By Ed Staskus

   “The end is always near,” Greg Harper said. My ears perked up. His hands were free and easy on the steering wheel. He was driving well enough to keep us on the road, but his eyes were like pinwheels. The magic mushroom he had popped into his mouth a half hour earlier was working its magic. I couldn’t tell him to slow down because he was driving slower than the oldest slowest man in the world. I reached for the seatbelt, anyway. When I did I found out Greg’s top drop Chevy Impala SS didn’t have seatbelts. 

   SS stood for Super Sport. There was nothing super about the car anymore, which came off the line in 1961, except for the engine. It was still super when it had to be. The rocker panels were rusting out, the front of the hood was dented, and the tires were bald as baloney skins. The car was Roman Red on the outside while the interior was scuffed black leather. I reached for the grab bar attached to the padded dashboard.

   “Did you know this car was built by union labor right here in the USA?” he asked, apropos of the Jap and German cars we had been seeing here and there.

   “No, I didn’t know that,” I said.

   “It’s got a V-8 engine. One of my relatives might have built it.”

   “Is that right? By the way, what do you mean the end is always near?”

   “Like they say,” he said, “the future’s uncertain and the end is always near.”

   At the moment the Chevy was running on V-1 and there were none of Greg’s car-making relatives in sight. What was in sight was the future. There was a flashing red light behind us. It was the kind of light that always looks final. It gave me the blues. The Meigs County cop didn’t have any trouble getting on our tail. He had trouble pulling us over, however, even though the road was straight as a preacher. The manual steering took more than five turns of the steering wheel to go from lock to lock. In the state he was in it took Greg a few minutes and a mile-or-so to master the mechanics of pulling off onto the shoulder.

   The policeman didn’t bother asking for Greg’s driver’s license. “Step out of the car and let me smell your breath, son,” he said.

    Greg exhaled in his direction.

   “You smell all right,” the policeman said. “It don’t seem like you been drinking or puffing on stinkweed.” The car had a vacuum powered ash tray that sucked ashes to a container in the trunk. “Why are you going so slow when you got that power horse under the hood?”

   “I know this road doesn’t go anywhere but I’m looking for the end of it,” Greg said. “I don’t want to miss it.” The Meigs County cop wasn’t fazed by what Greg said. “It don’t go nowhere but it always brings you back again,” he said. Greg looked flummoxed for a minute. The policeman looked the Impala up and down. “This is the car the Beach Boys wrote a song about, son.”

   The song was a big hit in its day. “Nobody can catch her, nothing can touch my 409, giddy up, giddy up, my four speed dual quad 409,” Brian Wilson sang in his big falsetto while the rest of the boys layered the harmonies. The fired-up 409 was fitted with a 4-barrel carburetor and a solid lifter camshaft. The pistons were made from forged aluminum. The heads and engine block were made from cast-iron.

   “Those were the days, boys. Make no mistake, that Impala is a real fine car. Try to put some giddy up into your driving. And keep it on the yellow line.” He got back into his black and white Dodge Coronet police car and u-turned around going the other way. He went away straight as an arrow.

   I was along for the ride on Greg’s ride that day. I was spending the spring summer and fall in a place called Carpenter living with Virginia Sustarsic in an abandoned general store. She wasn’t my girlfriend, but we got along, even though she was a dyed in the wool hippie and I wasn’t. She rolled her homegrown delicately and deliberately. We kept two goats, gleaned plenty of food, and brewed our own beer. A kitten made us his crash pad. The town wasn’t a town so much as a whistle stop, even though the railroad had long since abandoned the place. There were fewer than a dozen residents, including us. There were dust balls in all the corners. Every star in the universe twinkled in the nighttime sky.

   Carpenter was in Meigs County. It was named after Return Meigs, Jr., who was the fourth governor of Ohio. The county is on the Appalachian Plateau in the southeast corner of the state. The Shade River and Leading Creek drain into the Ohio River. Leading Creek ran right through Carpenter. In the 1970s the county’s population was less than 20,000. As far as I could tell there were no Asians, Native Americans, or African Americans. There were hillbilly highways as far as the eye could see.

   Greg was a friend of John McGraw’s, who was Virginia’s on-again off-again boyfriend back home. They both lived on the bohemian near east side of downtown, near Cleveland State University. John was a part-time writer and drank booze right from the bottle. Greg came from a more polite class and drank from a glass. He and John had planned on visiting Carpenter together, but at the last minute John bowed out. Greg came anyway, cruising all the way from one end of the state to the other in his big red Chevy.

   Virginia dressed like it was still the Summer of Love while John dressed like the Age of Beatniks had never ended. Greg wasn’t any better off than them, living half on and half off the American Dream, but he dressed like a preppy. He read the classics. He was studying Latin so he could read Ovid and Seneca in the original. Nobody ever suspected he kept magic mushrooms in his wallet.

   Something came over Greg the minute the Meigs County cop was out of sight. He fired up the Impala. He spun gravel getting back on the asphalt. The next minute we were doing eighty in a forty. The Doobie Brothers came on the radio belting out ‘Rockin’ Down the Highway.’ I took a peek in the rearview. There was no hot potato behind us. I looked through the windshield at what was in front of us. All the danger was ahead.

   “We should maybe slow down,” I suggested as loud as I could yell. 

   The Impala was a four on the floor. She wasn’t good on gas and burned some oil. Greg picked up speed. We were doing a hundred in no time. There were no more gears to shift up into. His eyes weren’t pinwheels anymore. They glinted like icepicks. He leaned over the steering wheel. The car wasn’t sloppy, nor was Greg’s handling of it sloppy, but we were headed for trouble. We were blasting down a back road. It was cracked and rough. Meigs County didn’t have the tax base to keep its roads in any kind of Daytona 500 shape.

    “I’m not asking for a miracle, Lord, just a little bit of luck will do,” I whispered.

   “Every minute counts,” Greg shouted above the wind noise.

   “Keep your eyes on the road,” I shouted back. “You never can tell what’s around the corner.”

   He waved at the outdoors with his left arm. Southeastern Ohio on a sunny day in the summer is beautiful. When we roared around a blind curve there wasn’t anything there, to my relief, until there suddenly was. It was a roadhouse with some cars and pick-ups in the front dirt lot. The sign said Frank’s Roadhouse. There were antlers nailed to the outside wall above the front windows. We pulled in, skidding in three or four different directions. There were half a dozen bungalows in the back.

   Inside there was a bar, a kitchen, some tables, a dance floor, a riser protected by chicken wire, and a pool table. A man and a woman were having mashed potatoes with pulled pork at one of the tables. A bottle of BBQ sauce stood at the ready between their plates. There was some action going on at the pool table but none on the dance floor. Before I knew it Greg had found his own action at the bar, where a cute brunette was sitting, a lowball glass half full of red wine and a paperback book in front of her.

   There was an oblong mirror on the wall behind the bar. It was too smudged to see into. There was a hand-written warning, too. It said, “Don’t eat the big white mint!” I didn’t ask what it meant. I didn’t want to know.

   What’s a simple man to do? I looked around for something to do. I put a dollar on the lip of the pool table marking my turn in line. There were two men playing nine ball. It was the middle of the day on a Thursday. Neither of them was on union soil. Neither of them was being especially efficient. There were seven or eight bottles of Burger Beer on a small round table behind them.

   One of the men looked me up and down. “I’m a pretty big man around these parts,” he said, flashing an ersatz grin. He had sharp teeth. He was shorter than me, but I knew what he meant. “I thought you’d be bigger,” I said. He didn’t laugh. He had the sense of humor of a circus strongman. The other man laughed his head off. My man broke the rack. He was no Minnesota Fats. When my turn came I ran the rack and took my dollar back. I collected a dollar from the local yokel. He tried his luck two more times and paid me two more dollars. He didn’t know, and I didn’t tell him, that I spent more time than I wanted to admit shooting snooker at Joe Tuna’s Pool Hall back in Cleveland.

   I bought them both beers, they clapped me on the back, the circus strongman harder than he needed to, and I went back to the bar, joining Greg and the brunette. He wasn’t paying any attention to her book. He gave me a wink, which meant the main drag from the eye to the heart doesn’t go through the intellect, or words to that effect.

   Her name was Jeannie. She was a third-year student at Ohio University in Athens, 20-some miles to the north of where we were. She was majoring in English. She wasn’t enrolled in classes that summer but had stayed in Athens instead of going home to Cincinnati. She spent her spare time exploring. She had found Frank’s Roadhouse by accident, liked the looks of it, and stopped in for the afternoon.

   “What do you like about this dump?” I asked.

   “It looks real,” she said.

   I was willing to grant her that. When the bartender approached I ordered a Vernors Ginger Soda. Between Greg’s psychedelics and the shot of whiskey in front of him, one of us had to stay sober. “Who is Frank,” I asked the bartender. “There ain’t no Frank, at least not no more,” he said. “What happened to him?” I asked. “Nobody knows,” he said. 

   I reminded Greg we had promised Virginia we would stop at the grocery store in Pomeroy and pick up milk, cheese, and toilet paper. The toilet paper was like gold where we lived. Greg’s eyes had gone soft. He needed reminding. I had to remind him twice. He finally slid off the bar stool glowing like an electric eel.

   Jeannie followed us out to the Impala. “I like your car,” she said. Greg asked her if she wanted a ride back to town. She pointed to a VW Beetle. “Fontasse postem infantem,” she said, jotting her name and phone number down on a  scrap of paper. She pressed it into Greg’s hand. She rose up on her tiptoes and gave him a kiss on the cheek. I never saw a man go head over heels as fast as Greg did that minute.

   Once we were in the car, humming along Route 143 on our way to Pomeroy, I asked him what she had said.

   “Maybe later baby,” he said. “That’s what she said.”

   There was enchantment in his eyes. “Keep your eyes on the road and your hands on the wheel,” I reminded him for the last time. I didn’t have to remind him to keep his hands off the magic mushrooms in his wallet. He was riding high on a different kind of magic. Love may not make the world go round, but it makes the ride worthwhile.

Ed Staskus edits Theatre PEI. He posts on 147 Stanley Street http://www.147stanleystreet.com and Made in Cleveland http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com.

Theatre PEI

By Ed Staskus

   Three hundred and sixty-four days of the year parents tell their children to never take candy from strangers. Then, on the last day of every October they dress those same children up in masks and weird costumes and tell them to go out on the streets at night and either threaten or beg strangers to give them candy.

   Halloween is traditionally a holiday observed on the eve of the Christian feast of All Hallows, or All Saints Day. In the Middle Ages it was believed that restless souls of the recently dead wandered during the year until All Saints Day, when their fate would be decided. All Hallows Eve was their last chance to get revenge on their enemies before entering the next world. Some people, fearing the consequences, would wear masks to disguise themselves.

   It wasn’t until the first decade of the 20th century that Halloween began to be celebrated in the United States and not until the 1930s that children began trick-or-treating. Since then costume parties, haunted house attractions, and watching horror films have also become popular.

   When I was a child Halloween was a special night after a long day filled with anticipation. My brother and sister and our friends and I couldn’t wait for nightfall to head out onto the dark streets and ring as many doorbells as we could.

   On the night of the last Halloween, postponed several days by thunderstorms, my wife and I and a neighbor sat out on our porch, on the top lip of the stairs, on a cold but dry night, with our cauldron of chocolate treats. We long ago learned that anything mostly chocolate was “the good stuff”.

   As we put fun-size Milky Ways and Kit Kats into plastic pumpkins, coffin containers, and grab-and-go pillowcases, we started asking some of the kids in cute spooky super hero disguises coming and going up and down our walk what they liked about Halloween.

   “The most fun is dressing up,” said one girl, dressed as the Material Girl. “I’m an 80s rock star. I love Madonna.”

   We wondered if she wasn’t chilly because of the weather.

   “I’m not cold,” she said. “I’m insulated.”

   One boy was a walking bundle of towels.

   “Some safety pins and a lot of old towels and you’re warm,” he said.

   We asked a puffed-up little boy in white what he was.

   “I’m a cloud!”

   “What is that on your pants?”

   “Lightning!”

   “What are those spots?”

   “Rain!”

   “Is that your mom?”

   “She’s a rainbow. We go together!”

   A girl dressed as a witch said she liked seeing other kids in costumes.

   “It’s a time for them to dress up like they’re not, to just be someone they never could be before.”

   Others take a minimalist approach. When we asked one boy why his friend wasn’t wearing a costume, he said, “See, he’s on his cell phone. He’s not wearing a costume because he’s a businessman.”

   Some children delight in the scary side of Halloween, the ghost stories, monsters, and gory special effects.

   “I like Halloween because it’s fun, “said a boy dressed in a Warrior Wasteland costume. “People scare you a lot. It’s so amazing. I just like the horror of it.”

   Other children take delight in seeing their heroes in the flesh.

   A stocky six-year-old in black pants, a red over-sized jacket, a red hat, and an enormous black mustache told us he was Super Mario.

   “Because I am,” he said. “My happy time, it was when I saw BATMAN! I love Halloween!”

   Another boy dressed as Spiderman said Halloween was fun because “Kids dress up!”

   “I like Spiderman because he’s red and white. If I was Spidey, I would sling my webbing and save all the people.”

   In an MSNBC poll, adults were asked what their favorite part of Halloween was. More than 50 percent said it was seeing little kids dressed in costumes, while just 10 percent said it was eating candy. Our own unscientific poll revealed the exact opposite. Nine out of ten kids told us it was all about the candy.

   “Candy is the best thing that ever happened to me on Halloween,” said someone in KISS regalia

   “It’s my favorite season. You get all the candy. I’m a vampire,” said a girl with bloody fangs.

   “They should have more Halloween weekends, and pass out a lot more candy,” said a boy dressed as a pirate, waving a rubber sword. “I would put it all in my treasure chest.”

   Many children walked the streets in groups, the smaller ones accompanied by their parents. But one teenager rode up alone on a bicycle, wearing a Beavis and Butt-Head latex mask. He jumped off his bike, which clattered to the ground, and ran up our walk. We tossed chocolate bars into his bag, asking him what he liked about Halloween. Sprinting back to his bike, he turned around and shouted,

   “Can’t talk, time is candy.”

   Our chocolate bars moved briskly all night, followed by the lollipops our neighbor had brought.

   “You just wolf down candy bars,” said a girl dressed as Fluff N Stuff, “but you can play with suckers, click them against your teeth.”

   I asked several children what were the least-liked least-desired treats they had gotten. Among the worst offenders were Mary Janes, Necco Wafers, and Christmas ribbon candy.

   “I don’t even know what Mary Janes are,” said a boy dressed as Luigi, in blue overalls, a hat two or three sizes too big, and white gloves.

   “They taste like molasses sawdust.”

   The worst offender, however, turned out to be money. Towards the end of the night, we ran out of candy, and since all we could see on the street were some stragglers, we gathered up our loose change to hand out rather than race to the corner store.

   A small girl dressed as Popstar Keira, with a tiara on her head, came bouncing up the stairs smiling. My wife put some dimes and nickels into her extended hand. The girl looked at the coins and then up at us. She threw the coins down stamped her feet and started crying.

   “I don’t want money! I want candy!”

   She refused to be consoled until we finally found a full-size Hershey bar in our kitchen and brought it out to her.

   After the streets were finally empty and Halloween was over, my wife and I popped a big bowl of popcorn and watched George Romero’s “Night of the Living Dead.” The moon was big and round and the sky clear. The last of the thunderstorms were past.

   When my wife, who had never seen the old black-and-white horror movie, finally realized what the zombies were after, she said, “Oh, man, it’s the undead trick-or-treating.”

Ed Staskus posts on 147 Stanley Street http://www.147stanleystreet.com and Made in Cleveland  http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com.

Theatre PEI

By Ed Staskus

   It is 11 miles as the crow flies from East 42^nd St. in Newburgh Heights to East 125^th St. and St. Clair Ave. in Cleveland. A streetcar in the 1950s would have made the trip in about 40 minutes and a car in about 20 minutes. Walking on a summer day would have taken about 3 hours. When Harold Scott left work at American Steel and Wire in Newburgh Heights for home on Friday November 24, 1950, in the middle of the Great Thanksgiving Blizzard, no streetcars were running, and he didn’t have a car. He started walking. He didn’t see a crow that day or the rest of the weekend.

   The storm started on the long holiday weekend when an arctic air mass barreled into town, and temperatures fell to below zero. The next day low pressure from Virginia moved into Ohio. When that happened a blizzard with high winds and heavy snow got rolling. By the end of the day two feet of snow had fallen and the airport was closed. Mayor Tom Burke declared a state of emergency and called out the National Guard. Snow plowing was hampered by more than 10,000 abandoned cars. The mayor declared a state of emergency. Unnecessary travel was banned. Everything nonessential was forbidden from trying to get downtown. The car ban lasted for a week until the last Cleveland Transit System line was back on the line. By then the temperatures hit the 50s and all the snow melted. Rivers flooded far and wide.

   Harold Scott was born in 1903. He had a sister, Eleanor, and a brother, LeGrant. His brother made it as a professional baseball player nicknamed Babe, after Babe Ruth, although he never made it out of the minor leagues. Hal married a local girl, Jennie O’Connell, and they had six children. Jennie died of pneumonia twenty years later leaving Harold with six kids under the age of eighteen. A year-and-a half later he married his next-door neighbor and they had two more kids, Mike and Teen, or Harold Jr. Teen was killed when he was four years old. He was sitting on a curb on a sunny day waiting for his brother to get home from school when a delivery truck backing up ran over him. After the funeral, Hal’s hair turned white as a ghost.

   When Hal started walking home as the Great Thanksgiving Blizzard was raging, he walked up E. 49^th St. zigzagging to Guy Ave. to Hamm Ave. to E. 55^th St. to St. Clair Ave. From there, he only had seventy blocks to go. It was slog. The snow was deep and getting deeper. Nobody was shoveling any sidewalks. He walked in the street more than on any sidewalk. He stopped every so often to catch his breath. It was dark as a squid’s basement by 8 o’clock. He was wearing a heavy wool coat, gloves, a hat, and rubber buckle galoshes. He pulled his collar up. Hal was dressed for bear, but it was hard going.

   “Everything came to a standstill,” said Burt Wilfong. He got to his feet off his sofa on the east side of town, bundled up, and went outside to shovel his walk and driveway. There was a hitch, though. “The garage doors were the kind that opened out. There was about 5 feet of snow that drifted around in front of the garage, and the snow shovel was inside.” He went back to his sofa and stayed there.

   By the time Hal got to Orey Ave. and East 55^th St. he was more than ready to sit down in the hole in the wall bar on the corner and warm up. He could use a bite and a drink, too, or two drinks. He sat down. A barfly two stools down had a bowl of black olives and a bottle of Blatz in front of him.

   “Hell of a night to be out,” the barfly said.

   “That’s the God’s truth,” Hal said.

   He ordered chicken soup in a pot with homemade noodles and hard-boiled sliced eggs. He thought about a draft beer but had a shot of rye whiskey instead. Halfway through his eggs he ordered another shot. He got a cottage cheese and pickle relish sandwich to go and stuck it in his coat pocket. He left $3.00 on the bar, buttoned up his coat, and started north up East 55^th St. again. He felt much better, although the storm was getting worse.

   He took short steps shuffling now and then when the going got icy. He walked bent slightly forward as much as he could, with his center of gravity directly over his feet. The wind made it tricky. It was worse than the snow. He stayed ready for falling as gusts slammed into him. The wind was at his back, slightly from the side, which was better, but not much better.

   “I was born during that storm,” Fred Rothhauser on the west side said. “My parents told me I was a miracle baby coming into the world the day hell froze over.”

   Every leafless branch of every tree was in motion. Twigs littered the snow. He stepped over branches that had cracked off. As the wind swept over roofs their tiles shook and flapped. When they were ripped away, they went sailing past disappearing. Overhead electric and telephone wires whistled. The infrequent passing car looked like it was on the verge of sliding and veering crazily off somewhere.

   Flo Ellis was two years old when she, her four brothers and sisters, and parents drove to Willoughby for Thanksgiving dinner. “We stayed overnight, the blizzard hit, and turned into almost a week. My grandma had to cut head holes and armholes in pillowcases to make nightgowns for us kids.”

   When he got to Fleet Ave. Hal saw two bars. One was on the opposite corner and the other one on his side of the street. He took the path of least resistance.  He might have gone to Krejci’s Tavern down the street but didn’t. It was “Where the Fishermen Meet” and where he met his pals for drinks. It would have been full of fishermen, anyway, talking tales about The Great Lakes Storm of 1913 that sank 30 freighters and killed more than 200 mariners. He wasn’t up for snow storm stories from the past.

   There was a three-story cupola over the front door he went through and lots of windows on the Feet Ave. side. A yellow sign said “Parking in the Rear” in red letters. There were two cars in the lot. How they got into and were planning on getting out of the lot was their business. The windows on the second and third stories were brightly lit. Whatever children and boarders the bartender and his wife the bar’s cook had up there were staying snug as bugs.

   The watering hole was full of people. The tables were all taken. He sat down at the bar alongside a group of six. When he asked the bartender, the man said, “It’s the local folks, they’ve been walking in all night, except for this group. They’re from Lakewood. I guess everybody has had their fill of turkey.”

   Gus and Eva Stanik were sitting closest to Hal. “We were going to Pennsylvania deer-hunting,” Eva said. “We got up in the morning, and there was a load of snow, and we decided that maybe we’d better not go.” Her younger brother, Gomer, disagreed and talked them into making the trip.

   “Oh, yeah, we can still do that,” he said in the afternoon. “It can’t keep snowing much longer.”

   Gus and Eva fired up their 1946 Buick Sedanet with her brother’s friend in the back seat. Gomer rode with his uncle Ivan and their friend Mack in a second car, Ivan’s 1941 Ford Super Deluxe. Their bags blankets gear and guns were in the trunks. They had coffee in thermoses.

   “We were young,” Eva said. “There were six of us all together in two different cars. So, we helped one another. But everywhere we went, my uncle got stuck.” They passed one deserted car stuck in a snow drift after another. “My husband was the only one that had chains on.”

   After the two cars went slip sliding out of the parking lot behind the bar, Ivan’s car got stuck in the street. Hal helped push it out. When they drove off, they followed snowplows east. Hal waved goodbye as he set off on East 55^th St. again. 

   “When we were going through Sharon in Pennsylvania, we came to a standstill,” Eva said. “Gomer got out of the car and went across the street to a place that sold peanuts in the shell. We ate peanuts the rest of the day.” They threw the shells out the windows. Their four-hour trip turned into a twelve-hour trip. They labored on to Coalport, found their motel, shoveled out parking spaces, and fell into bed.

   “Hell, yeah, I shot my deer the next day,” Gus said.

   Hal walked the rest of the night. The bars were all closed. The whole city was closed. He stopped for shelter in doorways now and then, watching plows waste their time. No sooner were they gone than snow started piling up again. The sun came up at 7:30, what there was of it. The light looked like old milk. When dawn happened, he turned the corner on to St. Clair Ave. When he did, he saw U. S. Army Pershing tanks hauling away broken-down busses and delivery trucks.

   “Hundreds of motorists abandoned stalled autos,” the Lakewood Sun Post wrote in its morning edition. “Stuck streetcars were strung along main arteries for miles. Bus routes were littered with coaches blocked by enormous drifts. Most plants closed, and some employees who did manage to report in were marooned on their jobs. Trucks laden with food couldn’t deliver. Babies were without milk, and grocery stores able to open were rationing it as well as bread.”

   Lakewood is Cleveland’s closest western neighbor, just across the Cuyahoga River. The far side of Lakewood butts up to the Rocky River. No neighbors were visiting neighbors that weekend, even though they could have skated across the frozen water. By the end of the day snow was wall-to-wall and drifts were 25 feet high. Some buildings collapsed under the weight of snowpack. More and more wires and trees were blown down. Bulldozers cleared roads so ambulances could reach those in need. The National Guard delivered food in their Jeeps to the out-of-the way. 

   Hal stopped at the first diner he saw for breakfast. He was hungry as a horse. The diner was the kind that never closed. He sat on a bar stool at the counter across from the galley kitchen. He had eggs sausage hash browns pancakes and two cups of coffee. When he was done, he folded his arms and lay his head down. A waitress woke him up when he started snoring.

   He trudged on as far as East 69^th St, where he stopped again. His legs were heavy. He was more tired than a month of overtime. He walked into the Maple Lanes Tavern and Bowling Alley. Nobody was bowling but a handful of men were at the bar. One of them was a snowplow driver. He looked exhausted. Hal sat at the bar and had two shots of rye whiskey. When he felt warm again, he went out into the cold for the last long stretch to home.

   The bone-chilling cold created a run on woolen clothing, long underwear, and flannel pajamas. A department store hosiery clerk took a telephone call asking for fleece-lined women’s hose. “I don’t know that there is any such thing,” she told the caller. Funerals and burials were delayed because cemeteries were neck-deep in snow. Hearses were unable to navigate roads to churches for services. An undertaker watched a body being unloaded from a commandeered milk truck for embalming.

   After Hal got home late Saturday afternoon, 24 hours after leaving work, his wife bombarded him with questions, but he was too cold and too tired to talk. He spoke to his son Mike for a few minutes, telling him everything was all right, took a long hot bath, and fell into bed. His wife threw an extra quilt over him. He slept the rest of the day, all day Sunday, and called off work on Monday. The National Guard went home on Wednesday November 29^th. Schools stayed closed all that week. When Hal got out of bed, he checked all his fingers and toes. He didn’t have a speck of frostbite on him.

   While he was winding up his long trek on Saturday, the Big Ten championship game in Columbus between Ohio State and Michigan went ahead as planned. A trip to the Rose Bowl was at stake. Fifty thousand fans, just more than half of the tickets sold, were in their seats for the kick-off. There was heavy snow, 40 MPH winds, and the temperature at game time was 5 degrees. Michigan won the Snow Bowl, even though they didn’t get a single first down and only gained a total of 27 yards. There were 45 punts between the two teams in the 60 minutes of playing time.

  “I was a teenager when the blizzard hit,” Irene DeBauche on the south side said. “It was something you never forget. We thought it was exciting and fun although our parents thought differently.”

   The Great Thanksgiving Blizzard impacted 22 states, killed 383 people, and caused almost $70 million in damage, equivalent to about $800 million today. Insurance companies paid out more money to their policy holders for damage than for any previous storm of any kind up to that time. 

   When Hal’s wife second wife Catherine died in 1964. he married another neighbor, Theresa, in 1969. After he went blind in his later years, he spent summer days on his porch. When his children and grandchildren visited, and the neighborhood kids ran over, everybody sat on the steps and porch. Hal always had a brown paper bag filled with taffy and candy bars. The younger kids snacked while the older kids counted the number of times he cursed. When they ran out of fingers to count on, they counted on their toes.

   Hal cursed up a storm whenever he recounted the Great Thanksgiving Blizzard of 1950, right up to the day he died in 1976. If he had lived a couple more years, he would have experienced the White Blizzard of 1978. When that storm was over everybody in Cleveland agreed it was the Storm of the Century. If he had made it that far, Hal would have had good opportunity to expand his stock of swear words about winter wonderland walks. 

Ed Staskus edits Theatre PEI. He posts on 147 Stanley Street http://www.147stanleystreet.com and Made in Cleveland http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com. 

Theatre PEI

By Ed Staskus

   The day push came to shove I had no idea what was going on. I was born 9 months 7 days and some hours after my mom and dad were done with the art of romance on a smile of a summer night. The day before I was born everything was so far so good. I was curled up warm and cozy in my mom’s womb. But before the day ended I was unexpectedly twisting and turning. I was restless all evening. The next thing I knew my mom and dad were in a taxi in the middle of the night on their way to the hospital.

   I was born in the Sudbury General Hospital of the Immaculate Heart of Mary. Everybody called it ‘The General.’ The hospital had opened the year before. There were 200 beds, and it was modern as could be. The Sisters of St. Joseph used their own money to get northern Ontario’s first English-speaking hospital built. They mortgaged their properties to get the loan for the construction.

   “They used to do this cool thing,” Ginette Tobodo, a Sudbury mother, said. “On the walls they painted certain colors, one color for the lab, another color for the cardiac department, and you just followed the color to where you needed to go. It was easy to find your way around.” My dad was sure I was going to be a boy, so he followed the color blue. It took him to the cardiac department where he explained he was going to have a heart attack if he didn’t find the maternity ward.

   In the end, when I was born a boy, he was on cloud nine. Courtney Lapointe’s three brothers were born at the same hospital. She was down in the dumps every time. “I wanted a sister so bad, I bawled my eyes out at the hospital when each one of the boys was born.”

   Being born is no business for babies. It’s a man’s job. When the squeezing and pushing were all over, and I looked around, I didn’t see anything recognizable. There were plenty of colors and shapes. The colors and shapes moved and made sounds. Everything more than a foot away was a mystery. I couldn’t make heads or tails of it. I was washed and swaddled and went to sleep. After I woke up I wanted to suck on something. When I smelled my mother’s milk I liked the smell and taste of it.

   My parents had moved to a new house on a new length of Stanley Street. It was just west of downtown, and dead ended at a cliff face of nearly 2-billion-year-old rock. My mom and dad had emigrated to Canada in the late 1940s, like many other Lithuanians after World War Two. Canada was admitting DP’s who were willing to do the dirty work. My dad was a miner for INCO. He loaded bore holes with black powder charges and stood back.  My mom had been a nanny for a family of 13 but was now her own homemaker.

   Sudbury is not a large city, but it is the largest city in northern Ontario. It is about 70 miles north of the Georgian Bay and about 250 miles northwest of Toronto. There are 330 lakes within the city limits. It came into being after the discovery of useful ore in 1883. The Canadian Pacific Railway was being constructed when excavations revealed vast stores of nickel and copper on the edge of the Sudbury Basin. Something crashed there from outer space a long time ago. Few craters are as old or as large anywhere on the planet. It wasn’t long before mines were being dug and settlers were arriving to work in the mines. 42,000 people lived there the year I was born.

   My first two years of life after coming home were uneventful. In the event, I couldn’t remember much of what happened from day to day, much less the week before. I was like a yogi living in the moment. I was about two and a half years old before I came into my own. I started busting out of my toddler bed so often my dad put a lock on it.    

   I found out there were rules. One rule was no climbing on the radiators. Another rule was no going into the basement. The basement was where the coal-fired boiler was. A third rule was absolutely no scaling the rock cliffs at the back end of our backyard.

   “Behave, or Baubas will come and get you,” my mom repeatedly warned me.

   Baubas is an evil spirit from Lithuania with bloodshot eyes, long skinny arms, and wrinkly fingers. He came from the Old World to Canada with the DP’s to keep their kids in line. He wears a dark hat and hides his face. He supposedly slept in our basement behind the octopus furnace. According to my mom he kept a close watch on my behavior. I had never seen him and never wanted to see him. Whenever I balked at eating my beet soup, my mom would knock on the underside of the kitchen table, pretending somebody was knocking on the door, and say, “Here comes Baubas. He must know there’s a child here who won’t eat his soup.”

   When I told my friend Lele about Baubas, she laughed and tried to steal my security blanket. Lele lived one block over on Beatty St. We played together every day when we weren’t fighting. Whenever we fought it was always about my blanket. Whenever I was hard on her heels trying to get it back, she waited to the last minute before laughing maniacally, tossing it to the side, and running even faster, knowing full well I would rescue my blanket first before trying to exact revenge on her.

   Most of my friends were Lithuanian kids like her. The man who built our house lived across the street in a house he built for his own family. He was French Canadian. Sudbury was the hub of Franco-Ontarian culture. He had two sons who were my age. We ran up and down the street playing make believe. There weren’t many cars and even less traffic. The Palm Dairies milk delivery truck rolled up the street every morning going about 5 MPH. The driver drove standing up. The throttle and brake were on the steering column. Their bottles of chocolate milk had tabs on the top through which a straw could be stuck. In the wintertime we skated in our yards when our fathers flooded them to make rinks. Sometimes in the morning in the sunlight hoarfrost sizzled. We practiced falling down and trying to get back up hundreds of times a day. I only spoke Lithuanian. My two friends spoke French and English. I learned to speak English from them. They said French was for art critics.

    They slept over one Monday night when their parents went out to dinner and later to a wrestling match at the INCO Club. Dinty Parks and Rocco Colombo were the gladiators that night. They bumped heads hard in the third round, and both went down. Rocco shook it off but was drop kicked by Dinty when he tried to get up. The next second Dinty got the same treatment from Rocco. It went back and forth, each man pinning the other for a two-count until the referee finally called it a draw. When he did the two wrestlers violated one of the most holy canons of pro wrestling by shaking hands before leaving the ring. Nobody in the audience could believe it.

   Sometime after our dinner my two friends showed me what they had brought with them. They were magic markers. We drew a picture of Baubas pierced with arrows. We drew a picture of him running on the Canadian Pacific tracks behind our house being chased by a raging locomotive. We drew a picture of him hitchhiking out of town in the direction of Gogama way up north.

   “Do you remember the mean green dinosaur?” my friend Frankie asked. His name was Francois, but he got red in the face whenever anybody called him that. We had seen “The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms” earlier that summer at the Regent Theatre on Elm St. We walked there with some older boys and girls and paper bags full of popcorn my mom popped for us. We sat in the front row so we could see as much as possible. The movie was about a hibernating dinosaur woken up by an atomic bomb test. When he wakes up he becomes ferocious. He ends up in New York City where he terrorizes everything and everybody.

   When we got tired of drawing pictures they convinced me to strip down to my skivvies and drew wavy lines all over me with a green magic marker. They drew a life-size dot on the tip of my nose. When they heard my mom outside the door the next thing I knew the marker was in my hand and my mom was demanding an explanation from me. I tried to tell her it wasn’t my fault, but my mom had no patience for explaining and complaining.

   “Go wash that off,” she said and pointed to the bathroom.

   The green marker, however, wouldn’t wash off. The ink was indelible. I called to my friends for help, and although they tried they were more hurt than help. They scrubbed enthusiastically until those parts of me not green were red with irritation. When they were done I was red and green all over.

   The tenth or twelfth time I climbed on a chair on the sly to get on top of the radiator to look out the side window was the time I lost my balance and went over the side. I stuck my arm out to break my fall and broke my collarbone. Before I knew it I was on my way back to ‘The General.’ I had to wear a sling for two weeks. That wasn’t the worst of it, though.

   My mom never bought anything from the Rawleigh salesman who went door to door selling snake oils. The next time he knocked on our door she did buy something, however. It was a bottle of PolyMusion, a yellow syrup with a horrible orange rind after taste. The Rawleigh man said it was a cure-all. There was no hiding when my mom came looking for me with a tablespoon of the thick liquid. She was nice enough afterwards to serve me blueberries soaking in a bowl of Multi-Milk.

   My brother was born when I was a year and a half old. After he got home our mom unretired our enameled diaper pail. When the time came his poop got scooped away and his diapers went into the pail to soak in water and bleach. The pail had a lid. We were thankful for that. When he went off his liquid diet after six months she put him on baby pablum, which was like sweet-tasting instant mashed potatoes.

   I was feeling better by Canada Day, what everybody called Firecracker Day. One of the bad boys on Stanley Street got his hands on a pack of Blockbuster firecrackers. They were five inches long and a half inch in diameter. “Do not hold in hand after lighting” was printed on top of the 4-pack. We snuck behind the last house on the other side of the street and behind some bushes at the base of the cliff. One of us had brought an old bushel basket and another of us brought an old teddy bear. The bear had a hard rubber face. We lit a Blockbuster, turned the basket upside down over it, and ran to the side. The Blockbuster blew the basket to smithereens. When it was the teddy bear’s turn we pushed a Blockbuster into a rip in his belly and ran to the side. The blast blew the stuffing out of the bear, which caught fire, some of it starting the bushes on fire. The man who lived in the last house put the fire out with his lawn hose. There was hell to pay up and down Stanley Street that night.

   No matter how many times I was warned to stay away from the rock cliffs was as many times I went scuttling up them. There were Canadian Pacific tracks at the top that curled around the backside of Stanley Street. One day I was exploring and lost track of time. My pockets were full of black pebbles by the time I realized what time it was. One of them was different. It was a shiny pinkish gray. Sudbury’s rock, which was everywhere, wasn’t naturally black. It was naturally pale gray. Smelter emissions contain sulphur dioxide and metal particulates. Sulphur dioxide mixed with atmospheric moisture creates acid rain that corrodes rock. A coating of silica gel trapped particulates that coated the rock black as pitch.

   I ran home, jumped the railroad tracks, and scrambled down the rock face. When I burst through the back door into the kitchen I saw my mom sitting at the kitchen table. She looked distressed.

   “Where have you been?” she asked, angry. “I’ve been looking for you for hours. I was worried sick.” She looked like she wanted to hit me. I pulled the shiny rock from my pocket.

   “I was searching for treasure,” I said. “I found this. It’s for you.” After that everything was forgiven, thank God.

   The day I screwed up my courage to find out what was down in the basement was the day I turned clumsy stunt man. My dad was blasting rock deep in the mines and my mom was taking a nap on the sofa. My brother was in a rocking baby Moses basket next to the sofa. He had been crying his head off lately and the only thing that stopped the flood of tears was the basket. One of my mom’s arms was over her face and her other arm was unconsciously rocking the basket. I snuck past to the basement door. I quietly opened the door. I took a step down, which turned out  to be a misstep, and tumbled down the rest of the stairs to the bottom. When I came to a stop after backflipping the last step I was surprised I hadn’t cried or screamed. I was also surprised to find I was unhurt. I looked in all directions for Baubas. I thought I saw something move in the shadows. I heard hissing and whispering. It felt like something was pulling my hair. I raced back up the stairs and burst into the living room. I was in a cold sweat. My mom was still asleep. My brother opened his eyes and winked at me.

   When I looked behind me there was no Baubas anywhere in sight. I closed and fastened the door to make sure. I needed fresh air. I went outside and sat on the front steps. Frankie and his younger brother Johnny came over. Johnny was short for Jean. The towhead had a dime in his hand.

   “Look what I found,” he said. A sailboat was on one side of the coin and King George VI was on the other side.

   “Let’s go to the candy store,” Frankie said, taking the dime. There was a store around the corner on Elm St.

   “There’s a monster in our basement,” I told Frankie and Johnny while we were walking there. “We almost got into a fight.”

   “I have nightmares about an unstoppable monster,” Johnny said. 

   “The way to fight monsters is with your brain, not your fists,” Frankie said.

   “How do you do that?” I asked.

   “You think up a plan.”

   “What’s thinking?” I asked.  

   “It’s what you do with your brain,” he said. “No problem can stand up to thinking.”

   Frankie was almost a year older than me and knew everything. Johnny was half a year younger than me. He didn’t know much. He stared at the dime not in his hand anymore. I liked what Frankie said. I could stay out of the basement but still do battle with scary old Baubas. I couldn’t wait to get home and outwit the monster. I was going to think him back to where he came from.

Ed Staskus edits Theatre PEI. He posts on 147 Stanley Street http://www.147stanleystreet.com and Made in Cleveland http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com. 

Theatre PEI