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 a little too older because he was in his 40s. You know, he was born in 1900, so the war started in about ’41.
Interviewer [00:31:13] So your grandfather was 41.
John Palivoda [00:31:15] Yeah, ’41. So he was 41 at that time. And so he never- His younger brother got drafted. But that’s about all. I still remember a lot of the gold stars and the blue stars hanging in the window, and the iceman. I still remember at that time they still had the horse-drawn cards for the paper X [paper rags] man. [00:31:46] The milk wagon [crosstalk], you know, putting the ice, the milk on the steps.
Interviewer [00:31:52] Wow.
John Palivoda [00:31:52] At night [crosstalk] and you know the milk would freeze up the top and freeze up and pop the top off. Yeah, I remember one of the mother taken during the war. You could get butter in that. Just take the cream off the milk and churn it, make butter. Yeah, coal. And everything was coal furnaces, of course-
Dianne Palivoda [00:32:15] I remember shoveling coal.
John Palivoda [00:32:17] Yeah, shoveling coal.
Dianne Palivoda [00:32:18] They would back up to the window and just drop it down to the basement.
John Palivoda [00:32:20] No, they couldn’t get in ours. [crosstalk] We had to take it by wagons and wheelbarrows from the front of the yard to the side. What else was it? The penny man, egg man, he used to stop to deliver eggs to the stores which were right across the street from us. And all the kids would run out there and line up and he’d give all the kids a penny. Of course, the ice man would give chips of ice. Ice man, the nut man, egg man, paper X man. Yeah, they all had horses at that time.
Dianne Palivoda [00:33:04] And instead of big grocery stores, you had little stores all around, different- [crosstalk] You know, all walk. Everybody could walk to a store. Yeah, and we used to go every day to the store and pick up stuff because your refrigerator couldn’t hold-
John Palivoda [00:33:17] Well, you didn’t have a refrigerator. You had ice box.
Dianne Palivoda [00:33:18] Yeah, we had ice box. Yeah, we had ice box.
John Palivoda [00:33:21] Yeah, they had a ice house on Jefferson between 7th and Thurman Alley. And they’d go up there and put it in a wagon, buy our ice, and get home and put it in the ice box.
Dianne Palivoda [00:33:39] You don’t realize how easy we have it now.
John Palivoda [00:33:41] Of course, no televisions. Radio was a big thing. Captain Midnight, Jack Armstrong.
Dianne Palivoda [00:33:51] Let’s Pretend.
John Palivoda [00:33:51] Let’s Pretend.
Interviewer [00:33:55] Did all the guys your age just listen to radio too, and did, I mean, a lot of people today, they’ll watch like some popular show today. It’s like Friends and everybody seems to talk about it the day after they-
John Palivoda [00:34:08] Everybody, Same thing. Oh, yeah. I love a mystery. You know, the spooky ones.
Dianne Palivoda [00:34:14] Yeah. Sunday night.
John Palivoda [00:34:15] Sunday nights, there’s always popular- They’ve- What’s the music one? The top 10, like-
Dianne Palivoda [00:34:24] Top 10.
John Palivoda [00:34:25] You know, it was the music.
Dianne Palivoda [00:34:28] Oh, hits?
John Palivoda [00:34:29] Yeah. Hit Parade.
Dianne Palivoda [00:34:31] Hit Parade.
John Palivoda [00:34:32] The Hit Parade was-
Dianne Palivoda [00:34:33] And then when the TV first came, I was about 12, I think, when it came. They were only those little tiny sets, and my dad had one we bought from Basista. Are you from this area around here? Basista Furniture used to be on Clark Avenue. Oh, yeah. And that’s where we bought our first one. And that was only on from 7 at night, I think, until 9 or 10. Only a couple hours a day TV. Milton Burl was one of the first ones on.
John Palivoda [00:35:02] Shelf shows.
Dianne Palivoda [00:35:05] Yeah, but you didn’t watch much TV, you know. And when you did, all your neighbors came in and we had popcorn. It was like a show, you know, and sit down and watch Texaco-
John Palivoda [00:35:14] Very few people.
Dianne Palivoda [00:35:15] Mm hmm. Because everybody didn’t have a television set. It was pretty good.
Interviewer [00:35:19] When was that? Like. Was that like in the early ’50s?
Dianne Palivoda [00:35:22] Let’s see. I was born in-
John Palivoda [00:35:23] Late ’40s.
Dianne Palivoda [00:35:25] Yeah. Late ’40s.
Interviewer [00:35:27] So like one person on a block, maybe, if you’re lucky?
Dianne Palivoda [00:35:32] Yeah, probably one out of every four or five or ten houses.
John Palivoda [00:35:36] Ten houses, I’d say.
Dianne Palivoda [00:35:38] Yeah, yeah, yeah. My dad worked on the West Side Market. He was a butcher, and my grandfather was. And so he made fairly decent money over there. So, you know, we did have a television set, so we were very fortunate.
John Palivoda [00:35:51] How about the teacher bribing you to get-
Dianne Palivoda [00:35:54] I had a second grade teacher. Used to be Buhrer School down there. Right on Raleigh and 14th. And my second grade teacher said to me, if you, how was it, if you get me a pound of butter- Because, you know, butter was rationed and meat, I’ll let you do, I can’t think of what it was she was going to let me do. But I was so thrilled, thrilled to get her a pound of butter. I had to eat butter at home, my dad. Because I would not eat butter. He says, if you eat some butter, he says, then I’ll get this for your teacher. And it was like white and you put a little yellow capsule in it.
John Palivoda [00:36:30] That was margarine.
Dianne Palivoda [00:36:31] Yeah. And you had to mix it up to make it yellow. I mean, it- And then we used to use the tokens in the market. I mean, when I worked down there, I worked there too.
John Palivoda [00:36:39] Still have some of those tokens.
Dianne Palivoda [00:36:40] Yeah, yeah. And stamps. They have-
John Palivoda [00:36:43] Yes, sale stamps.
Dianne Palivoda [00:36:45] Yeah, sales stamps.
John Palivoda [00:36:46] Yeah, we used to count those in school. I don’t know what- The school got something back from the state for all the sales stamps that they returned. So every school collected sales stamps.
Dianne Palivoda [00:37:02] What I always thought was a good idea, too, when we were in school, they used to have banking day, like every Friday, and you’d bring money in and they would put it in like a bank book type thing for you.
John Palivoda [00:37:13] I think my mother was one that came to my school.
Dianne Palivoda [00:37:15] Right. And then that’s a way of showing the kids how to save. And I thought that was wonderful. I thought that was- If it was maybe just a quarter week, they would take your money and then they would mark a book like that and show your savings how it can grow. And I thought that was great, like, for the kids today don’t realize a lot of these things. You know what I mean?
Interviewer [00:37:35] Yeah, do- I noticed, it seems even more so every year right now in this day and age in the 21st century, Halloween’s getting bigger and bigger and bigger. Was Halloween a big holiday?
John Palivoda [00:37:51] No.
Dianne Palivoda [00:37:51] No. I mean, everybody dressed up and you went to neighbors, you know, and the kids did.
John Palivoda [00:37:56] No, we didn’t dress up. We never dressed up. We knock on some doors trying to get some pennies. But yeah, go away, kid. You never got many pennies.
Interviewer [00:38:05] Did you ever get any egged houses or toilet paper?
Dianne Palivoda [00:38:08] No, I don’t remember that. Some did soak the windows. That’s the only thing I can remember. Down on one street, somebody soaked somebody’s windows because they didn’t have any candy or something.
John Palinode [00:38:17] But no, lights weren’t on on baker’s night.
Dianne Palivoda [00:38:21] Oh, no.
Interviewer [00:38:23] I was wondering, with your mom working, working and having a pretty good job for that day, and then your dad was working. Right now we have a situation in today’s society where both parents work and then there’s a, you know, usually problem at home with who does dishes, who cooks and everything. Did your mom work and then do all the dishes and all the cooking and cleaning?
John Palivoda [00:38:49] Oh, yeah.
Interviewer [00:38:50] Wasn’t about to help out? [laughs]
John Palivoda [00:38:51] Because he had, like I say, he had to go to work early in the morning, so he went to bed early at night. That’s why we were up at the Merrick House and that we couldn’t make any noise at home. That was all that was- You know, the roles were pretty clearly defined, who did what, and the kids listened. Father went to work and made a living and Mother took care of the house, and that’s the way it was. But even like we were- Well, I don’t know how old we were when my mother went to work, but we were in school already. It doesn’t make any difference because there was three other families in the house. You know, you didn’t get away with anything. [laughs] [crosstalk] You know, not in our apartment, but there’s three other apartments there.
Dianne Palivoda [00:39:40] And I think people watched out more for- They got involved more where now people say, I’m not gonna get involved, you know? Yeah. And I think kids knew that and they knew they weren’t gonna get away with a lot of stuff, so they didn’t pull quite as much, you know, as they do now. Plus, your parents didn’t think- [recording stops and resumes] What was I saying? It was about self-esteem, I think.
Interviewer [00:40:13] Kids had to prove themselves.
Dianne Palivoda [00:40:14] Yeah. I mean, if you failed something, you failed, but you learned from it. Where I think now they make ’em think it’s either somebody else’s fault, the teacher’s fault, somebody, but not them. So they don’t take account for it. And I think that’s what we’re having the trouble with the kids of today.
John Palivoda [00:40:30] Yeah. Nobody cared much about your self-esteem. [laughs]
Dianne Palivoda [00:40:32] No, they didn’t care about- I mean, if you really accomplished something, you know, you accomplished it. Nobody gave it to you, you know, and said that a boy. When you did things wrong, you know, I think that’s a problem.
Interviewer [00:40:45] Everybody, I take it, was like the parenting styles have changed. So people got spanked when they did something wrong back then?
Dianne Palivoda [00:40:55] Right.
John Palivoda [00:40:55] If you’re lucky you got spanked. [laughs]
Dianne Palivoda [00:40:56] Yeah, no, that’s true. No. And now, I mean, you can’t even talk to other kids, you know, because of all this scare of people. And I think that that has changed, how would you say, the interaction of people by kids with older people or kids with adults. Because now they’re scared of all this.
John Palivoda [00:41:15] Well, the other day I stopped at a Subway to pick up a sandwich to take out and this little kid, probably a son of the owner or one of the workers there, came up to me and said, pick me up. I can’t. You can’t in these days, you know, I can’t do it. You’re a cute little kid and probably no problem, but you just don’t dare do things like that now. I used to always pick up kids on the way home from school. Now you can’t. But in the old days, nobody would pick you up. They’d pick you up in a police car. [laughs]
Dianne Palivoda [00:41:57] But you could talk to everybody, I thin, in the old days. You talked to people all around you, or today they don’t. Well, they’re afraid. I mean, they’ve been told. And there are some crazy people out there, you know. But I think that’s changed our society a lot, you know.
John Palivoda [00:42:14] Yeah. I don’t remember any abuse cases or- Of course, probably under today’s standard, everybody was abused. [laughs]
Interviewer [00:42:22] I was just going to ask you, I mean, this bad question asked, but I mean, in this day, you know, is there any priests behaving poorly?
John Palivoda [00:42:31] Not that we know of. Because, you know, even if they were, nobody’d ever say anything because the priests were above all, you know.
Dianne Palivoda [00:42:40] Plus the news media and everything has done that, I think, and a lot of the television- Everything is just blared all over.
John Palivoda [00:42:46] That stuff shouldn’t be blared.
Dianne Palivoda [00:42:48] Well, yeah, I don’t mean that, but I mean, in that day and age, things weren’t-
Interviewer [00:42:52] Some things were taboo?
Dianne Palivoda [00:42:54] Absolutely. Yeah, I think so. Not that those things should happen and be allowed to happen, but it’s just that-
John Palivoda [00:43:01] I never heard of any.
Dianne Palivoda [00:43:04] No.
John Palivoda [00:43:05] Of course, sex was not something that was spoken. You know, there was no- Nothing was- Sex- Sex was a-
Dianne Palivoda [00:43:12] You didn’t say the word.
John Palivoda [00:43:13] No.
Interviewer [00:43:14] No sex education in school?
John Palivoda [00:43:16] No- Yeah, when we were in- [crosstalk] It was a biology class.
Dianne Palivoda [00:43:22] Yeah, basically biology.
John Palivoda [00:43:23] Boys, we went to one class, girls went to another class.
Dianne Palivoda [00:43:26] That was it.
John Palivoda [00:43:27] It was parts of the body, really. [laughs]
Dianne Palivoda [00:43:29] Right. Really, yeah/
John Palivoda [00:43:34] Like when we were in high school, I only remember one girl being pregnant in all the time we were there for six years, and that was a shock. They even- She was out of school and he was missing one day and-
Dianne Palivoda [00:43:48] I don’t remember any really in the area.
John Palivoda [00:43:50] No. Here again, that was a taboo, if it did happen.
Dianne Palivoda [00:43:54] Right, right.
Interviewer [00:43:56] I was just gonna ask. You said you didn’t remember any drug use. There’s occasional drugs and one pregnant girl. I’ll ask you the loaded question. What about homosexuality?
John Palivoda [00:44:09] Never heard of it.
Dianne Palivoda [00:44:10] Never heard of it. Never heard of that word before in school.
Interviewer [00:44:14] Okay.
Dianne Palivoda [00:44:14] Not until just recently. Really.
John Palivoda [00:44:17] Yeah.
Dianne Palivoda [00:44:17] I’m sure there must have been, you know, in some- I knew of none.
John Palivoda [00:44:21] There’s no. Nothing openly gay.
Dianne Palivoda [00:44:24] No. Ever. And we didn’t know of it. I didn’t know of any.
John Palivoda [00:44:29] And we were- We were popular in school. I mean, I was class, school president, student council president, was captain of the football team and she was a queen and that kind of stuff. So we were aware of what was happening in the school.
Dianne Palivoda [00:44:50] Yeah. Hung around in big groups of kids. You know.
John Palivoda [00:44:53] Yeah. We didn’t know they were cliques, but in today’s standards, they were cliques and they’re, 50 years later some of those things- [laughs] [crosstalk]
Dianne Palivoda [00:45:04] At our 50th class reunion, there were a couple stories, but.
John Palivoda [00:45:07] Yeah, like, you know, I was on the committee for the class reunion 50 years ago. We’d call some of the people and said, didn’t like you then, don’t like you now. I don’t want any part of it.
Dianne Palivoda [00:45:16] Can you imagine that? Yeah, but that’s maybe how they felt. You know, maybe they didn’t feel they were in the right clique or with the right group and maybe they thought you were. You know what I mean? And it wasn’t cliques. You hung around with people that you had things in common with. You know.
Interviewer [00:45:32] There was no cross-ethnic, that kids from different ethnicities hanging out?
John Palivoda [00:45:39] Oh, everybody did. [crosstalk My best friend that went to nursery school, he was Lebanese, Polish-
Dianne Palivoda [00:45:46] But no fighting. Is that what you meant? There was no fighting between them?
Interviewer [00:45:49] Well, what I meant was you hung out with other guys.
John Palivoda [00:45:52] Oh, yeah.
Interviewer [00:45:53] Okay.
Dianne Palivoda [00:45:53] Yeah.
Interviewer [00:45:54] Do you think it was mostly the generation before your parents’ folks or your parents, your parents themselves, your mom and dad and that generation, who really didn’t mesh well with the locals? But you think the kids maybe-
John Palivoda [00:46:09] No, I think they did too. My mom being in the banking business, she spoke about four or five different languages.
Interviewer [00:46:16] Really?
John Palivoda [00:46:16] Yeah, she worked with everybody from Greek to Ukrainian to Polish.
Interviewer [00:46:22] Talented lady.
John Palivoda [00:46:24] She was. Sharp lady. Neighbors were, you know, Polish, Ukrainian, Russian there. No problem. I’d say the churches really were the most- I think disagreements between the churches. And that was more the churches more than the people itself. No, I- I think in Lincoln we had time. How many nationalities? [crosstalk] Thirty-three different nationalities.
Interviewer [00:46:52] Wow.
Dianne Palivoda [00:46:52] In one school and never had anything like, you know, fighting against Irish and German or whatever. Never. But they had brought that out because we used to have nationality days and everything.
John Palivoda [00:47:04] Assistant principal was a big ethnic. He was really involved in South America and that. But he kind of promoted all this ethnic or-
Interviewer [00:47:19] All thirty-three?
John Palivoda [00:47:20] Oh, yeah. He was-
Dianne Palivoda [00:47:20] Yeah.
Interviewer [00:47:22] Even like German during World War II? Or was that-
John Palivoda [00:47:25] Yeah, my best friend, one of my best friends was Japanese.
Interviewer [00:47:29] Wow.
John Palivoda [00:47:29] He was named Mark Takahashi.
Interviewer [00:47:31] And he never gotten any-
John Palivoda [00:47:33] No. But you have to stick up for him once in an argument but-
Dianne Palivoda [00:47:36] But not because of him being Japanese.
John Palivoda [00:47:38] Yeah, well, but not much of a problem. He was- And he looked Japanese too. You know, he was- And he was- Well, he was thrown out of California, you know, when his family- [crosstalk]
Interviewer [00:47:50] Was he- Did he, like, grow up, I guess in the Tremont area?
John Palivoda [00:47:53] Yeah, until he was about junior high school when they moved out of the Tremont neighborhood.
Interviewer [00:47:59] Wow.
John Palivoda [00:47:59] And there’s, in fact his brother was a second lieutenant in the army. And right across from them in the building, this is right on West 5th and Jefferson, Namoros, they were another Japanese family that was moved out of the West Coast. But they were over at our house all the time. We were over their house. There was no problem.
Interviewer [00:48:23] That’s great.
John Palivoda [00:48:24] He was a sharp kid. In fact, he was, he graduated from Case, I believe and he was an engineer, metallurgical engineer also. But there, there wasn’t a whole lot of problems. More, more problems between husbands and wives, I think, stopping at the bar. [laughs]
Dianne Palivoda [00:48:43] Yeah, I was just gonna say that would probably be the main problem, you know. But these men worked hard all day, you know what I mean? And so they’d stop at the bar. And those bars weren’t like bars are today, you know, I mean we’d go, I know our family used to go on Scranton Road every Friday night to a bar for fish fries. And it was all families in there, you know, it wasn’t- [crosstalk] You didn’t see- But yeah, you know. Right. It was more of a social type of thing. The bar is thin. It’s still social, but it’s a little bit different, you know, now there’s.
John Palivoda [00:49:14] You didn’t have to walk far, you know, the only bar that you can crawl home from. [laughs]
Interviewer [00:49:17] Well, you could walk, yeah. People walked everywhere. You walked home, you walked out to eating, you walk to the show. We took a bus downtown, and that-
John Palivoda [00:49:25] Well, my father had a car, so it was one of the few perks.
Interviewer [00:49:30] Yeah, that’s nice.
John Palivoda [00:49:36] Of course, one good thing about the diversity of the- Was the food, you know, [crosstalk] the nationality food. Any place you go, some of you had different type of the food. It was all good.
Interviewer [00:49:53] What was your favorite food there like?
John Palivoda [00:49:55] Did you prefer your own stuffed cabbage pierogi, all that kind of stuff still has my mouth watering. [laughs]
Dianne Palivoda [00:50:04] Well, there were no restaurants down there, just bars. I mean you didn’t have any- I don’t even think of any restaurant that I can think of. Downtown was the only one I remember restaurants like the Mayflower but.
John Palivoda [00:50:13] But up on 25th Street, there’s, well, I don’t know if you called it restaurant.
Dianne Palivoda [00:50:18] Well, there was a Chinese one up there too. [crosstalk] That’s right. Yeah. Small little ones.
John Palivoda [00:50:23] Small restaurants. And CJ’s. More sandwich shops than full restaurants.
Interviewer [00:50:27] No sit-down restaurants in Tremont at all?
John Palivoda [00:50:30] None that I can think of.
Dianne Palivoda [00:50:32] Well, he would know, not me.
John Palivoda [00:50:33] Now look at it.
Dianne Palivoda [00:50:34] Yeah.
John Palivoda [00:50:36] I can’t afford to go to most. [laughs]
Dianne Palivoda [00:50:37] Yeah, it’s amazing.
Interviewer [00:50:39] I’ll tell you something. I went to this one place, Fahrenheit, and I looked at the menu there, and oh, let me tell ya.
Dianne Palivoda [00:50:45] Yeah. That’s what I heard. The prices are really high. We’ve gone to University Inn.
John Palivoda [00:50:49] Yeah, Sokolowski’s.
Dianne Palivoda [00:50:51] Yeah, Sokolowski’s.
John Palivoda [00:50:52] Okay, that’s good.
Dianne Palivoda [00:50:53] In fact, we still have- We have our class reunions there. All- Everybody gets together there. Yeah. Just before the regular reunion.
John Palivoda [00:51:00] That’s all the ethnic food in the old Polish neighborhood. That’s- What else was there on South Side? All the churches.
Dianne Palivoda [00:51:11] A lot of churches.
John Palivoda [00:51:12] A lot of churches had the canteens for the teenagers.
Dianne Palivoda [00:51:14] Yeah. For the kids.
John Palivoda [00:51:15] Different nights of the week, you’d go to a different kind of canteen. Merrick House had one. Of course, Pilgrim had one. St. Augustine’s had a canteen. That’s the ones I can remember.
Interviewer [00:51:30] When did the- I don’t know if this happened when you were in Tremont or not. When did the projects. When were they put in?
John Palivoda [00:51:38] During the Second World War.
Dianne Palivoda [00:51:40] Jim Solowski lived there, didn’t he?
John Palivoda [00:51:42] Yeah, right around the end of the war, I think. In fact, it could have been at the end of the war when all the troops were coming home. They had- That needed places to live and they were- They’re real nice.
Dianne Palivoda [00:51:53] They were really nice.
John Palivoda [00:51:54] Well kept up.
Dianne Palivoda [00:51:55] They had a nice hall down there. It was very nice. But they’re old now. I mean, you know. Plus, when they get run down, they don’t build them up, you know, And I don’t think they have enough things for the younger people to do is what it is, too, today. I think that’s why there’s so many gangs, because they get together like a family, because their own families maybe don’t support ’em or aren’t working too much or whatever the circumstances. And that’s why I think they have all that time to get in trouble because there’s nothing else to do.
John Palivoda [00:52:25] Yeah. It’s a Merrick House.
Dianne Palivoda [00:52:26] I went, oh, yeah.
John Palivoda [00:52:28] All my life really.
Dianne Palivoda [00:52:29] Yeah. Played basketball.
John Palivoda [00:52:30] Oh, I don’t know. When I was about a junior in high school, they built a new, that new building they have there now with a big gym and things like that. They just opened up everything. Be there every night of the week.
Dianne Palivoda [00:52:43] Well, now there’s a daycare center. Remember when we used to walk down?
John Palivoda [00:52:46] Yeah, there is. There was always been a daycare.
Dianne Palivoda [00:52:48] Yeah. But they have now special rooms in there now. It’s really nice inside Merrick House. We saw it on that walk and they showed us a lot of the new condos that are around that nice. I think it could come back, but it would take, you know, some doing.
Interviewer [00:53:04] You mentioned that there’s a lot of people who came from World War II who moved into the projects. Did they move out and then some trouble moved in. Is that what happened?
John Palivoda [00:53:16] I think a lot years later.
Dianne Palivoda [00:53:17] Oh, yeah, it was nice a long time.
John Palivoda [00:53:20] Yeah. Because a lot of kids, we went to high school, lived out there. [crosstalk] It wasn’t something to look down at. They were lucky to live in a nice place like that.
Interviewer [00:53:30] Kind of sought after home there?
Dianne Palivoda [00:53:31] Yeah, yeah.
Interviewer [00:53:32] It’s probably kind of like a good condo is now.
John Palivoda [00:53:34] Yeah.
Dianne Palivoda [00:53:35] Yeah, basically, good apartments with that. Yeah.
Interviewer [00:53:37] So we hear projects now, we’re like, uh!
Dianne Palivoda [00:53:39] yeah.
John Palivoda [00:53:40] And rightfully so, you know.
Dianne Palivoda [00:53:41] That’s right. They’ve deteriorated.
John Palivoda [00:53:43] And of course, DPs, you know, which are- It’s not a slur. That’s what they- [crosstalk] You know, after the war they came- We had a lot of them, a lot of kids in our class, you know. And then it was Pete the Greek, you know? Polack, you know?
Dianne Palivoda [00:54:01] His name would be Polack.
John Palivoda [00:54:92] Grievous the Greek.
Dianne Palivoda [00:54:03] Yeah.
John Palivoda [00:54:04] These were names. People had names. There was no ethnic slurs or anything.
Dianne Palivoda [00:54:08] No. And it’s funny because one of my teachers, I remember telling my dad when I got home, she defined DP as Delayed Pilgrims. [laughs] And when I went home to my dad, my dad just laughed. But see, she was trying to do this so that it was not declared like a slur of any kind. It wasn’t really, Displaced Persons really is what it stands for. And so nobody ever, you know, really made fun of anybody with that. I mean, that wasn’t meant as a slur like they would have all these different terms now for people. And that wasn’t done then. People seemed to respect other people’s property too.
John Palivoda [00:54:43] Oh, yeah.
Dianne Palivoda [00:54:44] You know, people kept their yards and houses nice and I don’t know what- Now it’s really bad, but I don’t know what they can do except demolish them and start all over again. But then all those poor people are out of a place to live unless they go in there and redo it all for ’em. There’s a- That’s a bad situation, I’m sure, all around.
John Palivoda [00:55:08] But I think the South Side was always unique. It was a different island, though, because the true South Side was east of West 14th Street.
Interviewer [00:55:23] I noticed that it was- Your memories are a lot different from my memories or anybody’s memories growing up nowadays. What do you think made Tremont different from another neighborhood at the same time?
John Palivoda [00:55:46] The closeness of the people. Everybody- It was stability, I’d say everybody knew everybody. You did everything locally. You went to church there, you went to the stores there. Sam’s department store right on Professor and Jefferson, that’s where people bought most of their stuff.
Interviewer [00:56:10] No need to go more than 10 blocks.
John Palivoda [00:56:11] No, no.
Interviewer [00:56:12] All clothing, all kinds of furniture, the hardware stores.
John Palivoda [00:56:17] You know, going downtown then was a big thing. You got kind of dressed up to go downtown.
Interviewer [00:56:21] Oh eeally?
Dianne Palivoda [00:56:22] Oh, yeah, you dressed up lot.
John Palivoda [00:56:23] Going down to the Palace or that was a big, big date. Of course, you took the bus. [laughs]
Dianne Palivoda [00:56:30] You took a bus. You had to wait for cars to go down. But, oh, everybody got dressed up going down there and it was really nice. Some of the stores were pretty too. Like now downtown, it’s a shame. Like Higbee’s- People used to go to Christmas all the time because all the stores had all the decorated windows. Sterling’s had the tree. That brought people down because there was something to do. But that was a big event in everybody’s life. That was a big day to go out downtown to see that.
John Palivoda [00:56:56] In fact, we used to take our kids there.
Dianne Palivoda [00:56:57] Mm hmm. Yeah.
John Palivoda [00:57:00] The winter wonderland at Sterling. [crosstalk] At Sterling’s.
the winter wonderland. [00:57:01] Yeah, that was-
John Palivoda [00:57:02] Oh, so that wasn’t-
Interviewer [00:57:05] You guys ever go to any Browns games or-
John Palivoda [00:57:07] I had season tickets for 20 years.
Interviewer [00:57:09] Oh, really?
John Palivoda [00:57:10] Yeah.
Interviewer [00:57:11] But when you were a kid, did you get a chance to go see the Indians or anything?
John Palivoda [00:57:14] Oh, yeah. My mother used to take me down.
Interviewer [00:57:15] Oh, yeah?
John Palivoda [00:57:16] Me and my brother used to take it down to sit in the left field stands on the upper deck and that. But-
Dianne Palivoda [00:57:21] What did you pay? You remember?
John Palivoda [00:57:23] Oh, I have no idea. I didn’t pay anything.
Dianne Palivoda [00:57:25] No, but I mean, you don’t remember?
John Palivoda [00:57:27] But the Browns, you know, in high school, they Used to have- Used to be able to get in the Browns game for 60 cents.
Interviewer [00:57:33] Really?
John Palivoda [00:57:33] Yeah. So the bleachers and, you know, that’s what I think built the Browns following. Then they got out of service- Yeah, we had upper deck, section 16 on the rail. We had the box ran on the rail looking down at the Browns. So.
Dianne Palivoda [00:57:54] How many of you shared the-
John Palivoda [00:57:57] Twenty years. There was eight of us.
Dianne Palivoda [00:57:58] Yeah. Yeah.
John Palivoda [00:57:59] Then we had brought our own hot dogs and thermos filled with hot dogs and sauerkraut. And the same people were around us. Year in, year out. You know, the same people you’d see during football seasons. Some of the people came up from Florida for the football season. And there’s people, they sit there, they have like a folding board. They come up there and fold it across the seats. It’s a candelabra they put on the bar. [laughs]
Dianne Palivoda [00:58:28] You could take your own food in. Oh yeah. Your own food, your own drinks. Could you take your drinks then too?
John Palivoda [00:58:34] Yeah. Take everything. Yeah, sure. It was a fun time story about Browns game. We were out of the service in a while and we had I think it was 10 seats in the box and we had eight of ’em. And I guess somebody died off and this new couple, older couple at the time came and they had the extra two seats. You know, here’s people probably in their 60s and with a bunch of 20 year olds. And they were raising Hell and passing the bottle back and forth and drinking and something happened and a guy spilled a drink all over this guy’s hat. That guy just looked up and you know, kind of, You asses, you know. [laughs] The game went on there and nothing much was said. And a guy said, hey, how about passing a bottle? He said, it’s empty. The guy looked up, took out his hat and says, here, chew on this for a while. [laughs] From then on next four or five years they got along fine.
Dianne Palivoda [00:59:34] That was one bottle for like all these fellas, you know, I mean, different kind of drinking down there too.
Interviewer [00:59:40] That’s great. Last question for you. What was your happiest moment, bar none, in Tremont? Anything you can think of that just brings a smile to your face. Sounds like there’s a lot of but try to nail down-
John Palivoda [00:59:59] Extra happy- One Christmas, probably, it was after the war. I remember I got an electric train. And what’s that set that you?
Dianne Palivoda [01:00:16] Lego?
John Palivoda [01:00:17] No, wasn’t Lego. It was a steel. As you bolt things together. Exacto? No, it wasn’t Exacto.
Interviewer [01:00:22] Erector set?
Dianne Palivoda [01:00:23] Erector set, yeah.
John Palivoda [01:00:24] That was probably because that was the first time that really toys you can get things like that. And in fact I still have that set. That’s probably one of the biggest moments because we really didn’t- You didn’t get too much for Christmas. And that- And that was a special one.
Interviewer [01:00:49] It’s great, guys. Thanks a lot. Appreciate it. You know, telling your story and everything. That’s great. And I appreciate it. You telling me a little bit about you too. Thanks a lot. It sounds like it was really special. [crosstalk] You guys. Thank you again. We’re gonna conclude here.
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