Landing in the Land O’ Cleves
I made my way to Cleveland a bit over 46 years ago via a circuitous route. Circuitous is a word made popular in my present personal vernacular by my wife of 43 years. It comes up routinely in conversations about my navigational abilities while driving a car. Not unlike our occasionally wayward road trips as a couple, my trek to Cleveland back then began without precise coordinates, or even a clear destination in mind.
Graduating Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio I had a little over a year to kill before I started grad school in Chicago. I had applied late and was wait-listed out a year by the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern. Despite bailing out of my first foray into a journalistic education at Boston University, I still entertained that grand design of becoming a crack op-ed writer.
I had thought transferring to B.U. from Kenyon as a junior and pursuing a degree in journalism made sense as a matter of career practicality. The concept of graduating college as an English major even then brought snide sniffs of probable employment purgatory. But after an excruciatingly boring time stuck in huge lecture classes I really wasn’t fully expected to attend, I thought better of it after just a semester, and thankfully Kenyon College was willing to take me back. Being a legacy student there with an uncle on the Board of Trustees may have had some influence.
So I had no concrete idea what I was going to do with my life for the next 15 months, but did know I needed to make some money to help fund the grad school project. So home to Westchester County, New York I sped for a summer of painting houses with college buddies, which ended up seeming to be quite lucrative. By summer’s end I felt like I was just flush with cash. (Little did I know.)
With fall coming ‘round, and a rumor circulating that the Grateful Dead would be ending the long, strange trip and breaking up, the painting crew conjured up the somewhat insane (to my parents) plan of making the obligatory “On The Road” trip west, seeing the Dead in their purported to be final concerts at Winterland in San Francisco and painting houses in Northern California just as successfully as we had in Southern New York. Sounded like great fun. A foolproof plan we thought.
It was pretty clear my parents were surreptitiously aghast at the idea. But after all, I was a college graduate and accepted into grad school, so as with many of the marginally zany quests into the unknown I conceived of, they acquiesced with only a minor murmur of under-the-breath protestation. The uncomfortably forced smile was a look my dear mother had perfected to a tee in her interactions with her occasionally wayward son.
So five of my pals and I piled into a couple of cars just before Labor Day taking different routes west. I was in the Plymouth Duster with two other scruffy cronies and the hot engine. Our route was less direct than the other car, which basically drove straight through to San Francisco on Route 80. My team took a much more leisurely and convoluted initial approach to the journey and headed back to Gambier to see people we knew who were still there in school. It wasn’t terribly off the optimal route west it seemed, but it began our habit of staying where they would have us regardless of locale. That said, recent graduates on the loose at their alma matter tend to be viewed and treated as a little lame, so we felt the “you’re not entirely welcome” vibe and kept the visit short.
We set off to see buddy Craig who had exited Kenyon junior year in academic distress and now was somewhat haphazardly attempting to complete a degree at Indiana University in Bloomington, which was not a big trip from Gambier, Ohio. Craig was from Indy, had a very hot car as all cool guys from Indy do and was aspiring to inherit interest in his dad’s wildly successful inner city tavern in there.
But Bloomington was a great college party town and we looked forward to celebrating there with him, which we did in a very serious way. Unfortunately we all caught the college version of the dreaded lung mung there that persistently stuck with us for the next few months. Those college viruses were always beastly.
The Twin Cities of Minnesota to see former college roommate Peter came next. Peter had been painting houses that summer too and wanted us to come up and help him finish a forest green oil-based job he was struggling to complete by himself. The homeowner was somewhat peeved at the time it was taking, oil based paint is a real pain to work with and Peter came home daily looking a little like the Jolly Green Giant.
With four of us working we got the job wrapped up in short order, and we then hoped we could guilt him into joining the magical mystery tour westward, but he intelligently demurred and we headed off to Iowa City to see a sister of one of my traveling buddies. We were now making only marginal progress in a vertically zigzag fashion through the country.
Certain details of this adventure are pretty hazy. Actually, lots of the details are hazy decades later. I’m not sure exactly how long it took us to get as far Iowa City, but it was too long. We had wanted to get to San Francisco briskly and get some jobs lined up, make a few bucks and find a place to crash there. The Dead show wasn’t scheduled until late October, but we had not been making much linear progress on a westbound trajectory and had burned up maybe two weeks lallygagging along, barely crossing the Mississippi.
So we high-tailed it from Iowa City. The road race through the great mid-west was a blur and the Duster performed brilliantly. I remember a little about it being visually spectacular coming down out of the mountains in Salt Lake City, and we had a ball in a great little place called Boomtown in Nevada, but not much else sticks in my brain but long, flat stretches of corn fields, prairie and desert.
We stayed in a very cheap, not particularly clean “no tell” motel in Boomtown and then spent more time and money than we should have in the casinos, so we made it a point to cruise through Reno without stopping. I’d never been west of Chicago before, so gambling, scantily clad showgirls, NFL football and Coors Beer at 10:00 a.m. was pretty darned cool stuff for me. And thus began the constant debate of Coors vs. Olympia while we were out west. I ended up an Oly man, as it happened.
We arrived in San Francisco and hung out for a while with a friend’s parents in a very swank place in Novato. We did the Haight / Ashbury thing, as we needed to do. It was pretty seedy by then and we felt like we were just too late for the scene and all the really the cool stuff had moved on. We also quickly discovered that house painting was not a thing that was going to yield much available work, even in an area of California where the weather wasn’t so mild.
We looked and looked, but there was just nothing to be had and there were way too many people just like us from the East looking to fund their fanciful and potentially recalcitrant daydreams. We wore out our welcome in Novato and migrated to UC San Francisco where we knew a guy who was in law school who had gotten us the tickets to the Dead shows at Winterland. He deftly informed us that the optimal place to find work was in Oakland, so we headed over there and hung out ever so briefly and awkwardly with some people he knew, but that was highly unproductive as well.
We did the Dead shows, which years later were the basis for their first feature rock n’ roll film, and came to the conclusion that this area of California was not going to work out painting-wise and money was starting to become an issue. We knew somebody at UC Santa Barbara, so with no better ideas in hand and desperation starting to close in we headed south.
Santa Barbara was indeed gorgeous, but I do remember well the globs of crude oil on the beach there from a spill that year that were pissing everyone off. There was something prophetic about that scene. That oil on the beach in this paradise seemed like a signal to me the California plan was about to come to a close.
A week or so in Santa Barbara yielded more tanning than work, and my money stash was getting perilous. The others were better situated financially and weren’t yet ready to leave, but I was. I did the math, and figured I had just about enough cash to take the train back east, and so that’s what I did.
I remember little about the ride, but we began in Los Angeles, I was in coach and fortunately I met a sailor (Jerry I think?) on leave who had spent a wild night in Tijuana and needed someone to continue the party with. I was willing to oblige, as he was flush with cash, had no problem feeding me and had two bottles of questionable tequila that needed to get crushed. We played non-stop blackjack, took care of the tequila and laughed it up riotously for the better part of a day and night, which is why I almost missed my train when we switched up in St. Louis.
Sailor buddy was going in a different direction, so we traded phone numbers and thanked each other for the wild ride. I had to wait for a train to Columbus, Ohio, so I stumbled over to get breakfast at an all-night diner close to the train station. I couldn’t afford it, but the lure of chicken-fried steak and eggs fueled by no sleep and a cheap bottle of hooch was pretty compelling.
I had about an hour or so before the train left for Columbus, so I went out to a nifty little city park that covered the underground train platforms just to watch the sun come up. Miraculously I woke up with about five minutes to spare before my train left, and it was a pretty vigorous sprint to make it. Running a relatively long distance in a sheer panic is a proven hangover cure, FYI.
So I took the train to Columbus, hitched up to Gambier and lurked suspiciously around the campus for a few days feeling out of place, and with Thanksgiving approaching in need of home cooking after a few months of fast food, purloined college institutional fare and whatever we could glean from the good graces of the people that miraculously put us up. Trying to conserve cash, I grabbed a smelly Greyhound from Mount Vernon, Ohio to Penn Station in New York City.
By this point I was indeed running seriously low on money. That summer of Westchester painting money was burnt up pretty fast rambling aimlessly around the California coast without work. But now I was also looking especially shaggy and headed home to see the parents. That breakfast cook in St. Louis had given me the eyeball, and I got seated at the table next to the bathrooms even though the place was half empty. That happened in the seventies to longhairs.
So when I spied the barbershop at Penn Station, I checked my wallet, thinking the Old Man wouldn’t mind at all if his kid arriving home for Thanksgiving looked kinda spiffy. I sat down in the chair, smiled and gave instructions with just two words: “Crew cut.” The incredulous barber gave me a long look and said, “Yes sir!”
I hoofed it over to Grand Central to grab the commuter train north. Getting off at the Katonah stop, I grabbed the payphone and called home. I had let them know I was done in LaLa Land but they had no idea how I was returning to New York and when that would be exactly, but getting there for Thanksgiving seemed like a pretty natural assumption.
The Old Man was visibly elated when he saw me, and gave the clean quaffed noggin a good tousle. (I knew that crew cut scam would work!) I literally arrived home with $2.00 in my pocket and not much at all left in the old passbook account. But it was one hell of a trip.
It was Thanksgiving week, and that was always a big deal for my family. My sister and her hubby were there from Cleveland along with the rest of the clan. I had no idea what was coming next for me, but I desperately needed a job. I had made it a habit of chilling with her in Cleveland while at Kenyon and catching the Dead when they were there, so I wasn’t entirely surprised when she said, “Come out to Cleveland and we’ll find you a job.” That’s all the invitation I needed! She and her husband did a ton of amazingly nice things for her baby brother.
Soon I was there in the Land O’ Cleves with my ’65 “Three on a Tree” Buick Special Wagon, working at Nighttown Restaurant as a busboy and looking for work as a writer. (Good luck with that one, Champ!) I submitted what I thought was a hilarious portfolio of greeting card jokes to the High Brow freaks at American Greetings, but I think they were probably just too stoned to get the humor. I eventually was promoted to waiter, moved out of my sister’s attic, got an apartment and thought I had hit the big time. Life was good!
But it was about to get exponentially and monumentally better. Soon, Nighttown hired their first female server, and I’ll just say I was instantly smitten. After a few months of working together and casually dating, I snuck up behind her one evening at the service bar and whispered musically in her ear, “Aruba?”
Grad school instantly became a distant and ill-conceived memory and there was nothing more that I wanted to do than marry this amazing woman and settle down in Cleveland, Ohio. She played frustratingly hard to get, but I was determined as hell and after living in sin for what seemed to me like an inordinately long time, she finally took a big risk and agreed to marry a heretofore-footloose guy with some pretty sketchy career prospects. And in that regard, I consider myself to this day to be the luckiest man on the planet.
We had the classic hippie wedding outside on the lawn just a few yards from the Lake Erie shore at my sister’s place on Kelly’s Island with nine people in attendance. It was Memorial Day weekend and the weather was perfect. I gathered wild flowers for the lovely lady’s hair the morning of the wedding, and we had to wait until my nephew woke up from his nap to start the ceremony. Fortunately my Old Man the retired preacher man could still marry people in Ohio, so he did the honors.
And, no, we never did make it to Aruba. No matter, though. Cleveland and the many other destinations we have enjoyed together have been just perfect for us.
But that’s another tale.
