Gatten: A dynamo and a template for women’s change
In the early 1970s, with the downtown crumbling and the upstart Upper Valley Mall siphoning off its lifeblood retail trade, Springfield launched a project to fashion a new future for the city’s Core Block.
As is often the case in American cities, events funneled down to a first Tuesday after the first Monday — this one in June 1975 — when taxpayers were asked to open their pockets to pass Issues 7 and 6.
Backers arranged for those numbers for the proposed half-percent income tax increase and changes in legal language to allow it in hopes of catching a tail wind from the Spirit of ’76 at a time when Springfielders were preparing for the next year’s celebration of America’s 200th birthday.
A sheet of now yellowed onionskin paper that seems old as parchment holds a bullet point list of other bits of campaign strategy and tactics typed by Jody Gatten.
Advertising money, she wrote, was to be spent on radio, newspaper and television outlets “in that order.”
At neighborhood coffee klatches, campaigners were to stick to their flip charts and keep the presentations simple.
“Every policeman, fireman, etc. (should) be especially courteous” in the weeks before the vote, she suggested — and traffic enforcement offers were told (for pity’s sake): “Don’t haul any cars away.”
Gatten, who died April 12, a month short of her 95th birthday, also pressed the committee to find “a man who must be willing to do the work … make fast decisions, particularly in the last two weeks of the campaign” — and who “must have political experience. (italics added).”
Two days after both issues narrowly passed, Joe Dirck, then city hall reporter for Springfield’s morning newspaper, The Sun, said, “The dynamo who probably had more to do with the passage of Issues 6 and 7 ... than any other person” had “manned the downtown office for hours on end and personally fielded enough questions ... to fill a taxation textbook” (italics added again).
The dynamo was Jody Gatten.
Convention of the time
On first mention, newspapers of the day referred to Gatten as they did most every woman: by her husband’s first name.
Lest history blame the media alone, the League of Women Voters honored the same convention with stationery in 196971 listing Mrs. James I. Gatten as its president.
That convention did nothing to lessen the purposefulness with which she pursued the local League’s civic goals of that year: To push for a city income tax “adequate for necessary municipal services and to support urban renewal; to work for improved jail facilities, expansion of parks and recreation services; and to continue consideration of how to best help “dependent, neglected and delinquent children” of the community.
Newspaper clippings show Gatten to have been as assiduous in her other community work.
In 1973, the head of the local Welfare Council honored her for “getting us on our feet as a separate agency” — work that qualified the group for state funding “to promote comprehensive community planning and resource development in Clark County for coordination, efficient social services through active participation with both public and private social agencies.”
And at the time the Springfield Rotary Club tapped her to administer its then Crippled Children’s program, Gatten sat on the Springfield City Schools’
Comprehensive Study Steering Committee; an active member of the Young Women’s Mission and the Women’s Symphony Association; and a lay delegate to the annual conference of the Methodist Church.
Public ‘needs and drives’ Tom Loftis, involved in
Issues 7 and 6 and most major civic projects in Springfield since, remembers Gatten as being “smarter than hell and very sensitive to the public needs and drives.”
“Fred brought Jodi to the table,” said Loftis, referring to longtime community leader Fred Leventhal.
“She was a great pulse-taker of the community, and she had great contacts.”
As the group ZZ Top would add, she knew how to use them.
“Her role was to set up the meetings and make sure that the right people were at those meetings — all elements of coordinating,” Loftis said.
Afterward, “she’d call and give reviews” of how presentations had been received, Loftis said, a duty that required diplomatic skills. So did her job on community rumor control after the morning call-in show on local radio station WBLY.
Among the many who noticed all this were two women given special notice in Gatten’s obituary.
Frances and Mary Lu
Frances Moran’s 2007 death notice mentions she, too, was instrumental in supporting local institutions. She “served as associate director during the Campaign for Wittenberg, which raised more than $20 million between 1979 and 1982.”
By then she had been president of Planned Parenthood; board member of the Springfield Urban League, Community Welfare Council, Clark County Mental Health and Retardation Board and League of Women Voters. She also had been a supporter of the Springfield Symphony and (like Gatten) was active in her home church.
And just as Gatten’s husband, Jim, had been active in reporting on racial issues, The Sun said, Moran and her husband, Sherwood, “played a leading role in helping Springfield build a strong civil-rights movement,” the obituary said, “in a successful campaign referendum to back fair-housing legislation.”
The second friend was Mary Lu Noonan.
“Mom loved Jody,” son Pete Noonan recalls.
“She always (spoke) in glowing terms of Jody and ... (her) hard work and tenacity. They were sort of buddies.”
Although his parents were “maybe not as outspoken as some,” Noonan said, “they were liberals when their friends probably were not.”
Rick Butler, whose wife, Linda, is one of two Gatten daughters, suggests a second element of the epoxy of the Noonan-gatten bond: Both were married to prominent men of the community.
The point, Noonan said, was this: “Even though their husbands were well known, they were trying to make their own way.”
Much the same could be said for the whole list of women referred to by their husbands’ names on the League of Women Voters stationery.
And as “Mrs. William Goettman,” then of the League,
recalls, that wasn’t always easy.
Broomsticks
On April 2, 1977, Carol Goettman joined other Springfield City Commissioners in breaking ground for the City Hall built with funds generated by Issues 7 and 6.
She was holding a shovel that day because she had defeated incumbent commissioner Florence Huebner, who had called Goettman a witch during the campaign for Goettman’s view on women’s issues.
“I was getting all these broomsticks from friends,” Goettman recalled in her retirement home in North Carolina.
Like Gatten, “at one time I was on five different boards in Springfield,” she said. That she also became a pilot indicates her search for more in her private life as well as her public life, while being the mother of three.
“I had to find my own identity,” she said. Her husband
Bill not only had the status of lifesaving surgeon but a hometown hero who returned to the town he helped to bring a state basketball championship in 1950.
Said Goettman, “I had to be more than the doctor’s wife.”
Although not referring to Goettman, Rick Butler added a hazard she shared with the wives of other prominent Springfield men who stepped into the public sphere.
In the fractious politics of the ’60s and ’70s, when those women attended anti-war protests or took other controversial stands “it was a bone of contention,” sometimes in their marriage and at least as often in the community.
“That also was the case with them supporting Planned Parenthood,” added the Gattens’ daughter, Linda Butler, who added: “But they did.”
‘But look how much I’ve gained’
The headline of the post-election story that referred to Jody Gatten as “the dynamo” ran under a headline that did identify her by her first name:
“Look Out, Pittsburgh!
Here Comes Jody Gatten” Gatten “will be leaving Springfield Sunday to join her husband in Pennsylvania,” the story said, “but she will be taking with her memories of the place that ‘will always be home for me.” Husband Jim had gone ahead to his new job in environmental public relations with Gulf Oil but was anxious for her to arrive because he “still hasn’t found the silverware,” she said.
The work with Gulf would move the couple to the cities and oil fields of Texas where, on Sept. 19,1982, Jim died a heart attack at 52.
As her obituary explains, in losing her husband “Jody also “found herself looking at an uncertain future with limited financial resources.”
“Suddenly, there would be no retirement income (from her husband) ... and Jody was a long way from Social Security eligibility.”
The obituary explains how she managed a problem she shared with many other women. She relocated to Columbus’ Short North area before it was trendy and continued to live a vigorous and stylish life with her flair for fashion and for everything Apple.
Laid low by an infection, her final days were spent in a Springfield care center where Fred Leventhal’s nephew, Eddie, found her reading Liz Cheney’s latest book.
A final word of thanks
After her morning exercises and daily mile-long walk to the center of her retirement community, 89-year-old Carol Goettman rues the changes that have come to politics in her later life, especially the
U.S. Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade.
Now living among women who she senses did even more with their lives, “I feel like I’m lagging behind,” she said.
Still she treasures Springfield memories of Harriett Levine and the friendship of Barbara Crabill, who followed Levine on the Board of the
City Schools; smiles at the recollections of annual lunches at the Springfield Country Club when she and Merle Kearns took Priscilla Smithers so all three could tweak the rules of a club that did not have African-american members with Smithers’ presence; and takes heart in Nancy Parker’s stalwart support of Planned Parenthood and the way in which Kim Nedelman Fish “has surpassed us all” in the influence she’s come to have in the community.
“I keep thinking it’s time to retire,” Goettman said. “But I’m so concerned about this election going on now.”
Meanwhile, thanks for Jody Gatten have and will continue to reside in a box in Clark County Heritage Center just a few folders away from the onion skin paper on which she typed strategies for Issues 7 and 6.
Written two days after issues’ passage by the Rev. Robert E. Karsten, then pastor to Wittenberg University, it says this:
Dear Jody,
I don’t know when I have had such a sense of satisfaction, and such a feeling that effort has been worthwhile.
It is nothing new to you, of course, to be involved in things like this, and I suppose you will continue a wide range of public service. For that, Springfield should be thankful, and, in any event, it will be benefitted.
Who could have imagined during some of those dreary meetings last summer that we would make it?
And how could we thank you for all that you did?
Let’s try this: Thanks, Jody. Very sincerely yours,
Bob Karsten