By Ed Staskus

   The weekend my mother-in-law Terese and her husband Dick moved out of Reserve Square in downtown Cleveland, they moved out of twin Brutalist inspired apartment towers into a turn of the century house. They had lived in their apartment for more than twenty years, on the 17^th floor facing Lake Erie. During the National Air Shows flying out of Burke Lakefront Airport they sat on their balcony and watched the Blue Angels streak past like roadrunners on the loose.

   There’s nothing like the sound of F/A-18 Hornets roaring a few hundred feet overhead and veering away at the last second from skyscrapers dead ahead. They are jets able to perform high angle of attack tail sitting maneuvers and can fly formation loops dirty, their landing gear down. The sound of silence once they’re gone is deafening.

   Terese and Dick bought an abundance of a house with four bedrooms and three bathrooms on the corner of East 73^rd St. and Chester Ave., in the blighted Hough neighborhood, ten minutes from downtown. It was built in 1910 in the colonial style. When they got done restoring it, they had added an attached garage, put on a new roof, installed new vinyl windows and siding, a new interior staircase, and a new kitchen. It went from ghetto to gentrified as fast as the contractors could make it happen.

   Almost 100% of the people living in Hough in 1999 were black. Only 2% of them were white. Terese was Lithuanian and Dick was Italian. They were part of the 2%. She was from Cleveland. He was from Rochester. Everybody and their uncle tried to talk them out of buying the house. The racial make-up of the neighborhood was the stumbling block of all their opinions. The color barrier, however, was not a stumbling block to Terese.

   Terese was a self-taught chef who owned four restaurants in her time and made herself into one of the city’s top-notch confectioners. The opera star Luciano Pavarotti searched her out and pigged out on her cookies and cakes whenever he was in Cleveland. “That man can eat,” she said. When he was done eating he was good and ready for an aria.

   Her signature creation was a 17-layer cake based on a recipe that Napoleon brought to Lithuania during his ill-fated Russian campaign. Terese, Dick, my wife, brother-in-law, and I helped make them Novembers and Decembers, working out of her kitchen, freezing them, and selling them during the holidays through the Neiman Marcus catalog. I went home most nights needing to shower clouds of flour off me. 

   Terese and Dick bought the house in Hough because she had grown up nearby, when the neighborhood was more white than not, and wanted to go home again. It wasn’t the same, but she saw what she wanted to see. She remembered the neighborhood from her childhood and made the reality fit her memory. She had a streak of magic realism running through her.

   My wife and I lived in Lakewood. I had a red Schwinn mountain bike that I frequently rode in the Rocky River Metropark, on the paved trail, the horse trails, and the single tracks. I rode downtown sometimes, winding my way through Ohio City and across the Hope Memorial Bridge, especially on weekends when all the bankers, lawyers, and city workers were at home. I usually rode the Hope Bridge over the Flats so I could see the Guardians.

   The 6,000-foot-long art deco truss bridge crosses the Cuyahoga River. Four pairs of immense stone statues officially named the “Guardians of Traffic” are sculpted onto opposite-facing pylons at each end. Each of the Guardians holds a different vehicle in its hands, a hay wagon, a covered wagon, a stagecoach, a 1930s-era automobile, and four different kinds of trucks. I always crossed an index and middle finger while going by in hopes of keeping traffic away from me.

   I got it into my head that I wanted to ride around on the east side of town, through Cleveland Heights and Shaker Heights. I thought about East Cleveland but thought better of it. The city had gone to hell in a handbasket. I asked Terese if I could park my car in their driveway while I rode. She said yes but cautioned me to bring my rear-mounted rack into the garage. Law and order was sketchy in her neighborhood. When I had stored the rack away she invited me into the kitchen to snack on  croissants fresh out of the oven.

   She was in the middle of two projects. One was chocolate-covered plastic spoons that turned into a steaming drink when hot water was added. There were rows of the spoons on baking trays. The other project she was working on was perfecting a handy self-serve pan to make the dry, hard-textured Italian cookies called biscotti. I preferred croissants fresh out of the oven.

   Whenever I had ridden downtown with friends and wanted to push ahead into Cedar and Fairfax, what my friends called the black hole, they always turned back. “I don’t want my husband getting killed by some spade,” one of their wives told me. I didn’t bother trying to explain that hot under the collar rednecks driving pick-ups were far more dangerous. It wouldn’t have done any good.

   I rode up the hill to Little Italy and Lake View Cemetery. The riding was twisty throughout the graveyard. I couldn’t see the lake, no matter what. I stopped at the Garfield Monument. President Garfield was shot four months into his term of office and died two months later from infections caused by his medical staff. He was determined to live but stood no chance against his White House doctors. The shooter was hung the next summer. On the gallows he recited a poem he had written called “I Am Going to the Lordy.” He signaled he was ready for his fate by dropping the paper it was written on. The hangman kicked the paper aside and didn’t screw around securing the noose.

   There are thousands of trees and 100,000 graves in the 280-acre cemetery, from nobodies to moguls. One of the most striking grave markers is the life-sized bronze statue called The Angel of Death Victorious but known as Haserot’s Angel. The statue is seated on the gravestone of Francis Haserot, holding an extinguished torch upside-down. The man made his fortune canning foodstuffs and importing tea and coffee. 

   The angel’s wings are outstretched and looks like it is crying black tears. “They formed over time,” Terese told me. “It’s an effect of the aging bronze.” She had taken drawing and painting classes at the Cleveland Institute of Art. I took her word for it.

   I rode Fairmount Blvd. to Shaker Hts. and bicycled around the Nature Center at Shaker Lakes. The green space was created in 1966 to stop the Clark Freeway from going in. Those behind the effort called themselves ‘Freeway Fighters.’ Cuyahoga County Engineer Albert Porter called the Shaker Lakes a “two-bit duck pond” and vowed that the highway would get built come hell or high water. The highway never got built, regardless.

   The twenty acres of the Nature Center has eight mapped natural habitats, four gardens for native plants and insects, and two trails. I rode the trails and tried not to squash any insects. I wheeled out on the 7-mile long Shaker Blvd. to Beachwood and back. Shaker Hts. was built by Oris and Mantis Van Swerington, early 20^thcentury developers. They modeled the suburb and the boulevard after examples of English Garden City planning. They laid rapid transit rail service down the middle of the boulevard. Broad tree-shaded lawns front the mansions on either side of the road. One of my cousins and her husband lived in one of the mansions, but I was crusty from sweat and didn’t stop to visit.

   The best thing about riding up Mayfield Rd. to the cemetery was riding down Mayfield Rd. from the cemetery. It was a long enough stretch that I could go as fast as I wanted, although I feathered the brakes all the way down. I didn’t want to end up laid out next to President Garfield.

   Terese always let me wash up when I got back to her house, made me a cup of coffee, and put something tasty she had baked on a plate. She had never gone to cooking school, instead learning her craft by getting the cooking done. Everything she made was as good as the cookbooks said it was supposed to be. In her time she had been the pastry chef at Max’s Deli in Rocky River and Gallucci’s Italian Foods in Cleveland.

   One weekend I rode my tricked-out Schwinn, which was equipped with front shock absorbers and disc brakes, and went looking for Sledgehammer Hill in Forest Hills Park. The city park is lodged between East Cleveland and Coventry Village. The sloping land rises to a plateau. It was where John D. Rockefeller’s private summer estate was in the 19^th century. He could afford it because his estimated net worth was equivalent to 1.5% of America’s GDP at the time. He was and still is the richest man in American business and economic history.

   There were lakes and bridle trails. There was a racetrack and a golf course. Before John D. Rockefeller died the property went to his son, John, Jr., who transferred one third of it to Cleveland Hts. and two thirds to East Cleveland. His only stipulation was the land be used for recreation and nothing else. The new park opened in 1942. It was about half forest and half meadow. It has been improved over the years, with tennis courts, a swimming pool, picnic areas, as well as basketball courts, football fields, and baseball diamonds.

   When I was growing up we hardly ever went there summers, but went there many times in the winter. We lived at East 128^th St. and St. Clair Ave. and getting there was no trouble. We went ice skating on the man-made lagoon and sledding down Sledgehammer Hill. That wasn’t its official name, if it even had one. It was what all of us called it because of the killer bump near the bottom.

   Skating was loads of fun. There was a boat house on the man-made lagoon. It was where we changed into skates. My father had taught us to skate growing up in Sudbury, Ontario. The mining town is north of the Georgian Bay and south of Wanapitei Lake. He would spray our front yard with a hose in the winter and the water froze hard as concrete in no time. When we moved to Cleveland in the late 1950s we took our skates with us. Neither my brother, sister, nor I were big leaguers on the ice, but we skated like dervishes, living it up as we tried to toe loop and pirouette.

   Sledgehammer Hill was a hill that started at the top of the plateau and ran down a wide treeless slope. When I went looking for it my memory of it was that it was long, fast, and deadly. I didn’t give my memory much credence, though, believing it must have really been short, slow, and safe. You never know when you’re making up the past.

   When I found it, thinking that I would ride down on my Schwinn, I was startled by what I saw. I backed away from the lip of the hill and got off my bike. I walked back to the edge and looked down. It looked even longer and more dangerous than I remembered. I saw the bump near the faraway bottom and remembered hitting it, going airborne, and landing like Godzilla had body-slammed me. Many kids veered away from the bump. None of us ever blamed them. We had all done the same thing one time or another. Only the innocent went over the bump full-bore the first time and lived.

   I don’t know how fast our sleds went, maybe 20 or 25 MPH, but they went fast as hell. We didn’t wear helmets. We wore knit caps. You were considered a sissy if you wore earmuffs. I started wearing earmuffs after one icy winter weekend my ears froze and almost fell off. Insults were easier to bear than frostbite.

   Our parents always went skating with us or watched from a bench, in case the ice started to  crack, but when we went sledding, they dropped us off and went on their way. My sister rarely sledded, my brother sometimes did, but I couldn’t get enough of it. We rode Speedaways, Yankee Clippers, and Flexible Flyers. Only the foolhardy among us rode Sno Wing Blazons. They were too fast for Sledgehammer Hill. Most of us wanted to go as fast as possible but not necessarily break our necks. We sledded until it started to get dark and our parents came back to pick us up. 

   I didn’t take a chance going down the hill on my Schwinn. I rode away from Sledgehammer Hill, roaming around the park plateau instead, taking in the highlights of the past. I rode to the north end of the hill where John D. Rockefeller’s mansion had stood. It burned to the ground under unexplained circumstances in 1917.

   It was early in the evening by the time I pedaled back to Terese’s house. After I told her about the hill she stepped into the middle of her kitchen, pretending to be standing on a snowboard, balancing with her arms stretched out, and racing to the bottom. 

   She had performed professionally as a ballet dancer when she was younger and taught the fine points of footwork to Cleveland’s Lithuanian folk dancing groups. I applauded her performance when she was done, but if she had tried that stunt on Sledgehammer Hill, professional dancer or not, she would have gone flying headfirst when she hit the killer bump, and there wouldn’t have been enough croissants in her kitchen to break her fall.

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

   By Ed Staskus

   I didn’t watch much TV growing up because we didn’t have a TV. It wasn’t until a couple of years after we moved from Sudbury, Ontario to Cleveland, Ohio that my parents bought a used 1955 Philco Custom 400. It was a 21-inch model in a cabinet of white oak with a finger-tip tuning system. It had a Double Gated Automatic Picture Control tuner that never worked during sketchy weather of any kind, whether it was drizzling or thunder storming.

   At first, I wasn’t impressed with what I saw. The shows were the likes of “McHale’s Navy,” “Car 54, Where Are You,” and “My Three Sons.” I had no use for “Hazel” and “I Love Lucy” drove me nuts. Lucy was a fruit loop and everybody hollered and played pratfalls like there was no tomorrow. I liked watching baseball and football games, although baseball games went on forever and football games were only broadcast on Sundays. The Cleveland Browns were a powerhouse. Everybody citywide stayed patriotically stuck to the tube when they were playing.

   Cartoons were fun and westerns were my favorite, especially “Maverick,” “Bart Masterson,” and “Have Gun – Will Travel.” My parents enjoyed “Bonanza” and watched it every Sunday night which meant my sister, brother, and I watched it every Sunday night. I didn’t care for it, the Cartwright’s being irredeemable do-gooders, but I couldn’t and didn’t say anything to my parents about my point of view. They were always telling me to be a good boy.

   My favorite was “Route 66.” It was about two young men driving around the country in a Chevy Corvette convertible. Besides the adventures, what I liked about the show was that every episode was shot on location in a new state. It was my kind of geography.  I would have given my tooth fairy money to be them. I didn’t mind being good, but I didn’t want to be too good.

   I had been to the neighborhood Shaw-Hayden Theater many times and seen plenty of space adventure and monster movies. My friends and I always sat in the front row. Movies were the real deal and TV was lame compared to the big screen. Movies were stupendous while TV was furniture. At about the same time we were watching Godzilla movies on the big screen the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission gave a speech to the National Association of Broadcasters. After praising the professionals in the room, he said that television should uphold the public interest. Then he said TV was a “vast wasteland.” He didn’t stop there. “When television is bad, nothing is worse.” He was a starry eyed idealist who didn’t pay attention to the commercials.

   One summer when I started watching “Queen for a Day” I watched it every day. It didn’t matter that my friends were riding bikes, playing ball, and messing around outside. I watched it laying on my stomach on the floor a few feet from the TV. I only watched it for three or four weeks, although it was more than enough to make me sweat bullets. When I stopped watching it, I went cold turkey and never watched it again. I hadn’t grown much older watching the sob show, but I seemed to be growing up way too fast on the tracks of melodrama and avarice.

   The show was originally a local affair on radio in Los Angeles but became popular enough that NBC picked it up and started broadcasting it nationally on television. The broadcast was live from the Moulin Rouge theater restaurant in Hollywood. Its ratings got so high that the network increased its running time from 30 to 45 minutes so they could sell more commercials. They were raking in $4,000 a minute, a premium price nobody else was getting. Sponsorships poured in. Every single prize came from sponsors. Models in faux medieval outfits plugged the products. They looked more slutty than maidenly. They had to put up with the sad sack-looking host saying things like, “Let’s give Mary Ann a big hand for finally doing something right.” Pre-recorded commercials ran between segments. Naming all the sponsors at the end of the show took more than five minutes.

   The show went to ABC from 1960 to 1964 until it finally folded. The television writer Mark Evanier has called it “one of the ghastliest programs ever produced, tasteless, demeaning to women, demeaning to anyone who watched it, cheap, insulting, and utterly degrading to the human spirit.” After that nobody bothered asking him what he really thought.

   The idea behind the show was simple as dog eat dog. “Queen for a Day” was about four women sharing their stories of unhappiness and tribulation in front of an all-female audience. There was always a box of Kleenex on the table behind which the women sat. jack Bailey was the host. He was a pencil mustached man who always looked like he needed another drink. The stories were about dead husbands and sons crippled with polio. One woman wanted to win so she could repair the bullet holes in her bedroom walls where her husband had committed suicide. He missed several times before getting it right. Determined widows with healthcare problems were a staple. If they had a small dying child, to boot, they were sure to win. 

   “I had two handicapped sons,” one woman said. “I lost them, and then I took care of an elderly lady in a wheelchair. She passed away, along with my mother and my father, and then my husband passed away. I feel that I would like to have a vacation.” She got her vacation. Another woman related the tale of her legally blind uncle and cousins. They were a poor farm family in Kansas. Everybody in the family had serious vision troubles. She came in second place and so none of her relations got new eyeballs.

   “On the show when Jack Bailey introduced my mother, he made a big deal about her being a long-lost cousin because her last name was Bailey,” one woman’s daughter recalled. “Since she was a farm girl, he asked her if she milked cows, and she demonstrated on his fingers. She became the queen that day. My uncle was given everything my mother asked for and more. He got a complete piano tuning tool set and a scholarship to a piano tuning school in Seattle. My mom got a full set of living room furniture and an Amana freezer that lasted for twenty-five years.”

   “My husband died,” one contestant explained. “Then my children and I were evicted and were out in the cold with nowhere to turn.” The show was the forerunner of all the reality TV shows that came after it. “Well, ha, ha, ha!” Jack Bailey laughed like he was at a circus. “Today is your lucky day, getting to tell your story here and having the chance at being chosen QUEEN FOR A DAY!” Sometimes, unable to help himself, he guffawed at the sad stories and threw out sarcastic comments, immediately explaining that he was just kidding.

   After the ladies finished, the audience applauded for the woman they wanted to see become “Queen for a Day.” The winner was determined by a decibel-reading Applause Meter, what I called the Thing-O-Meter. I didn’t always agree with the contraption, but what did I know. The winner was fitted with a jeweled crown and robed in a sable-trimmed robe. She got money, appliances, clothes, and vacations, among other things.

   “I always thought losing was the worst,” said Bill Costello, who like me found himself glued to the boob tube. “Then you find out your life sucks, but not enough.”

   Not just anyone was picked to be on the show. They had to somehow appeal to the  producers before they ever got to a live audience and the tens of millions watching at home. One woman explained she wanted to be on the show because “it would help me to regain my identity, which I seem to have lost somewhere between the maternity ward and the washing machine.” The best approach was delivering enough pathos and bawling to turn the trick. One woman said she would give her right arm to be on the show.

   My mother spotted me on the living room floor one day staring up at the TV, engrossed in the black and white pathos. She put her dish towel away and sat down in a sofa chair behind me. When the day’s episode was over, she shut the TV off. “Don’t watch that show anymore,” she said. She had never forbidden me to watch anything before. I knew there was something wrong with the show but couldn’t put my finger on it. It held me in its sordid grip. The women told fantastic stories, whoever got the most applause for her miserable tale won, got crowned, and walked away with prizes up the wazoo. What could be better?

   One winner said her husband was killed in a car crash, the family ended up poor as church mice, their savings exhausted, and needed help bad. “My mother was 28, pregnant, my sister was 8, and I was 5,” her daughter remembered years later. “My father promised my sister that if she got good grades, he would buy her a pony. She did but he died before he could fill his promise. My mother won two bedroom sets, a living room set, a dining room set complete with dishes for a service for eight, a set of silver ware, a cook-set, a built in mixer, a hot water heater, a 7-piece patio set, a complete set of Tupperware, twelve complete outfits that included dress, matching shoes and handbags, twelve pairs of stockings, a complete set of Sarah Coventry jewelry, a complete set of rhinestone jewelry, a diamond encrusted watch, a four piece matching mother-daughter outfit, a swimsuit, a check for $1,000, and a Shetland pony.” 

   When she came up for air she checked the time on the jewel-encrusted watch.

   Jack Bailey had a trademark signoff, which was, “Make every woman a queen, for every single day.” He never said what the losers got, although I always assumed they got nothing. Once my mother came to grips with the show, she disliked it instantly. My parents were World War Two refugees from Lithuania and didn’t believe a word about getting something for nothing.

   “I was babysitting my aunt’s four children in 1944 when the Russians came,” my mother said. “We ran away on a cart pulled by a horse with a cow tied to the back. On our way through East Prussia, we had to sell the cow for food. There was no milk for the baby. We slept under the cart every night and every night either the Germans or Russians bombed us. After the war I lived in Nuremberg in one room with three other women and worked at the Army Hospital. When I went to Canada where I had gotten a visa and a job, the job was as a nanny for a family of thirteen. When your father joined me the next year, he had no money and went to work in a cement factory the next day. When we got married, we still had no money, but we had the three of you and bought a small house. It’s shameful to go on a TV show, telling all the world your troubles for prizes.”

   She hadn’t seen her parents, uncles, aunts, brothers, sisters, and cousins for almost twenty years. The Iron Curtain was locked up tight. My parents never complained about it. They both went to work weekdays and on weekends worked around the house when they weren’t doing something at the church or with the Boy Scouts. They didn’t help us with our homework or drive us to the library. We did our own homework and walked to the library.

   She wasn’t telling me anything about “Queen for a Day” I didn’t already know, although I couldn’t if my life depended on it have put it into words. I knew I didn’t like the clapping like crazy for the most miserable story of the day. “Sure, the show was vulgar and sleazy and filled with bathos and bad taste,” the show’s producer Howard Blake said after the program’s nine-year run ended. “That was why it was so successful. It was exactly what the public wanted.”

   He didn’t stop there. He knew it was a trashy show that played on people’s misery, while those same people played out their tearjerkers to cash in on the American Dream. “Everybody was on the make, NBC and later ABC, the producers, the sponsors, and the suppliers of gifts. And how about all the down-on-their-luck women who we used to further our money-grubbing ends? Weren’t they all on the make? Weren’t they willing to wash their dirty linen on coast-to-coast TV for a chance at big money, for a chance to ride in our chauffeured Cadillac, for the free tour of Disneyland and the Hollywood nightclubs? What about one of the most common wishes they turned in? ‘I’d like to pay back my mother for all the wonderful things she’s done for me.’ The women who made that wish didn’t want to pay back their mothers at all. They wanted us to do that.”

   We never clapped and cheered when anybody in our grade school class at St. George’s Catholic School had a bad day. None of us clapped and cheered when a nun slapped one of us and made him or her stand in the hall. Nobody clapped and cheered when somebody was a step slow getting to the CTS streetcar taking us home. We yelled and slapped on the windows for the driver to stop and pick the kid up. None of us wanted to be finks for a day, or any other day.

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.

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