Even as her star rose
in Washington, D.C. as an influential member of Congress,
Marcia Fudge always made a point of trying to attend her
Shaker Heights High School reunions. That didn’t change
this past September when the class of 1971 got together for
their 50th reunion kickoff party at EDWINS Too at Shaker
Square. Fudge, less than a year into a demanding new job
as President Joe Biden’s Secretary of Housing and Urban
Development, wasn’t going to bail on her classmates.
Even if it meant bringing her security detail.
“It was so fascinating to see everyone 50 years later,”
the 69-year-old public servant says during a Zoom interview.
“Most of my friends showed up. Everybody’s doing well.
Everybody’s looking good.
“It just makes you feel so good that all the people
you started this journey with are doing well and doing
really good things, from judges to business owners to
filmmakers to whatever you can think of. We got it. It really
was a great class.”
Fudge isn’t exaggerating. The class of 1971’s celebrity
roster includes Jane Campbell, Cleveland’s first female
mayor; restaurateur Zack Bruell of Parallax and L’Albatros
fame; Cleveland Public Theatre founder James Levin; former
Cuyahoga County commissioner turned actor Peter Lawson
Jones; former Cleveland Municipal Court Judge Angela
Stokes; and current Aurora, Ohio, Mayor Ann Womer
Benjamin. And that’s the abbreviated list.
“Shaker Heights class of 1971 – and I don’t say this just
because I was a member of it – might be one of the most
accomplished classes of any high school anywhere,”
says Jones, who was recently cast in an upcoming
Tom Hanks movie.
“Whatever was in the water, Marcia had a healthy
helping of it,” he adds.
Still, few back in high school would have predicted
Fudge’s meteoric rise from Shaker’s Moreland
neighborhood to a spot in the U.S. Presidential line
of succession – she is 12th, just ahead of Secretary of
Transportation Pete Buttigieg.
Along the way she earned a law degree, headed her
national sorority, won election as the first Black and first
female mayor of Warrensville Heights, and then followed in
the footsteps of her friend and mentor, the late Stephanie
Tubbs Jones, as U.S. Representative for Ohio’s 11th
Congressional District.
Now she’s leading a federal agency with a nearly $70
billion budget proposed for 2022, and is tasked with such
ambitious goals as ending homelessness and housing
discrimination, as well as aiding millions of Americans who
have fallen behind on rent and mortgage payments because
of the pandemic.
Fudge compares her initial months as the head of HUD
to “drinking from five fire hoses.”
“I’m drinking from about two at this point,” she says
with a smile. “It’s a big role and we touch an awful lot of
people, millions and millions of people,” she says. “My
career has prepared me for this moment. But I’ll let history
decide if I was any good at it. I just try to figure out every
day how to make someone’s life better and give it the best
that I’ve got.”
“We had a great awareness of what was going
on in the world,” Fudge says. “The assassination
of King was just devastating for me and so
many of my classmates.”
38 SPRING 2022 | WWW.SHAKER.LIFE
/WWW.SHAKER.LIFE