AF: Today, Is January 27, 2022, and I am with Carolyn Milter. Did I pronounced that right?
CM: Carolyn Milter
AF: Okay, no problem. So, I’ll jump straight into the questions. My first question. Can you tell me about yourself when were you born where you grew up your parents and childhood upbringing?
CM: I was born In Charleston, West Virginia and grew up in a small town in West Virginia. In terms of what we’re thinking about here In relation to Ludlow, that small town everybody was white. There were no there were no Catholics, there were no Jews, there were no people of color, and there were no immigrants. It was very much a white, protestant environment. However my family was educated. For example, my mother had gone actually to a catholic nursing school in Michigan. Within my family there was not bigotry. I would also like to say about West Virginia, even today where it gets so much attention as it being a place of white supremacy and being difficult about civil rights, there’s truth there but there are also some good people too. I had several history teachers who talked about the civil war and about race in ways that were dealing with the historical reality which was worthwhile. I wanted to be a journalist. So, I went to Ohio University because it did have a very good journalism school. I met my husband Bert Milter in college. He grew up here in Cleveland, primarily In Cleveland Heights. When we got married we rented an apartment in East Cleveland, and this was during the period when the real estate industry was doing incredible blockbusting in East Cleveland. There was a year in that period in the spring this elementary school in East Cleveland was virtually all white and over the summer blockbusting cleaned out that particular neighborhood. When the school opened in the fall almost all the kids were black. We had liked East Cleveland. We were living near the Forest Hill Park. We had actually looked at houses in East Cleveland, but when all this blockbusting started obviously it made us very nervous. I had said, and my husband agreed, we then had a first child in 1964 and I said I want her to grow up in a place where there are different kinds of people, of different backgrounds, and it looks like East Cleveland Is not going to be the place. We went to a meeting at Kirk Junior High School in East Cleveland one night. It was called as a neighborhood meeting to discuss the housing situation and there were tons of people there, White people who were angry irate upset and the whole Issue was they wanted to keep blacks from moving Into East Cleveland they did not want East Cleveland to become all black which It pretty much Is today thanks to the real estate Industry. Well that kind of finished us with East Cleveland. I had had left the newspaper and gone to work for a little non-profit, which has since gone out of business, called the Council on Human Relations. Somehow someone there had passed a Ludlow newsletter on to me. I wish I had that newsletter, unfortunately I don’t. But I do remember what in it connected me to Ludlow. Joanne Finley, who was at that point I believe was in medical school living In Ludlow with her lawyer husband and her children, and very much Involved in the creation of what became the Ludlow Community Association and its housing program. In that newsletter, I remember she said she was writing it late at night sitting at her kitchen table. She wrote about what the vision was for Ludlow and it made an Incredible Impression on me. I showed It to my husband and I said let’s look for houses there. So, we contacted the Ludlow housing program, which had started again of course. We bought our house in 1964 and as you know the Ludlow Community Association had been founded in 1957. It was already active in the neighborhood when we moved In. There had been blockbusting in Ludlow by the real estate Industry. We didn’t use a realtor, we used the Ludlow housing program, the volunteers, and saw the house on Keswick road that we bought in 1964. The experience of seeing what happened in East Cleveland. Incidentally East Cleveland had had at one point a national reputation as a city manager run city, very well maintained, and very well managed. If the white people had not left on mass with a lot of help and a lot of pushing by the real estate Industry, East Cleveland could have been what Ludlow became. That Is it could have been a place where there was stability and both white and black people could be living. Unfortunately, it didn’t work out for East Cleveland. We were very happy to find Ludlow and then started our Ludlow adventure.
AF: That’s really interesting. I’m kind of curious I read an article you wrote In a Plain Dealer in April 1977 about what It was like to have white children in a majority black school. Do you mind to elaborate more on your children’s experience?
CM: You’re welcomed to when you’re thinking about me in the interview or anything, when I wrote that those feelings that were in that piece were about the best description I could give you of what our experience was. Of course this was the experience of a white family, not a black family. It would be hard for me to go into a lot about the children’s experiences because when you’re an adult and a parent and you’re seeing your children and their friends, you’re viewing them from an adult perspective. I’m not sure that you always totally understand what’s going on from their perspective. I do think, because I was thinking of being doing this Interview with you, I do think of one little Incident. I think it said something. It happened to my two daughters but the point is I think it could have happened to any of the kids that were growing up together during that period black or white. They experienced life together. They were together in school, they were together in the neighborhood, their parents knew each other, and for our society a very special experience so here’s the little Incident that I will tell you. I don’t think it’s in that article, maybe it is. I don’t remember. I think it says a great deal. There were a couple of boys who were brothers. One of them was in one of my daughter’s classes. One of these brothers was very tall and thin for his age, this was elementary school so we’re talking about fourth graders, sixth graders. The other brother was short and chubby, and it was just sort of funny because they were brothers but they looked so different. I was in the kitchen doing something and my two daughters were sitting at the breakfast room table. For some reason, one of them brought up one of the brothers and started talking about him. She launched into all kinds of negative adjectives, ‘oh he’s nasty, he yells at people, I don’t like to see him on the playground, he’s this he’s that.’ She went through a whole list of negative things. None of them having to do with race but negative comments. Her sister when she had gone through the list said, ‘well what about and she named, I’m not going to use her names because the families might still be able to figure out who I’m talking about. She mentioned the brother. She said what about him? The one who was who had said all the negative things about the other one said, ‘he’s great, he’s smart, he’s in my class, I really like him he’s this he’s that.’ She did a whole string of positive adjectives. They weren’t paying attention to me as I said I was doing something In the kitchen, It was almost like I was hearing them talk without them thinking about that I was listening to what they were saying. I thought how wonderful is this. I think that there’s quite a bit of this from our Ludlow children, and what was it? Is seeing somebody as an individual not seeing them just about their race, not seeing them as a racial stereotype of some sort. But seeing them as who they are as an Individual human being. What a wonderful thing. We know that in our society now we have a lot of problems that could I think to some extent be solved if we had more of that. Now of course, it wasn’t always like. I know and you’ll probably get this if you’re doing Interviews with different people, that when they became teenagers, even then and it’s true today, they’ll draw apart. You might go and might have gone into the high school cafeteria and you would have the black kids sitting together at a table, and then you would have the white kids at a different table. The white and black kids during this period might do separating. Although some of them were mature enough, strong enough, whatever, to continue their friendships unbroken but with teenagers it does get a lot more complicated. But at the end of the day, at the end of the line, when they’re In adulthood, what I have heard and what I’ve friends who went through all of this Ludlow period had the same experience that the children of that era of that civil rights era In Ludlow both the black children and the white children felt like that growing up as they did in Ludlow was a very positive thing, and had a positive effect on the way they see the world as adults.
AF: I talked to one person so far but other people I Imagine have similar stories. How did you meet the Stokes because I know Shelley or now Shelley Stokes-Hammond babysat your children?
CM: She babysat just when I had the first child and was she was very small, and maybe when the second one was just been born. I think mainly by the time Shelley was off and gone out of high school and gone, my child was still so young that I had a relationship with Shelley, but a child that young, Shelley was good to her Shelley took care of her, that was nice, but she wasn’t really old enough to remember what was going on. When she was sitting for her she was very young.
AF: I know you were a journalist though and I think you joined the Cleveland Press, when was that?
CM: I worked at the Cleveland press. I started there in 1958. It was about a positive experience mostly, but there were there were a couple of negatives which I will mention. First the positive experience. The press was an afternoon newspaper and as you know it no longer exists. The Plain Dealer was a morning newspaper, and the Plain Dealer was considered somehow more national more serious more national news. The Cleveland press had this reputation of being very close to the neighborhoods of Cleveland and the news in those neighborhoods. That was a good thing. It was a wonderful experience for me because it was like to getting an education about Cleveland as I got assignments and talked to different people, and got a chance to go to different parts of the city, I learned a lot and that was a good thing. However, the press then, and it wasn’t only the press, believe me, it was all of the all of the newspapers in the country, women and minorities were in very short supply. For me, the women thing was a problem. I could see that most of us were pushed into an area that they referred to then section of the paper called the women’s pages. The only women when I started there who were not In that part, were two women who were during World War II when the men were drafted and the paper was really needing help, these two women had been given beats to cover that they never would have gotten to If there’d been men around. For example, the one woman was in the business department. After the war she was strong enough and pushy enough that she managed to stay there. Those two women stuck it out but it was difficult and ultimately that was part of the reason that I left. I got somewhat disillusioned about the whole thing. The other thing that I got disillusioned about was race. One of the reasons that I wanted to go into journalism and thought that It was extremely worthwhile was because I believed the Thomas Jefferson line, which I’m going to quote but not get It exactly right but you’ll know what I mean, that If he had to do without a government or do without a free press he’d rather do without government. That how Important a free press was to society. I thought that was great and therefore it was discouraging to find out that when I got there In 1958 they had a very large staff then and there were only two black reporters. One of them was on the police beat which seemed like a stereotypical place to stick a black reporter. The police beat office was actually not even in the press building it was down in the district in the central in an office inside the police station. It was a long time before I even met that black reporter, and incidentally he lived in Ludlow which I didn’t even know but about eventually found out. The other black reporter got disillusioned by the way he could see blacks were being treated in journalism. He was very religious, and he left the paper to go be a missionary. I don’t remember which foreign country but I think he was assigned to a foreign country. Then the ultimate racial thing that I found very disillusioning is in crime stories often what would happen is the reporter would be phoning in and someone in the office would be writing the piece. I was not in a general assignment situation where I wrote the pieces, but of course I had peers, and friends, guys who did and I knew what happened. What would happen if It was a black-on-black crime the person who was calling the story In would tell the reporter who was going to wipe It up to put a c. So in time the quote marks after the person’s name so like you put John Doe and then you’d put a parenthesis and inside that you put C. C stood for color. Now what it told you Is if it was a black-on-black crime it wasn’t newsworthy. If it was a white crime, especially white on white, it was newsworthy. If it was black-on-white, it was newsworthy. If you put the little c in there that would lead you in the direction of what is newsworthy and what is not. Of course that is incredibly racist. I don’t know what year they stopped doing It, but I can tell you I was quite disillusioned when I when I learned that. Having said all that, there were good people there at the Cleveland Press, good reporters, some who really were a little bit ahead of the times and trying to look at what was going on in neighborhoods in connection with race and all kinds of other things. Today I still believe that a free press is absolutely necessary if we are going to solve our civil rights problems in this country.
AF: As somebody who looks at newspapers all the time I’ve seen similar patterns from the past. I know Ludlow did get a lot of national and local press recognition so did you ever try to write anything about it while you work for the Cleveland press?
CH: You worked on assignment. You didn’t decide what you were going to write about, that’s pretty much true today. Columnists, of course important national columnist, can decide what they want to write about. But reporters write about what the editor tells them to write about, and I was never assigned to write anything that would have had anything to do with race. You saw you’ve seen a couple things that I wrote you saw the piece that you referenced earlier from the April 1977 Plain Dealer. Once I was freelancing after a couple kids came along and I freelanced for a while, I sold several pieces that had a racial component to them but those were freelance pieces that would wind up on the op-ed pages. When I was a reporter I didn’t have any opportunity to do to cover issues related to race.
AF: I read a magazine article about straw buying so I was kind of curious how exactly do you and Ludlow association come to learn about Ernest and jack lee Jackie Tinsley difficulties in finding a home.
CH: I was active in the Ludlow Community Association from the time we moved In. As I told you we were involved with the Ludlow housing program helped we find our house. I immediately volunteered to be an activist in the Community Association. I was on the board of the Community Association. Even before that was involved as a volunteer in various things. Unfortunately you ask me in your written questions and you’re not the only one who has asked me, recently there when there’s been all this more Interest In doing the civil rights trail and everything. I’ve been asked about how did we get connected specifically to the Tinsley’s and honestly I don’t remember who the person was. All I can tell you it was almost certainly a board member, not necessarily the board president, but it could have been someone on the Ludlow board who was especially involved with housing stuff, specifically. I can’t remember who It was, but whoever It was approached my husband and me and said ‘we have a Ludlow family that wants to move to (27:51)… they contacted us and said It’s absolutely legal If you have the money to buy a house and the house Is for sale, that you should be able to look at the house and make an offer to buy it. They are doing this and they’re they kind of haven’t found what they want in Ludlow exactly and they want a somewhat larger house. They’re looking in Shaker but they are running into some serious difficulties and here’s a chance for Ludlow to do something that we can take a look at what’s going on with the real estate thing. We can help this family. Maybe we have to end up with doing a straw buy. I actually knew what a straw by was from when I had been, I told you I worked briefly with that nonprofit, and there was a woman who’d written a book which I read when I worked there and they had been a strong straw buyers In Kentucky. She had written about it and what it said about the real estate industry. I knew what a straw buyer was. I said yes but I have to talk to my husband. I talked to him he said yes and that’s how It started. It was Ludlow that brought us together. I didn’t know Ernie and Jackie and Bert didn’t know them. We came together at our house and a Byron Krantz lawyer who lived In Ludlow and also had been an activist with the Community Association, he had already told the board member whoever was put trying to put this together, that he would be happy to do a pro bono. That he would do the legal work both for the straw buyer to buy the house and the legal work for the straw buyer to sell the house to the Tinsley’s. He came to the meeting. The meeting in our house was the Tinsley’s Byron as a lawyer, and my husband and me. That night we talked about what would happen. Ernie Tinsley worked for the Internal Revenue Service in Cleveland. He had a professional job, I think he was the first black in the office of at the professional level that he was at. Jackie was a school teacher In Shaker Heights. Byron talked through with them. There was no question that the areas where they were thinking of looking for houses they absolutely had both the down payment and the Income to purchase such a house. Ernie was had very dark skin, I mean you would look at Ernie and you would say Ernie is black. Jackie could pass for white. Jackie obviously, I’m sure, had some white ancestors back there. Jackie could pass for white. What we talked about was first of all to go through and make sure that yes they couldn’t do this. The real estate Industry active In Shaker Heights, at that time, was not going to give them a chance to move where they wanted to move. Examples of that is one point they went to look at a house and all of a sudden the realtor, of course had not seen them, and now the realtor sees them and sees that they’re black says, ‘oh I don’t have the key. I don’t have the key to the house I’m sorry, but I’m not going to be able to show the house.’ Another time, Jackie said she went, and I believe Ernie was with her too, and all of a sudden they go to the place where they’re outside the house where they’re supposed to meet the realtor. The realtors said ‘oh the house just sold already.’ Which of course was not true. They were not even getting to look at the Interiors of these houses. What we came up with is that since Jackie could pass for white, is that I would shop for houses and Jackie would be my friend. I brought my friend Jackie with me. This would give Jackie an opportunity to see the house. Jackie would not take notes, Jackie would not ask questions because she was not supposed to be the buyer. I would ask questions and make notes. I would ask had asked Jackie before we would go in what do you want to know? I’ll ask that. Did you read the article that was In Shaker magazine about the straw buy?
AF: Yes I did.
CM: Well if you will remember I think It Is In the article that the one where we actually bought the house. She managed to get me in a different room. We were in a room and then she kind of moved me quickly into another room and lowered her voice and asked me, ‘is she a Negro?’ I knew in that second if I said yes that I was not going to get the house because she was going to know that Jackie was the real buyer. I said no. I thought of my mother and they bring you up not to lie, but one of my absolute, I read It every year on martin Luther king day, letter from Birmingham jail, where martin Luther king talks about when It Is okay to lie. When you’re furthering social justice and you’re saying the right thing is to do. In my mind, the right thing to do was to I can already tell that this was going to be the house that Jackie really wanted and I was going to If I didn’t lie there was no way she was going to get the house. It worked out okay. Then I had to bring my husband and we went through. I had him ask questions that I had asked Jackie. I dealt with Jackie all the time not Ernie and I’ll say something about that in a minute. I would ask Jackie what do you want to ask Burton. The kind of questions the man would ask. I remember going to ask about the furnace how old is the furnace and this sort of thing. We went through the house again and then we made an offer and we bought the house. If you read the article that when the seller found out who the ultimate buyers were, he felt like he had done something terrible to his former neighbors and he called up. When I answered the phone, what I remember Is, I picked up the phone and he started yelling so loud that for a minute I couldn’t even tell what he was saying. It was just like this great roaring noise. Unfortunately my mother who lived In west Virginia was visiting, what a time to have her visiting, and she and I had been sitting at the breakfast room table drinking tea or coffee and she could hear this yelling Into the phone. The phone had a long cord I moved out and sort of around the corner so I was sort of out of the hallway and he kept yelling. He said he was going to come over and kill Burt, my husband. Bert actually was out of town on business when this happened, he wasn’t even in town. Although I certainly wasn’t going to tell him that and he just went on and on and on. I just listened to him and I don’t even remember what I said in response. It doesn’t matter because he didn’t want to hear my response anyway. I don’t think I said much of anything. He just screamed and yelled and then eventually he hung up. But he made it sound like he was going to do something to us. I called Burt who was out of town right away and told him I lied again to my mother. She said that person was yelling on the phone what was that about, and I made up something to say to her. I immediately called Jackie and told Jackie that they should be on the alert for a while. We were and nothing happened. He did not do anything else. If this were happening today I think I would be more scared because so many people have guns today and there’s so much gun violence, but back then when he said he was going to come over and kill my husband I didn’t think, ‘oh my gosh I bet this guy has a gun and he Is going to come over here.’ I might think that today, but I didn’t think that back then. Or maybe I was just younger and I just was more naïve. I wasn’t as scared as maybe it should have been. Now about Ernie, I told you that Jackie got to see houses with me she got to see the house they bought that certainly Burt and I saw. There was no way that when Jackie found this house there was no way that Ernie could see the inside of It because If he had gone with her without her whatever. He never would have gotten anyway a realtor wasn’t going to show him the inside of the house. So he bought a house that he did not see the Inside of. This had to be, sure it was, a very painful experience. I made some handwritten notes at the time just about the actual buying meeting and stuff and I wrote that Ernie was very quiet, he said almost nothing. In other words, he was very upset and why wouldn’t he be. I never had the courage at the time to bring that up with Jackie. It was just too painful. We all moved on with our lives. I didn’t talk about it in the neighborhood. I’m sure I don’t believe she did either. It isn’t that we kept it a secret or anything if anybody from the Ludlow association would have wanted to talk to me more about It, I would have talked to them and I’m sure Byron the lawyer would have too. We didn’t keep it secret but we didn’t talk about it because it was a painful thing for the Tinsley’s. Many years went by and in a conversation with the archivist at the library, that’s how that magazine article came about the subject of the straw buy came up. She said ‘oh my,’ she said, ‘I think that should be something that we should really be part of history.’ So that’s when they approached us about doing the magazine article. In all those Intervening years, we didn’t say anything about It. It had to be very painful for Ernie. So then in 2008, I finally had the courage to call Jackie and asked her to go to lunch with me. I wanted to talk a little bit about the experience that had happened. She immediately, she was retired at that point, Ernie of course died much too young. He died in 1972. She was retired and she said certainly we could have lunch. So we went to Panera In Shaker Heights and for about an hour and a half we sat and we talked about It. We didn’t just talk about the straw buy, we talked about Shaker Heights, we talked about our lives, and we talked about retirement. At the very end, when we were getting ready to park. I finally had the courage to ask the question. I said ‘Ernie had to buy a house that he couldn’t see the Inside of, can you tell me did he really like the house?’ and I believe she was giving me a totally honest answer she said, ‘oh he did,’ she said, ‘he really liked It.’ She said, ‘when we bought It,’ she said, of course he couldn’t see, she said, ‘If you want It ,we’re going to buy It.’ She said, ‘he was a very special guy.’ I wrote a note about that I had her exact quote she said he was a very special guy. She proceeded to tell me some things that he had done. They took a sun room and converted it into an all-weather room. He did a couple of projects in the house and she said yes he did like It. But I can’t even imagine putting then and hand now what the whole experience felt like to him. When I think about Ludlow and when I think about what has happened since then and all of that. It makes me think that these experiences we have to understand this history, we can’t bury it. I think that’s why this civil rights trail will be a good thing. The people that that were part of the parts of the civil rights trail, not just the Ludlow part, but all those other parts, most of those people now are dead but that era, everything that happened ,we shouldn’t let that history be lost. We can’t solve our problems if we aren’t honest about what they are.
AF: Was straw buying pretty common In Ludlow or is your example the only one of?
CM: I never knew of any other one. The law event passed in 1968, the fair housing law. There were two things that happened in 1968, there was the national law and the other one was there was a supreme court decision called Jones v. Mayer you might look up. Jones v. Mayer referred back to a law that actually had passed in I think 1866, which dealt with the Issue of housing discrimination. You didn’t need to do straw buys, what you needed to do then in 1968 and going forward was to sue because now you have really have a law that says when the real estate Industry does what they’re doing it Is absolutely provably Illegal. You can really go after It. That’s what happened. Everybody we operation equality was started, was directed by first by Alan Gressel, Ludlow resident. Then by Joe Battle, Ludlow resident. I worked there, several other Ludlow people worked. There were other organizations that were started there when Cleveland Heights became active in the thing. So from 1968 going forward the challenge became to do something about the systemic problem which was the real estate Industry. Fortunately things have changed a lot. It is certainly possible now to go into an all-white community if you’re a person of color and buy a house, and actually have a realtor that will show you the house, and you can buy the house. But It Is also true that studies and things have been done to show that some discrimination still happens. Illegal discrimination still happens. In other words the real estate industry once the law was passed in 1968 didn’t change overnight immediately and start doing everything right. That didn’t happen. Again, It’s a good reason to have this civil rights trail to look at what we’re on Is a journey here and a journey that we need to understand the history of but that journey’s not over.
AF: I interviewed yesterday Maxine Isaac, who was the daughter of Bernard Isaac, the second president of Ludlow. What was your relationship with the other members of Ludlow?
CM: What was their relationship like?
AF: What was your relationship with other Ludlow members like the Isaacs?
CM: Bernie and Mimi, Maxine’s parents were extremely active In Ludlow. You know, Ludlow physically is not a very large community. The boundaries of Ludlow it’s not that big. The relationships that were forged, people who were very active were like In most endeavors it’s a small group of people who are usually the most active. There was a lot of awareness and a lot of back and forth and a lot of people knowing each other in the community and being Involved. It just happened.
AF: I was kind of wondering living In Ludlow, did you face any questions from family or friends about living In an Integrated neighborhood because It wasn’t pretty common elsewhere.
CM: Did I face any questions from the family. Well, most people don’t say what they’re really thinking. But an older relative of my husband said to me a year or two after we had moved Into Ludlow, and I’m sure she’d heard negative things. ‘Oh, there are blacks moving into that part of the community.’ She said to me, ‘Well don’t worry Carolyn you’ll get enough money at some point that you could afford to move.’ I said to her we’re not Interested In moving. We love our house, and we love our neighborhood, and we’re staying right here. Other than that I can’t think of any direct confrontation, or concern, or anything. My mother after she retired when she used to come and visit us for several weeks at a time, she forged a friendship with a couple of our black neighbors and really enjoyed these women, enjoyed when she came to visit sitting outside on our porch or on the front steps with them talking and getting to know them. She was very positive about her neighborhood. I think we’re really lucky in that regard.
AF: I noticed you were an active member of your community so how did you manage to gain trust from so many people to pursue public offices and serve on various boards?
CM: I’ll go back to saying that Ludlow is not only a small area, but Shaker Heights Isn’t even that big. People got to know each other. As time went on it wasn’t just Ludlow, there were other neighborhoods where there were people who were concerned about trying to make a community that was open and welcoming to all kinds of people. We got to know each other through community activism, through the PTA, those sorts of things. That’s how we built those relationships.
AF: Do you remember the various offices you held, I think you was on school board if I’m correct.
CM: I was on the school board. I was asked to run for the school board, it wasn’t my idea. I was asked to run. Steve Minter, who was an outstanding community leader not only in Shaker Heights but actually nationally at one point but certainly In here, head of the Cleveland foundation and a really strong leader statement. He was died not that long, was black. He really talked to me about running for the school board because it became clear that we needed to close some schools. This was happening all over the country. We were past the baby boom generations and people weren’t having as many kids. Some of these schools were underutilized and very expensive to operate. Shaker was certainly going to have to look at closing some schools, which of course ultimately we did. He talked to me and several other people did too. Asked me to run for the school board. So that’s how I got involved in that. Again, it relates to Ludlow because I knew when I ran for the school board, that if we won we ran as a slate or three of us, Charles Taylor, and Isaac Schultz. If we won that the expectation would be that we were going to push to close some schools, and I knew that Ludlow very likely could be one of the schools we closed, which It was. This had to do not with race exactly, but It had to do with geography who’s on the edge of the community. I knew that this could happen, but I also knew that It was the right thing to do. That we had to work out something that was made sense racially for the movement of kids but also financially that we absolutely had to do something. We couldn’t keep spending money on buildings that that we didn’t need. That’s how I got Involved in the school board.
AF: This Is my last questions question I like asking everybody. Can you talk about your life after you moved away from Ludlow and retiring?
CM: I don’t consider myself as having moved away from life. I’m In Shaker square. The reason we decided to move was I wanted to get on one floor If possible. I was starting to having a knee problem, which eventually I did have knee surgery and I wanted to get Into a one floor situation. There wasn’t really anything available In Ludlow, but I wanted to stay as close to Ludlow as possible. We’re in Shaker Square and of course that if you walk to the end of Ludlow going west you come to Shaker square. The Shaker square is right at the edge of Ludlow. So when we moved I still go to the same library, I still go to the same grocery store, the same pharmacy. When I walk, I’m not walking now in this cold weather, but I do walk outside for exercise a lot I still head back down and walk up and down the streets of Ludlow. So I’m not that far away and I didn’t want to be that far away.
AF: I’ve been to Shaker Square twice so far yeah and I was going to say that’s all my question.
