COLUMN ONE : Cincy Takes Schott to the Heart : Yes, they’ve got trouble, right there in River City. But for some, labeling the Reds owner a bigot only makes her one of the gang. Flowers fill her box seat as hate mail floods critics.

It is a weekday night at the Western Bowl & Cheyenne Social Club, where this west side neighborhood lets out its breath.

Bowling balls thunder down 68 lanes, chubby glasses clink together, sporadic cheers and laughter erupt from men crowded around poker games behind ball-return machines.

The feeling here, as in many such gatherings around these wooded hills, is one of a warm family reunion. The people glance at each other with tiny smiles that say there are certain things only they understand.

These days one of those things is the behavior of Marge Schott, owner of the Cincinnati Reds, who has been suspended from major league baseball for one year for racially derogatory remarks.

Oh, how they love her.

“Most everybody around here thinks Marge was treated wrongly,” said Jerry Beale, a middle-aged member of the Skippy Printing bowling team. “The things she said, she has always talked like that. In fact, a lot of us have always talked like that.

“You ain’t going to change her . . . or us.”

Steve Ashworth, a purchasing agent who came to Western Bowl just to watch his friends, agreed.

“The stuff she said, it’s something that slips off everybody’s tongue,” he said. “Maybe not every day, but certainly once or twice a week. We just wish they would leave her alone.”

From the working-class west side spots to trendy downtown restaurants, where patrons were recently handed paper fans imprinted with Schott’s face, the evidence is clear.

From the words of encouragement that fill local radio talk shows to the presence of flower arrangements on her empty box seat opening day, the message is strong.

With her banishment, Schott’s popularity in Cincinnati has grown.

“Put it this way,” said Scott Ramsey, an electrician, “I don’t think anybody was passing out fans with Marge Schott’s picture on them last year.”

Never before in her eight seasons as principal owner--seasons marked by charges that she treats employees like dogs and her St. Bernards like pampered children--has she been so beloved.

In the middle of the furor over her remarks, one local television station reported that of 10,000 responses to the question of whether Schott should abandon her office, 73% said no.

Two months earlier, when her statements first surfaced, only 31.9% of respondents to a Cincinnati Enquirer poll agreed with the statement that Schott was a racist.

Some say the reaction is based on a problem that has long existed just beneath the surface of a city that is equal parts North and South, with a cosmopolitan downtown fringed by ethnic neighborhoods and small hill communities in nearby Kentucky.

“This is a racist city, this is a redneck city,” said Bill Spillers, general manager and publisher of the Cincinnati Herald, a black weekly newspaper. “It’s unfortunate, but it is very true.”

Others question the polls and say that Schott supporters are not condoning her words, only her works.

“All of those polls are totally unscientific, if they get the right answer it is just dumb luck,” said Al Tuchfarber, director of the Institute of Policy Research at the University of Cincinnati. “I have done many studies that show the people here are, in affirmative action issues, actually more liberal than the rest of the country.

“Most people thought what Schott said was terrible . . . but they don’t think that makes her a terrible person.”

Schott took over a struggling franchise in 1984 and put together a winning team with the second-highest payroll and lowest ticket prices in the major leagues.

She is baseball’s only owner who sits in the stands during every home game and signs autographs. She is the only owner who insisted on keeping the prices of hot dogs at $1 while raising the price of beer, because “the kids eat the hot dogs, and baseball is for kids.”

“People here think of Marge for her involvement in a lot of community activities, for her commitment to the baseball team,” said Roger Ruhl, vice president of the Greater Cincinnati Chamber of Commerce.

About the only thing people can agree upon is that the community has suffered from a split that has even filtered into the Reds clubhouse.

Barry Larkin, a black shortstop, spoke out against Schott and received hate mail. Rob Dibble, a white relief pitcher, supported her and was embraced.

Most hard feelings have quieted since the start of the season. But in this city of 364,000, of which 38% are black, nobody has forgotten.

“This thing has been kept under cover for way too long,” said Tyrone Yates, a black city councilman who received death threats for condemning Schott. “The races here are superficially polite but substantially in conflict.”

Schott is not allowed in her Riverfront Stadium offices, nor in the stadium press box, nor the stadium dining room. Until today, she was not even allowed to sit in her front-row seat next to the Reds dugout.

Yet she doesn’t need to visit any of those places to understand her increased popularity. She just needs to go shopping.

Schott, 64, recently stepped out of her black Buick Riviera in front of a grocery store when a male fan, his hands filled with sacks, shouted at her from across the parking lot.

“He said, ‘ ‘F’ ‘em Marge . . . just do to them what they did to you . . . just ‘F’ ‘em,’ ” Schott said in a recent interview. “I thought to myself, these people are really neat.”

While she has not spoken to anyone in the organization since her suspension, Schott said her dog, Schottzie 02, has mailed a letter to Tony Perez, the Reds manager whose nickname is Doggie.

“The letter was from a dog to Uncle Doggie, I don’t think there are any rules against that,” Schott deadpanned.

Schott says she also is attending her diversity training courses, which are required as part of her suspension. Not that she always understands them.

“I spend two hours in a room talking with a black nun who wears the outfit but is not Catholic, a regular Catholic, and a guy who I think is Jewish,” Schott said. “I’m not sure what is supposed to be happening. Sometimes I think I am the one who is training them.”

Schott said she has spent most of her time in exile responding to the reams of supportive mail and numerous flower arrangements that have arrived at her east side mansion.

“One local company said they have never delivered so damn many flowers in all their life,” said Schott, noting that the level of her support did not surprise her.

“These people around here, they just have common sense,” she said. “They have intelligence.”

Schott has been accused of lacking both qualities since mid-November of 1992, when former Reds’ employee Charles Levy accused her of referring to former Reds players Eric Davis and Dave Parker as “million-dollar niggers.”

Levy also claimed that Schott once said, “Sneaky goddamn Jews are all alike,” and that she had a Nazi swastika in her home.

The statements were part of a deposition taken in a lawsuit filed against Schott by Tim Sabo, former Reds chief financial officer.

Schott immediately denied the allegations of racist comments but then later admitted possessing a swastika and said she had used the word nigger .

The suit by Sabo was eventually dismissed. Schott met with Cincinnati-area black leaders on Nov. 20 and apologized.

But on Nov. 25, Sharon Jones, longtime front office employee of the Oakland A’s, claimed that Schott had slandered blacks several years ago on a conference call with other owners.

Jones, who went public with her charges because she believed that Schott was not truly repentant after the first disclosures, claimed that Schott said, “I’d rather have a trained monkey working for me than a nigger.”

These charges led to an investigation by baseball’s Executive Council, which later learned that at least nine former Reds employees claimed they had heard Schott slander blacks and other minorities.

On Feb. 3, the council announced its actions, which included a $25,000 fine and an order that Schott attend diversity training workshops. She can regain control of the team on Nov. 1, and is on probation until Feb. 28.

“Mrs. Schott’s remarks reflect the most base and demeaning type of racial and ethnic stereotyping . . . indicating an insensitivity that cannot be accepted or tolerated by anyone in our industry or society in general,” said Bud Selig, owner of the Milwaukee Brewers and chairman of the council, which is made up of the two league presidents and eight owners.

Such intolerance was not immediately evident in Schott’s hometown, where locals have grown accustomed to her eccentricities.

During on-field ring ceremonies for her 1990 world championship team, Schott appeared to forget the first names of several players. She once called the then-general manager Bill Bergesch a “watchamadoodle.”

She is famous for allowing her dogs, the late Schottzie and Schottzie 02, to run wild around the field before the game, nipping at players’ heels and defecating on the first-base line.

“My people know the way I am,” Schott said. “They know that, in a lot of ways, I am one of them.”

For many in Cincinnati, “one of them” means being a direct descendant of the large group of German and Irish immigrants who came here before the Civil War, making it one of the largest cities in the country at that time.

“When Horace Greeley said, ‘Go West, young man,’ he was speaking specifically about Cincinnati,” said Gale Peterson, director of the Cincinnati Historical Society.

The flow of immigrants stopped during the turn of the century, however, as other Midwestern cities, such as Chicago and Cleveland, became more attractive with their increased industry and advanced rail systems.

Today, two groups have a particular influence on the character of the city--blacks, and whites from the Appalachian Mountain regions.

“The white Germans, Irish, English, Italians . . . they have all melded together as the majority,” said pollster Tuchfarber. “But the African-Americans and white Appalachians, they are very identifiable groups. They think of themselves as the minorities. It’s a cultural phenomenon.”

Yates, a 39-year-old lawyer in his second term on the City Council, has a different understanding of the city’s passion for “one of their own.”

As he took the lonely position of publicly demanding her suspension several months ago, that passion frightened him. “It got so I thought twice about starting my car. It got so I was always looking behind me.”

Bill Cunningham, a radio talk-show host for WLW, a 50,000-watt station that reaches 38 states at night, gave Yates’ City Hall phone number on the air and called for voters to “Throw (Yates) out of office on his black ass.”

Cunningham, who would not return phone calls for this story, later apologized on the air.

When asked whether the negative response to his actions surprised him, Yates said: “I was more surprised nobody assaulted me. I was more surprised nobody took a shot at me.”

Yates was working out of a narrow, cramped corner office in City Hall last winter when he began receiving phone calls. About 600 phone calls, as close as he can figure. All of them derogatory. Five of them containing death threats. And then there was his mail, most of it offensive.

Soon the office was further cramped with the presence of a full-time police officer, charged with guarding Yates’ life.

“It was painful for me that I was one of the few people in this city, and the only public official, to come out publicly and say that Schott was wrong and should be suspended,” Yates said. “People think of me as the bad guy.”

Several officials and community leaders initially demanded an apology from Schott but were mostly quieted after their meeting with her.

Even Dwight Tillery, the city’s black mayor, would not discuss whether the suspension was appropriate. “My only reaction is that I’m hopeful we will now be able to get this whole thing behind us,” he said at the time. Tillery did not respond to an interview request for this story.

Tillery actually had bigger problems last winter. The Ku Klux Klan erected a cross in Fountain Square, a public downtown meeting place, during the Christmas season. The cross was torn down and re-erected again and again for a week.

Larkin understood Yates’ plight when he became the first Reds player to speak out against Schott last winter.

“If that’s how she refers to black players, I would not want to play for that kind of person,” he said at the time.

For this, he received threatening mail from fans, a group which had once made this Cincinnati native the most popular member of the team. The mail contained, among other things, a suggestion that he offer himself as food to the starving children of Somalia.

“The whole off-season was a struggle,” Larkin said before a recent game. “I was pulled from both sides of the fence. I handled it the best way I could. I stood up for what I believed in.”

Larkin, who now does not regret that he has moved his family to Orlando, lowered his voice. “But I was not an insurrectionist, as somebody wrote.”

In the other corner of the Reds clubhouse sits white reliever Rob Dibble, who admittedly represents the group of Cincinnatians who appreciate Schott for her commitment to the community.

“I’ll go into the inner city to talk about drugs and Marge is right there with me,” he said. “I’ve seen her in church, in nursing homes, in hospitals. This city knows how much she cares.”

Schott has another quality that endears her to Dibble.

“She is not afraid of anybody, and no matter what anybody says, she’s not going to change. I like that.”

While the Reds players mostly ignored opening-day tributes to Schott, which included a stadium banner that read “Marge of Arc,” the opposing Montreal Expos noticed.

“We were surprised to see all that stuff about her,” said Darrin Fletcher, Expos catcher. “I kind of thought this town would just let the whole thing rest.”

That sort of reaction from outsiders makes community leaders worry that this Schott affair is damaging to the image of an industrious, growing community.

Job growth here has increased nearly 30% in the last nine years, with 166,000 more people working here today than nine years ago. Worker productivity is 25% higher than the national average.

“When I travel, the perception by some of this town bothers me,” said Stanley Chesley, former chairman of the board of trustees for the University of Cincinnati. “This is a family town.”

Family values are what have Yates most concerned.

“Nobody speaks about what harm (Schott’s) remarks are going to have on our children,” Yates said. “Where is the concern for our children?”

In the meantime, all 68 lanes at the Western Bowl & Cheyenne Social Club continue to fill up on Thursday nights, its patrons unwavering and unapologetic in defense of their woman.

“Marge was just the unfortunate one,” said Cindy Wertz, a day care operator. “She was the one who got caught.”