1982: The Cleveland Magazine Staff Celebrates 10 years of Success

It’d been 10 years since they published their very first issue of Cleveland Magazine. In the beginning, the joke was that staff would work all weekend and, when finally leaving on Sunday afternoon, tell each other to "have a good weekend."

Money was stretched thin, too. Editor Mike Roberts recalls an enraged investor cursing out him and publisher Lute Harmon Sr. over a story on the city's banks. Rather than appease him, Harmon replied that he and Roberts would buy him out for $10,000 — on the spot.

"I was stunned," Roberts says. "We didn't have any money, but over time, we paid it off.

It was all hard. But it was all good. 

By 10 years in, however, things were beginning to hum. To celebrate, Harmon and Roberts invited some 200 of their colleagues, friends and advertisers to the ballroom of the Statler Hotel on Euclid Avenue. Former Cleveland Mayor Ralph Perk, notorious for catching his hair on fire just three years after the river caught fire, crashed the party.

“We were a little afraid of him,” says Harmon with a laugh, “and he was a little afraid of us.” 

But it was not Perk who ignited the laughter and looks shared by Harmon, Roberts and their buddy Al Gentry in this photo. Rather, it was the feeling that comes from starting something new from scratch. Something you believe in. Something you take a moment to savor every decade or so. 

“We’d attained a sense of legitimacy as a publication that was respected in the city,” Roberts says. “It was joyful.”