Real Music & Real Estate . . .

 
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.

—
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.

—
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.

—

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

—

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.

—
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

 
Alice told me to read a Wall Street Journal article on how everybody is ADHD or a variant on that. I fit a couple of the traits; I don’t like scratchy labels or noise. But then I didn’t fit into the “always late” and “loses things” categories.

I’m on time and don’t lose stuff. I told Alice, “I’ve had the same gloves for years,” In fact, I have three types of gloves: liners, regular gloves and mittens. Baby, it’s cold outside.

I went to a concert and took the mittens and liners. I wore some of that stuff indoors, at the concert, which was in my former temple, where I had grown up. A drafty, big place. The Maltz Performing Arts Center.

The concert was a tribute to Hoagy Carmichael by the Cleveland Jazz Orchestra. Very well done. Alice didn’t want to go. I sat by myself. Ninety minutes later: done. No glove liners. What?

I went up into the balcony, where I had visited some friends during intermission. No gloves liners. I went to the men’s room. No liners. I got home and told my wife I now fit the profile in the WSJ story.

Then I found my glove liners. They were balled up inside my ski cap, which was on my head. In other words, I had been wearing the glove liners on my head.

What’s that disorder called?

—
Yiddishe Cup plays on Purim at Park Synagogue (Pepper Pipes, Ohio) on Monday (March 2). Free.  7:15 pm.

 
I was out of my skull. I broke into boxcars and unloaded Cutty Sark, golf balls and tires. Sometimes, tennis shoes. I had tin snips that cut right through corrugated boxcars roofs.

This was 50 years ago. Now I live a fairly quiet life. I’d rather not say where.

Let me tell you about my life. I never got married. I should have. There was this gal in the 1970s — Roz. She loved me but I wasn’t ready for her. Schmuck — me! I was 45, for God’s sake.

I was in the Marines. I couldn’t stand it. I was in for six months. Semper Fidelis was plain bullshit to me.

You ever notice how Italians swear all the time? It’s very big with them. If you’re Italian, you’re better than me, and you can cuss all day long. You can be the dumbest dunderhead on two feet, but if you’re Italian, you’re it.

I could be Italian if I wanted to be. I got enough spaghetti and wine in my veins. And don’t forget the goddamn hot peppers. I can eat a whole mason jar full.

Odd fact: I’m Jewish. I grew up in a deli on Kinsman in Cleveland. I remember the pickles. The cukes were right in the goddamn basement. They were delicious. And the goddamn gherkins.

My family disowned me after Marion. What was a nice Jewish boy doing in the joint? Not kosher! I haven’t talked to any relatives in, I bet, 50 years.

When I got out the last time, I made a clean slate of things. I sold stained glass to restaurants. Completely legit. I didn’t like it. So I went back to stealing. The hardest part was carrying the loot. I was that good.

Punchline: I was an accomplice several times but never killed anybody. The chickenshits from Murray Hill did the killings. They didn’t have my abilities. They stood around with their hands in their pockets, except they could kill.

Crime is a head game. Keep your mouth shut and show some intelligence and you’ll be fine. It has worked for me, most of the time. I’m paranoid. Sometimes you just know a place is a death trap.

It’s all trial and error.

My biggest mistake was quitting high school. I thought I knew more than the teachers. Again — schmuck! I hung out with boys who ran a stolen butter and cigarette ring on Woodland. An old fat Jew — The Eggman — was in charge. I rigged him up a walkie-talkie, which he appreciated.

Nowadays? For one thing I don’t have a dime. I spent everything I ever earned. I blew it all on cards, broads, beer and racehorses. It all fell through. I couldn’t deal with the thickheaded Italians at the track. I got out, but too late.

I live on wieners and beer. Love that combo. And the Browns. I remember when I pinched three cases of sausages from Red Barn. I didn’t fence it. I ate it all!

I’m 79 and in male menopause now. The docs talk about that on TV.

I love my TV. It doesn’t talk back to me. Perfect.

For the record, here’s my record:
NAME: JOSEPH A. MOSKOWITZ
ALIAS/NICKNAME: JOEY MOSCOW
DOB: 12-11-46
FACIAL ODDIITES: UNK
FACIAL HAIR: MUSTACHE
SPEECH: POLITE
COMPLEXION: MED
MISSING BODY PARTS: UNK
GENERAL APPEARANCE: UNKEMPT
TEETH: UNK
SCAR/BIRTHMARK/MOLE: UNK
TATTOO: UNK
WT: 245
HGT: 5-8
ADDRESS: UNK
CONVIC: MANSLAUGHTER, AGGRAV BURGLARY, LARCENY, KIDNAPPING, CRIMINAL TOOLS, GRAND LARCENY

 
Mark Schilling wrote this guest blog post:

Bert and I first met at Mich House (Michigan Cooperative House) in the fall of 1969. He was then a sophomore and I was a junior at the University of Michigan. We were both natives of Ohio or, as OSU football fans would say, “traitors.” I had lived in Barberton, Ohio, from grades one to eight, Bert in Cleveland from day one, so we shared memories of local TV shows and sports teams.

But our first and, for a while, foremost bond was musical. Bert, who had been a founder of the Ann Arbor Blues Festival, pronounced my record collection “cool,” especially for American Blues Festival, a rare LP of performances by Sonny Boy Williamson, Memphis Slim and other blues artists recorded in Bremen, Germany, in 1963. I’d found it in a cut-out bin in Dayton, Ohio.

Mark Schilling, 1970, Mich House

We listened to this and other records in Bert’s second-floor room, which he shared with John Cochrane, a laid-back Michigander who kept his hair short due to his service in the National Guard. We soon branched out to jazz, from Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington to Charlie “Bird” Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and other titans of bop.

A few ancient (i.e., over 30) grad students shared reminiscences about Dave Brubeck and other jazz favorites of their youth when they heard us spinning jazz discs (mostly borrowed from the Ann Arbor Public Library) on the record player in the living room, but other undergrads living or boarding at Mich House were rock fans so we became a Jazz Appreciation Society of two.

John, however, joined Bert and me on an expedition to Baker’s Keyboard Lounge, a jazz club in Detroit still in operation, to hear a “battle of the saxes” between Sonny Stitt and Gene Ammons, who had just finished a seven-year prison sentence for a narcotics possession charge. The place was packed but we were the only white guys in sight, save for the club owner, Clarence Baker, who was at first thrilled to see college kids in his joint, but became peeved when we didn’t order drinks for the second set. (I broke down and got another beer. Not sure about Bert and John.)

The music was great, prompting us to seek out more live jazz (if minus John). We caught a Duke Ellington concert at Hill Auditorium, sneaking down from the cheap seats to empty ones near the stage, as gray-haired audience members shot us looks both amused and surprised.

We also saw Rahsaan Roland Kirk in Detroit, where he played multiple horns simultaneously, blowing many minds, and Miles Davis at Hill Auditorium, where he and his quintet played tunes from his new album Bitches Brew. (Bert, who was sitting with me about 20 rows back, walked up to the stage and asked Miles something as he was preparing to play, which given Miles’ fearsome public image I thought took balls of brass.)

Then writing about music for the Michigan Daily student paper, Bert also caught folkies like Buffy Sainte Marie and Michael Cooney and blues greats like Mississippi Fred McDowell and Big Mama Thornton with me tagging along.

We also went to the John Sinclair Freedom Rally, a 1971 concert for poet/activist John Sinclair, who was then serving a 10-year prison sentence for selling two joints to an undercover agent. John Lennon showed up with a tune he had specially composed for the occasion, together with Yoko Ono, Phil Ochs, Bob Seger, Stevie Wonder, Commander Cody and others. Sinclair was sprung shortly thereafter.

Bert and I also ventured to the Cincinnati Jazz Festival at Riverfront Stadium in July 1971 to catch Billy Eckstine, Chuck Berry, Dizzy Gillespie, Herbie Mann, Lee Morgan, Rahsaan Roland Kirk (again) and Roberta Flack. A group of Black ladies sitting near us swooned over Billy but laughed at Chuck. His duck walk wasn’t their thing.

Along with all this concert- and club-going, Bert was playing the harmonica and the sax – the later to the annoyance of the guy across the hall, a music grad student from Texas who had the only single room in the co-op, which he wasn’t about to give up because of Bert. And Bert wasn’t about to stop playing in his room since he had nowhere else to practice. So the grad student, Morris, and Bert would exchange words while John buried his head in the blankets of his upper bunk bed, and I studied cracks on the wall.

Morris was not a jazz fan. And for Bert, klezmer was in the future.

—

Mark Schilling moved to Japan 51 years ago. He is the preeminent English-language writer on contemporary Japanese cinema. Mark was the “best man” at Bert’s wedding.

 
I got this text the other day: “Sir, there’s a cat in our restaurant that came through the ceiling.”

I rent to a restaurant. The cat belongs to a tenant who lives upstairs. The cat was in the restaurant, and I was getting calls. The cat-owner wasn’t around.

The access panel in the tenant’s bathtub was loose, and the cat had scurried down the pipe chase into the restaurant. I called the cops. “This is not an emergency,” I said.  I explained the cat-in-the-restaurant was a one-off freakish thing and wouldn’t happen again.

“It better not,” the cop said.

I shouldn’t have called the city. That often muddies things.

Eventually an animal warden came around and got the cat, and the tenant picked up the cat.

And then a couple days later, the cat fell through the ceiling again. My handyman had apparently not screwed in the access panel tight enough. Or maybe the cat was a tiger.

We got longer screws. We’re OK for the moment. Cat is not on the menu.

 
I was butt-hurt when my wife disparaged my klezmer lecture that I had given to a group of senior citizens. She criticized me about this the other day, even though the lecture was more than a decade ago.

I had done an “edu-tainment” lecture at a JCC “LearnInn” retreat in 2011. I had gone light on the dancing (which Alice led) and heavy on the talking.

Alice, the lecture was not a concert. It was a lecture.

I’m doing a klez lecture next Wednesday at the Cleveland JCC. Alice wants to add a PowerPoint this time around.

I don’t do PowerPoints! Alice said she’ll assemble the PowerPoint. OK, maybe a couple photos of Yiddishe Cup from the good old days. That would will be palatable. But no bullet points or text on screen  — no way. I don’t need PowerPoint. I’m a good lecturer. I’ve been on stage a million times. I don’t read from notes. I have spoken at the national Yiddish Clubs conference. I was stellar at the Shaker Heights Unitarian Church. I take questions, I talk about klez, I play clarinet.

I don’t want too many pics of random shtetl Jews with violins!

This is more fun:

Yiddishe Cup. 1993

 
“[Cleveland:] . . . its population abandoned to their fate, left to freeze their ass off, standing in the dirty winter slush, waiting for a bus that is a long time coming. Somehow they go on living.” – R. Crumb, cartoonist.

“Are you going to Florida?”

That’s what I hear this time of year. My tennis partner is in Fort Lauderdale. My real estate broker is in Sarasota. My lawyer is in Jupiter, Florida.

And I’m in Cleveland, freezing. I have a box of disposable hand warmers, flannel-lined jeans and a Patagonia parka. The first snow of the winter is nice, but the 15th snow — not so nice. And this winter — it started way too early, around Thanksgiving. The temperature was 12 degrees lower on average, per day, in Cleveland through Christmas.

Am I complaining? Just a bit. I like it here. My mantra is that bad weather is no excuse for bad attitude. If you don’t like gray, move or get a sun lamp. We accomplish more in gray weather. The Scots and New Englanders didn’t invent stuff sitting at the beach.

I’m a landlord, and a tenant recently called City Hall because the heat was too low in her apartment. The city of Lakewood — where my buildings are — mandates 70 degrees. That seems high to me. I keep my own house at 68. At my tenant’s apartment, the boiler’s flame sensor was going out. When I got the city’s low-heat call, I thought about Florida.

For one thing, Florida runs in my family. My late father said the best years of his life were his final years, in Florida. My wife and I — and our then-young children — went to Florida every winter. It was a good deal; my parents paid for the airplane and watched the grandkids for a week, and the only thing my wife and I had to watch out for were the golf-cart crossings.

The minute the plane landed in Florida, my dad would bug me about real estate opportunities down south. Florida bedazzled my dad: how it was growing so fast. We weren’t in the Rust Belt anymore, Son. On the drive from the Fort Lauderdale airport, my dad said, “This was a two-lane dirt road when we got here. Now it’s six-lane.” Glades Road, Boca Raton. “And there’s a bagel store on every other block.”

“We have bagel shops in Cleveland, too,” I said.

The Snowbelt . . . Is this the worst winter we’ve had since the 1960s — when I was shoveling driveways for a buck? It feels like it. Lakewood reinspected my (formerly) cold building. We got the boiler cranking and the thermostat up to 80 degrees. The tenants were hot. That was better than another no-heat citation. I’m not looking forward to my next gas bills, which will be record-breakers.

I haven’t been in Florida for more than a decade, but I remember an ex-pat Clevelander down there accosting me in a restaurant with, “Why are you still in Cleveland?”

That meant: “Are you nuts? Do you like snow, gray skies, slush and potholes?”

I do. As the Scandinavians say, there’s no such thing as bad weather, just bad clothes. A second ex-pat Clevelander said, “The day I hit 62 years old, I had to leave Cleveland.” She was considering Arizona, too. “But Arizona doesn’t have an ocean, and I like water,” she said.

Lake Erie is water. Look it up. Cleveland is doable.

One last word: layers.

—

This essay appeared in today’s Cleveland Plain Dealer.

 
Mike, an old friend from high school, found me on the internet and pummeled me with questions about  Cleveland real estate. He lived in Minneapolis. He ended by mentioning a few high school buddies’ names. He said, “I haven’t thought about high school in decades!”

Was he bragging — as in I’ve moved on? I think about high school fairly often. Maybe because I live five miles from Charles F. Brush High. I also think about elementary school and preschool. And I didn’t even go to preschool! News: “Nostalgia has been shown to counteract loneliness, boredom and anxiety,” John Tierney, New York Times.

I go to class reunions even when they’re not mine — like Cleveland Heights High’s 50th. I was playing a klezmer gig at a massive, multi-room party center and went into an adjacent room for the reunion, just for the atmospherics: Go Heights Tigers.

I wish teachers were invited to reunions. In the 1990s, my 12th-grade English teacher walked his dog by my house almost daily in Cleveland Heights. One day I got up the nerve to say hello. And he didn’t remember me.

“I had so many students,” he said.

“I’ll bet you remember Ann Wightman!” I said.

Yes, he remembered Ann, the salutatorian. Ann got all As and one B. I think she purposefully got the B to let a boy be valedictorian. That’s how it worked back then (1968). Some smart girls didn’t want to stick out academically.

I haven’t been back to Brush High in a while. It’s off my flowchart. If I entered Brush, I would probably feel very young or very old. I think “very old” would win. Not worth it.

—

A guy named Mel called. He was considering my band for his daughter’s wedding. Right off he asked where I had gone to high school. That’s the go-to question here in Cleveland. Mel himself had graduated from Cleveland Heights. I answered and then segued into the main topic: “It doesn’t matter what you want musically. What about your daughter? She’s calling the shots for the wedding band.”

“Did you play sports at Brush?”

“Tennis.”

“Do you know Joel Schackne?” Mel asked. (Schackne had been a champion tennis player at Cleveland Heights High.)

“I knew of him. He’s older than me. Whose idea is klezmer music for the wedding, yours or your daughter’s?”

“Schackne is in Florida. He’s still playing tennis.”

“What does your daughter think?”

“What AZA were you in?” (AZA is a national fraternal organization for Jewish boys.)

“I wasn’t in AZA.”

“Who do you see?”

“A guy named Mickey — a goy,” I said. “You wouldn’t know him.”

Most of my high school friends left Cleveland decades ago. The guys remaining are, for the most part, entrepreneurs and family-business owners. A few made serious money here. The intellectuals hit the road.

Do I have any kind of post–high school life?

Maybe.

 
One of my grandmother’s choice Yiddish expressions was “Geven-zhe nit a yold.” (Don’t you be a chump.)  My grandmother — Toby’s mother — owned a candy store, raised four kids almost single-handedly, buried a three-year-old daughter, and during her retirement years, owned a four-suite apartment building. She was nobody’s chump.

Anna Soltzberg (née Seiger) occasionally called her grandchildren — like me — foyl (lazy). She lived at our house for a while. I called her Bub — short for bubbe (grandmother). Bub was not into baseball; she was into the card game casino, the television show Queen for a Day; borscht and boiled chicken. She could eat. She had sugar diabetes. She wore bubbe shoes.

I couldn’t figure out where Bub was from. She was from Galicia, she said. Spain? Galicia was also a province in Austria-Hungary. Bub was from a shtetl called Grodzisk. She came to America at 20.

Anna Seiger Soltzberg (1884-1964). 1598 Laclede Rd., South Euclid, Ohio

In junior high I told my friends my grandmother was from Austria.  Not exactly Vienna, to be sure.  But “Austria” made sense to my friends.

Bub complained about the level of kashrut at my aunt’s house. Bub wanted my aunt not to keep kosher. Keeping kosher was too expensive.  Bub was an apikoros (non-believer), socialist and cheap.

Bub around 1904, New York City.

. . . Grodzisko, Galicia, Austria-Hungary. (The Yiddish name for the shtetl was Grodzisk, GRUD-zhisk) In the 1980s I located the shtetl on the Shtetl Finder map.

Grodzisk was about 60 miles west of Przemysl. The various shtetls had so many different names (Polish, Ukrainian, German, Yiddish). That was the tricky part.

I had a family postcard, postmarked “May 1, 1939, Grodzisko.” It was in Polish and said, “How are you?” On the flip side was a photo of a relative, Mili Seiger. The Germans invaded Poland four months after the postcard was mailed.

Mili Seiger, 1939, Grodzisko

I looked up “Mili Seiger” on the Yad Vashem online archives. There were so many Seigers, Siegers, Zygers, Zaygers and Zeigers, I couldn’t find Mili.

There are three types of Jews. Not Reform, Conservative and Orthodox. Try American, Israeli and victims of the Holocaust. Each about a third. These are my people.

—-

 Plotting Grodzisko [Grodzisk] by Teddy Stratton, 1998:

 
When I came home to Cleveland after college, I hung out at Case Western Reserve University. I wanted to stay in the college bubble. I didn’t like the alternative: the real world. I was helping my dad in the real estate business, and that was too real.

I met a medical illustrator at a Case party. When I told her,  “I manage apartment buildings,” she walked away. I had a harmonica in my pocket. She just didn’t know.

A friend whispered to me, “It’s not in her experience — apartment building management.”

A woman asked me, “Are you in OB?”

“No, I’m not in medical school.”

“Organizational behavior.”

“I’m not in that either.”

At Case, you were either a doctor, nutritionist, organizational behaviorist, or medical student. I ran into another medical illustrator. Nothing happened.

An OB grad​ student, Marcy, talked to me. She was doing her Ph.D. thesis on “the event of play in a closed group.” She had just graduated from Harvard.

“So many Harvard people here!” a man called out to Marcy. Three Harvard people, to be exact: 1.) The host,  2). Marcy, 3.) and  a Harvard grad on his way to Washington to become a lobbyist. All these Harvard people were on their way somewhere.

I was on my way to Lakewood. People called me up about low-water pressure, mice and clanging radiators. We had a tenant with no kitchen sink for two weeks because he ripped out the sink trying to install a butcher-block countertop. He wanted to charge us for dining out. Another  tenant lost his hot water for three days; I don’t remember why. I wrote him a Japanese-style apology. The tenant deducted a significant sum from his rent. I couldn’t blame him. A tenant saw a mouse and asked for a hotel room. That bugged me; mice are good people..

I recently googled the Harvard woman, Marcy. She’s a professor emerita at a university in Massachusetts (not Harvard). I don’t think I’ll contact her.

Maybe I should. I still have the harmonica.

Screw up

 
I grew up in Manhattan next-door to where John Lennon was killed. My parents ran an art gallery. They still do. They have a place in Switzerland and New York. I ran the Switzerland office for a while.

But I’m tired of the whole arts scene. I want out. I’m 30. I want to hang around with oil men, real estate guys and cowboys. Men who have never read the New York Times, particularly the Style section.

In college, at Kenyon, I had a roommate, Schwecky from Cleveland. I visited Cleveland a couple times with him and fell in love with the place. People in Cleveland have lawns and don’t pay $3000/month for a one-bedroom.

I have a one-bedroom in Cleveland Heights for $1200. Tricked out too. Marble countertops, dishwasher. I’m going to use my nest egg (courtesy of my old man) to buy up Cleveland. I can buy Cleveland’s whole East Side, I figure, for what my parents’ Central Park West condo goes for. But my dad wants me to stay in New York. No thanks. One question, Pops: what can I buy in New York for 1.5 million? Gornisht!

I’m hanging around with hustlers in Cleveland and loving it. This town – Cleveland’s East Side at least – is just old Jews, and when these boomers hear I’m from New York, they say, “I have a daughter in Brooklyn for you!” I groan. Those Brooklyn girls are trying to get jobs with my folks at the art gallery.

I’ve made some errors here in Cleveland, like an old Jew had me over for dinner and quizzed me on a couple things, and I guessed a milk chute is “maybe for the seltzer delivery,” and I didn’t know what treelawn meant.

I don’t think I’m ever leaving Cleveland. Cleveland Heights — where I live — is like Hoboken. Nice. Urban. But not too urban.

When I’m with my folks in the city, just going down to the deli for a sandwich is a major proposition. The crowd, the line, the elevator. I got mugged once. Eighth grade. Some kids pushed me over and took my book bag.

I don’t walk much in Cleveland. The roads here are bare — empty. There is infrastructure here for twice as many people as there are people. These are the wheels I’m going to buy:

fiction

 
Here’s my latest essay from the Cleveland Plain Dealer  . . .

Dick Van Dyke turned 100 on Saturday. That’s no big deal — in my world. Last month my klezmer band played a 100th birthday party — our fourth in three years. There was a chair placed prominently in the middle of the dance floor, to lift the birthday “girl” for “Hava Nagila.”

I said to myself, “No way.”

Correct: No way. We did not lift the celebrant on a chair. But the birthday “girl,” Etty Hoffman of Beachwood, did dance. She was out there on the dance floor. She boogied. And she gave a moving speech afterward, touching on more than five generations of her family, including “mommy and daddy.”

Nearly 10,000 Americans turn 100 each year, according to the Pew Research Center. The United States has the second-most number of centenarians in the world. Japan is first.

After the hora, I asked a dancer — Ms. Hoffman’s niece Joyce — if she was going to live forever. “What do you mean?” Joyce said. “Me or my aunt?”

“You. Do you assume you’re going to make it 100, too?”

“I’m planning on it!” she said. Joyce is in her 70s and plays flute, does yoga, lifts weights, walks a lot, and is skinny. Bonus: Joyce’s mom is 103. She’s Etty’s older sister. (Joyce’s mother was at the party, too.)

My dad made it to 68. Shvak. (Yiddish for weak). My mom died at 83. Better. A year before my father died, I interviewed him; I said, “You don’t talk much about your mother. Do you ever think about your mother?” I annoyed my dad. He said, “Of course I think about my mother!” My dad’s mother had single-handedly run the family’s candy store on Kinsman Road at East 151st Street. My dad’s father had been hit by a May Company truck in 1924 and spent most of his time hanging out at the pool hall after the accident.

At Julia Stratton’s gravesite in 2020, on the 100th anniversary of her birth. (Julia Stratton, 1920-2004.) From left: Lucy, Bert, Jack, Ted Stratton

At Ms. Hoffman’s birthday party, my band played: “My Girl” by the Temptations; “I’ve Just Seen a Face” by the Beatles; Tin Pan Alley classics; klezmer instrumentals; and some Yiddish songs. The partygoers applauded our wide-ranging set list. At a 100th birthday party, everybody is 100% mellow. A 100th birthday party is not a wedding — no anxious bride. It is not a bar mitzvah — no sullen 13-year-olds. There is no kvetching, period.

In the 1920s, Ohio-born vaudeville clarinetist Ted Lewis popularized the phrase, “Is everybody happy?” And yes, everybody was happy at Ms. Hoffman’s party. She was born in 1925 and grew up in the Glenville neighborhood and attended synagogue at the Cleveland Jewish Center (now Cory United Methodist Church) on East 105th Street. Etty was in the temple’s Confirmation class of 1941.

Her 100th birthday celebration was at Park Synagogue in Pepper Pike. Park Synagogue is a direct outgrowth of the Cleveland Jewish Center. Same congregation, different building. Ms. Hoffman has been a member of Park Synagogue since 1930. I wonder how many relatives at Ms. Hoffman’s party think they’ve inherited the family’s longevity gene.

They’ll find out.

Mary Tyler Moore died at 80. Keep that in mind.

And happy birthday to Dick Van Dyke, Etty Hoffman, and everybody trying to emulate them.

—

Link to Plain Dealer article here.

 
I knew a building inspector who could smell rats. He didn’t have to see rat droppings; he could smell rats.

I knew a handyman who could jimmy almost any apartment door with a credit card.

My talent is figuring out if a tenant has skipped out or not. I knock loudly on the tenant’s door. If there’s no response, I yell “maintenance” a couple times and bring out the master key. I yell “maintenance” a third time, and step into the apartment. A couch, a bed . . . always. Skippers leave behind the heavy stuff. TVs, for sure. Everyone upgrades his TV on move-out. Some small items are left behind: beer bottles, pennies, unopened bills. Usually enough to fill three or more garbage bags.

The stove is fried. The refrigerator is always missing a plastic shelf. Why?

Underwear and socks . . . gone.  No socks means no tenant. The guy definitely skipped.

Some of his clothes are on the floor. Some good, some bad. I found a tux left behind. The guy was 6-4. I had the pants legs shortened. (He wasn’t a skipper. He was a dead man. And his place was clean.)

I enjoy wrecked apartments. Who doesn’t? A building manager once phoned me with on-the-scene reporting from a wrecked apartment: “It looks like a cyclone went through here crossways!”

But occasionally a manager will not react positively. “I’m creeped out,” one manager told me, standing in the common-area hallway while I went into the suite. She was creeped out by a few bottles of beers, cat urine and cigarette butts. (Probably because she had to clean it.)

I phone the skipper to make sure he’s definitely gone. I say, “You out?”  Nothing more that than. No lectures about housekeeping. Nobody wants to be criticized on their house-cleaning skills.