Hello, Cleveland Part 5

Having completely satisfied our Sterle's cravings, we maneuvered our bloated bodies back down the restaurant's dark hallway.  We stumbled out into the parking lot and piled back in Dad's CRV.  We turned south on E. 55th at breakneck speed as I fumbled in my purse in an attempt to retrieve my Mapquest maps and camera.


"There's one of the bars my father used to go to," said Dad as he sped by a small, boarded up structure that was representative of a typical old beer joint, as they were called in Cleveland.  My dad's father, John Sterle, was pretty well-off in Slovenia.  His parents managed (or owned...I can't remember now) a country inn and he grew up with a governess.  He came to the United States to avoid being drafted in the Austrian army.  My dad sent me a correction after reading Part 1 of this blog.  His father didn't come here to avoid fighting for the Communists, as I previously stated, but rather for the Austrian government, which was actually a monarchy at the time.  The Communists would, however, take over until Slovenia became an independent nation in 1991.


At any rate, my dad sped by the old bar so fast that neither Julie nor I were able to whip out our cameras quickly enough.  Dagnabit.  I am fascinated my grandfather, who died when my father was in high school.  I never met him and never even saw a photograph of him until four years ago, when my aunt gave my parents a copy of his and my grandmother's wedding photograph.  He was a very handsome and regal man.  I sent my dad a copy of "Cleveland:  Then and Now" when he was recovering from hip surgery four years ago and he actually identified his father in one of the photos.  My dad never talked about his father, but I knew that he hated him, apparently for good reason.


John Sterle came to this country with the same hopes and dreams as many other European immigrants, only to lose everything he had in the great Stock Market Crash in 1929.  He had already gotten my grandmother pregnant out of wedlock (quite the family scandal given the times) and had several children to support by this time.  He worked in the steel mills, as did my maternal grandfather, and lived with my grandmother and eventually eight children in the upstairs portion of his in-laws' house.  My grandmother's father built this house on land that was once a fruit orchard.  The original farmhouse still stands:

I don't know much about my grandfather other than he became an alcoholic after the Stock Market Crash.  He drank at many of the neighborhood taverns and the Slovenian National Home on St. Clair Avenue, but also managed to hold down a full-time job at the steel mill and lead a Slovenian folk group at the Home.  He was a very talented musician, singer, and composer, but also a very abusive man who often went on benders that lasted several days, leaving my poor grandmother (whom my dad adored) to care for eight children.  My dad has only related bits and pieces of his childhood to us, for good reason, I'm sure.  He told us about the time that he and his brothers and sisters sat on the porch and watched their father eat an entire carton of ice cream by himself, only to offer to let them lick the cardboard after he was done.  My dad also told us about the time that he smarted off to his father at the dinner table and his father slapped him so hard that he fell off his chair, his glasses flying onto the floor and breaking.  He also remembers hearing his father raping his mother after he returned from his carousing.  She died of a stroke while she was in her early 40s.  She had high blood pressure and should have been on medication, but my grandfather drank all of the money away and she never received the medical care she needed and deserved.

My dad was number six out of eight kids and his three oldest brothers went off to fight in World War II.  He was very sensitive and creative, and related far better to his younger sisters than to his macho older brothers.  He said that they came back from the war very hardened and tough, further dividing them.  One of his brothers, Leonard, was shot down by the Nazis and spent 18 months in a German prisoner of war camp.  How could you NOT be changed by that?  I saw his daughter, my cousin Marian, last summer and she was kind enough to share his memoir and and war memorabilia with us.  Uncle Lenny was a true hero in our family and sadly passed away a few years ago. 

But I'm getting ahead of myself.  My dad was driving through his old stomping grounds quite quickly, as if to outrun the bad memories.  I was sitting in the front seat, my Mapquest printouts flying every which way as I tried to take photographs and notes on what I was photographing.  I don't remember seeing much of Dad's old neighborhood except through the lens of my camera.  He pointed out several spots as he sped through St. Clair-Superior.

This was an old neighborhood grocery store on the corner of Bonna and E. 60th, just down the street from Sterle's:

We didn't encounter many cars or pedestrians as we drove through the neighborhood, which made me sad.  I couldn't help but think of how vibrant this neighborhood must have been during the 1920s and 1930s.  I imagined women bartering with the grocer while their children longingly eyed the candy jars.  I'm sure there was busy foot traffic outside the shop as well as the smell of the north wind off the lake.  I'm sure that the grocer lived above the store with his immediate and extended family, and possibly a few young lads that just arrived here from the old country.  Now, the entire building is boarded up and vacant, even though the external structure appears to be intact and in great shape.


This was a candy store called Happy's:

Again, I'm sure that the owner and his family lived above the shop, and that he was truly invested in the neighborhood and church, St. Vitus.  He or members of his family most likely constructed this building, which is also now boarded up and vacant.  It would be interesting to know how long he or his descendants remained in the neighborhood; whether they held out during the "white flight" period in the 1960s, and when (if they were even still open then) they most likely lost the majority of their customers.  I would love to know if any stalwart holdouts remain, any descendants of the neighborhood's original inhabitants.  I want to think that there are some people that still believe in the neighborhood, but I all I could see were ghosts of a part of Cleveland's history that is long past.  There is a Slovenian retirement/nursing home nearby, within view of the neighborhood church, St. Vitus.  Oh, the stories that those residents could tell.


I literally felt that I was transported to "A Christmas Story," which is one of my dad's favorite Christmas movies.  He was around Ralphie's age during the time period portrayed in the movie and can relate to it in a very special way.  He remembers yearning for a Red Rider BB gun, which he never received because his family was too poor.  Portions of the movie were filmed in Tremont, a neighborhood on Cleveland's west side, as were portions of "The Deer Hunter."  The "Christmas Story house" has been restored and is now a fun, kitschy museum.  Tremont also boasts a beautiful Russian Orthodox Church, St. Theodisius.  I remember seeing its soaring spires from the highway when we used to visit my maternal grandmother when I was a kid.  I want to think that Cleveland proper can still attract residents from richly diverse backgrounds, but I'm not sure if it can.  The city is shrinking while the suburbs are relatively going strong.


Onward.  My dad told us that he used to play in this field, which belonged to St. George, a Lithuanian Catholic church:

I live in a rapidly-growing area of Fort Worth where new construction pops up virtually every day, so  it is almost unfathomable to me that a field that was vacant in the 1930s and 1940s remains vacant today.  This is but one illustration of how the Cleveland economy has stalled, to kindly put it.  

This used to be an old funeral home.  I have a hard time wrapping my brain around a Hell's Angel's chapter located in a predominantly African-American neighborhood, but what do I know (really)?

I complained about my dad's sun/rain visor that he has on his CRV, which is visible in the photos.  I've never seen anything like it before, but he swears that it deflects the rain and sun.  Even so, it screwed up a lot of my photos.  

Finally.....we turned onto Edna Avenue, where my great-grandfather built the house that my dad lived in until his parents died in the mid- to late-1940s.  

To my amazement, it hasn't changed since I saw it in 2006.  It is in remarkable condition considering that it was built in the late 1890s.  My great-grandparents lived on the bottom floor while my dad and his family lived on the top floor.  It is almost incomprehensible to me that a family of 10 could occupy the upstairs of a house that is no more than 2400 square feet.  My dad recalls having to share a bed with two or three of his siblings for many, many years.  It would get so hot in the summer that he sometimes had to sleep with his face propped on the window sill.  His mother died when he was 11 or 12 years old and his father "offered" to let my dad's oldest sister share his bed.  My dad sensed his father's intent and offered to share a bed with his father, a man that terrified him, in order to save his sister from being molested; the same wonderful, kind-hearted sister that acted as a surrogate mother to him when his father died just a few years later.

No wonder my dad never wanted to talk about his childhood.  Looking at the house, I can't even begin to imagine the horrors that occurred inside its walls.  I feel very thankful that my dad had the courage to put his fears and adverse memories aside for our sake, for family history's sake.  I felt more than just a little selfish asking him to relive these memories.  I often wondered how he could be happy in Ashland, a small, backward town one an hour south of Cleveland, but now I understand.  

We continued on and saw an old market, which is incredibly still a market, across the street from the old farmhouse:

According to my dad , it used to be called Stumpf's Market and Mr. Stumpf was known to cheat his customers.  

This empty lot once accomodated Toedman's Drug Store:

This building on the corner of Superior and East 55th was a dance hall and bar that my dad frequented:

Two of my aunts worked at Richman Brothers on East 55th, which has been long since boarded up:

My dad went to junior high school here:

As you can tell from the photos, we were whirring by these sites and I barely had a chance to photograph them while keeping my running list of what I was actually photographing.  It was a whirlwind trip, but I am so glad that I had the chance to speed down my dad's memory lane.....while he still remembers.  

Traveling to my mom's neighborhood was an entirely different story.