Steve Fedak

Stephan Fedak was born in Cleveland, Ohio on May 18, 1916, to Helen (Kaminski) and Joseph Fedak. Steve didn't remember a lot about his first brother, Walter. He wasn't a newborn or infant but Dad didn't think he was old enough to walk. He remembered rocking the crib to rock his brother to sleep. The baby died in the influenza (flu) epidemic of 1920. The funeral was at home. Dad remembered the black wreath nailed to the front of the apartment building. He also remembered someone asking him, "who died?", and answering, " ... my brother."
Dad remembered the day that he got his tonsils out. He was three or four years old at the time. Dad remembers walking over the Abby Street bridge, which was made out of wood. The bridge had big cracks between the boards and he was scared about crossing because he could see far below. Grandma took him across anyway. In the hospital he suspected something was wrong. He smelled the mask and didn't like it and fought like heck to get it away from his face. But he got the mask and his tonsils out anyway.
In 1922, Steve started kindergarten at Tremont school on West 10th street and Jefferson. At that time the family was living in an eight suite apartment house on Literary Ave. A grown-up boy who lived downstairs, took Dad to Tremont school for his first day. He took Dad right into the school and classroom. Dad was scared and he cried. He remembers having a new straw hat and refusing to leave it in the cloak room. The boy took out a piece of "roll-your-own" cigarette paper and put it in the brim of the hat. He said that Dad would be able to find his own hat easily because of the paper. After that, Dad was OK in school that day.
The family later moved to the Collinwood area on East 173rd street. They and the Szmagala's went in together to purchase a double house. Steve and his family lived on the first floor. One evening, while Steve and Walter were in deep sleep, they were awakened by Aunt Bertha Szmagala. They complained like heck. Aunt Bertha got them up anyway and took them upstairs to sleep on the couch. And then, the two little boys had a baby sister, Elsie. Steve’s mom, Helen, and Aunt Bertha Szmagala were sisters. For one year, while Steve was in the fourth grade, the family lived in the Buckeye area.
While living in the there, Steve realized that he wanted to become a Boy Scout when he was older. Dad thought that it would be wonderful to go camping and do all the boy scout things. Unfortunately for Dad, there was no scouting in the Collinwood area. Dad didn't get his chance to get into scouting until my brother Larry became a scout in Seven Hills in the 1950's. Dad became a Cub Scout leader and later a Boy Scout master. Steve’s son, Larry became an Eagle Scout.
While living in Buckeye, Steve’s Dad, Joe that year, Grandpa Joe took him to the neighborhood bath house to learn how to swim. That was when Steve learned to swim, a hobby he took up again in his 70's while living in Regency apartments. There was a neighborhood community center near where the family lived. As part of the activities, they had a plot of land that was divided into little ones that individual kids could cultivate and grow their own gardens. Dad remembers that the gardens on the upper part of the hill where the plots were, had the best success. Unfortunately, Dad's plot was on the lower part of the hill and didn't do too well. Dad remembers that his father sometimes came to help him with his garden plot.
The fall of 1926 while living on Buckeye Road was when Dad discovered baseball. He remembers the New York Yankees, led by Babe Ruth who hit .372 with 47 home runs and 145 RBI's, Lou Gehrig, Tony Lazzeri, and Bill Musiel. They were known as Murderers Row. They beat the Pittsburgh Pirates in the world series. In those days, they didn't even have radio broadcasts of the games. Newspapers would come out every two hours and they would have "extra" editions that would have the updated score, through the fifth inning or whatever and another "extra" that would have bold headlines, declaring the Yankees World Champions again. And Pop was correct because I checked the 1926 records in the Baseball Encyclopedia. Pop was in the fifth grade at the time.
Dad attended William H. Brett Elementary School in the third, fifth and sixth grades. The school is located on St. Clair Ave, down the road from East 173rd street where the family lived, past Graphite Bronze. The school was built, divided into two halves. The front half of the building housed the first, second and third grades. The back half housed the fourth, fifth and sixth grades. The school was divided by the auditorium in the middle. Between the auditorium and the classrooms, on both sides were wide hallways, which served as the gyms. Dad remembers playing kick baseball in the hallway, gym area while in school. Behind the school was a large playground area. Unfortunately, the school put up two temporary buildings there which ruined the playground area.
While in the sixth grade at Brett Elementary, Dad began walking to the Cleveland Public Library on East 152nd street, a distance of about a mile. That's very near Collinwood High School, which all the cousins attended. He remembers spending many hours there at a time and going there frequently. That really helped to make him the super reader that he was his whole life.
When Dad was ten years old, his half-brother, Kazimir (Carl) Kaminski came from the old country to live with his mother and her family. He was sixteen years old. Carl was the illegitimate son of Helen Kaminski. She left baby Carl behind, in the old country when he was only two or three years old. Helen paid for passage to bring her brother and sister to America but left her baby son over there. Carl never went to school in the United States. He had learned the blacksmith trade from his grandfather, John, in the old country and was always able to find work throughout the depression. He always managed to quarrel with his mother. Behind it all was probably because he was left behind as a little boy when Helen came to the United States. Before very long, Carl wore out his welcome in the Fedyk home and moved in with Uncle Mike Kaminski and his family. After that, he stayed in the neighborhood, renting at the Szmagala's double house.
My most vivid memories of Uncle Carl were of his holiday visits at Christmas, Easter and all the big family gatherings. I remember that he would always show up much later than everyone else. He never had his family with him, and he was always drunk. He and his mother would talk very loudly in Ukrainian in the kitchen, and then start yelling and then Grandpa would go in and everything would quiet down, and then Carl would leave. I never heard anything about who Carl's father was, why he was left behind or any of that stuff. When I was younger, Dad would just lie about it and say Grandma's first husband, in the old country just happened to have the same family Kaminski name. When I was older, he would just said he didn't know.
Steve started taking violin lessons as a child and joined the school orchestra in the seventh grade. He learned to play the cello in the eighth grade. Steve was a member of the school string quartet for three years. He was also a member of the All Cuyahoga County High school Symphony Orchestra for two summers. The orchestra was based at Severence Hall. Their final concert was broadcast nationwide on the NBC Radio. Steve sang in the boys glee club and the school acapella choir. He had a livelong love for music. Whenever he babysat his grandsons, Don and Joe, at his apartment in Parma, Ohio, Steve always played classical music for them.
While walking around downtown Las Vegas at 4 AM, Dad told me about the first time he ever saw the game of blackjack. As a little boy he remembered his fathers buddies (who probably included Uncle Dymetro Szmagala and Uncle Mike Kaminski who were really uncles, and Uncle Joe who was a first cousin of Dad's Mom and who had lived with Dad's family for a while after his mother died) sitting around playing cards . As Dad remembers it, they were playing blackjack. They called the game, "21". They all wanted to be the dealer because the dealer won the most money. A player could remain the dealer until another person got blackjack. Then, that person became the dealer until another person got blackjack. Dad's father never played cards. He always wrestled on the floor with the kids. As soon as they got over the house they were visiting, the kids would grab Grandpa Joe and start wrestling. The one who liked to wrestle the most was cousin Stella Szmagala. Dad said that they stopped playing "21" and started playing poker when he was in his late teens or early twenties which would have been the mid or late l930's.
The guy who really loved to play cards was Uncle Mike Kaminski. When he was playing cards, the time didn't matter. Cousin Helen Kaminski remembered that one time Uncle Mike and his friends were playing cards at a bootleg joint right across the street from Saint Peter and Paul's Church on West 11th street. Uncle Mike's wife, Aunt Mary went right into the bootleg joint and knocked the cards and money off the table. She broke the game right up, right there and then..
Dad thinks that Uncle Mike's card playing was one of the big reasons that the family moved away from the Ukrainian neighborhood of the Church and the West 11th street area . The church, St. Peter and Paul's, was on the corner of West Seventh and College streets. Dad thinks that it would have been a lot more fun growing up in the Ukrainian community. In the Collinwood area there were gangs of "Dagos'" waiting around to beat up Dad and his cousins. There were also gangs of "Protestants" who liked to beat up the "Catholics."
Dad was in the third grade when they came to Collinwood. Cousin Helen was in Dad's class at William H. Brett Elementary school. Helen was one of the smartest kids in the class. Dad said that he wasn't in the group with the smart kids. Helen was one year younger than Dad but she had skipped a grade, a practise that was common in those days and continued to my time. I haven't heard of that happening for many years. All through the years, Helen and Dad were in the same grade and were friends. Helen always gave her free baseball tickets from school to Dad even though she had an older brother, Walter and a younger brother, Johnny. While Dad participated in sports in high school, Helen was very interested in girls athletics and participated in everything she could. All through school, Helen's grades were always straight .
hen the families moved to the Collinwood area, it took one and a half hours by streetcar to get to church. Wally remembers that on holiday's, and often on Sundays, his mother would stay home and cook and Joe and his sons and daughter would go to church. It was a really big deal when Uncle Dymetro got his first car, a big Buick, and gave Joe and his family a ride to church.
Holidays rotated among the three families, the Fedyk's, the Kaminski's and the Szmagala's. Michael Kaminski was Helen Fedyk’s brother. Bertha Szmagala was Helen Szmagala’s sister. When the family gathered at the Szmagala home for the holiday, Father Gresko, the Pastor of St. Peter and Paul's Church, and Uncle Dymetro's great friend often joined them. Father Gresko liked to tell dirty jokes. Before he got started, the kids would get kicked out of the room. Uncle Wally remembered the men roaring with laughter. I remember Uncle Dymetro liked to tell jokes.
The families always had two Christmas holidays and two Easters, the American and the Ukrainian which had two different calendars and occurred on two different days. When the holidays came, the families came together to celebrate and they always stayed overnight. Dad loved staying overnight and the good food. The kids always slept on the floor. Dad loved to talk with his cousin Walter all night long. The grownups would yell to the kids to go to sleep. Dad and his cousin would wait for a few minutes, then start talking again. The family get-togethers continued into the early 1940's when cousins Helen and Walter and Mary got married and with their spouses and in-laws, the get-togethers got too big.
Wally remembers walking home one time down East 173rd street with his family after a holiday get together. Walt remembers that Grandpa Joe had been doing quite a bit of drinking. Along the way, Joe stopped. Helen asked him , "...why are we stopping." Grandpa Joe answered, " I think I'll just wait here for the house to come by." All the pictures of the family show them extremely serious and in stern poses. Really, though, there were lots of laughter among those people.
Steve played football, basketball and baseball. No kids ever played, who wore glasses. Steve wore glasses. Back then, whenever a football player came out of the game, he was out for the rest of the half. All players were two-way players. Only about 12 guys a year got letters. Steve’s good friend, George Suki was the star. In basketball, after every basket, they had a jump ball. And they used the push shot, which is the easiest shot to block today. Nobody uses it. But Steve loved sports. Dinner was long over by the time Steve got home from practise or Ukrainian language classes, which Steve took for many years. Dinner was whatever was left over. So Steve didn’t eat very well. He only weighed 145 pounds when he graduated from high school.

Steve graduated in 1934, the heart of the depression. His first job was in the heat treat department at Midwest Forge, a company that exists today, in it’s same location on East173rd and St. Clair Avenue. Steve’s job was to use a long pair of tongs to turn the axels just after they came out of the reheat furnaces. Really a miserable job. Just the thing to weed out new employees. Steve’s supervisor was Uncle Joe Kaminski. After one day, Steve told Uncle Mike, “You’ll never see me around here again.”

Greg's Ghreme

As far back as I can remember, my family has always had smoked sausage and our horseradish and beet concoction for Christmas breakfast, New Years breakfast and Easter breakfast. I remember, when I was a little guy, how grandpa Joe Fedak grew horseradishes, and a lot of other stuff in his garden, on East 173rd Street off St Clair Avenue. The garden was next to the 1 &½ car garage Joe and his wife’s cousin Joe Kaminski and friends and family built in the back yard. There was a pear tree right behind the house. The whole back yard was surrounded by a four foot wire fence. All around the back yard, up to the garden, were beautiful flowers. The yard and garden was perfectly maintained. Not a weed in the place. They had hundreds of snap dragon flowers. Larry and I and Doug and Gayle used to pick snap dragons and chase after each other, pretending the snap dragons would bite. Big fun. The lawn was all creeping bent grass, which golf courses use for their greens. There were no weeds. It was almost perfect. But we could always run and play on it. Anyway, back to the ghreme.

I remember Grandma Helen Fedak sitting on the back porch, grating the horseradishes from the garden, for the chreme. The word chreme was more guttural. This is just the way I chose to spell it. Then they would add the beets, grown in the garden, vinegar, salt, sugar and pepper, and mix it all up. There was no recipe. What we have now is my best attempt to recreate what they made. And it’s constantly being changed, as I strive to make it better, so it’s Greg’s Ghreme.

The Recipe


Eight cans, small whole beets-(sliced beets are just fine) (14 oz or so) 2 jars of 8.5 oz. bottle of horseradish. Prepared horseradish. Fresh. or: 16 oz. of pure horseradish. Or a few ounces less.
The ratio is about 7 ounces of beets to 1 ounce of horseradish.

1 cup of Burgundy Wine. (Cheap brands work fine) The better the wine, the better the flavor, I think. Add salt and pepper to taste.
(About 2 teaspoons of salt and less than 1/4 teaspoons pepper)


Open beet cans and drain off all water. Use hand crank sausage grinder or food processor to grind up beets in bowl. Squeeze all the juice out of the ground up beets. Measure the amount you squeezed off and replace it with wine.
Add horseradish and wine.
Add salt and pepper to taste.
Mix until the consistency is uniform. (5-10 minutes)
(Makes 2+ mason jars of ghreme.)

Should be made two to four days before serving with the ham and
sausage and rye bread. Always use horseradish fresh from the store. Old horseradish changes the consistency and flavor. The Ghreme gets weaker every day. Can be fixed up by adding more horseradish, according to your taste.

The other prime ingredient is the smoked sausage. Until Grandma and Grandpa got too old, they made their own smoked sausage. They used pork butts. They cut the meat away from the bone, trimmed away fat and chopped the pork into 1/2 inch chunks. They mixed in garlic, salt and pepper to taste. Then grandma stuffed the sausage into pigs intestines they bought from the butcher, making 5 inch links. (I watched them make it.) They both died, three months apart, when I was 23. There was no recipe. Grandpa tasted the raw meat, then spit it out and told grandma what it needed. Then, Grandpa smoked the sausage, using only fruit wood, in a paper barrel in the back yard. Then they hung the smoked sausage on wooden poles in the basement for months and months and months. Before every holiday, they gave us a bunch of Grandpa’s sausage and ghreme.

After they died, Dad got their grinder and their sausage stuffer. Eventually, we got a better grinder from Cindy Fedak's Mom, Marian Pierce. That's the one we use today.My Mom liked Grandpa’s sausage as much as Dad and I did. So we decided to make our own. We laboriously cut the pork butts. We added seasoning. Mom did the taste testing. We all taste tested. I didn’t have a clue what it needed. Then we smoked it, using Grandpa’s paper barrel. It didn’t even remotely taste like what we loved. But we tried a couple of more times. The second time, the barrel caught fire. So Dad and I took our sausage over to Uncle Demitri Szmagala’s house near Cam’s corner to complete the smoking. Weka Metro (sp) was happy to help us. The next time we made sausage, Dad told me to take the sausage and fruit wood over to his uncle’s house myself. The smoking process took hours. I was about 18 or 19 at the time. We got the fire started and the sausage smoking. It was a cold day. Metro suggested we go inside to warn up. He immediately brought out a bottle of Crown Royal and a couple of shot glasses. We each had a couple of shots and then went back out. We did that a couple of times. Aunt Bertha yelled at Metro about the booze. He’s just a kid. Metro just laughed, poured more shots and told her to get us something to eat. I was well lit by the time the sausage was finished.

That was the first time I really got to know Metro one on one. We always had fun together after that. I visited him in Middleburgh Hts, when he moved into a new house with his daughter and son-in-law, Nick and Mary Bobezcko. That guy could tell great stories. And he loved to tell dirty jokes. And I knew a ton of dirty jokes. We got on very well. I was very sad when he died.

After a few years, we gave up making sausage. After all, it was never that good. I suppose we could have gone in and made sausage with some of Dad’s relatives who could still make the old country stuff, but we never did. Mary and Nick probably still make the “real stuff.”

Dad started buying the sausage at a Slovenian Butcher shop on East 55th and Bonna Avenue. It was recommended to Dad by a good friend of his. The sausage was very good, but nowhere near as good as I remembered it. It was a two hour process to drive over there and back. The old man at Malensek’s Butcher shop died, leaving a son and daughter to carry on. As they got in their 60’s they got tired of the business. Their kids hated it. They were ready to retire. Couldn’t hire help to work with raw meat and the whole bit. So they made less and less sausage every year. At the end they only made #300 a day. If you weren’t one of the first 15 people in line, around Christmas or Easter, you didn’t get sausage. People came from all around to line up and hope to get some of that smoked sausage. I used to get there an hour early, to be first in line. By the time they opened the door, their would be forty people in line. In about 10 minutes, they were out of sausage. The butch shop guys were gruff and mean, like the Soup Nazi from Seinfeld’s TV show. One time I heard them say, let the animals in. Finally they just plain closed up.

Starting in 2005, I buy the sausage at State Meats at State Road and Tuxedo, in Parma, next door to Tuxedo bowling lanes. I get Slovenian smoked sausage. ( 4.89 / lb, April 2006) The “double smoked” is also very good. Maybe better. It’s about 3 ½ to 4 links per pound. For Christmas brunch, I boiled 5 pounds and probably needed 6 pounds. We had 10 for brunch. For new years brunch, I boiled 4 pounds for 5 people and that was more than enough. For Christmas, we should probably get 10-12 pounds of sausage.

State Meats vacuum packs the sausage. I sent Larry 12 links (3 ½ pounds) in a Postal (free) priority box. Sausage was $17 and priority mail was $11. Mailed it Wednesday at 2 PM. They got it with Friday’s mail. Two days!!

Sausage Cooking Instructions (As suggested by Uncle Wally – the best, juiciest sausage)

Put sausage in good sized pot and cover them with water. (No lid on Pot.) Cook at full heat until boiling. If they are straight from the freezer, it still works the same. The meat is already cooked in the smoking process. Boil for ten minutes. Then turn off the heat, put on the lid and let them sit in the boiling water for 20 minutes. Then drain and serve.

Got 15 # for Christmas. They are 3 ½ to 4 links per pound. Had 8 guests for Christmas morning, gave Larry 3 pounds and still had 4 pounds left for New Years with 5 guests.

Over the years, the making of the Ghreme has sort of taken on a life of it's own. It is a part of Greg and Phyllis' holiday tradition. Phyl never participates in the ritual of the "Making of the Ghreme." She sometimes watches. Often laughes. When someone is helping me, we always fool around. Joe and I have the official grinder, the traditional mixing spoon, the symbolic Ghreme jar we always use. The coffee jar with the red lid. And we drink burgandy while we make it, usually finishing off whatever is in the bottle. One of the most fun times was when Graeme and Laura Wilson were here for the ceremonial making of the ghreme. June 20, 2009, the day before Father's Day, I made up a 1/4 batch. As Joe's high school girlfriend Danielle put it, "after all, it's just slop."

Greg Fedak

It was a Saturday morning, August 14,1948. Dad asked Mom how she felt. Mom said she felt fine. Dad got on his old clothes and started to do some painting. Suddenly, Mom came running and said to take Larry to Grandma's house. Dad took off running down the street and dropped off Larry and came back. Mom let Dad change clothes but was in a big hurry. They jumped into their car, a 1934 Plymouth, and raced for Glenville Hospital. Dad drove through all the stop signs and red lights and the wrong way on a one-way street speeding to the Hospital. When they got there, Mom went into the delivery room. Dad had to wait out by the front door where the desk clerk answered the telephone. He could hear Mom yelling someplace off in the distance. (There was no waiting area) The desk clerk told Dad to go out and get a cup of coffee and something to eat as it was going to take a long time. Dad went to a neighborhood place called Mills Restaurant for something to eat. (This was a place Steve and Frances went once in a while for a steak dinner). When Dad got back from Mills, the desk clerk congratulated him, that he had a new baby boy. (Greg) Dad said "...I thought you said it was going to take a long time." The clerk said, "....guess I was wrong.

I never remember having a blanket thing. My blanket was sort of blue with gray and white stripes. The first kids that I remember playing with were Michael Murphy and later Mary Kay Murphy. They lived on the next street over from ours. We lived on East 173rd so it was either 172nd or 174th. Their father, John, was Dad's best friend. I guess Dad took us over there to play. It was always big fun because they had an empty lot next door to their yard so we had lots of room to run around. Also, across the street there were three vacant lots. They were sort of wooded and had a sort of a ravine in the back part of them. At the very back of the lot was a very high chain link fence that divided the residential property from the parking lot of Cleveland Graphite Bronze, later to be called Clevite, and still there. There was also a boy named Marty who lived next door to us or someplace close. Mary Kay was one year younger than me. When I was four, she was only three but we were sure that we were going to get married when we grew up. I saw their Dad, John Murphy several times a year in the late 80's at Cleveland Indians Wahoo club luncheon meetings. I saw Michael at a Cleveland Indians baseball game in 1993. He was almost totally grey-haired and getting pretty bald in front. The Murphy's moved to Euclid, Ohio, several years after we moved to Seven Hills.
The family enjoyed going on picnic's with George Suki, his wife and sons Brucey and Kippie. We often went to a place in the metropolitan parks called Squires Castle. The castle was an old mansion long since gone to ruin. It was big fun to climb up the walls and up on the second floor. The park had great swings, lots of woods and lots of open spaces to run around. Mom always had great stuff to eat. I remember watching the hot dogs cook and actually getting to cook marshmallows, myself. I remember Mom wearing a button-down green sweater on the picnics. Dad was starting to lose his hair and starting to wear baseball hats.
One of my earliest memories of television was of a Saturday afternoon Cleveland Indians Baseball game. Dad was watching the game with his good friend, Jack Zotler. The only thing I remember about the game was the commercials. They were for Carling Black Label beer. They were the ones that went, " tweet, tweet, Mabel, Black Label". The funny thing about the whole thing was, Dad and Jack were drinking plenty of beers. And, when they set down an empty bottle of beer on the floor, little Greg drank the little beer that was left. Don't think that I got particularly lit up as I really don't remember ever liking the taste of beer, but......
One of the high points of my preschool days was when I told my Mom how to change a flat tire on our car. I was only four years old. Mom had to get the tire changed to pick up Dad at work and didn't know how. To tell you the truth, I don't know where or when I learned, but I knew what to do. Boy were my parents surprised. Their car was a dark green, 1949 Oldsmobile they bought new. It had stick shift, on the steering column, vent windows in front of the door windows of the front seat. You could open those vent windows real far, and get a great breeze when the car was traveling down the road. If Dad opened his vent just a little way, he could flick his cigarette ashes out, or throw the butt out. No turn signals (they came about 1955). They rolled down their door windows and signaled with their arms. Straight out meant you were turning left. Your arm out but bent at a 90 degree angle meant a right turn. They always blinked their headlight high beams when they passed. Or they blinked the headlights to tell oncoming cars that they were coming up on a police car. No air conditioning (early 60’s in luxury type cars) or seat belts (they came after 1961). I remember that because our 1961 Comet had no seat belts.

One of my favorite things to do for myself in the kitchen on East 173rd street was to make myself tea. I knew how to fill and boil the water from watching Mom. I would make myself a cup, but I really liked lots of sugar...spoonfuls and spoonfuls of them. Also, I like the taste of lemon so I would get a heaping teaspoon of sugar then squeeze lemon juice onto the spoon until I got it nice and mooshie. I also like to make myself toast. We had a manual toaster, that heated until you opened the sides up. That was great fun for me. I loved to put a ton of butter on my toast then put a ton of cinnamon and sugar on it. Yum, yum .Got started with that cholesterol stuff at an early age. Don't remember who was supposed to be watching me when I was doing my cooking.
I remember my brother's first day of school. I remember that the big, tough guy was scared. But I wasn't. I knew everything was going to be all right for him, and it was. Around that time, he had to learn how to tie his shoes. He just couldn't get the hang of it and Mom got madder and madder. Pretty soon, Larry was getting smacked and he was crying and I was laughing. I could never get over the fact that I thought it was great and extremely funny every time my brother got smacked. It was embarrassing, laughing at another person's pain but sometimes I still get the urge to laugh. I'll tell you one thing, though. When it came time for me to learn to tie my shoes, I learned real fast because I didn't want to get smacked like my brother. I spent a lot of time trying to learn to write like my big brother. I was fascinated with the idea of writing my name. Except, when I really did learn to spell my name, I found out what I thought was my name was really "gory." But I sure was trying and I did a lot of scribbling and called it my writing.

Refrigerators in the 1950’s weren’t very good. They never got down to a freezing temperature. They all had drip pans to catch the condensation off the “freezer” part. They called them ice boxes, because these refrigerators had recently replaced ice boxes. The ice man would come around in his truck and people would buy a big square of ice and put it in the ice box to keep stuff cold. And people walked to the neighborhood grocery stores, on almost every corner on a daily basis to buy food. Anyway……….on hot summer days Mom and Dad would take us to the ice cream stand, on Lake Shortt Bouldvard. The top of the stand looked like an ice cream cone.Mega treat. It was 10 years later before you could keep ice cream cold overnight in the refrigerator. They would spell out I-c-e c-r-e-a-m to each other to see if they wanted to go. When Worrie heard i-c-e he would start screaming ice cream, ice cream, and Mom and Dad would have take us to get it. Probably one of 5 greatest food treats in my life and I can’t remember the other four. Sometimes we even got “Boston coolers.” Root beer floats. Wow!!
We kids really loved it.
My brother took the CTS bus to William H Brett School. He used to get hassled at the bus stop. The fifth graders sometimes took his bus pass and always tried to get his money. I remember Mom or Dad talking to Grandma about how they were going to handle the situation. Bobby Mueller was a neighbor of Grandmas. He was the worst of the bullys. They were really worried that they would not be able to fix things, but when Dad went to talk to the bully's father, the trouble stopped. I know one thing, though. Larry must have done quite a bit of fighting at the bus stops or at school because he sure was a great fighter. I never heard of him coming close to losing a fight and I don't think he ever did. He was already a great fighter before we moved from Collinwood.

Joe Kaminski

Joe Kaminski was a first cousin of Helen Kaminski, Steve Fedak's uncle

While still a boy, in the old country, Joe Kaminski's mother died. He was not able to get along with his father's new wife. He came to live with Grandma Helen Kaminski's family. Even as a boy, he was a very clever mechanic. He had a knack for repairing watches. He always seemed to have money and he often gave money to his aunt. Grandma's father, Joe's uncle had his own blacksmith business. Joe, along with his first cousin, Mike Kaminski learned the blacksmith trade from John Kaminski, the father and uncle.
Joe Kaminski was only 4ft, 11 inches tall. As a young man in Europe, Joe joined an elite unit of the Austro-Hungarian Empire calvary, the Uhlans. There, he probably learned to be the very meticulous dresser he was known to be, his entire life in the United States. His shoes were always polished to a mirror finish and his suits were perfect. He always wore a pocket watch with fob, attached to his vest.
In the early 1930's, living near Cleveland, Ohio, Cousin Joe and his wife bought or probably rented a farm. Joe had decided that he wanted to be a farmer. One Easter vacation Joe invited Cousin Walter Kaminski and Dad to stay with him. Dad and his first cousin, Walter Kaminski, brother of Helen and Johnny Kaminski took the streetcar from the east side to Lyndale railroad yard. They actually walked through the yard until they found where cousin Joe was working. They went on to the farm together. Dad remembers that a neighbor brought over equipment for planting. The teen-age boys cut the seed potatoes and rode the equipment and dropped the seed potatoes into the furrow. Another time during their stay, Walter was cutting grass with a sickle and cut his hand pretty badly. For some reason, Cousin Joe and his wife blamed Dad for the accident. Dad was really angry over being blamed and said he'd never come back to the farm . . .and he never did. The farm only lasted a few years
After Joe's first wife died, in 1948, Joe stayed with his cousin, Bertha and her husband, Dymetro Szmagala. He would often come home drunk, pull his car into the garage and fall asleep in the car. The neighbors saw this and started talking about him. This upset Bertha, and she kicked cousin Joe out. He then went to stay with his cousin, Helen Fedyk and her family on East 173rd street. Grandma Helen had a standing order with a liquor store to have two cases of beer a week delivered for cousin Joe. He kept his car in Grandpa Joe's brick garage. A few times, he let Dad back the car out of the garage, then he would give Dad a ride to his job at White Motors. Then, one day, he said that Dad had broke something on the car and couldn't back it out of the garage any more. Dad is sure he never hurt the car in any way. Joe got in a large number of auto accidents, usually related to the large amount of alcohol he drank, on a regular basis. One time he totaled one of his cars, hitting a post in the middle of the street that was there to protect passengers getting on the streetcar. He loved to argue with Dad's uncles Mike and Metro. When he got them all upset, he would tell them that they "...were full of shit," and laugh. Grandpa Joe Fedyk always laughed at the very sound of Joe Kaminski's name because he was so funny.
One time, Uncle Joe was in the hospital. Mom and Dad visited him. Joe wouldn't do anything the nurses said. He was jumping around the room like he was in perfect health. He was swearing at the nurses in Polish and Ukrainian. Mom tried to settle him down and get him to do what he was supposed to do without any success, Dad, knowing Uncle Joe, stood back and said nothing.
Joe never had any children. His first wife died fairly young, of cancer. Dad remembers that she was very fat. She and Joe would come over to Grandma Helen and Grandpa Joe's house for dinner. Shortly after dinner, she would fall asleep in a chair in the living room. In his later years, Joe remarried. The second marriage changed his life. Although he still lived to drink, he was more moderate and controlled. I remember him as an older man, always dressed to the hilt, with a suit and vest. I remember his very bushy mustache and the fact that he was very short. As a teenager, I could see that he was a character. I remember his wife giving him heck and him laughing. He bought an Opal GT sports type car with stick shift as a seventy year old man. He wife said he couldn't shift gears with a darn and he was an old fool. She said his driving would be the death of them, yet. He just laughed. Cousin Joe Kaminski and his first wife are buried in the St. Peter and Paul Cemetery in the northeastern corner of the original, main plot, very near to the road and very near to the WW2 monument. A large bush or tree is planted in front of their stone.

Joseph Fedak

According to Walter Fedyk's book, "The Kaminski Family in America, Joseph Fedak was born in Rava Ruska, in Ukraine on February 18, 1886. His mother died when he was only four and his first stepmother only lived a few years. Joseph grew up in a rural area. At age ten, he and a brother went to work in a coal mine in Germany with their father during the winter. Joseph hated the coal mines and going underground. He had no formal education whatever. He left home at age 14. The next twelve years of Joseph's life shall forever remain a mystery. There is no one left alive that can tell us anything about those years.
On January 28, 1910 Joseph Fedak entered America through Ellis Island, in New York harbor, as an immigrant from the Austro-Hungarian Empire of Franz Josef. Joe's passport and immigration papers showed his name as Fedak. The main reason that we believe that the Fedak spelling is the correct one is the immigration document. Although Joe could not speak English or write in any language, on Ellis Island, when he entered the country, the immigration people asked him his name. When he pronounced it for them, they spelled it, Fedak. Joe's citizenship papers dated September 18,1925 showed the name spelled Fedyk. The difference in the spelling of the name was discovered years later. According to Walter, that explains the two spellings of the family name, although on September 11,1993, in his home on Cresthaven, while showing pictures to Greg and Larry in the basement, he stated that he felt that the Fedak spelling was probably correct.
On November 4,1993, Dad told me and Phyllis, in his apartment, that he was in the eleventh grade in school when his mother realized that there was a difference in the spelling of the name. At that time, Walter was in the seventh grade and Elsie was in the third grade. Dad's Mom was extremely proud that Grandpa Joe, who had never gone to school, had passed the U.S. citizenship oral exam with flying colors the first time he took the test. Dad's rich uncle Dmytro had to take the test twice. All of the immigrant members of the family were extremely proud of their American citizenship. Grandma Helen felt that if they didn't change the family name to Fedyk, they would take away Grandpa's citizenship. At that time, Dad refused to change his name. He said that all through the years he was growing up, everyone pronounced the family name as , never the . In later years, Aunt Elsie gave Dad heck for either not changing the spelling of his name to be the same as the rest of the family, or convincing his parents that the error in the spelling on the citizenship papers could be corrected without a problem. After Dad's death, I discovered his birth certificate. On it, with the correct birthday and mother's name, the child was named, John Fedack. I remember Dad telling me years ago, that his birth certificate said that, but that his parents had decided to change his name to Stephan. His birth certificate indicates that his father's name was Joe Fedak, age 30 and a laborer, and that his mother's maiden name was Helen Kaminski and she was a housewife, age 23. Dad's Baptismal certificate dated June 11,1916, which I have, shows the boy's name as Stephen John Fedak and his parents names were Joseph Fedak and Helen Kaminski.
Joseph had an older brother and a younger brother. His older brother came to America, first. He was the one who got Grandpa Joe into the country and helped get him his first job with the railroad. They worked for several years and sent the money back home to their father who began purchasing farmland for them. After a couple of years, Joe's brother returned to Ukraine. Joe planned to stay a little longer but join them later. Almost as soon as he arrived back home, the older brother and the younger brother who had stayed in Ukraine, were drafted into the Austro-Hungarian army. The older brother was killed and the younger was seriously injured and permanently disabled. Joe married and remained here.
Years later, in the 1930's Dmytro Szmagala visited Joe's father and brother on their farm in Ukraine. They offered to sell a third of the land and send the money to Joe. As the depression was worldwide and the price of land was very low in Ukraine, Joe would have received very little if there had been any way to get the money to America. He told his family that they could keep his share of the land. Dad remembers his parents talking sometime in the 1930's about a letter from the old country telling that his father's Dad had died. Dad remembers his father wearing a black armband for a time and that's about all.
Joe was 5' 11" tall, with blue eyes and dark brown hair. He was taller than his sons, Steve and Walter, and towered over his wife, Helen who was only 4'11" tall. Joe and Helen were married in Cleveland on May 29,1915. Steve thinks that a matchmaker got them together although that story is another mystery. Helen told her daughter, Elsie that on their wedding day, when the guests returned from the church, all the food had been stolen. Grandma Helen's cousin, Joe Kaminski's wife was supposed to have stayed behind to watch the stuff and didn't.
While Joe and Helen were renting an apartment on the west side, they, along with the Szmagala family and a bunch of other Ukrainians put their money together and started a bank. The bank built a large building which housed the bank, a furniture store and some other businesses. The way Dad remembers the story, the furniture store sold the stuff too cheaply and the bank failed.