“Do you come up with your own ideas, or are they assigned?”
This is not a question I expected when I was studying journalism (and pasta) in college. Yet any time someone asks what I do, my answer is usually met by inquiries about story ideas.
As a general assignment reporter, a large portion of my stories were short breaking news pieces. Now, as part of the arts and culture team, breaking news is less prevalent. It typically involves arts funding or, sadly, scandals. The rest of the time, I’m able to approach “ideas” that grow organically into “stories.” And that requires research, networking — and listening. As the father of two turntables older than me, and five kids younger than me, I can tell you that the listening isn’t always easy.
A good example of “growing” a story happened last month. I was revisiting an idea from 2016, which was 50 years after the Hough riots. At the time, I had wanted to tell the story of the Sidaway Bridge connecting the Slavic Village and Kinsman neighborhoods of Cleveland. The structure was burned during the riots, destroying its wooden planks and rendering the metal structure unusable. Although this story didn’t come to fruition in 2016, I’ve kept it in the back of my mind.
And so has our producer extraordinaire, Jean-Marie Papoi. With the support of our wonderful and vacation-granting editor, Carrie Wise, we headed out to E. 65th Street and Sidaway Avenue on a hot June day to find and document the bridge.
We immediately came upon a long, paved area leading off into the oblivion of a valley below (filled with neatly stacked RTA railroad ties). Was the bridge gone? Had it rusted away at some point over the past decade? Was the River Kwai below? We dutifully documented the trash-strewn area with its remnants of a charred Volkswagen (not a Beetle, fortunately). As we emerged back onto E. 65th, a man in a pickup truck was waiting for us. His smile was friendly. Yet he was also moving with the unmistakable air of someone who had dialed “9-1” on his phone and was ready to dial “1” again if needed.
It was at this moment that I realized I had left my press pass in the car. I had no identification and was praying that Jean-Marie could assure our new friend that I was a reporter and not, in fact, Elvis.
“That driveway is off-limits,” he said, pointing to the concrete slab.
“Oh, I thought it was just blocked off for cars,” I replied, motioning toward our vehicles legally parked on the street. The sight of a Ford Mustang and an ancient Volkswagen Beetle (not charred) distracted and relieved him. Perhaps he thought we were shooting a sequel to “Bullitt”? Irregardless (relax, grammar police, Webster's says it is actually a word now), he was suddenly interested in our work. After I dropped the terms “WVIZ” and “Sidaway Bridge,” he dropped a bombshell.
“That concrete isn’t the bridge,” he said. “That was the Dan-Dee warehouse.”
My mind raced back 30 years, to Fazio’s supermarket: No party was complete without Dan-Dee “Bar-B-Q” chips, plus Faygo pop, Lawson’s French onion dip, and buns from Schwebel’s. Most of those names are gone or vastly different today. Yet Dan-Dee was in the news as recently as 2018, when it closed the last of its Cleveland operations after more than a century. The brand is still alive, but based out-of-state.
You’ve probably seen Dan-Dee's bags, with the unmistakable graphics resembling a laundromat dryer into which someone has placed an armload of chips. The concrete slab we had photographed is all that remains of the once oil-soaked warehouse. Our truck-driving friend (who wished to remain anonymous, even to us) remembers the building catching fire in 2014, with flames so high they seemed to never end. He now owns the smaller building across the street, the former Dan-Dee offices.
For only the third time in my life, I complied as this stranger asked me to follow him into the woods … where we came upon a gate densely covered in vegetation. As Jean-Marie and I looked closer, we saw some fencing and then, beyond that, the outline of a suspension bridge — reportedly the only suspension bridge ever built in Cleveland.
“Do you have pants?” our friend suddenly asked. It was a valid question, one my wife frequently asks me in February. As always, I did not; pants are for weddings, funerals and covered bridges. He assured me that with shorts on I would soon be mosquito and flea fodder, and he was right. But duty called and we entered the woods.
I’ll spare you the details of what we found in the spot where thousands of kids once walked daily to attend school. One theory for the bridge’s destruction is that it prevented kids from a predominantly Black neighborhood from attending school in a predominantly white neighborhood.
Later in the day, the impact of that became clear. We drove around the area asking people for interviews about the bridge and neighborhood. One young man said he grew up in Kinsman but attended school in Slavic Village in the 2000s. Had the bridge ever been rebuilt, he could have walked to school. But its carcass has been quietly hiding for 57 years. We’ll explain why during a segment about the Sidaway Bridge during “Applause” on WVIZ PBS in August.
This, hopefully, answers many questions about how I come up with story ideas and how they develop. And to answer some other work-related questions:
“Have you met Ari Shapiro?” (No.)
“Do you get free admission to Playhouse Square?” (No.)
“Have you finished writing ‘The Cut’ for this week?” (Yes!)
