Abstract
This oral history interview with Edward Mendyka, conducted by Garrick E. Lipscomb on February 22, 2003, offers a comprehensive account of Mendyka’s life growing up in the Tremont neighborhood of Cleveland, Ohio. Mendyka discusses his family's Polish immigrant roots, his father's long career in the steel mills, and his mother’s work to support the family during and after the Great Depression. He shares vivid memories of the ethnic traditions that shaped his childhood, including religious customs, home life, and community interactions. Mendyka also reflects on the social and economic changes in Tremont, particularly the impact of World War II, the post-war suburban migration, and the construction of Interstate 71, which significantly altered the neighborhood.
Interviewee
Mendyka, Edward (interviewee)
Interviewer
Lipscomb, Garrick E. (interviewer)
Project
Tremont History Project
Date
2-22-2003
Document Type
Oral History
Recommended Citation
"Edward Mendyka interview, 22 February 2003" (2003). Cleveland Regional Oral History Collection. Interview 223010.
https://engagedscholarship.csuohio.edu/crohc000/1326
Transcript
Garrick E. Lipscomb: This is the Tremont Oral History Project, and if you could state your name and spell it.
Edward Mendyka: Edward Mendyka. M-E-N-D-Y-K-A. And I live at Spring Hill Villa, on 4330 Jennings Road, Apartment 233, Cleveland, Ohio 44109.
Garrick E. Lipscomb: And we’re speaking on February 22, 2003. Were you born in Tremont?
Edward Mendyka: I was born on Rowley Avenue, 1607 Rowley Avenue. My dad and mom had a piece of property there , two houses on one lot. It was located right next to the old Buhrer School, and I was born in the front house. It was 1607. I was born there July 9th , 1930. What I’m told, I was thirteen pounds at birth, so, after that my mother, I guess, said no more kids. No more children.
Garrick E. Lipscomb: How many brothers and sisters do you have?
Edward Mendyka: I have one brother and two sisters. My brother was the oldest, Walter. He was, he became a doctor. He died in 1985. And I have a sister, Wanda Slusarski. She lives in Lake County. And, she put her name down to be interviewed. And I have another sister in Florida. Eugenia Lipowski. I was not married, I’m a confirmed bachelor. No children, let’s get that marital status stuff out of the way.
Garrick E. Lipscomb: Do you know when your family originally moved to Tremont?
Edward Mendyka: Well, my dad immigrated here in 1910. He located in Tremont. He located on West Sixth Street. The address was 2342 West Sixth Street. And, he lived on the south side his whole entire life since coming to this country. He lived on West Sixth Street, he lived on Jefferson, he lived on Auburn, and then, he lived on Rowley. That’s where I was born. But, all of us children went to Saint John Cantius, and, we spent our whole life in the, eh, Cantius, Tremont area.
Garrick E. Lipscomb: So, at that time Saint John Cantius had a High School, so you went all the way through High School?
Edward Mendyka: No, no, when we were going to school there the High School hadn’t been built yet, we went to Lincoln High School. The three of us, my brother Walter, my sister Wanda and myself, my sister Gen went to Jane Adams. But, at the time the High School wasn’t built. It was built under Father Duda. And I forget what year exactly it came into existence. I graduated from Cantius in the eighth grade in 1944. And that was a few years before the school started, the High School.
Garrick E. Lipscomb: Where did your father immigrated from?
Edward Mendyka: He immigrated from Poland. Well, at the time he immigrated here in 1910, there was no Poland on the map. Poland was partitioned by our neighbors, the last partition being in 1795. So, he at the time, that part of Poland was under the Austro- Hungarian empire, Galicia it was called. He immigrated from there.
Garrick E. Lipscomb: Did your parents speak English well?
Edward Mendyka: No, well– they–my dad learned some English, after he had been here a number of years, and my mom, she learned some English too. They were both naturalized citizens. But, you know, they didn’t major in English. But they, they could get themselves to be understood. And they understood English.
Garrick E. Lipscomb: What language did you learn at home?
Edward Mendyka: Polish. My brother, in fact, when he started kindergarten in an English school, he didn’t know a word of English. He, and our home language was Polish. Everything was in Polish and, as far as that goes, you could spend your whole lifetime in that neighborhood; we had Polish neighbors, and we went to Polish church, Polish school, Polish parish, so you know, you could have spent your whole lifetime in that neighborhood and you didn’t need to know that much English.
Garrick E. Lipscomb: Even as far as shopping goes?
Edward Mendyka: Shopping, at the time there were no supermarkets. There we has a little drugstore, not drugstore, we had a little, you’d call it a convenience store now. There was right up the street, on the other side of Buhrer school on Rowley, and that was run by the Rusynek family. And, My mother we did our shopping there for the most part. And then there were butcher shops where we went for meat. There was an A&P store on Fourteenth Street. We did some shopping there. But for the most part, for daily stuff we had a credit book. And we’d go up to Rusynek and if we needed milk or bread or doughnuts for the morning or something. He’d write it in the book, we had credit with them, and then come payday, we’d pay him what we owed him. That’s the way life went.
Garrick E. Lipscomb: Did you have relatives that lived in other parts of Cleveland? Or were they all in Tremont?
Edward Mendyka: We had relatives. I had an Uncle Tom that lived on College. I had an Uncle Mark that lived on Brayton. And then we had my Aunt Mary. She, lived out here in, well Old Brooklyn I’d guess you’d call it. She lived on Tampa. Yeah, but all of their friends lived over there on the, um. Well my Godmother was Mrs. Bronczyk, she lived on Sixteenth Street. There was Mr. Bronczyk. And then there were the Dominos. I went to school with Eddie. He lived on Sixteenth Street. There were the Lipowskis, lived on Seventeenth Place. There were the Slenczkas, the Pierkowskis, and over on Holmden, my dad’s best buddy, Mr. Obloj. There were a lot of Polish families.
Garrick E. Lipscomb: So was there a lot of interaction with the neighborhood?
Edward Mendyka: Absolutely, yes.
Garrick E. Lipscomb: Where did your father work?
Edward Mendyka: When he first came to this country, he worked at, on the 1910 census he has paper mill written down, written as occupation. He worked for them as a laborer. But I think what, he later worked in what we called a rag shop. It was a shop that he worked in, my Uncle Tom worked in, lot of people worked there and there was, the name was Silverman’s. I don’t know if those Silvermans has any connection to the Silvermans that now have the, but the name of the place was Silverman’s. It was a rag shop. You know, they’d turn these old rags into paper, whatever it was. But a lot of them got their start there. Then after a number of years, my dad went to work for Corrigan-McKinley, the steel mills. Later on it became Republic Steel. He worked there, I’m trying to think, little over thirty years. Long time.
Garrick E. Lipscomb: What did he do in the mills?
Edward Mendyka: He was, his designation was car operator, whatever that was, I don’t know. I know I went down, when he retired. He had a stroke in 1952, and, he retired from work. I went down with him to clean out the locker. And I thought the conditions were terrible. They were really abhorrent. They had these little steel lockers. It was very congested, they were packed in one on another. And the little lamp that hung on a wire, I didn’t see any modern day shower facilities, or anything like that. But he put in a lot of time over there.
Garrick E. Lipscomb: What work did your mother do?
Edward Mendyka: My mother was a homemaker until I was about six or seven years old. And then she felt the need for more income, family income, she went to work for Silverman’s, down off Columbus Avenue there. I think it was off Columbus, on Merwin. I don’t know, somewhere down there. Anyway, she put in a number of years in over there and she left there and after my dad died in 1953, she felt that there still wasn’t enough income coming in so she went to work for the Cleveland Public Schools. No, first she went to work for Hotel Carter downtown, she worked there a number of years, then she went to work for the Cleveland Public Schools, cleaning Buhrer School. In the afternoon after classes were through. So she worked for them for a number of years.
Garrick E. Lipscomb: What are your childhood memories of growing up in Tremont?
Edward Mendyka: I was thinking maybe that I could go through, I’ve got an outline.
Garrick E. Lipscomb: Sure, if you’ve got a format. Thoughts you want to get out.
Edward Mendyka: First, I’d like to, tell you how it was at home. This winter that we’ve been having, 2002–2003 is more like a winter like I remember as a kid. A lot of snow. A lot of cold weather. And, we didn’t have a lot of the things we have today. In that house on Rowley Avenue, there were no storm windows, no double paned windows, so in the winter time, when it got really cold, the windows became totally frosted on the inside. If you had a coin or something, you could actually outline, sketch a winter scene. The house was heated with coal. In the summer time we’d get a coal delivery. Our neighbor, we didn’t have a driveway, so we’d have to get permission from our neighbor and she would grant us permission and in the summer time the coal truck would pull up and he had a chute leading down from his truck, down to the window. In the basement we had a coal bin where we stored the coal. He’d let the coal down the chute, and you had to be careful what kind of coal you were buying. One that gave you enough heat and not a lot of residue, ashes and clinkers. The furnace downstairs was a coal furnace. There was no thermostat, nothing like that. In the evening you’d have to bank your fire so you’d have something to go with the next day. From time to time you’d have to clean the furnace. The ashes would fall down through the grate, but you’d have to clean out the clinkers. So you’d go in, they had a long, prong-type affair, and you’d go in there with your prong and take the clinkers out and the ashes you’d shovel out from the bottom, put them in a bushel and then we’d use the ashes in the winter time for when the sidewalks were icy. When the steps were icy, we’d spread ashes around so people wouldn’t fall. We didn’t have anything. We had a water tank in the basement. On Monday, before my mom would do the laundry, Monday’s were laundry days, so Monday evening I’d have to start the hot water tank about two hours ahead of time. During the week, just for washing up or something, if you wanted some hot water, you had to put it into a little pan and heat it on the stove. There was no hot water coming out of the pipes. Monday was wash day as I mentioned, and my mom had two copper kettles, huge things, and in these kettles she would heat the water, and then what she’d do, she’d boil the clothes in there. She’d put the clothes in the boiling water. I don’t know whether this was for disinfecting the clothes or what not. That’s the way it was done. Well she had, we had an old wringer, washing machine, but later on I remember we had a mechanical machine and we had three tubs downstairs. With the machine, the wringer would go out, from the washing machine into the first tub, that was like the rinse water. It would keep going down. Hanging up the wash, in the summer time was no problem. She would hang it up outside, but in the winter time, she would have to take her clothes, wet clothes, take them upstairs to the attic and hang them in the attic. Sometimes the cold, you know, you’d go up there and the clothes would be stiffer than, just hanging like that. Shoe repair, my dad used to have a couple of, it was like a stand with a stem and you’d have a couple of forms on the top that you could put on. They were for men’s shoes, children’s shoes, women’s shoes. He’d put on the form whichever he was using, and then he’s cut out the leather for the shoe and he’s do his own shoe repair. For the heels again, you’d cut out a piece of leather for the heels, and then he even put on these clips on the side if you wore your shoes down or heels down on one side, he’s put clips on it. But everything, you know, a lot of stuff was done at home. One of the things that, in the winter time, we’d have Christmas Eve, we’d have what they called a Wigilia in Polish. It’s like the Christmas Eve dinner. Christmas Eve is in a lot of ways more important than Christmas. The family gets together, and when the first star comes out a child is supposed to say that the first star is out and it’s time to have our evening meal. The family all gets together. They have these wafers, and every member of the family gets a piece of wafer, they extend it to all the family members, and you take a piece of my wafer and I take a piece of yours. We’d exchange good greetings. The meal for Wigilia is completely meatless, the menu is something like fish and pierogies, barley, buckwheat, butter potatoes, sauerkraut, all kinds of vegetables. At first, before my uncles had their own, well they had their own families, their children, but what they used to do, they would have Wigilia at different homes each year. But that one year I remember, I must have been six or seven, and we went on Brayton for Wigilia. By my Uncle Mark’s and Aunt Mary’s. For some reason, I don’t know, when peas came out, everybody started pulling hair. Now why that should be, I don’t know. It’s some kind of tradition, but I never did find out what the heck it was. But that was the one and only time, after that we had out Wigilia at home. The families were getting bigger, and then each family had it’s own Wigilia.
Garrick E. Lipscomb: That was Christmas Eve. Would you go to mass then that evening?
Edward Mendyka: After that, yes, we’d go to, well they called it Shepherd’s Mass, in Polish it’s Pasterka. Shepherd’s mass was at twelve o’clock. My brother and I would leave about eleven, a quarter after eleven, because at this time we were living on Rowley, it was about a mile for us to go. And you had better be sure that you got there ahead of time, because if you didn’t, at the time – the parishioners paid for what they called pew rent. And they put, they had little fasteners on the pews where your place was. The place that you had rented. And Lord help you if you were in someone else’s place for midnight mass. By that time, the church was packed with people, some one would come in thinking, that’s their spot, they’re paying for that, it’s reserved – somebody else is in their spot and there were times that – Hey get up out of my seat. It was always a beautiful ceremony, as it is to this day at Cantius. They start singing Christmas hymns at eleven- thirty, in Polish, Kolenda they call it. And it is beautiful. As far as the neighborhood, you know, my dad came here in 1910. I’ve got the record of the 1910 census, and he located at 2342 West Sixth Street. At the time the census shows that there were three families living there. Husband (head of household), wife and each had a daughter. So three families and among them, there were eleven boarders. So you can figure out how crowded it was. Then you have to understand that at that time there was no electricity, there was no indoor plumbing, so you can imagine, it had to be some kind of a health problem. When I was a kid I remember that I had chicken pox. We were living on Rowley, and when it was diagnosed that I had chicken pox, someone came over from the health department, Cleveland Health Department, and they put a sign up on the house. My house was quarantined until the chicken pox was over. Not only chicken pox but measles, any communicable disease. Another thing about the neighborhood, when there was a dead person, when there was a showing of the dead person, there was no funeral parlors involved. The dead person was laid out in the home, you know, and the funeral director would bring flowers or whatever, candles, but there was a great big purple wreath that was placed on the outside of the homes. Everybody would know that there was a dead person there and a showing. The summer times in the neighborhood, there were no big screens. If you wanted a little air in the summer time, they had these little screens, you’d open the window up and the screen would spread out and you’d put the window back down. Around the neighborhoods, there were various peddlers that would come around and all kinds of salespeople. For years there was a man, a peddler that came around in a horse drawn cart, and he would be yelling. “Paper, Rags. Paper, Rags.” And it sounded like paper and rex, R-E-X. It wasn’t until I was an adult that I found out that this guy was hollering out paper and rags. Some of the kids pulled all kinds of jokes on this paper rex man. And it was, my mother especially, it was a time for negotiation. We’d save the papers, we’d save rags, and sometimes you’d throw a piece of metal down in the rags and cover it so it would be more weight. But my mother would haggle with the guy, she’d say well, give me a few extra pennies, he needs to get ice cream, and I remember this one time specifically, neither one of them would budge, too stubborn, so the guy just left. We were left there with the papers and the rags.
Garrick E. Lipscomb: Was he from the neighborhood as well?
Edward Mendyka: No, he’d just come through occasionally, paper and rags he’d be picking up. Or metal. But metal not so much. But I was thinking, the paper that he picked up he probably took down to the rags shop, Silverman’s and sold it to him. Maybe they made it, recycled it into paper. Best kind of paper you can have is from rag paper. Anyway, there was ice men that used to come around. In the summer time he’d deliver to your ice box. And what ever you wanted, twenty-five pound piece, fifty pound piece. We had also, there was an ice house on West Seventeenth Street. Whenever we needed ice, I’d go up there with the wagon, you know, and get a piece of ice, bring it home and we’d put it in the ice box. There was also a guy, come around the neighborhood with a small pony, and with a camera. I guess he must have made his living that way. He’d take pictures. He took a picture of my brother, my brother must have been five, six years old. And he was decked out in one of these cowboy trousers, with a cowboy vest, and a cowboy hat and seated on this little pony. And this guy evidently made his living that way. Visiting in the old neighborhood was totally different from what it is today. If I went to see like my Godmother on Sixteenth Street, when you went in the house, you’d praise the Lord. And if she gave you her hand out, you kissed her hand. Upon leaving the house, you’d say, “Stay with God,” and if mother sent me over there for something or other, this was the way, these were the social mores, customs how things were done. I know the big thing in Polish culture, as opposed to our culture, instead of celebrating birthdays, they’re more inclined to celebrate name’s days. So actually when a child is born, he’s named on a certain saint’s day. He usually took that name. So his birth name and his saint’s day would usually coincide. But sometimes, you know, that actually wasn’t the case. But anyway, my dad had a good friend that lived on Holmden, and they used to celebrate name’s day. He would come, by us for my dad’s name’s day, and my dad would go to his place. So this one year I know we were to go over there and my mother says well, ask the nice nuns over at Cantius to write you out a poem and you can say it for his name’s day. Which I did. And of course, I was happy, because I forgot what he gave me, half of a dollar or something. But it was out of sight. My Cantius days were great. I lived right next to Buhrer School on Rowley Avenue. A couple of blocks up, there was Saint Michael’s on Scranton Road. Cantius for me was about a mile away. But just to show you the importance of ethnicity, I had to go to, it was determined that I had to go to a Catholic school, of course. I went to Buhrer for the first three years. Then I had to go to Polish Catholic school. It didn’t matter that Saint Michael’s Catholic school was on Scranton Road, that had a German heritage. I had to go to a Catholic school, Polish Catholic, Saint John Cantius. When I went there it was in 1939, in the third grade, and I became an altar boy. There were some little perks with being an altar boy. You had to learn your prayers in Latin, you didn’t know what you were mumbling, but you know, you had to memorize these responses, which I did. And the nice thing, I was an altar boy for all the years that I was there, from the third grade to the eighth. Five years. There were nice perks with being an altar boy because you were able to go on what they called Kolenda. Now Kolenda, literally in Polish means “Christmas Carol.” Kolenda in this respect was a little bit more. It was, it was like a visitation. The priest would take two altar boys, and he would visit each, well there were four assistants at Saint John Cantius, and each one got a certain area, a certain number of streets that they covered. They went to the parishioners house, they had a little five by seven card. It was a good time to keep up what was happening with the family. They would sit down, and they’d ask who turned eighteen, he should have his own envelopes. You know, who got married, any children, any additional children, stuff like that. It also meant, the priest would go there and he would bless the house. This was a yearly thing, this was after Three Kings, after the Christmas holidays, New Years, after Three Kings, he would bless the house. He had a piece of chalk and some holy water, bless the house with the holy water, which the altar boy would carry as they went from house to house. Then he’d take a piece of chalk and mark above the main entrance door frame. He’d mark the three kings, K-M-B, and then he’s mark the year. So if it was this year, it’d be K-M-B2003. People never took that writing off the door frame. Not until the following year when it was time for Kolenda. In the meantime, he’d come in and say a prayer and it was a short prayer. The altar boys would be singing a Polish Christmas carol. A short one. Then after the blessing, the singing, and the writing, then he’d sit down at the table and he’d ask, you know, get all the information. It was like a census of the parish. For your trouble, for your singing, usually the parishioner would give you maybe ten cents – if it was more affluent neighborhood, you’d get fifty cents. I came home, that one time, from Kolenda, I had a pocket full of change. It must have been close to ten dollars. So that was great. [Laughter]
Edward Mendyka: The nuns up at Cantius I thought were fantastic. They, you know we had forty to forty-five kids to a class. They had, hygiene wasn’t the best, sometimes somebody would come in with lice. My heart goes out to them. I think they were great. Sometimes you hear some of these old timers say well, they were pretty rough and they hit me, blah, blah, blah. But, you know – they – for the most part they grew up to be good, useful citizens. That little love tap or whatever, should be held against them. Of course today, it would be child abuse. But the nuns, I think, the way I knew I really got an education, when I went to Lincoln in ninth grade, I took Algebra, I seemed to be so much ahead of the other kids that came from like Thomas Jefferson or some of the other junior highs. So I really give a lot of credit to the nuns over at Cantius. At Lincoln, I think the teachers were fabulous, as far as I was concerned. I had a home room teacher, an English teacher, Ms. Bertha Palmer, and she was a tiny little thing, maybe about five two or five three. She was dressed always very conservatively. Her dresses high up on the neck. She had a little, one of these glasses on the chain. But she was a fantastic teacher. To this day, I remember when we were just beginning to study Shakespeare and in our English book, we had the play Macbeth. The first, we were going to study Shakespeare in our English class and I remember to this day. We came in and we sat down, and she starts out in a really screechy voice, ”when shall we three meet again?” And that’s the first scene. You know, scene one, act one in Macbeth. The three witches on the heath around the cauldron. That’s just to show you what kind of a teacher she was, she was fantastic. And there were other teachers there that were great. She was also my homeroom teacher, Bertha Palmer. There was G.D. Nelson, he was the math teacher, he tried to treat us like adults. When we came in there, at the beginning of the semester, we were taking geometry, maybe plain geometry, he says well, I’ll make a deal with you. If I call on you in class, and you guys are prepared, whoever I call on if you’re prepared, you don’t have to do homework. If you don’t, if you’re not prepared, you have to do homework. So needless to say, after about the first month, everybody was doing homework. They thought they could get away with something, but it wasn’t the case. I had a teacher there, Dorthea Taylor. She taught Algebra, another math teacher. But I really, it had to have been in forty-four of forty-five, we came in one morning and she was, she seemed to be very depressed. She was – so it came out during the course of the class that she read that a previous student of hers, one who just graduated the previous summer, Joe Misouri, that he’d been killed. He’d volunteered for the Rangers, and he’d been killed in action during the war. She was great. These people, you think sometimes they are there only to teach you, like they don’t have any feelings of their own. But this Dorthea Taylor, something showed that these people are human, they’re teachers, and they did the best they could. That was not, did not have one of the better reputations in the city for high schools, because it was in the Tremont area. And there was Mr. Cochran there, and he was great. Mr. Rowland, Miss Marchand, Ms. Dorsey, Mr. VanHorne. They were all great teachers. The last day of school at Lincoln before the Christmas vacation, what they did, this was like traditional over at Lincoln, Lincoln was a three story affair. Three or four. And anyway, they had around the – there was a well where you could look down to the main floor, from each floor. The day before Christmas vacation, they’d start caroling about seven-thirty in the morning down on the main floor. The music teacher, Mr. Rambo, and his chorus group, would be singing Christmas carols. And it was absolutely beautiful. You’d get there early in the morning, just for that thing, just to watch and witness the caroling. Oh, man, you got time for all this?
Garrick E. Lipscomb: Absolutely. I’m curious, when you were in high school, World War Two was ending…
Edward Mendyka: I graduated Cantius in 1944 and I graduated Lincoln in 1948. The war ended in 1945, but, you know, when I was graduating in 1944, I was hoping that they wouldn’t end it until I got to be in the service, become a hero. That was a crazy, crazy notion. Anyway, but I went in in 1948, when I graduated and I volunteered and I went to Korea. But during that period of time, 1944, during the war my sister got married. And she married, my sister Wanda, she married Gene Slusarski and he was in the Navy. It was like a service, you know, he was going to come home on furlough, in 1944 and they were going to get married. And luckily, he must have proposed earlier in the year or something, and parents on both sides had a, they wanted to give them a reception. A small reception. And they had a chance to prepare it. Certainly, you had to give them some lead way because everything at that time during the war was rationed. You know if you’re going to give them a little reception, you had; meat was rationed, canned goods was rationed, whisky was rationed, sugar was rationed. On both sides, my mom and my dad I know from our side, they were begging and pleading from all their friends and family for ration coupons. Meat coupons, you know. Coupons for canned goods. Coupons for whisky, coupons for sugar. Anyway, they did throw a nice reception for them August 26, 1944. It was at Vega Hall. And it was great. Of course at the time, I didn’t even see my sister’s wedding. My mom and I, we were living on Rowley. We had some stuff we had to take to the hall early in the morning and I had to stay there in order to let the cook in, see that somebody wouldn’t run off with what we brought and all this other stuff. I think I’m pretty much talked out. I know after the war, we had a, we threw a twenty-fifth anniversary party for my mom and dad. This was at Our Lady of Good Counsel home over there. It was a complete and total surprise. My dad went to work that day and we went to pick him up in an old thirty-two Chevy I had. We went to pick him up at work. We had to get him home – we told him a lie – we said my brother was coming home from the University of Cincinnati and bringing a girlfriend and he wanted to introduce her to my father. My dad was upset, he says, what, I can’t meet them another time? Anyway, we got him home, and he started to get dressed and it was a custom in the old country I believe, and even here for a party like that, to be a complete surprise. The good friends of the bride and groom twenty-five years later, they’d come with music to the door. This is what happened on Rowley. Some good friends of theirs came with musicians, they came in the house, and my mom nearly had a heart attack. She balled us kids out, “Why didn’t you tell me?” My dad finally realized what was going down. When we got to the hall, there was a silver top hat, silver flower and silver cane for my father and my mother had a little silver tiara, silver flower again. They had a Grand March around, show everybody the happy couple. It was great. It was fantastic. All of the kids, after the supper, we each got up and we had to extend our congratulations and best wishes. It was very touching, very nice. And I think with that, that was post-war. I don’t want to go into that business.
Garrick E. Lipscomb: We’ll pause it here. [Pause Tape]
Edward Mendyka: Okay. There was a time after the war, post-war, when there was no liquor to be sold on Sunday. Other than the facts that there were private clubs, that they could sell liquor. Sundays, sometimes, people just waited for Sundays because they could, all these clubs were private clubs and you had to be a member. It was like going into a speak-easy, you know. You had to rap on the door and then someone would come to the door and identify you as a member – then they’d let you in. And, you know, there were a number of these clubs around and you could really tie-one-on. There was a Polish Singers Club that was at Scranton and Mentor, and I was a member of that. There was a bartender there, Alex. I spent many a good times in there. There was the Cantius Club in old Polonia Hall. That was on the corner of College and Thurmon. There too, that was a private club. There was the Polish Library House. I remember the bartender’s name was Curly. Over there you had to go around to the side of the building, again you’d have to rap on the door or push a buzzer, and they’d come out and identify you and then you could get in. At the PLAV post, post thirty, that too, that was a private club. At the Ukrainian Labor Temple on Auburn there was, that too was a private club. You could get in there on Sundays and you’d drink. There was – Little Helen was the bartender over there. She was quite a character. But Sundays, there was no problem getting around this, this liquor prohibition on Sundays if you lived on the South Side. You could get, you could get pretty well stewed.
Garrick E. Lipscomb: As a club, you knew everyone inside?
Edward Mendyka: Well, yes. It was a social club, so you knew everyone there. And, you know, it was, it was a nice sociable, there were, as long as I was going there to any of these clubs, well this is all ancient history, but there was never a fight. They had card games, like at the Polish Singers. They played poker in the back there on Sundays. Poker games and people just, having a good time. Singing and dancing.
Garrick E. Lipscomb: Food as well?
Edward Mendyka: Yes, at the singers club they had somebody from the South Side. There were fish fries on Friday. It was a family type affair. There was a husband and a wife and her sister. Delicious fish fries. So, you know, everything was a neighborhood type of thing. It was very nice, very sociable and very safe. That article, “Between Spires and Steeples,” it paints the South Side in a very negative picture. It was like, you know, you can’t go in that area, because you’re liable to get mugged or hurt or whatever. If you were born and raised there you never had any problems, you know. You were part of the crowd. And there were all kinds of nationalities. Polish, Ukrainian, Greek, Slovak and Russian and somehow or another, you know, everybody was concerned about making a living and raising their family. That’s what they did. They earned a living, raised their families and tried to make their way in the world. Tried to make it better for the next generation, which they did. I think I already used up about most of your tape over there.
Garrick E. Lipscomb: We’re getting toward the end. Do you mind if I ask you a couple more questions?
Edward Mendyka: Sure. Anything you like.
Garrick E. Lipscomb: Did you go to Lincoln Park?
Edward Mendyka: Yes, I was, we used to go there, well we had, I lived next to Buhrer School so we did most of our playing there. They has a team on the South Side used to play around Lincoln Park. That’s when they had that old bandstand there. And I know the pitcher, Ray Oblock, he was in my class. His real name is Obloczinski but he changed his name to Oblock and he pitched for the softball, there was twelve inch, and he was a hell of a pitcher. Even when he went into the service, he pitched special services, then later his brother owned Pyramid Café. They just died not too long ago, him and his wife. They sponsored a team, a softball team, known as Pyramid Café. For years and years, they used to go to tournaments. They had a hell of a team.
Garrick E. Lipscomb: Did you go downtown often? Did you feel the need?
Edward Mendyka: It must have been on my tenth or eleventh birthday, my dad got me up in the morning, and he says Well, for you birthday present I’m going to take you downtown, we’re going to get you a bike. A two-wheeled bike. And so, my dad, me and my brother Walter, we went downtown. We went to Bailey’s, that was our department store, the one that we liked most. They had a big clock out in front that used to be, sometimes if you asked somebody, meet me under the clock, you’d know what they were talking about. Down below the clock at Bailey’s. We went to Bailey’s and we found and I picked out a beautiful marine and cream twenty-eight inch Roadmaster bike. Beautiful. So we decided to take it and my dad decided to buy it for me for a birthday present. My brother, he rode it home, across from Bailey’s, across the Lorain-Carnegie Bridge, back home. My dad and I, we rode the bus. When we were on the bus, we saw him going for home, and I waved to him through the window. Yeah, we’d go downtown, but it was, you know, unless we had to go down for shopping or something like that, we’d go to Bailey’s – we didn’t – there was no big pull to go downtown for anything.
Garrick E. Lipscomb: Do you remember anyone losing their homes? Apparently there were fires quite often in the neighborhood.
Edward Mendyka: Oh that was later, later on. Yes, during the depression. [End of Side A]
Edward Mendyka: My mom, she was happy if she could pay the interest. She went to see a Mr. Bizga, at the time it was Lincoln Heights, where Third Federal is now. Mr. Bizga was the teller and she discussed it with him and whoever owned the bank, that it was difficult for her to make payments. They told her just pay something on it, just pay the interest. We’ll carry on the books and somehow we’ll get through this, which is exactly what happened. They bought two houses on one lot on Rowley Avenue during the depression. I was born there and so it had to be prior to 1930, but anyway, it took them until after the war to pay those two houses off. Those two houses at the time, I think cost over $7000, maybe $7300. But it took them a lot of time to pay off those two mortgages on those houses. A lot of people, my Uncle Tom was one of them, they foreclosed on them because they couldn’t pay the mortgage. It was difficult for a lot of people.
Garrick E. Lipscomb: After World War Two, did the neighborhood change?
Edward Mendyka: Well, yes, even during World War Two there was, my dad used to work, you know, because of the war effort, he worked overtime, bringing more money home. When the boys got home, after the war, the veterans, already the people in Detroit were working, Ford had come out with a brand new designed car. They were bringing out new cars. The people then found out that they didn’t have to live close to where they worked, like if they worked down in the steel mills, they could commute back and forth to work so, there was somewhat of an exodus out of the area. The veterans didn’t want to live in this closed environment, they wanted a little air to breathe, so they’d move out to the suburbs. They would commute to work. Most of them still worked down in the steel mills or at Standard Oil, or one of those places. More and more they would, they spread out. They lived further out from the Tremont area. They moved to the suburbs, a lot of them moved into Parma, you know, and whatever. Then the neighborhood really took a beating when they brought in Interstate Seventy-One. When Interstate Seventy-One came through, they tore apart that whole neighborhood. They took a lot of houses, in fact ours, we went from 1607 Rowley Avenue, after the war we bought another house, my mom and dad, on Clark Avenue, 1515 Clark. Ours was the last house on Clark that they took for the throughway. Right there, through the neighborhood there were a lot of parishioners used to live there that went to Cantius, you know. They took their house and consequently they moved out of the neighborhood. There was a big change in the neighborhood after – well you know, the neighborhood was constantly changing. It was, that’s just the way it is. In the early part of the last century, mostly Germans in that area, but then when, during the immigration, the different ethnic groups were coming in from Central Europe or Eastern Europe, you know, South-Central Europe, all the Slavic nationalities were immigrating here. Then there was enormous crowding down in that area and then as time went on, you know, my dad moved from, well he started at West Sixth, Jefferson and Brayton, he moved to Auburn, then he moved to Rowley. And he more or less was just trying to get a little elbow room, a little more property so he could breathe.
Garrick E. Lipscomb: Was he (father) involved in the unions?
Edward Mendyka: I don’t know how involved he was. I know that during the thirties, this had to be thirty-seven of thirty-eight, they had at the steel mills, I think at the time, they were still Corrigan-McKinley] and they had a terrible strike down there. There were guys who were walking around with guns. Scabs were being beaten, you know, on their way home. My dad, he stuck with the union. He didn’t cross the picket line. I don’t think he was really – he supported the union – but he was not really active in it.
Garrick E. Lipscomb: Any radicals in the neighborhood?
Edward Mendyka: Not where we lived. No, not where we lived. But there were some radicals that lived on the South Side. [Interruption]
Edward Mendyka: At a certain point in Cleveland history, there was a lot of agitation. Labor agitation.
Garrick E. Lipscomb: A couple more questions?
Edward Mendyka: Shoot! Hey, I’m fine.
Garrick E. Lipscomb: Do you remember when the Valley View homes opened?
Edward Mendyka: No, I know where they’re at. But I don’t remember much about that. All I remember, one time we had a party there. I was in high school already. They have a social area or something there. It was from high school, the girls had a dance party or something. The only time I was in that place.
Garrick E. Lipscomb: We touched on crime earlier, did you notice an increase in crime as the years passed?
Edward Mendyka: Now here again if, in that history of Tremont, either of the two books, there’s a story about Filkowski. And he was notorious on the South Side. He was supposedly, he was, he shot somebody, he was a robber and the police were chasing him. On the South Side it was like an ethnic enclave. If you were from the neighborhood, people would trust you but they wouldn’t squeal, they wouldn’t tell an outsider. The police weren’t welcome there on the South Side. There was a good deal of crime on the South Side. In fact, some of the comments that are made are so – really you wonder. [Reference to 1936 book Between Spires and Stacks, commissioned by the Welfare Federation of Cleveland]
Edward Mendyka: This one is asked “How do you tell a juvenile delinquent on the South Side?” The police office, I think, he says, there, if there’s an adolescent on the South Side, they’re all delinquents. And that one guy advocating sterilization for everybody. Crime, it was prevalent on the South Side. It was because people didn’t have jobs, they didn’t have work, they didn’t have any money, they had too much time on their hands, and, you know, there were other parts of the city that had their fair share of crime too, so it wasn’t like it was just Tremont. But the thing was, this was written in the thirties, it was just before the Second World War. The war started in 1941, so all of the sudden after the war started and the draft kicked in, then they weren’t talking about sterilizing people on the South Side. All of the sudden, the delinquents became heroes. They were all drafted in the service and they were happy to, happy to get them in service. There was no more talk about sterilization, they came home and they were all heroes. That was another thing during the war, if you’d gone down any of the streets on the South Side, you’d find these little flags hanging in the window. You know, you’d have a little flag with a border of gold fringe, with a blue star or maybe two blue stars, and each star signified how many children or how many people from that household were in the service. And then if there was a gold star, you know that there was somebody from that family that had been killed. They’d have died in the service. But practically every house on the South Side had one of those flags hanging up. So I think the South Siders did their duty in World War Two and the Korean War and the Vietnam War and all the other wars.
Garrick E. Lipscomb: Do you go over to the old neighborhood still?
Edward Mendyka: I still belong to Saint John Cantius, I still go there for Mass. Well, we started a genealogy society over there, Polish Genealogical Society of Greater Cleveland. I’m one of the founders and I rub elbows with a lot of the South Siders, on Sunday after mass. And now with this history project I’m spreading the word, because I think, I’m gung-ho for this thing. I think it’s great. So I’m spreading the word, copying these forms that I’ve got, I’m sending them out to Josephine that lives on Eleventh Street. She’s going to tell her neighbor. I’m surprised that everyone isn’t getting behind this kind of thing because I think it’s something that’s your own history, you know, you’re going to document it. Save it for your kid’s kids. That’s why I wanted to go into detail about what it was like at home. Today, you know, you have thermostats, devices that control your temperature of you rooms, you have air conditioning. There was none of that stuff when I was growing up. You didn’t have a telephone, you had no computer, no telephone, no TV. We had an old floor model Arvin, but that would only turn on Sunday mornings. Polish program, John Lewandowski. He was on there like forever. It was on one of the radio stations here in town. But now this Eugenia Stolarczyk is keeping up the tradition. She claims that she is the, with the one continuous program from 1927, when Lewandowski had it. God Bless, she’s trying to keep up the tradition and the heritage, so it’s nice.
[End of Tape]
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