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of Maurice Weidenthal, who had cofounded the
Jewish Independent
with Aaron Newman. The following year he was on his own in business, using $500 to establish the Electro-Set Company, which built and sold lines of radio gear, telegraph equipment, electrical experiment kits, telescopes, and microscopes. The business took off, especially with kids, and moved from what was essentially a warehouse to a proper retail space. Joe had all kinds of schemes to grow the trade, such as a daily telegraph message to all customers to announce sales or new equipment: e-commerce in 1915! And because he knew his way around the insides of the equipment he sold, the shop became Cleveland’s first supplier of radio parts; soon it was involved in a thriving national mail-order enterprise.
    Unfortunately, World War I put an end to the sale of wireless equipment to civilians, and Electro-Set was suddenly deprived of a large part of its business. In 1917 it morphed, changing its name to Newman-Stern and mixing in sporting goods with the remaining lines of scientific and electrical equipment. Joe would serve as president of the company, and he had two partners: Arnold L. Stern, who was strictly an investor, and as secretary and treasurer his own younger brother, Art, a bachelor and failed journalist then twenty-three years old.

    A RTHUR S IGMUND N EWMAN was born on August 29, 1893, and soon afterward the family was altered forever; by the time of his second birthday, his father had died. Art, as he was always known, would be raised by his sisters and brothers, all still living at home as late as 1900. Hannah ran Newman’s Millinery in the bustling Jewish commercial district on Cleveland’s West Twenty-sixth Street. Like Joe, who was only two years older, Art attended Central High School; like Aaron, he was drawn into newspaper work. Not long after high school he founded, published, wrote, and solicited ads for a local business circular, the
Home Advertiser.
He parlayed that into a job in the advertising and news departments of the
Cleveland Press
, where he proved unlucky: in 1915, phoning into the newsroom to report a scoop regarding a contentious strike at the Mechanical Rubber Company, he was inadvertently connected to the rival
Cleveland News
, which published his story while his own paper got nothing; they canned him.
    And so Art went straight to work at Electro-Set, finding in Joe not only a surrogate parent (Hannah had died in 1913 when Art was seven teen) but a perfectly complementary partner as well. A few years later, interviewed in a Cleveland business journal, Joe said: “Art and I are as alike as sunup and sundown. I am the maniac of the business—the long-haired dreamer. At least that’s Art’s diagnosis. He is the hard-shelled, brass-tacks man. Every business needs both types. One counteracts the other.” The brothers would work together side by side for decades: Joe a wise and wacky jester filled with unpredictable energies, Art balding and sad-eyed and diligent and upright and exact. (Even in his twenties he looked older than his older brother.)
    The Newman-Stern Company they built would break all sorts of new ground: it was the first entity in Cleveland to broadcast election results by radio and the first to offer steel fishing rods and steel-shafted golf clubs; its sale of microscopes for children virtually invented the field. In 1921 the business relocated to a large downtown storefront, where it would expand again after just seven years and then again after World War II, by which time it had become the premier destination in the region for sporting equipment: baseball, camping and fishing gear, skis, small boats, tents, as well as radios, even television sets. And it always had a hand in gizmos: in 1946 Art stumbled upon a sweet deal onarmy surplus bombsight parts and gyroscopes and did a rampaging business liquidating it. *
    In all that time the brothers remained extremely close. Joe Newman filed away his personal