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Thunder Road

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   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 185th 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.

  I wasn’t allowed a boy cave at home. The home of slot car racing was the next best thing. I made Race Place my home away from home.

   The track was bare bones, There were no pretend bushes or trees. There were no miniature buildings or midgets in the bleachers. 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 any 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 his 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 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 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 didn’t care 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 runner-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 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 single sonic boom all weekend.

   We made up our own racing program, 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 madman.

   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 sports 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. I could see the handwriting on the wall. My parents made sure to let me know they were unhappy.

   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.”

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 Cold War shadows.

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

Front Row Seat

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By Ed Staskus

   The documentary “Night and Fog” is 32 minutes long, unless it’s watched thirty times in a row, which makes it 16 hours long. I was studying literature and film at Cleveland State University in the late 1970s when I saw it for the first time and the thirtieth time. It had been made twenty years earlier by the French filmmakers Jean Cayrol and Alain Resnais. It is about the Nazi concentration camps of the 1940s, specifically Majdanek and Auschwitz. It is a monster movie without the pretend.

   The reason I watched “Night and Fog” thirty times successively by myself in a small dim room wasn’t because I was especially interested in World War Two or the Holocaust. In fact, the documentary spooked the hell out of me. Dennis Giles, the one and only professor of film in the Communications Department at Cleveland State University, had suggested I write a paper about it. He made me a teacher’s assistant so I could have a closet-sized office on the 16th floor of Rhodes Tower down the hall from his office. In return, I screened motion pictures for his film classes, which was hardly a chore. The rest of the time, which was most of the time, was my own. 

   Nazi Germany and its Axis allies built thousands of concentration camps and other incarceration and extermination sites between 1933 and 1945. They stayed busy as killer bees. Majdanek was outside Lublin, Poland and run by the SS. The SS were the black-uniformed and self-described “political soldiers” of the Nazi Party. There were many gallows and seven gas chambers. Auschwitz was also in Poland, a complex of forty camps. It was run by the SS, too. It had more gallows and more gas chambers. The camps were what the Nazis called the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question.” They asked themselves the question and dreamed up the answer among themselves. The camps were also the solution about what to do with gypsies, homosexuals, Russian prisoners, and anybody else who got in the way of the Third Reich.

   My teacher’s assistant office was no-frills cinderblock, like the grind houses of the 1960s and 70s, which were old movie houses in bad neighborhoods showing low-budget horror movies. I was given access to a 16mm projector and a spotless copy of the documentary. It was the only thing clean about it. If the Nazis thought they were cleaning up the world, they had a dirty way of doing it. There was a method to their madness, but it was madness, nevertheless.

   Dennis Giles graduated from the University of Texas with a master’s degree. His thesis was “The End of Cinema.” He got a Ph.D. from Northwestern University and then showed up in Cleveland. He was tall, thin, lanky, dressed like a beatnik, and smoked like a chimney. He lived in Ohio City near the West Side Market. The neighborhood was a mess, but in the past ten years the Ohio City Redevelopment Association had gotten more than a hundred structures restored or redeveloped. Houses were being refurbished by the young upper middle-class, proto Yuppies, leading to complaints of gentrification. 

   If Dennis Giles was part of the gentrification, he didn’t look the part. He looked scruffy as a beatnik. He looked like he had spent too much time watching movies by himself. He was a member of the National Film Society. He liked to say film was art and television was furniture. He didn’t mean the furniture was any good, either.

   It took me a few days to figure out how to tackle the project. I finally decided to do a shot-by-shot analysis, zeroing in on how the shots were the brick and mortar of the scenes and sequences. I reasoned that if I tried writing about the gruesome nature of the subject, I would never get out of the weeds.

   The film goes back and forth between past and present, between black-and-white and color, with some of it shot by the filmmakers and some of it stock footage. The first shot is of a deadpan sky. The camera tracks downwards to a dreary landscape. It then tracks to the right and stops on strands of barbed wire. The second shot is of a field with a line of trees on the horizon. “An ordinary field with crows flying over it,” the narrator says. But it’s not an ordinary field. The camera again tracks to the right revealing posts with more barbed wire strung from post to post. The wire is electrified. The third shot tracks from an open road once more to the right to another tangle of more wire.

   After a while the tracking shots to the right and the wire everywhere start to look like a normal landscape. “An ordinary village, a church steeple, and a fairground. This is the way to a concentration camp,” the narrator says. When he says “steeple” the shot on screen is of an observation tower, machine guns at the ready.   

   The city of Siaulai is in the north of Lithuania, which is north of Poland. It is home to the Hill of Crosses. It is place of pilgrimage, established in the 19th century as a symbol of resistance to Russian rule. There are more than 100,000 big and small crosses on the hill. During World War Two almost every single Jew who lived in Siaulai bore his own cross. Most of the natives didn’t worry about them. They had more than enough of their own problems to worry about, squeezed between the Nazis and the Communists.

   My father was born in the mid-1920s and grew up in Siailiai. His father was the police chief who was swept up by the Russians in 1941 and deported to a Siberian labor camp for ideological reasons. He never stood a chance. He died of starvation the next year. My father was in his mid-teens. He had to take over the family farm. When the Germans invaded, capturing and imprisoning vast numbers of Red Army troops, he applied for and was granted labor rights to a dozen of them. There were severe manpower shortages. The Russians worked 12-hour days and slept in the barn. When they groused about the work, he passed out Bulgarian cigarettes and bottles of vodka. When they escaped, the Germans gave him more men and told him to lock the barn doors.

   The first part of “Night and Fog” is about the rise of fascist ideology in Germany. The second part contrasts the good life of loyal Germans to the travails of the concentration camp prisoners.  The third part details the sadism of the captors. The fourth part, all in black-and-white, is about gas chambers and piles of bodies. It is nothing if not dreadful. Even the living are bags of bones in their dingy barracks. The Nazis shaved everybody’s heads before they gassed them. They said it was for lice prevention and that the gas chambers were showers. They collected and saved the hair. It was used to make textiles at factories in occupied Poland. The last part is about the liberation of the camps and the bearing of responsibility.

   Everybody, even the next-door neighbors, said they didn’t know anything about the camps, or if they did, were just following orders. “We SS men were not supposed to think about these things,” said Rudolf Hoss, the commandant at Auschwitz. “We were all trained to obey orders without even thinking, so that the thought of disobeying an order would simply never have occurred to anybody, and somebody else would have done it just as well if I hadn’t. I never gave much thought to whether it was wrong. It just seemed a necessity.”

   The next shots of the film are of the rail lines to the camps and their gates. “All those caught, wrongly arrested, or simply unlucky make their way towards the camps,” the narrator says. “They are gates which no one will enter more than once.” The train tickets were all one-way. There was a 16-foot wide sign above the entrance gate to Auschwitz that said, “Work Makes One Free.” It didn’t say what kind of work.

   After World War Two started and the Nazis incorporated the Baltics into the Reich Ostland, there were about 240,000 Jews in Lithuania, about 10% of the population. The first thing the Einsatzgruppen did was start gunning them down in the countryside, aided by Lithuanian auxiliaries. By August 1941 most of them were dead or gone to ground. Then the SS killers started in the cities. There wasn’t a lot of search-and-destroy involved, so the grim business didn’t take long. 

   “Gangs of Lithuanians roamed the streets of Vilnius looking for Jews with beards to arrest,” said Efraim Zuroff, who didn’t wear a beard but whose wife and two sons were taken to Likiskis Prison and shot. Karl Jaeger, the commander of an Einsatzgruppen unit that did its work in Vilnius, kept an account book of their work. On September 1, 1941, he recorded those recently killed as “1,404 Jewish children, 1,763 Jews, 1,812 Jewesses, 109 mentally sick people, and one German woman who was married to a Jew.” When the war finally ended there were only 10,000-some Jews left in Lithuania, slightly more than 0% of the population. It was the largest-ever loss of life of any group in that short a period in the history of the country.

   The middle shots and scenes of the film are without narration. They show crowds of disheveled people being strong-armed into boxcars. The last shot is of a father leading his three children along a railroad platform. The father looks resigned and the children look bewildered. They are shoved into a boxcar. “Anonymous trains, their doors well-locked, a hundred deportees to every wagon,” the narrator says. “Neither night nor day, only hunger, thirst, and madness.”

   The Nazis occupied Siauliai in 1941. All the Jews were made to wear a yellow Star of David on their chests. Their children were forbidden to go to school. Their businesses were taken away from them. At the end of summer, the Einsatzgruppen and Lithuanian auxiliaries rounded up more than a thousand Jews, took them to a forest, ordered them to strip, and shot them down like dogs. They shoved their naked bodies into open pits. When the shooters left, they took all the watches, jewelry, wallets, and purses with them. “Today the sun shines,” the narrator says in the 70th shot of the film, tracking through the sunlit trees. “Go slowly along, looking for what? Traces of the bodies that fell to the ground?”

   The rest of the town’s Jews were made to move into a ghetto. Two years later two thousand adults and a thousand children were transported to Auschwitz and gassed. The next year the few of them left were sent to the Stutthof concentration camp. That finished off the Jews in Siauliai, once and for all.

   Nearing the end of the film the narrator asks, “How discover what remains of the reality of those camps, shrill with cries, alive with fleas, nights of chattering teeth, when they were despised by those who made them and eluded those who suffered there?” One of the last shots is of a macerated man lying on his side on the ground and drinking something from a bowl. “The deportee returns to the obsession of his life and dreams, food.” The next shot is of a dead man, legs akimbo in the mud, ignored by those around him. “Many are too weak to defend their ration against thieves and blows. They wait for the mud or snow. To lie down somewhere, anywhere, and die one’s own death.”

   My father fled Siauliai for East Prussia when the Red Army swarmed the country in 1944. His two sisters and mother were already on the run. One of his sisters made it to Germany, the other sister didn’t, going into hiding, while his mother was arrested and sent to Siberia, where she remained for the next ten years. Even though he fled with almost nothing except a handful of cash, a few family photographs, and a change of clothes, he had nothing to lose. The Russians would have shot him on the spot if they had captured him.

   Like most Lithuanians my father had no use for Jews. He never had a good word to say about them. He never let on to me, and never talked about went on in Siauliai, except as it related to his family, but I caught enough snatches of talk at parties, community events, and get-togethers to know what the score was. My father wasn’t a bad man, just like most Lithuanians weren’t bad men and women. He wasn’t any different than most people. He worked hard to support his family, community, and country. He was a Boy Scout leader and helped get the local church and parochial school built.

   The film ends with aerial shots of Auschwitz. It is 1945. The war is almost over. “There is no coal for the incinerators The camp streets are strewn with corpses.” One of the last sequences shows captured Nazi soldiers lined up by Allied forces outside a concentration camp. All of them look sullen and demoralized. Many of the soldiers are women. They carry rail thin corpses slung over their shoulders, throwing them into a pit, and going back for more. You never realize how thick the murk is until it lifts. Prisoners barely alive but suddenly free stand next to useless strands of rusting barbed wire. 

   In a Nuremberg courtroom one after another Nazi official says he was not responsible. “Who is responsible then?” the narrator asks. The Master Race all look like somebody’s bland Uncle Ernie. Nobody responsible says anything, although many at least were convicted of war crimes and hung. They should have been broken on the wheel and quartered for their evil deeds.

   Short of cannibalism, what the Nazis did to those they herded into their concentration camps was the worst thing they could have done. After I finished my thirtieth viewing of every shot, scene, and sequence in the film, I wrote my paper and turned it in. I got an A- for misspelling some words. I got to keep my cubbyhole. I knew I wouldn’t watch the documentary ever again. 

   One groundhog day after another had gotten me down in the dumps. Enough was enough. I returned my print of “Night and Fog” to the university library. I caught my breath and went for a walk in the brimming light of day.

A version of this story appeared in Literary Heist Magazine.

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

Cooking Up Trouble

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By Ed Staskus

   “Mom, you know it’s not dinner without a napkin,” Matt said. He was on the third floor on his cell phone talking to his mother Terese who was in the first- floor kitchen. She answered on the land line. She had made a 3-course dinner for him and taken it upstairs a minute earlier. 

   She made dinner and took it upstairs to him every night, at least on those nights he was at home. When he wasn’t, she caught a break. She would then quick fry some chicken and kick back in front of the TV. She liked B & W movies, mostly comedies and melodramas. Her husband worked split shifts. She had the house to herself those nights to laugh it up at the funny parts and cry at the sad parts.

   Terese was my mother-in-law. She was a self-taught chef. She got the bug from her mother Stefanija, who had emigrated from Lithuania to the United States after World War Two. Stefanija worked in the kitchen of Stouffer’s flagship restaurant in downtown Cleveland for the rest of her working life. After she retired, she compiled her favorite Lithuanian recipes and published them in a book called “Kvieciu Prie Stalo.” It means “We Welcome You to the Table.”

   Terese taught herself well enough that she could make anything, from sloppy joes at feed-the-poor kitchens to wedding cakes for millionaires. She only ever thumbed through cookbooks when she had to. No matter that she was intrepid and skilled, having conceived and operated several restaurants, as well as working as a pastry chef and a caterer, she had to play dumb waiter once a day.

   “I’ll bring one right up to you,” she said to her son. What else could she do? After all, she had taught him his table manners.

   Matt lived on carry out dinners except they were carry up dinners. His mother did the cooking and carrying. Matt did the eating. When he was done he dutifully brought his dishes downstairs. My father-in-law Dick washed them by hand every day. They had a dishwasher, but he preferred to stand at the sink and get his hands dirty while getting the dishes clean. He had been a war-time MP in Vietnam before becoming a bartender. He was a hands-on kind of man.

   Their house was on E. 73rd St. at the corner of Chester Ave. in the Fairfax neighborhood. It was built in 1910, three stories of it, four bedrooms, two baths, two fireplaces, and a full basement. The third floor was originally servant’s quarters. The foundation was sandstone quarried in nearby Amherst by the Cleveland Stone Company. Amherst was the “Sandstone Capital of the World” back in the day.

   There were stores, churches, and schools everywhere back then. There were light industries and warehouses. Street cars ran east and west all day and night on Euclid Ave., which was one block north of Chester Ave.. The Karamu House Theater opened in 1915. Langston Hughes developed and premiered some of his plays at the theater. Sears, Roebuck & Co. built a flagship store there in 1928. 40,000 people lived in Fairfax in the 1940s. Sixty years later, when my mother-in-law showed up, only 5,000-some people still lived there. 

   By the 1950s the servants on the third floor were long gone and so were the well-off families who had raised their children in the house. They moved away to the suburbs. Urban renewal was in full swing. As 1960 rolled around the neighborhood became nearly all-black and low-income. The house was divided up and converted into boarding rooms. By the 1980s it had gone to hell, in more ways than one.

   Terese and her husband were living in Reserve Square in a 17th floor three-bedroom corner apartment overlooking Lake Erie on E. 13th St. and Chester Ave. when they bought the house with the intention of bringing it back to life. They were living well enough. They owned and operated a bar restaurant on the ground floor of the apartment complex. They didn’t realize how much trouble they were getting into making the move. It was the kind of trouble confidence men outside their ken had dreamed up.

   The neighborhood they moved to was three miles from their former home in downtown Cleveland. The Fairfax neighborhood was on the edge of University Circle, where most of the city’s major educational institutions and museums were. The eastern side of the locality was dominated by the Cleveland Clinic, which was growing by leaps and bounds. The Hough neighborhood was just to the north and the St. Clair-Superior neighborhood was north of that.  On the other side of the city limits was the lake, where yellow perch and walleye lived rent-free.

   The house was being flipped when Terese and Dick first saw it. The flipper put the house back together as a single-family home, putting in a new central staircase, a new kitchen, and a new two-car garage. He stopped there. He bought the house for pennies on the dollar. He sold it to my in-laws for dollars on the dollar. They paid $135,000.00 for the house, more than double what almost all the other houses in Fairfax were priced at. The real estate agent described it as a ”steal.” A vacant lot next door was thrown in as a bonus. There was another vacant lot across the street. There were several others within sight. The empty lots were like tumbleweeds. The neighborhood was more ghost town than not. 

   Hough was where race riots happened in 1966, when Terese was in her mid-20s, married to her first husband, with a child and another one in the making. They then lived on the border of the Euclid Creek Reservation, bounded by North Collinwood and Richmond Hts. It was a family friendly neighborhood with good schools. All the men drove to work in the morning. Most of the women kept house. Children walked to school. Their backyard was a forest. On clear days in the winter they could see Mt. Baldy in the distance.

   The Hough Riots started when the white owner of the Seventy-Niners Café on Hough Ave. and E. 79th St. said “Hell, no” after being asked by a passing black man for a glass of water on an oppressively hot day. One thing led to another, an angry crowd gathered, there was some rock throwing which led to looting and vandalism, arson and sniper fire followed, and two days later the Ohio National Guard rolled in with .50 caliber machine guns mounted on their Jeeps. They carried live ammunition.

   Terese and Dick opted for the Fairfax house because Terese was pining for a house on the near east side near where she had grown up. She grew up in a Lithuanian family, her father and mother and four sisters in a two-bedroom bungalow where she slept on the sofa. It didn’t matter to her that the house she wanted was on the wrong side of the racial divide. Dick wanted what his wife wanted. They lived for each other. He cashed in his 401K to make the down payment on the house. The next summer they took out a second mortgage for $85,000.00 to replace the roof, replace all the old windows with vinyl windows, blow liquid polyurethane insulation into the walls, and side the exterior. They painted the interior, which meant Matt and I pulled on our painter’s pants and got to work.

   The floors were hardwood from back when there were man-sized forests. They had them refinished. When the floors were done, they sparkled like the clock had been turned back a century. No matter how old anything is, everything was once new.

   They blew through their second mortgage fast. When ownership of Terese’s downtown lunch counter in the National City Bank building on E. 9th St. and Euclid Ave. slipped out from under her feet, her partner getting the better of her, they began living partly on Dick’s paycheck, partly on her freelancing, and partly on their credit cards. It wasn’t long before they were making only the minimum payment on their many credit cards. It was a downward spiral.

   Matt moved in with his parents after sampling the bachelor life in Lakewood. He was working full-time for General Electric and going part-time to graduate school to get a second high-tech degree. He played lead guitar in a local rock ‘n roll band, keeping his eyes open for girls who might become his girlfriend. He paid some rent for his third-floor space and helped out around the house. 

   My wife landscaped the front yard and Dick put in a sizable garden in the back yard. Terese liked herbs and fresh vegetables where she could get her hands on them in a jiffy. They adopted a handful of stray cats. They invited Terese’s sisters and their husbands over for holiday dinners. Dick’s family lived in New York, which was a long drive and short excuse away. The house was spacious and cozy at the same time. The house was pretty as a postcard when it was lit up and full of people on Christmas.

   They had barbeques in the summer, opening the garage door and wheeling out a grill. Dick was a driveway cook. He wasn’t a chef, but he was a master at charcoal-broiling when it came to hot dogs, hamburgers, and steaks. We played horseshoes in the vacant lot where there was plenty of room for the forty-foot spacing. Dick was a big man with a soft touch and almost impossible to beat when it came to pitching. He was King of the Ringers. Even when he didn’t hit a ringer he was always close. The game is deceptively simple, but hard to master. When I complained about losing to him over and over again, he said, “You can’t blame your teammates for losing in horseshoes.”

   We bought skyrockets, paper tubes packed with rocket fuel, for Independence Day and shot them off from the vacant lot when it got dark. One of them went haywire and flew into the garage through the open door. Dick was standing at the grill in the driveway but ducked in the nick of time. The cats went running every which way. They stayed on the run for two days, until they got hungry and came back.

   Their garage got broken into. It got broken into again. It wasn’t the safest neighborhood. They installed a security system. They lost their front porch patio furniture to thieves. Terese saw the thieves dragging the furniture down the street in broad daylight, but she was alone and there wasn’t anything she could do about it. She called the Cleveland Police Department but there wasn’t anything they were inclined to do about it. The crime rate in Fairfax was high and the cops had better things to do. Dick replaced the furniture, chaining it down to the deck of the porch. They went on litter patrol most mornings, picking up empty wine and beer bottles and sweeping up cigarette butts and plastic bag trash.

   What few neighbors they had watched out for each other. A mailman lived in a newer house catty corner to them where Spangler Ct. met E. 73rd St.  He clued them in on the workings of Fairfax, what to watch out for and what didn’t matter, and after they took the measure of the neighborhood they got as comfortable with it as they were ever going to get. Terese started ministering to some of the kids who lived in the run-down walk-up four-story apartment building behind them. She made lunch for some of them, took some of them on day trips to nearby museums, and drove some of them to school when their parents were incapacitated.

   There were cluster homes and McMansions being built in both Hough and Fairfax, but they were far and few between. Police cars and ambulances sped up and down Chester Ave. every hour on the hour sirens blaring. There was an occasional gunshot in the night. Everybody locked their doors at sunset.

   One day, sitting on the steps of their front porch, I watched three men tie a rope around a dead tree in the vacant lot across the street. They were going to try to yank it out of the ground with a pick-up. The first time they tried the rope snapped. The second time they tried they used two ropes. They put their pick-up in low gear and tugged. The rear bumper got yanked off and the truck shot forward, the driver slamming on the brakes, tearing up the turf. They came back with a bigger truck. When the tree started to lean it fell over fast, cracking, the roots ripping loose, barely missing them. I thought they were going to saw the branches off and section the trunk after it crashed to the ground, but they didn’t. The tree lay moldering in the grass all summer.

   Neither Terese nor Dick lived to see their house vanishing in front of their eyes. If they had they would have seen their one asset in life reduced in value by 90%. All the money they had was tied up in the house. They would have been left with nothing. They could see it coming and it made them miserable. Their health started to fail. The confidence men who puffed up the housing market until the bubble blew up walked away free and clear. Alan Greenspan, who ran the Federal Reserve Bank for nearly twenty years, said the meltdown was due to a “flaw in the system.” He didn’t say much more about it that mattered.

   Terese died on New Year’s Eve 2005 and Dick died on Easter Saturday 2006. She collapsed  on the landing of their central staircase. She was dead by the time 911 got her to the nearby Cleveland Clinic. Dick collapsed in the wine room of their house in the middle of the night four months later while working on a crossword puzzle. He never used a pencil. He always filled the squares in with a pen. When Matt discovered him in the morning, he had almost finished the puzzle. His pen was on the floor. It still had plenty of ink in it.

   It was at that time that house prices started to crumble and the collapse that was going to push the United States into a recession picked up speed. Matt stayed in the house for a few years, trying to make the bank payments, taking in Case Western Reserve University student boarders, but it was no good. When he walked away it was for good. My wife and I helped empty the house, giving most of everything that wasn’t a personal effect to whoever could use it. 

   When it was all over Matt moved away and never went back. Whenever he found himself driving through the Fairfax neighborhood, the night sky filled with fat glittering stars and the streets empty, he avoided the crossroad at E. 73rd St. and Chester Ave. He preferred to not look backwards. He had no taste for what he might see, or not see.

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.

“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

Street Fighting Man

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By Ed Staskus

   Ziggy was ready to go home. He was more than ready. He had been in South Vietnam for one year and twenty nine days. His tour of duty was going to be officially over on January 30, 1968, which was tomorrow. He had the date circled. Tomorrow was also the beginning of the Lunar New Year. It was a week when families reunited and honored their ancestors, praying for luck, prosperity, and health in the coming year. 

   The morning the reunions got going was the morning he was going to be the first man in line for a seat on a Japan-bound C-141 Starlifter.  He was going to get the hell out of Southeast Asia. He was going to go home to Chicago. He would have dinner with his father at Healthy Food, a Lithuanian restaurant on Halsted St., where the food was “as mom used to make at home.” He was never going back to the killing fields of Vietnam. 

   Nobody in the Marine Corps called Sigitas Marcinkevicius by his given name. Other than his by-the-book commanding officer everybody called him Ziggy. Some of the men he fought with in the 3rd Marine Division called him Zig Zag for his uncanny ability to walk away unscathed from one firefight after another. Everybody wanted to be his best friend when on roving patrols.

   Ziggy volunteered for the Marine Corps in the summer of 1966. “I wanted to fight for our country,” he said. His father had fought Russians in the forests of Lithuania in 1945. “I wanted to fight commies like my dad and I wanted to be a hero. I thought I could get everything I wanted by joining the Marines.” He was sent to Parris Island for eight weeks.

   “I had no idea how grueling those two months of basic training were going to be. The DI’s worked us hard every day, and every night right before we hit the hay we had to do a hundred up-and-on-shoulders and a hundred squat thrusts. Everybody slept like the dead.”  

   He learned how to disassemble, clean, and fire the new M16 assault rifles. He was taught the target was the only goal. “You can’t hurt them if you can’t hit them,” his small arms instructor said. “You don’t want to die for your country, son. You want the other guy to die for his.” He was issued a Gomer Pyle uniform. He was issued sateen t-shirts, 2-pocket shorts, and 4-pocket utilities. He was issued a combat uniform, combat boots, and a combat helmet. He became a Leatherneck. He shipped out to South Vietnam and reported for duty at the Marine base at Con Thien. It was less than two miles from the North Vietnamese border. He got there just in time for a year’s worth of the most bitter fighting the base had seen since its establishment as a Special Forces camp.

   Con Thien meant Hill of Angels. It was anything but that. The nine thousand Marines there called it the ‘Meat Grinder’. It was a slice of hell, a treeless 525-foot high hill. The DMZ, where they repeatedly engaged the NVA, was called the ‘Dead Marine Zone.’ The base was shelled daily. Halfway through Ziggy’s tour of duty the NVA began hitting it with hundreds of rounds a day. During the last week of September more than three thousand shells slammed into the base. In December Ziggy was assigned to a work detail adding a dozen deep bunkers, digging a new trench along the forward slope of the base, and laying down endless miles of razor wire. The NVA never stopped shelling the base with 135-millimeter artillery which were sheltered inside caves. Keeping your head down was the order of the day. 

   Ziggy was rotated out several times, but was always rotated back in. He fought in Operations Hickory, Buffalo, and Kingfisher. One hundred and forty two Marines were killed in action during Operation Hickory. The NVA lost three hundred and sixty men. When it was over all of the civilian population within sight was removed and everything within sight became a free fire zone. One hundred and fifty nine Marines were killed in action during Operation Buffalo. The NVA lost more than a thousand men. Three hundred and forty Marines were killed in action during Operation Kingfisher. The NVA lost more than three thousand men, too many to count. American firepower was second to none.

   “We are fighting a war of attrition” was the way General William Westmoreland saw it. He was the commander in Vietnam. He believed in body counts front and center. He explained that the enemy was losing about two thousand men killed in action a week, while the allied forces were losing about four hundred men killed in action a week. He believed the North Vietnamese would sooner than later run out of manpower and give up. He was wrong about them giving up. They weren’t dominoes like American foreign policy said they were. They were fighting for the right to be themselves. They were never going to give up if it took a hundred years.

   The base at Con Thien was meant to block North Vietnamese incursions. The McNamara Line, named after the Secretary of Defense, brimming with acoustic sensors and minefields, was the means of blocking them. “Being ready is not what matters, though,” USMC Lieutenant General Krulack said. “What matters is winning.” The Marines at Con Thien were always prepared to win and never lost a major engagement, but they were losing the war. The McNamara Line was a sieve.

   “As soon as I got my discharge orders in late January I said goodbye to all my buddies, at least those who were still making it,” Ziggy said. A CH-47 Chinook transport helicopter came in fast during a lull in the constant shelling. “I had to wait my turn for the wounded and the body bags to be loaded. The minute we landed in Da Nang mortars started shelling the airfield. For a second I thought God didn’t want me to get out of there, after all.”

   The next day the Tet Offensive began with a bang. The goal of the North Vietnamese was to “crack the sky and shake the earth.” Eighty four thousand VC and NVA attacked most of the district capitals in the country, dozens of military bases, and Saigon itself, where they seized the national radio station. The  ancient walled city of Hue, which stood on the banks of the Perfume River not far from the DMZ, was overrun by a force of more than five thousand VC and NVA. Most of them hunkered down, setting up defensive perimeters. The rest encircled the ARVN holding out in the historic Citadel. VC assassination squads spread out and shot those they suspected of collaborating with the South Vietnamese regime. They weren’t overly concerned if they were right or wrong about who they shot.

   The 5th Marine Regiment was ordered to drive them back. “One of my buddies was in the 5th,” Ziggy said. “I couldn’t leave. We were Marines. I jumped into an M35 truck with him.” Da Nang was sixty miles from Hue City. The road was bad but most of the traffic was going south, the other way from them, fleeing to whatever place was safer. Those who fled north, however, found themselves on the Highway of Horror, where the NVA shelled them hour after hour. The Marines got to Hue City soon enough. All hell had broken loose. It would be the longest and bloodiest battle of the Tet Offensive.

   “It was a different kind of war than at Con Thien. It was street fighting. Every crossroad and every house on every street was a battlefield. It was ugly fighting, room by room. We tossed grenades over walls and through windows and emptied magazines without even looking. We never stopped shooting, no matter what.” Howitzers fired nearly twenty thousand rounds into close quarters. Naval forces fired nearly six thousand rounds. Planes and helicopters unleashed fire and brimstone.

   Not knowing where the enemy might be was nerve wracking. “That was the worst of it,” Ziggy’s buddy Sam Jackson, Jr. said. “They would pop out of shadows and sewers and start spraying us with their AK’s. All we could do was take cover and shoot back, trying to stay alive, day by goddamned day.”

   Ziggy secured an ace of spades playing card to the side of his helmet. It was either him or them. There wasn’t going to be any winning hearts and minds. He lived in his combat uniform, combat boots, and combat helmet for nearly two weeks. His boots sprouted fungi and his feet itched. He found a bottle of hydrogen peroxide and slathered it on his feet and groin. He smelled like a garbage dump, especially his arm pits, but the air was so filled with the smell of cordite, diesel fumes, and the decaying bodies of humans and animals that body odor was the least of anybody’s concerns.

   “I was into the tail end of my second week when I got knocked down by a blast,” Ziggy said. “Medics sewed up the gash on my forehead, but a piece of shrapnel got into my eye. I had to wear a patch. I could still shoot but I couldn’t shoot straight. I helped out on stretcher duty until I couldn’t anymore and was sent to the rear.” By that time the battle of Hue City was the only battle of the Tet Offensive still ongoing. It had taken American and ARVN forces a hard week to beat back the North Vietnamese attacks in the rest of the country. It was harder going in Hue City.

   The battle there lasted five weeks. More than six thousand civilians died during the battle. The day it started there were a hundred thirty five thousand residents of Hue City. The day it ended there were about twenty thousand still there, scuttling like crabs in the rubble for food. Everybody else had fled to the countryside. More than six hundred  Marines, ARVN, and 1st Calvary Division forces were killed in action. Thousands of them were wounded. More than three thousand VC and NVA were killed in action. Nobody knows how many of them were wounded. In the process of saving the city from each other, the Marines, the Viet Cong, the Army of South Vietnam, and the Army of North Vietnam destroyed it.

   After his eye was made good as new, Ziggy flew to San Francisco, and from there home to the Windy City. He and his father had dinner at Healthy Food. He found a job in the stockyards, the meat locker of the country. He joined the National Guard. “I did it so I could keep most of the benefits I got while in active service. I didn’t have to do much, except show up one weekend every month, pretend I was still a soldier, and catch some shuteye in the barracks.”

   He didn’t have to do much until the Democratic National Convention happened in August. Lyndon Johnson earlier in the year had unexpectedly announced he would not seek re-election. The No. 1 issue was the Vietnam War. Activists announced they were going to gather in force at the convention to protest United States policies. “If they push us out of Grant Park, we’re going to break windows,” said Abbie Hoffman, co-founder of the Yippies. Chicago’s mayor Richard Daley declared that would happen only over his dead body. 

   “All right, then, maybe we will levitate the International Amphitheatre into outer space,” Abbie Hoffman’s righthand man said. 

   Mayor Daley didn’t know what to say to that. One of his aides said, “The protestors are revolutionaries bent on the destruction of America.” The mayor refused permission for “anti-patriotic” groups to demonstrate at the International Amphitheatre. He ordered the site ringed with barbed wire. He put eleven thousand officers of the police force on twelve-hour shifts. Six thousand National Guardsmen were called up to secure the International Amphitheatre. 

   “If you’re going to Chicago, be sure to wear some armor in your hair,” said Todd Gitlin, who was one of the leaders of Students for a Democratic Society.

   “A Democratic Party convention is about to take place in a police state,” reported Walter Cronkite of CBS News. “There doesn’t seem to be any other way to say it.”

   Ziggy got a call from the Illinois Army National Guard base in North Riverside. “I thought they were going to pass out Billy clubs,” he said. “I thought we were being sent downtown to protect public places and keep the delegates safe.” Instead of Billy clubs, quartermasters started passing out flak jackets, bayonets, and live ammunition.

   “What are these for?” Ziggy asked.

   “They are for taking care of the commies and shitheads out there.”

   “They’re just a bunch of college students. My brother might even be there.” Ziggy’s brother was majoring in political science at the University of Chicago. He had already been arrested once for disorderly conduct during an anti-Vietnam War march.

   “I don’t care if he’s there, or not. It’s time to suit up.”

   “I’m not going,” Ziggy said.

   “Get on the truck, soldier.”

   “I told him, hell, no, I’m not going, and then I left,” Ziggy said. “I lost my benefits because I wouldn’t do it but I knew full well what locked and loaded was all about. I wasn’t going to kill some kid for getting excited and mouthing off.” He went home and watched what happened on TV.

   What happened was a riot, except it wasn’t the demonstrators who did the rioting. The Chicago Police Department did the rioting. The Battle of Michigan Avenue was fought in front of the Conrad Hilton, where many of the delegates were staying. The police attacked protesters, bystanders, and reporters. They fired tear gas indiscriminately. Some of it wafted into presidential nominee Hubert Humphrey’s hotel suite. Police pushed demonstrators through plate-glass windows, following them inside and beating them as they lay on broken glass. One hundred demonstrators were injured and more than six hundred were arrested. Emergent portable video cameras recorded the melee and TV stations nationwide featured the footage on their news shows. 

   “The whole world is watching” the demonstrators chanted. 

   On the convention floor Connecticut senator Abraham Ribicoff denounced the brutality as “Gestapo tactics.” Mayor Daley was asked at a press conference why the police had started cracking the heads of anti-war protestors. Did he have proof of “acts of provocation by the demonstrators” against the police? 

   “I don’t know if we have proof,” he said, “but we know it happened. Now, let’s get this thing straight, once and for all. The policeman isn’t there to create disorder. The policeman is there to preserve disorder.” Nobody knew what the mayor’s deeper meaning was. 

   “When I left Hue City I left dog fighting behind,” Ziggy said. “I didn’t go downtown not because I didn’t believe in law and order, but because I believed in my country. What I saw on TV was surreal, like the sci-fi show ‘The Outer Limits.’ The cops went nuts. It was un-American, beating up people to shut them up. They were grabbing kids who were speaking their mind, holding them down, and hitting them with nightclubs. I saw a cop who looked like he lived in my neighborhood beating up somebody who looked like me.I was the one who went face to face with Charlie every day for a year, not that bluebottle with a club.”

   In the end, a presidential commission concluded that what happened during the convention was a “police riot.” Not many cared what the commission thought. A Gallup Poll revealed that nearly 60% of Americans approved of what the police had done in Chicago. 

   The Tet Offensive in 1968 didn’t end the Vietnam War, like the North Vietnamese believed it would. It ended seven years later when their tanks rolled into Saigon and the last American helicopter lifted off from the roof of the American Embassy. Three million Vietnamese and fifty eight thousand Americans died during the conflict. Twenty years later, in 1995, former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara admitted he had known waging the Vietnam War was a mistake all along.

Photograph by Horst Faas.

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. Jackson Pollack opens a can of worms. President Eisenhower on his way to the opening game of the World Series where a hit man waits in the wings. A Hell’s Kitchen private eye scares up the shadows.

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

Life Boat

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By Ed Staskus

   When Angele Jurgelaityte first saw Vytautas Staskevicius at the Nuremberg Army Hospital in 1947 he was 23 years old and flat on his back on an operating table beneath a white sheet. He was out cold. She was 19 and wearing a cotton dress with a button-on apron and a nursing cap. It was harsh and snowy outside the hospital, a hard wind rattling the windows and piling up drifts. The winter that year came to be known as ‘Hungerwinter’ in Germany and most of Europe.

   It was nearly two years after the end of World War Two and four months after the end of the Nuremberg Trials. They were both refugees from Lithuania. Vytas had injured a hand during the Nazi occupation of the Baltics. The surgeon told him it would never be the same, but he would have partial use of it within a year.

   The military hospital was built in 1937 and personally dedicated by Adolf Hitler. Just like 90 percent of Nuremberg, the city that was Hitler’s favorite and the spiritual capital of the Third Reich. it had been devastated by air assaults. More than 500 British Lancaster bombers carpet bombed the city during one raid and the six-story central section of the hospital was badly damaged. By the time Angele and Vytas met it had been re-built and taken over by the United States Army. “The Americans fixed everything,” Angele said. “They re-built Nuremberg. If it had been the Russians, it would have taken twenty years.”

   Vytas was living in a refugee camp near Hanau, 120 miles north of Nuremberg, and Angele was a nurse trainee at the Army Hospital. She shared a single room in an adjoining building with three other young Lithuanian nurse trainees. There was a bathroom at the end of the hallway. They were officially known as displaced persons, displaced from Lithuania, which had first been annexed by the Russians in 1940, then invaded by the Germans in 1941, and finally re-occupied by the Russians during the Baltic Offensive of 1944.

   They both fled Lithuania like jumping out of a window. Vytas was whisked up by a truck-full of Wehrmacht, stationed at a Russian prisoner-of-war camp nearby, who stopped at his farm and told him he had five minutes to decide whether or not to come with them as they retreated from the rapidly advancing Red Army.

   “I was born in Siaulia,” Vytas said. “My father was the Director of the Department of Citizen Protection there. He was in charge of the police department, and the police chief, too. We had a house in town and farm in Dainai. It was a model farm. We had all the newest tools, cutting and sowing implements, and the planning and methods. Excursions would come to our farm from all over the country.”

   Angele woke up the same morning the Red Army barreled into Lithuania while babysitting her aunt’s four children. She found her aunt hurriedly hitching a horse to a cart, tossing in rucksacks, blankets, and a small trunk of valuables, while tying the family cow to the back of it. The youngest child needed milk every day.

   “I was from Suvalkija, in the southwest, from a farm near Gizai, five kilometers from Marijampole,” Angele said. “My family was all still there, but I couldn’t go back, there was no time, so I went with my aunt. There wasn’t anything else I could do. On the way to Germany, we had to sell the cow and jump into ditches whenever planes strafed and bombed us.” She never saw her parents again and only re-united with any of her family more than forty years later. Vytas lost his parents to political persecution as the Nazis and Communists traded racial and ideological blows, and Angele lost her parents to the vagaries of an uncaring global war, and both were then cut off from what remained of their homeland by what was fast becoming the Iron Curtain.

   “The Communists took my father in 1940 because he was a government official,” Vytas said. “They took him in the summer just as he was, with only the shirt on his back and wearing sandals. He was working in the garden. Later the mass deportations started, and my mother was arrested. She spent fifteen years in Siberia and when she was released after Stalin’s death she wasn’t allowed to go back to Siauliai. They sent her to a small western town to live. My father had been sent to Krasnojarsk where he starved to death in the labor camp there in 1942.”

   Anton Chekhov, one of the most acclaimed writers of short stories in literary history, once wrote that Krasnojarsk was the most beautiful city in Siberia. He might have mentioned beauty is in the eye of the beholder. There is no beauty in slave labor except for the overseers.

   Three years after fleeing Lithuania Vytas and Angele were both in central Bavaria, biding time, like more than 7 million other Eastern Europeans who had decamped to Germany in 1944 and 1945. Vytas had seriously injured a hand in a hay mower accident in 1942 when he was 18 years old and been compelled to take over the operation of the family farm. He was at the Nuremberg hospital in 1947 for a series of surgeries to restore the use of the hand to him.

   “In 1940 in Siauliai the mood was very bad,” he said. “We all felt that something terrible was going to happen. After both my parents were sent to Siberia, I had to maintain the family farm. I was on a horse-drawn mower cutting hay one day when I saw that rain was coming. I jumped down to walk with the horses so they would be able to pull the mower faster. As we started, I fell down right on the blades.”

   The horses stopped. It started raining. His hand gushed blood. “My hand was almost cut off,” he said. “The farmhand who was helping me ran over, and seeing my injured hand, fainted.”

   One of Angele’s roommates told her there was a new arrival in Nuremberg, teasing her that he was a young and good-looking man from Lithuania, but it wasn’t until she was transferred to the bone section of the hospital that she met him. When she finally saw him, he was unconscious in an operating theater, having a small part of a bone taken from his leg and put into his hand.

   She saw him the next day and every day for the next three months on her rounds as he recovered, now fully conscious, and more than ever conscious of her. “She took care of me,” he said, while she remembers that, “It felt so right to be with that guy.” As winter gave way to spring, they began to take walks on the hospital grounds, and in the nearby wooded parks, and later into Nuremberg to the zoo and downtown to watch American movies.

   After several more operations, his hand patched up, he was eventually discharged. He went back to Hanau, where he gradually gave up black-marketing cigarettes and chocolate he bought from troops in the American Zone and found work as a bookkeeper for the International Refugee Organization. Angele and Vytas stayed in touch by writing letters to each other once a week. In the middle of the year he returned to Nuremberg for more surgery, staying two months as he recovered, as well as romancing her again with long walks and talks. When he went back to Hanau, they continued to write one another, dating by mail.

   By 1948 Europe’s refugee camps were rapidly emptying as people left for Canada, Australia, the United States, or anywhere they could get a visa to for a fresh start. “No one knew where they would end up,” Angele said.  “You couldn’t go home and there was no future in Germany. We had nothing and there were no opportunities.”

   She finally chose to go to Canada, sponsored by a French-Canadian family in Sudbury, Ontario, to be an au pair for their 13 children. She sailed in December 1948, and after landing in Nova Scotia wrote Vytas about where she was going and what she was going to be doing there.

   He had papers allowing him to enter the United States, papers that had been hard to get. He had an uncle and friends there and was tempted by the prospect. His best friend wanted to emigrate to Australia and suggested they go together. He debated with himself about what to do. The girl in the nurse’s hat won the debate. In January 1949 he wrote her a letter, proposing to come to Canada, and popped the question of marriage, starting a family, and trying their hands at a farm, since they had both grown up on farms. Vytas had a chicken farm in mind. He knew how to raise them, and she knew how to break their necks for dinner, since that had been one of her chores on the family farm

   Two months later he got her return letter and started searching for a way to get to Canada, rather than the United State or Australia. Almost 4,000 miles away in Sudbury, but on almost the same latitude as Hanau, Angele was sure she had made the right decision. “He wasn’t a lady’s man and I liked that,” she said. “He was a steady man. And he was interesting. I didn’t want a boring man. He was the right guy for me, except I was going to have to break it to him that a farm was out. When I left Lithuania, I promised myself I would never be a servant or a farmer if I could help it.”

   Once Vytas secured sponsorship to go to Canada, he took a train to Bremen in northwestern Germany, but couldn’t get a boat, and passed the time in a boarding house in the Altstadt. After several more dead ends he found himself traveling back through Bavaria, across the Alps, and south of Rome to Naples. He waited for three weeks, living on espressos and cheap Neapolitan pizzas, and finally managed to secure a berth on a boat going to North America. It was time to make another getaway. “There were millions of us trying to get out of Europe,” he said.

   He arrived in Sudbury after a two-day train ride from Halifax early on the morning of September 7, 1949, with the clothes on his back, five dollars in American money in his wallet, and a small suitcase more empty than full. When no one met him at the train station he asked a policeman for directions to Angele’s address on Pine Street. He walked the three miles from the Canada Pacific terminal to her doorstep. He found the house, stepped up to the door, and knocked.

   “What are you doing here,” she said when she opened the door, wiping her wet hands on a kitchen towel, surprised to see him. She hadn’t been expecting him until the next day, September 8th.

   Standing on the steps, looking up at her, nonplussed, he said, “I came to marry you.”

   The next day he moved into a nearby one-room apartment, sharing it with another man for the next two weeks. There was only one bed, but he worked during the day and slept at night, while the other man worked at night and slept during the day.

   His first job in Sudbury was making cinder blocks for the Lapalme Cement Works, owned and operated by the large family for whom Angele was the nanny. “Is This Sudbury’s Largest Family?” asked the Sudbury Star in a feature about the family. The day after his initiation into concrete he knocked on her door and told her he ached from tip-to-toe and was going back to Germany. She gave him a back rub and sent him packing back to the cinder block factory.

   They were married two weeks later, on a Saturday, on a sunny day in what was usually an overcast month, in a ceremony presided over by two Catholic priests, one French-speaking and the other Lithuanian-speaking. The next day they went on a picnic for their honeymoon. Monday morning both of them went back to work. Within a year they moved out of their rented rooms and bought a house at 147 Stanley Street. The two-story house was brand new and cost them $13,000. J. A. Lepalme lent them $500.00 in cash for the down payment. They started a family, but set aside their plans for a chicken farm, Angele explaining to Vytas that Sudbury’s rocky landscape was more suited to mining than farming.

   Vytas went to work in Sudbury’s vast nickel mines, the world’s largest, judging the work easier than cinder block making. It wasn’t, at first, but he eventually rose in the blue-collar ranks. “I worked in the mines for seven years, 3300 hundred feet underground,” he said. “There were many Lithuanians working in Canada. Some cut down forests, which was very hard, and some worked in the mines, which was dangerous., but not as hard. I started work setting dynamite, then laying track for the trains that carried the rocks, but later I got an easier job driving the tractors.”

   Angele became her own nanny within a couple of years, at the end of the day raising three children. She wanted a step ahead life for them. “Most of the Lithuanians we knew in Sudbury eventually started looking for better work. Many left for Montreal and Toronto,” Vytas said. “We all started to go our separate ways. As soon as our turn came, our opportunity to go to America, Angele and I started getting ready.” In 1957 they left Sudbury behind and went to the United States, settling in Ohio, where they lived together for the next fifty-three years. 

   They started at the bottom. Vytas operated an elevator during the day and went to school at night. He earned a degree in accounting from Case Western Reserve University and went to work for Weatherhead. They bought their first house, a duplex they shared with his sister’s family, and then a single-family house in the Lithuanian American neighborhood in Cleveland’s North Collinwood neighborhood. He got a better job with TRW and later helped found Cleveland’s Taupa Credit Union in the early 1980s.

   In 1979, after nearly forty years, he saw his mother Antanina again. “It was the first time I returned to Lithuania. She was living in Silute, but when I tried to go there in secret I was stopped at a roadblock in Ukmerge and told to return to Vilnius.” The authorities gave him a hard time, but finally relented. “The next day I got permission to go for one day and I was able to get a car. I visited my mother and we spent three hours together.”

   Angele and Vytas traveled to Lithuania many times after the country’s declaration of independence in 1990, and the collapse of the Soviet Union, but never again to the Army Hospital in Nuremberg, which had survived the war but was closed down and demolished in 1994, there being no further need for it. The grounds were used to build apartments and homes for the burgeoning city.  A new generation had come of age. The past was rubble and best left in the past.

   “We never forgot where we met in Nuremberg,” Vytas said. “All we had to do was close our eyes to go there. We had our memories and heritage, but where we were going, our family, home, and community, was always more important to us. Everything else was in the past. When we settled in Cleveland we finally had our own place.”

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

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

“Captures the vibe of 1950s NYC.” Sam Winchell, Beyond Fiction

Available from Amazon

Late summer and early autumn. New York City. A Hell’s Kitchen private eye. The 1956 World Series. President Eisenhower at the opening game. An assassin in the dugout.

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

Beware the Lithuanians

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By Ed Staskus

   Before the Battle of Blue Waters was fought in the fall of 1363 the Russians had been under the thumb of Mongolia’s Golden Horde for more than a century. The Mongols invaded and conquered most of what is now Russia in the mid-1200s. They devastated Kievan Rus. They overran everything in their path and sacked both Kiev and Chernigov, two of the largest cities. From then on the Russians paid tribute in gold and silver to the Golden Horde to keep them at bay. 

   After the Mongol Empire was divided into four Khanates, Genghis Khan’s grandson Batu Khan established his capital at Sarai on the Volga River.  It was near enough to the principalities of the Russians to keep them under control and close enough, whenever the need arose, to speedily get back to Mongolia, which was  across the treeless steppe of what is now Kazakhstan.

   The Mongols were known in Europe as Hell’s Horsemen. They could ride up to eighty miles a day if they had to. Their horses were short, stocky, and shaggy. They were never stabled, even during Mongolia’s cruel winters when temperatures dropped to thirty below zero. “They are not very great in stature, but exceedingly strong, and maintained with little provender,” a 13th century Italian missionary priest said about the horses. Deadly accurate composite bows and innovative tactics won them battle after battle. By the time Genghis Khan and his sons were done the Mongol Empire was the largest contiguous land empire in the world, then or now. It covered more than nine million square miles from Hungary in the west to China in the east.

   In the middle of the 14th century the Golden Horde was preparing to move against the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. It was the largest country in Europe, being the lands of present-day Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine, as well as parts of Poland and Russia. The Mongols weren’t trying to bite off more than they could chew. They had already overrun Asia and the Middle East. Only the Turkish Mamluks had ever defeated them. During their invasion of Europe, Batu Khan inflicted a crushing defeat on King Béla IV’s Hungarian army, which had the best cavalry in Europe. The Mongols burned the city of Pest and seized control of the Hungarian plain. The Golden Horde wasn’t overly concerned about Lithuania’s chances.

   Kochubey, the strongman of the Golden Horde in southern Russia, was sitting on his horse at the top of a knoll looking westward in the spring of 1363. He had a small group of his commanders with him, as well as two mercenary Russian warlords. They had ravaged Poland six years earlier, destroying Lublin. They were feeling their oats. The Golden Horde had meant to engage the Lithuanians the year before, but the weather had been bad, wet and soggy. It didn’t suit the Mongol horses. The recent spring had been dry and the summer promised to be a good one for campaigning. Kochubey was eager to be on the move. He had dynastic issues with his brothers, who were trying to assassinate him, if he didn’t get to them first. He wanted to be at war somewhere. It was what he did best.

   Before the small group broke up, their commitment and decisions made, the two Russians rode up to Kochubey. They had fought the Lithuanians before. One of the warlords leaned over his horse and said quietly, “Beware the Lithuanians.” Kochubey snorted at the warning and puffed himself up. “The Lithuanians need to beware of us.” He wheeled his horse around and rode away. The Russians watched him go. They were hard men, but knew better than say anything else to their overlord. He was a harder man than them.

   Grand Duke Algirdas of Lithuania didn’t give a damn how tough the Mongols thought they were. He knew that ever since their empire had been split after the death of Genghis Khan they had been plagued by internal discord. The Golden Horde was in the middle of multiple succession disputes. They were fracturing into separate domains. The  resulting disorder was having a poisonous effect on their fighting men. It was a golden opportunity for Grand Duke Algirdas to expand  his southern territories. He wasn’t like the Russians who were content to pay tribute in return for an uneasy peace. If the Mongols wanted to come to him, all the better. He would make it easy for them by marching to the Don River near where they were. He would wait and design his plan of action.

   The Lithuanian forces were made up of lightly armored knights on fast horses, foot soldiers armed with swords and spears, and crossbow men. They were disciplined and determined. They were not under any illusions. They knew the Golden Horde, despite its problems, was a formidable force. Mongols were merciless on the field of battle. They took few prisoners. They had proven that at Samarkand and Bukhara. There would be blood. The Lithuanians were confident it would be Mongol blood.

   Ianiunas was a crossbowman man. He was from western Lithuania, from near the Curonian Spit. For hundreds of years the Curonian Spit had been the location of a pagan trading center. The Teutonic Knights took over in the 13th century, building a castle at Memel. It was where Ianiunas trained on the crossbow.  He joined Grand Duke Algirdas’s forces after getting sick and tired of the Germans trying to convert him to Christianity. He weas a pagan. He wasn’t going to convert to the White Christ, now or ever. He was going to live and die by the light of his own gods.

   Grand Duke Algirdas hadn’t converted, either. He worshiped the thunder god Perkunas. He was pagan to the core, like Ianiunas, even though he allowed Orthodox Christians living in Vilnius to build a church where the city’s gallows had once stood. It was the Grand Duke’s own private Idaho joke. He was a pagan, but he was a politician, too. He appointed Orthodox officials in the Slavic territories of Lithuania. He married one Orthodox princess after another. He didn’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind was blowing. 

   He was willing to bend but he wasn’t going to break. He and his brother Kestutis wanted the Teutonic Knights out of Lithuania. They were a threat to the throne. He had led Lithuanian-Slavic armies against them. During  the Uprising of the Night of Yury in 1345 one of the leaders of a provincial rebellion told the Grand Duke he had been elected king of the rebels. He was a peasant farmer. He informed the Grand Duke that if he followed him into battle the Germans would be driven away. Grand Duke Algirdas wasn’t going to wet nurse the man. He cut his head off right away. A peasant farmer pretending to be a king was as much a threat as the Teutonic Knights.

   It was a sunny day in October when the Lithuanians engaged the Golden Horde. Grand Duke Algirdas had moved his forces west and crossed the Dnieper River towards Podolia. The Mongols met the Lithuanians on the banks of a river near present-day Torhovytsia in southern Ukraine. The town was then known as Sinie Vody, or Blue Water. 

   The Lithuanians organized themselves into six interconnected groups arranged in a half circle. The Mongols began the battle with a barrage of arrows from their horsemen into both sides of the Lithuanian formation. The Lithuanians darkened the sky with bolts from their crossbows. Arrows from composite bows like what the Golden Horde fought with fly at 250 feet a second. Bolts from a crossbow fly at 350 feet a second. The leather armor many Mongols wore offered little protection from the bolts. 

   A row of pikemen with shields protected the crossbowmen, as did a row of pavises. The crossbowmen fired from behind their wall. Every man had two men behind him loading crossbows and rotating them from the back to the front. They held firm, ignoring Mongolian feints. Ianiunas killed one Mongol after another until he ran out of bolts. When he did he unsheathed his sword and joined the foot soldiers.

   The Lithuanians moved forward with pikes, lances, and spears, breaking the front line of the Mongol army. The men of the Naugardukas attacked the disorganized flanks of the Golden Horde with fresh crossbows. The liegemen of Karijotas Gediminas, the son of the former Grand Duke Gediminas, moved in for the kill. The Mongols weren’t able to maintain their formation and broke into a retreat which became a rout. The field of battle became a killing field. 

   The blue waters of Sinie Vody ran red with Mongol blood. At the end of the day Grand Duke Algirdas had achieved an open and shut victory. Without meaning to, the threat to European Christendom had been forestalled by a pagan.

   The victory secured Kiev and most of Ukraine for the Lithuanians. The Grand Duchy gained access to the Black Sea. Grand Duke Algirdas left his son Vladimir in charge. Vladimir became a bitter rival to the Grand Duchy of Moscow on the day he assumed power. From that day on there was no love lost between the Lithuanians and the Russians.

   Ianiunas went home to his wife and children. He had a farmstead on the banks of the Nemunas River in the south of Lithuania. It was on the edge of an impenetrable forest. A fort had been built in nearby Alytus to protect against Crusader raids seeking cattle, slaves, and conversion. When he left the battlefield he walked while an ox pulled a two-wheeled tumbrel filled to the gills with spoils. It took him a month to get home. He got there in the middle of November in the middle of a snowstorm. He got hot kisses from his wife and warm hugs from his children before they dug into the loot he had brought back. His favorite hound sniffed him up down and sideways before becoming his favorite hound again. The neighbors came over for tales of war told over a barrel of amber-colored honey wine. Everybody got drunk as skunks.

   Five years later Ianiunas celebrated the marriage of his eldest daughter to an immigrant  Mongol by the name of Chagatai. There was a big party and barrels of honey wine. The train wreck that was the Golden Horde was hemorrhaging its own. Many of them were seeking refuge in faraway places, including Lithuania. Nearly fifty thousand Mongols migrated to the Grand Duchy in the 14th century. Their first settlements were near Grodno and Trakai. 

   The first thing they did was learn the Lithuanian language and where to pay their taxes. The Grand Duke didn’t care what language they spoke, but he cared a great deal about taxes. They were allowed to build mosques, most of them being Muslims. They were allowed to marry Lithuanian women and raise Muslim children. In return, they were required to serve in the Grand Duchy’s soldiery. They had to provide their own weapons and horses. They patrolled borders and defended  towns and castles from attacks. 

   When it came to warfare they formed their own horse regiments. Although they grudgingly admitted the power of bolts, they had grown up learning to stand on the back of a galloping horse and hit a moving target with their arrows. Their weapon was a composite bow made of wood, sinew, and laminated horn. It was what steppe warriors had been using for a thousand years. They carried two or three bows and multiple quivers holding hundreds of arrows. The arrowheads were hardened by plunging them into brine after heating them until they were red hot. The Mongols were adept at firing their arrows at the split second all four of their horse’s hooves were off the ground, giving them a split second of stillness.

   Chagatai put his bows and arrows away the day of his wedding. By the time the ceremony, the dinner, and the revelry were over, almost everybody’s feet were off the ground, except for Ianiunas and Chagatai. They stood on a grassy spot on the edge of a pond next to the family house. Ianiunas’s favorite hound had flopped down and was sleeping at his feet. Chagatai looked at the hound.

   “I will have many dogs,” he said.

   “Dogs are useful animals and good companions,” Ianiunas said.

   “They are loyal, too,” Chagatai said.

   “Yes, dogs are the only creatures on this earth who will never betray you,” Ianiunas said.

   Chagatai was of the same mind. The two men stood next to each other gazing at star clusters in the inky sky. When Ianiunas’s hound started growling in his sleep and suddenly farted, their faces both creased up. Chagatai leaned down and patted the hound’s flank, who rolled over onto his feet. The three of them watched for shooting stars but there weren’t any, until there was one. They went back to the family house to whatever honey wine was still to be had.                 

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

A Cold War Thriller

“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, 1956. Stickball in the streets and the Mob on the make. President Eisenhower on his way to Ebbets Field for the opening game of the World Series. A killer waits in the wings. A Hell’s Kitchen private eye scares up the shadows.

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

Flying the Coop

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By Ed Staskus

   “Hey, what the hell do you think you’re doing?” Juozas Bankaitis barked coming back to his delivery truck. He had just dropped off three orders of fried chicken to a law office on the corner of 3rd St. and Yesler Way on Pioneer Square. Yesler Way was named after Henry Yesler, the founder of Seattle. A Negro man was tearing the spare tire cover off the back of his truck.

   “Who the hell do you think you are calling us coons?” the man yelled back.

   What is he griping about? Juozas wondered. Everybody loves coon chicken.

   Juozas was new to Seattle, Washington. He had come from Cleveland, Ohio. He had emigrated to the United States from Lithuania a year after the Great Depression parked itself for the long haul. None of the work he found in Cleveland ever lasted and he decided to take his chances out west. When he got to Seattle he liked what he saw. It reminded him of his home on the Baltic Sea. He changed his name to Joe Baker. He worked for the Coon Chicken Inn making deliveries and filling in whenever the kitchen needed him. He didn’t belong to the Church of Fried Chicken, but he was good at seasoning them and making sure the cooking oil temperature never dropped below 325F.

   “Give that back to me,” Joe said. 

   “Come and get it,” the man said. His name was Joseph Stanton. He worked for the Northwest Enterprise, a local Negro newspaper. The newspaper had been founded in 1920 by William Henry Wilson. By the time Joe Baker arrived in town William Henry Wilson was thought to be the most successful Negro in Seattle.

   Joe Baker and Joe Stanton each got their hands on the spare tire cover and started tugging. Before long the canvas cover tore in half. A policeman on foot patrol heard the commotion and broke up the tug of war. He arrested Joe Stanton. The Negro was booked for vandalizing an automobile. The next day in court the judge asked to see both parts of the spare tire cover. When a court attendant brought them out, the judge put the parts together and chuckled. It had Coon Chicken Inn printed on it in bold letters. Darkies could be sensitive.

   There was a color picture in the middle of the spare tire cover. It was the head of a grinning bald black man with enormous lips, a winking eye, and wearing a cockeyed porter’s cap. The same bald black man’s head formed the restaurant’s 12-foot high front entryway. The door was through his grinning mouth. The logo was on every menu, dish, and piece of silverware.

   “Well, I’ll just fine you three dollars and you go on home,” the judge said settling the matter by banging his gavel. Joe Stanton’s newspaper paid the fine. They padded his paycheck with a bonus the following week. 

   The first Coon Chicken Inn came to life in 1925 in Salt Lake City. The eatery took off the day its doors opened. Two years later the deep-fat grease-soaked place caught fire and was reduced to ashes. Fifty carpenters worked day and night for ten days building a newer bigger restaurant. An overflow crowd showed up on the eleventh day. Everybody got free dessert when they ordered the Coon Chicken Special. 

   The Seattle restaurant opened in 1929 on Bothell Highway, not far from Henry the Watermelon King, who sold king-sized watermelons. Just like in Salt Lake City, it was an instant success. “Anyone who has lived below the Mason-Dixon line knows that ‘coon chicken’ is the way the fowl is cooked by the old-fashioned southern mammy,” the Seattle Times reported, heedless that there were no old-fashioned southern mammy’s in the kitchen. The following year another one of the restaurants opened in Portland, Oregon. A cabaret, dance floor, and orchestra were soon added to the Salt Lake City and Seattle locations. The dance floor was where Joe Baker met Helen, who became his wife.

   “I’ve always said, never put a sword in the hands of a man who can’t dance,” Helen said. “But, oh boy, you can dance.”

   “I always say, if you can dance, you’ve got a chance,” Joe said. “Never mind that chicken, let’s shake a leg.”

   The fried chicken restaurants were owned and operated by Maxon Graham and his wife Adelaide. Maxon had been barely 16 years old in 1913 when he answered an ad for the Metz Automobile Company. They were looking for car dealers. Maxon wrangled financing from a local bank and got  distributorship rights for Utah, Idaho, and Nevada.  When he did, he became the youngest car dealer in the United States. Twenty years later Maxon and Adelaine were looking for a new opportunity. They settled on fried chicken.

   Most of the waiters, waitresses, and busboys at the Coon Chicken Inn were Negroes. “Their service to whites is preordained by God,” was the feeling of the day. Everybody knew, though, that they were thieving chicken-lovers. Everybody had seen their rascality in the movie “Rastus and the Chicken.” The birds were kept under strict supervision. The cooks were a mixed bag. The rest of the staff was white, especially the cashiers, bartenders, and everybody front-of-house. There were no Chinamen. 

   A Nevada periodical published an interview in 1972 with the grandfather of a waitress who worked at the last of the restaurants in Salt Lake City, which closed in 1957. “I was ridin’ out one day and comes across the Coon Chicken Inn. Seems like that ol’ coon head just sort of winked at me like it always done, and I’ll be dad blamed if I didn’t just wink right on back. I reckon de past ain’t all full of meanness. You got to laugh at some parts.”

   Seattle’s Coon Chicken Inn often hosted meetings of clubs and civic organizations. The Democratic Club met there. Weddings, anniversaries, and birthday parties were celebrated there. There were always an array of drinks at the catered meetings and celebrations, but the food was without fail fried chicken. In 1942, long after Joe Baker had left Seattle, Coon Chicken Inn was listed in ‘Best Places to Eat,’ the nationwide guidebook of auto clubs.

   Joe was filling in one busy Saturday night frying chicken one after the other when one of his friends in the kitchen pulled him aside. His name was Ernie. “You hear what the Chinamen are up to?” he asked.

   “No, I haven’t heard anything.”

   “They are planning on applying for work here at half our pay. It won’t be long before none of us has got no job anymore. Why don’t you join us tomorrow? We’re having a rally about what to do.”

   “OK, I will,” Joe said.

   The rally the next day was in a cleared field on the outskirts of Seattle. It was Sunday night. There were a thousand more men and women there than worked at the Coon Chicken Inn. Most of them were dressed in white robes. They were the rank-and-file. A few of them were dressed in green robes. They were the Grand Dragons. A dozen of them wore black robes. They were the Knighthawks, a kind of bouncer. Some of those in white had emblazoned their robes with stripes and emblems.

   Almost all of them were wearing a conical shaped hat. They were dunce hats with a mask flap. Round eye holes had been cut out of the front of the mask. The eye holes were stitched to prevent fraying. There was a red  tassel attached to the pointy top of the hat.

   “Is this the Ku Klux Klan?” Joe asked Ernie.

   “Yeah, that’s who we are,” Ernie said handing him a robe. “I couldn’t find a hood for you, but that’s all right. You’ll make do.”

   Joe knew hardly anything about the Ku Klux Klan except that they hated Negroes so much they burned down their houses in the night and lynched the survivors. What he didn’t know was they hated Chinamen almost as much as Negroes. He found out later they hated Jews and Catholics as well. When he found out they hated immigrants he was offended, but by then he was no longer living in Seattle.

   “I thought the Ku Klux Klan was against Negroes.”

   “Chinamen are the same as niggers, lazy and shiftless.”

   Joe was puzzled. It didn’t make sense. If they were lazy and shiftless, why were they trying to take everybody’s jobs? He was also puzzled that the Ku Klux Klan was in the Pacific Northwest in the first place. He thought they lived and died in Dixie.

   “No, it ain’t just there. We’ve been here since right after the Civil War, the same as back home. Hell, we were here before there even was a Klan.” Before the Civil War a group calling itself the Knights of the Golden Circle promoted the cause of the Confederacy. During the war they were a Fifth Column. They meant to spread slavery and take California, Oregon, and Washington out of the Union. They planned to form a Pacific Republic allied to Dixie.

   In 1868 in the Livermore Valley outside of San Francisco a circular was in wide circulation. “Action! Action! Action!” it said. “Fellow members of the KKK the days of oppression and tyranny is past, retribution and vengeance is at hand.” The circular threatened to impale those “who seek enslavement of a free people.” Their target was the Chinese. Anti-Chinese sentiment up and down the coast eventually led to the first race-based anti-immigrant laws in the United States. “ I believe this country of ours was destined for our own white race,” Senator John Hager said.

   “How are you going to keep the Chinese from taking our jobs?” Joe asked.

   “Stick around, you’ll see,” Ernie said. “We got the manpower to get it done.”

   In the summer of 1923 200,000 Klansmen gathered in Indiana for a mass rally. There were more Klansmen in Ohio, Illinois, and Indiana than there were south of the Mason Dixon line. That same year 50,000 of them rallied at Wilson’s Station in Oregon. “Over a green sloping hill on which stand four huge crosses an endless line of white-robed Klansmen move in single file and closed ranks,” is how the magazine Watcher on the Tower described it. “They form a square covering the space of five acres standing shoulder to shoulder. Suddenly a figure appears on the brow of the hill riding a horse. A voice heralding the stars passes the word ‘Every Klansmen will salute the Imperial Cyclops.’” Two years later almost 40,000 Klansmen paraded down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D. C. in broad daylight in full regalia.

   The rally started when the sun was down and the moon was up. Ernie elbowed his way to the front, Joe following in his wake. There was a 21-gun salute. A cohort of Klansmen paraded in military formation with red, white, and blue torches. A fireworks display exploded into three gigantic K’s and parachuted hundreds of small American flags. The first speaker declared that “our progress is the phenomena of the age. It is the best, biggest, and strongest movement in American life.” A troupe of actors reenacted scenes from D. W. Griffith’s “Birth of a Nation.” A local minister gave a sermon, calling for “an army of Christ to demand the continued supremacy of the white race as the only safeguard of the institutions and civilization of our country.”

   The imperial Cyclops was the last to speak. “We believe that the mission of America under Almighty God is to perpetuate the kind of civilization which our forefathers created. It should remain the same kind that was brought forth upon this continent. We believe races of men are as distinct as breeds of animals and that any mixture between races is evil. Our stock has proven its value and should not be mongrelized. We hold firmly that America belongs to Americans. Within a few years the land of our fathers will either be saved or lost. All who wish to see it saved must work with us.” 

   At the end of the rally a three story wooden cross was set on fire. Everybody watched as it slowly started to lean and toppled to the ground. The traffic jam leaving the Konklovation was long, clogging the rural roads. Sheriffs from Seattle helped direct traffic.

   Ernie drove to the heart of the city and stopped in front of the Merchants Cafe on Pioneer Square. It was the oldest bar in town. They had never stopped serving booze, Prohibition or no Prohibition. It was built long ago by W.E. Boone, who was a direct descendant of Daniel Boone. The upstairs had once been a brothel. The whores were known as seamstresses. It was their codeword. 

   Joe and Ernie sat down on the last two stools at the bar and ordered mugs of beer. ‘Here’s to You!’ was emblazoned on the stoneware mugs. The beer was a top-fermented local ale. It was cold and refreshing.

   “I watched the parades, listened to all the speeches, and I saw the cross burn, but I still don’t understand how the Ku Klux Klan is going to save our jobs,” Joe said. “Nobody said a word about it.”

   “All the words were about saving our jobs,” Ernie said. “You got to listen between the lines. First, we’re going to jump some of the Chinamen and teach them a lesson. If they don’t learn their lesson then we’ll burn some of their shacks down. If they still won’t listen to reason, we’ll string one or two of them up. That should take care of it. They’ll be out of Seattle soon enough.”

   Later that night, snug in bed, Joe and Helen talked about what was going on and what was in the works. Neither of them liked it. Helen’s grandparents had come from Poland, which like Joe’s Lithuania, had been an unwilling unhappy colony of Russia for a long time. Both countries had gotten their freedom back only after World War One, after a hundred and fifty-some years of tyranny.

   “My father told me all about the Russians,” Joe said. “They treated us like the Ku Klux Klan treats Negroes and Chinamen.”

   The Lithuanian legal code, originating in the 16th century, was quashed. Russian apparatchiks  occupied all the posts of power. Arrests and detention were at their discretion, no matter if a crime had been committed, or not. Russian was the only language allowed to be spoken in public. Teaching the Lithuanian language in schools was forbidden. No arguments were brooked. Books and magazines could be printed only in the Cyrillic alphabet. Latin script was forbidden. Books in Lithuanian in Latin script, printed in East Prussia, had to be smuggled into the country. When they were caught, some of the book carriers were shot on the spot. The rest were exiled to Siberia. The term of exile was 99 years to life. 

   “What should we do?” Helen asked.

   “I think we should leave this place,” Joe said.

   Joe and Helen packed two suitcases and a sea bag early the following Saturday morning. Joe had cashed his weekly paycheck the day before and consolidated their savings, which he entrusted to a money belt. He had warned the head man of the Chinamen in Seattle about what the Ku Klux Klan was planning. He didn’t bother warning the police. Enough of them were Klansmen to make telling them unwise. Joe and Helen took a ferry to Vancouver Island, landing in the town of Victoria after a three hour ride. They took a bus to Port Hardy on the northeast tip of the island, just inside the Arctic Circle.

   At first they both worked at the Bones Bay Cannery, but within two years had saved enough to open their own business. The business was a bakery. They called it Baker’s Bakery. The first employee they hired the next year, after getting their legs under them, was a Chinese immigrant willing to work for low pay.

   “Why you use same name twice?” he asked looking at the sign above the front door.

   “Because our bread is twice as good,” Joe said.

   “You pay me more when I make it three times as good?”

   “You be square with me and I’ll be square with you.”

   No man is an island, but Vancouver Island suited Joe and Helen. He wrote a letter to his parents in Lithuania telling them where he was, but the letter was lost and never delivered. She got pregnant and pregnant again. Their children were born Canadians. Growing up they would have laughed their heads off if anyone had told them about the KKK, about their variety show antics and Halloween-style hoods and robes. They would have hung their heads if anybody had told them about the KKK’s deadly serious night rides. As it was, nobody ever told them, at least not until they came of age and had a better understanding of gods and monsters.

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. Jackson Pollack opens a can of worms. President Eisenhower on his way to the opening game of the World Series where a hit man waits in the wings. A Hell’s Kitchen private eye scares up the shadows.

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

Age of Discovery

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By Ed Staskus

   I was three years and several months old before I got my first good look at Sudbury. I blinked rapidly and looked around. I didn’t know it had been a solitary railroad outpost in the late nineteenth century before rapidly growing after vast mineral resources were discovered. It was the end of summer on our street. When I took a last look before my nap I thought it was the best place in the world, a place where everything was new. 

   My brother had been born about two years after me, and had been crying at night lately, keeping us all awake. My father was a miner, working day shifts for two weeks and then night shifts for two weeks. He was one of the explosives men, setting black powder charges a mile down. He needed his nerves to be rock solid. He needed to sleep like a rock. He didn’t need any rattles in his brain.

   At first, my mother thought it was a passing thing. When it didn’t pass, she took to sleeping in the living room, on the sofa, with my brother on the floor beside her in a wooden rocking cradle. Whenever he started crying, she reached down and rocked him, settling him down. She didn’t get much sleep, although my father and I got all the shuteye we needed.

   One day, when my father was at work, and my mother had an appointment with the doctor to check my brother’s tonsils, my godfather Joe Dzenkaitis showed up to babysit me for the afternoon. He was on the night shift in the nickel mines and had time to kill. He showed up on a motorcycle. It was a 1948 Vincent Black Shadow. “I borrowed it from my neighbor,” he explained.

   Most of the Lithuanian immigrants who landed in Sudbury, Canada in the late 1940s and early 1950s worked in the mines. They got out of the black hole that Europe was for them after the war and ended up in another black hole. Most of them were saving every penny they could so they wouldn’t have to work in the mines a minute more than they had to. Many of them owned their own homes, it being all-important, but didn’t own a car, a motorcycle, or even a bicycle.

   The Vincent had a black tank and black frame. The chrome pipes were nickel chrome steel. The nickel came from Sudbury. The small city south of North Bay in Ontario sat on top of a big hole in the ground overflowing with ore. Some people called it the ‘Valley.’ Others called it the ‘Basin’. An asteroid smashed into the spot hundreds of millions of years earlier with a payload of vital metals. Nickel took the blue ribbon.

   During the Korean War, which ended the year before, nickel was regulated. Whenever there was combat anywhere in the world Sudbury boomed. Nickel was vital for making armor plate. When the fighting stopped Sudbury went back to scuffling. It wasn’t boom or bust, but it was a one-basket economy, so it was boom or bust.

   After World War Two the open pits were almost exhausted and new underground mines were being dug. Nickel was increasingly being used for civilian purposes. Technologically advanced smelters started seeing the light of day. While Sudbury slowly progressed from being the most polluted city in North America, cleaning itself up, I was just getting my legs under me. My friends and I played on the rock outcroppings behind our house all the time and never noticed the ever-present haze of ash and smoke. We played Man on the Moon. Real astronauts played the same game not far away on the dark side of the moon. Smelting on cordwood in open pits for decades had made the hinterland more lunar than not.

   When I was born in 1951, I didn’t see much of my hometown at first. I was homesick for my old home, which had been warm and fluid. I saw a lot of my crib, the kitchen, and the living room. It was lively when my parents and their friends had kitchen parties at our house. I only spoke Lithuanian until the spring of 1954, when I started meeting kids my own age on the street. They all spoke English and French although none of them spoke French among themselves. English was the language on the street. French was for talking to parents and policemen.

   The Vincent my godfather was riding was plenty fast enough, but it wasn’t the Black Lightning, which was the racing version of the Black Shadow. Every steel part on the Black Lightning that could be remade in aluminum had been remade in aluminum. Everything not essential was removed, reducing the weight by almost a hundred pounds. It had a single racing seat and rear footrests. In 1948 Rollie Free broke the motorcycle land speed record riding a Black Lightning on the Bonneville Salt Flats. He did it wearing a bathing suit, laying prone like a swimmer flat on his stomach, his legs dangling off the back end, hanging on to the handlebars for dear life. He took a slow look around when it was all over and exhaled.

   I sat on the motorcycle behind my godfather, who I called Uncle Joe. I couldn’t get my arms around him and had to hang on to his shirt. He burped the bike down Stanley Street to Elm Street and took a left towards downtown. We lived on a new stretch of Stanley Street. Houses were being built as fast as could be because Sudbury was the most congested city in Canada. The Dominion Bureau of Statistics reported there were “42,410 people jammed into 9,450 units.” More than a third of the housing was officially designated as “overcrowded.”

   We glided past the Regent Theatre where my parents went to see movies on weekends. My father learned to speak English in Lithuania, but my mother lived on an out-of-the-way family farm of pigs and sugar beets near the East Prussian border. English was an alien language to her. The movies were a way for her to learn the lingo. She had just seen “Creature from the Black Lagoon.” She learned how to call for help in one showing.

   The picture palace was run by Herbert Sutherland. By the time I was old enough to go see movies it was home to a colony of rats. It got so it was hard to tell if somebody was screaming because of the monsters on the screen or because of a rat biting their ankle. Herb Sutherland found several homeless cats and invited them to make the theater their home. The city sent him a letter saying, “We do not feel the use of cats is sufficient to eliminate the menace.” He threw the hired guns out and set out poison, making the problem disappear. 

   We went past the new Sudbury Arena which had replaced the old Palace Rink the year I was born. Uncle Joe rode carefully, watching for mud, threading the needle. The Junction Creek overflowed its banks every year, flooding the northern and central parts of Sudbury. We rode around the General Hospital where I was born. Outside the Grotto of Our Lady of Lourdes we stopped for ice cream cones. I looked over my shoulder for spirits and saints.

  Frederic Romanet du Caillaud, known as the Count of Sudbury, had a six-foot tall 1500-pound bronze statue of the Virgin Mary erected at the mouth of the grotto in 1907. “Queen of the Gauls” was inscribed on the statue. At first, an Italian family by the name of Drago took care of it, cleaning up grime and bird shit. In the 1950s the Rosary Club was formed and assigned Omer Naqult. a local barber and devout Catholic, to watch over the pilgrimage site.

   One year earlier almost 10,000 people gathered at the site, coming from all the various parishes of the Sault-Ste-Marie diocese. New lighting was installed to light up the shrine at night. At the end of the next spring more than 10,000 residents of Sudbury took part in another Corpus Christi  procession that ended at the grotto. My parents weren’t able to go to the parade, no matter how devoted to Catholicism they were, so I didn’t know anything about it at the time.

   The statue was an inch or two shorter than Uncle Joe, who wore his hair wavy and was strong as an ox. He could bend nails with his hands. He and his wife Brone didn’t have any kids, but I saw plenty of them, anyway. My parents had one of the biggest living rooms among their Lithuanian immigrant friends and our house was where card playing, dancing, eating, and drinking happened on many weekends.

   We set off for Ramsey Lake. Before there ever was a Sudbury the natives called the lake Bitimagamasing, which means “water that lies on the side of the hill.” Everybody agreed Ramsey was easier to pronounce and that is what everybody called it. Everybody also agreed the lake was dead. Sewage from Minnow Lake drained into Ramsey Lake. Open roast emissions had been going on for so long and led to so much pollution that the lake, which had few water flow outlets, had given up the ghost. Even though it was still the largest lake in the world located entirely within the boundaries of a single city, it was a shell of its former self.

   There weren’t many fish in the lake. By the 1950s, despite three decades of persistent stocking, angling was still bad. Besides the pollution, fishermen had long since been dynamiting for fish, wiping out some species like bass. When Lands and Forest biologist R. E. Whitefield went census netting, it took him four full days to catch five northern pike and one yellow perch. Lake trout were unsuccessfully stocked in 1952 and that was the end of stocking for the next twenty-five years.

   Before my father showed up to sweep her off her feet, my mother’s Canadian boyfriend often took her out on the lake in his speedboat, until the day he started showing off, racing and zig zagging, and she fell off the back of it without him noticing. An evil-looking pike watched her bob up to the surface. By the time her boyfriend looked for her she was floating on her back waiting for him, hoping the weight of her wet clothes wouldn’t drag her under.    

   The lake is named after William Ramsey, the chief of a survey party in the late 1800s who got into the weeds in heavy fog. After finding himself he named it Lost Lake. Others less lost decided it would be better to name it after him but misspelled his name, calling it Lake Ramsay. Forty years later somebody noticed the mistake and corrected the spelling.

   When we got to the lake, I begged Uncle Joe to let me go swimming, but the water was greasy and purple as far out as we could see. “It’s probably some poisonous waste, or something Inco is up to,” he said. I had no idea what Inco was, but I had heard “What are you up to?” from my mother often enough that I knew it couldn’t be anything good. We went for a walk instead. When I got tired my godfather carried me on his shoulders, my fingers a stranglehold in his thick head of hair.

   It was a late September day and trees were starting to change color. There weren’t many of them, but the yellows and reds got me going and I begged Uncle Joe to take me to a forest. He said there weren’t any, but finally relented when I wouldn’t leave it alone. We roared out of Sudbury on the Vincent and into the countryside.

   It turned out my godfather was right. There were hardly any trees anywhere, at all. The first thing to happen to them was the Great Chicago Fire in the 1870s. Lumber camps popped up all over Ontario providing wood for the American city’s reconstruction. Then the ore discoveries and smelting got rolling, the fires releasing sulfur, which combined with water forms sulfuric acid leading to acid rain. Saplings struggling to reforest the landscape didn’t have a chance and died by the millions. The land around Sudbury looked like a wasteland. 

   Our street in the city had trees and grass and gardens but the only vegetation I saw outside of the city was wild blueberry patches and paper birch. What other trees there were, lonely and threadbare, were giving it their best shot against long odds. They were like the crippled kid on Pine Street we sometimes played with, although never for long. He couldn’t hop, skip, or jump. He couldn’t keep up with us as we ran here and there playing.

   When my godfather checked his watch, he suddenly said we had to go. We raced back to Sudbury, to Stanley Street, to our house. My father wasn’t home from work, yet. Neither was my mother.

   “When she asks you what we did today, just tell her we went sightseeing, OK?” Uncle Joe said.

   “OK,” I said.

   After my mother came home, I told her we had a great time, and while she and my godfather had coffee on the front porch, I watched my baby brother crawl around in the back yard. He was making progress, gurgling rather than crying. Our street dead-ended in a sheer face of dark pitted rock. I was forbidden to climb it because it was steep, even though I had already gone up and down it many times with some of my friends. Sometimes rules are a moot point.

   When my friends ran into our front yard after dinner and asked me where I had been all day, I told them all about it, all the places I had been to, and how Sudbury was bigger, better, and more exciting than I had ever imagined. After that, Stanley Street was still our world, but we couldn’t wait to see more of the world. We ran up and down the street pretending to be riding motorcycles. The sunset was gleaming red and  orange that evening. When my mother put me to bed that night, saying I looked tired, I slept like the rock of ages.

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

A Mid-Century Crime Thriller

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

“Captures the vibe of 1950s 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 Brooklyn Dodger dugout.

End of the Line

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By Ed Staskus

   When my father died the funeral service was at Our Lady of Perpetual Help, the Lithuanian church on Cleveland’s east side, the memorial service was at the Lithuanian Club up the street, and he was buried on the grounds of All Souls in Chardon, forty miles farther east. It is where many local Lithuanian-American Catholics ending their days on the south shore of Lake Erie end up.

   All Souls Cemetery covers some 250 acres, features over 109 developed acres and 7 mausoleums, and could be a golf course if it wasn’t a boneyard. If someone’s got the blues, it’s where to go. It’s the place to bury your troubles once and for all.

   Two years later, paying my respects on a sunny summer day, visiting my father in the mausoleum where he is interned, and later wandering about the cemetery, I stumbled on the burial place of Antanas Smetona. The name rang a bell. When it came to me, I remembered he was the first and last president of Lithuania during the inter-war years.

   Walking back to my car I passed a headstone 50-some years old. Red and white artificial flowers lay on the ground. Engraved on the stone was a man’s name, the dates of his birth and death, and the inscription “He Done His Damnest.” It wasn’t the kind of epitaph I expected, which would have been more along the lines of “Always in Our Hearts” or “Gone but Not Forgotten.” Had the man gone to Heaven or Hell?

   Antanas Smetona did his damnest, too, during a damnably hard time. 

   He was born into a family of farmers, former serfs, the eighth of nine children. Their homestead was near a small lake, almost dead center in the middle of Lithuania. His father died when he was eleven, making a last wish that his youngest son be sent to school. He was the only one of his brothers and sisters to ever get an education. The instruction was in Russian, because the Russians were in charge and Lithuanian talk was closed down. Lithuanian literature was closed down. Lithuanian history was closed down.

   He was a top student and won a tuition waiver. He supported himself by superintending his dormitory and giving private lessons. After graduation he made his way to Latvia, got involved with the Lithuanian National Revival, got into trouble, made his way to St. Petersburg, got involved in the February 1899 student protests, got into more trouble, and got deported back to Lithuania.

   After he was allowed to return to St. Petersburg, he got involved with Lithuanian book smugglers, got arrested, got thrown into a castle that doubled as a prison, somehow got acquitted, cracked his books wide open, burned the midnight oil, graduated university, and finally made his way voluntarily out of Moscow’s orbit. He never went back. He went back to the homeland. Russia was like a cemetery with a big fence around it. Those inside couldn’t leave unless they were thrown out. Those outside didn’t want to scale the fence to get inside unless it was a matter of life and death.

   Antanas Smetona got married and went to work for the Vilnius Land Bank. When he wasn’t working, he was working with several Lithuanian nationalist groups and writing, editing, publishing, circulating news and editorials, all the while for advocating national unity and independence.

   When the First World War started, he chaired the Central Committee Relief Society and pressed demands on the Germans, who had pushed the Russians out of the country in 1915. His No. 1 demand was that that Lithuania be granted its independence. A year later he began editing and publishing the newspaper Lithuania’s Echo. His message, stated in the first issue, was the speedy establishment of an autonomous and sovereign Lithuanian state.

   Russia didn’t like that, since they had controlled the country for more than a hundred years, but they had their own problems, namely the Eastern Front, where they were busy suffering six million casualties and three-and-a-half million captured. On top of that more than a million civilians were dying of war-related causes. Adding to the anvil chorus, the Bolsheviks were breathing down their necks.

   When the Council of Lithuania was formed, Antanas Smetona was elected Chairman and in February 1918 he signed the Act of Independence of Lithuania. The next year he was elected the first President of the Republic of Lithuania. His tenure didn’t last long. The next year a new man was elected, and he was out. He taught classes at the University of Vilnius and got involved with the paramilitary group the Lithuanian Riflemen’s Union.

   Five years later he led a coup d’etat, deposing the president and seizing the office for himself. A year later he suppressed the parliament. Two years later he assumed dictatorial powers. For all his editorializing about autocratic czars, he became an autocratic czar. For the next nine years he ruled by decree, his own new constitution vesting in him both executive and legislative powers. Whenever there were new elections he ran as the only candidate.

   He added his name to the rise of totalitarianism and dictatorship in the 1930s, joining Benito Mussolini, Francesco Franco, Joseph Stalin, and Adolf Hitler. He went from idealism and high-mindedness to cynicism and the inside track. Realpolitik is not about democracy and human rights. It is the struggle for power. It’s like Adolf Hitler said, “It is not truth that matters but victory. If you win, you need not have to explain. If you lose, you should not be there to explain.”

   Although there aren’t many children nowadays who would accept guidance counseling from Adolf Hitler, there were plenty of men and women eighty and ninety years ago who were all ears. That’s why cemeteries in 1945 were overflowing with human beings, not including the dictators. They make their own bed of nails.

   Antanas Smetona may have been a patriot and a loyalist, doing his best to restore Lithuania to nation statehood, but he was nonetheless a dictator. He may have repressed the Iron Wolves, a radical rightist movement led by his former Prime Minister who he had earlier removed from office, but his own Lithuanian Nationalist Union took part in the 1934 Montreux Fascist Conference. He may have believed in political parties, but his was one-party rule and he was the ringleader of the party. He styled himself as the Tautos Vadas, or Leader of the People.

   Under his rule Lithuania “moved decisively towards a dictatorship of what might be termed the ‘fascism from above’ variety,” according to Martin Blinkhorn, British historian and author of “Fascism and the Right in Europe 1919 – 1945.” The Russians, the Muddy Mississippi of Fascism themselves, said he was trying to “adapt Italian Fascist concepts to Lithuanian conditions.” He was more centrist and moderate in his authoritarianism than many others, but he also believed he was the most qualified and experienced person to run the country. He rigged the elections to make sure it stayed that way.

   Not that it did him any good. By 1938 he was being squeezed by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Russians. He had never been able to get Vilnius back from the Poles. Now he had to surrender Memel to the Germans. When the Russians presented an ultimatum to his government in 1940, he urged armed resistance, but nobody agreed that Lithuania’s armed forces, numbering some twenty thousand, was up to the task of going toe to toe with the five-million-man Red Army.

   “I do not want to make Lithuania a Bolshevik country with my own hands,” he said from the steps of the Presidential Palace in Kaunas and left the country. A month later Lithuania was incorporated into the Soviet Union. He wasn’t on hand to try to stop it.

   When he got to the border Antanas Smetona and his bodyguard waded across a rivulet into Nazi Germany. When he did, he went from lightning rod to lightning bug. The next day his family convinced the Lithuanian crossing guards to let them go, too, since the big fish was already gone. The provisional government wanted him back, but what could they do?

   The Germans put him up in a hunting lodge in the Masurian Lake District. From there he was moved to Berlin, then traveled to Bern, Switzerland, and lastly to Rio de Janeiro. He finally landed on his feet in the United States where four hundred guests greeted him at New York City’s Pierre Hotel for a lavish dinner and evening function. He briefly lived in Pittsburgh and Chicago before finally settling down on the east side of Cleveland.

   When I grew up on the east side in the late 1950s and 60s, Eastern Europe was right across the street. There were Serbs, Slovenians, Croatians, plenty of Poles, and lots of Lithuanians. Everybody had their own church and their own watering holes. Everybody had their own talk in their own language about their old homes and their new place new lives new future in the United States.

   Antanas Smetona and his wife Sofija moved in with their son Julius on Ablewhite Avenue on the northeast side of the city, off Eddy Road, near Lake Erie. Julius worked as a grinder for Standard Tool and was married to Birute Nasvytyte, a former concert pianist, raising their two children. The self-styled President-in-Exile worked on his memoirs and visited Lithuanian communities across America speaking about the plight of the mother country and his hopes for its post-war independence.

   “What the Magna Carta was to the English, what the rights of man of the French Revolution were to personal liberty, the Atlantic Charter is to nations, especially small nations like ours,” he said.

   When my parents bought a two-and-a-half story duplex with a backyard big enough for a pack of kids, their first house in the United States, doubling up with my father’s sister and her family in 1958, both families recent immigrants, it was about a mile from the exile’s residence. When I attended the Iowa-Maple Elementary School my first school year in Cleveland, I sat in a classroom a stone’s throw from the house. I wasn’t aware of at the time that the ex-president of Lithuania died in that house less than twenty years earlier.

  The day he died, Sunday January 9, 1944, he and his wife were in their upstairs bedroom relaxing. It had snowed lightly on Saturday and the windows were frosty in the below freezing weather. They smelled something foul and saw smoke oozing into their room from under the door. 

   The furnace had been acting up lately. “The night before yesterday coal fumes made me dizzy. I could not think clearly. Now I have completely recovered,” he wrote in his journal two months earlier. This was worse. His clear thinking days were soon going to be over.

   The overheated furnace caught fire, leapt up the chimney, and swept through the house. The man and wife bolted out of the room and down the stairs, but he turned around, stepping back into the bedroom, grabbing a fur-lined overcoat to throw over his head. By the time he turned again to flee his wife was in the front yard. He never made it out of the house alive.

   Fire Battalion Chief Tom O’Brien said afterwards the fire had a “head start,” making it difficult to fight. The coal room was red-hot. By the time they extinguished the blaze and accounted for everyone, they went looking for Antanas Smetona. They had saved the house but found him face down in the second-floor kitchen dead of suffocation. Police outlined where his body was found in chalk, and other policemen carried him out on a stiff board.

   The pull out all the stops funeral was at the Cathedral of St. John the Evangelist in the heart of downtown and was presided over by Bishop Edward Hoban. The Cleveland Police Mounted Unit saluted as his coffin was carried out the front door. He was buried in Cleveland’s Knollwood Cemetery but in 1975 was moved to Chardon, next to his wife, who died in 1968.

   Although the inter-war years in Lithuania are often referred to as the Smetonian years, there is no monument to the man in Vilnius. “I really wouldn’t want to say whether I’d approve a monument to Smetona, or not,” Remigius Simasius the mayor of the city said. In the end he didn’t say. There is still some bad blood about the putsch and his authoritarianism. “Perhaps not so much for the coup itself than for disbanding political parties and essentially destroying the opposition,” said Vilnius University historian Alfredas Bumblauskas.

   When I went back the next summer to visit my father, I walked to where I knew Antanas Smetona was six feet up. The polished granite slabs are on a wall above Grace and Philip McGarry and below Michael and Anna Pula. Someone had fixed fresh flowers to both Antanas and his wife Sofija’s facings. The sepulchral stone was spic-and-span.

   I thought of Blind Lemon Jefferson’s song, “There’s just one kind favor I’ll ask of you, see that my grave is kept clean.” No matter what, whether Antanas Smetona had done the best he could, or not, whether he was a statesman or a tyrant, whether he was in Heaven or Hell, the earthly remains of the man were beyond reproach in his neat as a pin final resting place at All Souls. 

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

A Mid-Century Crime Thriller

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

“Captures the vibe of 1950s 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 Brooklyn Dodger dugout.

No Place Like Home

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By Ed Staskus

   Sigitas Kazlauskas didn’t know J. Edgar Hoover from the man in the moon. He didn’t necessarily want to make his acquaintance, either. He wanted to go home, even though he knew he didn’t have nearly the funds for the passage. The passage was across the Atlantic Ocean and over the North Sea. His home was far away in Lithuania. He didn’t know the Justice Department man was going to be his ticket back.

   Sigitas was living in Cleveland, Ohio in 1919, where it was Thanksgiving week. He had left home in late 1914, dodging forced conscription into the Russian Army. He knew being drafted meant the meat grinder. He also knew his socialist views were hazardous to his health. The Czar didn’t brook his kind of man. He made his way to the United States on a tramp steamer. He was living in Dope Town, a neighborhood west of East 9thSt. and north of Superior Ave. Suicide Pier on the Cuyahoga River was down one end of the street and the town dump was down the other end of the street. Lake Erie was on the north side and Little Poland was on the south side. 

   None of his friends called him Sigitas. Everybody called him Dave. When he asked why, they laughed and said, “David and Goliath, like in the Bible.” They didn’t bother with his surname since they weren’t his kith and kin. They were Eastern Europeans like him who had ended up in Cleveland for the same reason as him, which was opportunity. His opportunity had come and gone, which was why he was living in Dope Town. It was the only place he could afford a furnished room. The wrist a Cleveland policeman had broken with a truncheon during the May Day Riot six months earlier hadn’t helped, making him unemployable for three months and draining his savings.

   Since then, he had been living on bread and homemade beer. When the beer was ready he called his Polish friends, “Hey Polska, come get your right piwo.” He was well-known for his beer, attracting friends who were as friendly with his brew as they were with him, maybe more. They sang, “In Heaven there is no beer, which is why we drink it here.” He was hoping somebody would invite him to their turkey feast on the big day. He needed a square meal with his suds.

   Cleveland was going strong in 1919. It was the fifth largest city in the country. Iron and steel dominated the economy. Foundries and machine shops were everywhere. Skyscrapers were being built. The population was nearing one million. A third of the population was foreign born, working in the steel plants and garment factories. They worked long hours for low pay, but it was better than where they had come from, where they worked longer hours for even less pay.

   More than a quarter million Lithuanians left the Russian controlled Baltics between 1900 and 1914. When World War One broke out all immigration from Europe to the United States was brought to a stop. The new labor force that came into being was from the American South. There had been fewer than 10,000 Negroes in Cleveland in 1910. Ten years later there were nearly 40,000. There was enough work for everybody, though. Commercial construction was booming. The problem Sigitas had wasn’t finding work. The problem he had was keeping the work he found.

   He was a socialist, which was his problem. He believed in social ownership of the means of production. He didn’t believe in private ownership of it. The word socialism comes from the Latin word “sociare” which means to share. The modern use of the word was coined by the London Cooperative Magazine in 1827. The First International was founded in 1864 in Great Britain. After that it was off to the races. The Second International was founded in 1889. Anarchists were banned as a practical matter. Socialists didn’t want bomb throwers in their ranks, if only because bombs can be unpredictable about who they blow up.

   The May Day Riot in Cleveland on May 1, 1919 pitted trade unionists and socialists against police and military troops. The city was bursting at the seams with blue-collar foreign-born laborers. The activist Charles Ruthenberg got it into his head to organize a mass demonstration on Public Square on International Workers’ Day. He had run for mayor on the Socialist Party ticket two years earlier, polling nearly a third of the vote. He was well-known among the disaffected. He marched at the head of the assembly.

   Sigitas and his friends heeded the call. They joined the more than 30,000 men and women who showed up for the demonstration. They marched from Acme Hall on Upper Prospect to Lower Prospect to Public Square. The marchers wore red shirts and waved red flags. A parallel procession of army veterans in full uniform clashed with the socialists. Fights broke out and the police were called, who then quickly called for reinforcements and mounted forces. Harry Davis, the city’s mayor, called for the National Guard, who mustered in front of a beer hall before going into action with fixed bayonets. Tanks led the way, even though the socialists were unarmed. When Sigitas’s wrist was broken, a lady standing beside him used the 8 inch ivory hatpin holding her hat to her hair bun to stab the policeman in the chest. It was how Sigitas managed to break loose and not get arrested. 

   Several marchers were killed, nearly a hundred were injured, and many hundreds more were arrested. The Socialist Party headquarters at Acme Hall was ransacked by a “loyalist” mob. The next day all of Cleveland’s newspapers blamed the marchers for the riot, labelling them as “foreign agitators” even though most of them were native-born or naturalized citizens. The fourth estate demanded their deportation. The Immigration Acts of 1921 and 1924 later restricted immigration of “undesirable” Southern and Eastern Europeans, whether they were socialists, or not.

   It was at Thanksgiving dinner with his friend Teodor Wojcik and his family that his friend hatched a plan about how to get Sigitas out of the United States and back to Europe. Agnieszka was Teodor’s wife. They had two children and were moving up in the world. Teodor went by Teddy and Agnieszka went by Agnes. They weren’t socialists, but didn’t argue with Sigitas about it. They believed the United States was a free country where everyone was free to believe what they wanted. They weren’t silly enough, however, to say so in public.

   “There’s a man at the Justice Bureau who is heading up the new Radical Division,” Teddy said. “He’s already gone after the Negroes.” J. Edgar Hoover was the new man. He was after what he called “terroristic and similar classes.” He was a District man born and bred. He was a law and order man schooled in bigotry. “Something must be done to the editors of Negro publications as they are beyond doubt exciting the darkie elements of this country to riot,” he said in the summer when white soldiers and sailors rioted in the District, killing more than a dozen men and women, after a rumor spread that a Negro man had raped a white woman. The rumor was false. The Negro deaths were real.

   J. Edgar Hoover turned his attention to anarchists and communists at the end of summer. He got busy sending the notorious Emma Goldman back to Russia. He helped engineer the arrest of more than a thousand radicals in early November, with the intent of deporting them. “The Communist Party is a menace,” he said. He meant to send them all back to where they had come from.

   “What does this new man have to do with me?” Sigitas asked.

   Agnes brought a plate of paczek to the table. They were deep-fried pastries filled with jam, caramel, and chocolate. The outer layer was sprinkled with powdered sugar and dried orange bits. They drank coffee the Polish way, which was strong with full-fat cream.

   “What you have to do is forget about socialism and become a communist,” Teddy said. “Join the Communist Party. Volunteer for the dirty work. Become a firebrand. Make yourself known to the Radical Division. Make enough trouble and you should be on a boat on your way back to Lithuania in no time. It won’t cost you a penny for the fare and they will feed you during the voyage, too, so by the time you get home you’ll be back to your old self.”

   “They won’t shoot me?”

   “Probably not.”

   “They won’t throw me in jail?”

   “They probably will for a month-or-so, but they don’t want to keep anarchists and communists in jail. They don’t want them here. They want to send them somewhere else, anywhere else, which will be easy enough in your case since you were never naturalized.” Sigitas had never forgotten Lithuania and had never become a full-fledged American.

   Becoming an official communist was easy as pie. Charles Ruthenberg had split from the socialists after the May Day Riot and joined several splinter groups to form Cleveland’s Communist Party. They allied with the Communist Party of America. The woman who had saved him during the May Day Riot was a close associate of Charles Ruthenberg’s. She put in a good word for him. He was brought into the circle of fellow travelers. He was given a revolver but no bullets. He gave the gun back. J. Edgar Hoover’s Radical Division had numerous informers and inside men. They put Sigitas on their list soon enough. He didn’t have to wait long for the Palmer Raids.

   Seven months earlier the anarchist Carlo Valdinoci had put a bomb on the doorstep of newly appointed Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer’s house in Washington, D. C. When the bomb went off no one inside the house was hurt, although the anarchist mishandled the explosive and blew himself up, as well as the front of the house. Across the street where Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt were sleeping the blast shook them out of bed. The attack was coordinated with  attacks in eight other cities on judges, politicians, and policemen. The Attorney General had his eye on the White House. He got to work hyping the Red Scare. He put J. Edgar Hoover in charge of identifying and arresting as many socialists, anarchists, and communists as he could and deporting them as fast as he could.

   The first raids in December filled a freighter dubbed the “Red Ark.” It sailed out of New York City bound for Russia. Its passengers were foreigners and suspected radicals. A month later the Justice Department went big. A series of further raids netted 3,000 men and women in 30 towns and cities in 23 states. Search warrants and habeas corpus were an afterthought. Sigitas was one of the communists swept up in the net.

   Once everybody was locked up in holding facilities, J. Edgar Hoover admitted there had been “clear cases of brutality” during the round-up. His admission was beside the point. His point-of-view was guilty until proven innocent. Not everybody agreed. “We appear to be attempting to repress a political party,” said the U. S. Attorney for the Eastern District. “By such methods, we drive underground and make dangerous what was not dangerous before.” A. Mitchell Palmer answered that he couldn’t arrest radicals one by one to treat an “epidemic” and claimed fidelity to constitutional principles. The Constitution didn’t necessarily see it that way, but it was just a piece of paper.

   Sigitas knew it was all hot air. He knew letting the cat out of the bag was easier than getting it back in. After he was arrested he couldn’t wait to be frog-marched onto a boat bound for the Old World. The New World wasn’t for him anymore. There was too much capitalism and double-dealing.

   He had been rousted out of bed in his furnished room in the middle of the night by two uniformed Flying Squad men and a Justice Bureau man. “Are you the Hoover men?” he asked. “The only Hoover here is the vacuum cleaner kind,” one of the policemen said. “We’re here to get you into the bag. You got one minute to throw some clothes on.” A minute later he was in the back seat of their Buick Touring squad car.

   More than a week passed before Teddy was allowed to visit Sigitas at the Champlain Avenue Police Headquarters, The complex of offices, jail cells, and courtrooms was overdue for replacement. A new Central Station was already on the drawing boards. “The moment the new station at E. 21st St. and Payne Ave. opens for business, the ancient Champlain Avenue mausoleum of crime, rats, and malodors which has been functioning as a police headquarters for perhaps twenty-five years too long will start to crumble before the wrecking engines,” is what the Cleveland Plain Dealer said.

   “How are you doing?” Teddy asked. “They do anything bad to you?”

   “No, except the food is terrible, which is bad enough. There’s no beer, either.”

   “They tell you what is going to happen?”

   “They are taking me to New York City on the train tomorrow. They made it sound like I will be on a boat soon after that.”

   “That’s what you want, right?”

   “That’s what I want, yes. I want to go home.”

   “Home isn’t just a place, Dave” Teddy said. “It’s a feeling. It’s where the heart is.”

   “There’s no place like home,” Sigitas said. “That’s where I feel the best. It’s my second chance.”

   “You’re taking a chance,” Teddy said. “The Russians are gone now, sure, but the new Lithuania doesn’t like socialists any more than they do here. Socialism is no good. Sooner or later, you run out of other people’s money.”

   “Capitalism is no good, either,” Sigitas said. “Sooner or later all the money has been sucked up by the tycoons.”

   “Good luck,” Teddy said.

   The next day Sigitas was taken to the New York Central depot. He was handcuffed to a police detective who rode with him the full day it took to get to Grand Central Station. A day later, in a courtroom deciding his fate, was the only time he ever saw J. Edgar Hoover, who was sitting with the prosecutors, but never said a word. 

   He was younger than Sigitas had imagined him, maybe in his mid-20s. His short hair was shaved even closer at the temples. Sigitas was five foot eight and trim. J. Edgar Hoover was slightly shorter and just as trim. He was a lifetime District man and a Freemason, although Sigitas didn’t know that, or anything else about the man. He looked him in the face repeatedly, but the Radical Division man never made eye contact with him. He left before the proceeding was over. He knew what the verdict was going to be before it was announced. 

   A week later Sigitas was on board a refitted troop carrier. It was a leaky old tub. It took twenty eight days to get to Finland. The deportees were assigned cabins in pairs. Sentries stood at the cabin doors day and night. Sentries patrolled the deck for the one hour every day they were allowed to walk in the outside air. Once they got to Finland everybody was taken to a special train, guarded by U. S. Marines and Finnish White Guards. They were put thirty men to an unheated boxcar fitted with benches, tables, and beds. Each boxcar had seven boxes of army rations, which included bully-beef and hard bread. They were taken to Terijoki, about two miles from the Russian border. Most of the men were being dumped into Russia like so much garbage. Sigitas was the only deportee going to Lithuania. The Russians dumped him out like garbage, too.

   He took a train from St. Petersburg to Riga, Latvia, and from there he hitched a ride on a sugar beet truck across the border to Lithuania. Sigitas walked the fourteen miles to the farmlands outside of Kursenai. It felt good to stretch his legs. He found his family home without a problem, as though he had never left. “Labas, mamyte,” he said when he stepped through the front door and saw his mother peeling potatoes at the kitchen table. After the kissing and crying, after he had sat his mother back down, and his brothers and sisters were peppering him with questions, he knew he had made the right decision in returning to the Old World.

   The worst feeling in the world is homesickness. Sigitas felt like a new man. He had shed all his theories on board the troop carrier. He could no longer determine which political way was the more bad way. Ideologies were full of lies. “Eik i velnius” was all he had to say about the matter. If he had still been in the New World it would have come out of his mouth as “Go to hell.” Lithuania was a free country again after more than one hundred years. The Russians were good and gone, except when they weren’t. They were grabby and unpredictable

   Sigitas worked on the family farm for twenty years. He harvested hay starting on St. John’s Day. He raised his own pigs and brewed his own beer. He always had enough to eat and drink, at least until before the Russians came back in force in 1944. The politics of the 20th century caught up to him. The Russians weren’t school style idealogues. They were barrel of a gun idealogues. Either you believed in them, or else. He fought them first with the Territorial Defense Forces and later with the Forest Brothers. They engaged the Russians in guerilla warfare in the woodlands surrounding their homes. Sigitas Kazlauskas was shot and killed in the Dainava Forest in late January of 1945. His body was abandoned on the battlefield and decomposed in the spring. He slowly sank into the bloom until there was nothing left of him.

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. Jackson Pollack opens a can of worms. President Eisenhower on his way to the leadoff game of the World Series. A brainwashed assassin waits in the wings. A Hell’s Kitchen private eye scaring up the shadows.

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication