Mayor shares views at Leadership Day

Photo

Youngstown Mayor Jay Williams

By Ed Runyan

Former OSU quarterback Cornelius Greene also spoke to the eighth-graders.

CANFIELD — Youngstown has gotten a black eye from the Marc Dann scandal that it doesn’t deserve, Youngstown Mayor Jay Williams told pupils at Canfield Village Middle School.

Headlines in newspapers in Cleveland, Columbus and Cincinnati all shout the name Youngstown when they talk about the sexual harassment accusations leveled against the attorney general’s office under Dann’s leadership. Dann eventually resigned after the allegations came to light.

“Marc Dann is from Shaker Heights outside of Cleveland and lives in Liberty Township. Those accused of doing the harassing — none of those people are from Youngstown,” Williams said Friday.

“The other antics that were going on in the office — none of those people are from Youngstown. The activities that transpired — none of those activities transpired in Youngstown,” he said.

“But when the story is told down in Columbus, they’re saying Marc Dann and his cronies — ship them back to Youngstown,” he said.

Seeing a portrayal of the Marc Dann controversy as being an indictment of Youngstown is frustrating, Williams told the eighth-graders during a Leadership Day talk.

This is the third year the mayor has spoken on Leadership Day. He spent most of his time answering questions posed by pupils, who also asked about his relationship with the suburban areas around Youngstown.

Some people have accused him of wanting to help Youngstown at the expense of the townships in his Joint Economic Development District proposal to Austintown and Boardman, he said.

“My plans are to collectively strengthen Youngstown because then, in my opinion, that helps Canfield, Boardman, Austintown and a lot of other places,” he said.

“If I tried to build Youngstown and hurt the other communities, ultimately I’m hurting the Mahoning Valley,” he added.

Then the mayor asked the pupils if they knew where all of the retailers were located before the Southern Park Mall and U.S. Route 224 shopping centers were built. The answer is downtown Youngstown, he said.

But then some people moved out of Youngstown, and the wealth began to move with them. The once-booming industrial city generated the wealth and spent millions of dollars to extend water and sewer lines outside of the city, he said.

“It was OK when a lot of that wealth was generated in Youngstown and spread elsewhere, but now we’re saying things have changed, and a lot of that [wealth] is elsewhere, and we need to assist Youngstown, so that’s where maybe people disagree with me,” he said.

The other speaker was Cornelius Greene, quarterback at Ohio State University from 1972 through 1975, who now works as a parks manager in his hometown of Washington, D.C.

Greene earned four Rose Bowl rings with the Buckeyes under coach Woody Hayes, and was Ohio State’s first black quarterback.

Canfield resident Chris Cole, a friend of Greene’s, introduced the 54-year-old as possibly OSU’s best quarterback.

Greene said he learned some of his most important lessons in life during his first three months at Ohio State, when he roomed with wingback Brian Baschnagel.

Baschnagel came from a mostly white community, and Greene grew up where 95 percent of the residents were black.

“I had all these stereotypes of how I was going to be treated. But none of that happened,” Greene said of rooming with Baschnagel and living at OSU. “Everybody loved me.”

Among the highlights of Greene’s career was being selected team and Big 10 most valuable player in 1975, getting selected even over two-time Heisman Trophy winner Archie Griffin, who had been league MVP the two previous years. He later played two seasons in the National Football League with the Dallas Cowboys, Seattle Seahawks and New York Jets.

runyan@vindy.com