7

Our Neighborhood and Us

We lived on E. 114th St. in a row house we called "the terrace." A row house is one of a series of houses, usually eight to twelve, connected by common sidewalls and forming a continuous group. In later years it became fashionable to gentrify row houses and call them "townhouses."

Downstairs we had a full basement, living room, dining room, and kitchen; upstairs, three bedrooms and bathroom. Each room was postage-stamp sized. The living space was around 1,200 square feet. There was barely space in the bathroom for two people. When we ate in the dining room as a family the table extended into the living room, which itself, when not intruded upon by the family spread out to eat together, could crowd five in its space. My father said, "a person's lucky to live in a small house, he won't get lost."

The house was made even smaller by the presence of my maternal grandmother, Mary Zbornik, in one of the bedrooms. She was helpless and bedridden. When I was responsible for her care she told me when to bring her water and a small piece of bread, when to change her bedpan, and when to prop up her pillows, always in Czech. She spoke no English. Most of all I remember the foul smell of that room.

By E. 114th St. standards our house was middle class. Upper class was a single house. Lower class was the "Hooverville" in a gully at the end of our street, where people lived in shacks built of cardboard, scrap metal, packing boxes and tar paper. Two families lived in an unused sewer pipe and an elderly couple lived in a cave nearby.

The name "Hooverville" was a caustic tribute to President Herbert Hoover who presided over the first three years of the Depression, before he was deposed by Franklin Roosevelt in 1932.

During those three years Hoover assured Americans they had nothing to worry about. The business world, he promised, would soon have things under control. At least three times during 1931 he proudly announced, "the economic downturn is already turning around." For Hoover, the depression was "a temporary halt in the prosperity of a great people."

It was always, and continues to be, a mantra of those who don't suffer much when economies go south to say, "in the long run, capitalist markets correct temporary problems." During the Depression the British economist Keynes gave the world a counter-mantra, "in the long run, we're all dead."

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President Roosevelt championed radical public policies; necessary, he said, because "the market cannot on its own mitigate, let alone cure, the disasters befalling us." He never mentioned Keynes, though his policies looked like they were cut whole from Keynesian cloth.

Government housing projects was one of Roosevelt's favorite interventions; the first three were built in Cleveland between 1935 and 1937. They provided decent housing for poor people at a very low and guaranteed rent. My parents tried for years to get into one but our income was always a bit too high. "It's the two potatoes," my father concluded, never one to let bad news deter his intent to be amused by life.

The projects were designed by prominent architects, who, like everyone else, were eager to get work. Some were modernistic in the international style popular at that time, but, as can happen, recipients of help searched for hidden insults. A housing project for Afro-Americans, artistically rendered by the architects Walsh and Barret, was resented by the occupants because the bricks were black.

My mother, who seldom flinched from declaring generalizations based on a few of her experiences, equated our street with all of America. She elaborately described us as middle class, as though by saying it she proclaimed a great victory, perhaps understandably so in a time when so many were so desperately poor.

Walls between the units of our row house were little more than paper-thin. If either of your next-door neighbors made any kind of noise you heard it. From our neighbor on one side, the sounds were agonizing when Mr. Hawkins disciplined his son, Chuckie. "Ol' Man Hawkins," as we called him, beat Chuckie with his fists and belt, hurling him against the walls with such force that our floors echoed the thuds. I still remember Chuckie's wild and fearful eyes.

One otherwise unsurprising spring day when I was in the fourth grade Chuckie tried to set fire to our school building by starting a paper and clothing fire in the basement. I never saw him after that day nor found out what happened to him.

Chuckie had a younger sister. One Saturday morning I heard my mother saying to my father she hoped Mr. Hawkins would not unleash his anger "on the girl now that Chuckie is gone." In those days there were no authorities to whom you could report child or spousal abuse.

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My father walked out our front door, crossed the two tiny front yards and went to the Hawkins' front door. I rushed to a window but couldn't see anything except my father standing there mouthing words I couldn't hear. His head was bobbing back and forth like a bird pecking at feed, his powerful arms straight and stiff at his sides, fists clenched.

I never heard or saw any sign of Mr. Hawkins beating his daughter.

On our other side was soundless suspense. A man of indistinguishable age, Edward, lived there with his mother and her sister. Edward suffered from elephantiasis. His head was larger than his upper body and he had a narrow range of emotional feelings. When he sat on the front porch they shared with us one of the women would stand over him with her hand protectively resting on his shoulder. There were no conversations to be had with him, though he did reply in kind to "hi" and "seeya." I was told, "he is a cross to bear, a gift from God to his mother and aunt and all who come in contact with him."

The two women were always pleasant though never friendly. When I was their paper boy and came around to collect, one of them would gracefully invite me inside the door. Often Edward was sitting in a rocker nearby in front of a large crucifix hanging askew on a wall of flowery wallpaper. I was always paid immediately - something paperboys appreciated in those days - usually with a comment such as "Edward enjoys watching you and your friends playing outside." Or, "Edward enjoys hearing your accordion music."

Edward scared my friends. They thought I was courageous, though foolhardy, to go into his house. When we told ghost stories to one another someone always related a tale in which Edward, hatchet in hand, slips into my house at midnight and ominously ascends the stairs, heading for my bed.

Daily needs were within walking distance of our front steps. At the corner of 114th St. and St. Clair Ave., a two-minute walk from our house, there was a dry cleaning store, a bar, a drugstore, a Kroger's grocery store, a bakery, and a paint-and-linoleum store before you arrived at 116th St. If you continued you passed a Fisher's Grocery Store, an ice cream parlor, a barber shop, a beauty shop, a small lumber yard, and a newspaper and tobacco store.

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sundries store with a soda fountain, a tap-dancing studio, a hardware store, and a photography studio.

Nowadays places all smell the same. In those days each store had distinctive odors. Grocery stores had pungent cheese and rich coffee smells. The moment you walked into a hardware store you noticed an oily metallic odor. Dry cleaners featured chemical whiffs, and so it went.

St. Clair, Superior and Euclid were the three main streets going eastward from downtown. Streetcars ran frequently on each of them, stopping at almost every third street. Buses took you on the main streets going north-south and also ran frequently.

In summertime when screens replaced windows you could hear radios as you walked 114th street. If President Roosevelt was broadcasting a fireside chat or if Jack Graney was calling plays for a Cleveland Indians baseball game, you could keep up with what was being said as you walked.

Automobiles, or "machines," as we called them, were scarce in the thirties. When the Cleveland Municipal Stadium opened in 1931 it had a capacity of 78,512 seats and a parking lot with a 4,500-car limit.

The absence of cars on our street enabled us to turn it into a playground, a baseball field, and a football field. Side streets belonged to kids in the thirties. Our favorite game was touch football, but not as you'll see the Kennedys playing it in that documentary on Irish in America.

Touch football could be played with as few as two players per team, and you could add on immediately as kids came by to join. It was also relatively neighbor-friendly. Unlike baseballs, footballs don't bang and bounce menacingly on peoples' front porches or crash through windows. Particularly the footballs we used, tightly wadded newspapers held together by rubber bands.

The field of play was a street made of almost-fitting-together bricks. Public health spending in Cleveland lagged behind other large cities. Government attention to sanitation concerns such as street cleaning was sporadic and uneven between neighborhoods. Dog and horse droppings on the street often remained until eventually worn away. For this and other reasons, mothers ever warned or begged their street-bound kids, "Don't play in your school shoes!" We played in corduroy knickers and cheap, thin-rubbered Keds.

Side streets were neglected for two reasons. First, like other cities Cleveland was governed by a mayor elected at large and a council made up of elected representatives of

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neighborhood wards. The representatives were almost always small businessmen and professionals, especially lawyers, who were protecting their own interests and turf, not those of the workers. In my neighborhood public street-cleaners paid a lot more attention to St. Clair Avenue, where the commerce was, than to my street.

Second, by the time I was in the streets Cleveland's elite had moved out of the city. Except for downtown where they worked, they were unconcerned with appearances of the streets, and they had a keen interest in keeping business real estate taxes down. Thus, there was little money in the city budget for things like street cleaning.

The side streets were modestly brightened at night by lights that provided faded circles of illumination separated by corridors of semi-darkness. Those unlit corridors were our salvation on nights of Halloween pranks. If they were useful for nothing else, the lights helped mothers maintain some discipline. We were all told to be home before the street lights went on.

My father always found some kind of work and he felt very good about that. Probably he was an exception to the rule of joblessness because he had so many practical skills. He could install and fix anything inside a house and his carpentry skills were his best. In addition he was exceptionally strong, a valuable asset in a day when human strength and energy played such a big part in getting things done.

He said Cleveland had a working man's soul because even during the depression he could find work and a streetcar to get him there. The availability of transportation played a major role in family decisions. "Howya gonna git there?" was often the litmus test for a suggestion.

My mother was the main care-giver, the manager of the household, and also a breadwinner. She adroitly juggled part-time jobs and jobs with unusual hours along with everything else. Everyone was assigned a working role. My sister began cooking at the age of around ten. My brother ran the vacuum and cleaned windows. I did dishes and other chores.

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me by then. I assured her I could handle the costs. "OK," she said, "but you're going to hate that long bus ride."

Tom was a truly wonderful big brother. Even when he was coerced by my mother into taking me with him and his friends, he never took it out on me, but tried to make me feel welcome, which was not an easy thing to do given the hostility of his friends to my presence. He looked like my mother but walked more in my father's footsteps. He was modest about his accomplishments, more introspective than outgoing, not judgmental, and avoided confrontations.

When I was an adult a friend of mine asked my mother if my brother, whom he had never meant, was like me. My mother said, "Not at all. When they were little if I had a fight with Tommy and he ran out of the house I knew that in a few minutes the door would open and I'd see a white handkerchief waving. If I had a fight with Jimmy and he ran out I knew he was gone."

All of my father's relatives except his younger brother, Bill, lived within St. Al's Parish in the 1930s. Uncle Bill was an exception to the family's ways, a prosaic prodigal son who was everything my father wasn't.

My father left school when he was ten to work. Without the income he brought in his younger sisters would never have finished high school, and one of them didn't anyway. Bill was the youngest of the children. Handsome until debauchery exacted its price from his physical appearance, Uncle Bill struggled through seven or so years of school and then hit the road to become a hobo.

Hobos were mostly young men who drifted through the country by sneaking illegal rides on trains. Some laid boards across brake rods under passenger railway cars. Most rode inside and on top of freight train box cars. They set up makeshift camps near areas where trains slowed down before stopping at stations and in the camps fashioned a distinct culture of camaraderie and values.

The worst thing you could say to a hobo was to call him a tramp because tramps would steal rather than work. This was a problem for hobos because when they appeared at your back door offering to work for food you couldn't be sure they weren't tramps. Unless you were Mrs. O'Hara, a tiny, waddling widow who lived across the street with a houseful of cats and dogs. "I ask 'em if they follow the Lord," she explained, "if they nod too quick I know them to be tramps."

Uncle Bill returned to the neighborhood now and then, always to take, never to give. One would have never used

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the word avuncular in an attempt to picture him. Yet, he was an interesting person.

He taught Tom and me secrets of hobo communication. They left signs for one another by making small knife cuts in wooden fences or chalk marks on sidewalks. A plus sign with a straight line next to it said "food for work." A sign of the cross said "talk religion, get food." A rough approximation of a smiling cat said "kindhearted lady." The shape of an egg said "nothing doing here." There were signs to communicate warnings about police, bad dogs, dishonest people, bad tempered owners as well as happy news like sleeping possibilities, work available, and medical treatment.

My mother was an avid movie-goer. Like most people she went for the enjoyment; unlike most people she saw herself as a person who would have been a movie star had she been born twenty years later. This was not entirely a foolish notion. As a child her singing voice and craving for the spotlight propelled her to stardom in her parish musical productions, most of which were performed in Czech. She was also the church soloist at high masses. This was years before the commercial entertainment boom in America that launched a vast and not always discriminating search for talent that might have, had it come earlier, discovered her.

We heard much and often about her lost opportunity. As I grew older I felt sorry for her. She would describe, sometimes sing, even dance through, one of those performances, then she would nostalgically recall the applause, the flowers thrown to the stage, the adulation, the fawning. If she had not been so thoroughly self-satisfied in every other way, she might have been portrayed as a Tennessee Williams' tragic character in this memoir.

Movie theaters were everywhere in the thirties. In my neighborhood one could go to the Uptown Theater to see an "A" movie three weeks or so after it had been shown downtown; the Doan theater where you would see a double-feature of "B" movies, usually a western and a detective story or comedy, and the Jewel Theater where you'd see a double-feature of "A" and "B" movies, on their third run, maybe eight months after they had appeared at the Uptown and Doan. The "B" (low budget) movie was a phenomenon of the Depression. We stood in lines to see double features of, say, a western starring Roy Rogers, followed by Abbot and Costello in a comedy.

When I was around eleven, my mother's left hip surrendered to arthritis. She needed a cane to get around the house,

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and both a cane and a shoulder to lean on to go as far as the corner stores. I became her Wednesday-night theater escort. We went to the Jewel Theater because at least one of the old "A" films shown would often be a Bette Davis-Joan Crawford type drama. We went on Wednesdays, when they played a Bingo-like game called Screeno between films. Now and then one of us would win a dollar or so.

Going to the movies with her was fun, though embarrassing at times. I remember "Naughty Marietta" starring Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy. When MacDonald sang "Ship Ahoy, Ship Ahoy, Who will marry a sailor boy," my mother's arm began bouncing to the rhythm and she sang along, in what I suppose she thought was sotto voce.

Some of the movies she took me to were not approved by The Catholic Legion of Decency for someone my age. She was not familiar with the Legion's lists because they appeared in the Catholic Universe Bulletin, a weekly newspaper. She didn't read newspapers.

If she had known that the Legion of Decency rated most of Bette Davis movies as "Objectionable for Children," she would not have stopped taking me to them. She was not a woman to accept non-economic limitations on her behavior. Unlike my father, a devout Catholic and very quiet about it, my mother went to church only once a year, to avoid the automatic excommunication of those who didn't.

Nonetheless, the Church had no need to worry my mother would expose me to anything unchaste at the Jewel Theater. When I first learned the meaning of the word "prudish," I said, "Oh, that's my mother!" The Church discouraged me from giving free rein to my carnal urges, but was no match for her. From the time I found out how I came into the world I was baffled about how, in my mother's case, all the necessary biological steps could have been taken. My father's explanation for my existence, "we foun ya at a fire sale, marked down at that" suggested to me a real possibility. My sister said, "Makes you believe in the stork after all, doesn't it."

Actually, my mother might have asked that I give her some credit in this memoir for taking me away from hours of reading on those Wednesday nights. She disliked my addiction to reading library books. The only book I ever saw her read was Dr. Lindlar's "You are What You Eat." She was inordinately fond of flat stomachs and trim builds.

Perhaps it was bringing together sight and sound, or the literally larger-than-life images on the screen, or maybe

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it was the anonymity of a darkened theater, but whatever it was made movies the primary escapism of the thirties. There was no television. Radios were ubiquitous, we played cards, checkers and Monopoly, there were hundreds of magazines, newspapers and comic books, spectator sports were extremely popular, and we were all music lovers, but nothing took us outside of ourselves and our reality as did movies.

In addition to stroking the fantasies in our minds, movies conveyed moral lessons and explored controversial themes. For me, they revealed a reality not found anywhere else, such as the ruthless acquisitiveness shared by both the underworld and the corporate world. Consider "Little Caesar," with Edgar G. Robinson, a classic American gangster movie.

Caesar Bandello will do anything, including torture and murder, to make money and become someone. He refers to what he does as "a business" and this comparison of crime to business has continued in Hollywood's portrayal of the underworld. By the time of "The Godfather" series, organized crime in movies is thoroughly imbued with the belief it is a business.

In movies businessmen were sometimes more detestable than gangsters. In his 1939 tribute to Hollywood movie outlaws, "The Ballad of Pretty Boy Floyd," Woody Guthrie sang,

At least, that's how I and the other kids in my neighborhood saw it. An opposing view was to consider Hollywood a distributor of socialistic and communistic propaganda. After WWII the U.S. Senate conducted highly-publicized investigations of alleged communists in Hollywood. Though the movie business is run according to the prevailing rules of capitalism, it continues today to be a very large and visible thorn in the side of establishments, including itself.

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