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On the Spot

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By Ed Staskus

   When Frank Gwozdz and Tyrone Walker sat down in front of Lieutenant Ed Kovacic’s desk, Tyrone had a thick sheaf of files with him. Their ranking officer behind the desk looked at them. Tyrone looked at his ranking officer. Frank looked at the windows. It was windy and raining hard. The Central Station wasn’t what it used to be. Frank watched rain leaking in through the windows. He believed in keeping the out of doors where it belonged, which was out of doors. It wasn’t his problem, though. The city’s solution to  problems was often as bad as the problem. He turned his attention back to the matter at hand.

   “These are files of all the bombings the past five years in northeast Ohio, including the Youngstown bombings, which are almost as everyday as ours,” Tyrone said. Youngstown had long since been dubbed “Crime Town USA” by the Saturday Evening Post. Their gang wars had been going on as long as those in Cleveland. 

   “You can keep those on your lap for now, son,” Lieutenant Kovacic said. “Never mind about northeast Ohio. Forget about Youngstown. Concentrate on Cleveland.” A close second to Tyrone not liking being called nigger was not liking being called son. He did a slow burn but didn’t say anything. Saying something would have been a mistake. He bit his tongue.

   Ed Kovacic wasn’t born a police officer. He was born a Slovenian and baptized at St. Vitus Catholic Church, but everybody knew he was going to die a police officer. When he did the funeral mass was going to be at St. Vitus. Whenever anybody called him a cop, he reminded them with a stern look that he was a police officer. He hardly ever had to say it twice. When he did have to say it twice, his fellow police officers took a step away from whoever had called him a cop one too many times.

   “We don’t mind the Irish and Italian mobs blowing each other up, it keeps our cells spick and span, but they’ve started killing bystanders,” he said. “We can’t stand for that, which is why we are adding men to this investigation.”

   When Ed Kovacic graduated the police academy the first assignment he had was to walk a beat in the 6th District. He worked his way up to the Decoy Squad, the Detective Bureau, and finally the Bomb Squad. He married his high school sweetheart in 1951 before shipping off to the Korean War. When he got back he and his wife got busy in bed making six children. After that his wife stayed busy raising them. They lived in North Collinwood. 

   “We want to get them before they get more civilians. That’s your number one job from now on. When you’ve got the goods on one of them report to me. Make sure the charges are tight as a drum so we don’t wind up wasting our time. If you apprehend somebody red-handed, do what you have to do. Try to get him back here in one piece so we can question him.” He gave his police detectives a sharp look. 

   “Are we clear about that?”

   “Yes, sir,” Tyrone said. He knew his rulebook inside and out. Frank nodded. He had his own rule book spelling out what one piece meant. It meant still breathing.

   “The first thing I want you to do is go over to Lakewood. I talked to the chief there and he’s expecting you. After you see him, I want you to find Richie Drake and find out what he knows, or at least what he’s willing to tell you. He’s one of our on-again off-again informers. He’s a west side man. I understand he spends most of his life at the Tam O’Shanter there in Lakewood.”

   “I know the man and I know the place,” Frank said. He knew every stoolie in town, just like he knew every bar on every side of town that served food and drink to wrongdoers.

   “Which reminds me, the Plain Dealer boy who saw it happen, his father called, said the boy has something to tell us. Here’s the address.” He handed Frank a slip of paper.  “Stop there while you’re on that side of town and find out what he has to say.”

   Lakewood City Hall, its courtroom, and the police department, were on Detroit Ave., closer to Cleveland than the rest of the near west side suburb. Frank parked in the back. He and Tyrone went inside and waited. When they met with the police chief there wasn’t much he could tell them, other than to say his department would do all it could do to help. 

    “We believe in law and order here,” he said. “You point them out, we’ll lock them up.”

   Lakewood’s first jail was in the Halfway House, which was a bar on Detroit Ave., in one of the back rooms that had a locking door. It was soon relocated to a barn where lawbreakers were kept in two steel cages. After that they were kept in the basement of a sprawling house at the corner of Detroit Ave. and Warren Rd.

   After World War One Lakewood’s main streets, like Detroit Ave. and Clifton Blvd., began to be paved. When they were, speeding problems surfaced. The police force grew, adding two motorcycle men, to patrol Clifton Blvd. and Lake Ave., the streets where the better half lived. A Friday Night Burglar plied his trade on those streets, forcing the police to work overtime while those they were protecting were out on the town. The burglar was never caught. The better half bought more valuables to replace those that went missing.

   When Frank and Tyrone walked into the Tam O’Shanter the late afternoon crowd was starting to fill it up. They made their way to the bar. The bartender asked them what they would have.

   “Don’t I know you?” Frank asked.

   Jimmy Stamper was the bartender. “Maybe, but I don’t know you,” he said, wiping his hands with a damp rag.

   “Are you in a band?”

   “I’m a drummer, been in plenty of bands,” Jimmy said.

    “Are you in a band called Standing Room Only.”

   “You have a good memory,” Jimmy said. “That would have been around 1969, maybe 1970. It sounds like you liked our sound.”

   Frank didn’t tell Jimmy he had been tailing a suspect who was at a bar the band was playing at. The man stayed there until closing time which meant Frank stayed there until closing time. Surveillance was the easiest but most time-consuming part of his job. He had never liked rock and roll and after that night he disliked it even more. Standing Room Only played rock and roll covers. The only one Frank liked was their cover of the Venture’s tune “Hawaii Five-O.”

   “We’re looking for Richie,” Frank said, flashing his badge just long enough for Jimmy to get a peek of it. The bartender hitched his thumb over his left shoulder. “Last booth over there by the men’s toilets. He’s got a blonde with him. He should still be sober. At least he’s still doing all the sweet talking.”

   Frank sat down on the other side of Richie Drake after giving the blonde the thumb. “Drift” is what he said to her. She sat at the bar sulking. Tyrone stood to the side, neither near nor far, but close enough so that Richie knew he was between him and the door. Pinball machines and their pinball wizards were making a racket opposite the booth.

   “What can I do for you?” Richie Drake asked.  He didn’t bother asking who they were.

   Somebody slid a dime into the Rock-Ola jukebox. “It’s just your jive talkin’, you’re telling me lies, yeah, jive talkin’” the Bee Gees sang in their trademark falsetto style. Frank thought they sounded like pansies.

   “That business last Sunday down the street,” Frank said.

   “What business?”

   “You can either tell me here or out back while my partner has a Ginger Ale.”

   “Hold your horses,” Richie said. “Everybody knows it was the Italians.”

   “Why?”

   “I don’t know, exactly, but it had something to do with the Irishman. The guy who got it was a bog hopper. They can’t get to the main man, but they got to him.”

   “One more time, why?”

   “So far as I know, it was a message more than anything else.”

   “A message from who exactly?”

   “The way I hear it, it was Jack White.”

   Frank let it go at that. It seemed to him that Richie Drake didn’t know a hell of a whole lot. The police detective stood up and walked away. He stopped at the Rock-Ola jukebox and glanced at the playlist. He walked back to the booth. “I need a dime,” he said. Richie gave him a dime. He selected a song by B. J. Thomas. The juke box was playing the tune when he and Tyrone left.

   “Hey, wontcha play another somebody done somebody wrong song, so sad that it makes somebody cry, and make me feel at home.”

   Frank and Tyrone drove to Ethel Ave. They stopped and looked at Lorcan Sullivan’s corner house but didn’t bother getting out of the car. They drove to Tommy Monk’s house, parking across the street. Frank pressed the doorbell. When nobody answered they walked up the driveway to the backyard. The family was grilling out and having burgers and corn at a picnic table. A sweet gum tree kept them shaded. Chain link fencing and Japanese yews kept the yard private. Tommy’s father Einar invited them to sit down, bringing two lawn chairs out from the garage. Einar had changed the Old World family name but kept his given name. For all that, everybody and his wife called him Eddie.

   “How did you know the man in the corner house?” Frank asked Tommy. 

   “I delivered his paper every day,” Tommy said. “I knew him better than most because he tipped me better than most.”

   “Did you see anything before it happened?”

   “No, it was like any other Sunday morning, except it wasn’t raining or snowing.”

   “Did you see anything special after it happened?”

   “No.”

   “What is it you have to tell us?”

   “Mr. Sullivan asked me to keep an eye out for anybody prowling our street who didn’t look right. He always gave me a big bonus at Christmas. He told me what to look for. I never saw anybody until yesterday. The man I saw was just like what Mr. Sullivan said he might be. I memorized his license plate.”

   “What is it?”

   “Wait a minute,” Tommy said. “I need a copy of the newspaper.”

   He ran to the back door. A minute later he burst back through the door and ran to the picnic table. He had the front page of yesterday’s Cleveland Plain Dealer with him. He crossed out the headline and in its place wrote down the license plate number. He handed it to Frank.

   “Are you sure this is the number?”

   “I never make a mistake whenever I memorize anything this way.”

   “Good work, son,” Frank said. “If you see that man again, be careful. Don’t draw any attention to yourself. Tell your father right away.”

   He gave Eddie Monk his number. “Call me if your son spots anything else. I don’t think there’s any danger to him, but you never can tell. Make sure he knows not to talk to strangers.”

   “All my children already know that,” Eddie Monk said.

   “Good,” Frank said.

   The police detectives walked back to their car. Tyrone called in the license plate number. Frank smoked a cigarette while they waited. Tyrone had already formed  the impression Frank wasn’t big on small talk. He seemed to keep most talk to himself. When they got the license plate’s address, Tyrone wrote it down and handed it to his partner.

   “That’s in South Collinwood,” Frank said. “Let’s go there and pay Earnest Coote a visit.”

Excerpted from the book “Bomb City.”

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.”

“Bomb City” by Ed Staskus

It is Cleveland, Ohio in 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.

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Home Movies

Saving Ernest Hemingway

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By Ed Staskus

   The day Frank Domscheit pulled Ernest Hemingway out of the de Havilland Rapide, the day it crashed and caught fire, he didn’t know who the man in the airplane was, although he knew who Ernest Hemingway was. He had read one of his books before the war and liked it. It was about bullfighting. The man he pulled out of the airplane was covered in blood and babbling. Frank beat out the flames on the man’s arms and hands. He pulled him away from the airplane as fast as he could. The man was big and heavy but able to stumble forward with his help.

   Frank was in the Upper Nile lands of Uganda the last week of January 1954 tending to the wife of an Egyptian businessman, getting her ready to fly back to Cairo, when Ernest Hemingway’s airplane crashed and caught fire. It was more bad luck for the writer. It was his second airplane crash in two days. The Cessna 180 he and his wife had been on the day before, sightseeing the wilds surrounding the Great Rift Valley and Murchison Falls, encountered a large flock of birds. The pilot dove to avoid them but clipped an abandoned telegraph line, lost control, and crashed. Mary Hemingway, the writer’s fourth wife, suffered two cracked ribs, and Ernest Hemingway’s head got banged hard. Roy Marsh, the pilot, was unhurt. 

   They couldn’t send a distress call. Their on-board radio was broken. They walked away from the airplane where it was wedged in scrub trees. They walked to the Victoria Nile River. When night came they built a fire. They had some apples and biscuits. They had bottles of Carlsberg beer and  a bottle of Scotch that survived the crash. The men drank warm beer while Mary eased the pain of her cracked ribs with whiskey. Elephants trumpeted and hippos snorted at the waterline.

   “We held our breath while an elephant twelve paces away from us was silhouetted in the moonlight, listening to my wife’s snores,” Ernest Hemingway said.

   The British Colonial Administration sent search planes. They found the Cessna 180 soon enough. “One wheel of the undercarriage was broken, but otherwise the plane appeared little damaged,” said Capt. R. C. Jude, the pilot of the British Overseas Airways Corporation plane that circled the crash three miles below Murchison Falls. “The chap did a neat job getting her down.” When a ground rescue team reached the airplane, however, they discovered the Hemingway’s and their pilot were not there. 

   Uganda was more than 2,000 miles from where Frank Domscheit lived and worked in Cairo. He wasn’t an Egyptian. He was a Prussian Lithuanian. He had settled in Cairo after deserting the Afrika Corps. During World War Two the Afrika Corps was the 15th and 21st Panzer Divisions. There were some Italian armored and infantry divisions, as well. The Germans were highly skilled at desert tactics and noted for their esprit de corps. The Italians didn’t want to be in North Africa, surrendering whenever they could. When the British Eighth Army broke through the Axis defense lines and minefields at El Alamein, forcing General Erwin Rommel to withdraw, the war ended for Frank. The Afrika Corp went west, retreating to Tunisia. Frank went east, escaping to northern Egypt. 

   His family were fish merchants south of Klaipeda in Lithuania Minor on the Baltic Sea. They were herring wholesalers. He had been conscripted by the German Army in 1940, ending up as an ambulance driver. He served during the assault on France until France fell. After that he stayed in Paris. It might have been the best year of his life. He shipped out to North Africa in September 1941. The next year was the worst year of his life.

   Soldiers desert for many reasons, including home sickness, harsh conditions, and fear of combat. Frank deserted because he was sick of the day-to-day bloodshed. He didn’t know enough about why the war had started or why it was still going on. He didn’t disagree with German military policies or the leadership of his superiors. But he wasn’t invested in the war like they were. He didn’t care anymore. It seemed like a pointless struggle. He was sick of stitching some men up and burying the rest of them.

   When Ernest Hemingway, his wife, and their pilot were reconnoitering the morning after the crash, the writer spotted a launch on the river. “We had seen mirages when the sun got high, and at the sight of the launch, I thought, I must check my eyesight,” he said. “I called Mary and told her it looked like a launch was coming up the river. She looked and said it was.”

   The launch was the SS Murchison, the same boat that had been used in the 1951 movie “The African Queen.” It was piloted by Edwiges Abreo, a Goan from the west coast of India. “It was an excellent launch, fairly old-fashioned in lines,” Ernest Hemingway said. The captain told them it would cost one hundred shillings per person for the rescue. The writer paid the captain and they set off downriver to Butiaba on Lake Albert.

   When they got to Butiaba they disembarked and sat down under a silky oak tree to keep the sun off them. They waited for another airplane to arrive and take them to Nairobi for medical attention. It was a little-used airstrip. It was very hot and humid. When a de Havilland Rapide arrived they boarded it with their pilot and a policeman. They were near the end of the runway, a few seconds from liftoff, when the airplane hit an anthill, lost its balance, and crashed. The fuel tank exploded and they were engulfed in flames.

   Frank was watching the take-off from a thatched-roof hut. His Egyptian patient was napping in a folding canvas chair. She had fallen off a horse while on safari and hurt her head. When she didn’t improve, but rather got worse, Frank was eventually sent for. He was a neurologist, some said among the best in Egypt. He had studied medicine at Cairo University, starting before the war ended. He spoke German, Lithuanian, and English. He learned to speak Arabic. He became a doctor and trained at the Qasr El-Eyni Hospital. He was going to take his patient there for treatment.

   When he saw the airplane crash and explode he leapt to his feet and ran towards it. By the time he got to the airplane the policeman had gotten out, the bush pilot was dragging Mary Hemingway out through a broken front window, but Ernest Hemingway was trapped. The doors were jammed. He was banging on a side window with his head, trying to break it and get out that way. Frank could see that he would never get through the window frame, being too large of a man. He found a stick, jimmied the door with it, and when the door popped open, quickly frog marched Ernest Hemingway to safety. 

   He sat him down on the dry Nile mud. The writer had a scalp wound and burns up and down his arms. A part of his face was scorched. Frank found out later he had suffered a crushed vertebra and damage to his liver, spleen, and kidney. Their passports, all their money and clothes, and three pairs of the writer’s glasses were lost in the fire.

   He removed the rings on Ernest Hemingway’s fingers. He carefully cut away his shirt. He cooled his burns with water and covered them loosely with gauze. He checked him for shock, but his skin wasn’t clammy and his pulse was good. He thought the man might be in his 60s, although he seemed strong enough. He later found out he was in his 50s. His eyes were glassy. He was disoriented. There was something wrong.

   “How is your head?” Frank asked.

   “My head hurts,” Ernest Hemingway said.

   “You might have a concussion.”

   “I probably do.”

   “Have you had one before?”

   “I’ve had half-a-dozen, maybe more. I  tore my shoulder and banged my head yesterday when we went down at the falls. My head hasn’t killed me yet. I’m a writer. I need my head on straight. My luck is still good.”

   What he didn’t know was his luck was running out fast. It wasn’t ever going to be as good as it had been. His luck was getting worse and worse.

   “Do you have a headache?’

   “Yes.”

   “Are you dizzy at all?”

   “Yes.”

   “I want you to look to the right of the sun.”

   The African sky was clear and the sun was high. When Ernest Hemingway looked in the direction Frank indicated, he quickly looked away.

   “Are you sensitive to the light?”

   “Yes.”

    “Let me stand you up for a second.”

   “All right.”

   “How’s your balance?”

   “Not very good.”

   “That’s fine, let’s sit you down again.”

   “I need a drink.”

   “That would be a bad idea.”

   “My father was never the same after those two plane crashes,” Patrick Hemingway said. “When he visited me in Shimoni afterwards the atmosphere was bad.”  Patrick was Ernest Hemingway’s second son. Shimoni was a small village on Kenya’s south coast, popular with divers and fishermen.

   “It was like King Lear. He would shout, ‘What’s going on here? Aren’t I king?’” Ernest Hemingway had been a heavy drinker most of his life. He was drinking heavier in Shimoni. “I sympathized with his problems but you have to show some restraint. The last few weeks in Africa, he lost all restraint. I finally had enough. We never saw each other again.”

   The policeman who had been on the de Havilland Rapide stepped up and stopped beside Frank. He was a native. His black face was shiny with sweat. There was blood on his shirt.

    “How is he?”

   “He’s got some burns that need to be treated as soon as possible. I think he’s got a concussion. He needs to be examined in a hospital.”

   “Are you a doctor?”

   “Yes.”

   “He’s a famous writer,” the policeman said.

   “That’s what he said, that he’s a writer. I once read one of his books.”

    “I don’t read anything. I don’t know how to read.”

   A dark green Land River pulled up beside them. Two British Colonial Police Officers stepped out. Uganda was a British protectorate. They were wearing khaki jackets and short pants, black knee-high boots, black Sam Browne belts, and shiny billed black caps.

   “Is he fit enough to travel?”

   “Yes,” Frank said. “But he needs a hospital.”  

   One of the policemen led Ernest Hemingway to the Land Rover. Frank walked beside the writer, offering his arm in support. The native policeman helped Mary Hemingway into the back seat next to her husband. They were both quiet. They looked very tired.

   “I liked your book about Spain, about the bullfighting,” Frank said.

   “Thank you but I’m not getting into the ring with Tolstoy,” Ernest Hemingway said. “I love bullfighting, have for a long time. Bullfighting is the only art in which the artist is always in danger of death.”

   The Land Rover took them to Masindi, which was on the road from Murchison Falls towards Entebbe. They stayed at the Masindi Hotel, the oldest hotel in Uganda. That night the bar ran short of gin while Ernest Hemingway entertained a pack of reporters with tales about his near death. “I’ve never felt better,” he said. “It’s just a bump on the head.” When they got to Entebbe he was admitted to a hospital where he stayed for several weeks. His head was leaking cerebral fluid. Doctors told him he had fractured his skull.

   Three months later Frank got a hand-written letter from Ernest Hemingway thanking him for his help. He opened it while having lunch at the Tahrir Café opposite the Egyptian Museum. He had a bowl of koshary, which was vermicelli, fried rice, and brown lentils topped with garlic vinegar. He read the letter while he was eating.

   “I want to thank you for your help, even though I can’t write letters much on account of right arm which was burned to the bone third degree and it cramps up on me. Fingers burned and left hand third degree too, so can’t type and can’t get any work done. The big trouble is inside where right kidney was ruptured and liver and spleen injured. I am weak from so much internal bleeding. Being a good boy and trying to rest.”

   Seven months later Frank was at the Tahrir Café again reading the International Herald Tribune when he saw a news item about Ernest Hemingway. He had won the 1954 Nobel Prize for Literature. The prize cited “The Old Man and the Sea.”  As it turned out, it was his last novel. He never wrote another book.

   Frank bought a copy of the book and read it. He didn’t like it. It seemed solemn and maudlin. The old man was a Christ-like fisherman. The book was full of Christian symbolism. It was about redemption, as if there were such a thing. The only parts of the book he liked were the parts about Joe DiMaggio. Baseball players weren’t symbols. They were like the bullfighters in the other book he had read.

   He had seen the flesh and blood of Ernest Hemingway in Africa. The only sense of it in “The Old Man and the Sea” was the sharks who devoured the marlin the old man had landed. The book didn’t feel true to him. The writer had once been able to take the bull by the horns. He had been a correspondent during the Spanish Civil War and World War Two. The writing was clear-headed and hard-eyed. Frank wondered if the man’s concussions had made him sentimental. He wondered if his pen had dried up.

   When he had been talking to Ernest Hemingway in Butiaba, leaning into the Land Rover, he heard him say, “I never knew a morning all my years in Africa when I woke up and was not happy. I’m always happy to be alive, but I’m not happy about anything else anymore.”

   It was a broken-hearted thing to say. It ached of loneliness. Frank had never gone back to Lithuania, even though he was lonely for it. He couldn’t go even if he wanted to. The Iron Curtain was securely in place. Eight years after helping save the writer, when Frank read about him again in the International Herald Tribune, he read that Ernest Hemingway had committed suicide. He wasn’t surprised. Committing suicide is braving death, although there is rarely anything brave about it.  It is a desperate act. 

   “There is no lonelier man in death except the suicide,” is what Ernest Hemingway said. It was a desperate man’s way of escaping ills that had no remedy. There were no more i’s to dot or t’s to cross.

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.”

“Cross Walk” by Ed Staskus

Late summer, New York City, 1956. Big city streets full of menace. A high profile contract killing in the works. A private eye working out of Hell’s Kitchen scares up the shadows.

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A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

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X Marks the Spot

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By Ed Staskus

   As many times as I met Matt X. Sysack was as many times I didn’t meet his father Russell X. Sysack. Matt was my brother-in-law’s best friend. They met during their freshman year at St Ignatius High School on Cleveland’s near west side. My wife and I and my brother-in-law and Matt often went out together to weekend breakfasts, to shows, and to haunted houses. We went to honky-tonks to listen to the rock and roll band my brother-in-law played lead guitar for. After the two young men finished college and started on career tracks, they decided to not be too serious about life, at least not just yet. They decided to be fun guys while there was still some fun to be had.

   Neither of them lived on their own at the time. When they bought motorcycles they kept them in our garage. When they bought a Jet Ski together they kept it and its trailer in our garage. They launched the Jet Ski from Eddy’s Boat Harbor in the Rocky River Metropark a couple of minutes from our garage. We called the Metropark by its local name, which was the Valley. There was a bait shop at Eddy’s that sold ice cream. I had a cone one day while I watched the Sunday sailors launch their craft.

   It was only a couple thousand feet down the river to Lake Erie and fun riding the waves, except when they ran out of gas a half-mile out on the lake. When they did they discovered there wasn’t a paddle on board. A Good Samaritan in a power boat threw them a towline and got them safely to shore. It wasn’t long after that before they stopped cranking the throttle on the craft’s impeller. 

   Both Matt and my brother-in-law eventually sold their motorcycles and their Jet Ski and mothballed fun and games for the foreseeable future. “Hustle it up” is what they said. They put their noses to the grindstone. Matt’s father, Russell, always had his nose to the grindstone. He was a hard-working man with a family to support. At the same time, he never put his irreverent sense of fun away. He wasn’t going over the hill anytime soon. He knew over the hill meant picking up speed on the other side.

   Russell X. Sysack was born in Cleveland and went to John Carroll University, a Jesuit school in University Hts. After graduation he became co-owner and manager of the family business, Sysack Sign Co., in Old Brooklyn on Cleveland’s near west side. He sported a Waylon Jennings beard and overalls at work. The work he did was hand-painted signs, from small displays to big-size displays. When Russell’s father Harry X., who opened the business in 1940, punched the time clock for the last time, Russell took over. Over the years the Sysack Sign Co. gave the high life to innumerable storefronts.

   Russell mixed business with pleasure. He was a libertarian and provocateur, more in your face than subtle. He was outspoken. He was subtle as a sledgehammer. His signs were everywhere around northeastern Ohio. In the meantime, he had his own op-ed billboard at the front of his sign shop. It was across the street from a public library. His work for others expressed what their goods and services were about. His personal billboard was where he expressed himself. It was where he expressed himself In 2002 when he compared Martin Luther King, Jr. to Osama bin Laden. The comparison let the terrorist play his own tune; it insulted Martin Luther King, Jr. The billboard was set on fire one night. The Cleveland Police wrote up an incident report and filed it. Congresswoman Stephanie Tubbs Jones led a protest march. 

   “Mr. Sysack has said that over the years he’s been sued and received bomb threats because of his signs,” the Sun Press reported. Russell explained his resilience by saying “I take the right of free speech very seriously.” Stephanie Tubbs Jones wasn’t having any of it. “The right to free speech is limited,” she said. Nobody is allowed to falsely shout “fire” in a crowded theater, she added. The First Amendment doesn’t protect words “that incite people to violence.”

   The community was divided. “Those signs were the highlight of my day when I was stuck in traffic on W. 25thSt.,” Anna Namoose said. For some, his words were signposts. “I love his truthfulness,” Dale Bush said. “Sorry if the truth hurts.” Some were perplexed. “Every time I see his signs I’m struck with the same thought,” ‘Silent Dot’ said. “Sir, what do you think happens next? Do you think that someone driving by will stop and read your sign and go ‘Holy cow!’ this guy with the sign is a genius. I’m going to drive to the State House to speak my mind right now!” Others were outraged. “I hope your racist business closes,” Monica Green said. Some took an art school approach. “This is a special kind of batshit insane outsider art,” Adam Ohio said.

   One man, at least, took a philosophical approach. “Russell Sysack has been in our consciousness since the ’80s,” Tim Ferris said. “He really got going on issues in the ’90s when Mayor Mike White began compromising the public interest. He might be extreme, but he’s necessary. He forces us to think back towards a middle position. By temperament, perhaps by training, he’s a cartoonist, and it’s his purpose to distort and amplify so as to reveal or enlighten. We shouldn’t take cartoons too literally. Those who do, do so with the intent of silencing him. We also need to realize that we can’t look for good taste when it comes to addressing outrageous or extreme abuses. He speaks to big problems, and he uses strong talk.”

   He posted his strong talk on his personal billboard year after year and appeared regularly on local mouth-foam talk radio. His targets were Martin Luther King, Jr., the city’s African American mayors, and Black History Month. Politicians weren’t his favorite creatures. If they were Democrats, so much the worse for them. He celebrated Edward Kennedy’s death on his personal billboard, despite the Massachusetts senator being still very much alive. Public education and the Catholic church were targets of his ire. Anything new-fashioned was fair game. He compared environmentalists to Nazis. “The only way to make the earth green and stop global warming is for all humans to die” was what one sign said.

   The near west side sign man worked in the “Simon Sez” tradition even though he worked outside of the tradition.  Buddy Simon was the sign man on the near east side of town. He hung a “Simon Sez” sign outside his Carnegie Ave. shop every week for more than 30 years. They were usually wry and funny observations about the way we live today. He kept his nose out of race, religion, and politics. He stayed on the Mr. Rogers side of the street. Nobody ever set any of his signs on fire. 

   Russell X. Sysack was more of a soapbox man than Buddy Simon, although his soapboxing was more diatribe than not. He was a worried man singing a worried song. He was worried about how the present was going to affect the future. He stood by Abraham Lincoln, who said, “You cannot escape the responsibility of tomorrow by evading it today.”

   Splashing his op-ed sign on the street where everybody could see it, he wasn’t holding back.  He said he standing up for the taxpayer and the small businessman. He told anybody who would listen he was a defender of the American way of life, by which he meant capitalism. He said he was a patriot. He was met with threats, vandalism, and litigation. There were widespread complaints of racism. “I’m just expressing my opinion,” he told the Cleveland Plain Dealer, the city’s morning newspaper. 

   In this corner, still undefeated, it was Russell X. Sysack’s long-held opinions and beliefs. He didn’t need a referee. He gave as good as he got, even though his facts weren’t always reliable. Free speech advocates argued he was entitled to his own opinion. His detractors said he wasn’t entitled to his own facts. “Opinion has caused more trouble on this earth than plagues and earthquakes,” said the French Enlightenment writer Voltaire. The trouble with opinion is, more often than not, the fewer the facts the stronger the opinion. The White House under the thumb of a latter-day rabblerouser testifies to the trouble that can ensue.

   In retirement, Russell X. Sysack became a crossing guard for the Parma schools, working the streets in his neighborhood. He helped children cross the street safely. His presence made parents feel easy in their minds about their children walking to school. He reminded drivers in no uncertain terms of the presence of underage pedestrians. Nobody was ever run down on his watch. Pity the fool who tried to barrel down the road at 21 MPH.

   After he stepped aside from the sign company his sister Nancy took over the business, She lived in a house attached to the back of the sign shop. She was a chip off the old block. She kept up the family practice of posting the Sysack point of view on the op-ed billboard in front of their building. One of them had to do with migrants.

   “The head of DHS is a Communist & a Treasonist. On May 11th he will open the southern border. No illegal will be refused entry. US troops will transport them to every city in the US. They went to Panama to organize this invasion using NGO’s & the cartels with taxpayer money. 8 million will enter this country by year’s end from 150 countries. China has warships in the Bahamas. The plan is to overwhelm our system, crash our economy, and create a national emergency. There will be a fundamental change of our country into Communism. What are u going to do about this invasion?” 

   As it happened, nobody did anything because there were no Chinese warships in the Bahamas and no US troops were escorting anybody anywhere. The secret messages and conspiracies went up in smoke. The invasion was a nonstarter. Nancy went back to the drawing board.

   Her “Ugly Ugly Ugly” sign ruffled more than one feather in 2017.  It featured a woman’s wide open Rolling Stones-like mouth outlined in bright red lipstick. It said “All Women Are Beautiful Until They Open Their Mouth” and listed some women the sign maker considered loudmouths. It was in the tradition of bad taste making more millionaires than good taste.

   “The sign suggests women only have, or their mouths in particular, only have one purpose, and I find that greatly offensive,” said Christopher Demchak, one of the organizers of a demonstration. “Particularly in this political climate and particularly when young children and families are driving by.” The protestors were hoping a demonstration would influence the sign company to stop posting offensive content. They didn’t know who they were going up against.

   “We don’t want to cover up this message and stop somebody’s voice, since this was a woman who put this message out, interestingly enough,” said Christen DuVernay, the other organizer. “But, we do want to provide alternative messages for young girls in the community to say ‘your voice does matter.'” 

   President Barack Obama became the dartboard for Nancy’s darts when he was elected. “Now that red-necked and facist America elected Obama on a campaign of change, will blacks show their gratitude & change? Hell no. Will Jesse Jackson & Rev. Al stop being racists? Hell no. Will blacks stop using slavery as an excuse? Hell no.”

   When Russell invoked the First Amendment one of the things he meant was, if you can guarantee never offending anybody, you don’t need the amendment. It doesn’t guarantee you the right to be heard, though. Nobody has to read or listen to anything you have to say. All media has an on-off switch, even billboards, Look the other way if it rubs you the wrong way. You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the message blows.

   Russell X. Sysack died in 2009. He was in his mid-60s. He had run whatever race he was running. Wherever he has ended up, with the stand-up saints or the fallen angels, he is undoubtedly making his idiosyncratic voice heard, loud and clear.

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.”

“Cross Walk” by Ed Staskus

“A Cold War thriller that captures the vibe of mid-century NYC.” Sam Winchell, Beyond Books

Late summer, New York City, 1956. The Mob on the make. The streets full of menace. President Eisenhower on his way to Brooklyn for the opening game of the World Series. A killer waits in the wings. A private eye working out of Hell’s Kitchen scares up the shadows.

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

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

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Sonic Youth

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By Ed Staskus

   I was in my mid-teens when I started nodding off at Sunday mass. Before long I was snoozing at the drop of a hat, no matter what time I had gotten to bed the night before. My mother was a go-along Catholic but my father was a true believer, so the whole family went to church weekly. Part of my problem was familiarity. I had been an altar boy and knew the ceremony inside and out. I even knew the Latin, what was left of it, not that I knew what any of it meant. The other part of my problem was my growing belief in deism. I didn’t disbelieve the Roman Catholic theology but I didn’t believe it, either. I thought the Golden Rule and the Ten Commandments were good ideas, but that was as far as my commitment went.

   The Sunday in 2005 I first saw Jane Scott she was in a back pew at the First Church of Christ in Rocky River, Ohio, one suburb west of where my wife and I lived in Lakewood. I wasn’t a member of the congregation but my wife was. I went to services with her sometimes. Jane was wearing red glasses and a wide-brimmed church crown. She was out cold. I recognized a kindred spirit when I saw one. 

   When the service was over my wife made her rounds, saying hello and goodbye, chatting with the churchgoers she knew best. I stayed to the side. By the time we were ready to go Jane Scott had shaken off the sandman. My wife talked to her for a minute before we left for home.

   “That lady you were talking to, the one with the red glasses, she looked familiar, even though I don’t think I’ve ever met her before,” I said.

   “That’s Jane Scott,” she said. “She used to write for the newspaper. She was their rock ‘n  roll reporter until she retired a couple of years ago.”  She was in her early 80s the day she retired. She had long been known as “The World’s Oldest Rock Critic.”

   She went to work for the Cleveland Plain Dealer in 1952, three days after Alan Freed hosted the Moondog Coronation Ball, the world’s first rock ‘n roll concert. She covered the local social whirl through most of the 1950s. Starting in 1958 she wrote the “Boy and Girl” column. It targeted seven-and eight year-olds. She wrote “Senior Class” about issues relevant to senior citizens. “I covered everything from pimples to pensions,” she said. 

   She reviewed the Beatles concert when they first appeared in Cleveland in 1964 and two years later interviewed them before their sold-out rock fest at the 80,000 seat Municipal Stadium. “I never before saw thousands of 14-year-old girls, all screaming and yelling. I realized this was a phenomenon. The whole world changed.” She was going on nearly fifty years of age when her interview with the Fab Four appeared in the newspaper.

   When she became the rock critic for the Plain Dealer the newspaper became the first major newspaper to have a full-time music critic on staff. “Once I found rock I was never interested in anything else.” Not everybody considered rock ‘n roll to be music. Many considered it to be noise for the neck down. “This rock and roll stuff will never last,” said Mitch Miller, a maestro of the singalong. Others thought it was the “Devil’s Music.” They didn’t like hips gyrating and lyrics on the other side of pious. 

   Jane Scott was a Christian Scientist as well as a boogie on down correspondent. I don’t think she gave a damn about Satan. She knew full well he wasn’t interested in music of any kind unless it was the funeral march kind. He marched to the beat of doom and death. She was a live wire.

   “My husband Harry was Jane’s first boss when she started at the Cleveland Plain Dealer,” said Doris Linge. “Since she and Harry worked together, I would often get invited to her wonderful annual holiday party. She was a character, quirky and real.”

   Jane Scott was born in Cleveland less than a year after the end of World War One. She graduated from Lakewood High School and later from the University of Michigan. She tried out for the college newspaper but didn’t make the grade. During World War Two she enlisted in the Navy, rose to lieutenant, and worked as a code breaker. After the war, back home, she got a job as Women’s Editor for the suburban Chagrin Valley Herald, a community rag. 

   She went to Sunday services. She taught Sunday School. “Jane was a member of the Fifth Church, which was on the border of Lakewood and Cleveland,” said Doris Carlson, a member of First Church in Rocky River since 1957. “When it closed she came to our church. I remember seeing her on the TV news once in 1962, when she performed at an honorary birthday party here in town for President Kennedy. She was a hoot. She sang ‘Happy Birthday’ the same way Marylin Monroe did, even though she was practically a middle-aged woman. She could be sexy when she wanted to be.”

   The 1960s came and went and she missed her chance to go to the Woodstock Festival. Twenty five years later she went to the 25th anniversary show at the age of seventy five, tramping through the same kind of mud on the same kind of wet weekend. “I am going to try to make the 50th anniversary in 2019,” she said. If she made it she would be one hundred years old, she was reminded.

   “I don’t like the word retirement,” she said “Rock ‘n roll is excitement. It’s that unity of feeling you get when the audience is loving and sharing the music together. It’s the unexpectedness and the swift changes. You go from pop to hip-hop. It all melds into rock somehow. It keeps you on your toes.”

   Covering shows night after night, being on the short side, she always tried to get up front so she wouldn’t have to stand on her toes to see over fans. She always carried the same hefty bag slung over her shoulder. “I call it my security kit,” she said. “It includes ear plugs, Kleenex, because when you are at a show with 80,000 people they are sure to run out of toilet paper, safety pins to pin my car keys and backstage pass on, at least four pens because people borrow them and don’t return them, and two notebooks, one for interviews and one for observations.” She always had a peanut butter sandwich in the bag. “Peanut butter doesn’t spoil and sometimes you don’t have time to stand in line for food.” 

   When it came to rock ‘n roll, she always had ants in her pants for the next show and the will power to see her chronicles of the new music through. “She was allowed to take the rock beat because the newspaper thought it was trivial at the time, and a woman could have it,” said Anastasia Pantsios, a Plain Dealer writer and photographer. She had good energy, keeping at it for nearly forty years. “She literally did it ‘my way,’ independent, not afraid to go places by herself, with so much tenacity and work ethic,” her friend Mary Cipriani said.

   Jane made it a point to interview music makers with opinions, contentious musicians like Lou Reed and Frank Zappa. Lou Reed and she were close friends from the late 1960s until their deaths two years apart. “She was one of the only ones to treat me with respect in the early years,” Lou said. “Always fair, always interested.” The man who became the Grandfather of Punk called her Sweet Jane after his song of the same name.    

   The first time Jane saw the Velvet Underground hardly anybody in town noticed they were in town. There might have been as many people in the audience as there were in the band. The band was Lou Reed, a bad-tempered young man from Long Island, Sterling Morrison on guitar, the violist John Cale who doubled on bass, drummer Moe Tucker, who did her drumming standing up, and the partially deaf actress Nico, who sang in deadpan English with a German accent. 

   “I don’t know just what it’s all about but put your red pajamas on and find out,” Lou Reed said.

   Jane Scott was smitten the minute she heard the sound the band made. The man she had been waiting for sounded somewhere between Bob Dylan and Sonic Youth with some Andy Warhol thrown in. The band was about Beat poetry, Pop Art, and the French New Wave. Jane was good with the offbeat but kept the beat steady in her head.

   The Velvet Underground lasted until the early 1970s. When Sterling Morrison left the band he put his guitar down for a foghorn. He found work as captain of a tugboat and later earned a PhD in Medieval Literature. Moe Tucker formed her own one-gal band playing proto punk. The old Lou Reed became the new Lou Reed.

   Before the Velvet Underground there was L. A. and the Eldorados, back when Lou Reed was a student at Syracuse University. His friend Allan Hyman, who had been his friend since third grade, was tasked with getting him to frat party gigs on time. “He’d be asleep under three hundred pounds of pistachio nut shells, because Lou loved pistachios, so I’d have to shake him awake, throw him in the shower, and physically get him dressed,” Allan said. “He would be surly, but he’d play.”

   “Lou Reed was a prick,” said Rich Mishkin, the bassist for L. A. and the Eldorados. “He was not the kind of guy who would be nice to people in most circumstances. We got a lot of beer thrown at us over the years.” Rich drove the band around in his tail-finned white Chrysler with red guitars emblazoned on the sides.

   “It’s no secret that he has lived as well as walked on the wild side, the demi-world of drugs and violence and despair,” Jane said about Lou Reed. “’Heroin’ and ‘White Light, White Heat’ were two of the most popular songs of his first major group, the Velvet Underground in 1967, the same year of ‘I’m a Believer’ by the Monkees and ‘To Sir With Love’ by Lulu. He is wild, changeable, streetwise, poetic, cynical, and offbeat sensitive, maybe.”

   Jane wasn’t wild, although she was plenty streetwise, in a matronly kind of way. “We’re talking about some of the most depraved people in the world,” said Michael Stanley, who played heartland rock ‘n roll for donkey’s years in the Rock Capital of the World. “But with Jane, it was like they were talking to their mom or their grandma. It was, ‘Yes, ma’am’ and ‘No, ma’am.'”  

   Behind her trademark red-rimmed trifocals and dyed-blonde hair, she was unflappable. She was a fan as well as an advocate of the sound. “Since I was a little girl, I remember my dad, whose name was Pepe, enjoyed Jane’s reviews and would read them to my brothers and me after dinner,” said Callie Paris Rini. “We were music lovers. When the Beatles first came to Cleveland, Jane gave my dad a newsprint plate of them, and I still have it. I still have Jane’s review when Jimi Hendrix came to Cleveland, too. I read her articles whenever I went to concerts in the 60s and 70s.”

   The Beatles broke up in 1970. Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, and Janet Joplin all died, all three of them at the age of 27. Rock concerts moved from clubs and small theaters to sports arenas. Disco and glitter rock came and went. Jane Scott went to all the shows, even the new wave ones, where guitars were unplugged and synthesizers were plugged in. “I sat next to her for nearly three years of concerts back in the late 70s,” said Rick Weiner. “She would always ask me if I was enjoying myself. Jane stood out like a sore thumb, but once you conversed with her you knew there was a reason she was there.” 

   Her favorite musician of all time was Bruce Springsteen and her favorite album of all time was ‘Born to Run.’ When she reviewed his show at downtown Cleveland’s Allen Theatre in 1975 she wrote, “His name is Bruce Springsteen. He will be the next superstar.” Before the year was out the Boss was on the covers of Time and Newsweek. At a later Cleveland concert, he dedicated “Dancing in the Dark” to Jane Scott, who was in the audience. “If you can meet Bruce Springsteen, who wants to sit around and play bridge?” she asked tongue in cheek.

   When it came to her job, it was the more the merrier. “Jane was the first to welcome me to the news room when I came to Cleveland in 1979 as a Plain Dealer feature writer,” said Janet Gardner. “After I returned to New York, she would call me between sets from the Peppermint Lounge, breathless with enthusiasm. She was a truly ‘The World’s Oldest Teenager.’”

   In the 1980s superstars continued to sell out, selling out stadium concerts. Alternative rock emerged. Synth-pop got more and more popular. Dance-pop got hot. Hip-hop popped up. Olivia Newton-John recorded one number hit after another. Jane Scott covered them all. The older she got the younger she got. “I met Jane in 1984 when she was covering a Husker Du show at Pirate’s Cove,” said Rev Recluse. “She was the sweetest, kindest person to everyone and melted this too-cool-to-exist teen hipster’s heart by the encore.” The Pirate’s Cove was in the Flats when it was still a rough-and-tumble place featuring a shot and a beer. There were real shots sometimes down dark back alleys. Olivia Newton-John never set foot there. She kept it in the sugar bowl.

   “Jane didn’t critique music,” said Pere Ubu’s frontman Dave Thomas. Pere Ubu was a Cleveland-area avant-garage band. “She reported facts. And, subversively, she demystified the art. She peeked behind the curtain and rooted out the parochial. Every musician sees the media as gullible rubes. Well, Jane just didn’t cooperate. She laid the haughty low with enthusiasm.”

   The 1990s saw rap and reggae get popular. Urban-style music blended jazz, soul, and funk. Fusion genres came and went. Jane Scott stayed on top of it, reviewing everything that came her way. If it was going to be a long night she packed two peanut butter sandwiches in her hefty bag.

   “I had the privilege of attending several concerts with Jane in the 80s and 90s,” said Emile Knud-Hansen. “It was amazing to watch her interview some covered-in-black with safety pins in the eyebrows teenage rocker. She never judged anyone but gave performers ample time to explain their music. I was surprised to learn that she had never gone to a rock concert as a guest. So, my friends and I took her to see Huey Lewis and the News at the Blossom Music Center. We were in front of the amplifiers, right up front. She was happy in spirit and ruffled in appearance.”

   After Jane Scott retired from the Cleveland Plain Dealer and her long-time companion Jim Smith died, her legs started to go bad. She bought a walker and moved into Ennis Court, a small assisted-living facility in her hometown of Lakewood. When she did, Danielle Rose began visiting her, keeping her company.

   “I met her at First Church where we were both members,” Danielle said. “I lived up Detroit Ave. and could walk to where she was living. We started car-pooling to Wednesday Testimony Meetings. One summer night going home we were pulled over by a Lakewood cop car.” The policeman was a woman. She asked Jane if she knew why she had pulled her over.

   Jane thought for a moment. She fiddled with her hefty bag. She finally said, “No.”

   “Your lights aren’t on.”

   “Oh.”

   “Don’t forget to turn them on and drive safely,” the policewoman said.

   Jane had been pulled over in front of one of her favorite ice cream shops. When she noticed the lights were still on in the shop she left the running car where it was and stepped onto the sidewalk. 

   “Do you want to join us?” Sweet Jane asked the policewoman. 

   “She loved ice cream. She was just a big kid. Her car knew where every cone on the west side of town could be gotten,” Danielle said.

   “Thanks, but I’m on duty,” the policewoman said.

   “Maybe next time,” Jane said. 

   “She had a young spirit but she really shouldn’t have been driving anymore,” Danielle said.

   True to her spirit Jane Scott died on Independence Day in 2011. The next month a memorial service was held for her at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, which was attended by nearly a thousand people. A year later the museum unveiled a life-size bronze memorial statue of her sitting on a bench and taking notes, created by Dave Deming, past president of the Cleveland Institute of Art. It was permanently installed in the Reading Room of the Rock Hall’s Library and Archives. 

   All it took to get Jane Scott to sit still in one spot while the beat went on was for the clock to run down. “Walk it on home” is what Lou Seed sang in her ear. There was a hell of a band waiting for her in heaven.

Photograph by Janet Macoska.

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.”

“Cross Walk” by Ed Staskus

“A Cold War thriller that captures the vibe of mid-century NYC.” Sam Winchell, Beyond Books

Late summer, New York City, 1956. The Mob on the make and the streets full of menace. President Eisenhower on his way to Brooklyn for the opening game of the World Series. A killer waits in the wings. Stan Riddman, a private eye working out of Hell’s Kitchen, scares up the shadows.

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

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

Home Movies

Kingpin of the T

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By Ed Staskus

   The one and only time I met Daffy Dan was at a party in a fourth floor warehouse studio on Superior Ave. between downtown Cleveland and the Innerbelt. It was the ArtCraft Building. There was a car-sized freight elevator in the back, but the front stairs were what all the partygoers used. Nobody knew how to operate the old-fashioned elevator controls. They were ready for a drink by the time they got upstairs. The studio belonged to Joe Dwyer, somebody I had gone to high school with. He was an artist and was making artworks in the studio. He also threw parties there, especially on Halloween, which it was the night I met Daffy Dan. No sooner did I meet him than the lady friend I had come with wandered off.

   When I was introduced to Daffy Dan I realized who he was right away, if only because I had just seen the custom-made fifteen-foot tall caricature of him on the front of the warehouse building across the street. The sign next to the cut-out said, “The Creative Studio of Daffy Dan’s.”

   He was on the short side and wore his hair long, over his shoulders, and parted in the middle. He was 28 years old, slightly older than me. He had a handlebar mustache. It was the kind of mustache lawmen and outlaws wore in the 19thcentury. He wasn’t wearing a costume for the Halloween party. He had on faded blue jeans and a sports jacket over a  t-shirt. The t-shirt featured WWMS-FM, the city’s favorite rock ‘n’ roll radio station. Their buzzard logo, a top hat in one hand and a walking stick in the other hand, was in the middle of the t-shirt. “Ohio Tuxedo” was in bold red letters above the smiling blonde-haired buzzard.

   A campaign-style button was pinned to the lapel of his jacket. It said, “If your t-shirt doesn’t have a DD on the sleeve, it’s just underwear!!” The two exclamation points meant he meant business. Daffy had a can of beer he wasn’t drinking in his hand. Every few minutes somebody stopped and said hello to him.

   “How did you get into the t-shirt business?” I asked. I was interested because I wasn’t in any business of any kind. I floated from one job to another and was consequently relatively poor. Even though Daffy didn’t have a degree of higher learning, after a few minutes of talking to him it became clear he wasn’t a sandwich short of a picnic.

   “I dropped out of high school my senior year and went to work in the record store business,” he said. “I started to carry some rock group t-shirts. I got a catalog of shirts from who knows where. Other record stores started coming to me and asking me where I got them from, and rather than telling them, I looked up a dealer and started to wholesale them.”

   Even though he looked as counter cultural as the best of them, he was bright as a button when it came to commerce and capitalism. He was the city’s top dog of t-shirts. He knew how to circle his way around a dollar. “Before long I started to realize, wait a minute, those dealers aren’t doing it right. I can do it better. The rock group t-shirts just took off like a rocket. We located our storefront over on Clifton and West 104th St., and that’s where we really started. From the beginning we marketed ourselves as Daffy Dan’s from Cleveland, Ohio. We opened a single store in 1973.” There were now five of them, with four more planned. “It isn’t tourists, either. It is Clevelander’s buying Cleveland-themed t-shirts and merchandise. It’s a phenomenon.”

   The slogan of Daffy Dan’s first store was, “If You’ll Wear It, We’ll Print It.” By the time I met the man behind the phenomenon he was moving more than forty thousand t-shirts annually. One of his most popular offerings displayed the legend “Cleveland: You Gotta Be Tough.” On another best seller Andy Gibb’s face was the hot potato plastered on bosoms far and wide. It was followed in popularity by Darth Vader and Farrah Fawcett-Majors. 

   “It’s not a fad,” Daffy said. “Blue jeans and t-shirts have become the American way of life.”

   Back in the day t-shirts were called tunics. Well into the 19th century they were simply called undergarments. The first t-shirt was created when a union suit was cut in half with the top long enough to tuck into a waistband. The U. S. Navy put them into circulation as crew-necked, short-sleeved undershirts during World War One. Naval work parties in steaming hot engine rooms took to wearing them all the time. Farmers adopted them during the Great Depression. They were cheap and lightweight. The first printed t-shirt was an Air Corps Gunnery School t-shirt issued in 1942. In the 1960s they got popular as souvenirs, advertisements, and self-expression billboards. A friend of mine had one, featuring an angry Micky Mouse, that said, “My parents went to Disneyland and all I got was this lousy t-shirt.”

   Plain t-shirts were going out of fashion, even though they are versatile, like a blank canvas. Everybody has got something to say. If you don’t get what’s on your chest out on your chest you end up looking like nobody. That’s why you get a t-shirt with an iron-on monkey and the caption, “Here Comes Trouble.” There is no sense messing around. One of Daffy Dan’s t-shirts went in the out door. It said, “I Am a Virgin. This Shirt Is Very Old.” Another one of them was an entreaty for hugs and kisses. “Turkeys Need Love Too.” One got right down to its own bad-tempered point. It said, “Go to Hell.”

   “I love you, Daffy Dan,” Marsha Greene said years later. “You were with me through my teenage hood. I loved wearing your t-shirts. They made me feel proud and you were considered one of the cool kids when you wore a DD t-shirt back then. They helped my self-esteem.” Like they say, is a hippopotamus a hippopotamus, or just a really cool opotamus?

   The Halloween party had gone into overdrive. There were no quiet corners. Smoke from marijuana and tobacco lowered the ceiling. Joe threw an LP by Bobby “Boris” Pickett & the Crypt-Kickers onto the turntable. They started in on their smash hit ‘Monster Mash.’ The singer had a British accent with a sniff of Transylvania. “They did the monster mash, it was a graveyard smash, it caught on in a flash, they did the monster mash.” The speakers weren’t the greatest, but they didn’t have to be. They just had to hold out until the end of the night.

   “You silk screen a lot of rock ‘n’ roll t-shirts,” I said, pointing out the obvious. 

   “Yeah,” he said. “When I was starting, the Agora was packing them in every night. I saw rock ‘n’ roll t-shirts as an absolute natural.”

   “Do you listen to much music? Do you go to shows?” Cleveland was often touted as the Home of Rock ‘n’ Roll.

   “I go to music clubs or concerts every night of the week,” he said. “The offerings are spectacular. The Agora, of course, is at the top of my list, but there are a hundred clubs and concert venues, the Hullabaloo Club, It’s Boss, the Viking Saloon, the Roundtable, Utopia, Atomic Alps, and the Plato. I go to them all. The music scene in Cleveland is like being a kid in a candy store.”

   Joe  slid another record on the turntable. It went round and round. It was the Rolling Stones belting out ‘Sympathy for the Devil.’ Mick Jagger was in fine form. “Just as every cop is a criminal, and all the sinners saints, as heads is tails, just call me Lucifer.” It was a kind of Halloween theme song for the times.

   “Did you really drop out of high school?” I asked. “I thought that’s something you’re not supposed to do anymore, unless the Devil makes you do it.”

   “I was walking down the hall between classes at Shaker Heights High School when the baseball coach grabbed me,” Daffy Dan said. “He grabbed me by the peace sign hanging around my neck on a leather strap and led me to the principal’s office proclaiming that I would not be allowed to graduate with my class in June without a haircut. Mind you, this is 1968, and my hair barely touched my collar and was just a tad over my ears, but according to the coach, not up to the school dress code. The gauntlet had been thrown down and I promptly withdrew from school. That was a proud moment in our household. Not! I was plumb nuts back then.”

   After the Summer of Love in the late 1960s became a fact, entrepreneurs in California started producing t-shirts featuring motifs and emblems, especially anything associated with hippies, the Grateful Dead, and Che Guevara. They silk screened their t-shirts, just like Daffy Dan was doing. When screen printing, a design is separated into individual colors. Water based inks are applied to the shirt through mesh screens, limiting the areas where ink is deposited. The most important factors are making sure the t-shirt is on a flat surface and that the stencil is positioned exactly where the artwork is supposed to appear.

   T-shirts with glow-in-the-dark charts of the periodic elements were silk screened by special order. “My customers are individualists and eccentrics who want something a little different from what you can buy off the rack,” Daffy said. “They want a work of art.”

   The lady friend I had come with was still sight seeing, God knows where. Story of my life. The smell of marijuana was everywhere, even though it was decidedly illegal. Richard Nixon had declared a ‘War on Drugs’ a few years earlier. He said drugs were Public Enemy Number One. He didn’t say what was Public Enemy Number Two, although I might have suggested Tricky Dick himself. Daffy and I had to raise our voices to be understood, especially when Jimi Hendrix got going. “Purple haze all in my brain.” We lowered our voices between songs.

   “How did you get your nickname?” I asked. He told me he had been at a friend’s house pitching his idea of imprinting t-shirts. He was trying to raise capital. His friend’s wife didn’t think much of his business plan. “You’re daffy, Dan,” she said. It made him, Daniel Roger Gray, sit up straight. 

   “I stopped, speechless for a moment. That was it, Daffy Dan’s!”

   It was going on midnight when Joe slipped some Screamin’ Jay Hawkins under the needle. “I put a spell on you because you’re mine, stop the things you do, watch out, I ain’t lyin’, I can’t stand no runnin’ around, I can’t stand no puttin’ me down, I put a spell on you because you’re mine.”

   I said good night to Daffy Dan and looked around for my lady friend. I didn’t find her. I didn’t care all that much. She was slumming, anyway. She was a rich girl with conservative suburban parents. I wouldn’t have minded being rich, but not on her father’s terms. His terms were my way or the highway. She was going to become him sooner or later. I had dinner with her family one time and it was plain as day. 

   Out on the sidewalk it was starting to rain. I looked across the street at Daffy Dan’s Superior Ave. nerve center. His cut-out caricature was lit up by a floodlight. He had been lit up at the party, although not by marijuana or beer. He was glowing with going his own way. He had probably taken some wrong turns along the way but he seemed to have his eye on the prize. His path to flying colors looked somewhat different than most but that didn’t mean he was going in circles. He was no Daffy Duck, that was for sure.

Photograph by Heather Hileman.

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.”

“Cross Walk” by Ed Staskus

“A Cold War thriller that captures the vibe of mid-century NYC.” Sam Winchell, Beyond Books

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

Late summer, New York City, 1956. The Mob on the make and the streets full of menace. President Eisenhower on his way to Brooklyn for the opening game of the World Series. A killer waits in the wings. Stan Riddman, a private eye working out of Hell’s Kitchen, scares up the shadows.

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

Home Movies

Spaghetti House

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By Ed Staskus

   The morning after my first night waiting tables at the New York Spaghetti House I got a call from the assistant manager to not come back. He was loud and clear about what he meant to say. He said, “Don’t come back.” I told him I understood. I couldn’t have done a worse job. It would have been better for all concerned if I hadn’t shown up at all. I was surprised when he called me back in the middle of the afternoon and asked me to come back. He was again clear about why I was being asked to return.

   “I am not able to find anybody else,” he said.

   When I went back that night I was demoted from waiter to busboy and one of the experienced busboys was promoted to waiter. I had told them I was experienced at waiting tables, which was a gross exaggeration. I had once waited tables for a month at a greasy spoon near Chinatown where all I had to do was pour coffee and shuffle plates of breakfast and burgers back and forth. My first night had proven how thin my qualifications were.

   I worked at the New York Spaghetti House for nearly two weeks in the late 1970s because one waiter had gone to Las Vegas for a daughter’s wedding, where he stayed for another week when he got on a winning streak, one was helping his mother move into a rest home, and another was coughing his head off with the flu. The restaurant was all of a sudden short-handed. They had to take desperate measures, which was the only reason I was there. I was neighbors with one of the waiters. He was an older man, divorced, and lived in North Collinwood, like me. He had put the good word in about me. They paid me in cash, which I was good with.

   The New York Spaghetti House opened in 1927 in downtown Cleveland. Before it became a restaurant the building, built in 1870, had been the parsonage of the Zion Lutheran Church. After it wasn’t a parsonage anymore, sometime around 1900, a vaudeville promoter housed his actors there. The restaurant was opened by Mario and Maria Brigotti, who came from New York City, where Mario had worked as a waiter in several basement spaghetti houses. When they opened on E. 9th St. the neighborhood around them was overflowing with Greeks and Turks. They went to the New York Spaghetti House for Turkish coffee and hookahs. 

  The Brigotti’s served fresh warm bread and large bowls of pasta with a spicy brown sauce. The sauce was made from a vegetable and plum tomato base, finely ground up beef, and a secret blend of spices. The brown sauce made their name in the city. It’s not     how you write your name, it’s the ink in the pen that matters.

   The waiters at the New York Spaghetti House were all men, middle-aged and older. They carried themselves with poker faces, as though on military parade. The busboys were younger. I was one of the youngest busboys during my tenure there, even though I was in my late 20s. The waiters wore black pants, black shoes, and black ties. Some of them wore black vests. Their shirts were white. They took orders by memory, never writing anything down. That turned out to be my downfall. My memory played tricks on me all night long my first night there. The kitchen crew got sick and tired of replacing my mistakes.

   Once I got the hang of busing tables I didn’t mind it. At least I didn’t have to memorize anything. Bussing meant removing soiled  plates, glasses, silverware, and napkins from tables, setting tables for new feeders with clean plates, glasses, silverware, and napkins, refilling drinks and delivering food if servers were busy, as well as keeping the dining room tidy, mopping up spills, and staying out of the way of the head waiter. He was a stern man and didn’t suffer fools among the workforce, although he was unfailingly polite to diners.

   One evening a woman with Shaker Heights written all over her asked him if the cream in her coffee was fresh. “Yes, it is fresh,” he said. “This morning it was still grass.”

   “Oh, I’m so glad,” she said. The head waiter flashed a thin smile.

   The tablecloths were red and white checkered. Bussing tables meant always being at hand, even though there wasn’t always anything to do. In between staying busy I listened in on the goings on at nearby tables. It was like going to the movies. There were first dates and wedding anniversaries. There were birthdays, graduations, and family reunions. There was plenty of gossip to be overheard, there being plenty of lawyers, bankers, and politicians downtown.

   I listened in on a pair of yuppies. I worked out that they were both lawyers. I couldn’t work out the whys and wherefores behind their dinner date. They were a good-looking couple but sparred with mean-spirited conversation all through the appetizer, soup, and the principal meal. When they were done chewing their food they kept on chewing on each other.

   “You shouldn’t drink so much,” she said. “You’ve got be at work bright and early.”

   “Like they say, work is the curse of the drinking class,” he said.

   “You should know.”

   He got steamed up and looked like he was going to jump down his own throat, but instead poured some more booze down it.

   When vaudeville houses downtown were going strong in the 1920s performers like Jimmy Durante and W. C. Fields ate at the New York Spaghetti House all the time. After World War Two Mario’s brother Marino came from Rome to help out and stayed, eventually becoming the head chef. He was the boss of the kitchen during my short stint there. After my first day I avoided him, the same as I avoided the head waiter. I didn’t have a problem with authority, so long as it ignored me.

   The dining tables were draped with red-and-white-checked tablecloths and the walls were wood paneled, except where they were covered by murals. The murals were painted by John Cgosz, an expatriate Hungarian painter. They depicted gondoliers in Venice, the harbor at Naples, the Coliseum in Rome, and the island of Capri. The island was intensely sunlit in the dimly lit dining room. It was like a tour of Italy.

   Every so often somebody or other came in alone and ate alone, He was almost always a man. The life in his eyes was usually the color of something he’d forgotten. He drank Chianti while waiting for his spaghetti. He slurped coffee after dinner and never left much of a tip. He always looked the way somebody looks when he doesn’t know anybody at a party.

   One night a couple came in with twin six year olds. Children eating at the New York Spaghetti House weren’t entirely unusual, but it was uncommon. The twin girl started acting up during dinner and wouldn’t stop. Her brother soon joined her. Diners at two tables asked to be moved downstairs. The head waiter finally made an appearance and explained the children were being disruptive and they would have to leave. The father of the children, however, wasn’t prepared to leave his half-eaten dinner behind. He frog-marched his twins outside and came back alone a minute later. When the head waiter raised his eyebrows the man said, “I locked them up in the car.”

   The front of the restaurant was chalet-style, like something from the old country. Inside it was bigger than it looked from the sidewalk. It was six thousand square feet big, which was nearly two thousand square feet bigger than an NBA basketball court. There was a long oak bar in the lounge. There was a floating staircase. The kitchen was small. The station chefs, sous chefs, and head chef were always cursing in Italian in the infernal heat.

   On a mid-week night a man and woman walked in. “They have great spaghetti here,”  the man said as they entered. They had gotten married over the weekend and were still celebrating. They were seated on the main floor and ordered a bottle of red wine and matching spaghetti plates with meatballs on the side. Shortly after being served dinner their waiter came over and said to the wife as politely as he could, “We do not cut our spaghetti here.”  Long spaghetti is designed to be twirled around a fork. It ensures a better distribution of sauce. The brown sauce at the New York Spaghetti House was their measure of craftsmanship. Cutting the spaghetti made it harder to twirl and reduced the lengthy surface for the brown sauce. It altered the aesthetic.

   The wife looked up at the waiter and said, ‘I’m from Baltimore and we cut our spaghetti there.” She didn’t put her knife down. The waiter didn’t want to insult Baltimore and so he  didn’t say any more. The waiters could be stiff-necked but knew when to be discrete.

   I got acquainted with the other busboys, since we were all in the same boat. One of them, whose name was Enzo, was my age and we got along fine, until he was sent home and I didn’t see him after that. What happened occurred on a Sunday night. It wasn’t especially busy. Enzo and I were busy doing nothing when a young man strode across the main dining room right at us. He was wearing a gray t-shirt, black pants, and a scowl on his face. His hair was black, slicked back, and his skin was olive. He was Italian like Enzo.

   When he got to us he ignored me and got into Enzo’s face. He was speaking in Italian. I didn’t understand a word of it, although I could tell he was angry. Before I knew it he grabbed Enzo’s shirt collar, twisted it, and pushed him hard against the wall. Enzo was pinned. He pulled the ears of the young man but to no effect, so he head butted him. Blood gushed from the young man’s forehead. He punched Enzo and broke his nose, but before anything else could happen a scrum of waiters and busboys broke it up. They dragged the young man out the back door and threw him into the alley.

   When they came back Enzo was sitting in a corner with his head thrown back and ice on his nose. There was blood all over his white shirt. I asked one of the waiters what it had all been about. 

   “Enzo steal his girl,” the waiter said.

   A man in a dark suit and an angel face in a low cut dress were one of the last tables my last night. Thankfully, nothing had gone wrong that night, although closing time was still an hour away. The man was smoking a cigar. He looked like a gangster. After dinner he ordered decaf coffee for himself. The angel face was inspecting herself in a hand mirror. She didn’t order anything. The waiter was  busy and asked me to serve the coffee. “Make sure it’s decaf, pal,” the man said. “If I’m still awake at three in the morning, I’m going to call you to complain.” I didn’t like his sense of humor, if that’s what it was. It was the end of my job of work at the restaurant and I decided one more mistake wasn’t going to kill me. I brought him straight-up coffee. I wasn’t worried about him calling me. He didn’t have my phone number, which was a good thing. I found out later he didn’t just look like a wise guy. He was a wise guy up the hill in Little Italy.

   I collected my pay, had dinner on the house, and went home. It was the last time I set foot in the New York Spaghetti House. After I got married and thought about going for dinner sometime, it had closed and moved to the suburbs. My wife and I didn’t drive out there because the suburbs are more flavorless than not.

   One day the next summer I was standing outside of Captain Frank’s on the E. 9th St. pier when a man in a dark suit approached the front door. He looked like the Mob. Another man in a dark suit, younger and bigger, held the front door open for him. He looked like Mob muscle. Captain Frank’s was a seafood house. Cleveland’s underworld ate there day in and day out. I had gone for a long walk along the lakeshore to the Cleveland Public Power plant and back and was waiting for a friend of mine to pick me up.

   “Hey, don’t I know you from somewhere?” the Mob man said, pausing inside the doorway. ”Aren’t you a waiter here?”

   “No, sir, I don’t work here.” I didn’t say anything about the New York Spaghetti House.

   “I swear I remember you from somewhere and it’s a sour memory.”

   Oh, oh, spaghetti-o’s. “I’m new in town,” I said. “I just got here, so it couldn’t have been me.”

   “All right,” he said and made his way into Captain Frank’s.

   I walked to the landward side of the pier and leaned on a telephone pole, waiting for my friend. Whitecaps were breaking over the pier. Lake Erie is shallow, long, and narrow. The fetch makes waves grow taller and break forcefully. I knew full well there were no sharks in the water, but I kept my eyes open for any more unpleasant surprises.

A version of this story was published in the ezine Spillwords.

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.”

“Cross Walk” by Ed Staskus

“A Cold War thriller that captures the vibe of mid-century NYC.” Sam Winchell, Beyond Books

Late summer, New York City, 1956. The Mob on the make and the streets full of menace. President Eisenhower on his way to Brooklyn for the opening game of the World Series. A killer waits in the wings. Stan Riddman, a private eye working out of Hell’s Kitchen, scares up the shadows looking for a straight answer.

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

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

Home Movies

Boss Man

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By Ed Staskus

   It was ten minutes before five o’clock on a Friday when Dave Myers asked me to come into his office. I knew his plan was to get rid of me. Efficient Lighting was going downhill fast. There wasn’t much that was efficient about it anymore. I also knew I wanted to stick it out before it all went to hell and the doors closed for good. There was still some blood in the turnip. All I had to do was somehow convince the boss man to let bygones be bygones.

   That was going to be easier said than done. Dave’s bite could be worse than his bark. When I walked into his office and saw him with his wiener dog in his lap, sitting behind his St. Bernard-sized desk, I thought if I played my cards right, I might have a chance. He was high-handed but he could be flighty, too. The dog was the key.

   “You wanted to see me, Dave?”

   He was wearing a green checked shirt and a blue blazer. He gave me a sour look. He didn’t like me calling him Dave. I didn’t like calling him David. Some of the sales guys called him Corner Office. The two Vietnamese women who did the bookkeeping called him Big Daddy. The guys in the warehouse called him Big Cheese. 

   Efficient Lighting was the parent company of several offspring. We sold commercial lighting of all kinds for all kinds of uses, from illumination to disinfection. We sold heating bulbs and metal halide bulbs. We sold high-pressure sodium bulbs for parking lots. We sold plant grow bulbs and bulbs that made salt water coral grow. Our big seller was Light Sources tanning bulbs. We sold them by the boat load, although the boats had been slowly getting smaller since the start of the aughts, after tanning beds got mixed up with cigarettes. It was a slow death, but it was the kiss of death. Fewer and fewer people wanted to risk skin cancer for a drop-dead tan.

   The first time I met Dave Myers was at the Light Sources factory in Connecticut. Our sales guys were there for a tour of the plant, to see how fluorescent UV bulbs were made. I was one of the sales guys. When we were introduced to him, I couldn’t help noticing his office was spacious, something on the order of ten times the size of my cubicle. He was some kind of executive in charge of something. It seemed he was close to Christian Sauska, the head man of the operation. I found out later Dave Myers was married to a woman from the Sauska family.

   Light Sources went back to 1983, back to Hungary, when Christian Sauska and some long-gone buddies got the company off the ground. All the top guys in Connecticut, the site of their American factory, were Hungarians. Dave was enough Hungarian to count as one of the guys. When Light Sources engineered a takeover of Ultraviolet Resources International, the golden goose of Efficient Lighting, they sent Dave to us where we were in Brook Park, Ohio to run the show. He became our Dutch uncle.

   Doug Clarke was the owner of Efficient Lighting. He had built a state of the art 45,000 square foot warehouse and offices in Brook Park at the turn of the millennium, across the street from the Holy Cross Cemetery, after more than fifteen years in the light bulb business, most of them in a repurposed building in Lakewood. When Light Sources took control of Ultraviolet Resources everything stayed the same for a while. Everybody stayed right where they were. I stayed in my cubicle where everything was within arm’s reach. The only change was that Doug was kicked upstairs and Dave took over Doug’s ground floor corner office and day-to-day operations.

   I was a jack of all trades, working general lighting, salt water fish lighting, and tanning bulbs. Everybody was the boss of me at the same time nobody knew what to do with me. I kept my head down and kept moving, trying to stay out of the weeds. I went to all the sales and motivational meetings and tried not to doze off. I had trouble concentrating on the gasbags who did all the talking. 

   The second time I met Dave was at a trade show in Las Vegas. By the end of the day I thought, “This guy must get the same briefing the President of the United States gets every morning.” He seemed to know everything about everything. I never ventured an opinion about anything to him. I didn’t need him turning me over every chance he got.

   I was more-or-less civil to Dave from the day he showed up to the day he took Ultraviolet Resources to greener pastures. The family firm was splitting up and the day they would split up for good was fast approaching. Kathy Hayes, Doug’s wife, had brought her brothers and sisters into the business one after the other. They were all on the verge of jumping ship and signing on to the HMS Bounty. In the end that is what happened.

   Patty Hayes was our sales manager for the moment, but she was too mild-mannered to last and didn’t last. John Hayes, Kevin Hayes, and Maggie Hayes ran the show. They were mean-spirited and fit the bill. They rotated who was Beavis and who were the Buttheads on a daily basis. Maggie did her best to be Beavis as often as possible and took the trophy home more often than not. Kevin took personality lessons from Dave. John handled big accounts and tried to look too busy to care about trophies. What he cared about was his super-sized paycheck. Kevin’s wife was our long-time bean counter. She controlled the books with a left-handed smile.

   Dave and the Beavis and Butthead crew were on the verge of leaving Brook Park for a bigger building in Westlake. He was dreaming up a new business venture with Wisconsin-based Tan-U, a regional distributor in the upper Midwest. He had plans for becoming the top dog of the tanning bulb world.

   “As the indoor tanning industry evolves into a more mature market, consolidation makes a great deal of business sense,” he said. “I can’t think of another company which could result in a better fit and look forward to cementing the new company’s position as a major player in the market.” Dave could be on the level on occasion, but he was a big fan of corporate snake oil.

   He started by asking me if I liked my job.

   “Sure,” I said, stretching the truth.

   “Are you satisfied with how things are going?”

   “Sure,” I lied. 

   “What are your goals?”

   He was getting to be bothersome with his business school questions, but I played along. I made up some goals. Dave liked the sound of his own voice far more than he liked the sound of anybody else’s voice. I kept it short. The less said the better, unless I wanted to be treated like a country cousin.

   Dave nodded, stroking his wiener dog, considering my goals. He rubbed his chin and looked down his nose. I knew it was in one ear and out the other. His middle-aged dog was recovering from hip surgery. One of my middle-aged hips hurt. I was taking yoga classes, looking for relief. I was taking them two and three times a week. Along the way I was learning meditation and patience.

   Dave started explaining how the business world works. He was snarky and patronizing while talking at me. He told me that to understand how business works, you must have a firm understanding of how people think and behave, how people make decisions, act on those decisions, and communicate with others. At its core, he intoned, every enterprise is a collection of people whose work and processes can be reliably repeated to produce a particular result.

   “Do you understand what I’m getting at?” he asked after tossing me his guidance counselor crumbs.

   “Sure,” I said. “How is your dog doing?”

   “Much better,” he said. “Thanks for asking.” He described the limp the dog had had to live with, the operation, his recovery, and the first day the purebred Daschund had stepped out on grass and run a few steps, wagging its tail. He brought the dog to work every day. The dog slept in a custom-made bed in the corner. He ate a special diet catered to him in special doggie bowls. Dave encouraged the dog to follow at his heels whenever he went anywhere in the building in order to build its strength back up.

   “If there’s one thing that man loves without a shred of contempt, it’s that dog,” I thought.

   We talked about pets, animal cruelty and animal rescue, the companionship of dogs, the loyalty of dogs, and whether dogs were better people than people. By the time he was done, since he did most of the talking, it was past six o’clock and he said he had to pack up for a weekend trip. He gave me a bottle of wine from the walnut custom-made wine rack in his office. 

   “Thanks, Dave,” I said, hefting the bottle like a trophy. II was surprised. It was undoubtedly worth more than I made in a day. Dave had seventy or eighty bottles in his office. Maybe I could sell it on eBay. Maybe I would leave it out in the sun and let it turn to vinegar.

   He had forgotten to fire me, thanks to the dog. I slipped away to my cubicle, got my stuff, and left. In the parking lot I saw his four door luxury sedan and his natty ragtop sports car. They were parked on either side of my Saturn. I made sure to not dent, scratch, or otherwise molest one or the other of his rides. The last thing I wanted was a lecture from a clubhouse lawyer.

   When Westlake was ready for Ultraviolet Resources International, Dave, John, Kevin, Maggie, Kevin’s cagey accountant wife, somebody’s dodgy sister-in-law, and some others of the sales force went to the outer-ring suburb. Our building felt half-empty after that because it was half-empty. We were going to struggle for the next three years until all the downsizing that could be done was done and the building had to be sold. I was one of the last to be laid off, but I didn’t mind. There was hardly any work left for me to do by then, anyway. I had gotten tired of taking long lunches with nobody to talk to.

   The next thing I heard through the grapevine was that Dave wasn’t with Ultraviolet Resources reinventing corporate tricks anymore. He was up to his own tricks. He had set up an ISO Italia office near the Chagrin Highlands, selling glossy Italian tanning beds and shoddy Canadian-made Sylvania tanning bulbs. I was sure he could explain away the performance problems of his bulbs.

    The following year I read news that he had gone into the business of backdoor crookery. He had been charged by the Securities and Exchange Commission with insider trading. He had always been bullish on the stock market. I wasn’t sure he would be able to explain his actions away. Federal agents didn’t usually like it when their suspects talked down to them.

   “Baltimore-based consultant Brett Cohen received coded e-mails from a fraternity brother about two biotechnology companies and passed the information to an uncle, David Myers, of Cleveland, Ohio who traded on the tip,” the Securities and Exchange Commission said.

   The fraternity brother got the information from his real brother, who was a patent agent for California-based Sequenom, which made genetic analysis products. The patent agent passed along non-public information about the company’s plans to acquire Exact Sciences. Dave bought 35,000 shares of Exact Sciences on the sly before the acquisition was announced. The news sent Exact Sciences’ stock up 50 percent, setting Dave up to pocket first class profits by selling the stock over the next few weeks. “David Myers garnered more than $600,000 in profits trading on the inside information,” the Securities and Exchange Commission complained.

   The patent agent also passed on tips about an up-coming announcement that investors should no longer rely on Sequenom’s data about its Down syndrome testing. Dave bought Sequenom options just before the announcement, which caused a 75 percent drop in the company’s stock, according to the Securities and Exchange Commission complaint.

   “David Myers later sold that entire position for illegal profits of more than $570,000,” the complaint alleged. He knew how to put his nose to the grindstone when he had to. He knew how to generate cold hard cash out of nothing and spend it on himself, no problem. 

   On top of everything else, the United States Attorney for the Southern District of California filed criminal charges against Brett Cohen and Dave. My Dutch uncle was going to have to spend some of his profits on a mouthpiece. The mouthpiece was no great help. They both eventually pled guilty to conspiracy to commit securities fraud. 

   “Holy smokes,” I thought, shutting off my Apple iPad. I didn’t wish Dave any real harm, but it was nice to know he didn’t know everything after all. I didn’t care how much he knew because I knew he didn’t care what I thought. He had sometimes forgotten my name in mid-sentence. I had forgotten the wiener dog’s name but wished him the best, on and off the leash, although I thought he would be better off if he made a break for it, so long as his new hip was good to go. No good dog should end up being bad to the bone.

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.”

“Made in Cleveland” by Ed Staskus

Coming of age in the Midwest in the 1960s and 1970s.

“A collection of street level short stories blended with the historical, set in Cleveland, Ohio. The storytelling is plugged in.” Sam Winchell, Beyond Books

Available on Amazon:

A Crying of Lot 49 Production

Home Movies

Brother From Another Planet

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By Ed Staskus

   I wasn’t a sportswriter or a sports photographer at the time, but I had a media pass so I saw more Cleveland Cavalier games in the flesh during the 1980-81 season than I have ever seen in my life. I saw them from a better seat, too, even though I didn’t have a seat. I stood or sat cross-legged court side, under the baskets at the base of the stantions or beside the benches, and pretended to be doing something like taking notes. Nobody questioned my Kodak Instamatic Point & Shoot camera or schoolboy spiral notepad, even though the camera was rarely loaded with film and I often forgot to bring a pen.

   I got the media pass from my brother, who was a student at Lakeland Community College in Kirtland. He worked part-time for the school newspaper. He was their communications and media manager. It didn’t pay anything, but he got a nice business card to carry in his pocket. I had my pass laminated and wore it clipped on my belt. Whenever anybody bumped me jostling in or out of the arena I checked to make sure the pass was still on my belt. It was worth its weight in gold, getting me in to see the wine and gold whenever I wanted.

   The Cavaliers weren’t very good in 1980. Mike Mitchell was their best player. It was a sharp drop-off from there. Bill Musselman, who was the coach, didn’t have much to work with and it showed on his game face game after game. His face got longer as the season wore on. The team finished the year twenty four games out of first place.

   My drive to the Richfield Coliseum in Richfield Township, twenty-five miles south of where I lived near downtown Cleveland, was long and longer, especially whenever they were playing a league-leading team like the Boston Celtics or Philadelphia 76ers. I soon enough learned to go early or get stuck in traffic. The Richfield Coliseum was Larry Bird’s favorite basketball arena, but he didn’t have to drive there. An interstate and a turnpike both dumped cars onto a two-lane road in the middle of nowhere. It was a snail’s pace at the best of times. The traffic issues got worse the worse the weather got. In addition, the single level concourse made for bottlenecks among fans coming in all at once. Nobody liked that, shuffling their feet to get to their seats. I had to pay for parking, which I didn’t like, although I brushed it off. Once I flashed my pass at the turnstile and strolled in without a hitch I was happy again.

   A lot went on at the Richfield, Coliseum, including concerts, truck pulls, rodeos, circuses, ice shows, wrestling, hockey, and indoor soccer. The arena hosted a championship boxing match between Muhammad Ali and Chuck Wepner in the mid-70s. The fight went to the bitter end, the human punching bag holding on for dear life but going down before the final bell, losing in a TKO and inspiring Sylvester Stallone’s movie “Rocky.”

   The Cavaliers weren’t the first pro basketball team in Cleveland. The first three roundball teams, starting in 1924, were the Rosenblums, the Rebels, and the Pipers. When the “Miracle of Richfield” happened during the 1975 season, the Cavaliers advancing to the Eastern Conference Finals, everybody forgot about the team’s basketball pioneers, if they had ever thought about them in the first place.

   The Richfield Coliseum opened in October 1974 with Frank Sinatra doing the honors. When he sang “My Way” the sold-out crowd roared its approval. “My friend, I’ll make it clear, I’ll state my case, of which I am certain.” Nobody roared louder than Nick Mileti. He had been a lawyer in the inner-ring suburb of Lakewood, but then got the bug. “I want to have fun, make some dough, and leave a few footprints,” he told sportswriters asking about his origins.

   “Nick could sell you the Brooklyn Bridge, whether you wanted it or not,” said Bill Fitch, the Cavaliers coach from 1970 to 1979. The new arena in the middle of nowhere was the immigrant son’s Brooklyn Bridge to glory. “My daddy was a machinist who came over from Sicily as a teenager and had a dream that I was to wear a white shirt,” he said.

    He started by buying the Cleveland Arena and the city’s hockey team. He owned the Cleveland Indians baseball team for a while and then picked up the basketball team, too. He wasn’t using his own money, but he doctored it to look like it was his. After a while he took a good look at the Cleveland Arena, built in 1937, with its decrepit plumbing, lack of concessions, and a seating capacity of only 11,000 fans. What he saw was money flying out the window. 

   It was the venue for the first ever rock and roll concert in 1952, the Moondog Coronation Ball. The players slapping pucks and dunking basketballs called the place “The Black Hole of Calcutta.” They later called the new arena “The Palace on the Prairie.”

   “We met with the guy running the old arena,” Nick Mileti said. “There was a calendar on the wall and I asked, ‘Why is it all white?’ He said, ‘Because we don’t have any events.’ It was an incredible situation. I bought the Barons and the arena, and after that, the first call I made was to Walter Kennedy, the commissioner of the NBA, and said I wanted a basketball franchise. And two years later, I got one.”

   When in the early 1970s he decided on moving the basketball team halfway to Akron to do better business, every Cleveland politician and businessman was against the idea. They wanted to revitalize downtown, not vitalize someplace in the boondocks. They wanted the cash flow of twenty thousand fans driving in forty or fifty times a season. They wanted the countless concerts, circuses, and events the venue would host. They wanted the tax revenue. They didn’t get what they wanted. Brand new and bigger profits were what Nick Mileti wanted, and that was that.

   I didn’t get to know any radio or TV broadcasters doing the games, but I got to know some of the writers and photographers well enough to say hello. They were guys like Bill Nichols, Chuck Heaton, and Burt Graeff. One or the other of them was always giving me the fisheye. When I saw it happening I pretended to be taking a picture with my Instamatic. The only newshound I was on more than hello and goodbye terms was Pete Gaughan. He was a sportswriter for the SunMedia suburban papers, writing about high school, college, and pro sports and anything else that involved hitting, kicking, throwing, or catching a ball. I met him while refereeing flag football in Kirkland on Sunday mornings,

   The flag football league had started with four teams. By 1980 there were two fields and fourteen teams. The teams were mainly made up of former high school players. Another guy and I were the only two refs at first, but as more teams joined, a second and third two-man crew were needed. The brass paid $20.00 to each ref each game, but still had trouble recruiting and keeping crews for the Sunday morning games. When Pete Gaughan was taken on it was scraping the bottom of the barrel. Pete may have known all about local sports, but he didn’t know how to be on time and was indifferent about the rules.

   The first Sunday I met him he misjudged the parking space and brought his rust bucket to a stop on the wrong side of the curb. When the driver’s door swung open, the car still running, a half dozen empty Budweiser cans rolled out and he staggered out of the car in a cloud of cigarette smoke. He looked like hell, like he hadn’t slept in a week. I turned his car off while he struggled into ref’s clothes. I gave him a whistle and a penalty flag since he was assigned to me.

   Pete worked behind the offensive line while I worked downfield. He didn’t blow his whistle or throw his yellow rag once, not even when there was blood. One of the teams was made up of former Mentor High School players, and unlike most of the teams, they ran the ball more than they threw it. They were the number one team in the flag football league because they had played together in school and knew how to execute. One guy on the opposing team got tired of being battered by the relentless running attack, and when the halfback came through the line one more time, the ball tucked under his arm, and the other arm swatting hands away, he didn’t bother trying to reach for either of the flags dangling from the runner’s waist. He raised his forearm head high and let the halfback’s nose run into it. He went down like a shot and blood gushed out of his face. Pete spotted the ball at the spot and stepped to the side, lighting up a cigarette. 

   We called 911 and after an EMS truck showed up, taking care of business, they drove off with him, telling us his cheekbone was fractured along with his pulverized nose. We called the game. The Mentor boys were up by eight touchdowns anyway. Pete tossed his smoldering butt away and popped a Budweiser while we waited on the gridiron for the next game to get going.

   By the 1980 season the “Miracle of Richfield” was five years in the dustbin and Nick Mileti had given up his title as president of the Cavaliers, sold his interest, and control of the team went to Ted Stepien, who was nicknamed the King of Errors. There weren’t going to be any miracles under his reign. The NBA stayed busy writing rules addressing some of the crazy things he was prone to doing. He traded away five consecutive first-round picks. The league wrote the Stepien Rule, which states no team can trade away consecutive first-round draft picks.

   In the meantime, I tried to see all the games involving the better teams in the league. The Cavaliers were a half-good team who could keep up with other half-bad teams. They had trouble with the cream of the crop. That year they went 1 and 4 against the Celtics, 1 and 5 against the Bulls, 0 and 5 against the Knicks, 0 and 6 against the Bucks, and 0 and 6 against the 76ers.

   The Philadelphia team was my favorite team. They were always in the hunt for the title. Maurice Cheeks and Doug Collins were the guards. Bobby “The Secretary of Defense” Jones cleaned up around the basket. Julius “Dr. J” Erving and Daryl “Dr. Dunkenstein” Dawkins led the scoring parade. When the doctors were in the house they were good for almost fifty points. Julius Erving was menacing enough, but Daryl Dawkins was a menace unto himself.

   A year earlier in a game against the Kansas City Kings, dunking the ball with enthusiasm, Daryl broke the backboard, sending both teams ducking. Three weeks later he did it again at home against the San Antonio Spurs. The next week the NBA wrote a new rule that smashing a backboard to smithereens was wrong, so wrong that it would result in a hefty fine and suspension.

   Daryl named his backboard-breaking dunks “The Chocolate-Thunder-Flying, Teeth-Shaking, Glass-Breaking, Rump-Roasting, Wham-Bam, Glass-Breaker-I-Am-Jams.” His other dunks earned their own names, like the Rim Wrecker, the In-Your-Face Disgrace, the Spine-Chiller Supreme, and the Greyhound Special, for when he went coast to coast. 

   “When I dunk, I want to go straight up, and put it down on somebody.” 

   His nicknames were Sir Slam, Chocolate Thunder, and Dr. Dunkenstein. He wore a LoveTron t-shirt while warming up. He told the Cleveland sportswriters he was an alien from the planet LoveTron, where he spent the off-season practicing “interplanetary funkmanship” with his girlfriend Juicy Lucy. The sports reporters scribbled it down like it was manna from Heaven.

   His coach asked him to tone it down. “All the talk and bravado, enough,” Billy Cunningham said. The next day at practice Daryl told his teammates, “I’m not talking today. Coach made me Thunder Down Under.” It didn’t last long. He went back to talking more than ever the next day.

   Daryl Dawkins was in his mid-20s, six foot eleven, and 260 pounds of beef, brawn, and swagger. The Cavalier centers were Kim Hughes and Bill Lambeer, both six eleven, but both slower than Daryl, who wore gold chains during games. One of them featured a cross while another one proclaimed Sir Slam in gold script. Sometimes, he would shave his head and oil it, along with wearing a pirate’s earring. 

   The year before he had averaged almost fifteen points and nine rebounds, helping the 76ers to the NBA Finals, which they lost in six games to the Los Angeles Lakers. I watched him go coast to coast against a back-pedaling Bill Lambeer one night. If it had been the other Cavalier center, Kim Hughes, about forty pounds lighter than Daryl, he wouldn’t have even bothered back-pedaling. He would have gotten out of the way. Bill Lambeer was more stubborn. All the way to the inevitable slam dunk Daryl’s gold chains swung one way and the other way slapping at Bill’s face until he finally ducked and covered. He wasn’t that stubborn. The next year the NBA forbade the wearing of any jewelry while playing ball.

   The last three games I saw at the Richfield Coliseum were the last three games of the season. The Cavaliers lost by 26 to the Bucks, by 21 to the 76ers, and by 35 to the Bullets. It had been a long year. The opening game of the next season boded another long year when the wine and gold lost to the 76ers by 24. But before that game was even played, I didn’t have a media pass anymore and wasn’t planning on going back to the Richfield Coliseum anytime soon. I didn’t have a dependable car and God forbid I break down in the cow pastures of Summit County in the middle of the night.

   I missed going out there, missed the lights and noise, groaning and cheering, being on the floor, the action and excitement, the coaches fuming and cursing, and the players putting up with unruly fans sitting behind them. Daryl Dawkins wasn’t big on putting up with anything. When he flaked on a dunk one night, hearing the catcalls, he kicked somebody’s extra-large Coke off the floor, sticky sugar water spraying on everybody in their top dollar front row seats. He didn’t look back and didn’t apologize. 

   After the Cleveland Cavaliers returned to Cleveland to the new Gund Arena the Palace on the Prairie closed and the parking lot bloomed with weeds and memories. I walked to games on Ontario Ave. a couple of times, but the atmosphere was more corporate than cutthroat and I didn’t go back. They were charging corporate prices for the tickets and I wasn’t about to bust the bank to cheer grown men in shorts bouncing a ball from one end of a hardwood floor to the other end. Besides, the last time I checked on Daryl Dawkins, he was playing for the Harlem Globetrotters. That was where the fun and games had gone.

Ed Staskus posts monthly on 147 Stanley Street at 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.”

“Cross Walk” by Ed Staskus

“A Cold War thriller that captures the vibe of mid-century NYC.” Sam Winchell, Beyond Books

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

The end of summer, New York City, 1956. Stickball in the streets and the Mob on the make. President Eisenhower on his way to Ebbets Field for the opening game of the World Series. A torpedo waits in the wings. A Hell’s Kitchen private eye scares up the shadows.

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Home Movies

Chilling at Irv’s

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By Ed Staskus

   Every Friday and Saturday in the 1970s deli’s like Solomon’s in South Euclid, Budin’s in Shaker Hts., and Irv’s in Cleveland Hts. were packed to the gills. The minute the front doors opened the smells of pastrami and corned beef wafted out like minstrels. My friends and I followed our noses. The minute anybody sat down was the minute a cup of coffee and a menu appeared. After that it was all about waiting for a server, who showed up sooner or later, to bring us sandwiches, pickles, and French fries..

   Even though we hardly ever went to Solomon’s, and only stopped in at Budin’s when we were going to the nearby Shaker Movie Theatre, I was at Budin’s one day having a bagel and coffee when Sandy Herskovitz’s friend won a bet. “I was sitting with a friend,” Sandy said. “A few tables down there were some women. One of them had on a straw hat. A countermen walked by with a jug of coleslaw and my friend says to me, ‘How much do you want to bet that guy is going to dump the coleslaw on the straw hat?’ OK, I’ll take that bet. Sure enough, he tripped and dumped his coleslaw all over the straw hat.”

   We went to Irv’s Deli in Coventry Village more often than not. It was like going to grandma’s house. It was closest to where we lived and it was where latter day beatniks and present day hippies, cops and lawyers, college students, cutie pies, no-good bookies, gangster wannabes, and Jews went for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. There was the occasional misfit everybody ignored. We went there for the cheap breakfasts. We went there late at night, after everything else closed. Irv’s never closed. There were Outlaws and Hells Angels who lurked here and there, at least when the weather was warm and dry, but we avoided them. They spent most of their time drinking heavy down the street at the C-Saw Café, anyway.

   How Irv made any money with us spending the night ordering free refills of coffee is beyond me. Matzo ball soup was a buck a bowl and corned beef sandwiches were a buck-and-a-half. Somebody said Irv printed money in a room behind the kitchen. “You know how those Jews are,” a Case Western Reserve University student said. “They’ve always got secrets.” He was wearing bell bottoms and a turtleneck sweater and sported a Prince Valiant. One time when a waitress was complaining about the bikers and hippies who hung around without ever leaving a tip, Irv, who was always there, said, “You know how those losers are.” He knew how to give as good as he got.

   Although we went there all the time we didn’t usually eat there because we were chronically short on cash. We always had 15 cents for a cup of coffee, but not much more for food, unless it was a free deli roll and butter. Besides, the kitchen was sketchy. None of us ever got sick eating at Irv’s, but all of us closely inspected our food as soon as it was delivered. Nothing that appeared on a plate in front of us ever bore any resemblance to the way it was described on the menu. Beggars can’t be choosers. One night a hippie girl at our table said the sinks and stoves in the kitchen were filthy. We all rolled our eyes and laughed. 

   “No, I mean it,” the girl said. We laughed because the kitchen couldn’t have been any dirtier than her. She needed a bath right away and an appointment at a hair salon right after that. When my friend Jimmy the Jet said he was willing to send an SOS to Mr. Clean, she got into a huff. “Hey, babe, it’s all right, your beauty shines through,” he said. He was a smooth-talking devil.

   Jimmy was called the Jet not because he was fast on his feet but because he talked a mile a minute. Everything he said was a springboard for the next thing he was going to say. He always had an ace up his sleeve, and then another one, and another one. We knew he kept little white pills on his person at all times. He was the only one of us still bright-eyed as the night wore on, rapping with his dope fiend friends. He was always the last to leave, talking to himself as he walked back to his apartment on Mayfield Rd.

   Irv’s was a Jewish deli that served Chinese food, among everything else food-wise, and a bar that specialized in strong shots and weak beer. It was on the corner of Hampshire Rd. and Coventry Rd. in what was called Coventry Village in Cleveland Hts. Irving Gulko opened the delicatessen in 1959. His father and grandfather had both once operated eateries in Cleveland. It was in his blood, even though his food was generally bloodless. There were rumors that he wasn’t really in the deli business, but was in the drugs, prostitution, and bookmaking businesses. We never saw any drug-addled hookers lounging around and laying down bets, but that was neither here nor there.

   The prostitution supposedly went on in the basement, spilling over into the apartment building next door. Jimmy told us there was a secret door leading from Irv’s basement to the apartment building’s basement. “Everybody knows that,” he said. None of us knew it, but we didn’t have the means to rent a hooker, anyway, even if we wanted to. Besides, at the time, we believed in free love.

   At the turn of the century Coventry Village was a retail and restaurant venue for Cleveland’s Jewish community. The Mayfield and Euclid Heights streetcar lines met at the Coventry Rd. and Mayfield Rd. intersection. The streetcars made coming and going more convenient. By the 1920s a profusion of walk-up apartments had been built. There were bakeries and tailor shops. There was a kosher poultry slaughterhouse. By the time we showed up, however, many Jews were packing up and moving to Beachwood and the neighborhood was filling up with head shops and record stores.

   We hung around Coventry Books and flipped through books we weren’t going to buy. Reading was what libraries were for. “Bookstores are a place for youth to come and see people that you wouldn’t see at home,” the owner Ellie Strong said. We followed her advice and did more people watching than reading.

   We didn’t buy books unless we bought them from Kay’s Used Books downtown, where “War and Peace” could be had for 50 cents, but we did buy new records. We bought them at Record Revolution, which had opened a few years earlier. It was up the street from Irv’s. They sold tie-dyed t-shirts and pot paraphernalia, as well, calling the stuff “smoking accessories.” The walls were covered with autographs by Lou Reed, Led Zeppelin, and The Who, among others. Rock critics called it the “coolest place to buy records in Ohio.” It was a dingy place but it had the best LP’s. The rock station WWMS-FM routinely inquired about what was selling and added the albums to its playlist. 

   Many of us didn’t have cars, but some of us had bikes. We kibitzed at Pee Wee’s Bike Shop where they knew everything. If it wasn’t too involved of a repair, Marvin Rosenberg, who was Pee Wee during working hours, fixed things for free. When he was done he always said, “And don’t come back unless you have cash next time.”

   We idled through the High Tide Rock Bottom gift shop. Marcia Polevoi, the owner, never had any advice for us, although she kept an eagle eye on our doings. Shoplifting was endemic. The only customers who always paid were the Outlaws and the Hells Angels. They were criminals but didn’t do any petty thieving.

   The Coventry Street Fair happened for the first time in 1974, drawing close to 50,000 people in a neighborhood where 5,000 was too many. It was dreamt up to draw a new crowd to the scene. There were magicians and fire eaters. We checked out the scene but ran out of breathing room. The crowd was mostly suburbanites curious about the counter culture. “It got so big that the neighbors said they liked it, but whenever it was on, they left town,” said Bruce Hennes, president of the Coventry Neighbors Association. We didn’t leave town although we did what amounted to the same thing. We stayed away. We wouldn’t have been able to elbow our way into Irv’s, anyway.

   We went to the Dobama Theatre. It was a small playhouse in a renovated bowling alley that mostly featured serious style shows. I never saw a musical there. I saw Gore Vidal’s 1972 play “An Evening with Richard Nixon.” The playbill said, “ It is the playwright’s contention that American citizens don’t really remember anything. And a politician is thus able to re-invent himself on a day-to-day basis. Unless it is otherwise noted in the dialogue, what the Nixon character says and does this evening is what Mr. Nixon has really said and done.” I put my toy G.O.P. elephant away in a quiet corner so it could repent its sins. 

   The Saloon was where we went to hear bands. It was more-or-less a rowdy local bar, which worked well when the music was bad, but not so well when the music was good. Stairway and Rocket from the Tombs played there. Our favorite was the Electric Eels. The lead singer liked to dress up in tin foil and rat traps. “Wake up you miracle dumbbells!” he sang. “It’s time to fall out the window!” Their songs were more anti-social noise attack than music. They liked to bring a lawnmower on stage with them. Whenever fans got out of hand the Eels threw glasses of water on them. When that happened, we left, not saying goodbye.

   When we wanted a milkshake we stopped at Tommy Fello’s new dinette, which he called Tommy’s. It was small place with a small menu. He had bought the seven-seat Fine Arts Confectionary two years earlier. He knew how to make three dishes, which were all three of them Lebanese. We stuck to the milkshakes. They were fit for a king and only cost 35 cents each.

   We went to the Heights Art Theatre all the time. It was a 1,2000-seat movie house that opened in 1919. They showed movies nobody else was showing in northeastern Ohio. I saw “The Discrete Charm of the Bourgeoisie” there. The surrealist Spanish movie bowled me over. I was at the midnight showing of it and didn’t make it to Irv’s that night.

   “The Lovers” was screened at the Heights Art Theatre in 1959. It had won a Special Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival the year before. The local cops weren’t handing out any awards. They cleared the theater and confiscated the film. The Cleveland Plain Dealer called the movie “shockingly nasty.” The manager got arrested and convicted of “public depiction of obscene material.” He cried foul and appealed the verdict. The case worked its way up the chain of command. Five years later the Supreme Court overturned the ruling. They said the criminal conviction was improper and the film was not obscene. “I know it when I see it,” is what Justice Potter Stewart said about obscenity. When I saw the movie years later I thought, “What was all the fuss about?” It was a French movie. Everybody talked a lot and smoked a lot cigarettes more than they did anything else.

   Irv’s Deli was where we hung out and where we went when we were down to spare change. It was also where we ran seeking sanctuary whenever things went wrong out on the street. Even though we went to the C-Saw Café sometimes, we generally avoided it. The baseball fans who rioted at Municipal Stadium during Ten Cent Beer Night the summer of 1974 in the middle of a game between the Texas Rangers and Cleveland Indians, and who ended up at the C-Saw Cafe later that night, didn’t know what they were getting into when they started arguing with the bikers at the bar. It is one thing to drunkenly storm a playing field and attack baseball players. It is another thing to drunkenly attack Hells Angels. The bikers drink more than anybody but never get drunk. When they fight they are all business. They don’t hit singles. When they hit you it is a home run.

   Jimmy the Jet and I were walking past the bar when a man came stumbling all arms and legs out the door and landed on his back. All the breath went out of him. He started gasping. He was followed out the door by a Hells Angel who began kicking him. Before long there was blood coming out of the man’s mouth. His friends poured out onto the sidewalk, but stood back like innocent bystanders. The Hells Angel continued to kick the man. Before I knew it Jimmy was stepping in. “Hey, stop that!” he yelled and pushed the biker. That was a big mistake.

   “What the hell?” the biker bellowed and swung his arm at Jimmy. He was unsteady on his feet, however, and the momentum toppled him over. When he did other Hells Angels came out of the bar. When they did they saw Jimmy and me standing over their fallen motorbike brother. When they glared at us and growled, showing their teeth, we knew the jig was up.

   Jimmy and I ran into Irv’s, the Hells Angels on our heels. We barreled past Irv who was sitting where he always sat. I followed Jimmy when he ran to the back of the deli and through a door. It was the door to the basement. He fastened the dead bolt on the other side as soon as we were through the door. As soon as he did hobnail boots started kicking the other side of it. The boots sounded angry. We ran down the stairs and into the basement of the apartment building next door. I looked around for the helping hand of a hooker, but there weren’t any, not even one. We ran up the apartment building’s stairs to the first floor and back out onto Coventry Rd. There was a crowd of bikers milling around Irv’s front door.

   “What’s going on?” I asked, still breathless.

   “Some punk jumped one of our guys,” a biker said. “When we find him we’re going to feed him to the rats. Then it will be down the sewer for whatever is left of him.”

   We wished him and his friends the best of luck and hurried away. We walked to Jimmy’s apartment. When we got there he set the deadbolt and secured the chain lock behind us. We sat in the gloom. Jimmy kept the lights off like it was a scary movie. He hadn’t said a word since we left Irv’s, setting a new world’s record. He lit a Lucky Strike and started to chill out. He put an LP on the turntable and lowered the needle. It was Jim Croce singing “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown.”

   “It’s too bad more men aren’t angels,” he said, leaning back and idly blowing smoke rings. “If they were we wouldn’t need to be sitting here like this.” There was a full moon that night. A police car siren went past wailing. I left in the middle of the night, but didn’t go home. I went back to Irv’s and splurged on a pastrami sandwich.

Ed Staskus posts monthly on 147 Stanley Street at 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.”

“Made in Cleveland” by Ed Staskus

Coming of age in the Rust Belt in the 1960s and 1970s.

“A collection of street level stories blended with the historical, set in Cleveland, Ohio. The storytelling is plugged in.” Sam Winchell, Beyond Books

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Cooking Up Trouble

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By Ed Staskus

   “Mom, you know it’s not dinner without a napkin,” Matt said. He was on the third floor on his cell phone talking to his mother Terese who was in the first- floor kitchen. She answered on the land line. She had made a 3-course dinner for him and taken it upstairs a minute earlier. 

   She made dinner and took it upstairs to him every night, at least on those nights he was at home. When he wasn’t, she caught a break. She would then quick fry some chicken and kick back in front of the TV. She liked B & W movies, mostly comedies and melodramas. Her husband worked split shifts. She had the house to herself those nights to laugh it up at the funny parts and cry at the sad parts.

   Terese was my mother-in-law. She was a self-taught chef. She got the bug from her mother Stefanija, who had emigrated from Lithuania to the United States after World War Two. Stefanija worked in the kitchen of Stouffer’s flagship restaurant in downtown Cleveland for the rest of her working life. After she retired, she compiled her favorite Lithuanian recipes and published them in a book called “Kvieciu Prie Stalo.” It means “We Welcome You to the Table.”

   Terese taught herself well enough that she could make anything, from sloppy joes at feed-the-poor kitchens to wedding cakes for millionaires. She only ever thumbed through cookbooks when she had to. No matter that she was intrepid and skilled, having conceived and operated several restaurants, as well as working as a pastry chef and a caterer, she had to play dumb waiter once a day.

   “I’ll bring one right up to you,” she said to her son. What else could she do? After all, she had taught him his table manners.

   Matt lived on carry out dinners except they were carry up dinners. His mother did the cooking and carrying. Matt did the eating. When he was done he dutifully brought his dishes downstairs. My father-in-law Dick washed them by hand every day. They had a dishwasher, but he preferred to stand at the sink and get his hands dirty while getting the dishes clean. He had been a war-time MP in Vietnam before becoming a bartender. He was a hands-on kind of man.

   Their house was on E. 73rd St. at the corner of Chester Ave. in the Fairfax neighborhood. It was built in 1910, three stories of it, four bedrooms, two baths, two fireplaces, and a full basement. The third floor was originally servant’s quarters. The foundation was sandstone quarried in nearby Amherst by the Cleveland Stone Company. Amherst was the “Sandstone Capital of the World” back in the day.

   There were stores, churches, and schools everywhere back then. There were light industries and warehouses. Street cars ran east and west all day and night on Euclid Ave., which was one block north of Chester Ave.. The Karamu House Theater opened in 1915. Langston Hughes developed and premiered some of his plays at the theater. Sears, Roebuck & Co. built a flagship store there in 1928. 40,000 people lived in Fairfax in the 1940s. Sixty years later, when my mother-in-law showed up, only 5,000-some people still lived there. 

   By the 1950s the servants on the third floor were long gone and so were the well-off families who had raised their children in the house. They moved away to the suburbs. Urban renewal was in full swing. As 1960 rolled around the neighborhood became nearly all-black and low-income. The house was divided up and converted into boarding rooms. By the 1980s it had gone to hell, in more ways than one.

   Terese and her husband were living in Reserve Square in a 17th floor three-bedroom corner apartment overlooking Lake Erie on E. 13th St. and Chester Ave. when they bought the house with the intention of bringing it back to life. They were living well enough. They owned and operated a bar restaurant on the ground floor of the apartment complex. They didn’t realize how much trouble they were getting into making the move. It was the kind of trouble confidence men outside their ken had dreamed up.

   The neighborhood they moved to was three miles from their former home in downtown Cleveland. The Fairfax neighborhood was on the edge of University Circle, where most of the city’s major educational institutions and museums were. The eastern side of the locality was dominated by the Cleveland Clinic, which was growing by leaps and bounds. The Hough neighborhood was just to the north and the St. Clair-Superior neighborhood was north of that.  On the other side of the city limits was the lake, where yellow perch and walleye lived rent-free.

   The house was being flipped when Terese and Dick first saw it. The flipper put the house back together as a single-family home, putting in a new central staircase, a new kitchen, and a new two-car garage. He stopped there. He bought the house for pennies on the dollar. He sold it to my in-laws for dollars on the dollar. They paid $135,000.00 for the house, more than double what almost all the other houses in Fairfax were priced at. The real estate agent described it as a ”steal.” A vacant lot next door was thrown in as a bonus. There was another vacant lot across the street. There were several others within sight. The empty lots were like tumbleweeds. The neighborhood was more ghost town than not. 

   Hough was where race riots happened in 1966, when Terese was in her mid-20s, married to her first husband, with a child and another one in the making. They then lived on the border of the Euclid Creek Reservation, bounded by North Collinwood and Richmond Hts. It was a family friendly neighborhood with good schools. All the men drove to work in the morning. Most of the women kept house. Children walked to school. Their backyard was a forest. On clear days in the winter they could see Mt. Baldy in the distance.

   The Hough Riots started when the white owner of the Seventy-Niners Café on Hough Ave. and E. 79th St. said “Hell, no” after being asked by a passing black man for a glass of water on an oppressively hot day. One thing led to another, an angry crowd gathered, there was some rock throwing which led to looting and vandalism, arson and sniper fire followed, and two days later the Ohio National Guard rolled in with .50 caliber machine guns mounted on their Jeeps. They carried live ammunition.

   Terese and Dick opted for the Fairfax house because Terese was pining for a house on the near east side near where she had grown up. She grew up in a Lithuanian family, her father and mother and four sisters in a two-bedroom bungalow where she slept on the sofa. It didn’t matter to her that the house she wanted was on the wrong side of the racial divide. Dick wanted what his wife wanted. They lived for each other. He cashed in his 401K to make the down payment on the house. The next summer they took out a second mortgage for $85,000.00 to replace the roof, replace all the old windows with vinyl windows, blow liquid polyurethane insulation into the walls, and side the exterior. They painted the interior, which meant Matt and I pulled on our painter’s pants and got to work.

   The floors were hardwood from back when there were man-sized forests. They had them refinished. When the floors were done, they sparkled like the clock had been turned back a century. No matter how old anything is, everything was once new.

   They blew through their second mortgage fast. When ownership of Terese’s downtown lunch counter in the National City Bank building on E. 9th St. and Euclid Ave. slipped out from under her feet, her partner getting the better of her, they began living partly on Dick’s paycheck, partly on her freelancing, and partly on their credit cards. It wasn’t long before they were making only the minimum payment on their many credit cards. It was a downward spiral.

   Matt moved in with his parents after sampling the bachelor life in Lakewood. He was working full-time for General Electric and going part-time to graduate school to get a second high-tech degree. He played lead guitar in a local rock ‘n roll band, keeping his eyes open for girls who might become his girlfriend. He paid some rent for his third-floor space and helped out around the house. 

   My wife landscaped the front yard and Dick put in a sizable garden in the back yard. Terese liked herbs and fresh vegetables where she could get her hands on them in a jiffy. They adopted a handful of stray cats. They invited Terese’s sisters and their husbands over for holiday dinners. Dick’s family lived in New York, which was a long drive and short excuse away. The house was spacious and cozy at the same time. The house was pretty as a postcard when it was lit up and full of people on Christmas.

   They had barbeques in the summer, opening the garage door and wheeling out a grill. Dick was a driveway cook. He wasn’t a chef, but he was a master at charcoal-broiling when it came to hot dogs, hamburgers, and steaks. We played horseshoes in the vacant lot where there was plenty of room for the forty-foot spacing. Dick was a big man with a soft touch and almost impossible to beat when it came to pitching. He was King of the Ringers. Even when he didn’t hit a ringer he was always close. The game is deceptively simple, but hard to master. When I complained about losing to him over and over again, he said, “You can’t blame your teammates for losing in horseshoes.”

   We bought skyrockets, paper tubes packed with rocket fuel, for Independence Day and shot them off from the vacant lot when it got dark. One of them went haywire and flew into the garage through the open door. Dick was standing at the grill in the driveway but ducked in the nick of time. The cats went running every which way. They stayed on the run for two days, until they got hungry and came back.

   Their garage got broken into. It got broken into again. It wasn’t the safest neighborhood. They installed a security system. They lost their front porch patio furniture to thieves. Terese saw the thieves dragging the furniture down the street in broad daylight, but she was alone and there wasn’t anything she could do about it. She called the Cleveland Police Department but there wasn’t anything they were inclined to do about it. The crime rate in Fairfax was high and the cops had better things to do. Dick replaced the furniture, chaining it down to the deck of the porch. They went on litter patrol most mornings, picking up empty wine and beer bottles and sweeping up cigarette butts and plastic bag trash.

   What few neighbors they had watched out for each other. A mailman lived in a newer house catty corner to them where Spangler Ct. met E. 73rd St.  He clued them in on the workings of Fairfax, what to watch out for and what didn’t matter, and after they took the measure of the neighborhood they got as comfortable with it as they were ever going to get. Terese started ministering to some of the kids who lived in the run-down walk-up four-story apartment building behind them. She made lunch for some of them, took some of them on day trips to nearby museums, and drove some of them to school when their parents were incapacitated.

   There were cluster homes and McMansions being built in both Hough and Fairfax, but they were far and few between. Police cars and ambulances sped up and down Chester Ave. every hour on the hour sirens blaring. There was an occasional gunshot in the night. Everybody locked their doors at sunset.

   One day, sitting on the steps of their front porch, I watched three men tie a rope around a dead tree in the vacant lot across the street. They were going to try to yank it out of the ground with a pick-up. The first time they tried the rope snapped. The second time they tried they used two ropes. They put their pick-up in low gear and tugged. The rear bumper got yanked off and the truck shot forward, the driver slamming on the brakes, tearing up the turf. They came back with a bigger truck. When the tree started to lean it fell over fast, cracking, the roots ripping loose, barely missing them. I thought they were going to saw the branches off and section the trunk after it crashed to the ground, but they didn’t. The tree lay moldering in the grass all summer.

   Neither Terese nor Dick lived to see their house vanishing in front of their eyes. If they had they would have seen their one asset in life reduced in value by 90%. All the money they had was tied up in the house. They would have been left with nothing. They could see it coming and it made them miserable. Their health started to fail. The confidence men who puffed up the housing market until the bubble blew up walked away free and clear. Alan Greenspan, who ran the Federal Reserve Bank for nearly twenty years, said the meltdown was due to a “flaw in the system.” He didn’t say much more about it that mattered.

   Terese died on New Year’s Eve 2005 and Dick died on Easter Saturday 2006. She collapsed  on the landing of their central staircase. She was dead by the time 911 got her to the nearby Cleveland Clinic. Dick collapsed in the wine room of their house in the middle of the night four months later while working on a crossword puzzle. He never used a pencil. He always filled the squares in with a pen. When Matt discovered him in the morning, he had almost finished the puzzle. His pen was on the floor. It still had plenty of ink in it.

   It was at that time that house prices started to crumble and the collapse that was going to push the United States into a recession picked up speed. Matt stayed in the house for a few years, trying to make the bank payments, taking in Case Western Reserve University student boarders, but it was no good. When he walked away it was for good. My wife and I helped empty the house, giving most of everything that wasn’t a personal effect to whoever could use it. 

   When it was all over Matt moved away and never went back. Whenever he found himself driving through the Fairfax neighborhood, the night sky filled with fat glittering stars and the streets empty, he avoided the crossroad at E. 73rd St. and Chester Ave. He preferred to not look backwards. He had no taste for what he might see, or not see.

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. 

“Made in Cleveland” by Ed Staskus

Coming of age in the Rust Belt in the 1960s and 1970s.

“An anthology of first-person street level stories blended with the historical, set in Cleveland, Ohio. The storytelling is plugged in.” Sam Winchell, Beyond Fiction

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