Over the Rainbow
A tribute to Joanne Lewis (1933-2024)
Joanne Lewis was a good witch.
If you know me in real life, you have probably heard tales of my magical Grandma Joanne. If you spent any significant time in the Cleveland area, there’s a good chance you crossed paths with her. And if you didn’t have the honor to meet her before she passed away on February 18, I would love to give you a sense of her unique spirit and inspiring life.
Joanne Marcia Lewis (née Waxman) was born in Cleveland, Ohio on June 5, 1933. The eldest of three sisters, she inherited a strong sense of morality from her father Harry and a fierce independent streak from her mother Dorothy. Her imaginativeness was apparent from a young age, as she spent her childhood looking for the little people inside the radio set and taking the family vacuum-cum-pet, “Hoover,” for walks. Her passion for activism had also manifested by the time she was in grade school, when she was marshaling the other neighborhood kids to sell war stamps.
By the time she started at Cleveland Heights High School — where seven of her children and grandchildren would follow, and she is enshrined in the Distinguished Alumni Hall of Fame — she was a social butterfly. According to family lore, she had three dates a weekend, and would return from one outing to find her next suitor sitting in her mother’s kitchen. She and her best friends at Heights High, a septet of women whom my grandfather later dubbed “The Pleiades,” have remained a close-knit group for more than seventy years.
Joanne dreamed of traveling the world, or at least getting out of Ohio. In 1951 she left for the University of Michigan, where she majored in English and art history. She spent her junior year at the University of Geneva, designing her own vision of an experiential study-abroad program. This was a time when young Jewish women didn’t do such things by themselves, yet it was merely the first of the many international adventures from which she drew her legendary stories.
Over the course of her many travels she was courted by an African prince, lived with a tribe of Romani people, and was the invited guest of honor at a feast in rural Peru where she had no language in common with the villagers. (One of my favorite of her famous lines was on picking up the vocabulary in a foreign country: “I could read the newspaper, but I couldn’t tell if it was good news or bad news.”) She received a mysterious sack of jewels on a train, meditated on the sacred grounds of Delphi, flew over the Andes on a low-flying plane while snow blew in through the windows, and accepted a foxlike man’s offer to smuggle her into East Berlin.
By the early sixties she was in New York, having resolved to write the Great American Novel from her treasured apartment on Riverside Drive. She didn’t, but the audacious adventures she had and the colorful cast of characters she knew would have been worthy of it. A representative story from this part of her life started at Louis Mayer’s dinner table, detoured into Christmas shopping for Lawrence Olivier — “Larry,” she called him — and ended at a party in Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe’s hotel suite. She was awestruck by the celebrities’ indulgence of choice: a chic new dessert called Häagen-Dazs. So vast was her collection of stories that somehow I first heard this one only a few years ago. “I must have told you this before,” she protested, as though I could possibly have forgotten her description of Joltin’ Joe digging into a tub of Chocolate Chocolate Chip.
In 1963 she married my grandfather, Robert Lewis. She and “Rompie” (as we called him), a widower with three sons, were set up on a blind date while he was in New York for a business trip. He fell in love at first sight. Joanne later recalled:
I told him that there were two reasons that I could not marry him. Number one: I would never live in Cleveland. Number two: He was not exactly what I had in mind!
His answer: He was relieved to know that those were the only two problems!
Two years later there were five kids clamoring around their house in Cleveland Heights. They were married for over forty years, until Rompie died in 2005.
Joanne was an enthusiastic listener who loved hearing stories even more than telling them. This served her well as a writer. She was an eminent historian of Cleveland landmarks like the Lakeview Cemetery and Millionaire’s Row. Her best-known authored work was To Market, To Market, on the history, architecture, and people of the West Side Market. Of recording and synthesizing people’s individual stories, she always stressed that “the truths are more important than the facts.”
Joanne was a lifelong peacenik who turned the family’s great room into a local hub for antiwar activism. She remembered spotting FBI agents taking her picture outside a Pete Seeger concert. In 1985, horrified by Ronald Reagan’s belligerent Cold War rhetoric, she felt called to organize for greater cross-cultural understanding. The result was the Global Issues Resource Center, or as she called it, her “Save the World project.” Based out of Cuyahoga Community College (where Robert had been the founding Chairman of the Board), its goal was to educate ordinary people so they could be empowered to advocate on important issues, from the nuclear arms race to school bullying. “We don’t have to share beliefs,” their slogan went, “just a planet.” Joanne had the audacity to invite renowned leaders and experts to Cleveland, so they came for events like “So You Don’t Know Borscht about the Russians,” which paired a lecture from a visiting denuclearization scholar with a dinner of traditional beet soup.
Her lifelong mantra was: “You CAN make a difference in the way the world turns.”
She was a devoted patron of the arts, and our family lost count of how many creative or good-doing groups were midwifed at her and Rompie’s kitchen table. The organizations she helped to found include the Near West Theater, a community group that builds diversity and inclusiveness through theater; and the Robert L. Lewis Academy of Scholars, an honors program at Cuyahoga Community College created in my grandfather’s memory that combined Socratic seminars on the meaning of social justice with designing real-world projects to help those in need.
Joanne loved making connections. As much of an impression as she made on everyone who met her, they were just as remarkable to her. She regularly asked and reminisced about my childhood friends, even those she hadn’t seen in over a decade. Join her at a museum or the movies and you could count on her bumping into old friends in the lobby. From activists to artists to paleontologists to wandering hippies to nudist veterinarians, people were always showing up at my grandparents’ table and crashing in their spare bedroom. When I was little, I thought she knew everyone in Cleveland. To this day I’m not sure she didn’t.
She had a natural gift of forging deep relationships. Joanne carried business cards listing herself as a “Professional Jewish Mother.” She emerged from doctor’s appointments more interested in where a nurse’s kid got into college than her own medical condition. A cable repairman once left her apartment with a wedding gift. Some years ago, after Joanne hung up on a telemarketer, my mom facetiously asked her how many kids the saleswoman had. “Oh,” Joanne replied matter-of-factly, “she can’t have children.”
Nothing brought Joanne more joy than her family. Any chance to see her children, grandchildren, or great-grandchildren was by definition a special occasion. Especially in her later years, she demurred on questions about herself, preferring to kvell about the latest news from her progeny. Anything we did filled her with pride: not merely good, but “wonderful!” A call from one of my cousins would sustain her for days. A visit from out-of-town family would be a topic of effusive conversation for months.
She was an unequivocally unique spirit. She was creative, kooky, and whimsical. She had a dry wit and an uproarious laugh. She had a distinct diction that was rhythmic, esoteric, and colorful. Her furniture and decor, collected from travels and artist friends, had no coherent theme — she said all her stuff just had to learn to live together. “There’s a fine line between a nightgown and an evening gown,” she often quipped, though her style was more focused on her eccentric, dangly jewelry. She liked to give people words as gifts, which was fitting, as she was the kind of person for whom you run out of adjectives.
Joanne always described herself as a witch. She communicated with the family via long-distance telekinetic surges, which she called “zapping.” She had a preternatural ability to predict what her grandkids would want for dinner or who was calling when the phone rang. (She was miffed that the advent of caller ID rendered that magic power obsolete.) Those who didn’t witness her mystical abilities may roll their eyes at our family’s credulity. But as with the stories from the farmers and butchers of the West Side Market, and whether she really had a snowball fight inside a plane over the Andes Mountains, the truths are more important than the facts.
Growing up in Cleveland meant Grandma Joanne and Rompie were part of my everyday life. Our “odd grandmother” decided that I should be cultured, so she took me to museums and shows as often as she could. She nurtured my early interest in jazz, bringing me to any concert she thought I would find inspiring. Her matzoh ball soup became my Platonic ideal of a comfort food. There were dinners and sleepovers and holidays and drop-ins, all with a distinctive Joanne twist.
In my adolescence, she was one of the first adults in my life to treat me as a respected peer instead of just a kid. By the time I started high school she referred to me as her therapist. Joanne invited me for conversations with scholarly friends whom she thought I would find interesting. She became my chaperone to R-rated movies until I was old enough to go without supervision. She fell out of her seat laughing at the montage of phallic drawings in Superbad — much to the horror of my friends. We would meet at my aunt and uncle’s pool on summer afternoons to do our respective aquatic exercises, splashing away to the strains of Benny Goodman.
Our relationship evolved again in my adulthood. Coming home to visit meant going to Joanne’s favorite restaurant for standing rib, dirty martinis, and philosophical conversations. In recent years reservations at Nighttown gave way to takeout in her apartment, where the discussions were no less stimulating. She gave me her recipes and some vintage cookware, and loved that I was learning the family’s culinary traditions. (Few moments in my life have been prouder than the time I sent my grandmother home with leftovers.) She started living vicariously through my travel stories. We talked about once a week, and whatever was going on in my life, she ended most of our calls with the same encouragement: “Go for it!”
Two years ago, Grandma officiated our wedding. Joanne had treated my now-wife Lizzie as one of her own grandchildren from the day they met. Resplendent in an embroidered purple robe, she delivered a wonderful speech as only she could. She surprised us by pulling out a magic wand to seal our marriage with her witchcraft. When we asked her to perform our ceremony, her health had already started to decline, and she was worried she would not be up to the task. Sustaining her magic long enough to charm our union is the greatest gift she could have given us.
Joanne had a stoic outlook on mortality and preferred not to dwell on grief. At her age, death was part of the deal: “I’m ninety years old, for god’s sakes.” Her mother Dorothy passed away peacefully in her own bed the day before she was to go to assisted living. Joanne moved into a lower-maintenance apartment a few years ago and possessed a similar clarity that she would not uproot herself again. She had a severe shellfish allergy and had long joked that, if her quality of life became untenable, she would order a lobster dinner.
I flew in the day before Grandma passed and had the honor of sharing some of her last waking hours. She told me she was glad I trimmed my beard and corrected me on the details of her escapade in East Berlin. We talked about all the family who couldn’t be there themselves. How much they loved her and how proud she was of them. She brought up my career change and preached the importance of good work-life balance. “You have to stand up for that,” she emphasized.
While she would not want to be remembered by her final days, I was deeply moved by two specific essences of Joanne that persisted to the end. The first was her diction. The day before she died, she complained that the family’s bedside conversations were “pretty innocuous.” The previous week, while coming down from a moment of anxiety, she remarked to the room that the experience had been “psychotic, and neurotic, and a little bit exotic.”
The second was her love. To say she never failed to recognize us feels condescending, as if to suggest that it was in doubt. Yet amidst the fog of sadness and confusion, Joanne truly knew and took comfort in all the faces at her bedside, the voices on the phone, the myriad messengers of telekinetic zaps. She felt the heroic efforts of her children, who stepped up in ways I could never before have imagined, and her angelic aides, who grieved alongside us as though they were family.
This was love, at its most basic, primal, raw, difficult form. I don’t have the words to describe what it was like to be part of such a thing. I bet Grandma would have.
As I process Joanne’s passing, I keep coming back to the last scene of her favorite movie, The Wizard of Oz. The world has lost some color without her, just as it did when Dorothy woke up back in Kansas. But everyone who experienced Joanne was changed by her magic, and her light will always be shining from over the rainbow.
This is a wonderful tribute, Lewie. I chuckled when I got to the Superbad bit, as that has stuck out to me since you first told me many years ago. May your grandmother's memory be a blessing.
absolutely beautiful, she sounds like an amazing woman