Last week, after looking into the gaunt and dull-eyed face of liberated Europe for six months, the "nationalities editor" of the Cleveland Press came home. As gently as he could, in lectures and in print, Theodore Andrica would describe that haunting face to the "foreign" two-thirds of Cleveland's population, gathered in mass meetings, schools, churches, parlors. The Czechs, Serbs, and Slovenes would be grateful for news, however tragic, from the homeland. But sometimes it would be hard to look them in the eye.
In Bucharest, Andrica had put a notice in several Rumanian papers that he was anxious to meet relatives and friends of Cleveland people. That started a forlorn parade to his room at the Athenee Palace Hotel. In a fortnight he plodded through 675 interviews, and the pattern was the same as in Belgrade and Prague, Nürnberg and Trieste. Wept hollow-cheeked Bertha Lutwak: "Tell my uncle in Cincinnati I am in great need." Attorney Dumitru Ellenes had a sad message for his brother-in-law: "Our family was deported to Austria; only our sister Helen returned alive."
Stranger Here Myself. An immigrant (from Radna, Rumania), short, bustling, bespectacled Theodore Andrica (rhymes with Eureka), 45, knows the immigrant's nostalgia for the old country. Broke when he landed in the U.S. in 1921, he worked as an orderly in a Buffalo hospital, was ordained a Russian Orthodox priest in Erie, Pa., changed from cleric to bank clerk, drifted to Cleveland.
It generally took a bootleg murder to get "foreigners' " names in Cleveland's big dailies in those days. The city's 36 nationality groups lived together as hostile neighbors. One day in 1926, Andrica called on Editor Louis B. Seltzer of the Scripps-Howard Press. He brandished a batch of scribbled items, registered a heavily accented complaint:
"These should have been in your paper," he scolded. "You are ignoring news important to 65% of the people—and missing a good bet." As an experiment, Seltzer hired him at $35 a week. Soon, in a homely, rough-cut column called "Around the World in Cleveland," new and jawbreaking names began to appear in the Press. Known in the office either as the "Hunky" or "broken-English" editor, to whom every mustached office visitor was automatically referred, Andrica worked tirelessly to promote giant dance festivals and international exhibits (one drew 150,000 people), organized a Council for American Unity to break down the barriers between neighbors. The competition decided it had been missing a bet too.
Native's Return. In 1932 Andrica talked his boss into a bolder experiment. He began annual pilgrimages along the highways and footpaths of Europe, covering the continent as an editor of a country weekly covers his community, with plenty of names of plain people. Every fall when he came home, hundreds of thousands of Clevelanders went to hear him and see his movies of their relatives in the old country.
Last summer, after a five-year wartime lapse, Theodore Andrica went overseas in a war correspondent's uniform. It was his ninth trip, and this time he penetrated deeper into the Balkan byways than any U.S. correspondent since the war.