By Ed Staskus
I was taken aback the day my mother told me that, other than the two-week sun and sand Lithuanian youth camp in Wasaga Beach, and our one-week Boy Scout camp at Pymatuning State Park, I would be working most of the summer at the newspaper Dirva. I shouldn’t have been surprised, since my parents believed in the work ethic and worked like a dogs, but I was. She gave me an annoyed look when I blurted out it would screw up my off-from-school plans.
She and I weren’t on the same page, so I kept my dismay to myself. It wouldn’t have helped, anyway. I knew once she told me I would be working at Dirva from the day after Independence Day to Labor Day, I would be working there. My mother’s best friend was Regina Ciuberkiene and Regina’s husband, Jonas, was the editor of Dirva. They had arranged it. Thank God it was only part-time. I would be home before four and didn’t have to work on Fridays. I was going to be enjoying three-day weekends before I even knew what three-day weekends were.
Before the newspaper Dirva, which means field, was Dirva, it was Santaika, which means peace. Kazys Karpius was the editor then and stayed on the job for thirty years, from the end of World War One through the Great Depression to the end of World War Two, getting the week’s news out without fail. The paper was anti-communist, pro-democracy, and true-blue to the homeland, which was Lithuania.
Kazys Karpius wrote poems, plays, and histories about Lithuania, especially about warding off the Vikings and Teutonic Knights back in the day. The Teutonic Knights were always tramping into the Baltics for plunder and conversions, not their own conversion, but that of the natives they regarded as pagans. The Lithuanians didn’t see eye to eye with the Germans about it, insisting it was none of their business. The Teutonic Knights and Baltic tribes fought with longswords, battles axes, crossbows, maces, picks and war hammers, knives, clubs, slingshots, and hand-to-hand for the fate of their souls.
The first day I slouched my way to work was a sun-drenched summer morning. I was down on Dirva but resigned to the handwriting on the wall. I rode two CTS buses, transferring once, from where we lived off St. Clair Ave. to E. 105th St. and over Liberty Blvd. down to Superior Ave. It was the same two buses and same route I took going to school, to St. George’s, on E. 67th St. and Superior Ave.
Lithuanian immigrants came to Cleveland on the south shore of Lake Erie in two waves, the first one in the late 19th century. They were cheap labor for emerging industries. They wanted their own church and their own newspaper. At the turn of the century Father Joe Jankus threw up a small wooden church near downtown. The next pastor bought the land St. George’s was going to stand on and after it was built Father Vincent Vilkutaitis ran the parish for forty years. His last year was my first year of five years attending school there.
The church was on the top floor of the two-and-a-half story brick building, the grade school on the middle floor, and the community hall on the ground floor, which was partly below ground. Since it was the Atomic Age, and the Cold War was in full swing, the hall doubled as a Nuclear Fallout Shelter. Every few months we had a Civil Defense drill and had to file out of our classes and down to the community hall, where we shuffled around until the drill was over.
If we had somehow survived the atomic blast, even though we all brought our own sandwiches in Jetson and Dudley Do-Right lunch boxes, we would have all slowly starved to death trying to live on crumbs and apple cores. Our movers and shakers in D. C. wouldn’t have been any help, snug in their bunker under the Pentagon.
Jonas Ciuberkis was our neighbor two houses down from where we lived off St. Clair Ave, on the corner of Bartfield and Coronado, in a Polish double my parents had bought with my father’s sister and her family. He was the editor of Dirva, working out of a small office next to the front door. A quiet man, going bald, careful in manner, he was married to a woman fifteen-some years his junior, a woman who had given him three children, and who was fleshy and gregarious. Nobody knew how they made it work.
Regina Ciuberkiene had an opinion about everything and could talk your ear off. It didn’t matter that we were just kids. A little less talking and a little more action is what we believed in. We avoided her. My mother never called her Regina. She called her Ciuberkiene, even to her face. Many of Jonas’s friends called him Janis, which is Latvian for Jonas. He had studied law in Lithuania and worked in Latvia before the war. Their two daughters were either too old or too young for us, but their son, Arunas, was just right and we horsed around with him.
Dirva was in a drab one-story building on Superior Ave., next to the haunted house that was next to St. George’s. The Lithuanian Hall Society was next door to Dirva. It was where civic and cultural business was done. It was also where there were parties, dances, and heavy drinking. Jonas Ciuberkis wasn’t sure what to do with me, so the first few days I didn’t do anything. After that he obliged me to start cleaning up the mess, starting with the bathroom. My job was to do this, do that, or whatever I was told to do.
The printing press looked like it belonged in a museum. It worked, sort of, but it was my archenemy, always threatening my health and safety. It was a hand-fed flat-bed cylinder press that always sounded like it was in distress. There was metal type for headings and an intertype machine for news and features. When the paper was ready for print, I got the machine rolling, crossing my fingers and hoping for the best. As the copies came off the belt I changed hats, becoming the press-boy who checked for defects. If and when the press got everything done, I became the mail-boy, wrapping the papers in bundles. Then I became the push-boy, carting them to the back door for pick-up.
By the time World War One was over there were almost ten thousand Lithuanians in Cleveland. They had long been sick of the Tsar. It didn’t take them long to get sick of the communists. St. George’s was their church. Dirva was their newspaper. It was put out by the Ohio Lithuanian Publishing Company, which was then run by Apdonas Bartusevicius.
After World War Two boatloads of Lithuanians fleeing Europe made it to Cleveland. Dirva published local, national, and international news, as well as keeping everybody informed about what was going on back in the homeland. We mailed the paper to Detroit and Pittsburgh and other places where there was a community.
Jonas Ciuberkis went out most days for lunch and usually came back smelling like whiskey. One day when he was walking out the door and I was sitting on a crate doing nothing, he waved at me and said, “Ateik.” I must have been daydreaming because he had to say it again before I realized he wanted me to go with him.
He usually wore a white shirt and brown pleated pants. His thin hair was brownish gray. He drove a brown car. The interior was tan Naugahyde, clean and anonymous. No one would ever have suspected he had a vivacious wife. He turned right on Norwood Rd., six blocks later turned right on St. Clair Ave., past the Slovenian National Home, to the Maple Lanes Bowling Alley and Tavern. It took five minutes. He parked on the street and we went in. Nothing was going on in the bowling alley, but he wasn’t going to the bowling alley, anyway. He walked into the bar, checking to see that I was following him, and took a stool.
“Atsisesk,” he said, adding, “Don’t tell your mother.”
I sat down next to him. The bartender stepped up and a heavy shadow fell over me. He was wearing a bow tie and looked like as big as a mattress wearing a bow tie. I couldn’t see around him even if I had wanted to.
Jonas Ciuberkis ordered a shot and a water chaser and asked me what I wanted. I wanted a Coca-Cola. I wanted it to be ice cold. It was in the 90s and humid. There was a big glass jar of pickled eggs at his elbow. He took one for himself and nodded at the jar, looking at me. I said thanks, but no thanks. Pickled eggs are eggs hard boiled, the shell removed, and submerged in a solution of vinegar, salt, spices, and seasonings. The eggs are left in the brine anywhere from one day to several months. They get more and more rubbery the longer they are in the pickling solution.
“They’re Pennsylvania Dutch,” my boss said. “Try a bite.”
Pennsylvania Dutch style means whole beets, onions, vinegar, sugar and salt, as well as cloves and a cinnamon stick are used as the brine. The eggs looked pinkish purple. I took a bite, gingerly. It wasn’t bad. It was far better than the koseliena, which was chopped cow’s tongues and pig’s feet in cold aspic, my mother was always trying to get us to eat. Some food from the old country should have been left in the old country, dead and buried.
When the bartender moved to the side, I saw a large painting right in front of me. It was on the wall above the top shelf of liquor bottles. It was of a half-naked woman reclining on her side on a chaise, looking down on the drinkers, her long blonde hair hanging loose. Her eyes were wide set and her lips pouty red. It was Lili St. Cyr, a burlesque dancer forty-some years ago. She was a stripper known for her cutting-edge performances. One of her most famous tricks was “The Flying G.” While she was doing her striptease, the lights slowly going down, just at the instant when everything went completely dark, a man in the wings with a fishing rod would snag her G-string with a hook and pull it off. Even if you didn’t blink it looked like it had disappeared just like that.
A man who had seen her perform many times all around town painted the mural in 1954. Maple Lanes paid him off in beer and pickled eggs. Above the burlesque queen’s legs in the painting was an English proverb, “A woman is an angel at ten, a saint at fifteen, a devil at forty, and a witch at fourscore.”
Jonas Ciuberkis flicked his eyes at the painting ten and twenty times, while I narrowed my altar boy eyes. I was an acolyte at St. George’s on the side. Some women are like the highway from Akron to Cleveland, no curves. She wasn’t one of those women The boss had another shot, this time with a beer chaser. My mother always told us an apple a day, not a bottle of soda pop, kept the doctor away, so, I turned down more Coca-Cola.
He talked about the “Great Books,” one of his favorite subjects, so I didn’t tell him about my reading habits, which revolved around Fantomas, Doc Savage, and John Carter of Mars. He talked about Lithuania, his other favorite subject, its history, the commies, and how to restore its freedom. I didn’t tell him it was going in one ear and out the other. He talked in a passionate way, but I couldn’t pay attention, so I gave up, and set my sights back on Lili St. Cyr. When I did she started looking familiar. I finally realized, if she were wearing clothes, she looked just like Regina Ciuberkiene, wide set eyes and full mouth, buxom, calves of salami. She wasn’t a spitting image but as close as spit got.
I noticed the black and white portable TV high on the wall in a corner was broadcasting a re-run of a boxing match. The two men were taking small steps, staying on the balls of their feet, and never crossing their legs so they never lost their balance. When one threw a punch the other one rolled with it. They were doing a lot of chopping, throwing punches right and left, but not many chips were flying.
Jonas Ciuberkis had to drag me away and never invited me to Maple Lanes again. Mondays through Thursdays the long summer crawled by, while Fridays through Sundays flew by. I fooled around with my friends during my three-day weekends, rode my bike, and played a boatload of pick-up baseball. By the time my employment was coming to an end, Labor Day fast approaching, I had come to an accommodation with my job. The printing press and I were on speaking terms. I was no longer down on Dirva. I almost enjoyed it. I asked about my paychecks. I hadn’t seen a single one of them.
“I gave them to your father every two weeks,” my boss said.
“Oh,” I said.
I didn’t ask my father about the paychecks. He was a fanatical saver, being an accountant, putting every spare penny in the bank. I thought I knew what he was going to be doing with the money, which was clothes and tuition for school. I didn’t have much money, anyway, so less of it wasn’t going to be a burden.
By the next year we had moved past Five Points to the new Lithuanian neighborhood in North Collinwood. Everybody was moving there because, with urban renewal in full swing, black people were steadily shifting east, moving into our old neighborhood. “We like them less than the hillbillies,” my father said “They’re lazy.” If you weren’t a workaholic my parents thought you were lazy.
The first Lithuanians in Cleveland lived near downtown, but fifty years later were mostly living in the St. Clair – Superior neighborhood around St. George’s. After that they moved near the church of Our Lady of Perpetual Help, off of E. 185th St. Most Lithuanians are Roman Catholic, although some are Lutherans, and a few are Jewish. None are pagans anymore. A small group of Cleveland’s Lithuanians broke off to live among working-class Poles on the south side, even though there is no love lost between Poles and Lithuanians.
I enrolled in St. Joseph’s High School when the time came. It was where E. 185th St. intersected with Lakeshore Blvd. It was an all-boy’s school. I took a peek at Dirva now and then, but when classes were on all I read were my schoolbooks. I read Doc Savage adventure books on weekends. There were twenty-four of them in all. I read them all. My favorite was “The Secret of Satan’s Spine.”
Jonas Ciuberkis was fired from his job the year I started high school and Vytautas Gedgaudas took over. I didn’t know him and nobody I knew ever told me anything about him. He expanded the publication schedule to three times a week, but it went back to its original weekly frequency soon enough. Working that much must have driven the printing press crazy, and driven whoever was operating it crazy, too.
Maple Lanes Bowling Alley and Tavern was sold that same summer of 1964. Ann Abranovich and Josephine Reeves, sisters and working mothers, bought it so they could make more money and spend more time with their growing families. Josephine lived a few blocks from the bowling alley and walked to work. Ann moved her family into the apartment upstairs. The noise downstairs was money in the bank.
When I heard the St. Joseph’s High School bowling team was going there for a tournament, I told them I knew the ins and outs of the bowling alley and they let me tag along. Everybody asked me about the painting, which the new owners hadn’t messed with. I told them I knew everything about it. I didn’t really know the painting from playing polo, although I knew the seniors at school liked blondes the best.
The kids from upstairs were the pinsetters. You had to be careful not to roll while they were still setting up. They screamed and threw the kingpin at you if you did. The alleys weren’t even and smooth. They were old wood, not laminate, and there were warps, bumps, gouges, divots, and waves from one end to the other. It was hard if not impossible to tell what your ball was going to do. The St. Joe’s and Padua and St. Ignatius teams rolled the worst scores of their lives. The talk was that no one had ever rolled a three hundred perfect score at Maple Lanes, and that no one ever would, unless they made a deal with the devil.
That was unlikely to happen, because everybody in our neck of the woods went to church on Sundays. Even Lili St. Cyr probably went back in the day, to atone for her strip teasing sins. There weren’t as many churches as bars, but it was close enough. There would have been gossip like wildfire if it happened, front page news that you had rolled a three hundred game, and there would have been hell to pay, everybody saying tell Old Scratch that Mr. Perfect is rolling himself there as fast as he can.
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.
“Cross Walk” by Ed Staskus
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“A once upon a crime whodunit.” Barron Cannon, Adventure Books
“Captures the vibe of 1950s NYC.” Sam Winchell, Beyond Fiction
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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 Brooklyn Dodger dugout.
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