Tag Archives: Terese Parello

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

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Accidental Reality

Sledgehammer Hill

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By Ed Staskus

   The weekend my mother-in-law Terese and her husband Dick moved out of Reserve Square in downtown Cleveland, they moved out of twin Brutalist inspired apartment towers into a turn of the century house. They had lived in their apartment for more than twenty years, on the 17th floor facing Lake Erie. During the National Air Shows flying out of Burke Lakefront Airport they sat on their balcony and watched the Blue Angels streak past like roadrunners on the loose.

   There’s nothing like the sound of F/A-18 Hornets roaring a few hundred feet overhead and veering away at the last second from skyscrapers dead ahead. They are jets able to perform high angle of attack tail sitting maneuvers and can fly formation loops dirty, their landing gear down. The sound of silence once they’re gone is deafening.

   Terese and Dick bought an abundance of a house with four bedrooms and three bathrooms on the corner of East 73rd St. and Chester Ave., in the blighted Hough neighborhood, ten minutes from downtown. It was built in 1910 in the colonial style. When they got done restoring it, they had added an attached garage, put on a new roof, installed new vinyl windows and siding, a new interior staircase, and a new kitchen. It went from ghetto to gentrified as fast as the contractors could make it happen.

   Almost 100% of the people living in Hough in 1999 were black. Only 2% of them were white. Terese was Lithuanian and Dick was Italian. They were part of the 2%. She was from Cleveland. He was from Rochester. Everybody and their uncle tried to talk them out of buying the house. The racial make-up of the neighborhood was the stumbling block of all their opinions. The color barrier, however, was not a stumbling block to Terese.

   Terese was a self-taught chef who owned four restaurants in her time and made herself into one of the city’s top-notch confectioners. The opera star Luciano Pavarotti searched her out and pigged out on her cookies and cakes whenever he was in Cleveland. “That man can eat,” she said. When he was done eating he was good and ready for an aria.

   Her signature creation was a 17-layer cake based on a recipe that Napoleon brought to Lithuania during his ill-fated Russian campaign. Terese, Dick, my wife, brother-in-law, and I helped make them Novembers and Decembers, working out of her kitchen, freezing them, and selling them during the holidays through the Neiman Marcus catalog. I went home most nights needing to shower clouds of flour off me. 

   Terese and Dick bought the house in Hough because she had grown up nearby, when the neighborhood was more white than not, and wanted to go home again. It wasn’t the same, but she saw what she wanted to see. She remembered the neighborhood from her childhood and made the reality fit her memory. She had a streak of magic realism running through her.

   My wife and I lived in Lakewood. I had a red Schwinn mountain bike that I frequently rode in the Rocky River Metropark, on the paved trail, the horse trails, and the single tracks. I rode downtown sometimes, winding my way through Ohio City and across the Hope Memorial Bridge, especially on weekends when all the bankers, lawyers, and city workers were at home. I usually rode the Hope Bridge over the Flats so I could see the Guardians.

   The 6,000-foot-long art deco truss bridge crosses the Cuyahoga River. Four pairs of immense stone statues officially named the “Guardians of Traffic” are sculpted onto opposite-facing pylons at each end. Each of the Guardians holds a different vehicle in its hands, a hay wagon, a covered wagon, a stagecoach, a 1930s-era automobile, and four different kinds of trucks. I always crossed an index and middle finger while going by in hopes of keeping traffic away from me.

   I got it into my head that I wanted to ride around on the east side of town, through Cleveland Heights and Shaker Heights. I thought about East Cleveland but thought better of it. The city had gone to hell in a handbasket. I asked Terese if I could park my car in their driveway while I rode. She said yes but cautioned me to bring my rear-mounted rack into the garage. Law and order was sketchy in her neighborhood. When I had stored the rack away she invited me into the kitchen to snack on  croissants fresh out of the oven.

   She was in the middle of two projects. One was chocolate-covered plastic spoons that turned into a steaming drink when hot water was added. There were rows of the spoons on baking trays. The other project she was working on was perfecting a handy self-serve pan to make the dry, hard-textured Italian cookies called biscotti. I preferred croissants fresh out of the oven.

   Whenever I had ridden downtown with friends and wanted to push ahead into Cedar and Fairfax, what my friends called the black hole, they always turned back. “I don’t want my husband getting killed by some spade,” one of their wives told me. I didn’t bother trying to explain that hot under the collar rednecks driving pick-ups were far more dangerous. It wouldn’t have done any good.

   I rode up the hill to Little Italy and Lake View Cemetery. The riding was twisty throughout the graveyard. I couldn’t see the lake, no matter what. I stopped at the Garfield Monument. President Garfield was shot four months into his term of office and died two months later from infections caused by his medical staff. He was determined to live but stood no chance against his White House doctors. The shooter was hung the next summer. On the gallows he recited a poem he had written called “I Am Going to the Lordy.” He signaled he was ready for his fate by dropping the paper it was written on. The hangman kicked the paper aside and didn’t screw around securing the noose.

   There are thousands of trees and 100,000 graves in the 280-acre cemetery, from nobodies to moguls. One of the most striking grave markers is the life-sized bronze statue called The Angel of Death Victorious but known as Haserot’s Angel. The statue is seated on the gravestone of Francis Haserot, holding an extinguished torch upside-down. The man made his fortune canning foodstuffs and importing tea and coffee. 

   The angel’s wings are outstretched and looks like it is crying black tears. “They formed over time,” Terese told me. “It’s an effect of the aging bronze.” She had taken drawing and painting classes at the Cleveland Institute of Art. I took her word for it.

   I rode Fairmount Blvd. to Shaker Hts. and bicycled around the Nature Center at Shaker Lakes. The green space was created in 1966 to stop the Clark Freeway from going in. Those behind the effort called themselves ‘Freeway Fighters.’ Cuyahoga County Engineer Albert Porter called the Shaker Lakes a “two-bit duck pond” and vowed that the highway would get built come hell or high water. The highway never got built, regardless.

   The twenty acres of the Nature Center has eight mapped natural habitats, four gardens for native plants and insects, and two trails. I rode the trails and tried not to squash any insects. I wheeled out on the 7-mile long Shaker Blvd. to Beachwood and back. Shaker Hts. was built by Oris and Mantis Van Swerington, early 20thcentury developers. They modeled the suburb and the boulevard after examples of English Garden City planning. They laid rapid transit rail service down the middle of the boulevard. Broad tree-shaded lawns front the mansions on either side of the road. One of my cousins and her husband lived in one of the mansions, but I was crusty from sweat and didn’t stop to visit.

   The best thing about riding up Mayfield Rd. to the cemetery was riding down Mayfield Rd. from the cemetery. It was a long enough stretch that I could go as fast as I wanted, although I feathered the brakes all the way down. I didn’t want to end up laid out next to President Garfield.

   Terese always let me wash up when I got back to her house, made me a cup of coffee, and put something tasty she had baked on a plate. She had never gone to cooking school, instead learning her craft by getting the cooking done. Everything she made was as good as the cookbooks said it was supposed to be. In her time she had been the pastry chef at Max’s Deli in Rocky River and Gallucci’s Italian Foods in Cleveland.

   One weekend I rode my tricked-out Schwinn, which was equipped with front shock absorbers and disc brakes, and went looking for Sledgehammer Hill in Forest Hills Park. The city park is lodged between East Cleveland and Coventry Village. The sloping land rises to a plateau. It was where John D. Rockefeller’s private summer estate was in the 19th century. He could afford it because his estimated net worth was equivalent to 1.5% of America’s GDP at the time. He was and still is the richest man in American business and economic history.

   There were lakes and bridle trails. There was a racetrack and a golf course. Before John D. Rockefeller died the property went to his son, John, Jr., who transferred one third of it to Cleveland Hts. and two thirds to East Cleveland. His only stipulation was the land be used for recreation and nothing else. The new park opened in 1942. It was about half forest and half meadow. It has been improved over the years, with tennis courts, a swimming pool, picnic areas, as well as basketball courts, football fields, and baseball diamonds.

   When I was growing up we hardly ever went there summers, but went there many times in the winter. We lived at East 128th St. and St. Clair Ave. and getting there was no trouble. We went ice skating on the man-made lagoon and sledding down Sledgehammer Hill. That wasn’t its official name, if it even had one. It was what all of us called it because of the killer bump near the bottom.

   Skating was loads of fun. There was a boat house on the man-made lagoon. It was where we changed into skates. My father had taught us to skate growing up in Sudbury, Ontario. The mining town is north of the Georgian Bay and south of Wanapitei Lake. He would spray our front yard with a hose in the winter and the water froze hard as concrete in no time. When we moved to Cleveland in the late 1950s we took our skates with us. Neither my brother, sister, nor I were big leaguers on the ice, but we skated like dervishes, living it up as we tried to toe loop and pirouette.

   Sledgehammer Hill was a hill that started at the top of the plateau and ran down a wide treeless slope. When I went looking for it my memory of it was that it was long, fast, and deadly. I didn’t give my memory much credence, though, believing it must have really been short, slow, and safe. You never know when you’re making up the past.

   When I found it, thinking that I would ride down on my Schwinn, I was startled by what I saw. I backed away from the lip of the hill and got off my bike. I walked back to the edge and looked down. It looked even longer and more dangerous than I remembered. I saw the bump near the faraway bottom and remembered hitting it, going airborne, and landing like Godzilla had body-slammed me. Many kids veered away from the bump. None of us ever blamed them. We had all done the same thing one time or another. Only the innocent went over the bump full-bore the first time and lived.

   I don’t know how fast our sleds went, maybe 20 or 25 MPH, but they went fast as hell. We didn’t wear helmets. We wore knit caps. You were considered a sissy if you wore earmuffs. I started wearing earmuffs after one icy winter weekend my ears froze and almost fell off. Insults were easier to bear than frostbite.

   Our parents always went skating with us or watched from a bench, in case the ice started to  crack, but when we went sledding, they dropped us off and went on their way. My sister rarely sledded, my brother sometimes did, but I couldn’t get enough of it. We rode Speedaways, Yankee Clippers, and Flexible Flyers. Only the foolhardy among us rode Sno Wing Blazons. They were too fast for Sledgehammer Hill. Most of us wanted to go as fast as possible but not necessarily break our necks. We sledded until it started to get dark and our parents came back to pick us up. 

   I didn’t take a chance going down the hill on my Schwinn. I rode away from Sledgehammer Hill, roaming around the park plateau instead, taking in the highlights of the past. I rode to the north end of the hill where John D. Rockefeller’s mansion had stood. It burned to the ground under unexplained circumstances in 1917.

   It was early in the evening by the time I pedaled back to Terese’s house. After I told her about the hill she stepped into the middle of her kitchen, pretending to be standing on a snowboard, balancing with her arms stretched out, and racing to the bottom. 

   She had performed professionally as a ballet dancer when she was younger and taught the fine points of footwork to Cleveland’s Lithuanian folk dancing groups. I applauded her performance when she was done, but if she had tried that stunt on Sledgehammer Hill, professional dancer or not, she would have gone flying headfirst when she hit the killer bump, and there wouldn’t have been enough croissants in her kitchen to break her fall.

Ed Staskus posts stories on 147 Stanley Street http://www.147stanleystreet.com and Cleveland Ohio Daybook http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.”