By Ed Staskus

    I was taking a walk around the perimeter of Madison Park across the street from the Lake Erie Screw Building when my Nokia rang. I was on my lunch break. It was practically the first call on my first cell phone. One of the guys in the warehouse called it a candy bar phone because it looked like a candy bar. All the top salesmen had  gotten a cell phone earlier in the year. I wasn’t one of them. I wasn’t especially good at slapping backs and kissing babies.

   My brother, Rick, was the top salesman at Light Bulb Supply. Kevin and John were officially the barrow boys, but they were that by reason of being brothers of the woman who married the man who owned the company. It pays to be who you know.

   Rick was the moneymaker because he would do or say anything to make a sale. We sold everything related to light bulbs, from illumination to disinfection, from grow lights to tanning bulbs. Sales of tanning bulbs were going through the roof. Rick parked himself on that roof. He refused to take any calls that weren’t for tanning bulbs. When they came in he jumped on them like a hophead.

   I was taking a walk partly because I always did when the weather allowed and partly because I needed to cool off. Rick had told a tanning bulb customer who had come into our Will Call, a customer I had developed by phone, who was placing a seven thousand dollar order, that he was me. He wrote up the order and got the commission. The owner of the company didn’t care whose name was on the order so long as the check was made out to Light Bulb Supply.

   “I didn’t know he was yours,” Rick said.

   “Whatever you say.”

   I was rounding the swimming pool at Madison Park, on my way back to the Screw Building, when my new cell phone rang. I sat down on the lip of a water slide and answered the call. It was my sister Rita. She was calling from Born to Travel, the travel agency she worked at.

   “Can you drive dad and me to the airport tomorrow?”

   “Sure, I can arrange that.”

   “Thanks so much.” 

   “Where are you going?”

   “Lithuania.”

   “Who is he visiting this time?”

   “He’s not, he’s going to buy a baby.”

   “He’s buying a baby?”

   “Not exactly, although he is going there to arrange for one.”

   “Mom and dad are a little old for a baby.” My mother was nearly seventy years old while my father was definitely in his early seventies.

   “It’s not for them.”

   “Is this like the head of Lenin that dad got for Russell Bundy?”

   “Kind of, but it’s not for him, it’s for his daughter.”

   Russell Bundy was a businessman from Urbana in southern Ohio. He operated a large manufacturing business, which was Bundy Baking Solutions. He had seven children. One of them, Beth, had married, but when she and her husband Joe decided to have a child, discovered they couldn’t. No matter what they tried they couldn’t negotiate a bun into the oven.

   Beth and Joe had tried finding a newborn to adopt in the United States, but it had proven to be difficult. There was a low supply of them and a high number of prospective parents. There was a long waiting list. They thought it might be easier to accomplish in Eastern Europe. Russell Bundy hired my father to smooth the way.

   Russell Bundy, my father, and my mother had made an exploratory visit to Lithuania a month earlier. My mother took an extra suitcase stuffed with jeans and cartons of cigarettes for our relatives. Russell Bundy took an extra suitcase full of candy. He passed the candy out at the orphanages they visited. The kids liked the candy, but he wasn’t able to strike a deal. My father found someone who could make it happen. He had been born and bred in Lithuania and knew his way around.

   “Dad calls her the Baby Middleman.”

   “l let you know when I have baby for you,” she told Russell Bundy.

   “How long will it take?”

   “Not long, you will see.”

   Russell Bundy flew back to his corner office in Urbana. My parents flew back to Cleveland.  My father was tasked with seeing the business through. It didn’t take long. “I have baby for you, born yesterday,” the Baby Middleman told my father three weeks later. “You must come right away.”

   The baby cost twenty one thousand dollars. It amounted to eighty four thousand litai. The litas was Lithuania’s currency. The average annual wage in Lithuania was three thousand litai. The baby was costing twenty eight times the average annual wage in Lithuania. Russell Bundy wired the money. 

   I drove Rita and my father to Hopkins International Airport. They flew off without incident. I went back to selling light bulbs. A month later Rita and I were at our parent’s house having dinner. My mother had made koldunai, which are Lithuanian dumplings smothered in bits of bacon and spoonfuls of sour cream. They were what we had grown up on.

   “Did you get a baby for Bundy?” I asked.

   “It wasn’t easy, but we got her,” Rita said.

   “What wasn’t easy about it?”

   “Dad and I flew to Vilnius and we went straight to the hospital. Beth and Joe were coming in a few days so we wanted to get everything arranged. The hospital was Soviet style, shabby and depressing. We parked in the back.”  A group of male nurses were smoking Balomorkanals outside the door. The cheap tobacco was at one end of the cigarette and at the other end was a hollow cardboard tube through which to suck the smoke. 

   “They looked me up and down. I remember thinking, I’m just going to act cool. We asked for the doctor we were supposed to see. She was small, gray haired, with lots of wrinkles. She told us the mother had given birth one day and slipped out of the hospital the next day. She left the baby behind. Dad and she talked some more and then she asked me why I hadn’t made a baby for our American friends.”

   “That’s a strange question to ask a total stranger.”

     “I didn’t know what to say, so I said, I’m only along for the ride. Dad asked to see the baby but the doctor said no.  I thought, uh-oh, there is no baby. It was tense but she finally brought it. She was wrapped up like a mummy. Only her little head was sticking out. The doctor wouldn’t let us hold her. Maybe she thought we were going to run away with her. Then she started telling dad that another couple from Denmark wanted the baby and they were willing to pay extra. They had volunteered to buy some equipment for the hospital. Dad didn’t like that. He said, wait a minute, but she wouldn’t let it go.”  

   “How much do you want?” my father finally asked. Before he retired he had been a certified public accountant. He knew when to get down to brass tacks.

   “She wouldn’t say it out loud, no matter how many times he asked her, so dad pushed a notepad towards her.”

   “Why don’t you write down how much this equipment is going to cost,” he said.

   “She wrote it down, dad looked at it, stood up, and slammed the notepad down on the table. No, that’s not right! We agreed on a price. We paid the price. We’re not paying any more. He was so angry.”

   They were staying at the Sarunas Hotel in downtown Vilnius. The recently opened hotel was launched in 1992 by the famous Lithuanian basketball player Šarūnas Marčiulionis. It was where many foreign businessmen stayed when doing business in post-independence Lithuania. The country was busy transitioning to capitalism. 

   “When we got to our room dad called the Baby Middleman but she didn’t answer her phone. He called  over and over, pacing back and forth. He wore out the carpeting. He finally reached her late at night and told her what had happened.”

   The money Russel Bundy had wired had been wired to her. She was supposed to pay the hospital when the baby was delivered to Beth and Joe. My father reminded her that they had an agreement and that he had done his part. It was up to her to do her part.

   “Meet me at ten o’clock tomorrow morning at Canteen Broth,” she said. “It’s a café. Come alone.”

   The next morning, one of our uncles at the wheel of his car, his son beside him, and my father and Rita in the back seat, were sitting squeezed together in the small car at the curb of Canteen Broth. It opened at ten o‘clock.

   “The lady walked up to our car and dad rolled his window down. She looked at us one at a time. She pointed to dad and said ‘Just you.’ They went inside. They were inside so long I fell asleep. When they came out they were smiling. When they shook hands I thought, good, it’s done.”

   “Was it done?” 

   “Yes, they got the baby, no problem. Dad didn’t tell me how it got accomplished.” Our father often kept things close to the vest.

   The next day, while Beth, Joe, and my father took care of the red tape, Rita went for a long walk around Vilnius. It was a cloudless day, warm and sunny. In the summer the sun sets at around ten o’clock. In the winter the sun sets at around four o’clock. It was summer.

   “Our uncle said to call him if I needed a ride back to the hotel. I walked all around the Old Town.” She went to see the Gediminas Castle Tower and the Gates of Dawn. The gate is one of nine leading into the city. It features an icon of the Virgin Mary and is a major site of Catholic pilgrimages to this day. Gates of Dawn is also the name of a classic Pink Floyd album. Fans of Pink Floyd make their own idiosyncratic pilgrimages.

   Rita asked two men standing on a street corner where the Church of Sts. Peter and Paul was. “One of them said it was that way. He turned to point that way and lost his balance. He reeked of vodka.” It was the middle of the afternoon. “He fell over and passed out. His friend stood there smiling and looking down at him.”

   She took a break and sat in the silence of the airy and bright nave. It was a classic Baroque church. Lithuanians were the last Europeans to convert from paganism to Christianity. It happened in the late 14rth century. Grand Duke Jogaila ordered it done for dynastic reasons. Nobody believed in the powers of the White Christ, at least not then. Monks and priests eventually put the fear of God in them. The church was built in the 17^th century to commemorate a victory over the Russians and their expulsion from Vilnius. There were two thousand stucco figures inside the church. They glowed in the light pouring in through the high windows. None of them ever said anything about anything.

   “When I went to call our uncle I didn’t have any money for a pay phone. All I had was my credit card. I stopped at a shop. It was called Kavine.” The word means coffee in the native tongue. “I asked if I could use their phone, speaking in Lithuanian. The man behind the counter was reading a newspaper. He didn’t even look up when he said no. I went to another place, same thing, except this time the woman there said they didn’t have a phone, even though I could see a phone behind her. When I stopped into a third place I spoke English instead of Lithuanian. The man there said, ‘Anything you need.’ I was offered complimentary coffee and a pastry while I waited for the phone to become available.”

   Beth bought two pairs of footsie pajamas and a hat for the baby. Joe packed for their return trip. Rita packed her clothes and some souvenirs. They drove to Vilnius Airport. The terminal dated to the 1950s, built in a drab Stalinist style. There was already talk that it was a symbol of the past and had to be updated, the sooner the better.

   “Dad stayed in Lithuania for a few days while I flew back with Beth and Joe.” They flew from Vilnius to Helsinki to New York City to Cleveland. “Crossing the Atlantic I happened to  be in first class with the baby. Beth and Joe were just behind me in coach. I could hear them. They were arguing about what was packed in their suitcases. It was one thing or another the whole flight. I found out later they argued all the time.”

   “What did they name the baby?” I asked, putting my fork and knife down and pushing my empty plate away. I dabbed a spot of sour cream from the corner of my mouth.

   “Hannah.”

   The name means grace in Hebrew and bliss in Arabic. It doesn’t mean anything in the Lithuanian language.

   “That’s s fine name,” I said.

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.”

“Made in Cleveland” by Ed Staskus

Coming of age in the rough and tumble of the 1960s and 1970s. A collection of street level short stories set in Cleveland, Ohio.

Available on Amazon:

A Crying of Lot 49 Production

By Ed Staskus

   It was the morning of the autumnal equinox, day and night balanced. It was the end of summer. The Azores anticyclone would be coming back soon heralding an Indian summer, but for now the outdoors was wet and brisk. It was once thought otherworldly things happened on the equinox, things like Gediminas, the Grand Duke of Lithuania, dreaming about an iron wolf foretelling the building of Vilnius. Since then residents of the capital celebrated the equinox and Duke Gediminas Day, the birthday of Vilnius, on the last weekend of the month. On Sunday night, at the end of the festivities, a straw billy goat, a symbol of fruitfulness, was ceremonially burnt.

   It was the first anniversary of his wife’s death and Ignas Petrauskas had gotten up early, ordered flowers, eaten breakfast, and drank a cup of strong coffee while skimming through the national newspaper, Echo of Lithuania. When he was done with his second cup he would go to the Rasos Cemetery and lay the flowers at his wife’s grave. The coffee was good. The newspaper was filled with bad news. He put it aside. He looked out the window at the Vilnia River.

   He lived in Uzupis on the east side of the river across from the Old Town of Vilnius. It was a small apartment on the riverbank, but modern, unlike most of the neighborhood, which was the worse for wear, although it was slowly being gentrified. In the meantime it was filled with bohemians and artists from the nearby Vilnius Academy of the Arts. A statue of the American musician Frank Zappa was around the corner, erected by local artists proclaiming the spirit of the place. They called their place the Republic of Uzupis.

   There was a plaque on nearby Paupio St. that read, “Everyone has the right to hot water, heating in winter, and a tiled roof. A cat is not obliged to love its owner, but must help in time of need. Everyone has the right to be unique.”

   Most of the inhabitants of Uzupis, which meant “beyond the river”, lived there because the rent was dirt cheap. Some squatted free of charge anywhere a landlord was non-existent. Ignas wasn’t a bohemian or an artist. He was a police detective assigned to the General Prosecutor’s Office. 

   He wasn’t bothered by the idiosyncrasies or rough and tumble of Uzupis  He had served as a military policeman with the Komendantskaya Sluzhba in Afghanistan in the mid-1980s during the Red Army occupation of the Central Asian country. A yellow letter “K” on a red patch worn on his right sleeve made sure everybody knew what his job was. He had not been able to settle the question during his two-year tour of duty of who was worse, the Mujahadeen or the Soviet Armed Forces. He finally resolved the question by cursing the both of them.

   “Velniai griebtu,” is what he said. He meant “May devils grab you.”

   He got married soon after returning to Lithuania, to Birute, a girl from his hometown of Smiltyne on the northern tip of the Curonian Spit. When the Russians were dislodged after more than four decades of occupation, and a new Law on Police was enacted in December 1990, providing a legal basis for a Lithuanian police force, they moved to Vilnius. It was at the other end of the country from Smiltyne. He joined the force, making his way up the ladder to the Criminal Police. He briefly worked with the Organized Crime Bureau before being assigned to the General Prosecutor’s Office..

   Ignas bought his new apartment after Birute’s death. He sold their house. It had become lonely, full of nothing but memories. No matter how good the memory it was like the shard of a broken mirror. His marriage to Birute had been good. They understood each other. He liked the way she smelled. They liked getting into bed together at night and getting up together in the morning. They went for walks on summer weekends to Story Park where there were many wooden sculptures based on folklore and Hill Park where they picnicked at the Hill of Three Crosses. They made each other laugh. Now she was gone forever.

   He visited her grave once a month. Rasos Cemetery was the oldest graveyard inside the city limits of Vilnius, going back to 1801, when the first person, Jonas Muller, the Burgomaster of the city, was buried there. New burials were restricted to family graves, but since one of Birute’s grandfathers was buried there near Jonas Basanavicius, editor of the first Lithuanian-language newspaper and one of the signers of the Act of Independence in 1918, Ignas had been allowed to bury his wife there.

   Somebody had swerved onto the sidewalk outside their house late one night when Birute was walking home and struck her. It was a hit-and-run. She might have lived if she had been found sooner and treated. She died of internal bleeding. The car was found a week later on the grounds of the abandoned ELFA Electro Technics factory. It had been reported stolen two weeks before, by a professor in the Centre of Oriental Studies at Vilnius University. He had been in Paris the night of the hit-and-run. There were no fingerprints of any kind on the steering wheel and no fingerprints except those of the owner anywhere else. 

   A blonde hair was found on the driver’s seat head restraint. DNA testing wasn’t available in Lithuania. The hair was sent to Interpol in Lyon, France, which had begun standardizing DNA techniques in the early 1990s. “We’ve been quietly sending saliva samples to them since then,” the chief of the Organized Crime Bureau told Ignas. Interpol came up with a match, but the match didn’t make sense.

   “The DNA matches Boris Dekanidze, even though the analysis shows it came from a female’s head.”

   “How can that be? He’s been dead since 1995.”

   Ignas had worked on the case that led to the gangster Boris Dekanidze’s arrest and execution. He had been the one on the team who handcuffed the gangster and delivered him up for interrogation..

   “Could it be somebody from his family?”

   “If it’s a woman’s hair it couldn’t have been his father. He’s as corrupt as all that gold he wears, but he’s a gray beard, and besides, I can’t see him doing anything like that himself. It couldn’t have been a sibling, there were none, and he was too much of a playboy to ever have had children. Even if there was a sibling, or a child, the DNA match wouldn’t  be one hundred percent. It would be more like fifty percent.”

   Birute’s death eventually became a cold case, although it never became that in Ignas’s mind. There will be blood is what stayed on his mind.

   He always walked to the cemetery. It was less than a half hour from his apartment. He put on a pair of boots and a leather coat. It was a utility coat with snap closures and front flap pockets. He positioned a hat with a downwards-sloping brim on his head. As soon as he stepped out the door, however, it started raining harder. It was much windier than he thought it would be. Heavy rain drops drummed on the crown of his hat. He walked across the bridge to the Old Town and caught the No. 89 bus to the cemetery.

   Rasos Cemetery was located on two hills with a valley separating the hills. Birute was buried on one of the hills. He took a footpath he knew by heart. By the time he got to Birute’s grave the wind had died down. He pulled his flowers out of the plastic grocery bag he had brought them in. They were rues with bright yellow cup-shaped blooms, tied together with a black ribbon. The flowers were believed to ward off evil. He lay them down.

   Ignas stood in front of the headstone quietly for ten minutes. He didn’t notice that it had stopped raining. When he was ready to leave he stepped up to the headstone and laid his hand on top of it. He had often rested a hand on Birute’s thigh when they were together on the sofa in their living room, she sewing and he reading. The memory made him feel empty as an echo. 

   He took the same footpath leaving Rasos Cemetery, but since the bad weather had taken a break he walked back to Uzupis instead of taking the bus. He put his hat, boots, and leather coat away. He mixed a drink of vodka. honey, and cinnamon in a water glass to warm himself up. He sat down. Heavy clouds shortened the afternoon. He watched the rain coming back through the glass door leading to the balcony. He made another drink. It got dark the minute sunset happened and he got sleepy. He fell asleep.

   Ignas woke up to the sound of the telephone ringing. He was surprised it hadn’t stopped ringing by the time he got to it. It was past nine o’clock. He lifted the receiver, wiping away a soggy spot from the corner of his mouth.

   “Labas,” he said.

   “Labas,” the voice of his boss in the General Prosecutor’s Office said.

   “How is everything?”

   “As good as can be expected.”

   “Is something going on?”

   “Yes, I need you to go to Siauliai.”

   “What’s happened?”

   “An American has been found dead.”

   “That’s not good.”

   “No, it is not. An agreement on investment with the United States has just been arrived at and now this. Their embassy has been informed about the death, but we are leading the investigation.”

   “What about the Criminal Police?”

   “They are deferring to us on this one. They suggested you.”

   “Why me?”

   “You have experience with criminal gangs and the Russians.”

   “Are they involved?”

   “Siauliai seems to think they might be, one of their dirty tricks, although I don’t know. It might be they’re playing pin the tail on the donkey.  I don’t put it past the Russians, but they’ve got their own problems right now, what with Chechnya and the ruble going downhill. The whole country is a petrol station run by gangsters pretending to be a nation.”

   Ignas laughed to himself. He thought that without their oil and natural gas they would be back in the Middle Ages.

   “Was it murder?”

   “I  can’t say for sure, but, yes, it seems so. The local police aren’t saying much, although they did pass on it was the third such death in the last week-or-so. The other two were residents.”

   “Are they saying the deaths were similar?”

   “Yes.”

   “How soon do you need me there?”

   “As soon as possible, Go as soon as there’s light.”

   Siauliai was two hundred-some kilometers from Vilnius, which meant between two and three hours of driving, as long as the road hadn’t caved in somewhere along the way. Sunrise was at about seven o’clock. If he was on the way by then he would be in Siauliai no later than ten in the morning.

   “Am I going alone?”

   “For now, yes. If you need help, call me, I’ll send a second man.”

   “All right.”

   After Ignas’s boss hung up he went to the bathroom, washed his hands and face, brushed his teeth, and slipped into a pair of pajamas. He got into bed. He lay there unable to fall asleep. He had spent many sleepless nights since Birute’s death. He missed the smell of her and the sound of her breathing. He missed the feel of her pressed up against him. He missed her heartbeat. He felt lonely in the dark. He got up and sat on the side of the bed. 

   He took thirty steady breaths and then another thirty. It was something he had learned to do. He wasn’t going to be any good in the morning if he didn’t get some sleep. There was a framed photograph of Birute on the dresser. He got it and put it face up on the other pillow. He got back under the covers and soon fell asleep.

   The rain stopped sometime before dawn. On the heels of the rain the rest of the cold front blew in from the Baltic Sea. The wind got gusty. It snapped tree branches. When the alarm clock went off Ignas turned it off. He got up, shaved, brushed his teeth again, and put together his two travel bags, one of them toiletries and clothes and the other one his investigation kit. The tools in the kit included measuring tape, a flashlight, magnifying glass, notebooks and pens, a recorder, binoculars, a fingerprint kit with lift tape, tweezers, forceps, glass vials, a scalpel, chalk, evidence bags, and a 35mm camera loaded with color print film.

   He checked his Browning Mark III. It was a 9mm pistol with a thirteen round magazine. He packed an extra magazine. When he was working he carried the black pistol in a hip holster. He attached the holster to his belt. He turned off all the lights and locked the door of his apartment. When he got into his Audi five-door wagon he saw he needed fuel. There was a Statoil station two or three minutes away. He drove to it and filled up with diesel. 

   He pulled over to the side and unfolded a road map. The A2 would take him to Panevezys. From there he would take the A9 to Siauliai. He would stop along the way for coffee. He had neglected to bring a hat. He would have to buy a new one. In Scotland they say “It’s Baltic out there” whenever there is bad weather.  He didn’t think the weather was going to get any better in the Baltics anytime soon.

Excerpted from the book A Murder of Crows.

“Made in Cleveland” by Ed Staskus

Coming of age in the rough and tumble of the 1960s and 1970s.

“A collection of plugged in street level short stories blended with the historical times, set in Cleveland, Ohio.” Sam Winchell, Beyond Books

Available on Amazon:

A Crying of Lot 49 Production

By Ed Staskus

   “Scouting is a man’s job cut down to a boy’s size.”  Robert Baden-Powell

   My father was born on a family farm outside Siauliai in 1924, six years after Lithuania’s Declaration of Independence and two years before the start of what is known as the Smetonic Era. The small city, the capital of northern Lithuania, is home to the Hill of Crosses, a spiritual statement and folk-art site of about one hundred thousand Christian crosses.

   Siauliai goes back to 1236 to the Battle of Saule against the Teutonic Knights. The merciless war between the Teutonic Order and Lithuania was one of the longest in the history of Europe. The first Cristian church was built in 1445. Until then Lithuanians were steadfast pagans. They believed Hell was a fine place to end up, if it came to that, since Lithuania was cold, and Hell was warm.

   In the 19^th century Jews were encouraged to go to Lithuania for its entrée and their prosperity. The city was majority Jewish by 1910. Šiauliai was famous for its leather industry. The biggest leather factory in the Russian Empire was there. A battleground during both World Wars, it saw tens of thousands run for their lives during the wars, never to come back.

   My grandfather was a native and a former officer in the Czarist Army. My grandmother was Russian and a former schoolteacher. They met when he was stationed far southeast of Moscow. “In those days drunks went into the navy and dimwits into the infantry,” he said. He thanked God every day he had been impressed as an officer by Lithuania’s overlords.

   Vytas Staskevicius was a Boy Scout early on. Since his father was the police chief of their province, and since Antanas Smetona, the President of the country, was the Chief Scout, and since there were privileges provided to scout troops in schools by the Ministry of Education, Antanas Staskevicius, back from the Russian badlands, involved his son in scouting as soon as he grew to be school age.

   I found myself a Boy Scout in the early 1960s in Troop 311, the Cleveland, Ohio troop my father became Scoutmaster of. We wore official Boy Scouts of America neckerchiefs and carried unofficial knives in scabbards on our belts. We hiked trails through woods, although most of us were hapless with a compass, instead relying on ingenuity, stamina, and dumb luck to find our way.

   Boy Scouts got their start in 1907 when a British Army officer gathered up twenty boys and took them camping, exploring, and pioneering on an island off England’s southern coast. The next year the army officer, Robert Baden-Powell, wrote “Scouting for Boys.” That same year more than ten thousand Boy Scouts attended a rally at the Crystal Palace in London.

   The first scout patrol of ten boys and two girls in Lithuania was organized in 1918. The next year there were two patrols, one for boys and another for girls. During the inter-war years more than 60,000 boys and girls participated in scouting, making it one of the most popular activities among youth culture at that time. In 1939, just before the start of World War Two, there were 22,000 Lithuanian scouts, or almost one percent of the country’s population.

   Four out of five Lithuanians were farmers or lived in the country and camping was everyone’s favorite part of scouting. It’s what probably accounts for my father’s fondness for the outdoors and all the scout camps he was later Scoutmaster at. They weren’t all sun-kissed and starlit summer camps, either.

   Winter Blasts were camps in thin-skinned cabins in the highlands of the Chagrin Valley at which the scouts earned cold weather Merit Badges. We were reassured that exploring outdoors in December was fun. We always built a fire first thing in the morning in the cabin’s Franklin stove, kept it well stoked, and hoped we wouldn’t freeze to death in the long night.

   In the summer a grab bag of Merit Badges was up for grabs. There were more than a hundred of them, from sports to sciences. I learned the six basic Boy Scout knots, from the sheet bend to the clove hitch, and earned my Pioneering Badge, although I never learned to properly knot a tie, even later in life, when my wife always helped me with it.

   My father was forever putting up and tearing down tents, finding lost stakes and poles, and persuading my mother to repair rips in canvas. He told us sleeping outdoors was manly robust healthy, no matter how much rain leaked onto our sleeping bags. He thought fresh air was a tonic for boys.

   He led us searching for adventure in duck puddles. He had a maxim that a week of camp was worth six months of theory. To this day some of his former scouts are lousy at theory but always vacation in either the woods or at the seashore.

   It wasn’t just the Boy Scouts, either.

   For many years he was the boss at Ausra, a two-week sports-related, Lithuanian-inflected, and Franciscan-inspired summer camp at Wasaga Beach on the Georgian Bay north of Toronto. Although the campers did calisthenics every morning, went to Mass after breakfast, and spoke Lithuanian whenever they had to, what we actually did most of the time was run around in the woods like madmen, play tackle football in the bay, and sing off-key long into the night at the nightly bonfires.

   Singing around a bonfire is even better than singing in the car or the shower.

   When Vytas was nine years old he was one of the nearly two thousand homeboys at the 1933 Reception Camp in Palanga when Robert Baden-Powell, founder of the Boy Scouts, came to Lithuania. Palanga is a seaside resort on the Baltic Sea known for its beaches and sand dunes. Then a sleepy resort, today it’s a summer party spot.

   He never forgot having been at that camp, seeing scouting’s leader and guiding light, if only on that one occasion. “He was a hero to us, someone who gave his life to something bigger than himself, even though we were all smaller than him,” he said.

   The scout founder’s son, who was with him in 1933, didn’t forget, either. “I particularly remember the warm and friendly welcome we received as we came ashore on Lithuanian soil,” recalled Peter Baden-Powell in 1956.

   Five years later Vytas was at the Second National Jamboree in Panemune, the smallest city in the country, which commemorated both the 20th anniversaries of the foundation of the Lithuanian Boy Scout Association and the restoration of Lithuania’s independence.

   Things change fast, though. Two years later the Soviet Union invaded, the country’s independence was overturned, and scouting was outlawed. During the war and successive occupations, first by the Russians, then the Nazis, and then the Russians again, both of his parents were arrested and transported to concentration camps. His father died of starvation in a Siberian labor camp. His mother spent 20 years in the Gulag.

   In 1ate 1944 he fled to Germany, made his way buying and selling black market cigarettes, and after the war worked for relief organizations dealing with the masses of displaced people. He met his wife-to-be in a hospital in Nuremberg, where she was a nurse’s aide, and he was being operated on several times for a wound that almost cost him his right hand.

   He found passage to Canada in 1949, married Angele Jurgelaityte, who had emigrated there a year earlier, and by 1956 was the father of three children. In 1957 he left Sudbury, Ontario, where he had worked in nickel mines for almost seven years, first as a black powder blaster and then as an ore hauler, and moved to Cleveland, Ohio. We followed a half-year later. He worked as an elevator operator for seventy-five cents an hour, less than half of what he had been making in the mines, swept floors stocked warehouses did whatever he could for a paycheck, and took classes in accounting at Western Reserve University at night.

   While in Canada he wasn’t involved in scouting.

   “There weren’t any children, or they were all still babies,” my mother said. “All of us from Lithuania, and there was a large community of us in Sudbury in the early 1950s, were all so young. We were just starting to rebuild our lives, getting married and having children, but it was taking time for them to grow up to scouting age.”

   Robert Baden-Powell always counseled that Bot Scouts should be prepared for the unexpected and not be taken by surprise. “A scout knows exactly what to do when anything unexpected happens,” he said. By that guiding light scouting stood my father in good stead through the 1940s.

   When his parents were arrested by the NKVD and deported, he took over the family farm. He was 17 years old. When he fled their farm in 1944 with ten minutes notice about the Red Army being on the horizon, he barely crossed the border before it was closed for good. When he landed in Halifax, Nova Scotia, in 1949, everything he had was in a small suitcase and there were twenty dollars in his wallet. In the event, he still had five dollars left when he knocked on Angele’s door in Sudbury, almost six hundred miles away.

   In Cleveland, living in a Polish double he bought and shared with his sister’s family, who had also fled Lithuania, he found work full-time at the Weatherhead Corporation, went to school at night, and after earning a degree in accounting went to work for TRW. He made his way up the ladder, finally managing his division’s financial operations in South America.

   After taking early retirement in the late-1980s he helped found the Taupa Lithuanian Credit Union and as director built its assets into the tens of millions. In the 1990s he formed NIDA Enterprises and managed it through 2008, when he was in his 80s. He believed the workingman was the happy man. “Nothing works unless we do,” he said. He believed there was value in work. He believed work without effort was valueless.

  Because of World War Two and its dislocations, living rough and subsequent emigration overseas, as well as the demands of rebuilding a life and building a family, he didn’t participate in scouting for many years. But once a scout always a scout. “What you learn stays with you long after you’ve outgrown the uniform,” he said.

   When he took over from Vytautas Jokubaitis as Scoutmaster of Troop 311 they were big shoes to fill. Vyto Jokubaitis was a tireless advocate for his countrymen who became director of Cleveland’s Lithuanian American Club. He was awarded the Ohio Governor’s “Humanitarian of the Year” award in 1994.

   My father worked with Cleveland’s Lithuanian scouts for nearly twenty years, although even after giving up scouting, until his death in 2011, he never really stopped scouting. While Scoutmaster he helped affiliate Troop 311 with the American Boy Scouts, opening up camping and jamboree venues, as well as linking it to the traditions and activities of scouting worldwide. In the late 1960s he established an ancillary scouting camp at Ausra, the campsite on the Georgian Bay, where Cleveland’s scouts enjoyed two weeks of camping, and by many accounts, some of the biggest nighttime bonfires they ever experienced.

   “Dad loved bonfires,” recalled my brother Rick, who was also a scout. “It was a rule with him, that there be one every night. Some of his log cabin-style fires were as big as dining room tables and were still smoldering in the morning when we got up for our morning exercises and raising the flags.” When asked what bonfires meant to him Vytas said, “Sometimes it takes looking through campfire smoke to see the world clearly.”

   Although they never exactly warmed to it, he introduced winter camping and hiking to his troop, even encouraging them to try snowshoes. “I don’t remember ever falling down as much as when I tried walking on top of snow drifts wearing snowshoes,” recalled one of his scouts. “But he said it didn’t matter how many times we fell down, it only mattered that we get up and try again, although getting up while stuck in snowshoes is easier said than done.”

   He stressed achievement by encouraging the pursuit of Merit Badges, especially those that involved self-reliance and taking your chances. “One summer at a Canadian camp at Blue Mountain we were taken on a two-night canoe trip,” my brother said. “We were supervised, but only given a compass, a canteen, and a big bag of chocolate chip cookies. We had to make the round-trip up the bay and back to the camp ourselves without any help. They told us it was both a duty and a challenge to find our way, and we did it, and I still remember how accomplished we all felt when we did that.”

   In the 1970s he inaugurated Scautiu Kucius, a kind of Boy Scout’s Christmas Eve, a tradition that endures to this day. Every year, a weekend before Christmas, Cleveland’s Lithuanian scouts gather and feast on twelve foods representing the twelve apostles, sing carols, and kick their shoes off over their heads to see what girl they will land near, which is old-school marriage-making..

   Another annual event he was invested in was the Kazuke Muge, a scouting craft fair, fund-raiser, and parade held every March in the community hall of Our Lady of Perpetual Help, Cleveland’s Lithuanian church. He organized and promoted it for many years, making sure stalls were assembled for the craft sales, arranging indoor games and entertainment, and encouraging everyone to support the scouts.

   Although he did much for the movement, as a Scoutmaster he didn’t try to do everything for his charges. He thought it better to encourage boys to educate themselves instead of always instructing them. “When you want a thing done ‘Don’t do it yourself’ is a good motto for a Scoutmaster,” said Robert Baden-Powell. Like him my father believed that to be true.

   “There is no ideal way to do things,” he explained to Gintaras Taoras, one of his scouts. “There is no absolute wrong way to do things. Everyone has different ways to accomplish something. It will just take some faster to accomplish the task and others longer, but you both end up at the same end point. Learn through your mistakes.”

   Gintaras, who would become a Scoutmaster in his own right, when asked what person had made a difference in his scouting career, said it was Vytas Staskevicius. “Brother Vytas was never afraid to try anything new. He always gave us the chance to do things ourselves, like getting our camps organized and set up. If we got it wrong, he didn’t harp on us getting it wrong. He would ask us how we could have done things differently, what we learned, and we would then move on.”

   After World War Two the Lithuanian Boy Scouts Association began to re-organize. In 1948 a National Jamboree was held in the German Alps. More than a thousand displaced Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts were there. In 1950 there was a Lithuanian presence at the Boy Scouts of America Jamboree in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania.

   In 2014 Gintaras Taoras was in the front ranks when the 65^th anniversary of scouting for Lithuanian immigrants on four continents was recognized at the Lithuanian Embassy in Washington, D. C.  “Scouting is a powerful movement providing life-changing opportunities to today’s Lithuanian youth,” said Zygimantas Pavilionis, the Lithuanian ambassador.

   “I wish to personally congratulate the Lithuanian Scouts Association,” said Robert Gates, former Secretary of Defense under Presidents Bush and Obama and National President of the Boy Scouts of America.

   The Centennial of Lithuanian scouting was celebrated in 2018. My father was one of many Scoutmasters who kept scouting alive. Although he passed away before the celebration, whatever scout camp in the sky he is at, he is sure to be smiling through the smoke of a celestial bonfire at how Lithuanian scouting has resurrected itself one hundred years later.

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.”

“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. Revenge is always personal. It gets personal.

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication