Summertime Musings
Memories and a love letter to Cleveland in its finest season
What’s an East coast girl like me doing living in Cleveland, Ohio? It’s a fair question. I was born in Washington, D.C., and raised in suburban Maryland, adopted by parents originally from Ohio. When they decided to move back to my mom’s hometown of Girard, near Youngstown, after I graduated from high school, they told me to pick a college in Ohio. I didn’t love the idea, but they were footing the bill, so I did.
I landed in Cleveland after graduation from the University of Akron, when my internship in the newsroom at one of the local television stations turned into my first job. I met my daughter’s father there—he was a news photographer—and life just rolled on. It’s 40 years later, and here I am, now living a stone’s throw from the shores of Lake Erie.
Cleveland gets under your skin. It is gritty and determined, and good hearted, hard-working people live here. I raised my family in Chagrin Falls, an eastern suburb that sort of reminded me of Maryland. Founded by settlers from the Connecticut Western Reserve, Chagrin is a charming little town of nearly 5,000 people with a triangle in the center, local storefronts, an actual water fall, and a popcorn and ice cream shop where summer cone lickers show up with regularity. It’s those summer days that make living through what can be brutal winters whipped by lake effect snow worth the trouble.
Cleveland Rocks!
Working in local TV news, I covered the official opening of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a morning show producer. In 1997 I attended the first Rock Hall induction ceremony held in Cleveland (still chuffed that George Clinton of Funkadelic told me I looked ‘fine’). The Rock Hall is one of my favorite places to take friends when they visit—and I suggest they come in the summertime.
Recently a California friend (whose visit was mentioned in my last post) joined me at the Rock Hall for a special night celebrating a new exhibit highlighting Paul McCartney and Wings. The VIP party featured a musical performance by Laurence Juber, the Wings guitarist, and the band’s last drummer, Steve Holley.
As a kid growing up in the 70s, I actually loved Wings even more than the Beatles. They were more of my generation. “Silly Love Songs” was a staple of my teen summer listening, released in April of 1976 as a single, with its easy hook and feel-good vibes. And “Band on the Run” was just fun. So I was thrilled to be able to meet Juber and Holley at a book signing after their Q&A and performance in May. (If you are also into Wings, the documentary Paul McCartney: Man on the Run is excellent.)
Wings fans can’t feel anything but joy when viewing the memorabilia and videos playing while surrounded by the band’s artifacts. Let me apologize right now for my singing in the following video:
My music-loving self feels so fortunate to be able to visit the Rock Hall for free as a resident of Cleveland (a benefit of a local grant) as often as I like. Sometimes I spend hours there by myself, without a visitor in tow. The heart of rock and roll is still beating in Cleveland, as Huey Lewis so aptly noted.
My Dad loved Cleveland
This past week, my father Bob would have turned 90. His birthday was the summer solstice, June 21, and on that day I participated in an online Iota Writing session led by Suzanne Strempek Shea, one of the authors I met recently in Ireland. It was also Father’s Day, so he was much on my mind. (As an adoptee I was lucky enough to have two great dads.) The first prompt she gave us was “the longest day.” This is what I wrote:
Summer solstice, June 21st, the longest day, is my father Bob’s birthday. Today he would have turned 90, but he died too young, of a heart attack. He was only 52-- I was 24 when it happened—just starting to get to know him as an adult.
Dad grew up in Cleveland, but raised me and my two sisters in suburban Maryland, just outside of D.C. He worked for the government, a systems analyst for the Census Bureau. He got his degree at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. He and my Mom met in the D.C. area but moved back to my Mom’s Ohio hometown just outside of Youngstown when I was headed to college, only a few years before he died so suddenly.
I didn’t really know my father as an Ohio guy, a Clevelander, yet I have lived here in Northeast Ohio since college—more than 40 years now. When he passed, I didn’t know much about where he grew up exactly, though he sometimes he talked about coming from the suburb where that doctor infamously killed his wife in the 1950s.
When the movie “A Christmas Story” came out in 1983, Dad fell in love with it. We saw it in the theatre together, and then rewatched it on Christmas holidays until 1987—he died in May of ’88. The movie was filmed in Cleveland (the Christmas Story house is a tourist attraction not far from where I live). Dad told me those opening scenes of the Christmas parade around Public Square, where the main character Ralphie is looking into the magical Higbee’s department store windows, was just how he remembered his 1940s childhood Christmases. I am nostalgic about that movie to this day, and rewatch every year. I think of my dad as Ralphie.
My mother died this year, she had lived a widow’s life for all those passing years. When I was going through her house preparing it to sell, I found a treasure trove of photographs I had not seen before, including one of my dad at age 14 (according to the note on the back) standing at the pavilion of Edgewater Park, very close to my home today.
How I would love to ask him about that day at the lake, about his childhood in what has become my city of record, where I now play with my granddaughter Rosie. When he left us, I had only started getting to know not only him as an adult, but an Ohioan, a Clevelander.
He came to my workplace once, my first job out of college, at the ABC affiliate WEWS Channel 5. I was an associate news producer, and was thrilled to give him a tour of the station he grew up watching, introducing him to the station engineers (they had quite a bit in common), and the on-air talent alike. He was so proud of me, I could see it in how his eyes shone.
I don’t remember what we did after the station tour, maybe went to lunch, or just hugged goodbye. In any case, I wish I had that day over again. I wish it would not be such a short day in my memory. The longest day is the day I miss him most.
More summer beauty in my ‘hood
My days are filled with dog walks around my near west side Cleveland neighborhood, and summer is certainly the best time for that. (The dog walking this past winter was just awful, I’m not going to lie.)
I’m rewarded with the beauty of gorgeous flowers popping up on every street we traverse. I made a post with some of my favorites a couple of days ago, but I neglected to include the photo I snapped of my boy Porter. So here he is now, just returning from one of our daily jaunts in the Cleveland summertime.
