Real Music & Real Estate . . .

I knew a building manager who followed the weather reports relentlessly and thought the end of the world was coming every day via hurricanes, heat waves, or snowstorms. I don’t think she ever went outside.

Another manager was also fixated on the weather. He did a lot of indoor apartment painting and wanted every day to be 74 degrees, like Costa Rica, so he wouldn’t sweat.

A neighbor of mine once asked if I had a winter place in Florida.

I was surprised. I’m not there — retired in Florida.

However, I know a klezmer musician — a bushy-haired, ex-hippie clarinetist — who moved to Florida and took up golf. Anything is possible. I hope he plays a hora by the water fountain on the 16^th hole. (Mickey Katz did that. His band surprised a golfer on his birthday.)

Arizona versus Florida. That is a question. Which place is too hot, or not too hot.

Alice and I went to a wedding in Florida, where a guest asked, “Are you still in Cleveland?” Meaning  “Are you nuts? Do you like gray skies, slush and potholes?”

Another Clevelander at the wedding said, “The day I hit sixty-two I had to leave.” She spends her winters in Scottsdale, Arizona. A third Clevelander, originally from South Africa, prefers Florida over Arizona. “I like the ocean,” she said.

One time in Florida, at a Yiddishe Cup gig, I ran into a man who had lived in both Florida and Arizona. He said summer in Arizona is unbearable, and Florida is bearable.

What about Ohio? Is it bearable? I think so.

 
I was born with a silver spoon. An employee fine-tuned “silver spoon” to “Stratton, you were born with a silver spoon up your ass.”

I wasn’t made for real estate, like my old man. I didn’t grow up the hard way. South Euclid was no slum. I got a journalism job after college in the Collinwood neighborhood. I wrote for the the Sun Scoop Journal. Look it up. The paper doesn’t exist anymore. I dealt with all kinds of working-stiff Slovenians, Lithuanians, Italians, and blacks in northeast Cleveland.

Then I bought a house nearby, right by Lake Erie. Northeast Cleveland was cool, I learned on the job. Then I bought more houses there — with my old man’s money.

I got up to a four houses, sold them, and bought an apartment building. Scaling up is the real estate term. My old man co-signed on the mortgages. My old man — not too subtly —  pushed me into real estate. So I quit the newspaper.

And I became my old man, and my old man was very happy about that. Throughout the rest of his life, he never failed to remind there was zero money in journalism. A numbers guy — my dad. He thought about money nonstop and kept records on everything.

I don’t like numbers, and I don’t keep records. The only thing I collect is receipts from the wastebaskets outside Home Depot. And every spring I take my shopping bag full of  receipts to my accountant. I’ve never balanced my checkbook. If the bank screws me, I don’t know. Fine with me.

So here I am, in 2026, still annoyed by that building manager saying, in 1984, I had a silver spoon up my ass.  He could have simply said “silver spoon.” I wouldn’t have remembered that.

Silver spoon–plus  has staying power. Maybe it’s true.

(This is autobiographical fiction.)

 
I dream about Buddy Holly.

One problem: I wear clear-frame glasses and Buddy Holly had black, and I don’t feel like going to the optician’s for new frames. I want to be Buddy Holly, but I’m kind of lazy.

I may have to settle for Klezmer Guy.

Animal voices — the sound of cats and fleas. Significant to my music? Definitely.

There are no rules for good music, only examples of it.

Yiddishe Cup’s Meshugeneh Mambo is a terrific record. (It’s on Spotify.)

The wrong song in the wrong place can often be the right song.

Hope You Like Klezmer is a coffee table book with more than 100 color photos of klezmer musicians. Some tied up, some with instruments in odd places. I’m in a bathtub with reeds, like Moses.

Half-ended melodies are fun.

I want to play gigs with the Buddy Holly Klezmer Band. Instead, I’m playing with Yiddishe Cup.

 
I’ve written several unpublished novels. My best was about a married couple with a kid who died from SIDS. An editor at HarperCollins liked it. She wrote, “But we need you to change it to a female narrator.”

OK, done.

My lit agent told me, “If you don’t want to change the narrator’s sex, don’t. I can sell it as is.”

OK, I’ll leave it as is.

My agent shopped the manuscript around. Evocative — as praise — showed up a lot – two years of evocatives. In the end, nothing. I probably should have rewritten the book.

I did. I sent the revised version back to HarperCollins, but the editor was gone. Editors jump around a lot. Susan Orlean had about 10 editors on her first book.

I switched to non-fiction, like Orlean. I wrote Bodegas and Bagels, a trade paperback about the Americanization of the bagel. It came out in 2017 and didn’t go anywhere.

I wrote My Main Man, Maimonides (2021). The Jewish Review of Books gave it five dreidels. Didn’t go anywhere, either.

Now I’m working on an e-book about the end of the world. The main character is a Jewish Studies prof who subsists solely on baba ganoush during the famine. I’ll self-publish. Annoying, I know . . . everybody is self-publishing and clogging the Quality Lit pipeline.

This morning I wrote a poem, “I Smoke my Own Lox.” I’ll paste it below.

No, I’ll spare you. I’ll put it in my book and make you buy it.

This post is fiction.

—

Yiddishe Cup plays a free concert 7 pm this Sunday (June 28), Alma Theater, Cain Park, Cleveland Heights.

 
Some musicians hear every microtone and nuance. They say “oh, he’s flat,” or “she’s pitchy.” Come on.

Yiddishe Cup’s keyboard player, Alan Douglass, hears everything. He tells me to “push in” my saxophone mouthpiece, because I’m often flat. (More on Alan later.)

I’m bringing back an old Yiddishe Cup tune from 2009. We originally learned the piece, “Sam Malik’s Tune,” from the New Shtetl Band, who learned it from one Sami Malik, a Macedonian village musician.

I tried the tune the other day and didn’t nail it right off. I figured out the first section, but not the second. I had forgotten a lot. Which reminds me, clarinetist Sid Beckerman, at a Klezkamp workshop, once said, “I haven’t played this tune in  20 years,” and then nailed some obscure freylekhs.

I didn’t nail “Sami Malik’s Tune.” But I want to perform it at Cain Park. [Alma Theater, Cleveland Heights. 7:30 Sun., June 28. Free.]

Alan listened to the tune, which he hadn’t heard in 16 years, and nailed it. He remembered every nuance. And “Sami Malik’s Tune” is not “Mary Had a Little Lamb”; it’s a strange Macedonian tune. Or maybe Albanian.

Jazz pianist Joey Hunter once said about Alan: “he hears everything.” Alan, on gigs, knows when the other musicians are off, but he doesn’t bug them, except me., because I ask him to bug me. Why not? I don’t want to sound bad if I don’t have to.

(L) Alan Douglass and Bert Stratton, Cain Park, 2022. (Photo by Lloyd Wolf)

—

 
Whatever happened to Putt-Putt? There are only 29 Putt-Putt courses left in the United State.

My son Teddy had a childhood birthday party at the Northfield Road Putt-Putt in 1990. He got a trophy and a cake. The birthday boy got a trophy, no matter what.

At Putt-Putt, you can make a hole-in-one on every hole if you are good and lucky. All the holes are par 2. Teddy — in his adulthood — had a friend who was a Putt-Putt pro.

There used to be a Chinese mini-golf course on Libby Road at Broadway Avenue in Cleveland, with a Buddha that went up and down. That was the epitome of exotic outings to my high school gang.

My grandkids are now two and four years old. Time for me to revive my mini-golf outings? I just need to stay healthy so I can bend down and pick up the ball. That’s the hardest part of mini-golf.

I always liked the windmills and streams, like at Pirate’s Cove. The man who started Putt-Putt called those features “gimmicks.” He was Don Clayton of Fayetteville, North Carolina. I’m not him.

—

Yiddishe Cup plays a free concert 7 pm Sunday, June 28, at the Alma Theater, Cain Park, Cleveland Heights, Ohio.

(This op-ed, below, was in the Wall Street Journal last week.The op-ed generated 880 comments. Struck a chord.)

I have a no-dogs policy. I’m a landlord. When I bought the building in Lakewood, Ohio, decades ago, a gigantic Doberman lived in apartment 400. It bounded down the stairs and almost ran me over. Also, the dog stained the oak floors by regularly urinating in the living room.

So I kicked the dog out, and the tenant, and instituted a new policy. (Cats are OK at an additional $20 a month.)

Yet I do have dogs in the building—“emotional support animals.” These aren’t trained service animals like those that help the blind. Tenants find a licensed social worker or psychologist to write a letter saying the animal is needed for their mental health. The Fair Housing Amendments Act obligates the landlord to offer “reasonable accommodations” to tenants with disabilities, emotional and otherwise.

Last month a new tenant informed me she has two emotional-support dogs. She brought this up after she had already moved in. She described the dogs as “mixed-breeds, about 20 pounds each.” I immediately fantasized about changing my no-dog policy to “second dogs are OK—at $500 a month.” That would slow the pooch parade. But it would be illegal.

The tenant texted me that Daisy and Miu “are bonded and separating them would cause distress that would negatively impact my condition.” The dogs’ owner also pointed out: “My apartment is approximately 700 square feet, which is sufficient space for their size and needs.” My tenant had done her homework. More than I had. I didn’t know you could have two emotional-support dogs in a one-bedroom. How about three dogs?

The tenant said each dog has a unique function: “One assists me with daily functioning and provides support when I leave home, whereas the other helps reduce anxiety and provides a sense of safety and stability within my home environment, particularly following a past traumatic experience.”

The tenant works in a restaurant, but everybody is a lawyer on the side, courtesy of AI.

If the dogs aren’t quiet, I’ll have to file an eviction for “disrupting the neighbors’ peaceful enjoyment of the premises.” What a hassle.

I’m hoping the dogs are reasonable. The tenant isn’t.

—

The link (no paywall) to the actual WSJ article, with comments, is here.

—

Yiddishe Cup plays a free concert 7 pm Sunday, June 28, at the Alma Theater, Cain Park, Cleveland Heights, Ohio.

Steven Greenman & His Violin, plus some sidemen, 1992

 
My tennis partner, Ivan, wanted to add a drive-thru window at his frozen custard shop. The addition was a big deal; there were environmental remediation concerns. The drive-thru would be on the site of a former auto repair place. Nobody wants gasoline on their ice cream cone. Ivan is 77. The drive-thru would cost hundreds of thousands. What did he need this aggravation for?

He did it. You’ve to respect an old man still taking risks like that. Or maybe Ivan is crazy.

I’m not a big risk taker. For instance, 12 years ago I freaked out about buying a medical office building in Solon, Ohio. I was 63 and didn’t really need more “action.” But my friend Carl — a fellow real estate investor — said, “You’re not dead yet.” And my wife added, “It would be a good challenge, and you’ll learn something.”

Or I could have studied Spanish, or maybe art history, at Cleveland State University. The university sponsors tuition-free classes for seniors 60 and over. The medical office building would cost more than a million dollars, and if it flopped, I wouldn’t be too happy. Carl said, “If it flops, you’ll be OK. You’ll live with it.”

I lived with it.

Do something — that’s my wife’s mantra. She’s a former gym teacher. Still, when I’m spending a lot of money, I get nervous.

I wrote an email to my investment partner: “I’m out. I don’t need it.” I didn’t relish such a roller coaster ride in middle age. I didn’t need more buildings. I met my partner for breakfast the next morning and bailed. He said, “If you’re that anxious, yes, bail.”

I slept on it again — actually, didn’t sleep — and changed my mind. The deal happened. Then, three years later, I sold the property right before the office building crash. I made money. Win some. (I’m not going to tell you about my “lose some”s.)

I have three file cabinets in my home office. That’s probably more than you have. I like paper. Yes, I have QuickBooks Pro and Excel spreadsheets, but I’m more old school than new school. (My daughter runs a 100-person company and doesn’t even own a pen, she says.)

A 24-year-old employee once said to me, “The whole history of 20th-century Cleveland real estate is in this office.” Like the other day, I threw out some 1994 employee W-2s and a boiler manual from 1990. I also collect notes from my father, who died in 1986. He started the family real estate biz. He used to jot notes on 8-column green accounting pads. I study these accounting pad marginalia for insights. I’m not quite sure what I learn . . . “Light the incinerator from the top floor down, so the refuse burns down.” Incinerators were banned around 1974. “Blow down the boilers every week.”

I should have been a historian.

I don’t dwell on the past all day long, but how about half hour a day? I recommend it, particularly if you’re 60 and up.

A high school friend, now living in New York, recently wrote me a super-curt email: “Not sure I want to meet up. No nostalgia here.” That was the entire email. He and I and other high school friends were supposed to meet up in Cleveland. My old buddies were from out of town. That’s the thing with a family business; I’m stuck here. We didn’t visit our old stomping grounds. We went to the Cleveland Museum of Art — always a safe, quality choice.

Toby Stratton, 1985 — a year before he died.

A year before my father died, I interviewed him on videotape. Part of my history-buff thing. My dad got riled when I asked him, “Do you ever think about your mother?” I asked that because my dad rarely talked about the good old days, in central Cleveland, with his dirt-poor Eastern European Jewish immigrant parents. My dad said, “Son, I think about my mother every day!” He just didn’t feel like announcing his affection daily.

My dad was good about moving on. He was always reinventing himself: chemist, stockbroker, office manager, cosmetics salesman, real estate investor. I’m not that great at it — moving on.

I saved some of my father’s personal financial statements. He inflated car values and listed stocks he didn’t own. He liked to fudge financial statements. These slightly cooked documents helped him get bank mortgages for his investment properties. My dad claimed he had $17,000 total in Emerson Electric GTE and GM stocks. And he claimed he had life insurance with a cash value of $78,000. Nope.

My dad loved leverage. He bought his first building with only 8 percent down. I don’t know how he slept at night. Come to think of it, he didn’t sleep much. He was often cranky.

I don’t roll the dice as easily. I’d like to own an old Burroughs adding machine — one that makes a lot of noise and has a clanky lever like a slot machine. Take me back.

Sorry, I’m losing it. I’ve been stuck in this real estate office, above my garage, for 32 years. Before that, I was in a basement for 12 years. Before that, a third-floor attic.

I move slowly.

Change? Let me think about it.

—

[This essay first appeared in Phi Kappa Phi Forum magazine, Spring 2026.]

 
Jack’s Deli in University Heights, Ohio, suddenly shut down on Sunday. There’s no Jewish deli in Cleveland now, although there might be an ersatz deli, sans old Jews, somewhere in Greater Cleveland.

I had a connection to Jack’s Deli. In 1981 I wrote a thank-you note which was posted in the entrance of Jack’s. My letter was about the terrific tray Jack’s had prepared for the bris of my first child, Teddy.

And I’m good with deli-talk banter. Alan Douglass (Yiddishe Cup’s keyboardist) and I often play “16 Tons (of hard salami),” which is a Mickey Katz parody of Tennessee Ernie Ford’s “16 Tons.” After the song, I query the crowd — typically at a nursing home — about their favorite Cleveland delis: Seiger’s, Budin’s, Solomon’s, C&Ls, Irv’s, Lefton’s.

None of which exist now.

I don’t eat much salami or halvah. Maybe that’s part of the reason delis are gone. I used to eat a ton of salami. In high school I sold salamis for a Jewish boys’ club fundraiser. We used the money to go to Washington.

Irwin Weinberger, formerly of Yiddishe Cup, went to Jack’s Deli whenever he visited Cleveland. (He moved to North Carolina four years ago.) Irwin liked the big sandwiches — pastrami or corned beef — and matzo ball soup. And french fries. I never understood the fries, Irwin.

The owner of Jack’s said he hopes to  remodel and reopen. He told Cleveland Scene, “I’m not saying that it is going to be a completely different restaurant, but it definitely won’t be called Jack’s and it will make sense for us. We’re going to need some time to put all that together.”

Maybe he’ll call it Mack’s . . .

And don’t forget, Corky & Lenny’s — Cleveland’s other big-player deli — closed in 2023. They had hoped to reopen, too. Deli Death 1.

 
There were several klezmer dynasties in Eastern Euorpe. In America, too. Even in the late-20th century, some baby-boomer klezmer musicians brandished serious yikhes (prominent lineage). Hankus Netsky’s uncle was a klez big shot in Philly, and Henry Sapoznik’s father, who was a cantor, worked in the Catskills alongside clarinetist Dave Tarras.

In Cleveland, the klez-band scene in the past 70 years has been Seaman, then Selker, then Stratton. (There are a lot of S’s in the yiddishe velt. My shul’s yahrzeit list doesn’t hit stride until the S’s. And the Z’s are zippy: Zweig, Zwerdling, Zwick.) My former rabbi used to mix “Stratton” up with “Seaman,” as in “Morrey Seaman” — a 1940-60s bandleader.

My great uncle Earl Kassoff led the Earl Castle Band. This was in the 1930s and 1940s. He was a drummer, xylophonist and house painter.

Morrey Seaman owned a dry-cleaning business. I, in case you don’t know, am in the real estate biz. Bandleader Greg Selker went into the executive-search business. Selker founded the Kleveland Klezmorim in 1983 and folded the group in 1990. The Kleveland Klezmorim wouldn’t play “Hava Nagila”; Yiddishe Cup would, so we got all the simcha work.

In 1992 I interviewed a local klezmer musician, Harold Finger. I can’t remember what his day-job was. He described his clarinet playing as “faking”(improvising).  When I met him, he was in a community orchestra. “I don’t do much jobbing anymore,” he said. (“Jobbing” was gigging.) Harold died several years after the interview.

I thought Harold’s kids would want a copy of the interview tape. I called a son and left a message, and didn’t hear back. The son should have called me. Harold’s wife was on the tape, too, badgering him about how he loved his axe more than her. Harold said, “What? I quit playing music for you!”

Coda: Another macher on the Cleveland Jewish music scene in recent decades was bandleader Barry Cik (pronounced “chick“). He had yikhes to-the-nth-degree. He’s from a family of Hungarian Jewish musicians. In the 1990s Cik’s son Yehuda was quite prominent on the national Orthodox Jewish music scene, and Barry wouldn’t shut up about it. When I played with Barry’s band as a sideman, I thought to myself What about your own band, Barry? The one I’m playing with right now! But Barry preferred to talk about his son’s band.

I get that now.

Yikhes (pronounced YIH-khiss).

 
Sharon, a jazz saxophone teacher, pitched me a year-long package of music lessons. I don’t have “big ears” — as the jazzers says — and I want to improve my ear-training and chord-recognition game.

I was on a Zoom call with Sharon, who was based in Los Angeles. She wanted to talk about my motivation, and I wanted to talk about cost of the lessons. She didn’t want to talk about money. She had a PAC system and an HSP system — these initials stood for something. I don’t know what. She asked what my level of motivation was, on a scale of 1-to-10. She wasn’t happy when I answered “5.”

I said, “What if I’m in a group lesson on Zoom with beginner musicians who don’t know what a C7 chord is? Maybe I should I do a solo course.” I had found Sharon on the internet. (She said to tell you the truth a lot, which annoyed me.)

An hour later she told me the solo course was $1,200, for a year. Sharon continued, “But my assistant, Juliet, in the Philippines, will send you a link to knock it down to $500. And I’m going to be a hardass about that. There will be no access to coaching in the solo course, and the price is good for a week, cool? This isn’t about money, it’s about increasing your motivation.”

Sharon’s bio said she had majored in psychology and music.

Her quick drop from $1,200 to $500 jolted me.

This was a bit of a red flag, no?

I called my son the musico and discussed the matter. He said the whole thing sounded “opaque.” I passed.

[“Sharon” is a pseudonym.]

—

Yiddishe Cup plays a free Mother’s Day concert this Sun., May 10, 2-3 pm. Beachwood library branch/ Cuyahoga County Public Library, 25501 Shaker Blvd [corner of Shaker and Richmond]. Beachwood, Ohio. We’ll play “My Yiddishe Momma,” “Natural Woman,” and klezmer!

 
After I received smicha (rabbinic ordination), I interviewed for a few rabbi gigs. This was around 1978. First I interviewed at the Hillel in Norman, Oklahoma, but I couldn’t see myself there. I’m not a geography snob, but Oklahoma was not OK. I didn’t insist on a sexy spot like Encino, Marin, or Bethesda, but how about a place with some Jews?

The Mensch, 1978

I took a stab at Omaha. Don’t underestimate the Jewish scene there. The board of trustees at BethSteak grilled me — grilled me hard. Back then I had a Jew-fro and looked like I’d just  come off the beach in Venice, California (which wasn’t too far off the mark). A board member asked, “How would you liven up our Purim carnival?”

I’d throw glow sticks all over the social-hall floor, and I’d free the goldfish from the tank. I’d pass out Free The Fish! signs. What I actually said: “I’ll listen. I’m a good listener.”

A trustee asked me how I’d handle lifecycle events.

“I’d show up,” I said. (Lifecycle was a new word back then.)

My responses to the board were all short. I was nervous, facing 20 AKs. At 28,  it was difficult to string together wisdom for the elderly. Maybe I should have delivered my hard-hitting sermon “I’ve Got the Jewish Blues,” complete with blues harp accompaniment. Instead, I did a dvar Torah. I don’t remember exactly what I said, but I ended with “The key is listening.” (I picked up some stock lines at rabbinical school.)

A board member asked when I was getting married. I said, “Have you got someone for me?” That got a laugh.

I flung some Hebrew; I knew more Ivrit than they did. They weren’t going to get anybody better than me.

The board president asked the last question: “How would your friends and family describe you?”

Thank you,  Mr. President, for that question! I said, “I don’t like to talk about myself, but I suspect my friends and relatives would say, in a word, I’m a mensch.”

Mensch — that’s the password. It unlocks the door to the Holy of Holies and all the other Temple doors, including the pantry. If you’re a mensch, you’re in. I got the gig.

And I turned it down! Me — geo snob. I wasn’t going to Omaha, Nebraska.

I did one final interview, in Muncie, Indiana — even smaller latkes. (The word had gotten out that I had turned down Omaha.) The Muncie rabbi bought all the food for the kiddushes and spread out the hummus and poured the wine.

I didn’t get the Muncie gig. A folksinging rabbi did. I heard her clips years later on YouTube. Not bad.

I wound up in property management in Cleveland. I blame that on my father. He led me into the promised land:  the dog-eat-dog world of apartment management. I joined the rabid/ate.

[fiction]

—

Yiddishe Cup plays a free Mother’s Day concert 2-3 pm Sunday (May 10) at the Cuyahoga County Public Library, Beachwood branch, 25501 Shaker Boulevard [corner of Shaker and Richmond], Beachwood, Ohio. Best to register. You can probably get in without registering, but it’s best to sign up.

 
I got in some trouble. Didn’t we all? Nothing horrible. Look, I studied hard and turned in my homework on time.

And I wound up in South Euclid court twice. I was riding around on a motorcycle without a helmet. I was on the back of the cycle; a roommate from my A2 dorm had come down to Cleveland and wanted to ride around. Riding without a helmet was against the law. The South Euclid judge knew me; I was a friend of his older son — the valedictorian of my class. The son and I had been in the same JCC boys’ club.

The judge’s son once drove the wrong way on Belvoir Boulevard. He didn’t realize he was driving on the wrong side of the grassy median strip. Nobody died, and nobody was arrested.

The South Euclid judge, by the way, had a quality collection of high-fidelity sound effects LPs, and a good turntable and speakers. I occasionally went over to his house after school and produced audio stories, along with his son, using sound effects.

The judge threw out my case regarding the “no helmet.”

The judge had a younger son, who went to Annapolis, which was a odd for a Jewish boy, but not that odd. That son eventually wound up as the acting chief of the Cleveland FBI and gave me a tour.

Another high school friend, Jerry, joined the Marines, and right before he went in, he had the idea that we sneak into the Mayfield Country Club (strictly off limits for non-members). We jumped into the swimming pool in our underwear and then stole the golf course’s 18^th-hole flag.

The fuzz nailed us on the way out of the club.

We wound up at the South Euclid jail in our underpants. (White.) Again, the judge threw out my case. He said, “I’m not going to see you in here on a regular basis, am I?”

“No, sir, you are not,” I said.

“Get out of here!”

—

(The first half of this story is true; the second half is fiction.)

 
[This essay, in abbreviated form, was in the Cleveland Plain Dealer on Sunday.]

In 2019 I walked over to Horseshoe Lake – which straddles Shaker Heights and Cleveland Heights — to see a bit of nature. The lake was gone. It was missing. The Northeast Ohio Regional Sewer District had drained it.

And NEORSD hasn’t refilled it.

I’ve seen “missing dog” signs on neighborhood phone poles, but I’ve never seen a “missing lake” sign. Maybe I should put one up! Our family’s dog went missing last week. She ran away. And then she was found. Unlike my lake.

Horseshoe Lake (and adjacent Lower Shaker Lake) are like Central Park for many East Side residents. The lakes are refuges — our lungs. The lakes are a blue space. Residents from throughout Cleveland come to Shaker Lakes for fresh air and to clear their heads. We hike, meditate, see birds, see blue water, and talk to neighbors who are walking dogs.

At the latest Cleveland Heights city council meeting, approximately 80 citizens showed up to protest NEORSD’s removal of Horseshoe Lake and the sewer district’s proposed gutting of Lower Shaker Lake. Twenty residents spoke. Each had two minutes. What particularly ticked off many of the speakers was NEORSD’s plan to chain-saw about a thousand trees, and plant saplings, plus add riprap (small rocks). The end result will be “re-meandered” streams where Horseshoe Lake was.

This was news to many locals. Shaker Lakes news does not bump off Trump/Iran-level headlines. For instance, Paul Springstubb, a Cleveland Heights resident, didn’t realize what’s in store for Shaker Lakes. He does now. He just texted me, “Just read about the packed Cleveland Heights council meeting. I can’t believe residents of Shaker and Cleveland Heights won’t vigorously work to stop a clear-cut of the lakes’ trees! What I’ve begun to fear is the natural feel of a lake — with its surrounding mature trees – turns into a totally over-planned, neatly groomed, ‘just so’ park.”

Springstubb, who is a retired Shaker Heights High English teacher, continued: “All these saplings that the NEORSD plans to plant. That’s not nature. That’s upscale mall/commercial planning, like Legacy Village, Lyndhurst. Maybe we’ll have loudspeakers in the scattered ‘rocks’ located along the redirected, but perfectly serpentine, streams. Maybe the speakers will play songs of the various birds that lost their homes at Horseshoe Lake.”

NEORSD and saplings. Spare us the sunburn due to the lack of shade for the next 10 or 20 years while the saplings mature.

If any Shaker Heights or Cleveland Heights elected officials acquiesce to the destruction of Horseshoe Lake and Lower Shaker Lake, their names should be registered in the imaginary Albert Porter Hall of Shame. (Porter was a county engineer who tried to run a freeway through the Shaker Lakes in the 1960s and was stopped by citizens civic groups.)

Cleveland Heights’ new mayor, Jim Petras, said at the council meeting that the City/ NEORSD deal to eliminate Horseshoe Lake was made before his time. That’s not a good excuse, Mr. Mayor. The cities of Shaker Heights and Cleveland Heights can rectify this monumental screw up.

In the public-discussion portion of the council meeting, Cleveland Heights resident Kevin Charnas nailed the situation in one sentence: “The sewer district just bulldozes stuff, pun intended.”

Erin Flanagan, a Cleveland Heights lawyer, has filed a federal suit to slow down the sewer people. Amy Weinfurtner of Shaker Heights has led citizen opposition to the lakes’ destruction. She administrates the website shakerlakesconservancy.org.

If Horseshoe Lake or Lower Shaker Lake go away, they’re not coming back. Dogs come back. Lakes don’t.

Horseshoe Lake when it was a lake.

 
I’ve spent many hours on Lee Road, and I’m going to spend another hour and half there on Saturday, May 2, when the Klezmer Guy Trio performs at Heights Arts, 2175 Lee Road. We’ll play klezmer, Motown and swing, interspersed with spoken word.

Here’s a “spoken word” (in writing) . . .

Boomer Boulevard: Lee Road. I attended Fairfax School’s Grandparents Day and told everybody my grandchild was “Jim,” as in Gym. I didn’t have a grandchild back then, in 2012. I watched my wife, Alice, then a phys-ed teacher, lead a class. She wore a mic like Madonna. Alice was not a roll-out-the-ball gym teacher.

After the grandparents’ event, I walked by the Lee Road library and wondered if I should submit an application for the library’s board of trustees. I had already filled out the application but was worried it might have been too flippant, so I hadn’t submitted it. I had used the word “libe.” (Later, I did submit the application and got rejected.)

Classical music blared outside the Subway at Lee and Meadowbrook Boulevard. Must have been a crowd-control thing.

At the Lusty Wrench, Sam Bell, the owner and chief mechanic, told me he drove less than 1,000 miles a year. I asked, “When did you start hating cars?”

Sam said he used to like cars; he said he once drove 160 mph from Baltimore to Chicago in college. Apparently Sam liked the idea of cars, but not actual cars.

Tim Burdick, a woodwind repairman, worked next door to the Lusty Wrench, on the second floor of the Douglas Building. Tim had a $350 mouthpiece lying around. “It’s Frank’s,” Tim said. “Frank” as in “Franklin Cohen” — the then-principal clarinetist of the Cleveland Orchestra. I tried the extra mouthpiece and took it home and ran it by the musicians in Yiddishe Cup. They couldn’t hear any difference between Frank’s mouthpiece and my own. Keyboardist Alan Douglass said I didn’t sound in control with Frank’s mouthpiece.

I planned to meet Carlo Wolff for dinner at Marotta’s. Carlo was a jazz critic who had become a reporter for the Cleveland Jewish News. I wondered how Carlo was fitting in at the paper; he’s Jewish but “not very Jewish,” he told me. At the dinner he reported he was doing fine at the paper.

The epicenter of Lee Road is — you know this — Stone Oven. Yes, I go there; it’s my obligation as a baby boomer. I got in line in back of Ray Lesser, the editor of the Funny Times. Ray had recently turned down some of my funny stories. I didn’t bring that up. I took the high road!

Carl Goldstein — a Cleveland Heights landlord – went to the Stone Oven every morning. I promised I would start hanging out there with him. But I never did. Every morning? I’m just not that social.

The “Lee” in “Lee Road” comes from a farmer named Lee. I learned that fact on a local-history walking tour. Other farmers included Silsby, Taylor, and Dille.

Here’s a bit of immaterial Lee Road music history: the first time I saw a live professional band was at the Stardust Ballroom, which was in back of the Cedar Lee Theatre. I was in junior high, at a bar mitzvah party, and the bandleader was Morrey Seaman. Maybe he was playing “Stardust” at the Stardust.

Have you ever noticed how Cleveland Heights High grads like to reminisce about the Cedar-Lee neighborhood? Even more than I do. That’s their nexus — the Cedar Lee Theatre and what used to be around there: Mawby’s, Meyer Miller shoe store, Earth by April. A Heights High grad, Jimmy Sollisch, once told me he learned almost everything in life by selling shoes at Meyer Miller as a teenager. Meyer Miller’s co-owner was Cuppy Cohen.

There was a pool hall next to the Cedar Lee Theatre: Wally’s. Who cares about Wally’s? Not me. People who grew up in the Heights care about Wally’s. I grew up in South Euclid and don’t care about Wally’s. Let’s talk about Mayfield Road in South Euclid . . . the Cream-O-Freeze, Warehouse Beverage, Alesci’s. (No, different story.)

If you stand on the glass-enclosed Heights Library walkway over Lee Road, you’ll see a fair amount of life pass by. Nothing too monumental–- no gigantic moving vans or rock-star buses, like you might see at the New York Thruway overpass at Angola, New York. But give Lee Road some leeway. It’s got some life.

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CONCERT INFO:

The Klezmer Guy Trio performs 7 p.m Saturday, May 2, at Heights Arts. Admission is free with ticket(s). Tix are available here. Donations are accepted. Seating is limited. The Klezmer Guy Trio is Tamar Gray (vocalist and Fairfax Elementary School music teacher), Alan Douglass (keyboards) and Bert Stratton (clarinet and spoken word). The show is a mix of klezmer, Motown and spoken word. A variety show, sort of.

 
My last cousin left Cleveland in 2001. My relatives went to warmer places or died. Cleveland was not hopping. (Still isn’t.) I’m in about two traffic jams a year in Cleveland. I would prefer five. I don’t relish the horrible traffic of Chicago or Washington, but just a few more traffic jams in Cleveland would be nice.

I’ve got mishpocha in Chicago, and that’s where I’ll be for Seder tonight My daughter and family live in Chi, plus my wife also has a slew of first cousins there. They all moved to Chicago decades ago from Clarksburg, West Virginia. Just upped and left Appalachia for pancake-flat Chi. (The West Virginia exodus makes Cleveland’s population-loss look like nothing.)

I remember, in the 1970s Clevelanders first began imagining the whole town could go under. A musician in Milwaukee even wrote a song called “Thank God This Isn’t Cleveland.”

Some Clevelanders never got over the trauma of the 1970s. I know Clevelanders who vacation on Cape Cod because they’re instructed by the national media to vacation on the East Coast. They wait an hour for ice cream on Cape Cod. Why?

Some of the best scenery in America is the bike path from Gambier to Coshocton, Ohio. Rolling farm country, horses, sheep, cows, pigs and Amish buggies.

But some Midwesterners need to see the ocean. They drive all day to the Carolina shore. Hey, Lake Erie has beaches, waves and miniature golf. Check out Geneva on-the-Lake or Put-in-Bay.

Willie Sklar,1920s. Louise, Miss.

After my relatives bailed, I looked for distant relatives elsewhere. I found them via the media. My son Teddy found a Mississippi connection on a PBS documentary, “Delta Jews,” about the Jews of the Mississippi Delta. The mayor of Louise, Miss., had been my mother’s cousin. (My mother grew up in Yazoo City, Miss.) Teddy called a Mississippi relative who had been in the documentary. We eventually met the Mississippi clan and have gotten together with them several times. Most are lawyers. They have Southern accents. That’s what you want from Southerners — an accent. So often an educated Southerner will disappoint you on that front.

My West-by-Gawd Vuh-gin-yuh relatives don’t have accents. Maybe I can induce them with wine and afikommen money to fake accents tonight.

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I’m part of a kosher-style, David Sedaris-ripoff reading / music gig  7 pm. Sat., May 2, at Heights Arts, 2175 Lee Road, Cleveland Hts. It’ll be klezmer, spoken word and Motown. The trio is Tamar Gray (vocals), Alan Douglass (keys), and me on clarinet and spoken word. The event is free but get a TICKET prior because the gallery will probably “sell out.”

 
I had a neighbor who frequently offered me Beck’s beer. I could only drink so much. This guy could drink. His name was Weinberg and he wore a huge cross. (I once met a Jew in New York who wore a cross, too; he said he wore it to keep away the Chabadniks.)

My neighbor — or maybe it was his father — was a heavy-duty convert to Christianity. They all belonged to a Romanian Orthodox Church on the West Side.

My neighbor was quiet — no dogs, no loud music. Perfect. Just one small negative: he had a big Mercedes box truck (against city code). But I was OK with that.

Also, I didn’t like his snow blowing. It was too loud; I offered to hire a plow for his drive, but he turned me down. A very quiet guy.

Except one night in July 2012 around midnight . . .

I had my earplugs in; nevertheless, I could hear screaming. I thought it was from across the street, where teenage boys sometimes partied late. I tried to sleep through it. But then the cops showed up.

This was right next door. The convert was chasing his wife around with a butcher’s knife, and the couple’s kids were screaming. Four cop cars pulled up. My neighbor, in handcuffs, said through the bushes, “What’s going on, Bert?”

I didn’t know.

The family disbanded shortly after that. The wife said she was going to Phoenix with the kids, and she mentioned the convert had had extramarital affairs, and the kids talked about drunkenness, like “Daddy drove on the sidewalk.”

There were four pianos in the living room — three uprights and a baby grand. The convert said he fixed pianos for a living. About a month after the knife-chase, he came back for the pianos, with a police escort. I think he was charged with domestic violence. Maybe there was a restraining order, too.

Then a private detective showed up at my house; he wanted info on Weinberg. I didn’t know much except his preference for Beck’s.

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Historical-accuracy footnote: The house was on the northern front, not western, but “western” makes for a better title.

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THE KLEZMER GUY TRIO:

(L) Alan Douglass, Bert Stratton, Tamar Gray

I’m part of a kosher-style, David Sedaris-ripoff reading / music gig  7 pm. Sat., May 2, at Heights Arts, 2175 Lee Road, Cleveland Hts. It’ll be klezmer, spoken word and Motown. The trio is Tamar Gray (vocals), Alan Douglass (keys), and me on clarinet and spoken word. The event is free but get a TICKET prior because the gallery will probably “sell out.”

 
I have some troubled relatives. One of my siblings thinks I’m his personal ATM. He’s always going in and out of jail. Small stuff, but I have to bail him out. And then there’s my cousin Shelly, who is a doofus; he used to steal my car from my driveway and just drive it around and smash it somewhere. I finally got a video cam on my house.

Next, I wound up in jail. Everybody’s minds were blown; “Bert wound up in jail!” I’m 75 and the last guy you’d expect in jail, right?  I mean, you read this blog. My relatives gloated.

Here’s  the story. One night I took a Valium, which I’m wont to do on occasion, and got in my car. I know, “Don’t handle heavy machinery or operate a fork lift.” I wasn’t going to chain-saw any trees. I was driving to Fairmount Circle for some ibuprofen. I smashed into a mailbox.

A United States mailbox costs $5,000. I know, believe me.

The cop made me walk a line, which I couldn’t. He handcuffed me and took me to the Shaker Heights jail. Going into the cell at the police station, I said, “You got any espresso?” I was trying to lighten the mood. No go.

I sat in the cell for six hours — me, a toilet and a sink. Finally my brother — the one who is always hitting me up for money — bailed me out for $176, cash.

Now I’m on a year’s probation. And don’t forget the 5K for the mailbox. And there was another 4K for the lawyer.

Was it worth it? Yes. I’m no longer an embarrassment to my family. I’ve been to jail!

[fiction]

 
I’ve probably been to eviction court 100 times in Lakewood, Ohio. In the old days I actually stood in a real courtroom with a judge with a gavel. But nowadays I meet up in a conference room with a magistrate. The guy knows me. Believe me. We sometimes exchange pleasantries post-hearing. But not usually. The guy is in a hurry. The other day I faced off with a deadbeat tenant — nothing unusual here — except he announced to the magistrate and me, “I probably shouldn’t even be here. I have a contagious disease.”

That got our attention. He said he couldn’t go to work because of the disease. The magistrate shut him down and gave him the eviction notice — the red tag — right then.

The magistrate

Post-adjournment, the tenant explained he was “skin-to-skin contagious.” So you have to touch him to get what he had. That made us all feel better.

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And please read my essay “Rolling the Dice” in the latest Forum magazine. Author Jim Sollisch says it’s one of my better outings.

 
Yiddishe Cup’s violinist, Steve Greenman, flew back from Panama City, where he recently played a wedding gig. That’s class and must be noted. Steve is one of the world’s top klezmer violinists.

Then a couple nights later, he played — with Yiddishe Cup — a gig in Youngstown, Ohio, a town that gets  an end-of-the-world rap. But note, Youngstown has a Classic Reform shul built in 1915. Congregation Ohev Beth Sholom. It’s like a miniature The Temple, Cleveland (now the Maltz Performing Arts Center).

Elyria, Erie, New Castle, Sharon, Warren, Canton, Lorain, Akron. Yiddishe Cup has played them all. Many of these Rust Belt shuls are history.

Youngstown’s Ohev Beth Sholom has about 300 families, down from its peak in 1967 when it had 710 families and 395 kids in the religious school. There are a lot of yahrzeit plaques on the walls there.

At Yiddishe Cup’s Ohev Beth Sholom gig, a former Shaker Heights resident described her move to Youngstown as a “reverse exodus.” She said, “You can get everywhere here in eight minutes. Friendly people, too.” She married a doctor from Youngstown.

Yiddishe Cup’s most successful Y-town gig was more than 30 years ago at Temple El Emeth. The rabbi at El Emeth went on to become the head rabbi at a Boca Raton synagogue, and he brought Yiddishe Cup to Florida twice. Dead of winter both times. Nice.

Congregation Ohev Beth Sholom (formerly Rodef Sholom). Youngstown