 was the done deal that he was partly responsible for foisting on the city, Baughman admitted that it was not best use of the land after all. The jobs at the Route 23 Viaduct establishments would be of the minimum-wage, service-sector variety, filled largely by young low-paid part-time employees, hamburger flippers, ticket takers, and telemarketers, with a high turn-over ratio, not the kind of work force that could be expected to help turn Portsmouth’s economy around. But if the employees at the Viaduct establishments make low wages, Mullins and the owners of the businesses who bought land from him, make good profits, perhaps even profits high enough to drool over.

Low Wages, High Profits

Take note of what price tag the Scioto County Auditor puts on the property that was subsequently built on the Route 23 Viaduct, for which Mullins paid only $60,000. The County Auditor lists the Portsmouth Cinemas at $1,820,630; the Telemarketing operation at $899,710; Salmons State Farm Insurance, $458,530; Buffalo Wild Wings, $334,430, and Dairy Queen, $140,750. The value of the new sub shop Penn Station has not yet been established by the County Auditor. The value put on the businesses in the Route 23 Viaduct by the county auditor is in the neighborhood of $4,000,000, and counting, because not all of the nearly eight acres has been developed. The estimated value the County Auditor puts on property is traditionally below market value, so the property may be worth substantially more than $4,000,000, and Mullins, without much regard to greenery or appearance, has not done selling off every inch of it. How much money has Mullins made on his $60,000 investment? Maybe only his accountant and the IRS know, but if the related Mullins Construction company has also profited from the construction on the site, it could be much more than whatever Elmer Mullins made selling the land.

The scandalous footnote to all this is that every single business in the Route 23 Viaduct is abated. Nobody is paying a dime of taxes and won’t for years. Marty Mohr said at a January 2004 City Council meeting, “We cannot continue to give tax exemptions to companies within our district. A smaller percent of the people are picking up the tab.” He went on to say that the city had given so many tax credits during the past four to five years that he didn’t feel the city could afford another exemption. I am not aware that Mohr or any other council member did anything to stop the abatements for businesses in the Viaduct, even though they are glaring examples of unwarranted abatements. Some abatements make sense, but they have metastasized in Portsmouth’s economy. Whether they deserve an abatement or not, almost every new business gets one, which means the money the city needs for schools and other essential operations is just not there. What incentives do businesses need for building at the Route 23 Viaduct, with its advantageous location? The Viaduct property, to use one of Mayor Kalb’s expressions for another scam-in-the-making, the Municipal building site, is “prime real estate.” Bauer estimated that initially 1600 vehicles would go on and off the Viaduct every day. Five years later, let’s say that number is around 2000, which would mean annually 730,000 automobiles, many of which would have more than one passenger. At a minimum, that’s a million potential customers a year. Did the city need to give tax free status for from ten to fifteen years to attract businesses to the Viaduct? I very much doubt it, but when it comes to money the city of Portsmouth is like a drunk that every business knows it can roll. 

Even the new downtown office building that Clayton Johnson built in 2004 was abated, setting an example for the Dairy Queens and Buffalo Wild Wings of the world to follow. If the man reputed to be the richest lawyer in Portsmouth, and who claims to be always doing what is best for the city, won’t pay his fair share of taxes, why should businesses that have no roots in the community? The big profits alone should have been enough incentive at the Viaduct, but there were other perks. Because of Bauer’s lies, the city had to pick up the $125,000 tab for the traffic light at the entrance to the Viaduct. Bauer claimed that a traffic light in that location had been mandated by the state, and therefore the city and county were obligated to pay for it, which was no truer than his claim that the OEPA had mandated a toxic cleanup of the site. The traffic light was just one more plum in Mullins’s pie.

“A Rotten Organization”

The two-hundred-employee business that Mullins provided turned out to be a franchise of the notorious telemarketing company Civic Development Group (CDG). Public relations firms get paid big money to come up with these euphemistic or fraudulent names: Civic Development Group! How about Con Artists Consolidated or Royal Rip-Offs, Inc. Telemarketing is now what pocket picking was in the past. Owning the ten-thousand-square-foot building that it occupies, Mullins became a partner in the Portsmouth CDG telemarketing business. This was not a new business and these were not new jobs. The CDG had first come to Portsmouth in 1995, occupying the old GTE building, on Albert St. The home offices of the CDG are in in New Jersey, in Tony Soprano territory. A longtime employee of the Civic Development Group operation in Portsmouth told me he had heard from fellow employees that the New Jersey Mafia were possibly in control of the CDG, which at that time had thirty-seven offices in the United States. “It is a shame,” a veteran telemarketer who had worked for the CDG commented on the website RipOffReport.com, (a whistle-blowing website), that through the CDG, “police and fire organizations get in bed with mafia types such as these.”

A former employee of the CDG, who identified himself as “Ted, from Canton, Ohio,” wrote a revealing exposé of the Canton CDG in RipOffReport. He wrote “that telemarketers often skirt the edge of taste, ethics, and manners. However, Civic Development Group, aka Millenium Teleservices, aka CDG Management, is a particularly rotten organization from both an employee as well as the public’s perspective.” Ted pointed out that most of CDG’s profits come from telephone solicitation for charities, especially for donations for state troopers’ associations. Ted said CDG’s employees were encouraged to create the impression that it was actually a state police officer who was making the call. As long ago as 5 June 1998, the Federal Trade Commission charged CDG with fraudulently claiming that money collected for the police would go for bullet proof vests and death benefits for the families of officers killed in the line of duty. In fact, most money collected by CDG for the police never went to the police.

As recently as November 2007, Channel 5 in Cleveland exposed the telemarketing scam of the CDG operation in Canton involving disabled veterans. Of every dollar raised for disabled veterans, the CDG kept eighty-seven cents and gave thirteen to a phony front organization called Disabled Veterans Association. Contributors thought they were giving to the Disabled American Veterans, a legitimate charity. In its reporting on that same story, on 19 November 2007, the Columbus Dispatch published an article headed “Troopers’ Fundraising Company Scrutinized,” which revealed that only a small fraction of the money the Ohio Trooper Coalition raised went to kids. “Most of the rest of the money went into the pockets of Civic Development Group LLC, a New Jersey Company that’s now being sued by the Ohio attorney general’s offices over its fundraising practices for the troopers’ group . . .” A watchdog group on charities put the Ohio Trooper Coalition on its Top Ten Ebenezer Scrooge list when it comes to giving to charity. If OTC skimps on charity, it doesn’t on salary. It paid its executive director $90,000 in 2004 for working a twenty hour week. Do you recall reading about any of this in the Portsmouth Daily Times? Jeff Barron was recently fired and blacklisted in Scioto County for daring to report that a Glockner Motors employee was arrested for dealing drugs. Imagine what they would have done to him if he had dare investigate Portsmouth’s CDG operation? They might have fished him out of the Ohio River.

As someone who has received more than one call from the CDG, I know how their solicitors try to awe, confuse, and intimidate a “mark,” a slang term for a gullible victim of a con artist. I wrote a blog recently about how the marketing firm KaBoom! exploits the love people have for children. The CDG exploits the respect and fear people have for law enforcement. The police associations and unions, unfortunately, have been all too willing to enter into this unsavory relationship with an operation with reputed criminal ties since they get their cut, small as it is, without doing anything except letting their reputation be smirched.

Ted of Canton revealed that the CDG likes to establish franchises “in small, down-on-their-luck communities.” Well, Portsmouth certainly qualifies on that score. The CDG finds depressed communities in Appalachia ripe for picking, or for telemarketing. Such communities are so grateful to have any company offer them any kind of jobs, even low-paying and shady ones, that they don’t look a gift horse in the mouth. CDG franchisers find it easier to hire employees in depressed communities where unemployment is high or where there is a pool of students, who will work for low hourly wages. But since they have some education, students can be a problem. Most of what I learned about the Portsmouth CDG came from students. Ted says the CDG prefers "the desperate, uneducated, and those least likely to question what they do.” They also seem to have a weakness for those with criminal backgrounds, according to my sources at the Portsmouth CDG, which literally went after street people, advertising by pasting notices on telephone poles.

Drive-by Shooting

An experience I had several years ago with CDG revealed to me what a fishy business it is. I was driving through the Route 23 Viaduct on my way to the Adelphia Cable office, which was then located in the wasteland behind the Viaduct, next to the railroad tracks. On my way to the Adelphia office, I stopped, got out of my car, a good distance from the CDG building, and took a photo of it. It couldn’t have taken more than a few seconds. I have taken hundreds of photos of buildings in Portsmouth, so I wasn’t doing anything unusual. As a matter of fact, when I got to the Adelphia building, which looked like a fur trapper’s cabin out in the wilderness, I also took a photo of it before entering to take care of some business.

When I came out ten or fifteen minutes later, I noticed two people near my car. One was behind it, taking down my license plate number, the other was looking through the windows of the car to see what was inside. As I approached my car to ask what was going on, I was told, without any apology or hesitation, that they were employees of CDG and they wanted to know why I had just taken a photo of the CDG building. Evidently, in the short time it had taken me to snap a photo, someone in the CDG building had spotted me, presumably through that big one-way window in front, and two employees were dispatched to follow me. I was to made to feel I had committed a drive-by shooting when the only shot I had taken was with my camera.

I had taught as a U.S. State Dept. Fulbright exchange professor in Communist Poland, in 1971-72. Portsmouth reminds me a little of Communist Poland, only I don’t remember, even though I took photos in Poland, ever being stopped and interrogated. My CDG interrogators were probably speaking with all the authority of officials in a police state. The CDG had close ties to both the Ohio state police and, possibly, to organized crime. I mean, why not demand to know why someone is taking photos if you have the police and the Mafia in your corner? But what do they have to hide, anyway? What are they so guilty about? Why become so paranoid when someone takes a photo?

I got out of that tricky situation by pointing out I was just a harmless old gent who takes a lot of photos in Portsmouth, which happened to be true. Well, maybe not the part about being harmless. I found it hard to believe that I had to explain anything to them, but what was I going to do? Complain to the state police, who were in on the take? Or to the Portsmouth police chief, Charles Horner, who has accused senior citizens like me of being “domestic terrorists” for mounting campaigns to recall elected officials? I was later warned by people who had worked for or knew something about the CDG that I better not get on their shit list, or should I say hit list. I was told by a colleague at Shawnee State of someone who allegedly had fled Portsmouth after being threatened for asking too many questions about the CDG.

No Call List

The telemarketing building now sports the initials OTC, which stands for Ohio Trooper Coalition. The OTC was established in 1984 “to assist in promoting the image of troopers across the state.” It also exists to promote the interests of state troopers, working for better working conditions and wages, the way any union or professional association is expected to. Most of the funds for the OTC, by its own admission, are raised through telemarketing. So the adoption of the Telemarketing Sales Rule, which restricts indiscriminate telephone solicitation, threatened to cut off the financial lifeblood that the OTC raises through telemarketing. In a 2002 letter to the Federal Trade Commission, the e OTC executive director lobbied the Federal Trade Commission for an exemption from the Telemarketing Sales Rule, but not on the basis of being a union, which would not have been a very effective argument, but on the basis of the programs the OTC sponsors for children. Remember the marketing strategy slogan for KaBoom!? It’s for the kids? The OTC is engaging in “social marketing,” emphasizing what it does for kids, not what it does for itself. The $90,000 a year part-time executive director of the Ohio Trooper Coalition wrote to the FTC, “The proposed amendment to the Telemarketing Sales Rule would more than likely diminish the funds that are presently used to provide our drug education program, B.A.D. (Bears Against Drugs), and also our Hug-A-Bear program to children.” The plea “Woodsman, spare that tree” is replaced by “Legislator, spare that child.”

The state of Ohio law restricting telephone solicitation became effective September 2003, but includes an enormous number of exemptions, (ORC 4719.01) one of which the OTC apparently falls under, because the OTC is still doing telephone soliciting, or having a telemarketer do it in on its behalf. The CDG previously did the telemarketing for the OTC. What is the role of CDG now? That is not clear, but what is clear from records in the County Auditor’s office is that Mullins still owns the building, so he may still have something to do with whatever telemarketing company is doing the solicitation for the OTC. Or has the OTC eliminated the telemarketing middle-man, the CDG, and is the OTC running the operation itself? That would mean the police had muscled out the shady New Jersey crowd in handling a lucrative racket.

Hmm, what's the name of that developer?

One thing about the Viaduct scam that needs to be remembered is that Mayor Bauer kept the name of the developer behind it, Elmer Mullins, a secret as long as possible, just as Mayor Kalb (shown here) is keeping secret the name of the developer who allegedly wants to buy the site of the current Municipal Building. Is Elmer Mullins or Neal Hatcher that unnamed developer? Why do public officials keep the public in the dark about the identity of the developer who is behind a major project until the last minute? Probably because it enables corrupt city officials to secretly work out with a disreputable developer the details of a dirty deal, and then at the last minute claim there is an emergency that requires the City Council to suspend the rules and approve it immediately.

In its seemingly permanently arrested state of economic and moral development, Portsmouth has looked for a half century to a mall as its salvation. Our local con artist lawyers and developers have grown rich perpetrating the Myth of the Mall. What we got instead was the Route 23 Viaduct, a “commercial park,” as Bauer originally called it. In view of the shady history of that possibly contaminated commercial park, I think a more appropriate and more easily remembered name for it would be Shady Acres. There have been so many shady developers, shady lawyers, shady politicians, and shady employees connected to it that it deserves that name. I don’t know, it has a certain ring to it, the same ring I associate with a call from a telemarketer. 

ToxiCity

Residents of Portsmouth may be eating chicken wings, drinking milk shakes, and watching movies on a toxic site without realizing it. Rumors began circulating about seven years ago that the ground under the Route 23 Viaduct site was toxic. Even though Portsmouth Mayor Bauer was among those circulating the rumors of contamination, the Ohio EPA (OEPA) did not test the soil or make any study of the Viaduct site. Portsmouth police chief Charles Horner conducted an investigation of the sale of the Viaduct property. In his report, he wrote, “On June 10, 2004, I contacted Chris Osborne, with the Ohio EPA, and she indicated they have no record of any environmental studies completed on the Chillicothe Street Viaduct property and after checking all available databases, determined they have no record of any mandate EPA Cleanup of the property.”

On January 30, 2008, Ken Dewey, who is the Manager of the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency’s Division of Emergency and Remedial Response in the Southeast District Office, confirmed for me that the Ohio EPA had never done an analysis of the soil at what is now called the Route 23 Viaduct area. (It used to be called the Chillicothe St. Viaduct.) What Chris Osborne of the staff of the Southeast District office did do was investigate the rumors that contaminated soil from the Coke Plant had been dumped at the Viaduct. Dewey told me her investigation proved that those rumors of contamination were without foundation.

But Wally Leedom, a Portsmouth resident and an editor of the Shawnee Sentinel, has been saying for years that the Viaduct is possibly toxic because he followed trucks that had been taking soil from the toxic New Boston Coke plant site and dumping it in the Viaduct area. “Can you remember about where the soil was dumped?” I asked him on Jan. 26, 2008. “About where the Dairy Queen and Buffalo Wild Wings are now located,” he told me. I double-checked with him on Jan. 31 about his having seen trucks dumping on the Viaduct site. He repeated what he had told me previously, and added that he thought he knew whose trucks they were. Because he wasn’t positive in identifying the trucks, I won’t mention any names. I asked Chris Osborne on Jan. 31, 2008, if she had ever talked to or heard of someone who claimed to have seen trucks dumping soil from the Coke Plant onto the Viaduct site. I was thinking of Wally Leedom. She said she had not. So her investigation of the rumors, no matter how thorough it might have been, had not included someone who claimed to have witnessed dumping on the Viaduct site.

In view of the controversy over the Viaduct site and the potentially harmful long range consequences of toxic soil on humans, I am surprised that OEPA didn’t do at least a soil analysis of the Viaduct. Before theaters and restaurants were built and before many thousands of customers frequented the Viaduct, hundreds of them employees on a daily basis, OEPA could have put the rumors about contamination to rest by doing a soil analysis.

In my unprofessional opinion, it is not likely the Viaduct is contaminated, but considering the stakes involved, is “not likely” good enough? No one can say positively as of this date that the Viaduct property is not contaminated. Because of the rumors about toxicity that had circulated six or seven years ago and continue to circulate, I have avoided going on the Viaduct property ever since it was developed. I went to the movie theater for the first time last month, but until a soil analysis is done, I will continue to avoid it. Harmful effects of toxic chemicals often take years to reveal themselves in humans. Because of frequent exposure, longtime employees at the Viaduct will, unfortunately, probably be the first to discover if the area is toxic.

I think the Ohio EPA should rethink its previous decision not to test the soil, though now that most of the area is covered with asphalt it will not be easy to get a good sample. On Jan. 31, I emailed a letter to the office of Chris Korleski, the head of the Ohio EPA, requesting the soil at Route 23 Viaduct be tested.

The Portsmouth Daily Times is not doing any investigation of the Viaduct, as far as I know. That could be because Daily Times reporters risk their jobs investigating controversies and scandals that the over-privileged of Portsmouth want suppressed. The two most experienced reporters in Portsmouth, Mike Deaterla and Jeff Barron, were recently fired by the Daily Times. Why? I believe because they know too much. Which leaves it up to part-time bloggers like myself to do the investigating.

Whether or not the Viaduct is toxic chemically, and I repeat that I think it probably is not, it certainly is politically and financially toxic. Chief Horner concluded in his report, which is available on Teresa Mollette’s invaluable website (under "Investigations") the sale of the Viaduct property by the city to the developer Elmer Mullins was fraudulent. Horner thought there was probable cause that Mayor Bauer and Mullins had spread the toxicity rumor to discourage other bidders, making it possible for Mullins to obtain the property dirt cheap, at the minimum mandated price of $60,000. Very little has been done or written about the Viaduct Scam, which got lost in the shadow of the Marting Scam, but I will have more to say in blogs to follow.

Slashings & Rip-Offs

After managing to avoid them all my life, I recently saw my first slasher movie. Like Pinocchio to the circus, I was lured to the Portsmouth Cinema, for the first time, by the critical praise heaped on the Hollywood musical Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. Roger Ebert gave it four stars and the New York Times, not given to stars, judged it a masterpiece. It turns out Sweeney Todd is a bubble blood bath of a movie, a slasher of a movie that arrived just in neck of Oscar time. With all those magnificently filmed slit throats, how can it not get an Academy Award? There is a masterpiece lurking somewhere in the bloody mess that is Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. The trouble is the potential masterpiece was left on the cutting room floor.

Sweeney Todd himself is a Dickensian hero with a psychotic twist. He is a bloodthirsty Oliver Twitch. “Please, sir, may I have more blood?” With a glint in his eye, Sweeney Todd dispatches dozens and dozens and presumably hundreds and hundreds of victims with a flick of his wrist, and they are promptly turned into meat pies by Mrs. Lovett, who serves them fresh, a rare treat, in her eatery.

What the Dickens!

I had not seen such an over-the-top Dickensian characters since I had been to the Portsmouth City Council meeting the previous Monday evening. Where outside of Oliver Twist will we find a gallery of more unforgettable characters than at the City Council meetings. There is lapdog Mayor Jim Kalb; smarmy council president Howard Baughman; “I Get No Respect” Vice President of Council, Rev. David Malone (to give our adulterous Second Ward Councilman his full and proper title); Police Chief (domestic terrorist expert extraordinaire and City Council bouncer) Chuck Horner; and, most notoriously and salaciously First Ward councilman Mike Mearan, who was appointed to City Council and then appointed Building Committee chair presumably because of his extensive knowledge of the sewers of Portsmouth.

Give credit where credit is due: Mearan is always willing to help out damsels in distress, such as Heather Hren, the drug-addicted, purse-snatching twenty-something blond he ensconced in a public-housing-project love nest and then selected as his left-handed stenographer for the Building Committee. If chairs had knees, Hren might have been dictated to indefinitely if she hadn’t been pulled over by the police and arrested for transporting Oxycontin from Columbus to Portsmouth in a sub-sub-compact that Mearan, (playing Bill Sikes, if not Fagin, to Hren’s Nancy) had rented for her.

Done in like Midred Dunnock

Johnny Depp who plays the barbarous Sweeney Todd, combines the sexual ambiguity of Montgomery Clift with the psychotic intensity of Richard Widmark, who made a name for himself in Kiss of Death (1947) when he killed an old woman in a wheelchair (played by Mildred Dunnock, shown here) by gleefully pushing her down a flight of stairs. How insensitive we Americans are when it comes to violence and how oh-so-sensitive we are, especially the evangelicals among us, on the evils of sexuality. I was struck by this parental advisory for Sweeney Todd that appeared on the Internet Movie Data Base: “The throat slittings are occasionally disturbing.” Throat slittings, mind you, are not always, not usually, but only occasionally disturbing. Could any parental advisory better express the lethal hypocrisy of American culture? “The throat slittings are occasionally disturbing.” These self-appointed guardians of morality have a keener nose for sexual transgressions than a specially trained German shepherd does for explosives. We’ll convert the Third World to “democracy” and consumerism even if we have to carpet-bomb the bastards to do it. If Widmark had done nothing more than given Mildred Dunnock a feel in Kiss of Death, the film would have been banned in all forty-eight states. And if it had been an old guy that he had given a feel, the evangelical Taliban from Idaho, Sen. Larry Craig’s home state, and members of the Catholic Decency League, might have put Widmark in its cross-hairs. Widmark was actually a good student, president of his senior class in high school, and planning to become a lawyer, but then he discovered a more lucrative career: playing a psychotic. When you come down to it, we are all Mildred Dunnocks, since our Dickensian crooks control local government, the police department, the Chamber of Commerce, the Southern Ohio Growth Partnership, and the local newspapers and radio stations.

Cut It Out!

I recently read a complaint in the Boston Globe to the effect that “Tom Brady is a disgrace to all Catholics.” As an ex-Boston Irish Catholic, I have to say that I find Catholics and especially Boston Irish Catholics a disgrace to ex-Catholics, and the Church a refuge for lesbian nuns and pedophile priests. In view of what has happened to the Church in the last twenty-five years, I think Catholics should take a vow of silence for the next thousand years when it comes to the issues of sex and morality. If Brady, the second coming of Christ, in cleats, and a Protestant supermodel become unwed parents, Catholics must not think the worst of him, especially since he is, obviously, still a practicing Catholic. At least he does not practice birth control when he is having sex with Protestant supermodels. As for Brady’s being an unwed father, what would you have him do, you outraged Boston Catholics, marry outside the Faith, begorra? Get over it outraged Boston Catholics and Catholic Legion of Decency. If you will not make a peep about the graphic throat-slashings in Sweeney Todd, not even the occasionally disturbing ones, then stop condemning Scorsese’s Passion of Christ and denigrating Tom Terrific, for Christ’s sake! Brady has had an audience with the Pope. Who have you had an audience with?

Angry Kalb Won't Slash Budget

Mayor Kalb has met with the president of the United States, but he has not yet had an audience with the Pope. The main business of the City Council meeting, on January 14, was the attempt by the City Auditor and others to get Mayor Kalb to cut the budget, however slightly, which he stubbornly refused to do, in spite of an impending recession. He refused to cut the budget by a dime because he has tucked in to it a raise for himself as reward for his incompetence, and he fears that that raise might be the first thing that’s cut. If Kalb will not cut the budget, there is no chance he would agree to slash it, but that may be what he will be forced to do if the looming recession is as bad as economists predict. Kalb did not get the big new SUV he wanted as his mayormobile, but he is determined to get a raise for himself as well as some $10 to $15 million for his new Municipal Building, which may yet turn out to be the 120-year-old Old Maid Marting building. When the current site of the Municipal Building is sold to the mysterious party who has allegedly been waiting for over a decade to get his hands on this “prime piece of property,” to paraphrase Kalb, look for another Marting-like rip-off.

My thesis, which I apologize for taking so long to state, is that the difference between Sweeney Todd’s London and Mayor Kalb’s Portsmouth is that in London the people get slashed and in Portsmouth they get ripped off. The ones who are doing the ripping off in Portsmouth are not a deranged barber and a crooked cook but some developers and lawyers, deranged not by blood but by money. They have managed to bleed the poor Appalachians of Portsmouth of millions and millions because, as Clayton Johnson said at a lunch at Williams Restaurant, according to Portsmouthcitizens.info, they are so ignorant they don’t even know how to set an alarm clock. I have heard of at least two failed Portsmouth eateries blaming their closing on unreliable and dishonest employees, and I was told by the scion of another local business that residents of Portsmouth, as employees, are for the most part, “not worth shit.”

Coming Attraction

In my next blog, I will show how the very ground on which sit the Portsmouth Cinema and other Chillicothe St. viaduct businesses was a rip-off that makes the Marting scam look like a humble meat pie from Mrs. Lovett’s eatery.

Golden Wazoo

On January 8, 2008, Ka-BOOM! announced the winners of the three $25,000 Golden Kazoo and five Silver Kazoo $5,000 grants in the Playful City contest. Portsmouth, one of the contestants, was not one of the winners. If our local news media reported Portsmouth’s failure to win anything in the contest, I missed it. You see, reporting a setback or something that’s wrong with the city, is supposed to be bad for the city. Instead we are told everything is wonderful, things have never been better, it’s progress, progress, progress, all the time. You can read all about it in the special Progress issue that the Portsmouth Daily Times is currently working on. If a reporter strays from that line, the line that everything is wonderful in Portsmouth, if a reporter doesn’t show the crooks who control this town in a favorable light, if a reporter disloyally shows examples of how our river city is not progressing, if a reporter shows how imperfect, how very imperfect Portsmouth is, he won’t be able to work for the Daily Times. He will be fired, like reporter Jeff Barron was. What we get instead from the Daily Times are unctuous editorials from the hypocritical Arthur Kuhn, the latest in a long line of short-lived managing editors. Just what Portsmouth needs, another Kuhn artist.

Somebody at the Daily Times or Community Common or WNXT, should have done a little digging and pointed out that the Ka-BOOM! Playful City contest tends to prove the wisdom of P.T. Barnum’s reminder: “There’s a sucker born every minute.” A city, as well as an individual, you see, can be a sucker. Contestant cities in the Ka-BOOM! contest had to jump through a number of hoops before they could qualify to enter the contest for those Kazoos. One purpose of the qualification trials may be to enable Ka-BOOM! to separate those communities that are likely to be able to follow through on their goals and spend the most money on building play areas for kids. In other words, Ka-BOOM! may be sizing up the potential suckers. The “Playful” grants are seed money, with communities being expected to raise considerably more to complete their play areas. The playground construction companies and building suppliers behind the Ka-BOOM! Playful Cities contest expect winning communities to spend much more than the grants they win, and they not only expect, they require the winners to spend their seed money, in the stores and construction companies behind the contest. Those are the requirements included in the so-called “guidelines” that Ka-BOOM! contestants must agree to. Contestant cities’ building plans must be approved by Ka-BOOM! in order for a city to become a contestant.

No Place like Home Depot

Home Depot contributes $500 to the $5,000 grants, but the $500 is really a gift certificate that must be spent at a Home Depot store. And the other $4500 must be spent at the designated play area construction companies. Home Depot’s $500 and the other $4500 that must be spent in specified construction companies are like “loss leaders” in retail stores. The store advertises an item on which it takes a loss in order to get you into the store where you are expected to buy a lot more other items the store will make a good profit on. If a winner must go to Home Depot to spend the gift certificate, it’s likely the larger amounts the winner will spend on building supplies will be spent at a Home Depot store.

And as an added bonus, Ka-BOOM! ends up not only with the names and email addresses of contest participants, Ka-BOOM! also ends up with the names and email addresses of the many more people who, in an unwise show of civic virtue, supplied their email addresses in voting for their city’s contest video. The fine print says Ka-BOOM! will not sell these names and email addresses to third parties, but it does not say it and the companies connected with the Playful Cities contest cannot use these lists for their own purposes. More spam anybody?

The Ka-BOOM! contest is a marketing scheme posing as philanthropy. Marketing is about making more money by selling more of your product or service. Marketing has been around for a long time and is now part of the curriculum in business schools and colleges. It is like a degree in fleecing. Marketing includes but is not limited to advertising, the purpose of which often is to convince somebody to buy something he or she doesn’t need and can’t afford. Marketing is as pervasive as the oxygen we breathe, so we are hardly aware how much it dominates every facet of life, not just commerce but politics, sports, sex, religion, etc. What are political campaigns but vast marketing exercises? What are candidates promoting if not variations of the two dominant brands, Republican and Democrat? What is religion in America today but a fierce struggle of varieties of the dominant brand, Christianity, for customer loyalty? What are the most successful brands of Christianity? The ones that promise the biggest bang for your buck. Do you remember councilman David Malone’s “Portsmouth: City of Prosperity” campaign, something he borrowed from the Ministry of Truth movement?

Social Marketing

In a new twist, marketing has evolved into something called “social marketing,” which is supposed to employ the methods of marketing but for the sake of the public, not for the sake of profits. Ka-BOOM! is supposed to be engaging in social marketing. A cynic might say – and count me among them – that the line between marketing and social marketing is a narrow one and is easily crossed. Marketing wolves can easily change into social marketing clothing. Count Ka-BOOM! among the wolves offering a bigger bang for your buck. How do you explain that ridiculous name – Ka-BOOM! – if not as a bigger bang for your buck? What an image to use for a kids' campaign, a violent explosion!!!

The name of the company that provided Ka-BOOM! with the idea for the Playful City contest is Shycast, which should be called Slycast. On its website, Shycast “claims to be a community of people and brands, working together to make great new things happen in the world of social marketing.” Notice, it claims to be “a community,” not a company, and its announced goal is not to make money but “to make great things happen” through social marketing. What “great things” are they talking about? “At Shycast,” they boast, “we see the future: brands opening up to their customers, and people becoming more able, interested in, and open to, a real relationship with their favorite brands.” If there is something missing in your life, it may be you do not have “a real relationship” with your favorite brands. Is Home Depot your favorite “brand,” is Home Depot your favorite building supply store, or are you still in a meaningless relationship with poky old Lowe’s? Win a Silver Kazoo and you might see the light, or at least enter into a real relationship with a building supplier. After God, Country, and kids, what is more sacred to us than “Home,” with all its meaningful associations. Social marketing is prepared to exploit our most sacred feelings for the sake of profits. We haven't just been screwed; we've been "shycasted."

Hot Videos

Shycast is a company that provides other companies with a marketing strategy to make money. One of Shycast’s marketing strategies is conduct contests that include videos as part of the competition. “If you have a hot video contest idea for a brand you love,” Shycast says, “tell us about it. Brands tune in; they can make it real. We'll be working in the background, helping them find you. If your idea gets made, you’ve been shycast, and you’ll be involved.” Most of the contests Shycast helps promote are not even remotely beneficial to society. Shycast does not appear to be involved in the campaigns to eliminate AIDS or other Sexually Transmitted Diseases, or smoking. On behalf of IKEA, an international home product company, Shycast came up with a contest for new ways of making a bed. “We’re looking for bed-making maniacs who aren’t worried about what Mom says,” the come-on for the IKEA bed-making video contest says. “If you mix and match sheets, have a special blankie for the Shih-tzu, or the craziest of quilts this contest is for you.” Or if you have kids who, in addition to being bed-making maniacs, are also overweight couch potatoes, get on the ball and join Ka-BOOMS!’ Playful Cities contest.

Embarrassing Video

The Portsmouth video that was entered in the contests is, like our mayor, who is featured in it, an embarrassment to the city. Hot it is not. Instead of featuring kids, the Portsmouth video features city employees taking time off from their jobs to have fun. Try to imagine how hard it must have been to get them to do that. Try to imagine how hard it must have been to persuade our playful mayor to tool around on his motorcycle as the helmeted mystery star of the video.

If Portsmouth was not awarded a Golden of Silver Kazoo, it was awarded a consolation prize for being the best stunt video. What does that mean? One definition of “stunt” is an “unusual or difficult feat requiring great skill or daring.” Another definition of stunt is something “performed or undertaken chiefly to gain publicity.” I watched the video several times. I saw no feats requiring great skill or daring. I did see something done to gain publicity for city employees and Mayor Kalb. Unfortunately, it is bad publicity. The technical skill and the imagination behind the video is also an embarrassment. Portsmouth has a video specialist who claims to be a professional: the owner of Dawgbert Productions. If this Ka-BOOM! video is the best Dawgbert can do technically, go to Columbus or Huntington to have a video made, because Dawgbert is to videos what Snuffy Smith is to grammar. Dawgbert was the official media consultant for David Kuhn’s recent disastrous re-election campaign for city solicitor. ‘Nuf said? Perhaps Dawgbert can enter a social marketing contest on the evils of marijuana. Perhaps he could make a video called “Potsmouth,” showing the harmful effect heavy marijuana use has on the social development of over-the-hill bikers. Perhaps, he could win an Up-the-Golden-Wazoo Award.

Charity Begins at Home

Rather than helping make profits for Ka-BOOM! and company, Portsmouth could have better used the time and energy expended fruitlessly in the Playful Cities campaign. If more and better playground areas is a high priority for Portsmouth, some public or private agency should have organized a campaign for that purpose and not allowed a marketer to make a sucker of the city. Such playground projects have been undertaken in the past in Portsmouth. But with our current crop of public officials, intelligence and imagination, not to mention honesty and competency, are in short supply. Foolishness on the part of adults should not be mistaken for playfulness, nor a clueless biker for a cool dude. We now have two councilmen who will not be rubber stamps for the over-privileged of Portsmouth, and a city solicitor who has taken down the “Out-to-Lunch” sign. The Municipal Building should not be a playground out of which employees come pouring to have fun but the seat of city government, whose responsibility it is to provide safe places for kids to play in every neighborhood.

http://kaboom.shycast.com/contest/1/?page=0

Seventeen Mohr Resolutions

In a revealing interview in the Portsmouth Daily Times (Nov. 7, 2007), Marty Mohr said a number of foolish things, as he so often has done in the past when he shoots his mouth off, illustrating the point that one of the reasons Portsmouth is in such bad shape is our local politicians are not only dishonest they’re also dumb. What follows are seventeen New Year’s resolutions Mohr might make to make up for his dumb and dishonest mistakes.



1. I will not say Marting’s is “an extremely sound building,” as I did in the Nov. 7, 2007 Daily Times interview, when I had earlier said, in an interview in the Columbus Dispatch in June 2004, that the Marting building “ain’t worth anything.”

2. I will not say “They [the voters] really didn't vote it [the renovation of the Marting building] down,” because every damn fool including one as big as Jim Kalb knows they did.

3. I will not say that the Marting referendum “didn’t have nothing to do with stopping the building or using the building,” when everyone in the city, including my crooked cohorts on the City Council, acknowledge that the referendum did do just that.

4. I will not say that the accomplishment I’m most proud of is that I helped “negotiate a settlement with the Richard D. Marting Foundation to return the building and $1.4 million from the 2002 purchase of the former Marting’s Department Store,” because that “settlement” was in fact the most dishonest and stupidest act of my political career and guarantees that I will be remembered as one of the most crooked nincompoops in Portsmouth’s political history.

5. I will not say that I plan “to be part of the decision making” process, because the man I hoped would enable me to be part of the decision making process was defeated for the Sixth Ward council seat by Rich Noel, who is going to be his own man on the council, not a stooge of Clayton Johnson’s.

6. I will not say that I am getting out of politics for my wife’s sake and then in the same interview announce that I plan “to be part of the decision making,” because how can I be part of the decision making without being involved in politics?

7. I will not make the City Council a forum in which I defend myself against adultery charges because council meetings should be for official business.

8. I will not say “Politics sometimes can be a little cruel to you and your family,” when it has been me who has been cruel to my family by responding to those adultery rumors, directly and indirectly, over and over again, in public, long after those rumors started and long after they would have been forgotten if I had ignored rather than repeatedly denied them.

9. If the shoe fits, I will follow the example of Second Ward Councilman, Rev. David Malone, who admitted he was an adulterer, asked forgiveness from the Lord and from his wife, and right went on speaking in tongues and acting like nothing had happened.

10. I will not “vehemently deny the [adultery] accusation on repeated occasions,” as the Portsmouth Daily Times reported, since vehemently denying it on repeated occasions suggests I have a guilty conscience.

11. Because of those adultery rumors, I will find some smarter way of saying what my wife would do to me if I did not get out of politics than “I will have to find someplace else to sleep.”

12. I will not say that I hope “to have the public comment portion of City Council meetings banned before I leave office” because I don’t want to be remembered as the councilman who put an end to free speech.

13. I will not say again that “Every progressive city in the country has stopped that,” meaning stopped free speech, because that statement, like so many other stupid things I have said, is without proof or foundation.

14. If I ever hold public office again, I will not act like a member of the government in Rome during the reign of Mussolini or in Karachi during the reign of military dictator Pervez Musharaff.

15. I will not butt in if I overhear “people who are interested in doing business with city” talking about the Shawnee Sentinel, telling them, “These [Sentinel] guys are crazy,” because those people who are considering doing business with the city may just decide it is me, not the Sentinel people, who is crazy, and that they would be foolish to do business with a city that has a loudmouth fool like me on the City Council.

16. I will not call citizens who take the time and trouble to attend City Council meetings “crap.”

17. To summarize, I will not in 2008, since so many Portsmouth citizens already find me an embarrassment to the city, continue to bring up the subject of adultery, continue to accuse my critics of being crazy, continue to lie about the Marting building, continue to try to stifle free speech, continue to call people crap, and continue to make a public fool of myself.

Common Sense

It is that time of year again, when the marketing of the Christ child reaches obscenely commercial depths in the annual materialistic Christmas orgy, and when controversies over nativity scenes in public places are ritually reenacted to pump up Christians’ persecution complex and to make the foxy Bill O’Falafel pump up his television ratings.

We have had a local example of the nativity controversy. As reported in the Portsmouth Daily Times (PDT) which has recently fired reporter Jeff Barron for telling some inconvenient truths about the over-privileged of Portsmouth, the manager of the Shawnee State Lodge, Bill Griffin, decided that there would be no nativity display this year. His explanation was that non-Christians had requested permission to put on displays to honor their religions, claiming they had as much right as Christians to do so. The PDT reported (6 Dec. 2007), “Griffin said he received phone calls from ‘pagans’ wishing to erect their own displays, and opted instead to remove the [nativity] display entirely.” Preacher Gary Chaffins of the Voice of Truth Ministry launched a public protest. Chaffins claimed that “He (Griffin) chose against Christianity.”

The controversy was resolved, sort of, when Gov. Strickland ordered that the nativity display be returned to Shawnee State Lodge and other state parks where they had been removed. As reported in the PDT (7 Dec. 2007), a spokesman for the Governor said the state is not obligated to allow other religions to put up displays. “He thinks we need to approach this with as much common sense as we can,” the Governor’s spokesman said. Merriam-Webster defines common sense as “sound and prudent judgment based on a simple perception of the situation or facts.” Strickland is both an ordained Christian minister and governor, so it is possible his decision to allow the nativity display and disallow “pagan,” or non-Christian displays, was based on both religious and political considerations. But whether religion or politics were involved, I do not think common sense, as the dictionary defines it, had much to do with his decision. Nor did truth, unless you accept “truth” as defined by Gary Chaffins of the Voice of Truth Ministry. The “truth” Chaffins promotes is rooted in an ignorance so deep and a prejudice so wide that it dwarfs the Atlantic and the Pacific combined. How can Chaffins or anyone else adrift in that ocean be expected to understand why the original decision of the general manager of the Shawnee to have no religious displays at the Shawnee State Lodge made sense – made not just common sense but historical and philosophical sense.

The revolutionary Founding Fathers did not intend that United States of America would be a Christian nation. They were not atheists, but they were not orthodox Christians either. Most of them, including Washington and Jefferson, were Deists. To return to Merriam-Webster again, Deism is defined as “a movement or system of thought advocating natural religion, emphasizing morality, and in the 18th century denying the interference of the Creator with the laws of the universe.” Some Deists were more revolutionary than others. Thomas Paine (shown above), one of the most radical and influential, wrote works in support of the American Revolution and Deism. His book in support of the Revolution and in favor of the separation of church and state was titled Common Sense. He closed Common Sense by saying to a religious group, “Sincerely wishing, that as men and Christians, ye may always fully and uninterruptedly enjoy every civil and religious right; and be, in your turn, the means of securing it to others; but that the example which ye have unwisely set, of mingling religion with politics, may be disavowed and reprobated by every inhabitant of America.” The setting up of a Christian display in a public place and the disallowing other displays is mingling religion with politics, which Paine had warned against. It is allowing one religion to claim that it speaks “the truth,” a truth which the state must allow it to promote in public displays.

Many Americans do not believe Jesus is the son of God or that he is their savior. There are many Americans who do not believe in Christianity. There are even Americans, a minority but more than you might suspect, who do not believe in God. I do not believe in ghosts, holy or unholy. I believe those who believe in ghosts have the right to worship ghosts within their houses of worship. They also have the right to put up religious displays in those tax exempt houses of worship. But I do not believe they have the right to put up religious displays on public property. That is a violation of the separation clause of the U.S. Constitution. There is no mention of god in our Constitution, and that was not an oversight. There is no mention of Christ in the Declaration of Independence, but there is, in the famous opening lines, mention of “the laws of nature and of nature’s God.” That is not an oversight either. To insist that the US was founded as a Christian nation is untrue. This nation was founded by Deists, who believed not in the Christian God but in “the laws of nature and of nature’s God.” Only a Ministry of Lies, not a Ministry of Truth, would claim otherwise.

A Tale of Two Fires

Lee Scott Summoned

Here’s a sad coincidence. On Oct. 18, 2007, in the ancient market town of Neath, in Wales, a beloved music theatre, the Gwyn Hall, built in 1887, went up in flames. The roof collapsed and the stage was completely destroyed. The theatre had recently undergone a restoration costing about 8 million in U.S. dollars and was scheduled to reopen shortly as a community cultural and performing center. The Welsh town of about 50,000 inhabitants was extremely proud of the theatre and many people cherished memories of having been in the beautiful old brick building on one occasion or another. The building was insured and local officials promised that they would rebuild, using as much brick from the old building as possible.

A month after the Gwyn Hall fire, as we in Portsmouth know to our sorrow, the Columbia Theater, which had been restored by Lee Scott at a cost of millions of dollars and thousands of hours of labor of love by Lee, his son Eddie, and others, went up in flames about 3 AM, on November 11. The roof collapsed and the stage was completely destroyed, but the damage would be at least partially covered by insurance, and Scott promised to rebuild.

Those are the similarities, but there are important differences between the two theaters and the two fires. The town government of Neath had backed the restoration of Gwyn Hall from the start. Nobody raised objections to the costs of restoration. Almost everyone recognized that the theater was an architectural treasure that would play an important role in the economic revitalization of downtown Neath. In Portsmouth, because Scott was not part of the clique that controls the city economically and politically, the clique that has never served their time, every obstacle was put in the way of the restoration of the Columbia. I interviewed Scott for The Recall of Mayor Bauer, a video essay I put together in the summer of 2005. In that interview, conducted inside the Columbia, he described some of the roadblocks Mayor Bauer and the city government had thrown up to stop the restoration.

Columbia Interior

Wires Crossed

In a recent conversation I had with Scott, he said the city back in the Bauer administration had rejected the plans he had made for rewiring the theater. A city inspector insisted that Scott do the wiring another way, even though Scott believed the plans he had were safer and in closer compliance with state codes. Whether it was more of the same obstructionism he had faced from the start or just the typical incompetence of public employees, many of whom owed their jobs to political connections, the wiring plan Scott had been told he must follow may have been the indirect cause of the fire, which probably started in the electrical control room near the stage. The city government had been determined from the start to stop Scott from restoring the Columbia. A couple of years after Mayor Bauer and other city officials had been recalled from office, thanks in part to Scott’s campaigning, they may have succeeded, in absentia, in achieving their goal. The fire may have resulted from the wiring Scott did not want installed.

The arson verdict was apparently based on trained dogs sniffing some flammable residue in the wreckage. Scott said it’s too bad the dogs couldn’t speak, because maybe they could have said that the inflammable substance residue they were smelling was very old. Like from the age of the Hollywood wonder dog Rin-Tin-Tin. Unless someone confesses, it is hard to believe anybody could be convicted on the basis of the dogs’ noses. Rin-Tin-Tin, who romped across the screen at the Columbia in the 1920s, would no doubt have been able to catch the arsonist in the time it took to run a three-reeler, but Horner and his CSI crew are going to need more time than that, and then maybe no amount of time will be enough. Only 15 percent of arson cases result in an arrest, and the odds are probably less than that for our local constabulary. Remember how long the Journeys were running a chop-shop/oxycontin operation less than a mile from the Portsmouth Police Station. Only when other police in the tri-state area got involved was that operation put out of business.

I dropped by the Columbia around noon, on Tuesday, November 27, to take some photos of the devastated interior. As I walked from the parking lot behind the Columbia, I saw a couple of vintage pickups and a dumpster in back of the theater. About a half dozen men were working to remove debris from the theater and hauling it away in the pickups. Lee Scott and his son Eddie were two of those working hard on the clean-up. During the early stages of the restoration of the Columbia, I had a number of times witnessed the two of them working very hard. Among the things that make the two of them different in Portsmouth is that they are workaholics, a rare disorder among Portsmouth natives, especially among those employed in the public sector. If there was a Workaholics Anonymous chapter in Portsmouth, Scott and Eddie would be charter members. “Hi. My name is Scott and I’m a workaholic.” Of course, Scott is also an ex-convict and suspicions have been raised in the city, if not encouraged, that he is somehow responsible for the fire. In a bizarre rumor, it was even reported Lee’s lawyer wife had been arrested for arson.

In Neath, Wales, after an examination of the burned theatre, fire and police officials said they did not know the exact cause, but said they found nothing to make them believe it might have been set. In a striking contrast, Police Chief Horner was at the rear of the Columbia early Sunday morning gruffly warning people who got too close that they were at a crime scene and had better retreat if they did not want to get arrested. Every fire is a potential crime scene until the cause can be determined, but Horner acted as if he was guarding a crime scene, and that arson was the likely cause. I don’t remember any police guarding Ken Rase’s office after the fire there, a few years back, even though there was reason to think it might be related to the Marting scam. I think Horner’s behavior on the morning following the fire might be a clue to understanding what has transpired since. I am not implying Horner had anything to do with the fire, though there are those who would not put it past him. I think Horner is an even more unlikely suspect than Scott or his wife. What I am suggesting is that when state and federal officials got involved with the investigation, they were dealing with a local police chief who was already inclined, if not hell-bent, on getting this fire ruled arson.

Why would Chief Horner be so inclined? Because Horner, like President Bush and General Musharraf of Pakistan, uses fear and terror as a way of maintaining control politically. A ridiculous instance of this technique was his labeling as “domestic terrorists” those concerned citizens, the majority of them aged 50 to 80, who were active in working for the recall of elected officials. If people think there are terrorists and arsonists in their community, they are going to give presidents, generals, and police chiefs every benefit of the doubt. Recall that one of the things Horner did when Mayor Bauer was rumored to be close to firing him was to accuse Bauer of committing a criminal act in connection with the purchase of the Marting Building. Bauer was recalled as a result of the Marting scam, and Horner kept his job. But since competence is not the basis on which Horner’s tenure as chief rests, he has to keep people worrying about public enemies and playing on paranoia. The cross-dressing director of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, was the master at this game, holding on to his job for 48 years, spanning eight different presidencies. He kept files on those politicians who had the authority to fire him.

Lee Scott has been a constant critic of the city government and of Horner in particular. Scott has accused Horner of trying to shake down downtown merchants by requiring them to pay $200 a month for extra protection. Councilman Mearan, who can certainly speak with authority on crime, was quoted in the Daily Times as saying about ten merchants, including himself, were paying $200 per month for an off-duty officer to patrol downtown. There is a name for such a scheme: it is called a protection racket. That a local merchant, Terry Ockerman, is being given credit for coming up with the scheme is no assurance that Horner had nothing to do with it, because that same carpetbagging Ockerman is a sidekick of Mayor Kalb, who generally does what Horner wants him to. And Horner wants to get Lee Scott, and the Columbia fire may provide the terrorist/arsonist angle he needs to work with.

I was inclined to suppose from the start that the fire was an accident. The odds alone favor such a supposition. The FBI report for Portsmouth showed among the many fires in 2005, just one them was ruled arson. The FBI did not publish any crime statistics for Portsmouth for 2006, arson or otherwise. Does that mean whoever is supposed to supply the crime statistics for Portsmouth failed to do so? Is that Horner’s way of cutting down on crime in Portsmouth, by not reporting it? In any event, arson is an uncommon occurrence in our otherwise crime-ridden city. The national arson rate is about half of what it was ten years ago, and over half of arsonists turn out to be juveniles.

Campaign of Harassment

The long campaign of harassment and intimidation against Scott has not stopped just because the Columbia burned down. Scott told me that the city has given him only thirty days to clear up the wreckage of the Columbia or it would be torn down. As much wreckage as there is in the Columbia, it seems it would require a little more than thirty days to clear out. Thirty days is what the city charter allows a property owner to repair a sidewalk, but the city granted Clayton Johnson sixty days to repair his. Johnson took his time in meeting the sixty day deadline, as I reported in a previous blog, but from what I could see on November 27, Lee and his small crew were working feverishly to meet the thirty-day deadline.

When I was leaving the Columbia on November 27, and heading toward my car in the parking lot, I saw a Portsmouth police officer approach Scott. He told Scott that the dumpster in back was in violation of a city ordinance. Scott told the officer he had called the mayor’s office the day before and learned he needed to give the city forty-hour notice before placing a dumpster. Scott said he offered to move the dumpster for forty hours, but he was told he didn’t need to do that. So he thought he had approval for the dumpster, but then the police officer appeared with the summons, which Scott holds in photo at the left. The officer said he was acting under orders from Horner. Whether or not Neal Hatcher notifies the city forty hours in advance for all the dumpsters he places on streets throughout the city, where they sometimes sit for ages, is beside the point, the point being that Scott said the mayor’s office gave the OK to his dumpster.

Meanwhile, over in Wales . . .

"Hail, Columbia!"

Columbia Theater, c. 1916

In the first half of the 1900s, movies became the most popular and influential cultural medium in the United States. Thousands of movie theaters were built across the country, many of them as dream palaces, with ornate and lavish interiors. They provided a hardscrabble nation with a dream of glamour, romance, and adventure, and the ideals of success and equality. They were like secular churches where we all worshiped at the shrine of the American Dream.

In the last half the 1900s, restoring old movie theaters became a national cultural movement. To learn more about this preservation movement, look at Cinema Treasures, a non-profit website devoted to saving classic movie theaters. The site includes information about theater restorations, photographs, virtual tours, message boards, a chat room, and a listing of over 9200 hundred historic theaters. Portsmouth’s Columbia Theater should soon find a place on the Cinema Treasures website whose online address is http://www.cinematreasures.org/

Americans attended church at most once a week. But even relatively small towns had at least one enchanting movie theater where on average, two or three times a week, and especially on weekends, most of the town turned out to watch the steady stream of movies Hollywood produced. Those films were not considered works of art at the time, but neither were the plays of Shakespeare in Elizabethan England. Elizabethan plays were a popular form of entertainment that appealed to all social classes. But when Shakespeare wanted to write something his contemporaries considered high art, he wrote the long narrative poems about classical subjects – Venus and Adonis, The Rape of Lucrece, and the sonnets. Elizabethan theater was the television of its time: it was a form of popular entertainment, not high art. The English-speaking world eventually recognized the value of Elizabethan plays, and the Hollywood films of the 1930s through the 1960s are now appreciated for their artistic merit.

The restoration of old theaters is partly a recognition of the artistic quality of the entertainment they provided to ordinary Americans, in a sumptuous setting, at relatively low cost. The heart and soul of a community is reflected in its art; it just takes time for a community to recognize what is, or was, art. We usually only really appreciate something valuable after we have lost it. The movies were a glorious art form in which Americans once excelled. In particular, the Hollywood musical of the 30s and 40s and 50s was a celebration of American grace, energy and inventiveness. Think of the teenagers Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland putting together a really great show on a shoestring and a prayer.

In 1908, the Forrest, Nickleton, Orpheum, and Arcana were the first movie theaters built in the Portsmouth area, and the Columbia, Airdome, and Pastime followed in 1910. What’s in a name? Columbia was an early poetic name for the United States. The Brits had “Hail, Britannia!” We borrowed, the tune, added new words, and had “Hail, Columbia!,” our first national anthem. The Columbia is the only old Portsmouth movie theater still standing, and therefore it is one of city’s most important architectural and cultural treasures, Beginning as a music hall, the Columbia featured stage performances and silent movies. Based on the name of the silent film on the marquee, The Prince Chap, the old photograph of the Columbia shown above can be dated to 1916. In the middle of the 1920s the Columbia’s stage was enlarged to accommodate vaudeville acts and larger orchestras. Guy Lombardo and His Royal Canadians orchestra was the second act booked after the mid-twenties expansion. In 1929 the Columbia installed the equipment for sound movies, the first of which was The Jazz Singer, with Al Jolson. An American idiom had come into its own; Americans were considered worthy of making movies about, in contrast to The Prince Chap, which was about upper-class English society.

Notre Dame Cathedral

The difference between seeing a movie in a palatial theater in the past and in a multiplex matchbox in the present is the difference between a sit-down meal in a first-class restaurant and fast food at McDonald’s. In theaters like the Columbia, movie-going was a social and aesthetic experience. In theaters such as the Laroy, which was built on Gay Street in 1926, the dazzling interiors had time to work their magic on the viewer’s imagination, even before the lights went down and the projector started rolling. In a country of immigrants and nativists, the movies were the shared experience that helped forge a national identity. In a recent tour of the Columbia, which is so much larger inside than you would think from its entrance, I experienced feelings similar to those I had over thirty years ago standing in the cavernous Notre Dame cathedral, in Paris. For someone of my generation, especially for those from the working class, movie palaces are like secular churches. This is where we fell in love with the American Dream, with Rita Hayworth, with the future, with life.

By various accounts, the Laroy, built for movie and stage productions, was the most impressive of Portsmouth’s theaters. It was torn down in 1973 to widen Gay Street. Imagine London tearing down the Globe to widen a street, as if progress was defined by the degree a society accommodates itself to vehicular traffic. All the other Portsmouth movie theaters, with the exception of the Columbia, have been demolished. The survival of the Columbia may have been a fluke. Because of the chronically depressed economy, it just didn’t pay to tear it down, even for another parking lot.

About three years ago, Lee Scott, a local entrepreneur, a very rare bird in Portsmouth, decided that he would rescue the Columbia from the wrecking ball and oblivion, but he soon found that he not only would not get any help from the city but that roadblocks would be thrown in his way. When Scott risked so much of his own time and money to restore the theater, the Chamber of Commerce locals must have thought he had a screw loose. How could anyone undertake such a project without a feeding tube connecting it to public funds? Didn’t he realize that the way to succeed in Portsmouth was to find a place for himself at the public trough?

In a letter he sent to all Portsmouth residents, dated June 14, 2004, then-mayor Bauer wrote, Scott “cannot obtain credit, financing or insurance for his renovation project as a result of decisions he made in his past.” Bauer spelled out what he meant by “decisions he made in the past” by calling Scott “a convicted felon who served multiple jail sentences for many crimes in the 1980s.”

The important difference between Scott and Bauer is not that Scott was convicted and Bauer was unindicted, or that Scott served his time and Bauer did not. The important difference between them is that Scott became a legitimate businessman and succeeded while Bauer was a failure, first in business and then politics. The reason Scott could not get credit, financing, or insurance was not that he was an ex-convict but that those who control the economy and city government of Portsmouth were determined that the renovation of the Columbia would fail. Scott is not done yet, and maybe the Columbia will fail, but based on what I’ve seen so far, I would bet the Columbia will rise again because he is extraordinarily persistent, as an entrepreneur should be.

In 2002, J. W. Kelley, a Portsmouth resident, wrote a letter to an online magazine Preservation. The heading of the letter was “An Ohio Town’s ‘Apathy.’” (Click on the link below to read the letter.)
http://www.nationaltrust.org/magazine/archives/arc_911/051402.htm

Kelley included photographs of two historic architectural landmarks: one of them was the Columbia. Here is what Kelley wrote about it: “The level of apathy toward historic buildings here is pathetic. We have one of the few surviving Columbia theaters, built in 1911. You would think that one of our wealthy residents would want to preserve this piece of history. Wrong. After it closed in the 1980s, it was empty until a Columbus businessman bought it last year. He is fully restoring it, and plans to use it as a live-music venue, but no one—not the mayor, the city council, or any of the many wealthy residents of our area—is lifting a finger to help.” What to Mr. Kelley a few years ago appeared to be apathy today looks much more like antipathy. But I think we are going to have a Hollywood ending, and the bad guys, the unindicted, are not going to do in the good guy. I hope to see a historic old flick in the restored theater. Hail, Columbia!

(For the words and music of “Hail, Columbia!” click on the following link:
http://www.niehs.nih.gov/kids/lyrics/hailcolumbia.htm

Election Reflections

• Why did City Solicitor Kuhn lose to challenger Mike Jones by more than a 2 to 1 margin, in spite of outspending Jones by more than a 2 to 1 margin? Because Kuhn made many enemies in his twelve years in office, and apparently other enemies before that, as an attorney. So deep are feelings against Kuhn that several people I talked to said they voted early by absentee ballot because they wanted to be sure that if they died before the election they would have the satisfaction of knowing their votes would count against him. I heard of a ninety-year-old woman who was wheeled to the polls by her daughter for one reason: to vote against Kuhn. What might her grievance be? Those who united to defeat him worked tirelessly and creatively. For them, this was not a campaign; it was a crusade.
• Some were not so much voting for Jones as against Kuhn. Jones will have the opportunity to prove he can do a good job as solicitor, but this election voters were taking him on faith because they had so little faith in Kuhn, who was the devil they knew.
• Jones was surprised at the margin of his victory. What he didn’t realize is how many enemies Kuhn has made, how many people he has deeply offended with his hypocrisy and outraged by his incompetence. Jones said he had no animosity toward Kuhn, but many of those who voted Kuhn out of office did.
• Now Bob Mollette will not be the lone voice of reason on the City Council, and he will not have to spend so much time trying to get the City Solicitor to do what he is supposed to do. After his defeat, Kuhn had no comment when contacted by the PDT. At least they were able to contact him, which was not always the case before the election.
• A mild-mannered man who felt he had been wronged by Kuhn told me that if the solicitor were reelected to office he would no longer have any faith in the democratic process. Political campaigns, like marriages, are not made in heaven, and politicians unfortunately too often represent the worst in a community, while claiming to represent the best. It was ever thus, and all we can hope is that there will always be concerned citizens, however few in number, who have not lost all faith in government and who are willing to take on the rich and powerful, who are too often also the greedy and the dictatorial who control government.
• The absence of Marty Mohr and the presence of Rich Noel, who replaces him as the Sixth Ward councilman, will mean an end to the snarling contentiousness that sometimes erupted into shouting matches and led to Council president Baughman banging his gavel. Noel will never call citizens who show up at council meetings “crap” nor will he be quick to get into testosterone contests with young bucks. When the octogenarian Noel told the PDT he had “been there and done that,” he meant he had more important things to do on city council than flex his muscles. Noel will not try to restrict the rights of citizens to address the council. He will not flip-flop on Marting’s, as Mohr did. Noel is like a redwood, old in years but strong in stature. He’s seen the fire and he’s seen the rain, and he’s still standing. He’s seen them come and he’s seen them go, the successive generations of politicians who have stuck it to the city, the generations of businessmen who were willing to do everything they could for Portsmouth except let in some competition.
• Bob Mollette will not be alone anymore. We will have fewer five to one votes. But we are not out of the woods yet. Not by a long shot. Kalb is still mayor. Baughman is still president of City Council. The Second and Fifth Wards are still represented by the rubber stamps Malone and Albrecht. (Malone, of course, represents not the Second Ward but Neal Hatcher.) The First Ward still has to bear the ignominy of being represented by “appointee” Mike Mearan, minus his purse-snatching stenographer Heather Hren. Horner is still Chief of Police, denouncing concerned citizens as “domestic terrorists.” Larry Justice is still City Engineer, marking up the sidewalks of those who criticize city government. Mark Kuhn is still County Solicitor, even if he can no longer team up with his uncle to frustrate justice. The local economy is still controlled by the Southern Ohio Growth Partnership. The Portsmouth Daily Times is still the house organ of the Chamber of Commerce. Real estate predator Neal Hatcher is still giving people the finger. And businesses on Chillicothe street are still closing a year after the Bridge to Nowhere was supposed to begin reviving downtown Portsmouth. Council meetings are still not televised because our corrupt politicians don’t want the public to witness American Idle.
• Ministers who dabble in child pornography are still invited to council to give the benediction. And the leak in the council chamber ceiling is allowed to get worse to justify spending $12 million on a new municipal building in the left armpit of Portsmouth, in the shadow of the Osco factory.
• But at least this election has made the city government a little less corrupt than it was. They haven’t yet succeeded in shoving the Marting building down the throat of the public, though Kalb is still trying, trying, trying. They can’t get away with what they could fifty years ago, before the internet, blogs, chatrooms, cell phones, texting, and alternative newspapers. Citizens continue to crowd council meetings and ask probing questions, something they had not done before the Marting Scam. Despite disappointments, this is an election to be thankful for, and to be thankful for those few who fought the good fight for a long time, against greater odds. If they are not with us in body, they are with us in spirit, providing us with an example to follow. They survive somewhere in the Blogosphere.
  
  
  

Last Minute Lies

As the hours dwindle down to election day, the river of lies coming from incumbent politicians threatens to overflow the floodwall of truth. The incumbents have the financial backing to buy newspaper space and radio time to make last minute claims that there is not enough time to refute. Teresa Mollette has analyzed a claim by Solicitor Kuhn and shown it to be preposterous. She reports that Kuhn claims to have prosecuted over 13,000 criminals in 2006. That averages out to the prosecution of 54 criminals a day. Of course, Portsmouth does have a high crime rate for a city its size and has lots of criminals, including the un-indicted ones who control the city. But that Kuhn prosecuted 54 criminals each workday is hard to believe, given the limited amount of time his usual workday consists of.

Kuhn is living an elaborate lie right to the conclusion of his campaign, pretending to be someone other than who he really is. His current campaign charade is designed to hide his dishonesty and incompetency and to hide the fact that he puts about as much stock in the oath of office as he does in the marriage vow. A number of Republicans know what he is like in his political and private life and are not going to vote for him. But less sophisticated voters who are being bombarded by billboards, radio ads, and mail flyers may be taken in by his lies. If money buys elections, Kuhn has purchased himself, or his replacement, four more years in office.

Malone Takes the Cake

But it is Second Ward councilman David Malone who takes the cake when it comes to hypocrisy. This so-called man of god stood on the steps of the Municipal Building in June of 2005, denouncing the nameless forces of evil that were hovering over Portsmouth. He didn’t name them, of course, because he is the adulterous tool of the crooks who control Portsmouth and in particular of real-estate predator Neal Hatcher. So why would he name them? I captured on tape Malone’s performance, as well as his wife parading at the foot the stairs talking in tongues in a documentary Recall, which is available at the Portsmouth Public Library and the Shawnee State library.

This hypocritical minister of the gospel was not only betraying the people of Portsmouth on the City Council, he was also carrying on an affair with a female employee of the Portsmouth Municipal Housing Authority, the same public agency where his wife works. Underemployed males who have trouble finding real jobs find it helps to have wives who work for in the public sector. There is an adage “Don’t get involved sexually with people you work with.” It needs to be amended for Rev. Malone: “Don’t get involved sexually with people your wife works with in the public sector, not unless you want to jeopardize your main source of income.” His affair, or affairs, is not only a violation of a Commandment of the religious faith Malone claims to believe in, it is also not good for family values, any more than it is good for family values for a so-called moral crusader and gay-bashing senator like Larry Craig, of Idaho, to go cruising in men’s rooms for sex. Just as the hypocritical Craig, the cruiser of men’s rooms, stood in the Senate and denounced homosexuals, Malone stood on the steps of city hall and denounced the nameless evil-doers of Portsmouth, at the same time that as councilman he was serving the interests of the nameless evil doers.

Malone’s last-minute letter-to-the-editor that appeared in the PDT on 3 Nov. 2007, was another lie because Malone did not write it, any more than Timothy Loper wrote the letters-to-the-editor that have appeared in the PDT in the last year. Loper’s last letter was a lofty pronouncement on the evils of drinking and driving, something he can speak with authority on given his record for drunk driving. The way people write is almost as unique as fingerprints. Malone, like Loper, has an individual style of writing, if “style” is interpreted very loosely. I have read Malone’s writing. Loper is barely literate; Malone is literate, but he writes in tongues. Malone is a tool of those who control the city, and he will vote as they wish. He will also write as they dictate, literally. I know what Malone writes like. Just as most people can tell one voice from another, someone who has taught composition for forty years, fifteen of them in Portsmouth, can tell when someone tries to pass off as their own letters that were written, or dictated by someone else. And the Portsmouth Daily Times will publish them two days before the election, giving them, or the crooks they work for, the last word.

The Predator and the Preacher

Malone is especially useful to Hatcher. Malone signs are visible on Hatcher’s empty lots throughout the city. But Malone alone, of all the incumbents, has the privilege of having his campaign signs on Hatcher’s mansion-office on Gay St. I recall the City Council Meeting at which Hatcher showed up with some smoke-and-mirror architectural designs for the renovation of the so-called Adelphia building. Malone’s wife was there to help Hatcher display the designs, presumably on a volunteer basis, for certainly an employee of the Portsmouth Municipal Housing Authority would not be assigned to help Hatcher promote the Adelphia building scam. Would she?

“How dare he even attempt to question the integrity and legitimacy of my livelihood!” Malone said that about Lee Scott’s disparaging of his professional qualifications to be a minister or his limitations as a breadwinner. If you believe Malone wrote the sentence, “How dare he even attempt to question the integrity and legitimacy of my livelihood!” you probably believe that our dyslexic president actually writes his speeches. The only person I can think of who would sound right uttering that sentence would be the late actress Betty Davis. Look at it once more: “How dare he even attempt to question the integrity and legitimacy of my livelihood!” Oh, the moral outrage, the indignation, and this from our hypocritical adulterous councilman who carried on with a woman who not only worked with his wife at the PMHA but was also a member of his congregation. The truth is Malone’s wife is the breadwinner in the family; Malone is the sinner. If she speaks in tongues, he lies in tongues.

Malone wrote that “Scott’s comment on the idea I would be in favor of an income-tax increase really is not an issue.” It is not an issue that a member of City Council is in favor of raising income taxes and said so at a public forum that was reported on in the Daily Times? That is not an issue? Whoever wrote the letter tries to cover up for Malone by saying it is not relevant. Malone’s statement to the League of Women forum was one of those statements that Malone sometimes makes when he has to speak in public without a prepared script and then tries to deny afterwards.

By far the most biggest lie Malone wrote in his letter, or somebody wrote for him, is in regard to the Marting Scam. After saying he had not been in favor of the purchase of the Marting building, Malone, or his letter writer, wrote: “But the other party involved in the deal came back to the city and said, ‘OK, let us make it right. We will give you another $500,000 for the pain and suffering caused you.’ Believe me, any successful corporation, intelligent businessman or the common citizen would accept that offer.” Doesn’t Malone, or Hatcher or Kuhn or whoever wrote his letter understand there are minutes of the Council meetings and that no one representing “the other party involved,” to use his euphemism, ever came back and said anything about making up for “the pain and suffering we have caused you”? What the so-called “other party,” that is Clayton Johnson, actually did was stick it to the city and the taxpayers a second time and got a full pardon for any crimes the Marting Foundation may have committed the first time around. The “other party,” that is Clayton Johnson, is not giving anybody anything. That money was stolen from the taxpayers, and then when the sale was invalidated by the courts, the other party set up a number of conditions by which the city could get some of the money back. Why didn’t “the other party” simply give back all the money he had stolen? Attorney Bender, representing “the other party,” came before the Council and said one of the reasons the Marting Foundation would not give the money back was because the city government could not be trusted with it. And with councilmen as clueless as David Malone, who is to say Bender was not right. Not having done his homework or attended the rump meeting that takes place prior to the regular meeting, Malone comes to some Council meetings unsure of how he is supposed to vote. He waits to see how Marty Mohr or Howard Baughman vote. And if Hatcher has his way, this is the councilman who will be representing the Second Ward for another four years.