Paul Newman Read Online Free

with his own hat-making workshop and store, Newman’s Millinery. Perhaps that accounts for the pause in births in the family. It wasn’t until 1891 that Joseph, the second son, was born, followed by the last of the bunch, Arthur, in 1893.
    The Newmans lived in the Jewish neighborhoods of Cleveland that resembled the Jewish enclaves of other big American cities, with pushcarts and small family businesses and tenements pouring out old-world noises and aromas—cauldrons from which bright young men and women strove toward integration into American society through education and entry into social and cultural institutions. As in New York and Chicago, the Cleveland Jews established themselves relatively rapidly in professional, academic, and public pursuits throughout the city. They may even have made a quicker ascent there than in other places because of the youth of the city and its lightning rise and its sprawl.
    Consider the Newmans. There were grander birthrights, even among recent immigrant families, than the Newmans’ tiny family hat-making business. But Hannah and Simon were raising a remarkablycreative and successful group of offspring. Their hat shop, for instance, would one day be immortalized in 1943 in
Polly Poppingay, Milliner
, a popular chapter book for children written by Gertrude Newman, who by then had already published another children’s book,
The Story of Delicia, a Rag Doll.
Lillian, too, was a writer, producing verse in Yiddish. Ottile would become a schoolteacher and go on to head the drama group at the Euclid Avenue Temple, probably the most prominent synagogue in Cleveland; one of her sons, Richard Newman Campen, would graduate from Dartmouth College and forge a career as a noted historian of midwestern art and architecture.
    The Newman boys were also to make marks on the world. Aaron attended some college and then became a reporter for the
Cleveland World
and, in 1906, the cofounder and business manager of the
Jewish Independent
, one of several Jewish papers in town. In 1927, that incredibly flush year, he inaugurated two enterprises: the Little Theater of the Movies, the first cinema in Cleveland devoted exclusively to foreign films, and the Cleveland Sportsman’s and Outdoors Show, a trade fair at which manufacturers and retailers exhibited the latest recreational gear. During the Depression he wrote several satirical pamphlets about the fear of Communist strains in the New Deal. *
    Quite a character. And yet his brother Joseph made even more of a splash in the world. No history of twentieth-century Cleveland is truly complete without mentioning, at least in passing, the ingenious, loquacious, mercurial, professorial, practical, affable, quixotic sprite born Joseph Simon Newman. Poet, inventor, orator, journalist, gadabout, boulevardier, and mensch, Joe Newman published science columns and light verse in newspapers, held patents on electronic communications gizmos, wrote the annual musical comedy revue for the City Club for more than three decades, taught at Cleveland College, served as atrustee of the Cleveland Play House, published four books of poetry, and built with his kid brother, Arthur, the most successful sporting and recreational goods store between Chicago and New York.
    Joe was always good with both words and numbers. After high school he spent a year at college and then worked for six months in an electrical lab. Then he went into retail, working for the big Stearn and Co. department store in the electrical, camera, and mechanical toy departments. All the while he fussed with electrical equipment and with words. Under the name Dr. Si. N. Tiffic, he wrote a kids’ science column for the
Plain Dealer
, as well as a stream of light verse on public issues of the day. And he invented things—small radio and telegraph components, remote-controlled switches for toys and lights, a telephone system for children—some of which he took out patents for.
    By 1913 he was married to the daughter