Perpetual Motion

The audience in Cleveland's Labor Hall was in an ugly mood. The 450 union men had come to hear a debate between two rival candidates for the school board, but their favorite, a union president, had not appeared. As his opponent, a plump, middle-aged matron, stepped to the microphone, the audience began to boo and stamp. They did not know Mrs. Norma Wulff.

They soon began to. "You invited me here," she shouted, "and I'm staying." Then she began to tell them a thing or two. The school board was corrupt and inefficient, she said, and who was to blame? Well, it was a labor union bloc that ran it. Unionmen were "damn fools," she said, to support such a board. Why, only one member of the bloc was actually a union member.

The union audience didn't take kindly to her remarks, but they listened. And when, after the speech, Mrs. Wulff got an anonymous threat in the mail, that didn't stop her either. Nothing could. She talked on street corners and at over 100 rallies. Eventually, Norma Wulff, the mother of two grown daughters, talked herself into a seat on the school board. Four years ago she became the first woman president of Cleveland's school board.

From the first, the politicians on the board had baited her. They thought the old tricks would work: they had once driven another woman member off the board by making boisterous and vulgar remarks that sent her, weeping with embarrassment, from every board meeting. Such tactics didn't budge Mrs. Wulff.

Soon, once indifferent Clevelanders were jamming the meeting hall to hear what Norma Wulff had to say. She was garrulous and disjointed in her speech, but she made her points by the force of her enthusiasm and an irresistible supply of facts. Gradually accepting her as someone they could trust, teachers brought her stories of corruption, of campaign shakedowns, of unjust dismissals, and of board members who kept their relatives on the city payroll. The year she became president of the school board, Clevelanders went the whole way with her, voting the labor bloc out of office.

Politically a conservative Republican, she fights anyone--unions or real-estate boards--she thinks in the wrong. It keeps her busy. Up at 6 a.m.--long before her husband, who is a telephone company supervisor--Norma Wulff starts her day talking on her two private telephones. As she eats breakfast and washes the dishes, she has the receiver hooked to her shoulder, talking incessantly to teachers, newspapermen and P.T.A. women (she was president of the all-city P.T.A. before her election to the board).

She is forever popping up in one or another of Cleveland's 151 schools, whirling through classrooms, doggedly inspecting furnaces and washrooms, machine-gunning questions at janitors and principals. She has plumped for better schools and playgrounds, demanded higher wages for school employees, secured 180,000 signatures to a petition for lower streetcar fares for schoolchildren, camped in newspaper offices until editors promised help. She and her board got more money for their schools than any before them. They upped teachers' salaries $1,200 a year, established free dental clinics in schools, set up a veterans' education program.

A year ago, when Cleveland celebrated its sesquicentennial, Norma Wulff was named the city's outstanding woman in education. Last week Cleveland gratefully elected Mrs. Wulff to a fourth term on the school board. Said a fellow member admiringly: "Whoever says there is no such thing as perpetual motion doesn't know Norma Wulff."

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