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Accidental Reality

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. 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

Baltic Place

Motor City Breakdown

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By Ed Staskus

   Antanas Kairis was two years older than me, sure of himself, and quick on the uptake. He was even quicker when things took a twist. I met him at a party at a small mansion on Magnolia Dr. in University Circle, around the corner from the Music Settlement. Dalia and Algis Nasvytis, who were near my age and who I knew through the community, lived there with their younger sister, Julia, and their parents. It was two weeks before Christmas.

   They threw their house open occasionally, clearing the big room in the back for kids, teenagers, and young adults to dance to records. The grown-ups mingled, smoking and drinking and chatting. The house was brick, two stories with a front facing slate roof and gables and windows galore. Mid-December was cold and it had snowed for days. All lit up the house sparkled in the frosty night.

   Antanas was from Boston and had come to Cleveland, Ohio, to see his girlfriend, who was from Dearborn, Michigan. When I called him Antanas he said, “Call me Andy.” His girlfriend Aida was blonde and beautiful and visiting friends. She didn’t know our hosts, but her friends did, and she knew Andy.

   I didn’t know I was standing next to him until Aida sauntered off to dance with another boy. “What do you know, I drive all day, and she slips off with somebody else,” he grumbled, grinning devilishly. It took me a second to realize he was talking to me. I was wall flowering more than dancing. At least he had a girl to complain about. The field I was playing was empty. I didn’t often strike up conversations with strangers. Andy was more silver-tongued than me, by far.

   He wanted a cigarette. We went out on the back terrace and he lit up. He offered me one but I didn’t smoke. He did most of the talking. By the time we went back inside it seemed like we were fast friends. I didn’t see much of him the rest of the night. He had eyes only for Aida. He clapped me on the back when I was leaving with my ride, saying he hoped we would meet again. I said sure, even though I didn’t expect to ever see him again.

   I don’t know how Andy got my phone number but two months later I found myself on the phone with him. He was driving to Dearborn to see Aida the next weekend and wanted to know if I wanted to go along. I cleared it with my parents, even though they didn’t know him or his family. It was enough for them that he was Lithuanian. He picked me up the next Friday morning. When he arrived he looked like he had driven all night.

   He was driving an almost new hardtop GTO 428. GTO stands for Grand Turismo Omologato. It was red, what Pontiac called Montero Red. It was a cool car inside a hot color. It had street cred, and more. I waved goodbye and jumped in. When we got to the corner of our street, he asked me if I minded driving. I said I didn’t mind and drove all the way to Dearborn while he slept. Dearborn was one hundred and seventy miles away. We made it in record time in the smooth as silk muscle car. The engine had a throaty sound and handled like doing simple arithmetic.

   Henry Ford was born on a farm in Dearborn and later built an estate there. He pioneered the mass production of automobiles and his world headquarters was based there. He forged the River Rouge Complex there, the largest factory of his industrial empire. He had a reconstructed historic village and museum built nearby, immortalizing his youth. The back lot was planted with sunflowers and his favorite crop, which were soybeans. The crops were never harvested.

   There were lots of Poles, Germans, and Lithuanians in Dearborn. If there were any African Americans, I didn’t see them. “Negroes can’t get in here. Every time we hear of a Negro moving in, we respond quicker than reporters do to a fire,” said Orville Hubbard, the mayor of Dearborn for thirty two years. “As far as I am concerned, it is against the law for a Negro to live in my town.” 

   The Michigan Civil Rights Commission found him guilty of posting racist newspaper clippings on City Hall bulletin boards. However, he never saw jail time. He was an equal opportunity bigot. He complained that “the Jews own this country” and that the Irish “are even more corrupt than the Dagos.” When Middle Easterners started moving into Dearborn after the Six-Day War he said “the Syrians are even worse than the niggers.” In 1970 his son John Jay Hubbard ran for mayor against him but got beaten to a pulp. The unofficial slogan of the town was “The Sun Never Sets on a Negro in Dearborn.”

   We got to Aida’s house without too much trouble, except for stopping at several gas stations to ask for directions. Her parents had reservations about Andy but brushed me off as a harmless sidekick. They agreed to let us sleep in their furnished basement that night and Saturday night and made supper. It was cold beet soup with black rye bread and kugelis. I wasn’t surprised it wasn’t burgers and fries. They were true blue Baltic folks.

   We went out on the town, visiting the Automotive Hall of Fame. We went to the Henry Ford Museum and rode in a Model-T. We went to the Fairlane and sat in an old bus. We went to the movies and saw “In the Heat of the Night.” We stopped at a tavern with a neon sign in the window saying “EATS.” Andy explained I was with him and they let me in. We had burgers and fries. Andy had a beer. Aida and I had cans of Sprite.

   On the way back Andy and Aida rolled around in the back seat making out. We were at a stop light minding our own business, waiting for the green light, when a car pulling up next to us got too close and broke off the GTO’s sideview mirror. There wasn’t one to begin with on the passenger side which meant now we didn’t have any. The young woman driving the white Chevy Corvair looked at me, looking chagrined. She put the car in park and got out. I noticed her compact car didn’t had side mirrors from the get-go. The Corvair is on most lists of “The Ten Most Questionable Cars of All Time.” 

   I was standing beside the driver’s door looking at the broken mirror lying in the road when I noticed Andy bolting out of the back seat and making a beeline to who-knows-where. He hit the pavement running and disappeared down a side street. When the police appeared, I pointed to the broken mirror and explained what happened. Aida and I stood next to the GTO while they went about their business. They wrote a ticket and gave it to the guilty girl. She drove away in her Corvair waving goodbye.

   “We’ve called your parents and they’ll be here to pick you up soon,” one of the policemen told Aida. She looked stricken. 

   “Are your parents strict?” I asked. She nodded yes.

   “What about me?” I asked one of the policemen.

   “You’re coming with us,” the policeman said.

   “Where are we going?”

   “You’re going to jail,” he said.

   “Why? I didn’t do anything.”

   “This is a stolen car,” he said.

   The city hall, the police station, and the district court were all in a row on Michigan Ave. I was taken to the police station, photographed and fingerprinted. They put me in a holding tank. It smelled bad, like a toilet with a dead rat in it. A man in a suit showed up and took my statement. 

   “I didn’t steal that car,” I said. “Find Andy. He’ll tell you.”

   “We already found him.”

   “And?”

   “He said you stole the car.”

   “What! That’s not true. Why did he run away if he didn’t steal it? I didn’t steal anything. He did all the stealing, the rat.”

   “Have you ever been to Massachusetts.”

   “No, except once a couple of years ago when there was a Boy Scout Jamboree there.”

   “All right, sit tight,” he said.

   I sat tight that night and the next night and the night after that until my court appearance on Monday. I was stuffed into a cell with three other men, two of them there for drunk and disorderly and one of them, an African American, for being in Dearborn after the sun went down. He called us honkies every so often. After a while we ignored him.

   “I don’t trust anyone that hasn’t been to jail at least once in their life,” the movie director John Waters once declared. “You should have been, or something’s the matter with you.” I was in jail for the first time in my life, working on my trustability.

   I was suspicious of the two drunks and slept with one eye open. My fears were put to rest the next day when they sobered up. They built Ford Mustangs at River Rouge. The complex included ninety three buildings with nearly sixteen million square feet of factory floor space. It had its own docks on the dredged-our Rouge River, one hundred miles of interior railroad track, a private electricity plant, and an integrated steel mill. It was able to turn raw materials into complete cars all within its own space. 

   “You leave your brain at the door,” one of the men said. “Just bring your body, because they don’t need any other part. It’s a good thing, otherwise I would lose my mind. They tell you what to do and how to do it. No thinking allowed.”

   “Hey, there ain’t a lot of variety in the paint shop either,” the other one complained. “You clip on the color hose, bleed out the old color, and squirt. Clip, bleed, squirt, clip, bleed, squirt, stop and scratch your nose. Only now the bosses have taken away the time to scratch my nose.” 

   “Yeah, the line speed used to be forty-some cars an hour twenty years ago but now it’s working its way up to a hundred cars. A lot of the time I have to get into the car and do my job sitting on base metal. I was always going home with black and blue marks on the back of my legs. I made a padded apron to wear backwards so I would be more comfortable.”

   “I was a two-bolt man for a while,” the painter said. “There were two bolts and I put in one and secured it. Then I put in the other one and secured it. They came pretty fast, so it was time after time all of the time. I always had a sore shoulder. It just wears you down in your bones.”

   A rolling rack of paperback books came by and I grabbed a couple of Perry Mason mysteries. We were fed morning, noon, and night. I took naps whenever I wanted to. Being behind bars was better than it was cracked up to be. By Monday morning I had gained a pound or two, was working on my jailbird tan, and was well rested.

   On the way to the courtroom I saw Andy in another group and jumped him, only to be separated from him by force of arms. I spit out curses, calling him a dirty liar. He gave me the finger and that ended our so-called friendship on the spot. In the courtroom I saw my father, who had taken the day off and driven to Dearborn. He was poker-faced. When my turn came a police detective and an assistant district attorney talked to the judge. When they were done the judge crooked his finger at me to approach the bench.

   “Your friend has admitted stealing the car in Boston to go joyriding and so we are dropping all charges against you,” he said.

   “He’s not my friend,” I said.

   “In any case, you’re free to go.”

   Automobile theft was rampant all over the country, with almost a million of them going missing every year. Michigan was one of the states that led the way. My case was open and shut, thank God. Stealing cars was a trap door to prison. I left with my father, who wasn’t at all happy, but was happy I had been sprung loose.

   “I still can’t believe another Lithuanian would do that to me, especially lying about stealing the car,” I said on our way back to Cleveland.

   My father brushed my naivete aside. “In Lithuania, whenever anyone is driving, they are cautious of people on the side of the road trying to flag them down, trying to get them to pull over,” he said. “Those are usually up to no good.” The only time anybody had to stop, he said, no questions asked, was when a Russian in a uniform told them to stop.

   The Russians had their clamps on Lithuania in those years. They didn’t care whose car you stole, as long as it wasn’t one of their cars. When that happened they got their commie private eye kits out and went looking for the thieves. When they got their ma it was payback time.

   “More often than not it’s a trick to get you out of your car so that a second man can either steal what’s in it or drive off with it,” my father continued. “Everybody knows that if you absolutely must leave your car, let’s say you are involved in an accident, be sure to turn off the ignition, take the keys, and lock the car. Lithuanians are not all saints, believe me.”

   He was from the homeland. He knew the score better than me. He tapped out a Pall Mall, lit it, and drove in silence while he smoked.

   “What do you think the moral of your lost weekend might be?” he asked ten minutes later while stubbing out his cigarette.

   I looked at the pivoting globe compass and the small painted statue of St. Christopher on top of the dashboard, wiggling slightly on their magnetic bases. Even though the compass told him what direction he was going, my father was terrible with directions, often getting lost. He didn’t like asking for them, in any case, and relied on St. Christopher, the patron saint of travelers. Unfortunately, St. Christopher never said a word about anything.

   I couldn’t think what the moral of my weekend in Motor City might or might not be. I was sure there was going to be some kind of sermon. He surprised me, though, tempering sternness with advice.

   “Trust everybody, but always cut the cards.” He was a very good bridge player. He knew when to bid and when to pass. “Be careful when somebody calls himself your friend, no matter whether he’s Lithuanian, or not. You never lose when you lose a false friend.”

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

Baltic Place

Dancing in Circles

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By Ed Staskus

   When the Juventus Folk Dance Festival showed up towards the end of June, I didn’t brush off my dancing shoes or brush up on my steps. I never had many steps to begin with, even though I had once been in the game. I had done some stepping with a minor league folk dancing group who practiced at the Lithuanian Catholic church in North Collinwood, near where my family lived. I grew up in a household with one bathroom which everybody wanted to use at the same time in the morning. I picked up most of my ad lib two-steps waiting for my turn. In the end, which wasn’t long coming, I was kicked out of the minor league group. Being clumsy isn’t especially a problem bunny hopping by yourself, but it can be in a group of twenty-or-more in close quarters going in circles and branching out in all directions.

   Something on the order of three hundred dancers from five countries cut the rug at the show in the Berkman Hall Auditorium on the campus of Cleveland State University. “They represent every region of Lithuania,” said Ingrida Bublys, the Honorary Consul of Lithuania for Ohio, Indiana, and Kentucky. The event was sold-out and sponsored by the dance group known as Svyturys, which means Beacon. The Beacon has been lighting the way in Cleveland for twenty years.

   Although Lithuania has been around for ages, Lithuanian folk dancing has only been around for an age. It got started in the late nineteenth century during the National Awakening, when the country was under the thumb of Moscow. The native language and native writing were proscribed, but the Czar turned a blind eye to busting moves, so long as the busting didn’t have anything to do with treason and dynamite. The first Lithuanian folk dance, known as Suktinis, was performed in St. Petersburg in 1903. Suktinis means winding or twisting. The first down home dance festival was held in Kaunas, then the capital of the country, in 1937. There were 448 dancers hoofing it, most of them going around and around.

   Lithuanian folk dances are usually one of two kinds. There are sokiai, which are ordinary dances, and there are rateliai, which are ring dances. Sokiai are often accompanied by instrumental music and sometimes by songs. One of the most popular dances is called Malunelis, which means windmill. Ring dances are more-or-less walked, sometimes slowly, sometimes faster, sometimes in a slow trot. The secret is in the center of the ring for anybody who knows where to look. The movements are simple and usually repeated over and over. They take the form of circles and double circles, as well as rows, bridges, and chains. The circles transform into lines and snakes as the dancing progresses. The dancers sometimes break up into pairs. The high stepping that follows is usually of foreign origin, like the Polish polka.

   Raganaites, which means the Dance of the Little Witches, is performed by young girls wielding straw brooms. They pretend to ride them. They twirl them, do some mock jousting with them, and try not to poke anybody’s eye out. A witch taking time off from her cauldron must be at least a hundred years old and have memorized the 7,892 spells in the Great Book of Magic before being allowed to do the dance. But the rules are always waived for Lithuanian kids.

   If an honest-to-goodness witch ever threatened me by saying she planned on dancing on my grave, I would tell her, “Be my guest. Even though I’m the grandson of landed farmers, I plan on being buried at sea.” 

   Before there was Svyturys there was Grandinele, which means Little Chain, and before there was Grandinele there were six refugees who in 1948 performed at the Slovak Cultural Gardens. It was One World Day. Nearly 40,000 Lithuanians landed in the United States after World War Two. Four thousand of them landed in Cleveland, joining the 10,000-some who already lived in the northern Ohio city. Even though the Lithuanian Cultural Garden was officially dedicated in 1936, the garden was only big enough on its lower level to hold the bust of Jonas Basanavicius, a freedom fighter who never gave up fighting tyranny. Over time a middle and upper level were created. The upper level is where the Fountain of Birute is. She was a priestess in the Temple of the God of Thunder. In her day the Russians stayed away from the Baltics. Even the Golden Horde was known to warn freebooters, “Beware the Lithuanians.” The Grand Dukes weren’t anybody the Russians wanted to mess with. They kept to their dachas, which were dry except for cupboards full of vodka. There were lightning rods on the roofs.

   My sister Rita was a dancer in Grandinele, the by-then acclaimed folk dancing group, in the mid-1970s. My brother Rick was not in any dancing group. He was smooth with the spoken word, but had two left feet like me, except I could tell my two feet apart, while he couldn’t. He was banned for fear of kicking up his heels in too many directions. Rita danced in Grandinele for almost five years. During that time, she toured Argentina, France, and Germany with the group. “We danced in front of large audiences,” she said. “Before I went I had no idea there were so many Lithuanians in South America.” The group wasn’t allowed to perform in Lithuania, which was behind the Iron Curtain at the time. The Kremlin didn’t let anybody beat feet in Eastern Europe.

   Grandinele was formed by Luidas and Alexandra Sagys in 1953. The dancers were mostly high school and college students. They rehearsed twice a week at a YMCA in Cleveland Heights. A second group composed of tadpoles was formed in 1973, to teach them the basics and get them ready for the limelight. They didn’t perform in front of the public, but they performed in front of Luidas and Alexandra, which could be even more unnerving.

   “He was strict but creative,” Rita said. “Not everybody in the community liked him making up his own folk dances, which were almost like ballets with a story. She was strict and could be mean.” Alexandra was the group’s business manager. She took care of the costumes. Nobody wanted to get on the wrong side of her, unless they wanted to risk being dressed up like Raggedy Ann.

   Luidas Sagys had been a professional dancer with the National Folk Dance Ensemble in Lithuania before World War Two. He fled the country after the Red Army came back in 1944. They seemed to always be coming back, even though the Baltics were sick of them. The apparatchik’s thought Lithuania was theirs to do with as they pleased. Their revolutionary ideals were long gone and not coming back. They had turned into rats. Their reasoning was that since the Nemunas River rises in central Belarus and flows through Lithuania, it was Russian water and wherever it went the land was part of Mother Russia. They have applied the same reasoning to the flow of the Dnieper River, which rises near Smolensk before flowing through Ukraine to the Black Sea. Ukraine is still living with the consequences of Moscow’s crazy reasoning.

   When Luidas Sagys formed Grandinele he could shake a leg with the best of them. In 1963 he directed the Second American and Canadian Folk Dance Festival. He looked authentic as could be whenever he donned indigenous garb and got into the act. Even though his culture and imagination were the genesis of his art, the art of him was his body in motion for all to see. He ran the Folk Dance Festival in Cleveland for many years. He liked to wear bow ties and sported a puckish grin when he wasn’t working on new choreography. When he was done, he liked to have a drink or two.

   My wife and I were by chance in Toronto when the XI North American Lithuanian Folk Dance Festival was staged there in 2000. The quadrennial festival, known as the Sokiu Svente, which means Dancing Celebration, was first staged in Chicago in 1957. We found tickets at the last minute and hurriedly got our bottoms in place. We sat in the cheap seats of the big auditorium. We didn’t mind since the view was better, anyway. Zilvitis, a musical ensemble from Lithuania, accompanied the performance of 1,600 dancers.

   The show was a swirl of color and action. A couple of thousand dancers dressed in the red, green, and yellow colors of Lithuania is a lot to look at in the space of a few hours, not to mention the mass maneuvering and the music. The performers and jam-packed audience were more Lithuanians than I had ever seen in one place. On top of that most of them were speaking the natal tongue. I grew up with the lingo and was able to keep up.

  One of the dance groups at the show was Malunas, which means to mill. Back in the day, before they did much dancing, most Lithuanians were either peasants or farmers. There were grindstones far and wide. Baltimore was the dance group’s homestead. They had been performing up and down the East Coast for nearly thirty years. They have appeared on PBS-TV and at presidential inauguration festivities. Toronto was their fifth Sokiu Sevente.

   A tradition at every Sokiu Svente during the rehearsal before the big show is for every group to wear a distinguishing practice outfit. When silk-screened t-shirts became popular in the 1970s, groups began to design and wear custom t-shirts. They came up with their own silk-screened identities. After the last practice groups trade identities, which become mementoes. In Toronto, Malunas came up with a new idea. They were inspired by the Grateful Dead shirts of the 1992 and 1996 Lithuanian Olympic Basketball teams. One of their own, Michelle Dulys, dreamed up a design of skeletons as dancers rather than basketball players. The t-shirts were a knockout. The ones not exchanged were sold fast, faster than we could buy one. We watched the last skeleton sauntering off from the concession stand.

   The Lithuanian Folk Dance Festival Institute was formed soon after the Sokiu Svente became a going concern to liaison with dance groups worldwide. The institute hosts a week-long training course at Camp Dainava, in southeastern Michigan. Although it is an educational, recreational, and cultural summer camp for children and young adults, the name of the camp derives either from the past tense of the word sing, from a village in the middle of nowhere back in the homeland, or from a Lithuanian liqueur of the same name, made with grain spirits and fruit juices. The booze has a vibrant red color and a complex, sour-like flavor. Even though Lithuanians are ranked among the top ten barflies in the world, it is forbidden on all 226 acres of the campground.

   The two-and-a-half-hour divertissement that was the Juventas Festival started with a parade and a song. There was some speech-making. There was a violin, a couple of wind instruments, and a drummer, while an accordion led the way. There were costumes galore and faux torches. There was circle dancing. There was pairs dancing. The pairs dancing got fast and lively. There was more singing. Before every part of the show a young man and a young woman in civilian clothes explained, in both English and Lithuanian, what was coming up. A group of kids did their own version of a circle dance. Not one of them got dizzy and fell over. There was a courtship dance, the young men and women taking their wooden shoes off and going at the romance barefoot. Whenever the top guns came back, everybody sat up. They were good as gold. They had it going.

   In the end all the dancers somehow squeezed themselves onto all the parts of the stage. There was waving and rhythmic clapping. There were loads of smiles. A half dozen men lifted a half dozen women up on their shoulders and did an impromptu circle dance. It was a wrap.

   Most of June in Cleveland had been dry, so much so that lawns were going yellow. But it had rained a few days earlier. The smoke from the Canadian forest fires that had made the sky hazy gray for more than a week had gone somewhere else. Driving home everything smelled fresh and clean. The dancing had been traditional but not hidebound. It had been fresh and alive.

   Life can often be more like wrestling than dancing. Many people believe living has meaning only in the struggle. That’s just the way things are. But nobody can wrestle all day and all night. “The one thing that can solve most of our problems is dancing,” said James Brown, the boogaloo man known as Soul Brother No. 1. What he didn’t say was that, in a way, it’s like going to church. Nobody bends a knee in the sanctuary to find trouble. They go there and the dance hall to lose it.

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

Accidental Reality

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 sat, stood, or knelt court side, sometimes 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 man. I had it 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 steep 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. 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 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 massive congestion among the fans and nobody liked that, either. I had to pay for parking, which I didn’t like, although I brushed it off. Once I flashed my pass 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 nineteen seconds 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 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 prosecutor 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 sportswriter Bob Oates of the Los Angeles Times.

   “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 Sicilian son’s Brooklyn Bridge to glory. “My daddy was a machinist who came over 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. 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 30-plus-year-old Cleveland Arena with its bad plumbing and a seating capacity of only 11,000. What he saw was money flying out the window. The players called it “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. “On the wall, there was a calendar, and I said, ‘Why is it all white?’ They 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 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. But that was what Nick Mileti wanted, and that was that.

   I didn’t get to know any broadcasters doing the games, but I got to know some of the writers and cameramen 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 golf, 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 Sunday mornings at Lakeland Community College.

   My brother had started a flag football league there with four teams. By 1980 he had two fields and fourteen teams. The teams were mainly made up of former high school players. He and I were the only two refs at first, but as more teams joined, he needed a second and third two-man crew. He paid $20.00 to each ref each game, but still had trouble recruiting and keeping crews for the Sunday morning games. When Pete Gaughan volunteered and my brother took him 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 a 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, a leg flopped here and there, and he finally 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 my brother got him into ref’s clothes, gave him a whistle and a penalty flag, and decided he would work with me.

   “Thanks, bro,” I said while he trotted off to another field.

   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, the other arm swatting hands away, he didn’t bother trying to reach for either of the flags on 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 nose. 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, they drove off with him, telling us his cheekbone was fractured along with his messed-up nose. We called the game. The Mentor boys were up by eight touchdowns anyway. Pete popped a Budweiser.

   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, 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 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 in KC, 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 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 reporters scribbled it down like it was sirloin.

   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 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 and skinnier 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 gold pirate’s earring. 

   The year before he had averaged almost 15 points and 9 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 40 pounds lighter than Daryl, he wouldn’t have even bothered back-pedaling. Bill Lambeer was far 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. 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 venomous 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 the big-ticket seats. He didn’t look back and didn’t apologize. I kept a firm grip on my jumbo soft pretzel.

   After the Cleveland Cavaliers returned to Cleveland to a new arena the Palace on the Prairie closed and the parking lot went to weeds and shadows. I walked to games downtown a couple of times, but the atmosphere was more corporate than cutthroat and I didn’t go back. Besides, they were charging corporate prices for the tickets, and I wasn’t about to bust my piggybank 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 were.

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.

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

Baltic Place

Never Look Back

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By Ed Staskus

   The new-style lightning war that started in 1939 won the Third Reich most of Europe and substantial parts of Russia. Five years later the Red Army was poised to take revenge on its enemy. When the Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front tried to weather the storm and fight out of encirclements, the Russians did what the Germans would have done, fed armor into the attack, maintaining mobility, forcing the issue deep into rear areas, faster than the enemy could respond. Their M4A2 Sherman tanks, built by the United States, could be replaced when destroyed faster than German factories could take a breath and say, “Gute trauer!”

   “The Russians came very quickly,” said Angele Jurgelaityte. “We listened to the radio every day. We could hear booming in the distance, which was their bombs and cannons. The Germans were all over the roads. The Russians were to the north and the east of us. Everybody knew they were coming.”

   The angel-face of her aunt’s family, the family Angele was staying with near Alvitas, Lithuania, didn’t know, but everybody else in the Baltics knew the Red Army was coming back and there was going to be hell to pay. “Everybody was worried and unhappy.” Most Lithuanians sided with the Germans. There were centuries of bitterness smoldering between Vilnius and the Muscovites.

   It was in the summer of 1944 that Soviet forces went on the offensive. The Germans were pushed back on a shifting front. Armored tank columns from both sides advanced on Vilkaviskis, four miles away from where Angele was. If it wasn’t for land mines she could have walked there in an hour. The Russian 33rd Army entered the town a few days later and then secured the rail depot at Marijampole. The Third Panzer Army mounted a counterattack, but after several grim tank battles was finally forced to retreat to Kybartai, rolling back to a last-ditch defensive line defending the Baltics. Neither the Germans nor the Russians listened to a single Lithuanian who said the land wasn’t their land to begin with.

   “It was one day in the afternoon that a lady, a teacher, who was one of my aunt’s friends, with two kids, a small boy and a small girl, came to our farm from Vilnius,” Angele said. The woman and Angele’s aunt, Ona Kreivenas, had studied and graduated together from a teacher’s college. She was in a horse drawn wagon with her children and what chattels and valuables she could pack and carry. She had come from the big city in a rush. She told them there was Russian armor hiding on the nearby farm tracks.

   The next morning Ona, Angele, and the children, Mindaugas, Carmen, Ramute, and the toddler Gema, loaded their wagon with clothes, blankets, and food. They hitched two horses to the wagon and tied a cow to the back. “We took milk with us when we left, for baby Gema, and hoped we would find more when we were gone.” They took whatever they could shoulder. They left their buggy and let the riding horse, the rest of the cows, and all the pigs and chickens loose. Ona’s friend followed behind them.

   “We let all the animals go. What could we do? The Russians would have just stolen all of them.”

   Ona took all her money and what jewelry she possessed with her in a handbag that she could keep close to the vest. She filled a trunk with her sewing machine, china, vases, artifacts, and family heirlooms. They lugged it behind the barn, where the remains of months of potatoes thrown down to feed the pigs were piled up.

   They cleared a space, dug a four-foot deep hole, and buried the trunk. They threw potato scraps back over the overturned ground. When they were done, they left in two wagons, two women, seven children, and a cow on the move, suddenly homeless in their own home.

   “We moved back about fifteen miles.”

   They went southwest towards East Prussia. “We stopped at a big farm. When we got there, there were already hundreds of people in the fields, with their wagons, and their families. The farmer there slaughtered and cut pigs up for us. All the women made food. Everybody was talking about the war, about what to do.”

   There was heavy fighting between German and Soviet troops in the Baltics. As the fighting raged, more than 130,000 Latvians escaped to Sweden and Germany. In total, the country lost almost 20% of its population during the war, either dead or gone. The Great Escape in Estonia started in the summer and continued through the fall. It is estimated 80,000 Estonians fled from the Red Army to anywhere else. Almost a 100,000 Lithuanians joined them, clogging the roads to Poland, Prussia, and Germany.

   Ona crept back to her farm during the week the Panzer divisions were holding their own. The countryside was nearly deserted. She discovered the trunk they had buried underneath the pile of potato scraps behind the barn had been dug up and was gone. “There was just a big hole. The Russians took it. They used metal sticks to poke into the ground. Her sewing machine was gone, all gone, everything gone.”

   They slept rough, out of doors, like everybody else. “We slept on blankets on the ground. When it rained, we slept under the wagon and stretched a tarp out to keep the water away.” Every day it got darker. Over the course of September, the length of the day in Lithuania rapidly decreases. By the end of the month the daylight is two hours less than it was at the start of the month.

   Their encampment stretched out for six weeks. They dug latrines and filled barrels with water. They picked apples off trees and blueberries from bushes. They took especial care of their horses. They greased the axles of their wagons, making sure the grease bucket was always full of animal fat and tar, and making sure they had a spare axle. Without one a broken axle would be a disaster, bringing them to a standstill.

   The children played games whenever they had idle time. “We played the ring game,” Angele said. “We all sat in a circle and passed around a pretend ring, like a twig or a pebble. Sometimes we passed it, but other times we didn’t. We just pretended to give it to who was next to us. One of us was it, like in tag, who had to guess who had the ring. If they were right, they got a prize, like a pencil. If they were wrong, they had to sing a song or do a dance in the middle of the circle.”

   When they finally left, they left in the early evening. They had heard over the radio that morning that the Russians had come closer. They spent the day packing and preparing. It was now or never. “Most of us left, although some stayed. Some of the farmers wanted their land back. They didn’t want to leave.” It was all they had. It was all they had ever known. They were loath to give it up. “My aunt had to go, no matter what. The farm didn’t matter. Her husband had already been taken by the Communists. She knew they would take her, too, if they caught her, send her away to Siberia, and her children would be left behind, orphans.”

   It rained that day and the rest of the night. “The road was crowded on both sides. There were thousands of wagons, wagon after wagon, all going one way. There wasn’t a single car or truck, just horses. We knew the Germans were somewhere ahead of us and the Russians somewhere behind us, but we didn’t see any soldiers anywhere, at all.”

   Ona was at the reins of the two-horse team, her seven-year-old daughter Ramute beside her holding the three-year-old Gema, and Carmen, Mindaugas, and Angele walking. Most of the refugees were walking, their wagons jam-packed with possessions and provisions. Their friend from Vilnius with her two small children stayed in line behind them.

   Before the war, Lithuania’s population was almost 3 million. After the war it was closer to 2 million. Some Lithuanians ended up dead. Many were deported. Others ran for their lives. The displaced were forced to make new lives in different countries all around the world, whatever country they could get to, whatever country would take them, whatever country they could sneak into.

   When the second Soviet invasion of the 1940s happened, some Lithuanians tried to flee across the Baltic Sea to the Nordic countries, but only a few were successful. Patrol boats apprehended them, and they ended up hauled off to labor camps. Most fled west, while others went south to Hungary, Romania, and the Balkans.

   “On the way we met my uncle on the road, Uncle Jankauskas and his family.” Her uncle’s wagon fell into line with them. The progression of wagons stretched as far as the eye could see, ahead and behind. They soon crossed into East Prussia. There were no guards. They had all fled. The borderland was a mess.

   “I was so sad leaving Lithuania,” Angele said.

   Russian warplanes strafed and bombed the column of evacuees several times. The Red Air Force was bombing and strafing at will, both German Army and refugee columns alike. Forest and brush on both sides of the road were set on fire. There was smoke in the sky day and night. Wagons and carts slowly wended their way around rain-filled craters.

   “It was all just wagons. They knew we were refugees They dropped bombs and shot their machine guns. I don’t know why they did that. Whenever we heard airplanes, we all ran and jumped into ditches beside the road. I was afraid, but somehow I knew I wouldn’t be hurt by them.”

   What was called the Baltic Gap had grown so menacing to the Reich that Adolf Hitler moved his headquarters from Berchtesgaden to Rastenburg in East Prussia. The German situation on the Eastern Front was desperate. The fighting was hard and bitter. It was a fight to the finish. The hinterland was torn up, abandoned and forlorn.

   “Most of the people on farms had run away. We would go into their houses and find dried fruit, pickles, mushrooms, pork, and wine.” They ransacked barns, pantries, and root cellars. “We took all the food we could find, all of it. It rained most of the time, it was cold, and we walked and walked. Everybody was hungry.”

   The rain and asphalt track were hurtful to their cow. The animal was careful as could be on the poor traction of the wet road, stepping timidly with its rear feet spread wide. It was compensating by walking with an arched back. They finally had to do something. They knew the long miles and pavement weren’t good for it. They thought she might be going lame. Angele’s uncle looked at the cow’s hooves and saw lesions. An ulcer was forming on one hoof.

   “Mindaugas and I found a family that hadn’t run away. We went to their farmhouse and sold the cow to them.” They gave the money to Ona and she hid it on her person with the rest of her money. She had plans for it.

   One cold night when they stopped to rest her uncle said, “Kids, jump up and down to warm yourselves up.” When Angele stopped jumping, he grasped her under the armpits. “He grabbed me. We were jumping up and down and he dropped me by accident.” She broke her wrist. “It hurt bad, but there were no doctors to help me.” When they got to a town with a railroad station, there weren’t any doctors there, either. The smart and the skilled had already left. Everybody else was hoping against hope. Angele’s wrist had to take care of itself.

   After the New Year the German population of East Prussia, most of whom had not yet cut and run, began to evacuate as the Red Army rapidly advanced. Within weeks it turned into helter-skelter flight as more than two million of the two-and-half million men women children of the enclave bolted into the Polish Corridor heading for Germany. The winter weather was bad, the roads were caving in, and the civil authorities were overwhelmed. There was panic and quagmire and many thousands died, some caught in combat, others swept away in the chaos.

   But before that happened, Ona Kreivenas had already sold their wagon and horses and everything they couldn’t carry and managed against the odds to get passage on a train going to Berlin. The Prussian Eastern Railway connected Danzig and Konigsberg to Berlin. A month later, the last week of January 1945, the last train to Berlin ran the rails. There was no traffic on the line after that.

   “The train was completely full. The corridors were full, too.” They stood in a tight group in the corridor. The passenger cars were red and had ten large windows on both sides. They were pressed against one of the windows. Some of the windows were smashed and the passageway was as cold as the outside. “We had a pillow for Gema, who slept on the floor, but we stood that night and the next day.”

   The twin locomotives pulling the long line of passenger cars and baggage cars and a caboose were in camouflage livery. On their front was painted the Hoheitsadler, an eagle, Germany’s traditional symbol of national sovereignty, holding a swastika in its talons. By the time they crossed Poland and entered Germany, the talons and swastika were obscured by coal soot.

   Lehrter Bahnhof was the Berlin terminus, adjacent to Hamburger Bahnhof, built in the late 19th century just outside of what was then Berlin’s boundary on the Spree River.  It was built in the French neo-Renaissance style, the façade covered in glazed tiles. The station had long been known as a “palace among stations.” But it had been severely damaged by Allied strategic bombing and was near to being a shambles.

   When they finally got off the train in Berlin, tired and stiff from standing, they were met on the platform by Bishop Brizgys. The clergyman was Ona’s husband’s cousin. Vincentas Brizgys had been the assistant to Juozapas Skvireckas, the archbishop of Kaunas. During the summer of 1944 he and the archbishop and more than two hundred other Lithuanian priests fled the country with several retreating German army divisions. Ona had somehow located him by telephone, and he arranged to meet them at the train station. He was wearing a dark suit and a homburg and carrying a basket of hot buns.

   “He gave one to each of us. I was so happy,” Angele said.

   She was 16-years old, somewhere between childhood and adulthood. Seven years later, and a  continent away, she gave birth to me, followed quickly by my brother and sister. In the meantime, hope for the future was the only thing keeping her on her feet.

   The Third Reich’s war economy was on the verge of collapse. The whole country was a sinking ship. There was a shortage of bread sausage cabbage beer, and everything else. When they looked around, the buns the bishop had brought were the only cheer they could see. There wasn’t going to be any traditional roast goose this holiday season.

   Angele looked at the four children and her aunt. She glanced up and down the platform. Their friend from Vilnius and her uncle were long gone, lost in the fog of war. Bishop Brizgys led them out of the station into the city. The Red Army numbering over four million men was massing on the Vistula River and along the East Prussian border. Their superiority was ten to one in infantry and twenty to one in artillery and planes. Berlin and its three million residents were already a wreck, the day and night Allied bombing taking a monstrous toll.

   The early afternoon was a gray haze. There was smoke in the sky. It was darkness at noon. She looked at the rubble in the street. When she looked ahead, she knew in her teenaged bones it was going to be a grown-up bare-bones winter on German soil.

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 killer waits in the wings. A Hell’s Kitchen private eye scares up the shadows.

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

Baltic Place

No Place Like Home

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By Ed Staskus

   Sigitas Kazlauskas didn’t know J. Edgar Hoover from the man in the moon. He didn’t necessarily want to make his acquaintance, either. He wanted to go home, even though he knew he didn’t have nearly the funds for the passage. The passage was across the Atlantic Ocean and over the North Sea. His home was far away in Lithuania. He didn’t know the Justice Department man was going to be his ticket back.

   Sigitas was living in Cleveland, Ohio in 1919, where it was Thanksgiving week. He had left home in late 1914, dodging forced conscription into the Russian Army. He knew being drafted meant the meat grinder. He also knew his socialist views were hazardous to his health. The Czar didn’t brook his kind of man. He made his way to the United States on a tramp steamer. He was living in Dope Town, a neighborhood west of East 9thSt. and north of Superior Ave. Suicide Pier on the Cuyahoga River was down one end of the street and the town dump was down the other end of the street. Lake Erie was on the north side and Little Poland was on the south side. 

   None of his friends called him Sigitas. Everybody called him Dave. When he asked why, they laughed and said, “David and Goliath, like in the Bible.” They didn’t bother with his surname since they weren’t his kith and kin. They were Eastern Europeans like him who had ended up in Cleveland for the same reason as him, which was opportunity. His opportunity had come and gone, which was why he was living in Dope Town. It was the only place he could afford a furnished room. The wrist a Cleveland policeman had broken with a truncheon during the May Day Riot six months earlier hadn’t helped, making him unemployable for three months and draining his savings.

   Since then, he had been living on bread and homemade beer. When the beer was ready he called his Polish friends, “Hey Polska, come get your right piwo.” He was well-known for his beer, attracting friends who were as friendly with his brew as they were with him, maybe more. They sang, “In Heaven there is no beer, which is why we drink it here.” He was hoping somebody would invite him to their turkey feast on the big day. He needed a square meal with his suds.

   Cleveland was going strong in 1919. It was the fifth largest city in the country. Iron and steel dominated the economy. Foundries and machine shops were everywhere. Skyscrapers were being built. The population was nearing one million. A third of the population was foreign born, working in the steel plants and garment factories. They worked long hours for low pay, but it was better than where they had come from, where they worked longer hours for even less pay.

   More than a quarter million Lithuanians left the Russian controlled Baltics between 1900 and 1914. When World War One broke out all immigration from Europe to the United States was brought to a stop. The new labor force that came into being was from the American South. There had been fewer than 10,000 Negroes in Cleveland in 1910. Ten years later there were nearly 40,000. There was enough work for everybody, though. Commercial construction was booming. The problem Sigitas had wasn’t finding work. The problem he had was keeping the work he found.

   He was a socialist, which was his problem. He believed in social ownership of the means of production. He didn’t believe in private ownership of it. The word socialism comes from the Latin word “sociare” which means to share. The modern use of the word was coined by the London Cooperative Magazine in 1827. The First International was founded in 1864 in Great Britain. After that it was off to the races. The Second International was founded in 1889. Anarchists were banned as a practical matter. Socialists didn’t want bomb throwers in their ranks, if only because bombs can be unpredictable about who they blow up.

   The May Day Riot in Cleveland on May 1, 1919 pitted trade unionists and socialists against police and military troops. The city was bursting at the seams with blue-collar foreign-born laborers. The activist Charles Ruthenberg got it into his head to organize a mass demonstration on Public Square on International Workers’ Day. He had run for mayor on the Socialist Party ticket two years earlier, polling nearly a third of the vote. He was well-known among the disaffected. He marched at the head of the assembly.

   Sigitas and his friends heeded the call. They joined the more than 30,000 men and women who showed up for the demonstration. They marched from Acme Hall on Upper Prospect to Lower Prospect to Public Square. The marchers wore red shirts and waved red flags. A parallel procession of army veterans in full uniform clashed with the socialists. Fights broke out and the police were called, who then quickly called for reinforcements and mounted forces. Harry Davis, the city’s mayor, called for the National Guard, who mustered in front of a beer hall before going into action with fixed bayonets. Tanks led the way, even though the socialists were unarmed. When Sigitas’s wrist was broken, a lady standing beside him used the 8 inch ivory hatpin holding her hat to her hair bun to stab the policeman in the chest. It was how Sigitas managed to break loose and not get arrested. 

   Several marchers were killed, nearly a hundred were injured, and many hundreds more were arrested. The Socialist Party headquarters at Acme Hall was ransacked by a “loyalist” mob. The next day all of Cleveland’s newspapers blamed the marchers for the riot, labelling them as “foreign agitators” even though most of them were native-born or naturalized citizens. The fourth estate demanded their deportation. The Immigration Acts of 1921 and 1924 later restricted immigration of “undesirable” Southern and Eastern Europeans, whether they were socialists, or not.

   It was at Thanksgiving dinner with his friend Teodor Wojcik and his family that his friend hatched a plan about how to get Sigitas out of the United States and back to Europe. Agnieszka was Teodor’s wife. They had two children and were moving up in the world. Teodor went by Teddy and Agnieszka went by Agnes. They weren’t socialists, but didn’t argue with Sigitas about it. They believed the United States was a free country where everyone was free to believe what they wanted. They weren’t silly enough, however, to say so in public.

   “There’s a man at the Justice Bureau who is heading up the new Radical Division,” Teddy said. “He’s already gone after the Negroes.” J. Edgar Hoover was the new man. He was after what he called “terroristic and similar classes.” He was a District man born and bred. He was a law and order man schooled in bigotry. “Something must be done to the editors of Negro publications as they are beyond doubt exciting the darkie elements of this country to riot,” he said in the summer when white soldiers and sailors rioted in the District, killing more than a dozen men and women, after a rumor spread that a Negro man had raped a white woman. The rumor was false. The Negro deaths were real.

   J. Edgar Hoover turned his attention to anarchists and communists at the end of summer. He got busy sending the notorious Emma Goldman back to Russia. He helped engineer the arrest of more than a thousand radicals in early November, with the intent of deporting them. “The Communist Party is a menace,” he said. He meant to send them all back to where they had come from.

   “What does this new man have to do with me?” Sigitas asked.

   Agnes brought a plate of paczek to the table. They were deep-fried pastries filled with jam, caramel, and chocolate. The outer layer was sprinkled with powdered sugar and dried orange bits. They drank coffee the Polish way, which was strong with full-fat cream.

   “What you have to do is forget about socialism and become a communist,” Teddy said. “Join the Communist Party. Volunteer for the dirty work. Become a firebrand. Make yourself known to the Radical Division. Make enough trouble and you should be on a boat on your way back to Lithuania in no time. It won’t cost you a penny for the fare and they will feed you during the voyage, too, so by the time you get home you’ll be back to your old self.”

   “They won’t shoot me?”

   “Probably not.”

   “They won’t throw me in jail?”

   “They probably will for a month-or-so, but they don’t want to keep anarchists and communists in jail. They don’t want them here. They want to send them somewhere else, anywhere else, which will be easy enough in your case since you were never naturalized.” Sigitas had never forgotten Lithuania and had never become a full-fledged American.

   Becoming an official communist was easy as pie. Charles Ruthenberg had split from the socialists after the May Day Riot and joined several splinter groups to form Cleveland’s Communist Party. They allied with the Communist Party of America. The woman who had saved him during the May Day Riot was a close associate of Charles Ruthenberg’s. She put in a good word for him. He was brought into the circle of fellow travelers. He was given a revolver but no bullets. He gave the gun back. J. Edgar Hoover’s Radical Division had numerous informers and inside men. They put Sigitas on their list soon enough. He didn’t have to wait long for the Palmer Raids.

   Seven months earlier the anarchist Carlo Valdinoci had put a bomb on the doorstep of newly appointed Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer’s house in Washington, D. C. When the bomb went off no one inside the house was hurt, although the anarchist mishandled the explosive and blew himself up, as well as the front of the house. Across the street where Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt were sleeping the blast shook them out of bed. The attack was coordinated with  attacks in eight other cities on judges, politicians, and policemen. The Attorney General had his eye on the White House. He got to work hyping the Red Scare. He put J. Edgar Hoover in charge of identifying and arresting as many socialists, anarchists, and communists as he could and deporting them as fast as he could.

   The first raids in December filled a freighter dubbed the “Red Ark.” It sailed out of New York City bound for Russia. Its passengers were foreigners and suspected radicals. A month later the Justice Department went big. A series of further raids netted 3,000 men and women in 30 towns and cities in 23 states. Search warrants and habeas corpus were an afterthought. Sigitas was one of the communists swept up in the net.

   Once everybody was locked up in holding facilities, J. Edgar Hoover admitted there had been “clear cases of brutality” during the round-up. His admission was beside the point. His point-of-view was guilty until proven innocent. Not everybody agreed. “We appear to be attempting to repress a political party,” said the U. S. Attorney for the Eastern District. “By such methods, we drive underground and make dangerous what was not dangerous before.” A. Mitchell Palmer answered that he couldn’t arrest radicals one by one to treat an “epidemic” and claimed fidelity to constitutional principles. The Constitution didn’t necessarily see it that way, but it was just a piece of paper.

   Sigitas knew it was all hot air. He knew letting the cat out of the bag was easier than getting it back in. After he was arrested he couldn’t wait to be frog-marched onto a boat bound for the Old World. The New World wasn’t for him anymore. There was too much capitalism and double-dealing.

   He had been rousted out of bed in his furnished room in the middle of the night by two uniformed Flying Squad men and a Justice Bureau man. “Are you the Hoover men?” he asked. “The only Hoover here is the vacuum cleaner kind,” one of the policemen said. “We’re here to get you into the bag. You got one minute to throw some clothes on.” A minute later he was in the back seat of their Buick Touring squad car.

   More than a week passed before Teddy was allowed to visit Sigitas at the Champlain Avenue Police Headquarters, The complex of offices, jail cells, and courtrooms was overdue for replacement. A new Central Station was already on the drawing boards. “The moment the new station at E. 21st St. and Payne Ave. opens for business, the ancient Champlain Avenue mausoleum of crime, rats, and malodors which has been functioning as a police headquarters for perhaps twenty-five years too long will start to crumble before the wrecking engines,” is what the Cleveland Plain Dealer said.

   “How are you doing?” Teddy asked. “They do anything bad to you?”

   “No, except the food is terrible, which is bad enough. There’s no beer, either.”

   “They tell you what is going to happen?”

   “They are taking me to New York City on the train tomorrow. They made it sound like I will be on a boat soon after that.”

   “That’s what you want, right?”

   “That’s what I want, yes. I want to go home.”

   “Home isn’t just a place, Dave” Teddy said. “It’s a feeling. It’s where the heart is.”

   “There’s no place like home,” Sigitas said. “That’s where I feel the best. It’s my second chance.”

   “You’re taking a chance,” Teddy said. “The Russians are gone now, sure, but the new Lithuania doesn’t like socialists any more than they do here. Socialism is no good. Sooner or later, you run out of other people’s money.”

   “Capitalism is no good, either,” Sigitas said. “Sooner or later all the money has been sucked up by the tycoons.”

   “Good luck,” Teddy said.

   The next day Sigitas was taken to the New York Central depot. He was handcuffed to a police detective who rode with him the full day it took to get to Grand Central Station. A day later, in a courtroom deciding his fate, was the only time he ever saw J. Edgar Hoover, who was sitting with the prosecutors, but never said a word. 

   He was younger than Sigitas had imagined him, maybe in his mid-20s. His short hair was shaved even closer at the temples. Sigitas was five foot eight and trim. J. Edgar Hoover was slightly shorter and just as trim. He was a lifetime District man and a Freemason, although Sigitas didn’t know that, or anything else about the man. He looked him in the face repeatedly, but the Radical Division man never made eye contact with him. He left before the proceeding was over. He knew what the verdict was going to be before it was announced. 

   A week later Sigitas was on board a refitted troop carrier. It was a leaky old tub. It took twenty eight days to get to Finland. The deportees were assigned cabins in pairs. Sentries stood at the cabin doors day and night. Sentries patrolled the deck for the one hour every day they were allowed to walk in the outside air. Once they got to Finland everybody was taken to a special train, guarded by U. S. Marines and Finnish White Guards. They were put thirty men to an unheated boxcar fitted with benches, tables, and beds. Each boxcar had seven boxes of army rations, which included bully-beef and hard bread. They were taken to Terijoki, about two miles from the Russian border. Most of the men were being dumped into Russia like so much garbage. Sigitas was the only deportee going to Lithuania. The Russians dumped him out like garbage, too.

   He took a train from St. Petersburg to Riga, Latvia, and from there he hitched a ride on a sugar beet truck across the border to Lithuania. Sigitas walked the fourteen miles to the farmlands outside of Kursenai. It felt good to stretch his legs. He found his family home without a problem, as though he had never left. “Labas, mamyte,” he said when he stepped through the front door and saw his mother peeling potatoes at the kitchen table. After the kissing and crying, after he had sat his mother back down, and his brothers and sisters were peppering him with questions, he knew he had made the right decision in returning to the Old World.

   The worst feeling in the world is homesickness. Sigitas felt like a new man. He had shed all his theories on board the troop carrier. He could no longer determine which political way was the more bad way. Ideologies were full of lies. “Eik i velnius” was all he had to say about the matter. If he had still been in the New World it would have come out of his mouth as “Go to hell.” Lithuania was a free country again after more than one hundred years. The Russians were good and gone, except when they weren’t. They were grabby and unpredictable

   Sigitas worked on the family farm for twenty years. He harvested hay starting on St. John’s Day. He raised his own pigs and brewed his own beer. He always had enough to eat and drink, at least until before the Russians came back in force in 1944. The politics of the 20th century caught up to him. The Russians weren’t school style idealogues. They were barrel of a gun idealogues. Either you believed in them, or else. He fought them first with the Territorial Defense Forces and later with the Forest Brothers. They engaged the Russians in guerilla warfare in the woodlands surrounding their homes. Sigitas Kazlauskas was shot and killed in the Dainava Forest in late January of 1945. His body was abandoned on the battlefield and decomposed in the spring. He slowly sank into the bloom until there was nothing left of him.

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.

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

Made in Cleveland

Elbow Grease

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By Ed Staskus

   When Mike White was elected the 55th mayor of Cleveland in the fall of 1989 he became the city’s second youngest mayor. Everybody thanked their lucky stars he wasn’t Dennis Kucinich, who had been the youngest, and who had bankrupted the city in 1978. He also became the city’s second African American mayor. Blacks weren’t exactly Blacks then, although they were getting there. They were African Americans. When Frank Jackson finally retired in 2022, after serving four terms as the 57th mayor of Cleveland, Mike White became the second-longest-serving mayor. He had served three terms.

   The day he was sworn in he inherited a boatload of crime, poverty, and unemployment. The tax-paying population of the city was shrinking fast. Downtown was more a hotbed of boll weevils than hotties. There was no Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and no Gund Arena, which is now Rocket Mortgage Field House. The Indians and Browns were both still playing their ballgames in the decrepit Municipal Stadium on the south shore of Lake Erie, although the Browns were thinking of packing up and moving to Baltimore.

   My wife and I were living in Lakewood, which wasn’t Cleveland, although it was close enough. It was the big city’s next door neighbor, what in the day was called a streetcar suburb. Nearly half of Cleveland’s residents were African American. Less than 1% of Lakewood’s residents were African American. We lived on the west end of town where there were zero African Americans. There wasn’t a Berlin Wall keeping them out of town but there was a Berlin Wall.

   We lived off Riverside Ave. on the east side of the Rocky River valley, which had been transformed into the Rocky River Metropark. The river and the valley were just steps from our front porch. Cleveland’s racial divisions seemed like a distant problem. In the event, one day a man was apprehended throwing more than a dozen black bowling balls into the Rocky River at Eddys Boat Dock. He explained to the police officers, “I thought they were nigger eggs.”

   Being the mayor of a village is hard enough. Being the mayor of a city can be thankless. It can be worse than thankless when the top dog shows up. “I would not vote for the mayor of that town,” Fidel Castro once said while touring his island nation. “It’s not just because he didn’t invite me to dinner, but because on my way into town from the airport there were such enormous potholes.”

   There was only one reason Mike White wanted the job. He was a born and bred Cleveland man. He was a true believer and a do-gooder. He was bound and determined to make the city a better place to live. “I remember looking out at the crowd of Cleveland residents, black and white, and reflecting on how many children were there,” he said about his inauguration day in 1990. “I remember how they looked at me as a symbol of what could be. It speaks to the powerful responsibility of being the kind of leader people want to follow.” 

   Getting the job done was going to be a problem, if not Mike White’s man-sized burden. He presented himself on the stump as pro-business, pro-police, and an effective manager. He argued that “jobs are the cure for the addiction to the mailbox,” by which he meant once-a-month welfare checks. He didn’t win over any live and die by the mailbox voters. In the end he won 80% of the vote in the white wards, 30% of the vote in the African American wards, and 100% of the brass ring.

   “Caesar is dead! Caesar is dead!” the crowd in Cleveland Centre cheered when the result was announced. It was near midnight. “Long live the king! Long live Mike!” When the mayor-elect appeared, people stood on chairs and cheered some more. “I extend my hand to all of Cleveland whether they were with me or not” he said. It had been a bitter uphill campaign. “The healing begins in the morning!” There were more cheers. “We … shall … be… ONE … CITY!” He spent twelve years trying to make it happen.

   “Winning an election is a good-news, bad-news kind of thing,” Clint Eastwood, the movie star who was once the mayor of Carmel-by-the-Sea, has said. “Okay, the good news is, now you’re the mayor. The bad news is, now you’re the mayor.” He ran on a promise to roll back Carmel’s back-handed ban on ice cream cones. The law stated that take-out ice cream cones had to be in secure and foolproof packaging with a cover. “Eating on the street is strongly discouraged,” the suck all the fun out of it city fathers said. The actor beat the incumbent in a tight race. One of his first official acts was getting au naturel ice cream cones back on the streets. After his two-year term was over he never stood for elected office again. Politics was too dirty for even Dirty Harry.

   By the time Mike White took office I couldn’t have cared less about Cleveland. For one thing, I no longer lived there anymore. For another thing, I wasn’t working in Cleveland anymore. I was working for the Light Bulb Supply Company. They were in the Lake Erie Screw Building in Lakewood. I wasn’t attending Cleveland State University anymore, either. As much as I used to go to the asphalt jungle was as much as I didn’t go there anymore.

   The city in 1990 was a mess, literally. Nobody thought anything about throwing litter and trash into the street. The police had never been busier. The fire department had never been busier. The schools had deteriorated so much that everything educational looked like up to the teachers. The graduation rate was less than 40%. “It couldn’t have gotten much worse,” recalled James Lumsden, a school board member. Mike White likened the schools to the Vietnam War, where well-meaning people went to help, but ended up stuck in a nightmare.

   Manufacturing jobs were disappearing, the workforce hemorrhaging paychecks, labor costs being outsourced like nobody’s business. Only street cleaners felt secure in their employment. The No. 1 bank in the city, Cleveland Trust, which had become AmeriTrust, was being dragged down by bad loans and a collapsing real estate market. The iconic May Company was drawing up plans to close its downtown store, which had been on Public Square for nearly 90 years. 

   In 1950 the city was the 6th largest in the country. Forty years later it was the 23rd largest in the country. Everybody who could move away was moving to the suburbs. When the inner ring suburbs filled up, new outer ring suburbs popped up. When they filled up, exurbia became the next place to go. Nobody from nowhere was moving to Cleveland. It was hard to believe anybody wanted to be mayor.

   Mike White grew up in Glenville on Cleveland’s east side. It was a rough and tumble neighborhood, notorious for a 1968 shootout. Gunfire was exchanged one night for nearly four hours between the Cleveland Police Department and the Black Nationalists of New Libya. They were a Black Power group. Three policemen, three Black Power men, and a bystander were killed. Fifteen others were wounded. Lots of others were shoved into paddy wagons and locked up.

   The new mayor’s father was a machinist at Chase Brass and Copper. He was a union man and ran a union shop at home, too. “If not for the discipline at home, we would have been lost,” Mike’s sister Marsha said. The first summer Mike White came home from college in 1970 his father took one look at him and told him to cut his hair. He had grown it long and was fluffing it into an afro. While he was a student at Ohio State University in Columbus he protested against racial discrimination practiced by the capital city’s public bus system. He was arrested. He got involved with Afro-Am and led a civil rights protest march. He was arrested again. The charges were disorderly conduct and resisting arrest. He didn’t deny the charges. “I hated the sheets back then,” he said.

   He was sick and tired of being arrested. He put his thinking cap on and ran for Student Union President. When he won he became Ohio State University’s first African American student body leader.  He earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1973 and a Master of Public Administration degree in 1974. He began his professional political career as an administrative assistant for Cleveland’s city council in 1976 and was elected councilman from the Glenville neighborhood in 1978. From 1984 until he ran for mayor he represented Ohio’s 21st District in the State Senate, serving as assistant minority whip for the Democrats. 

   Mike White’s opponent in the race for mayor was the long-time politician George Forbes, who was also African American. The color of his skin turned out not to matter. Mike White had gone color blind. He described George Forbes as a “foul-mouthed, uncouth, unregenerated politician of the most despicable sort.” The Forbes campaign countered by accusing their opponent of abusing his wife and abusing the tenants of his inner-city properties by ignoring housing codes. The difference between a hero and a villain can be as slight as a good press agent.

   I didn’t pay too much attention to the character assassinations. My wife and I were working on our new house. It had been built in 1922, and although the previous owners had done what they could, it was our turn to do what we could. What we were doing first was ripping out all the shag carpeting and taking all the wallpaper down. When we were done with those two projects we painted all the walls and restored the hardwood floors. Our game plan was by necessity long-term. We started on the basement next, started saving for a new roof, and started making plans for everything else.

   Mike White didn’t give a damn about ice cream cones, but he gave a damn about the kids who ate ice cream cones. “We can spend our money on bridges and sewer systems as we must,” he said, “but we can never afford to forget that children remain the true infrastructure of our city’s future. We need to create a work program and show every able-bodied person that we have the time and patience to train them. And we should start people young. We want to guarantee every kid graduating from high school a job or a chance to go to college.”

   He put the city’s power brokers on notice. “We do not accept that ours must be a two-tier community with a sparkling downtown surrounded by vacant stores and whitewashed windows.  You can’t have a great town with only a great downtown. I’ve said to corporate Cleveland that I’m going to work on the agenda of downtown, but I also expect them to work on the agenda of neighborhood rebuilding.” He wasn’t above making deals, although he wasn’t selling any alibis. Safety became a mantra for him. “Safety is the right of every American,” he said. “A 13-year-old drug pusher on the corner where I live is a far greater danger to me and this city than Saddam Hussein will ever be.”

   He would prove to be true to his commitments. In the meantime, he put his nose to the grindstone. He worked Herculean hours. His staff worked Herculean hours. Anybody who complained they weren’t Hercules was advised to find work elsewhere. When he found out the Gulf War was costing the United States $500 million a day, he was outraged. “I’m the mayor of one of the largest cities in the country while we have an administration in Washington that is oblivious to the problems of human beings in this country,” he said. “I sit here like everyone else, watching CNN, watching a half-billion dollar a day investment in Iraq and Kuwait, and I can’t get a half-million dollar increase in investment in Cleveland.”

   Mike White was never going to be president of the United States. He probably didn’t want to be president. He had his hands full as it was, making it happen in his hometown. He wanted a Cleveland with dirtier fingernails and cleaner streets. The city was in a hole. His goal was to get it to stop digging. It wasn’t going to be easy. He didn’t always speak softly, but words being what they are, he made sure that as mayor he carried a big stick, the biggest stick in sight.

   He was going to need it, if only because President Lyndon Baines Johnson had said so. “When the burdens of the presidency seem unusually big, I always remind myself it could be worse,” LBJ said during his troubled administration. When asked how that could be, he said, “I could be a mayor.”

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.

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

Accidental Reality

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. We followed our noses. The minute anybody sat down was the minute a cup of coffee and a menu appeared. After that it was about waiting for a waitress to bring the sandwiches, French fries, and pickles.

   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 like going to grandma’s house. It was closest to where we lived and it was where the fun beatniks and hippies, cops and lawyers, college students, cutie pies, no-good bookies and gangster wannabees, and Hebrew folks 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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A Crying of Lot 49 Production

Baltic Place

Tailor Made

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By Ed Staskus

   My uncle Justinas was a short man with a long face and a bald dome fringed with tufts of gray hair. He lived in Marijampole, which is in southern Lithuania. Whenever anybody in our family visited the motherland they stayed at his house, even though his house didn’t have an indoor bathroom or running water. He was always in hot water, though. Everybody loved Justinas. That was the problem. At least, that was the way his wife saw it.

   “He’s always coming home with bobby pins in his hair,” his wife Janina complained.

   Plenty of women liked him. He was silver-tongued. They wore their best dresses whenever visiting. Even Rasa Jurgelaityte, his niece, looked swank when she dropped by, clad in a bluish-purple shag sweater, sitting at the table drinking strong tea in the afternoon. There wasn’t anything untoward about it. Justinas had an Andy Kaufman meets Roger Moore vibe about him.

   When he moved from Gizai to Marijampole fewer than 20,000 people lived there. It was a small town. More than forty years later about 40,000 people lived there. It was still a small town. He always wore a sports coat or an old suit jacket. When the weather was bad he wore a herringbone newsboy cap. He was good working with his hands, deft and quick. His face was wrinkled, he could look gnomish slightly hunched over, but he was usually on the uptake.

   Nobody ever told him how young he looked, so he never heard how old he was. He was born a year after World War One ended, on a family farm near the border with East Prussia, one of eleven children, six of whom survived infancy. He was a cavalryman in the Lithuanian Army when World War Two broke out. “He was so handsome in his uniform,” my mother said. In the end, however, his war lasted only a few days after the Red Army in 1940 sent a half million troops and three thousand tanks into the Baltic states. It was Goliath vs. David, except David didn’t have a nearly big enough slingshot.

   He trained as a tailor when he was a teenager. He went back to that line of work after his horse was shot dead. “What did I ever do to you?” the horse wanted to ask the Russian who shot him. After the war, and all during the annexation, he took in or let out seats and waists, replaced zippers, buttons, and liners, and made custom pants and jackets. He got married and raised four children. The Russians controlled the money supply, however, and he was hard-pressed getting ahead, at least in any straightforward way.

   Justinas played the accordion like any minute was a good time for a good time. He couldn’t read music, not that it mattered. He knew what it was supposed to sound like. Squeezebox skills back then were passed on generation to generation, one-on-one. He belted out songs, too, even though his voice was thin and scratchy.  He could be the life of the party. He wasn’t planning on going to the grave with any music left inside of him.

   He was in good spirits most of the time, which was surprising. Until 1990, when the Soviet Union finally got the boot, Lithuania was a gray country, surly Russians and unhappy Lithuanians in the grip of the Russians. Even the post-war reconstruction looked miserable. There were busts and statues of Lenin everywhere. The tyrant didn’t look remotely happy in a single one of them. Justinas was happy enough to be alive, somehow staying on the sunny side of the street behind Lenin’s sour Iron Curtain.

    No matter how affable he could be, if you messed with his private Idaho museum or his pigeons, you would get yours, for sure. He dropped the hammer on the occasional black rat and red fox in the wrong place at the wrong time. When a neighbor’s cat mauled one of his favorite birds, Justinas got his shotgun and hunted the cat down. He shot it pointblank in the street where he found it. The neighbor never said anything about it, either to him or the police. The rest of the neighborhood warned their cats about the madman in their midst.

   My uncle’s home was a small two-story house. It was painted green. It backed up to railroad tracks. They had an electric stove, but no basement or furnace. They heated the house with a fireplace and a Franklin-style stove. They burned coal and dried turf. Justinas said the stove could burn anything with hardly any smell. His driveway and the road in front of the house were hard-packed dirt. The road was slightly higher than the surrounding terrain but there were no side ditches for rainwater to flow to. Whenever it stormed the pathway turned into a quagmire. When it was dry, except for an occasional man-eating pothole, it was like driving on rock bed.

   Justinas owned a four-door early-1970s Lada, manufactured by Fiat in collaboration with the Soviet Union. It was black. Everybody’s Lada’s were black. It had heavy-duty steel body panels and cheap components. It rode like a tank on the bumpy roads. It was a manual four-speed with slightly elevated ground clearance. It was made to be worked on by its owners, which is what my uncle did. The Lada was not a hot car but it ran hot. He changed the oil once a month. He replaced the muffler and the drum brakes when he had to. He installed a rack on the top and kept the outside of the car reasonably clean, although the inside was a dump. It wasn’t filthy dirty, just trashy, like a teenager owned it. 

   Justinas pumped his gasoline from child-sized pumps set on cinder blocks with fifteen-foot long snaky hoses. The concrete islands at their neighborhood gas station were unusually wide. The station looked like it had been built before the beginning of time. Motorists pulled in willy-nilly. They tried to ignore the long lines for fuel.

   Lithuanians are keen on wolves, bears, and moose. According to legend, Grand Duke Gediminas dreamt an iron wolf told him to create Vilnius and make the city his capital. The bear is a symbol of Samogitia, one of the country’s regions, and is part of the coat of arms of Siauliai, another region. The Lazdijai region features a moose as its hero, although when it shows up uninvited townsfolk stay behind closed doors. Birds don’t take a back seat. Everybody likes the cuckoo because its call is said to sweep away the last bits and pieces of winter. The pigeon, which is called balandis, gets its own month, which is April, or balanzio menuo.

    There was a barn-like garage behind Justinas’s house. He kept his old sewing machines and tailoring goods on the ground floor. Upstairs, up a ladder, he kept a coop of rock pigeons. Even though they can always find their way home, even when released blindfolded from no matter where, navigating by the earth’s magnetic fields, and even though they had carried messages across battlefields for armies during both world wars, Justinas never let his pigeons go anywhere without him. They weren’t prisoners, exactly, but they were there to stay.

   He loved his birds and they loved him. He fed them as well as he fed himself. He and his friends bred and traded them. Thieves sometimes tried to steal the pigeons, so there was a padlock fixed to the garage door. He kept a dog on a long leash chained to a stake in front of the garage, just in case. The dog was ready to bite whenever strangers approached.

   Behind the garage was a chicken wire enclosure brimming with white rabbits. My uncle raised them for the family’s dinner table. When the time came he would catch and pin one of the rabbits to the ground, put a stick across its neck, step on one side of the stick, quickly step on the other side of it, and pull the rabbit upward by its hind legs, breaking its neck. After cutting off its head he hung it upside down to clean it. Janina seasoned and cooked the bunnies, frying and braising them and mixing them into stews.

   His private Idaho museum was on the second floor of their house. Nobody had ever stolen anything from it, but God pity the fool who tried. Justinas might have committed murder in the event. The door was never locked, but you had to be invited to get in. He never gave anything in his museum away, either, not even to his own children, although he traded with his friends, just like he traded his birds with them.

   There was a glass case filled with gold and silver coins, military medals, and men’s pocket watches. There were framed pictures of Catholic saints, Lithuanian kings and politicians, and British luxury liners on the walls. He had carved figures, including an eagle, talons and wings outstretched and its head thrust forward. He had a restored Victrola with a new needle, new springs, new crank and motor, and a burnt orange sound horn. There were a dozen clocks, which were his prized possessions. They were grandfather wood wall clocks with pendulums and chimes. Every one of them was set to a random time of day. They all worked whenever he wanted them to work.

   Two smaller rooms adjoined the museum on the second floor. They were bedrooms where his four children had grown up. Both of the rooms had pint-sized windows. The rooms were stuffy, filled with dust motes and memories.

   Justinas and Janina were always accusing each other of having extra-marital affairs. She made great-tasting potato pancakes morning, noon, and night. One day while they were having a pancake lunch with two neighborhood widows in the living room, since there wasn’t a dining room, she told her husband to go outside for a minute. 

   “Oh, my God, he’s such a womanizer, always chasing women,” she said out of the blue. The two widows didn’t know what to say. She was in her late 60s and he was in his early 70s. He never talked about his wife, but she talked about him constantly. Somebody said she was the one having all the affairs. Nobody knew what to believe.

   When he walked back into the living room he was smiling. “What were you talking about?” he asked innocently enough. He wasn’t planning on living a century-or-more and giving up all the things that make you want to live that long. He believed it was best to die in the prime of life at a ripe old age.

   Justinas had a water well operated by a wheel pulley in the backyard. There was a red plastic bucket to get water and bring it into the house. Whenever anybody wanted to brush their teeth or wash their face, they took from the bucket. The outhouse was beside the garage. Everybody called it the little house. They kept cut-up scraps of Russian newspapers on a ledge inside the side door of the little house. Whenever relatives were visiting Janina gave them a vessel to keep beside their bed in case they needed to go in the middle of the night and didn’t want to go outside. Everybody made sure to not drink too much too late into the evening.

   They didn’t have a tub, either. They went to a nearby public bath to take showers once a week. Once when my sister was visiting she declared the outhouse was more than enough. She wasn’t going to any public bathhouse. Justinas told her he had a lady friend who had a bathtub. When they got there, it was full of turnips. The lady took them all out, but the water never warmed up above tepid. She took a bath anyway, since it was better than nothing.

   Even when Justinas retired from tailoring he was always out doing something, up to something. ”I have responsibilities,” he would say. It was never clear what those responsibilities were, although he stayed busy fulfilling them.

   My uncle Sigitas and his wife Terese had a pig farm near Gizai, near where my mother’s side of the family had originally come from. Terese worked for the Russians in a building supplies warehouse. She smiled politely and stole them blind. Nobody knew what my younger uncle Juozukas did. He had a truck and could fix anything, including stoves and electric circuits. He never got up in the morning at the same time and never went to work to the same place.

   He had patched together a kiosk and attached it to the side of his house. The hand-painted sign said, “Odds and Ends.” He and his wife sold soft drinks, chocolate bars, gum, and cigarettes. On the first of every month he had to pay off the local Lithuanian mobsters. They demanded a cut of everything, including gum. It was like Spanky and Our Gang.

   Everybody in Lithuania complained about everything and they especially complained about money. It was easier and more prudent to never ask anybody what they did. “This and that,” is what many of them said. They were always going to Poland and across the Baltic Sea to Sweden and bringing back clothes, food, prescription drugs, as well as cigarettes and more cigarettes. They smuggled contraband goods across borders without declaring anything, traversing forests and crossing rivers on the sly. Whenever they bootlegged cars or trucks they drove the long way around at night with the headlights off.

   After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the resumption of Lithuania, we collected financing from family members and sent enough to Justinas and Janina so they could get an indoor bathroom built and running water installed. The lady of the house absolutely wanted a toilet and faucets. She was more than happy when she got the funds. She even stopped complaining about her supposedly over-sexed husband for a while.

   When Justinas found out about the proposed toilet he said thanks, but no thanks. He said he had grown up and lived his whole life without the modern convenience. “What was good for my father is good for me,” he said. He wasn’t hidebound but wasn’t going to change anything more than he had to after all the years of his life. “I was coming down the ladder from the coop just now carrying a drink in one hand and a pigeon in the other hand,” he told anybody who asked about his reasons. “Don’t try that when you get to be my age.” His explanations were often elliptical.

   He was swimming upstream with Janina about the plumbing. She eventually got what she wanted. Over time, given Lithuania’s long and cold winters, he learned to like the indoor bathroom more than his wife or anybody else. He was an old dog who had sussed out a new trick. He never gave up visiting his lady friends, though. He didn’t forget how to make hot water.

Photograph by Rita Staskus. Juozukas Jurgelaitis, Justinas Jurgelaitis, and Rasa Jurgelaityte, 1994.

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 Rust Belt in the 1960s and 1970s.

“A collection of first-person street level 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

Accidental Reality

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

Available on Amazon:

A Crying of Lot 49 Production