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.”