West Cleveland

There is a time in many childhoods where the horizons of the child expand suddenly, where the world grows immense and the opportunities for filling seemingly limitless free time seem limitless. For Richard this cosmic expansion occurred when Al and Lillian left the cozy apartment near the aptly named Charles Dickens Elementary School and obtained a storefront for the Healthflow orange juice business, with living quarters in the back, way over in West Cleveland. This was the industrial heart of the city where, a mere bike ride away, the flats of the Cuyahoga River lay lined with industrial detritus that only a nine year old of that era could love. The store front was on West 25th St. where the trolley car ran along, and for three cents a kid could ride all over the whole city. Three building up from the store front and across the street was the Sadie family grocery where a kid could buy all the essentials, a soda or a candy bar, or sometimes some bread and milk and a can of peas for Lillian. Nearly perfect for Richard, Lillian hated it. The Healthflow storefront was right next door to a butcher's. Right out the back door the butcher kept three barrels of offal which in warm weather attracted, it is not an exaggeration to say, hundreds of thousands of black flies. From Lillian's kitchen window she was 15 ft. from the barrels of flies and the smell was unspeakable. And speak she didn't; she just left the windows closed on the hottest of days and endured as the storefront filled up with out-of-service Healthflow machines.

First day of school

On his first day of school at Charles Dickens Elementary, the teacher had Richard stand in front of the class while she introduced him, "Now children, this is Richard. He's moved here all the way from Florida! Let's make sure we all make him feel welcome, etc. etc." Then she called on a big boy, six inches taller than Richard, to come up to the front of the class as well. "Richard this is Clark." Clark was clearly one of those angelic nine year old's that grow-ups instinctively trust. "Clark I want you to show Richard around today," the teacher said. "Now Richard I want you to follow Clark. You go everywhere that Clark goes. Just stick with him and follow him around." Richard, terrified of being at yet another new school, nodded. Then as Clark went back to his desk, Richard's innate sense of comedy kicked in and he followed Clark back to Clark's chair. The whole class burst out laughing and Richard was very embarrassed and ashamed. But it had been funny.

Cleveland-The railed window well

Richard had gotten used to entertaining himself and one cold, blustery Saturday he took his basketball and climbed the fence to the Charles Dickens playground where he saw some other kids. After whiling the time away playing ball, it began to get colder and sky was darkening behind its usual winter white. Richard started for home. Along the way though, his ball took a wild jump and bounced down into a window well guarded by a double railing. Richard immediately jumped down into this cage after the ball. The well was about five feet deep and was built to give some light to a basement room. It was railed off so that no one would fall into it. Once he was down there, Richard began to see the problems. It was cold, it was dark, it was a weekend, nobody knew where he was, and he couldn't reach the railing to pull himself back up. He was struck with a moment of panic that overtook him until he stopped to think about the problem. First he threw the ball over the rails. Then he maneuvered several different ways until he found he could angle himself in one corner and with a hand and foot on each wall use pressure to shimmy out of the well, grab the lower rail and climb over it. This was important because it was that process, the panic followed by an intellectual grasp of the problem followed by figuring out a solution was to grace him for the rest of his life. It got so that he could depend on it like a friend. He began to believe in solutions.

Cleveland part 1

Within four months of returning to Al and Lillian in Tampa, the family was on the move again. This time the destination was Cleveland, Ohio where Al had bought an Orange Juice franchise by the name of Health Flow. Here Al was a bit ahead of his time. As we know health drinks are big business and even in 1948 the Health Flow product sold pretty well. It was one of the deals where you buy a drink of orange juice while in line at the market or dime store from one of the constantly gurgling plastic dome tanks of juice that sat by tempting you as you checked out. Many were located at dime store lunch counters.

Health Flow's booth at the Restaurant Convention in Cleveland, Oct. 1949
Al and Lillian at right, Mechanic left, hand out free drinks.

The problem was, and there was always a problem with one of Al's get rich quick schemes, the Health Flow machines were always breaking down. Because he wasn't very mechanical, Al spent all his profits driving around picking up machines and taking them in to be fixed. Finally he had to hire a guy to be his full time mechanic. The mechanic made more than Al did. Luckily Lillian had a job.

Richard started school immediately at the rather aptly named Charles Dickens Elementary School.

Tampa part 2

Richard returned to Tampa in May of 1948. There is a telling photo of Nene, Grace Prettyman, and Richard standing somewhere between Moran and the airport in Kansas City. All of them looking stoical while Richard wonders whether or not Lillian and Al really want him back. The flight back was delayed in St. Louis where Richard was placed in the hands of two Stewardesses who took him back with them to their quarters. They made him dinner and then all went to bed. In the morning, thinking him cute they merrily redressed  into their flying outfits and took him back to his seat on the plane. Being with the Stewardesses reminded him of when he would sit in the bathroom with Lillian while she was preparing for a date, back in LA, She'd be dressed in her bra, stockings and slip, applying lipstick and perfume and curling her hair, all the while smoking cigarettes and flicking their butts  into the bowl. After she left the room, Richard would aim his piss at the filterless butts and blow them into smithereens like a gunner attacking a zero. He felt he could almost cry for his mother.

Lillian was so glad to see him but a little worried too.  He thought she thought he might be mad at her for sending him away, but maybe it was something else. Before leaving Tamps for Moran, the family had moved so many times that Richard had gone to three different schools. Home was now a store front next door to a Cuban Grocery. Richard went back to Robert E. Lee School, a racially segregated elementary school. The Cubans next door were not recent immigrants and the two families got along well. They had a few children for Richard to play with when they weren't working at the store. But the grocery brought rats to their side of the building and one night Al killed one and marveled almost gleefully at the size of it while Lillian shuddered. There were a couple of floors of apartments above the store fronts and a WWII one armed veteran lived in one of them. He used to come home from his job at the local newspaper and toss around 20 cents of change on the ground and watch all the kids scramble for it. Maybe it reminded him of tossing coins to natives out in the water off a ship in the Pacific during the war. At any rate he was a fixture until one afternoon when Richard came home from school and found the building surrounded with cops, keeping everyone at least 40 ft. away. The scene reeked of natural gas. Richard found out that evening that the vet had gassed himself to death.

These memories, of rats and suicides, reflected Richard's melancholy at the time. He really felt an outcast around Al. And his mother's depression also affected him badly. To Al's dubious credit, he really thought only of his own concerns and probably saw Richard as just some gloomy kid. He probably never actively wanted Richard out of the way. But Richard was a pleaser, and he could never please Al which made him feel that Al disliked him.

Moran Cont'd

As Spring rolled around, Richard started having more fun. He found a stick that looked like a flintlock and designed a whole play about pioneers around it. Jacky Harris got some of the lesser rolls. They even brought chairs for the audience down to the edge of the ditch where the play's action was to take place. "Ah nobody's going to come see a play down at that old sewer ditch," Nene said. Grace Prettyman was a sourpuss and thought the whole thing was silly.

One day Richard found some red rocks marbled with white quartz that reminded him of  pieces of uncooked roast. He put one in his grandmother's refrigerator only to have her give him a look that said, "Have you plumb taken leave of your senses?" She had NO imagination.

For special occasions, and Nene always contended that he was born on leap day and Grace Prettyman on Valentines, his grandmother would bake triple layer cakes with buttery yellow frosting and jellybeans all over them. Richard could have passed on the jelly beans; he wanted to get straight to the frosting.

Sometimes they drove out north to Great Aunt Maude Prettyman's house for Sunday dinner. She was fun, not like her sister. But that made Richard think about the sad story of grandmother, how she lost her first son to some kind of illness when he was two. His name had been Scott. Two years later Carl had been born and even Richard knew he was a bad replacement.

Richard never ceased to miss his own mother. Here are some of his letters to her: (add letters)

Carl part 2

There was a weird night visit with Carl. It must have been along about February because it was already dark when Nene told Richard to put together some things to wear in the morning, that he was going to see his father. Carl couldn't be seen in Moran (that's all Richard ever knew about it).  So he was staying with his childhood buddy at the family's farm three miles north of town. Nene dropped him off but Carl wasn't there. Someone took Richard up into an attic bedroom
and told him to go to bed. Some time went by and Richard must have nodded off. Carl must have arrived earlier and been socializing with the family, everyone drinking, because it was very late when Carl finally arrived up stairs and shook Richard awake. Carl would have been about 33 then. "How are you doing in school?" he asked Richard. "Are you making good grades?" It went on like this for about five minutes. Then he told Richard to scoot over so he could go to bed too. "I'm tired," he told Richard.

The next morning Richard woke up alone. He got dressed and went down stairs where someone told him Carl had gone squirrel hunting. Richard waited in the house until Carl and his buddy got back. Then Nene drove up and took Richard back to Moran. Richard didn't see Carl for another 26 years.