It was supposed to be a one-year fling when Merle Levin walked into the converted barbershop which was the office for the Fenn College Athletic Department in 1955, found a typewriter, and assumed the part-time duties of the school’s first sports publicist. Somehow the Glenville High grad, an ex-sports editor of the University of Michigan Daily, needed 38 years to get the sports writing bug out of his system. The part time sports publicity job evolved into a full time post as Administrative Assistant to the Athletic Director when the state transformed Fenn into Cleveland State University in 1964. He became the department’s utility man, handling the duties of numerous jobs yet to be filled by the understaffed office. Later he would play an active role in helping to form a mid-major athletic conference, the Mid-Continent, for CSU teams to play in, paving the way to compete for berths in NCAA and NIT basketball tourneys. Along the way, Levin triggered the start-up of the school’s first endowed athletic scholarships, helped create CSU’s Athletic Hall of Fame, and filled advisory roles in the planning of CSU’s Physical Education Center and acclaimed Convocation Center. He also made time as Sports Information Director to oversee media activities for five NCAA National Swimming and Diving Championships hosted by CSU, plus numerous regional tournaments in basketball, soccer, and wrestling and to produce several team publications named best in nation by his peers while his job title morphed into Assistant Athletic Director. Calling it a career in 1992, he became Executive Director of SMACO (Sports Media Association of Cleveland and Ohio), helping to raise nearly $500,000 for charity in the next decade. He and his wife, Dolores, make their home in Gates Mills.
(Deceased)
In the middle of the 20th century, the thriving metropolis of Cleveland, with three daily newspapers bearing its name on their mastheads, was blessed with a coterie of sportswriter/columnists who could coax the keys of their typewriters to produce the news, the insights, the drama, the joys and the sorrows of their special world with the very best in the nation. Among this special group was the man whose somber face graced the top of a regular column entitled “Plain Dealing”, the man seemingly known to everyone simply as Cobby. Gordon Cobbledick was the sports editor of the Plain Dealer from 1946 until his retirement in 1964. Before that he had covered the Cleveland Indians for 25 years with his signature story perhaps being the news of the team’s rebellion against manager Oscar Vitt in 1940. Shortly thereafter he would turn war correspondent, writing from the Pacific Theatre during World War II, then returning to become PD sports editor soon after. During his long career he served a term as president of the Baseball Writers Association of America and in 1977, nine years after his death, he would become the first Ohio writer to be inducted into the writers wing of the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown. Another posthumous honor would come his way in 1982 when he was inducted into the Journalism Hall of Fame. Born in Cleveland, Cobby was the holder of a masters degree in mining engineering from Case Tech, where he starred in football. He continued to make the city his home until moving to Tucson, AZ shortly before his death in 1969.
(Deceased)
A nationally known sportswriter, Hal Lebovitz entertained and informed Cleveland sports fans for more than 50 years with his incisive reporting talents. A graduate of Glenville High and Western Reserve University, he became a full-time writer for the Cleveland News in 1946, covering high school sports. In 1950 he became the paper’s baseball beat writer, then moved to the Plain Dealer with the same assignment when the News folded in 1960 and began a 20-year reign as the PD sports editor in 1964. His highly popular PD sports columns continued thereafter in a chain of papers serving much of Greater Cleveland. So did his “Ask Hal, The Referee” columns, which appeared nationally in The Sporting News from 1947 to 1993. The column drew on Hal’s vast situational sports knowledge acquired through many years as an umpire and referee.