When I was in junior high, I was kind of skinny. My mother was overly concerned, so she took me to our family doctor, Dr. Evans, on East 5th Street.

Dr. Evans gave her a bottle of something that he said would fill me out a bit. I was supposed to drink a glass of it every day. She would put a glass of the stuff on my dresser every morning for me to drink. It was disgusting.

I forced it down every morning, but it was a battle. One morning I was having a tough time keeping it down and I was losing the struggle—the stuff was trying to make an exit from my skinny body—it was coming up!

I ran to the bathroom and as I opened the door my mother was in the process of coming out. I could not hold it.

The stuff came out like the gushing oil wells you see in movies and landed full blast on my mother. She had just showered and dressed for work.

To say that she was mad would be a profound understatement. I thought, “Okay, here is where I go to prison—or at least reform school.” But she realized that I couldn’t hold it down and then she was not mad. I thought, “Okay, if she is not sending me to the workhouse, I guess I can get dressed for school.”

The apartment behind us was occupied by a beautiful young woman and her mother-in-law. They were sharing the apartment while the young woman’s husband was in the army.

I had a huge crush on her, but it was hopeless because I was 14 and she was in her early 20s. There was a side porch on the building that ran by our apartments. If she was sitting on the porch, I would walk by her like I was on an important mission. I would hurry past her like I had very important things on my mind.

“What did that prove, dumb ass,” I would ask myself. It proved that I was too shy to talk to her and that I had just made a fool of myself. Now on the ground with no place to go, I would quietly sneak back up to our apartment through the inner steps. “Is love always going to be this difficult?” Little did I know, little did I know….

The first-floor rear apartment was occupied by a reclusive couple who were very rarely seen. They didn’t speak English or the language that the Slovaks spoke. Their language sounded like Russian. I wondered if I should call the FBI?

The first-floor front was occupied by the Grabovic family; Danny and Marge and their three sons Danny Junior and two younger kids. No one knew the younger boys’ names for some reason. They were just called Frog and Toad by everyone.

Danny Senior liked to sneak out of the house and walk to Douch’s tavern on East 49th Street and St. Clair Avenue. Marge did not approve. When she realized that he had snuck out again she would lock the outside doors. Danny would come home late in a state of inebriation from drinking POC, (Pride of Cleveland beer) and pound on the front door while hollering. “Come on Marge, let me in.”

When Marge didn’t respond, Danny Senior would knock longer and shout loudly, “Come on honey, please let me in.”

My bedroom was right above their door, and I couldn’t sleep with all that going on. I kept thinking, “Jesus, Marge, will you please let him in.” If it wasn’t the rats, it was Danny and Marge and their drunken melodrama! She would eventually let him in, and I could get some sleep.

Frog and Toad were nice kids. Frog looked after his younger brother, and they spent their days at the playground. Toad had a permanent runny nose that covered his upper lip, and he had a bit of a speech impediment.

The city hired college students to look after the younger kids on the playground. The little kids called the college students “Teach” and You could always hear Toad running after one of them, calling out “Neach, Neach!”

Big brother Danny Junior was about 19, was tall and handsome and a teenage heartthrob for all the young girls in the neighborhood. Danny’s best friend was Ronny Adamovich.

One day a car pulled into the alley and Danny and Ronny got out. The car was a 1939 something-or-other.

I asked Ronny, “What are you going to do with that piece of junk?” With the coolness that he always displayed, he said, “Well, we are going to make it a hotrod, young pipsqueak.”

They worked on it every day. They sanded it down and put a coat of gray primer on it. They took off the fenders but left the hood on. They did some things to the engine that were unknown to me, and painted some parts of the engine red. The hood remained as it was. It tapered to the front and came to a downward point. It looked like a long bird beak. They called the car “The Screaming Eagle.”

One day they took me for a ride. At one point we were on the marginal of the freeway and were turning to go up the East 49th Street hill.

Danny said, “Watch this,” as he stepped on the gas pedal. There were railroad tracks at the top of that hill and as we reached the top, the car went slightly airborne as we crossed the tracks.

“That was fun!” Danny said. He turned the car around and we went back down the hill. This time he drove a little faster and landed with a resounding “whomp!” Then we heard a loud “scree!”

The car came to a stop. The engine had fallen out! We walked back to Ronny's house and came back with his father in his father’s truck and towed the car and the engine back to Ronny’s garage. There was some kind of lifting apparatus in the garage ceiling that they used to lift the engine and somehow get it back into the car.

Believe it or not, they eventually got the car running again. I declined any ride offers from Rony after that experience.

Yeah, I know, they don’t make them like that anymore.