Kenneth D. Levin

1944 - 2024

News story
By Mike Sigov
Blade Staff Writer

Kenneth Levin, a Toledo appraiser, historian, and author, died Oct. 6 in Kingston Residence of Sylvania. He was 80.

He had health problems, but the family did not have the exact cause of death, said Richard Eppstein, a cousin.

"He was a very gentle, thoughtful man. And he believed in a better world," said James Anderson, his attorney.

Mr. Levin, a retired Toledo-area commercial and industrial real estate appraiser and manager of at least 30 years, was a former vice president of Webstrand Appraisal Co., the job he had in the 1980s after serving as a field appraisal supervisor for the Ohio office of tax equalization.

Over nearly 40 years, the Toledo history enthusiast with an academic background in modern history gathered a massive collection of thousands of postcards that documented half a century of Toledo history, starting from the 1890s.

Mr. Levin donated the collection to the Toledo Lucas County Public Library, which spent two years digitizing and describing the images before making them available for the public's use in the summer of 2019.

The library digitized more than 3,000 of the postcard images, each one fronted with a scene that reveals something about the city's one-time hotels, residences, shops, industries, churches, hospitals, and infrastructure. They can be accessed at https://shorturl.at/6jHWR.

"Ken was a lover of history and collecting postcards was the way he chose to celebrate local history," said Jill Gregg Clever, the manager of the library's local history and genealogy department.

"He was generous with his time and sharing his knowledge when he chose to donate his vast collection to the Toledo Lucas County Public Library," she said. "In fact, he continued donating individual postcards to us that he found for several years after he donated his whole collection. It was a privilege to know and work with him."

John Dewees, the library's then-director of digitization services, told The Blade in 2019 that the digitized postcard collection is "a go-to visual resource at the library, often an immediate recommendation for patrons who are curious about some element of their hometown's history."

"There is a ton of lost architecture here in Toledo," Mr. Dewees said. "This is a fantastic way to not only get images of those buildings, but from a large plurality of angles and points of view and perspectives."

In 2008, Mr. Levin's collection was also published by The Blade in a pictorial book titled You Will Do Better in Toledo: From Frogtown to Glass City. It was subtitled A Toledo Retrospective in Postcards,1893-1929. The Collection and Writings of Ken Levin.

Mr. Levin told The Blade at the time that the Chicago World's Fair of 1893 helped put Libbey Glass Co. - and by extension, Toledo - on the map.

"That was Toledo's most important era of growth, when we became the city of Toledo," Mr. Levin said of the 50 or so years that followed. "Before that, we were a river town that was bustling a little bit. But if we had gone on in that direction, we would have been like an Ashtabula or a Sandusky or maybe Monroe, Mich."

The growth years of the city coincided with the heyday years of the postcard, one effectively documenting the other until each came up hard again the Great Depression in the 1930s. They "kind of paralleled each other," said Mr. Levin, who describes the coincidence in his book.

The book wasn't his first.

Mr. Levin previously co-authored China! Inside the People's Republic, after visiting China in 1971 as part of scholarly delegation at the height of the Cultural Revolution, which lasted from the mid-1960s until Mao Zedong's death in 1976 and included the internment of ideologically unfit officials and intellectuals in "re-education camps."

The book was published in 1972 by the Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars, the group of which he was a member and with which he traveled to China. It was the first group of Americans to visit mainland China since 1949.

Born July 19, 1944, in Toledo to Alice and David Levin, he was a 1962 graduate of Sylvania High School and was graduated with honors in 1966 from the College of Wooster, where he majored in history and philosophy.

He then received his master's degree at the University of Wisconsin, where he later was a doctorate candidate in modern Chinese history.

After visiting China in the summer of 1971, he lectured about the country during a 1972 coast-to-coast speaking tour in the United States.

Also in 1972, he wrote for the former Blade Sunday Magazine as a Blade special writer based on his Chinese experience, including a story about Chinese acupuncture titled "Acupuncture: China Puts The Needle Into Modern Medicine."

Mr. Levin then taught at Antioch College in Ohio for a few years before returning to Toledo to go into real estate appraising.

He never married.

"Ken was a really high-quality person and a really level-headed fellow. He was interested in people, was very open, and had many interests," Mr. Eppstein said, noting that along with history and postcards Mr. Levin's interests included Chinese opera.

He also collected stamps, played chess, and loved sports, Mr. Eppstein said.

Mr. Levin was preceded in death by two siblings.

There are no immediate survivors.

There will be no visitation and no funeral services.