Posts from — March 2025

 
I got an email from a literary agent: “Just read your op-ed in the New York Times and have spent the past couple hours reading everything you’ve written. Your op-eds are rooted in your personal experience, yet have universal appeal.”

Nice! Do I write a book about real estate? And then I would lecture at the Cleveland JCC Jewish Book Fair and sell product. But the writing game is so formidable, so competitive, even locally. How many more books does the world need? A thousand? Have you read Bart Wolstein’s Crossing The Road to Entrepreneurship or Maury Feren’s Wheeling and Dealing? These authors were both Clevelanders who died shortly after self-publishing. Simon’s book is about real estate and Feren’s is about selling vegetables.

Veggies. Why not. How about french fries? My son Ted was astounded in 1990 when I gave up french fries at the Fort Erie, Ontario, Burger King. I said, “No more greasy fries.” We were on our way to Toronto to see the new Blue Jays stadium.

Chicken . . . I often wound up at the KFC on Shattuck Avenue (a hangout with absolutely no countercultural status) when I hitchhiked to California in the 1970s.

KFCs are hard to find lately. Where did they all go?

A burger book? Sonic Burger, In-N-Out, Steak n Shake. What about Arby’s — the non-burger? I liked Arby’s roast beef sandwich with Arby’s Sauce. And add a Jamocha shake. In Cleveland there was an Arby’s knock-off, Beef Corral (a k a Barf Corral), owned by the Modzelewski brothers, former Browns players.

When my daughter Lucy was little, she designed a coat-of-arms for me that read “No Fries.” That’s my legacy unless I crank out a real estate book.

The real estate book . . . in 2016 I wrote a proposal, outline and sample chapter, and my lit agent got no takers for the project. Here are some sample chapter titles from the proposal: “Build an Ark: this place is flooding,” “Booms, bubbles and cash flow,” “We have standards,” “Job #1: get the money in the bank,” “Gotta serve somebody,” “Pull the trigger,” “Never on Sunday (because the tradesmen are on their boats in Lake Erie),” “Quasi-Legal Advice,” “Renting the American Dream,” “Jazz and Real Estate.”

I wouldn’t entirely rule it out, the real estate book, just yet. Or some sort of book. AKs like me like to self-publish about french fries, burgers, real estate, whatever.

 
I ran into a funny rabbi the other night. Happens. Some rabbis are funny. Rabbi Matt Eisenberg told me he is the “second funniest rabbi in Cleveland.” Why number-two? He explained he came in second in Cleveland’s Funniest Rabbi Contest in 2011. Fourteen years later, he’s still funny. He did a clever Purim shpiel based on Fiddler on the Roof.

I was a judge at the funniest rabbi contest once, but not the year Rabbi Eisenberg participated. I was a judge a couple years later. The winner that year wasn’t even a rabbi. The funniest rabbi in Cleveland in 2013 was a doctor/mohel — Kiva Shtull.

The judges made comments after each rabbis did their shtick. We rated the ravs. Afterward, an audience member said to me, “You were very nice in your comments.”

Why not?  Author Theodore Dalrymple wrote (about “comedian” Boris Johnson of England), “Telling a joke that falls flat is an excruciating social experiment.” Telling original jokes, non-stop, in front of 200 people at the Schmaltz Museum of Jewish Heritage — that’s not for the faint of heart or your typical pulpit rabbi. I had stocked-piled complimentary adjectives in advance. My arsenal was droll, gut-busting (didn’t use that one), cheery, sharp, zany, wacky, witty and perturbing.

Nobody was perturbing, unfortunately.

I gave the highest rating to the mohel, who moonlighted as the spiritual leader of Congregation Shir Shalom in Bainbridge Township, Ohio. He got wry, droll and zany. (The shul went under about a year later. I don’t know why.)

I just rediscovered a video of Dr. Shtull’s comedy routine. It holds up, at least for the first couple minutes. I’m not sure if Rabbi Eisenberg — the second funniest rabbi of 2011 — has a video. Probably. But check out Shtull’s shtick. Listen at least till you hear the word Chabad — around the two-minute mark.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wxd4_oGjeso

 
I put a latch on my bedroom door to keep my parents out. I was a grown-up — in my early twenties. I was at my parents’ Beachwood apartment, the Mark IV (featured a couple weeks ago in a Klezmer Guy post). The Mark IV was later called The Hamptons and is now The Vantage. I was listening to John Handy’s “Don’t Stop the Carnival” on my record player. There was talk about real estate and bridge games. I pondered some prospective book titles:

Suburban Nightmare

Rebounding from the Bar Mitzvah Trail

Confessions of a Bar Mitzvah Wino

He played Clarinet Between his Legs

Unstuck Pads

The Bar Mitzvah-Goer

Maybe I thought about bar mitzvahs because I never had one. I was Confirmed, Reform-style. (In my adulthood, I did leyn Torah a couple times.)

I swam in the Mark IV apartment pool and got in an argument with an old guy — maybe 65. He said, “You’re going to bump into my grandkids and you’ll be sorry you did!”

Lay off, man. (I love grandkids — 50 years later.)

My dad considered selling me his beater car, a Plymouth Valiant, so I could drive away from Beachwood. He said, “But if you get the car, what are you going to do to support it?”

“I’ll get some money somewhere. I’ll rob a bank.”

“You do that and I’ll wipe my hands of you!”

Simmer down, Dad. I bought the car, but I didn’t drive too far. I went four miles west to Cleveland Heights and rented a room in half-a-house.

Where else could I have gone? Boston was too collegiate. New York? I had been there and had had my ride towed. New York is a tough town for cars. Go back to Ann Arbor? Too many kids there. California? Too hard to get to.

Tough times . . .

My dad said, “You don’t know what a tough is!”

Change your place, change your life. I met a girl via the ride board at Case Western Reserve University. (A lot of my life revolved around that CWRU board.) The girl was Jewish, cute and English. A true trifecta. We hitchhiked to California, and somewhere near Knoxville she told me she was going to meet up with her boyfriend in California. Bummer road!

Because of the “chick” factor, we even got rides from truckers.

I ran into the English girl again, in Israel a year later. She said nothing had materialized with the “boyfriend” out west (and nothing much happened with me and her in Eretz Yisrael).
California . . . I said cheerio to the English woman and hitched back east solo.  When I walked into my parents’ apartment, my dad said, “Isn’t that a pistol.”

I guess it was. As Isaac Bashevis Singer wrote, “Life was too good to us. We had to ask for trouble.” I looked for trouble, somewhat unsuccessfully.

Isaac Bashevis Singer

 
(This essay was in the Cleveland Plain Dealer on Sunday.)

Even if you’re rich, you can’t always get what you want. For example, you can’t buy Horseshoe Lake, which straddles Shaker Heights and Cleveland Heights. An assortment of neighborhood high-rollers, medium-rollers and salt-of-the-earth ex-hippies tried to save Horseshoe Lake. These lake-lovers funded lawsuits against the cities of Shaker Heights, Cleveland Heights and the Northeast Ohio Regional Sewer District.

We fought the law and the law won.

I was a founder of Friends of Horseshoe Lake. We paid for the lawsuits and an engineer’s evaluation of the defunct dam. We wrangled a couple thousand signatures on a petition to save the lake, but not enough people cared.

Horseshoe Lake when it was a lake. (Photo by Lucy Stratton)

The Sewer District is going to turn the former lake — which was drained almost six years ago — into a boardwalk and nature preserve. They plan to rip down some trees and put in a paved service road. Is the road a homage to the never-built Clark Freeway that the county wanted to put through the Shaker Lakes area in the 1960s?

I have a friend who lives a mile from Horseshoe Lake. He lives near Lower Shaker Lake. He said, “I have my lake. I don’t care about yours.” The notion of NIMBY (Not in my Backyard) doesn’t travel well; you get about a mile from the Horseshoe Lake, and not that many people get worked up about its disappearance.

Granted, there are more pressing issues than Horseshoe Lake, like crime, housing matters and leaf blowers. But how many boardwalks and little playgrounds do we need? We already have the Nature Center at Shaker Lakes. Even a “lake feature” is lacking at the upcoming Horseshoe park. The Sewer Board is spending $28.7 million – up from the original $14 million – and that doesn’t include another $8.6 million for amenities, which supposedly Shaker Heights and somewhat-financially-strapped Cleveland Heights are expected to cover.

The Sewer District and the Ohio Department of Natural Resources claim the goal is to prevent a flood disaster downstream in University Circle. Nobody has died from a flood there, but you never know. Every hundred years a person might die in a storm under the Cedar Road Rapid tracks. And I might get hit by a bus tomorrow.

I live about a football-field away from the late great Horseshoe Lake. I used to live several miles away and visited often. Horseshoe Lake was calming. It was blue and serene. I couldn’t bike out to Lake Erie that often; that’s a six-mile schlep from Cleveland Heights. The Metroparks aren’t too close to the Heights either. Speaking of which, our lawyer talked with Metroparks’ people, and the park system wasn’t highly motivated to save Horseshoe Lake. On a stroll around the Heights, I ran into retired Cleveland city planner Bob Brown. He said he thought the Sewer District’s plan for the Horseshoe area “doesn’t look so horrible.” I hope Bob is right.

In winters I used to walk across the frozen lake. There were signs posted against it, but the water wasn’t that deep, and I figured if I fell into the lake. it would be a classy exit. Now what can I fall into? A playground amenity? No thanks.