Photograph by Jeremy Kramer
Standing on stage at MadTree Brewing in Oakley in May, former U.S. Senator Rob Portman described his first time paddling past Brewster Rhoads’s houseboat on the Ohio River. “Tied to my left, I saw an ancient houseboat with a grill on the back,” said Portman, impersonating Rhoads in a fake mustache, a Paddlefest T-shirt, and ball cap. “I found out it’s 70 years old. Brewster had never taken it out on the Ohio River—good thing, because it was without an engine. Brewster calls it his vacation home, but what I saw had been there so long the ropes tying it to the dock had grown roots. Classic Brewster. He’s so frugal he should be a Republican.”
The audience, attending a “rhoast” of Rhoads to celebrate his years of service, erupted with laughter. “My experience with this wily Democratic strategist,” continued the famously Republican Portman, “is that he has become a respected nature strategist precisely because he sees past party labels. He’s a proud Democrat who believes in the Big Tent as well as the Green Umbrella.”
Photograph courtesy Adventure Crew
The roast, emceed by former Cincinnati Zoo Director Thane Maynard, featured three former Ohio governors and a throng of local elected officials, along with some of Rhoads’s friends, family, and coworkers. Even Jane Fonda sent a video message. The evening also raised more than $100,000 for one of Rhoads’s passion projects, the nonprofit organization Adventure Crew, which helps local youth get active in the outdoors, be it hiking, mountain biking, skiing, or kayaking.
Rhoads has spent more than 50 years in public service, often behind the scenes and on the other side of a megaphone or a camera. Through the decades, he’s organized some 150 campaigns for political candidates and issues, before becoming the region’s pied piper around environmental issues and goals as the first executive director of Green Umbrella and, for decades now, one of the Ohio River’s biggest fans.
Slowing down goes against the nature of this 5-foot-2 Energizer Bunny. But with a new grandchild, his first, having arrived in June and his 75th birthday approaching in October, even Rhoads admits it’s time to pull back a bit and enjoy life more.
At the roast, Kylie Johnson, managing director of field advocacy for the Ohio Environmental Council, shared her first experience meeting Rhoads. She was opening an Ohio office for a national climate nonprofit and giving a presentation to a group in Cincinnati. She noticed a short man in attendance smiling from ear to ear throughout her talk.
“I remember thinking this might be the happiest man that I have ever met. What is his deal?” Johnson said. “I would learn that is just the joy that’s Brewster. I know my story is not unique. Many of us have had our careers and confidence shaped because he took the time to connect with us, to champion us, and to cheer us on.”
Photograph courtesy Adventure Crew
Carroll Brewster Rhoads III was born in 1951 and named after his grandfather, a prominent attorney in Philadelphia. His father was a manager at the telephone company, while his mother stayed at home to care for Brewster and his two younger siblings. Their home sat on three acres of land at the edge of suburbia and farmland, he says, about 15 miles outside of downtown Philly.
“I grew up making lean-tos and building fires,” says Rhoads. “It was the sort of deal where on a Saturday or a Sunday or vacation day Mom would say, Just come back when you hear the dinner bell ring.”
His father had served in World War II. Having spent many unpleasant nights in a tent in the French countryside during the war, he was hesitant when his children begged to go camping. But, led by Brewster, the children succeeded in twisting their father’s arm and the family took a trip to Nova Scotia.
“The first night, it was pouring rain, and of course we hadn’t read the instructions to raise the tent,” Rhoads recalls. “But the good news is the sun came out the next day and we had a wonderful trip.”
The family camped regularly from then on, and his father kept up the pastime for the rest of his life, Rhoads says.
Rhoads attended William Penn Charter School, a Quaker school founded by William Penn in 1689 and one of the longest continuously operating schools in the U.S. By 1969, the year Rhoads graduated, he says the student body was mainly secular, with a handful of students identifying as Quaker, but many of the school’s ideals appealed to him, like the slogan “Good instruction is better than riches.”
Rhoads was unsurprisingly an active teen, confirms his younger brother Stephen. Brewster adored sports and played as many as he could until a series of serious concussions led doctors to recommended that he no longer participate in contact sports.
“He was a good tennis player, and that didn’t seem to bother his headaches and things, but he couldn’t continue wrestling, which is probably what he would have really excelled at,” says Stephen. “Instead, he became the manager of all things sports. He managed the wrestling team, he managed the football team, and most importantly he started the Spirit Committee at Penn Charter.”
The committee cheered on athletes and held pep rallies but also organized events like films and speakers for students to learn about the issues of the day, says Rhoads. The Vietnam War, for example, had been going since the 1950s, with an unpopular military draft starting in 1964. Some progress had been made in the civil rights movement, with the 1964 passage of the Civil Rights Act. Women’s rights, workers’ rights, and environmental movements were heating up, too, and at his school there was “an encouragement to have a social conscience,” Rhoads says.
“Every day the names of people from your community who died in Vietnam were published in the paper,” he says. “So to sit on my hands and not be engaged was not an option.”
After high school, Rhoads attended Williams College, a liberal arts school in Massachusetts. He initially intended to pursue a degree in geology but finished with a degree in social psychology, which he calls a great major for a budding organizer.
At Williams, he linked up with similar-minded classmates and helped organize a 24-hour candlelight vigil against the war that lasted a month following the October Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam. He attended protests in Washington, D.C., and, after President Nixon expanded the war into Cambodia, attended a meeting at Yale University organized by student and civil rights leader Tom Hayden on the topic of a national student strike to protest the war. The group voted in favor of a strike, resulting in the May Day protests.
“All of us went back to organize our campuses, and then that Monday afternoon was Kent State,” Rhoads says, referring to May 4, 1970, when student protesters clashed with Ohio National Guardsmen who opened fire, killing four students and wounding nine. “That was the moment we said, We’ve got to shut this whole damn system down. They’re shooting American students in the streets. This is no time for wasting and doing schoolwork.”
Stephen Rhoads remembers his brother calling home from college on Sundays. Being that their father was a telephone executive, they had all the latest gadgetry, including a speaker phone in the kitchen. On one such call, Brewster reported he was on strike and not going to class.
“My father, who was a World War II vet at Normandy and all that, said to my brother, Let me get this straight. You are on strike and I’m paying to send you to college?” his brother recalls. “That was the beginning of a really fascinating evolution of understanding between them, and I think my brother started to learn about how to deliver a message and communicate with people.”
By graduation, Rhoads was working as a regional organizer for Hayden’s and Jane Fonda’s Indo-China Peace Campaign. Following the Paris Peace Accords in 1973, which officially ended U.S. military involvement in Vietnam but did not entirely stop U.S. involvement or spending there, Rhoads moved to Washington, D.C., to work as an outreach organizer for the Coalition to Stop Funding War, which consisted of 55 religious, peace, and labor organizations opposed to continued U.S. military engagement in Southeast Asia.
Photograph courtesy Adventure Crew
“At least the older ones in the audience may remember The Whistleblower,” said Tim Burke, former chairman of the Hamilton County Democratic Party, at Rhoads’s roast. “That was a daily faxed newsletter that made fun of virtually everyone involved in local politics. Rob Portman, I’ll warn you, you’re in this issue, too.”
The January 4, 2006, edition contained a description of a swearing-in ceremony for the new Hamilton County commissioners. “Punky Brewster Rhoads was there taking pictures,” Burke read from the newsletter, opining that “Spunky may have been a better name.”
Spunk certainly applied to Rhoads’s move to Cincinnati in 1980. He’d been in D.C. for six years at that point, but Ronald Reagan was running for president and Rhoads didn’t see Reagan furthering his anti-war/civil rights agenda. Many of his activist comrades had started working for citizen action agencies around the country to focus on mobilizing people around civil and individual rights. One of them, Ohio Citizen Action, remains active today, advocating on issues like access to work, voter rights, and clean energy.
The first director of Ohio Citizen Action had worked with Rhoads in D.C. and offered him a job in Cincinnati. By then Rhoads was dating a young lawyer, Ann Lugbill. “The real deal,” he says, and she was his height. They knew a couple who had moved to Cincinnati and decided to visit them to check out the city.
“We went out in Mt. Adams and looked out over the river and said, Hey, this is pretty cool,” Rhoads recalls. They learned homes were affordable, in the $40,000 to $50,000 range, and thought Cincinnati could be a nice place to raise a family.
Rhoads and Lugbill got married in May 1980 and moved here that August, buying their first home in Oakley. Reagan won the 1980 election, of course, but for the subsequent decades Rhoads kept up the pressure, organizing dozens and dozens of political campaigns for candidates and issues and one failed attempt at getting elected himself to the Hamilton County Board of Commissioners.
One of Rhoads’s early victories was Right to Know, legislation that, among other standards, required companies to inform their employees and local fire and emergency service agencies what kinds of toxic chemicals were being stored or used on a property where people worked.
It was a public safety and an environmental issue, Rhoads says, and in order to champion the cause he led the reelection campaign for Cincinnati City Councilman Tom Brush, who agreed to sponsor the legislation at the municipal level. They were successful in passing the law.
Rhoads worked for former Ohio Governor Dick Celeste, who supported and signed Ohio’s statewide Right to Know legislature into law. He then campaigned for U.S. Senator Howard M. Metzenbaum, who introduced federal Right to Know legislation, which eventually became the law across the country. “It all started here in Cincinnati,” says Rhoads.
Another proud moment was the 1983 election of Marian Spencer, the first Black woman voted to Cincinnati City Council. Rhoads served as her campaign manager and, among other highlights of that campaign, estimates her camp registered around 9,000 new voters.
“It’s irresistible to me to be involved in a good campaign that people understand makes a difference,” Rhoads says. “Not just to elect somebody who you know, but to elect somebody who’s going to advance a set of issues and make a difference when it comes to public policy and people’s lives.”
Riding on the high of those early successes, he ran for county commissioner the next year and lost. “I’d been in Cincinnati only four years. How stupid could I have been?” says Rhoads. “Regardless, we had a great campaign, I met all kinds of people I’d never met before, and I learned a lot about what not to do.”
He went on to lead election campaigns for Cincinnati Mayor Roxanne Qualls, Ohio Governor Ted Strickland, and many others before becoming mastermind of the “yes” vote on ballot issues and tax levies. His wins included children’s services, mental health, and developmental disability levies in Hamilton County; a Cincinnati Museum Center levy; a couple of Cincinnati Zoo levies; multiple elderly services levies in Hamilton, Butler, and Warren counties; and his final campaign to date, Preschool Promise.
Looking back, he says the work he did for Cincinnati Public Schools was among his most rewarding, including passing the “do or die” 1991 levy that raised property taxes substantially but maintained local control of the school district. He’s also proud of the successful 2003 bond issue he organized that resulted in $1 billion in new school construction.
“I’m a doer, not a contemplator or an armchair critic,” says Rhoads. “In addition, it’s fun. I really enjoy working with people around a common objective, strategizing together, and thinking through tactics that hopefully draw broad support.”
One of his two daughters, Caroline Rhoads, became a teacher and currently works at a Montessori elementary school in Berlin, Germany. “He’s taught me that there is always another idea, solution, or person around the corner to help when something needs to be changed,” she says. “In my classroom, I am constantly thinking about what I can do differently to support each student better while also making sure our community as a whole can function safely for everyone.”
Photograph courtesy Adventure Crew
Rhoads never anticipated that he’d fall deeply in love with the Ohio River. Ann’s family had introduced him to kayaking before the couple came to Cincinnati, and early in their marriage they rented a small space at a campground on the Whitewater River in Indiana for $900, with a little trailer to keep their kayaks. He loved paddling because it helped him get exercise to calm his mind.
But Rhoads was also a busy guy, and he wanted that experience closer to home. So he started driving from Oakley to downtown to put in his kayak at the Public Landing or down some stairs leading to the water’s edge near Montgomery Inn Boathouse. Sometimes, after driving home from a workday in Columbus, he wouldn’t get on the river until after 10 p.m. But it became a bit of an obsession, which he tracked in a notebook. He paddled 326 days one year, 90 percent of the time in the Ohio River.
“A, the convenience, and B, the ease with which I could put in one spot, paddle around, and come back to the same spot,” says Rhoads. “If you get out where you put in, that’s easy. It’s like paddling in a lake.”
He still tries to paddle most days (his sister Nan jokes he’s the only 74-year-old with six-pack abs) and always marvels at how the Ohio River is alive and ever changing—be it the current, water level, floating debris, or wildlife. Among his favorite sightings are a family of four beavers, a 10-point buck and a doe swimming across the river, and bald eagles. “It’s like a little mini vacation,” Rhoads says. “I just feel so renewed being out in the river.”
In 1999, there came a call from the corporate community to “reset Cincinnati,” Rhoads says. An agency was hired to study the metro region and determine what was working and what wasn’t. One of its findings suggested embracing the opportunities offered by the Ohio River, says Rhoads. The agency recommended the creation of a nonprofit to help foster better collaboration among towns up and down the river in order to promote recreation, protect the natural asset, and bring it to life.
Recognizing Rhoads’s river rat status, he was recruited to help organize that effort. Unsure where to start, he sat down with some of his paddling buddies, drank beer, and dreamed up the first Paddlefest. The idea was to get more people experiencing the river at a time when the public perceived it to be dirty and dangerous. “Ideally they fall in love with it,” says Rhoads, “which in turn motivates them to become stewards of it.”
The first Paddlefest in 2000 registered 99 people in advance, and about 240 people showed up to float three miles downstream. In recent years, more than 2,000 people have signed up to spend the morning of the first Saturday in August paddling up to nine miles downriver. This year, the 25th annual event, there will be an attempt to clinch the title of “largest paddle craft party” with the Guinness Book of World Records. [Editor’s note: They captured the record.]
“He touches everybody in some way that’s just so down to earth and gives them a piece of himself,” says his sister, Nan. “He believes that he can make something happen. If it’s not going to work the first way, he’s going to find a Plan B.”
Rhoads remains board chair of Ohio River Way, the nonprofit he and his friends formed. Last year, after many years of effort, the organization successfully earned National Water Trail designation for a 308-mile stretch of the river. The distinction is granted by the National Parks Service and the U.S. Department of the Interior, which has recognized 40 such trails across the country.
“It means that we’ve met a very high standard for safety information, for trip planning, and information in digital online guides,” says Rhoads, “so you can figure out where you are on the river at any given time.” Where the barges are. Where to fuel up. Where to find a boat ramp, marina, rest stop, campgrounds, bathrooms, and unique historical attractions, plus all of the required signage.
Jenny O’Donnell met Rhoads in 1996, when they were both working on Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign. She was drawn to his positivity and his energy and feels lucky to have been mentored by the best networker in town. Whenever Rhoads made a call to action, she—like so many others—raised her hand. That’s included volunteering to help organize Paddlefest nearly every year since its inception.
“Brewster has brought to life the idea that we can rescue the river,” says O’Donnell. “We can make it accessible to everyone and rescue it from the damage we’ve done. And, in general, he has encouraged so many people to find their path to be politically active. You don’t have to run for office. You don’t have to be a campaign manager. You can just put a sign in your yard.”
Rhoads’s Rolodex is a gold mine, says Bill Hopple, who recruited him to be Green Umbrella’s first executive director and get the organization off the ground. “One of his greatest legacies is the fact that in his environmental work he’s been really apolitical,” says Hopple. “He worked for Democratic governors, but he can also pick up the phone and call Governor Mike DeWine, who sees him as an asset and an ally.”
Photograph courtesy Adventure Crew
At the roast, many of Rhoads’s supporters also wore fake mustaches and wooden buttons that said, “Brew Crew.” Rhoads promised he wouldn’t disappear into the sunset entirely but would stay involved in his corners of the world: the Ohio River, of course, but also Lake Erie (he and Ann own a one-bedroom cottage in Marblehead) and Big Pine Key in the Florida Keys (which he started visiting in 1971 and where he’s owned property for 27 years).
Rhoads plans to remain on the board of the Florida Keys Wildlife Society, leading a monthly moonrise paddle. He’ll also make time to visit his daughter’s growing family in Germany as well as his other daughter, Elizabeth, an assistant professor of human rights focused on Southeast Asia at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden.
“We went to Vietnam together just before the pandemic, and that was very moving for me and for him,” she says. “He was visiting a place that was part of his daily life as an anti-war activist 45 years earlier but where he’d never been before.”
Rhoads vows to continue to use his First Amendment rights to protest actions by the Trump administration, like when he organized three weekly honk-ins against ICE last winter. “I am in a perpetual state of outrage about what’s happening politically in America today,” he says.
Back at MadTree, the roast was wrapping up when Rhoads made a wager. If the crowd could pull together the final few thousand dollars to reach his $100,000 goal, he’d shave off his mustache, which he’d had since 1969. They did, and the ’stache came off. Anything for a good cause.
“Look, I guess my motto is to work hard, to make a difference, and to have fun,” he then said.
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