My Life With Guns (Revised and Updated)

   The first time I ever saw a gun was when Don Glaser fired a pistol into the ceiling in Mr.Tubaugh's ninth grade English glass at Roosevelt Jr. High in Cleveland Heights. Needless to say mayhem ensued. Naomi Garber, who was sitting next to Don, screamed hysterically,
   "I can't hear! I can't hear!"
   Don, who later in life went on to win the Nobel prize in physics, had no idea the pistol was loaded, trembled and dropped it to the floor. Mr. Tubaugh, a round faced little bald man, who looked for all the world like Oliver Hardy, seemed about to explode. Punky Bernstein, a street-smart trouble maker who owned the gun, looked perplexed.
   "It's only a starter pistol," he shouted.
   "It’s okay. Nothing to worry about.”
   But it wasn't okay. Mr.Tubaugh grabbed Bernstein by the collar and threw him out of class, calming Naomi as well as he could. Of course no one called the police, and the class was dismissed with no assignment for the next day.
   But I had learned a lifelong lesson. It was back then, just before WW II was about to tear the civilized world apart, that it I came to the rather simplistic conclusion that guns, real or fake, loaded or unloaded, had no place in the classroom. And creeps the likes of Punky Bernstein, needed to be watched by someone carefully. BUT, with all that, Punky popped into my young life early on. We were neighbors. He lived in the next apartment building over on Euclid Heights Blvd. near Coventry.    There was no avoiding him. One day, we heard several loud snapping sounds not far away.
   “That’s a gun!,” he shouted, with considerable assurance.
   “Let's go!"
   We raced toward Coventry and the noises. Punky was exuberant.
   "It's gunshots!" There was no doubt in his voice. He was excited. Frantic. I was breathless and confused. What we found was not nice. It was the Bird brothers, a nationally notorious gang of bank robbers. They had attempted to hold up the Central National Bank at Lancashire and Coventry.
The Heights police had caught them on the spot. It was a nasty scene. There had been a shoot out. Two of the four Birds were shot and lay bleeding in the street. An innocent woman waiting for a trolley had been killed in the crossfire. When the smoke cleared and I had time to think, I asked myself, "Why?!" This was crazy. Had the world gone crazy?
   Fast forward a few years to World War II. I was the innocent, chosen at 18 for the infantry to fight with General Patton in Europe. Plenty of guns and much ugliness. Enormous devastation and lots of questions. Occasionally in the silence of an evening or two, I paused to ask myself,
   "Why this craziness? Why?"
   On my first week as a police reporter at the Cleveland Press, after college, I learned of a terrible tragedy. A woman in East Cleveland had accidentally shot and severely wounded her baby boy. I pounced on the story with visions of a page one byline driving my passion. With the help of police I found this attractive, but terribly distraught middle class white mother. She of course, was beside herself in horror and guilt. The gun was somehow left on the bed loaded. It was there, she claimed, to protect herself and her eight month old son from her husband, a madman who had threatened to kill her. Somehow the baby, while crawling on the bed, gotten hold of the gun and it fired.
   “Why?!,” I wanted to ask. But this was not the time. I was too busy getting my first story, which did indeed appear across the top of the page the next day. Mixed feelings, of course. It was a victory for my budding career.
   That was sixty years ago. No time for philosophical thinking. Strange how the memory of my first page one byline sticks.
   I don't remember whether the little boy died, or whether that mother went to jail, but I have often wondered about this fetish with guns. And as I read with distress about infants being shot in their homes or in their car seats, teenagers dying in gang shoot-outs, there are more questions about this human inanity. And I ask why, hoping that someone is listening.
   Maybe I should ask my Texas friend, Mark, a retired motorcycle policeman and gun aficionado, who once shot himself in the foot while loading his rifle, proudly posting a picture of it on Facebook.
Okay Mark, why?
   Perhaps that monumental intellect Jeb Bush had the answer the other day when asked by a reporter about the massacre of students at that Oregon Community College. With only a short pause, he declared without further comment,
   "Stuff happens," and then went on to brag about how he cut taxes in Florida when he was governor.
I guess that's it Jeb.
   "Stuff happens".
Why Jeb, WHY?

Kicking & Screaming Into a Wonderful World

Maurice, Evelyn & Margaret

         Weidenthal family lore has it that on Thanksgiving Day, many years ago, a little guy to be named Maurice, for his grandfather, came splashing out of his mother’s womb, kicking and screaming, hanging on to his twin sister’s big toe for dear life. 

         The event is reported to have taken place at a small hospital converted from an aging apartment house on E.55^th St. between Cedar and Woodland Avenues.  It was not much of a neighborhood   and in a matter of days young Maurice and his twin Margaret were hustled up Cedar Hill to a rented duplex on Meadowbrook Blvd. near Lee Rd. in Cleveland Heights.

        

Our Last Christmas Tree

  The troubling news that Wal-Mart, Walgreen’s and several other big box stores had caved into the pressure of religious Christian right and will bring the theme “Merry Christmas” back into their stores, replacing the more palatable, “Happy Holidays” sent my mind spinning back to the early 1930’s and the year of our last Christmas tree.  I suspect that we were not the only secular or Reform Jewish family in Cleveland to erect a Christmas tree in the living room during those blustery final weeks of December during the Depression.

  Our tree, of course, in my impressionable young mind, was special.  It was enormous, majestic. And the center of a lot of excitement and anticipation, that had absolutely nothing to do with the celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ.
    For me Christmas was sneaking downstairs in the early a.m. of that “holiday” to get a look at what “Santa” had brought. It brought joy to our house. At age five I thought nothing more of it than that. In fact, Christmas, the tree, the gifts, the songs was the major topic of conversation among classmates and in the classroom at Coventry School in Cleveland Heights.

My Dirty Little Secret

Lida & Maurice Weidenthal 1911

   There are photos of my grandmother Lida and my grandfather Maurice romping in the water in the strangest kind of swimming attire. Defying simple description. There was my Dad hanging from a tree limb over the beach, playing some kind of ball with the others and running in the the water.

  I cannot identify the day my body and my mind become completely obsessed with the need to swim.  Not the ordinary, once a week “let’s go the beach” kind of need. That’s controlled, modified by weather, where you happened to be, one’s mood etc. This is uncontrollable. I need to do it every day. The circumstances are irrelevant. Much more scary, much more psychologically mysterious.

  I certainly wasn’t addicted when I was a kid. I had ear trouble, and kept away from the water much of my youth.  When I went to Cumberland pool as a youngster, my friends would jump off into the deep end.  I would timidly approach the three feet, splash around pretending that I knew what I was doing, and then return to the safety of the deck and hide behind a book or something. 

Remembering the Pain and Tears Of Depression and War

My magnificent mother almost never cried.

She had been widowed in the depth of the great depression. Left with five-year-old twins and limited resources, she became, out of necessity, a successful businesswoman. Struggling to maintain the family and the home we came to love. She was no feminist but when my father died in January, 1931, she went to work running his large printing and publishing company, and never complained. “I had no choice,” she often said later.

We had moved into an apartment house on Euclid Heights Blvd. in Cleveland Heights.  It was located in a pleasant residential stretch of buildings where perhaps 50 families lived in relative comfort in a single block between Lancashire and Hampshire. Many, as we did, had moved from private homes as incomes diminished. There were lots of children, and for the most part we hung together, gathering nightly on the tree lawns, or playing ball in the “empty lot” around the corner.