Abstract
John Palivoda recounts his life experiences in the Tremont neighborhood. Born in 1933 to Slovak immigrant parents, Palivoda discusses his family's background and the cultural traditions that shaped his upbringing. He reflects on the close-knit community of Tremont, highlighting the importance of local churches, social gatherings, and the influence of ethnic heritage on daily life. The interview also addresses the challenges faced by residents during economic changes and the impact of urban development on the neighborhood. Palivoda's narrative offers valuable insights into the historical context and community dynamics of Tremont throughout the mid-20th century.
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Interviewee
Palivoda, John (interviewee); Palivoda, Dianne (participant)
Project
Tremont History Project
Date
2003
Document Type
Oral History
Duration
61 minutes
Recommended Citation
"John Palivoda interview, 2003" (2003). Cleveland Regional Oral History Collection. Interview 223064.
https://engagedscholarship.csuohio.edu/crohc000/1381
Transcript
Interviewer [00:00:01] With me, Mr. John Palivoda. And he’s going to tell us a little bit of what it was like growing up in Tremont. John, could you do me a favor and could you spell your last name for me?
John Palivoda [00:00:13] P, A, L, I, V as in Victor, O, D, A.
Interviewer [00:00:16] I was wondering, John, if you could tell me some of your earliest childhood moments growing up in Tremont.
John Palivoda [00:00:25] Well, everything was basically was family and people that lived there for a whole long time. Neighborhood stores, neighborhood bars, neighborhood churches. Church on one corner and bar on the other corner all year round. A lot of people didn’t have cars.
Dianne Palivoda [00:00:49] Merrick House.
John Palivoda [00:00:50] Yeah, Merrick- Well, these are the older. Well, not really. Went to Pilgrim Church, which had a daycare center. Probably one of the first daycare centers around. And Merrick House was all-around recreation place or formal, I guess leaders there, social workers spent a lot of time. And the bathhouse which was across from Lincoln Park, which was- Well, it was no longer a bathhouse when I was there, but it was a recreation center. But they still had the showers and that in the basement, I guess the buildings. The building’s still there, but it’s converted to condos now.
Interviewer [00:01:38] Did you guys hang out there a lot?
John Palivoda [00:01:41] All the time. Every day. Every day from school till 9 o’clock when the place is closed.
Interviewer [00:01:50] Like younger guys, like you know, 14 or 15 or like-
John Palivoda [00:01:54] Oh yeah, it was pretty, right.
Interviewer [00:01:55] From a wide range.
John Palivoda [00:01:57] Wide range, yeah, I’d say most of it was high school and below. America first started out just was a couple of storefronts. Actually one storefront, one building there on the West 10th and Starkweather was kind of the rec hall where they had dances and sock hops there and showed movies. And upstairs they taught what we call DPs now English and citizen classes. Good people, still remember their name. Mr. Schnur was the director of the boys activities. Ms. Abraham Abrams was the director of the America House. Ms. Maloney, she taught all the citizenship classes and the English classes. Then you had a lot of volunteers come in different clubs and groups. But then as part of Catholic Charities, supported it. Didn’t know that.
Interviewer [00:03:06] What church did you go to?
John Palivoda [00:03:08] St. Peter and Paul, which was on College and West 7th, which is a typical old ethnic church where- That’s why I’m not Catholic anymore because everything was in Ukrainian or in Rome, Latin. So I went to church.
Interviewer [00:03:27] Mass was set in Ukrainian and Latin.
John Palivoda [00:03:29] Yeah. And of course I didn’t understand any of it. [laughs] So I was just there. The only thing I understood was money.
Interviewer [00:03:37] They passed the plate around.
John Palivoda [00:03::40] My grandmother and grandfather went there in the old style.
Interviewer [00:03:48] How many generations does your family go back there? Just your grandparents?
John Palivoda [00:03:52] My grandparents came over from Europe.
Interviewer [00:03:55] Do you mind me asking what your ethnicity is?
John Palivoda [00:03:57] Ukrainian. Yeah, that’s what they call themselves. My father, he was actually born in the old country. He came over and he was about three years old or something like that, but-
Interviewer [00:04:09] Pardon the interruption. Do you know why he came over?
John Palivoda [00:04:13] His mother came over. [laughs] I guess my grandfather came over first. And I actually got kind of lost over here, you know, like many of the- So my grandmother came over with a. My father and another brother looking for him. And they landed in New York. Imagine not speaking a word of English, not knowing where they’re going. And they ran into some people that knew him and they said, oh, yeah, he’s in Pennsylvania working in the coal mines. So she took off for Pennsylvania, lived [recording stops and resumes] and one day he came from work and there she was. But my grandmother, she came over when she was like 14 years old by herself, brought her brother and her sister over and, you know, they left Europe because there was just no food. He had to go, you know, they sold a cow or something like that and scraped up the money and off she went to the United States by herself and brought her sister and her brother over. And they lived well into their 80s, middle or late 80s, and grandfather worked on the railroad underneath the Clark Avenue Bridge on the roundhouse there. He was a boilermaker. Grandmother was a charwoman of the buildings downtown. No education, no nothing. Just worked hard and owned their own houses. And my grandmother had two houses. In fact, she had her house on West 12th, a big old house. Then she owned a big apartment building we lived in down on West 5th Street. There was a four-apartment house. I lived there till I got out of high school or about graduated from high school. Now the house isn’t there, nothing’s there. [laughs]
Interviewer [00:06:17] Have you been back to the neighborhood recently?
John Palivoda [00:06:20] In the daytime. I don’t go back at night. West 5th is- Well, now they’re building new houses there, but I still wouldn’t walk the streets there at night.
Interviewer [00:06:29] What do you think, in your opinions caused the decline of Tremont? I mean, it used to be, according to by all accounts, a great neighborhood.
John Palivoda [00:06:36] It was. We never had any trouble. My wife walked back from the show at night. When you’re-
Dianne Palivoda [00:06:43] Never worried.
John Palivoda [00:06:44] Never worried, by herself. The projects had a lot to do with the decline.
Dianne Palivoda [00:06:51] At the beginning they were nice.
John Palivoda [00:06:52] Yeah, that’s where the rich people lived.
Dianne Palivoda [00:06:55] Yeah, they were very nice projects.
John Palivoda [00:06:58] They had grass, they had playgrounds, did a auditorium there in the Projects. It’s a very nice, well-kept neighborhood. A lot of my friends lived there and we used to play up there at the playgrounds a lot. West 5th was just- Do you know, are you familiar with West 5th? It’s right at the top of the projects building. And they had, you know, the ball fields on there. That’s the only basically ball field there was in the neighborhood was on the Projects where we played our class F and early baseball down there.
Interviewer [00:07:34] What year did you graduate?
John Palivoda [00:07:35] 1952.
Interviewer [00:07:36] 52, yeah.
Dianne Palivoda [00:07:38] But you went to Tremont.
John Palivoda [00:07:39] Yeah, I went to Tremont the whole time. [crosstalk] Lincoln High. Tremont was the elementary school. And actually at that time they had a junior high at Tremont too. And when I was there they were phasing out the junior high. So I went to seventh grade at Tremont and eighth grade our class went to Lincoln and the junior high moved there.
Interviewer [00:08:02] Do you have any memories of life in Tremont during the war?
John Palivoda [00:08:05] Oh, yeah, I remember the bomb drills. That was regular, I think once a week or once every other week. What they’d have is a tornado drill. Now going into the hallways and sitting down and covering your head. Paper drives and tin drives. Tremont always had those. All the people in the neighborhood would stack up all their papers and bring it up to the school.
Interviewer [00:08:32] I noticed there’s a lot of Ukrainians, of course, and Slovaks in the neighborhood. Any group of people that you felt like had a harder time over there?
John Palivoda [00:08:44] No, everybody had a hard time. [laughs] There were a lot of Greeks, Russians, a lot of Syrians, Lebanese. Very few Germans. There were very few of ’em. And I remember staying on a corner with somebody be speaking Polish and somebody else was just speaking Ukrainian. They’d both be speaking their own language and they’d be carrying on a conversation. The Greeks were up most of around 14th Street and Fairfield. A lot of Russians, of course, St. Theodosius there, and even the Ukrainians. There was the Ukrainian Greek Catholic, which was St. Peter and Paul. And there was the Ukrainian Orthodox up on West 11th Street. I don’t remember the name of that church. They wouldn’t talk to each other. They were kind of- It was, yeah, you know, they’re both Ukrainian and both- Everything in the world the same. [crosstalk] They could- Well, just different, I guess religion, because they could. Their priests could marry and that kind of stuff. It was the old school and this was more of going into the Catholic. But even being Greek Catholic at the time, which were like a little school they call St. Peter and Paul, you can Go to a Roman Catholic like the Polish, this Polish Saint John Cantius, just to lock up. It was a sin to go to, you know, Roman Catholics.
Interviewer [00:10:23] So it was more along the ethnic-
John Palivoda [00:10:26] Religious. More religious and ethnic with the problems. I know my grandmother hated the Polish. Damn Polacks, yeah. Well. And then I found out why later when she was a little girl in the Ukraine. Polish occupied. They were occupied by the Polish. And of course, the holidays were different then. You know, the Easter was one date and the Ukrainian Easter was a different date because they went by different calendars. And my grandmother was quite happy if it rained on the Polish Easter. [laughs] But the old traditional meals, you know, the Christmas Eve, Christmas and Easter and Good Friday, they were all traditional meals. So always went to my grandmother’s for that until after we were married. We still went there.
Interviewer [00:11:17] When were you married?
John Palivoda [00:11:18] 1956.
Interviewer [00:11:20] So that’s four years after graduation.
John Palivoda [00:11:23] Yeah.
Dianne Palivoda [00:11:23] You went into the service.
John Palivoda [00:11:24] Well, those days, you know, you graduated from high school, that was Korea, you got drafted and then you got out, and you got married, you know, basically-
Dianne Palivoda [00:11:34] Yeah. Simpler than it is now. But we went on his 50th class reunion and we did the tour of the Tremont area. And the principal took us through Tremont. It’s very pretty inside. I didn’t go to Tremont. He did. But it’s amazing how, I don’t know, clean and neat that school was after all those years. I mean, they have tile up the walls and all their floors and everything was very neat.
John Palivoda [00:12:00] It was built to last.
Dianne Palivoda [00:12:02] Yeah. [recording stops and resumes] Principal there was very nice to her. She was so happy to see people that had gone there 50 years earlier. You know, then we took a tour of the neighborhood and ate at Dempsey’s and had lunch at Dempsey’s. And then we even toured Pilgrim. We got married at Pilgrim Church and we toured Pilgrim. And I mean, the areas that they’re taking over, I mean, are doing really nice. If they could clean, I think, the projects up. I think that is the hardest part because that’s where the people have a problem moving closer to the projects. But I think the, what do you call it, the restaurants and that down there are unbelievable. They just had a restaurant ad in the paper the last couple of days for Theories, I think is the name of it. Yeah. And it was going on to say how what they were doing to get ready for the neighborhood and everything. But there were a lot of people talk about the Tremont area.
John Palivoda [00:12:54] You know, we lived there. The only restaurants, basically, were the bars. [crosstalk] But the bars were, you know, this place where you had a fish fry On Friday nights. Of course, there was always the, like, Ukrainian Home.
Interviewer [00:13:07] Are you, like, an active member over there at the Ukrainian Home?
John Palivoda [00:13:11] No.
Dianne Palivoda [00:13:11] Your dad was.
John Palivoda [00:13:12] My parents were.
Dianne Palivoda [00:13:13] Yeah. Yeah. We got married there.
John Palivoda [00:13:15] I took Ukrainian dancing there. Ethics was a big thing. But it was always- And that was probably at the end of World War II, really, you know, probably. And everybody made sure we were Ukrainian dancers, not Russians, because there were Ukrainians and the Russians. [laughs] Look here again. Because the Russians occupied Ukraine. Ukraine. That was always the homes, too. There’s a Polish National Home and Ukrainian National Home. Then there was the Labor Temple, which was on Auburn. That was communist, you know, Bolshevik kind of thing, as they call it. Bolsheviks, I think. I don’t know if it’s communist or whatever. I never knew what Bolsheviks were, really. [laughs]
Interviewer [00:13:59] Was there a lot of backlash regarding Communists, like the- With that?
John Palivoda [00:14:04] No, I was really never aware of any because people were arguing, like, you know, at the bar at the National. They’d always be arguing in Ukrainian and that. [laughs] So I didn’t know what the heck they were saying.
Interviewer [00:14:18] I don’t mean to get you in trouble with this question right in front of your wife, but how was dating?
John Palivoda [00:14:24] I mean [crosstalk] we dated through high school, too.
Dianne Palivoda [00:14:27] Sixteen.
Interviewer [00:14:28] Wow.
Dianne Palivoda [00:14:28] We both went to Lincoln.
John Palivoda [00:14:29] A lot of our friends did, too.
Dianne Palivoda [00:14:30] Yeah. In fact, we’re still friends with quite a few that were in the very immediate neighbor of Tremont.
Interviewer [00:14:35] Very good.
John Palivoda [00:14:36] I still see a kid that I went to nursery school with at Pilgrim Church. [Wow.] Don’t see him too much because he lives in Florida, on the beach in Sarasota. He sold his 17 McDonald’s restaurants and moved there.
Dianne Palivoda [00:14:50] Yeah. Without a college education.
Interviewer [00:14:53] Wow. Did you guys get a chance to go to college later on in life or did you just-
John Palivoda [00:14:57] [crosstalk] I have a couple years in engineering and- But then you have kids and, in fact, I went to Fenn College.
Dianne Palivoda [00:15:06] Fenn College.
John Palivoda [00:15:08] My brother graduated from Fenn as a metallurgical engineer, but not too many. A lot of my friends who went to Tremont are very successful. I mean, chief financial officer of Butler Wick’s stockbroking company.
Dianne Palivoda [00:15:26] Howie.
John Palivoda [00:15:27] Howie owns his own engineering company. He flunked out at Case.
Dianne Palivoda [00:15:31] Yeah. Survey the company. Very, very-
John Palivoda [00:15:34] Our class president is a nuclear physicist down in Los Alamos. Los Alamos.
Dianne Palivoda [00:15:31] Yeah.
Interviewer [00:15:42] A lot of these guys all came from Lincoln?
Dianne Palivoda [00:15:45] Yeah. Right. Like I say, very few college-
John Palivoda [00:15:48] Chief executive officer of a printing company in California.
Interviewer [00:15:54] Got, I think, Dennis Kucinich, you know, later on.
John Palivoda [00:15:56] That was later on. Yeah. He was- We were there when he got the consul. Yeah. [crosstalk] Won the council seat.
Dianne Palivoda [00:16:05] Polensky I think he beat out.
John Palivoda [00:16:06] Yeah. And what I was thinking? The picnics. The churches all had- Well, St. Peter and Paul had the picnic grove right off Pleasant Valley, Hertz Road, where St. Andrews is. And Sunday afternoons they’d leave church and go out to the Pleasant Valley area, which was out in the country then.
Dianne Palivoda [00:16:31] Oh yeah, that was-
John Palivoda [00:16:31] And the priest used to be a bartender. [laughs] Sunday was- You couldn’t sell liquor then. And I don’t know if it was a private party or what.
Dianne Palivoda [00:16:43] Probably a private party.
John Palivoda [00:16:44] And that’s not too far from where we live right now.
Dianne Palivoda [00:16:47] Yeah, right around the corner.
Interviewer [00:16:48] You guys think Tremont’s on the right track? I know you mentioned you were glad to see some restaurants and some better housing going up. Do you think they’re getting better now?
John Palivoda [00:16:57] Oh, of course, [crosstalk] it was real bad there for a while, but Lincoln Park was, a young teenager, that’s where we stayed all until 10 o’clock or whatever time it was we had to be home. But initially it was always when the street lights came on. That’s when time to go home. Or when the church bells rang because there’s so many churches back down there.
Dianne Palivoda [00:17:20] There wasn’t any violence down in- I mean, fights maybe, but no violence. [crosstalk] No, we had one where we lived on 14th, somebody got stabbed and that’s the only one I can ever remember. And that was just between two people, you know what I mean? It wasn’t like there was no gangs. No, no. I mean, kids hung around in groups, but not. I don’t know how to say it. Not, not vicious in their heart.
John Palivoda [00:17:43] I don’t remember any drugs.
Dianne Palivoda [00:17:44] No. I’m sure there may have been some out there.
John Palivoda [00:17:46] In high school, there was some beers and stuff like that.
Interviewer [00:17:49] Yeah, beer, which is-
John Palivoda [00:17:50] That was some, what, 11th grade and 12th grade, and that’s all. No drugs. [crosstalk] I don’t remember drugs at all.
Dianne Palivoda [00:18:01] No drinking. People drank, but I don’t remember anything or knew of anybody with drugs.
Interviewer [00:18:08] It seems like a completely different world sometimes. I mean from the Tremont you speak of and then just the neighborhoods that they are nowadays. What do you guys, like, I know you said the projects for Tremont, but I mean, what do you think attributes to the, just the lack of, I don’t know, kids seem to get in trouble. You said there’s no drugs, now there are drugs? [inaudible]
John Palivoda [00:18:30] Probably if I was walking home from Tremont, if I got in a fight or problem there, by the time I got home, my parents knew about it because you knew everybody was sitting on their porches. Everybody knew you. You knew everybody. You know, they may not know I’m John. But it was that damn Palivoda and [laughs] everybody- I remember later because we had to walk every place. You know, we didn’t have cars. But walking up from my house to her house, probably in 1948, during the World Series, I could walk up the whole way and listen to the whole game because everybody was sitting on their porch listening to every radio [00:19:14] Everybody’s on porches-
Dianne Palivoda [00:19:15] Listening to ball games.
John Palivoda [00:19:16] You know, and-
Interviewer [00:19:18] Strong community.
John Palivoda [00:19:19] Oh, yeah.
Dianne Palivoda [00:19:20] Right. And nobody ever blamed anybody else when somebody got in trouble.
John Palivoda [00:19:24] [crosstalk] Oh, yeah, it was a jam.
Mrs. Palivdoa [00:19:26] No, no.
John Palivoda [00:19:26] Oh, yeah. It was your fault.
Dianne Palivoda [00:19:27] No, what I mean, it was your fault. It wasn’t the teacher’s fault. It wasn’t the policeman’s fault. It was your fault. And they wouldn’t listen. I mean, if the teacher said you did something wrong, that was it.
John Palivoda [00:19:37] I would never come home until the teacher slapped me and got peddled.
Dianne Palivoda [00:19:40] Oh, no, no. [crosstalk] Seriously. And I think that’s it. Well, good friends of lived in the Tremont area, when her mom and dad died, they got the two houses, two small, like one in the back and one in front. Well, her brother had bought them out and he redid both houses. Now I guess they have an artist living in one. And he did a really nice job. He gutted them all out and made them all, you know, sided it and it looks really nice. And I think this is what people are doing. They’re buying up these houses and they’re redoing ’em because they think people are going to be coming, like for the condos and that they are. Like I say, I think it’ll thrive if the projects could be taken out. Only because I think that scares people more than anything and they’re frightened, you know.
Interviewer [00:20:32] You guys, well, I already asked that question. So. You didn’t- You weren’t a real- How should I ask this question? What church did you go to?
Dianne Palivoda [00:20:45] Did I go to? I went to all of them. Seriously. My family were not churchgoers, and I went with any of my girlfriends. I went to St. Michael’s; I went to the Baptist Church across from St. Michael’s; I went to a German Lutheran church in the corner. Whoever I went with, with my girl, my family did not pursue, you know, the religious part. And so when we got married, we got married at Pilgrim. Now I’m very, very much into church out in North Royalton.
John Palivoda [00:21:14] Another thing, you know, the churches down there were probably way ahead of their time. Like Pilgrim Church had a bowling alley, a gym. [crosstalk] They had the local canteen for the Friday nights, canteen for the kids. Let’s see, whatever. Of course, St. John Cantius had a bowling alley complete with bar, you know, [laughs] in the basement.
Dianne Palivoda [00:21:36] They were more helping, I think, the young kids more.
John Palivoda [00:21:39] They kept the people in.
Interviewer [00:21:41] Kept the kids busy.
Dianne Palivoda [00:21:42] Right. I think that’s the problem. Kids have too much time or there’s nothing for them to do. So they hang around in gangs. And then the next thing you know, there’s problems because one will feed the other and before you know it, they get on the wrong path.
John Palivoda [00:21:57] Yeah, we like say, walking every- We walk.
Dianne Palivoda [00:22:01] Oh, yeah. Nobody ever had. Nobody had a car.
John Palivoda [00:22:05] Friday night was going to the Jennings show.
Dianne Palivoda [00:22:07] Yeah, the Jennings show was on the 14th Street.
John Palivoda [00:22:10] I think the shows changed three times a week. Then we went to the show.
Dianne Palivoda [00:22:14] It was our only, really- We went on Saturdays, Wednesdays and Friday nights.
John Palivoda [00:22:20] Yeah. And of course he had the bingo or they gave dishes away. And that was the full show too, with newsreel and cartoon and short subjects. And then probably a double feature. For a quarter. Quarter. And popcorn was a nickel, I believe.
Dianne Palivoda [00:22:40] Yeah. And we went roller skating. We used to go roller skating at the Rollercade.
John Palivoda [00:22:47] In fact, St. Michael’s Church had- They had roller skating in their basement too [crosstalk] on Scranton.
Dianne Palivoda [00:22:51] You could skate in their basement, on Friday nights they had it.
Interviewer [00:22:55] Now you graduated and then you went into the service. When you got back from the service, did you kind of come home? Where did you go home to?
John Palivoda [00:23:08] Well, my parents moved then, you know, right after I got to high school, to Old Brooklyn. And so that was home then. My grandmother stayed there until just, oh, 10 years ago she died. And then my uncle lived there and turned out to be a hermit there really.
Dianne Palivoda [00:23:28] But just to show with his uncles that he was gone, in the hospital, they tore his front door off of his house on Christmas day because they were valuable. They had [crosstalk], you know, all that old stained glass and heavy wood. Because the police called and said that they took the door off because I guess there was a market, you know, to sell these kind of doors. But I mean, before you could leave your door open. We never locked your doors ever in our house. In our house. And I don’t think you did either. Did you never lock doors?
Interviewer [00:23:57] Taking stained glass doors right off-
Dianne Palivoda [00:24:00] Right off the hinges. They knew he was in the hospital probably because he was old and, you know, then the house was empty. There were alleys a lot around houses. But no, it was a nice neighborhood.
John Palivoda [00:24:15] And the stores, you know, the local grocery stores. My mom would send me to store, get something and just wrote it down. Didn’t take any money with me. Bring it back and put it on the tab.
Dianne Palivoda [00:24:28] They’d keep little books in the stores, and you’d go and get it and they just put on that book, and at the end of the week, they would pay it. Nobody ever questioned, did you buy it or did you not buy it? Are you padding the book or are you putting extra things? You just took everybody’s word on what they did. It was very, you know.
Interviewer [00:24:47] Very trusting.
Dianne Palivoda [00:24:48] Oh, yeah. Very trusting.
John Palivoda [00:24:48] Very interesting thing. My mother was the- Well, eventually she lined up as a manager of Ukrainian Savings, which is a Professor and Jefferson. It’s now by Fifth Third.
Dianne Palivoda [00:25:01] Yeah.
John Palivoda [00:25:02] And that was.
Dianne Palivoda [00:25:03] He was across the street.
John Palivoda [00:25:04] Yeah. Ben Stefanski was. [crosstalk] But it was unusual for a woman to have a position like that in an ethnic neighborhood. But she was there for a long time. Did quite well.
Interviewer [00:25:23] I’m shocked that the community- I mean, it just seems like another world. I mean, even unlike- My dad’s 60 years old right now, and he tells me he grew up in like South Euclid and things like that. But, I mean, you know, this is why we’re doing this project, because Tremont is so unique.
Dianne Palivoda [00:25:43] It is.
Interviewer [00:25:43] I can’t imagine, you know, that strong of a social fabric, community spirit.
John Palivoda [00:25:49] Then it was the South Side.
Interviewer [00:25:51] Yeah, we called it the South Side at that time.
John Palivoda [00:25:53] That wasn’t the Tremont historically. [laughs]
Dianne Palivoda [00:25:56] Yeah, yeah, it was the South Side.
John Palivoda [00:25:58] And people from outside were kind of hesitant to come in there-
Dianne Palivoda [00:26:05] Because of the strong ethnic.
John Palivoda [00:25:07] Yeah, it was very close. And if you were an outsider, you didn’t belong there.
Dianne Palivoda [00:26:13] But 14th Street used to be beautiful. That was Millionaires’ Row years ago. Beautiful. Big homes. Homes are still big.
John Palivoda [00:26:20] Homes were- Look in the window and see moose heads hanging on the wall, oil paintings- [crosstalk]
Dianne Palivoda [00:26:26] One of my friends lived down there.
John Palivoda [00:26:28] Oh, in my grandmother’s house, there was a room in the attic for the maid. Of course, they never had the maid, [crosstalk] but it was old. But they bought it from a, supposedly a radio announcer or somebody in really early radio, and I guess they had a maid.
Dianne Palivoda [00:26:45] But that was on West 12th near Clark. Yeah. That was not quite in the Tremont area, though.
Interviewer [00:26:51] Did you- You said you could, you didn’t see too many people coming, like, from the outside of Tremont area, could you spot an outsider pretty much?
John Palivoda [00:27:01] Yeah. Probably. Because if you didn’t know them, they’re not- Yeah. I mean, the kids, you knew all the kids, and there was some, yeah, there were some roughnecks, like there is in any neighborhood there that you probably stayed away from them. I don’t know if they’re-
Dianne Palivoda [00:27:19] But you know, I don’t remember ever seeing police.
John Palivoda [00:27:22] No. Well, yeah, police just chased us out of the street. Couldn’t play football in the street.
Dianne Palivoda [00:27:25] See, I don’t remember in our neighborhood ever seeing police cars.
John Palivoda [00:27:27] Well, you were in the Heights. [crosstalk] But they used to chase us off the street playing football on the street and games because some of the houses on 5th Street still had outhouses.
Interviewer [00:27:40] Really?
John Palivoda [00:27:41] Yeah.
Interviewer [00:27:42] Wow.
John Palivoda [00:27:46] We had a bathtub in our house. But most of the houses didn’t have really bathrooms. They had a commode but no bathtubs and that in there. Well, a lot of those houses. Another thing, like kids all sleep over? I never slept over anybody’s house. You belonged at home and that’s where you stayed.
Dianne Palivoda [00:28:10] Yeah, yeah.
John Palivoda [00:28:13] What else? There’s the weddings and the Polish, the old polkas at the weddings and the clarinets and that was always- But the wedding was a family thing. All the kids went and-
Dianne Palivoda [00:28:27] Kids were included in everything I think. You know, seriously, like now they aren’t. Some people, you’ll see a wedding invitation, “No children allowed.” You know. And I find that bad because of the fact that’s keeping families apart. And that’s why they only get to see sometime the kids, you know. Trying to think what else.
John Palivoda [00:28:49] The bars. The drunks were there. You know, the people, they worked hard.
Dianne Palivoda [00:28:59] Yeah.
John Palivoda [00:28:59] On the way home from work they stopped in the bar, had their beers.
Interviewer [00:29:02] Majority of them were steel workers?
John Palivoda [00:29:04] Steel workers. Railroads, a lot of steel workers. Because the mills were right down the hill or you know-
Dianne Palivoda [00:29:11] They worked hard, those people.
Interviewer [00:29:13] Who was in your, like, immediate family that lived with you when growing up in Tremont?
John Palivoda [00:29:19] Well, my wife’s uncles that came over from Europe are really, lived right across the street from us. And my grandmother lived up not too, you know, at West 12th. So it wasn’t- [crosstalk] Yeah. And my brother. Yeah.
Interviewer [00:29:35] An older brother or younger?
John Palivoda [00:29:37] Younger. Two years younger. He’s the one that graduated from Fenn College.
Dianne Palivoda [00:29:44] Yeah.
John Palivoda [00:29:44] And he was the first really college graduate in our family, probably.
Dianne Palivoda [00:29:48] Yeah. He worked for LTV after.
Interviewer [00:29:54] What did your dad do when he used to work?
John Palivoda [00:29:56] No, he drove a bread truck. Auburn Baking, which was right on the Auburn Avenue. All, rye bread, pastries, not pastries, [inaudible] and things like that. Nut [inaudible] and oh, what’s the other one? Nut and poppyseed [inaudible] and things like that. [inaudible] My dad got sick. Then I’d have to work with him during the summer on the truck. Hated that. You started like in 4:30 in the morning. [laughs] For a teenager, you know?
Interviewer [00:30:42] Your mom didn’t work at all, did she?
John Palivoda [00:30:44] Oh yeah, she worked in the bank.
Interviewer [00:30:46] Oh, she’s the one in the bank?
John Palivoda [00:30:47] Yeah.
Interviewer [00:30:47] Okay. Wow. Now that’s interesting because when you think back in the ’50s and stuff, you know, that they make it- I guess she started working like during the war?
John Palivoda [00:30:59] Yeah, during the war.
Interviewer [00:31:01] That’s when- Did your dad have to go?
John Palivoda [00:31:03] No, he was
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