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.