Mike Fiala interview, 10 June 2024

Abstract

Near West Side resident Mike Fiala recollects how his early life experiences shaped his role in Cleveland's Catholic Worker movement. He shares his involvement in activism on behalf of affordable housing and providing services for unhoused people on the Near West Side. Fiala highlights the rise of gentrification in the Near West Side, along with the expansion of St. Ignatius High School. He also recollects his involvement in the 2015 March for Tamir Rice.

Interviewee

Fiala, Mike (interviewee)

Interviewer

White, Bali (interviewer)

Project

Near West Side Housing Activism

Date

6-10-2024

Document Type

Oral History

Duration

95 minutes

Recommended Citation

"Mike Fiala interview, 10 June 2024" (2024). Cleveland Regional Oral History Collection. Interview 544001.
https://engagedscholarship.csuohio.edu/crohc000/1284

Related Resources

Near West Side @ Cleveland Voices

Transcript

Bali White [00:00:00] Let’s get into it. Hi, all. So I am Bali White, and I am here recording Mike Fiala for the Cleveland Regional Oral History Project. For the record, can you state your name and spell your last name for me, please?

Mike Fiala [00:00:17] Yeah, it’s Michael Fiala, and it’s spelled F, as in Frank, I A L A.

Bali White [00:00:24] Awesome. Could you briefly introduce yourself who you are when you were born?

Mike Fiala [00:00:30] Yeah, I think probably the best way to introduce myself is to sort of situate us, sort of locate where we are, because I really see myself, like, embedded in a place. And so who I am is connected to this space and time. And so, like, the first thing is actually to recognize that we’re in a room, a pretty small room that has some interesting pictures of Cleveland and the Near West Side. And I’ve been in these rooms before with the Kentucky Garden steering committee, because we have our meetings here oftentimes. But we’re also in the Carnegie West Library, which is an incredible space because it’s a magnificent triangular building on a triangular lot. And it actually resonates with my whole history and who I am, because Andrew Carnegie was central to things that have to do with actually building, having this built, I should say, this library. And my parents, my mother and my grandparents were in southwestern Pennsylvania, which had, they were coal miners and farmers, and suffered under Andrew Carnegie and the people who he employed. Frick, who was one of his primary point people for development of coal mines and so he was also a part of- Andrew Carnegie was a part of having Pinkertons kill people in strikes. So I have this incredible tension just being in a location like that. And then the next part of it is that it’s a spectacular building. And people who are my friends, who are unhoused in the winter particularly, but year round, enjoy this space immensely. And this atrium that allows the light in is a magnificent thing. So when I start situating myself, just even this space, it’s a big deal. And then I start thinking, like, there’s a lot more to this space. Like how I live nearby and walk to it, that it’s like, to the north is an incredible Lake Erie. It’s like, you know, within eyesight and very close. And I appreciate that water, because we are in the Lake Erie basin, and the Cuyahoga River is to our east, and, like, to the south is this great, all these watersheds going to the Ohio River. And to the west, there is this incredible long great plains and where the sun sets. So that space becomes a very crucial part of, like, my very being, because the soil and the air and the land and the water is life and that’s what actually is in me. And so when I start thinking about that, like, there’s this unfolding of space and the land and the soil into our very being, to the very marrow of our bones and our flesh. And so when I start thinking of myself as so embedded into space, then I also start thinking about time, how we’re in the year 2024 in the Common Era, and that there were people here before, how my mother came from southwestern Pennsylvania during World War Two and met my father in the steel mills and stayed, how my mother didn’t even speak English when she first went to school at age five and only got a third grade education. So I think about that, but I also think about the people who were here previously, the land of the ancient mound builders, incredible, awesome mound builders from 2000 years ago and 1500 years ago, and their descendants, the Lenape, the Ojibwa, the Iroquois, a whole host of native peoples, and that were on that land, and we fundamentally displaced them and carved it up into real estate by Moses Cleveland. And now we parcel it out and sell it, and it becomes, in some sense, like the central question of how I got involved with housing and land justice. Housing justice really is built on improvements on the land and how the community land trust movement was a part of redefining how we understand land and housing and as an American land reform movement. And I think about Near West Housing Corporation and Ohio City Near West organizations in the neighborhood that tried to and achieved, in some sense, Near West Housing Corporation in particular, created 100 homes for people who, using the low-income housing tax credits for very lower income people. So who I am are these people who are embedded in my very being and we’re so connected that for me, it’s hard to define myself separately from that, but in a larger sense, in a very particular sense, like my parents lived on Fulton Avenue about a mile from here, south near the second district police station. And my brothers were born there. I should say they lived there. They were both born in a farmhouse in southwestern Pennsylvania. I was born, actually, Lutheran Hospital down the street. But my parents, my father built, substantially himself, a house in the great out there, as I call it, on the border of North Royalton and Parma on Sprague Road in 1952 to 1954. So I start off, it was a kind of urban foundation that becomes rural, really, because that far out, we had like a square mile of woods behind us, undeveloped. And I used to spend time there and. But we were focused north, which is Parma, which is very suburbanized. So my early experiences was urbanized, foundation ruralized, with a suburbanized focus sense. And then in 1961, my family sort of fell apart. My mother sold the house. My parents separated semi-permanently, and we moved such that from age seven to age 15, I lived in 13 different places. So that really is a kind of foundational. And I lived on the east side, and I lived in this city, and I lived in Garfield Heights and Maple Heights and in Parma again. So I had all these different experiences and finally spent most of my high school years, three of them, in Parma, and then went off to college. That experience sort of gives me a sense of, like, I’ve lived in the same house since 1981, so that’s 43 years, which is a pretty stable. When I bought that house, the real estate people say, you only stay here seven years. That’s what the routine is. And I bought that house in 1981 at 16% interest rate, which, you know, like, was unheard of and crazy. So that, you know, coming to the Near West Side, coming back to it came as a function of coming out of college and traveling all over the country and living in different places, like Las Vegas, where my brothers were working and doing work there in Las Vegas for six months and living with my uncles a bit, who were farmers in southwestern Pennsylvania, and traveling and doing other things, doing various work. And in the late seventies, I came back to the Near West Side to talk to a Jesuit priest whose name was Tom Leonhardt, because I was searching for something that didn’t- I didn’t even have the name for, but what I was really searching for was community. And so think about what I opened with, the sense of, like, the deep embedding and enfolding of the whole space here from all one thing.

Bali White [00:09:37] Could you actually spell Tom Leonhardt for the record?

Mike Fiala [00:09:41] Yeah. L-E-O-N-H-A-R-D-T. [crosstalk] Yeah. So that sense of community, I didn’t have the word for it, because in some sense, I had channeled the layers of alienation of, like, suburbanization, urbanization, over educated in an elite college because I played sports, and I was recruited to play a sport there. And I had this combination of working class who, people who believed in education. And so I, you know, got one. But I was not sure what to do with my life, which is a lot of the case. Like, do I get on the conveyor belt and join? And I just did not have it in me for lots of reasons. And so I came to the Near West Side and visited with Tom, who I met over the years. He was a Jesuit priest still was. Then he later on left the Jesuits and got married to someone who was also a dear friend of mine, Carolyn. And so I came here looking for something because my life had sort of, like, just not gone, like, anywhere. And I had this intense need to find something, like a way of life. And that really was the beginning of my sort of deep connection to the Near West Side. There was a community that was forming at the time, an intentional community in the Abbas’s Children was the name. It was, I like to describe it, pentecostal charismatic Catholic movement, which is not your typical images of what Catholics were doing, but that era really had this intense sense of the Holy Spirit falling upon us afresh and just incredible energy and vitality. And that really had been a foundational part of my life. Playing sports was like one of the biggest ones. It was like a kind of religion for me. But I also grew up in a very- My mother was very devout and also conflicted about her devotion because divorcing my father in the sixties put her in a very ostracized situation with the church, and she felt thoroughly oppressed and ostracized. And her own behavior, in many ways, also led to some of those things. But that’s a whole long story that’s different. So those layers of my life really were looking for something life giving. And I felt I had experienced it within about six months. I was really taken by the community, the people, people my age, people older. It was intergenerational, children. And we had incredible powerful liturgies and worship and connections of doing things together. And so when I bought that house in literally June 18, in 1981 is when it transferred. I was seeing it as a community house and fostering community. So those things are foundational in a way, or thoroughly, I should say. And I saw myself being on West 38th Street, as partly, as being a foundationally connected to the Near West Side, and seeing how I could be a sense of God’s presence. And I had no idea, in some sense, what I was doing. This is partly the problem. There’s little mentorship in, like, radical life, or we’re also independent minded, that we don’t even know how to hook up with people, but we do inevitably find some niche and we start doing it, and people try to help us. But some sense we have this kind of also radical independence. I like to say that you didn’t end up on the Near West Side unless something really went wrong in that day, because it was a very liminal space, like, I would describe it as the Wild West, lots of, like, challenging intersections. Liminal is another word I use because of the contradictions of urban space puts people into all sorts of situations that are not immediately comfortable. And in some sense, suburbanization is to try to eliminate all these discomforts. But lots of people find that there’s something missing, like it’s hollowed out. Consumption becomes sort of it, more of a focus. And so I had experienced those layers. So that hopefully answers something like your question, Bali. But you can sort of see how I have to walk into it in ways that make sense to me, and that allows me to sort of be better focused on what you’re interested in.

Bali White [00:14:58] You touched base on, actually a couple of my follow-up questions, so that worked out perfectly.

Mike Fiala [00:15:03] Yeah.

Bali White [00:15:04] My next question for you, though, is could you describe what this neighborhood looked like upon your arrival in 1981, in terms of the conditions, demographics, etcetera?

Mike Fiala [00:15:23] Wow, that’s an evocative question. So one way to think about it is, since I went to the high school down the street, the first way to think about coming here is all of us, all of us, if we go back to where we went to high school, pivotal turning point of my life. I would like to describe the Jesuits as saving my life, because, let’s say I was fairly unruly, yet I had, I would respect authority, but not necessarily be easily adaptable. And so playing sports was a helpful and healthy way for me to get out all this intense energy and potentially conflictual energy and so having come back to the place where I went to high school, think about the rush of emotion. Like 14 to 17 years old. I can remember having been held up by somebody at 14,[laughs] coming out of the gym with a friend who wanted my coat. And my friend tells me that I said, no, I’ll fight you for it. I don’t think I actually said that.[laughs] I said no. And then I saw a knife that looked like a sword, but that’s because my eyes were so- I was so scared to death. And, you know, it’s probably, you know, a butcher knife or something. And he pulled it out from behind his coat. And I said, no, I won’t give you my coat, but I’ll give you my watch. I negotiated with him,[laughs] and he took it and took off, you know, interesting. I, you know, I called. I saw the police pulling away, you know, maybe five minutes later down the street. I called out to them. They said, hey, let’s go file a report. I said, no. I don’t need to file a report. I just got robbed, and I’m not if you don’t want to deal with it, that’s your business. I’m not going to deal with it either. So all of that rush of emotion came, and I was hanging out at St. Ignatius High School because the Jesuit priest was, while he was living at St. Patrick’s, we would have worship space in the chapel there at St. Ignatius. So all of this was a nice seam. My later separation from St. Ignatius High School is, like, breaks my heart, and it’s like being a stabbing in my heart, but I love that place. It all fits. We’re worshiping together. This is what I believed in. I finally found a home, and the physical space was, you would have nodes of places, of people you would know, or you would wander by the streets, and, you know, you could make the argument it was extremely run down on one level, right? Because it was old housing and people weren’t redoing much of it. And it was significantly and thoroughly poor. And so, so, like- And while I had grown up in various stages, it was still pretty uncomfortable. You know, I remember, like, trying to get to know people and kids and, like and having a wild party at my house because I had no furniture, and I just had big speakers. And I invited the guy across the street who came. You know, he was maybe in his fifties or forties, and he came and what I remember is he drank a half a bottle of whiskey, and I was, like, blown away. I didn’t realize, like, at the time, I just thought it was bizarre. But what I realize now is he could have had alcohol poisoning from that much alcohol. And, you know, later on, his house burned down ’cause he fell asleep drinking, and he was smoking, and he barely survived. So. And I was getting to know the kids in the neighborhood, and there was buildings right next to me that were in various stages of disrepair and in stress. And so Orange Blossom Press was on in the Schott Building. And what I remember is there was also a bar there, Walt’s Friendly Tavern, which would later become Lozada’s. And there was a garage that had been, was working as a working garage when I moved in. And so it was incredibly hard-working people doing the lower level kinds of work. And there was, like, a furniture store later on in the Schott Building. So it was- The buildings were, like, aging, and the housing had all of the people who were still here. The woman who I bought the house from moved into a nursing home, and the people next door were all related to one another. And so when I start- And just before I arrived, this incredible rec building that belonged to, I think I can’t remember the name of it was, had just burned down because lots of buildings were burning down or being set afire for to get the insurance- And so in that context, there were groups organizing a Near West Neighbors in Action. But then there were development groups called Near West Housing Corporation that just formed in that era of the early eighties, who were trying to save this housing, first of all, boarding it up and then finding methods by which to do that. And that’s where the low-income housing tax credits and my involvement within Near West Housing came, because I was extremely concerned about all of this and the neighborhood, because I had chosen either the worst possible place to ever live or the best possible place. All the action was going to happen. I was so close to Lorain Avenue, basically my picture window in my house faced it for, lots of reasons I won’t describe, but I was as close as you can get to Lorain Avenue, so all of the crazinesses that were there, what happened, and I would even write poems about how people in the middle of the night would be screaming at the top of their lungs, you know, crazed, in some Technicolor, you know, suit of some sort. So that sense of, like, immediate need, crisis and personal, and how buildings were attached to it. Because I had a dream in 1984, after I had been there for three years, I had a dream or a vision, I’m not sure, of all of those buildings right next to me being gone. And I said, oh, my God. No buffer whatsoever from Lorain Avenue. And that led me to getting involved with Near West Housing Corporation. I called Bill Merriman, who was the source of all information on the Near West Side. Most beloved, always caring, accessible, my friend. And I called him up and I said, Bill, I’m really worried. And he said, ah, call Near West Housing Corporation. They’ll help you. And I called them and got to know Chuck Ackerman, and they said, hey, you should run for the board. And so in January of 1985, I ran for the board and didn’t win. [laughs] Then they appointed me to the board because anybody was willing to get involved they either made a new board position or they had an empty board position, and they put me on the board. And that was my beginning of, like, learning the ropes of how things start to happen in my neighborhood and how housing, buildings, and first of all, saving them, boarding them up, and then finding methods, the tools that are provided in various forms of development projects and pro formas that will actually create a project and do that long term. So I think I’m still approximating your questions. Let me also say something about this process. It’s a little challenging for me to generate monologues because my experience is always a dialogue. And while I understand the format, I just sort of want to recognize how storytelling, and in my sense of how the common experience of my community would be, like, we would be in a roundtable all sharing different parts, and it would start, it would start like, oh, yes, and that part of the story and that part and that, yes, and this was the point because I want to decenter my particular details, not to say that they’re not crucial, but it’s really a body that I’m talking about, and it’s actually a political body, and it’s actually what I believe is a mystical body and a mystical body of Christ that connects us all. And that- I’m just bringing forth a kind of grace that I have that comes through me, through a spirit, the spirit that I share with others. Whether we feel it or not, there’s a spirit to this neighborhood of sorts. Right? It’s a certain ethos, a culture. And so it’s a challenge sometimes. To want to generate these stories autonomously, out of context and not in a dialogue in a more direct way with you, Bali, but I respect the format and want to sort of acknowledge that because it has both the sense of, of dialectic and dialogue, looking for the truths and trying to really hear most clearly what I’m struggling to articulate. And it’s also sort of what people like rabbis and people who wrote the stories and the scriptures would have stories they’d talk about, and then they’d revise them and tell it in a different way and tell a whole different part of the present based on those past stories. And so that’s, like, deeply rooted in how I see conversation. Right? Ordinary conversation always has this potential for a deep dive. And we can go back and forth because we live in this very material world, you know, taking in the air and the space and the water and the soil and Kentucky Garden, who’s down the street that we actually raise food at, and how there’s so much lead in the soil. Like, you start to see, hey, thank God that space in Kentucky Garden was saved. All those things are really what I like to emphasize. And so I’m working with this format to try to respect that these are the contexts in which we need to work. Thank you for your patience. Glad to listen to the next response and question.

Bali White [00:26:56] So I’m kind of curious. When exactly did you join the Cleveland Catholic Worker movement? What led you to be a part of that?

Mike Fiala [00:27:05] Yeah, such a good question. Goes right to the heart. Thank you. So the Near West Side is a neighborhood with many layers to it. You can put your toe in, you can put your leg, you can put most of your body, you can jump in and be immersed at layers and layers. So I came through one avenue, let’s say St. Ignatius High School, and my grandparents from down the street, or primarily my grandmother and my parents, but also because of this charismatic community, Abba’s Children, so central. But there had been here a Catholic Worker Community in the late thirties and early fifties that I had never known about. We find all of these things out later. But in the late sixties, a group called the Thomas Merton became the Thomas Merton Community. And even that name is an interesting name. I actually asked them a long time, a while ago how they came to that name, because Thomas Merton is, let’s say, a famous Catholic for some people. The Pope mentioned his name along with Dorothy Day when he came to speak at Congress. Right? People hear Martin Luther King Junior, who the Pope mentioned, and Abraham Lincoln. But the Pope mentioned two other people, Thomas Merton, Dorothy Day. Not familiar names among even Catholics. So there was a Thomas Merton Community here that had come in the late sixties, basically, let’s say ’69, for various reasons. This location, rather than maybe Glenville, which they had initially thought of, it was primarily the Corrigans and the Maguires, Father Bob Begin, diocesan priests who had gotten into lots of these issues of antiracism and antiwar activity. They had all sort of started congregating on the Near West Side. To be transformed and forming would be essentially a Catholic Worker Community. They did hospitality for people who are homeless. Hospitality is always an experiment in learning about the truth of, like, how do you really engage relationships, what limits you have, or none. So people were doing that at a very early age, early time, in the late sixties and through the seventies. And in 1984, ’83, ’84, Joe Lehner came to the Near West Side from Mishawaka, Indiana, near Notre Dame. And he was older, he was in his late twenties, which is not the typical Jesuit volunteer, but he had come and said that Bob Begin, who was the priest, who had a lot of resources, because he had, over the years, had really seen like, hey, I’m going to be a conduit for lots of projects. He was known for doing that. Incredible vital force. So Joe Lehner said, hey, I want to form a Catholic Worker Community, and I want support for that from people, particularly I didn’t think he went to Bob Begin, but probably to the Corrigans and others. And he got support and was able to have the Catholic- Have the convent on St. Patrick’s grounds given or available for the Catholic Worker Community to use. In approximately ’84, ’85, they moved in there and paid rent and other things, but minimal, and lived there and did hospitality. And so I was not directly involved in those initial stages. I was involved with- I had gotten married. So Maryellen, who was essential to this whole story, too, is a part of, like, how we formed a community ourselves, and a relationship that would be life giving to our community and so we were forming our relationship. I was working now full-time, and I had gone to graduate school to get a degree to find sort of more stable and ongoing employment. And so lots of my friends were involved with it. And so probably 1989 is really a turning point for me in my involvement, because the West 38th Street had come through, was in a crisis having to do with. This was the era of crack beginning. And the craziness hit, like, the forefront because the guys who I knew next door, the people I known who originally lived there, sort of got kicked out by somebody who had bought the house on a land contract, and he had been smoking dope, but now he got hooked on crack and so now the house next door to me, which is like 40 inches away, three and a half feet, is a 24/7, let’s say drug house, prostitution and other things. And that kind of craziness. Pretty overwhelming, right? My wife would get up in the middle of the night when they’re, you know, having a wild craziness and say, hey, I have to get up in the morning. I have to go to sleep, you know, and they would all be, okay. We understand. Sorry. Think about that. They respect the sense that you have to go to work. Oh, yeah, we’re doing our own thing, but, yeah, we’ll try to stop. It’s hard because we’re, you know, doing all this craziness. So because it was so crazy, I was pretty overwhelmed. Like, I had this vision of, like, powerful presence, like, be transformative and, let’s say, redemptive and part of a transformation of the Near West Side. And then I started realizing, well, what would it be like to be a part of the transformation of just a corner of a block, right? And here it is in my face, and I’m overwhelmed, and I don’t know what to do. And let’s suggest- Or I could say, while I’m tempted and was employed and tried to engage the police, at a certain point, they were totally unhelpful, and there’s multiple levels why that’s the case. So in those days, I didn’t have the full sense of, like, how to deal with this. I would, in some sense, try every strategy. I’m less inclined to see the police solve any problem at this point. But then I imagine maybe. But while they were unhelpful, I engaged my friends, who all believed in nonviolence. And now here’s the rubber meeting the road. I’m in a severe crisis. And we were all pretty pathetic and unable to come up with much other than that, they would hang out with me in my house overnight from 6:00 p.m. till six in the morning. Handful of them, two to three or four people. And the sheer fact of their presence took the craziness out of me. I was no longer oppressed. I was free to deal with the problem. And over time, I engaged the person who was living there, who had owned it on a land contract, and said, hey, your house went up for sheriff sale. I didn’t buy it because it was way too much money. It wasn’t- It was probably $14,000. I went to him and I said, hey, do you want to get out of this? And he said, yeah, and I’ll sell it to you direct. And so I purchased it from him. And the problem is, he hadn’t paid his property taxes, so he got nothing out of it. And so he refused to leave and he wanted to kill me. So this is the context in which the community and the Catholic Worker came to my rescue by presence. So, like, what had been, you know, I had been in contact with these kinds of communities. I had gone to 1980 to hear Molly Rush with Bill Corrigan and Tom Leonhardt, who was a part of the first Plowshares, eight nuclear weapons, Mark VI or Mark IV nuclear missiles, their actions of trying to disarm those things. I had been a part of these communities in loose ways, but now the rubber met the road and I needed them, and they came, and that started to create this deep bond of connectedness. And so I started participating much more thoroughly in community, in that community, so, like- And that there was always overlap, but now was much more personal. And in many ways, I had also left Abba’s Children for lots of reasons that’s hard to describe without giving more detail, but in some sense I had felt like we were to be rooted in the Near West Side and there was a range of what people wanted that was not really just focused on the Near West Side. And they were also profound sort of weaknesses in my own life that I had sort of created serious problems and conflict with the community that sort of led to my sort of like being in a new space and open to the Catholic Worker. I’m going to take a breath and drink some water.

Bali White [00:36:15] Go for it. You had mentioned that housing justice in the Near West Side is kind of key in understanding the type of activism you are involved in. Could you explain to us what exactly your role in providing, I guess, affordable housing for the Near West Side?

Mike Fiala [00:36:38] Wow. Thank you. That’s the perfect question again, partly because, like, all of what I just said to you points me exactly to that question. It’s like so perfect. It’s sort of like you’re socratic. [laughs] You’ve asked the pregnant question. It’s so wonderful and really sweet to be able to feel that connection with you, that you’re like, right on the cusp of that next question, because that’s it. I’m in this incredible space and I believe in these things and we can actually, like, do it in a concrete way. Housing is foundational land justice because you have to have houses on land. And what’s the quality of the land? And what’s the- Because one version of real estate is it’s location, location, location. And now it’s bizarre. Land is so expensive here and it doesn’t matter what the quality of the house is or not. People are going to pay outrageous prices. And so there’s this bizarre, weird, liminal, contradictory sense of space here now. And you’re going back to like your eighties. And, you know, my involvement with the Catholic Worker and how it gave life to these housing projects. Well, the Catholic Worker was about housing foundationally, doing hospitality, welcoming the stranger, welcoming the immigrant, help the migrant, welcoming those who are unhoused, living in community with them under many different and challenging circumstances, helping them to get on their feet, to move on, or long term relationships. So that in the sense that the people who are in the greatest need actually are our most vital asset. What, is that a novel idea? Is that a crazy idea? Is it like absolutely true? Like, think about if we work on making sure that those who are in the greatest need get their needs met, then we’re a community who lifts up that because clearly we have lots of power or we at least have an over education or enough education or all the other things, right? And any of us can go down that road. In fact, if I hadn’t gotten- My mother hadn’t done all this work to make sure I got an education, really valued education because she didn’t have one, I could easily be in the same position. So that doesn’t mean it’s not difficult or those people are unhoused are very difficult, or just needing a relationship or all the things. So if we start with that, and what’s incredible is Near West Housing Corporation was like, right on that. They’re going to actually work with people who they were using low-income housing tax credits, which while that’s an awful way to fund housing, it was the method available, and so they were there to do it, low-income housing, giving financial and housing stability to people who were in great need. Now, there’s lots of problems with the long-term housing tax credits because, like, you have to live there for 15 years to get to own it, which is sort of crazy, and that’s why we can make the argument for the land trust. You’re an owner, and significantly an owner from the very beginning. But, like, it dovetailed perfectly that I was connecting to the Catholic Worker or this neighborhood on multiple levels, that it had a direct effect on where I was living. And here’s an organization who does it. And, like, out of that need and getting involved, I started seeing these things concretely happen, and it happened significantly on West 38th Street. There were housing that they did, low-income housing, tax credit housing, and also Homeward housing, which was actually for middle-class people. So Near West Housing Corporation, as it did, let ten, over ten years significantly affordable housing for low-income housing people. It also tried to adapt to saying, hey, there’s other programs, and the city is really pressuring us not to just do low-income housing. So, yeah, okay, we can sort of adapt and do these things and do middle-class housing. And so there’s people, friends of mine, who live in that former Homeward houses on West 38th Street, and in fact, there was such a gap on West 38th Street from that building that had burned down. Two new houses were built on that street. Yeah, two. And one came through St. Patrick’s Project Afford house, and was lived in by a family that was lower-income at that time for a short period of time. So all of that percolates. And while I wasn’t conscious, I wasn’t articulating it in those forms, you can see it being revealed, like, oh, like the interconnectedness all comes together. And like, you start to imagine. [shows emotion]

Bali White [00:42:05] Would you like to take a minute?

Mike Fiala [00:42:09] Well, thank you for saying that. Because you start to imagine-[shows emotion] [recording paused and resumed] You can start up. You can start, you can start up again. So you start to imagine that the Near West Side could be an incredible place. It could actually [shows emotion] embrace such economic diversity by starting with those in the greatest need. And that if we do it now, it can happen over time, because inevitably there’s all sorts of development forces, and so you have to get in and do it early and really have a vision. It’s not an absolute vision. Right? It didn’t have to go this route. Right? So it’s not like I forecast the future, but if you see, and clearly, this was a neighborhood coveted from the beginning in multiple ways by the city for redevelopment. And I won’t go into the insidious reasons why they see it that way. It could take me an hour to describe it, but this neighborhood was coveted from the beginning, and we were, in some sense, somewhat under the radar for a long period of time, or in that space where lots of possibilities could be imagined and you could see you had the tools to do it, and the land trust was a tool. Affordable housing like low-income house tax credits, all those things, had done foundational things to do that. And on a regular basis, we would be cut off at the knees, meaning undermined and not supported and always being pushed in other directions. So I think it sort of describes, like, where. And you could see how, as I was telling the story, I was swept up in that vision.

Bali White [00:44:25] Absolutely. Thank you, Mike. Yeah, I am curious. So newer generations are referring to this area as Ohio City. Could you explain to us why you and many other community members still currently refer to this neighborhood as the Near West Side?

Mike Fiala [00:44:45] Yeah, it’s amazing how few people anymore even want to even use that term because they’ve just accepted. I have this ability to- I’ll be the last one describing it as the Near West Side. Yeah, that’s another great question, because it goes to the heart of a sense of divide, and a divide in image and vision and hope for this neighborhood. And my hope had always been, I believe, that there could be and would be unity. I couldn’t fathom that people would actually not want this. And in some sense, I still don’t believe it, that they don’t want it. In fact, now the people who are typically those who might have been my adversaries 10, 10 years ago are unhappy with the neighborhood like it is now, because it is density without respect for relationship. It is massive tax giveaways to developers with no rhyme or reason other than density and maybe tweaking it around the tape around the edges. And while there’s virtues in density, one has to start to think about them in lots of ways that you don’t undermine what’s here. And in some sense, cities have no investment in community. What they really are is they are scared to death that they have undermined all their tax base. And so they’re going to give it away more. Even though we’re on a Great Lake, we’re in like a gold mine for fresh water. This is like the Great Lakes and where we are is like going to be paradise. And we still think we have nothing to offer. So it’s like a rush to the bottom. And while millions of people are coming and density needs to be integrated, not as though without a context in making sure that we have structural ways to include everyone. And so what happens is you just give it away and then you wait for the next wave when people get tired of this neighborhood, because now it’s not gentrification. I would call it entertainment distrification and transience, which is sort of like built into our ethos and so I’m trying to go trace myself back to your question.

Bali White [00:47:16] Yeah. So you refer to this area something else while others are call it Ohio City-

Mike Fiala [00:47:23] Yeah. Yeah. So Ohio City got associated with people who wanted to redevelop and gentrify. And the people on the other side were those who were, you know, either the way we might be pigeonholed. And this is, it’s always not a very good idea to set up conflicting groups as though they don’t have lots in common. Let’s say. How much do we have in common? Well, we’re all white liberals. Like, it’s sort of pathetic when you think about it. Like, really, we have very little not in common. We’re over educated usually, too. But there was an indigenous population of Appalachian white people, Puerto Rican people, working-class people here, let’s say the Irish who went to St. Patrick’s, too, who had been here for a long time. And this intermix brought in a whole bunch of other people who, you know, said, hey, there’s this incredible architecture. I love architecture. I love these buildings, but let’s think about the people and the community, first and foremost. And like, if we understand, like what, if you want to even call it economic, the most economic investment is in those with the greatest need because they’re going to spend the most money and they have, and they’re the ones who can actually are going to do the work. Now they call it workforce housing and not lower-income housing or low-income housing. They have to give it new names to make it acceptable. So the divide is less. I would like to think of that there was a radical option, but it goes to the root of the issue, and the root of the issue is that we actually start with those in the greatest need, and so those who called it Ohio City, while there was a name Ohio City 150 years ago, that wasn’t the name for this neighborhood. It was an old name that was revived to give it a new edge and to not get it associated with the Near West Side. So you’d see articles in the Plain Dealer. They would talk about Ohio City versus the Near West Side, and the Near West Side would have crime, and Ohio City didn’t. And when you use the wrong word, some people would get upset because you shouldn’t call Ohio City the Near West Side when there’s crime happening. So that kind of divide led to a sense like it became very divisive. What you would think can’t be that quibbling around crumbs, like, do you understand the city? And, like, the structural injustices that we have to deal with at a foundational level. And what I start with is the military budget, which is like now a trillion dollars and takes up half of the federal budget if you include all the interest on it. That’s the elephant in the room, taking up all the space, and what’s the other elephant? Now we’re paying for stadiums and billions of dollars of investment, and so they take up all the space and we’re quibbling around the edges around a little, little neighborhood. And that’s what people are going to argue about and say, oh, yeah, no, we have to invest all this money to bring in back the middle class. Well, the working class will become the middle class. I think you understand that. I understand it. I was the working class. My father met my mother in the steel mills. My mother had three jobs. She was a beautician, she worked in a factory, and she drove a school bus. I’m way over educated for lots of reasons to overcome that oppression. And then I learned how my education caused me to assimilate to mainstream America and want to be, have all that power and take care and look out for myself and get all sorts of people who look just like me. And then because of Jesus from the Catholic Worker and people who are liberal and believe in looking out for the people who are poor and are compelled by that vision as a humanistic vision, that’s where the separation comes of, like, oh, it gets stark and even the names you use, right? So there’s insider language, the Near West Side. Outsider language, everybody knows it is Ohio City and I like to just disrupt that sense of equilibrium. And, you know, people will see me as a gadfly or contrarian or disruptor. Or bringer of bad news. Thank you.

Bali White [00:51:56] You had mentioned that this area was becoming kind of more and more gentrified. Could you kind of explain that and talk about who exactly gentrification is affecting in this area?

Mike Fiala [00:52:09] Yeah, probably eight to ten years ago, all the things that had been worked on for 30 to 40 years were finally going to take off and explode. And in terms of housing and expense, I think at one point, and maybe still this neighborhood is the highest increase in rents in the world, or I should say in the United States, $2,000 a month rents, and partly was low interest rates were allowed for massive developments. The city, there is the financialization of real estate that’s unique now because the east and west coast and other places had experienced this for ages, and the Midwest had surprisingly high rents, but low housing prices. High rents. Low housing prices. So in Garfield Heights ten years ago, you could buy a house for $20,000, but you could charge rent at $700 a month. What? Well, in three years, you could buy that house. Well, did the rents go down? No. So we have an international effort to buy up real estate in cities in the midwest, and this is a prime location because now it’s exploding, and so there’s no buffer. So there is no neighborhood. This neighborhood is in the international real estate business. What? What? So ten years ago, it started happening because of all of this, and now it’s exploding. Right. It’s not to say you won’t see pockets of pretty poor housing and things undeveloped. It’s clearly so, but bet all of those things sometimes are not even being redeveloped, and they’re doing Airbnbs. On my street there’s at least three or four Airbnbs on a very residential communal street. What? And the issue of connectedness when, you know, the building behind me is called the Tinnerman. It was used to be Vista Color Lab, and the people who live there are mostly residents, interns at the hospitals there for three years, and then they go to someplace else. So that’s feeding and a kind of entertainment. And that doesn’t mean that we don’t. Well, I don’t know that I’ve ever got to meet any of them beyond. It’s even with my neighbors. Somebody’s going to be selling their house down the street who was friends of mine who are probably going to take $100 to $200,000 with them, extracting it from the neighborhood because they lived her for a period of time. The person who, the people, the couple that lived next door to the Catholic Worker House on Fulton, bought their house probably for $300,000, and probably sold it for 450 [thousand] within two or three years because they had a child and they were going to move to the suburbs, and he was the one who wanted everything to be redeveloped and overdeveloped. And he would get online and preach all of that and be, be complaining when people didn’t gone. And he had come from New York City, so, and we were actually friendly with him, and we would sit down, have conversations with him too, next to the guy. So it’s not like we didn’t have a relationship, so one could say in the last ten years, that is now housing is like a million dollars for some houses, half a million dollars on my street. This is like, there’s no place for people. So historically, people could come here who were lower income or middle income, or try to find a niche in a community. You’re just not. I would say you can’t and you go somewhere else. I actually provide housing at a low income, lower income rate to people next door to me because I own the house, because I’m not here to make money. I’m here actually primarily to support the community, and so I asked people who move in that they would find a way to contribute in a concrete way into the community. And friends of mine do equally who are homeowners who actually have rental properties. Over time, you inevitably start to either acquire things in proximity to sort of stave off and insanity, and so that divide and the change in the neighborhood is just pronounced. And so what you see is a massive influx of people coming here. They have already gone to what people call Hingetown, which in a negative sense is called Cringetown, has this incredible, like, oh, yeah, we’re going to bring all these people. Yeah, they have this veneer of like, oh, yeah, we live here too. Okay. But clearly Lorain Avenue has hit this stride too, and redevelopment is not a bad thing. We’re not talking- This is the first thing. Oh, you don’t like any development? No, it’s actually healthy buildings need to get restored. It does take investments of money, and so we’re glad to have that. How you actually plan that and do it so that everybody has a place, because the displacement is profound. St. Ignatius High School got eliminated over 100 homes in the nineties that were primarily low-income and poor people, and they have playing fields, and those places could have been another opportunity for that school to see a different vision, where they embrace the poor as a part of their vision, not that they, that they covet and then displace, and so a whole community was displaced. And there’s even a church there nearby who all, many of their parishioners who lived in that neighborhood no longer were able to live in that neighborhood and put stress on their community. So that transformation has been growing. Right. But it exploded with what I described as, like, the change of how the coveting, of financializing the real estate came to Cleveland in the Near West Side.

Bali White [00:58:52] In the Near West Side, you had mentioned St. Ignatius. About what years were they expanding in this neighborhood?

Mike Fiala [00:59:01] So they’ve been expanding almost from the beginning, really. I mean, they, you know, you can make it as a very positive contribution. Right. The Jesuits are known for education. Education is what I got with them. I got to go to an elite school and be recruited to play a sport because I had gone there. So this is what they do. This is their vision. We’re going to educate Catholic people. That’s really what they were committed. They now accept a wide range of people. So they’re not wanting to be only that, but. And that Catholics were not, let’s say, quite mainstreamed yet. John F. Kennedy is sort of like the beginning of, like, thinking Catholics are mainstream because it was a revolutionary idea that a Catholic could be elected president. Why? John F. Kennedy said, hey, I’ll do what’s right. People believe that you actually are subject to the pope. And in some sense, that’s right. Pope is in theory a Catholic’s leader, but Ignatius had always been about, you know, education and educating the next era and the assimilation into mainstream America and also bring what they would call a social justice perspective. Let’s say I imbibed all that, and somehow must have gotten it from them and then turned it on them and said, okay, if that’s what you believe, let’s see it, and they did the opposite. They leveled the whole neighborhood. So they were always taking buildings because they wanted to expand, because that’s the nature of, like, education. Think about hospitals. They swallow neighborhoods because there’s a huge investment of healthcare. Education is like, we believe it’s the, let’s say, you could say it’s the salvation. I would say it’s a dangerous one because it leads you to mainstream assimilation to the American empire, which is so destructive to the planet. Martin Luther King said, my own government is the most violent force on the planet. When you start to hear and learn and see that over 150 million military bases all over the planet that the US does and how it extracts wealth from other places, then you say, maybe it’s not a good idea to assimilate to the mainstream American culture. As a Catholic, you actually have to be counterculture. And there was a massive uprising of Catholic opposition with priests in the sixties saying no to the Vietnam War, no to nuclear weapons, and no to the military budget. And that leads to, like, we are no longer belong in this place. We have a different vision, and we actually think we’re the most dangerous. And the transformation comes from, how do you walk away from that kind of violence?

Bali White [01:01:53] Awesome. Thank you. So do you have any connections to younger generations of activists or students in this community or outside of this community?

Mike Fiala [01:02:04] Yes.

Bali White [01:02:05] Can you share with us a little bit about that?

Mike Fiala [01:02:08] Give me a sense of timing so that I don’t [crosstalk]

Bali White [01:02:14] Oh, I’m sorry. We’re at an hour and two minutes.

Mike Fiala [01:02:17] Okay, great. So we have maybe 20 more minutes at most.

Bali White [01:02:20] We can go as long as an hour and 45 minutes.

Mike Fiala [01:02:22] Okay. All right, so, young people. I was the young person, right? I came here 45 years ago. So I was twenty, I was 25, 24 years old when I first came here in September. So I was a young person with lots of other young people in that community, that charismatic Catholic community. I met Mary Ellen, my wife, through that community. My dearest friend to this day, who lives on West 38th Street, Kathleen McDonnell, was a part of that community. I met her through that community. So the very core of when you’re young is you do need mentoring. I’m going to take some water here, and so that’s what the Jesuits, you can make the argument, and priests are supposed to be pastors, shepherds. And so I was shepherded by Tom Leonhardt, by Bob Begin, by Mark DiNardo, by Bill Corrigan, but also Judy Corrigan, and also by Jean Merriman and Bill Merriman and a host of others. Powerful characters, that I am really grateful for that when I was young, they had a welcome, and they brought me in. But my sort of style is really independent and, not necessarily like I was the youngest in my family, so my brothers looked out for me. So I didn’t have a natural, nurturing side to me in one, in many ways, but either aging or transformation or living with Mary Ellen, because hospitality and welcome is, like, the core of her being and her parents. Right, Her parents were, like, the most hospitable people to everyone. They, in fact, adopted, strictly speaking, three young men who were Vietnamese boat people. So, like, this core sense of hospitality and welcome, you start to see the next generation and in some sense, I was always an organizer. An organizer was like, yeah, I’ll take anybody, and I’m building community. So that means everyone on every level and show up, and you’re welcome. Everybody’s welcome in, just like I had welcome Wilbur from across the street, come on to the party I’m having. Even though you don’t fit this group, you know, you’ll come over and we’ll have community. So I always had that sense of, like, in the neighborhood, always pulled me out of my house because it was so crazy. And, like, I was curious. And so kids, actually, I knew children in the neighborhood, and they would flock to my house, and we would, like, hang out and look out for them, and, you know, they would steal from me. And then I would say, hey, don’t do that. And then, you know, I would get smarter about making sure they don’t steal. So kids, you know, we would hang out with and look out for and, you know, like, I have Tom Bonnadio, who is, like, my most beloved son, in a sense, adopted. He considers us parents. He was 14 years old, and I sponsored him. He was being confirmed because his mother asked me to do that. And so we are still in deep connection 40 years later. So I was always mentoring young people.

Bali White [01:05:55] For the record, can you spell Tom Bonnadio’s last name?

Mike Fiala [01:05:59] B-O-N-N-A-D-I-O. And so, in some sense, always mentoring young people. There’s a whole- Essentially, there’s no one wandering the streets anymore. Kids, six-year-olds would show up in my street and want to make money, like raking leaves, and we got to know them. I have pictures of them and others would come back ten years later and visit us and knock on the door. Even the people who were the people going crazy next door have come back 20 years later and said, oh, you’re still living here? Because we hadn’t gotten into a violent conflict. We ultimately had peaceable relations in that process. So I was, in some sense, we were always mentoring young people in the activist sense or, like, the people. So we have the Catholic Worker Community is almost like a natural for that because young people are often curious, like what do I do? Let’s say there’s a Jesuit volunteer core group that comes through here every year, maybe anywhere from four to eight of them. And so sometimes they want to find out about what’s going on and what groups are out there and how radical you want to be or liberal or conservative, like, so you have your radical group called the Catholic Worker, maybe not so radical. Have community, eat together. So there’s a German volunteer who lives in the Catholic Worker Community almost the last 30 plus years for a year. So they’re young, usually 19, 20, sometimes a little older. But then there’s all other young people and we in the Catholic Worker House and community in some sense, you could make the argument every decade is covered. There’s children, there’s teens, twenties, thirties, forties, fifties, sixties, seventies and eighties. In midst of 15 people at a community dinner, we can have that whole age group. So you have an opportunity. And then we have sometimes students like Creighton University comes to visit and we’ll take them around and give them a walk about and they spend a week with us, so they get educated in a certain way about, let’s say, homelessness and city of Cleveland and those kinds of things. I think that covers.

Bali White [01:08:07] Yes, So the Catholic Worker Storefront provides services and amenities to the unhoused individuals in this area. So as we know, in the spring of 2020, we faced a worldwide pandemic. Did this affect any of these services and amenities in any way? And if so, how did you manage to cope and offer these services to unhoused people in the area during that time?

Mike Fiala [01:08:36] Bali, you ask such good questions. I’m feeling the spirit of Socrates. In some sense it didn’t have affect us at all. Like, clearly we did things that address it seriously, but we were committed to hospitality. It’s amazing. I’m not sure I would have foreseeing it, but on the other side it’s only. I don’t know. That’s a good way to put it. I don’t know that my imagination would have been able to grasp it on my own. But a community will like give you some because I tend to not necessarily always have sane approaches to things. So I need my brothers and sisters and non-gendered friends to help illuminate what I might just do is crazy. What we believe we could still provide services and in some sense didn’t stop. We did it in a different way. So we wore masks, we served food, but we brought them out to people. We had showers, but really we tried to limit it to one or two people in, you know, so we can have a shower, use the bathroom, provide food, but no one lingers inside, so we linger outside. Right. And so that felt like we were still doing the same thing. It was very shocking because the day it happened is a striking moment. I remember it vividly and it must be March 13th or 14th or maybe it was. Yeah, March 13, 14th. And we had a Creighton University group with us and they were told they had to come back home to Creighton because of this on the 13th, which was the Thursday, and they negotiated with their group, the head of that, that they’d come back on Friday because they wanted to stay Thursday night and I thought we were all going to die because we were going to have hospitality because we could not. So we’re now supposed to have a complete shutdown. The Catholic Worker is not shutting down. We’re going to have all these people come who are unhoused, who are probably going to spread the epidemic and we’re going to spread it to these students and I’m like crazed. So we had a big meeting with all the people there and the students who had stayed because they’re going to drive all the way back rather than stop in Chicago halfway. So they negotiated, they’ll drive all the way back on that Friday. So we negotiated that we had to have new plans, and that’s what we did and over time, we figured out how to provide all those services. And we did lots of other things, like the Catholic Workers still had worship services at the library park. We would meet outside and round one of these circles and started to appreciate our friends would come up and worship with us. So in many ways, the one thing that hit the Catholic Worker very hard is we actually did not eat together for a long time in our own community, which was our eating together is like a central practice of, like, community building. And in some sense, many of our friends come and visit us. People even from the street will sometimes come up and come and eat with us. During our dinner time at six, we stopped. And that’s the one striking, and in one sense it was very painful. I even wrote a poem about that loss and the sense of it and it was actually healthy. We needed not just the health of, but like sometimes taking a break, you appreciate things more.

Bali White [01:12:16] So I’m going to go into a little bit about some of the marches you were involved in, if that’s all right. So on November 14, 2014, 12-year-old Tamir Rice was shot outside Cudell Recreation Center for brandishing a toy gun. Could you tell us about the activism and rallying for justice you were a part of, especially on January 15, 2015, during the March for Tamir Rice.

Mike Fiala [01:12:50] Give me a break.[shows emotion] [recording paused and resumed]

Bali White [01:12:55] All right, we’re back. Okay, so I had mentioned previously about the unfortunate untimely death of Tamir Rice in 2014 and how you were a part of the March for Tamir Rice on January 15, 2015, otherwise known as MLK Junior Day. Would you be able to share with us a little bit about what you did that day?

Mike Fiala [01:13:28] Well, I think rather than immediately focus on those events is to sort of think about the layers of what was happening, really US wide, right. Ferguson had happened. Michael Brown. I had lived in St. Louis and gone to school there at Washington University in St. Louis. It was a tumult of, like, things were happening and consciousness and awareness of, like, things happening. And over my time in this neighborhood, I had built bonds with people who were African American. This was not my history. I had pretty much spent my. All my life in growing up, I should say, in a White world and I had worked in Cleveland Heights schools for 25 years, and I had been transformed by working with African Americans. And in this neighborhood, I had built powerful bonds with people and organized with them on housing issues and had really found a whole different kind of companionship and relationship and that is, like, one of the more powerful parts of the story, because that transformation led to my engagement on multiple levels of these things. And I had engaged the Commander, the former Commander of the second district, about this issue, and had a long conversation with him, which was a powerful one that I’m not going to detail at this point, but it was in November, probably, or December. I had that conversation of 2014, and I was still working full-time at Cleveland Heights High School, which is probably, you know, it’s essentially a huge 75% African American population, and I had been, over time, embraced at a deep level and been loved by people and families in that school system. And so. And part of it is I hang out with people who are always doing something and so on, you know? And I had engaged people around these conversations, and I had read Michelle Alexander’s book, The New Jim Crow, which really, like, oh, my God. When you read this book, you start to just weep and then start to feel compelled, and I mean compelled to act. And then I’m grateful that I belong to a community that is in that groundswell so that I can be pulled in. I don’t have to figure out entirely what to do. And so friends of mine said, hey, we’re going to go to the Tamir Rice March. I said, okay, I have Martin Luther King day off. Thank goodness. Do I really want to go? Okay, we’re gonna walk to the, you know, the rapid and take the rapid up to Cudell. Okay. And then I find out, you know, like, it’s an hour or two we’re doing this at this, at where he was murdered. And the story is beyond belief, right? The actual details, when you see it or start to learn it, I won’t unpack those, but, like, you can’t fathom that. And there’s other layers to Tamir Rice. And I’m actually in awe of his mother. I’ve heard her speak at the Kent State commemoration May 4. She is such a powerful speaker. She reminds me of my mother, such a grassroots person coming from her very being you, like, she ain’t varnishing, and she’s speaking from her spirit and soul in a way that, like, cuts through everything. So I was there at that event. You know, they had an hour or so, and then they’re going to march down the streets all the way from Cudell to Public Square. And apparently you’re going to think they’re going to meet some other groups, but I’m not sure how well that worked out. So I’m with that group. Okay. I’m not sure, but we own the streets. We actually take the whole streets and we’re all walking down, and thank God I stopped at 45th and Detroit, there’s a restaurant there was open, and I used the restroom there. This is like now having walked two or 3 miles, it seems, and my bladder is full. And so just before we get to the bridge. At the bridge, So at the bridge, the police start funneling us into one lane. And we are going to go over the. Now you have to realize the movie Selma has just come out, right? There’s a big bridge story in the Selma story. Movie, right. Edmund Pettus Bridge, I believe. And let’s say they got beaten, the protesters, and they had to do it a second time. Right? And so you don’t think about the priests, like the police do you actually understand, like, maybe how you deal with a bridge might be. These are the kinds of things that sometimes are lost on some people. So they funnel us into one lane. Initially, we are in all lanes. So it’s a slow process. So some people, people I know because they got arrested and I got arrested with them later on. I was the last person. A couple other people got arrested on the way up, meaning they weren’t funneling. And so we’re in the lane, we’re going over the bridge, and I’m walking down the bridge. And as I hear some words being used by us, the protesters, I’m saying, hey, I finally realized I really have to say something. And I’m leaning over telling the police, you know, that’s not what I think, you know? And I keep saying this, you know, apparently because I don’t think they’re hearing me or I want to make sure. They hear me, and the next thing I know, I’m picked up by the police. The Commander, literally at that time, which was a different Commander than the previous one I had talked to that past fall, and I’m pulled out and put in a paddy wagon. Now, before that happens, the crowd, my people that I’m with, pull me back. So it’s a fascinating sort of, like, tug of war. And me, I’m like, what is going on here? Because I don’t understand. I’ve done anything. Right. Apparently, I was walking too close or over the double yellow line. I mean, a couple feet. I spent 36 hours in jail, aggravated disorderly conduct, resisting arrest. Let me put it this way. I never look, I mean, I love the idea of getting arrested because, like, I’d love to go to jail for the right thing, but I don’t want to make it a performance. Right? A lot of people do this, but this was not expected. And in some sense, all my friends knew it, too, and so they were very worried because I had to go to work the next day. Right. I have, I have a life. This is part of the problem for most people is, like, it’s hard. And so I’m pulled off, you know, and the, you know, the joke is that you, you know, friends of mine called Maryellen at work saying, don’t worry. First words out of their mouth. What did Mike do now? You know? You know, like, I never heard he was even going to this thing, right? I wasn’t, Brian called me, let’s walk and let’s go. So, so there’s so many fascinating details to this story, like being in jail. It’s a revelation experience, right? Let me put it this way, I know lots of people. I’ve visited people in jail, and it was education in a way that we all need to see it. And, and I had a lot of support. I had so much support it blew my gaskets. There were three lawyers who interviewed me within 24 hours who were supporting. I said, how do I get to see three lawyers in 24 hours? Like, who and what’s going on here? There’s a massive support network, right? And these are pretty sharp people. These are the top people in Cleveland as lawyers. Like, so you feel like you’re super advantaged. Like, it’s not fair. And I can detail lots of little nuances of, like, how you’re treated and talked to. I was told by the, the guy who was interviewing me said, we’re gonna throw you in the dungeon trying to scare me. And he told me all sorts of awful things. Like you thought to yourself, like, do police really say these things? You have to believe, do you realize who you’re talking to? Like, he told me so many insidious things that you can’t believe. I’m not- I don’t feel like I want to show that much disrespect for him to repeat them. So that actually pushed me in a deep way. And I, you know, the next day when I got out late in the day, I called all the people I had to call at work and went to work to let everybody know what had happened because I felt like I had to talk all the people I worked for who were like principals, and my supervisor was very grateful that I called them because, you know, the superintendent will get wind of this, and it’s better if I know that. Now, let’s think about this, too. If I was working in North Olmsted, what would be the reception? I worked in Cleveland Heights. People embraced me,[shows emotion] so I’m grateful, and then I started to learn more about Tamir Rice and start to appreciate his life in a much more detail and his mother and families ongoing and his cousin or relative, Denise. I think Goldsby is very involved with many things and went on to be a powerful leader and connect even with the Near West Side InterReligious Task Force on Central America through Chrissy Stonebraker-Martinez. And so that is like, it was like an exclamation point to my life in a way, particularly at work, because I left and retired in June 30th of 2015. So all of this, and it was, you know, like a parting kind of connectedness. And I think that’s plenty to say about it.

Bali White [01:25:11] Thank you. Thank you. Since then, have you been involved in any other marches?

Mike Fiala [01:25:18] You know, it’s interesting. I’m not big on marches, but I clearly do witnesses is what I would call them. Like, you know, the Catholic Worker has a long term witness against the Cleveland National Air Show. So we spend usually three days there now, like, fasting, you know, and witnessing against it, and sometimes have done civil disobedience actions in the community. So it’s more stationary, not marches. You know, I’m part of a community called the Witness Against Torture that does actions in Washington, DC around having the men in Guantanamo Bay released. Essentially all of them, very few of them were ever guilty of anything and they were all kept and tortured in Guantanamo Bay without ever even being charged almost across the board. So I’ve participated in those are kinds of marches. We’ve done witnesses and actions there, significant ones in Cleveland, I’ve always sort of been mostly on the, you know, like working on the structures and putting my body on the line and concrete ways, but not necessarily in the same sense of marches. Right. Doing a lot of the legwork behind and supporting people’s efforts. There’s probably, like, we do a May Day march sometimes over the years. We participate in some things like that because it’s actually International Workers Day, not the Labor Day. In the US, Labor Day is in September. May Day is actually the International Workers Day, but that’s probably not my primary sense of- That’s why it’s sort of like, how did I get arrested on this particular one? It’s not life. Yeah.

Bali White [01:27:02] In retrospect, with your history of activism in regards to a variety of different issues, is there anything you would have done differently or would like to have liked to see done differently now in 2024?

Mike Fiala [01:27:18] Yeah. Good. Again. So, you know, I was a battler. I wanted to win on many issues and win decisions. And when I was working, particularly in housing, you know, at board levels, and winning elections to have people win so they can then vote on the right issues, I was pretty intense about it in a way that at times made me a lightning rod for opposition. And I wasn’t very gracious about it. And so I had an attitude or a lack of warmth towards the opposition that I have a lot of regrets about. So that I try to dwell on my failings, Look at my failings in those ways, baldly, that you can disagree vehemently with people without being disagreeable or in some sense, like, right. Or another way. I would say it is. I had a kind of self righteousness that’s really pretty painful to think about. I believe, and I can argue the rightness of the positions, but I deeply projected myself into those issues in a way that it was me, the person I was, was also in that issue and it led to a kind of self righteousness that I’m really embarrassed by and feel badly about because, like I said, you can actually embrace people at the same time as you disagreed with them. Now, it’s hard to generate a lot of energy if you think, oh, yeah, we’re just disagreeing because the problem is, it wasn’t just a disagreement. They had the power, money, resources, and Saint Ignatius had God on their side. So, like, how am I supposed to be gracious? Like, oh, yeah, that’s maybe the liberal position, but like, hey, you are so oppressing people and so much cutting people off at the knees and cutting us off and leveraging it and undermining us. And I’m supposed to have an equanimity about it. So now I can step back and sort of say, oh, yeah, boy, was I obnoxious. I can’t stand myself thinking about it. But, you know, the image I sometimes think of is I had a sledgehammer I was bringing to issues, and that made it unpleasant sometimes to be around me, or I was forceful in a way that wasn’t allowing all others to sort of share and have their own point of view, because I was trying, under limited circumstances in time, because, like, hey, I have a full-time job, a full time life. I have all these other engagements. I didn’t realize that we have to dwell and slow the process down and trust a lot more. I was trying to control, and that’s what I’m about, power and I’ve learned there’s a different kind of power that’s much more dance without, like, force. That- That kind of force.

Bali White [01:30:37] Awesome. Thank you. And then last but certainly not least, do you have any advice for future generations or anyone else wanting to get involved in the type of activism yourself and the other members of your community provide in the Near West Side?

Mike Fiala [01:30:53] Yeah, I mean, here’s the thing. If you, this is the search for your heart’s desire. I would even suggest that’s your question for yourself, too, Bali. Right? We do believe there’s a place in the world for us where our heart’s desire, not just with people. A person, perhaps. If we want to have a long-term personal relationship with one person, that’s one version of our heart’s desire. I think we have a deep heart’s desire for community, and we have it for justice. It’s there oftentimes under the radar. If we hold on to it, we’ll find it. Whether it’s in our work community, whether it’s in our, our neighborhood, or both, it happens. And if you’re persisting to keep looking for it, you will find it, because there’s lots of people who are doing it oftentimes way under the radar. And you’ll find your niche, whatever niche it is. If it means, like, you help on weekends, that’s a participation. If it means it’s your life, that’s a participation. If it means that you do it in the evening, if it means you just come to a Bible study and let it, you trust that the next step will come to you. Any one of those. It isn’t religious, and it is religious. The Catholic Worker is known for, you know, not being Catholic, but, you know, Atheists feel welcome because they understand the work is so potentially valuable and the community is okay. We don’t have to have this sort of absolutism about it. So even that sense, we have a flexibility. The joke, too, was that we didn’t do any work. Well, it’s amazing how much work a lot of the Catholic Workers do do. So I really do believe if you- And I think we all have this in the core of our being, to find a deep resonance in the world for us, right? That’s there in a very personal way, whether it’s for people who remain celibate or otherwise, like, the spirit of God is like that for you, but it’s also, if it’s a person, but then community, and then in some sense, that that connectedness allows us to be hospitable at our boundaries, right? Because we all have some kind of boundary. The question is, how permeable and welcoming are we? And so that’s the future for the Near West Side, I would believe, welcoming the immigrants, all the people who are going to be migrating here to the fresh water. Are we going to have massive tents and thousands of people at Fairview Park tenting and then all the empty spaces and places that nobody wants, let’s say, where there’s massive empty spaces in Harvard-Lee area, those places are going to be filled with millions of people because we live next to a gold mine. So if you just want to make food, cook food, harvest food, you know, agriculture, channel water, Like, for an example is Food Not Bombs was something that Dan Kerr helped create or reenergize in the nineties in Cleveland, and that created a whole vibe and way. So awesome, awesome.

Bali White [01:34:14] Thank you again, Mike. I’m Bali White. Today is June 10, 2024, at the Carnegie West library. We’re just wrapping up this oral history. Thank you for your time. I really do appreciate it.

Mike Fiala [01:34:28] You got it. Was that okay?

Bali White [01:34:34] Oh, that was perfect.

Mike Fiala [01:34:35] It hit the mark?

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