Rocket From the Tombs

September 1, 2023 Edward Staskus Leave a comment

By Ed Staskus

It was sometime during the Me Decade that I discovered I was poor as a church mouse. I owned lots of dog-eared books, some clothes, and a car I didn’t dare drive. I didn’t own an alarm clock. I didn’t have any money in the bank because I didn’t have a bank account. I was living at the Plaza Apartments on Prospect Ave., where the rent was more than reasonable. I got by doing odd jobs and taking advantage of opportunities, although I was far from being a capitalist.

The Plaza was in a neighborhood called Upper Prospect. There were about thirty architecturally and historically significant buildings there, built between 1838 and 1929. The Plaza was one of the buildings. Upper Prospect had long benefitted from Ohio’s first streetcar line that connected it to the downtown business district. Those days were long gone.

In the 1870s Prospect Ave. advanced past Erie St., which is now E. 9^th St., and kept going until it reached E. 55^th St. That’s where it stopped. “Lower Prospect, closer into downtown, went commercial long ago, but Upper Prospect stayed residential longer,” says Bill Barrow, historian at the Michael Schwartz Library at Cleveland State University. Lower Prospect is where lots of downtown entertainment is now, including Rocket Arena, where the Cleveland Cavs follow the bouncing ball, and the House of Blues, where music fans have a ball.

The Winton Hotel was built in 1916 on the far side of E. 9^th St. It was nothing if not grand. It was renamed the Carter Hotel in 1931, suffered a major fire in the 1960s, but was renovated and renamed Carter Manor. I never set foot in it. The Ohio Bell Building went up in the 1920s before the Terminal Tower on Public Square was built. When it was finished it became the tallest structure in the city. I never set foot in it, either. It was the building that Cleveland’s teenaged creators of Superman had the Man of Steel leap over in a single bound. The cartoon strip first appeared in their Glenville High School student newspaper, which was the Daily Planet.

Before Superman ever got his nickname, the first Man of Steel was Doc Savage. There were dozens of the adventure books written by Lester Dent. When I was a child I read every one I could get my hands on. Doc Savage always saved the day. Nothing ever slowed him down, not kryptonite, not anything.

In the 1970s Prospect Ave. wasn’t a place where anybody wanted to raise children. Nobody even wanted to visit the place with their children in tow. The street was littered with trash, dive bars, hookers, and bookstores like the Blue Bijou. There was heroin in the shadows and plasma centers that opened first thing in the morning. The junkies knew all about needles and got paid in cash for their plasma donations.

The Plaza was around 70 years old when I moved in. There was ivy on the brick walls and shade trees in the courtyard. There were day laborers, retirees, college students, latter day beatniks, scruffy hippies, artists, musicians, and some no-goods living there. “The people who lived in the building during my days there helped shaped my artistic and moral being,” Joanie Deveney said. “We drank and partied, but our endeavors were true, sincere, and full of learning.” Everybody called her Joan of Art.

Not everybody was an artist or musician. “But anybody could try to be,” Rich Clark said. “We were bartenders and beauticians and bookstore clerks with something to say. There was an abiding respect for self-expression. We encouraged each other to try new things and people dabbled in different forms. Poets painted, painters made music, and musicians wrote fiction.”

The avant-garage band Pere Ubu called it home. Their synch player Allen Ravenstine owned the building with his partner Dave Bloomquist. “I was a kid from the suburbs,” Allen said. “When we bought the building in the red-light district in 1969, we did everything from paint to carpentry. We tried to restore it unit by unit.”

The restoration work went on during the day. The parties went on during the night. They went on long into the night. “I remember coming home at four in the morning,” Larry Collins said. “There would be people in the courtyard drinking beer and playing music. We watched the hookers and the customers play hide-and-seek with undercover vice cops. In the morning, I would wake up to see a huge line of locals waiting in line in front of the plasma center.”

When I lived there, I attended Cleveland State University on and off, stayed fit by walking since my car was unfit, and hung around with my friends. Most of us didn’t have TV’s. We entertained ourselves. I worked for Minuteman whenever I absolutely had to. The jobs I got through them were the lowest-paying worse jobs on the face of the planet, but beggars can’t be choosers.

I spent a couple of weeks on pest control, crawling into and out of tight spaces searching for rats, roaches, and termites. My job was to kill them with poison. The bugs ran and hid when they saw me coming. I tried to not breathe in the white mist. I spent a couple of days roofing, hoping to not fall off sloping elevated surfaces that were far hotter than the reported temperature of the day. The work was mostly unskilled, which suited me, but I got to hate high places. My land legs were what kept me upright. I didn’t want to fall off a roof and break either one of them

I passed the day one summer day jack hammering, quitting near the end of my shift. I thought the jack hammer was trying to kill me. “If you don’t go back, don’t bother coming back here,” the Minuteman boss told me. “Take a hike, pal,” I said, walking out. I wasn’t worried about alienating the temporary labor agency. Somebody was always hiring somebody to do the dirty work.

The Plaza was four stories tall and a basement below, a high and low world. Some of the residents were lazy as bags of baloney while others were hard-working. Some didn’t think farther ahead than their next breath while others thought life was a Lego world for the making. There was plenty in sight to catch one’s eye.

“I had a basement apartment in the front,” Nancy Prudic said. “The junkies sat on the ledge and partied all night long. But the Plaza was a confluence of creative minds from many fields. It was our own little world. Besides artists, there were architects and urban planners.”

Pete Laughner was a hard-working musician. He was from Bay Village, an upper middle class suburb west of Cleveland. He wrote songs, sang, and played guitar. He was “the single biggest catalyst in the birth of Cleveland’s alternative rock scene in the mid-1970s,” Richard Unterberger said. He led the bands Friction and Cinderella Backstreet. He co-founded Rocket from the Tombs. “They were a mutant papa to punk rock as well as spawning a number of famous and infamous talents, all packed into one band,” Dave Thomas said. After the Rockets crashed and burned, Pete teamed with Dave to form Pere Ubu.

Dave Thomas was nicknamed the Crocus Behemoth because he was ornery and overweight. He went against the grain by occasionally performing in a suit. He was a tenor who sometimes sang and others times muttered, whistled, and barked. “If nobody likes what you do, and nobody is ever going to like what you do, and you’ll never be seen by anyone, you do what you want to do,” he said. He commandeered the street in front of the Plaza for middle of the day open air concerts. “He never let the lack of any musical training get in his way,” said Tony Maimone, Pere Ubu’s bass player.

Pere Ubu’s debut pay-to-get-in show was at the Viking Saloon in late 1975. Their flyer said, “New Year’s Eve at the Viking. Another Go-damn Night. Another year for me and you, another year with nothing to do.” Pete had a different take on it. “We’re pointing toward the music of the 80s.”

When he wasn’t making his stand on a riser, Pete was writing about rock and roll for Creem, a new monthly music magazine which was as sincere and irreverent as his guitar playing. The magazine coined the term “punk rock” in 1971. “Creem nailed it in a way that nobody else did,” said Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth.

Pete played with the Mr. Stress Blues Band in 1972 when he was 20 years old. They played every Friday and Saturday at the Brick Cottage. Mr. Stress called the squat building at Euclid Ave. and Ford Rd. the “Sick Brick.” When he did everybody called for another round. Monique, the one and only bartender, ran around like a madwoman. “The more you drink, the better we sound,” Mr. Stress said and picked up his mouth organ.

The harmonica man was a TV repairman by day. The lanky Pete was in disrepair both day and night. He wasn’t a part-time anything. He wasn’t like other sidemen. His guitar playing was raw and jagged. While the band was doing one thing, he seemed to be doing another thing.

“He only ever had three guitar lessons,” his mother said. Pete was in bands by his mid-teens. “He was my boyfriend when we were 15,” Kathy Hudson said. “He still had his braces. He was with the Fifth Edition. They were playing at the Bay Way one time and he wanted them to bust up their equipment like The Who. The others weren’t down with it.”

“He was so energetic and driven, but his energy couldn’t be regulated,” said Schmidt Horning, who played in the Akron band Chi Pig. “It could make it hard to play with him. He was so anxious and wouldn’t take a methodical approach.”

Charlotte Pressler was the woman Pete married. “From 1968 to 1975 a small group of people were evolving styles of music that would, much later, come to be called ‘New Wave’. But the whole system of New Wave interconnections which made it possible for every second person on Manhattan’s Lower East Side to become a star did not exist in Cleveland,” she said. “There were no stars in Cleveland. Nobody cared what they were doing. If they did anything at all, they did it for themselves. They adapted to those conditions in different ways. Some are famous. Some are still struggling. One is dead, my Pete.”

Not long before everything fell apart Pete stepped into a photo booth in the Cleveland Arcade, one of the earliest indoor shopping arcades in the United States. He was wearing a black leather jacket and looked exhausted. His eyes had the life of broken glass in them. He sent the pictures and a note to a friend. “Having a wonderful time. Hope you never find yourself here.”

He played his kind of music at Pirate’s Cove in the Flats, along with Devo and the Dead Boys. “We’re trying to go beyond those bands like the James Gang and the Raspberries, drawing on the industrial energy here,” Pete said. He played at the Viking Saloon, not far from the Greyhound station, until it burned down in 1976. Dave Thomas was a bouncer there, keeping law and order more than just an idle threat. He wasn’t the Crocus Behemoth for nothing.

“I’m drinking myself to death,” Pete wrote to a friend of his in 1976. “No band, no job, running out of friends. It’s easy, you start upon waking with Bloody Mary’s and beer, then progress through the afternoon to martinis, and finally cognac or Pernod. When I decided I wanted to quit I simply bought a lot of speed and took it and then drank only about a case of beer a day, until one day I woke up and knew something was wrong, very wrong. I couldn’t drink. I couldn’t eat. And then the pain started, slowly like a rat eating at my guts until I couldn’t stand it anymore and was admitted to the hospital.”

The rat was pancreatitis. If you lose a shoe at midnight you’re drunk. Pete lost shoes like other people lost socks in the dryer. He didn’t need any shoes however, where he was going. It was the beginning of the end of him. It didn’t take long. He wouldn’t or couldn’t listen to his doctor’s orders. He went back to his old pal, which was booze.

“Pete could do whatever he wanted to do,” said Tony Mamione. “He was instrumental in crafting the Pere Ubu sound, but, even at such an early age, had a deep understanding of all kinds of music.” Tony and Pete met when they lived across the hall from each other on the third floor of the Plaza Apartments. “I had just moved in and would play my bass and Pete heard it through the walls and knocked on my door. We started talking and he went back and grabbed his guitar and some beer, and we started jamming right away.”

Pete was as good if not better on the piano than the guitar, even though the guitar was his tried and true. One day he found a serviceable piano at a bargain price and bought it. He and Tony picked it up to take back to the Plaza. “Here I was driving his green Chevy van down Cedar Ave. and there he was in the back of the van rocking out on the piano,” Tony said. “He was so special, a pure musician.” After they dragged, muscled, and coaxed the piano up to the third floor, they had some beers and the next jam session started.

“I want to do for Cleveland what Brian Wilson did for California and Lou Reed did for New York,” Pete said in 1974. “I’m the guy between the Fender and the Gibson. I want a crowd that knows a little bit of the difference between the sky and the street. It’s all those kids out there standing at the bar, talking trash, waiting for an anthem.”

They would have to wait for somebody else. Pete Laughner died in 1977 a month before his 25^th birthday. He was one year younger than me when he met his maker. He didn’t die at the Plaza Apartments. Neither of us was there anymore. He died in his sleep at his parent’s home in Bay Village. There’s nowhere to fall when your back is against the wall, except maybe where you got up on your feet in the first place.

Ed Staskus posts monthly on 147 Stanley Street http://www.147stanleystreet.com, Made in Cleveland http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com, Atlantic Canada http://www.redroadpei.com, and Lithuanian Journal http://www.lithuanianjournal.com.

A New Thriller by Ed Staskus

“Cross Walk“

“A once upon a crime whodunit.” Barron Cannon, Adventure Books

“Captures the vibe of mid-century NYC.” Sam Winchell, Beyond Fiction

Available on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CRPSFPKP

Late summer and early autumn. New York City. A Hell’s Kitchen private eye. The 1956 World Series. President Eisenhower at the opening game. A killer in the dugout.

Baltic Place

King of the Cowboys

September 1, 2023 Edward Staskus Leave a comment

By Ed Staskus

I was three years and some months old before I got my first good look at Sudbury. I didn’t know it had started life as a railroad outpost in the later nineteenth century before rapidly expanding when vast mineral resources were discovered. I didn’t know what it had grown up to be seventy years later. I knew it was springtime on our street. When I looked around, I thought it was the best place in the world, a place where everything was new.

My brother had been born in the fall, and had been crying at night lately, keeping us all awake. My father was a miner, working day shifts for two weeks and then night shifts for two weeks. He was one of the explosives men, setting black powder charges a mile down. He needed his nerves to be rock solid. He needed to sleep like a baby. He didn’t need crying rattling around in his brain.

At first, my mother thought it was a passing thing. When it didn’t pass, she took to sleeping in the living room, on the sofa, with my brother on the floor beside her in a small rocking cradle. Whenever he started crying, she reached down and rocked him, settling him down. She didn’t get much sleep, although my father and I got all the shuteye we needed.

One day, when my father was at work, and my mother had an appointment with the family doctor to check my brother’s tonsils, my godfather Joe Dzenkaitis showed up to babysit me for the afternoon. He was on the night shift in the nickel mines and had time to kill. He showed up on a 1948 Vincent Black Shadow motorcycle.

“I borrowed it from my neighbor,” he explained.

Most of the Lithuanian immigrants who came hat in hand to Sudbury in the late 1940s and early 1950s worked in the mines. They got out of the black hole that Europe was for them after World War Two and ended up in another black hole. Most of them were saving every penny they could so they wouldn’t have to work in the mines a minute more than they had to. Many of them had clawed enough cash together to buy their own homes, but didn’t own a car, a motorcycle, or even a bicycle.

The Vincent had a black tank and a black frame. The chrome pipes were nickel chrome steel. The nickel came from Sudbury. The city south of North Bay in Ontario sat on top of a big hole in the ground overflowing with ore. Some people called it the ‘Valley.’ Others called it the ‘Basin.’ Still others simply called it ‘Paydirt.’ An asteroid smashed into the spot in Canada hundreds of millions of years ago with a cargo of vital metals. Nickel took the blue ribbon.

During the Korean War, which had ended the year before, nickel was regulated. Whenever there was combat anywhere in the world Sudbury boomed. Nickel was vital for making modern man-killing warfare. When the fighting stopped Sudbury went back to scuffling. It wasn’t boom or bust, but it was a one-basket economy, so it was boom or bust.

After World War Two the open pits were almost exhausted and new underground mines were being dug. Nickel was being used for more and more civilian purposes. Technologically advanced smelters started seeing the light of day. While Sudbury slowly progressed from being one of the most polluted cities in North America, cleaning itself up, I was just getting my legs under me. My friends and I played on the outcroppings behind our house all the time and never noticed the ever-present haze of ash and smoke. We played Man on the Moon.

Astronauts from the United States played Man on the Moon on the rocky wastelands surrounding Sudbury in 1971. They were part of the Apollo 16 mission. More American astronauts trained outside of town a year later, for Apollo 17, for the moon landing in December of 1972. They were practicing for the real thing.

When I was born in 1951, I didn’t see much of my hometown at first. I was homesick for my old home, which had been warm and fluid. After I was squeezed out into the real world I saw a lot of my crib and the kitchen. It was lively when my parents and their friends had kitchen parties at our house. I only spoke Lithuanian until the spring of 1954, when I started meeting kids my own age on the street. They all spoke English and French although none of them spoke French among themselves. English was their language on the street. They said French was for talking to girls and their parents.

The Vincent my godfather was riding was plenty fast enough, but it wasn’t the Black Lightning, which was the racing version of the Black Shadow. Every steel part on the Lightning that could be remade in aluminum had been remade in aluminum. Everything not essential was removed, reducing the weight by almost a hundred pounds. It had a single racing seat and rear footrests. In 1948 Rollie Free broke the motorcycle land speed record riding a Black Lightning on the Bonneville Salt Flats. He did it wearing a bathing suit, laying like a swimmer flat on his stomach, his legs dangling off the back end, and hanging on to the handlebars for dear life. When he came to a stop, he was coated tip-to-toe with sand and salt.

I sat on the motorcycle behind my godfather, who I called Uncle Joe. I couldn’t get my arms around him and had to hang tight to his shirt. He burped the bike down Stanley Street to Elm Street and took a left towards downtown. My friends and I had been to an arcade and ridden Roy Roger’s horse Trigger, but none of us had ever been on a real motorcycle. Roy was “King of the Cowboys.” He was from Ohio, where my family was going to end up in a few years. The only cowboys I ever saw in Cleveland, Ohio rode ponies in parades.

We lived on a new stretch of Stanley Street. Houses were being built as fast as could be because Sudbury was the most congested city in Canada. The Dominion Bureau of Statistics reported there were “42,410 people jammed into 9,450 units.” More than a third of the housing was officially designated as “overcrowded.”

We glided past the Regent Theatre where my parents went to see movies on weekends. My father learned to speak English in Lithuania, but my mother had lived on an out-of-the-way family farm of pigs and sugar beets near the East Prussian border. The native lingo was all she knew. The movies were a way for her to learn English. A twin bill was showing “Creature from the Black Lagoon” and “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers.”

The movie house was operated by Herbert Sutherland. By the time I was old enough to go see movies it was home to a colony of rats. It got so it was hard to tell if somebody was screaming because of the monsters on the screen or because of a rat biting their ankles. Herb Sutherland found several homeless cats and invited them to make his theater their home. The city sent him a letter saying, “We do not feel the use of cats is sufficient to eliminate the menace.” He threw the hired guns out and set out poison, making the problem disappear.

We went past the new Sudbury Arena which had replaced the old Palace Rink the year I was born. Uncle Joe rode carefully, watching for mud, threading the needle. The Junction Creek overflowed its banks every year, flooding the northern and central parts of Sudbury. We rode around the General Hospital where I was born. Outside the Grotto of Our Lady of Lourdes we stopped for ice cream cones. I peeked over my shoulder for spirits, saintly or otherwise.

Frederic Romanet du Caillaud, known as the Count of Sudbury, had a six-foot tall 1500-pound bronze statue of the Virgin Mary erected at the mouth of the grotto in 1907. “Queen of the Gauls” was inscribed on the statue. At first, an Italian family by the name of Drago took care of it, wiping off grime and bird shit every spring and autumn. In the 1950s the Rosary Club was formed. Omer Naqult. a local barber and devout Catholic, watched over the pilgrimage site.

One year earlier almost 10,000 people had gathered at the site, coming from all the various parishes of the Sault-Ste-Marie diocese. New lighting was installed to light up the shrine at night. At the start of the next summer more than 10,000 residents of Sudbury took part in the procession of Corpus Christi that ended up at the grotto. My parents were not able to go to the parade, no matter how devoted to Catholicism they were, so I didn’t know anything about it at the time.

The statue was an inch or two shorter than Uncle Joe, who wore his hair wavy and was strong as an ox. He could bend nails with his fingers. He and his wife Brone didn’t have any kids, but I saw plenty of them, anyway. My parents had a good-sized living room, and our house was where card playing, dancing, and drinking booze took place on many weekends. There was always a spread of Baltic foodstuffs.

We set off for Ramsey Lake. Before there ever was a Sudbury the natives called the lake Bitimagamasing, which means “water that lies on the side of the hill.” Everybody agreed Ramsey was easier to pronounce and that is what everybody called it. Everybody also agreed the lake was dead as a doornail. Sewage from Minnow Lake drained into Ramsey Lake. Open roast emissions had been going on for so long and led to so much pollution that the lake, which had few water flow outlets, had given up the ghost. Even though it was still the largest lake in the world located entirely within the boundaries of a single city, it was a shell of its former self.

There weren’t many fish in the lake. By the 1950s, despite three decades of persistent stocking, angling was still bad. Besides the pollution, fishermen had long since been dynamiting for fish, wiping out some species like bass. When Lands and Forest biologist R. E. Whitefield went survey netting, it took him four full days to catch five pike and one yellow perch. Lake trout were re-stocked in 1952, but when they disappeared, that was the end of stocking for the next twenty-five years.

Before my father showed up to sweep her off her feet, my mother’s Canadian boyfriend often took her out on the lake in his speedboat, until the day he started showing off, racing and zig zagging, and she fell off the back of it without him noticing. An evil-looking northern pike watched her bob up to the surface. By the time her boyfriend thought to look for her she was floating on her back waiting for him, hoping the weight of her wet clothes wouldn’t drag her under.

The lake is named after William Ramsey, who was the chief of a surveillance party in the late 1800s and got into the weeds in heavy fog. After finding himself he named it Lost Lake. Others more civic minded decided it would be better to name it after him but misspelled his name, calling it Lake Ramsay. Forty years later somebody noticed the mistake and corrected the spelling.

When we got to the lake, I begged Uncle Joe to let me go swimming, but there was a greasy purple substance on the surface of the water as far out as we could see. “It’s probably some poisonous waste, or something Inco is up to,” he said. I had no idea what Inco was, but I had heard “What are you up to?” from my mother often enough to know it couldn’t be anything good. We went for a walk instead. When I got tired my godfather carried me sitting on his shoulders, my hands gripping his thick head of hair.

It was an early fall day and trees were starting to change color. There weren’t many of them, but the yellows and reds got me going and I begged my uncle to take me to a forest. He said there weren’t any, but finally relented when I wouldn’t leave it alone. We rolled slowly out of town on the Vincent. Uncle Joe flat-hatted across the hinterland.

It turned out my godfather was right. There were hardly any trees anywhere, at all. The first thing to happen to them was the Great Chicago Fire in the 1870s. Lumber camps popped up all over Ontario providing wood for the American city’s reconstruction. Then the ore discoveries and smelting got going, the fires releasing sulfur, which combined with water forms sulfuric acid, leading to acid rain. Saplings struggling to reforest the landscape didn’t have a chance and died by the millions. The hinterland of Sudbury looked like a wasteland by the 1940s.

Our street in the city had trees and grass and gardens but the only vegetation I saw outside the city was wild blueberry patches and paper birch. What other trees there were, were giving it their best shot against long odds. They were like the crippled kid on Pine Street we sometimes played with, although never for long. He couldn’t hop, skip, or run. He couldn’t keep up with us. He sat under a tree watching.

When my godfather checked his watch, he suddenly said we had to go. We raced back to Sudbury, to Stanley Street, to our house. My father wasn’t home from work, yet. Neither was my mother.

“When she asks you what we did today, just tell her we went sightseeing, OK?” Uncle Joe said.

“OK,” I said.

After my mother came home, I told her we had a great time, and while she and my godfather had coffee on the front porch, I watched my baby brother crawl around in the back yard. He was making progress, gurgling rather than crying. Our street dead-ended in a dark face of pitted rock. I was forbidden to climb it because it was steep, even though I had already gone up and down it many times with my friends. Sometimes rules are just a moot point.

When my friends ran into our front yard after dinner and asked me where I had been all day, I told them all about it, all the places I had been to, and how Sudbury was bigger, better, and more exciting than I had ever imagined. After that, Stanley Street was our world, but we couldn’t wait to see more of the world. We ran up and down the street that evening pretending to be riding motorcycles. The sunset was a gleaming red and orange. We were spent and sat down on a big rock watching night happen. When my mother put me to bed, saying I looked tired, I slept like the rock of ages.