Winging It to Goose Lake

November 1, 2026 Edward Staskus Leave a comment

By Ed Staskus

Arunas Petkus wasn’t an especially talkative young man. He was more taciturn than not. So, when he came up for air after ten minutes of lamenting the Woodstock Music & Art Fair, which was what he missed because the weekend before it happened he stepped on a shard of glass in the beach sand at Mentor Headlands, it dawned on me he was dismayed. I glanced at his left foot. He had needed five stiches to staunch the bleeding. The stiches were being removed the following day.

He had planned on hitching a ride to the Catskills, where the music festival was staged, but with his bad foot ended up limping around home. We both lived in North Collinwood on Cleveland’s east side and had both attended near-at-hand St. Joseph High School. All the school’s sports teams were nicknamed the Vikings, and we had the trophies to prove it, but since our school was Catholic, run by the Marianist Fathers of the Society of Mary, we weren’t allowed to do anything like the Vikings used to do, such as maraud, plunder, or practice Old Norse paganism.

We were sitting around the backyard of the Petkus house where Arunas lived with his parents, north of Lakeshore Blvd. and ten minutes from our high school. Until that summer I had lived with my parents, south of Lakeshore Blvd. and the same ten minutes from the school. We graduated in the same class. I had since moved to the bohemian neighborhood of Upper Prospect on the fringes of downtown.

Steve Warszawski, one of our friends from Cleveland State University, where the three of us were undergraduates, had joined us and was fingering a joint he had rolled. He was high strung and could blaze it all day. Arunas warned him to not light up until his parents left. Steve was Polish, not Lithuanian like us, but it was close enough. The Polish – Lithuanian Commonwealth had been a European powerhouse during the Early Modern Period.

Arunas was majoring in Fine Arts at Cleveland State University, I was majoring in English, and Steve was majoring in Political Science.

“Do you know what the word politics means? “Arunas asked, grinning like a Cheshire cat.

Steve shot him a wary look.

“Poly is Greek for many and tics are blood sucking insects.”

“Very funny, but I’ll tell you this, I’m finding out a lot, especially about the two things most important when it comes to politics.”

“What are those?”

“The first one is money and I forget the second one. I’m going to have lots of money someday while you two are going to be poor with all your reading and drawing.”

“So when you’re the top dog you’re going to legalize weed and make millions?”

“That’s right.”

I hadn’t known anything about the music festival beforehand and so wasn’t being driven to lamentations about it, although after reading the news in the Cleveland Plain Dealer wished I had gone. Steve had gone in his rundown 1956 Ford Country Sedan with nine freeloaders. The car had been known as “America’s Favorite Station Wagon” back in the day, but by the time Steve got his hands on the bucket of bolts its day was long gone.

“Describing Woodstock as the Big Bang, I think that’s a great way to describe it,” David Crosby of Crosby, Stills & Nash said. Their set made a bang, even though the music festival was only the group’s second-ever live public performance.

“I didn’t see anybody play, except when I was standing backstage waiting to go on, because it was so muddy,” Grace Slick of Jefferson Airplane said. “The weather was horrible.

“The important thing that you’ve proven to the world is that a half a million kids can have three days of fun and music and have nothing but fun and music, and I bless you for it,” Max Yasgur, the dairy farmer who hosted the gathering on his land, said.

“Man, oh man, there was a lot of free weed,” Steve said. “When I got home I thought I was going to have to face the music, but the only thing my mother asked me was whether I had smoked any LSD. I was able to honestly tell her I hadn’t.” He didn’t tell her LSD wasn’t smokable.

“All I know is that I wasn’t there,” Arunas grumbled.

Joni Mitchell wasn’t there, either, but she ended up writing the best song about the event. She wrote it in a New York City hotel room while watching news coverage of the Woodstock Music & Art Fair on TV. “I’m going down to Yasgur’s farm, think I’ll join a rock and roll band, I’ll camp out on the land, I’ll try and set my soul free.”

A year later Arunas’s foot, which had mended in time for the previous year’s fall classes at Cleveland State University, was itching to go to another music festival, this time at Goose Lake in Michigan. Steve had brought up the idea, but Arunas had made it his own.

“Do you still have your Country Sedan?”

“No, the head gasket blew, but I’ve got something better.”

The something better was a 1961 Chevrolet Corvair, which by 1970 was considered the worst car manufactured in the 1960s. It had oil leak and fan belt issues. Its rear-engine swing-axle design caused severe oversteer and a loss of control at high speeds, which meant rollovers. The handling flaws and rollovers had led to a congressional investigation five years earlier. Ralph Nader weighed in, saying the car was a menace.

“That sounds great,” Arunas said.

The Goose Lake International Music Festival was going to be held in Leoni Township, Michigan, not far from the city of Jackson. The city was the birthplace of the Republican Party. The festival was slated for the first weekend of August, almost exactly a year to the day that the Woodstock Music & Art Fair had taken place. We stuffed clothes, socks and underwear, rain slickers, and cans of pork and beans into our backpacks. Arunas brought a tarp and some rope and I brought an aluminum-barrier bag of powdered Tang. Steve brought his hash pipe. He was a dopehead. We each brought our own sleeping bags. Arunas and I prayed for good weather. We were Catholics. Steve didn’t pray. He was an atheist.

“You can’t be a successful politician if you believe in anything,” he explained.

We got on the Ohio Turnpike to Michigan in the early afternoon the day before the rockfest. Our plan was to be there in four-some hours, park someplace out of the way, sleep under the stars, and be in line first thing in the morning. Steve slept on top of the car that night. Arunas slept under the car and had to fend off a pesky groundhog. I ended up sleeping in the back seat.

It eventually took us eight hours to get to Goose Lake, adding oil to the engine every hundred miles. Steve had brought five or six extra quarts of Bardahl. We had to change a flat tire outside of Sandusky. When we did Arunas piped up that he had always wanted to ride the Blue Streak at nearby Cedar Point, so we detoured to the amusement park on Lake Erie and rode the roller coaster half a dozen times, until Steve got grayed out. The G-forces of that kind of ride push blood down towards the feet, which reduces blood and oxygen getting to the brain. Steve got lightheaded and almost fainted. Arunas and I had to do the two-rescuer walk to get him back to the car. He wouldn’t let either of us drive, however, saying only he knew how to handle the death trap that the Chevrolet Corvair was.

Back on the road we saw a billboard that said “Beautify America…Get a Haircut.” All three of us had locks. We ignored the billboard. Steve said he had heard there were going to be 60,000 people at the festival. That was the capacity of the site. When we got to the front gate at seven o’clock on Friday morning, groggy and disheveled, there were nearly 60,000 people already there. By mid-day there were 140,000. By nightfall there were more than 200,000.

Waiting in line to get into the festival I noticed the eight-foot high chain link fence encircling the 390 acre site featured barbed wire and was electrified. A kind of moat ran parallel to the fence. Security guards on horseback were patrolling the water-filled ditch. They looked as young as us. “A young, hip police force was hired to provide 24-hour protection,” Bobby Mann, one of the promoters, said. “The only thing that can blow our rock festival is kids who might try to crash it.” By Saturday more than half of the attendees had snuck in.

The Goose Lake International Music Festival was the brainchild of Richard Songer, a successful Detroit area businessman who had cashed out in his mid-30s and was looking for something new to do. He had a brainstorm. He would build a permanent venue for giant music festivals and ride the profits into old age. He bought the land, which included shoreline on Goose Lake, and started construction of a rotating stage and sound towers. No sooner did he do that than the Goose Lake Property Owners Association took him to court.

“You can call it a rock festival,” one of the property owners said. “It’s just another way to sell dope.”

“What the community had heard about Woodstock was out-of-control youth, rampant drug use, motorcycle gangs, sex, and all sorts of things you just couldn’t have,” said Larry Jacobson, a local historian. “A lot of people thought, ‘You’re not bringing that here. We’re not going to allow it.” They filed a lawsuit, claiming the event would “pollute the area and bring in an invasion of hippies,” but the property’s zoning allowed for it, and that was that. “There are no ordinances to prevent the event from happening,” the judge said.

The Woodstock Music & Arts Fair and Altamont Free Concert had set the stage for the complaints. The crowd at Woodstock had greatly exceeded expectations. Traffic on the rural roads completely locked up. There weren’t enough food vendors and not nearly enough toilets There was more than enough nudity and drug use, not to mention the anti-establishment music. At Altamont the Hells Angels had been hired as security, resulting in beatings of attendees and even some performers. The beatings were by fist and chain. One concertgoer was stabbed to death by the motorcycle gang.

The Jackson County police forces took a hand-off approach, controlling what was happening outside the rockfest, but not entering the site. Sheriff Charles Southworth told his deputies, “Leave them alone. I don’t care what the hell they do once they’re in that private park.”

If the police had entered the private park they wouldn’t have had enough paddy wagons. “One of the security guards was standing right next to a table where a guy was selling drugs,” said Dave Eckler, one of the attendees. “The guy said, ‘Hey, can I borrow your bullhorn for a second?’ And he goes, ‘Acid! Mescaline! Hashish!’ He was using the bullhorn to advertise to people who were walking through the crowd.”

The grounds at Goose Lake were top-notch. There was free parking, plenty of campground, where we unrolled our sleeping bags beneath the tarp Arunas had brought, lots of restrooms with toilet paper and some showers, trails for walking and dirt bikes, and open kitchens, although we lived on our pork and beans and Tang all weekend, managing our finances. There was the world’s longest slide that we raced down on burlap sacks.

The weather was dry, but hot. The sandy beach was a mile long. A boatload of skinny dipping went on to cool off. We spent Friday and Saturday listening to bands like Chicago, Mountain, Rod Stewart and the Faces, Ten Years After, and the Flying Burrito Brothers. The Burrito Brothers did a spirited version of their song “My Uncle.” They meant Uncle Sam.

“Now I don’t know how much I owe my uncle, but I suspect it’s more than I can pay, he’s askin’ me to sign a three-year contract, I guess I’ll catch the first bus out today, so I’m headin’ for the nearest foreign border, Vancouver may be just my kind of town.”

They got a standing ovation. Everybody knew we weren’t going to win the Vietnam War. Nobody wanted to die eight thousand miles away in a losing cause. Victor Charlie was engaged in a War of Independence and the United States wasn’t. I didn’t know about Arunas or Steve, but I no longer believed in “My country right or wrong,” especially not when Richard Nixon said it.

We saw Chicago from the very back of the amphitheater, but their three man horn section came through loud and clear, even though we were about a quarter mile away. Mountain did some terrific acid blues. John Sebastian was tie-dyed, folksy, and sincere.

The highlight on Saturday was the Stooges. Iggy Pop was on vocals and the rest of the band was the original line-up. It would be the last time the original line-up played together. The bassist Dave Alexander was so intoxicated during the set that he was thrown out of the band by Iggy Pop as soon as they left the stage.

I didn’t know anything about the Stooges. Somebody said the band was from Ann Arbor. Somebody else said they were from Detroit. When Iggy Pop appeared he was shirtless, wearing ratty blue jeans and a dog collar, and his face was white as chalk. He was big into stage diving. His voice was volatile. He sounded like a wolf at times. The band was abrasive, a raw wall of sound, heavy on grit and feedback. Iggy Pop ran his microphone through Marshall amps, distorting his voice. I couldn’t understand a word of the lyrics.

The line-up of bands on Sunday was whopping good, including the Bob Seeger System, the James Gang, who were from our hometown, and Mitch Ryder & the Detroit Wheels. Jethro Tull closed the show with their song “Dharma for One” and an extended drum solo.

We were rolling up our sleeping bags when we heard a warning over the public address loudspeakers to not take drugs with us, as the police outside the gates were ready. Just inside the exit we went out of there were half-a-dozen 50-gallon drums full of drugs. Everybody was emptying their pockets. “The drums were overflowing,” Johnie Kyke Rains said. “Any color of pill you could think of, blocks of hash, marijuana, everything.”

As we were leaving a lanky pony-tailed guy wearing a leather codpiece, and nothing else, slipped past us back through the gate. He was carrying a penny whistle. He looked dazed and confused, so Arunas pointed over his shoulder and told him the parking lot was the other way.

“That’s cool,” he said, “but I’m looking for my baby, man. I lost her somewhere.”

“Where did you last see her?”

“I think it was down by the lake.”

We walked him to Goose Lake and sure enough, a bare-breasted young woman was cavorting in waist deep water.

“Benjy, my man,” she called out happily.

A big smile lit up Benjy’s face. He played the opening bars of “A Groovy Kind of Love” by the Mindbenders on his penny whistle and ran into the water, launching himself at her. The last we saw of them they looked like a pair of eels having fun. It was getting dark so we hustled our way to the parking lot and got going. Everybody else was doing the same thing. It took us a while to get to the Ohio Turnpike. The Chevrolet Corvair held up, even though Steve drove like the Road Runner, popping pills to stay awake, and we were back in Cleveland just after midnight.

Richard Songer had planned on making the festival an annual thing, but it wasn’t to be. No sooner was the weekend over than the Jackson County Prosecutor called the event a “public nuisance.” He claimed the promoters had condoned the “open sale of drugs and irresponsible behavior.” Michigan’s Attorney General chimed in that the state had seen “its first and last rock concert.” Despite Richard Songer never being convicted of anything, an injunction forbade any more rockfests being staged at Goose Lake.

Over the years the site transformed itself. It became a drive through zoo for a time and eventually the Greenwood Acres Campground. They pay homage to the Goose Lake International Music Festival every August with a “Groovin’ at Greenwood” weekend of live music. The sound towers are still there, but the wall of sound isn’t. Iggy Pop has never been invited back. The Greenwood Acres Campground is “family friendly” with an Olympic-size swimming pool and an 18-hole putt-putt course. Even though marijuana is legal nowadays, it is not allowed on the grounds.

Ed Staskus posts monthly on 147 Stanley Street http://www.147stanleystreet.com, Made in Cleveland http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com, Down East http://www.redroadpei.com, and Lithuanian Journal http://www.lithuanianjournal.com. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.” His books are available on Amazon and Apple Books.

“Bomb City”

Cleveland, Ohio 1975. The John Scalish Crime Family and Danny Greene’s Irish Mob are at war. Car bombs are the weapon of choice. Two police detectives are assigned to find the bomb makers. It gets personal. Revenge is always personal.

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

Home Movies

Ten Cent Beer Night

November 1, 2026 Edward Staskus Leave a comment

By Ed Staskus

When my friends and I heard there was going to be a Ten Cent Beer Night at Municipal Stadium, we started scrounging for loose change. It was Monday morning, June 3, 1974. Beer Night was going to be the next day. We didn’t have much time, but we had plenty of motivation. When the big night arrived our pockets were full of nickels, dimes, and quarters. We met at East 30^th St. and St. Clair Ave. and took a bus to East 9^th St. From there we walked to the ballpark.

Municipal Stadium opened in 1931 and was the home of both the Cleveland Indians and Cleveland Browns. Two days after it was formally dedicated Max Schmeling fought Young Stribling for the World Heavyweight Championship. The two sluggers brawled for the full fifteen rounds. In the end Young Stribling was covered in more bumps, bruises, and blood than Max Schmeling, so the German won the match on a TKO. A month later the Tribe played their first game there, losing to Lefty Grove and the Philadelphia Athletics one to nothing. The crowd of more than eighty thousand set a major league record.

When it was built, and for many years afterwards, Municipal Stadium was the biggest baseball stadium in the country, although by the 1970s it was drawing the smallest crowds in the country. A month earlier only four thousand fans had showed up to watch the Indians beat the Boston Red Sox. There were two reasons everybody stayed home and watched something else on TV. The stadium was built all wrong, for one thing. It was cavernous. God forbid your seat was at the far end of the cavern. Relief pitchers had to be driven to the mound from the bullpen. Even when new outfield fences were installed shrinking the size of the playing field, it was still nearly five hundred feet from home plate to the bleachers in straightaway center field. High and deep fly balls went there to die. We always sat in the cut-rate seats. No wannabe home run ever reached us. The upper deck was even farther from the field. Sitting in the stratosphere meant high-powered binoculars in order to see the action.

As the Swinging Sixties were coming to an end the place was falling apart. It looked like Miss Havisham’s mansion. It stood on Lake Erie, a wheezy open-air mausoleum squatting on the south shore. It was a dismal hulk, especially in the spring and fall when cold winds blew in off the lake. During the summer, during night games, the lights attracted swarms of midges and mayflies. The bathrooms were unbearable for many reasons. Only the desperate ever visited them, however briefly.

On top of everything else, the Tribe couldn’t punch its way out of a paper bag. In the 1950s they were routinely winning ninety and hundred games every season. They won championships. But by the 1960s they were lucky to win eighty games a season. In 1971 they lost more than a hundred games, finishing so far out of first place fans lit memorial candles. The locker room got sad and gloomy. The Tribe lost more games during the decade of the 1970s than during any other decade of the team’s long history, to this day.

When we got inside the stadium we were surprised by how many fans were there, about twenty five thousand of them, although we shouldn’t have been. Besides the cheap beer, payback time was in play. A week earlier in Texas the Indians and the Rangers had gotten into it. In the bottom of the eighth inning a Tribe pitcher threw behind a Ranger batter’s head. A few pitches later the batter laid down a bunt. The pitcher fielded the ball and tagged the runner out. The runner didn’t stop running, though, clubbing the pitcher in the face with a forearm as he ran past. When he got to first base he head butted the Tribe’s first baseman in the groin. The first baseman started swinging. Both benches emptied. After the fracas, as Indians players and coaches returned to their dugout, they were greeted with giant pretzels and warm beer hurled by Texas fans. Dave Duncan, the short-tempered Cleveland catcher, had to be restrained from storming the stands.

After the game a reporter asked Rangers manager Billy Martin, “Are you going to take your armor to Cleveland?” Billy Martin said, “Naw, they won’t have enough fans there to worry about.” The following week sports radio talk show hosts whipped up the ire of Cleveland’s baseball fans. The game was billed as “Revenge Rematch Time.” The Cleveland Plain Dealer printed a cartoon of Chief Wahoo wearing boxing gloves. The caption read, “Be Ready for Anything!”

Ten Cent Beer Night was the dream child of the Tribe’s sales and marketing department. “We were on a mission to save baseball in Cleveland,” said Carl Fazio, one of the men overseeing promotions. “We did everything possible to make baseball successful in our town. If we were going to fail, it wasn’t going to be because we didn’t try things.” Beer Night was one of those things.

Tuesday was a hot sticky night. The sky was clear and the moon was full. Many more fans showed up as the sales and marketing showmen expected. “It was a stinkin’ humid night, and you kind of had a feeling things weren’t going to be good,” said Paul Tepley, a Cleveland Press photographer. “Billy Martin stood in front of the Rangers dugout before the game heckling the fans, and the fans were heckling him. It had the makings of a bad night.”

No sooner did anybody step into the stadium than they made a beeline to the special tables manned by teenagers selling the low-cost beer. The legal drinking age in 1974 was eighteen. Banners behind the tables said, “From One Beer Lover to Another.” The regular price was sixty five cents. The promotional price of ten cents was a big discount. There was a limit of six cups a purchase but no limit on how many purchases anybody could make during the game. The first Beer Night had been staged three years earlier. There were some incidents then but they mostly involved horseplay, vomit, and getting dead drunk.

Some fans brought pockets full of firecrackers and smoke bombs to Ten Cent Beer Night. They blew them off in the stands and threw some on the field before the game started. When the first pitch was thrown for a strike everybody settled back with their suds and tuned into the matchup. The mischief started in the second inning when a woman sporting a bouffant ran to the on-deck circle, lifted her shirt, and flashed the crowd. She was stacked, beaming smiles. She tried to kiss home plate umpire Nestor Chylack. He was not in a smooching mood, however. Everybody cheered the sight of boobs but gave the umpire a Bronx cheer for ducking the kiss.

The Rangers took a three to nothing lead when Tom Grieve slammed a home run with men on base. As he went around second base a nearly naked man slid into the bag behind him. He was wearing two black socks. We thought he might be an insurance agent. When the streaker got up he saluted the crowd before dashing away. His butt was road rash red. He ran through center field towards the bleachers. One of his socks got loose. By the time he got to the fence in front of us, he was down to one sock. He vaulted over the fence and disappeared under our seats. The next inning a father and son ran out onto the field and simultaneously mooned the crowd. The son’s butt was light bulb white. The father’s butt was cream cheese white.

When the special tables selling cheap beer started to run dry the Stroh’s Brewing Co. sent a tanker full of brew to the back of the ballpark. Fans gathered at the industrial spigots fastened to the rear of the truck. Before the truck arrived every Rangers player who stepped up to the plate had been roundly booed. Twenty minutes after the truck got there the crowd started throwing things at them.

“I bet I had five or ten pounds of hot dogs thrown at me,” said Mike Hargrove, a Rangers rookie playing the infield. “A gallon jug of Thunderbird landed about ten feet behind me.” When he realized what he had done, the man who threw the half-full jug of fortified wine demanded it back. Fans threw rocks, batteries, and golf balls. One man threw a tennis ball and was almost laughed out of the ballpark. The bullpens had to be evacuated after cherry bombs were lobbed into them.

Everything went to hell in the home half of the ninth inning. Everybody with children and a wife had already fled. The Tribe put together four straight hits and a sacrifice fly. They tied the game at five runs apiece. The winning run was standing on second base. Unfortunately for the Indians, that was as far as he got.

Just then two young men ran out on the field towards Rangers outfielder Jeff Burroughs. They were greased for trouble. One of them tried to steal the ballplayer’s cap. Jeff Burroughs kicked at the man but slipped and fell down. The rest of the Rangers, far away in their dugout, thought the men had knocked their teammate down. Billy Martin led his Rangers players onto the field. “Let’s go get ‘em, boys.” They sprinted to the rescue. They were brandishing every bat they had on the rack. When hundreds of fans poured out of the stands after them, with slats they had torn off from their seats, the riot was on.

The law and order detail at Municipal Stadium on Ten Cent Beer Night was fifty older part-time men and two off-duty Cleveland policemen. They were swept aside by the flow of drunks. Some of the troublemakers were waving chains. Others had knives. Twenty police cars responded to the call for help. When they got to the ballpark they called for the Riot Squad. When the Riot Squad got there they called for more men. “We would have needed twenty thousand cops to handle that crowd,” said Frank Ferrone, the Chief of Stadium Security.

Tribe manager Ken Aspromonte ordered his players onto the field to help the Rangers. They armed themselves with their own bats and formed a phalanx. “They saved our lives,” Billy Martin said. “That’s the closest you’re ever going to see someone get killed in this game of baseball.” He didn’t know it got closer in 1920, when Yankee’s pitcher Carl May hit Indian’s batter Ray Chapman in the head with an errant fastball and killed him.

A Cleveland player was hurt during the riot when a flying metal chair hit him in the head. He had to be helped off the field. Nestor Chylack’s hand was badly cut and he was hit by a flying chair as well, before finally declaring the game a forfeit. The mob was incensed. More chairs went airborne. “They were animals,” the injured home plate umpire said. ”I’ve never seen anything like it, except in a zoo.”

The organist played “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” over and over again. Some fans ripped the padding off the third base line fence. They stole all the bases. “This is an absolute tragedy,” declared Joe Tait, one of the broadcasters. “I’ve been in this business for twenty years and I have never seen anything as disgusting as this. I just don’t know what to say.”

When beat reporter Dan Coughlin tried to interview a rioter, he was punched in the face. When he tried to interview a second rioter he was punched in the face again. After that he put his notebook away and went looking for a drink, something stronger than beer. There was no charm in trying a third time.

Mike Hargrove had a chunky teenager on the ground and was walloping him. “That kid came up and hit him from behind is what happened,” said Herb Score, the other broadcaster. When the ballplayers fought their way back to their clubhouses, they bolted the doors behind them and left Municipal Stadium under escort of armed guards. The Riot Squad flooded the field with tear gas.

“It’s not just baseball,” Ken Aspromonte said. “It’s the society we live in. Nobody seems to care about anything. We complained about their people in Texas last week when they threw beer on us and taunted us to fight. But look at our people. They were worse. I don’t know what it was and I don’t know who’s to blame.”

When the fireworks were all over we walked to Superior Ave., across the bridge over the Cuyahoga River, and crossed West 25^th St. We passed the insurance agent streaker. He was wearing what looked like ratty clothes from a thrift shop. He was barefoot, having lost his other black sock. We walked to the Big Egg, where we got late-night grub, hash browns and fried eggs. They hadn’t run out of that day’s gravy. Their sauce was boss. The Big Egg wasn’t the cleanest diner in town, but it stayed open all night and the food was dirt cheap. Their slogan, on the wall behind the counter, was “Where the Egg is King and the Queen is, too!”

“I don’t look at it as a black eye at all,” Carl Fazio said afterwards about what took place that night. “It was just one of those crazy things that happened because of a set of circumstances that all came together that night.”

The next day the Tribe slugged five home runs, pummeling the Rangers in front of eight thousand spectators. The stolen bases were never recovered. New ones had been put in place. My friends and I stayed home. I read about the second game of the series a day later in the Cleveland Plain Dealer. The fans were well-behaved, cheering their heads off but not throwing anything onto the field. They sipped their beer before tossing their plastic cups under the seats. The heat and humidity had broken. It was a breezy evening with bright stars high in the sky. Everybody kept their cool and kept their clothes on, too.

“Bomb City”

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

Home Movies

Heart to Heart

October 1, 2026 Edward Staskus Leave a comment

By Ed Staskus

When Francie Chmielewski’s husband Steve doubled over while putting his shoes on, she didn’t bother asking him if he was all right. “I have to sit down,” he said in the backyard. It was a Sunday evening in late May. He was feeling a great deal of pressure on the left side of his chest. “I don’t think it’s my heart, but maybe we should go to Fairview Hospital.” One look at him fumbling and dropping his shoes on the steps of their kitchen told her everything she needed to know. He was not all right. He was having a heart attack.

“Steve is a very fit man,” Francie said. He wasn’t a man so out of shape he might have a heart attack watching that day’s bad news on TV. “He doesn’t smoke, eats right, and rides his bike to work every day, even in the winter.” His bike ride to work takes an hour one way, from Rocky River to the near east side of Cleveland, and then another hour back home. Two days earlier, on a Friday, he complained to a co-worker about being out of breath during his ride. His co-worker urged him to call his doctor. Steve’s doctor said, “OK, come in on Tuesday.”

“What happened on Sunday was the widow maker,” Francie said. ”His main artery shut down.”

Heart problems were one of the most uncommon causes of death in the United States until 1900. Heart disease had always been uncommon. Fifty years later it was the most common cause of death in the country. It became the go-to way to die. Everybody was smoking their heads off. Doctors routinely appeared in print and on TV promoting their favorite fag. Everybody was eating as much pork and beef as they could get their hands on. The protein was good. The saturated fat was sketchy. The off-the-chart serum cholesterol was terrible.

It is still the most common cause of death in the United States, despite almost everybody having given up smoking and many former junk foodies eating a more balanced diet. “After I had a heart attack, it was a very simple choice,” said one-time football player and coach Mike Ditka. “What the doctor told me, I did and I did it religiously. I ate nothing but lean turkey breast or chicken breast or a piece of fish that was very lean. I mean, I stayed away from everything.” The misguided popularity of maintaining an unhealthy weight has kept it in the top spot, as has the notion that exercising at least thirty minutes a day five days a week is for somebody else.

There is never a good time to have a heart attack. The worst time to have one might be during a game of charades. Steve wasn’t playing games. What was happening to him was sudden and massive. He was down and the clock was ticking. Around half of all heart attack deaths occur within one hour, especially if the victim isn’t able to get immediate help and get to a hospital fast. It is called the Golden Hour. The longer a person goes without treatment, the faster the clock ticks.

“One day my father went hunting,” the French movie director Alain Resnais recalled. “He had a good day. He killed a lot of game. He was with his best friends. He said, ‘Ah, I’m still a good hunter.’ Then he said, ‘I don’t feel well.’ In thirty seconds, it was all over.”

Steve started to shake and his eyes rolled up and back. One of the issues with heart problems is that the first symptoms can be fatal. “This isn’t looking good,” Francie thought. She got serious as a heart attack and sprang into action. She had been ready for the moment for a long time. She stretched Steve out and began performing CPR on him, at the same time hurriedly calling 911 on her cell phone. She wasn’t the kind of wife who mailed in her request for help, checking the spelling before sealing the envelope.

“He had cardiac arrest,” she said. “His heart stopped. When I saw he wasn’t breathing my adrenaline kicked in. I just reacted.” When the Rocky River EMS team got there they checked his heart’s rhythm, gave him oxygen, and administered a blood thinner. They sped him to the Cleveland Clinic in Fairview Park where he spent the next two weeks in the Intensive Care Unit flat on his back hooked up to a ventilator. “I never saw anybody like him,” an ICU nurse told Francie. “Most people in his circumstances die.”

“Steve isn’t most people,” Francie told the nurse.

“The quicker we can get a person having a heart attack into the cardiac catheterization lab the better,” explained Erica Spatz, a cardiologist at Yale Medicine. “Time matters in treating heart attacks.” The heart pumps oxygen-rich blood to the rest of the body through a network of arteries. However, the arteries around the heart can get clogged up, usually by a blood clot. When that happens, blood flow is slowed or blocked. The obstruction is seriously dangerous.

Nearly a million people in the United States suffer a heart attack every year. It happens about every forty seconds. The cost of care for coronary heart disease is more than $100 billion dollars annually. One of the least expensive and front of the line interventions is CPR. Francie was ready to bust it. “I teach CPR at the Rocky River Recreation Center,” she said. “But I never had to actually do it on a real person. I never thought the first time would be on my own husband.”

CPR, officially known as Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation, is an emergency lifesaving procedure performed when the heart stops beating. It can double or triple the odds of survival after cardiac arrest. It is a critical step in what is called the Chain of Survival. Keeping blood flow active multiplies the chances of a successful resuscitation once medical staff arrives. Professional CPR is about chest compressions and mouth-to-mouth breathing at a ratio of 30 compressions to 2 breaths. The basic recommendation to bystanders who happen upon a heart attack victim is hands-only CPR until help arrives.

After two weeks in ICU Steve was transferred to a Step Down Unit at the Cleveland Clinic in Avon, where he stayed for a week-and-a-half. His last five days in the hospital were spent in rehab. One of his daughters was visiting him when a doctor walked in reviewing a chart. “This guy us really sick,” the doctor said to himself. Steve and his daughter dropped what they were doing and stared at him.

“Oh, sorry, not you, somebody else,” the doctor said, stopping dead in his tracks, quickly flipping to Steve’s chart. “You are actually doing very well.”

“The doctor told me he was doing well because he had never smoked, was more than fit enough for his age, and had gotten to the hospital soon enough to make a difference,” Francie said. “Only about one out of ten people with his kind of heart attack survive. If he had been a smoker he would have had a zero chance.”

When Steve got home he wasn’t allowed some of the small pleasures of life, like ice cream and beer. He had to take a handful of prescription drugs every day. He was wired to a heart monitor. He wasn’t allowed to go back to work. He had to take several months off. “His doctor said he could go back in September.” He was allowed to work from home. “They told him not to overdo it.”

He was hazy about what happened during his near-fatal weekend. “He can’t remember anything about it, from Friday through Sunday,” Francie said. Many of the memories surrounding heart attacks are lost to cardiac arrest survivors. They don’t always come back because the brain didn’t have enough time to store them. It doesn’t always want to remember near death experiences, no matter that the ordeal tends to put things into perspective.

In some ways life itself is a near death experience. Like the song says, the end is always near. Francie wasn’t patting herself on the back for saving her husband’s life. “I wasn’t sure if he had life insurance or not, so I had to do it,” she explained. Buddha long ago said in plain English that the act of saving a life was a greater good than spending the whole of one’s life making religious offerings to the gods.

Steve spent the rest of the summer resting, walking up and down stairs, and making further strides with short walks outdoors. He progressed to varied aerobic activities designed to improve circulation, lower blood pressure, and strengthen his heart. Francie watched him like a mother hen. “He is the kind of man who pushes it,” she said. “I told him not to push it.”

World Heart Day is celebrated every year on September 29^th. This year Francie and Steve hope to enjoy the holiday together. “Keep a Healthy Heart So We Won’t Be Apart” has become their new married couple motto.

“Bomb City”

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

Home Movies

Jimmy Crack Corn

October 1, 2026 Edward Staskus Leave a comment

By Ed Staskus

When Layla told Jimmy she had called the police, he hustled to his pick-up truck and started scrounging, searching for his paraphernalia and drugs, especially the crack. He took a garbage bag full of narcotics into the big house and hid it. Afterwards he couldn’t remember where he had put it.

“The devil knows where I stashed it!” he said. He was so mad about what had happened he could barely talk, which for him was spitting mad, since he talked at ninety miles an hour.

“The pony run, he jumped, he pitched, he threw the master in the ditch, Jimmy, crack corn and I don’t care.”

Layla and Jimmy had gotten into a knockdown fight a month earlier and he had left the big house in Florida, going to work in Pennsylvania. He was a heavy machine operator. When she called him after a month he high-tailed it back to her. But it wasn’t what he thought it was going to be.

“Do you know this could put me back in prison?” Jimmy asked.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to, but my lawyer said I had to.” She was already regretting it.

The police arrived and before he knew it slapped handcuffs on him.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” he said. “What are you arresting me for?”

“You stole that pick-up truck,” one of the policemen said, pointing at the truck.

“That is bullcrap,” Jimmy said. “I’ve been making payments every month to her for it. I was just in Pennsylvania for a month with it. She was fine with that. I can show you our text messages, where she always says, your truck, your truck, not my truck, yours.”

“Let me see those text messages,” the policeman said.

He went to their squad car. He scrolled through the texts. He fiddled with his vehicle’s mobile radio. When he came back he returned the cell phone to Jimmy.

“I’d say it’s his pick-up truck,” the policeman said to Layla. “That’s what you’ve been saying in all your text messages.”

They took the cuffs off. They had to work out a few more details but finally drove away. Jimmy heaved a sigh of relief

“You called the police on me,” he said to Layla, glaring at her.

“We can work this out,” she said. She gave him a piece of paper, signed and dated, saying, this is my truck, in my name, but I have given Jimmy full power over it.

“There’s no working this out, night and day” he said. “You ruined everything.”

“No, Jimmy,” I told him later. “You ruined everything by going out and having a crack weekend. Maybe you shouldn’t have been that stupid.” He didn’t like that. “Don’t blame Layla because she called the cops. Yeah, it’s a crappy thing to do, but it gets to the point where you don’t give people too much choice. It’s always your way or the highway, and if they don’t like it, they can go, so, honestly, I can see where she’s coming from.”

“Hey, I’m paying her every month for the pick-up,” he said. “I’m not going to go back on my word. I’m never going back to her, either. She ruined everything.”

He was talking on his cell phone. I could tell he was driving. I asked him where he was going. “I packed my stuff and I’m going to Colorado,” he said. His boys lived in Colorado. One of them was a Marine. The other one wanted to be a pilot, but his eyes were bad.

“Are you high?” I asked him.

“I don’t want to answer that,” he said.

“You’re a special kind of stupid,” I said. “Getting high and drinking and driving, putting yourself and others at risk, you selfish bastard. What’s wrong with you?”

“They can’t nail me. I’m not drunk enough.” He had a forever taste for drink and cocaine. I was at a loss for words.

“Your brother was an addict,” he said.

“What’s that got to do with anything?”

“He’s fat, too.”

“What? Are you two?”

“He replaced drugs with food.”

“I have no idea why you’re bringing Brian into this. And he’s not fat, not by far.”

“Don’t bother defending your fatso brother,” he said. He hung up and blocked me. He unblocked me a few days later. I sent him a text.

“This friendship has reached its end. There’s nowhere for it to go.”

A month later I got an oversized letter in the mail. It was addressed to Jimmy. He had lived in our house for the best part of a year, getting back on his feet. Some of his mail was still being delivered to our home. He never bothered going to the post office to set up a forwarding address.

He doesn’t want to hear how he used Shirley and me and never paid us back for everything we paid for while he was living in our house. He doesn’t want to acknowledge we took him in when no one else would, fed him, clothed him, and got him on his feet. What we got in return was nothing, not even a thank you.

Inside the oversized letter were his new heavy machinery training certificate and new union membership card. Jimmy is notorious for ignoring people. I wasn’t like him. I texted him about the letter.

“I got your working stuff, where do I mail them to? If I don’t hear from you, they’re in the trash tomorrow.” He sent me his new address right away.

We weren’t friends anymore, but we were still friends on Facebook. He posted things about me, playing the victim. “When people throw you out of your life” are the kinds of things he posted. He became a drama queen.

I admit when I’m wrong, and I would say to Jimmy, don’t be a dirtbag your whole life. I didn’t know what to do with him. He was constantly pretending he never did anything wrong, no matter what side of the truth he was on.

Jimmy and my brother Brian were once best friends, better friends than Jimmy and me, but not anymore.

“I don’t want to see you again,” he said. “You bent over backwards for your brother but you’re always laying into me. This is the end of the road.”

But Jimmy is a bad penny and bad pennies always turn up. He complains and explains night and day. “Inside of me are two dogs. One is mean and the other one is good. They fight each other all the time. When asked which one wins, I answer, the one I feed the most.” I expected Jimmy to resurface someday soon.

When I couldn’t find my favorite suitcase a few days before Shirley and I were going down to Mexico for a week, I called him.

“Do you have my suitcase?” I asked.

“I’ve had it for three years,” he said.

“We take it to Mexico every year. You haven’t had it for three years.”

“Yes, I have, you’re wrong,” he said.

“No, you’re wrong,” I said.

“No, I’m not.”

“Are you ever wrong, Jimmy?”

“No.”

“You sound like you’ve had a few drinks,” I said.

“Yeah, a few, but I work hard and I need recreation. After this I’m off to see the smoke wizard. I’m not telling you for fun. I’m telling you because you want me to be honest. I don’t need any judgement from friends.”

“I’m sorry, but you can’t have it both ways,” I said. “Either you have friends who care about you, or not, so I’m going to say you’re a good for nothing for smoking crack.”

“I work hard all week. Layla knows what I’m doing,” he said. He was back in Florida in the big house.

“Then she’s a bigger fool than I thought she was, for letting you smoke crack while you’re supposedly taking care of her.” Layla had more than one health issue. On top of that, she liked watching horror movies on TV and liked being disturbed by them.

“What are you doing this weekend?” he asked, out of the blue.

“It’s a blizzard outside, so I’m in the house cooking.”

I did the cooking at home, although Shirley boiled water, peeled potatoes, and washed the dishes. I like to cook when it’s storming.

“What are you making?”

“I’m making spanakopita. It’s a Greek spinach pie, with onions, cheese, and herbs. It’s folded up in a flaky crispy dough.”

“Oh, you mean spanakapita.”

“I’m pretty sure it’s pronounced with an O,” I said.

“You’re a dimwit,” he said. “You never admit when you’re wrong, do you?”

“OK, you’re right. I’m making spanakapita. Happy now?” Why do I talk to Jimmy, I asked myself. Shirley refuses to speak to him.

“Why do you even talk to that jackass?” she asks me.

“Why are we even friends?” I asked Jimmy.

“Are you going to tell me you’re not my friend anymore?”

“Unfortunately, Jimmy, you and I have been friends since the 3rd grade. There’s just no getting rid of you.”

“I took Layla to a French restaurant last week.”

“So, you’re back in her good graces?”

“Yeah.”

“How’s your dad? Is he still alive and kicking?”

“Yeah.”

I didn’t ask if his father hung out at Layla’s house anymore. For a while Jimmy’s father, an ex-Cleveland cop who retired south and lived nearby, had tried to get Layla for himself, before Jimmy finally won her over.

“I heard Layla’s dad has showed up again down there.”

“Yeah.”

Layla’s father was a rich man with a twisted mind. like many rich men. Last year, when Jimmy started seeing Layla, he had a fit. In the first place, he hated Jimmy. He called him a loser. He said he was going to shoot him, although he never did. He was a coward at heart. He had an undying love for his daughter, but not the right kind of love.

“I’m not allowed to be there when he comes over,” Jimmy said. “I take off.”

He knows it’s weird, but he makes himself scarce when Layla’s father comes over. She has a big spread, what with her polo ponies, so there’s a lot of landscape to lose yourself in. He didn’t lose himself on horseback. He couldn’t ride to save his life.

“I don’t understand your life,” I said.

“I’m being honest,” he said.

“That doesn’t mean I have to like it. It doesn’t mean I don’t worry about you. You’re romancing a woman 20-some years older than you, who has a father who’s like a hundred, and who, we won’t even talk about that, and you are smoking crack every chance you get.”

“Everybody has a few drinks. Why can’t I have some crack?”

“They don’t serve crack at bars in this country, not even Florida, that’s why,” I said.

“I can control it,” he said.

“Right, says every crackhead and none ever did,” I said.

“When I was young I used to wait on master and give him his plate, and pass him the bottle when he got dry, and brush away the blue tail fly, Jimmy, crack corn and I don’t care.”

“I do my work, then I chill, hang out, be myself,” Jimmy said. He works construction all week, and had started working for Layla, too, doing small jobs, in her house and around her property.

“Why shouldn’t I do the work, instead of the wetbacks?” he said. “Why shouldn’t I earn the money?”

What Jimmy likes is Layla has got money and a big house. What she likes is the fun, games, and sex. They are both getting what they think they want. They don’t care about rain as long as they get their rainbows.

“Basically, you’re doing whatever the hell you want, and she’s doing whatever the hell she wants,” I said. “You’re both femme fatales.”

That didn’t go over well. Jimmy says he’s being honest whenever he says whatever he says, but he doesn’t want any trueness in return. He thinks you’re getting in his face. Every time we talk, he tells me why he’s the greatest and why Shirley and I are idiots.

“Why won’t your wife talk to me?” he asked.

“Because you ran out on us after we took care of you when you were down and out,” I said.

“That’s not true,” he said.

“How do you see it in your world?”

The crack he’s smoked for years hasn’t changed Jimmy all that much. He’s still as selfish and self-righteous as he always was. Shirley says that he will never grow up because he thinks he’s not wrong and will never be wrong,

When I told him Shirley’s new business had turned the corner and was doing well, he didn’t want to hear it. When I first told him about it, what she was planning, he told me she would fail, for sure. Nothing is what Jimmy said when I told him her business was growing. For once, he had nothing dismissive to say.

When Jimmy broke up with Layla the second time it was because, when she got fussy about his drug use, he told her that her addiction to pain medicines and her drinking weren’t any different than his smoking crack and drinking. He told her he was going to smoke crack every day, and that was that. When Jimmy gets it into his head that something is going to be, there’s no changing his mind. Layla thought he was crazy. They got into a knockdown fight.

“I’m never coming back,” he said at the end of the fight. He walked out of the big house and gave his pick-up truck back to her, but before he did he went mud bog racing with it. When he was done, the first place trophy in his lap, the pick-up truck wasn’t good for anything anymore. He left with his suitcase, his phone, and his wallet. He walked to the bus station.

“I dropped a truth bomb on her,” he said.

“I’m going to drop a truth bomb on you,” I said. “You’re homeless, you’re living out of your son’s van, and you don’t have a job.”

“I’m trying to find work,” he said.

JJ and Alex, his sons, had a house in Colorado. They invited him to visit them, with the intention of doing an intervention on their father. He got stoned and stayed stoned the whole way, hitching rides with truckers, lost his phone, lost his wallet, and lost his way, but somehow made it there. When he found out what they were up to, he got his hands on Alex’s new van one night and beat feet.

“How dare they pull that bullcrap on me!” he fumed.

Trying to get Jimmy to do something he doesn’t want to do is like trying to dam up Niagara Falls with toothpicks. He drove to Oklahoma where he drove the van into a ditch. He stole two old tires and got back on the road. He made it to Georgia. He called me. He had gotten another phone, somehow.

“I’m coming to Cleveland.”

“Why?”

He showed up a week later. He didn’t have any money. He had stolen his way from Atlanta to Cleveland. He would go to a Walmart, steal bread and cold cuts, go to gas stations, and steal gasoline and snacks. When he had to, he found a backyard bird feeder and ate all the seeds.

“I have a Home Depot gift card,” he said. “Can you buy it off me?”

“I’ll think about it.”

“You know it’s stolen, don’t you?” Shirley asked me.

“Yes.”

Jimmy steals merchandise from big box stores, returns it later for a refund, claiming he has lost the receipt, and gets gift cards in return. He can be slick when he’s beggared.

We met him for breakfast when he got to Cleveland.

“I don’t have any gas,” he said, wolfing down ham and eggs and a plate of pancakes.

“I’ll fill your tank up,” I said.

He was hoping we would ask him to stay at our house. I could tell. I brought it up to Shirley later at home. But, buying him breakfast and filling up his gas tank was as far as it was going to go.

“He’s not sitting on our sofa, much less staying at our house,” she said.

Jimmy called me again about buying the Home Depot card.

“How much is it?” I asked.

“It’s $186.00, but you can have it for a hundred.”

I knew it was throwing money away. We would never use it. It would just be something to help Jimmy out.

“I have to get out of Cleveland,” he said.

“Who did you piss off?”

“Nobody,” he said.

“Did you steal some drugs?”

“I just need to go,” he said.

“You are such an asshole.”

“All right, but are you going to buy this gift card, or not?”

“OK, I’ll come and get it. I just need to stop at an ATM.”

“No, I’ll come and get you,” he said.

Like a fool, when he came over, I got into his van to go to the ATM. He went flying down Detroit Rd. in Lakewood and sideswiped a parked car. He didn’t stop. He just kept going.

“Stop the car,” I yelled. He stopped some blocks later when he ran into a fire hydrant. It began to spay water.

The side of his son’s new van, on the passenger side, where I was sitting, was potholed from bumper to bumper. The front bumper had fallen off when he hit the hydrant. Trash and empty cans of Mountain Dew were scattered everywhere inside the van.

“Do you know you just smashed your kid’s new van? And you drove away. You could have killed me.”

“I know, but I promise I’ll be good.”

“Did you steal all that food?” I asked. There were loaves of white bread, jars of Jiffy peanut butter, and half-eaten candy bars a gogo.

“A guy’s got to eat,” he said.

The next day JJ called.

“Alex is in Cleveland,” he said. “He’s gone there to get the van back from our dad.”

“JJ, why didn’t you tell me he was coming? Jimmy was here yesterday, but now he’s gone.”

“We called him yesterday and said Alex was coming.”

“That was a mistake,” I said. “He’s gone to Canton.”

“Why Canton?”

“Because Alex isn’t in Canton, that’s why. He’s hiding from you.”

They finally located him and Alex went to see him. They met in Canton behind a bowling alley. But Jimmy parked the van a couple of blocks away, so Alex wouldn’t see it and take it away from him. They talked, but Alex never got the van back. He went back to Colorado and Jimmy went back to living in parking lots.

“When he’d ride in the afternoon, I’d follow after with a hickory broom, the pony being rather shy when bitten by blue tail fly, Jimmy, crack corn and I don’t care.”

Jimmy thought I had led his sons to him. He thought I was conspiring with them to take the van away from him. He called me on the phone and called me every name in the book.

“Even though you do what you do to your kids?”

“That’s right,” he said.

“You treat them worse than junk yards treat their dogs.”

He barked like a dog, trying to get under my skin.

“The only way you’ll ever get that van back is if you report it stolen,” I told JJ when I talked to him later.

“No, I can’t do that,” he said. “My dad would go to jail if I turned him in.”

“Maybe that’s what he needs,” I said. “Maybe he needs to be behind bars for a while breaking rocks and thinking things through.” JJ and I both knew he would end up behind bars sooner or later, but whether he would turn things over was anybody’s guess. Jimmy was not especially a thinking kind of man. He was a cracking the corn kind of man.

“Bomb City”

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

Chasing Infinity

The Last Transylvanian

September 1, 2026 Edward Staskus Leave a comment

BY Ed Staskus

When Agnes Schaser lost her balance on the rolling deck of the SS Stuttgart as it steamed into New York Harbor in 1931 she was 22 years old. It was windy and raining. She had barely been able to make out the Statue of Liberty in the fog. She reached for and kept a firm grip on the arm of Mathias Schaser, her new husband. When she walked down the covered gangway she had, unbeknownst to her, a bun in the oven. The voyage had taken seven days. The first day on the ship had been a honeymoon. She had been seasick the next six days in a row. She was glad to get her land legs under her when she set foot on North American soil.

Mathias had brown eyes, brown hair, and was five foot five. Agnes had blue eyes, brown hair, and was five foot three. He had emigrated from Transylvania to the United States midway through the Roaring Twenties and was naturalized in 1929. He did well for himself and when the day came he went back to his hometown of Hamlesch to fetch the girl he had been marking time to grow up. Their marriage had been arranged years before. Among the Transylvanian Saxons marriage was more of an economic contract than a romantic union.

He was born in 1888. She was born in 1909. He was twice her age. The difference didn’t matter to either of them. They were second cousins. The genealogy didn’t matter to their Lutheran brethren. A week before the wedding they put on traditional folk costumes and went door-to-door inviting guests. Mathias carried a big wooden invitation stick. All the invitees brought food to the wedding feast, milk, butter, lard, and bacon. Every household brought one obligatory chicken. Women rolled out and cut dough for noodles. Many yeast cakes, called Handlich’s, were baked and topped with egg custard. Everybody was meant to get a slice.

A wedding flag was decorated with tassels, ribbons, and kerchiefs. It was carried by a Fahnrich, Mathias’s closest friend, who led the wedding procession. A ceremonial tree was crafted for the feast. It symbolized life and prosperity. Mathias and Agnes exchanged vows in the big church in Hermannstadt, which was near their hometown. He wore a black suit. She wore a white dress. Agnes Kloos became Agnes Schaser on that day.

Hermannstadt was one of the original seven Transylvanian Saxon towns. According to legend, the Pied Piper brought the towns to life with his flute. Fate leads everyone who follows it. He lured a hundred and thirty children from the German town of Hamelin with his tunes, led them into a mountain, and guided them underground the length of Europe until they finally emerged from a cave in Transylvania. The children separated into groups and founded the first seven Saxon towns in the land.

All the towns in the Saxon lands of Transylvania were fortified. On top of that, all the churches were even more fortified. There were more than three hundred of the fortified churches throughout Transylvania, both Romanesque and Gothic, built of brick and stone, and most of them featuring a red tile roof. The village hall, school, and grain storage barns were clustered around the church. The churches were always built in the middle of town, often on a mound or a hill, with water tranches, multiple walls, and at least one tower. The tower was for observation, a warning bell, and for throwing rocks and pouring boiling oil on the heads of invaders. The fortified churches were the last refuge of the townsfolk.

The Saxons came from the Low Countries and Germany, before there was a Romania. It wouldn’t become a country until the late 19^th century. When they arrived it was a part of the Kingdom of Hungary. The colonization of Transylvania by Central Europeans, who later became known as Transylvanian Saxons, began during the reign of King Geza II in the 1140s. He recruited them to farm the valleys and exploit copper and iron ore mining in the northeast.

They were also expected to help defend against marauding steppe tribes. They weren’t successful against the Mongols, but learned their lesson. When the Ottoman Turks showed up, they were ready for them. They made their stand in their fortified towns and churches. After the Battle of Breadfield the Ottoman Turks complained to their God, but all he said was “Try again.” The Transylvanian Saxons thanked their God. It was every man for himself and God against all.

Mathias and Agnes took a train from Bucharest to Berlin, made their way to Bremen, steamed up the Weser River, and crossed the Atlantic Ocean. Whenever Agnes wasn’t throwing up over the side, Mathias sat her down trying to teach her the English language. It was a slow go. They landed in New York City in mid-May, where they spent the rest of the week seeing the sights, going to the top of the newly built Empire State Building, strolling the length of Central Park, and feasting on Nathan’s hot dogs at Coney Island. On the Monday morning of the next week they took the Empire State Express to Cleveland’s Union Terminal.

Until she got to Berlin, Agnes had never seen a train station bigger than a platform. Berlin was big, but she was struck dumb by New York City’s Grand Central Terminal. When she got to Cleveland she was struck again by the size of the train station there. More than two thousand buildings had been demolished in the early 1920s to make room for the underground station and the 52-story Terminal Tower built on top of it. It was at the time the second-largest excavation project in the world, after the Panama Canal. When the Terminal Tower opened to its first tenants in 1928 it was the tallest skyscraper in North America outside of New York City. The Carpathian Mountains that surrounded Agnes’s homeland were large, but the United States was larger than life.

Although she realized she might never see her family again, she was relieved to be gone from Transylvania, where trouble was brewing. The problem was, Transylvanian Saxons weren’t Romanians. The ethnic minority was one of the oldest German-speaking groups of the German diaspora. Before 1867 Transylvania had sometimes been autonomous and sometimes in union with Hungary. After the Compromise of 1867 it was incorporated into the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. When the uneasy royal alliance came to an end at the end of World War One, the Romanian majority in Transylvania clamored for unification with the Kingdom of Romania. The Treaty of Trianon in 1920 ratified it. The nationalist aspirations of the Romanians, however, ate away at the independence of the Transylvanian Saxons. The handwriting was on the wall.

Saxons had been leaving Transylvania, regardless of the political turmoil, in sizable numbers since the late 19^th century. Many of them emigrated to Cleveland, where they formed a fraternal organization called Erster Siebenburgen Sachsen Kranken Untersteutszung Verein, which meant First Transylvanian Saxon Sick Benefit Society. It was a mouthful no matter the language. The immigrants were determined to take care of their own. They purchased a sprawling old house on Denison Ave. in 1907 and converted it into what they called the Sachsenheim. They renovated it in 1925, adding two bowling alleys, a ballroom, a music room, a dining room, and a restaurant. They expanded the bar so more beer could be served.

The married couple settled down on the west side of Cleveland, which was the side of town where most of the city’s Transylvanian Saxons lived. Mathias operated a corner store on Clark Ave., a fifteen minute walk from the Sachsenheim. He sold Big Hunks, Tootsie Rolls, and Chick-O-Sticks. There was chocolate galore. There was a soda counter and all the latest magazines. Agnes gave birth to their first son Harold at City Hospital. Everybody called the boy Hal. Mathias and Agnes scrimped and saved, setting money aside for a new house. She gave birth to their second son William in November 1933. Everybody called the boy Willie. Two days later, after the baby was safely delivered, her husband Mathias was shot twice in the chest at point-blank range. He died in the middle of the night in City Hospital where Agnes was still recovering from Willie’s birth.

“You mustn’t stay here any longer,” Agnes had told her husband when he visited her earlier that day at City Hospital. She was supposed to stay in the hospital a few days more. “You go back to the store. We need to have more money now.” He went back to the store. He planned to return for his wife and child and bring them home by the end of the week.

Two teenagers, Pete Wanach and Pete Hansinger, walked in when Mathias was closing the store for the night and demanded the day’s receipts. It was a hold up. When Mathias refused to give it to them, balling up his fists, one of them pulled a handgun and shot him dead. They scooped up all the bills and change in the till and fled. The Cleveland Police apprehended them soon enough. They were tried, found guilty of murder, and sentenced to life imprisonment in the Ohio State Penitentiary. Pete Hansinger had a teenage wife who was pregnant. She gave birth soon after he started serving his life sentence,

Pete Wanach offered Agnes a one hundred savings bond after his conviction. It was his way of saying sorry. She refused to take it. Pete Hansinger sent her a Christmas card from the penitentiary. She returned the favor every holiday season. “Maybe it will make him feel better,” she said.

Needing a father for her two sons Agnes married again, tying the knot with Joe Levak, a Slovak from the east side. They moved to that side of town and rented a small house. She decorated the house with cheap landscapes from Woolworths and fine Bavarian China. She gave birth to two daughters one right after the other. The house was filled to the gills with life. She and her husband had their hands full. After five years of marriage Joe Levak dropped dead in 1940. Agnes never remarried. She raised her family on a Mother’s Pension, which was $90.00 a month, and piecework on the side.

“I taught my sons to be forgiving, not to be bitter,” she said. “We got along all right. They started delivering newspapers when they were 10 years old. They finished high school even though they always worked part-time at a bakery.” On top of that, her sons had to play the violin. Agnes played it and her sons had to learn the instrument at her insistence, although Willie threw a temper tantrum and was soon excused.

“You can’t carry a tune, anyway,” Hal, singing the blues, told his younger brother.

Hal was 13 years old in 1944. His middle name was Mathias, the same as his father’s given name. It was an Indian summer day in October. He was walking home from his 7^th grade class at Wilson Junior High School. He was looking forward to a bowl of potato tarragon soup. Agnes had brought the recipe from Transylvania. She made it with smoked ham. Hal was nearing his house when he was almost knocked off his feet by a thunderous blast. When he steadied himself and looked around, he saw roofs on fire.

“It was like the sky blew up all at once, like blood and guts,” he said. Thick black smoke turned the day to night. Hal’s dog Buddy ran up the front steps and pawed at the door. Agnes bolted out of the house. Buddy ran into the house and straight down to the basement. Agnes’s daughters stood in the doorway bawling. Willie came running from the backyard. Hal ran to his mother on the front lawn. They all looked up at the red and black sky.

The explosion and subsequent fires far and wide were caused when an East Ohio Gas liquefied natural gas storage tank started leaking. The gas flowed onto the concrete lot below the tank and began to vaporize. It turned into a thick white fog. It somehow ignited. It might have been a spark from a passing railcar or somebody lighting a cigarette. The deafening blast blew the tank and everything in sight of it to smithereens, starting with the two men working on top of it.

It happened at the foot of East 61^st St. near the New York Central Railroad tracks. When the gas exploded it blew up at about twenty five million horsepower, the same as the combined output of all the hydroelectric plants west of the Mississippi River in 1944. One hundred year old oak trees were knocked down. Cleveland streets convulsed as far as four miles away. Flames reached 3,000 feet high and the heat reached 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit. Birds were turned to charcoal and fell out of the sky.

Agnes and her children lived on East 66^th St. and Lexington Ave., less than a mile from the East Ohio Gas tank farm. White ash trees on their street were on fire. Agnes was dead set on not losing her house. She started spraying garden hose water on it. From the front lawn she watched a tangled multitude of cars, busses, and Clevelanders on foot fleeing from the fire. Police, fire, and civil defense cars and trucks raced towards the fire, which was spewing gas, molten steel, and rock wool into the sky.

Housewives were caught unaware as flames spread through sewers and up their drains. When that happened, homes caught on fire. “I was getting ready to do some housework” said Alice Janos, one of Agnes’s neighbors. “Suddenly it seems like the walls turn all red. I look at the windows and the shades are on fire. The house fills with smoke. I think the furnace has blown up, but then I see smoke all around the neighborhood.”

Gas ran into the streets, into the gutters, and down catch basins, igniting and blowing up wherever it pooled. Manhole covers were sent flying like bottle rockets. Utility poles bent in the heat. Fire trucks fell into sinkholes. Less than a half hour after the first explosion a second tank exploded. It knocked Agnes down, but she got back on her feet right away. Whenever things were going to hell she kept going. She had lost both her husbands. She was determined to not lose her house. She sprayed it with the garden hose until the water pressure turned to nothing. The land of dreams had turned into bad dreams, but her house was saved. The family didn’t have to shelter at Wilson Junior High. It was one of the schools where the Red Cross ended up taking in thousands of suddenly homeless men, women, and children. It was more than a week before children were able to go back to school.

By Saturday morning the fire department had the inferno under control. In the afternoon, even though Agnes had told them to stay near the house, Hal and Willie went exploring. All the stop signs and traffic lights were gone, but there was no traffic, anyway. Soggy hulks of cars and trucks were pell-mell everywhere. Dogs sniffed at flotsam. Fire hoses littered every intersection.

“What happened to this place?” Willie asked. “It’s a mess. Do you think it was the Martians?”

“I don’t think it was the Martians,” Hal said. “Why would they come all this way to blow things up? Mom said it must have been Nazi sabotage.”

“This wouldn’t have happened if Superman had been here,” Willie said.

“Yeah, him and Captain America, too,” Hal said. “They got the moxie.”

Agnes spent the weekend airing out the house, washing the curtains, beating the rugs, and clearing the front and back yards of debris. She swept clumps of ash into the street. When she was done her yard, at least, looked like not much had happened. The framed wedding picture of Mathias and her, taken in a photography studio in Hermannstadt in 1931, had fallen off the fireplace mantle. The glass was broken. She walked seven blocks where she found an open hardware store and replaced the glass. When she got home she gave her long-gone first husband a kiss and put the picture back on the mantle.

Pete Wanach and Pete Hansinger, who had shot and killed Mathias Schaser, were paroled in 1955. They were middle-aged men by the time they were released. When Agnes was told the news she wished them well. “I have a happy life and my four children. I hope these men have changed and can find good jobs and become good citizens.”

Her life changed when she was compelled to sell her house in the early 1960s. She had fallen behind and her real estate taxes were in arrears, as well. The Transylvanian Saxons in her hometown of Hamlesch had a saying, “Et as Wasser am Brannen, awer em mess et schepen.” It meant, “There is water in the well, but one must scoop it up.” Her piecework on the side and Mother’s Pension only went so far. The water in the well was scraping the bottom. She started living with her children.

“She lived with my father and mother after they were married, from before I was born,” her granddaughter Vanessa said. Agnes’s son Hal had married Terese Stasas, a Lithuanian girl from North Collinwood. Terese eventually put her foot down. “What’s the difference between a mother-in-law and a storm? You can wait out a storm until it passes. I got tired of waiting.” Agnes had to move in with a daughter instead of a daughter-in-law.

“After she moved, she visited us sometimes. One morning when I was three years old, she was making eggs for me. I was standing on a stool next to her telling her exactly how I wanted them done. I told her the whites should be cooked a certain way, and the yolks should be soft and pink, not orange. But I must have said too much because she suddenly turned, looked down at me, and said, ‘Halt die klappe!’”

The little girl didn’t know German but knew exactly what her grandmother meant. Agnes had raised four children and buried two husbands in her time. She didn’t need or want a three-year-old telling her how to fry eggs. She had done all the cooking in her own home all her years and wasn’t in the mood for a food critic.

Agnes Schaser died two years later. She was sixty years old. She had lived in Cleveland for thirty eight years. She was buried in an out of the way local cemetery. In the meantime, Nicolae Ceausescu, the dictator of Romania, was scaling up his plan of moving the country’s Transylvanian Saxons to West Germany. His communist economy was struggling. He needed hard currency. West Germany was offering ransoms. By the early 1970s the plan evolved into a human trade agreement. Hundreds of millions of Deutschmarks were paid to the Romanian state and by 1990 a half million ethnic Germans, nearly all the descendants of who had long ago settled in the Southeastern European country, had been ransomed and there were no more Transylvanian Saxons.

Studio Photograph: Mathias Schaser and Agnes Kloos, 1931, Transylvania

“Bomb City”

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

School Days

Down the Rabbit Hole

September 1, 2026 Edward Staskus Leave a comment

By Ed Staskus

Even though my name isn’t Jack, that’s the name I go by. My father was a big fan of Wild West movies back in the day. He named me after Wyatt Earp after he saw a movie about some gunfight at the OK Corral. I didn’t have any say about it until I reached the age of reason. My father wanted me to grow up and become a lawman, but we have agreed that is not going to happen. He’s disappointed, but I reminded him that when you have expectations, you are setting yourself up for disappointment.

I wake up on school days before everybody else, while they are snoring their heads off, stare at the ceiling in the dark, wonder whether the sun did or didn’t explode in the night, and mess around with Blackie. He’s my cat that sleeps at my feet. Sometimes he curls up under my arm with his face pressed into my armpit. I wonder how he even breathes. I shouldn’t wonder, though, since he’s the Chuck Norris of everything that goes on in the neighborhood. Nothing messes with him twice, especially since I never trim his claws.

When it’s time to rise and shine I throw on sweats. I like going outside first thing, so I always do that right after I get out of bed. Otherwise, somebody would tell me to do something else. Most mornings I walk Scar, our Beagle, although he won’t go out in the rain. We stay on the back porch and chill when it rains. We got him from the Animal Protective League. He’s like a hound with short legs and long ears. He has a bad habit of biting strangers. I never interfere with that. A dog’s got to do what a dog’s got to do. He’s got a chase reflex, too, especially if they’re squirrels, cats, or any dog smaller than him.

We jog down Riverside Dr. to Hogsback Ln. and into the Rocky River Metropark, but I have to keep my eyes peeled, because if he sees a badger in the park it’s all over. He doesn’t believe it’s a revenge obsession, but he’s deluded. He got torn up when he was still a puppy. There was a badger with cubs in our backyard, behind the garage, and Scar got too close to them. There was an explosion of yelps, screeches, and barking when it happened. His face was ripped open and we had to rush him to the Animal Clinic.

I used to eat breakfast with my parents, even though there was always something. “Take your elbows off the table and pass the ketchup. Did you do your homework? Is that a clean shirt?” There would be a quiz about what I did yesterday and what I was going to be doing today. They hardly eat together anymore, anyway. Both of them are always in a hurry to get to work, even though my dad hates his job because of the toads whose business it is. My stepmom teaches at the new middle school down the street. She loves it because she can boss everybody around and make big money doing it. She talks about her paycheck and pension all the time. She made sure all of our neighbors voted her way when a school tax levy was on the ballot last year. Most of them did. She’s not friends with those who didn’t vote her way anymore.

The first thing I do after I’ve showered and gotten dressed for school is call the Red Door Deli and order a Bagel Bacon Bagel Special. There’s a Chinaman who works there. He has a thick accent. My father is down on immigrants, even though his parents were immigrants, but the Chinaman makes a mean bacon bagel, so he’s in my good book.

“Hallo!”

I’m, like, “Hi.”

“Yes?”

“I want to order a Bagel Bacon Bagel Special.”

When he repeats my order, I can barely understand him. “That’s right,” I always say no matter what he says. Everybody there knows me, but he pretends it’s the first time he’s ever talked to me, even though he answers the phone every morning. He’s the one who hands me my bagels at the counter, too.

The Red Door Deli is across the street from St. Edward High School in Lakewood, in a pint-sized strip shopping center, squeezed between Bubbles, a pit stop for dirty laundry, and Sassy Beauty, a hair salon. I go to the deli every morning and since they know me my main man just hands me my paper bag without a word and I fork over my three dollars.

What time I get there for my bagels depends, although it’s never later than eight o’clock. It depends on Noah’s father, who drives both of us to school. Noah lives next door. His father works at a garden center in Avon, even though their yard isn’t any better than ours, which is surprising. Noah calls my cell phone when they’re ready to go and I run right over.

“Pick it up, pick it up,” his father grumbles, shrugging his way into their F-150 Raptor. It’s the latest, the 2014 full-size model, even though he got it last year. He always sounds peeved about something, like he’s going to bite my head off if I look at him the wrong way. He drops us off at the Red Door Deli. I get my breakfast. Noah and I walk across the street to school.

The cafeteria is at the back of the building, which is the new part of the school. We cross the street, squeeze between the chapel and main classroom, and go in through a side door. Our chapel is boss, topped with a gold dome, just like Notre Dame. You can see it from blocks away. It glows in the sun.

Every morning there are loads of guys in the cafeteria. The TV’s are all on and everybody is watching whatever, which is mostly the news. The flat screens are on every wall except the far wall with the windows. There’s destruction and disaster every morning on the FOX Morning Show, major scariness everywhere, but it doesn’t mess with anybody’s breakfast.

My father, stepmom, and Billy watch FOX News every night. They agree among themselves that every word the talking heads say is true. It’s doing to them what they say video games are doing to me. It’s making them slow and stupid. What they don’t know is video games make me fast and smart, although my stepmom doesn’t want to hear it. I’ll leave her in the dust soon enough.

I wouldn’t want to be on the news being body slammed while inside an airplane hitting a hillside. It’s an instant emergency room, all broken bones. It only takes a second, but forever can happen in a second. Everybody’s so burned up and busted to pieces that dentists have to be brought in to find out who is who.

One day there was major terrorist news that caught my eye, except it wasn’t on the news. It was on the internet. It was too gruesome for the news. Towelheads captured some scruffy looking people and wouldn’t let them go. It was holy war time. They tied them to posts and blindfolded them. They shot them one at a time, although they didn’t shoot to kill. They shot them in the legs. Then they went back and shot them in the arms. The internet loves blood and guts.

Our military is totally rad and could take them out, but nobody is going to win that war. It’s an epic fail over there. It’s been going on forever. I hope they try to come here. We would rumble on their butts. It’s cammo, ammo, and Rambo. Our family has plenty of guns in the attic and we have plenty of ammunition, too. I’m not sure about everything we have, though. Billy is the only one who knows for sure.

“I have two 12-gauge’s, a semi-automatic pistol, a .22 Sig Sauer, a big bore 14-gauge, and an AK-47 semi-automatic,” Billy says, looking full of himself. “I have more, but the rest of it isn’t any of your business.”

Billy is like that. He’s my older half-brother. He lives on the third floor and doesn’t let anybody in his room. It’s under lock-and-key, starting with his bedroom door. My stepmom is good with it. It wouldn’t be good for me if I tried it. He wears tight-fitting clothes and goes to Cleveland State University. He wants to be a policeman or an army man. He’ll be gone in two or three years. I can’t wait for that to happen.

His arsenal is technically my father’s, because he bought most of it, but they’re totally my half-brother’s. Billy buys guns for himself now that he’s turned eighteen and become an adult. Before that he wasn’t allowed. He was still a child. He says he’s grown up now. He says lots of things.

We go shooting on my grandfather’s farm in Michigan. Our family goes to the farm every summer to visit my stepmom’s family. My grandfather says that whenever anybody says you don’t need a gun, you’d better make sure you have one that works. Anything other than the Second Amendment sticks in his craw. “They always want to take guns away from the people who didn’t do it,” he says. Last summer I shot so many rounds off at the farm, at targets, at trees, even at nothing, that I got a blister on my hand.

I have my own gun, although it’s not exactly a real one. It’s a G & G Carbine air soft gun. It’s not real, but it looks, feels, and acts like the real deal. It shoots BB’s instead of bullets. Ted Nugent said the BB gun is the most important gun in the history of American weaponry. He should know. He has his own name brand BB’s. Air soft ammo is plastic, not metal. They leave a welt when they smack skin.

My father bought it for me. He didn’t tell my stepmom. He gets nitpicked on a daily basis. It’s not from Target or anyplace like that. It cost almost four hundred dollars. My friends, Nick and Jake, and I use Grudge Tactical pellets when we’re out shooting each other. The pellets are coated with powder, so they leave a mark on your clothes.

Nobody talks about guns at St. Ed’s, not us, and not our teachers. Even though everybody runs guns down, when they say anything at all, Mr. Rote, our religion teacher, told us self-defense is in the Good Book and told us about St. Aquinas and taking care of business. Mr. Rote said it’s best to shoot first and ask questions later. He said the Dalai Lama says the same thing. Nobody asked him who that was, since nobody cared about any Lama.

“It’s your responsibility to defend your faith, your family, and your country,” he said. “It’s a duty to defend church and country from evil men.” He didn’t say much more than that. He plays the guitar. He’s probably never had a gun in his hands his whole life. What does he know? We don’t have metal detectors at St. Ed’s like they do at public schools, but if anyone ever brought a gun to our school that would be the end. They would be expelled and never be allowed back.

You can wear pajamas to public school, but at St. Ed’s we have to wear a dress shirt and tie, pressed pants, and black shoes. You can’t even have too much style in your hair. When you’re in a Catholic school there’s more expected of you. If you’re a St. Ed’s man everybody expects you to be a good person. What you do in public school is up to you, which isn’t always a good thing. Not everybody is a good kid, no sir. There are plenty of rotten apples.

When I was in middle school big kids would make fun of small kids with learning disabilities. They picked on the younger specimens. They would walk right up to them, start being mean, and push them around. They would go after the ones with ADHD or Tourette’s, edge on them, and make fun of them.

From sixth grade on it was all about bullying kids who were shy or different, especially in gym class. There was a posse, led by Tristan and Justin. They were complete dirtbags. I would try to help, as long as the monsters weren’t there, the ones who say they don’t punch you in the back, they punch you in the face.

“You shouldn’t act up like that,” I told them whenever I could.

“Shut up.”

“Leave them alone, make fun of somebody else.”

“Yeah, sure, beat it.”

They wouldn’t stop. It wasn’t like they were in class, so they could keep doing it and doing it. They thought they were so superior. That’s how they got the stupid kids to like them. That’s the thing about Catholic schools and public schools. Guys don’t do that at Catholic schools. I’m sure some do, but not like that. So many public school kids are dipsticks. They learn to think by watching cartoons.

If a teacher at a Catholic school got wind of bullying like that there would be no problem seeing the trouble you were in. All hell would break loose. When you’re in a Catholic school there’s a lot more expected of you. You’re expected to be a better person. You have to take charge of yourself and take the bull by the tail. It’s a big change when you leave public school for good. I didn’t go to a parochial grade school. I went to a public grade school. I didn’t have eight years of dress rehearsal. It was a big change for me.

The food is better at St. Ed’s than it is at public schools, where it’s mostly grown in boxes and cans. Their cooks carry X-Acto knives instead of spatulas. At St. Ed’s we have real cooks and we’re served real food, whole grains, fruits, and vegetables. No sugar drinks are allowed. The milk is low fat. It doesn’t pay to be fat at St. Ed’s. It’s the Breakfast of Champions, but I still bring my Bagel Bacon Bagel Special most mornings, because we don’t get enough food.

There are rules about everything, even about how many calories we’re allowed. I don’t get enough for cross-country and the football players always complain about their portions. Football is the most important thing at St. Ed’s. Everybody knows where the goalposts are. We won states last year, so this year we are the defending state champions.

When school started in the fall we were 5^th in the USA Today poll and 6^th in the ESPN poll. That’s in the whole country, not just Ohio. That’s how good we are. At St. Ed’s it’s either football season or it’s waiting for football season. We say it’s faith, family, and touchdowns. Sometimes it almost seems like it means more than Heaven and Hell. It puts pep in everybody’s step when we win. I tried football in grade school, but it didn’t work out. I was more bantam than bulky and then I broke my collarbone. Now I love running.

The football players boycotted lunch one day. It was a big stir. My friend Rick, who is a 6-foot-3-inch 220-pound linebacker, said he burns more than 3,000 calories during three hours of weight training and practice after school. “We are getting hungry even before the practice starts,” he told one of the vice-principals. “Our metabolisms are all sped up.”

“I could not be more passionate about this,” the food supervisor said, making a speech the next day before lunch. Grown-ups are always making speeches, masterminds on their soapboxes. “I want to solve this problem,” she said, looking smug and serious. She had everybody fill out cards about what we did and didn’t like about our meals. We all laughed about it. Everybody knew nothing was going to change. They’re always trying to put it over on us with their plans and schemes. Grown-ups do what’s good for them, not for anybody else, not even other grown-ups.

They got our cafeteria right. It is the nicest one I’ve ever seen. There are skylights over the atrium, polished wood floors, oblong tables, and ergonomic chairs. Everything is super modern. Somebody’s father died and gave the school a ton of money, millions of it, as soon as he was six feet under. He was probably trying to make it up to God about something. The whole school is up-to-date, even though it was built in 1949, on land that used to be a feeding stop for cattle trains. Back then if you got a detention you had to help dig out the new basement with a shovel. Punishment was about being blue collar for a day, made to work with your hands. St. Edward High School in 2011 isn’t about working with your hands, unless it’s tapping on a keyboard in the computer lab.

When I check the time on my cell phone and it’s 8:25 I wolf down what’s left of my Bagel Bacon Bagel Special and pop up fast because my first class is at 8:30. Being late for Mr. Rote’s Roman Catholic religion class would be the worst thing I could do to start my day. If I did there would be crime and punishment. When we hit the hallway it’s down the rabbit hole. It’s every freshman for himself and the almighty against all.

Excerpted from “White Rabbit.”

“Bomb City”

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

Baltic Place

Our Daily Bread

August 1, 2026 Edward Staskus Leave a comment

By Ed Staskus

My mother started working at Pick-N-Pay when my sister was 7 years old and had reached the age of reason. It was 1964. My brother and I were a few years older than our sister, but listening to my mother anybody would have thought we were still trying to catch up to her in smarts. We told our mother we knew our way around.

She was mending a skirt. She put her needle down and said, “Boys, the young know everything, the middle-aged are suspicious of everything, and the old believe everything. I’m not young but I’m not old, either. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

“Come on mom, we’re not stupid.”

“Good,” she said.

The next day we found out what she was saying when we asked an older student at school what she was saying.

“What she’s trying to tell you is, she suspects everything, especially you two,” he said, walking away and shaking his head.

“Oh, right, that’s what we thought,” my brother improvised.

We were living in a two-family house in the St. Clair-Superior neighborhood. The house had been built in 1903. There were tornado doors leading into the basement from the backyard and an out-of-date coal room. The anthracite chute had been bolted shut. There was a sweet gum tree in the backyard. It was where we played William Tell with rubber arrows. We attended St. George’s Catholic School, taking two city buses there in the morning and two city buses back home in the afternoon.

“Every day Vytas drove to work and the kids went to school,” my mother said. “I was left all alone. Most of my friends worked, helping provide, but Vytas said under no circumstances did he want me to go to work outside of the house. We didn’t agree about that. One day after I learned how to drive I thought I would try to find a job in a bank. I looked in the newspaper. There was an ad for a new bank opening on Noble Rd. in Cleveland Hts. Vytas didn’t know I was going, but I went.”

By that time we had moved to North Collinwood and were living east of E. 185^th St. The bank’s main office was on Rockside Rd., 25 miles away. She had yet to drive five miles in any one direction. It took her an hour to get there. She didn’t get the job, but there were Pick-N-Pay offices in a building next door. She saw a sign saying they were hiring cashiers for a new store on the same Noble Rd. as the bank.

Pick-N-Pay got started in the 1920s when Ed Silverberg opened a dairy store in Cleveland Hts. During the Great Depression he surprisingly expanded and called his new stores Farmview Creamery. He changed the name to Pick-N-Pay in 1940 and by 1951 they had grown to 10 locations. When my mother went to work for the supermarket chain there were more than 40 locations.

“There were maybe 50 people filling out applications. They asked me if I played the piano. No, I said. They asked me if I knew how to type. No, I said.”

The interviewer looked up from his desk. “He asked me if there was anything at all that recommended me. I told him I worked nights with a relative, an immigrant like us, who was an accountant. He moonlighted doing the books for more than a dozen women who staged Tupperware home parties.”

The sales parties took place in living rooms. Tupperware was a plastic storage container invented by Earl Tupper. They were going like gangbusters. Our next-door neighbor Arlene Noga had a full set. She put leftovers in them instead of throwing the food away. Only after she forgot about the leftovers and they finally spoiled in the containers did she throw the food away.

“I am very good on adding machines is what I said to the man interviewing me.”

Four women were hired that day. My mother was one of them. She started her new job on Noble Rd. two weeks later.

“When I got home it was late. Vytas had made supper. As soon as I walked in the door he wanted to know where I had been. I hadn’t left a note. When I told him I had gotten a job he was unhappy.”

“Who’s going to take care of the kids?” he asked.

“They’re old enough to take care of themselves,” she said.

It wasn’t exactly true but our father didn’t know that. He had a full time and a part-time job on top of that. We hardly saw him Monday through Friday. On weekends he told us what we must do and must not do. We didn’t have to deserve our mother’s love. We had to deserve our father’s.

“My first day on the job, after my training, the head cashier showed me around the store. ‘Do your best,’ she told me. ‘You’ll never be as good as me but do your best.’ Everything had to be rung up one at a time. If there was a sale, like seven for a dollar, I had to do the division. Very soon, I didn’t have to look at the keys on the register, just push the groceries with one hand while my other hand rang them up while I talked to the customer. I got to be as good as the head cashier. Even she said so.”

Starting in the 1970s, after cashiers rang up orders, they gave customers S & H Green Stamps based on their total purchase. It was a loyalty program. Shoppers pasted the stamps into booklets and redeemed them for ash trays, bicycles, and appliances. “We had boxes on the floor next to us where we kept the booklets and rolls of stamps. I didn’t like the boxes because there wasn’t much room to move around in the first place, what with all the circulars down there.”

One day my father was complaining about the competitive spirit in the land. “It’s dead in America,” he said.

“If you believe it’s dead,” my mother said, “you’ve never been in my grocery store when a cashier opens another check-out line.”

My mother had a falling out with the manager at the Noble Rd. store. “I told him I needed time off every summer. We took the kids to a Lithuanian summer camp on the Georgian Bay north of Toronto. My husband and I were volunteers and stayed the whole two weeks. He said OK but when summer came he wouldn’t let me go. I said, I’m going, no matter what you say. He said no, again, although I didn’t listen. He had no choice, because I went, but he punished me. I worked eight-hour days three days a week, but never on Saturdays. He made me work on Saturdays, at least until he was fired. He got the ax when they found out he was stealing steaks.”

Her intention was to work 20-some years and retire with a good pension. “It wasn’t hard work. I enjoyed it. We had to bag the groceries but on weekends we had kids bagging. I didn’t lift anything heavy. I just pushed it.” I spent a summer while in high school bagging at a Pick-N-Pay store on E. 72^nd St. and St. Clair Ave. I did more heavy lifting than I expected. A gallon of anything weighs eight pounds. Hundreds of gallons a day weigh thousands of pounds a day.

“Sometimes customers would help. Old people were always coming into my check-out line. I tried to remember their names and we talked because they often didn’t have anybody else to talk to. One lady believed in ancient aliens while another one liked describing the butterflies in her backyard. They had long faces whenever they saw me working the express line.”

After we moved out of North Collinwood and were living in Euclid on the Lake Erie side of Lakeshore Blvd. she asked the new manager to be transferred. Pick-N-Pay had opened a new store within walking distance and my mother wanted to work there. “The manager was a good man, but because I was good worker he didn’t want to let me go. One day the guy who hired me was at the store, bagging groceries for the cashiers. He was married to the daughter of the man who owned the stores. He often went to them unannounced and got his hands dirty. I asked him if I could go to the new store. I lied and said I didn’t have a car. He said, ‘Wait until tomorrow.’ The next day he stopped in and said, ‘Monday, go to the new store.’”

She walked home for lunch every day. One day before lunch she went into the basement to throw some clothes in the washer and discovered the basement was flooded. “Vytas didn’t know how to do anything around the house but I called him anyway. He didn’t know where the main shut-off was. I ran back to the store and told the manager. He ran back to our house with me and turned the water right off. He knew everything.”

When my parents moved to Sagamore Hills she again had to ask for a transfer. The manager said, “No problem.” He threw a staff party for my mother. “He brought his wife and their triplets. He was a hands-on man but having triplets was no walk in the park. He said, ‘It’s a whole lot of love, a whole lot of diapers, and a whole lot of who’s crying now. It’s three times the blessings but three times the chaos, too.’”

She went to work at the Pick-N-Pay store on Emery Rd. “The head cashier, Katie, and I became best friends. Her husband and she liked music shows. We often went to the Carousel Dinner Theater together.”

The Carousel was in Ravenna a half hour away. It had opened in 1973 with Arte Johnson, a cast member of “Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In,” starring in Neil Simon’s “Last of the Red Hot Lovers.” Arte Johnson called the show “ver-r-r-ry in-te-res-ting.” Performances ran Tuesday through Sunday at the 500-seat complex. Tickets ranged from $6.95 on weekdays to $10.95 on Friday and Saturday nights. The tickets were for dinner and a play. Entrees included roast beef, chicken almondine, ham steak, and seafood casserole. Seconds and thirds were included. My parents ate light to save room the day of the show. My mother never made breakfast the next day.

Dave Fulford, the founder and manager of the Carousel, favored light comedies. He didn’t care for the “snob hits” of New York City, saying they were “so intellectual they go beyond entertainment. I don’t think dinner theater audiences want to work. They don’t want an algebra test after dinner.”

My parents and their friends went to the last show in Ravenna in 1988 before the Carousel moved to Akron. The show was “Big Bad Burlesque.” It was an off-Broadway revue, a musical salute to the golden days of burlesque. The show was made up of skits and girls, lots of girls. The skits were based on one joke, which was unsatiated and unrequited lust. My father had trouble keeping his eyes on his dinner plate.

“By today’s standards, burlesque is the only family show left in town,” Katie’s husband grumbled.

After the show my mother told her friend she was retiring from Pick-N-Pay. “She tried to talk me out of it, but I had worked long enough. My husband had moved up at TRW and I wanted to start volunteering, especially at our church.”

My mother worked three days a week every week her 24 years at the supermarket chain. What she didn’t know was that the trouble with retirement is you never get a day off. Her church sold frozen Lithuanian dumplings every Sunday to raise money, just like they hosted bingo on Friday nights. She worked the bingo games and twice a week made dumplings with six or seven other women. After mass she worked in the community hall selling them. After they were all sold she helped clean up. She worked at all the church’s special events.

One evening while visiting my parents I observed that she was working more in her retirement than she had when she was a working woman.

“I retire when I go to bed,” she said.

“Hell’s Kitchen”

New York City, 1956. Times Square, Coney Island, and the World Series. A high profile Mob contract in the works. Stan Riddman, a private eye working the edges, stirs up the shadows.

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

Chasing Infinity

On the Warpath

August 1, 2026 Edward Staskus Leave a comment

By Ed Staskus

Bernard Shaw was on a roll in the Roaring Twenties. For over a decade he had been scoring theatrical winners, spirited satires of the times, breezy comedies revolving around artificial circumstance, and melodramas based on marriage and family life. When he switched gears it was with “Heartbreak House” in 1920. It was produced in New York City and was well-received. The theme of the play dealt with the ethics of humanism and scientific determinism at loggerheads with each other. It marked a return of a sense of high purpose in the playwright’s work.

It met with less success in London a year later. “It was partly because of miscasting, but chiefly because the London audience was a failure,” Bernard Shaw said with a splash of venom. He was always ready to speak his mind. “The secret of success is to offend the greatest number of people,” he said.

“Back to Methuselah” hit the stage in 1921. An elaborate speculative fantasy, it met with critical acclaim and public listlessness when performed in the United States, which had until then taken Bernard Shaw to its bosom and heaped honors on him in a form everybody understood, namely dollars and cents.

For all of his success as a writer, there were a few cracks in Bernard Shaw’s happiness. He was closing in on his threescore and ten. “Threescore-and-ten’s the mark, and no man with a conscience, and a proper sense of what’s expected of him, has any business to live longer, flying in the face of the Bible,” Charles Dickens wrote. Even though he eventually exceeded the Biblical edict, he knew the remarkable energy of his so far long lifetime was waning. The death of his older sister served as a reminder that even he would one day pass away.

Although “Back to Methuselah” was a good play, there were some critics, like Homer Woodbridge, who believed “as a playwright he has shot his bolt, and that as a preacher he is getting very tiresome.” Even though Bernard Shaw was capable of great disdain, he was still irked by the criticism. He wanted to write another play right away, but had trouble getting started. “Sometimes the urge to write comes over me and I cannot think what to write about,” he said. “This happened before I started ‘Saint Joan.’ I wanted to get to work on something but I hadn’t a subject. ‘Why not write a play on Joan of Arc?’ said my wife. So, I did.”

“Saint Joan” was written in 1923 and produced in 1924. It was a success in both New York City and London. It stilled his most obstinate detractors. The play incorporated two themes Bernard Shaw was interested in, which were history and religion. (Two earlier plays, “Androcles and the Lion” and “The Devil’s Disciple,” had focused on those same concerns.) Essentially a tragedy concerned with a universal issue, namely the conflicts that arise between individuals and the institutions they erect, “Saint Joan” has come to be considered Bernard Shaw’s “last great hurrah.”

Many critics approach the play as one of Bernard Shaw’s best efforts, comparable in importance and popularity to “Man and Superman.” The Oxford History of English Literature has called it his outstanding work, “conceivably the finest and most moving English drama since ‘The Winter’s Tale’ or ‘The Tempest.’ It owns that sure mark of greatness, a stature that remains intact after every consideration has been given to its evident and undeniable imperfections.”

In 1910, long before the appearance of “Saint Joan,” G. K. Chesterton published a biography of Bernard Shaw, even though he had said, “It is indefensibly foolish to attempt to explain a man whose whole object through life has been to explain himself.” After it was published the playwright said, “It is the best work of literary art I have yet provoked. It is a fascinating portrait study and is in the great tradition of literary portraiture.”

G. K. Chesterton and Bernard Shaw had been good friends for many years. They enjoyed debating one another about the world’s problems. The biography begins with a preface that outlines the headaches of preparing a preface for a book about the ‘Master of Prefaces,’ which Bernard Shaw was. The book itself is divided into six parts. The first three parts, “The Irishman,” “The Puritan,” and “The Progressive” describe the soil out of which Bernard Shaw sprang. The last three parts, “The Critic,” “The Dramatist,” and “The Philosopher” delineate the playwright’s activities with and relationship to the stage up to about 1909.

My purpose is to examine the parts of the biography and see to what extent G. K. Chesterton’s observations about Bernard Shaw anticipate the creation of “Saint Joan.” The question I hope to answer is whether or not Bernard Shaw was in a sense ordained to write the play, or something very like it. I don’t think the playwright would scoff at my proposal that there was something miraculous going on. He once said it was funny being asked why he denied miracles “because I never do deny them, but, on the contrary, spend my life largely affirming them. The world is full of miracles.”

Bernard Shaw was an Irishman. A connection between his ancestry and Joan of Arc can be made in this way: the maid was a virgin and in the 15^th century was considered to be a saint, which she became in actuality 500 years later. Bernard Shaw came from a land variously known as “The Land of Virgins” and “The Land of Saints.” G. K. Chesterton writes that in some other time, in another kind of civilization, Bernard Shaw might have been regarded as a saint, albeit an ascetic and negative one. He embellished the image by marking a strange note in Bernard Shaw, which is “that he is literally unworldly. Worldliness has no human magic for him; he is not bewitched by rank nor drawn on by conviviality at all.”

There is a clear relationship between Bernard Shaw and Joan of Arc. She is “unworldly” to the extent of communicating with spirits and with God himself. In the preface to “Saint Joan” the storyteller writes that this trick of the imagination visits many of those burdened with genius, which he considers Joan of Arc to be.

Bernard Shaw was not unaware of his own genius. In 1924 he concluded that “if Paris perishes in ignorance of my works, the loss will be for Paris and not for me. I do not say that the loss would not be serious; for I am as indispensable as Bergson for a complete modern culture.” He may not have heard voices, but he could appreciate the reason Joan of Arc did.

Like Bernard Shaw, Joan of Arc is not attracted by the trappings of rank .She does not aspire to generalship in the usual sense. Throughout the play she remains aware of her origins and breeding. Conviviality does not strike a chord in her. If it had she would not have alienated almost all of her compatriots. But if she had not she could not have been heroic, since her heroism depends on willfulness and stubbornness, which are antithetical to conviviality. As it happens, her heroic virtues are given free rein.

According to G. K. Chesterton, there are several modal elements that can be ascribed to the Irish. He believes Irishmen succeed in those labors that “require a certain crystalline realism; such professions are the lawyer and the soldier.” Joan of Arc becomes a soldier and argues her own case like a lawyer before the Inquisition. The Irishman is “aggressive, and he attacks, he goes on asking for a thing because he wants it, and he tries really to hurt his enemies because they are his enemies.” Joan of Arc’s arrival on the front signals the beginning of an implacable campaign to oust the English from France and, in the process, to crown the Dauphin king, which she alone seems to want.

The Irish mentality embraces a kind of peculiar and “wild chastity” in regards to sex. Joan of Arc is a peasant girl who is able to remain chaste amid a mob of soldiers, whose sexual desires were often held in abeyance for lengthy periods with great difficulty. She wears armor for more reasons than one.

The last general truth G. K. Chesterton asserts is that “Ireland is a country in which the political conflicts are at least genuine; they are about something.” He goes on to say that they are real because they hinge on the “ three great realities” of patriotism, religion, and hard cash. “Saint Joan” has nothing to do with money, but everything to do with the other two realities. Without being actually cognizant of the issues, Joan of Arc nevertheless promotes nationalism at the cost of the nobles, and undermines the Catholic Church’s contention that one can apprehend God only with the assistance of an assigned intermediary. If political contests are contests for power, “Saint Joan” is unquestionably a story of such a struggle.

Besides being an Irishman, which endowed him with a kind of “intellectual chastity and the fighting spirit,” Bernard Shaw was an Orangeman. He was a Protestant in a Roman Catholic land. There were many Nationalist Irishmen who condemned him as a “West Briton.” Bernard Shaw was “an exile from Ireland living in Ireland,” much as Joan of Arc was an outsider to the land and church she fought for.

The kind of Protestant that Bernard Shaw was amounted to Puritanism. G. K. Chesterton defines the basic tenet of Puritanism in this way: “It is a refusal to contemplate God or goodness with anything lighter or milder than the most fierce concentration of the intellect.” Bernard Shaw wrote in 1912 that if he could “conceive a God as deliberately creating something less than himself, I should class him as a cad. If he were simply satisfied with himself, I should class him as a coxcomb. My God must continually strive to surpass himself.” Just like God must reaffirm and surpass himself so must a Puritan in service to his God.

This touches on Joan of Arc in two ways. First, she eschews, however unwittingly, dealing with her God except on the most immediate basis. She brings all of herself to it. Second, she reaffirms her stance, though in a roundabout way, during and at the conclusion of her trial. Her faith wavers momentarily, but her fierceness wins out in the end. She unequivocally returns to the essential and demanding Puritan idea that “God can only be praised by direct contemplation of him.”

G. K. Chesterton maintains that, because he is a Puritan, Bernard Shaw is never frivolous. The same can be said for Joan of Arc. She does not make war wearing a ball gown. While talking to the artist Walter Tittle in 1924 George Shaw said Joan of Arc’s idea “in wearing man’s clothes was a sensible one; she was a soldier, and could not be bothered with skirts, and as she was associated with soldiers constantly it was more modest to dress as one of them.” But this was one of the counts against her at the trial, and was interpreted by the Catholic Church as wanton immodesty. Joan of Arc never uses her wit for fun – so much like Bernard Shaw’s, in that it is not a sense of humor, which implies that truth is tricky. She rather uses it as one of the means to attain her goals. She joshes the Dauphin to give him courage. When she pokes fun at religious leaders it is because she understands they are her enemies. She uses her wit like a weapon. It is, like a Calvinist’s and like Bernard Shaw’s, consistent as a sharp tongue eager to engage.

An aspect of all Puritans is that they are austere. Bernard Shaw’s Puritan teachers “could not prevent him from taking up theatricals, but they made him take theatricals seriously .” Joan of Arc is similarly austere. During her trial she declares that she could comfortably live on bread and water. Her aversion to excess is signaled by her reaction to everlasting imprisonment as punishment for her heresy. Her recantation is recanted. She instinctively recoils from that judgment because it would deny her the lifeforce of nature, and also because she believes the verdict is wildly extravagant. Death has preference because it pales in the face of profligacy.

He austerity in the play is occasionally belied by some historical inaccuracies. The critic J. Van Kan has observed that Joan of Arc would sooner have endured diabolical cruelties at the hands of her torturers than to admit a naturalistic explanation for her “voices.” On the whole, though, considering her sincerity, background, and mission, and the means she employs to fulfill her destiny, she is an austere character. Bernard Shaw answered for his errors of strict fact when he wrote to a critic of his representation of Joan of Arc’s nature that he had “ no theory about Joan, and understand her no more than I understand myself.”

If Bernard Shaw’s vocation was as a playwright, then his avocation was as a progressive. G. K Chesterton writes that he was born in an epoch that had taken the great political and moral successes of the 19^th century and fashioned them into portals of nothing. “The moral world was pretty well all windows and no house by the time George Bernard Shaw arrived on the scene.” The reason it was mostly windows by the time he got to London was that morality had morphed into mud. Bernard Shaw waded into the mudflat and “thoroughly trashed all competitors in the difficult art of being at the same time modern and intelligent.” He kept revolutionists on their toes by such declarations as that physical science was a mystical fake. He didn’t go into details and left it at that.

As a progressive Bernard Shaw concentrated on two crusades. The first was the humanitarian cause. “At its best and noblest it meant a sort of mystical identification of our life with the whole life of nature,” G. K. Chesterton says, though he does not mention what it is at its worst. Joan of Arc’s identification with a similar cause can be shown by two examples. First, although she went to war, it was specifically to save her homeland. On the battlefield she did not actually kill anyone. Second, she prefers the stake to exile from nature.

Another cause Bernard Shaw committed himself to was Socialism. G. K. Chesterton says that this exemplifies the same trait as his humanitarianism. If it does, then Joan of Arc leaving the farming life of her parents to live among a gaggle of soldiers is a reflection of her sociological leanings and human compassion

G. K Chesterton admires Bernard Shaw’s moral and social persuasions, but says thst his “great defect was and is the lack of democratic sentiment.” This particular lack is exactly what sends Joan of Arc on the warpath and to her death. She fails to see that her trial is political, not religious. In addition, she is unable or unwilling to delegate authority, and consequently comes to be considered arrogant and disagreeable. She and her spirit oracles cannot make a mistake. He body will fail Joan of Arc. She may not be a democrat, but, like Bernard Shaw, she makes an excellent republican. Her death will be a success. The two of them “are more for the Public Thing than the Private Thing.”

I have emphasized the first three parts of G. K. Chesterton’s biography because they have the most to reveal about Bernard Shaw’s nature and character, and by inference Joan of Arc herself. The last three parts say less about who Bernard Shaw was and more about what he did up to 1910, which was that he wrote a few lackadaisical novels and a good many good plays. Each of these imaginings had a plot and a theme. Some of the attitudes expressed in the plays and other writings can be brought to bear on “Saint Joan.”

When Bernard Shaw was a critic for the Saturday Review he defended the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen. He informed everyone that Ibsen “was not artistic, but moral; that his dramas were didactic and that all great art was didactic.” Bernard Shaw might as well have been talking about himself.. He went to great lengths to make his plays didactic. The original version of “Back to Methuselah” took three days to perform. If one was willing to stay and listen, one couldn’t help but get the point. Many of his plays sport prefaces and epilogues intended to make the meaning clear as a bell. With “Saint Joan” Bernard Shaw was doing what Socrates believed to be the highest duty of a teacher, which was exposing prejudices and misconceptions in order to arrive at the truth.

In Plato’s “The Last Days of Socrates” the doomed philosopher invents a persona for “The Laws and Constitution of Athens” in order to find out whether or not he should flee the sentence of death that hangs over him. It is worthwhile pointing out that Bernard Shaw likewise creates spokesmen for the political and religious adventures of the time, and then posits Joan of Arc against them. The dialogues that ensue set forth the relative positions of all involved and then, in the epilogue, synthesize those positions. This is done subtly enough so that Bernard Shaw’s conception of the truth is set forth forthrightly, and yet space is left for the audience to come to their own conclusions. In this vein the critic F. F. Rattray said that “it is a tribute to Shaw that both Catholics and Protestants have been satisfied with how their respective cases have been dealt with in it.”

G. K. Chesterton writes that in “Arms and the Man” there was, among other elements of style, “one thing not unimportant; there was savage sincerity.” In the future, out of the remote past, Joan of Arc lay in wait. A warrior of ferocious sincerity, she seems an apt character for Bernard Shaw’s pen. She fits right into his style.

Idealism is not the same as sincerity. Bernard Shaw published “The Philanderer” in 1898 as part of “Plays Unpleasant.” It was in part an exposition of the ”dangers of ideals, the sacrifice of people to principles.” It strongly suggested that “ the idealist is more concerned about the sin than the sinner.” Bernard Shaw went on to recapitulate this idea in “Saint Joan.” He used the Catholic Church to demonstrate the inhumanity of doggedly adhering to a single creed. That might be their only crime. They harm not only others, but eventually themselves, as well. They disregard the fact that happiness is a practical, not an abstract concern.

One of Bernard Shaw’s most important plays, and the last one I will talk about in relation to “Saint Joan,” is “Man and Superman.” The play mixes many themes but one stands out, which is his discovery of Frederick Nietzsche and the concept of the Superman. Frederick Nietzsche believed that just as man had evolved from primates, leaving them behind on the evolutionary ladder, man would ultimately give rise to a new breed of man, higher than Homo Sapiens as he is higher than the apes. In Frederick Nietzsche’s mind this eventually became interwoven with anachronistic ideas about valor and a hatred of pity. Bernard Shaw was not taken in by these latter beliefs, for, as G. K. Chesterton says, “It would require more than ten thousand mad Polish professors to make Bernard Shaw anything but a generous and compassionate man.”

Bernard Shaw came to believe that man’s only hope was in evolution. Consequently, he made the hero of “Man and Superman” a woman, whose justification in seeking a mate suitable for producing a better race is that she will be the mother of the coming Superman. One of the ideas buttressing the play is that nature desires ideal marriages.

Insomuch as it must be a woman who produces the Superman, it may be that Bernard Shaw envisioned Joan of Arc as a precursor to the woman who would do it. One of Joan of Arc’s achievements is that she promotes a redefinition of the role of women in society. Her other achievement is that she is an example of how evolution is thought to work, which is along the lines of sudden changes or mutations. The tragedy of Joan of Arc is that she appeared to soon, too fast, and too insistent in the 15^th century. An unlikely pioneer, she was crucified in the name of conventional morality. Her gifts and genius doomed her, as the old customs and obligations proved too strong. But she signals a new set of virtues and indicates that the time will come. It is inevitable, even though she raises the cry “How long, how long?” to her God.

Posing the question of whether Bernard Shaw was fated to write “Saint Joan” reveals the answer to be “Who knows?” There is some evidence suggesting the seed of the play was in him, but the evidence must remain circumstantial. Nobody knows enough about the secret workings of fate to make assertions about its nature. Everybody knows enough about it to connect some of the dots. We are not prisoners of fate, even though some people meet their destiny on the road they take to avoid it. Rather, for good or ill, we are prisoners of our own minds.

“Hell’s Kitchen”

New York City, 1956. Times Square, Coney Island, and the World Series. A high profile Mob contract in the works. Stan Riddman, a private eye working the edges, stirs up the shadows.

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

Baltic Place

Dancing With the Stars

August 1, 2026 Edward Staskus Leave a comment

By Ed Staskus

Folk dancing costumes are by and large traditional, except when they aren’t. When Gabriele Baltrunaite traveled from Cleveland, Ohio to the 2024 Centenary Song and Dance Celebration in Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, she had to borrow one, even though she had one. “I had to borrow a dancing costume because, although I had one, but it was too Lithuanian,” she said. “They wanted us to wear our own versions for the festival.”

“It is important for us that every participating ensemble bring their own tradition, their own songs, those they inherited from their own place, their own dances and customs,” said Vida Šatkauskienė of the Folklore Day creative group. “And all that diversity, every region, every ensemble, every individual performer, are what makes up our day.”

The day lasted a week through the first week of July. It featured Folklore Day, Dance Day, Ensembles Evening, and Song Day. More than 9,000 dancers performed on Dance Day. Gabriele went with the Cleveland folk dance group Svyturys.

The dance group was established in 2003, when 16 young dancers got together to prepare for the XII Lithuanian Folk Dance Festival in Chicago. They perform at shows, festivals, and special events. They have appeared throughout the United States and Europe, as well as South America. They have organized “Concerts of Friendship” to which dancers from the Lithuanian diaspora are invited to participate.

“I started dancing at St. Casimir’s when I was in 2^nd grade,” Gabriele said. “In the 8^th grade I started dancing with Svyturys.” She has danced with the group since she was 13 years old, participating in many of its overseas excursions. “Sweden was my favorite trip,” she said. It’s hard to beat a breath of fresh Scandinavian air. In between breathing there is fika, the coffee break ritual of the Swedes.

“Dancing is fun and I like the exercise, although sometimes it can suck practicing every Sunday.” The group practices Sundays from 10:30 to 1:30 at the Kirtland Community Center on the east side of Cleveland. “It’s partner dancing in a group. It’s highly choreographed, with lots of circles, polkas, and spinning. I like the social aspect of being in the group, making friends and making deeper connections. When it’s getting close to a concert, we have boot camp and practice even more. I love dancing at concerts, the forms and shapes we make on the dance floor, and the attention, the fact that people are looking at me.”

Gabriele was born in Lithuania but grew up in the United States. In 1999 when she was three years old her parents Ausra and Gintaras tried their luck at the Green Card Lottery, a result of the Immigration Act of 1990. The new law allowed hundreds of thousands of immigrants to enter the United States. Lithuania was one of thirty one qualifying countries. Their luck was good. They were awarded visas. More immigrants were admitted into the United States from 1991 to 2000 than in any prior decade in American history, with11 million documented entries.

“My parents were doing all right, but the economy was bad,” Gabriele said. “They wanted more success in life. They wanted a change of pace, something new, even though all they knew about the United States was what they had seen on TV.”

Gabriele attended Eastlake North High School, Lakeland Community College, and graduated with a degree in Business Economics from Cleveland State University. She is a real estate agent with EXP Realty and operates her own commercial cleaning service with several employees. “I live by my phone,” she said.

The 2024 Centenary Song and Dance Celebration was one hundred years in the making. The first Song Day was staged in Kaunas in 1924 and continued to be staged all through the Soviet Occupation after World War Two. It became a World Celebration after the fall of the Iron Curtain, and in 1994 more than 1,200 singers, dancers, and musicians from ten countries participated in the event

This year’s event described itself as, “We, the singing and dancing people, make the living tradition that has survived through this century. We are the unique kin that meets every few years and speaks its own language. The language of this kin resembles the language of the earth – the language of the bird and the river, the culture and the memory, for our language is the one of life, spoken by all the members of the Cantor Lituanus kinship.”

Flying from Cleveland to Helsinki to Vilnius takes about a full day and night with layovers. It takes a couple of days to get over the jet lag. The Svyturys group numbered more than forty on the plane, from dancers to teachers to volunteer support. They got to Lithuania a week before the big show. They stayed in the Old Town of Vilnius, brought back to life after the country recovered its independence in 1991. Nearly $30 million euros have been spent on restoration projects. Everybody got a complimentary bus pass with which to explore the city, of which there is much to explore. There are the Gates of Dawn, the Palace of the Grand Dukes, and the notorious Soviet-era Lukiskes Prison, which has morphed into a go-to for hundreds of artists and musicians who have set up their studios in renovated spaces there. Kankles are mightier than the sword.

On Friday, the day after they arrived, the group boarded a chartered bus and went to Palanga for the weekend to lay their jet lag out in the sun. Palanga is a resort town in western Lithuania on the shore of the Baltic Sea. In the height of summer, the sun comes up at 5 AM and doesn’t set until after 10 PM. “It doesn’t get totally dark until 11,” Gabriele said. It is the country’s largest seasonal resort, sporting beaches 11 miles long and 1,000 feet wide, with sand dunes to boot.

Lithuania was the last European country to give up paganism and adopt Catholic Christianity. There used to be a pagan shrine at the base of a hill in Palanga watched over by a beautiful priestess by the name of Birute. She tended the ceremonial fire. One day Kestutis, the Grand Duke of Lithuania, laid eyes on her and decided he had to have her, even though she had promised the sky god Perkunas to remain a virgin as long as she lived. Kestutis wasn’t going to be denied, however, and took her back to Trakai, his fortress home. There was a lavish wedding, but the joy didn’t last long. Kestutis was murdered soon after and buried with his weapons and horses. Once free, Birute went back to Palanga, resumed her duties at the shrine, and when she died was buried at the top of the hill, as close to the stars as she could get.

When the group got back to Vilnius from Palanga on Sunday they had a free night and the next day visited Seimas Palace, which is where the Parliament of the Republic of Lithuania meets. After that they had the rest of the day to themselves. Everybody tried to hit the hay early, although with little success, there being too much to do and see.

Each and every one of them knew that the next day the hard work was going to begin. The hard work coming up was going to be three straight days of practice. “Our practices were at a nearby park deep in the woods,” Gabriele said. “It was an athletic complex with fields, food trucks, and port-a-potties. Our practices were on one of two fields depending on the choreography. One part of one of the fields was super dusty. We had to run the field while dust kicked up, for two hours, running back and forth. When I got done my nose was full of dark boogers. It was tough.”

What was tougher was the eagle-eyed man on the platform calling out instructions. “He was on a platform maybe 30 feet up, with a microphone and loudspeakers,” Gabriele said. “He had written the part of the concert we were going to perform. He had a PhD in folk dancing.” There wasn’t going to be any easy way of explaining away missteps. “He knew every group’s assigned number.”

As the first and second 12-hour days of practice unfolded Gabriele heard less of “Number 37, you’re doing it wrong.” Her group was Number 37. Nobody wanted to be the group whose number was being repeatedly called out. Svyturys kept their eyes open and their feet moving.

“During one dance, which is actually technically easy, but it’s hard to remember, it’s always changing from a circle to a square to a diamond, he had to keep calling out and reminding us of the order,” Gabriele said. “But one group couldn’t get it right, no matter what.”

“Number 13, stop it, you keep doing it wrong!” the man on the platform finally barked. “Get out of here.”

“They had to leave and practice on their own until they got it right,” Gabriele said.

The last day of practice was Thursday. The practice and subsequent dress rehearsal ended close to midnight, a 16-hour day instead of a 12-hour day. “It went so long they ran out of food,” Gabriele said. “I was sick tired. My calves were cramping so bad. I was praying to God, let me get through this. At one point I had to stop. And then the man on the platform pointed at me and said, ‘You need to run!’”

In the end it ended well. The man on the platform announced they wouldn’t have to brush anything up on Friday morning. “Thank you so much for everything you’ve done,” he said. “I really appreciate it. I know I’ve been yelling at you guys, but you have all been fantastic. I love you.”

“It was so heartfelt and moving,” Gabriele said. “ He told us to go out and just dance.”

The theme of the 2024 Centenary Song and Dance Celebration was “May the Green Forest Grow.” It brought together 37,000 artisans, singers, and dancers. The audience for the 14 large scale events during the week was in the hundreds of thousands. Song Day on July 6th featured 400 choirs on the outdoor stage. The performance was in the spirit of the Singing Revolution of 1987-91, when Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania defied their Soviet occupiers by breaking out into native songs. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 everybody sang “Hit the Road Jack.” They put some oomph into it by finishing with “and don’t you come back no more, no more.”

“The event shows our resilience and that music unites people and inspires them to break free from repressive regimes and fight for their country’s sovereignty,” said Saulius Liausa, director of the Lithuanian Song Celebration. “We had to fight for freedom to preserve our cultural identity, traditions, and language.”

Friday was Dance Day. Svytutys performed at 1 PM and again at 9 PM. “The dance concert was close to where we were staying,” Gabriele said. “We walked there in our costumes.” The were many other groups walking to the venue as well. The streets were soon overflowing with them. “There were thousands of us.” The groups gathered and waited on adjoining fields for their turn to dance in the stadium. At the event groups rotated in and out during the two-hour shows. Video cameras on the ground and in the sky recorded the carousal.

“My mom went to the show,” Gabriele said. “She said it was OK, but when she saw the replay on LRT TV, she said it was amazing.”

On Saturday morning a parade of the singing and dancing participants walked the several miles to the Song Day venue. “All of us had our full costumes on,” Gabriele said. “It was very cool.” The participants included children, teenagers, adults, and older folks. “My uncle lives in Lithuania, on a farm. He’s in his late 60s but came to Vilnius to dance.”

When the last song faded away late Saturday night, the 2024 Centenary Song and Dance Celebration was officially over. The participants from 21 countries said their goodbyes and went their own way. The Australians had the longest flight home. They smeared their crackers with Vegemite, the down under by-product paste.

“History is pretty clear today,” Saulius Liausa said “Our festival was the only way to keep the tradition alive, to not forget.” It kept the cultural fires burning through the war years and the occupation years. The flames reached free Lithuanian communities everywhere. A fair highlighting those communities around the world was sponsored by the Vilnius Town Hall Square.

The song and dance showcase on native soil happens every four years. The next one is in 2028. Lithuanian folk dancers worldwide are tapping their toes and waiting for their cue. Gabriele is sprucing up her old school costume and going back to practice.

“Hell’s Kitchen”

New York City, 1956. Times Square, Coney Island, and the World Series. A high profile Mob contract in the works. Stan Riddman, a private eye working the edges, stirs up the shadows.

A crying of Lot 49 Publication

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Burning Down the House

July 1, 2026 Edward Staskus Leave a comment

By Ed Staskus

My father was born in the village of Vadzgiris in 1892. Lithuania had been under the thumb of the Russians for a hundred years. They had wiped the name of the country off the map. They instead called the land the “Western Provinces.” They had declared a press ban thirty years earlier that prohibited printing Lithuanian books in the Latin alphabet. Cyrillic script became obligatory, no matter what my father or anybody else said. A large scale crop failure in 1892 led to widespread famine. Migration to North America swelled to a tidal wave after that. That same year the first light bulb in the country was lit in the town of Rietavas. There was at least one small light at the end of the tunnel.

A certificate of baptism makes the birth place and birth year of Antanas Staskevicius, my father, clear as day. That is probably where he grew up, although it is uncertain. He had a younger brother, Juozas, who not wanting to be drafted into the Imperial Russian Army, emigrated to the United States. My father served in the Czar’s army in Saransk. He always said it was in the middle of nowhere, although nobody knew for sure where the middle was. My mother was a native Russian he met there, a school teacher, pretty as a postcard. They started a family in 1916, starting with my two sisters.

When the Bolsheviks took over from the Czar they sent many military officers to jail. Since my father was a Lithuanian they let him return to his country. In those days Lithuanians who returned from the Russian Imperial Army were not looked upon favorably. Their Russian wives were even less popular. But as time went on people got used to them.

At first, my father lived in Siauliai. Later on, he lived in Kaunas. Around 1930 he went to work in Panevezys for a short time. I spoke only Russian until I was four or five years old, no matter that my mother spoke Lithuanian very well, without an accent. Although she was Russian Orthodox, we went to a Catholic Church, acceding to my father’s wishes. I would occasionally go to the Russian Orthodox Church with my mother, but only when my father was away from home.

I was born in Siauliai, not far from the Hill of Crosses, in 1924, even though we did not live there at the time. After I was born my father moved to Kaunas. He became the Director of the Department of Citizen Protection there. Later on we moved back to Siauliai. My father was appointed the Chief of Police. He used to wear a fancy uniform when he would attend events. It was always exciting to see him in it. He was in charge of the entire region as well as the police department.

I remember Police Captain Kurpius. He had a big face and a small mouth. He would stop at our house after duty hours to eat and smoke. He and my father drank vodka and sang all night. My mother plucked a kankles while they sang. Both of my sisters were friends with the daughters of the man who was the director of the Teacher’s College. They dreamt about becoming teachers like our mother.

Sometime in 1938 or 1939 my father was transferred from Siauliai to Panevezys and then to Zarasai. Augustinas Voldemaras lived in Zarasai at that time. He had been banished there after briefly serving as the country’s first prime minister. He was a stubborn man with a quick temper. He often came to our house. I used to go with my father to the sauna where I rubbed Augustinas Voldemaras’ lower back for him. When he felt better he used to run out of the sauna and jump into an ice hole.

I did not finish grade school. I went for only two grades since I did not find it difficult. My father hired a tutor for me and two of my friends. The tutor helped us prepare for the high school exams. We passed the exams and started high school. We were the youngest in the class. Since I attended three different high schools, in Siauliai, Panevezys, and Zarasai, I could not remember the names of my classmates very well.

My father had a good friend in Kaunas who was a certain Mr. Dagys. My mother was good friends with his wife. When they would come to our house I used to have to hold the door open for them. I did not like to kiss the hands of married women, which at that time was customary, but I had to kiss her hand. One time I cut my lip on a diamond ring she was wearing.

We had an open air Chevrolet Eagle Cabriolet. When the famous pilot Feliksas Vaitkus, the second Lithuanian after Darius and Girenas to fly across the Atlantic Ocean, came to Panevezys. I went with our driver, who called the car “Stovebolt” after its engine, and my father to the train station to meet him. I was on the edge of my seat being in the car with the aviator. Later in the day he met with the public and gave a long speech I didn’t listen to.

When we lived in Zarasai we had a driver who was a police officer. He wore a peaked visor cap with a cockade fixed to the front. My father and I lived there by ourselves for a year. My mother was supposed to join us as soon as we were established, but she never came. The year passed quickly and then the Russians came. My father returned to Siauliai, since he, like all officials, was relieved of his duties.

He spent most of his time in the hinterland instead of the city. Our farm in Dainai was a model farm. In the summer excursions would come from all over to see our land and operation. We had all the newest tools and farming equipment, both cutting and sowing implements. We had many cows and an orchard of yellow Alyvinis apples.

After the Russians came our car was taken away. In 1940 the mood was very bad. We had a fear of the future in the pit of our stomachs. My father was seized by the Russians a week before the mass deportations of 1941. They took him as he was, just the shirt on his back and wearing sandals. Three men came in a passenger car. They asked my father for some help. They claimed they were having car trouble, or maybe they needed water. My father walked over to them and they shoved him into the back seat of the car. I was not at home. I was taking my exam at the high school. My mother called the high school. I sped home right away on my bicycle, but there wasn’t anything I could do.

Later, my mother and I went to the prison and took clothes and food for my father. We weren’t allowed see him. We drove to the NKVD office in the County Police Headquarters where we were told to go home. No one explained anything to us. I never saw him again. He was sent to a slave labor camp in Siberia and starved to death in 1942.

The mass deportations began in June. When they started my mother and I hid in the woods. When things got better we went home. One of my sisters was living in Vilnius. My mother said to me, “Go to Vilnius and warn her to watch out for herself.” Soon after I got there a neighbor called and told me to come back. He said my mother might be arrested. She was hiding in his root cellar. In the meantime, the Germans went to war with the Russians, occupying the country, and it was toilsome trying to return. No one was allowed to travel without permission, but I got lucky. Someone who had been a policeman in Siauliai was working with the Germans in Vilnius. At one time he had worked for my father. He was taking care of travel documents. I don’t remember his name, but I went to him, he introduced me to a German officer, and I got permission to travel by train. I returned to Siauliai.

After my father was sent to Siberia I had to manage the farm. I knew almost nothing about farming, even though I thought I knew in the fall the fields had to be plowed. I told the farm hands who had not run away, “Go plow the fields.” A neighbor saw them and ran over and said, “What the hell are you doing? You are plowing next year’s clover under.”

I hurt my hand during the war. I had ridden out with a horse drawn mower to cut hay. I saw that rain was coming. I tried to speed things up. Instead of sitting down as you should I walked beside the horses so that I could get them to pull the mower faster. As I was encouraging them I tripped and fell on the blades. The horses stopped. My right hand was almost cut off. The farmhand who was helping me ran over and, seeing my mangled hand, fainted. Meanwhile, my hand was hanging there and I was losing blood. I ran a kilometer to the prisoner camp where Red Army troops were being held, which was also in Dainai, for medical help. An ambulance came and rushed me to the hospital.

My mother was arrested and deported in 1944. She spent twelve years in Siberia. Later, after Stalin’s death, she was released, but was not allowed to return to Dainai or Siauliai. Nobody said why. She was moved into a cinder block apartment in Silute near the Curonian Lagoon.

I fled Lithuania when the Russians came back. I escaped with a company of Werhmacht leaving the Red Army prison camp in their Opel Blitz trucks. Their aim was to get to East Prussia. They were in a big hurry and only gave me a few minutes to gather what I could. We were a mile away when I looked back. I could see black smoke from our house and barn that the Russians had set on fire.

I went to Germany where I stayed for five years. At first I lived in a DP camp. I worked wherever I could doing whatever I could, I sold chocolate and cigarettes and shoes on the black market. I found legitimate work with the International Refugee Organization in 1948. I left for Sudbury, Ontario in 1949. I worked in a nickel mine, thousands of feet deep, working there for nearly seven years. There were many expatriates holding down jobs in Canada. Some cut down forests, which was hard work. Some went into the mines, which was dangerous work, but for men who barely spoke English and who did not have any specialty, the pay was good. I worked as a black powder man. I worked laying tracks for trains that carried the ore. Eventually I got an easier job driving underground tractors.

It was In Sudbury that I made a family. My three children were born there. My wife, Angele Jurgelaityte, was from southwestern Lithuania, from a small farm near Gizai, five kilometers from Marijampole. We met in Nuremberg where she was a nurse. She helped operate on my hand, which needed two more operations to restore its use to me.

After five years of living in Sudbury we started planning where we would live next. Most of the Lithuanians in the city were looking for better prospects. Many left for Montreal and Toronto, others to Chicago and Pittsburgh. We all started to go our separate ways. When I was living in Germany I had applied for a visa to live in the United States, in case the prospect ever arose. When the opportunity came we sold our house in Sudbury. We moved to Cleveland, Ohio in late 1957 with our children. My older sister and her husband were living there.

At the time I fled Lithuania my younger sister was forced to stay behind. We had all fled separately. She was unable to evade the Russians and get across the border. She stayed locked up behind the Iron Curtain for the rest of her life.

When I went back to Lithuania for the first time in 1979 I looked for our farm. I hadn’t seen it for thirty five years. Our house and barn were gone. There was a collective on most of the land. I found an old woman who remembered my parents. She briefly told me some things. She told me that in 1957 my mother searched for me by printing an announcement through the Red Cross in the American Lithuanian newspaper Darbininkas. A priest from Siauliai, Father Justinas Lapis, helped us to make the connection with my mother. He had looked after her welfare when she returned to Lithuania from Siberia.

After arriving in Lithuania I was determined to see her, no matter what the restrictions were. At first I tried to travel secretly to Silute, but was stopped in Ukmerge and ordered to go back to Vilnius. The next day I got permission to go for one day and was able to get a car. They charged me two hundred American dollars for it, which was highway robbery, especially since the car was of such poor quality. I visited with my mother and we spent three hours together. The car broke down on our way back to Vilnius.

From our former farm the city of Siauliai is five kilometers away. It was a busy city, or so it seemed to me after we went there from Panevezys, which seemed to be a very quiet city. Everyone used to say that Siauliai was known for its hooligans, although I didn’t see any. I did not like Siauliai when I lived there. The requirements of the high school there were not strict. I didn’t like that. The high school in Panevezys was very strict. The director would personally make sure everyone was in uniform, that their collars were buttoned and ties knotted, whereas the high school in Siauliai was not strict about the dress code, at all.

After a few years in the United States my wife and I shortened our surname from Staskevicius to something easier to pronounce. Since I worked in international business it was bothersome always explaining my family name to foreigners. I worked for TRW for seventeen years, selling auto parts worldwide. I was a Manager for International Service and traveled all over South America. Later they closed our division and gave the older workers pensions. In 1984 | collaborated to start the Taupa Credit Union in Cleveland. I worked there for six years before leaving. I became an international trade consultant and started traveling to Lithuania often. We tried to buy and sell a number of things, not all of them successfully.

One thing, furniture plugs, was successful. In the United States there are only a few companies that manufacture them because you need good birch trees. Lithuania has plenty of good birch trees. We negotiated there for two years. We looked for partners in Kazlu Ruda, a city near Marijampole, and Panevezys, to no avail. We finally found a group in Elektrenai, in southeastern Lithuania, to partner with and who we successfully began doing business with in the United States.

Birch trees lose their leaves in early fall in the Baltics, but they keep their roots intact year after year. Winter storms in the land of forests make the trees dig deep to stay the course. They are a pioneer species. They are the first to regrow after wildfires and ecological disturbances. When I set foot in North America I had to make a new home far from home. I had to carry my roots with me. I planted them where I landed, which was all I could do.

“Hell’s Kitchen”

New York City, 1956. Times Square, Coney Island, and the World Series. A high profile Mob contract in the works. Stan Riddman, a private eye working the edges, stirs up the shadows.

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

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