XX. Short Vincent

Short Vincent does not appear under that name in the Cleveland street guide, which stiffly insists on identifying it as Vincent Avenue N.E. in the unbending manner of street guides everywhere. But the formal tag is not nearly as satisfying or as recognizable as the commonly used name. As Short Vincent, it enjoys mingled fame and notoriety all over the nation among people who make it their business to know interesting streets.

Clevelanders in particular treasure the nickname because an unimaginative city government in 1905 adopted a numbered street system in the interest of efficiency, and in so doing sacrificed a collection of colorful and historically meaningful names. The north-south streets in the downtown area took on such sterile identifications as East 4th Street, East 6th Street, East 9th Street, and East 12th Street, for example, losing the more picturesque designations of Sheriff Street, Bond Street, Erie Street, and Muirson Street. Now the people cling jealously to such interesting names as have been left to them, and Short Vincent, a name of their own coinage, is a leading example.

The fact is that Short Vincent physically is not much of a street as streets come and go. It is, as its name implies, a short, narrow thoroughfare of undistinguished lineage and limited utility value. It travels a mere 485 feet-just over one-eleventh of a mile. Even people who are terribly fond of the street admit its value in the over-all pattern of public movement in downtown Cleveland is negligible. It performs only a minor service by providing a kind of passageway for one-way (westbound) traffic between East 6th Street and East 9th Street, but it is not a route that a motorist intent on getting somewhere would seek out, because it really doesn’t lead anywhere.

Once, in the formative days of the city, this little mews with the bend in the middle was an alley that served the stables and coach houses of the estates that fronted on Superior Avenue to the north and Euclid Avenue to the south. It came by its Christian name honestly. The land which it crosses was part of the farm of an early Cleveland settler named John Vincent. The soil must have been fertile, judging from the way the street sprouted with life in later years. It became, in the modern era, one of the city’s most significant concentrations of facilities for fun and games, not to mention good food.

Much of the credit for this development must go to the influence of the Hollenden Hotel, the largest and gayest hostelry between New York and Chicago, which fronted on Superior Avenue and backed up to the sidewalk of Short Vincent. The old hotel was tom down in 1963 to make way for the handsome new Hollenden House which now sits on the historic site, but silent tears rolled down the cheeks of some Clevelanders when the magnificent old structure was destroyed.

The Hollenden was one of the city’s outstanding landmarks; a living memorial of the Victorian period. Even in the rundown condition in which it found itself at the end, it was a magnificent building and it still enjoyed the loyalty, if not affection, of thousands of regular patrons who sentimentally insisted on the Hollenden address whenever they visited Cleveland. It was a fourteen-story red brick towered structure with one thousand rooms and bay windows that bellied out on every floor. Its builder, in 1885, was Liberty E. Holden, the owner of the Plain Dealer, whose newspaper building sat diagonally across from the hotel on Superior Avenue at East 6th Street. The former newspaper plant now is a branch building of the Cleveland Public Library. “Hollenden” was the ancestral spelling of the Holden family name. The management of the hotel was inordinately proud of the fact that it was the first hotel in the world which had electric illumination as a built-in convenience. It also boasted one hundred private baths at the time of its opening, which was a pretty sensational feature for the time, as was the fact that it was of fireproof construction.

City Hall was just a short distance west of the Hollenden, on Superior Avenue near Public Square, and the old Courthouse was directly on the Square, and there were several newspapers grouped nearby. These fed the hotel a steady patronage of politicians, lawyers, newspapermen and, in their train, the sporting element of the town. The Hollenden was the community’s smart spot and-it follows-it was the center of the downtown social life. Among its more notable features was the elegant Crystal Room, whose mirrored walls and great crystal chandeliers shimmered with brilliance during a formal function; especially one that called for the use of the solid gold service, usually reserved for heads of foreign governments and Presidents of the United States. Five presidents made the Hollenden their stopping-off place: William McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, Woodrow Wilson, and Warren G. Harding. Among those who frequented the Hollenden’s dining room regularly was Mark Hanna, the President-maker, and his favorite dish was always on the menu. It was called Hanna Hash.

After living gloriously and proudly through its first sixty years, the hotel, already beginning to give way to the natural laws of physical obsolescence, its financial position weakened by the Depression, fell into the hands of a succession of hit-and-run operators who were completely lacking in respect for the Hollenden’s tradition of class and without pride in its history. Their superficial attempts at modernization resulted in a spoiling of the rococo splendor of the hotel. In a vulgar bid to prolong its earning powers, the huge chandeliers were ripped out and replaced by garish fluorescent fixtures; paint was splashed over the shining grain of the mahogany paneling; chrome-and-glass wall fixtures were installed, and in places asphalt tile squares covered the old marble flooring, completing the desecration. The stately old lady of character was turned into a gaudy frump, and when ownership finally was wrested from the hands of out-of-town interests by two Cleveland investors, James Carney and Peter Kleist, they decided it had gone too far downhill to be rescued and would have to be replaced with a new structure.

The demolition of the old Hollenden proved to be one of the most interesting spectacles of the 1963-64 wrecking season in Cleveland. No hotel ever put up a better last-ditch fight. The wrecking company found that slamming its large iron ball against the wall of the hotel only had the effect of turning the heavy ball into a misshapen mass. After pounding the Hollenden a number of times, the ball began to look more like a cube and the wrecker wisely turned to a slower, piecemeal system of destruction. It took him more than a year to level the structure, many months more than had been anticipated, and all the admirers of this holdover from the past applauded the building’s last convincing show of quality.

There is, of course, something immature in America’s haste to destroy so many of the worthwhile landmarks that connect the present with the past. We admire and revere the ancient cathedrals, inns, houses, and taverns that decorate the cities of the British Isles and Europe; we cheerfully contribute our money to help rescue the temples of Abu Simbel from the Hooding Nile Valley, and so many of our millionaires have dismantled old castles in Europe and the United Kingdom and rebuilt them on an American site, stone by stone, that the practice has come to be regarded as hokey. Meanwhile, we are constantly on the lookout for any of our native buildings which may be acquiring the beautifying patina of the years, and when we spot one we order it leveled in the name of progress. It is all part of our impatience with homegrown antiquity, and the American insistence on equating age with obsolescence.

A large share of the life generated within the Hollenden spilled out the back door onto Short Vincent, helping mightily in the establishment of that street’s unique atmosphere and lasting reputation. Taverns and restaurants crowded along the walks of the quaint cobblestoned street, and the way was filled with interesting characters. Somehow, despite the physical changes that have occurred in the neighborhood, the street has managed to retain its character. It even took on fresh appeal when an institution that embodied the spirit of the progressive, liberal forces in Cleveland moved its quarters to a Vincent address. It-the City Club-is an outgrowth of the rich political climate that prevailed during the administration of Mayor Tom L. Johnson. It was formed in 1912 shortly after his death, and its founders included some of his former lieutenants and disciples, among them Newton D. Baker, Frederick A. Henry, Professor A. R. Hatton, and John H. Clarke. The basic tenet of the City Club was open, public discussion of all issues facing the people. Its credo:

“I hail and harbor and hear men of every belief and party; for within my portals prejudice grows less and bias dwindles. I have a forum as wholly uncensored as it is rigidly impartial. ‘Freedom of Speech’ is graven about my rostrum; and beside it, Fairness of Speech: I am accessible to men of all Sides-literally and figuratively-for I am located in the heart of a city. Spiritually and geographically, I am the city’s club-the City Club.”

All local and state election campaigns traditionally reach their climax in the City Club’s Short Vincent quarters on the Saturday noon preceding Election Day, when opposing candidates for major office come together in direct confrontation, not only to make their last oratorical bids for office, but also to undergo an oftentimes grueling cross-examination by the club’s membership. Close races very often have been decided on the floor of the City Club in the heat of the question-and-answer period.

In recent decades, Short Vincent has become best known as a retreat-in-depth for some of the most interesting characters in the community fold-gamblers, bookies, touts, playboys and playgirls, show people and sports figures, the broadcasting crowd and the newspaper crowd, politicians and panhandlers, lovers of jazz music, conventioners, and a lot of anonymous seekers after excitement.

The establishment that anchors the entire street is the Theatrical Restaurant, which started out as a hole-in-the-wall some thirty years ago and developed into a fine place to eat and a preserve for jazz musicians. The place changes character at the dinner hour when the musicians come on, and if the diners sometimes have trouble shouting their orders into the ears of the waiters, nobody really seems to mind that minor annoyance.

The Theatrical is the creation of a streetwise, amiable little man known to his friends and customers as Mushy Wexler. His nickname springs reasonably out of his right name, Moishe, the Yiddish form of Morris. Some formalists insist on addressing him as “Mr. Wexler,” or Morris, but that kind of strained speech makes all the Short Vincenters uncomfortable and even wary. It is a tradition of the street with a nickname that all its people go by a nickname, and the astonishing ingenuity of the people who inhabit the crooked little way has given rise to a sensational collection of sobriquets. Damon Runyon would have loved the street and all its people; he would have admired their colorful speech and savored the quaint names of such celebrities as Shoes Rosen, Honest Yockim, Milwaukee the Book, Fuzzy Lakis, Mustache Mike, Smalley, Russian Mike, Race Horse Richard, Heigh-Ho Silver, Pinky Schulte, and Squeaky Hilow.

Shoes Rosen and Honest Yockim were the Damon-and-Pythias pair of the Short Vincent gambling gentry until the failing health of Shoes impelled him to move to the softer clime of Las Vegas. The breakup of the genial combination was viewed with genuine regret by everybody who knew them. The anecdotes about their many gaming adventures are still told and retold, especially the one about their trip in a flying machine.

Wherever there was an important prize fight, with all its concomitant opportunities for making an honest wager or two, Shoes and Honest almost always were in attendance. It is not surprising, therefore, that they should have decided to attend a big fight which was to be held in Pittsburgh during one of the early years of the 1930s.

Pittsburgh is not far from Cleveland; a mere 125 miles or so, but at that early time there was no Ohio Turnpike to take motorists swiftly to the Pennsylvania border. Neither was there a Pennsylvania Turnpike to take the travelers deeper within the Keystone State. Such roads as there were had to be among the worst roads in the nation. The alternative to driving was flying, which was generally regarded in that early day as a rather risky venture, with unfavorable odds going against the passengers.

It was probably that element of risk that appealed to the pair and led them to take the plane to Pittsburgh. The trip to the Pennsylvania city was a humdrum experience, but the return flight, after the bout, was a Pegasus of a different color. Shortly after the plane took off it ran head-on into a violent thunderstorm that shivered the frail craft and buffeted it about the sky as icy blue slashes of lightning shot all about it, like a Conestoga wagon under attack by burning arrows.

The few passengers aboard the frail craft- perhaps even the crew- were of the same mind: This was the end. As the weather worsened and the little plane bucked and fluttered, sideslipped and shuddered in the grip of the storm, Honest Yockim turned to his old friend and spoke his mind in a voice filled with regret.

“She’ll never make it,” said Honest.

Shoes, who had been slumped in his seat staring fearfully at the rain splattering the window, sat up with new color suddenly suffusing his cheeks.

“I bet she does,” said Shoes.

Honest sneered.

“I got fifty that says she goes down,” he said scornfully. “Even money.”

The other passengers within earshot whimpered, but Shoes nodded agreement to the terms, and for the rest of the turbulent trip, Honest was pulling for the plane to crash and Shoes was cheering it onward to the safe landing it eventually achieved in Cleveland.

The moral is, naturally, that men who are really dedicated to the fun of gambling will not overlook any opportunity to test the laws of chance. Life is made to order for them because it is made up of opposites. There are two sides to every question, to every game, to every issue; there is life and death, good and evil, black and white, sickness and health, slow and fast, early and late. Any world so constituted had the foil approval of Honest Yockim and Shoes Rosen. They simply took sides, made their bets, and waited for the outcome. The subject of the bet didn’t matter. The wager was everything.

Some of the life went out of Short Vincent in 1963 when the popular Kornman’s Restaurant, owned and operated by the Weinberger family, closed its doors after a vigorous run of approximately half a century. An outstanding seafood restaurant, Fischer-Rohr’s, had occupied the site in the early decades of the century, but shifted to new quarters on Chester Avenue, near East 12th Street. Under the direction of the Weinbergers-Mom and Pop and their sons, Julius and Billy-Kornman’s became a headquarters for hearty eaters. Even though the restaurant’s main entrance was on East 9th Street, it had a side entrance on Short Vincent, next to the communications center of the street, Frank Ciccia’s Barber Shop, and everybody regarded the place as part of the Short Vincent establishment. In the afternoons and in the early evening hours, as the night characters came astir, they naturally drifted into Kornman’s to exchange the latest news bulletins, such as who was running at Thistledown or the North Randall Track and what were the odds in the crucial night game between the Clevelands and the Chicagos. There was a big, round oak table in the corner, near the front door, that was their exclusive sitting place, and it was close enough to the end of the bar so that they could still hear the classic monologues delivered from time to time by William “Squeaky” Hilow, the most interesting bartender in the city; a gentle Lebanese with a bashed nose, an irrepressible sense of humor, and a burning desire to perform.

Short Vincent was at its liveliest peak in the years immediately following World War II when Bill Veeck arrived in Cleveland to direct the fortunes of the Cleveland Indians and set up, incidentally, a nighttime dugout on the little avenue. The brilliant burrhead took charge wherever he went; he was living in a hurry and there weren’t enough hours in the day. He still had two legs when he became a Clevelander, but he was limping badly and he knew it was only a matter of time before the doctors would relieve him of the leg that had been badly smashed by the recoil of an artillery piece when he was serving in the United States Marines. He wanted the leg to take him places while it could- and it did.

People with two good legs couldn’t keep up with Veeck, but some of them made a game try, dashing along in his hobbling wake as he shuttled about town almost every night in the week, from Gruber’s Restaurant in Shaker Heights to the Theatrical and Kornman’s on Short Vincent. Accompanying him most of the time in this spirited routine was a group of loyal and admiring companions, mostly newspaper people, who won the name of the Jolly Set.

One of the uncontested leaders of the Jolly Set, by popular acknowledgment, was Winsor French, the Press columnist, a daily commentator on the Cleveland scene who shares his time between cafe society and Society-society. He is likely the one who introduced Veeck to Short Vincent, but the baseball celebrity would have found his way there without any help. He, like French, admires unusual personalities on or off the baseball field, and such connoisseurs of characters are drawn to Short Vincent the way a dedicated fisherman is attracted to a sparkling mountain stream filled with gigantic, angry-tailed trout.

It was French, indeed, who was the moving force behind a celebrated scheme to raise funds for charity by blocking traffic off Short Vincent one night in 1953 and using the street for an outdoor bazaar. The date chosen was June 8th and the affair was called “Fun For Funds Fair.” Performers from night clubs, theaters, radio and television stations all volunteered their services, as did the town’s star athletes and celebrities, including Bob Feller and Hank Greenberg, then general manager of the Indians. Paint was sloshed on the black asphalt street pavement in appropriately gay patterns, wooden booths and platforms were built, public address systems installed, decorative tinsel hung and, as a special touch to publicize the fair, a tall flagpole was installed. This was not intended as a patriotic gesture, but as a roosting place for a Short Vincent bartender named Richard Tuma.

“Cleveland hadn’t had a flagpole sitter in a long time,” mused French, chairman of the event. “It seemed like a good stunt at the time.”

A month before the big street fiesta, Tuma made his way to the top of the pole and settled down to his sitting assignment. All his friends on Short Vincent were bursting with pride to see him up there, and they shared the vicarious thrill of achievement, basking in the after-glow of all the publicity the three Cleveland newspapers gave the city’s leading flagpole sitter. They would yell up to him and wave their arms, and Richard Tuma would wave right back. He didn’t have the slightest sign of a big head, and that reassuring word passed up and down the avenue.

Finally came the late afternoon of the big day when the “Fun For Funds” bazaar was to be held, and no event ever gave promise of a more complete success. All the newspapers, radio stations, and television stations had gotten behind the project and publicized it mightily. Thousands of Clevelanders made their way downtown, drawn by the big buildup, and there was no question but that it would be a roaring, smashing success.

As it turned out, it was all of that-and more!

The fun-seekers streamed early into the gaily decorated street and carnival sounds filled the air as the gaming wheels spun, concessionaires called attention to their stands, and a girl vocalist, Barbara Page of Station WGAR, sang from a bandstand rigged in a tiny parking lot. The “Fun For Funds” committee, led by Marshall Samuel former publicist for the Cleveland Indians, was elated at the signs of success, but their joy was tempered by the dead hush of the air and the strange color of the twilight sky, a sickly yellow. Not many of the Short Vincent regulars were alarmed by the sight because it was the first time most of them had seen a daytime sky in years and they naturally assumed that this was the way it always looked. Not so Tuma, high atop the flagpole that be had called home for so many days. He knew, as the committee and many of the fairgoers did, that there was something decidedly strange about the sky. As he peered toward the west, his worst fears were confirmed. The horizon presented a mass of ominous saffron-colored clouds. There could be no doubt that something special in the way of a storm was approaching.

Tuma, appalled by the sight from his vantage place, shimmied down the flagpole and with hundreds of Clevelanders dashed for cover even as somebody pushed the panic button by yelling: “Tornado!”

It was exactly that: A real, honest-to-goodness tornado; a twister from out of the west. It swung lazily into the city from the southwest, touched down near Cleveland Hopkins Airport and, moving steadily in a north-easterly direction, it roared and swayed through the city, dipped down briefly at Short Vincent and East 9th Street, and passed on out into Lake Erie.

After a cautious interval, heads began to peek tentatively out of doorways, barrooms, restaurants, garages, and Frank’s Barber Shop. It all had happened so quickly, but the damage wrought by the tornado was unbelievable. The doughty little street was strewn with debris. Windows were smashed, bunting from the carnival stands lay in the puddles, and the stands themselves were nowhere to be found. A beautiful Hammond organ which had been loaned for the street bazaar by the Halle Brothers department store was smashed against a building wall and lay slumped in ruins. A policeman’s horse had been picked up, carried through the air, and lay dead in the street. The tall sign that had been firmly attached to the Gillsy Hotel had been wrenched loose and hung precariously over the littered East 9th Street at the comer of Vincent.

In the quiet aftermath, as the silently accumulating crowd of awed Clevelanders looked about at the wreckage, a drunk staggered out of Mickey’s Bar, looked up and down in disgust, and posed the most pointed question of the day.

“What’s going on here?” he growled as he flapped his arms and moved uncertainly off into the crowd.

For a long time after that spectacular late afternoon catastrophe, Short Vincenters liked to ruminate over what would have happened if Tuma had stuck to his post at the top of the flagpole in the face of the tornado. The general belief was that he would have ridden out the storm safely, and some of the boys were rueful that he had not taken this perilous course because as the only man in history to go through a tornado atop a flagpole he would have given the entire street added national luster.

Several years later, in October of 1958, Tuma gave all his confreres new reason for pride when, in another outburst of public-spirited cooperation, he agreed to participate in a pseudoscientific test to determine if a mere man could outrun a racehorse. Arthur Brisbane, the Hearst editor-columnist, years before had just about proven to everybody’s satisfaction that a gorilla could beat a prize fighter, but hardly anybody had even bothered to consider the man vs. racehorse question. Such controversy as there was came about in a casual way.

The Short Vincent bartender, it seems, had been a patron of a rather sorry racetrack called Cranwood at the end of Miles Avenue in Warrensville Heights, and his luck at the two-dollar window had not been good. One night, while standing about the clubhouse with some of the track officials, Tuma moodily volunteered the opinion that all the nags racing at the Cranwood course were bums.

“I could run faster than any horse you’ve got here!” he asserted, making no attempt to suppress the bitterness in his voice.

Henry Gottfried, president of the track, and John O’Keeffe, general manager, bridled (as good horsemen are wont to do), and their first impulse was to take umbrage. Gottfried, indeed, shouted back at Tuma, “I’d like to see you!”

“Give me a chance!” yelled Tuma.

O’Keelfe, widely known as a race track publicist before moving up the executive ladder, suddenly saw the possibilities for newspaper space in the bartender’s challenging statement. He suggested, craftily, that perhaps Tuma was jesting; that he didn’t really believe, deep down, that he could outrun a real racehorse.

Tuma replied, heatedly, that he could beat the best horse that was entered in the Cranwood meet. What’s more, he said, he’d like the opportunity to prove it.

“You’re on!” said Gottfried.

The race, appropriately named the Question Mark Handicap, was arranged to be run between the third and fourth races at the track on October 23, 1958. On the program it was listed as Race No. 3 1/2, one of several inspired touches provided by the track publicist, Ron Lewis.

Instead of having Tuma run against the best horse available, it was decided in the interest of sportsmanship to name as his competition the worst of the Cranwood entries. The significance of this decision can be better appreciated in the light of the knowledge that the horses running at Cranwood possibly were, in the aggregate, the worst racehorses assembled at anyone American track that particular year.

The horse chosen for the big race was a three-year-old colt named Hard Luck Joe which, true to its name, bad never won a race in its entire career. One reason for this sorry record, possibly, was that Hard Luck Joe’s owners had insisted on running him against horses. They finally must have reasoned that he might have a better chance running against a middle-aged bartender.

When the news of the great contest was announced, all the Short Vincent regulars stirred with interest and there was an immediate flurry of betting, with almost all the money going on the horse, except for a few sentimental side bets. The odds were decidedly unfavorable to Tuma, but everybody admired the determined way he went about preparing himself for the big race.

The word was that Tuma was getting up early every morning and running in the park where track spies could not clock his workouts. He even made some test runs on the track between races, much to the delight of the fans. All of these preliminaries were duly noted and reported by the newspapers, of course, and a capacity crowd was at the track when the big day finally arrived. Among the spectators, certainly, was a strong delegation of Tuma’s friends from Short Vincent. Even if they were betting on Hard Luck Joe, the bartender, after all, still was their boy!

It had been arranged by O’Keeffe and Lewis that Tuma would have the advantage of a handicap. He was to start his run at the head of the homestretch while the horse was around the track on the backstretch. The way it figured out, Tuma would run only one-eighth of a mile while the horse was running five-sixteenths of a mile. A hard path, furthermore, had been leveled along the outside rail for Tuma’s benefit.

Some of the sharp-eyed spectators to the event say that Tuma added to his advantage by jumping the gun. According to their account, the man got such a head start that all he had to do was float over the finish line. At any rate, it was a runaway victory for Tuma. The poor horse, ridden by Buck Thornburg, came thundering down the stretch like Whirlaway riding for the roses, but the bartender beat him by an estimated seventy yards.

The joy was unconfined on Short Vincent that historic night. One of their boys actually had gone out and beaten a racehorse at its own racket, running! Whether or not Tuma had jumped the gun was shrugged off as a mere technicality. From that night on, the bartender was known simply as Race Horse Richard. It was common knowledge, incidentally, that Race Horse Richard, true to the tradition of the avenue, had bet heavily On himself to win, and so had come out of the memorable race with something more tangible and more valuable even than a new nickname.

When he returned to his bartending duties in Mickey’s saloon he was as much an attraction of the place as the exotic dancers, which is really saying a lot because the dancers usually doubled as “B” girls and strove mightily to entertain the customers.

Mickey’s was one of the most rollicking honky-tanks on the south side of the street-the side of the street reserved for indecorous visitors bent on high jinks. All it took to bring them back in line when they went too far, usually, was a reproving look from Mickey’s manager, a man named Fuzzy Lakis.

There is no ready explanation why the street was divided as it was; why the north side should have been endowed with respectability by the Theatrical Lounge and Kornman’s while the opposite side of the street bounced with girlie joints, excepting the City Club, of course, and a discreet rear entrance to a Stouffer Restaurant.

“We are separated by the Gaza Strip,” Mushy Wexler once noted, borrowing the name of the neutral zone that separates Egypt and Israel. But his allusion carried additional Significance. The monotony of the girlie joints across the street-Mickey’s Show Bar, The Frolics Cafe, The French Quarter, The 730 Lounge Bar-was broken by an alley which leads to the rear stage entrance of the fusty old Roxy Burlesque Theater. Every time one of the Roxy shows ended, it seemed as if scores of heavily mascaraed glamor girls poured out of the alley in an unstoppable high-heeled herd. There weren’t that many, actually; it just seemed that way. It was, in every instance, an eye-popping spectacle for tourists who just happened to be passing by. You could see them looking after the crowd of slim-legged beauties and then peering, tentatively, into the empty alley in sheer wonderment.

Being so close to the City Club, and being partial to politics anyway, as all gamblers are, the Short Vincent regulars were swollen with pride one year when one of their own number, one Hymie Mintz, decided to throw his hat into the political ring. He announced his candidacy for the state legislature, and in due course he was called before the screening committee of the Citizens League of Cleveland, a voters’ watchdog association which, among other duties, tries to make appraisals of candidates for public office and to offer recommendations to the bewildered electorate.

The story has it that when Hymie made his appearance before the Citizens League committee, he provided the usual basic biographical information and then answered a series of questions put to him by the committee members. One of the questions was: “What is your position on the Taft-Hartley Bill?”

“I already paid it!” Hymie is said to have replied in a voice quivering with righteous indignation.

Hymie didn’t make it up the political ladder, but another man who was well known on the famous little street did. He was Anthony O. Calabrese, an Italian immigrant with a captivating ability to twist the King’s English and still make an uncommon lot of sense. He ran for the state legislature, was elected, and surprised most of the political experts by his victory. One or two of the experts, analyzing the results, attributed the Calabrese win to voter confusion. They pointed out, cynically, that there happened to be a very popular mayor of Cleveland named Anthony J. Celebrezze. Their broadly implied insinuation was that some voters who had cast their ballots for Tony Calabrese may have thought they were voting for Tony Celebrezze- the American pronunciation of the two names is very close. The Calabrese forces, unmoved by that argument and refusing to concede any part of the paint, countered with the suggestion that the truth was just the reverse; that Tony Celebrezze owed some of his success to the voters’ confusing him with Tony Calabrese.

As if the voters of Cleveland were not sufficiently confused by the similarity of these two principals, a number of other Celebrezzes and Calabreses have been active to the city’s politics. The former mayor and Kennedy cabinet member, Anthony J. Celebrezze (now a federal judge in Cincinnati), had a brother named Frank D. Celebrezze, who served with high distinction as Cleveland’s safety director during the administration of Mayor Frank J. Lausche, and who later was elected to the municipal bench. His son, also named Frank Celebrezze, now is an active politician and was elected a judge of the Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Court in 1965. Meanwhile, Anthony O. Calabrese, Jr., son of the veteran state legislator, came of political age and was promptly elected to the Ohio House of Representatives. In the 1966 election, he unsuccessfully ran for Congress against Representative Frances P. Bolton, a member of the House from Cleveland since the 1930s, when she took the place of her late husband, Representative Chester Bolton.

Time was when as many politicians as horseplayers could be counted on Short Vincent. The lobby of the Hollenden Hotel was a traditional refuge for men of all parties and Manus McCafferty’s Artists and Writers Club in that hotel was a time-honored haven for politically oriented citizens. Manus himself, a former amateur flyweight boxing champion and onetime stage union official, held nightly sessions as the Nostradamus of the local party scene.

The glue that held together so many of these interesting and diverse characters in Cleveland’s downtown life came unstuck when the old Hollenden closed and submitted to the crowbar and sledge. It was but the first of many hard blows to be directed against the little avenue. One of the worst, outside of the tornado, was the fire that razed the Theatrical Lounge in 1960. That cast a funereal pall over the entire 485 feet of street. Bookmakers, horseplayers, touts, saloon operators, entertainers, and just plain drinking men, all normally optimists by nature, stood back in dismay that verged on despair. The Theatrical was the magnet that drew the conventioners and the money crowd. Fuzzy Lalds, a spokesman for the south side of the avenue, said publicly that Short Vincent was through without the Theatrical; that the little honky-tonks, in effect, could not survive without it. Fortunately for them, Mushy Wexler did rebuild, and his new place, given the more dignified name of the Theatrical Lounge, proved to be even more attractive and popular than the establishment that burned down.

But the blows continued to fall on the little avenue. In 1963, the Weinberger family reluctantly decided to discontinue their famous Kornman’s Restaurant. Close on the heels of this dismaying development, the afternoon Press went after the tactics of the B-girls in the area’s strip joints and it was twilight for Short Vincent as agents of the Ohio Department of Liquor Control pressed charges against one saloon and then another, until the south side of the street was virtually dark at night.

It is really an old story, familiar to every large American city. Nothing is anchored; nothing is stable. The fun centers are continually shifting about, dispossessed by the natural factors of civic expansion, growth, and obsolescence. In Cleveland, it appears that the center of downtown night life is shifting to upper Euclid Avenue; to the outer reaches of that extravagant stretch which once represented the Affluent Life to so many wealthy Cleveland families of the late nineteenth century.

The present century has been as unkind to Millionaire’s Row as it has been to Short Vincent’s honky-tonks, thereby proving the impartiality or neutrality of fate, if that is any solace to either side. The great estates and the mighty mansions have come inexorably to an end either disastrous or embarrassing. A number of the large homes became boarding houses, cheap hotels, headquarters buildings for assorted organizations, or merely massive backdrops for used car lots.

Some were summarily abandoned and boarded up. Others were torn down to make way for parking lots. The pattern of demolition was checkered and the effect on the beautiful old avenue was to give it the toothless grin of a withered hag.

Most of the homes mercifully have been removed from the painful present in a recent development which has produced a bright colony of fancy motels, sleek office buildings, attractive restaurants and, of course, a generous sprinkling of watering holes for thirsty travelers along that part of Euclid Avenue.

Once upon a time the gay establishments-the theaters, restaurants, and cafes-were clustered west of Public Square, on the plateau overlooking the downtown flats where the city began. That part of the Flats is still possibly the most picturesque section of Cleveland, but today it looks like the opening scene in a mystery film with its ramshackle old warehouse buildings, the rotting piles of the docks that lay half-collapsed in the oily river, the railroad tracks on all sides, and industrial debris everywhere. The very real mystery is how any proud city could permit such a priceless resource as its very heartland to deteriorate so.

Here and there are signs of interesting life and evidences of a struggle to revive the historic area. There is the old Harbor Inn, a colorful riverside tavern under the towering arches of the Main Street Bridge, and there is Jim’s Steak House at Collision Bend, one of the more spectacular hairpin curves of the river, and there is Harry Fagan’s Beacon House along the river, at the foot of Lakeside Avenue and West nth Street-a stronghold of Dixieland music and carefree drinking.

The valley, otherwise, is a scene of urban abandonment and memories. The city travels overhead on the many bridges and viaducts that present such a spectacular scene at night, and very few Clevelanders ever think of looking down at the despoiled river and its littered banks with any measure of compassion.

During the Victorian period the theatrical and tavern district leaped across Public Square to the eastern part of downtown, between the Square and E. 9th Street. The heart of the city vibrated with life then. There were nine or ten theaters providing live entertainment of assorted grades simultaneously, not to mention the halls that provided stages for the thousands of irrepressible lecturers who seemed to abound in those days. Some of the old glory of that time still lives on here and there, as it does in the revived splendor of Weber’s Restaurant, now known as The Round Table, a popular hangout of past decades on Superior Avenue across from the old Federal Building.

City Hall once stood on the site of the Federal Building, and in its rented quarters an unknown painter named Archibald M. Willard painted a large oil in 1876 for the centennial celebration of American independence. He called it “The Spirit of ’76.” One of the numerous “originals” of this painting hangs today in the rotunda of the modern City Hall, and the small park immediately to the east of the center of municipal government is called, in the painter’s honor, Willard Park.

Another vestige of the past still living on in downtown is an East 4th Street restaurant called Otto Moser’s Cafe. At the tum of the century, when East 4th Street was more appreciatively known as Sheriff Street, this narrow little thoroughfare was the Short Vincent of the day, and Otto Moser’s was the most popular cafe among the sporting bloods of the town. It was directly opposite the stage entrance of the Euclid Avenue Opera House, the grandest in town, and all the great, fabled stars of the time patronized Moser’s. They are still memorialized by hundreds of dusty, autographed pictures of the old-time stage stars which cover the walls of the old restaurant. Moser’s successors, Max and Jack Joseph, former employees of the original proprietor, would not allow anything to be altered or rearranged. The only concession they made to the twentieth century was the installation of a cash register, which they regarded as a painful necessity. Moser himself would not permit one in the place. He just threw the money onto the marble-topped backbar as it came across the counter and let it accumulate or dwindle, as the ups and downs of business dictated. Next door to Moser’s is another survivor of the past gayety, The Rathskeller- not so elaborately theatrical in its atmosphere but still an authentic holdover of the past. Its owner, in the days of its prime, was Henry Grebe, acclaimed as one of the best restaurateurs in the nation.

Among the contemporaries of Otto Moser was a knowledgeable restaurateur of French descent, one Henry Menjou, who ruled over eating places whose names belied his ancestry. One was called The Bismarck and the other, its successor, was called The Berghoff. Each featured menus printed in German, the fashionable language in Cleveland in those days. The Hollenden Hotel ventured to introduce French-language menus at the time, and it was the talk of the town-not the French language but the hotel’s audacity. One of Henry Menjou’s headwaiters, briefly, was his son, Adolphe, a debonair lad who was completely confident that he was cut out for bigger things in life than feeding hungry Clevelanders. He proved the point to everybody’s satisfaction by leaving town to become a motion picture star and creating the universal image of the Man of the World. This was not a small achievement for a kid from East High School, but it may be that Cornell University helped, too.

A young, aspiring music composer named Ernest Roland Ball was among those who stood on the fringe of Cleveland’s cafe society in the final years of the old century. Everybody who knew him well called him Rolly, and it was generally conceded that he was a youth with an extraordinary talent for bringing musical notes together in fetching combinations.

Ball was born in Cleveland at 1541 East 30th Street, on the fringe of downtown, in 1878. He attended the Cleveland Conservatory of Music, and, while a student there, worked as a song plugger in a downtown dime store. When he wasn’t banging out the new hit tunes of the day on the beatup piano installed on a high platform behind the counter, he occasionally fingered a few melodies that were entirely unknown to the customers. They were his own tunes; random escapees from the rush of music that filled his head. He had begun writing songs at the age of fifteen and it pleased him to note, when he slipped one of his songs into his dime store medleys, that some of the customers beamed and smiled as he played.

After he graduated from the conservatory, Ball went to New York and landed a job in a small music publishing house. He hardly had had time to get settled when one day a slim, personable young man named James J. Walker asked him to set some verses he had written to appropriate music. Ball obliged and the song, “Will You Love Me in December as You Do in May?” became a hit. Young Mr. Walker, as is generally known, went on to become the mayor of New York City.

That was merely the beginning of Ball’s spectacular song-writing career, in the course of which he composed some four hundred tunes, including “Mother Machree” (with Chauncey Olcott), “Dear Little Boy of Mine,” “In the Garden of My Heart,” “A Little Bit of Heaven, Sure They Call It Ireland,” “Till the Sands of the Desert Grow Cold,” “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling,” and “Let the Rest of the World Go By.”

“Mother Machree” was inspired by his own mother, Anna (Nannie) Ball, and each Mother’s Day the sentimental composer would send the same wire to her: “Today and Every Day I send you my love, my Mother Machree.”

Chauncey Olcott and John McCormack sang the songs of Rolly Ball all over the world, making them part of the universal musical heritage, but the Cleveland composer, a brilliant pianist, also was a stage performer and sang his own tunes successfully in vaudeville appearances around the country. In his last stage appearance in Cleveland, at the new, fabulous B. F. Keith Palace Theater, Mrs. Ball sat in one of the front box seats while Rolly serenaded her with “Mother Machree.”

“Somewhere out in this great audience is my mother-my own Mother Machree,” Ball announced. “Won’t you stand up, pretty mother?”

But Mrs. Ban was too frightened to stand and the audience applauded in vain.

On May 3, 1927, Ball volunteered to play some of his compositions on a Mississippi Hood relief concert program in Santa Ana, California. It isn’t likely that he ever played for a more enthusiastically approving audience. Its members gave him a thunderous ovation at the end of each number and he had to take eight curtain calls. As he bowed his thanks the last time, he told the audience, apologetically, that he couldn’t come out again. He went to his dressing room, put his head down on the makeup table, and quietly died of a heart attack. He was forty-eight years old. His body was returned to Cleveland and he was buried on a foggy, rainy day in May in Lake View Cemetery, next to the grave of his father. His pallbearers included Irving Berlin and George M. Cohan.

Cleveland had changed a great deal in the quarter-century or so that had elapsed between the time Ernest Roland Ball had left to seek success as a songwriter and the time he had returned for the final requiem. The gay, scintillating theater district around East 4th Street and Euclid, and on Superior Avenue and Prospect Avenue, had been overwhelmed by the mercantile expansion and a building boom that had moved ruthlessly in on the choice sites occupied by old theaters. The motion picture had arrived on the scene and new cinema palaces were the order of the day. Film houses were spotted all over the downtown area, but with the exception of the mammoth Hippodrome Theater on lower Euclid Avenue, the best and the newest of the theaters were in the developing Playhouse Square area, extending roughly from East 12th Street to East 17th Street along Euclid.

Some four miles farther east on Euclid was the increasingly important uptown district where East 105th crossed the avenue; an intersection known historically as Doan’s Comer after the original pioneer of the area, Nathaniel Doan. The classiest theater, by far, in this busy district was Keith’s 105th. It was in this theater that the show business career of Leslie Townes Hope had its beginning. It was many years later that he took the name of Bob Hope. His mother took him to the vaudeville-movie house to see and hear Frank Fay, then the top monologist-humorist of the day, and the seed was planted. Fay had a way of making show business look easy.

The Hope family came to Cleveland the roundabout way; by way of Eltham, England, where Leslie Townes Hope was born in 1903. He was five years old when Cleveland became home. Life for the transplanted family in the strange and busy American city was a fight for survival, but the Hopes were up to the challenge.

Recalling those beginning days in his autobiography, Have Tux, Will Travel, the famous comedian wrote:

“I tried so many different ways of raising a dollar Horatio Alger could have used me for a technical expert. I don’t remember whether the paper route was my first job or my tenth. Any job that needed a strong back and a weak mind was where you’d find young Les Hope, pointing the profit motive like a bird dog trying out his nose for distance.

“At one point I sold papers on one of the comers of 102d and Euclid. Three of my brothers had stands On the other comers. I had the Southwest Grocery Store comer, Jack had the Cleveland Trust Company corner, Sid had the Marshall Drugstore comer, Fred the Standard Drugstore comer.

“I had one regular customer whose name I didn’t know; all I knew was that he snapped his face open and shut like a wrinkled old coin purse. Not that he talked often. I sold him his paper every night when he went home from downtown in a chauffeur-driven brougham automobile. But we weren’t chatty about it. We made our deal with gestures on my part and grunts on his. I’d hand him his paper and he’d hand me two cents. One night he gave me a dime. I told him I was fresh out of pennies, but he didn’t say, ’Keep the change. Pay me tomorrow: It was my rush hour, but I said, ‘I’ll run and get your change: and I hotfooted it into the grocery store on my corner.

“It was one of those stores with the cashier in the rear and the change going back and forth in little baskets whipping along on overhead wires. When I came back, my customer said, ‘Young man, I’m going to give you some advice. If you want to be a success in business, trust nobody. Never give credit and always keep change on hand. That way you won’t miss any customers while you’re going for it.’

“I was turning that over in my mind when a streetcar inspector asked me, ‘Do you know who that was?’

“I said, ‘No.’

“‘He is only the richest man in the world: the inspector said. ‘That’s John D. Rockefeller, Senior: He was living in Forest Hill, just outside of Cleveland. There have been times when I wish I had taken his advice.”

Hope attended Fairmount Elementary School and Fairmount Junior High School. His high school career was brief and incomplete; he attended East High for a year and a half, thereby posing a continuing problem for school authorities who are still hard pressed to explain to new generations of youngsters impatient with formal education how it could happen that a dropout named Hope could make out so well in spite of his educational handicap.

When he was sixteen years old and one of the leading lights of the Fairmount gang that hung out at the comer of East 105th and Euclid, with special preference for the cozy comfort of the Alhambra Pool Palace, Hope tried out his talents as an amateur boxer, entering a tournament under the ringname of Packy East. One of his good friends, Whitey Jennings, was fighting in the same Ohio State amateur competition under the name of Packy West. The Hope sense of humor already was at work.

Packy East won his first fight, much to his own surprise, drew a bye, and moved into the semifinals against the state amateur champion, one Happy Walsh. Walsh came out of the ring still Happy, but Packy East, the victim of a kayo, came out of the bout as Les Hope once again. It infuriated Hope that his schoolmates had a way of twisting his name around to make it Hope, Les.

It was after that episode that young Hope, a trained hoofer, became an amateur vaudevillian and moved on to stardom in show business. The old gang that used to hang around Doan’s Comer with him has thinned out considerably, but those who are left are very proud of his success. They share vicariously in his fame by recalling that they knew him when. Hope is keenly aware of this as he revealed when he wrote in his autobiography:

“People I’ve never known claim to be my long.lost friends. It’s no secret that I used to play pool at the Alhambra Billiard Palace in Cleveland and I meet a lot of people who open with, ‘We used to play pool together.’

“I played with many people, but not that many.”