Call Me Mike
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Call Me Mike

A Political Biography of Michael V. DiSalle

Richard Zimmerman

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Call Me Mike

A Political Biography of Michael V. DiSalle

Richard Zimmerman

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About This Book

Michael V. DiSalle was elected to his first and only term as governor in one of Ohio's most contentious elections, which featured a ferocious battle over the so-called "Right-to-Work" issue, a union-busting constitutional amendment placed on the ballot over the objections of Republican party professionals by fanatic conservative business interests. As a result, Democrats won most statewide offices and briefly gained control of the Ohio General Assembly.

During his term, which ran from his inauguration in January 1959 to January 1963, when Republican James Rhodes replaced him, DiSalle passed sorely needed tax increases, but he was less successful in his attempts to pique the conscience of Ohioans on social issues such as the poor conditions in state mental hospitals and the abolishment of capital punishment. His tours of the state's dismal mental institutions were widely publicized, but the public showed little interest in the details concerning the warehousing of the state's most-neglected wards. His agonizing over death-penalty cases that he was legally obligated to review alienated many in the legal and law enforcement communities.

DiSalle's private life was almost as controversial as his public life. Through-out his term as governor he was dogged by reports of his wife's unhappiness with her role as Ohio's First Lady and later by rumors of his romantic involvement with his personal secretary. His post-gubernatorial life was marred by several unfortunate business ventures, and like his hero, Thomas Jefferson, DiSalle seemed perpetually short of cash after he left office. Despite the controversies that plagued his career, he never stopped living a caring, passionate life.

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Year
1998
ISBN
9781612773469

1

FROM NEW YORK TENEMENT TO GEORGETOWN LAW

The first Italian American to become governor of Ohio was the second son named Michael born to Anthony DiSalle and Assunta D’Arcangelo. The first Michael, born to Anthony and Assunta following their marriage in 1906 in New York City, died in infancy of complications associated with measles and pneumonia, common ailments among children of poor immigrant parents. About six months after the death of their first child, Michael Vincent was born on January 6, 1908.1
Anthony and Assunta had both immigrated to America just after the turn of the century from the town of Vasto (late-twentieth-century population: about 30,000), located in the province of Abruzzi on the Adriatic Sea, about 120 miles east of Rome. But they were not to meet until both had arrived in New York. Anthony, the son of a shoemaker whose ancestors left France at the time of the French Revolution, had completed third grade and sailed penniless for the United States in 1902 at the age of fourteen, in the company of a family friend. He eventually found work operating a punch press starting at about $2.50 a week. His rent was $8.00 a month.
Assunta had completed six years of elementary school and a valued year of convent school before she immigrated with her older brother in 1903 at the age of eighteen. A trained seamstress, Assunta found take-home piecework in Manhattan’s garment district and, by the standards of the time and place, soon was considered financially comfortable. She met Anthony at one of the many social affairs organized by New York City’s Vastese community. Despite her mother’s objections over their differences in age—he was seventeen, she was twenty-one—the diminutive young couple (their wedding picture shows Anthony, who never equaled his eldest son’s adult height of five feet five and one-half inches, towering over Assunta) were joined in a union that was to last sixty-eight years and produce eight children.
Soon after he was born, Michael Vincent came down with several of the same symptoms that had presaged his brother’s death. Heeding a doctor’s advice, the DiSalle family moved from Sullivan Street, on the edge of Manhattan’s teeming Little Italy, to the Bronx, which at the time was considered “in the country.” Anthony opened a small grocery store featuring Italian products, and promptly lost his three-hundred-dollar investment. When Michael fully recovered, the family moved back to the city to be closer both to the garment district and to Anthony’s new job buffing and polishing hand-lighted lamps and rubber bulb horns, accessories for the fledgling automobile industry. Anthony’s new employer, Herman Saxon, correctly predicted that auto manufacturing would eventually center in Michigan and Ohio and decided to relocate his small plant to Toledo. Saxon offered Anthony a foreman’s job at the new Ohio facility, and in June 1911, age twenty-four, the elder DiSalle left his growing family (Michael, 3, Nicholas, 2, and infant Joseph) to reconnoiter what he considered still to be the Wild West. Instead of a sleepy cow town, Anthony found a booming Midwestern industrial city.
During the two decades prior to Anthony’s arrival, 1890 to 1910, Toledo had more than doubled its population, from 81,434 to 168,497, due to a furiously expanding industrial base. About the turn of the century, glassmaker Edward Libby had invested in Michael Owens’s bottle company, and Edward Ford had begun to operate his plate-glass company just outside Toledo’s city limits. (The giant Libby-Owens-Ford Glass Company would emerge in 1930.) Allen Dilbiss had invented a springless computing scale, and in 1901 sold his patents to the Toledo Scale and Cash Register Company, which within nine years boasted sales offices in fifty U.S. cities. In 1905 the busy Craig Ship Building Company in East Toledo passed to the Toledo Ship Building Company, which would build some of the largest cargo ships plying the Great Lakes. When oil was discovered in northwest Ohio in 1885, several refineries and drilling-supply companies grew up in Toledo, along with a number of foundries, one of which grew into the Houghton Elevator and Machine Company in 1890. In 1909 the Indiana-based Willys-Overland Company purchased and moved its operations to the facilities of the failing Toledo-based Pope Motor Car Company. By 1915 Willys-Overland was second only to the Ford Motor Company in number of automobiles produced.
Many of those who flocked to work in Toledo’s factories were, like Anthony, foreign born, or, like Michael and his siblings, first-generation Americans. In the 1890 census, more than 27 percent of Toledo’s population listed themselves as being born outside the United States. With the inclusion of first-generation Americans, more than 82 percent of the population had close ties abroad, mostly to Europe. Though proportionally smaller, the influx of immigrant workers continued well into the twentieth century. Although earlier substantial Irish immigration had leveled off and was dropping slightly, Saint Patrick’s parish where Michael would grow up had completed an impressive new Gothic cathedral by 1901. German-, Russian-, and Italian-born populations continued to increase, while the most substantial growth continued to be in the Polish and Hungarian communities. The 1910 census indicated that about 20 percent of Toledo’s population was foreign born.2
Satisfied that Toledo offered unlimited job opportunities for immigrants and their offspring, Anthony DiSalle soon sent for his family, reporting that he approved of this very cosmopolitan city and had found a home for them. Assunta loyally—and expectantly but apprehensively—loaded her three small children aboard a train and headed west, only to be absolutely appalled when she inspected the house Anthony had rented on Toledo’s Indiana Avenue. According to son Michael’s autobiography,
[T]here were no lights or water, only an outdoor toilet facility and no stores in which she could purchase the family necessities. In addition to all this, there were no friends, and she [Assunta] cried for six months, pleading to return to New York City. There were stormy sessions between them, but Anthony would not leave, feeling that his fortune could be made in Toledo. He found jobs for some of his New York friends and co-workers…. Several became boarders, adding to Assunta’s burdens.
About six months after Anthony had brought his young family to Toledo, he was fired by Saxton for joining the Metal Polishers Union. Anthony eventually went to work for the Electric Auto-Lite Company, where he stayed for seventeen years before starting his own, ultimately highly successful, plating business.3
Eventually water, gas, and electricity came to the DiSalle home on Indiana Avenue and a resigned Assunta overcame her homesickness. Michael recalled that his father left for work very early in the morning to catch a streetcar, but that “the nights were fun, though. We had boarders and there were always card games where the stakes were wine and beer instead of money and they managed to have fun singing and dancing.”4 DiSalle also recalled in a preinaugural 1959 interview how his parents “lived in fear of exposures that might face their children in a strange new city, how they sheltered him from even the neighborhood children and how he was sent home from kindergarten at four and again at five because ‘[he] couldn’t speak a word of English.”’5
Twice turned away from Saint Patrick’s parish school, apparently because parochial institutions could opt not to admit non-English speakers, Michael was accepted at age five into the first grade by Jefferson Public Elementary School in the fall of 1913. In his uncompleted autobiography, partly written in the third person, DiSalle described himself as “a funny little boy who did not understand what other children said to him and could not respond to them in English. He was sometimes beaten by other children and called names he did not understand.”6 DiSalle said he never forgot “how it was to be on your way to school at the age of five and have a big boy stop you, every day, and beat you up for no reason except you were different. Finally, you found you had to fight back.”7 But he added that, “the kindness of teachers compensated” for what he described as “running the gauntlet every day.”
DiSalle does not detail how he learned to speak English without a hint of an accent, whether it was by simple assimilation or if his teachers offered him remedial help. But by the third grade DiSalle described himself as “now more literate” in English and noted that his teacher, Rose Carter, “took great interest in Michael. She took him to the country where he first saw a cow and had a glass of freshly produced milk. Rose Carter later took him to Fort Meigs, where there were historical signs to read, to the zoo and art museum, and to her home.” When Carter noticed that Michael was not reading as many library books as usual, he explained that he was unable to pay a seventy-nine-cent fine that had been levied against him for damaging a book. Carter paid the fine and Michael’s library card was returned. DiSalle corresponded with Rose Carter for the next fiftyyears. She lived long enough to see her special pupil inaugurated governor.8
While emphasizing the role his early public and parochial schoolteachers—Michael finally entered Saint Patrick’s in the sixth grade—played in his maturation, DiSalle rather haughtily dismissed the role his early contemporaries from the multiracial “Irish Hill” neighborhood of the Avondale-Belmont section played in shaping his character. “I have to say that in the early years the kind of friends I had wouldn’t be the kind that would influence me—it was more my influencing them,” he wrote his daughter Antoinette. (Later, however, he was to say that growing up with the children of Irish, German, and African American parents helped him respect people of all races.)
It was his father Anthony’s continuing social and intellectual growth that contributed at least as much as his teachers’ influence to young Michael’s own coming-of-age. “My father’s deep interest in government and politics of course was very influential in developing my interests,” DiSalle recalled, noting that his father considered himself a Republican simply because Theodore Roosevelt, a Republican, had been president when the elder DiSalle had arrived in New York City. Anthony applied for citizenship when Michael was ten or eleven, and when the naturalization judge asked him to name the president of the United States, Anthony replied, “Thomas Woodrow Wilson.” “You know, I’d forgotten the president’s name was Thomas,” the judge observed approvingly. Anthony remained a registered Republican until his son began to run regularly in Democratic primaries, but he began to move to the left of center much earlier. Michael believed his father voted for Socialist Eugene V. Debs in 1920, for Progressive Robert La Follette in 1924, and for Democrats Al Smith and Franklin Roosevelt in 1928 and 1932, respectively. DiSalle remembered his father as “a constant reader and writer. He was acting counsel for Italy in the Toledo area. He was an orator in Italian and a very impressive one. He was correspondent for an Italian/American newspaper and wrote beautifully.” A story DiSalle repeated often when recalling his relationship with his father concerned Michael’s being sent home from the eighth grade for allegedly talking during choir practice. “The next morning, Anthony took time off from work to return with Michael to school. Sister Austin explained to Anthony the need for discipline. He listened, but then in broken English and with a pointing finger said, ‘Listen here, nun, if Michael said he wasn’t talking, he wasn’t. He is not a liar.”’ (Later, as a politician, DiSalle took great pride in being truthful, sometimes to the point of undiplomatic bluntness.) Anthony also showed some of the dry wit for which his son was to become famous. “I remember one Columbus Day, when a man named Sam Young was running for reelection as judge and my father was chairman of the affair and the judge kept after him, saying he would like my father to take him around and introduce him. Well, my dad didn’t like him because he was a prohibitionist and yet the judge was very persistent, so my father … began introducing him to people. In English he would say, ‘This is Judge Sam Young and he is running for reelection’ and in Italian he would say ‘don’t vote for him because he is a dry.”’9
DiSalle remembered his mother as an expert Italian cook and gracious hostess. “Dinners at festive occasions [such as Michael’s first communion during his first year in parochial school] were always typical Assunta meals,” he recalled, “including an elaborate antipasto consisting of prosciutto, capicolla, various cheeses, black and green olives, red peppers. Chicken broth with celery followed this, then homemade pasta, ravioli with spinach filling, meat which was used to make spaghetti sauce…. Anthony’s delight was the last—after dinner drinks including brandy, anisette and other liqueurs. After dinner drinks and coffee lasted for hours, because these were the social hours. This was Anthony’s and Assunta’s recreation. Michael never saw his parents go out to dinner or a movie.” Anthony was making about forty dollars a week, which in the early 1920s was considered decent factory pay, but there were now six children to care for and money was always scarce. Anthony cut his children’s hair and mended their shoes, and Assunta either made or continually altered their clothing. Whatever money Michael made working during the summer from age fourteen on was turned over to his parents. His weekly allowance ranged between twenty-five cents and one dollar.
At the end of the eighth grade Michael took and passed a competitive exam for admittance to Saint John’s, a prestigious private Jesuit high school. But his parents were unable to afford the comparatively steep tuition and Michael enrolled in Central Catholic High School, where tuition was an affordable ten dollars a year. Anthony had decided that Michael was to become a mechanical engineer, but after a disastrous six weeks Michael’s drafting teacher called Anthony in for a conference. As Michael “could not draw a straight line even with the help of a T-square,” it was suggested that perhaps he should stick with English, history, and the classics and become a journalist or lawyer. Michael became sophomore editor of the Centric, the school paper, and was elected junior-class president, beating “a handsome opponent.” (Throughout his life, DiSalle seldom passed up the opportunity to mention that he often equaled or bettered a competitor whom he considered better looking, taller, or in some way more agreeable in appearance than himself.) Although his parents considered sports a waste of time, Michael practiced football without their knowledge and made varsity fullback his senior year. The yearbook described him as “small [he weighed about 135 pounds] but a fighter every inch.” One of his teammates and good friends during high school was Frank Restivo, who, DiSalle noted, “was a target of attentions of girls, a problem that did not pursue Michael. Although they shared his homework readily enough, girls did not seem to want to share Michael’s company.” Michael’s first formal date was on the night he graduated with honors in the spring of 1925 and “was spent at home, where [Michael’s] parents had a party.”
It was never a question as to whether Michael, as the eldest son, would go on to college, just where. He initially enrolled in Toledo’s small Saint John’s College but was bored. “It was like continuing high school with the same friends around,” he observed. He spent most of his time in the college’s recreation room playing pool and billiards, and he quit before Christmas, going back to work in various factories to earn enough to go away to school. Cousins of Anthony’s who lived in Washington, D.C., suggested he attend George Washington University in that city. But an assistant pastor at Saint Patrick’s urged him to enroll in Washington’s Georgetown University, a Jesuit school much in need of pre-law and law students at the time, which was actively recruiting and catering to young Catholic men, and which charged only two hundred dollars annual tuition. Michael DiSalle, now eighteen, was seen off at the train station by his family. According to DiSalle, “He cried himself to sleep that night on the train. He was on his own.”10

2

LAW AND MARRIAGE, BUT NO DEGREE

As a protected eighteen-year-old leaving home for the first time, Michael DiSalle may have thought that he was indeed “on his own” when he arrived at Washington’s Union Station to begin his studies at Georgetown University. But he was hardly a stranger in a strange land. He was met at the station by his father’s cousin, Anna Tana, and her husband, Carl, a barber, who along with their boarder, also a barber, were all natives of Vasto and spoke an Italian dialect with which Michael was very familiar. His relatives quickly put him in touch with two Italian American social organizations, Circolo Italiano and Lido Club, which held dinner dances and provided young Washington newcomers of Italian descent with invitations to private homes. Among the first new friends DiSalle made was fellow pre-law student Joseph Lettieri from Roselle Park, New Jersey, who three years later would serve as Michael’s best man and would remain a lifelong intimate. Lettieri remembered DiSalle as “a great conversationalist and a joy to be with. He already was ‘in’ with people in the community of Italian background. [With his] knowledge of local conditions…he was helpful from the very beginning and became quite popular.”1
Michael entered a five-year course of study then offered by Georgetown University that involved two years of undergraduate pre-law courses at the main campus overlooking the Potomac River in Northwest Washington, and three years at the downtown law school at Sixth and E Streets, Northwest. Apparently his first two years at Georgetown were mainly uneventful, as Michael recalled only a few incidents worth mentioning. Money was still tight. His father sent him nine dollars a week, and his younger brother Nicholas sometimes was able to spare a couple of dollars from his meat-cutter’s salary. Nevertheless, beset by homesickness as Christmas 1926 approached, Michael, who could barely afford trolley fare, decided to go home for the holidays. By nightfall of his first day on the road, he had hitchhiked only as far as Cumberland, Maryland. He recalled hobo friends in Toledo talking about how they often “rode the rails” for free, so he hop...

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