By Ed Staskus
There are thousands of restaurants in Cleveland, Ohio. Captain Frank’s isn’t one of them anymore. It used to be and when it was it was one of the best places to eat if you liked waves and wind shaking the building on the E. 9th St. pier sticking out into Lake Erie. Every so often somebody full of cheer and careless after a hearty meal, or simply drunk as a skunk, drove off the pier into the deep.
“It was always my last stop after a night of drinking in the Flats,” Nancy Wasen said. “Every night I was surprised no one fell off the pier and drowned.” It wasn’t for want of trying.
Captain Frank’s was a “Lobster House” or a “Sea Food House” depending on the signage . It changed now and then. There was a panhandler who called himself Captain Frank who hung around outside the restaurant day and night, his hand stuck out. Policemen who had kept quiet about hidden rooms in gambling joints or pocketed cash in job-buying schemes were assigned to Seagull Patrol on the pier, usually in the dead of winter. They ignored the panhandler and did their best to walk the cold off. Sometimes they helped the innocent just to stay on the move.
Francesco Visconti was the Captain Frank who ran the restaurant. He was a Sicilian from Palermo whose parents beat it out of Europe the year World War One started. At first, as soon as he could handle a horse, he sold fish from a wagon. After that he operated the Fulton Fish Market on E. 22nd St. He was forty years old in 1940 and lived with his wife, Rose, a son, and three daughters.
He bought a beat-up passenger ferry building on the E. 9th pier in 1953 and opened Captain Frank’s. I was a small boy living the easy life in Sudbury, Ontario at the time and missed the grand opening. Kim Rifici Augustine’s grandfather was the original chef at Captain Frank’s. “The wax matches he used for flambé caused a fire back in the 1958,” she said. The fish shack burned down. Frank Visconti built it back bigger and better the next year. Kim’s grandfather was forbidden to handle matches of any kind from then on.
By the late 1950s my family had emigrated from Canada to Cleveland, Ohio. We lived close enough, but never went to Captain Frank’s. My parents were from Lithuania and ate bowls of beetroot soup and plates of potato pancakes at their own table. They didn’t know an Italian-style diet from the man in the moon.
In the Old Country they had feasted on pigs and crows. My mother’s father was a family farmer who kept a herd of swine, slaughtering them himself, and smoking them in a box he built in the attic of the house, the box built around their fireplace chimney. “It was the best bacon and sausage I ever had in my life,” my mother reminisced many years later.
They hunted wild crows. “Those birds were tasty,” my mother said. The younger the birds the better. Those still in the nest and unable to get away were considered delicacies. Their crow cookouts involved breaking necks and boiling the birds in cooking oil over a bonfire. They served them with cabbage or whatever northern European vegetables they had at hand.
Since I was part of the family, I ate with my parents, my brother, and sister. My mother prepared every meal. I ate whatever she made, even the fried liver and God-awful Lithuanian headcheese, although we never, thank God, ate carrion-loving crows. Even if I had wanted to go to the Lobster House, or anywhere else, I didn’t have a dime to my name.
Captain Frank’s boomed in the 1960s and 1970s. There were views of the lake out every window. There was an indoor waterfall. If you had water on the brain, it was the place to be. The food was terrific. Judy Garland, Nelson Eddy, and Flip Wilson ate there whenever they were in town performing. The Shah of Iran and Mott the Hoople partied there, although not at the same time. They weren’t any which way on the same wavelength.
There was a luncheonette behind the restaurant that doubled as a custard stand in the summer. When the Shah or Mott the Hoople stayed later than ever, they could sit in the back in the morning in the breezy sunshine with a cup of custard while iron ore boats went back-and-forth. “I never went inside Captain Frank’s, but I remember the ice cream shop in the back well,” recalled Bob Peake, a homegrown boy who was a frozen sweets savant.
Frank Visconti was a made member of the Cleveland Crime Family. His criminal record dated back to 1931, including arrests for narcotics, bootlegging, and counterfeiting. The restaurant was frequented by high-echelon hoods and low-minded politicians alike. Many crime family meetings were held there. Many politicians filled their piggy banks there.
Longshoremen went to Kindler’s and Dugan’s to drink before and after work, but between their double shifts went to Captain Frank’s for power shots. When they were done it was only a short walk back to the docks. When the weather was bad they were all warmed up by the time they clocked back in to work.
The restaurant was a football field’s length from Lakefront Stadium, where Chief Wahoo and the NFL Browns played. The ballpark sat nearly 80,000 fans. The Indians were always limping along, their glory days long gone, but the Browns were exciting, and on game day crazy loud cheering rocked the windows of the restaurant. Cold biting winds blew into the stadium in spring, fall, and winter. In the summer, under the lights, swarms of midges and mayflies sometimes brought baseball games to a standstill.
Mary Jane Jereb was sixteen years old in 1964. She didn’t know a single thing about Captain Frank’s. She was in a car with her cousin and a neighbor and a driver’s education trainer. “He took us downtown, to prepare for city driving. I wasn’t driving, my neighbor was. The instructor directed her to this particular parking lot.” It was Captain Frank’s parking lot. They drove straight to the edge of the slimy pier. Spray from a stormy Lake Erie obscured their windshield.
“The instructor told my neighbor to turn around and head back to Parma. My short young life flashed before me as she pulled into a parking space and then backed out.” She did it by feel. None of them could see through the blurry washed-out windows. They carefully left the deep blue sea behind them.
In 1966 the Beatles played the stadium and after that the Beach Boys, Pink Floyd, and the Rolling Stones showed up to rock the home of rock-n-roll. It was always a walloping paycheck for a night’s work. In the 1980s U2 brought its big show to town, raking in millions singing about love and lovesickness. Every so often they threw in something about social injustice.
Even though I was grown-up by the 1970s I still didn’t dine out at Captain Frank’s. I was living in a rented house in a vague part of town and it was all I could do to feed myself at home. I didn’t have pocket money to eat out. Most of my friends were already racing to the top. I was starting at the bottom. When I finally joined the way of the world and could afford to go and wasn’t too tired from working all day, I ate out.
There was a kind of magic eating at Captain Frank’s at night. My friends and I watched the lights of freighters making their way slowly into Cleveland’s harbors while munching on scampi and warm dinner rolls swimming in garlic butter. They served steaks the cooks seared just right, but the seafood was usually just threatened with high heat. It was never overcooked and dried out. Students from St. John College on E. 9th and Superior Ave. walked there to have midnight breakfast because it was nearby and the plates were substantial.
The Friday night in September 1984 my friend Matti Lavikka and I treated my brother to dinner at Captain Frank’s on his thirty first birthday was almost the last birthday he celebrated. We didn’t know Frank Visconti had died earlier that year, but in the car on the pier after dinner we thought my brother was dying. He was gasping for air. The dinner had been very good, but he looked very bad. We were afraid he might end up swimming with the fish.
He was getting over a marriage to a Columbus girl that had lasted only fifty six days. He was singing the blues. It was his own fault, having used all the wedding’s wishing well money to pay off his gambling debts, but that was beside the point. We picked him up in Mentor, where he was living alone, and went downtown. It was a starry late summer evening. We ordered a bottle of Chianti, some pasta, and lots of shellfish. We didn’t know, and he didn’t know, that he was allergic to shellfish.
“I don’t know why, but I hardly ever eat fish,” he said. “It doesn’t always agree with me.” Nevertheless, he dug in. Our dinner at Frank’s that night included scallops, shrimp, and lobster. He might not have been allergic to all of them, but he was allergic to one of them, for sure.
Halfway through coffee and dessert, which was sfogliatelle, layers of crispy puff pastry bundled together, he was itching, wheezing, and his head was puffing up. His lips, tongue, and throat looked like silly putty. He was breaking out into hives. He was getting dizzy and dizzier. It was like he had eaten a poisoned apple.
Shellfish allergy is an abnormal response by the body’s immune system to proteins in all manner of marine animals. Among those are crustaceans and mollusks. Some people with the allergy react to all shellfish. Others react to only some of them. It ranges from mild symptoms, like a stuffy nose, to life-threatening.
Matt was a fireman and paramedic in Bay Village. Looking at my brother he didn’t like what he was seeing. We hustled him to the car and made a beeline for the nearest hospital. Matti put the pedal to the metal. The Cleveland Clinic wasn’t far away and we had him at the front door of the emergency room in ten minutes. Five minutes later a doctor was injecting him with epinephrine and a half-hour later he was his old self.
“Thanks, guys,” he said when we dropped him off at his bachelor pad in Mentor. He staggered away to bed. Matt and I agreed it had been a waste of good seafood.
After Frank Visconti died the restaurant limped along. The service and food got worse and worse. The tables and chairs got old and the walls looked like they needed at least one new coat of paint. Fewer and fewer people were going downtown for any reason other than work. I was working downtown near the Cleveland State University campus, where Matt and I had started a small two-man business. One evening when I got off work I called my girlfriend and invited her to dinner at Captain Frank’s. I knew she wasn’t allergic to seafood. She had a hollow leg and generous portions were right up her alley. When we got there, however, the pier was dark in all directions. There were no parked cars in the lot and no lights in any of the windows.
Rudolph Hubka, Jr., the new owner who had given it five years, had given up the ghost and declared bankruptcy in 1989. Nobody said a word. Hardly anybody noticed. The building was demolished in 1994. The only thing left was dust and litter blowing around in the lakeshore wind.
We drove to Little Italy and snagged a table at Guarino’s. Sam Guarino had died two years earlier, but his wife Marilyn, who everybody called Mama Guarino, was carrying on with the aid of Sam’s sister Marie, who lived upstairs and helped with the cooking in the basement kitchen. “Marilyn sat in front, and she was like the captain on a ship, making sure everything was just right,” said Suzy Pacifico, who was a waitress at the eatery for fifty-two years.
We had a farm-to-table dinner before there was farm-to-table, red wine, and coffee with tiramisu. We didn’t see any fishy characters, even though Little Italy was the home of the Cleveland Crime Family. Mama Guarino asked us how we liked the cake. We told her we liked it very much. When I drove my girlfriend home there were no piers to accidentally drive off of. We were both happy as clams all that night.
Ed Staskus posts monthly on 147 Stanley Street at http://www.147stanleystreet.com, Made in Cleveland http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com, Down East http://www.redroadpei.com, and Lithuanian Journal http://www.lithuanianjournal.com. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.”
“Bomb City” by Ed Staskus
Cleveland, Ohio 1975. The John Scalish Crime Family and Danny Greene’s Irish Mob are at war. Car bombs are the weapon of choice. A police detective is assigned to find the bomb makers. Revenge is always personal. It gets personal.
A Crying of Lot 49 Publication
Made in Cleveland 