Abstract

Doris Vargo discusses the history of Plymouth Church, its origins in Shaker Heights, and her own personal experiences with the church. This includes the church's community invovlement in Shaker Heights and its progressive beliefs. Vargo also discusses housing in Shaker Heights.

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Interviewee

Vargo, Doris (Interviewee)

Interviewer

Smith, Kelsey (Interviewer)

Project

Shaker Heights Centennial

Date

7-16-2012

Document Type

Oral History

Duration

79 minutes

Transcript

Doris Vargo [00:00:00] 1922, around the corner from the church. He never went there until 1964. Well, no, I take that back. He went there in high school because the minister at that time was doing lectures on current affairs. This is during World War II, when my husband was in high school. And if you went to those lectures and wrote a report about these lectures by this famous minister who was well known in Cleveland. He and a rabbi were big time in Cleveland at that time. And if you went to his lectures and you wrote a report for your sociology class, you got extra points. So he never went to the church, well, he would go occasionally. His mother was unusual at those times. A working mother, a working single mother. And they had, as they still do, dinners at the church, inexpensive prices. And rather than cook, some nights she would take her son to dinner at the church and not have to cook. You know, big deal for her, it was a good deal. So later on, well, you’re going to want to hear this, why we joined the church. And I suppose. Well, that’ll come later. But anyway, I found this. I have a cookbook that I worked on in 1960. And then there’s one in between this. This one is. This one has a picture of the church as it was before they added the addition in the 60s. It has in here not only wonderful ads of all the merchants in Shaker Heights and Cleveland Heights at the time, but recipes by some rather famous people including the sisters of the Oris and Paxton Van Sweringen. Which is why Plymouth Church is where it is, the reason it’s there, the brochure that I forgot to get for you, which they probably have a copy of downstairs in the Shaker Historical Room. We put out a brochure recently and we’ve put out several. I’ve written some of them during the years. In any event, the Van Sweringen brothers wanted to donate certain land to, like they donated land for Laurel School and University School and Hathaway Brown. And they donated certain plots of land to churches, I think First Baptist and so on. The first donation was a plot of land which lies half in Cleveland, half in Shaker Heights on Coventry Road at Weymouth, one block south of Shaker Square and one block east of Shaker Square, one block south of Shaker Boulevard, and that is Plymouth Church of Shaker Heights. And since the Van Sweringens donated the land, they gave it to what was at that time a Congregational church to which their sisters belonged, their maiden sisters. One of the important things at that church recently gone under is the Candy Circle. The Candy Circle was started by the Van Sweringen sisters when they were at Case Western Reserve University. They made fudge and they sold it to raise money for the church. And thus began the famous candy circle. Sixty some years old until they abandoned it two years ago. It was abandoned because nobody but women my age were working in it anymore. Young women do not make candy for sale for the church. But that candy circle raised thousands of dollars for the church. When it was abandoned, there was enough money left to donate to the church treasury. And part of that money, the church wisely decided would be put in honor of the Candy Circle. So they took a meeting room off the main parlor and they fitted it out with Amish cabinets, a green floor, marble slabs on the sink for a kitchen, marble slabs on the sink, which are the original marble slabs used by the Candy circle on which they molded the stuff. And a plaque on the wall donated to the Candy Circle. There was a story about it in the Plain Dealer in the Sun Press. I don’t know. The Plain Dealer doesn’t cover anything much. You read the New York Times and the Plain Dealer and occasionally some opinion column. But it’s better than- It’s better than television, whatever. It’s a historic church because it was the first church built in Shaker. The others all came later. There are many churches in Shaker. It is also named Plymouth Church because Plymouth Church began during the Civil War. The people who started Plymouth Church were upset with a slow pace of old stone church on anti slavery. So they absconded from the church and for years and years they had a place in Cleveland. They had various churches. The last one was a brick building, 40th and, not Superior, I think Paine, which is now a German church. They still. It’s a Lutheran church where I still, I think up until recently they still did one service on Sunday in German. Unusual, but we’ve got a lot of German people in Cleveland, German heritage people. But basically Plymouth was a congregational church. And Henry Ward Beecher said call it, call it Plymouth, like my church in Boston. When they started the congregation and when they built the church in 1923, the architect was a guy named Schneider who was a well known Cleveland architect. Maybe you know some of this stuff, you’ve looked it up or something. But in any event, Mr. Schneider put up a Georgian church and it’s as you can see, perfect example of Georgian architecture. Have you ever been inside? We offer tours.

Kelsey Smith [00:06:41] I have not been inside.

Doris Vargo [00:06:42] Well, I’ll tell you, I’ll take you there. We should have met there. It would have made more sense but you’re here. But basically you have to book a room or something. Basically, you should come sometime. We were offering free tours as part of the Shaker Centennial, but nobody came, so we decided to charge. People will come thinking it’s better than- And the money will go to the food center, the food program, whatever. You know, the Cleveland Food Center. Nobody- A church doesn’t want five bucks to show people around. But the Shaker Centennial Committee set up the tours and asked us to have them on Labor Day and Memorial Day weekend. Well, nobody came. Nobody’s going to come to tour. We had some tours about 18 months ago when the Friends of Shaker Square were running tours in the neighborhood. And so the church offered to. We donated our restroom and our parking lot so people who were touring the neighborhood of the square could park and walk around and they could come in the church. We had a jazz pianist playing in the chapel to play show tunes and junk. And we had our bathrooms available and we offered tours. And people did. When they came in to use the bathroom or just decided they wanted to look at the church, especially if they were from out of town, they wanted to look around. Well, if you walk into that church, you would think you were in Boston. It’s totally white, totally New England, totally gorgeous. The church that looks exactly like it is, strangely enough, St. Dominic’s Catholic Church at the end of the Van Aken rapid line. St. Dominic’s is totally white, totally New England, totally gorgeous, except for the Mary altar on the side, which is a little more elaborate. But it is also looks like this in the front. Got the pillars and the whole thing. It’s at the end of the line there. We’re kind of, you know, both at one end and the other of Van Aken. Someone I know who joined Plymouth after something or other, after some transformation in her life, said she felt right at home. She used to go to St. Dominic’s now she was at Plymouth and didn’t seem anything. I mean, service. The hymns weren’t even that different. We sing. I mean, Protestants and Catholics, they’re all Christians, they sing some of the same hymns. Big deal. You know, we say debtors instead of transgressors. And you say the Lord’s Prayer or Trespasses. Once in a while I go to a funeral and somebody behind me will say trespasses. And I know them. We print in our program debtors, debts and debtors because so many people say trespass. I don’t know when that change came, but whatever. People have to be reminded of it, but it’s an interesting thing. I guess we’re all coming closer and closer in the churches. Why not? Big deal. I mean, I don’t. If I go off into Catholic churches, I go to funerals and weddings and sometimes just for no good reason at all, because of a friend. But I have been known to stem it in Catholic churches and just sit there for a while. They’re good places to sit and meditate, if not to pray. But basically the difference being mostly that Protestant churches are usually more simple. Not all of them. I’ve been to St. Peter’s Lutheran Church in Cedar Road [00:10:00] in Cleveland Heights, and that’s much more elaborate than Plymouth. I’ve been to other churches like that. Well, the Episcopal church there at St. Paul’s is pretty. You’d think you were in London or England somewhere. You know, it’s not exactly- It’s a big stone mausoleum. But Plymouth and St Dominic’s are pretty simple places. They’re big, but they’re very simple inside. And I find it comforting, comfortable. Okay. You know, the acoustics are very good, which means that we have a lot of concerts there. We have a minister of music who is in charge of arts programs, and he has people who do a lot of other kinds of artwork. I mean, you’ll have an arts fair once a year. And people bring the crochet they do. They’ll bring the embroidery they do. They’ll bring the fact that they do their own postcards or stationery design their own stationery or paintings, stuff like that. We have people who. We have members who have done pictures of the church and of other things, watercolors and one thing, another hanging all over the place in the church. They’ve been donated and used, you know. But that candy circle room that I spoke about is a pretty interesting place. It’s a small meeting room, conference room off the main parlor, where you have meetings and conferences and the board of trustees meets there. And when there’s a funeral, that’s where the family stands to greet them, people who have attended the funeral. And the conference room next door to it has a doorway into it, and there’s a small lavatory thing with a sink. They’ve turned the conference room into a kind of a kitchen, as I said, so that they can use it when you do a funeral collation. And you invite people to come and meet the family and have a cup of tea or a glass of punch. You have to have all those cookies and things. And naturally, you never know when there’s going to be a funeral. So there’s a whole committee, a memorial committee that makes stuff all year round. And they store it in the freezers in the kitchen. And then they drag that stuff out when they need it and put it on trays and get the silver out of the locked drawer. The silver trays which have some name of some president of the women’s association from 19 what. No, whatever. 1942 or something. And that’s another thing that’s gone by the board. We no longer have a formal Women’s Association, but instead we have fellowship meetings once a month. Our Women’s association was extremely active. There were six circles, circles within the group. The Women’s association met once a week on Tuesday throughout the year, except on Christmas week, because you were too busy, you didn’t have time. They met once a week. There were groups called circles that met in between for lunch in their homes. Some of them played bridge, some of them folded bandages. Some of them knitted and crocheted stuff. I belonged to circle seven. They had six circles. The candy circle was number six. And then after World War II, they started the seventh circle. And it was composed of people like myself who were either new members or were maybe not new members, but were newly married people who couldn’t afford to do all that stuff in the daytime because we couldn’t afford to hire a sitter. So we would meet once a month in our homes. We had to take our turn serving at the luncheons. Everybody had to serve at them. The luncheons were huge. One of the regular luncheons was the PTA annual meeting where all the PTA presidents and officials met from the Shaker School District. They would serve lunch to 100 people. The men’s association used to serve dinners. There was a men’s group that cooked and served dinners to fathers and sons. My husband and my son used to go to. They would have Browns players come and talk, you know, football players, baseball players, they. Sports night, you know, for the fathers and sons. The Women’s Association served luncheons and occasional dinners. Because there would always be church dinners. The Women’s Association would serve a lunch once a week. Many women who were not members of the church came to these lunches, including Paul Newman’s mother. And we know it because she came every week. She lived in Moreland Courts. And there were a whole contingency of women who lived in Moreland Courts who did not. Some of them belonged to Plymouth, Most of them did not. But they came regularly. They used to lunch on the square when there were lots of restaurants like Clark’s and so on. Not the restaurants that are there. Stouffer’s and so not the kind that are there today, but ladies lunch in kind of like places. And these women would get tired of eating in restaurants. So once a week they would come to Plymouth and eat there. And you could get for very little money a superb luncheon. Because we always had one of our women who was a volunteer who was in charge of the kitchen. And we have some of those recipes are in here. The Plymouth punch cookies for 200, you know, whatever, canapes for a thousand, whatever. No, you know, you serve big meals to a lot of people. Now we don’t do that anymore because nobody does that anymore. But one of one of the few places anymore. And there are women from Our lady of Peace and women who live in the neighborhood who come to the once a month luncheons at Plymouth Church. We have a fellowship luncheon. Retired men come as well as women. People who for some reason are available at lunchtime come. For six bucks you get a lunch which includes soup or some kind of introductory thing, an entree, a salad, coffee, tea or milk, and a dessert. Now the guy, we had a woman doing the luncheons from a young woman and she’s gone back to school so she doesn’t have time to do it. She’s not that young, but she’s gone back to graduate school or something. But instead we now have Hans. Hans is a member of our church who happens to be a chef and caterer. And he does the lunches. So for $6 you get this meal. He serves strawberry shortcake the other day. And when he serves strawberry shortcake, he doesn’t use those little things you buy in the supermarket. No, no, no. The shortcake itself is puff pastry and the strawberries are fresh and the whipped cream is real. You have to mess around. Six bucks for lunch. Dinner is five dollars. We get the same kind of meal at dinner. He does dinner too. Dinner comes in Lent and before Christmas we have dinners as a fellowship thing. It’s five bucks a piece on my son’s birthday, I said, I’ll take you out to dinner. He said, yeah, take me to Plymouth. They’re doing, I noticed in your bulletin they’re having something good on the menu. Close to my birthday, they’re having a meal I like and I want to go there. So I took him. Cost me 10 bucks to take my son out to dinner. But it’s $5 a piece. No family pays more than $15. If you bring your whole kids, it’s 15 bucks. Because the object is not to make money, the object is to pay for the food. The chef is a volunteer. You go, you serve yourself. You know, you don’t have to have waitresses, but you do have someone helping out in the kitchen, cleaning up and stuff like that. We have dishwashers, but so what? You know, you still have to have somebody who cleans up. But it’s always an entree, some kind of appetizer, an entree, a salad, coffee, tea and milk, dessert, bread and right on the counter because they know kids. Peanut butter and jelly and bread. If they won’t eat it, you got something they’ll eat, you know, because it’s a way of getting together. My son who doesn’t go to church anymore, although he was a member, you know, the kids joined the church at whatever, 12 or something. But he goes to dinners because the people are nice. He says that church does good work. I approve of what they do and I’m not coming to the sermons, but I’ll go to dinner. The dinners are good and the people are nice. So big deal. I mean he just, well, for one thing he’s been in retail for a long time and he said to work on Sundays in retail, you don’t ask, you just do. You don’t have a choice. So he’s still doing that. He worked for Borders for 15 years and you know what happened to Borders? So he got a part time job which he’s happy to have. He sells Omaha Steaks in the same mall he was working at before La Place, doing what he said he started out doing when he got out of college. His first job out of college was working for Sears taking photographs at Richmond Mall. He was a good photographer, but you didn’t have to be a good photographer because your job was you couldn’t miss. The cameras were great, he would take good pictures. [00:20:00] Your job was to sell the package. All this money, his job is to sell the package of meat. His grandfather was a meat cutter and a store owner of grocery and meat markets all his life. But Alex said, I don’t know anything. My grandfather knew, I sell the package, it’s already cut. It’s right. That’s the way life has changed. But we’ve been members of Plymouth. Well, my husband of course is gone now, but we joined in 1964. We moved when we were first married. We lived in Euclid. We didn’t join a church as most people. We didn’t think about joining a church. We had been married by a justice of the peace in my parents living room because neither of us was going to church. And I had not gone to church at all growing up. Most of my friends were Catholic. I lived in the North Collinwood neighborhood, and that’s a heavily Slovenian, Italian and mixed neighborhood where most of the people are Catholic. A lot of kids go to Catholic school and then they go to public school later on. But my husband had grown up here and was also not a church goer. But of course we were looking for a church when we had children and moved to Shaker and we were looking for a Sunday school, as most young people do at first. We originally we were living in Cleveland Heights, so we went to. Thought about going to Fairmont Presbyterian, but my husband was working at the CEI. He was an economist there. And his boss was Bob Ginn, who was a very active member of Plymouth Church. And he said, what do you want to go to Fairmount for? So John said to me, he’s telling me we should go to Plymouth. I said, is that an order as your boss? He said, no, it’s not an order suggestion. I said, okay, let’s try it. So we went one Sunday. Well, at that time, we didn’t have three kids. We had two. My son was four. Our daughter was, no, he was three and our daughter was six. So she talks. She goes off to the Sunday school and he goes into Barbara Van Sweringen’s class for toddlers. Well, not only is Barbara, great woman, whom he adored, but they had what they call (?) toys. Those are these wooden toys, wooden cars and trucks and trains. The best toys in the world. Alex had such a great time. We pick him up at the end of the service and he says, do we have to wait till next week to come back? We thought, oh, boy, we’re not going to get him anywhere else. This has got to be it. And it’s true. Until he got older and got to be critical, like all teenagers do. And along with my, no, my daughter stayed there. My older daughter stayed at Plymouth because she was one of the first girls to get usher when they finally decided to come into the 20th, let alone the 21st century, and they let girls usher. But my son started going to Heights Christian to the teenage group because all of his friends were going, you know, that kind. And we figured, big deal, we’re not going to fuss about it. He’s going. He had become a member at Plymouth. That was a little bit of a bone of contention too, because my older children had not been baptized. Our youngest was but the oldest when they became members, had to be baptized. Well, we were not about to ask 12 year olds, 11, well, 12, 14, whatever they were to be baptized in front of everybody. They would have been embarrassed to death. So at that time our minister was Skip Holliday, who’s gone out to California years ago. But Skip, as they called him, was a great minister, really nice man, a very, very devout man. He was the one who did my husband’s funeral. And I was very glad he did because he was. When my husband was sick, he was there always for him. In any event, he said, well, just meet me late afternoon from work to my husband, someone come down here and we’ll go in the parlor and I’ll baptize the kids. They don’t have to stand in front of the whole church on Sunday. We’ll do a private baptism, which was fine with the kids. And that was fine for us too. So then they met all the qualifications, stand up and become members. So they all became members and the kids were all members of the, we had a minister of music called John Hur from Pennsylvania Dutch country. And John Hur always had a children’s choir. And all of my kids were members of the children’s choir. Everybody liked the children’s choir. The other thing, the church always did, and I have pictures of this that are riot. The angel pageant at Christmas. You know, Protestant churches do the angel pageant and I mean I- They probably do them in Catholic churches too. I don’t know. I know ours is- I don’t really know.

Kelsey Smith [00:25:05] Well I’m Protestant too, so.

Doris Vargo [00:25:06] Well, they’re not going to do it in the synagogues, of course. But basically we have this pageant, you know, with the shepherds and the fake baby. Although one year we had a real baby. Someone donated their baby who didn’t whimper during the whole thing. It was incredible. Everybody expected to hear wah during the whole thing. But this baby just lay there. We had a real life baby, but you know, you get the fake lambs and the tall blonde girl is always, you know, Gabriel the angel. And the other kids are all just whatever. The other girls, the short, fat, and dark-haired ones or anything, they’re just something.

Kelsey Smith [00:25:47] That’s always a wise man.

Doris Vargo [00:25:50] A wise man. Yeah, yeah, wise man. See, I was always just in the chorus. We used to do them. This is the funny thing too. This has nothing to do with church. But when I was at Oliver Hazard Perry’s school growing up, back in the days when it was permissible to sing Christmas carols in public schools and we did a Christmas pageant and that would have been [gagging sound] today because it would be considered too religious. But we did a Christmas pageant, kind of. I mean, it wasn’t very religious. But I still remember for years the girl who played Mary was the only Jewish girl in our school. She was a beautiful girl, and it was certainly appropriate that she was Jewish when you think about it. But the teacher didn’t even think about it. She just chose this girl because she looked the part, you know, you could put the veil on her and whatever, and she could hold the baby, and she looked like Mary. Mary doesn’t have to be a blonde, you know. I don’t know what Mary looked like. None of us do. But it was so funny. I mean, I didn’t realize that until much later when I was growing up. And I thought, oh, my God, Ruth Schaeffer was Mary all those years. The rest of us were who knows what shepherds, wise men. Anyway, going back to church, we joined the church. We were active in the church. My husband did the finance drive every year. He also did the finance drive for the United Way. When you worked at the CEI, you were expected to do your civic duty and go out and do good works. That was part of your resume, for God’s sake. They didn’t force you to do it, but you knew darn well if you were bucking for a promotion, you better have a few things on your resume that looked like you cared about the community, you know? Well, on top of which, we always sort of thought, well, yeah, you ought to do something. You shouldn’t just sit there like a lum. And then we were members of the couples club, and we went to church dinners, and my husband ushered through the years, and I was in the Women’s association, and I did the newsletter back when it was hot type. When you didn’t have computers and you typed stuff and you took it to a printer and you proofread and all of that stuff. And I worked on the archives, and I worked on a number of. A guy that just died was the first member of the church who kept the archives, kept all the important stuff. And years later, when he was no longer active, it almost got trashed. Somebody threw everything into a closet. And then another guy came along and said, you can’t do this, and rescued it all. So the second guy, Jack Doxie, set up a real archive, and he set it up so that some of the archives of this church, which is important to Shaker, ended up in the Shaker Heights Library downstairs here in the A Shaker room, which is appropriate. Some of Them went to. One of the members of his committee, was a real archivist who worked for the Historical Society or somebody like that. And she took some stuff down to the Cleveland Historical Society because it’s part of Cleveland, and then most importantly, it’s part of Shaker as an early church. But one of the things the church does is as part of the community. Of course, we do a lot of active stuff we are involved in. I’m involved and have been for 15 years in tutoring at Buckeye Woodland School. That’s an important thing. That was set up originally by a couple of our members, one of whom was a retired teacher who had substituted Buckeye Woodland. And she said, there’s a need. So we filled the need. A bunch of us went down and started tutoring. Now the Jewish Community Federation runs the program now. They have people coming from John Carroll, kids from John Carroll. They have people from the temples. They have people from Plymouth. There’s like 45 people that are tutoring. [00:30:00] There are 500 kids at Buckeye Woodland from K through 8th grade, and they all need tutoring. One of the kids recently, the woman in charge of the tutoring program, has a list of kids who want to be tutored. They don’t share enough tutors. Some of us tutor more than one kid, but there’s still not enough tutors. You can only do so much. She had tried to find tutors for everybody, but couldn’t find tutors for everybody. But there was one little boy who really wanted to be tutored. And one day I’ve gotten friendly, as everybody has, with the secretary at the school. The lead secretary has been there a long time. Right now she’s probably the interim social worker, because they don’t have social workers in the Cleveland schools. She handles all situations. But in any event, she was in the office and this kid came in and he had a postcard. And he asked her if she had a stamp for postcard or knew how much it cost or what to get one. And she said, what’s this? She looked at the postcard. It was a postcard addressed to the woman in charge of the program asking for a tutor. He really wanted a tutor. So he thought maybe if he sent her a postcard, she’d put him on the list. So this touched the lady so much that she said, I’ll take care of it. I’ll take care of it. I’ll get a post. So she just handed it to this woman and said, get him a tutor. And she did get him a tutor. That was pretty impressive. That a kid was smart enough. But I know that I’ve tutored kids for 15 years and after they get older, once they leave the school, of course I don’t see them. But I don’t always recognize them when I see them on the playground. When they grow up, they change. I don’t change well, I get grayer, but I don’t change as much as they do. But they yell at me, you know, hey, Ms. Wargo, how are you doing? Because I’m not teaching them anything. I’m their non critical friend who urges them to pick up a book and enjoy it. That’s my job and I can do that because I can always pick up a book and enjoy it and so can my whole family. We’ve always done that. And I believe strongly that these kids are not going to have a shot at life if they don’t learn to pick up a book and read. That’s plain and simple where it’s at and we know it. And I don’t care how much money they spend or how much reform they bring or who runs the schools or how good or bad the teachers are. If you can’t get the kids caring about reading and wanting to read and trying to read, somebody’s got to inspire them to do that. The teacher, the parent. I have a feeling this has got nothing to do with Plymouth, but I’ve wondered sometimes because I’ve also worked my children, my two daughters rather have worked as English as a second language. My one daughter is Spanish and the other worked up in Canada for a number of years. She’s a professor of English literature in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. When she was in Toronto at graduate school, she worked in the Chinese neighborhood where they taught English as a second language to oriental immigrants. But in any event, they’ve both done English to grownups. And Julie, my younger one, not only has done Spanish, but she worked in Chicago and she taught English to Polish immigrants. I mean, you know, they just thought it was a good thing to do. And I’ve done that too. But teaching English to adults, I thought about and I thought part of the problem, they always say the problem is in the home. The problem is in the home the parents don’t care. Maybe the parents can’t read either. I’m sure many of them can’t. Maybe we should be also looking at the parents and helping them read. And maybe they care more when I read things like the fact that this has nothing to do with Plymouth, but it does because we’re strong on supporting reading. When I read things like the fact that a good portion of the Cleveland population can’t read a timetable for the buses because they read so poorly. I think, oh, my God, where are we going? Who’s going to do the. I don’t know if everybody needs a college education, but everybody has to know how to read. That’s it. Plain and simple. So I’m very proud of Plymouth Church for being involved in a program that helps with reading. They’re also doing the usual stuff with the food bank and raising money for all kinds of missions. Our children in the high school and junior high school go on missions. They’ve been to Indian reservations. They’ve been to North Carolina and Kentucky and all kinds of places. They also go on trips for fun. They went to Washington, D.C. Kids used to do that in high school, but I don’t know if they do that anymore. They used to be part of their social studies classes. They would go to Columbus and they would go to Washington and learn about government. Now it seems like kids do that more likely from church. The other thing my church is doing along with the. I was going to say Episcopal, but it’s not Episcopal, certainly not Unitarian Church. We are offering sex education only with parents permission. Parents go to a class first to find out what will be taught, and then children are taught. Not in Sunday school, but children are invited at a tender age to a sex education class. I still remember when there was a big fuss at Fernway School when the PTA considered whether or not we should have sex education classes at the elementary school in the sixth grade, I guess. And one of the mothers was very upset. I always don’t want to talk about this. Well, I reported this at dinner that night, and my older daughter, who knew her voice, said she doesn’t know what they’re talking about on the playground. You know, we never think that our children need what they probably need. We don’t know. We forget what it was like when we were kids. And I think if the parents can’t always do it, if you belong to a church, maybe the church can help. So I don’t think that’s inappropriate. I think it’s a good idea. I would have welcomed any help I could get in educating my children in any way. And I think that there are lots of ways. But beyond that, the physical things that the church does, we are open and affirming, which means we welcome gays. We have gay members. Our ministers will perform weddings for not only gays, but beyond, and funerals for gays. One of the first things I think Our ministers were asked to do was once a gay person died and the family wanted a funeral. It was very hard to find a church. But Plymouth has been open to that for a long time. It’s not a matter of everybody being happy about it. That’s not true. I know a lot of people. Plymouth isn’t what it used to be. Well, what is? What’s wrong with the world if we don’t change? I mean, things are going to change. Life is not going to stay the same. Some of the standards we revere are going to be different. But on the whole, that doesn’t mean we’ve lost dignity or we’ve lost caring or love. And that’s what religion is supposed to be about. That’s what a church should be about and we try to adhere to that. So they support food programs and try to support Africa and oh, another thing that we’ve always been pretty big, at women’s shelters. We’ve always, the Women’s association has always collected, you know, those things you get when you go to a hotel and they give you samples of cosmetics and everything under the sun and toiletries. Well, we would gather those every year and take them to the Selma George shelter someplace or other. Also cookies for the USO church, Women United or some group like that that we have membership in. We would always do cookies. Each church had to take a month when they would make cookies for the USO offices at the airport. And there is a USO office down on the Port of Cleveland for the sailors who come in on foreign ships. I understand. Well, I know because I’ve been there. We do have helped at. Oh, the homeless. We’re part of a group. Let’s see, Plymouth offers overnight accommodations. We give supper, provide a place for the kids to play. Play, Provide a bedroom and a bathroom, shower, cots, beds and a shower bathroom on a second floor. They’ve taken one of the big Sunday school rooms that isn’t used anymore and converted into a sort of a small suite for a homeless family to use. I think it’s every six weeks or once a month or something. It’s a group of people. I don’t remember the name of it now, but it’s a committee and there’s always a trio. I think we’re allied with the Temple on Chagrin, closest to the end of the Rapid Line. I forgot the name of it. And then there’s that congregation and the Episcopal Church on Warrensville Center. Christ Episcopal Church, I guess it’s called. So the three of us take care of a homeless family weekend. [00:40:00] I mean, we do the dinner and the place for them to stay. I think the temple takes care of some of that, but they also do some other stuff. They take care of the mothers and get them to the places they can look for jobs, etc. Etc. And Christ Episcopal does a daycare for the kids and gets the ones who are in school to their schools because while they’re homeless, the object is to keep the kids in the school they were originally in. So you get a bus to take them to the different schools around. You know, they don’t have to be in this. They don’t have to move to some different school. So that’s an important thing. There’s a committee that is involved in that and works regularly on that. The committees have committees. We have a group that meets every Sunday at 9 o’clock and they meet to have forums. They’re called the Forum Group. They meet in a room. Well, we have a room when you walk in one of the entrances, next to where the nursery school is. Well, first of all, there’s a Head Start program that runs in Plymouth. We have Tai Chi, we have Zumba Fitness, we have, I don’t know, all kinds of stuff. We have a labyrinth. We have a meditation room where. Which is open 24 hours a day where people can just go and sit. We have a library where you can take a book and keep it, bring a book, leave it, you know, plus some books that are always there that you take out and you assign for. We have a room when you walk in the door, one of the doors, where there’s always coffee and newspapers and you can sit in there and have a cup of coffee and read the paper, read a magazine. And that’s there particularly for people who have to come and sit and wait because they brought their spouse to choir or to a meeting or something and they just got to kill time. That’s one of the reasons why we have dinners on Wednesday nights, because most of the committee meetings are Wednesday nights or the choir practice or something like that, you know, so that’s the night we’ll have a dinner so people can come and have dinner and then go to their meeting. It’s convenient to do it that way. We don’t have dinners every Wednesday night, but during season, during Lent, as I say, and before Christmas. We don’t make the candy anymore, but we do have a big fair every year where they sell. What are these things that are, I can’t remember the name of it, Fair trade coffee and all kinds of stuff that benefits missionaries and mission groups and all kinds of, not just religious but, but charitable organizations all over the world. So those things are available and can be sold at this big fair which is held a couple of weeks. We do a bicycle blessing. The other thing we have every June, well, we meet in this big church which is not air conditioned. I was at a funeral yesterday, a very well attended funeral man who was very active in the church. Well, he was born in 1922 in a house across the street from Plymouth Church. So he was there when they started building the church and as somebody said, oh, he toddled over there with one of his brothers and sisters and went to the Sunday school when he was a kid. So he’d been a member. The man was close to 90. So he’d been a member for a good 60 years, something like that. More. So Tom and his family, he had a huge extended family. They covered, they filled the first four rows of the church but it was very well attended because the man was very well known. He was a navigation attorney, but he was a typical example of a longtime member. The minister showed something that Tom had given her when he was in bed, he was bedridden and she came one day to visit him and he said, I want you to know that I’ve been a loyal and faithful member of this church for more years than you can remember. So he said, he showed her a canceled check. He said, this was my first real donation to Plymouth Church. And the check was dated in 1950 and the check was for $8.52 in 1950 he was unemployed, just out of school, looking for a job. But he had donated $8.52 to Plymouth Church. He was donating a lot more money than that now because as you can imagine, after the funeral the church, instead of having a reception at the church, had a reception at the country club. So they’re well off now. So obviously in the last few years the man has donated a lot more to church. But he’s typical of the kind of members who stayed. People come and go. We’ve had people come and go depending on which minister is there and whether or not the minister is popular. Now of course we have, as my husband says, that hellfire of brimstone lady. We have the first woman minister of Plymouth Church. She’s not the first minister around. There are a lot of them around, but there’s never been one at Plymouth before. She’s good. I mean, she wakes them up. She’s not afraid to tackle tough subjects. She was asked one time to speak and she did on adultery. And she spoke about adultery, which is, of course, course, something that you don’t expect your minister to necessarily talk about, but it’s in the Bible. And her point was, as I remember, there are many victims in adultery, but the ones that people don’t think about are the children. And they’re the hardest of all to think about. When these things happen and they happen, you’ve got to consider the children and the effect on them. But it was, as she usually is, a thoughtful comment on a situation that is common in life. More common than we want to think about, maybe. And she has a way of doing that. She will pick up on stuff. As I get it, her main thesis is, I want you here every Sunday, but I don’t really care. What I want you to do is act like a Christian the rest of the week. That’s what’s important. If you’re a Christian, I want you to act like one the rest of the week. Whether or not you’re here on Sunday. I can’t argue with that. That’s a reason to go back. That and the fact that I never knew I had so many friends until my husband died. And they were more than friends. They were there for me. They not only brought covered dishes, they came and invited me to go to the movies. They invited me to come over and have dinner. They didn’t forget about me because I was no longer a couple, which happens because you get to be, you’re a member of the couples club or this or that, or the discussion group where you both go or you are seen together at dinner, usually, or in church together, or your husband ushers and you do something else. You do the knitting or whatever women do. But it is an interesting thing. And the other thing is, nobody cares what it is you choose to do. There are women who knit and crochet. There are women who say prayers. There are women who cook dinners and lunches. There are women who go out and raise money. There are women who tutor and women who help with the homeless and women who do all kinds of hard work. Bagging groceries at the food bank, teaching Sunday school. I consider that hard work. I couldn’t do it. Watch the babies. I’ve done that. That I can do. Usher, take care of preparing the, when we take communion, somebody’s got to cut up those pieces of bread and put that fruit juice in the pitchers and get those cups out. And there’s somebody who does that. There’s somebody who cooks the meals and washes the dishes. We have help. We do have a facilities manager, he’s called, and a custodian and a woman who is a cleaner and a helper who helps in the kitchen and who cleans the bathrooms and so on. And they’re members of the staff and their photos are in our yearbook. And they’re considered. Well, they’re nice people. They’re really nice people. And they also hire a couple of high school kids during the year to help out around and about in the yard work and stuff. There’s a landscaper, but you gotta have somebody out cutting the lawn or spading up the place or something or other. There are people who serve in the community committee and people who serve on a greeting committee. Somebody has to stand at the door and say, welcome to Plymouth Church. And it’s a pleasure to do that. I mean, that’s the object of being there. And it isn’t just [00:50:00] anybody who do that. Some of the movers and shakers of this community stand at the door and say, welcome to Plymouth Church. Because it’s not necessarily your mission, but you’re proud to do it. If you’re a member, you should be welcome, welcoming people to come. I think I forgot to mention the big event. We do meet, as I say, and I mean this. We do meet, as I say, in this big room, this big sanctuary, which has wonderful acoustics. So the Cleveland Orchestra chorus performs there. We’ve had chamber music concerts there. We’ve had all kinds of good events there. And we meet there from September through December through June. The end of May. June we start meeting in the chapel the first Sunday of June. The chapel is a small addition. It’s air conditioned, so that’s nicer in the summertime. A day like yesterday when everybody had the fans and we were meeting in the sanctuary because it was. Chapel wasn’t big enough for the funeral. So brown forward, the funeral director brought these hand fans which were very welcome, believe me. But it was an interesting thing. When we started meeting there, they decided to do something they’d been doing for years. Every year in June, the first Sunday in June, probably since the 30s, Plymouth Church has had an annual picnic and usually they go to Horseshoe Lake. And about 15 years ago, they said, why are we going to Horseshoe Lake? We got this huge lawn. So now we have the picnic on the lawn. Everybody comes in picnic clothes, including the minister under the rope. And after the service, they bring out the tables. Well, they already have the tables. The kids get ready to do the car wash. People park on the street, street. They put up tables and chairs. They Cook hot dogs and hamburgers and everybody brings a covered dish or a dessert. And we have a picnic on the lawn and everybody who lives in the circle around the church gets an invitation to come because we’re going to be noisy and cause disturbance on that Sunday and, you know, cause a little inconvenience to their Sunday using their parking spaces on the street. So they’re invited to come. Some of them do we have members. We have one member I can think of who lives at Moreland Courts. He belongs to Plymouth and St Paul’s both, and that’s good business. He’s smart enough to know that he needs to belong. He has clients at both places and he isn’t going to play favorite. He always comes to our picnic. He goes to their Easter service. Ours isn’t bad, but theirs is grand and glorious. You know, we’re talking St. Paul’s sort of like going to St. Paul’s in London or something. I don’t know. I’ve been there. Not at Easter, but I’ve been there enough to know it’s pretty glorious. So trumpets should be blowing forever. But basically, well, we have trumpets now, too. Our minister’s husband is a music teacher. He teaches at the University of Indiana and he happens to be a trumpet player. So occasionally we get trumpets during when trumpets are called for, he can blow. It’s an interesting thing, though. Having something like the picnic is part of how we connect with the community and we also have contributed to the Friends of Shaker Square. I represented Plymouth on the board of Friends of Shaker Square at one time. I don’t know if we have a member anymore, but we used to always have an ad in the Shaker the Connection, the Friends of Shaker Square newsletter. And I don’t know if we have a member on the board anymore, but we are part of. We’re. We have a membership in the Friends of Shaker Square because we’re part of Shaker Square. We’re an important part of Shaker Square. There’s no question. People will frequently ask me where something is and I can tell them by explaining, well, you know, that big tall spire. Now I sit in my living room, which is six floors up in Shaker Courts, an apartment on Shaker Boulevard across the street from Moreland Courts. And from my window I can see the church spire at night. It’s a very pretty sight. I have many nice views. I look down below me and on the rooftop of our garage is the second floor suite of Sam Caraballude, my neighbor. Sam has a garden beyond belief he has everything, including a fountain. And I don’t have to do any work. I just look at it. I really like Sam. He knows I like his garden. And there are several gardens. Down below on the second floor, on the garage roof, there are patio suites. And above me on the seventh and eighth floor is a penthouse apartment. That’s the top of my building, my section of the building. But it’s very interesting to live in this community. And it’s very interesting to live on the border between two communities. I actually live in Cleveland. That’s Cleveland. Shaker Square is Cleveland. But I’m in the Shaker Heights School district. And my grandson. When my daughter first came here, she lived in an apartment on South Woodland. She came here from Chicago after her marriage broke up and her son was in second grade. So she moved to an apartment on South Woodland. And then she bought a condo in my building further up the street. And her son went to Boulevard School. So they’ve enjoyed living in the community too. And they haven’t come to church. But I must say my grandson has occasionally come and spoken to the youth ministry minister. When he wanted to talk to somebody and his uncle wasn’t available, he felt that he could come and talk. We have a good youth minister. So he’s done that, which is pretty nice I think. That’s another whole program that is fine. At our church we have an excellent youth minister. And until a couple of weeks ago, we had a marvelous associate pastor. She is a counselor, a social worker counselor. And she just resigned because she had been doing counseling work in addition to her part time ministry. And she finally had to give up one or the other associates. We’re looking for a new associate minister now. Not we, but some committee. But we have, you know, the minister. We have the youth minister who handles all the young people’s stuff and also helps run programs because Lois, the associate pastor is gone now. I mean, he gets people to speak and stuff like that at our luncheons. And then we have the minister of music who is really terrific. Jim Riggs is very good because he is very attuned to art and all things artistic. And because we happen to be located now, we happen to have a building that has excellent acoustics. We are able to attract a great many good musical events. Not only is our own choir very good so that we have excellent programs, but we have Les Delices, which is a French group. It’s a French name. It’s a group of. There’s a certain kind of music as a renaissance, I guess, type music, string quartet music. And the Cleveland Orchestra Chorus has practiced regularly at Plymouth Church because it’s a good place to practice. We’ve had chamber music concerts regularly through the years. We’ve had a lot of other kinds of things. When that big tragedy happened in Japan, the earthquake, and there was a benefit for Japan, and members of the Cleveland Orchestra sponsored a benefit, they had a concert and people came and donated money. It was in Plymouth Church. They chose to come there. We regularly have programs, or not programs, but services where musicians perform. They are always members of the Cleveland Orchestra because Jim Riggs knows them. They know him. We have a couple of members of the orchestra, but not that many. It’s just that they know the church. They know it as a place to perform. It’s a matter of acoustics as anything, but it’s a pleasant. No, it’s more than a pleasant place to go. It’s an inspiring place to go to church. And I’d like to think that it epitomizes Shaker Heights, open and affirming, interesting and beautiful. I’ve been a great many times to Portland, Oregon, where my sister lives. The west coast is gorgeous and they’re always bragging about the climate, how beautiful it is, and it’s beautiful indeed. But when my sister comes here and we drive around and we drive in the old neighborhood I lived in, I lived in an area. I lived on a street called Ingleside Road, which runs north of Lakeshore Boulevard to the lake in North Collinwood. And I lived there in my growing up years and went to Oliver Hazard Perry School. And then when my husband and I got married, we lived in an apartment in Euclid for a couple of years, bought a house in Cleveland Heights, and then we bought a house in Shaker on Ingleside Road. So most of my life I’ve lived. That’s a pretty common name. I think these builders love to take those. An ingle is something like a hillside, something or other, I don’t know, or maybe. Oh, I know. An ingle is next to the fireplace. It’s where you sit next to the fire. It’s some kind of English name that builders like to use in Ingleside, whatever. But Ingleside Road is where I’ve lived most of my life. Shaker Heights has been the biggest part of it and it’s been very interesting. I have enjoyed living here and I’ve enjoyed being at Plymouth Church, which is a very important part of Shaker Heights. For a variety of reasons. Historical, political is not the right word, but I guess, culturally, it’s part of Shaker Heights. It sits on the border. It’s a welcoming point, and it’s meant to be a welcoming place. I don’t know if I’m supposed to talk more about Shaker or more about Plymouth.

Kelsey Smith [01:01:25] If you’d like.

Doris Vargo [01:01:26] Well, I like Shaker. I have frequently run into prejudice against Shaker. I was thinking, for example, of a good friend of mine I’ve known since junior high who moved years ago to Middleburg Heights. And she used to tease me regularly about Shaker. I was on a trip with her once, and she asked me about the property values in Shaker Heights. I said, I don’t know. I don’t pay any attention to that particularly, but maybe I should start looking. So I started looking. So the next time I saw her, I said, as far as I can tell, the Shaker Heights property values are pretty much staying steady. Nothing is worth what it was when we had this. Well, everything went up and up and up. We paid something like $25,000 for our house when we bought it and sold it for $125,000. So what? Most of that was inflation. But it didn’t matter, because by that time, when we sold the house, we didn’t have to spend that much money on a condo. So we made money. That’s fine. Whether or not you make money on buying a house in Middleburg Heights, I can’t tell. I don’t care. Middleburg Heights used to be a great bean field. It was an open bean field, and then it became a suburb with a lot of people who built houses. But she gave herself away when she said to me once, well, we have all these nice modern houses here. Well because, Shaker has old houses. It’s an older community. It’s like Cleveland Heights. We have those old houses. Euclid, whatever, Bedford someplace, Rocky River, even. Lakewood. So Middleburg Heights is brand new stuff. Okay, that’s fine. And she said, of course, there’s this one area where the houses are pretty expensive. It’s sort of- It’s got big Tudor places, sort of like Shaker Heights. Well, you know, Cleveland Heights and Shaker Heights have the big old houses on Fairmount Boulevard and Shaker Boulevard. Nobody, not everybody lives there. Not everybody wants to live there. I don’t- I wouldn’t- I wouldn’t know what to do with a house like that. I’d have to hire a staff. I mean, you’d have to have a maid anyway. You couldn’t clean it all yourself. I look at these new houses nowadays that have ceilings that are this high. How do you clean the ceiling? Who do you get to come in with a pole that high? You know, I mean, a nine-foot ceiling is fine. I think that’s great. It’s better than an eight-foot ceiling. But I can clean that. I can’t deal with these two-story, foyers. I mean, wonderful. But McMansions and, you know, it’s all great. And if you have the money and you choose to live that way, that’s great. But Shaker Heights, along with a lot of other communities, Lakewood, Rocky River, Cleveland Heights, have a lot of side streets, a lot of nice houses everybody would like to live in. And that’s the kind of places I lived in when I was living on Ingleside Road in Cleveland, Ingleside Road. When I lived on Edgehill Road in Cleveland Heights, there was another place that was a nice place to live. Nowadays it’s right around the corner from Coventry. Now that’s a problem because everybody’s worried about Coventry, which is too bad, because that’s a nice neighborhood. We lived there when Coventry school was the old kind of. It looked like a fortress. And then he tore it down and built a modern school. And that neighborhood has changed a great deal. It was shabby when we lived there. The houses were nice. But the neighborhood, the neighborhood, the shopping district on Coventry was very shabby. There was a fish market and a kosher meat market, and there was a great bakery. It’s no longer there. And a hardware store that’s still there that, boy, you could get anything you needed in that hardware store. It wasn’t like one of the big modern hardware stores, but you could get every, you could get the tiniest little screw and nut and bolt. They had everything. And they knew where it was too. They could find it too. It’s still there. It’s a good hardware store. I remember when we first moved into my house, my husband- Our house- My husband went down there to get junk right away because there was always something to fix. But Coventry has changed and it’s changed for the better because it’s not shabby anymore. So it’s got a bad reputation when they had some problems a couple summers ago. They’ll work it out. It’s a nice neighborhood. Shaker Heights is a nice community. Cleveland Heights is nice. So is Euclid where I used to live. I have friends that I see regularly who live in Euclid in a bungalow near the lake, have a huge herb garden, nice house. I mean, these neighborhoods are what you make it. And what you make it is what the people are like. And if the people are of goodwill, they’re great. Look at that window, though. Look at those trees and that interesting building over there. And then the city hall is around, and then behind there is the- There’s a big modern building that is actually a senior apartment building that was put up by a church group. Heights Christian Church and Plymouth Church, I think, put up that apartment building. It’s a senior building. One of the things Shaker Heights didn’t have enough of, what they’re finally catching up to, was housing that people could afford once they retired. And we thought about that when we retired and we looked outside of Shaker, thinking it might be more economical. But then we decided it would be stupid to move too far away because it would be hard. You’d have to change your doctor and your shopping areas and the grocery store, everything you did, and it wasn’t worth it. We had considered trying to move, say, Lakewood, but we never lived west. And, you know, that whole thing in Cleveland, you don’t go west of the river if you’ve lived east forever. Stupid. You know, I like it west of the river. I just always lived on the east side. It’s, invite me, I’ll go west. But, you know, it’s kind of weird. We just have that kind of thing here and in other cities, same way. But the big thing is you just gotta like the neighborhood you live in. You’ve got to cooperate with your neighbors. You’ve got to have respect for other people and their property, and you get along. This is a very pleasant place to live. When I talk about my sister when she comes back here, and she doesn’t come much because she doesn’t have much money now that she’s retired and she’s a little afraid to fly. I don’t know. She’s getting up to the age where she doesn’t want. She’s younger than me, but she doesn’t like to travel. But basically, when Peg comes here, she misses it because Portland is beautiful. But people do not realize. And I read this the other day, there’s a guy who is in charge. I read this article in the plane. A man who in charge of the Great Lakes. No, not Great Lakes. Something like the Western Reserve preservation. I don’t know about land preservation. And he came here from somewhere else and they asked him. I think he lives in shape and lives here and likes to go around. They asked him about living here. Will he stay here? He said, why would I move anywhere else? And I noticed something the other day about a movie that’s going to be made here, that’s going to be made in the Metroparks. And the director of this movie said people who- He came here from here originally, I guess. He said people who think of the Middle West think of it as some kind of vast prairie. They don’t realize how beautiful it is here. And the other thing I learned was that the Cuyahoga Valley Park, National Park, not only is it gorgeous, but it has the biggest attendance of any national park in the country.

Kelsey Smith [01:09:43] It’s so accessible.

Doris Vargo [01:09:44] It’s accessible. [crosstalk] Obviously, you can get there without any hassle. And you can go out there and take that crazy train and, you know, and you can take your kids out there.

Kelsey Smith [01:09:54] I grew up in Bedford, and we ended up going there.

Doris Vargo [01:09:58] Oh, you went there?

Kelsey Smith [01:09:59] And that’s where we went all the time.

Doris Vargo [01:10:00] Bedford Reservation, and the other place I used to, when I grew up, having grown up in Euclid, Euclid Creek Reservation. You can get there on the streetcar, on the bus, and you can go have a picnic. You can just walk in there. And there’s this big place with a stream and a baseball diamond and picnic tables and, you know, we used to go there when I was a kid. We would take our bicycles to go to Euclid Creek Reservation, have a picnic, because we could because we lived so close by and it was no big deal to go there. Yeah, I think that we overlooked the fact that going east, I like going east. I’ve been a lot in New York and I’ve been a lot in Chicago because my daughter went to school, to university there and then she lived there for a number of years when she was first married. And she still sees her mother in law a lot. And she and her son and I see Kathy, her mother in law, nice woman. So we’ve all gone to Chicago a lot. And I like Chicago. It’s more like Cleveland than New York is. It’s Midwestern. You know, it’s a little different from New York, but it’s not as snooty. You know, New Yorkers are actually friendlier than you think. I was once a New York and need a change for bus. And I was about to go into a convenience food store and the people at the bus stop said, don’t do that. They’re very unfriendly. They’ll never give you change. You have to buy something. Here, can we make change for this lady? You know, these people standing around a bus stop and they were making change for me. So New Yorkers aren’t as bad as we think they are, but basically the Midwest is great.

Kelsey Smith [01:11:42] It is.

Doris Vargo [01:11:43] It’s beautiful, too.

Kelsey Smith [01:11:45] Mm hmm. Even just this area. My family was on vacation in Kentucky, and they were like, you know, they were like, we went hiking the other day, and the trail was just not as pretty as some of the ones around us.

Doris Vargo [01:11:56] The Metroparks here are gorgeous. And the other thing is, they cover. There is a division through the Metroparks between the water that flows down to the Ohio River and the water that flows north to Lake Erie. The watershed is somewhere in the Metropark. So you get almost two kinds of climate. I mean, I know Columbus is different and Cincinnati are different from Cleveland. The climate is always different. It’s hotter there in the summer. They don’t get the lake effect.

Kelsey Smith [01:12:25] My sister goes to school in Columbus. It’s always hot.

Doris Vargo [01:12:27] Well, then, you know, it’s always hot in Columbus.

Kelsey Smith [01:12:23] Yeah. It’s always hotter.

Doris Vargo [01:12:30] I used to go down there. My sister lived there for about 10 years, and I would go down there with my kids. I’d take the bus down, like, on a Thursday or a Friday so the kids, the cousins could play together. And then my husband would come down on Saturday to pick us up and take us home Sunday. We’d stay overnight or something. But, you know, it was weird. It was always hotter down there. It would be cooler up here to me. And it’s got to be lake effect. I can’t imagine what else it could be. It’s just kind of weird. I have no reason to think it’s anything other than that Columbus sort of sits in a bowl. It’s kind of- It’s at the bottom of some kind of the hills around it. Yeah, and my-

Kelsey Smith [01:13:11] Yeah. She always sends us pictures of, like, daffodils, and we’ve still got snow on the ground.

Doris Vargo [01:13:16] Yeah, I know, I know. And Cincinnati’s even worse because I went down there once in March and everything was blooming in Cincinnati. And here we were snowbound. But on the other hand, I still would rather live here. I think Cincinnati is an interesting town. My nieces- I have two nieces who live in Columbus. German Village is quite nice.

Kelsey Smith [01:13:40] I’ve been there.

Doris Vargo [01:13:42] That’s nice. The rest of Columbus, and I know there’s some nice suburbs, but to me, it’s boring. And I noticed that both my nieces like to come up here. They find it more interesting here. And one of my nieces has a daughter, Maggie, who’s cute. Maggie goes to a Catholic school, and for some reason they were studying the Holocaust, and she wanted to know more about the Holocaust. And I had written to her mother about this. I talked to her mother, and I said, well, she should come up here and go to the. We have this wonderful museum here. Well, they didn’t even know about it, but they came up here and spent the night and I took them to the Maltz Museum. And of course, Maggie was enthralled because she got all the information for a whole paper that she’s writing. And Maggie liked it, too. Maggie was about 12 at the time, but she and my older nieces, her mother and her aunt, really liked Cleveland. Well, they lived in Cleveland until they were about 8 or 9 years old. Then they lived in Mentor for a while. They lived in Lakewood. Then they lived in Mentor for a while. Then they moved to Mobile, Alabama, and Charleston, South Carolina. They lived in the south for a number of years. They finally moved to Columbus, and then their father, who worked for. He worked for Faberge Cosmetic Company. He was a salesman for them, and he was a district or route manager or whatever they call him. And he had. He didn’t have Cleveland, but he had Columbus and all of southern Ohio and western Pennsylvania. And he wanted to go west. Basically, he was trying to get away from his family. Kind of feeling he was trying to get away from his mother, particularly. I gathered his mother was the kind of woman who would drop in on Sunday morning to see if they’d gone to church. Who drops in on Sunday morning? What’s Sunday morning? What are you doing dropping in on somebody? I don’t blame them for wanting to move out of town, but anyway, that must have been hard on my sister, too. Anyway, they moved to Portland, Oregon. He got a chance to take a job in Portland, and he took it. I guess he was offered a chance to go east or go west, and he decided he couldn’t afford New York. He had, what, he had five kids in the family. He couldn’t afford to live in New York, so he took Portland. It’s cheaper. Anyway, they’ve lived out there for 35 years now, and it’s lovely out there, but they. They don’t have anything on Cleveland. It’s quite beautiful in this area. All of northeastern Ohio. I mean, Cleveland, Loraine. I went to school in Oberlin for a couple of years, and the rest of the time I’ve lived here. I’ve never lived anywhere else. I’ve been a lot of different places, many of them quite beautiful, including Ireland. I finally went to Ireland a couple of years ago. Go there sometime if you haven’t, everybody will talk to you. You don’t need this. I mean, people in Ireland will talk to you. Sit down. And they’re sitting there and they’ll just start up a conversation. I had an interesting adventure there, and my children tell me, always travel alone, Mother. You always have adventures. My father’s family was Irish. They came here during the Civil War, probably to avoid a famine or something or other. And they started working on the New York Central Railroad. And their name was Cunneen. C-U-N-N-E-E-N. And there were only two branches of the Cunneen family in Cleveland. They were all from County Cork, and they were like distant cousins, you know, third cousins or fourth cousins or something. So I never knew much about them. But my older daughter went to Ireland with a group a couple years ago, and they were in Cork, and they were coming out of a pub late at night. And across the street is a store that says Cunneen’s Key Shop. Same name they took a picture of and gave it to me. So we were trying to find out about it. So I went to Ireland, and I was in Cork. Of course, it was in the evening we were there for dinner, and I went to a cab stand, and I asked the guy if he could if he knew where this. He said, well, I know where it is, but I won’t take you there. I said, why not? He said, because if you walk around the corner, it’s right there, ma’am. Why should I take you there when you can walk there? So I walked around the corner, there it was. Of course, it was closed, but I went in the pub and they said, oh, yeah, we know them well. They come in here for lunch every day. So fine. But there was nothing I could do about it. The place was closed. So the next day, I’m in Dublin and I’m having breakfast, and the man sitting next to me with a lady, and then the lady goes, leaves the table. He starts talking to me, and he asked me who I am and where I’m from and blah, blah, blah. So I told him I’d been looking for something. I was in Cork. And I said. I told him my story. He said, oh, yes, the Cunneens. I know them well. I said, oh, get out of here. He said, no, no, no. I’m a tax assessor and they run a key shop. And when I need to get in someone’s locks, I hire them. Ireland is a trip. I can’t believe it. I mean, that I should meet this man and he should be a tax assessor, and he should know. Well, evidently, the Cunneen family owns more than one key shop. And the head, a guy named Paul Cunneen, the head of the company now, is the head of the key shop people of Ireland or something or other, I don’t know. They’re locksmiths and he’s an important locksmith. And among locksmiths in Ireland. And the tax assessors use locksmiths when they have to break into someone’s locked possessions to get at them. But Ireland is fun. It’s beautiful. It’s very green. It’ll rain every afternoon you’re there. But I was always either on the bus or in a store. What do I care, you know? But it’s a beautiful place and extremely friendly. And you don’t have a language barrier. It’s better than going to the rest of Europe. Well, you don’t have a language barrier in England. You don’t have a language barrier anywhere anymore. They all speak English no matter where you are. In France, maybe French people like to speak French even though they know you speak English, you know, I mean, it’s a pride bit. So you say merci and let it go at that. I don’t know what else I can tell you. I’ve gotten way off the subject.

Kelsey Smith [01:20:25] Oh, that’s alright. I was just going to ask you. What was I going to ask you? It’s about Plymouth. Oh, where did you guys sell your candy? In the candy circle. Where would you-

Doris Vargo [01:20:36] Oh, where did we sell it? Well, actually, we sold it to anybody who’d buy it. But at the end we could only make so much and the people in the church bought so much of it, we couldn’t sell it to anybody else. If you wanted to buy it, it was excellent candy, hand dipped chocolates. And the dippers were people who knew how to do this. In fact, we were trying to train people to do it when the older people were dying out. And my son gave me the idea and we did it. We had candy camp. The younger women were invited to come on a Saturday and learn how to make you cook the fillings all of different flavors. And then you sort out the nuts because you have covered nuts. And then you melt chocolate. And then you set up these stations which has a gas fire and a pot of chocolate. And with your hands and gloves, you take the pieces of candy and you dip them and swirl them so that it says C on top if it’s chocolate, V if it’s vanilla, whatever. These are hand dipped by four people or three people who know how. And they’re the only ones who dip. I never got to dip. I made little things like making marbles, you know, with gloves on. You always wear gloves and a hairnet. I also cupped. You take those little paper cups, frilly cups, and you put the candies in. And then you put them in boxes with all vanilla, all this, all that. And then you fill the boxes. And the boxes have to weigh exactly one pound. And they have to be in a certain order. Like, you know, there’s a diagram, like shrafts or one of those candies where they tell you on the box top what’s where. You have to fill them that way. And each box has to weigh one pound. And then you put on a label that says, this candy may be frozen. And Plymouth Church candy, Plymouth Church, Shaker Heights. And then you sell it for, I guess it was something like seven bucks a pound or something. It was cheaper than Godiva, but so good that we had a waiting list of people to buy it. And they would make at least $10,000 a year selling this candy. And it was work, work, work for six weeks straight before Easter, before Christmas, every year. And they finally just couldn’t do it anymore because it takes a lot of manpower. We had men working on it. We had my grandson. He came one day and he made crunch. He was off school because they had conferences or something. And he said, can I go to Candy Circle with you? I knew he was hoping to get samples. Of course he did. He was willing to wear the mitts and put on a hairnet to do this. He was nine years old. And he rolled out the crunch because he was strong enough. And then he came and helped me cup, and he’s sitting with me. And he said, gee, Grandma, these women who were dipping were sitting in front of us. They were chatting. And he said, these women talk a lot, don’t they? I said, oh, yeah. You mean they gossip a lot? He said, well, yeah, but mom told me never to say stuff like that. They were talking about the mother of one of his friends in school. They were evidently neighbors of this woman. And they were gossiping about this woman, whatever they thought about her. And he heard the name, and he listened, you know, what are they saying? But they did. One of the reasons, I think, the Candy Circle broke up, I don’t think so much that the young women didn’t want to do it. But some of these older women were just plain nasty. They could be mean to you. When I first joined, before I even joined, well, I didn’t join at first. I was going to join, but then I went back to work to help the kids go to school. My kids were in high school or in elementary school all day. I went back to work in order to raise college money. So I didn’t join that until after I retired. But when I was younger, I was there one day with my little girl who was sitting there playing coloring books or something. And I was told by one of the older women, there’s a time for this and a time for that. And I thought she was going to quote from the Bible. Well, she said there’s a time for the PTA and a time for the candy circle. And you haven’t yet reached your time for the candy circle. We don’t bring our children here. So I never went back. I mean, if she’s going to tell me that my kids sitting there on a coloring book and I’m there over a stove melting chocolate for her. You know, these women were nasty, some of them. The older women can be very nasty sometimes. They’re just not. They don’t, they’re resentful of the younger women. I don’t know what it is. By the time I got to be. Well, I’m 82 now, but by the time I got to be that age, what’s the point of being nasty to the younger women? I mean, you may need them someday. Your daughter is a younger woman. Get real, honey. You know, I don’t know, but I think there was a time when women wore hats to church regularly. We had grandams, you know, women who were various sundry people who were movers and shakers or thought they were, and they didn’t have to be nice to anybody. But that is silly.

Kelsey Smith [01:26:01] It’s no fun.

Doris Vargo [01:26:02] And what’s the point? I mean, I don’t get it. I don’t know you, but why should I be mean to you? I mean, you’re a student at Cleveland State. By the way, what do you take at Cleveland State in particular?

Kelsey Smith [01:26:16] I’m a history major.

Doris Vargo [01:26:17] Oh, you’re- Oh, history. Oh, great. That’s terrific. That makes sense. And someone will say to you someday, and what are you gonna do? You might as well be a fine arts major. What are you gonnado with history? Teach? You know. Well, I don’t care what you- You could be an attorney.

Kelsey Smith [01:26:32] I want to go into museum studies, but-

Doris Vargo [01:26:34] Oh, that would be interesting. Yeah. That there is a field, I think, I think probably openings in that area someday.

Kelsey Smith [01:26:41] There actually kind of are even just within the past couple years because a lot of the older museum people are kind of retiring and things like that. And I’ve heard that. And then just, you know, the field of public history in general is opening-

Doris Vargo [01:26:56] Is opening up, isn’t it?

Kelsey Smith [01:26:57] I mean, you can kind of- You know, there’s different places that just want to hire you, you know, consultants, consult on something.

Doris Vargo [01:27:03] Yeah, I was thinking.

Kelsey Smith [01:27:04] You know, if a church wants- You know, I don’t want to go into archives, but if a church needs it, that’s-

Doris Vargo [01:27:09] No, I know. Archives-

Kelsey Smith [01:27:11] Or if they want to set up like- [crosstalk]

Doris Vargo [01:27:12] I worked at University Hospitals for a number of years, and we had an official archivist, which was important. This was an old hospital. They needed someone to keep the records properly. The important records having to do with the history of the hospital, not the bills or anything, but the archives of the hospital. And that was very important. And we had, well, somebody was writing a history of the hospital. When I was there, I worked in public relations, and one of the women was writing history. And we had to have the archives available for the history. But it was an interesting thing, the whole field of history. I think cable television has made some of that possible. People, The History Channel and all the rest of it.

Kelsey Smith [01:27:56] Even the Internet.

Doris Vargo [01:27:57] Oh, the Internet, too.

Kelsey Smith [01:27:58] I didn’t get to explain this to you. These interviews-

Doris Vargo [01:28:03] Yeah. What are you going to do?

Kelsey Smith [01:28:04] What will happen is it goes on a database.

Doris Vargo [01:28:07] Sure.

Kelsey Smith [01:28:08] And eventually that database is going to be public so people can use them for research.

Doris Vargo [01:28:11] Oh, great. That’s good.

Kelsey Smith [01:28:12] I don’t know when that’s gonna happen. I keep hearing updates on the project. They’re like, we’re still waiting.

Doris Vargo [01:28:19] They always tell you that, tomorrow, tomorrow.

Kelsey Smith [01:28:21] Like any day now. But, you know.

Doris Vargo [01:28:23] Yeah, yeah, sure.

Kelsey Smith [01:28:24] And. But what we do, what I’m gonna do is I will clip the audio and so, like, short little vignettes about different things. And I work for the center for Public History and Digital Humanities, and it’s out of the history department. And one of the big things that we do is we, they developed an app for your smartphone that basically curates the city. It’s called Cleveland Historical. So you walk, you can walk around downtown or actually, there’s some sites in Shaker Heights. You know, the centennial got a grant to do it. And so it pulls up description and then photos and then has short audio clips, oral history clips. So that’s what these interviews will become. The short clips.

Doris Vargo [01:29:16] I was, I was thinking the other day I saw an ad in the paper about hikes downtown. I have done a hike downtown with a natural history history museum had one a few years ago where we walked around the square, literally, we went to the soldiers and said it was a monument and to the federal courthouse and Old Stone Church and Society for Savings and the Cleveland Public Library. And we looked at the stone that was used in Building those places. And we talked about the buildings itself. Well, like the Cleveland Public Library. I have a fondness for that place. I worked there once when I was in college. I worked there one summer. But that’s a gorgeous building. It’s so beautiful. It’s so different, too. It really is. It was a pleasure to work there because it was so beautiful. It was kind of fun to go there every day and be someplace that was that beautiful to work in. Not everybody cares about that, and most of the time you don’t work in any place that nice. But on the other hand. And it helps when you do.

Kelsey Smith [01:30:17] I’m sure. I’m always very affected by my surroundings, so, you know, I love being when I can work somewhere.

Doris Vargo [01:30:26] Sure. Sure. Well, that doesn’t have much about the history, but it tells you some of them. You might as well keep that because I’ve got extra copies. I did forget, but they will have downstairs, some kind of brochures in the Shaker Room, because I know we have donated brochures about Plymouth to that library, so you can certainly look at them if you need to.

Kelsey Smith [01:30:47] Yeah. Someone actually already wrote the Plymouth site and did a lot of the research, so they’ve probably already seen it.

Doris Vargo [01:30:53] Sure, I’m sure.

Kelsey Smith [01:30:54] My job this summer, I’m on a grant from the provost [crosstalk] for the summer-

Doris Vargo [01:30:56] Yeah, sure.

Kelsey Smith [01:30:57] So my job is basically to do this.

Doris Vargo [01:30:59] Sure. Yeah. Well, that’s right. Well, I’m sure that they have all that information available to this project. Well, I find it interesting that this is happening and I’m pleased that I guess I remember when Shaker was 50 years old, 75 years. 75 years old, I guess, and they did some kind of big thing. Now, the library, I guess, is 75 years old this year. At least I believe that’s correct. I’m not sure that I’m right, but it is kind of interesting that we forget how old things are. And we’re going to have. One of the things that Plymouth is going to do, in addition to having agreed to do tours, which somebody will show up for eventually, I guess. We’re going to have, and I’m in charge of doing this, a series of lectures, informal lectures in October, and we’re going to invite people who do or do not live in Shaker, and they don’t necessarily have to belong to Plymouth, to talk about Plymouth Church, its place in the community, and Shaker itself and its place in the Greater Cleveland community. And that will be interesting. I mean, we’re going to get. I’m going to ask the mayor to introduce these people rather than me. But we’re just going to ask, like, three people each Wednesday instead of long speeches, short talks, and then we’re going to have it. Instead of having it in the sanctuary, we’re going to go to the fellowship hall and serve coffee and let people sit around like this at tables and question and answer stuff, if possible. I mean, otherwise, I don’t think people are going to come out at 7 o’clock on an October evening. We deliberately skip the last Wednesday in October because it’s Halloween. That wouldn’t make any sense, now, would it?

Kelsey Smith [01:32:51] No.

Doris Vargo [01:32:52] You better be home on Halloween and not at a lecture. I don’t think that it’s a good idea not to be. Anything else? Do I have to sign this?

Kelsey Smith [01:32:59] I’ll have you sign this. I don’t have a pen.

Doris Vargo [01:33:03] I have one.

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