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Joe Eszterhas

GOD SAVE THE NEWSPAPER PEOPLE!

In 1971, I was fired by The Plain Dealer for writing a critical, snarky (and possibly

sophomoric) article in a national magazine about the newspaper’s editor and publisher,

Tom Vail.

Now, nearly 50 years later, I am asking you to participate in a campaign to save

The Plain Dealer.

Because the truth is that for much of my life I have begun my morning with a

cigarette, a cup of coffee, and The Plain Dealer. I can’t smoke or drink coffee anymore.

Only The Plain Dealer is left.

When I was a boy, an immigrant kid growing up on Lorain Avenue, I read The

Plain Dealer avidly to keep track of my boyhood heroes: Lou Teller, Hungarian bank

robber; Shondor Birns, Hungarian racketeer; Papa Joe Cremati, who sold so-called “call

girls.” I didn’t even know what those two words meant, but they certainly got my

attention!

My beloved Hungarian mother would cut those Plain Dealer articles I read into

strips and tie them to our Christmas tree, bought at bargain basement prices at the

Gerzeny and Sons Movers on 39th and Lorain. Imagine that! The Plain Dealer was

part of the Christmas arrival of Baby Jesus and the holy angels each year.

And when I was in high school, a glorious woman at The Plain Dealer named

Jane Scott picked me as the winner of an essay contest -- my first writing published in

the English language. (To my critics: It was all -- ALL! -- Jane’s fault.)

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When I was 23 years old I was hired as a Plain Dealer reporter, thanks to the

recommendations of a Hungarian priest and a Hungarian judge. Behind me in the city

room sat a wizened reporter in his seventies named J.C. Daschbach, who kept calling

me, for obvious aesthetic reasons, “Eszter’s belly.”

Across from me sat an Irish terrorist of a reporter named Terry Sheridan, who did

his best to seduce any executive’s secretary so that he could have access to all the

internal memoranda the execs wrote. Scattered about the city room sat: steely-eyed

Doris O’Donnell, the best investigative reporter I’d ever meet; Mike Roberts, the star

feature writer of the staff; and Gerri Javor, my fellow Hungarian, who became my first

wife.

My favorite person in the city room was Johnny Rees, the gravel-voiced assistant

city editor, who taught me everything I needed to know about journalism, drinking,

hemorrhoids, and women.

Oh, Lord, the many adventures I had! I spent an afternoon with Martin Luther

King. And I took Jimi Hendrix to lunch at the Balaton Restaurant, then on Buckeye

Road. Imagine that! Jimi Hendrix and I, stoned, gobbling down several orders of

chicken paprikash. And I was the last person in the world to interview the great Otis

Redding (at Leo’s Casino) before he got on his private plane the next day and died.

I covered innumerable hold-ups and shootings, becoming expert at the morally

dubious art of speaking to grieving relatives and convincing them to give me a

photograph of their dead loved ones. Real reporters, I was told, were real men, He

Men, who had the balls to observe an autopsy while eating a cheeseburger. But,

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alas...thank you, God... I wasn’t enough of a He Man; I didn’t have the balls (or

whatever else it took) to be able to do that.

I loved The Plain Dealer and I truly loved many of the people there. I was

decimated when I was fired. But, you know, it was a crazy time. I mean, it was the

craziest time! It was such an unbelievably crazy time that some of us in The Plain

Dealer city room, Time Magazine wrote, were suspected by management of trying to

put LSD into the water coolers. It was bullshit; none of us in the city room had ever

done any acid yet -- this was Cleveland, for God’s sake! (It took my future friend Hunter

Thompson to introduce me to those kinds of chemical wonders.)

So, decimated, I went to California and wrote other things for other publications

and companies. But every month or so, I’d sneak down to the public library without

telling anyone and read The Plain Dealer. I just had to know which of my rock heroes

Jane Scott was interviewing, and what Chuck Heaton and Hal Lebovitz were writing

about the Browns and the Indians. And I just had to see whether that grand old fart J.C.

Daschbach was still getting bylines.

Then, 30 years after I went to California, I came back to Cleveland with a gaggle

of young sons and a new wife and I greeted the day once again by reading The Plain

Dealer.

And I felt at home once again. Michael Heaton, Chuck’s kid, was always funny

and often moving . . . Andrea Simakis had the chutzpah (balls?) to declare herself the

Diva of Cleveland, and lived up to the title with her prose . . .Terry Pluto wrote about two

of things I love the most in life: God and the Indians. Regina Brett somehow always

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found stories that touched my heart . . . and Connie Schultz, now absent, enthralled me

with stories of her family, especially her father.

I was deeply saddened by the news that The Powers That Be are probably going

to limit The Plain Dealer’s appearance to three times a week. Truth to tell, I’m not sure

how I’m going to cope with that. (I’m a complete Luddite and I don’t even have a cell

phone.) I don’t think that reading The New York Times instead will really brighten my

sadness.

So . . . it’s up to you who are reading this to help me.

Back in the day, I’d probably grab a picket sign and some friends and go down to

18th and Superior and scream some simplistic and probably cliched anti-capitalist

profanities. But my friends and I are more than a few years older now, and my voice

these days gets lost in the wind a lot.

So it’s up to you to raise some benevolent, dignified hell (What? Benevolent and

dignified hell? What the hell is that?) and email The Powers That Be . . . specifically

Steve Newhouse at stevejj@aol.com.

Tell that capitalist dude that he will be saddening a lot of people if he does what

we expect he’ll do. Tell him that there are a lot of people . . . newspaper men and

women, not journalists, not analysts, not commentators, newspaper people . . . who

have put their hearts and souls -- for not a lot of money -- into informing and entertaining

readers whose daily lives are bettered by their commitment and intelligence.

And, OK, if all of that benevolent, dignified stuff doesn’t work -- then I say let’s go

out and find the picket signs and see if we have enough voice left to tell the

sonsofbitches what we really think.

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One other thing. Since I have become a born-again Catholic I have finally

forgiven Tom Vail for firing me in 1971. I even grant the possibility that he was right to

do it.

To be fair to the man, he taught me a lesson about life that I never heard from

anyone else. At lunch one day, cigar in hand, Tom Vail told me that the best way to

smoke a good cigar is to dip its suck-end into some very fine five-star cognac before

you fire it up.

Such a really great life lesson, now that I can’t smoke.

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