The Cincinnati Enquirer from Cincinnati, Ohio • Page 4

A-4From Page 1 the Cincinnati enquirer Sunday, July 20. 1986 MMO BLAOKWELL CONTINUED FROM PAGE A-l "He's very intelligent and expresses himself clearly both in speaking and in writing," says his close friend, John Rue, a businessman and former Republican council candidate. "The most important reason he's so effective is that he works so hard." His critics acknowledge his intelligence and quick wit but view him as a political chameleon who espouses whatever ideas he thinks will benefit him politically. "Anyone evaluating Ken needs to remember one fact," says Arn Bortz, his strongest critic on city council. "He's a guy who supported Jimmy Carter in November of 1980 and became a Reagan Republican barely four months later.

"That should shape anyone's judgment of him. It's the most remarkable transformation since Pinocchio changed from a puppet into a little boy." fall. Rahshann is in North Carolina for an eight-week wilderness camp. "I've been Mr. Mom the past few weeks," Blackwell says.

"My daughters and I have been eating a Bill Cosby breakfast of Corn Flakes and devil's food cake." Despite his schedule at XU and city hall, Blackwell makes time for his family. He attends the games of his children's sports teams and some of their practices. "I believe my family deserves not only quality time, but quantity time, too," he says. His home hardly serves as a refuge from the hectic pace and controversies from his daily life. refuge? Are you kidding? With a 15-year-old in the he says, laughing.

"Parenting brings controversial moments of its own. It's important to tell young kids what you expect of them and to set standards." Blackwell's own upbringing with his younger brother, Carl, who works at General Electric, took place in the West End and Avon-dale. His mother, Dana, still lives in Cincinnati, but his father, George, died in 1981 at age 56. Blackwell frequently lunches at Alex's restaurant in Avondale with a predominantly black clientele. "This is one of my information centers, he says as he gets out of his dark blue Chevrolet Caprice Classic station wagon.

"This is an excellent listening post for what's going on in the black community. He enters the restaurant and greets several friends and acquaintances before sitting down for lunch. He is among the numerous local black celebrities and politicians whose photographs hang on the restaurant's walls. Waitress Joni Johnson begins joking with him about the prowess of the Los Angeles Dodgers, her favorite baseball team. She and Blackwell have a wager that if the Dodgers finish the season ahead of the Reds, he has to serve her a glass of fresh, hand-squeezed orange juice.

"You're in serious trouble," Blackwell replies. "The last time I looked, the Dodgers were in last place." "But they've had a lot of injuries," she says. Blackwell has yet to deliver on the bet he lost when the Boston Celtics beat the Los Angeles Lakers for the NBA title last month. "You have to cookmy breakfast in our kitchen and brings it out here and serve it to me, shp reminds him. I I i I 'Tl I i 4 I i.Xt- L.

i mm ri mi miii vt -4lA i i 1 Til i )tr Blackwell looks up from his plate of poached eggs and toast at Sugar 'N Spice restaurant in Bond Hill, as a man he doesn't know approaches his table. The man hands him a $5 bill and says, "Give 'em hell. Bail them out." The $5 is for a legal defense fund Blackwell is raising for 21 anti-abortion demonstrators who were arrested June 28 in front of the Margaret Sanger Medical Clinic in Avondale. The demonstrators were accused of violating a judge's orders on demonstrations at the clinic, operated by Planned Parenthood Association. Blackwell nods in thanks, folds the bill and places it in an inside pocket of his sports coat.

Blackwell's vocal opposition to abortion has generated the most controversy of his current council term. A hero to anti-abortion supporters, he is scorned by pro-choice advocates. "I don't think that the abortion issue should be a top priority of a city council member elected to address city concerns," says Timothy Black, an active Republican who is an attorney for Planned Parenthood. "I question whether raising money for people engaged in civil disobedience is an appropriate activity for a vice mayor." Blackwell, who served as Cincinnati mayor in 1979 and 1980, is quick to defend his actions. "Fund-raisin a for trood causes is not something that I shy away from," he says.

"I've raised money for senior citizens housing, for a minority-owned bank. It's not so much that I condone all of the actions of the protesters. But I do believe that they deserve quality representation." Blackwell denies that his opposition to abortion is politically motivated. "I was against abortion in my college days," he says. "On the abortion issue, the nation's conscience is at risk." No matter how much controversy Blackwell generates by his political views, some people consider his ability to get media coverage to be the hallmark of his political career.

No councilman contacts the media more often than Blackwell. "He's a very astute politician in the sense of getting his name in the paper," says Joe Dehner, former president of the Charter Committee, the political party from which Blackwell bitterly broke in 1980. "He gets publicity because he works at it," Dehner says. "He has a real knack of claiming credit, even where it's not due. He makes things into controversies where there were really no controversies and sometimes no stories at all." At times Blackwell's play for media attention is merely amusing, but occasionally it's destructive, says Bortz, a Charterite.

He recalled that on the eve of the city firefighter's strike in 1983, Blackwell broke away from a closed council meeting to tell the media that the city had no contingency plans for fighting fires. "He was in the hallway telling the media we had no contingency plans at the precise moment (City Manager) Sy Murray was describing contingency plans inside the meeting room," Bortz says. "That is unnecessarily inducing alarm and panic." Blackwell gives a different version of the incident. "Arn's attention to details and facts is atrocious," he says. "I told the media my basic concern was that we no longer had a mutual firefighter assistance agreement with neighboring communities, which was true.

I had heard Sy Murray's speech two hours before he gave it to the rest of council." He makes no apologies for intensively courting the media. "It would be pretty idiotic of me to practice poor media relations," Blackwell says. "The media have a profound effect on public policy. The Cincinnati EnquirerFred Straub Ken Blackwell works in the community as well as in his Xavier University office. When Blackwell turned Republican five years ago, some blacks accused him of forsaking the black community to become closer to the city's' white power structure.

His percentage of the black vote dropped from 83 in the 1979 city council race to 60 in the '81 race. But he has steadily regained support among black voters. His percentage of the black vote rose to 72 last November. Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, a noted civil rights activist who was a close friend of Dr.

Martin Luther King says Blackwell is serving his black constituents well despite his Republican affiliation. "I won't lambaste him, and that's what some people expect me to do," he says. "I think he's been working to improve his image and his service to the black community. If he can represent the white community and still be concerned about the black community's interests, then that's a good thing." But some blacks persist in viewing him as a traitor. "Ken Blackwell hasn't done anything for the black community," said Gloria Williams, a nurse who lives in St.

Bernard. "He just runs his mouth." Blackwell points out that he departs from the Reagan administration on many civil rights policies. He has been a strong supporter of affirmative action programs at city hall and has brought to the council table numerous issues of concern to the black community. But he1 doesn't consider himself strictly a representative of black interests. "I'm elected in an at-large system to advance the common good for the whole city," he says.

"That means I have to balance my personal convictions with the broader view of the community." But Blackwell's future may extend beyond Cincinnati City Hall. There is speculation that he may run in 1988 for a Congressional seat, a U.S. Senate seat or perhaps a state office. Blackwell simply says he's keeping his options open. Whatever political world he occupies in 1988 and beyond, one thing's for certain.

John Kenneth Blackwell, the irrepressible, karate-chopping, ex-linebacker, wili still be dancing arm in arm with controversy. Few other partners could match lis pace. As chairwoman of the Cincinnati Women's Political Caucus and a member of the Charter Committee's board of directors, Garry is at odds with Blackwell on many issues. But she considers Blackwell a friend and applauds his work with the neighborhoods. "Years ago, Xavier sometimes acted arrogant toward the neigh-iborhoods," Garry says.

"Xavier had angry people in every neighborhood around it. Ken just turned that around." His duties at the Jesuit-operated university often overlap with his duties as a councilman. "The people you have to know to be a good community relations person are often the same people you have to know to be a good elected leader," he says. His bond with XU entails more than a weekly paycheck. It's a relationship based on religious, intellectual and emotional involvement.

"Over the last five years, I've been offered four jobs that would have doubled my salary," says Blackwell, who converted to Catholicism in 1982. A wide grin suddenly appears on his face. "But none of them offered me enough to override the Jesuits' pipeline to God." Anybody in politics who doesn't understand that is looking at the world through his own navel." Ross Love, Blackwell's close friend and campaign manager, says there's a warm, caring side to Blackwell that city hall observers might miss. "His big quality is that he cares about people," Love says. "When he sees people in bad situations, he hurts.

You can see the pain visibly on his face. He enjoys helping people. It's not a game to him. It's very real." Blackwell walks into the IGA store in Avondale Town Center to check on the progress of the store under new ownership. The store closed May 1 7 because of financial problems, but reopened June 29.

The shopping center is a key economic project for Avondale, a predominantly black community that lost many businesses after racial disturbances in the late 1960s. The IGA store is considered the Town Center's anchor. Blackwell spots Gillard Brown, his former woodworking teacher at Samuel Ach Junior High School. They have kept in touch other over the years. "Hey, Mr.

Brown, I want to talk to you about something later on today, Blackwell says as he shakes Brown 's hand. The two begin to reminisce about Blackwell's days in woodworking class. Brown, a broad-shouldered man, says he applied his swatting board to Blackwell's posterior on more than one was no angel, Blackwell says, laughing. "I thought I was a tough kid. Through Mr.

Brown, I learned early in my life that my body couldn 't stand pain. As Xavier University's vice president of community and legislative relations, Blackwell's main responsibilities are to improve XU's relations with its surrounding communities and to help those communities with their problems. As a result, he spends most of his workday in the neighborhoods bordering the university. "It doesn't do me or the neighborhoods any good for me to be stuck behind a desk," Blackwell says. He was a football star at XU, graduating in 1970 with a bachelor's degree in education.

He earned his master's degree there a year later. Pat Garry, a long-time neighborhood activist, is a member of XU's community relations advisory council that Blackwell formed a few years ago. i Avondale hold many memories for Blackwell. He and his family lived in an apartment there from his fourth grade through his junior year in high school. As he walks between the buildings, which face each other, he recalls the baseball games he and his friends played in the grassy 15-foot-wide strip separating the buildings.

It's hard to imagine that this tiny, makeshift baseball field ever presented much of a challenge for Blackwell, who stands 6-feet-4. became a good line drive, centerfield hitter, Blackwell says. "If you went right or left, you broke a window. Once we got the knack of hitting to straightaway centerfield, we graduated from a whiffle ball to a rubber ball. Blackwell, his wife, Rosa, and their three children, Kim, 15, Rah-shann, 12, and Kristin, 4, live in an attractive red-brick house in Bond Hill, a predominantly black neighborhood.

Mrs. Blackwell, who began dating her husband when they were sophomores at Hughes High School, is principal of Shroder Junior High School in Kennedy Heights. This summer she will be in New Mexico for several weeks studying a new educational program that will be installed at herchool this The two, one-story apartment buildings on Rockdale Avenue in.