Putting out a newspaper is one of the most competitive sports ever invented. Those noir tales of beat reporters trailing some flatfoot for the big scoop, then pounding facts into prose on a Royal to narrowly make deadline, and getting some cigar-chomping editor so excited he yells “stop the presses!” really did happen, and not that long ago. Those were the days Siegel and Shuster fashioned the Daily Planet while working on their high school newspaper in Glenville. Their creation of Lois Lane guided my own imagination a decade later, and helped launch a path. I absorbed the history of the underground press and in the 1970s jumped into the emerging alternative newsweekly culture, bugging mentors like Bruce Brugmann (San Francisco Bay Guardian), Steve Mindich (Boston Phoenix) and Bob Roth (Chicago Reader) to tell me their start-up stories.

I was fortunate to get involved in the Free Times at the ground floor, helping to design the page grid, the distribution routes, and working with a pool of artists to come up with a logo. Publisher Richard Siegel had already decided on the name and, like most activities that take more than one person to accomplish, there was debate, struggle and competition. We ended up with a rubber-stamp-style logo to echo the FREE stamp sculpture, a rebellious idea of Claus Oldenberg’s which caused great controversy in Cleveland. Richard loved controversy. His belief was simple: Civic controversy aired in public will generally result in a better direction for the community. A lawyer who worked on big labor negotiations, Richard was against enormous taxpayer underwriting and abatements to make the Gateway complex fly. He admired Cleveland’s legendary muckraker Roldo Bartimole’s weekly column in the Cleveland Edition and when that paper was forced to close up shop because the publisher’s funds dried up, Richard stepped forward, committed to giving Roldo another vehicle. It was a brave endeavor for someone who had to rely on and trust in other people’s knowledge and planning capabilities.

It was a fast and bumpy startup. I think we managed to go from design to first issue in slightly more than one month’s time. The first issue was queued to our big output printer as one giant file instead of individual pages, so it was like a rabbit passing through a python; you could see the shape of something moving, but you really weren’t sure if anything was coming out on the other end. Jeff Hagan, who wrote the incredibly funny The Talk column, volunteered to stay with me. We became fast friends that night, telling stories and trying to talk about anything but what we’d tell Richard if we missed our printing window. Just after dawn, the printer started making noise, spitting out page after page. Later that day, Richard was toasting us all, with the first issue of the Cleveland Free Times in his hand. A proud patriarch.

We were, like most of these organizations, a great dysfunctional family as we sat around a long conference table, debating our strengths and weaknesses. Richard didn’t have a bottomless source of funds; he’d leveraged the family home in Pepper Pike, so he was counting on us to bring in ad dollars and not spend too much. He unmercifully got rid of a few of the start-up brain trust who had lined up big salaries for themselves, and put it on me and a few lower-priced staffers to pull the Free Times off. Three months into the project, I went from associate publisher to editor, for a while wearing both hats. Everything I’d ever learned about creating a newspaper was put to the test.

In 1992, we were competing with Scene for advertisers even though we were very different papers. And we were competing with The Plain Dealer for stories. We collected a crew of amazingly enthusiastic sales people, many personal friends of someone else on the staff, who sold the paper based on Richard’s civic-minded mission: “This paper is good for the community so you should support it.” We then asked our readers to support our advertisers. And it worked. We had loyal readers and loyal advertisers. We already had some of the best writers in Cleveland in our stable, the Edition crew like Hagan, Roldo, Doug Clarke on sports, Amy Sparks, Eric Broder, Mark Winegartner, Harvey Pekar, Mark Reynolds, John Ettorre, to name a few. And we developed new writers and gave people chances.

Richard called on his own family to step in and help. His son Randy had a pretty high-powered marketing job working for Newsweek in New York, but moved back to Cleveland to take on the publisher role. We were small but growing and finding success as we approached the one-year anniversary. Richard and his wife Mimsy took a much-needed vacation to the Southwest and one day we got a phone call. Richard had been bicycling up a hill in front of Mimsy when he just simply fell over. He was gone. He was only the age I am now, 57. We were less than a month from the paper’s first anniversary.

When Matt Fabyan called me to explain that Scene and Free Times were being folded into one paper, I already understood that market forces had changed greatly since 1992. I’ve watched page counts shrink and the small businesses that keep these papers afloat deciding to go in one paper or the other because they can’t afford to advertise in both anymore. It’s really been a test of wills. Who would fold first?

Village Voice Media bought Free Times in 1998. Soon after, longtime Scene owner Richard Kabat sold the music-focused weekly to New Times Inc., the Phoenix-based chain, and we all knew the Free Times was up against a formidable enemy. Having served on the national board of the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies, I had heard rumors that the New Times bosses were aiming for a takeover of the top 20 markets in the country; amongst the industry folks who believed in locally owned alt-weeklies with regional flavor, the New Times, which always came in and cleaned house to create their own cookie-cutter-style alternative, was commonly referred to as “the evil empire.” And I knew something was going to happen in the Cleveland market when I found out one of the New Times execs was a former Clevelander and an Indians fan; New Times had a pompous swagger about buying in cities where they might like to also buy season tickets.

Oddly enough, Cleveland became one of the few cities in the country where the two chains went head to head. Then came the two-city deal, in which VVM sold Free Times to New Times, and New Times sold its LA paper to VVM. Thankfully, Dennis Kucinich’s office took the deal to the Justice Department to look at anti-trust violations. Many of us who were involved past and present were asked to provide depositions on industry policies and competitive advertising options. In the end the companies agreed to resell the papers they’d bought and closed, and Free Times publisher Matt Fabyan put together a new ownership group.

Not long after that, the Village Voice and New Times chains merged, got major investment and resumed the march to major-city domination. But not here.

It’s evident to anyone who follows the newspaper/media industry that putting out any kind of print product in the age of instant information is only getting harder. And my tale of having to drive hard copies of pages to the printer is only a romantic story, as alien to button-pushing kids today as the idea of setting metal type on a giant press was to me. In the end though, no matter what format, the best way to attract readers is frank discussion and good stories about things that matter. If you have to lose the long-standing tribute to founder Richard H. Siegel (1935-1993) from the masthead, I hope you at least hold on to his mission. “Dialogue journalism. Advocacy journalism. Tough-minded, responsible and gutsy coverage of what’s really going on in this town — in politics, arts and entertainment, race, ethnic and gender relationships, business and sports.”

To Richard, I’m sure it would not be about the name but the ability to stay in the game and keep up the fight.

Former Free Times editor Cindy Barber owns the Beachland Ballroom.

 THE SECRET HISTORY OF THE FREE TIMES

By Eric Broder

The Cleveland Free Times was born in September 1992 in the old Cleveland Institute of Art’s Factory Building in University Circle. As with most business start-ups, its beginning was a challenge.

Because all of us — graphics designers, editors, writers, account executives — were artistes, egos and emotions ran high during those first difficult months. Screaming jags, noisy stomp-outs, conniption fits and cows of all kinds were commonplace. Office supplies, computer monitors, Xerox machines, printers, chairs and sometimes staffers themselves were chucked out the windows in frustration. Nearly every day you’d hear loud pounding sounds, then sobbing coming from the men’s bathroom.

Eventually the paper started running efficiently, becoming the well-oiled weekly machine you’ve picked up every Wednesday for the past 16 years. Here are just a few notable stories from the Free Times’ long run.

1992. Despite the early hiccups, the paper almost immediately made its presence known both on the local and national levels.

At the approaching climax of the ’92 election season, Bill Clinton came to the Free Times office to seek the paper’s endorsement (“I wanna hook up with alternative people,” he told us).

At first he impressed the staff with the famous Clinton charisma as he strolled around the office delivering his campaign shtick. But after working the room for a while, Clinton took aside one of our young female interns and murmured, “How you doin’, darlin’,” then commenced to play some serious grabass.

Outraged, we demanded that he leave our offices immediately. Clinton’s face got red and he hollered, “Well, fuck y’all! Fuck all y’all!” His Secret Service contingent rolled their eyes as they escorted him outside, and to the McDonald’s next door.

From the Free Times endorsement, appearing just weeks before the election, October 1992: “Although we fully approve of Mr. Clinton’s policies and agenda — and believe he will be an effective and efficient chief executive — this guy is one MAJOR horndog. He better hope it don’t come back to bite him on the ass.”

1993-1994. The Free Times continued to establish itself as a viable news alternative to The Plain Dealer — exposing all types of political hijinks and shenanigans throughout Northeast Ohio — while providing comprehensive arts and entertainment coverage. It was fast becoming a weekly habit for thousands of area readers.

For publicity purposes, the paper introduced “Freebie,” the Free Times official mascot. Freebie was a big floppy-eared mutt with the Free Times logo stamped across his chest. Freebie handed out papers on downtown streets and delighted passersby with his running commentary and comical antics. The paper kept his identity secret.

Freebie was such a hit that speculation became rampant over who he was. The Plain Dealer even ran a front-page story asking, “Who is Freebie, Anyway?”

Freebie was none other than up-and-coming comedian Drew Carey, who flourished in this role for a full year before ultimately landing his own ABC television series in 1995. (Carey will deny his Freebie identity if you ask him today, perhaps even pretending not to know what you’re talking about.)

Unfortunately, Carey’s successors in the Freebie role didn’t represent the Free Times in as positive a light over the next few years.

1995. The Free Times moved its offices to Coventry Road in Cleveland Heights. The paper got into the spirit of the famous hippie district, as staffers regularly indulged in some extremely fine herb that was readily available in the area.

Critics noted that the paper became very sloppily written and edited during this drug-hazed period, with cover headline typos a frequent embarrassment. Huge local stories were represented with such headlines as: 

WAHO! INDANS MAKE WOLD SERIES

BUMER: BRONS MOVE TO BALTIMORE; MODELL SUCKS

CLEVEAND ROCKS! ROCK HALL ROCK HALL OPENS OPENS

After these mortifying mistakes the paper introduced a stringent drug policy, with only beer and light cocktails permitted during office hours.

1997. In ’97 Cleveland hosted both the NBA and MLB All-Star games, as well as three World Series games. The Free Times had booths inside both Gund Arena and Jacobs Field during these big events, with various Times-ers passing out papers to out-of-town journalists and fans.

The paper received a considerable black eye when the mascot Freebie “manned” the booth during the MLB All-Star game. Before the game, drunk on tequila, Freebie abandoned his post and managed to get out onto the field, challenging several New York Yankee players to fistfights. After screaming at Derek Jeter, calling him “pussy” and “penis breath,” Freebie was knocked down and repeatedly kicked in the balls by the Indians mascot Slider — the ultimate humiliation for the paper. Freebie was banned from all Free Times events from that point on, and was later arrested and jailed for selling methamphetamines out of his dog suit.

1999-2000. The Free Times got caught up in the “Y2K fever” by predicting the direst consequences the moment the new millennium arrived.

In the last week of December 1999, the cover story “Prepare for Thy Doom” informed readers that the nation’s vast computer system would shut completely down at 12:00:01 a.m., Jan. 1, 2000. The infrastructure would collapse, planes would plummet from the sky, the fresh water supply would be gone within days and everyone would perish.

From the cover story:

“There are no ‘ifs’ here, people. We are all going to die. We will all be gone. If you’re not already dead by the time you read this, we ask you: Are you prepared?

“Will you die on your knees, or on your feet? Will you go out screaming and crying, or saying, ‘Hey, it’s been a great 2,000 years!’? That’s what we here at the Free Times are going to do. We’re going out with a smile, our heads held high.

“So we say to the peoples of the Earth ... au revoir! Adios! Auf wiedersehn, sayonara, shalom! We’ll see you in the next, hopefully better world! Goodbye and god bless, everyone! Goodbye!”

An editor’s note in the next issue read: “We regret any inconvenience last week’s cover story ‘Prepare for Thy Doom’ may have caused, and hope you continue to rely on the Free Times for the best coverage of news, arts and entertainment in Northeast Ohio!”

2002-2003. In October 2002, the Free Times temporarily closed when its parent company sold it to its competitor’s parent company, in a definitely non-kosher business transaction. The paper found an unlikely ally in George W. Bush, who personally lead the Justice Department in looking into the potential antitrust violations of the deal.

When the paper began to publish again in 2003, President Bush came to the office to celebrate the Free Times’ rebirth. He briefly addressed the staff.

“I am very happy to see the Free Times back in print. When I read about the deal closing it, I said to Laura, ‘That doesn’t sound right. That’s some antitrust monkey business right there.’ She said, ‘Well, you’re going to do something about it, aren’t you, George?’ And I said, ‘By golly, I will. I’ll get the Justice boys on it.’ And here we all are, having a party, with Doritos, and dip, and cookies, too. All right.”

2003-2008. After its phoenix-like return, the paper kept on moving forward, right up to this week’s final issue under the name Free Times.

During the past five years, the Free Times has branched out in its interests, primarily to become significant players in the professional sports scene. Its actions have had considerable influence over the fortunes of area teams.

For example, representatives of the Free Times were invited to go to the 2003 NBA lottery in Secaucus, New Jersey. Through various machinations too complicated to get into here, these representatives were able to “manipulate” the 2003 NBA lottery’s pingpong balls to fall in the Cavaliers’ favor. The Cavs were awarded the first pick in the draft — a fellow whose name, let’s just say, rhymes with “Shlebron Shjames.” Yes, that was all Free Times.

The Free Times was also the key player during the famous Indians-Yankees “bug game” in the 2007 baseball playoffs.

Over the years the paper maintained a Free Times Flying Insect Colony at Jacobs Field, instituted to enhance the publication’s presence at Indians games. In Game Three, Yankee pitcher Joba Chamberlain was dominating Tribe hitters and the game seemed all but lost. The Free Times executive in charge of the Flying Insect Colony approached the Indians’ groundskeeper and very quietly instructed him: “Release the midges.”

The rest is, as they say, history.

Eric Broder was managing editor from 1992-2002, and has remained a contributor.

AN ALTERNATIVE MUST CHALLENGE THE STATUS QUO

By Roldo Bartimole

The title for the column was “Water Boys for the Establishment.” It ran in the Cleveland Edition, a forerunner of the Free Times.

It was a piece about how Mayor Michael White and County Commissioner Tim Hagan flew to Columbus on a private corporate jet to lobby for a tax abatement for Jacobs Field and Gund Arena at the behest of corporate interests here. The pair of Cuyahoga County politicians was intent on getting the Gateway project exempted from paying property taxes despite the promise they made voters that property taxes would be paid. In an ad before the county voted, the Gateway promoters pledged to ask for no tax abatement and that the Cleveland schools would get $15 million a year “for the children.” They lied on both counts. The schools got nothing.

At the meeting in Columbus, Richard H. Siegel, a labor lawyer who didn’t like what was happening politically in Cleveland, voiced a sharp protest. He had been a financial supporter of Hagan and other liberal politicians and causes over the years and served as president of the Citizen’s League of Greater Cleveland.

Siegel was angered by the lack of public discourse on the major issues, and he made the trip to Columbus to speak out personally against the tax abatement. He told the state legislators, “You’re going to be used as a rubber stamp for a political process no one trusts anymore.” He was talking about the politics of Cleveland and Cuyahoga County. He cautioned the legislators to avoid entanglement in the “political fratricide” of a Cleveland mired in “deep cynicism and deep depression about its political processes.” Some things only get worse.

Siegel compared the Cleveland electorate “to Indians on a reservation, frustrated victims of vital decisions made for them by others.” He told the hearing, “Let the people who live and work there have the opportunity to make that decision [on whether to abate the taxes for the facilities].” White and Hagan obviously didn’t want that to happen since every Cleveland ward save one had voted against the “sin” taxes for the sports facilities.

It was this strong feeling that eventually propelled Siegel to begin the Free Times after the Cleveland Edition ended publication and left a void. Bill Gunlocke’s quirky, artistic, sometimes acerbic and graphically pleasing Edition folded in May 1992 under financial stress. Gunlocke had a gift to recruit an odd combination of writers that somehow came together as a unique staff. It was readymade for the Free Times to pick up and start running immediately.

The Free Times began publication Sept. 30, 1992. Siegel met an early death by sudden heart attack in August 1993. The paper later came under control of the owners of the Village Voice until its demise in late 2002. The Free Times returned in May 2003. It will end in name again with this issue.

I had noticed that Siegel attended hearings on Gateway at City Council as an opponent of the project and he experienced the frustration of many citizens whose views received little or no attention from city officials. He was an unusual figure there at that time since all established business and legal figures were lining up to boost the project.

Oddly, in Columbus the day of the abatement hearing, I struck up a short conversation with Siegel when the meeting ended. He made clear that he was unhappy not only with public officials. He felt a one-newspaper town was helping stifle the debate necessary for true community decision-making.

“My father was a great reader of newspapers and he believed that the political debate in Cleveland should not be controlled — or even moderated — by a single editorial viewpoint,” his son William Siegel, a lawyer in Miami, wrote me this week.

“His hope was that the Free Times would fill that void…” he wrote. It did for awhile.

A lot has happened to the news business since then. Many new voices have been given life by the Internet via blogs and Web sites. There are many alternative voices but they vary greatly in quality, experience, exposure and impact.

Therefore, there remains a dire need for a strong alternative newspaper voice in this town.

Frankly, I’ve been disappointed by both the Free Times and the Scene, with some notable exceptions, for their inability to act as an alternative voice to the more and more corporate (and boring) Plain Dealer. And for the failure to be a sharp, consistent and credible critic of the established order here.

The opportunity is there. I wonder, however, where the passion and combativeness have gone. Possibly, it is the times. More likely, it is simply a dearth of honest anger that should be the foundation of anything that wants to call itself an “alternative” to what is.

We now await a new paper. The name really doesn’t matter. Its thrust does. It needs to be a vigorous voice against what is and for what should be. Then it can call itself a true alternative.

Roldo Bartimole wrote for the Free Times from its launch in 1992 until its temporary closure in 2002. Today his work can be found at CoolCleveland.com, LakewoodBuzz.com, ClevelandLeader.com and RealNEO.us/blog.

FAILURE IS NOT AN OPTION

By Charles Cassady Jr.

From time to time people — mostly my family — who know precious little about the journalism field advise me, Charles, you should start your own local publication. Make yourself editor, finally take charge. Bring your vision to full fruition. Get all your fabulous articles and reviews published just the way you want, and make big money selling ads. It will be a sensation! Why don’t you do that, instead of just struggling along as an obscure freelancer? That’s when I tell them about the Failure Box.

It is a blue plastic crate in which I have collected a good stack of defunct, short-lived local newspapers and magazines. Sort of an ossuary of about 20 years’ worth, actually, of such gone-and-mostly-forgotten Cleveland-area alt-news publications as Pivot, The River Burns, The Spot, Revue, Music’s Bottom Line, Patrol, US Rocker, Downtown, Downtown Tab, Urban Dialect, Cleveland Standard, 3C Magazine, Bathroom Journal, Lifestyles, Artefakt, Simply Home, Glucose, Savoir-Faire News, Euclid Avenue, MBA, one thin broadsheet that had the audacity to title itself The Cleveland Press and, of course, the Cleveland Edition, the precursor to the Free Times.

All these paper corpses in my Failure Box were once bright, shining dreams of their own editors/publishers, created, printed and distributed in the hopes of becoming self-sustaining. And all succumbed, some sooner than others, to the high cost of printing and distribution, public apathy, insufficiency of ad revenue and the sheer hard labor that goes into squeezing out a periodical on deadline. Aye, even 3C Magazine — launched with an ambitious notion to tie together Cleveland, Columbus and Cincinnati — couldn’t make a go of it. What possible chance could I have? And that, I tell my naive cheerleaders, is why I never invested in launching my own venture. Even if the mad delusion struck, the Failure Box was my memento mori, a de-motivational object lesson to remind me to not even try. Save the money and spare the heartache.

But now the Free Times is passing out of existence as well. I am no longer the sardonic witness to this; it’s the paper for which I have been a regular contributing writer for 11 years now. Shall I add a copy to my Failure Box?

Perhaps out of habit I shall. But it would not be proper to call the Free Times a failure. Gone too soon, yes. Should have had an even bigger readership, no doubt. But a failure? No, I don’t think so. The newspaper came back from the brink — even from beyond the brink — time and again. It enjoyed a good run and made an impression upon the community.

All things are transient, we are told, all things must pass, nothing lasts forever (with the possible exception of Ohio’s economic recession). Yes, it would have been nice if the Free Times had soldiered on for a few more decades. But in the uncertain and poignantly ephemeral world of alternative newspapers, I judge its lifespan to have been a respectable and eventful one. I would like to express my gratitude to those Free Times editors who gave me this forum and tolerated my pretentious prose stylings. Not to mention the readers who did the same.

We are, all of us, impermanent. If you want to be really philosophical about it, our mortal remains are inevitably destined for our individual Failure Boxes (for those who would prefer cremation, Failure Urns). Does that mean we are all failures? Even I cannot be that cynical. Yes, I will lay yellowing copies of this newspaper to rest with its fellows. From time to time I may turn to the cache and page through the old issues again. But not to seek discouragement and despair. Rather, to inspire myself, to be reminded what is possible, and what really good writing is like, and that, when circumstances are right, how it finds its way into print. To commune privately with old friends again at the feathered end of time’s arrow.

Farewell, Free Times. You were a lot of things, but a failure was not one of them.

Charles Cassady Jr. is one of Free Times’ longest-serving and most prolific contributors.

THERE’S ALWAYS MORE TO THE STORY

By Ted Schwarz

When asked what I did for the Free Times over the last few years, I often say that I got paid to be nosey. It’s the only way I know to discover the real story beyond the image a subject wants to project. Take my cover story on Jerry Springer when he was contemplating a run for Ohio governor and the media focused on his television show because it was fun to write about mothers sleeping with their sons-in-law, best friends forever cheating with each other’s husbands, and similar sleaze that made “trailer trash” morally upright by comparison.

I don’t want to talk about your television show, I told Springer when we met in the Renaissance Hotel. I want to know who you are. Then, stunned, the man who had once been both the youngest mayor in Cincinnati history and the winner of that seat by the greatest plurality, took me back to Poland where his family prepared to flee to England to escape the Nazis.

Jerry’s father and pregnant mother were ready to leave a week before the others. They were asked to stay but decided to take the ship on which they had booked passage to London so they could find housing for everyone. The decision was critical. Hitler’s troops moved faster than expected and only Springer’s parents escaped dying in the Holocaust.

The Springers moved to the United States where Jerry’s father earned his living by making toys, then going from game to game along the Atlantic City Boardwalk, selling the toys for use as prizes.

Eventually reaching Cincinnati, Springer’s family history led him to become a populist, deeply concerned about poverty and injustice, his motivation for both entering politics and moving into television news and commentary. Springer was happy until the station ownership told him it was going in a new direction. He could move into the entertainment division with what became the show even he likes to deride, or he could collect his last paycheck. That was when he mentioned his daughter, Katie, who was born legally blind, deaf in one ear, and needing an operation when she was one day old to open her nasal passages. The cost of her health care was so great, he accepted a career direction that offered a high income and the death knell of serious politics. Because he could afford the medical treatments, Katie is now a productive adult who was recently married.

The story I wrote for the Free Times was quoted by dozens of Ohio dailies. But only much later, when Springer appeared on Dancing with the Stars to learn to waltz at his daughter’s wedding, did other journalists fully understand the depth of the man only the Free Times had profiled.

When Les Roberts became Cleveland’s “flavor of the month,” lauded because he created a private investigator who solved crimes in Cleveland! he was routinely asked about nothing else. We told of his writing 2,500 half-hour television programs, more than anyone in Hollywood history, including working for the real Get Smart, the television series on which the pathetic new movie is based. He was founding producer of Hollywood Squares, and he had delightful stories about the quirks of the famous.

We have been the only paper to explore the issue of why emotionally troubled elementary school students reaching out for help through drawings and writings are being ignored until they act out violently. One surprised Cleveland official commented that none of the other reporters knew to ask the right questions.

We have also reinvestigated murders, including the case of Kevin Young, acquitted of murdering Shaker Heights High School student Lisa Pruett. All journalists have access to police records after a case has gone to court, but daily news is not big on reflection. We went through the records, then spent months interviewing and winning the trust of most of the people involved, including Young, who provided the Free Times with the records from his stay in the psychiatric hospital following Lisa’s murder. These records had never been seen by the prosecution, the police investigators or Young’s parents, but were key to our two-part series, published in 2004. And as I write this, current Free Times staff writer James Renner is investigating the case again, and may come to a different conclusion.

Renner is striving for the truth, just as I did. And that’s what alternative weeklies ultimately are all about, the reason we loved what we did as the Free Times and we will love pursuing new stories in the merged paper coming next week.

Former Free Times news editor Ted Schwarz is a prolific author.

AMIDST THE RUBBLE, A GIFT

By Joshua Greene

Ah, Cleveland. City of burning waters, how I miss thy smell, the industrial valley, the hiss of the pipes, the magnesium fire, the streets at night — 10-cent fares, 50-cent words, dollar for your hollar, loose ladies, lousy cops and a daze of hazy days. Cleveland.

When I was there I tried to convince management at the Free Times what the city really needed was a Great Depression issue. I interviewed the old hulks in the nursing homes about how they managed in the first Great Depression. I wanted it but the boss said it wouldn’t be such a sell with our advertisers. Go figure; even then times were tough.

I never wrote that story but, alas, let us call it a spade, daddio.

The predecessor to the first Great Depression was an industrial slowdown that hit the mining, milling, factory towns. Read LTV, GE, TRW ... tech-bubble, housing bubble, energy bubble, food bubble (opening soon to a venue near you).

Today the big news machine still blunders, wonders whether we’re in a recession. Could it be? Hmm. Bush says “no.” But I’m guessing he ain’t had to gas up the Hummer in a while.

Me, I’m just glad the Harvest Moon Hack column I wrote for the Free Times ended and I’m not still out on the streets wondering how to pay a lease — and that was back when gas was $1.80 a gallon. Ah, the good old days. Hey drivers, how you faring out there?

Back when I was running, the only hope in the middle of the night, besides the generous tips of the drug-courier grandmother, was to get some of those patients the inner-city hospitals were dumping. Oh, fairest policy makers, let us now debate the definition of a rendition of a recession.

The last thing I did in Cleveland was sell my truck, buy a $300 Subaru and head to Kentucky looking for pot farmers. I guess after my big idea about “the Great Depression story” the boss wanted me dead. Kind of a heavy-handed editorial policy if you ask me, but what the hay, I was game. It was somewhere in the middle of a Kentucky wilderness, in a biker gang’s hangout, passing beers and joints, wary of the pills, that the sawed-off double barrel of a shotgun caught my attention. Sure, the room was spinning and that makes it much harder to shoot a person, but nonetheless, I’m pretty sure the gun was loaded and I’ve been shot at before and I’m actually kind of adverse to the idea.

“We don’t like trouble,” a toothless codger with beady eyes spit out at me, finger on the trigger, barrel to my chest. I finished my beer, always in touch with priorities. “Me neither,” I said thirstily.

After stealing their story I spent the next night riding shotgun with the Perry County Sheriff’s Department. I was fortunate enough to ride around with the ATF guys raiding bars, looking for illegal drinkers. One poor chap refused to show his ID and instantly had his head smashed on the bar and was then arrested. Down at intake when the kid, still bleeding profusely, gave the guards some lip, he was informed, “Son, you ain’t in Indiana anymore, you’re in Hazard, Kentucky, and we don’t give a damn about your constitutional rights.”

Well, I got my story, but there’s always so much you can’t say in a news story. Sure we wrote about the booby-trapped pot plants and the war on drugs being fought with Hueys and machine guns seven hours from your back door. But there’s plenty more that never gets told. Drink, drink to the stories that never get told.

For the Free Times I bunked in the flop houses, slept in the shelters, worked in the temp shops, drove cab through the slums, chased lousy politicians sleeping with their lobbyists and tried to find some of that humanity we all sense is missing.

Ah the missing humanity. Booms and busts, foreclosed dreams, dirty air and missing humanity.

To me, the Free Times was a gift. It was one of those gifts that costs money, and publisher Matt Fabyan always balanced that need to know with that need to survive. But it was a gift. There were two alternatives in the Cleveland market, a rarity these days to have competing print media. Scene played dirty and liked the myopic, and the Free Times searched for that missing humanity — that simple cry for justice, that song of righteousness sung by the hardworking activists that found harbor in the news and views in those pages.

That great evil we name money manifests itself again. A deal goes down and the writers and editors and printers and delivery drivers turn to lives of crime. A judge signs an order and 40,000 pensioners lose their benefits. A murmur spreads through Wall Street and Fannie Mae loses 30 percent in the first hour of trading, July 10, 2008. Our world built on this concept of money, a mere representation of value, is as ephemeral as the value of the dollar itself. Your wages deflate but your bills inflate — how is that? Alas, we shall not tarry long and discuss such trivial matters. Money is but a theory but The Bookstore on West 25th has come and gone — and so now bloweth the Free Times.

I recently interviewed a not-fully-documented migrant worker in Bakersfield, California who said it best: “Money can be an intangible concept, if you have plenty of it. If you don’t, it becomes quite real.”

Fare-thee-well old cubicles and florescent lights and flickering screens. Fare-thee-well night janitors waiting on the next mess to come. Fare-thee-well dear readers, and keep in touch.

Former Free Times writer Joshua Greene can be reached at joshuagreene@yahoo.com.

A SEARCH FOR SOUL

By Daniel Gray-Kontar

I am writing these notes from Japan, while listening to the composition of a musical producer here whose work I’ve enjoyed for a long while, and now have the pleasure of recording with. I’m interested in his music because his work contains an ethereal otherworldliness that speaks to my soul in a way that no other producer’s music has. Through the notes, I am reminded of the future we are shaping in the present. Through music composition and lyricism, we are both searching for an inner dialectic of truth by connecting at once to spirit and to community. In many ways, I suppose I have spent much of my life identifying people who are interested in this same journey, and while I have shifted my vocation from that of a full-time journalist to that of a vocalist, educator and scholar, it’s safe to say that it was the Free Times’ pursuit of truth, spirit and community that brought me on board as a writer for this magazine from about 1997 until 2002.

It was not an easy five years. During that time I worked for five editors, whose personalities couldn’t have been more different: Cindy Barber, Tom Vasich, Lisa Chamberlain, Donald Forst and David Eden. These were all thoughtful, well-intentioned leaders with tremendous gifts and glaring flaws. I learned much from each of them. Cindy Barber gave me my first shot at writing for this magazine, seeing a voice that was desperately needed in Cleveland alternative media. Tom Vasich taught me to be unafraid to push convention. Lisa Chamberlain taught me to be more attentive to detail, and to push myself to be more than a good writer but a good reporter. David Eden gave me the opportunity to write a weekly column and challenged my political thinking in ways that I will never forget. Despite the quibbles, arguments and screaming matches, I am truly grateful to call most of these editors dear friends even today.

But the fact that I worked for so many editors in so short a period of time speaks to the rocky waters of alternative media — a media that I have been critical of in recent years, and continue to be. The fact that there have been so many editors at the Free Times, for example, is a testament to the fact that alternative media has been, for a long time, searching for its soul; and while I believe this to be true wherever alternative weekly magazines exist, I am most familiar with the situation here.

I remain concerned that there have never been enough voices of color appearing in the pages of local alternative media. And I feel that this lack of diverse voices is one of many areas worthy of considerable soul-searching during this moment when this magazine is undergoing yet another transformative period.

The lack of diversity in alternative media remains, and Cleveland is not the better for it. If an English-speaking foreigner were to visit Cleveland and pick up an alternative magazine by happenstance, that individual would not get a sense of the city’s true diversity. Cleveland is a city with a predominately black population, the second-largest community of Palestinians in the United States, an impressive population of Puerto Rican and Mexican residents — not to mention a growing Central and South American population, and so much more. But you’d never know that by gauging what’s reported and written about in the city’s alternative media. Tantamount to what is written about is who is doing the writing.

For my part, I was for some time the lone black writer of the Free Times, in large measure because I felt I had to be. It was a dangerous trap to put myself in, and in retrospect, I am glad to have held this role, but I also wish sometimes that I hadn’t done this. If there were important black films appearing in the city, I wrote about them. Important black books, black music … if there were dynamics in grassroots politics, all were penned by DGK. And since the Cleveland Municipal School District comprised mostly of black students, I wrote about the district too.

I realized that more writers of color were needed to cover specific areas that I did not have the expertise for, and it was with this idea in mind that in 2002 I pitched David Eden to allow me to edit a column in the magazine called “Urban Dialect.” I got the name from the rapper Planet Asia. It was a perfect representation of what I thought alternative media in Cleveland needed. It needed a diverse group of writers of color that could speak in the dialect of a new audience of urban readers. In the face of countless Cleveland editors who said they could not find black writers, such individuals as Jimi Izrael, Diona Shaw, Neal Hodges, just to mention a few, contributed to the column. The column ended when the Free Times was forced to close its doors that same year. I wanted to keep the dream of the column alive, so I called a few former Free Times staffers, and together, we launched the magazine with the same name. The magazine was also, sadly, short-lived.

As I close this writing from a Tokyo-based apartment, I’m listening to the music of this producer/arranger who reminds me of what it is to search for soul, for community, for truth. As the magazine enters a brave new period in its evolution, I hope that with respect to the needs of Clevelanders, this time, they get it right. There is much more than diversity that alternative magazines need to confront if they are to truly claim the term “alternative,” but the time and space allotted for this writing do not allow for a deeper exploration of these necessities. I will simply close by wishing the Free Times the very best as it moves into this new period, but I do so with the hope that its leadership will understand and confront the need for change.

Former Free Times writer Daniel Gray Kontar recently released his first album on the neo-soul label Futuristic Music, and is pursuing a PhD at the University of California at Berkeley.

WE’VE SCENE GOOD TIMES

By Michael Gill

I had given two weeks’ notice at Sun Newspapers in June 2002 to take a job as a staff writer for the Free Times. The offices were still on the second floor of a Coventry storefront, a building owned by the paper’s founding family. My new job meant a 30-percent raise, but more importantly, a paper that had room for style, time for investigation, and a perspective beyond suburban city council meetings. People whose writing I admired worked there.

On the Wednesday of my last week at the Lakewood Sun Post, I came to work to find a copy of Scene taped to my computer screen. The cover story was by former Scene editor Pete Kotz. The headline: “Meltdown at the Free Times.” The image: a mushroom cloud.

At that time, conventional wisdom had it that both papers — Free Times, owned by Village Voice Media, and Scene, owned by Phoenix-based New Times — were losing money, propped up by their owners in the hope of one day owning Cleveland. In this case, the conventional wisdom turned out to be correct. Both papers fought fiercely for control of this Rust Belt town. The most visible faces of the competition were the editors, two complicated men, Kotz and Free Times editor David Eden.

Both were at the helms of their respective papers on Oct. 2, 2002 when the news was dropped that their owners were divvying up the markets where they were competing, Cleveland and Los Angeles. There was no victory in that deal; the competitors canceled the game and paid each other off. Readers might have thought that the competition had ended just then, but that was only halftime. The New York Times and Los Angeles Times competed with each other to tell the story of the US Justice Department’s antitrust investigation that followed.

Free Times publisher Matt Fabyan then built a coalition of investors, led by Erie Times Publishing, of Erie, Pennsylvania, to bring the paper back in May 2003. The Kotz v. Eden grudge match resumed. In one incident gleefully reported in the pee dee, the two nearly came to blows at a convention. You didn’t have to be there to imagine their proud bellies bumping.

Not a week went by that Eden didn’t attack then-Mayor Jane Campbell and the city’s power brokers on the pages of the Free Times, hurling invented nicknames and a seemingly inexhaustible supply of anger. But he didn’t write much about his competition (the “ObScene”). Kotz and company, on the other hand, made attacking the Free Times a routine. An artist was commissioned to draw caricatures of Eden and Fabyan. In a comical stroke of mercenary aggression, Village Voice Media executive editor Michael Lacey put a price on Eden’s head, paying Scene staffers bonus money for digging up dirt on Eden’s past (he made it clear that it wasn’t competition he loathed; it was Eden specifically).

But a steady flow of both business and editorial staffers going back and forth between the two papers (though mostly from Scene to Free Times) made alternative publishing in Cleveland feel like one big, divided and angry family. People who should have been fast friends — writers on local issues, politics, music, the arts — were suspicious of each other and rarely talked. When people left the Free Times for Scene (Kevin Hoffman, now an editor in Minneapolis), it was usually to make more money. When they left Scene for the Free Times, it was because they couldn’t stand Scene’s culture (James Renner) or because they were fired (Frank Lewis, Jeff Niesel). Scene’s “rejects” helped make the modern Free Times great. Scene’s former owners didn’t know what they had. They thought they could buy more.

Working at the Free Times during that era felt like working at the local hardware store, duking it out against the Home Depot. The feeling grew when Scene’s owners, New Times, and the Free Times’ former owners (prior to the Great Collusion of 2002) merged and became the new Village Voice Media, with 16 papers across the US. We were far outgunned by the size of Scene’s staff, and if motivation were measured in salaries, they had us beat there, too. Nonetheless, in 2004 — the year Eden left for Channel 19 — the Free Times won the Cleveland Press Club’s award for best alternative paper in Ohio. Scene has won several times since then.

In the ensuing years, both papers whittled back their staffs. The Free Times went from 50 full-timers under Village Voice ownership to 35 when we returned to the newsstands in 2003. Since then, entirely through attrition, our numbers have dwindled to 24.

So we wrote about things that mattered to us. We watched the bottom line. We read the industry news: According to testimony provided during a predatory pricing lawsuit in San Francisco — where the independent SF Bay Guardian competes against one of Scene’s sister papers, the Village Voice Media-owned SF Weekly — Scene lost $1.3 million last year. When the company lost their case, the parent company faced a $15 million judgment, or the prospect of an expensive appeal. It was a war of attrition. We told ourselves we were wearing them down (even as we took months to pay some of our bills). We thought we could win outright.

In recent months we knew that something was up — the US Justice Department had been sniffing around again — and we hoped that Village Voice Media was looking to get out of Cleveland. We never guessed that a company unrelated to either would buy both starving papers and merge them into one.

Imagine the Cuyahoga River drying up and making East indistinguishable from West. That’s where we are, neither victorious nor defeated. Wish us luck.

Former Scene contributor and longtime Free Times staffer Michael Gill will oversee arts coverage at the new, merged Scene.