Greg Fedak II

Mom and Dad decided to move to the west side, when I was about four years old. They bought a lot on Crossview Drive in Seven Hills. Dad hired subcontractors to do the work of building but he did a some of the work himself . I remember Mom picking up Grandpa Joe and then going to White Motors to pick up Dad. Then we drove out to the new house. I remember it as just a hole in the ground on up. One of my favorite things was to hammer nails. I used to spend hours trying to hammer nails in a board. I think that everyone got a laugh out of the little kid trying to hammer. Bill Dodge helped Dad with the carpenter work. I loved to listen to Bill Dodge tell stories. He could tell the greatest adventure stories anyone could imagine. Mr. Dodge had a terrific, deep, resonant speaking voice. One of my fondest childhood memories was of sitting with Dad in the basement of the Dodge house on the hill in Parma, overlooking Ridgewood Dr, with Mr. Dodge's pipe smoke drifting in long, fine streams across the room. And the pipe smoke smelled great, too. Bill Dodge lived with the Mormon's and was a cowboy and lived in the south and traveled through Mexico and a bunch of other things. He was extremely successful with investments in the stock market. I remember him once saying he was a quarter-millionaire. Somehow, I think he was a full millionaire long before he died. He was a little bit funny in that he never bought a new car, that I knew of. He just liked to get a "good deal on a used one." Over the years, I heard a lot of the stories four and five times and they never changed a bit. That always told me that he was telling the truth.
Right around my fifth birthday, the family moved into the new brick ranch Dad built for us in Seven Hills. I was very excited and scared about the move. Sometime during the first night, I peed the bed. Mom was really mad. I said it would never happen again and that it was because of the new house and all...and it never did.
A few weeks later my life really changed with my first day at Broadview Elementary School. I was very nervous but didn't cry because I was with my "big brudder, Worrie." He took really good care of me on the bus and into the school and over to my room but then he pushed me in and said, "bye." I was super scared and started to cry a little even though a teacher or mommie helped me into the class and showed me where to go to play for a while. There was a huge pile of blocks and all kinds of other toys and a bunch of kids playing. I kind of stood around until a friend came up to me. It was Billy Dodge, the son of my Dad's friend, Bill. Once I got together with him, I was OK. We played together and sat together.
I really loved to ride the bus. My bus was called the yellow bus because it had a big piece of yellow paper in the window next to the door. I never missed it. Got to be really good friends with a girl named Gayle Storm. She lived really far from me, in a big, white colonial on Hillside road between the new Elementary school they were building and Broadview Road. We played and played. She loved horses. We played horsey, and I was the horsey. We played doggie and I was the doggie. We always sat together on the bus. She had short, very dark hair, turned under, all the way around. She was a little bit chubby but cute. I think all the boys liked her. She moved away two or three years later.
School was always fun for me. Kindergarten for us was only half a day. We were in the morning session. The teacher was Miss Summer. She was super nice. There was one kid that I just hated. He was constantly peeing his pants. By the end of the morning he really stunk! I think we called him stinky. He always had sunflower seeds with salt on them and you could smell them too. He didn't stay in class with us all year. I think they sent him back home again because of the pee thing. I enjoyed writing the letters and numbers in rows on folded pieces of paper. I was a terrible drawing student. Never could draw a bit from day one. One time, however, we were supposed to practise printing our names over the weekend. Anyway I forgot. When Billy Dodge reminded me, I didn't know what to do. I knew that there wasn't enough time to learn. I wrote my name on a little piece of paper. When it came time for us to be tested to see if we could do it, I looked at that little piece of paper and then wrote the letters. Felt really bad about that and worked real hard to be sure that would never happen again. Also, I had a terrible time with my colors. I just couldn't call them by their right names. Gayle Storm tried hard on the bus to teach me the colors but they were tough for me.
Our next-door neighbors were the Golden's. They had a boy named Timothy. He was about a year younger than me. They also had a daughter, a couple of years older than me. Timothy and I played together a little but were not great buddies. When I was five, the Golden's moved away and the Di Angelos moved in next door. The oldest Di Angelo, Ray was in the same grade as Larry. He was always tall and skinny. He tried to play little league baseball for a couple of years and gave up. We almost never had anything in common with him and did little with him. The Daughter, Donna, was a year younger then I was. She had a dark hair and a very dark completion. For some reason, she never appealed to me as a friend or as a girl. Donna was great friends with Frances Brezina who lived right across the street from her. They also had a little brother , Johnny, who was three or four years younger than me, way too young to be considered. I don't even know who he played with. Bob Markovich's little brother, Jimmy, and Frances Brezina's brother, Gary, were both about the same age, but neither hung around with Johnny. As the years went by, Mom and Dad gradually cooled to the Di Angelos to the point that neither of the families spoke to each other.
The Bryan's lived across the street. They had two boy's. Chuck was way older than my brother and Clayton or Clay who was a year younger than Larry. They also had two older daughters, Amie and Cookie who were way older and a baby sister, Sally. Clay was my brother's pal. They were in the same grade in school. Once in a while, I tagged along with them., but they usually did their thing without me. For a number of years, Clay was a very good friend of Larry's. I remember that Clay and Larry would lift weights and talk together every day. When Clay was in the third grade, there was a fire and explosion in their garage caused by Clay's brother, Chuck. Clay was seriously burned on both of his legs. For a while they didn't know whether he would even live. He got better but the third degree burns left terrible scars on both his legs. Clay missed so much school due to the accident that he had to repeat a grade of school, falling one year behind Larry. Still, Clay prospered. He became quite a good looking young man. He had blond hair and blue eyes and a pleasant personality. He also was a weight lifter with a terrific build, although not grotesque. The girls just loved him. They hung all over him. He was always surrounded by the best looking girls in the school.

I attended my first Cleveland Indians baseball game, the first of thousands, with my friend, Billy Dodge and his mother, Agnes. I was only six or seven and didn't know the first thing about the game. The thing that was fun was all the hot dog, pop, crackerjacks, popcorn, ice cream and everything. It was an afternoon game against the dreaded New York Yankees. Billy and his Mom knew everything about the game and the players and batting averages and pitching records and were surprised that I didn't, too. They yacked and watched the game, I ate and ate, happily. I remember being ready to go long before the game was over. I asked several times,"....is it time to go, yet?" The outcome has long since faded. The year was probably 1955. It was a day game. I remember playing at Billy's house with trains or something until it got dark when Mom and Dad came to pick me up.
When we moved to Crossview Road (they changed the name of the road to Cricket Lane about a year after we moved in), my parents became instant farmers, We had a huge backyard, and most of it immediately became a garden. That garden had to be at least eighty feet wide and fifty feet long, no it probably was one hundred feel long. The soil was extremely poor, all clay and rocks and shale. After a rain, it would turn hard as concrete. And rocks would pop out. For at least five years, whenever we got into trouble or it looked like we didn't have anything to do, we were sent out to pick rocks out of the garden. Hated that. Mom believed in cultivating the soil between the rows. She had a hand cultivator that consisted of a large steel wheel and an axle and frame connected to two handles, with three little prongs attached. The idea was for one of us to pull the damned thing while the other one pushed down on the wooden handles which made the prongs dig into the concrete, I mean soil. Because the soul was so poor, we always had to put all our garbage in the garden, to build up the soul. And we always put the garbage in the rows between the crops. We had to hoe around each individual little plant. Boy were you ever in trouble if you ever chopped off a plant. If you got one, you propped it back up and hoped nobody noticed.
We planted lettuce almost when the snow was still on the ground. We had leaf lettuce and endive and several other types of lettuce, from the end of March until the end of September. We had salad every day for dinner. I hated salad. The part I liked was the salad dressing and the other junk that got put in there. The one I liked best was the little bacon bits. I was big on the colesteral stuff, even back then.
One of Mom's big crops was tomatoes. We had tomatoes and tomatoes and more tomatoes. And Mom canned hundreds of jars of tomatoes. After eating fresh tomatoes all summer, which I hated, we had stewed tomatoes all winter from Mom's canning jars. I was really bad about eating regular, sliced tomatoes. I never had to pick tomatoes. Probably, I never saw any good ones or ones I wanted to eat. Anyway, Mom or Dad picked them. I would eat them reluctantly, with a pile of sugar on a slice or sometimes some salt, if sufficiently threatened. I flat out refused to eat stewed tomatoes. They would make me sit there until I ate a bowl of them, and I would just refuse. They would smack me and yell at me and threaten me, and I would refuse to eat those stewed tomatoes. Sometimes I would take a mouthful of them and gag and almost throw up and sometimes they would let me go. Usually, it was a major hassle. If they had only known to call it "sausa", and serve it as a delicacy or treat . .. Actually, it took thirty years for me to start liking tomatoes a little bit. A black co-worker named Andy Bizzell brought in some beefsteak tomatoes, and I tried them and liked them. Then another coworker, Ray Zabrecky, brought in some cherrystone tomatoes, and I liked them. Them, five years later my stomach problem cropped up and the doctor advised me not to eat fruits with high acid, like oranges and tomatoes. Not a crushing loss in my diet, though.
We grew thousands of carrots and beats and rows of beans and tons of peppers. Now there was something that I liked. Loved fried peppers. Probably, it was the stuff Mom fried them in ... bacon grease or something. To this day I love fried peppers. We had them a lot. Yum, yum. Mom used to can a few jars of pepper. Not that many, though. They seemed to lose a lot when they came out of the jar. Hated picking those green beans. That was a job we all shared, except Dad. As I remember it, the only big garden work I remember Dad doing was digging up and planting. Mom and Larry were the big gardeners. Mom really loved the gardening. She had spent quite a few years of her childhood on a farm, and enjoyed having her hands in the dirt, I believe. I was a rock picker and hoer..that doesn't sound too good... bean picker and digger around the little plants and weed puller. However, every year, the garden got smaller and smaller. It shrunk by a few rows every year. The smaller it got, the better I liked it, even if I did love corn on the cob picked fresh from the garden, swimming with butter and cucumbers with sour cream.
Mom and Dad also planted lots of fruit trees around the back yard. There were apple trees, peach trees and plum trees. We planted shade trees all around the yard, too. All the big trees on the lot were probably planted by Mom or me. The fruit trees along the north side of the lot, next to the DeAngelo's yard, never did well. They were shaded by the neighbor's scruffy but tall pine trees, growing along the lot line. And we planted our trees too close to them. Along that side of the yard, we also planted strawberries and raspberries. For about five or so years we had bountiful crops of them, then we sort of grew tired of them and didn't pick em that much, or transplant. The raspberries lasted the longest. We probably had them growing there for fifteen years.
On the south side of the back yard, on the Kozak's side, Mom planted grapes. She had about a dozen plants, spread over about twenty feet. The Kozak's had planted pricker bushes all along our side of their back yard. Those prickers grew into and around the grapes, constantly. At least twice a year, one of us had to trim the pricker bushes away. Those bushes were really obnoxious. Just beyond the grape vines was a wonderful, small, ugly crabapple tree. Larry and I and the neighborhood kids loved to throw them around, and mostly at each other. They would really fly a long way. They weren't too big, so when they hit you, it wasn't a critical injury. We never had a major injury. Mom would get really angry when she would see us throwing them around, so that kept our crabapple wars to a minimum. Someone got the brilliant idea to get a sharpened stick and jamb a crabapple on the end and wing it. That would increase the speed and distance that they would travel. Very clever!!