He explained that he was named after his grandfather, but parents “Americanized” Adolfo to Adolf.
“After my career in politics was up, I thought it would be OK to not be seen as a German anymore,” he joked.
Both of his parents were born in Cuba, but going back another generation or two would put the roots of the family tree firmly in Spain.
“In the 1950s, the area hospitals were all recruiting nurses and doctors from Central America, South America and the Caribbean islands, and my mother got an offer to come to Fort Hamilton Hospital to work,” Olivas said.
“I don’t think they wanted to stay here, but they established themselves and found a large Hispanic community,” he said.
For a time, the family would go back to Cuba every year to visit family, driving from Hamilton to Key West, then taking a ferry 90 miles to the island.
They were in Cuba when Fidel Castro took over the government, which led to the mother’s detention.
His father had received citizenship when he was in New York, and young Adolf was born in America, but his mother only had a work visa.
“I remember sitting in my mom’s lap and a man putting his machete in the window,” he said. “She was detained for three days until the U.S. Embassy and the Swiss embassy resolved it. My father was never able to go back to Cuba.”
Olivas was born in Hamilton, but his parents would only speak Spanish at home, fearing that if they taught him English, he would learn it with an accent and thought it would be better if he learned from people he knew or from television.
Although he grew up in apartments on Walnut Street and South Seventh Street, he still had an international upbringing with Italian landlords and a Portuguese babysitter. He also recalled many times hanging out at Jonson’s Restaurant because his father was good friends with the owner Nicholas Jonson, who was also a multilingual immigrant.
His father foresaw a career in politics and would say he wanted young Adolf to become president of the United States.
“There were many high expectations,” he said. “If I came home with a B on my report card, I didn’t hear much about the five As.
He got offers to go away to college, but opted to go to the University of Cincinnati for both undergrad and law school so he could stay close to home because his parents were in their 40s when he was born and were getting elderly by the time he finished high school.
Politics was always an integral part of the Olivas family life, he said.
“My father was very political,” he said. “He grew up in a country that if you’re not happy with the government you take to the streets and have a revolution. Some babies are fed formula; I was fed politics.”
What he learned, however, is that politics is “something you do to give back, not get rich; to do good, not to do well.”
In the first few weeks of enrolling at U.C., he became a residence hall representative, and went on to be speaker of the student senate and student body president, which gave him a seat on the university’s board of trustees — and free college tuition.
He first ran for city council, he said, after something of a run-in with the mayor in 1983.
“It kind of dropped in my lap because of what I was doing practicing law,” he said. “Our client was the Fraternal Order of Police.”
The city council had laid off eight police officers and Olivas was trying “to help them overcome this wrinkle in the road.”
So he did an analysis of the city budget and received snide comments from the mayor when he confronted council with the information. So he ran for city council. One of council’s first acts after Olivas took office was to hire back the eight officers.
From 1986 to 2002, Olivas served as Hamilton’s mayor or vice mayor.
Although he had many accomplishments as mayor, including enacting tanning bed and hazardous material laws and fighting a battle over the Greenup Hydroelectric Plant that ended with the city owning it, one enduring legacy is his design of the city logo.
He didn’t like the logo the city was using at the time, so he came up with a seal featuring Billy Yank, the sculpture on top of the Soldiers, Sailors and Pioneers Monument, as his personal letterhead. Other members of council latched onto it, and with a few changes in typeface, it is still used as the city’s official logo.
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