George Condon chats with Doris O'Donnell at a PD retirees lunch in 2006.
Michael Heaton's obit on George Condon:
George E. Condon celebrated Cleveland.
No writer did more to advance this area's reputation as a colorful and desirable corner of the world than journalist, author and historian George E. Condon.
Condon died today, Oct. 7, in his sleep at Huntington Woods, Westlake. He was 94.
The writer, originally from Fall River, Mass., began his career at The Plain Dealer in 1943 as a general assignment reporter. He became the paper's first television and radio critic in 1948. After 14 years on that beat he moved to the editorial page, where he wrote a daily column until his retirement in 1985.
Besides covering the city for The Plain Dealer, Condon wrote nine books, among them "Cleveland: the Best Kept Secret," a portrait in essays in 1967; "Laughter from the Rafters," a collection of columns in 1968; "Stars in the Water: the History of the Erie Canal," in 1974; and "Yesterday's Cleveland," a photographic history, in 1976.
Condon was a dogged reporter, an astute critic and a self-styled, proudly Irish philosopher. Above all, he was a graceful wordsmith.
"A Cleveland winter ordinarily is an angry, temperamental creature, lashing its tailwinds and looking out darkly underneath low-lying clouds. A Cleveland winter stalks the streets with an icy breath that buffets you when you turn a street corner and makes you dig your chin harder against your chest," he wrote.
He knew the city and its people, from the mayors and civic philanthropists down to the bartenders and cops who walked a beat. His columns were both witty and wise. Taken as a whole, they provide a picture of Cleveland in both its high and low periods. He had a love for the old ways of doing things, for a time when the shoe repair guy was known as a "cobbler" and for the fading art of penmanship.
When Condon was a boy, his family lived in a powder blue up-and-down double house on West 32nd Street. It wasn't far from St. Patrick Catholic Church. Of course, Condon quickly became the foremost authority on the church's origins.
"The parishioners themselves built the church," he once told a reporter. "Some generous benefactor told the founding pastor they could have all the stone they wanted, but they would have to go to his quarry in Sandusky and cart it back here. Parishioners took turns on horse and wagon. That's a lot of work they put into this church," Condon said.
Condon put a lot of hard work into his career. He wrote seven days a week as a television critic and then five days a week as a general columnist.
"He took TV lightly. He was very wry, a very funny writer," the late Bill Hickey, who took over The Plain Dealer's TV column from Condon, said in 2006. "There was no pretension. He wrote for Everyman. All the Condons grew up poor West Side kids who scrambled their way to success."
Condon's parents immigrated from Ireland. His father was a foreman at a textile mill in Fall River. After they moved to Cleveland, his mother was a maid at the Clevelander hotel downtown. Condon attended St. Patrick Catholic School and West Technical High School. After graduating, he majored in journalism at Ohio State University. It was there he met his future bride, Marjorie Philona Smith. They married in 1942 and moved to Cleveland the following year, when Condon joined The Plain Dealer.
The couple had seven children in 15 years. Condon outlived two of them. His wife, Marjorie Condon, a teacher in the Cleveland public school system for 20 years, died in March of 2001.
Mary Brereton said, "My father always complained to us that every day he had to stare at a blank piece of paper and create something seven days a week, but I think he enjoyed going to the office and the company of the people he worked with. He always talked about the 'characters' in his business. I think he loved it."
George Condon Jr., who covers the White House for the National Journal, remembered early on his father having a different sort of job than the fathers of other kids on the block.
"Other kids' dads went to work every morning," Condon Jr. said. "My dad watched television for a living. I remember him during the new TV season trying to watch three shows at once changing stations by hand and taking notes. And he was always surrounded by interesting people."
Neither George Jr. nor Susan Condon Love, the Plain Dealer's Inside & Out editor until this year, ever felt pushed into journalism. Their father led by example.
"When he wrote the first Cleveland book in 1967, he'd come home after work, have dinner, then disappear upstairs until 1:00 in the morning," said Condon Jr. "If you ever drove around with him he could point out history on every corner."
Plain Dealer Reporter Michael K. McIntyre did just that for a piece during Cleveland's Bicentennial. He got an earful as well.
Condon pointed out the spot on West 25th Street where gangster Shondor Birns was blown up. He talked about the steel mills in the industrial valley and how John D. Rockefeller fled to Cuyahoga County with a father leaving a sex scandal back in New York. The circus used to set up shop on a vacant lot on East 9th Street and Lakeside where the North Point office building now stands.
When asked why he knew so much, Condon replied, "It's the stories."
Condon never stopped writing stories about the city he loved. And during the Runyonesque era of journalism, he was a tireless reporter. He liked to tell the story of the day he covered the opening of a television station and wound up helping program the first hour's entertainment, which he became part of. Then he filed his story.
He left the station, noticed that the Central Market, where Jacobs Field now stands, was on fire and called the city desk. They told him to cover it. He wrote the first edition story but not before getting soaked by fire hoses. Afterward, he retired to an after-hours club on Short Vincent for a drink. Just after he got there, the police raided the place and arrested everyone. After leaving the police station, he wrote that story, too. It was a long night.
Condon won numerous awards during his career. He was given the Ohioana Award for history, the Women's City Club of Cleveland Award for Literature, the Burke Award for Literature as well as the Sigma Delta Chi Award for Distinguished Service He is also in the Cleveland Journalism Hall of Fame.
In his acceptance speech for the Ohioana Award, Condon wrote, "What I oppose is the hushed, carpeted fearful approach to history and those who made history. There is the air of the funeral parlor in most of our history books, and perhaps the sound of some rinky-tink piano is what we need to break the sad spell and bring history to its feet again. Only in life is there any hope for history."
Susan Love said, "Even after retirement, my Dad couldn't stop writing. He always had a book in progress --- and it would be about some aspect of Cleveland history, his passion."
But Condon was never blinded by nostalgia. He wasn't afraid to write about the town's weaknesses as well as its strengths. When a politician once declared that no building should be erected taller than the Terminal Tower, Condon called him on his lack of vision.
Like the man himself, he wanted the city to keep evolving.
Survivors: Theresa Ann Condon of Silver Spring, Md., George Jr. of Silver Spring, Katherine Elizabeth Condon of Catonsville, Md., Mary Philona Brereton of Alexandria, Va., and Susan Condon Love of Lakewood; four grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.
Funeral: Funeral: 10 a.m. Monday, St. Angela Merici Catholic Church, 20970 Lorain Rd., Fairview Park.
Arrangements: Chambers Funeral Home, Cleveland.
