Throne of Blood

April 1, 2024 Edward Staskus Leave a comment

By Ed Staskus

Little Italy was a fifteen-minute drive from the Central Station. Frank Gwozdz drove slightly under the speed limit and didn’t try to time the lights. It took them twenty minutes. He parked at the intersection of Euclid Ave. and Ford Dr. on the border of city life and Case Western Reserve University. Downtown was its own world. The school was its own world. Little Italy was up Mayfield Rd. It was its own world, too.

“We’ll leave the car here,” Frank said. “We can walk the rest of the way.”

“No respect for the law where we’re going?” Tyrone Walker asked.

“Let’s just say it’s better to leave the car here where the school kids are,” Frank said.

They walked to Corbo’s Dolceria on Mayfield Rd. at the corner of Murray Hill Rd. After sitting down at one of a handful of small tables in the front, Frank ordered a caffe normale and Tyrone ordered a coffee with cream and sugar.

“Do you want to try a cappuccino instead?” Frank asked.

“Whatever that is, no,” Tyrone said.

Frank ordered a cassata for himself and another one for Tyrone.

“Do you want it the Sicilian way or the American way?”

“What’s the difference?”

“The Sicilian way is with cannoli filling and maraschino cherries. The American way is with fresh strawberries and custard.”

“I’ll take mine the American way.”

“Suit yourself,” Frank said, ordering the Sicilian way for himself. Antoinette Corbo, who owned the bakery with her husband Joe, brought them their coffees and cassata cakes. She gave Tyrone a sidelong glance.

“Did you know the macaroni machine was invented in this neighborhood 70 years ago?” Frank asked Tyrone.

“No, I didn’t know. I don’t know anything about this neighborhood.”

“It’s kind of like an Italian hill town,” Frank said. “Cleveland is down there and Cleveland Hts. is up there at the top of Mayfield Rd. It’s been here nearly a hundred years. Most of the first immigrants, who were from around Naples, worked at nearby marble works. They were stone cutters. Their women went into the garment trades, mostly lacework and embroidery.”

“Why are we here?” Tyrone asked.

“We’re here for you to see the neighborhood,” Frank said.

“Is this the hot bed of dynamite?”

“This is one side of the bed. The other side of the bed is the Celtic Club.”

“I’ve been boning up on the files.”

“Not here, not now,” Frank said. “After we finish our drinks we can take in the sights and sounds and then walk up to the cemetery. We can talk there. The walls have ears here. The dead don’t care there.”

“What cemetery?”

“Lakeview Cemetery. You can’t see it from here, but we’re sitting right next to it. That why all the Italian stone masons came here in the first place.”

After finishing their cups of coffee Frank and Tyrone walked two blocks down the hill to the Holy Rosary Roman Catholic Church. It was a Baroque-style building. The house of worship stood four-square on the incline of the street.

“The dagos weren’t here but a few years before they started building this church,” Frank said.

“Don’t call them dagos,” Tyrone said.

“I agreed to not call you a Negro,” Frank said. “That’s all the agreeing I’m going to do for one day.”

“All right then,” Tyrone said under his breath.

“Where was I?”

“Christian charity,” Tyrone said.

“I didn’t agree to listen to wisecracks, either.”

“All right,” Tyrone said under his breath again. Frank was his partner but partner or not, he was still his superior officer. There was no point in making an enemy of him his first day on the job. That could wait for later. He followed Frank up one of the flights of concrete stairs to the double front doors. There were two large arched windows above the doors. There were statues of saints at the top of the façade. A domed bell and clock tower anchored the eastern corner of the church. There was a parochial school in the back run by nuns of Maestre Pie Filippini. Boys and girls were forbidden giving them any lip. The nuns were not above giving them a hard crack. Their parents did worse than that whenever they heard excuses from their children about their misbehavior in school.

“Since all the Italians back in the day here were stone cutters, like you said, how come this church is built of brick?” Tyrone asked.

“The foundation is stone,” Frank said.

“I guess that’s good enough,” Tyrone said.

“Are you a church-goer?” Frank asked as they stepped inside.

“Yes, but Baptist, not Roman,” Tyrone said. “How about you?”

“Not anymore.”

They went inside. It was quiet as a moonbeam. The church was empty. The sanctuary was brightly colored, but the nave was musty. It felt like a tomb. The police detectives looked around. Frank spoke low and slow.

“This where the dagos get baptized, get married, and get buried,” he said. “We are always here for the funerals, to make sure whoever is in the casket is the man we won’t miss seeing, making sure he’s really dead, and check out what other hoodlums are in the crowd.”

“Do you take pictures of them?”

“No, we show some respect when we’re here. Beside, we know who’s who.”

“It sounds like routine enough work.”

“It’s not the kind of work you’re going to be doing anytime soon, not with your face.”

“My badge is the same color as everybody else’s,” Tyrone said.

“The men we’re talking about don’t have any respect for badges, no matter what color they are. They have even less respect for black men carrying badges.”

Back on Mayfield Rd. they went across the street again. Frank slipped back into Corbo’s and came out with a cold bottle of San Pellegrino. He looked back at the church. “They have a weekend here called the ‘The Feast of the Assumption’ every summer. It’s some kind of fundraiser. They hoist the Virgin Mary up on a platform, march her around, and everybody pins dollar bills on her. There are so many people nobody can move.”

They went up the hill. They stopped when they got to the New Mayfield Repertory Cinema. “Opening Soon – Classic and Foreign Films” an a-frame sidewalk sign announced. “It’s some Jew who lost his job teaching English out in the suburbs,” Frank said pointing at the sign. “He got a year’s pay in the downsize and is re-opening this place. He thinks between the arty college crowd down on Euclid Ave. and the grab bag hippies up on Coventry Rd. he can turn a hobby into a business.”

Tyrone wanted to say something about calling Jews Jews but wasn’t sure what to say. It was dawning on him that Frank was less mean mouthed than missing a sense of properness. He wasn’t a babe in the woods by any means but for a big city cop he was somehow more country than big city. He was like white men in Alabama who couldn’t help themselves. A glass encased poster for the opening movie said “La Strada.” It was an Italian movie with Anthony Quin and Richard Basehart in it. Anthony Quinn looked musclebound. Richard Basehart was wearing angel wings and walking a tightrope. The love interest was somebody by the name of Giulietta Masina. She wore a bowler hat and had a clown’s dot on the tip of her nose. She didn’t look like any leading lady Tyrone had ever seen. The director was somebody by the name of Federico Fellini. Tyrone had never heard of him.

“The funny thing about it is, he had to talk to Blackie first about getting this place,” Frank said.

“Who’s that?” Tyrone asked.

“That’s Jim Licavoli, one of the mob bosses here. They had lunch together and he finally gave the Jew his blessing to lease the Mayfield, even though he didn’t have any ownership in it. It used to be a vaudeville theater that closed six or seven years ago. The way Blackie looked at it, strippers were OK but foreign movies were immoral.”

“Why do you call him Blackie? His name came up in a file, but it said he’s called Jack White.”

“He’s almost as dark as you, which is why we call him Blackie. He calls himself Jack White, God knows why. We never call him by that name.”

“How do you know they had lunch together?”

“We were nearby and heard the whole thing, although it was more a waste of time than anything else. The Jew had curly hair and was sincere as Shirley Temple. He wouldn’t stop talking about how much he loved movies. We thought he was a faggot. I think Blackie gave him his blessing just to get rid of him.”

“You go to the movies?” Tyrone asked.

“Not since I was in the academy,” Frank said. “’The Music Man’ might have been the last movie I saw.”

“What do you do to relax?”

“Fight with my wife,” Frank said.

“She can’t be all bad.”

“She comes the closest.”

“That’s too bad.”

“Yeah, it’s too bad.”

They continued walking up Mayfield Rd. When they got to E. 126^th St. they turned left. At a dead-end past half-a-dozen houses they walked through a line of trees into the cemetery. Frank led the way, zig zagging to the James Garfield Monument.

“It’s a tragedy what happened to him,” Frank said.

“It’s a tragedy any time somebody gets shot, president or no president” Tyrone said.

“No, I mean it’s too bad about how he died. He had the best doctors in the country, but they didn’t believe in disinfecting their hands and instruments. So, he didn’t die of the gunshot wound. He died of infection. He had only been president four months. He was six feet tall and had been a two-star general. It took him almost three months to die.”

They stopped to look at John D. Rockefeller’s grave, but Tyrone didn’t want to stay. “He was the richest man in the world, selling his black gold, but he wouldn’t give the black man a chance. His kids did better later, but not John D. He was a son-of-a-bitch.”

They crossed the cemetery’s Hillside Rd. before coming to the Haserot Angel.

“What is that?” Tyrone asked looking at it. It was a life-sized bronze angel sitting on a marble gravestone. She held an extinguished torch upside down. Her wings were outstretched. She seemed to be crying black tears.

“They call it ‘The Angel of Death Victorious’ because of the torch that is out,” Frank said. “Some people call it the weeping angel because it looks like she’s crying. It was put up about fifty years ago by a local man who made his fortune in canned goods.” The name ‘Haserot’ was chiseled into the base of the gravestone. “The man who sculpted it is buried in this same boneyard. Lots of people say this place is haunted, especially this spot right here.”

They heard a cough and rustling behind the angel. There was a bad smell in the air. Frank put a finger to his lips and signaled Tyrone to step back. Tyrone slipped his Colt into his hand with the barrel pointing to the ground. Frank stepped to the side of the monument. The angel stayed where it was, looking deadpan.

“All right, come out of there, with your hands where we can see them.”

What stumbled out from behind the marble angel was a small swarthy man who reeked of booze. There was a pint bottle of it peeking out from his back pocket. It was emptier than fuller. He slapped dirt off his hands and shrugged loose grass off his shoulders. One of his shoes was untied. His shirt was checked, and his eyes were fly belly blue. His zipper sagged at the crotch of his pants. All of him smelled worse the closer he got to them.

“That’s close enough,” Frank said. “What are you doing here?”

“Visiting old friends,” the man said.

“Let me introduce you to Joey Bag of Donuts, one of the bomb makers for the dagos,” Frank said to Tyrone, pointing to the man. “Does Danny Greene know you’re here? He might show up with a shovel.”

“It takes an earlier bird than that dumb-ass paddy to get the better of a worm like me,” Joey said smiling slyly.

Excerpted from “Bomb City.”

Ed Staskus posts monthly on 147 Stanley Street http://www.147stanleystreet.com, Made in Cleveland http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com, Atlantic Canada http://www.redroadpei.com, and Lithuanian Journal http://www.lithuanianjournal.com.

“Cross Walk” by Ed Staskus

A Mid-Century Crime Thriller

“A once upon a crime whodunit.” Barron Cannon, Adventure Books

“Captures the vibe of 1950s NYC.” Sam Winchell, Beyond Fiction

Available on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CRPSFPKP

Late summer and early autumn. New York City. A Hell’s Kitchen private eye. The 1956 World Series. President Eisenhower at the opening game. A killer in the Brooklyn Dodger dugout.

Accidental Realism

Angel Face

April 1, 2024 Edward Staskus Leave a comment

By Ed Staskus

“My first grade gym teacher was the man who started me out in music,” Chuck Eversole said. The gym teacher was an ex-Jarhead with a standard issue buzz cut. “He had a meeting with my mom and dad one day.” The meeting was about him. “Charles has very poor hand eye coordination,” he told Chuck’s parents. “He has trouble catching balls. I have a suggestion. I think he should take piano classes, or learn some kind of keyboard instrument.”

When Chuck’s grandfather heard about the suggestion, he suggested the accordion. It had a keyboard. He was from Switzerland where everybody in his part of the mountains danced to the squeezebox. It was what kept them up at night, young men swinging and squeezing young women around the floor. It was his favorite musical instrument. When he sized up his grandson, however, he changed his mind.

“I was always the smallest kid at the end of the row in our school pictures,” Chuck said. He tipped the scales at just over 40 pounds. Beginner accordions weigh about 15 pounds. “It was too heavy for me, so grandpa bought me a piano.” He started taking lessons when he started 2^nd grade. “I took to it right away. By the time I was in 6th grade the choir director at our school asked me to play piano for his choir practices.”

Chuck’s mother Katherine and his father Charles met at a math teacher’s summer conference. She was from Long Island. He was from Ohio. They were both math teachers. Before long one plus one became two peas in a pod. “Every summer our vacations were going to some college campus for a math workshop. One summer we went to Stow, Vermont. I had just seen ‘The Sound of Music’ so my parents took me to where the real Maria von Trapp was operating a ski lodge there.”

He bought a book about the musical in the gift shop. There was a picture on the back cover of Maria von Trapp wearing a colorful dirndl. “We were in the parking lot getting ready to leave when a turquoise sports car raced up and stopped beside us. Maria von Trapp, wearing the same dirndl, popped out of the driver’s seat. I was so excited because music was my thing. I went right up to her and got her autograph.”

That school year Chuck made friends with a new kid in his class. His name was Cory Harding. “We went to choir classes together.” One day Cory told Chuck he was in another singing group and they were going to perform downtown at Music Hall on Mother’s Day. “I told my parents we had to go.” The only tickets left were in the nosebleed part of the balcony. “We were three rows from the top. The stage was a sea of kids. After their first song I turned to my mom and dad and told them I had to be in that group.”

The group was the Singing Angels. The year was 1978. The Singing Angels had been the brainchild of Bill Boehm. When he was a young man he performed in musicals at John Adams High School and Western Reserve University. He became a professional singer. Then World War Two broke out. “I had everything going for me. My God, I had a contract from Hollywood in my hand. I had a contract from Broadway. But I came from a family where you’re an American, so what do you do? Well, somebody has got to fight for this country.”

He founded the Singing Angels in 1964. It was the same year the Beatles blasted off. A few years earlier while doing research in the Western Reserve University library for his master’s degree in theater, he had struck up a conversation with a woman about a project he had in mind. He wanted to organize a children’s singing group. “I had this idea for quite a while and just didn’t know what to do with it. Even so, I knew I had something practical that would work and be good for the kids.”

The woman suggested he contact the Cleveland Friends of Music. He went to see them. He told them he wanted to put on a show at Severance Hall, the home of the Cleveland Orchestra. They told him they would promote it if he would and could sell all the tickets. He put out a notice for singers. Eighty children responded. “From the word go I knew I had something.”

Bill Boehm recruited children from all around Cleveland to perform what he called “good” music. Rock and roll was the rage. He thought it was “very bad” music. “There is no melody,” he said. “It is just volume.” Their first show was a medley of holiday songs that Christmas season. They were a smash. The Lakeside Summer Art Festival became an annual venue the next year after their first show there. Their first television special was on a local TV station in 1967. Two years later they were invited to the White House for a Command Performance. That same month they appeared on the Kraft Music Hall Special on NBC-TV.

Chuck kept the Singing Angels at the front of his mind all summer. Auditions were scheduled for September. But when his turn came he was told the group only took children up to and in the 8^th grade. He was going into the 9^th grade. Chuck was crestfallen. “You are breaking his heart,” his mother said.

There was a training chorus and a performing chorus. As children matured and got better they were promoted into singing on stage. Chuck’s mother wrangled an audition for her son. When he was done auditioning, he was invited to join the performing chorus on the spot. Rehearsals were in a large enough extra space at the Fireman’s Training Academy on the periphery of downtown. “There were more than a hundred kids there from all over. I had never seen so many different kinds. I came from Richmond Hts. where there was only one black kid in our school of a thousand.”

He had led a sheltered life. “My mom was overprotective. Whenever I wanted to go out with my high school friends she had a fit. But after a year with the Angels, if I had told her I was going out with a gang of them to knock off a bank, she would have said, ‘Make sure to be home on time for dinner.’”

Practices were on Saturdays. They lasted three hours. The Tuesday night practices lasted two hours. If they had a big show coming up they practiced on Sundays, too. “We had to memorize all our songs,” Chuck said. “We didn’t use sheet music. We weren’t a choir. We were a performing chorus. It wasn’t a religious group, all sacred music. There was some spiritual music, but it was mostly show tunes, barber shop harmonies, and holiday songs. Every January after Christmas we had to learn and memorize a whole new repertoire.”

The Singing Angels staged up to 30 shows during the holiday season and that many again the rest of the year. Mothers and fathers had to make as much of a commitment as their children. Neither of Chuck’s parents sang or played a musical instrument. Regardless, they supported him non-stop. His grandfather had some musical talent. “He was a very severe man, but he knew how to yodel,” Chuck said. Some people have van Gogh’s ear for music. Chuck had an elephant’s ear for it.

He was in the marching band in high school. He played the trumpet while wearing a shakos hat and marching up and down the field. “We didn’t have plumes, though,” he said. One of his parents would drive him to the Saturday morning football games in their Chrysler New Yorker. “It was the model with the fins. It was like the Batmobile. As soon as halftime was over I would run to the car and change while I was being driven downtown for Angel practice. I would duck down on the back seat, strip off my marching band uniform, and change into civilian clothes.”

The Singing Angels began touring foreign countries in 1974. Their first tour was to Romania. “My second year with the group, which was 1980, we toured Berlin, Vienna, and Rome. The pope came out to St. Peter’s Square to see us. My third year we went to the International Song Competition in Wales. We had to learn all new to us classical songs for it. There were 32 groups there. We came in 4^th place. My last year we toured Mexico.” The year after Chuck left the group the Singing Angels went to China, just ten years after Richard Nixon ended the isolation between the United States and the communist country. “I always wanted to make music that would bring joy,” Bill Boehm said. “What would bring young people together, and help them understand patriotic things, human things. It’s the magic of music.”

Everybody’s tour of duty with the Singing Angels came to end when they graduated from high school. By then Chuck’s younger brother William was in the group. “He stayed longer than I did since he joined earlier. When I was a kid I had an imaginary friend named Billy. After my parents named my brother Billy I had to say goodbye to my imaginary friend, although at first I wanted my mother to take my baby brother right back to where he had come from.”

A year after Chuck retired from the group his mother Katherine joined it as the administrator of the training chorus. “She replaced Roe Green, for whom the Kent State University Center for Performing Arts is named.” Katherine stayed with the Singing Angels for the next 30-some years. “One of her first responsibilities was ironing the red taffeta ties the kids wore.”

The Caroling Crusaders came into being at that time. They performed in small groups at hospitals and nursing homes. “They sang a cappella. They learned how to adapt on a dime, from going to a small nursing home to the Cuyahoga County Fair to St. Peter’s Square. As much as they learned about music they learned about life.”

There was a lot to learn. “There I was, a high school student, and I was one of the soloists at Music Hall with a microphone in my hand in front of a sold-out audience. I learned how to be confident around other people. I learned more about life than I learned about music. That’s the truth.” Confidence in your ability is the key. Once somebody has that, and is ready to follow through, they are nearly unstoppable.

“If you’re not going to go all the way, why go at all?” said NFL quarterback Joe Namath. When he won the Super Bowl in 1968 he went all the way. At the same time, he knew how to have fun. “When you have confidence, you can have a lot of fun. And when you have fun, you can do amazing things.”

The Singing Angels weren’t always angels, no matter how amazing they were. “Some of my friends and I snuck out of our hotel one night when we were in Wales. We hung out and ran around all over. It was lots of fun. We had to sneak back into our rooms like secret agents in the middle of the night.” At the end of the day, if it was fun, it was a good day.

“We were in England walking around after a show when some girls asked my friends and me for our autographs. They were like groupies. Two weeks later when I was back home in Richmond Hts. I got a postcard from one of the girls, It was addressed to Chuck Eversole, Singing Angels, Cleveland, USA. That was it. I don’t know how it ever got to me, but it did. Her address was on the postcard and we ended up being pen pals for the next five years.”

Being a pen pal can be a testament to patience. Letters mailed to England in the 1980s took almost two weeks to get there and another two weeks for the response to get to where it was going to. When Chuck finally got a letter from his pen pal it was always the write time to put his Bic pen to paper.

After four years in the Singing Angels his magical mystery tour with the group was over. He had made many friends. He stayed friends with some of them through the years. “Absolutely,” Chuck said. “I’m still friends with Cory, the boy who introduced me to the group. He’s a television producer for Dateline. Whenever I’m in New York City we try to get together.” The Singing Angels was a garden where Chuck blossomed. It was where he found the freedom to lift up his voice and be himself. It was where he learned to be amazing.