Ruling the World

Maybe you’ve seen him.

That was him, powering down Lennox Road in Cleveland Heights in his wheelchair, making his twice-daily trips to Cedar-Fairmount.

Or more likely you spotted him at  where he’s called “The Mayor” or “Czar” — terms of endearment bestowed on him by customers and staff alike who cling to his every word when he holds court there.

The name Allen Friedlander is famous if you talk to the right people. Aside from his local notoriety at the coffee shop, Friedlander is also a nationally recognized artist whose near-perfect sketches of sports heroes can still be bought in poster form through dozens of websites (just do a Google search of his name).

Fifteen of those pieces will be on display during an exhibit Tuesday night at Montefiore nursing home in Beachwood, Friedlander’s home since April after the multiple sclerosis that has been ravaging his body for decades finally became too much to bear. The exhibit will be from 7 to 8 p.m. in the nursing home’s Maltz Auditorium off David Myers Parkway.

“When I tell people here that I’m having an exhibit, they say, ‘You’re Allen Friedlander?’” he said. Friedlander raised his eyebrows, mimicking the shocked look he gets when people meet him for the first time.

He certainly doesn’t look the same as he did when he reigned over his subjects at Starbucks. A recent illness has forced him to lie in bed most days, unable to move much, even to shake a visitor’s hand. His speech is a lot slower than it used to be and he apologizes often for forgetting common words.

“MS does that to you,” he said, rubbing his forehead as if to massage what he is thinking of out of his brain. “It makes you forget words.”

But that spark that draws people to him hasn’t left, and shows no sign of retreat. You can see it in his eyes when they become wide and glow as he mentions a pretty girl he used to flirt with at Starbucks or a drawing he created that he especially liked.

The regulars at Starbucks would look forward to hearing him speak each day. Starbucks employee Corey Kregenow said it was a daily ritual that Friedlander would park his wheelchair in the dining area and the regulars would pull up chairs around him to talk or just listen as they studied for an exam or drank their coffee.

Among his other nicknames, they would call him the Godfather of Schmooze.

“I had a friend who was a Ph.D. in Mathematics, and she always would talk to me, and one day I told her I was in a lousy mood. She said, ‘I look for you for inspiration, you’re not allowed to be in a lousy mood,’” Friedlander said.

Lennox Road to Starbucks

Friedlander grew up in Cleveland Heights and graduated from Heights High in 1971. He spent a year at The Ohio State University and then transferred to Cleveland State University where he would spend six years getting a degree in psychology. His grades were never good and since it was before he discovered his talent for art, nothing really interested him.

“I was bored with school,” he said. “Now I know it was because I was an artist, even though I wasn’t drawing yet.”

In fact it was boredom that first inspired the art he would become known for. He was working at a coffee shop, David’s Place, during an April blizzard in 1982 and the place hadn’t had a customer for hours.

“I was talking to a maintenance worker about how bored I was. Nobody showed up and I read the sports section three times,” he explained. “He has a pencil between his ear and his head and he hands it to me and says, ‘Why don’t you draw something.’”

Friedlander, then 28, drew a sketch of his hand. The next day customer after customer commented on his work. Someone even got the art director at WKYC to come over and look at it and even he raved.

“He told me, ‘You have a lot of raw talent,’” he said.

He spent the next several years trying to make a living with his art, despite not taking one lesson for fear that an instructor would rid him of his unique style. People would commission him to draw replicas of photographs, like one Lincoln Insurance salesman who wanted a sketch of Abraham Lincoln for his office. He also made deals with poster companies who were infatuated with his sketches of sports stars like Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig and Muhammad Ali. Those posters would sell all over the country.

One of them, drawn from a photo of Babe Ruth standing next to Lou Gehrig in full Yankee uniforms, hangs on the wall opposite Friedlander’s bed at the nursing home. It looks so realistic it is often mistaken for a black-and-white photo.

Even though he began garnering some success, it never translated into a lucrative career. The drawings would take hundreds of hours to make, but he might only get paid a few hundred dollars for a commission. Royalty checks from the posters he would sell were also disappointing, so he kept odd jobs to pay his bills.

“Disconnection notices would pile up, so sometimes I just put on classical music and draw all day, knowing I wasn’t going to sell a piece,” he said.

About 15 years ago, he stopped working those odd jobs and began drawing full time. The aches and pains he had felt since he was a teenager were becoming worse, so doing the manual labor that he was required at some of those jobs was no longer possible. Then in the late '90s, doctors told him he had MS, an autoimmune disease that slows impulses sent from the brain to make the rest of the body work.

“It was almost a relief to get diagnosed with MS because I knew I’d start getting Social Security,” he said. “People ask me why I didn’t get it checked sooner and I told them, ‘I’m an artist. I didn’t have insurance.’”

The Disease - Present

Friedlander suspects that he has had MS since he was in junior high school, even though he wasn’t officially diagnosed until about 10 years ago. He’d always been an athlete, so having a little soreness here and there never seemed out of the ordinary and he never thought it could have been more serious.

“I was working, I was drawing, I was lifting weights, I was walking my dog,” he said. “I remember lifting one day and taking a shower and my arms and armpits were numb. I just thought that was an aging process because I didn’t have anything to compare it to.”

Around the age of 43 he began frequenting Starbucks, at first by using a cane to walk the 100 yards or so from his apartment on Lennox Road. It was the perfect spot since it opened early, was close to his home and allowed people to sit in their dining area as long as they wanted.

He’d get there about 9 a.m. and visit with a Frappuccino — his favorite is mocha — or some kind of macchiato. Then he’d go home and have lunch about 12:30 p.m. and return for a couple hours around 2 p.m.

When he was diagnosed with MS five years later he began using a wheelchair, even when the weather got too terrible for even cars to maneuver.

“His determination to get up every morning, put himself in his chair even when it was snowing really inspired me,” said Ryan Chamberlain, a Ph. D. student at Case Western Reserve University, who became part of Friedlander’s inner circle at Starbucks.

Chamberlain, 37, visits his friend often at the nursing home and said that although it’s difficult for Friedlander to keep drawing with his hands, he still draws in his mind.

“He’s amazing and he’s always been great to talk to,” he said. “He always knew what was going on in the neighborhood. Even in there he knows what’s going on in the neighborhood.”

Friedlander said he’s just starting to accept his circumstances, which is helping with the depression he feels sometimes.

“One day one of the nurses told me I was depressed, and I said ‘I’m in bed, I’m in a nursing home and I’m stuck here,’” he said. “This is one of the worst things that could happen. But it’s like if I were at home I couldn’t do anything anyway.”

He just recently started leaving his room to go downstairs and visit with the other residents, staff and guests who visit the nursing home — always with a cup of coffee, sometimes one brought in from Starbucks courtesy of a family member or friend.

“I go down there and talk to everybody, just like I did at Starbucks,” he said. “Now they call me ‘The Mayor’ here.”