CLEVELAND — A decade ago, Frank Jackson, then-City Council president, and Charles “Arnie” de la Porte crossed paths for the first time.
The Netherlands native, who had come to call Grafton home, had one message for the future Cleveland mayor: Get a Cleveland-to-Europe freighter going out of the Port of Cleveland.
“He was persistent about it at times and about how we needed to connect Cleveland to the Netherlands commercially,” Jackson said Tuesday.
In the years after that meeting, de la Porte, who died in November while vacationing in Maine with his wife of 54 years, Maud, remained an impassioned and steadfast champion of international trade via the Great Lakes and Saint Lawrence Seaway.
Had the businessman, husband, father and honorary consul for the Netherlands to Ohio been alive today, he would have called the recent arrival of a Dutch ship to the Port of Cleveland one of the best things ever to happen to the region.
To honor de la Porte’s dedication to commerce, the Port of Cleveland posthumously honored him Tuesday by renaming Erieside Avenue, the main thoroughfare that runs east to west from the port’s gate to the water’s edge, Arnie de la Porte Way.
A replica of the street sign was handed to his son, Pete de la Porte, at an event in Cleveland. The leader of LifeCare, an ambulance company he runs with his brother, Herb de la Porte, could only say the one thing on the mind of everyone who knew the Dutch patriarch.
“I wish my father was here,” he said. “He would have been so excited.”
By welcoming the first vessel to Cleveland from Antwerp, Belgium, the Cleveland-Europe Express received its inaugural vessel in what will be the only regularly scheduled international cargo service on the Great Lakes.