Abstract

Baseball historian Jim Egan discusses the history of baseball in Cleveland. He discusses the early architectural features in the city, including horse hitching posts, flat-roofed housing, and chimneys. He discusses the creation of the modern game, baseball clubs (both locally and nationally), amateur baseball, and the formation of city leagues. He also discusses the connections between baseball and ethnicity, civic boosterism, local ballparks, and labor unions. Other topics include the Cleveland's Euclid Corridor Transportation Project, Egan family history, the rivalry between the city's east side and west side, memories from his young adulthood, and the Tremont neighborhood.

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Interviewee

Egan, Jim (interviewee)

Interviewer

Calder, James (interviewer)

Project

Midtown Cleveland

Date

7-24-2007

Document Type

Oral History

Duration

62 minutes

Transcript

James Calder [00:00:00] Okay. So do you want to introduce yourself since you’re-?

Jim Egan [00:00:06] I’m Jim Egan. I’m a lifelong resident of Cleveland, except for a few years of traveling around the country where I learned a lot of things and I brought some of them back to Cleveland. And hopefully I took some good things from Cleveland other places in my travels. And I’ve always had an interest in how our city’s put together and hope the best for its future and hope to be here when I’m older, when it’s warm, and somewhere warmer when it’s cold. I’m a baseball historian and I’m also sort of an amateur historian concerning other aspects of the history of Cleveland. And I live in the, basically in the downtown neighborhood, what’s called Chinatown. It’s got different names in the neighborhood, but it’s basically the Chinatown area around 46th and Superior. So I’ve been down 20 years now.

James Calder [00:00:51] What are the other names of it in the neighborhood?

Jim Egan [00:00:54] The social workers call the neighborhood Goodrich-Gannett, which is named after the Goodrich family which was involved with social work. They was one of the pastors of the Old Stone Church many years ago, and Gannett was a social worker for many years. So the community house in the neighborhood at St. Clair and 55th is known as Goodrich-Gannett. And so the neighborhood social planning areas that the social workers use for a lot of their stuff is called Goodrich-Gannett area. The neighborhood people don’t really refer to it as anything. Sometimes the Near East Side. I’m from the west side. Ohio City was always called by us the Near West Side or if you’re Irish or old neighborhood, we call it Old St. Pat’s neighborhood, which is the parish. A lot of times people refer to their neighborhood by the major Catholic church in it. That’s, they would say the Immaculate Conception area or St. Vitus area or I’m from, where you from? I’m from St. Paul’s Parish. The lines are not exact, but most of the people that I’ve met are Polish and Slovenian and have the oldest and deepest roots in the neighborhood. There’s a lot of people came in the seventies that are Korean, but they kind of are thought of by other people from the outside as being part of the Chinese community. The original Chinatown is actually behind the Plain Dealer. There’s only a couple of streets because it’s sort of a sexy sounding thing in the social work trade. I guess it’s been extended all the way up to 55th from about 18th from the lake to about Prospect is what people would refer to as Chinatown now. Same thing happened in Ohio City. The realtors and other developers kept expanding the original borders of what the map shows Ohio City like. And the Ohio City Corporation was more than happy to keep expanding its area. So it’s probably four or five times larger than the original Ohio City. So, similar here. I call it Little Yugoslavia, which seems to irritate all of the ethnic groups that are from Yugoslavia because they want to be Serb, not Serbians aren’t here so much, but the Croatians and Slovenians especially like to separate themselves from each other. [laughs] So I say, oh, it’s more like Little Yugoslavia. And they go, what’s that? It’s my invention. So anyways.

James Calder [00:03:12] And so you- Well, one thing you focus on besides baseball is the ethnic history of Cleveland. That’s what we talked about, right?

Jim Egan [00:03:23] Yeah, we talked about, you know, I’m familiar with the different nationalities and how, when and where they came into Cleveland. My specialty and interest is in the baseball history, the sport from 1865 through 1900. That’s probably. I know more about that than, than anybody, I hope.

James Calder [00:03:40] Okay.

Jim Egan [00:03:41] I feel sorry for them if they know more than me, because then they’re supposed to not had a whole lot of a life for a while. [laughs]

James Calder [00:03:46] All right, well, we can move, and we talked before. We can move in a lot of directions. Yeah, talk about the, some of the things about the history of Cleveland that we talked about before. We can talk about you personally. Personal stories of Cleveland’s another thing we like to, to get into. And then also, obviously, your specialty, baseball in Cleveland. So, I don’t know. Which do you feel like talking about today?

Jim Egan [00:04:15] Well, I think I’d like to hear a little bit about baseball history, but this is basically the Euclid Corridor, so if I can tie into a few things along that line, I would think. The one thing that comes to mind ties into baseball is on 40th and Euclid Avenue is St. Paul’s Church, which was purchased by the Catholic diocese from a protestant congregation, and that was known as the church of John D. Rockefeller. That was his church, and he’s. One of his early mansions was basically behind the church. So he was not too far from the baseball park that was on 46th and Carnegie, which was the first National League park. So he could have probably almost heard of ball games out the back window of his mansion. And I think that’s kind of cool that John D. Rockefeller was right there when the ball games were being played. My grandfather was quite a bit older when he got married. He was actually born in 1879. So it’s easy for me to remember his birthday, because that was the year that ballpark opened. It was 1879. I always stop and think my grandfather was maybe five years old. He might have gone to a ball game the last year of the National League park, which was in 1884. He would have been five years old, but it’s possible that he came up here. He lived in southern Ohio many years, but came to Cleveland and went to the Spanish American War in 1898 as a young man, and was probably mustered out at one of the two armories. In 1898, the boys in Cleveland from the Cleveland Grays and other units had a breakfast at the Central Armory, which is down near City Hall, and the other armory, which is the Grays Armory, which is on Bolivar and Prospect. The different groups had a breakfast with their families, and then they organized up, and they marched in uniform down Euclid Avenue with people waving flags and wishing them well. They marched all the way down Euclid Avenue, past Public Square, and down a hill into the flats by the Baltimore & Ohio railroad yards. They were all loaded onto the trains and headed towards southern Ohio, where they hooked up with some other trains on their way to Cuba. That was done in the morning. It also happened to be the opening day of the baseball season, the same day. So it was a rather sad day for the town. They were wishing their troops well. So my grandfather may very well have been one of the troops marching from perhaps the Gray’s Armory, which is not too far from Jacobs Field, which is kind of another baseball connection. So, in all my baseball history, I’ve always run into all kinds of other related histories of different things in Cleveland that I find kind of, you know, ironic or interesting coincidences. That’s one of the reasons I like the downtown neighborhood, because all the old ballparks that I study, which predate League Park at 66th and Lexington, are all below, pretty much all below 55th Street. So I’m right in the center of where all this history was. And the original city ran from, basically from the square up to 55th. Once you passed East 55th, that was the original city of East Cleveland, which did not become a part of Cleveland until 1873. So everywhere I wander around in the downtown area, in the neighborhood that I live in, I say, I’m in Moses Cleaveland’s original Cleveland, and I touch the ground. I say, these are where all these old pioneers were roaming around. And I find some things that are very interesting, and I go, oh, that’s what that is. I’ll see a fence, and there’ll be a weird stone column on it, and there’s just three or four of them. And I know what they are, and the people on the streets don’t know. They’re horse hitching posts that are left over from the days of the horse. A lot of the houses do not have driveways in the near east area or Chinatown area because they didn’t have cars, and horses were banned. You had to go down to the corner and rent a horse at the livery because they didn’t want them on the streets. There was really no room for horses when the population got very large. And what’s interesting is the oldest, junkiest looking houses. The oldest ones are the junkiest looking houses. They’re little wood shacks thrown together. Some of the deeds show them from, like, 1840s, 1850s. I thought they were something that had been built maybe in the Depression, in the thirties, initially, until I started checking in a little bit more, I said, well, the reason that the nicer, interesting mansions and old buildings are not as old is because the city didn’t have any money yet. It wasn’t until the wealth was made that people could build, like, little stone or brick buildings. And some of the earliest mansions are not real fancy, but they sort of stand out in the neighborhood. But they were all built after 1870. Everything I’ve been able to find, and people think, they look at it and say, oh, that’s the oldest thing in the neighborhood. And it’s really a little run down shack next to its older. The housing, when it was built, little developers, they would put in the sewer and some other basically infrastructure, and it was up to you to put the house on the property. So the houses were not put together by professionals. When you get in some of these old houses, you’ll find out that the back room, all of a sudden, the joists or the two by fours that are holding up the building get further and further apart because grandma and grandpa were running out of wood and money. So the back of the houses oftentimes are flimsier because they didn’t know how much wood to use. So they needed an extra room and what they had left. That’s what they used. And if they were short, that was too bad. Also, what makes it interesting is the oldest houses have a little telltale sign. It’s the chimneys. The chimneys are left over from the pre-Civil War times. And if you look at all the different chimneys, the oldest, strangest looking chimneys oftentimes are the oldest houses. And another weird feature of some of the older architecture is that the houses, some of them are pretty large, have flat roofs and a little raised part in front of them. They’re similar to, like what you would see in a western movie frontier town, where the guys are always up on a roof shooting at people. It’s a flat roof. Those are some of the earliest houses, too, because that was a western style architecture that really became known in the west. But this was a pioneer town at the time of Moses Cleaveland. So that architecture was already somewhat new here. So the frontier expanded so quickly after the 1830s that people don’t realize that this was really the staging ground for the movement west. Cleveland was described in one book by a local pillow called Where the East Coast Meets the Midwest. And that’s really a good description. And also it has a sort of a. In the ruling classes, it has sort of a Yale, which is Connecticut, attitude. Moses Cleaveland went to Yale College. Our Public Square is laid out on sort of the Connecticut New England style city, which makes it different than a number of other cities I’ve been in, because mentally, Clevelanders have the Terminal Tower and Public Square almost in their heart as a symbol of their city. It’s a physical, emotional symbol. That’s Cleveland. Even as a kid, I go, oh, Terminal Tower. Somehow that represented Cleveland sort of like Notre Dame Cathedral or some other major icon in the world. That, to me, was always important.

James Calder [00:11:28] Excellent. That’s. Well, so the people moved out. When did baseball start in Cleveland?

Jim Egan [00:11:39] Baseball as an organized sport started in Cleveland in 1865. There had been forms of the game played many years before, but it wasn’t a systematic rules game. There was pickup games. They had a large number of different names. Barnball, goldball, wicket. Around the country, they’ve been playing baseball. There’s some records that go back to the- Showing that the American soldiers playing form of baseball at Valley Forge in the middle of the American Revolutionary War. But the organized games rule started in New York City in 1845. That game expanded along the east coast. And when the Civil War started, the New York organized game, being that it was something being organized, the military being organized. The military encouraged its members to play the organized baseball. So a lot of the soldiers had the rulebook when they came back. So most of the early players in Cleveland were Civil War veterans, a lot of them. Some of them from Oberlin College, which they had returned to college after the war. I have a little interesting story about how right after there was a big celebration in Oberlin when they got word that Lee had surrendered at Appomattox, he had a bonfire that went on all night, and a week later, there’s a couple days later, actually, there’s a story in the paper about a train coming into town, and three young men wearing Confederate uniforms jumped off the train and ran out of town as fast as they could. The papers speculated that they were guys from the countryside looking for work. So some of the farm boys joined the wrong side in the war, hitched a train ride back up north, and knew when they were in Oberlin, which very liberal town to run quick before they were captured. Shortly after the end of the month, there was organized games being played in Oberlin, and Cleveland organized a team later in the fall, and they were the only two organized teams, so they ended up playing each other in 1865 in Cleveland. So that’s written down as the first game of baseball.

James Calder [00:13:36] So was this New York and Cleveland?

Jim Egan [00:13:38] Well, this is a New York-style game. It’s called the New York. It was the New York rules.

James Calder [00:13:42] Okay.

Jim Egan [00:13:43] Okay. That was. That game is the New York rules of the Knickerbockers of Alexander Cartwright. That document, that set of rules is what today’s baseball evolved from as an organized sport. In the early days, it was regulated by an amateur association similar to the NCAA. And professionalism started creeping into the game on the east coast. And by 1868, there was already money being paid under the table in Cleveland. And a year later, professionalism was officially sanctioned. And that’s when the famous Cincinnati Red Stockings, who went for almost two years undefeated, won 84 straight games with one tie, they came to Cleveland during that time period, and Cleveland went down to Cincinnati. We managed to lose all the games we played with them. But four cities, Cleveland were considered one of the top teams in the country, definitely, perhaps one of the top two or three in the state. And from that amateur club, which was originally a cricket club before the Civil War, players were mostly from some of the ruling classes. They were the gentry of Cleveland, some of the Hanna families. The names of the players. You look around town, you see the names on all the buildings downtown. Those people that were the old White Anglo-Saxon Protestant ruling class. Then they started hiring ringers that they would bring in from New York. So when you start seeing a lot of Irish last names, you start realizing these are guys who are being paid under the table. So the four city clubs evolved into what became the major league baseball teams of the 1870s and on through the end of the century. It’s a very interesting history because it teaches you a lot about how baseball was introduced to the various ethnic groups. You start to see as different groups become larger in town, you’ll have a Gratzinger’s which is like a German club, or they’ll have different nationalities will have a club. It’ll be the Polish boys. Or there’s a team of young Irish kids, immigrants on the west side. And they call themselves the Young Potatoes Hard to Peel, which is hard to beat us. And there was later some commercial aspects of the amateur game, the little Leaguers. One group was called the Blue Pigs, which I thought was kind of interesting name. And then somewhere I ran across that was an ointment that was developed by a local pharmacist. It was in a blue bottle, and the medicine that was used comes from the lining of the pig. And I guess it was something that was used, and pepsin, I believe it was used in chewing gum later. But a lot of that was developed in Cleveland. And Doctor Beeman, who was from Cleveland, was Beeman gum, is the most famous. So I think this was his blue bottles of ointment, and he was sponsoring this team so they called themselves the Blue Pigs, rather than Blue Ointments. The joke being that the pig was, you know, the ointment was from the lining of the pig. These are all interesting little things or something it took a long time to find out. Just with a lot of reading, you make connections that you would read and go, I have no idea what this is. This is a time period, it’s interesting to go back in Cleveland history, and when you read all the newspapers and the crime reports and you start to put together, there’s sort of a mindset or a way of thinking or a sense of humor that was in touch with the times of the country, but was also something that was more uniquely Cleveland. Writings about baseball games and so forth, where Cleveland crowds would go to other cities, they would write about the Cleveland crowd, how they were, people of Cleveland were different than they were other places. They would say, Cleveland has a unique voice, and they’re very loud, and they would hear a lot of different languages being spoken and curses and cusses. But they would all go as groups to these games. And they were usually the ones that traveled on the road to watch the team play were the heavy bettors from Cleveland, and they represented all different types of backgrounds. So the gamblers were almost an ethnic group in themselves, comprised of all the different groups in Cleveland. So they were sort of like- [laughs] They were a melting pot of sort of a negative type. But that I found interesting, and that’s just a lot of interesting things about how, from that time period, that, you know the expression, the more things change, the more they stay the same. There’s so much current of human nature all through times, and a lot of practical things that you wouldn’t think about that they go, well, today we do that. Things had to be done then. They were clever. For example, they didn’t have television, they didn’t have radio, but they had the telegraph. So when a baseball team would go on the road, there would be such an interest in the teams that some clever, theatrical people would actually have a show, which they would dress up as the ball players from the two teams and reenact, via telegraph reports, the game in progress on the roads. Cleveland Spiders and the Boston Bean Eaters could be playing in Boston, and you would get the guys pretending they’re pitching on stage, dressed up- One guy would be dressed up as a Cleveland pitcher, Cy Young. And they were just making up as they went along. All they had was the hits and the runs per inning. And they tried to make it as close to the actual occurrence. And it would be advertised as, come see the reenactment of the live game. [laughs] Re-see it as it happens. See the reproduction of an actual event almost in exact time. And there was a few other things they did where they would actually build big displays and put ’em up in halls and charge to get in there. And they would have little figurine characters that were mechanically running around the bases. And it was like looking at a giant scoreboard. If you were at the game and all you were looking at was a scoreboard, you would see how that was happening. But it was a mechanical computer contrivance that some of the kids at Case Institute put together to make some money.

James Calder [00:19:15] So was even amateur baseball very popular?

Jim Egan [00:19:19] Yes, amateur baseball was extremely popular. There was a lot. There were a lot of fields, and there’s different types of amateur baseball. There’s little kids played in any corner lot whatsoever. But all the factories in town, a lot of them had good grounds set aside. There was like the rubber works grounds. There would be the basket grounds and hardware grounds. And the different major manufacturing concerns would build ballparks on their facilities. It would be sort of the home field for their factory team, but they would play other factory teams around town or other amateur teams. They would sometimes line up games with, let’s say, for Yale College would come into town, or the University of Michigan from Ann Arbor would come into town and play factory teams. So they were kind of semi pro league. Or the guys that played on the team didn’t work as many hours as the guys who didn’t play on the teams. And then there was city leagues, which came about a little bit later when there was a need for recreation as the ethnic population expanded so much that the city got into the recreation more and more. The park systems came about. This was all largely in the 1890s. The city from 1865, with the first organized teams, had of population around 70,000, and by the close of the century, it was 350,000. So that’s, you know, a fivefold increase in population, some of it through annexation, but it was just a huge amount of immigration coming into town. They even had to have an immigrant police that were down at the railroad yards to make sure that the flim flam artists didn’t rip off the new ethnic people when they were coming into town. So they would say, you know, you just come in from- Are you a Swedish immigrant group? Yeah. Come with me. I’m your immigration officer. So that was kind of- I found that interesting. And then there was little articles you read—I would cut them out—about different characters around town. And some of the so-called homeless people of the times, they would have different odd names, and they were doing some of the same things that were going on today. The city was trying to regulate some of the shoeshine boys because they were charging out of towners a dime, and they were only authorized to charge a nickel. They were chasing them around a little bit. You can’t do that. You’re ripping the tourists off. It’s not good. Things that happen today are the same things that are same locations. It’s fun to read about, on Ontario and Euclid, this was happening. There was one ballplayer. He went in there into a bar on Ontario street. He didn’t stay with the team very long because he was too heavy a drinker, and his nickname was Gentle Willie, and he was anything but that. He was always getting in trouble. And he walks into this bar, which was attached to a hotel downtown, and he runs into two guys that are in town doing a show. One’s a professional wrestler, and his buddy’s a professional boxer. So this little Gentle Willie starts picking on ’em. And the one wrestler tells the boxer, don’t hit him. Your hand’s not healed up yet. Don’t hit him. I’ll hit him for you. So the wrestler throws him on the ground and beats the holy bejesus out of him. And Willie runs out and says, I’ll be back. I’m going to get my gun. I’ll fix you guys. Well, he never came back. He probably went and got drunk at another bar. But the story got told by some people that were there to the manager of the baseball team, and Willie was given his walking papers. So, I liked stories like that. There’s a lot of very human stories. You pick out the right stories from reading the paper, it kind of gives you some insight into how the people were thinking, the different classes of people, different attitudes. Some were highly educated, some were not so highly educated, but sometimes they’re the more interesting characters.

James Calder [00:22:51] How was the average baseball player originally? Where did they- Well, I think you kind of said-

Jim Egan [00:23:02] Originally, most of the professionals that stocked all the major league teams and the most western city at one point in the early major leagues was Cleveland, and then it became Chicago and St. Louis. Most of the teams in the 1870s, when the major leagues first started, were stocked by players that came from Philadelphia, Boston and New York. Those were the heavy centers of baseball professionalism. There were a lot of Irish players. There was some speculation in one newspaper is why there were so many Irish players in the major leagues. And one guy said, well, their parents are all drunk all the time. They’re immigrants, they don’t like to work, so the kids play baseball constantly from the time they come out of the crib. So by the time they’re teenagers, they’re almost professionals already, because they play 12 hours a day, seven days a week. So that was one kind of theory that wouldn’t be accepted today. But they would write a lot of politically incorrect things in a paper at that time, which you’re kind of like, okay, that’s kind of interesting. Or they would couch it in certain riddles. You go, oh, I know what they’re talking about. The Irish, being part Irish, I get a kick out of reading some of these comments from the more English writers in the early papers, and they became more accommodating. The Irish became writers on a lot of the papers, too. So then after being kicked around by the English writers, they started kicking around whatever group was more recently coming to town. They would beat up on them a little bit. But Irish writers were kind of funny, because whatever it was, it was a new building or a new ballpark, it was the most beautiful thing ever built. This is the greatest, the most grandest. I go, what? It was just sort of a style among those writers. If it’s new, it’s the biggest and best there ever was. It’s truly beautiful and grand and magical. [laughs] And then you would read sometimes where there would be actually, they would try to. The writers would try to imitate, like, accents or expressions of different nationalities. It would be kind of funny. One mayor Tom Johnson’s brother, was very involved with baseball, and he would do imitations of the different nationalities. I guess he had a very good imitation of the Irish brogue. So he was a popular show, but he would show off to his English friends doing that. And he was a real character. He went to the one ballpark, and he was with his wealthy friends, and they were gamblers and other things and hotel owners. And they had a little corner of the ballpark over by near 55th in Carnegie. And they call it Blackberry Wine Row. They drank blackberry wine, and they would do all kinds of stunts. And they were like. They were sort of the first unofficial booster club. And one of their hijinks that they would pull is Al Johnson shows up with a mascot, which is like an animal that was supposed to bring the team good luck, and it was a bear cub. And he was bringing that around for a while. So I guess it started getting a little bit too big or making a mess. And he banned his bear from the ballpark. They were very popular in the newspaper. And in 1883, the team did very, very well, but they basically used one pitcher. And by the end of the year, Jim McCormick had pitched about 70 games and was so tired his arm wasn’t ready to fall off. So they went from first place, and they dropped down a couple in the standings. But they left Cleveland to close out the season for several weeks. The last three weeks of the season were on the road.

James Calder [00:26:08] Which team was this?

Jim Egan [00:26:10] Well, this was the 1883 Cleveland Bluestockings of the National League. It was the first time they were very competitive. When they closed out the home season at home, and see they had almost a month of road games. At the end of the season, they were in first place. So they had a big celebration, and a whole lot of bottles of wine got broke open in Blackberry Wine Row. The heads off a lot of. I forget the expression. He was the. The heads were knocked off a lot of better bottles of wine in that one section of the left field, outfield, lower deck is where they were at. And because there’s not a whole lot written about these parks, it’s difficult to know how advanced they were. There was one little article that said the police officer chased one of the youngsters off to the corner of the field where he was sitting on a fire hydrant. So I didn’t realize that the ballparks had fire hydrants in them. So that was, they were a little bit more, as far back as 1879, a little more sophisticated than you would think that they actually had fire protection in the ballparks. They actually had hooked up to hydrants. In case of a fire, they were built out of wood. A lot of these ballparks burned down around the country. It wasn’t until the 20th century that they went over to more cement and steel skyscraper techniques, and they were able to build much bigger ballparks. These ballparks all had seating for anywhere from a thousand to 3,000. And a really big holiday game you might get 6, 7,000. It would be mostly standing room. They were interesting places.

James Calder [00:27:33] What were some of the. Well, I guess, actually, we’ll go with that. What description can you offer of the early ballpark? Sort of beyond what you just said?

Jim Egan [00:27:43] They were wooden structures. They would tend to have bleachers, which they would. They. They call them. Sometimes they call them the sunboards. Bleaches are also used. And it was an uncovered set of freestanding stands, which benches? They would have a pavilion, which would be wooden benches, but they might have a wooden back, and that would have a little bit of a cover over it. The bleachers, for example, might be a quarter. The pavilion might be thirty five cents, and then a fancy grandstand would be fifty cents. And that would have a clubhouse underneath it, oftentimes. Some of them would have, like, facilities for the writers. There would be visitors in a home team clubhouse. There would be showers for the home team. Oftentimes the visiting team had a shower up at the hotel, and they would come down on the city buses or cable cars in uniform. And opening day, they would be brought down with parades on the cable cars. The two teams would get together and they’d have a brass band, and they would parade the city to advertise opening day. And then they would march across the field with a band leading them. There’s all kinds of pomp and ceremony connected with opening day for many years. The ballparks, they were pretty simple affairs, but each generation, it would last five or six years, the franchise would leave where it would be time to rebuild a ballpark. They were built out of wood. They were thrown up for about five to $10,000, which was quite a bit of money at that time, but nowhere near the amount involved with the modern facilities. But baseball grew, as everywhere in the country as the population expanded. So the ballpark in 1871, which major league would hold 1,500. By the turn of the century, the first wooden League Park would hold 10,000. So you would see an increase of about eight times. But they were still all built out of wood. They got more sophisticated with it. They learned to do things that they didn’t know they could do with wood. Union carpenters came in, there were fights with the owners over having to hire union labor to put up the ballpark. So there was a lot of different things around that way. There were strikes and attempts at union organization by the 1890s. Cleveland was- A number of trade guilds banded together here to form one of the first labor organizations in the country. And it’s considered by many people sort of the antecedent of the directly antecedent it was. The Cleveland Labor Guild became the AFL American Federation of Labor, pretty much traces itself to- Some people claim it’s from Cleveland, but it’s close. A lot of the organizing of the AFL or its predecessors were Cleveland groups. You can see that even involved with the baseball, there were some issues dealing with the unions. The unions would boycott the team if they were mad at the owner for using non labor in building some facility. Well, it might even have anything to do with baseball. He might have used non-union building one of his railroad lines or streetcar lines, and they would say, well, we’ll take it out on him by not going to his ball games. There were issues with a lot of fighting between the religious groups and the baseball owners and other entertainment owners because so many entertainments were banned on Sunday. The church groups wanted the people to go to church, and the working-class guys were working Saturdays. And sometimes would get off for a game. The one day they could go was Sunday. So Sunday games, when they were able to hold ’em, sometimes you would hold ’em outside of Cleveland on a neutral site or at an amusement park or illegally in the city, would double the draw for the whole week. So you could make 10,000. You could get 10,000 people in on a Sunday, whereas on a Tuesday you might only draw 800. So the owners definitely wanted to have Sunday baseball, and they thought it was a clean-cut game. They would ban liquor sales on Sundays, please the church groups. But they were fought pretty hard. One of the interesting stories is about what was referred to in Plain Dealer as an unholy alliance in which the Ministers Association and the Bar Owners Association got together to keep baseball from being played on Sunday. Apparently the owners of the bars had all kinds of political connections, and they were staying open on Sunday all throughout the town illegally anyway. So for some reason, they were able to organize themselves together with the Ministers Association for different reasons. We got our connections to stay open, and you want to keep your business going. They were afraid that the ballparks were going to take away from the liquor business as well as from the church attendance. And so it was referred to as an unholy alliance. Went on for a while, and it just delayed the inevitable. Cleveland had Sunday games by the early part of the 20th century. And some cities, like Philadelphia, surprisingly didn’t really have Sunday baseball until almost after World War One. That was a big issue. It was kind of interesting to watch a lot of the politics involved. There were some other political interesting things that happened, too. A police lieutenant showed up at the ballpark early in the year and told the owner that they needed a special license for every ballgame, and it would cost, like $5 a game for the special license that the mayor now wanted. And the owner of the team went downtown and found an office that issues these licenses, and they couldn’t find a baseball park license. So they found one that had to deal with- Had to deal with the- I’m trying to remember exactly how they described it, essentially what it was, it was a, it was sort of an entertainment license, but it dealt with the regulation of the bathhouses and at the public parks. So basically, he got a bath house license, which was an entertainment license, which was basically a license that regulated city parks and the concession stands. And he got that license, and it was like $20. He then took the $20 license, and he said that, according to the law, that he is now to be provided police protection with his special license at the cost of, like, $1 a game or something like that. And he said he had ten off-duty policemen that he was paying $2 a game, which was $20 a game. And he wanted the city to provide all this police that were needed for the size of his crowds for this $1, because that’s written into this special license he has. And the mayor and everybody, like, all of a sudden, there was no more herd. He couldn’t get any more- There was no more harassment. There was no more talk about any special game licenses. It was like, okay, forget it. [laughs] There was other complaints about how the policemen wanted to get raises for the amount they were getting paid at the games, and the papers were criticizing them a great deal about that. And the papers would take turns criticizing each other, because one newspaper would get five free passes for its writers, and another paper would say, they deserve 15, and one would call the other one greedy. So when they’re not writing about how the policemen are trying to get away with something, they were busy trying to get away with something themselves. [laughs] It’s kind of funny to see how the world worked at that time hasn’t changed.

James Calder [00:34:42] Yeah, I know. Sounds like today.

Jim Egan [00:34:45] We’re just talking a lot about baseball here, because that’s the thing I know a lot about. I’m trying to give some insight into the nature of what Cleveland’s mindset, history is. A lot of things kind of follow all the way through history. Don’t quite understand why certain things are done certain ways. Can’t give me any concrete examples. There’s sort of like an instinctual feeling I have about a lot of things from reading history, I go, Cleveland’s always been kind of known for that. There’s some criticism of Clevelanders in general who have never been the greatest dressers in the world. There’s some exceptions about that, but that they were much more of a plain town. I’ve read stories that when they couldn’t sell certain types of clothing lines that came out of the New York garment manufacturer’s designs, they could always dump it in Cleveland. They could get rid of it. When they couldn’t sell it anywhere else, they would sell here. And some of the earliest history books about Cleveland talk about Clevelanders are basically rather simply dressed. They wear simple shirts. [laughs] They were not the most sophisticated people. Yet, they were a sophisticated city. This city was said to really not ever have farmers. It was really sort of a merchant-class city from day one. So Clevelanders always kind of set themselves apart from the outlying areas referred to what today would be the suburbs as land of the hicks. And they were always sort of from the very, very beginning, there was always sort of like a humor between the more sophisticated city person, the guys coming in from the countryside. That was sort of a running gag throughout the stories about the city. Maybe some redneck coming in from, farmer coming in from Westlake or whatever the township was called that time. There would be different operators down on the square trying to hustle them into whatever they had going. Oh, you want to go to this. This. You want to go to this event, or you want to go to this event? And they were sort of, like, waiting for ’em.

James Calder [00:36:35] Well, what- One thing I wanted to ask you, we’re talking about is especially the parks themselves, where were they? Well, one thing I thought was interesting-

Jim Egan [00:36:46] Ballparks?

James Calder [00:36:47] Yeah. Is that, um, you said they would only last, like, two or three years-?

Jim Egan [00:36:51] Well, they would last anywhere, about five years for most of them, until League Park started in 1891. And that was a wooden park, and that parcel was sort of like the last undeveloped piece of land within the central city. So they had to stay there. And that, in one form or another, parts were torn down and built on top of that, lasted from 1891 up until about last. Games were. Major League games were probably played there in the fifties, early fifties, and then it became a city recreation center. It’s an interesting, that particular parcel land at 66th and Lexington, and there’s been amateur baseball and major league baseball played there from continuously from about 1889 up to the present. So it’s probably the only facility, a piece of land that had a major league ballpark on it for a number of years, that actually had baseball played there for 115 years continuously. And it’s still there, and they’re going to remodel it into a museum, possible site for Cleveland State University. A lot of history is going to be sort of like the cornerstone for the redevelopment of that neighborhood and the heart of the old Hough neighborhood, which was at one time the very wealthy part of Cleveland. So there’s some hopes for that. It may take a while yet. Cleveland takes a while to get things done. The Euclid Corridor Project that was everybody talks about with the transportation system and development of the entire Euclid Avenue from the University Circle downtown. I remember hearing plans about that when I ran a coffeehouse in East Cleveland in 1969. There was some fellow from one of the foundations was in, said, Oh, you ought to see the plans they have. They got this great development plan they’re going to have, you know, the Euclid Corridor is going to be all renovated by the early, by 1973. You’re not going to recognize Euclid. Well, that, 35 years later, this is starting to happen, or pretty much is a done deal now. But all these five-year plans in Cleveland sometimes take 35 years. So a five-year plan is seven five-year plans. So that’s why, I’m getting up in age, I think any real estate opportunities that might have presented themselves, had I had a little bit of money today I wouldn’t do because I’m afraid I’ll be dead by the time that happens. There’s some things I could have done if I had a little money in 1970, which I was a little bit short, that would have made me some money over the years. But that didn’t happen. So. When you’re 18 years old, you don’t want to think about, well, I did this, and maybe when I’m 60, I’ll make a nice profit off it. You don’t want to wait that long, so you pass on it.

James Calder [00:39:24] Is there anything you’d like to talk to just growing up in Cleveland because you grew up in Cleveland?

Jim Egan [00:39:28] Yeah, I grew up on my father’s- I’m actually third generation Irish, and they trace their ancestry back to St. Patrick’s, probably the late 1880s, early 1890s. My grandfather and father grew up on the near west side, what they call Ohio City now, and my great grandfather came here from Wisconsin. He was a coal miner. And they were originally came from England via County Mayo, Ireland. They went to Preston, England, got involved with the boats, came over here as sailors, worked on the Great Lakes, and settled in Wisconsin, and they came to Cleveland in the 1890s. They know all the Irish history. They talk about when they were basically ditch diggers, and they worked their way into the politics and they became policemen and politicians. So I hear all kinds of great stories about what your great uncle did in 1920 and how different they would get into it with different nationalities. He had a cement company, supposedly in the twenties. I used to see my great uncle’s name, JP Egan, on some of the sidewalks, and that was their small cement company. The story goes in the family is that they went into another nationality neighborhood, and they told the guy, well, you got to vote for this Irish politician. Well, we’re voting for our guy. He’s running for a councilman. So somehow a couple of bars that were asked to put these political signs up had their sidewalks all smashed up with sledgehammers overnight. My uncle’s, great uncle’s company got the job replacing their sidewalks when they wanted one of their companies to do it, whatever the deal was. So they were out to get them. So they went out of this mysterious to get out of the cement company rather quickly. [laughs] Another story about my, one of my great uncles was a policeman, young policeman in his early twenties, and they didn’t have a whole lot of money. They weren’t well trained at that point. He got off- He was riding a streetcar home, and he was wearing a uniform, and there was a street fight going on. It seems to me they’re more like security guards today, but there was a street fight going on in the corner in a nationality area that wasn’t Irish, but it was where he had to make his connection. So he made the mistake of breaking it up, and I guess he hit the one guy pretty good with a billy club. He turned out to be a relative of one of the councilmen down there. And the councilman called up the police chief and said, you know, in no uncertain terms of that certain Irish so and so was seen getting off the streetcar. That’ll be the last time you see him. So my great uncle got called into the office of his commander and said, You’re not gonna be wearing a uniform anymore. He goes, it was an incident over there. I wrote up what happened. He said, yeah, we know about that. He says, but we’re going to have to promote you. He goes, what? He said, I’m going to put you in plain clothes. I’m making you a detective so you can ride the streetcar and they won’t spot you in that uniform. He said to my grandfather, if I knew that’s all it took, was beating up one of these guys, I would have done it a long time ago. [laughs] I would have done it much earlier to get the promotion. So he got promoted by beating somebody up or breaking up a fight, depending on whose side of the story you’re listening to. I kind of find that kind of interesting, that that’s how things were done at that time period. It was a little bit later when Eliot Ness came to town that they actually became much more of a professional police force. He put car radios in the police cars and actually had a training academy and actually learned to operate somewhat professionally. Well, some of the stories I heard about things that went on in the thirties sounded anything but professional. But I guess they were somewhat of an improvement over, like, are you a good Irish boy? You know right from wrong? Here’s your club, here’s your gun, go do your job. That was about it. [laughs] The priest doesn’t have anything bad. The parish doesn’t have anything bad to say about you, so you can be a cop.

James Calder [00:43:14] Do you have any stories from the thirties stick out?

Jim Egan [00:43:22] Not right offhand. This was the Depression, and people struggled. My grandfather was on the Irish side, he was involved with the union movement. He worked for Corrigan McKinney, which was a steel mills, which I believe became- It was either Jones and Laughlin or Republic. I think it became Republic. But Corrigan and McKinney was well known, and he was involved. He got blackballed, as they called it. He wasn’t allowed to work because he said all the guys that organized the union, as soon as the union got in, they got rid of us. They put in the professional union people. And the real workers that were behind the organizing got shoved aside. And he got a job in the probably late twenties, actually, and then through the thirties at Standard Erin Brew, which was a beer making company over on Train Avenue. And it was a German people owned it, but they had some Irish partners and one of the congressmen Feighan. There was a couple of Congressmen Feighans. There was a more recent Feighan, Ed Feighan ran for mayor. He was for congressman for a while. But it was his grandfather was on the immigration committee. And he had a lot of that helped him a lot politically in Cleveland, because he got various nationalities citizenship for their family members. But he was involved with ownership of this brewery. And they hired, through Feighan, all the Irish strikers that were blackballed by other companies. They had to go to work for the brewery. So my grandfather got to become a stationary engineer, which was a guy who watched all the gauges and dials on the vats at night. And he liked it because there were no bosses around. He was a bit of an artist, and he used to draw pictures on the tanks, and he drew a lot of pictures of American Indians and stuff. Sometimes the bosses would come over to see some of his artwork, but he liked to work that late shift. And one of the stories is that the Irish policemen or their friends, they weren’t Irish, but they were friends of the Irish policemen, other policemen, would come by late at night, at two in the morning when he was bored, and they would open up the back garage door of part of the brewery, and they could pull the police car in there and hide it. And the guys would have a couple of shorties, which were like the beers that had been shorted when they were being put online. If it came off the assembly line, it wasn’t filled all the way to the top. It was discarded and put in a box separately. Well, a couple of these short boxes were always ended up over in the stationary engineer’s room. And they would be passed out to the policemen that needed to catch a little bit of sleep or a little bit of rest, or they were bored. And they would have a beer or two and talk to my grandfather and some of the other workers about politics. My grandfather knew everybody in town. Unfortunately, he died at a relatively young age, in his sixties, and so all his political connections didn’t do his grandkids any good, because my father was not involved with any of that stuff. But that was always kind of. I thought that was kind of funny. And also that the different nationality groups that would work for the breweries, they were in different buildings. The Germans would be in one building, the Irish in another building, and Polish in another. Those were the three I remember my grandfather said they had to let them out at different times so they wouldn’t get in fights with each other. And they were isolated in the building. So it was like the great American melting pot that Archie Bunker talks about, all Americans getting along fine, each in his own neighborhood after dark, and God help you if you go into their neighborhood after dark where you don’t belong, that’s the American way. So it was sort of an element of that was true. The Irish and the Polish had a lot of bad blood between them because a lot of Polish have been brought in from Europe to- A lot of the young boys who were avoiding a civil war over there were brought to Cleveland by some of the owners of the factories to help be replacement workers. And so there was sort of an antagonism. There’s an old story that goes at the South High Ironman, which is what they were called at one time. Later, the Flyers, I believe they call the South High Ironman. That was considered like the steel ward, that was heavily Polish, and then Holy Name over on Broadway, Catholic school, was called the Greenway because it was heavily Irish. And so this historical antagonism between the Polish and Irish workers was kind of taken out on the football field between these two rival teams that were in the East Senate for many years. So the Holy Name - South High was a big, big game and had a lot of ethnic roots going. It was sort of like having a warfare without having a warfare. That was the east side stuff that I heard about.

James Calder [00:47:44] Was any of that ever reflected in sort of the baseball games, too, or were they completely separate then?

Jim Egan [00:47:50] Baseball didn’t have the intensity as a high school football. It was interesting. And the games weren’t played in the evenings under lights. They were like daytime games. So the baseball, you know, it might have been earlier on, but I mean, this is. We’re talking the 20th century. The football rivalries between the east side and the west side and the various schools were much more interesting to the people in general. They were talked about a lot more. The Ignatius and Benedictine games were huge. Even when I was a kid, they would be played on the radio. I mean, people all over Cleveland that had nothing to do with Catholic schools, were interested in the east side versus the west side, which meant the two powerhouse Catholic schools would be playing each other. And they used to go have the Thanksgiving Day game down at the stadium, actually, that’s the last football game, actually that was, I think, 1967. St. Ignatius was playing Glenville, I think. And those were- Those were because of some problems between the kids having too many fights. Those games were discontinued for many, many years. I think they brought them back, like last year for the first time in many years. But that was the game down at the stadium on Thanksgiving Day. It was a very big local event. A lot of things are- People have like a Cleveland identity. Those are- That’s one of the part of the Cleveland identity. You run into people when you travel. When I was younger and traveled around the country and from Shaker Heights or anywhere else, or you’re like their long lost countrymen or something. Oh, yeah, I’m from Cleveland. What part? Shaker. I go, I’m from the city. They go, no, that’s the same thing. And I go, okay. [laughs] It wasn’t when we were there, because now that we’re not there, it’s the one big area. There was one older couple - I was a kid, I was hitchhiking - They picked me up for some reason. They were both from Shaker. And you remember-? Oh, yeah, I know about the Shaker. Oh, he knows about the Shaker Rapid. And they went on and on about the Shaker Rapid. It was like, they hadn’t been in Cleveland 50 years, but it was kind of interesting. And I was always surprised to find out in my travels how many Clevelanders were all- You couldn’t go anywhere in the United States without running into some Clevelanders. And even in San Francisco, when I was there for a short time in 1970, I went up to the Haight-Ashbury area. I wanted to see what was left of that. And it was even that early, ’70, was very little left from what was called the Summer of Love, but there was still some remnants of it left. And I found it kind of funny that the most popular band in San Francisco at the time, the local band, was called the Cleveland Wrecking Company. It used to have a couple of Cleveland members. I never got to hear them play, but they had a lot of ads in the local, so-called underground papers. People would say, oh, yeah, they’re good. We know them.

James Calder [00:50:29] Do you want to talk about traveling around the country, or is that something you’d be interested in talking about? It sounds interesting to me.

Jim Egan [00:50:35] Not really so much. Basically, you could kind of say that my time I spent in the Greenwich Village in New York, which is what most people know, what’s the East and the West Village combined together are called Greenwich Village. The West Village is a little bit more prosperous, with the so-called brownstones and the big steps in front. And the East Village is closer to the East River, and it has large tenement buildings. These are 15 story tall buildings, buildings that are crammed in, which, you know, probably from about the 1870s, saw wave after wave after wave of immigration. Somebody one time recited the building I was in, that was Lithuanians, and then it was Italians. There was all these different waves went through. And you’re like the 11th wave, the hippies, the 11th wave that went through here. And I guess after we left, there was a couple more waves of drug addicts, followed by gays and some other groups. I don’t know what’s there now, but that was interesting. And Haight-Ashbury was interesting because I was kind of interested in what the political aspects of the hippie movement. I was actually sort of more interested in what was going on in Berkeley and some of the politics that was going on in New York at the time when I was there. But I was always hoping, I said, I’d like to see this art community that they have in San Francisco and New York. What I’ve seen of the arts and the politics come to Cleveland somewhere. And I always thought there was going to be sort of like some sort of a rebirth of the whole country. The so-called alternative culture at the time that they thought the hippies were gonna be, which we didn’t call ourselves. We had different terms for the generation. Freaks, which is not probably any better than the word hippies, which is what the hippies called each other, or their various- Or heads, which dealt with, I guess, with pothead or acid head is a San Francisco term. But the street kids like to use those terms. I’m a head or I’m a freak. I’m not a hippie. Hippie is a media thing, which it was. Although old hippies call themselves old hippies now, because it’s sort of like, that’s a joke. But what I thought was. I thought that’s a form of San Francisco arts community, or a form of the New York arts community, which are actually much older than the hippie movement. Mark Twain was in the East Village at one time. I thought that would come to Cleveland. I thought it would be like, I was hoping it would grow up in Ohio City. I thought that was like the perfect neighborhood. And it wasn’t too long after I came back from those New York and San Francisco in the early seventies that the term Ohio City started being used. I said, oh, okay. But I didn’t know what they called it. Social workers started calling, some of the radical ones, it’s a gentrification of the neighborhood. I go, what’s gentrification? It’s bringing all the wealthy people in here and to drive all the poor people out. Now they call them the yuppies. And I said, well, I don’t really see a problem with that. I said, you know, I said, when people got money, that means the people that don’t have money can get jobs. They got connections. I figured if you could do nothing else, you can cut their lawns and paint their houses. They could pay for it. A lot of poor people all together, that doesn’t do anybody any good, because all they do is prey on each other. They says, well, maybe now they can, they get some money there’ll be less crime. I saw the Near West Side change from the Irish roots and a number of other nationalities and became Appalachian and Puerto Rican. And it became sort of a slum. And that moved up more closer to where I’m from which is Storer Avenue. Over the years, I watched a lot of transitional changes. Then I went to St. Ignatius, which was right in the heart of it all. So, there’s a very elite Catholic parochial school. It’s right in the heart of the city. And they were involved with a lot of social work. I’ll give them credit for that. The Christian Action movement. I had a little involvement with that when I went there. And they were not outside of dealing with the people in the neighborhood. I was unique of the 1100 students going. I was probably one of maybe 20 or 30 that were actually from the city itself. There was only two or three of us that actually lived in the neighborhood that we were going to school to. So meeting all these suburbanites was sort of like a new experience to me. I didn’t get along real well with ’em. It’s funny because I remember when we were freshmen we had to bring some of money to school for books. And a number of the freshmen were getting robbed roaming around the neighborhood by some of the undesirable element which was the neighborhood kids. And I wasn’t getting robbed because I knew all these kids. Because I’ve been working in the Community House the summer before. So I was laughing because I knew who was robbing ’em. And I got the football team, went after these characters and took care of that problem. [laughs] I just kind of sat back and watched it all from a distance. I gotta work too hard. I don’t have time for this silliness.

James Calder [00:55:10] Did you ever see that sort of arts community develop in Cleveland or anything?

Jim Egan [00:55:17] Yeah, Ohio City. I watched as it sort of became, emphasized the arts. And then what they thought was really gonna take off in Ohio City, actually in the last 15 years exploded in Tremont. That’s where the real arts, with the galleries and a lot of people coming there. And that’s seen much more as sort of an arts community or a Greenwich Village that would be a bohemian type. Mainstream bohemian. [laughs] I don’t know if that would be a good way to put it. [crosstalk] Acceptable. Acceptable arts.

James Calder [00:55:51] That’s a good term.

Jim Egan [00:55:53] It’s an interesting mixture. I’m amazed when I go down into what I call Tremont. Or actually they call it Tremont. We used to call it the South Side. That was sort of. The west siders were always afraid of the street gangs from down there. Even the sort of the street gangs I knew were a little bit tentative about going down to the South Side or Tremont area because there were some pretty tough characters down there. It was a very interesting area because it was very isolated. A lot of churches. There was a lot of stuff packed into a relatively small area geographically surrounded by the river on one side. And it’s just the way that it’s laid out. It’s like that’s, I think, the attraction to people. It’s like an unknown neighborhood, and it has to do with- It almost has, like, barriers all the way around it. So it’s almost like an island in a way. And the streets are laid out so goofy. If you really don’t know your way around, it’s very easy to get lost your first time down there. You really gotta spend some time down there. So that was another way of always throwing off, sort of like the invaders from the outside. Any group that went down there was asking for it unless you really had maps. Most people don’t walk- Teenagers that are troublemakers don’t walk around with maps to find their way around. So I was kind of amused on how that took off. I always walk in areas down there and see all these beautiful cars parked down the street. I go, man, I can’t believe they’re not stealing all these cars, because for a while, there was such a mixture of people, very poor and very wealthy, that were leaving each other alone. And that kind of always amazed me. I sort of had isolated myself from Ohio City and Tremont for about 15 years. Didn’t spend too much time down there. So when I would go down there and see that there had been quite a bit of advancement in terms of, like, the money coming into the neighborhood, I was still amazed that the poor people just weren’t just ripping them off like crazy. They were like, guys were standing in front of a store drinking wine, looking at people parking Mercedes at the yuppie bar across the street, and nobody’s having a problem with each other. Strange to me. [laughs] You know, there’d be some antagonism, but it was a lot less than I thought. I always give the people that moved in there a whole lot of credit for being able to deal with the environment. I didn’t like it. I’m third generation. My whole family wanted out. We wanted to go to the suburbs. They’ve all made it, except me. I’m downtown, which is a little more quiet. The Chinatown area, which is actually the quietest area in Cleveland at night, because it’s, again, sort of another isolated community. It’s isolated between the skyscraper and business community downtown and the inner-city ghetto uptown a little bit. This little neighborhood sandwiched in there. And so after 8:00 at night, there’s really no reason for any traffic to be going up Superior or St. Clair or Payne. So it’s quiet. It’s extremely quiet. You know, I lived on the west side in various neighborhoods off of Storer and Denison, and it was noisy all night. I heard trucks going down Denison Avenue all night because they were accessing all the factories and the freeways. So I grew up with a lot of noise. And so I said, man, downtown, right in the heart of it all, and here I feel like I’m out in the countryside. I’m waiting- I got everything downtown where I live but crickets.

James Calder [00:58:43] That’s kind of what just happened to me. I just moved from Coventry right off of Mayfield to, like, 123rd in Little Italy and down that street it’s weird. You’re like, right. Like, now I’m actually in Cleveland and I can’t hear a thing when I’m going to bed at night. I’m used to hearing cars and people yelling and all that.

Jim Egan [00:59:04] Yeah. One of the things, my favorite things when I wake up is sometimes I wake up, there’s a real low, sweet hum. It’s the Amtrak trains coming in. There’s like two of them coming real late at night. And the whistle is a little bit different than the other trains, and the other trains. I don’t want to say fade into the background. There’s not as many trains running late at night, but those Amtraks have to come early. And I go, oh, it’s like 3:00 a.m. I don’t have to look at the clock. I can hear that Amtrak train. It’s very pleasant sound. I don’t know, it’s sort of like it’s the one identification I have, sort of with the neighborhood that I didn’t have anywhere else in Cleveland. I go, I know I’m down here in sort of like my community now. So my family roots go back so far on the Near West Side or just outside of that, you know. My family was there in that one basic geographical area for almost 100 years so I almost feel like I’m part of the soil myself. But I’ve been downtown now here, where I’m at up on 46th for 20 years, so I actually feel like I’m an east sider. That was sort of a mental mindset in Cleveland. It actually went beyond the city east and west side. You know, separated by the river, which is not, the legal separation is actually Ontario Street, which is why us west Siders, originally, west siders could claim the Terminal Tower as ours. And the old stadium. Well, what do you have on the west side? Well, we’ve got the stadium and the Terminal Tower, the zoo and the airport. What do you got on the east side? [laughs] We got the BP building. I said, but that’s shorter. That doesn’t count. Then they got the Key Tower. So the tallest building is now on the east side of the square. But I was always surprised that actually there was sort of a separation-

James Calder [01:00:44] [addressing the facilitator] Are we running late on time?

Unknown speaker [01:00:48] Yeah, it’s 11:30-

James Calder [01:00:50] Okay, well, I think we got-

Jim Egan [01:00:53] What I was gonna say really quickly is that there’s sort of a mental separation between the east side and west side, which goes beyond the city into the suburbs. I never really realized that people in Westlake considered themselves west siders. They were somehow different than people who lived in Chagrin Falls. There was this suburban separation that, as a city kid, I was really never cognizant of. But in the last few years, this whole idea of the greater Cleveland area is really what you have to have. And there’s a lot more tolerance, I think, of city people that are more established of the whole area than there was before. And that’s something new that I’ve noticed. Or maybe I’m just getting older, or the population is getting older, and they tolerate everybody a lot more. So that’s, you have to remember in terms of the economics, that Cleveland is like the 26th, 27th city, down about 450,000 from what was a million at one time. But the region is still very large. The metropolitan region is right behind Atlanta, and as a region, is, like, 12th. So we can’t go by the fact that we’re the 26th city, have to go by the fact that we’re the 12th region unless we think more regionally and put aside a lot of the really petty differences. There’s a lot of petty differences in the city neighborhoods that politically held the city back because there are people that didn’t make it, the older people that vote, and they just were kind of petty politics. And a lot of the politics at city hall is a little bit too much turf protecting for their little group of family and clique, and you gotta think a little bit in larger terms. I don’t know how they’re gonna do that, but-

James Calder [01:02:19] Excellent.

Jim Egan [01:02:20] They’re thinking about it. So, that’s a good thing.

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