Abstract
This is an interview with Rob Jagelewski, parish historian and member at St. Stanislaus Church in Slavic Village. Jagelewski's parents and grandparents were also members of this Polish community parish.The early part of the interview involves discussion of how St. Stanislaus Church has been the center of Polish culture in Cleveland's Slavic neighborhood and particulars about the membership. History of the parish includes when it was founded and built at its' present location. There is discussion of (Father K) and controversy surrounding his time in Cleveland. In 1901 the Franciscan order began to administer the parish. There is more discussion about renovations to the church. St. Stanislaus has sister parishes and is the center of Polish Cleveland. The interview continues with talk of the school, enrollment and other important roles of the parish such as the festival and outreach. It should be noted in 2004, the church was declared a shrine in honor of St. Stanislaus and Pope John Paul II.
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Interviewee
Jagelewski, Rob (interviewee)
Interviewer
Lanese, James (interviewer); Valore, Kenneth (interviewer)
Project
Sacred Landmarks
Date
9-13-2011
Document Type
Oral History
Duration
50 minutes
Recommended Citation
"Rob Jagelewski Interview, 2011" (2011). Cleveland Regional Oral History Collection. Interview 127014.
https://engagedscholarship.csuohio.edu/crohc000/376
Transcript
James Lanese [00:00:00] Good afternoon. My name is Jim Lanese and I’m joined by Ken Valore to conduct an interview for the Center for Public History and Digital Humanities of Cleveland State University to document the history of St. Stanislaus in Cleveland. The interview is being held at St. Stanislaus Church, located on East 65th Street in Cleveland. Oh, please introduce yourself. State your name and affiliation with the congregation.
Rob Jagelewski [00:00:32] My name is Rob Jagelewski. Jagelewski in Polish. I’m a Wadsworth parish historian. Here at St. Stan’s I’m a lector as well and an usher as well as doing any number of other things. I think I’m mainly a parish historian because I’ve been here long enough through any number of pastorates and things of that nature. I went to school here, went to grade school here, went to high school here, and still call this my home.
James Lanese [00:01:08] And if you would trace back during your time and your parents time, as you can recall the parish and its community and the surrounding neighborhood, if you could describe that for us.
Rob Jagelewski [00:01:23] Well, my parents came here. My father was in the naval service in World War II, submarine service, and my mother went with him to live in New England while he was in the service. My grandparents were here. My grandfather immigrated from Poland. He was editor of the alliance of Poles newspaper and worked for the Polish Monitor, which was a daily newspaper here. So they came here from Amsterdam, New York, my grandmother mostly. And oddly enough, the parish they were at in Amsterdam, New York was St. Stanislaus. So they moved here. At that time, the neighborhood was entirely Polish. I tell people that even when I grew up here in the 60s, I thought everybody was Polish and Catholic because everybody on the street was Polish. You knew where everybody, who everybody was in every house. You knew what their family name was, how many kids they had, who their kids were. You went to school with some of their kids. The parish, even before my time, was the center of the social life of the neighborhood and the people who lived here. There were no malls. There wasn’t a lot of good transportation. You had a lot of mom and pop stores. They didn’t have to go out of the neighborhood to get what they needed to live. So it was a tight knit community. Later on, as I was growing up and the malls started coming in, fast food restaurants and things of that nature. Still, when I was a kid, it was, like I said, mostly all Polish. Then you had the immigration to the suburbs and people moving out and that kind of thing. Currently, I would say we still have 1100 families here at St. Stanislaus. I would say it’s about 60, 40, 60% live in the suburbs. 40% still live closer to the church. We mail to about 30 or 40 different postal zip codes. And we have a lot of people who come here. And we have people from Wadsworth who come here for Mass every week. People from Paynesville from far away. They’re just drawn to the parish and I guess the interior of the church and it reminds them of when they were kids. And the churches they used to go to.
Ken Valore [00:03:54] To, do they come for the Polish Mass?
Rob Jagelewski [00:03:57] Yes, we have a Polish Mass every weekend and we have a lot of younger Polish immigrant families who join up to our parish. But I’d say we still get. We have three English Masses a weekend. And that’s still. We still draw all kinds of people here. It’s not really Polish, as Polish as it was when I was a kid, but I’d say the majority of the people are still Polish.
James Lanese [00:04:29] How long has the Congregation St. Stanislaus been established? And tell us a little bit about its early beginnings.
Rob Jagelewski [00:04:40] The parish itself began in 1873. There was no church building. They used to worship at St. Mary’s in the flats and then at the old St. Joe’s on Woodland Avenue. And they built a two story structure here in 1881, which had a school on one floor and a church on the other floor. Later on, as the parish grew, they had a lot of people here, so many that spun off St. Hyacinth Parish, Sacred Heart of Jesus. In the neighborhood itself. There were a lot of ravines here, so people had to traverse those ravines to get to church. Wasn’t easy. And this was the old Newburgh too, at the time, before it was annexed to Cleveland. But going on in 1886, Father Koleshevsky, Father Anton Koleshevsky, built this church for the cost of $250,000, which was a lot of money in 1886. Finished in 1891. There were some financial discrepancies, other things which he didn’t get along with the bishop about. The bishop moved him to New York. And Father Koleshewski was a man he either loved or hated. There was no in between with him. So the people who loved him said, come back, you know, build another church. Well, he came back without the bishop’s permission and built Immaculate Heart of Mary, which is about eight blocks south of here, was not accepted as a Catholic church in the Diocese of Cleveland. Became American National Catholic. Father Koleshevsky was excommunicated. All our parishioners from here who went there were excommunicated as well. And you can imagine the rift in the neighborhood. I mean, these people work together at the steel mills. Some of our people would go there, disrupt their services. They would come here, disrupt ours. There’s an article I read, I believe in the New York Times about a riot that took place on Grant and 71st in Cuyahoga Heights. A bunch of our people waited for them. They were going to dedicate their cemetery, Immaculate Heart Cemetery, and there was a fight that erupted there. So these kind of things. Also in the neighborhood, you had friction between the Poles and the Irish at Holy Name. Because when the Poles came here to work in the steel mills, they were strike breakers, essentially, and took the Irish jobs, Irish, Welsh jobs, that they went on strike. So later on, when the Poles went on strike, this was a more violent strike. Even the mayor came here to Father Kolchevsky and said, control your parishioners. So they rioted downtown, all this kind of stuff going on. But the strike was settled. And see, Father Koleshevsky was kind of between a rock and a hard place. He needed money to build his church. He needed the guys to be working to get the money. So one of the charges they brought up against him was he was siding with management. So that didn’t go over too well. But one thing Father Kolshevsky used to do, and this shows you how he knew his parishioners, is he used to go on payday to the gate of the steel mill and wait for the guys to get off work and get their money before they went to the saloon to drink it all away. So he knew his parishioners, but he was a great man. Despite that, I would say the greatest pastor we’ve had, because he built this church, which is the drawing card, the Mother Church of Polonia in Cleveland. And going on after that, after he left. And another thing I want to mention is the man who shot President McKinley, Leon Czolgos, used to be. I don’t know if he was a parishioner, but he used to frequent here. He worked in the steel mills. He quit that job, and I. There’s another article in the New York Times when McKinley was shot that he went to visit Chogos for his collection because there were no church envelopes at the time. The pastors had to go door to door. So he asked Chogos for his money, and Chogos says, I’m not Catholic anymore. I’m an anarchist. So then he went to Buffalo in time and shot President McKinley. But later on, we had the Franciscans come here in 1906. Then we had the tornado hit in 1909, which ripped our steeples off of the church. The steeples were so high, they were over 200 feet high. You could see them from downtown Cleveland. So the immigrants would come to the train station at the terminal tower. All they knew was St. Stanislaus, and they’d take them outside and show them where the steeples were. And that’s how they got here, you know, by hook or by crook. But the tornado, the church was rebuilt in a year. And oddly enough, two years before the tornado, the bishop at the time told our pastor to get cyclone insurance. So they had it, and they rebuilt the church within a year. We couldn’t put the steeples back up to the original height because of city code, although now some of our parishioners are kind of, you know, energizing themselves for. You know, you could do it with aluminum, but you’d have to put lights up there for airplanes. They were that tall. But through the years, like I said, this was a social center of life for the people here. Dances, whatever. This is where they met their wives, where they went to school. And this was the center of the social life of the community. Even now, it’s the churches in the neighborhood that are holding it together. Without the Catholic churches here or the other churches, I mean, who knows what would happen?
James Lanese [00:10:38] Tell us a little bit about the school.
Rob Jagelewski [00:10:41] St. Stanislaus School was. Well, when my mother went here, they taught in Polish. Everything was in Polish. In the 30s, there were over 3,000 kids in the school. They had so many kids in there that they had to build another building, which became a junior high, which eventually became St. Stanislaus High School and is now Cleveland Central Catholic High School. So another thing about that. When I went to school here in the 60s, I had all nuns, all the time, only one layperson the whole time I was in school. And now the kids have one nun, and they complain to me about it. And I say, look, you know, it’d be rare if I had a layperson now. It’s rare for you to have a nun. But the school, when I went there, we maybe had 1,000 kids in there. I know we had 50 in each class. We had two of each grade. But it was. I mean, it was a Catholic education. I mean, you can’t beat it.
James Lanese [00:11:53] So is there still a relationship or a direct connection with Cleveland Central Catholic and the Parish?
Rob Jagelewski [00:12:01] Well, it was. St. Stanislaus High School was the parish’s high school when it became Cleveland Central Catholic. It’s run diocesan now. We share facilities like Our gym, they use our gym for basketball, things of that nature, and our social center. And outside of that, we don’t have anything to do with Central Catholic. The great schools still are. We have about 300 some kids in there, which is good for an inner city school. Although without. I would say without vouchers, we probably wouldn’t have a school. There were no state vouchers, and we just renovated. In fact, when my mother went to school, on the fourth floor, there was a stage, and they used to stage plays in Polish and presentations and things. And we just renovated that space about a year ago. And there’s a computer room up there, a music room in a library now. So it was interesting. The stage is still there, but it was interesting to get back up there and see what it was like.
James Lanese [00:13:07] Let’s turn our attention to the church building and structure. And you had mentioned some of the exterior features and being visible from downtown. What else about the exterior is notable?
Rob Jagelewski [00:13:23] Well, mainly the Gothic architecture, the pointed arches. In fact, we still have some pedestals on the outside of the church where there were statues of Polish heroes or saints. You can still see the pedestals on those statues are there. The church itself, if you would take it, fly over it in an airplane, you would see it’s built in the shape of a cross, a distinct cross, and it’s just massive. You know, when you think of how they built this in the late 1800s, with wood scaffolding, and it took them five years to. They dug the foundation by themselves, the parishioners. And I can’t remember the name of the architect, but he also built St. Edwards. I think it was Mr. Dunn. Dunn. But when the church opened, this building was more ornate than it is now. It was a Victorian Gothic. More statues in here than there are now, gas lighting. So any artwork you see on the walls had to be more pronounced. The colors had to be more garish, so you could see them in the dim light. But when we redid this In 1998, we renovated the interior. The scroll work on the walls was there under layers of paint and wallpaper. And the company who did this had books they could look into, and we had pictures, too, so they knew precisely what the designs were on the walls. And a lot of the people that were young when it last looked like this, when we opened it up, and they’re older now, they were crying because they said this is what it looked like when they were children, that they remembered it. So it’s. I know when I’m an usher on Sundays, and I know the parishioners by now, who’s a parishioner, but I know when there’s visitors coming in and I wait to see their face when they first come in here. And it’s the same look. They get, like overwhelmed by everything. They just can’t take it in at one time. And I can always tell who’s a non parishioner by that look.
James Lanese [00:15:45] Tell us about John Paul’s visit.
Rob Jagelewski [00:15:50] Pope John Paul and Cardinal Carol Wojtyl visited our parish as a cardinal in 1969. He came to visit the Polish communities in the United States. And he came here. It was in September of ‘69. He brought us the relic of St. Stanislaus as a thank you for the work Cleveland Polonia did for Poland before, during and after World War II. And that’s currently in our church as well, still here. And it’s primarily because of that we were made a shrine, a diocesan shrine in 2004 by Bishop Pilla. And we also have in our shrine area here, we have a miter that John Paul wore when he was a bishop, was given to us by Cardinal Jevis. And we also have an icon that was made in Poland by a Polish artist of John Paul and Saint Stanislaus side by side. Both were Archbishop of Krakow at one time. And we were able to now put a halo on John Paul because he’s blessed. And this is a popular area for our church’s shrine area. We also have the three icons of our Blessed Mother Mary. One is Our Lady of Ostra, Brahma, which is Lithuanian. The biggest one is Our Lady of Czestochowa, Queen of Poland. And the other one is Our Lady of Guadalupe or Lady of the Americas. But a lot of people come here, they like to pray here in this area. We, I mean, it’s a sacred, kind of sacred place. You know, we’ve always had a relationship with John Paul. A lot of our poor Polish parishioners, when they were younger, they knew him as a priest, either baptized them or confirmed them. The day of his funeral, 4 o’ clock our time that his funeral started and we had a big screen TV in the sanctuary and the church was packed just as if his funeral was here. So we have a big connection with John Paul.
James Lanese [00:18:01] How about with other Polish communities within the region or the United States? Is there an ongoing dialogue or relationship with cities or.
Rob Jagelewski [00:18:13] Yeah, since we’re the mother church for Polonia, Cleveland, we’ve had any number of things, not per se, to say Polish. We have city music concerts here, Cleveland Orchestra. We have any number of Concerts. We’re having the Russian singing group here next month. We like to stress the cultural aspects. And we’ve had a lot of people recording in our church because they say the acoustics lend themselves to that. As far as Poland, we have a Polish priest here who’s from a Polish province, province in Poland. And we have a dialogue with them, our Franciscans. And those Franciscans have a dialogue going on. And plus, just the people here, the Polish people who go to Poland every summer, they’re just coming back now. In fact, our Polish festival is every October, and we sell a lot of Polish import items and things of that nature. But whenever, like for instance, when the Polish government was killed in a plane crash, this is where Polonia came for requiem mass, we had. And the church was packed. So whenever anything happens big with Poland, you usually see us on the news or things of that nature. But it’s still the mother church and you can’t get away from that.
James Lanese [00:19:48] Earlier you had described a little more of the interior as far as the statues that are here, as well as the stained glass windows and how they evolved over the years. Elaborate a bit.
Rob Jagelewski [00:20:00] The stained glass windows, the original stained glass, are all from Innsbruck, Austria. It’s called Berlin glass. Very detailed work. The statues, the original statues are from France. They’re wood and plaster. We have some newer statues here. The floor, the original floor was Italian marble, but it cracked up too much and they had to take that out. The second floor was like a brown linoleum, dingy type thing. And this is the third floor, which is porcelain tile. The lighting has been revamped in 1998, when, prior to that, all we had, it was kind of dim in here. The lighting wasn’t that great. Now we can control the lighting. During the renovation, we redid the lighting. The heating was updated and the sound system was updated, although people still complain about it. The heating is. We have a big boiler that heats the high school, the grade school and the church. And there’s a big boiler over there. And one of the things I remember as a kid was the nuns would ask, who wants to take the garbage out? Well, at the end of the day, we’d go over and we’d open these big cast iron doors and these flames would be shooting out and we’d just throw the garbage in there. Can you imagine that happening now? I mean, there’s no way. But, yeah, the church. Now, as I said, if you come in here and you look up, you see what you may think is the roof, but it’s really the Ceiling. Between the ceiling and the roof is 100 more feet, and there’s a catwalk there. And that’s how we change the light bulbs that are in the ceiling. There are two rooms, long rooms on the side. You see interior windows. They’re not exterior windows. And from those windows to other, each, each wall, that’s a big, long room, used to be used for storage. Now there’s really nothing up there, although we have. Can change some lighting there. But it’s funny, when the power went out, I don’t know how long, it was a massive power outage. You’d be surprised how far you could see from our bell tower without the lights interferring from the city and things of that nature. But the communion rail we used to have here was taken out during the renovation. The sanctuary was enlarged for liturgical purposes. Some pews were taken out. That was the biggest argument we had probably during the renovation was the communion rail. People didn’t want to see it go, but, you know, you give and you get whatever. But now the part they took out is in the church in San Diego, in a shrine area there. One of our assistants, his nephew, has a parish in San Diego, and he took our communion rail. So at least it’s in a church, and we’re happy with that. The organ has 1400 pipes. It’s a massive organ. Our organist, David Krakowski, he knows how to get the best out of it. That’s really the third organ. The original organ was a Holt Camp organization, which is a company that’s still in Cleveland on the west side. And before the renovation, I mean, when you would really key that organ up, then reverberations would go, plaster would fall from the ceiling. So we had to rope certain areas of the pews off so nobody would get hit. So, yeah, if you come in here, if you haven’t been in here since the renovation, it would look different, and yet it wouldn’t. You would notice the changes. And yet I think the changes that were made, like the shrine area now, for instance, the icon altar was. That’s brand new, and yet it looks like it fits in here right away. A lot of people say we don’t have the craftsman to do this kind of work. And, well, we do. You know, you have to pay for it, but we have the craftsmen to do it. During the renovation, we had to have a guy from Europe come and work on the stack statues, repair them and whatever, because that’s kind of a lost art here. Think of that massive work undertaking. So the pews are the original. They’re red oak. The doors, the massive doors are red oak. The Stations of the Cross are hand carved wood with plaster relief statues. And they’re about over six feet tall when they’re on the ground, straight up. But everything keeps to that wood. Wood motif, basic wood color.
Ken Valore [00:24:51] Did those Stations of the Cross come.
Rob Jagelewski [00:24:53] From here or were they European? Yes. Our pulpit there, which we still use every weekend, the priests preach from there used to be for further down one pillar. Because of the sound, there’s no microphones at that time. There was a massive wood canopy over that and it was so tall that we have murals up towards the ceiling. And the molding underneath the murals, that canopy was higher than that molding. And we have a statue in the vestibule, the Good Shepherd. That statue was on top of the canopy. But in the ’40s, some canopies fell in some churches in Ohio and some people were injured. So the state of Ohio and city of Cleveland changed the law. They send out inspectors and all our canopies went because they weren’t that stable. We had canopies over all the statues and over the pulpit. So where they went, I don’t know. It’s one of the mysteries.
James Lanese [00:25:55] And the altars, the front altars are German carved?
Rob Jagelewski [00:25:59] Yes.
James Lanese [00:25:59] Hand carved.
Rob Jagelewski [00:26:00] Yes. The massive middle altar that came in stages and they just put it together when it got here. You have a number of statues on there as well. There’s a catwalk in the back of there and you can crawl up there. Now, our tabernacle there in the middle, it’s gold plated on the front. What it actually is, is. And it goes all the way back to the altar. It’s a long box of lead, lead lined. And when we had that replated, we had to put that back in there. And that was so heavy, you couldn’t imagine. And it goes pretty far back because the altar, there are cabinets in back of the altar where we store things. And that tabernacle goes all the way back almost to the end of that. You can walk behind the altar, but that’s there. And those little designs on there, there’s bread, there’s the Holy Spirit there. We had a brother here, Brother sacristan. Brother Fidelis was a saintly type guy. And when the photographers would come for weddings with the old flashbulbs, he would collect the flashbulbs and he made all that decoration on there from the silver from the flashbulbs. He crafted all that work around the tabernacle. So a lot of people, his brother would make his Own hosts. He was blind, he had glaucoma. Knew every inch of the church and people wouldn’t be lined up here. I remember as an altar boy, after Mass, they want vigilites lit, and they’d be lined up here on the communion rail. Brother with. He’d remember everyone wanted to be lit, how many they wanted everything, you know. So one story, when I was just a young altar boy, Brother says, will you help me? And you couldn’t say no to brother. He says, well, what do you mean? I need you to change your light bulb. Well, all right. So we’re walking down the side aisle. We go up to the choir loft, and we used to have a clock on the facing of the camera, the choir loft. And he says, the light bulbs in this. This clock. And I’m in the fourth grade, and I look over, I said, brother, I can’t take this height. And brother says. He gives me the light bulb and he says, grab my legs. I’m going to hang down there. And so I’m praying God, don’t let me drop him.
James Lanese [00:28:30] Great story. Give us some recollections of the church’s role within the community. You mentioned quite often that it’s a central cultural gathering place and so forth. Does the church have banquet facilities, things, you know, how does the community utilize the church?
Rob Jagelewski [00:28:58] In 1961, our social center was built, which is on the next street. That allowed us. We used to. Before there, they have meetings only in the. This little house they had or in the church rectory and things of that nature. But when the social ceremony was. That opened up a lot of things. We have a lot of now weddings. They’ll go to big banquet halls and things of that nature. So the wedding industry is kind of out for us, but we still host a lot of things. We have a room in the basement of the grade school where we host certain smaller, like, showers and things like that. The parish, basically. I mean, we have a lot of meetings here. We have AA uses our facilities once a week. And we have our Polish festival coming up in October, and that’s three days. And right now the women are cooking. We just made 9,000 pierogies and 2,600 stuffed cabbage. And so it’s still. I mean, like I said before, when the church was the center of the neighborhood, the social center, it was different. Now there are a lot of distractions for people and a lot of other places to go. But still, I mean, you got to have a center somewhere, and this is it. We play a role in the community as Far as city things, we try and help, you know, the city, Cleveland government out in certain areas and things of that nature. But basically, like I said, it’s far reaching because we have so many people from so many parts of Northeast Ohio that are parishioners here. So. And everywhere you go, there’s somebody, oh, I went to St. Stan’s or I grew up there, and things of that nature. I mean, we were at a club in Lakewood and the band took a break and somebody yelled out, srenti Stanislaw, you know. Well, there’s another one.
James Lanese [00:31:10] They appear out of nowhere, I imagine. Are there other predominantly Polish parishes in the region or in Cleveland?
Rob Jagelewski [00:31:20] Yes, I mentioned Immaculate Heart, which sprung from here. It used to be Sacred Heart, which was closed in st. Hyacinth. Those two are daughter parishes which were closed. St. Casimir, which was closed, which didn’t spring from here. St. John Catntius in Tremont is Polish. There was St. Hedwig in Lakewood, which is now a museum. Some other Polish parishes, there was one in Grafton, St. Mary’s I believe. I’m not sure of that. I’m trying to remember from our mailings for the festival. We try to hit all the Polish churches, some in Akron, I think there were two or three Polish parishes in Akron, one in Illyria and one in Lorraine that have now since closed. So the Polish, see, they built a lot of churches. They each had. St. Casimir’s was from one region of Poland. They built that. We were from around Krakow on that area. Most of our people who came here to work in the steel mills were Galicians from Poland, and they worked in the steel mills there. And so they kind of congregated amongst their own people. When you think of what I try to remember the neighborhood, I try to picture it as it was when the parish first started. And I mentioned the gullies and. And the little homes. In fact, Father Koleshevsky designed some of the homes around here. He was quite an accomplished person. In fact, one letter he wrote to the bishop, he says, he’s their lawyer, he’s their counselor, he’s their appointment agent and all this. There was a guy who had a travel agency here, Michael Kniola was his name. K-N-I-O-L-A. And he provided people with transportation to Poland. He came up with fraternal insurance for them. And then this is how the whole, like Polish alliance of Polls formed Union of Polls for fraternal Insurance and things of that nature. So, I mean, still, when I was a kid, those two agencies were still here. Union of Poles has since moved out to Garfield Heights. Alliance of Polls is no longer there. But my grandfather was editor of the alliance of Polls paper for, like, 50 years. And another side script is that me and my brother took my nephew to the New Plain Dealer plant because we used to help my grandfather getting the mailings out and all this stuff. And this was when the old Linotype machines were there and the noise and the ink and all that. And they opened the doors at the Plain Dealer facility to the printing area. And that smell hit us of that newspaper ink. And it both took us back to those days when we’d helped my grandfather out put. Putting the paper out and things of that nature. But I just have fond memories of the neighborhood growing up. One, my mother. I have two brothers. We did anything bad, My mother knew about it before we got home. So there was no escape.
James Lanese [00:34:28] Probably even without the telephone.
Rob Jagelewski [00:34:29] That’s right.
James Lanese [00:34:39] What are some of your other recollections growing up in the community? Social events, activities, things like that. And for example, the St. Stan’s High School and I think Holy Name is not too far away in South High. Was there a relationship among the young?
Rob Jagelewski [00:35:01] There was more rivalry between south and Holy Name. They used to play for the pig iron trophy in football every year. And our school was really too small to play them. We play them occasionally, but we’d get murdered in football and we didn’t have enough guys. We played St. Stan’s played in the North Central Conference with Lord St. John Cantius. Chanel was even in there at the time. Elyria Catholic, Lorain, St. Mary’s Akron. St. Mary’s one thing I remember is they used to play high school games on Sunday afternoons before the NFL got really big. And I remember we’d come to early morning mass and we’d just leave church and we’d go on. They had like four, five, six buses. And we just take a bus trip to Elyria or Lorain or Akron and then come back. St. Stan’s didn’t have their own field, so we used to play at Cuyahoga Heights Field. And we used to have homecoming every year. I remember being in the parade going down 71st to Cuyahoga Heights Field. Just basically, you know, happy memories. I was in the Cub Scouts. We had Cub Scouts and Boy Scouts. Later on we had Girl Scouts. We didn’t like it that much because during Scout we could wear our Cub Scout uniforms. But then the Girl Scouts were wearing theirs and taking some of our, you know, PR away. So I still see a lot of the kids. I Went to school with. I bump into them occasionally. A lot of them I went to high school with at St. Stan’s High School and in Central Catholic, so it’s an ongoing thing. And there was also our Lady Chance de Hova, which is, was on 131st and Miles.
Ken Valore [00:36:53] No, Harvard.
Rob Jagelewski [00:36:54] Oh, yeah. Somewhere out there.
Ken Valore [00:36:57] Yeah.
Rob Jagelewski [00:36:58] Yeah. Which is long ago closed. And a lot of those kids used to come to our high school, so I know a lot of those kids, too. St. Stan’s used to- A lot of the high schools around here we used to get kids from. And I tell people, I said, you know, we had a kid when I was in grade school who came all the way from East. Excuse me, East 131st in Harvard, on a bus by himself every day. Came to St. Stan’s grade school and went home. I said, you know, it’s just a different time, I guess.
James Lanese [00:37:30] A lot of loyalty.
Rob Jagelewski [00:37:31] Yeah, well, we- My brother- My one brother got married, he moved to West Park, and he- Now he’s back here again. He belonged to St. Mark’s and now he’s here, too. He says he just feels like home. So he’s back here now. I remember as an altar boy, we had about 100 some altar servers here. Of course, there were no girl servers at the time. And this was at the time when the mass changed from Latin to English and things of that nature. But we had- I mean, we were here serving, you know, serving Mass or whatever, or helping brother make hosts. And then he would give us scraps from the. He used to have a machine that punched the hosts out, and then we’d get the bag of scraps, you know, to take home. So we were helping out here all the time.
Ken Valore [00:38:29] Did the church have a credit union?
Rob Jagelewski [00:38:31] No, we never had a credit union. That was, I think, more because alliance of Poles had one, union of Poles had one. And. And the people were more into that, into those kind of fraternal society things than they were for a parish credit union.
Ken Valore [00:38:51] Is there a preschool now?
Rob Jagelewski [00:38:54] We- I think there’s- I know we have after school care. I don’t know if we have preschool. We might, but I’m not sure that we do have. It’s called Good Shepherd School, which is a religious preschool. On Sundays we have that. So. But that wasn’t. I mean, when I went to school, you were there in kindergarten and that was it. You know.
James Lanese [00:39:22] How about other outreach and community programs that the parish. Current. Currently.
Rob Jagelewski [00:39:28] Well, we have all the parishes in Slavic Village donate to the Ozanam Center, which is St. Vincent de Paul, and it’s centered at Holy Name Church. Our church is in charge of gathering foodstuffs for infants, baby food, baby clothes, diapers, things of that nature. And we have a section in the vestibule where people bring things like that every week. So we just, we handle it through there. We used to have our own food kitchen here. Just stuff, canned foods and things. Some people would show up and they’d give them that, but all that’s that Holy Name. Now for all the parishes in this neighborhood, all the parishes, I mean, they talk about clustering in the way it was before, but we clustered with all the parishes in Slavic Village long before that. We used to have our confirmation, say four or five parishes get together, have one confirmation and. And swivel it around to the different churches every year. We’ve had cooperation like that amongst the parishes here for a long time. So it was nothing new for us. During the. When the churches were closing, I mean, we’d see people come here and you could see they’re shopping for a new parish. And our pastor, Father Michael, number of times said to his I want you to welcome these people. You know, how would you feel if your parish was closing? Think of that and just open your arms to them and welcome them because it’s a hard experience for them. So we’ve had a number of people join, particularly from our daughter parishes that close, Sacred Heart of Jesus and Saint Hyacinth. And they come right in here and they’ve blended in well and got a lot of good volunteers. So it’s good if you want to remember. Our pastor, Father William Goulis, was murdered in 2002. It was just in the paper. Dan Montgomery wants a trial by a man by Dan, who was going to be a Franciscan, was told he wasn’t going to be fit in to. The Franciscans, had to leave and something snapped or whatever, and he set the rectory on fire to cover it up. So that was, needless to say, a very traumatic thing for our parishioners. I mean, Father William was a pastor in every sense of the word. When you think of the word priest, that’s. He was. He was responsible for this renovation. A lot of the new housing on 65th was Father William’s thing. And. But what are you going to do? You’re going to give up right there? You’re going to, you know, get up off the floor and keep going, which is what he would have wanted, which is what we did. So we keep him, in fact, in the back of our church, we have a picture of Father William on one of the walls of the confessionals there. So we moved on from that. And it’s people remark to me. It seems that we have a very friendly parish and welcoming. That’s what I hear most often as an usher, very welcoming to strangers. So it’s one thing we like to push.
James Lanese [00:42:52] There was just an article in the Plain Dealer within the last week or so of highlighting a group of displaced parishioners and seeking where to go by visiting various parishes. And that.
Rob Jagelewski [00:43:08] Well, that’s a hard. I’ve talked to some of these people and some still are. They have, you know, hard feelings yet. And like, for instance, we have a man from St. Hyacinth, which was a smaller parish and a smaller church building, and it took him a good eight months to get used to coming to Mass here and everything. But now he’s kind of getting used to things and he’s feeling at home, I guess. But it takes a long time. I know some people still haven’t found a parish yet that they, you know, they can’t bring themselves to do it, I guess. And I understand that.
James Lanese [00:43:54] You’ve mentioned a lot of changes that have occurred with. With respect to the church and the property here. How about the community? What kind of changes have you seen over the last 30, 40 years?
Rob Jagelewski [00:44:07] And how has that affected more non Catholics? Like it was the immigration to the suburbs, and even then you had less and less Catholics. Now we have a outdoor Corpus Christi procession every year, which used to be big, I mean, gigantic. I mean, now it’s more and it still is pretty big for an inner city parish. And we go out there as a witness more now to the non Catholics who are living here. And it’s important for us as a neighborhood, we believe to witness that our faith in the neighborhood more than ever. That’s the biggest change. When I mentioned that I knew everybody on the street when I was a kid, knew who. That’s not the case anymore. I don’t know. A lot of the people, some of them are transients that are coming and going. There’s a lot more absentee landlord in the neighborhood, which isn’t good and things of that nature. But Slavic Village gets a bad rap. I mean, it seems that the media thinks Slavic Village is everything from downtown to the Garfield Heights border when it isn’t. So, I mean, things happen everywhere, you know. So I think that’s the biggest change. More non Catholics, less Catholics in the neighborhood. And that’s reflected in a lot of these churches that close. They just don’t have the membership anymore. And the people that moved are going where they’re living, and they don’t support where they used to come from.
Ken Valore [00:45:53] So wasn’t there a. Wasn’t there some kind of split about this procession, or was that a different procession?
Rob Jagelewski [00:46:04] No, that was a different one. We had one time, one of a woman used to have an altar, and. And we like to change the altars up every year because we have three altars of parishioners homes, and we visit them. Fourth is at the church here. And we like to change who has the altars and the locations from year to year. So she got kind of angry about that, but that was minor. There’s something always going on here. You know, we don’t accept things that easily. Just because the bishop would tell us to do something doesn’t mean we’re kind of hard on bishops sometimes here. But I tell you, when we became a shrine, we wanted to be a basilica, but there’s already a basilica to St. Stanislaus in Massachusetts. You can’t have two basilicas to the same saint in one country. So hopefully one day we’re diocesan shrine. Now we want to go for national shrine. So we’re already a landmark, national landmark. So we’ll see. We have some groups coming here for pilgrimages that come here, and we like to expand. Expand that part of it, have a place where they could come for the whole day, a place where they can eat. Some of them go to the Red chimney here on 65th, or to Seven Roses, which is a Polish restaurant on Fleet. So we like to take care of that ourselves eventually. And I still, you know, for us, what’s important is keeping the Polish tradition up. It’s very important to us. Even the church as a whole has gotten away from a lot of things they used to do, but we like to keep some of those up. We still have a pretty good turnout for a lot of things that we have. When it’s something big, usually all Polonia shows up. If we have it at the Polish mass or something of that. We have even our Corpus Christi procession. We have a number of kids in Polish costume and different organizations involved in that. So it’s still very viable. And I think that people look to us as a kind of leadership thing in the neighborhood with the school here, too. I mean, the high school, the two schools on our campus, and now Central has their football field. So it’s kind of a thriving area, you know, in a part of the city most people don’t know about or want to know about. So we would like to have more restaurants and things like Tremont, but.
James Lanese [00:49:06] As you said before, it’s probably a matter of time.
Rob Jagelewski [00:49:08] Yeah, hopefully. Yes.
James Lanese [00:49:11] Do you have any?
Rob Jagelewski [00:49:12] No.
Ken Valore [00:49:13] I think you’ve covered it pretty well. We appreciate your time and your knowledge.
James Lanese [00:49:22] Anything you’d like to add?
Rob Jagelewski [00:49:24] No, I think.
James Lanese [00:49:26] Talked about.
Rob Jagelewski [00:49:27] I think I’ve covered everything. I could tell you some stories about nuns, but I don’t. I think I’d be smacked around for that.
James Lanese [00:49:36] They’d appear somewhere.
Rob Jagelewski [00:49:37] That’s right. I tell people when I give tours because the pews used to come up here to this pillar and there was a little niche there, a pew, and I would sit right there because the priests couldn’t see what I was doing. I was blocked from the altar. But I forgot that the nuns were watching me. And I got them many times for the things I was doing.
James Lanese [00:50:02] That’s a good ending story. But we certainly appreciate your time.
Rob Jagelewski [00:50:05] Rob, thank you for coming and our opportunity to visit.
James Lanese [00:50:10] Thank you very much.
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