George Voinovich

To me, George Voinovich will always be Mayor Voinovich. Although he later was elected governor of Ohio, then U.S. senator from Ohio, he loved his time as mayor, because he loved his hometown of Cleveland. For about 45 of his 79 years he lived in the same house in the northeast neighborhood part of town, called Collinwood. He was mayor at a time when the country was seeing a continuing decline in the decent paying jobs provided by heavy industry, as technology replaced human labor. Cleveland's economic foundation had long been heavy industry. Voinovich, a Republican, was not a member of the fanatical right wing that developed a major foothold in the GOP during the 1980s, but he had a definite conservative side, based upon his devout Roman Catholicism, derived from his Serbo-Croatian and Slovenian heritage, as the child of immigrants from that region of southeastern Europe.

As mayor, George Voinovich developed a great working relationship with another man named George; the president of Cleveland city council, and highly influential political force, George Forbes. Together, the two helped move a number of projects and reforms forward, laying the foundation for the highly modernized Cleveland of today. Forbes, known for his highly volatile temperament, forced controversial legislation through a sometimes reluctant city council, while Voinovich was more laidback and a conciliator; the two were like a perfect match. One time, however, angry with the media criticism of the Cleveland Indians, Mayor Voinovich publicly laid into the press, then saying, "I think we've got a damn good team." Jaws dropped, including mine, as Voinovich's public use of "damn" stunned many people more than Rhett Butler's 1930's retort to Scarlett O'Hara, "Frankly my dear, I don't give a damn!" The mayor picked a date and set "City of Cleveland Night" at an Indians' game which drew a huge crowd to the then home of the Indians, old Cleveland Municipal Stadium.

As a Republican in an overwhelming Democratic city and county, Voinovich learned how to compromise and how to get along with various groups, and it showed, as people of all backgrounds liked George Voinovich. In a nation now so often polarized by venomous politics, Voinovich was a rare bridge between the two parties, between the, in my opinion, false choice of being either a Fox News or an MSNBC viewer. When he was a senator, he angered me once, as in reply to a letter I sent about the staggering increase in oil and gasoline prices at that time (2007), he wrote something that could have been written by an oil company CEO, not a true representative of the people: "while oil companies experienced record high revenues, their profit margins are still below that of many other industries." Then to rub salt into the wound, he continued, "...these larger industry profits have translated into greater tax revenues from these companies payments' of federal and state taxes." I couldn't believe Voinovich had said this, but you put people in Washington D.C., and sometimes they change. It was like, "Thank God for sky high gasoline prices, they give us more tax money." It was all a bunch of nonsense, which was demonstrated when the economic nosedive occurred just months later, and oil prices, vastly inflated, collapsed along with the economy and many people's lives. I eventually got over Voinovich's remarks, and when he later decided to retire, he said "something to the effect" about how a person can get out of touch with the people he grew up with and worked with for so long. He talked too how he missed home, and that meant Cleveland. His time in Washington was just not for him, as extreme partisanship was not Voinovich's style. He later told how, upon Barack Obama's assuming the presidency, the Republican leaders in the Senate had told Republican members  to oppose everything the new president proposed, Voinovich saying, "If he was for it, we had to be against it."

So now we've lost George Voinovich, a man who became a part of so many lives, including my own. His ally from his days as mayor, George Forbes, now 85, commented about his long time friend: "Most of us saw ourselves as leaders, George Voinovich saw himself as a servant." Farewell Mayor Voinovich!

WORD HISTORY:
Mayor (Major)-These are really the same word, although the specific meanings diverged. They go back to Indo European "meg," which had the idea of, "large, great." This then produced "megnyo," as a comparative adjective meaning, "greater, larger." The Indo European form gave Latin "magnus," which also meant "large, great." and also "maior," the comparative form of "magnus;" thus, "larger, greater." A noun developed from the use of the adjective, and "maior" meant, "main leader of a town." Old French, a Latin-based language, had "maire," with the governmental meaning, and English borrowed the term from both the French and Latin forms, likely with one reinforcing the other. The adjective "major" was also derived from "magnus," as another comparative form (larger, greater), and it "seemingly" was borrowed into English directly from Latin in the early 12th Century. Meanwhile, Latin also used "major" as a noun, meaning "an adult, a grown up, mature person," but also, "a superior officer of an organization, often military." French used the term as part of the military rank, "sergeant-major," which was often shortened to just "major" by many, and it was borrowed by English in the mid 1600s as the military rank. The verb, "to study a particular subject with great emphasis," and that noun use, "main course of study," developed in American English in the late 1800s and early 1900s.