Category — Miscellaneous

 
Mike, an old friend from high school, found me on the internet and pummeled me with questions about  Cleveland real estate. He lived in Minneapolis. He ended by mentioning a few high school buddies’ names. He said, “I haven’t thought about high school in decades!”

Was he bragging — as in I’ve moved on? I think about high school fairly often. Maybe because I live five miles from Charles F. Brush High. I also think about elementary school and preschool. And I didn’t even go to preschool! News: “Nostalgia has been shown to counteract loneliness, boredom and anxiety,” John Tierney, New York Times.

I go to class reunions even when they’re not mine — like Cleveland Heights High’s 50th. I was playing a klezmer gig at a massive, multi-room party center and went into an adjacent room for the reunion, just for the atmospherics: Go Heights Tigers.

I wish teachers were invited to reunions. In the 1990s, my 12th-grade English teacher walked his dog by my house almost daily in Cleveland Heights. One day I got up the nerve to say hello. And he didn’t remember me.

“I had so many students,” he said.

“I’ll bet you remember Ann Wightman!” I said.

Yes, he remembered Ann, the salutatorian. Ann got all As and one B. I think she purposefully got the B to let a boy be valedictorian. That’s how it worked back then (1968). Some smart girls didn’t want to stick out academically.

I haven’t been back to Brush High in a while. It’s off my flowchart. If I entered Brush, I would probably feel very young or very old. I think “very old” would win. Not worth it.

—

A guy named Mel called. He was considering my band for his daughter’s wedding. Right off he asked where I had gone to high school. That’s the go-to question here in Cleveland. Mel himself had graduated from Cleveland Heights. I answered and then segued into the main topic: “It doesn’t matter what you want musically. What about your daughter? She’s calling the shots for the wedding band.”

“Did you play sports at Brush?”

“Tennis.”

“Do you know Joel Schackne?” Mel asked. (Schackne had been a champion tennis player at Cleveland Heights High.)

“I knew of him. He’s older than me. Whose idea is klezmer music for the wedding, yours or your daughter’s?”

“Schackne is in Florida. He’s still playing tennis.”

“What does your daughter think?”

“What AZA were you in?” (AZA is a national fraternal organization for Jewish boys.)

“I wasn’t in AZA.”

“Who do you see?”

“A guy named Mickey — a goy,” I said. “You wouldn’t know him.”

Most of my high school friends left Cleveland decades ago. The guys remaining are, for the most part, entrepreneurs and family-business owners. A few made serious money here. The intellectuals hit the road.

Do I have any kind of post–high school life?

Maybe.

 
When I came home to Cleveland after college, I hung out at Case Western Reserve University. I wanted to stay in the college bubble. I didn’t like the alternative: the real world. I was helping my dad in the real estate business, and that was too real.

I met a medical illustrator at a Case party. When I told her,  “I manage apartment buildings,” she walked away. I had a harmonica in my pocket. She just didn’t know.

A friend whispered to me, “It’s not in her experience — apartment building management.”

A woman asked me, “Are you in OB?”

“No, I’m not in medical school.”

“Organizational behavior.”

“I’m not in that either.”

At Case, you were either a doctor, nutritionist, organizational behaviorist, or medical student. I ran into another medical illustrator. Nothing happened.

An OB grad​ student, Marcy, talked to me. She was doing her Ph.D. thesis on “the event of play in a closed group.” She had just graduated from Harvard.

“So many Harvard people here!” a man called out to Marcy. Three Harvard people, to be exact: 1.) The host,  2). Marcy, 3.) and  a Harvard grad on his way to Washington to become a lobbyist. All these Harvard people were on their way somewhere.

I was on my way to Lakewood. People called me up about low-water pressure, mice and clanging radiators. We had a tenant with no kitchen sink for two weeks because he ripped out the sink trying to install a butcher-block countertop. He wanted to charge us for dining out. Another  tenant lost his hot water for three days; I don’t remember why. I wrote him a Japanese-style apology. The tenant deducted a significant sum from his rent. I couldn’t blame him. A tenant saw a mouse and asked for a hotel room. That bugged me; mice are good people..

I recently googled the Harvard woman, Marcy. She’s a professor emerita at a university in Massachusetts (not Harvard). I don’t think I’ll contact her.

Maybe I should. I still have the harmonica.

Screw up

 
I grew up in Manhattan next-door to where John Lennon was killed. My parents ran an art gallery. They still do. They have a place in Switzerland and New York. I ran the Switzerland office for a while.

But I’m tired of the whole arts scene. I want out. I’m 30. I want to hang around with oil men, real estate guys and cowboys. Men who have never read the New York Times, particularly the Style section.

In college, at Kenyon, I had a roommate, Schwecky from Cleveland. I visited Cleveland a couple times with him and fell in love with the place. People in Cleveland have lawns and don’t pay $3000/month for a one-bedroom.

I have a one-bedroom in Cleveland Heights for $1200. Tricked out too. Marble countertops, dishwasher. I’m going to use my nest egg (courtesy of my old man) to buy up Cleveland. I can buy Cleveland’s whole East Side, I figure, for what my parents’ Central Park West condo goes for. But my dad wants me to stay in New York. No thanks. One question, Pops: what can I buy in New York for 1.5 million? Gornisht!

I’m hanging around with hustlers in Cleveland and loving it. This town – Cleveland’s East Side at least – is just old Jews, and when these boomers hear I’m from New York, they say, “I have a daughter in Brooklyn for you!” I groan. Those Brooklyn girls are trying to get jobs with my folks at the art gallery.

I’ve made some errors here in Cleveland, like an old Jew had me over for dinner and quizzed me on a couple things, and I guessed a milk chute is “maybe for the seltzer delivery,” and I didn’t know what treelawn meant.

I don’t think I’m ever leaving Cleveland. Cleveland Heights — where I live — is like Hoboken. Nice. Urban. But not too urban.

When I’m with my folks in the city, just going down to the deli for a sandwich is a major proposition. The crowd, the line, the elevator. I got mugged once. Eighth grade. Some kids pushed me over and took my book bag.

I don’t walk much in Cleveland. The roads here are bare — empty. There is infrastructure here for twice as many people as there are people. These are the wheels I’m going to buy:

fiction

 
Here’s my latest essay from the Cleveland Plain Dealer  . . .

Dick Van Dyke turned 100 on Saturday. That’s no big deal — in my world. Last month my klezmer band played a 100th birthday party — our fourth in three years. There was a chair placed prominently in the middle of the dance floor, to lift the birthday “girl” for “Hava Nagila.”

I said to myself, “No way.”

Correct: No way. We did not lift the celebrant on a chair. But the birthday “girl,” Etty Hoffman of Beachwood, did dance. She was out there on the dance floor. She boogied. And she gave a moving speech afterward, touching on more than five generations of her family, including “mommy and daddy.”

Nearly 10,000 Americans turn 100 each year, according to the Pew Research Center. The United States has the second-most number of centenarians in the world. Japan is first.

After the hora, I asked a dancer — Ms. Hoffman’s niece Joyce — if she was going to live forever. “What do you mean?” Joyce said. “Me or my aunt?”

“You. Do you assume you’re going to make it 100, too?”

“I’m planning on it!” she said. Joyce is in her 70s and plays flute, does yoga, lifts weights, walks a lot, and is skinny. Bonus: Joyce’s mom is 103. She’s Etty’s older sister. (Joyce’s mother was at the party, too.)

My dad made it to 68. Shvak. (Yiddish for weak). My mom died at 83. Better. A year before my father died, I interviewed him; I said, “You don’t talk much about your mother. Do you ever think about your mother?” I annoyed my dad. He said, “Of course I think about my mother!” My dad’s mother had single-handedly run the family’s candy store on Kinsman Road at East 151st Street. My dad’s father had been hit by a May Company truck in 1924 and spent most of his time hanging out at the pool hall after the accident.

At Julia Stratton’s gravesite in 2020, on the 100th anniversary of her birth. (Julia Stratton, 1920-2004.) From left: Lucy, Bert, Jack, Ted Stratton

At Ms. Hoffman’s birthday party, my band played: “My Girl” by the Temptations; “I’ve Just Seen a Face” by the Beatles; Tin Pan Alley classics; klezmer instrumentals; and some Yiddish songs. The partygoers applauded our wide-ranging set list. At a 100th birthday party, everybody is 100% mellow. A 100th birthday party is not a wedding — no anxious bride. It is not a bar mitzvah — no sullen 13-year-olds. There is no kvetching, period.

In the 1920s, Ohio-born vaudeville clarinetist Ted Lewis popularized the phrase, “Is everybody happy?” And yes, everybody was happy at Ms. Hoffman’s party. She was born in 1925 and grew up in the Glenville neighborhood and attended synagogue at the Cleveland Jewish Center (now Cory United Methodist Church) on East 105th Street. Etty was in the temple’s Confirmation class of 1941.

Her 100th birthday celebration was at Park Synagogue in Pepper Pike. Park Synagogue is a direct outgrowth of the Cleveland Jewish Center. Same congregation, different building. Ms. Hoffman has been a member of Park Synagogue since 1930. I wonder how many relatives at Ms. Hoffman’s party think they’ve inherited the family’s longevity gene.

They’ll find out.

Mary Tyler Moore died at 80. Keep that in mind.

And happy birthday to Dick Van Dyke, Etty Hoffman, and everybody trying to emulate them.

—

Link to Plain Dealer article here.

 
Why don’t columnists write about pet peeves anymore? That bugs me.

Why do nursing-home administrators insist on peppy tunes? Oldsters sometimes want to hear contemplative tunes.

Why do eyeglass adjusters have so much power over us? Did they all go to I.U.?

Why do “highly sensitive” people insist on telling us they’re bothered by the labels on their shirts? That’s irritating.

My wife took our electric toothbrush on her trip to Columbus. The electric toothbrush is a “permanent attachments to the dwelling,” ma’am.

What about those phone calls from my kids’ alma maters? I already give zero to my own alma mater.

When my computer messes up, why I do I feel like my arm broke? Why can’t I feel like a mosquito bit my ankle?

What about friends who grow arugula and offer you some? Why don’t they grow dates or figs?

Why do symphony-goers applaud wildly after every single piece? These people nap for 54 minutes during Mahler, then give the conductor multiple curtain calls. Applaud this!

Don’t get worked up over house address signs like “The Smith’s.”

I am worked up!

If you want to discuss cars, first ask: “Do you mind if I talk to you about cars?” Yes, I do mind.

Which is preferable: (1.) “He passed away” or (2.) “He passed.” Both stink. He passed what — Wendy’s?

Who’s nostalgic for mimeo machines? Somebody should be.

 
I came down with a bad case of Anglophilia. This happened decades ago. Via the Cleveland Press, I got a pen pal from Blackpool, England.

Bleak name –Blackpool. Then my Blackpool pen pal moved to Hamilton, Ontario, and that ended our correspondence. He lived several hours away. He was of no use to me any longer.

With no English pen pal, I decided to turn myself into a Limey.

And I’ve been a Brit-by-choice ever since. Everything about Limeyland fascinates me — in an off-kilter way: shandies, tyres with a “y,” cricket, venison faggots, regattas, even the bathroom graffiti. Bear with me. Check this out:

“This is not the place to sit and slumber but the place to fart and thunder.”

“The wall painter’s work was all in vain, the shithouse poet strikes again.”

These lines were on a pub wall in Bath. The year — 1980. You had to be there, and I was. I’ve didn’t visit the grittier parts of England. I didn’t need to see that.

Oh, to be in England.

I frequently go to the Cedar Lee Theater in Cleveland Heights to see films about England. My favorite  flicks are England-in-the-1950s films, like An Education and Nowhere Boy.

Clevelanders often complain about gray skies, but do Limeys? No, they don’t. They don’t get all cheesed off about rain and clouds.

Snow? I don’t think Limeys even have snow. But they would like it. I certainly do.

 
John Cermak installed a pool table, gun rack and shower in his parents’ basement. He lived down there his entire adult life. In his twenties, John drove a humpy Saab. Had to be a Saab. He showed me how to do oil changes on my car (a Plymouth Valiant) and helped me build a coffee table from pine 2x4s. We grew up across the street from each other.

John especially liked motors, fishing and woodworking, but that’s not the whole picture; he went to St. Ignatius High and graduated John Carroll University as an English major.

When I got into the landlord biz (thanks, Dad), I called John for advice on boilers, blown fuses, leaks and everything else. John was my guru of the physical world.

When John was in elementary school, he mounted a lawnmower engine on a tricycle. The guy knew everything.

John died in 1992 at age 41 from complications of mental illness and alcoholism. He could put away a case of Wiedemann’s in a day. Schizophrenia ran in his family.

A repairman called me and said, “The voltage at the cap is good.”

What’s that mean? If the voltage was good, why didn’t we have power in four suites? The man said, “The inside line, outside, is yours.”

John, you there?

 
I was at the Fuji Rock music festival, where I hung out with British lads — guys in their twenties. I was at Fuji Rock, in Japan, to see Vulfpeck. The lads were from Leeds.  Japan was so hot, the lads went bare-chested and drank a lot, and were amusingly, obnoxiously inebriated. Jimmy, on meeting a genuine VulfDad — me —  bear-hugged me and said, “I’m the stickiest man you ever met!” It was 95 degrees. The sweat.

Booze, Brits and heat.

No sane tourist visits Japan in July, when Fuji Rock is. The lads repeatedly mentioned how “warm” it was. (Leeds people say “warm” to mean “hot.”) Jimmy said, “There’s moisture everywhere.” He schlepped around a four-pack beer caddy. The humidity was Houston-level.

The Japanese — they can handle it. They don’t drink much in public (except at salaryman bars) and don’t complain about the weather. Air conditioning is generally “low” in Japan, on purpose, to save energy. Another thing, off subject: Japanese restaurants play quality background music — sometimes even Coltrane — on low volume. And everybody talks quietly in public places.

The Brits: total aliens.

—
The above is autobiographical fiction. Yes,  I was at Fuji Rock but I didn’t hang out with Brits. However, I later watched a video about Brits at Fuji Rock. The vid is cued up below. Check out a few minutes.

 
I had an op-ed, “To Life, Marriage and Wine,” in the Wall Street Journal on Saturday. Here’s the essay:

I convinced my wife to go to synagogue, which is a hard sell. My come-on was the wine. The first Saturday of the month, our synagogue passes out free bottles of Israeli kosher wine to married couples celebrating anniversaries that month.

Two friends recently called to say they were separating from their spouses. I look for reinforcement for the institution of marriage wherever I can find it. Alice and I stood on the bimah (altar) with eight other couples while congregants sang along to “Siman Tov and Mazel Tov” (good luck and congratulations). Rabbi Joshua Skoff announced the winner in the anniversary derby, a couple celebrating 55 years of matrimony.

Everybody read from the supplementary prayer booklet: “These couples have come to the synagogue to give thanks for the institution of marriage and for their mutual love and devotion.”

Bert and Alice, Oct. 22, 1978. Columbus, Ohio

One married man had a gray ponytail. There was an accountant in a suit and an obstetrician in a red pantsuit. The Torah portion was from Genesis. The rabbi noted that because Adam and Eve sinned, we are all going to die, which makes things interesting because if we lived forever we’d never get around to doing anything: “Why would you diet if you can put it off for 500 years?”

Our marriage-boosting interlude ended with: “May it be God’s will that these married couples continue to live to a ripe old age together in happiness, lightening each other’s burdens, and reaping a harvest of joy from the seeds of love they have sown in the hearts of their family.”

To life. And free wine.

 
My roommate Ed died. In 2006. I just found out about it. I thought I saw him the other day walking in Lakewood. I recognized him from the back. Nope, he’s dead.

Ed was the archetypal Lakewood Man — a poor white guy wearing a Browns hat, smoking a cigarette, shambling toward Discount Drug Mart.

I shared a duplex house with Ed and two other guys for a couple years in Cleveland Heights in the mid-1970s. I met Ed via the apartments-for-rent bulletin board at Case Western Reserve University. (A major portion of my life revolved around that bulletin board, like I met my future wife via the board.)

Ed was a nonstop liar and enjoyed talking on the phone for hours about bills he claimed he would pay, jobs he had or didn’t have, money he had or didn’t have. He worked as a security guard at CWRU.

His room was filthy, and he stunk, and he smoked nonstop. He could cook. Grant him that. He said the rest of us “lived out of cans.”

Ed had epilepsy, and one morning he went thud on the floor and started foaming at the mouth and bleeding around his tongue. He was about 6-2 and fat, so the thud was real. It rattled the house — and me. Ed should have warned us he had epilepsy. I hadn’t seen a grand mal seizure before (and haven’t since). Ed didn’t take his meds regularly. EMS got him straightened out.

I didn’t see Ed’s obit in the Plain Dealer in 2006. But I googled him after I “saw” him in Lakewood the other day. He died at 59. He had a hard life.

 
My cousin Brian Kent is a beast. He didn’t get his beastliness from me — or my side of the family. Brian’s dad (my uncle Bob) married into the family and was a brawler. Uncle Bob had a bashed-up nose from fighting. Uncle Bob used to crash weddings in the 1940s to pick up girls, like at the Cleveland Jewish Center on East 105th Street and the Temple on the Heights on Mayfield Road in Cleveland Heights. Both high-class shuls. Bob, who was a proste yid from Kinsman Road, got around.

He joined the army. He claimed he wanted to fight for Israel in the Haganah after WWII, but that never happened. He wound up in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, in 1949, studying art. He ultimately became an art-education professor.

But we’re not here to talk about Bob. Brian the beast . . . Brian, his wife, Deborah, and I recently biked around Cleveland. On our bike trek, Brian biked down 12 steps at Case Western Reserve University. He biked down the steps, instead of walking the bike down the steps. Brian is no teenager. He’s 65. Later, Brian fell off his bike downtown and got right back up.

Brian Kent out west, 2025. (He lives in Connecticut)

I was the bike tour guide. Starting in Cleveland Heights, we headed toward Lake Erie, via the Cultural Gardens (East Boulevard). We planned on eating lunch at the Marina-at-55^th Street. We were going to get walleye. But the lakefront restaurant doesn’t exist. Ripped down. And I had checked the restaurant’s website, which said it was “open.” So we settled on the Siam Café at East 40th Street and St. Clair Avenue. We saw the former mayor in there. (Had to google his name. Frank Jackson.)

We biked to League Park in the Hough neighborhood. The baseball museum was closed. Hough looked pretty good, actually. Babe Ruth hit his 511th home run at League Park.

We biked past John Hay High, where Brian’s mother (my aunt Celeste Zalk) had gone to high school in the 1940s. Secretarial track.

Returning to the Heights, we stopped at a secret waterfall, which I can’t tell you about, and went to Shaker Square to see how run-down it is.

Brian said the highlights of the trip were the waterfall and the tasty lunch at the Siam Café. For me, the highlight was watching Brian bike down 12 stairs.

Beast.

 
Tokyo had Houston-level humidity and was 96 degrees. The water at the Tokyo swimming pool was at 32C, the lifeguard told me. I googled 32C; that was 90F! It was like swimming in miso soup. Plus, I had to wear a bathing cap, which made the miso even warmer. (You have to wear a cap in Japan.)

Then I found an indoor Tokyo pool, which was cooler, temp-wise. My son the musician sneaked me into his hotel, and on floor 15 there was a three-lane lap pool. No kiddie area. Just lanes. That’s class. I had to wear a bathing cap there, too.

—

I was visiting my daughter’s family in Chicago this summer. It was 93 degrees. No lockers at the Chicago pool. I changed into my swimsuit in the locker room, but I couldn’t store clothes or valuables. I had to take everything to the pool deck. I said to a lifeguard, “What — no lockers?” Alfred E. Neuman-style. The guard said nobody would steal anything.

A couple hundred people —  like in Tokyo — tried to chill in the heat. Nobody stole anything.

—

Cumberland Pool

Cumberland Pool in Cleveland Heights has 14 lap lanes.  Name a pool with more lap lanes. The city adds lanes and reduces the kiddie area, probably because Cleveland Heights is boomer central, with many elderly lap swimmers and lap joggers.

—

My go-to Cleveland swimming pool is the Cleveland Skating Club, which has six indoor lap lanes (and a skating rink). I never have to share a lane, year-round. That seclusion is worth the club dues. I don’t like playing rugby in the water.

Maybe I’ll install a one-person “endless” lap pool/tub where my dining room is. But I haven’t heard much, good or bad, about “endless” tubs.

One last thing . . . in Japan nobody wears flip-flops at pools. It’s all bare feet.

 
I got an email with Michael “Moon” Stevens in the subject line. Moon is, or was, 82, and not too healthy. His obit?

Nope. Moon still “is.” Moon is the original Flint, Michigan, hipster.

Michael “Moon” Stevens grew up with John Sinclair, the well-known jazz aficionado and political nut-job from Flint. One of Moon’s relatives just contacted me about Moon. I know Moon through his sister, who lives in Cleveland.

For decades Moon was a union painter at the Los Angeles airport. He still maintains a cozy pad in L.A., where he’ll spin records for you. You are instructed to sit on his living room couch — in just the right corner — to optimally hear his jazz LPs.

Moon has an almost photographic memory for jazz facts. He gets most of his information from reading jazz bios and LP liner notes. He told me Sun Ra was a “congenital eunuch.” I didn’t know that. He said Joe Maneri was really fat, and Pharaoh Sanders foamed at the mouth and pounded his chest when he played.

When Moon was healthier, he visited Cleveland. One visit Moon was talking to me and his brother-in-law Lewis about Albert Ayler, Charlie Parker, Roland Kirk and Bill Evans. Moon covered all bases. Lewis — Moon’s bro-in-law — said Bill Evans was Jewish.

“How do you know Evans is Jewish?” I said to Lewis. “Do you wake up in the morning and wonder who’s Jewish, and who isn’t?” I do. But why would Lewis — a gentile — think about Jews nonstop?

“I grew up in Greenwich Village,” Lewis said. “New York was a very Jewish town when I grew up.”

“If somebody shoots somebody,” I said, “or if somebody wins the Nobel Prize, I wonder if the guy is Jewish. That’s my M.O.”

Moon said, “Bill Evans wasn’t Jewish. His father was Welsh and his mother was Russian Orthodox.”

Lewis corroborated this on Google.

Impressive, Moon.

—

Yiddishe Cup plays next Wednesday (Aug 27) at 7 p.m. at the outdoor, covered Wain Pavilion on the grounds of Park Synagogue, 27500 Shaker Blvd., Pepper Pipes, Ohio. There are chairs. The concert is free. And if you want, you can donate to Magen David Adom (the Israel Red Cross) at the show.

Was Dave Brubeck Jewish? Find out here  . . .

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iaWvixN_a9Q

 
I have this mishegas, where I detach uncanceled postage stamps from envelopes and reuse the stamps. I get a ton of mail, and some of it has uncanceled stamps.

Deeper: some of the uncanceled stamps are actually my own  — stamps I put on envelopes and, for whatever reason, I don’t use the envelope. Maybe I put a check in an envelope and then notice I’ve put the wrong check in. I rip open the envelope. The stamp is still good. (The envelope isn’t.)

I’ve been around stamps a while. I collected UN stamps and first-day covers. Some plate blocks. When I was in junior high, I took the bus downtown to the Manger Hotel for stamp shows. I was probably the youngest guy in there by about 50 years.

I collected stamps until college. My mother sent first-day covers to my dorm, and I had to tell her to stop. It was too embarrassing.

My stamps

I made $28.47 today, in a half hour, by rescuing uncanceled stamps from envelopes in my office. [39 “forever” stamps X 73 cents =$28.47]

I once had a tenant who used uncanceled stamps from the 1960s to send in her rent. I got 4-centers up until 1992, when she died.

I had the first stamps from Malaysia.

There was a stamp dealer, Mr. Stern, on Superior Road in Cleveland Heights. Alfred Stern: not a Jew. That shocked me. He was a German with a Christmas tree. My mom occasionally drove me to his apartment. He got me the Malaysian stamps.

I subscribed to Linn’s Stamp News from Sidney, Ohio. I had a friend — named Stamps, of all things — who collected coins. He subscribed to Coin World — also from Sidney, Ohio. Stamps collected brilliant uncirculated rolls of coins. I think his dad was into it, too. The Stamps were more like speculators. I was a collector. Still am.

 
My life flashed in front of me. I was walking to the bank. I was at Courtland Oval at Fairmount Boulevard, when a funeral cortege went by, and right off, I knew who was in the coffin and where it was going and where it had been. It was going to the same place I’m going some day. The coffin contained Jerry Zober (1948-2024). I knew him slightly. He was a shrink. I knew his sister, Muriel, better; we were in the same grade in school.

Jerry’s cortege proceeded from the Berkowitz Kumin Memorial Chapel in Cleveland Heights to Hillcrest cemetery in Bedford Heights. I knew all this because I had just read Jerry’s obit. The mourners’ cars had Berkowitz’s orange stick-on Jewish-flag ornaments.

I didn’t want to get too close to the cortege because I was feeling somewhat guilty about missing the funeral. I was busy that day! And I had never socialized with Jerry. Not even once. And I was flying to New York the next day and had to deal with stuff before leaving town.

Here’s the way I appraised the situation: at the funeral parlor — prior to the service — there would have been very little  time to schmooze with Muriel, Jerry’s sister. She would have been surrounded by relatives in the family-seating section. Who’s this guy Bert?

Shiva would have been great, but I couldn’t make it. I had last seen Muriel at her mom’s shiva 10 years ago. Muriel lives in Virginia. Also, I had been to the Berkowitz funeral parlor just a week prior for a friend’s aunt’s funeral. My friend lives in Israel and couldn’t make his aunt’s funeral so I repped him.

Give me a papal dispensation on Jerry’s funeral, please.

I sent Muriel an email saying I was sorry I couldn’t make the funeral and shiva. She wrote back, “Thanks. I was hoping to see you. Be well.”

If you ever see my coffin going down Fairmount Boulevard on its way to Hillcrest cemetery, considering waving. Or hide. If you didn’t know me very well, please have ambivalent feelings about the whole thing.

 
(This essay was in Sunday’s Cleveland Plain Dealer.)

The last time my father, Toby, ate out was at Wendy’s, on his way to a leukemia treatment in Columbus. My dad really liked Wendy’s. He thought he had a quasi-business relationship with the chain because he had almost invested in Wendy’s — headquartered in Columbus — before the chain got big. Almost is the key word. My dad’s near-miss with Wendy’s always topped my uncles’ near-miss get-rich-quick chronicles at Passover Seders.

I sat at Vintage India Restaurant on Detroit Avenue in Lakewood recently, thinking about my dad. My dad bought the building – not the restaurant, the building – decades ago. My family still owns the building. My dad died in 1986. I’m pretty sure Toby never ordered saag paneer in his life. Haagen Dazs, yes, but not saag paneer.

Vintage India is nothing special to look at. It has big plate-glass windows facing Detroit, and a laminate floor and drop-ceiling tiles. Bland decor, good food. The owners Ram and Shakuntla Lal do the cooking and their two adult children are servers. The son studies pre-med at Cleveland State University, and the daughter does nursing. The restaurant space, in previous iterations, was a medical-supply house, mattress store, office-supply house, furniture store and a video rental outlet called Cinema Transit. None of the businesses got the foot traffic of Vintage India. I counted more than 20 diners, plus a line of take-out customers, on a recent Saturday night.

Theodore “Toby” Stratton (1917-1986). 1985 photo.

My dad knew something about restaurants and food. His immigrant mother became a part-owner of Seiger’s deli at East 118th Street and Kinsman Road, and she also ran a mom-and-pop candy store further east on Kinsman Road. One of my dad’s childhood laments was that he couldn’t try out for the track team at John Adams High School because he had to work in the candy store after school.

“Financial security” was my dad’s watchword. He started early. One summer, he worked at Cedar Point, selling corned beef sandwiches on the beach. That’s the same beach where Notre Dame football coach Knute Rockne supposedly developed the forward pass. It would be great if Cedar Point put up a plaque for my dad, maybe something with wording like, “Toby’s favorite food was a good piece of rye bread.” Chocolate phosphates were a close second.

At Ohio State University, Toby lived in the Tower Club, a scholarship dorm in a wing of the stadium. It was a bunch of guys on cots in a big room. Toby majored in chemistry and made Phi Beta Kappa. After college, he had a lot of different jobs – none of them in chemistry. The chemical industry wasn’t hiring a lot of Jews when he graduated in 1938. He eventually wound up – 27 years later — a real estate investor. He put down 8% on the Vintage-India-Restaurant-to-be building in 1965 and “carried paper,” meaning he had first and second mortgages. He loved leverage.

If my dad is reincarnated, I hope he and I go to Vintage India. Toby will definitely appreciate the Lal family’s hustle and drive. I’ll advise my dad to stick to “1” on the 1-to-10 spiciness chart. The food at Vintage India food is hot, and my dad was a Wendy’s guy.

 
He said he was the last private-practice ENT in Northeast Ohio. I found him online — called him because my ear-wax appointment at the Cleveland Clinic was for six weeks out. Six weeks out for ear wax? Ridiculous.

I had already gone to the CVS Minute Clinic, in Chicago no less. I went to that CVS while visiting my daughter. I thought CVS’ exploration of my ear canals would be free because I’m old (Medicare), but I got billed $100. And they didn’t get the ear wax out.

The private-practice doc in Cleveland was Bert Brown. He said, “I hope you’re B-e-r-t, not B-u-r-t.” So we hit it off. He had a hook tool that got the wax out in about 3 seconds per ear.

The balls of wax were the size of blueberries. CVS had used water spray instead of a hook. Dr. Bert said I should come back every year to get cleaned. I asked his nurse for the ear-wax balls to take home but she had already pitched them. I should have at least taken a photo. My wife would have been interested.

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Free Father’s Day Concert: Yiddishe Cup plays 7 pm Sunday, June 15, at the Alma Theater at Cain Park, Cleveland Heights, Ohio.

 
You know Jim Sollisch. Or somebody like him. He’s that “gray-haired, middle-aged man in jeans and tennis shoes” (his words), hanging around Cleveland Heights. “If you ran into me on the street,” he noted, “you might guess that I was father or a husband. You might think I was Democrat or the owner of a foreign car.”

Sollisch, 67, has just published a collection of his personal essays, How Donating a Kidney Fixed my Jump Shot. How’s that for a catchy title? Sollisch is a copywriter at the Marcus Thomas ad agency and has written two Super Bowl commercials. Who else in Cleveland can say that? His side hustle is publishing op-eds in newspapers like the Plain Dealer, New York Times and Wall Street Journal. He has had hundreds of essays published the past several decades. He had an op-ed in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal about colonoscopies. [Link at end of this post.] For a while, in the 1990s, he read his essays aloud on National Public Radio’s “Morning Edition.”

Sollisch is well-rounded. He is feminine, marvelous and tough (to steal a phrase from poet Ted Berrigan).

Jim Sollisch

The feminine Sollisch . . . In high school, he badgered the administration at Cleveland Heights High into letting him take home economics instead of shop (1972). He likes to cook. He writes that he goes to various grocery stores up to four times a day to shop for fresh food. “And I was the only guy in my dorm [at Kent State] of 400 guys who ever used the kitchen. I became as powerful as the inmate with cigarettes.”

At 13 he wrote such poignant bar mitzvah thank-you notes that his recipients wrote Sollisch back, thanking him for his thank-you notes. His mother saved the notes. Nice.

The marvelous Sollisch. He donated a kidney to a co-worker. Who does that? A co-worker, not a relative. After giving up the kidney, the doctor told Sollisch he couldn’t take ibuprofen ever again, which he had regularly used to mask a sore hip. The hip — now unmedicated — started hurting so badly he got a new hip, and that improved his jump shot.

The tough Sollisch. He was scheduled to start at quarterback at Heights High his senior year, but at the last minute decided against it because he was only 5-8 and might get squashed. He stuck with basketball. He played basketball into his 60s.

The most interesting part, though, is Sollisch is a major-league kvetcher. He writes: “I hate bike riding . . ,  I hate summer camp . . . I hate fall, and there’s a fall phrase I detest: sweater weather.” Also, he doesn’t like bucket lists: “It’s not that I don’t like new experiences, I just like routine more. I like knowing where I’m going to have my coffee in the morning. I like not letting the grass grow too long.”

There you have it; Sollisch enjoys cutting his grass. He is the opposite of a down-and-out bohemian. Sollisch writes, “I was born here in Cleveland and grew up here, because that’s where my family lives. I own a home, I have a good job, plenty of friends [including me, writing this], and every Thanksgiving I play in the annual Turkey Bowl game on the football field I played on in junior high.” (One of Sollisch’s Turkey Bowl teammates was Steve Presser of Big Fun fame. Small world — the Heights.)

Sollisch’s essays have appeared in publications from Anchorage, Alaska, to Japan, and yet he’s Full Cleveland. He sticks to the unglamorous, to the quotidian. He writes, “I don’t live large. I get most of my clothes at thrift stores. My cat is 9 years old. I don’t dine at pricey restaurants. But I’ll tell you one extravagance I’m not willing to give up: yawning. I like to get up in the morning and yawn, really stretch my arms.”

Sollisch doesn’t write much about his advertising job, but I bet he could make that interesting. Maybe he’s waiting until he retires. Sollisch ponders what might have happened if he hadn’t gone into the ad biz. “I wonder what I might have written, what ideas I might not have censored, what risky paths I might have taken.” In other words, what if Sollisch had gone full-bore literary? Would he have deserted us for  a cabin in Maine? Doubt it. He would have been an adjunct prof at John Carroll, I think.

Sollisch’s book is a 166-page collection of concise, well-written essays about a Heights man who likes to cook and hang out with his wife, children and grandchildren, and who hates certain things. He’s writing about life. Make that “life in the Heights” — although there is one essay about North Carolina, which he didn’t like.

If you want to know what your neighbor is up to, read this book.

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Here’s a link (no paywall) to Sollisch’s op-ed in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal.

On Sunday, June 22, Sollisch gives a reading at Township Hall, 83 Main Street, Chagrin Falls, Ohio, 3-5 pm. Sponsored by Fireside Books.

How Donating a Kidney Fixed my Jump Shot is available at Cleveland-area bookstores and online at Amazon.

This review appeared, slightly abbreviated, in the June 2025 Heights Observer.

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Yiddishe Cup plays a free concert on Father’s Day at Cain Park, Cleveland Heights, 7 pm Sun. June 15. Alma Theater.

 
I’m not a foodie. I don’t go nuts about meals, good or bad,
but . . .

I had a bad sandwich at the Wolfgang Puck restaurant at O‘Hare Airport. Alice and I had just arrived in Chicago, and it was noon (= 1 pm Cleve time), and we thought we’d get a bite at the aeropuerto before taking an Uber to our daughter’s house. At O’Hare, the line for the Mexican place was long so I got a very crappy, expensive Puck sandwich, which was cold-cuts —  “cold” as in just out of the freezer. Bad bread, too. I was “hangry.” Get over it.

Three days later — heading back to the airport — Alice and I decided to pick up sandwiches in my daughter’s neighborhood, in the city. Why did we choose Jimmy Johns? I ordered a cold tuna sub on a spongy white bread roll.

Stop complaining.

Why?

Back in Cleveland . . .  We shouldn’t have stopped for dinner on the drive home from the Cleveland airport. You’re antsy to see if your house is still there. You’re tired.

We went to a hole-in-the-wall, Pupuseria La Bendicion, on the West Side. I’d never heard of it but our son Ted had, and he drove us from the Cleveland airport. La Pupuseria would have been decent but the wait was too long. “Hangry” again. I paced outside the store for 35 minutes. The pupusas were cheesy things that stuck to the aluminum- foil wrap.

Is there a lesson here?

Yes. Pupusas are the national dish of El Salvador.

 
My latest essay in the Cleveland Plain Dealer . . .

CLEVELAND HEIGHTS, Ohio — I want to be more than just another number with the folks at the Internal Revenue Service. I write “landlord/bandleader” in the “occupation” blank on my taxes. Maybe the word “bandleader” piques somebody’s interest at the Cincinnati IRS processing center. Maybe “bandleader” conjures up Benny Goodman or Jon Batiste and makes an IRS worker’s day more interesting. Or maybe nobody looks at my returns in Cincinnati.

In the 1980s, I had an in-person audit. I went to the downtown Cleveland federal building solo, without a lawyer or accountant. I knew about taxes. My father had taught me. He didn’t teach me how to fix cars, but he did teach me how to fix taxes. My dad used to keep two sets of books — one in pencil and one in pen. He gave the government the pen version (with creative math), and he kept the pencil version (with the real numbers). My dad had grown up on Kinsman Road during the Depression and was a self-made man.

The auditor didn’t find anything wrong with my taxes. That’s how the second generation often rolls: legit numbers. The auditor gave me an $80 credit for some “supplies” I had forgotten to claim.

I think about taxes. Not just in April. Taxes are interesting.

Here are some tax pointers for this season:

Schedule C/Business income: The government looks closely at sole proprietors’ expenses. As a bandleader, how should I list the candy bars I buy for my sleep-deprived, van-driving keyboard player? For instance, are his Milky Ways a “meal”? Or are they just “maintenance”? What if my drummer wears a bright-red suit on stage? Can he deduct the suit — and the dry-cleaning costs — as a business expense? Yes. But if he wears the suit offstage, as well — in real life — then, no deduction. It’s just a suit.

Qualified Dividends: Every year, I try to remember what qualified dividends qualify for. (They qualify for lower capital-gains tax rates.)

Schedule D/Capital gains and losses: In 1977, my wife-to-be, Alice, bought a couple shares of a Vanguard mutual fund. Did anyone other than Alice and Vanguard’s founder, John Bogle, own mutual funds in 1977? A smart business move — me marrying Alice.

Supplemental income and loss: Income from royalties and rental property are reported on the same Schedule E form. Why are such different sources of income on the same form? Are there many more “landlord/bandleaders” out there than I know about? I know an accordion player from Parma who owns a shopping-strip center on the West Side. I don’t know any other musicians collecting rent on the side. The most my band ever received in royalties was $45.56. That’s why I own rental property.

Depreciation/Form 4562: Buildings have different life expectancies than, say, people. Apartment buildings fully depreciate in 27½ years. Commercial buildings (like shopping strips) last 39 years. You don’t need to know that, unless you’re me.

Self-employment tax/Schedule SE: The tax on Social Security and Medicare is effectively 15.3% for a self-employed person. A salaried person pays only half that — 7.65%. That’s worth pondering about, if you’re a self-employed, small-business owner.

Maybe I’ll make somebody’s day in Cincinnati this month. I try to make my tax returns interesting. Just not too interesting.

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(Illustration by Ralph Solonitz)