Shaker Heights Quotes

There is a velvety sensuality here at the mouth of the Mississippi that you won't find anywhere else. Tell me what the air feels like at 3 A.M. on a Thursday night in August in Shaker Heights and I bet you won't be able to say because nobody stays up that late. But in New Orleans, I tell you, it's ink and honey passed through silver moonlight.

There aren’t any Shakers in Shaker Heights,” he said. “They all died out. Didn’t believe in sex. They just named the town after them.

Did he break it off? Were you too tall for him?” “We’re the same height. Actually.” “Really. That’s adorable. Like salt and pepper shakers.

Everyone in Shaker Heights was talking about it that summer: how Isabelle, the last of the Richardson children, had finally gone around the bend and burned the house down.

By the time they had graduated, he had fallen for Shaker Heights as well, the way Elena described it: the first planned community, the most progressive community, the perfect place for young idealists. In his own little hometown, they'd been suspicious of ideas: he'd grown up surrounded by a kind of resigned cynicism, though he'd been sure the world could be better.

The Shakers had indeed left the land that would become Shaker Heights long before, and by the summer of 1997 there were exactly twelve left in the world. But Shaker Heights had been founded, if not on Shaker principles, with the same idea of creating a utopia. Order—and regulation, the father of order—had been the Shakers’ key to harmony. They had regulated everything: the proper time for rising in the morning, the proper color of window curtains, the proper length of a man’s hair, the proper way to fold one’s hands in prayer (right thumb over left). If they planned every detail, the Shakers had believed, they could create a patch of heaven on earth, a little refuge from the world, and the founders of Shaker Heights had thought the same. In advertisements they depicted Shaker Heights in the clouds, looking down upon the grimy city of Cleveland from a mountaintop at the end of a rainbow’s arch. Perfection: that was the goal, and perhaps the Shakers had lived it so strongly it had seeped into the soil itself, feeding those who grew up there with a propensity to overachieve and a deep intolerance for flaws. Even the teens of Shaker Heights—whose main exposure to Shakers was singing “Simple Gifts” in music class—could feel that drive for perfection still in the air.

Already perceived by tests and/or recommendations as lacking intellectual ability, students in the lowest level begin to perform according to expectation. Teachers no longer teach; students no longer learn.

Start small. Identify a few things around you that others need help with. Paul Newman started small. He grew up a few blocks from my home in Shaker Heights and sold lemonade on the corner. Now he sells lemonade all over the world, and most of the profits go to help children. The key here is to do something small with a big heart and stick with it.

The Good Life in Shaker Heights,” Cosmopolitan, March 1963

Blacks in upscale Shaker Heights are convinced they are victims. They are professionals who moved to the Cleveland suburb because of its good schools, but found that black children had an average grade point average of 1.9 compared to a white average of 3.45. John Ogbu, a Nigerian immigrant who is an expert at UC Berkeley on race differences in school performance, moved to Shaker Heights for nine months and researched the schools. He concluded that most of the problem was that black students were not interested in studying—they considered it “acting white”—and that their parents did not push them. Blacks were outraged. One parent called him “an academic Clarence Thomas,” and the National Urban League said his conclusions were an effort to “blame the victims of racism.” One reporter could not find a single black person in Shaker Heights who had anything good to say about Prof. Ogbu’s conclusions. For blacks, there was only one explanation for black failure: white racism.

Three-year-olds have no control over their lives. If you don’t want your kids competing in pageants, you hold the power, not them. I sincerely doubt a six-year-old would hitchhike to the banquet room at the Sheraton and compete in the Little Miss Shaker Heights pageant herself if her emotionally damaged Mommy wasn’t pushing her.

Outside in the world, volcanoes erupted, governments rose and collapsed and bartered for hostages, rockets exploded, walls fell. But in Shaker Heights, things were peaceful, and riots and bombs and earthquakes were quiet thumps, muffled by distance.

But I've cared as much, I admit, about people I haven't met. I care about Judy Garland and Natalie Wood and the Black Dahlia. I care about the lacrosse player murdered by her ex at UVA, and the girl whose boyfriend was definitely not working at LensCrafters that day, and the high school student killed in her boyfriend's Shaker Heights home while everyone slept, and poor Martha Moxley, and the woman in the hotel elevator, and the only Black woman at the white-lady wine party, dead on the lawn, and the woman shot through the bathroom door by her famous boyfriend, who claimed he thought she was a burglar. I have opinions about their deaths, ones I'm not entitled to. I'm queasy, at the same time, about the way they've become public property, subject to the collective imagination. I'm queasy about the fact that the women whose deaths I dwell on are mostly beautiful and well-off. That most were young, as we prefer our sacrificial lambs. That I'm not alone in my fixations.