Inside a blue box on wooden shelves in his second-floor executive office of the Toledo Lucas County Public Library’s main branch, Jason Kucsma keeps a stack of Clamor magazines neatly secured in plastic sheet protectors.
He pulled out an issue from the summer of 2006 and had a moment of pause before chuckling.
“It’s made out to my parents,” he said with a smile. “My parents were subscribers.”
Mr. Kucsma, 45, is a busy man lately.
On Aug. 1, the library’s board of trustees appointed him as its next executive director and fiscal officer, a position he carried on an interim basis since Clyde Scoles, who had held the director title since 1985, unexpectedly passed away in February. Mr. Kucsma’s new salary is $190,000 and he oversees 20 library branches in Lucas County. He came back to Toledo in 2015, when Mr. Scoles hired him as his deputy director.
Mr. Kucsma is also the father of 5-year-old twins, Aaron and Audrey, whom he and his wife Megan Plesea call “The Bright Stripes,” a nickname that sprouted from a picture of the children that resembles a band photo. He says between work and his family life, he doesn’t have much time for hobbies.
But every now and then, Mr. Kucsma — who admits he was a “bundle of anxiety” the past six months during the board’s library director search — takes time from his fast-paced life, opens up his blue box and shuffles through old issues of Clamor, a former bi-monthly left-wing independent magazine, which ran from late 1999 to 2006. Mr. Kucsma is tied to the magazine. He co-created it, after all.
It all started out of a home office in Bowling Green when he and co-founder Jen Angel sought to introduce a new political voice in the form of a ‘Zine,’ self-published alternative magazines.
Clamor, which self-described itself as a “DIY Guide to Everyday revolution” and was printed in Canada, ran 38 issues throughout its seven-year existence, publishing covers with headlines such as: “We’re all going to die,” “Borders, they divide: we conquer,” and “Stop me before I kill again,” which featured the face of George W. Bush on its cover.
Mr. Kucsma and Ms. Angel, who dated, married and divorced all during the creation of Clamor, moved its operations in 2002 to the Old West End in Toledo. They both credit Toledo’s affordable living as a reason they were able to sustain an independent magazine for seven years. Mr. Kucsma calls the Midwest a “best-kept secret.”
At the height of Clamor in 2001, Mr. Kucsma, 27 at the time, donned pink hair, wore a silver lip ring, and fashioned button-sized earrings in both earlobes. The look was a far cry from a decade prior, when he was smashing into defenders as a high school football player at Lake Catholic High School in Mentor, Ohio.
It’s an even further cry from his appearance today.
A ‘TENACIOUS’ ATHLETE
Mr. Kucsma grew up on the Eastside of Cleveland in the area of Willoughby and Mentor. He graduated from Lake Catholic in 1992. He was an offensive lineman on the football team and won a state championship his senior year, playing with the likes of quarterback Rick Trefzger, who went on to play at Purdue, and wide receiver Joe Jurevicius, who played 10 seasons in the NFL with the Giants, Buccaneers, Seahawks, and Browns.
Mr. Kucsma’s former coach, John Gibbons, an Ohio High School Football Coaches Association Hall-of-Famer, said the current library director was once a “tenacious” athlete.
“He was a talented player,” said Mr. Gibbons. “He wasn’t the biggest guy, but he was very tenacious, and he knew exactly what he was doing. It was a great team and he was a huge part of it.”
Even though it’s unique, Mr. Gibbons isn’t surprised by Mr. Kucsma’s career trajectory.
“He’s a go-getter,” he said. “He was a hard worker, he was very aggressive, and he was talented. We played a high level of competition and he was always undersized. But he just went to work.”
Mr. Kucsma initially planned to play college football after high school and considered attending Mount Union, a perennial NCAA Division III power that has won 13 national titles since 1993.
He instead chose to attend Bowling Green State University, earning a bachelor’s degree in communications and later a master’s degree in American culture studies. He would later change career paths after graduation and earned a master’s degree in library and information science at the University of Arizona in Tucson with his wife Megan. The two then moved to New York City, where Mr. Kucsma worked at the Metropolitan New York Library Council before moving back to Ohio.
THE ‘ZINE SCENE
Mr. Kucsma and Ms. Angel had met through zine culture events and both grew up on the outskirts of Cleveland.
Ms. Angel now lives in Oakland. She opened up her own bakery called Angel Cakes 10 years ago, and even though she’s found her home in California, she says she also reflects from time-to-time on the magazine she co-created.
“That was a really influential time for me,” she said. “One of our goals was to publish a new writer every issue. So, I developed these relationships, a lot of which I still have today, which is really rewarding.”
Ms. Angel says she isn’t close with Mr. Kucsma anymore but calls their relationship “friendly and amicable.” She said they talked recently this spring after the death of her dog Tobe, who they had gotten together. She thinks Mr. Kucsma belongs in a library.
“He’s always been a driven, committed person,” she said. “I feel like this is a good career trajectory for him. He’s been really involved in thinking about issues about culture and social justice and I think with the library he will keep up with that.”
THE FATHER OF ‘THE BRIGHT STRIPES’
Today, Mr. Kucsma sports a navy suit with shiny brown dress shoes and a lapel pin with the library’s logo on it. His glasses top off the look of a modern librarian.
He says he still has his political opinions but insists it doesn’t get in the way of his work at the library, which he says is built on “objectivity.” In fact, he maintains that the library is one of the only safe places left that’s rid of division in a polarized political climate.
“We’re an objective institution in the sense that we’re not left or right, we kind of provide access to all different sides,” he said. “Different sides of an argument, different sides of the story.”
Instead of hiding from his transformation, Mr. Kucsma has embraced it.
“We’ve all come from someplace,” he said. “Every one of those decisions or moments in our lives lead us up to where we are today. And I don’t think you can second-guess them or be embarrassed by them.”
When it came time to select the next library head, library board president George Tucker said Mr. Kucsma was the best candidate out of a national search.
“We needed someone familiar with running that many branches and we thought he was consistent, and he’s proved he’s done well for us,” Mr. Tucker said.
Mr. Kucsma recently tweeted about his career transformation on a thread, where he reflected about Clamor Magazine.
“I’m kinda amazed at how much I’ve grown up in the last 20+ years in NW Ohio,” he wrote.
But if you ask him today how he defines himself, it’s not an alternative magazine publisher. He’s not a state championship football player. He’s not even the man in charge of 20 library branches throughout the county.
“I’m just a husband to Megan and the father of The Bright Stripes,” he said.
First Published August 16, 2019, 2:00 p.m.
