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Accidental Reality

Career Day

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By Ed Staskus

   All through my junior and senior years at St. Joseph High School, which was within walking distance of where we lived, my father pressed me to focus on something that would lead to a career. He was big on the idea. He was himself a career man. During those two years I told him I didn’t know what I wanted to focus on. I didn’t tell him I wasn’t enthralled by guidance counselors. I was reading Charles Baudelaire, a mid-19th century French prose-poet, who had  told his parents, “I don’t feel I have a vocation for anything.”

   I wasn’t especially interested in seeing my picture on a baseball card or a wanted poster.  Photographs are full of lies and labels. I wanted to take my own picture and tuck it away somewhere private.

   I read Charles Baudelaire’s book “The Flowers of Evil” the winter of my senior year at St. Joseph’s. It wasn’t assigned reading, not by far. St. Joseph’s was a traditional college preparatory high school, focusing on core academic subjects like math and science, social studies, and English. Religious instruction was a required feature of every day. Our teachers, the Marianists, brothers of the Society of Mary, made sure it was an everyday thing. There was no arguing the divine with them. There were vocational courses, as well, but my father was determined that I go to college. He didn’t want to see me repairing cars or working a tool and die press.

   My favorite class was English. My favorite thing to do was read books. I always did my homework. I read assigned books like “The Great Gatsby” and “Of Mice and Men” and “To Kill a Mockingbird.” I wrote sincere essays and aced tests. I neglected my other classes, reading books that weren’t assigned. I read “Lord of the Flies” and “Nineteen Eighty-Four” and “The Catcher in the Rye.”

   “The Catcher in the Rye” wasn’t banned at St. Joseph’s, but reading it was strongly discouraged. The official explanation was we should stick to our program of studies. The unofficial explanation was the book was depraved, full of vulgar language, sexual references, and anti-establishment themes. The Marianists were concerned about the book’s morality, or lack of it.

   After graduation I opted to attend Cleveland State University. It was close to hand, a twenty minute bus ride away, and affordable. The school had been established as a state university in 1964, taking over the buildings, faculty, and curriculum of Fenn College, a private engineering and business school of several thousand students that had been founded in 1929.

   I spent my freshman year at Cleveland State University the same way I had spent my junior and senior years at St. Joseph’s, attending English classes without fail and neglecting my other classes. At the conclusion of the school year my father sat me down and read me the riot act. It led to a stinging argument, but in the end, since I was still living in my parent’s house and my father was paying part of my tuition, I agreed to participate in a kind of career day scheduled for the next month in the Flats, the city’s industrial valley.

   Most of my father’s friends were Lithuanians and most of them were professionals. They were doctors, lawyers, and engineers. My father was a certified public accountant. One of his friends was a mechanical engineer. He had a son my age who was majoring in engineering at Cleveland State University. One of his classes had a field trip to the Flats planned. They saved a seat for me.

   The day of the field trip I waited on our front steps for my ride. It was June 22, 1969, early on a Sunday morning. The factories in the Flats never closed, but slowed down somewhat on Sundays, which made it less demanding to accommodate college students wandering around. When my ride came down our street I saw it a mile away, it being a chrome yellow color. it was a 1965 Ford Econoline Club Wagon. It didn’t have a front end to speak of but there were plenty of windows. Half of the  family van was windows. There were two bucket seats up front and three rows of bench seating in the back. My father’s friend was driving and there were six engineering students in the van. They had saved the front passenger bucket for me. It was a lonesome seat, but I wasn’t one of the rank and file, anyway, so I didn’t mind.

   We got on I-90 and drove to the Flats. There was hardly any traffic. When we got downtown we drove into the industrial valley. It was a warm and sunny day. It was more warm and less sunny in the valley. The air smelled like sewage and rotten eggs. The A. W. Stadler Rendering Plant near the Harvard Ave. Bridge added the odor of rotting animal matter to the stench.

   The Flats were located along the Cuyahoga River where it snaked through the north side of the city and drained into Lake Erie. It is bottom land there, the floodplain for the river. The earliest settlers in Cleveland settled in the floodplain, but it was swampy and they soon moved to higher ground. The Ohio & Erie Canal spurred lake shipping in the 1830s and rail lines spurred commercial growth in the 1860s. The Flats became the cradle of heavy industry in Cleveland. Business boomed exponentially. After 1870 the Flats teemed with foundries, iron furnaces, rolling mills, oil refineries, and chemical factories. The river was where they dumped their waste. It was their liquid landfill.

   A century later the Flats was dank, begrimed, and very polluted. Nobody went there other than to work in the warehouses and steel mills. There were dive bars like the Harbor Inn and the Flat Iron that served greasy food and cheap booze to working men. The air was bad and the waterway was worse. No one had dared to swim in the Cuyahoga River for decades. A journalist described braving the water as “no person drowns in it, they decay.” All the fish in the reach from Akron to Cleveland had long ago died. Nothing except Japanese movie monsters could survive in the thick sludge that had once been water

   “The river was a scary thing,” Tim Donovan explained. He was a high school graduate that summer, saving up for college, working as a hatch tender unloading ore carriers. Dead rats floated past the dockside cranes, bloated to the size of dogs. “There was a general rule that if you fell in, God forbid, you would immediately go to the hospital.”

    We toured Republic Steel and Jones & Laughlin Steel. They were colossal enterprises. We could have saved time by just going to one of them since they were so much alike. There was an unbroken roar of loud machinery. The fires, furnaces, and molten metal made the factories hot. Dust and black soot covered everything. The gasses in the air didn’t make for garden variety air pollution. Breathing as we walked from one end to the other end of the factories was like breathing something poisonous.

   The reason the engineering students were on the field trip was to help them bridge the gap between classroom theory and real-world application. Manufacturing steel involved many engineering disciplines. Seeing it happen in real time gave them a chance to see complex machinery involved in large-scale processes. They got to see first-hand how their classes in mechanical design and material science applied to the steel industry. It was eye-opening to them, and me, too. I found out there and then that I wasn’t prepared be an engineer.

   It was mid-day when the field trip wrapped up. We piled back into the Ford Econoline Club Wagon, drove in one direction, and then another direction. The through streets in the Flats generally followed the Cuyahoga River, running parallel to its banks. The side streets connected to surrounding neighborhoods like Ohio City and Tremont. Nonetheless, we got lost. We finally found ourselves on the Campbell Rd. Bridge, 

   There was a Plymouth Barracuda at a dead stop ahead of us on the bridge. We stopped and waited. A police car, its lights flashing, pulled up behind us. We stayed sandwiched where we were between them.

   “What’s going on?” one of the engineering students asked.

   “There seems to be a small fire down there somewhere,” our driver parent said, peering over the dashboard. 

   There was a sudden whoosh. Oily clouds of heavy black smoke rose up. We got out of the family van and went to the railing to get a better look. The smoke became a sky-high wall obscuring everything beyond the opposite bank. A fire department tanker truck crept onto the bridge. A fireboat by the name of Anthony J. Celebrezze made its way under the bridge to the wall of smoke. 

   What was going on was the Cuyahoga River was on fire.  It wasn’t the first time it had caught fire. It had happened a dozen times since 1868. This was the thirteenth time it caught fire. A flare tossed from an overpassing train had ignited the  petroleum-covered water. 

   The worst of the earlier fires happened in 1952 when oil and industrial debris on the river’s surface ignited. The fire destroyed three tugboats, three buildings, and some ship repair shops. It damaged a railroad bridge. It caused over one and a half million dollars’ worth of damage. Nobody in Cleveland was shocked by the river catching fire. It didn’t flow as much as ooze. Everybody was resigned to the city being one of the most polluted cities in the United States. “It’s the cost of doing business,” city fathers and business moguls said.

   The fireboat crept close to the blaze, began drawing water directly from the river, and used its deck guns to try to smother the flames. It was like pouring gasoline on gasoline. The flames leapt higher. Three fire battalions drew water from hydrants and discharged it onto the fire from the river bank. They were far more effective. 

   We watched from the deck of the bridge, standing in a cluster behind a railing. The summer breeze was blowing our way, but from behind us, so we weren’t smothered by the smoke. It was still noxious. It was sharp and acrid, like burnt toast that had been buttered in sulfur compounds. We got back into the Ford Econoline Club Wagon and rolled up the windows. It didn’t help all that much.

   The inferno lasted thirty minutes. Once it was out a policeman waved us forward and we drove away. We drove along the river. As we went the water became orange from the pickling acid used by the steel mills. We got lost again and ended up on the Jennings Rd. Bridge, which connected Abbey Ave. to W. 25th St. Our driving parent knew W. 25th St. well because he shopped for fruits and vegetables at the West Side Market. He knew how to get home from there. Crossing the bridge I looked down. There was a slaughterhouse below us. I could see blood and animal parts streaming out of  outfalls and into the Cuyahoga River.

   “That was amazing,” one of the engineering students said.

   “Who ever heard of water catching fire?” another one said. “Somebody should do something about it.”

   “And put us out of a job?” a third one said.

   Once I got home I threw my clothes down the clothes chute and took a shower to wash away the smell. I put on a clean pair of jeans and a t-shirt. I combed my hair. My father was taking a Sunday late afternoon nap in the backyard. He woke up when I threw myself down in a lawn chair.

   “How was your career day?” he asked.

   “We toured a couple of steel mills and saw the Cuyahoga River catch fire,” I said.

   He seemed unfazed by the news. He had lived through World War Two as a teenager on his own. He had seen his share of bombs and fires. He fled Lithuania in 1944 and spent five years in and out of refugee camps, working black markets until he found steady work with a relief organization near Nuremberg. When he finally made it to North America he ended up in Canada, where he worked digging up nickel and copper in the Sudbury ore basin for eight years. We had been in the United States the past ten years.

   “Have you thought about getting into engineering?”  he asked.

   “I don’t think I have a talent for engineering, although I understand engineers make the world go round, at least our modern world,” I said. “But you’ve got to watch out for them. They start by making sewing machines and end with crazy hellfire.”

Ed Staskus posts monthly on 147 Stanley Street  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.”

“Cross Walk” by Ed Staskus

“A Cold War thriller that captures the vibe of mid-century NYC.” Sam Winchell, Beyond Books

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

Late summer, New York City, 1956. The Mob on the make and the streets full of menace. President Eisenhower on his way to Brooklyn for the opening game of the World Series. A killer waits in the wings. Stan Riddman, a private eye working out of Hell’s Kitchen, scares up the shadows looking for a straight answer.

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

Accidental Reality

Gimme Shelter

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By Ed Staskus

   Not only did I not see the Rolling Stones when they rolled into Cleveland, I didn’t even get a t-shirt. In the event, however, I heard every song they played inside Municipal Stadium and I made more money that day than I was accustomed to making. I kept the money in my pocket, not rushing out to buy the band’s latest album. I didn’t have any of their albums, anyway, so I didn’t need another one to add to my collection.

   The band was in town on July 1, 1978, as part of the World Series of Rock. Just before they hit the stage in front of 83,000 fans a question flashed on and off in five-foot letters on the scoreboard. The question was, “Who’s the Greatest Rock and Roll Band in the World?” There was a roar from the crowd. I didn’t see the flashing letters but I heard the roar and saw the hundreds of red balloons that were released. I watched the balloons from where I was float over the rim of the stadium and out over Lake Erie .

   A small parking lot outside the entrance gates was where I was.  What I was doing in the parking lot was selling t-shirts. A neighbor of mine by the name of Hugo had gotten them silk screened at Daffy Dan’s. He and I spent the day peddling them from an eight-foot folding table at the southeast corner of the stadium. He didn’t have a license that I saw, but I did see a policeman wave to Hugo in a friendly way. I took that to mean we could stay.

   It was an overcast day, hot and sticky. It was the kind of day that looked like rain or maybe a thunderstorm rumbling in from Lake Erie. The stadium was on the south shore of the lake. It was the first place rain would show up.

   The show started just before one o’clock with Peter Tosh, who was from Jamaica, followed by Kansas, who were from Kansas. They sang their big hit from the year before, which was “Dust in the Wind.” As it was, they should have changed the lyrics to “Rain in the Wind” because in the middle of the song it started to drizzle. By the time the Rolling Stones hit the boards at five o’clock it was raining more and had gotten windy. It rained on-and-off throughout their 18-song set. 

   “Fans huddled under blankets or plastic wraps,” wrote Jane Scott, rock critic for the Cleveland Plain Dealer. “But the show was the most exuberant and exciting that the group has brought here. Mick Jagger was jauntier and more active than he has ever been. He skipped onstage in a red jacket, brownish vinyl pants and a red cap. He jogged in place and discoed to the first song. He waved his hands at the audience and doffed his cap. He seemed as carefree as a drunken sailor.”

   Hugo wasn’t jaunty or carefree. He had come prepared for bad weather with yellow slickers for both of us and a tarp to cover our table. We did a brisk business after the show selling dry t-shirts. It was the reason I never got one of them. We sold them out.

   The World Series of Rock was a recurring summer concert series staged at Cleveland’s Municipal Stadium from 1974 to 1980. The shows were organized by Belkin Productions, a local promotion company, and WMMS, a local radio station known as the ‘Home of the Buzzard.’ Some of the bands that came and went were Emerson, Lake & Palmer, Foreigner, Pink Floyd, Journey, Lynyrd Skynyrd, and Fleetwood Mac. None of them drew fewer than 60,000 fans. The all-day shows were notorious for drug use, drunkenness, and rowdiness. Every so often somebody fell or jumped off the upper deck. Most of them survived. All of them were more-or-less seriously hurt. 

   The Cleveland Free Clinic ministered to the hurt. They were funded by Belkin Productions. They conditioned their funding on the Free Clinic’s nondisclosure of the number of staff on duty, the nature of the injuries treated, and the number of concertgoers treated. Don’t upset the apple cart was the word of the day.

   The last World Series of Rock was staged in 1980 featuring Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band. Municipal Stadium officials had gotten sick and tired of the baseball playing field being torn up after every show and city officials had gotten sick and tired of the robberies and violence that had become part and parcel of the events.

   Hugo was a large man, four or five years older than me. He drove a well-kept 1962 Rambler Classic station wagon. His hair was long and tied back in a ponytail. His eyes were the green of sea glass. He wore a white t-shirt, dungarees, and Red Wing boots the day of the show, He was genial with buyers and gruff with everybody else. Not a single person messed with us, not even the outlaw bikers and shifty boys from the ghetto. 

   He handled the money, stuffing the bills into his pockets. He didn’t let anybody pay with loose change. Whenever he had a minute he rolled the bills up, rubber banded them, and pushed them down into a canvas messenger bag. He wore the bag cross-body, with the strap over one shoulder and the bag resting on his opposite hip. If somebody misjudged Hugo and tried to grab the bag, it wasn’t going to be easy getting it off him. It was going to be a mistake.

   The Rolling Stones started their set with “Let It Rock” followed by “Honky Tonk Women” and “When the Whip Comes Down.” I wasn’t a big fan of the band and so didn’t pay much attention. I enjoyed their last two songs, Chuck Berry’s  “Sweet Little Sixteen” and their own “Jumpin’ Jack Flash.”

   “I was born in a crossfire hurricane, and I howled at my ma in the drivin’ rain, but it’s all right now, in fact, it’s a gas, but it’s all right, I’m Jumpin’ Jack Flash.”

    Jack Flash was a 1950s adventure story character featured in the British comic magazine ‘The Beano’. It was hard to make out what the song was about, although it seemed to be something about enduring hardships and overcoming challenges. It didn’t help that hearing the lyrics was a challenge.

   “It was my first and last concert at Municipal Stadium,” said Chris Austin, a suburban Rocky River native. “It was hard to hear the music with all the screaming and yelling in my ears. It was a good line up but it was a shame you couldn’t hear it unless you were anywhere near the front row. All you heard was screaming.”

   Hugo didn’t know the Rolling Stones from the Beach Boys and didn’t care. He didn’t get a kick out of rock ‘n’ roll. He called the music the Beatles made “bug music.” He didn’t know much about rockabilly, the British Invasion, surf rock or Southern rock, hard rock or psychedelic rock, folk rock, blues rock, or funk rock. As far as I knew the only music he listened to was old Zydeco and rhythm and blues from mid-century, give or take a decade-or-two.  His favorite Zydeco musician was Boozoo Chavis, who played the accordion and was usually accompanied  by a fiddle and a washboard. He sang all his songs in French. Hugo didn’t speak a word of French so he paid attention to the rhythm and the feeling instead.

   I knew the Rolling Stones were one of the most popular rock ‘n’ roll bands in the world, but to me they were a money-making machine living the high life in the Top 10. I knew they portrayed themselves as outlaws but I also knew they were multi-millionaires. I had my doubts about millionaires being able to be outlaws. It seemed to be against the laws of nature. The rich steal with a fountain pen. That doesn’t make them desperadoes, at least not until they run out of money. 

   Tours by the Rolling Stones were a license to print money. Their United States tour in 1978 took them to twenty four venues coast to coast in fifty days. Their gross in Cleveland was more than a million dollars, or about five million dollars in today’s money. Mick Jagger was reported to be “jolly and high-spirited” after the show. It is easy enough to imagine how happy the band was with the loot they hauled back to Great Britain, where they could spend it doing whatever wealthy outlaws do.  

   I liked some rock ‘n’ roll bands like the Doors and the Jimi Hendrix Experience, but Jim Morrison was dead and so was Jimi Hendrix. I liked what I heard from Peter Tosh at the World Series of Rock and went  to see him and his seven-man band at the Front Row Theater in Highland Hts. three years later. It was a hike for my car but worth it. I even bought one of their albums.

   Peter Tosh’s songs were about equality and social justice. He sang about oppression and injustice, blending rocksteady with reggae, always keeping a skank beat going, although his rhythm section, Sky Dunbar and Robbie Shakespeare, called it the “rockers rhythm.”

   “Everyone is crying out for peace, yes, none is crying out for justice, I don’t want no peace, I need equal rights and justice.”

   Many of the songs the Rolling Stones sang were about sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll. They portrayed themselves as the rebellious spirit of the age. They claimed to challenge the status quo, even though they were the status quo. At least, that was what the Bank of England thought of them. They addressed some social and political issues, but didn’t make a bad habit of it. Swagger buttered their bread, not warmheartedness.

   It was incidental what I thought about the Rolling Stones. Most of the fans I heard talking about them while walking past our table of rapidly disappearing t-shirts seemed more than happy with what they had gotten for their $12.50. “He is the God of Cool” one of them said to his friend. I assumed he was talking about Mick Jagger. Somebody else said the show was “electrifying” while another said it was “unforgettable.” Two young women, one of them carrying a tote bag with the band’s iconic red lips and tongue logo on it, were talking excitedly. I couldn’t make out what they were saying, although it didn’t matter. Whatever they were saying was plain as day on their faces.

   The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is a five minute walk from where Municipal Stadium once stood until it was torn down in 1997. The museum marked the 50th anniversary of the World Series of Rock with an exhibit at their Library and Archives in 2024. There were guitars used by some of the musicians. There were old posters and mangy ticket stubs. There were many photographs.

   “They put together some good stuff,” said Jules Belkin of Belkin Productions. “It was a group of years that are etched in people’s memories.” He was there when it happened in the 1970s, although he didn’t seem to remember much about the shows. He was too busy backstage staging them to see anything. 

   “It was pioneering in terms of massive concerts like that,”  said Andy Leach, Senior Director of Museum and Archival Collections at the Rock Hall. “I don’t think there will ever be anything quite like that again. From what I’ve heard from friends of mine, you could wander right up to the stage.”

   I didn’t see the exhibit. I have never seen an exhibit at the Roll and Roll Hall of Fame because I have never been there, even though I live fifteen minutes away. I don’t see what museums have to do with rock ‘n’ roll since the music genre is a right now right here thing. The proof is in the pudding, not well-bred and displayed on a wall.

   Jerry Garcia, when the Grateful Dead were inducted, sat out the ceremony. He said he found the concept of a rock ‘n’ roll museum “stupid.” The rest of the band attended the induction ceremony. They brought a full-size cardboard cutout of Jerry Garcia with them. The Sex Pistols were even more uncompromising about refusing the honor. “Next to the Sex Pistols, rock and roll and that Hall of Fame is a piss stain,” they said. “Your museum. Urine in wine. We’re not coming. We’re not your monkeys. If you voted for us, hope you noted your reasons. You’re anonymous as judges but you’re still music industry people. We’re not coming. You’re not paying attention. Outside the shit-stream is a real Sex Pistol.”

   Hugo and I were packing up, which amounted to folding up our table and carrying it more than a mile to where we had parked, when a very drunk young man staggered past us bellowing “Monkey Man, play Monkey Man.” He kept bellowing until he was far away and we couldn’t hear him anymore. I hadn’t heard the song during the show.

   “Monkey Man” was a Rolling Stones song from the late 1960s. The lyrics went, “I’m a flea-bit peanut monkey, all my friends are junkies, that’s not really true, I’m a cold Italian pizza, but I’ve been bit, and I’ve been tossed around, by every she-rat in this town.” Whether the lyrics had ever been immortalized by the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is an open question. The man’s enthusiasm for the song was undeniable.

   We left Municipal Stadium and the World Series of Rock behind. The departing crowd had thinned out. We walked as fast as we could to get to our car before more weather happened, although Hugo stopped at a hot dog cart and sprang for two foot-longs.

   “Ooh, a storm is threatening, my very life today, if I don’t get some shelter, ooh yeah, I’m gonna fade away, gimme shelter.”

   We got to the car, got the table stowed away, and secured the canvas messenger bag fat with cash under the front seat. A clap of thunder and a lightning bolt lit up the darkening sky. We slid into the car and got it running just as it started to rain for real. The car was shelter from the storm. It kept the outdoors where it belonged, which was outdoors.

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

“A police procedural when the Rust Belt was a mean street.” Sam Winchell, Beyond Books

Available on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0F1LM1WF9/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2MYAQAOZIC2U9&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.hTm7BGbiQbSe5ZapFwYPPfcwOpTe-Vdg6VLE4aGyTyk.Z0R-VNBWWEcvKcNaO9LdCOUnNIOOXgvYkRS_FXiXuHk&dib_tag=se&keywords=bomb+city+ed+status&qid=1742136726&sprefix=bomb+city+ed+staskus%2Caps%2C84&sr=8-1

Cleveland, Ohio 1975. The John Scalish Crime Family and Danny Greene’s Irish Mob are at war. Car bombs are the weapon of choice. Two police detectives are assigned to find the bomb makers. It soon gets personal.

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication