By Ed Staskus

   The best thing about living in North Collinwood the summer before I shuffled off to my freshman year at St. Joseph’s High School was the Race Place that had opened at the beginning of the year on East 185^th St. It was a five-minute walk away. It was in what had once been a corner candy store. On one plate glass window was plastered “Speed Action Fun Excitement!” The other window said, “Come in! This is where it’s all happening!” Inside the front door was a counter, some stools along the near side wall, pinball machines on the other wall, and an eight-lane racecourse. The track was laid out on top of sheets of plywood that were set on saw horses.

  None of my friends nor I were ever given permission to knock together a boy cave at home. The home of slot car racing was the next best thing. We made Race Place our home away from home.

   The track was bare bones, There were no pretend bushes or trees. There were no miniature buildings. There were no trains tooting their friendly way to the next station. Racing slot cars was girding your loins and going fast as hell, leaving the other guy eating your dust. It was thrills and spills sans real blood. No bones got broken, although feelings got bruised black and blue every day.

   A man wearing a pork pie hat, and smoking a cigar more often than not, sat on a stool behind the counter. His name was Ralph. Sometimes he wore a t-shirt that said, “I Like Beer and Maybe Three People.” He never said hello or goodbye. Nobody knew where he lived or how old he was. Nobody knew what he looked like, exactly, behind the cloud of stogie smoke obscuring his face. He took our spare change in return for time on the track, which was by the quarter hour, rented shabby slot cars to the poverty-stricken, and sold 10-ounce bottles of Coke from a cooler behind him.

   There was a poster on the wall next to the cooler. It said, “Drink Coca-Cola.” The picture was of a cutie pie smiling from ear to ear and dressed like a princess in a low-cut white dress, wearing forearm gloves, and a jewel-encrusted crown. There was a bottle of Coca-Cola in her hand. “Refresh…Add Zest” was written at the bottom of the poster.

   Slot cars are miniature electric powered race cars guided by a slot in the track on which they run. The cars are 1:32 scale. A blade extends from the bottom of the car into the slot. We used hand-held squeeze controllers to speed up and slow down the low-voltage motors inside the cars. The front wheels ran with the post in its guide-slot, but the rear wheels were free to drift and slide. When they started to slide was when you wanted to put metal to the petal. When you got it right was when the car ended up pointing straight down the straightaway coming out of a curve. The challenge was taking curves as fast as possible without losing your grip of the slot and spinning out. When that happened you de-slotted, flying off the track, everybody ducking out of the way and laughing their heads off. 

   I went to the slot car track with my friends, who were Ignas, Gediminas, Justinas, and the two Tommy’s. Everybody called Ignas Iggy. We called Gediminas Eddie while Justinas was just himself. He tried on several nicknames, but we told him nicknaming yourself was not cool. Tommy One Shoe and Tommy Two Shoes were twins. For some reason nobody ever found out, their mother named both of them Tommy. She was a no-explaining woman. They were Irish, not Lithuanian like the rest of us. The twins were hard to tell apart at the best of times, until the morning one of them forgot one of his shoes. By the time he boarded the CTS bus to school it was too late. He shuffled around all that day wearing one shoe and wearing a hole in his shoeless sock. The nuns didn’t bother hitting him with their rulers. They shook their heads, instead. “Poor little retard kid,” one of them whispered to another. He was so embarrassed a red dot like a freckle popped up on the tip of his nose. The next day it was still there. It never went away. After that there was no trouble telling the twins apart.

   Our slot cars were fast as lightning, close to 15 MPH flat out. The scale miles were more like 500 MPH. The cars were always shooting off the track. Everybody had nitro on the brain and wanted to go faster and faster. “If you’re in control you’re not going fast enough,” is what Tommy Two Shoes said. “Straight roads are for fast cars,” Tommy One Shoe said in return. “Turns are for fast drivers, like me.” Whenever Two Shoes took on One Shoe head-to-head, One Shoe always won. 

   “What’s behind you doesn’t matter,” he told his brother every time he won. He was the fastest thing on four tiny wheels. He started wearing a phony racing car helmet. He took a lot of teasing about it, but didn’t seem to care.

   “Run your car, not your mouth,” Tommy Two Shoes retorted. He rubbed castor oil on the warmed-up engine of his Lotus-Ford  to make it smell more authentic. He added racing emblems from a decal sheet. There was an itsy-bitsy driver in the open cockpit. Itsy-bitsy was modeled after Graham Hill. Tommy painted a devil-may-care whisker-thin moustache on it. He was turning himself into the Smokey Yunick of the slots, improvising and modifying. No matter what he did, though, he couldn’t beat his brother’s yellow Mustang with ‘The Boss’ emblazoned on the sides of it. The pony car was nearly unbeatable with Tommy One Shoe in the driver’s seat.

   He was training for the National Ford-Aurora Model Motoring competition. First prize was a full-size Thunderbird Sports Roadster. “If I win I might let my dad drive it sometimes,” he said. “I know I can do it. I’m going to be numb to the competition.” He was 12 years old. If he won he was going to be the only grade schooler in the world with his own real-life muscle car.

   The first toy racing cars made by the Lionel Train Company rolled off the assembly line in 1912. They were powered by raised electric rails. Then World War One happened. The assembly line stopped dead. In 1938 Bachman Brothers made the “Motorcycle Cop & Car Speedway.” it was a single track with vehicles made from tin. Two keys were included, and the cars were powered by winding them up with the keys.

   After World War Two British hobbyists began to toy with them again, except this time they fitted them with handmade stop-gap motors. The motors were the size of a dime. A fragment of iron was the magnet. In 1954 Great Britain’s Southport Model Engineering Society built an electric slotted course nearly 60 feet long. “Slot car” was coined to set the new racers apart from the earlier “rail cars.”  

   The summer that I burned up the neighborhood race track and destroyed two slot cars by virtue of aggressive cornering and excessive speed, there were close to 4,000 tracks in the country. Revell, Scalextrix, and Aurora were selling hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of cars and equipment annually. Boys’ Life magazine had slot cars written about and advertised in every edition.

   Ed Shorer, the only Jewish kid in our neighborhood, with a head of thick curls and quick hands on the controller, couldn’t get enough of his new hobby. “I was ditching Hebrew school one day when I was 12 years old and I wandered into a hobby shop,” he said. By the time he left he was hooked. “As a result, I never got my bar mitzvah.”

   Scalextric came out with models fashioned after the Maserati 250F and the Ferrari 375. Their Grand Prix-themed cars were unbeatable, at least until they went up against Aurora’s Model Motoring line-up. By 1963 the Aurora Thunderjet-500 was the slot car to beat. When push came to shove, however, success on the track came down to who had the hot hand on the controller.

   Whenever the competition got over-heated among us we heard Ralph at the counter somewhere behind his cloud of stogie smoke break in, “All right, boys, the No. 1 rule is have fun.” He was oblivious to who had the hot hand.

   “I have more fun when I win,” Tommy One Shoe declared, not paying attention to the ruckus, and never taking his eyes off the track.

   I had a Cleveland Press paper route that paid the piper. I was blowing through my savings, but I couldn’t help myself. I delivered my papers in the afternoon as fast as I could, never breaking stride, hurling rubber-banded newspapers out of my shoulder-slung bag onto porches. I never looked back to see if any of them rolled into the bushes. As soon as I was done I hustled to the slot car track, where I raced until dinnertime, when I hurried back home. My parents were by-the-rules Eastern Europeans and my sister, brother, and I were expected to be in our seats for cold beetroot soup and cepelinai, otherwise known as potato dumplings with a meat center, exactly on time. We ate our zeppelins larded with sour cream and pork cracklings.

   By the middle of summer I was delivering my newspapers faster than ever. Lines had been forming at the slot car raceway. Everybody and their brother wanted in on the action. Polk’s Model Craft Hobbies, the biggest hobby store in New York City, estimated it was becoming as popular as model railroading. There was a new 475-foot track in nearby Long Island. Elvis Presley raced there, not that it mattered. We didn’t listen to his songs anymore since he had become a movie star. We were listening to Jan and Dean.

   “We both popped the clutch when the light turned green, you should have heard the whine from my screamin’ machine, Dead Man’s Curve, I could hear ‘em say, won’t come back from Dead Man’s Curve,” Jan and Dean warned.

   Labor Day weekend that summer was the weekend of our slot car blow-out. Most of us were going to start high school the following Tuesday. We didn’t know if or when we would be racing again. The Cleveland National Air Show came back to town that weekend, after a fifteen-year hiatus, but no matter how many Blue Angels did however many aerobatic tricks we were going to be doing our own kind of high-flying. We got started on Saturday morning and wrapped it up on Sunday afternoon. Inside the Race Place we didn’t hear a even one sonic boom all weekend.

   We made up our own order of the day, which was a round-robin tournament. There were eight of us. Ralph smoothed the way by letting us have two slot lanes for the weekend. By the end of Saturday Tommy One Shoe and I were on top of the leader board. By Sunday afternoon everybody else was out and there was one last do-or-die race left. Tommy One Shoe lowered his pony car into the inside slot. I lowered my Scalextric Shelby Cobra into the slot next to the Ford Mustang. The race was set for ten laps.

   “One, two, three, go!” Iggy called out from a stool behind us. He was acting as referee, even though he didn’t know refereeing from a hole in the wall. He had brought a small, checkered flag with him that he waved around like a matador.

   I was a year older than Tommy One Shoe and no greenhorn on the track, but I never stood a chance. I didn’t know he practiced day and night on his own homemade track. I didn’t know he rehearsed going into turns and coming out of them. I didn’t know he used fine grit sandpaper to rough up his wheels to improve their handling. By his standards I was a babe in the woods, which is where I ended up.

   I also didn’t know he had upgraded the magnets on his car. He wasn’t going to be flying off the merry-go-round anytime soon. No sooner did I fall behind a half-lap after three laps than I was forced to speed up. It didn’t do me any good. After seven laps I was behind by almost a full lap. I sped up some more. My Shelby was screaming down the track, but every time I checked on Tommy’s Mustang, he was inching farther ahead.

   I knew my goose was cooked. I inevitably de-slotted, flipping high up into outer space. My car went crashing into the far wall, where the body of it broke away from the chassis, and the engine fell behind a pinball machine. Tommy One Shoe slowed down on the last lap, took a victory lap, jumped up on his stool, and raised his arms above his head making V’s with his fingers. The stool wobbled and toppled over. Tommy went head over heels, but Ralph was walking past and snagged him out of the air by the back of his collar before his phony helmet hit the floor.

   “Watch your step, champ,” he said, setting him straight.

   When high school started I still raced weekends and over the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays, but after the New Year I put my slot gear away. I had gotten straight A’s all through grade school without even trying. Halfway through my freshman year I was getting straight C’s without even trying. My parents made sure to let me know they were unhappy. Slot car racing was in my blood but I could see the handwriting on the wall. 

   Tommy One Shoe entered and won slot car races all over northeastern Ohio for a few years but never won the Ford Thunderbird he wanted. I thought he might be disappointed after all the work he had put into his hobby, but I was wrong. “Winning isn’t the point, even though somebody has got to get to the finish line first,” he said. He had become a philosopher as well as a slot car champion. 

   “Wanting to win is the point,” he said.

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

“Captures the vibe of mid-century NYC, from stickball in the streets to the Mob on the make.” Sam Winchell, Beyond Fiction

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

Late summer and early autumn. New York City, 1956. President Eisenhower on his way to the opening game of the World Series. A hit man waits in the wings. A Hell’s Kitchen private eye scares up the shadows.

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

By Ed Staskus

   The Chinese started settling in the United States in the 18^th century. Wherever whenever there were enough of them, they lived close to hand, building their own neighborhoods, appropriately called Chinatowns. There are more than 50 of them across the United States, including at least 16 in California alone.

   There are several of the towns within cities in New York City, the most famous one being in Manhattan. It’s the largest Chinatown in the country, spread out over 40 blocks and home to more than 150,000 Chinese-speaking residents.

   Cleveland, Ohio used to have a Chinatown, a colony at Rockwell Ave. near downtown. Immigrants settled in the area starting in the 1920s. After the Communist takeover of the mainland and into the 1960s more than 2,000 lived in the neighborhood. There was a row of Chinese restaurants, among them the Three Sisters, Golden Coin, and Shanghai, as well as two grocery stores between East 21^st and East 24^th. Storehouses in the district supplied native eateries one end of the city to the other. There was a temple and a meeting hall.

   Chinatown went into sharp decline in the early 1970s and a few years later, when I moved into what was becoming Asia Town, there wasn’t much left. Most of the residents moved to the suburbs and by the 1980s there were only two half-empty restaurants holding on, catering mostly to business folk and occasional tourists looking for the city’s historic Chinese quarter.

   Asia Town is roughly from East 18^th St. to East 40^th St. and from St. Clair Ave. to Perkins Ave. It has the highest percentage of Chinese, Koreans, and Vietnamese in Ohio. When I lived on East 34^th St. between Payne Avenue and Superior Ave. in the mid to late 70s, there weren’t as many yellow faces yet but they were everywhere. There were dirt poor whites, dirt poor blacks, and a recent influx of college students. It wasn’t as present-day as it would become after the 1990s when Asia Plaza was built at East 30^th St. and Payne Ave., when it became a business as well as a residential community.

   My roommate Carl Poston was tall, walked with a lanky slouch, and wore a mop of twisty black hair. Everybody called him Erby. He never said why, and I never asked. He liked to read, tearing through the Plain Dealer newspaper every morning, and liked to play chess, like me, but was better than me. He had a bad-ass motorcycle and several bad-ass friends with motorcycles. He worked downtown for the city helping crunch numbers and delivering bad news as Cleveland went under.

   In 1978 the city became the first one in the United States to go bust since the Great Depression. After the bankruptcy it became known as the Mistake on the Lake, a nickname nobody in the hometown liked. When Mayor George Voinovich showed up at a Cleveland Indians game against the New York Yankees in the 1980s wearing a t-shirt under his sports coat, the t-shirt said, “New York’s the Big Apple, but Cleveland’s a Plum.” Only the Asians liked the plum thing, since plums represent purity and perseverance to them. Nicknames come and go but when Cleveland later became ‘The Land,’ nobody shook their heads in despair. It was far better than the mistake and the plum.

   Our house on East 34^th St. was behind another house. There was no backyard or garage. Almost all the houses on the west side of the street were that way. The houses across the street had backyards and most of the houses in the neighborhood had backyards. But there were some houses so tucked away one had to be looking right at them to see them. Our rent was more than reasonable, and my half was even better. The landlord lived in Strongsville. His grandmother lived in Asia Town, like me. In return for checking up on her at the beginning of the week and taking her to Dave’s Grocery at the end of the week, I lived almost rent-free.

   Her name was Katya, and she was hundreds of years old. She was five foot four something short and hunchbacked on top of that. She was always in her kitchen when I knocked on the side door, she always croaked “Come in, honey,” and when I went in, she always asked me what I wanted.

   She had three cats who I never saw. She kept a pan of water next to the door for them but no food bowls or litter. They were freeloaders, running down grub in the wild. She had a stack of old newspapers in a corner and the linoleum kitchen floor was usually covered with them. It was sketchy walking inside. The unfolded papers piled haphazardly on top of each other slid every which way. I had to walk like a duck to stay upright.

   “I keep my kitchen floor clean that way.” she said, peeling back the corner of a newspaper and showing me.

   She bought her clothes from third hand stores but bought her shoes new. She was crazy frugal, but she wasn’t crazy. She was built to last, and her feet had to lead the way.

   Katya was from Slovenia, from sometime back in the 19^th century. Her parents were peasants from a village nobody ever heard of southeast of Ljublijana. They came to Cleveland to work in the steel mills in the 1890s. At first, they lived in Newburgh, but when a community started forming along East 30^th St., from Lake Erie south to Superior Ave., they moved, finally landing on East 38^th St. She still lived in the small house her parents bequeathed her.

   By 1910 there were so many Slovenes in Cleveland that it would have been the third-largest Slovenian city in the world if it was in Slovenia. The immigrants opened enough taverns to drown their New World blues and enough churches to repent their drinking. St Vitus was established in 1893, St. Lawrence in 1901, and St. Mary in 1906. Each had its own school. They published their own newspapers in their mother tongue and formed debating drama and singing clubs.

   The singing clubs were stamping grounds, as well. The Lira Singing Society, located in the St. Clair neighborhood, and adamantly Catholic, was opposed by the Zaria Singing Society, sponsored by atheists and socialists. Everybody knew what the arguments were about.

   Katya was married long enough to have two sons before her husband was shot by mistake by a policeman outside a Collinwood bank during a botched robbery. He bled to death before an ambulance could reach him. She buried him in Woodlawn Cemetery, never married again, raising her sons by herself. She took in sewing days and worked nights during World War Two. Her oldest son moved to Seattle and she never saw him again. Her younger son moved to the west side and had a family, but they didn’t want to visit her.

   “We aren’t going to your crazy grandmother’s house in that terrible neighborhood, and that’s final,” his wife said. What the woman didn’t know was that Katya kept a loaded Colt Pocket Hammerless in her kitchen table drawer. It was a single action blowback .32 caliber handgun.

   “Nobody going to shoot me by accident,” she said.

   Her eldest grandson loved her and made sure she had what she needed to stay afloat. She had a small pension and some social security, too. She told me she had silver dollars buried in the backyard, but quickly shot me a wily look.

   “Forget I say that.”

   When Katya’s husband Janez was buried in Woodlawn, it was the oldest cemetery in Cleveland, the first man being inhumed there in 1853. It was the worst cemetery in Cleveland, too. The Depression wrecked its finances. There were sunken graves, toppled headstones, grass never mowed, piles of rotting leaves, and broken tree branches all over the place. That was before the city found out Louise Dewald, who worked in the finance office, had stolen almost half a million in today’s dollars from the coffers as the Depression picked up steam.

   After that it got worse.

   The cemetery chapel roof and the rest of it collapsed in 1951 and was hauled away. The next year City Council thought about digging up and moving all the bodies somewhere else, but the public outcry was too great. Katya never stopped visiting Janez, no matter what, no matter what it took to get there. 

   One Friday walking her home from Dave’s Grocery she asked me if I could take her to the Slovenian National Home the next afternoon for a luncheon. 

   “I don’t have a car anymore, Katya, sorry.” My 1962 Rambler Custom Six, that I had gotten for free, was no more. When I got it, the car was already on its last legs. It was now rusting peacefully away in a junk lot somewhere up on Carnegie Ave.

   “Oh,” she said. “Maybe you walk with me there?”

   “It’s pretty far,” I said. I didn’t mention taking a bus. She distrusted the metropolitan buses getting to where they were going, ever since the city’s rail tracks had been torn up and the electric cars replaced with diesel transport. She believed half the drivers were addled from the fumes.

   The Home was almost thirty blocks away on East 64^th St. and St. Clair Ave. At the rate she walked we would have to start as we spoke. After the luncheon we would have to walk the whole night to get back.

   “Oh, that too bad. Janez and I dance there all the time before he die.”

   “Let me see what I can do.”

   I asked my roommate Carl, in return for my washing the dishes, cleaning the house, and mowing our grave-sized plot of grass, if he would take her there and back.

   “It’s a deal,” he said.

   The next day he schlepped her to the Slovenian Home on his Harley, waiting outside smoking cigarettes and shooting the bull with passersby. She was a big hit with her cronies when they spilled outside after the gabbing and feedbag and saw her climb on the back of the hog, wrap her stumpy arms around Carl’s waist, and glide away.

   The Slovenian Home was where my Baltic kinsmen booked their big wedding receptions and celebrations. The Lithuanian Hall on Superior Ave. was too small in the 1960s and the new Community Center in North Collinwood wasn’t built yet. The Home opened in 1924, with two auditoriums, a stage, bar restaurant kitchen, meeting rooms, a gym, and a Slovenian National Library.

   The main auditorium was plenty big enough for any get together and the stage was plenty big enough for any band. The bar was big enough for even Lithuanians. Europeans drink more alcohol than anybody else in the world and Lithuanians are number one in Europe. Whenever I accompanied my parents to the Slovenian Home for a reception or gala, it was always a long night. There was a big dinner at big round tables, speeches, chatting it up, dancing, drinking, and as the drinking went on, singing. My father and his friends would booze it up well into one and two in the morning, singing “In the Sea of Palanga” and “The Old Roofs of Vilnius” and “Oh, Don’t Cry, Beloved Mother.”

   By then I was snoozing sprawled out in the balcony.

   Unlike our no backyard house Katya had a backyard where she grew Brussels sprouts cauliflower broccoli onions potatoes and anything else she could squeeze in. She liked prosciutto and bread for lunch. Sundays she made loads of yota with turnips beans cabbage and potatoes and a slab of meat loaf with hardboiled eggs in the middle. She kept it in the fridge all week, dinner at her beck and call.

   That fall I had to tell Katya that once the school quarter at Cleveland State University was over, I was going to have to take the next quarter off. I had found a job with an electrostatic painting outfit that was going to send me on the road, expenses like food and motels paid, for a couple of months. We were going to start in Chicago, swing out to the west coast, end up in Texas, and be back in time for the spring quarter at CSU. It was chance for me to earn good money and save almost all of it.

   “I going to miss you,” she said.

   We traveled in three-man crews and worked nights, from about 5:30 to about 1 in the morning. We worked in offices, painting office furniture like metal filing cabinets, desks, bookcases, and storage cabinets. The paint was loaded with a low voltage positive charge and the metal items magnetized negative. The finish was like new, no runs, no brush or roller marks, and there was almost no overspray.

   When I got back from my two-and-a-half months on the road, I picked up my cat Mr. Moto from my parents, did my laundry, and registered for classes for the spring quarter at CSU. I went to visit Katya that evening, but she wasn’t there anymore. The house was vacant. A “For Sale” sign was posted. I asked one of the neighbors, but he said he didn’t know much, just that a moving truck pulled up one morning and by the end of the day she was gone.

   I peeked through the windows. The ground floor rooms were all empty. The only thing left was a stack of old newspapers in a corner of the kitchen.

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. 

A New Thriller by Ed Staskus

“Cross Walk“

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

“Captures the vibe of mid-century 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 dugout.