Lifelong Tribe Fan

This is Nate. He is 93 years old, and I met him at Cleveland's Progressive Field, the afternoon before Game 6 of the 2016 World Series.

"I was at the 1948 World Series," said Nate, a lifelong Indians fan. The Indians last won the Series in '48. "I've been waiting a long time for this."

Sadly, the Indians lost the Series to the Chicago Cubs, whose championship drought was even longer than Cleveland's.

Aurora, Goddess of Dawn

The Aurora in 2011

I photographed this apartment building on Decker Avenue in Cleveland's Hough neighborhood in 2011. Its name, spelled in the Art Nouveau lettering style of the early 20th century, is Aurora. It was abandoned and crumbling, but clearly was once a beautiful place to live.

Last weekend I had another look at the Aurora, and found its deterioration five years worse — an upper porch had collapsed, windows were missing, and the front entrance was now covered with a wooden board.

In 2016.

A man walking past noticed me and my camera. "Are you thinking of restoring it?" he asked.

"I wish," I said. "I just think it's a beautiful building."

"That was a really nice place," said the man, whose name is Mark. "It had all the old things, faucets and fixtures and staircases. I knew everyone that lived there."

Mark's house is catacorner to the Aurora. It's a big, well-kept house with a large American flag hung between the pillars of the front porch.

Mark  talked about the Decker neighborhood, part of Cleveland's seventh ward. "I lived here all my life. I'm 54 years old." Gesturing down the street, lined with empty lots and old houses in varying condition, he mused on the passing of time, "I remember when this street was full." He points to houses and names the families who used to live in them.

"I went to school down here," he said. "I went to Addison [Junior High] and East High. They closed those schools. They don't care about education. If they did, they wouldn't close the schools. Those — what do they call them? Charter schools? They're no good. The classes now are too big — there's no discipline, no respect. The parents aren't involved."

He remembers the days when Fannie Lewis, a fierce champion of her Hough constituents, was the Ward 7 Councilwoman. "Fannie Lewis, she fought to get this area restored. The new guy, [Councilman] T.J. Dow, he doesn't really care."

Plans for improvement in Cleveland never seem to involve Mark's neighborhood. "They always forget about Decker."

Clutching his money, Mark was on his way to the corner store. "I like it here. I feel safe.

"It's rough," he said, looking thoughtfully toward East 79th Street, "but I feel safe."

— Pamela Zoslov

Sarah, Rex and Me: A Remembrance

By Pamela Zoslov

The first dog I ever knew and loved was Rex, a German Shepherd mix who belonged to Sarah White, the lovely lady who was our family's housekeeper when I was a child.

Although we weren't rich and my mom didn't work outside the house, having a maid was in those days considered the birthright of middle-class suburban Jewish housewives. Sarah was more like a second mom or nanny — she would chat with me while ironing my dad's shirts, patiently abiding my endless questions, even when they betrayed my childish naïveté about race.

At the age of eight, I had no awareness of the social system that relegated black women to working as domestics in white people's houses. One day I asked my mom, whose wistful expression I'd noticed,  what was wrong. "I'm just thinking about how poor Sarah is." My mom had grown up parentless and poor, and, I imagine, suffered from a certain level of bourgeois guilt about employing maids. She helped our housekeepers in the ways she could, giving them extra money, clothes and housewares.

Sarah gave me this snapshot of Rex, in his younger days. I duly captioned it with Rex's first and last names, and the photo, now creased and wrinkled, lives on my dresser mirror.

Sarah was impeccable and dignified — "classy" was my parents' term. She insisted on wearing a starched white uniform while on duty. I just knew her as a warm and serene presence, a second mother who always seemed to have time for me. I told her about my little-girl hopes and dreams. In the laundry room, there was a cardboard carton of "play clothes" — Mom's old dresses and shoes — and I would put them on, clomping around in size 10 pumps and a polka dot New Look dress. I asked Sarah when I would be grown up, and she replied, "In 1980." So I made up a rhyming song: "In nineteen-eighty/I'll be a lady....!" (Turns out, that wasn't quite true; in 1980, I was only a foolish college freshman.)

My parents traveled a lot then, often leaving me with my aunt (unhappily), but one time, to my delight, they left me at home in the care of Sarah, who brought with her the excellent Rex. I had often begged for a dog, a plea to which Mom's standard response was "We'll see." (By age ten, I realized the "Can we get a dog?"/"We'll see" duet was getting me nowhere. I asked my dad, who said "Pick out the kind you want.")

With Rex living in the house, I was in paradise. Sarah let me clip his leather leash to his collar and take him for walks. I get to walk a dog! He slept on the staircase landing, and every morning I would spring out of bed, excited that there was an actual dog living in my house, I still remember shaking the box of dog treats, and Rex's tail wagging as he took the crunchy morsel out of my hand. A little girl could hardly be happier. I didn't particularly miss my parents that time, and was sorry to see Sarah and Rex leave when they returned.

Nearly a half century later, I can still remember how I felt when my mom told me that Sarah died. She was in her 40s, and had cancer. It was the first major loss of my life, and hit me much harder than the subsequent losses of my grandfather and grandmother, who were comparatively distant figures in my life. I thought I would never stop crying.

Sarah. I hope you know what you meant to me. I miss you, and Rex, too.

Freighthoppers

By Pamela Zoslov

I met a couple of young men downtown sitting in a doorway, dressed in tattered, muddy overalls that spoke of hard living.

"Take a picture for any part of a nickel?"

They are freighthoppers, men who catch rides surreptitiously on freight trains. They are exceptionally open and friendly and speak in the casual cadences typical of young adults.

They introduced themselves: "I'm called Kid," said one. His traveling companion goes by Hesh.

"We met on the road. We've been hopping freight since last spring." They came from Spokane, Washington and landed in Cleveland by way of Lorain. "We're trying to go to Virginia, to my parents'."

What's it like traveling this way, engaging in a hallowed hobo practice that first arose after the Civil War?

"It's fun. It's always windy and sort of cold."

It's heartening, in a way, to meet young people not on a competitive career path, even if their alternative is to live like Depression-era tramps. The idea of riding the rails still, in 2016, has an American romantic quality that appeals to the freedom-lover in us.

"It's an addiction," says the Kid.

"It's better than hitchhiking," says Hesh. "I still hitchhike, but it's dangerous."

The weather can be forbidding for freighthoppers.

"Going from Nashville to Memphis, it was pouring-ass rain. Sixteen hours of water," said The Kid.

How do they elude train authorities — the "bulls," as Neal Cassady called them?

"It's a game of cat-and-mouse. Jump and run."

Hesh agrees. "A lot of running."

Racing a Pigeon

Road to Hope

                                              

Scenes from Road to Hope, a Cleveland Public Theatre-sponsored event commemorating the Cozad- Bates House in University Circle, which was a station along the Underground Railroad. April 24, 2016.