A Cleveland Republican and millionaire debutante, Bolton first learned the ways of the real world with the Visiting Nurse Association. At the age of 18, Bolton followed nurses as they made house calls to Cleveland's poor sick children. She spent the rest of her life advancing the causes of nursing education and public health issues. In 1940, Bolton became the first Ohio woman elected to the US House of Representatives, and gained new levers of power. Among her most important political contributions was a 1943 bill that created the United States Cadet Nursing Corps, and legislation that purchased property that included the home of George Washington, and so kept away commercial development. She helped endow a school of nursing at Western Reserve University, which today, at Case Western Reserve University, is named after her. Bolton died in 1997, in Lyndhurst. - CG

ELIZA BRYANT

The daughter of a freed slave and a plantation owner, Bryant was born into the most contentious political issue of her day - and indeed, all of American history. Bryant's mother was freed in 1848, and moved to Cleveland with her young family, where the 21-year-old Bryant began a life in humanitarian work. Bryant went on to establish a nursing home specifically for elderly African Americans, who, Bryant increasingly discovered, often came to northern cities with nothing more than their freedom and suffered under Cleveland's harsh living conditions, where homeless shelters wouldn't accept them. In 1893, at the age of 66, Bryant started on the path to establishing the Cleveland Home of Aged Colored People and it was incorporated in 1896. Bryant died in 1917 and is buried in Woodland Cemetery. The nursing home she founded is still open and has since moved into the Hough neighborhood. Now called the Eliza Bryant Village, it houses almost 275 African-American seniors. - CG

HAROLD HITZ BURTON

Massachusetts native and Harvard Law grad Burton launched his impressive political career in Cleveland in the late 1920s: Ohio House, then Cleveland law director, Cleveland mayor, US Senate. He served there until 1945 when President Truman appointed him to the US Supreme Court. According to Chief Justice Earl Warren, Burton was instrumental in shaping the court's landmark desegregation ruling, Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, four years before his retirement. He died in 1964. - FL

RICHARD CELESTE

There was a time, not so long ago, when intellect and wisdom were not considered political liabilities. Dick Celeste was that kind of politician. After Yale he attended Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, then served in the Peace Corps. His political career began in the Ohio House of Representatives in 1970, and he later was elected lieutenant governor. His first bid for governor was unsuccessful, but instead of just preparing for the next election, he accepted President Carter's offer to head the Peace Corps - and still won the next Ohio gubernatorial election. His two terms were not without controversies, but in hindsight they pale in comparison to the messes created in subsequent years, on the watches of less well-prepared leaders. Today Celeste is president of Colorado College and sits on various advisory boards. - FL

JAMES GARFIELD

He may have been US president for only four months, but it still counts. A Lincoln-type Republican, Garfield enlisted in the Union Army during the Civil War. He fought the good fight against the Confederates and was promoted to a major general. All of this helped his profile at home. Garfield, born in Moreland Hills in 1831, won a seat in the House of Representatives and served for almost 20 years before a move to the US Senate. In 1880, he subverted the Republican convention nomination process and came out the dark horse presidential nominee. Garfield's was the second shortest presidency ever, because he was the second president to be assassinated, in 1881 (after Lincoln). He's interred in a mausoleum in Lake View Cemetery in Cleveland. - CG

ELLIOT NESS

CARL STOKES - Made history in 1967.

His name is almost synonymous with law enforcement. After delivering Chicago's Al Capone to the authorities, the 33-year-old Ness was recruited to Cleveland as its safety director in 1935 to rid the police department of mob ties. He did so with aplomb, and after several months of secret investigations, with a Cleveland version of his "untouchables," Ness cleared the department of crooked cops. Ness also made headlines here when he led a special squad to assemble evidence on labor-union protected extortion and racketeering of farmers and truck drivers in Northeast Ohio. Another famous, but not as successful, Ness venture was the pursuit of the "Mad Butcher," also known as the perpretrator of the "Torso Murders" or the "Kingsbury Run Murders." Years and years of clues, leads, suspects and interrogations led nowhere, and the serial killer was never found. Ness left Cleveland in 1942, only to return five years later to run for mayor. When he failed to win, Ness left again. - CG

HOWARD METZENBAUM

Who would've thought this Jewish Buckeye raised in Cleveland squalor, a union lawyer in Cleveland in the '50s and '60s often rumored by the right to be in cahoots with the Communist Party, could win the Democratic primary in astronaut John Glenn's first foray into senatorial politics? Perhaps Glenn didn't have the name recognition that Metzenbaum had then already achieved by old-fashioned little-guy championing and a hard-nosed business sense. Starting with a short stint as a state representative during WWII, and then another in the Senate just before the Korean War kicked off, Metzenbaum for a while did work for other people's campaigns and went into business for himself, founding the weekly Sun Newspapers chain and parking behemoth APCOA. But he didn't stop venturing toward the Hill. In 1976, he began a 19-year stretch in the Senate characterized by liberal positioning with conservative-seeming tactics. Sure, the man was known by some like Republican Jesse Helms as "Senator No" for tying things up when the other party was getting its way, but he was one of the most reliable lefties to ever serve in the Senate, fighting for abortion rights and stricter antitrust rules. - DH

MARY ROSE OAKAR

It's times like these, when ethnicity and theology is so enmeshed on the global stage with political ideology, when we need a woman like this. After snagging a bachelor's at Ursuline College and a master's at John Carroll, Oakar first worked as a teacher at Lourdes Academy, directed plays and graduated to teaching at Tri-C. But she soon was drawn to politics, serving a short stint as a Cleveland councilwoman from '73 to '76 before making her biggest mark as one of the few Arab-American members of Congress. By the end of her time in Washington, though, she was starting to bear the scars of partisan potshots. In addition to being called to the carpet for writing overdraft checks at the House Bank, she also pleaded guilty in 1993, just after losing a tight race to Republican Martin Hoke, to violating campaign finance law. Oakar served a term in the Ohio House of Representatives from 2000-02 and is now president of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. - DH

CARL STOKES

Carl Stokes' election as mayor of Cleveland in 1967 was a historic moment for the city and the nation. He was the first black man ever entrusted by voters with the leadership of a major city. And none understood better than Stokes himself the enormity of the event. "I had what no black man in the country has had before or since: direct control of the government of a predominantly white population," Stokes wrote in Promises of Power: A Political Autobiography, published in 1973. His achievement was all the more astonishing given his background: growing up amidst poverty, and getting out with hard work, a brief stint in the US Army and a law degree, and working with whites and blacks as he strove to politicize Cleveland's poor and mobilize black power. Stokes worked his way up from state liquor inspector, to state legislator, to mayor in 1968. Soon after, Glenville, racially polarized like much of Cleveland, broke out in riots and tarnished Stokes' credibility. He won reelection in 1971, but never ran again. He was later a TV news anchor in New York City, and returned to Cleveland as a lawyer and municipal court judge. Stokes died in 1996 of cancer. He is buried in Cleveland's Lake View Cemetery. - CG

LOUIS STOKES

Carl's brother Louis achieved his own share of the American Dream, all the way from his humble beginnings in Cleveland's first projects, Outhwaite Homes. After fighting in World War II, Stokes went to Western Reserve University, then Cleveland-Marshall College of Law, rising steadily in a legal profession dominated by whites. Then, in 1968, he mounted his first of many successful political races, representing mostly Cleveland's East Side in Congress for nearly 30 years, ending his long and influential reign in 1999. Stokes' children, Angela, Lori and Chuck, are now a Cleveland Municipal Court judge and two big-city journalists respectively. He's still practicing law in Cleveland. Learn all about the man, where the whole ball got rolling, at the Louis Stokes Museum in the projects at Outhwaite Homes, 4302 Quincy Ave. - DH