THANK GOD I’M SLOVENIAN

The sign at the McDonald’s on Lake Shore Boulevard read: 30-minute time limit while consuming food.  The manager must enforce these rules.  Your cooperation is appreciated.

Several retired cops sat beneath the sign, drinking coffee all morning.

Ex-cop Bill Tofant said to me, “I used to work out every day at the YMCA. You know what that stands for?  The Yiddishe Meat Cutters Union.”

I didn’t know that.  (I was with retired cops because I was a police reporter in the 1980s.)

“I can still run a mile at 73 and hold my own in fisticuffs, and I can turn my head to see if traffic is coming,” Tofant said.

Tofant liked me — or put up with me — because my Great Uncle Itchy Seiger had owned a deli on Kinsman Road, which all the cops used to eat at.   “Your uncle would throw his arms around me every time I came into the restaurant,” Tofant said.  “I couldn’t spend a nickel there.  They had corned beef, turkey, you name it, gherkin pickles.”

The cops at McDonald’s decided to rate pawnbrokers — most of whom were “good sharpYidls.”

I knew one of the Yidls: Larry Botnick of Euclid Loan at East 59th and Euclid.  Larry had played tennis with my father.  Larry got shot and killed in a stick-up.  A couple streets over, there had been another stick-up . . .

“Three colored guys went in back of East 63rd and St. Clair,”  said Bill Lonchar, an ex-cop.  “One guy had a horse pistol yea long. It stuck out like a sore thumb.  It was a military weapon.”

Re: the pawnbroker at East 79th and Hough . . .  1.) not shot at,  and 2.)  “not so good.”  “He would buy a stove [gun] that was red hot and smile.”

The cops  rated Italian.   Not pawnbrokers.  Burglars.  Hardly worth talking about.  “If you’re not Italian, you’re nobody.  All that goddamn bullshit.  All that Italian camaraderie bullshit.”

The Lithuanians were worth talking about.  “The Lits will eat soup for twenty years, three times a day, and save their money, and all of a sudden they buy apartment buildings,” Lonchar said.

The Irish: dunderheads.

The blacks: no comment.

The Slovenians:  “Very respectable.”  Top of the line.   “There was a safecracker, Charlie Broeckel,” Lonchar said.  “He went out to Laguna Niguel, California, and hit a bank there.  Burned [spent] seven-mill worth of shit in negotiable papers.  Charlie always found his way out.  He might have been German, not Slovenian, actually.  His mother held a very respectable job.  She was beyond reproach, nothing like a stumblebum. The Broeckels lived at 8815 St. Clair.”

Put up a plaque.  Lonchar was Slovenian.   [So were the district police commander, the ward councilman and the mayor, Voinovich.  All lived within a mile of  McDonald’s.  (Voinovich was half  Slovenian, half Serbian.  Good enough.)]

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Footnote:  “Thank God I’m Slovenian” was a popular bumper sticker in Cleveland in the 1980s.  Cleveland has more Slovenian immigrants than any American city.

The top-selling ethnic  bumper stickers in Cleveland were “Thank God I’m Polish” and “Thank God I’m Irish.”    I know,  I  interviewed the bumper-sticker maker in Broadview Heights.  Special-order: “Thank God  I’m Transylvanian Saxon.”  No market: “Thank God I’m Jewish.”

Check out this vid, Who’s Cheaper: Slovenians or Lithuanians?

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