EXCERPT 8 FROM ‘VOICES IN THE STORM’ — INITIATION

The following is an excerpt from Chapter Four of the autobiographical book I’m currently writing, entitled “Voices in the Storm: A Journalist’s Memoir”, about my early days in Buenos Aires.

Robert Cox had led me to believe on my first night at the Herald that, for the moment, I would mostly be observing, learning the ropes, seeing how things were done, filling in gaps in the personnel roster, basically doing “one thing and another.” In all fairness, he did warn, however, that because the paper was chronically short-handed and run on a shoestring budget, I would frequently find myself on my own when, truth be told, I should be under the supervision of someone more experienced, and that, in those cases, I’d simply have to wing it and hope to hell I got it right.

But I never imagined that this would be so much the case when I came in for my second night on the job. Cox himself intercepted me at the swinging doors of the editiorial department. He was frantic. A couple of the staff had their night off and couldn’t be reached, and a couple of others had called in sick. I’d have to get to work right away, he said, and as fast as I could. He handed me a pile of local news agency cables in Spanish and said I needed to get to work translating them ASAP.

It had never occurred to me when I was badgering the editor to let me work in his paper that a significant part of the job of an English-language newspaper in a Spanish-speaking country would be translating the local news, but that reality became graphically clear to me right off the bat. Other than textbook translations reluctantly carried out in two years of Spanish classes back at Wapakoneta High School and during the two quarters of Spanish I had taken at Ohio State, I had never translated anything in my life. My Spanish skills were shaky to say the least. Despite a few months living in Buenos Aires, my Spanish was still decidedly Tarzanesque.  Translating a single paragraph of news copy with the constant help of a bilingual dictionary took me ages, and I was to learn quickly just how little column space a translated paragraph could fill. I was in awe of veterans like local news editor Andrew Graham-Yooll, senior reporter Reginald “Toby” Rowland and cables editor Stuart Stirling, who could hammer out translations as fast as they could type. Needless to say, I felt totally inadequate. When I had struggled through my first fifteen-line brief, I took it to Graham-Yooll, as Cox had told me to, and timidly said, “Mr. Cox told me to bring you this as soon as I was finished translating it.”

Graham-Yooll looked up from his work and narrowed his eyes at me as if I were a panhandler who’d just asked him for the price of a pint, wheezed, muttered, “Thanks,” and laid the piece off to the side before returning to the developing story he had rolled into his typewriter. I went back to my hammered-to-death-give-it-to-the-new-guy typewriter in a far corner of the room and started struggling to understand a second cable in Spanish. But as I worked, I couldn’t help glancing over Graham-Yooll’s way every little bit to see when he was going to get to my translation. When he finally did, I stopped working and watched as he placed it on the desk in front of him, paused, took his long beard with one hand and stroked it,  while retrieving a pencil from within the shaggy hair that hung over his ear with the other, and beginning to edit—slashing, marking out, circling, writing in, slashing, slashing, slashing, writing in, then writing instructions to the shop at the top of the page before laying the piece off to the side again.

When he was done, he leaned back far enough to open his middle desk drawer, rifled around in the pencil tray inside, took something out, then got up and walked over to my desk. I smiled. He didn’t. Instead, he leaned over my shoulder where I sat, and with his thick index finger, punched a series of aes, oes and ees on the blank page in the roll of my typewriter. Then he pointed at them as if to say, “What do you see?” What I saw was that the centers of the letters that should have been white were blacked out, which made it easy to mistake one letter for the other. I looked at the letters, then craned my neck backward to look at him and when I did, he held up a longish straight pin that he was pinching like a tiny sword between his thumb and forefinger up in front of my eyes and said, in his serene, asthmatic, Alfred Hitchcock voice, “I hereby present you with the Order of the Pin. Clean those out so we can tell which letter is which.”

As he turned to leave, I addressed the back of his head. “Um, how was the piece.”

“I’m sure it’ll get better,” he said, still walking and without turning toward me. And then he added, “It can’t get any worse.”

As I was starting my second translation, Bob Cox rushed out of his office and over to my desk again. “Dan, how are you doing?” he said in a tone that made it clear that this was a rhetorical question. “Um, I have something here I think you might be suited to,” he went on.

“Well,” I said, “I still have these to do,” and pointed to the little pile of agency cables on the corner of my desk.”

“Oh...yes, well, you can continue with those afterward. Right now, I need you to write an obituary. It’s for a lady who worked at the Missions to Seamen.”

“The what?”

“Missions to Seamen,” he said again, and then muttered under his breath, “Quite, you wouldn’t know about that, would you?” Being a bloody Yank and a Midwesterner to boot, he could have added, but, politely, didn’t. “It’s an Anglican organization,” he continued, “that has branches in ports all over the world.” He explained that these missions were usually run by Church of England chaplains with a few staff, and the rest of the people working for them were all volunteers.

It sounded to me like a sort of USO, without all of the singing and dancing. It had started in the nineteenth century when Britannia ruled the waves and there were British seafarers all around the globe. The organization’s mission was “to offer practical, emotional and spiritual support to seafarers through ship visits, drop-in centers and a range of welfare and emergency support services.” Since the Herald had started out as a maritime journal and still had strong ties to the shipping community, Cox had been asked to put something nice in the paper about this lady, Jenny, who had worked for the local Missions to Seamen drop-in center for something like forty years.

Rather hesitantly, Bob now handed me the press release he’d received and said, “This thing’s bloody awful but all of the basic information is there. Could you try and write something that sounds like we knew her? You know, a nice short article about what a nice person she was, how helpful to these sailors far from home, something warm and human.

“I’ll give it a shot,” I said.

“Cheers!” he answered and rushed back to his office, leaving me alone with Miss Jenny and a blank sheet of paper.

Thinking myself a consumate writer, I told myself this would be a piece of cake and quickly dashed off an obit that I thought would bring tears to the editor’s eyes. I zipped it out of the typewriter and strode briskly across the editorial bay to the editor’s office. Maybe I couldn’t translate for shit, I told myself, but I could write my ass off.

Cox’s door was open and he was sitting at his typewriter, hands poised to type, looking at some notes on his desk.  When I knocked softly on the door-jamb, he looked up from his reading but his hands remained poised over the typewriter keys. The body language was not lost on me. It said, I hope you don’t plan to bother me for more than a couple of seconds.

“What is it, Dan?” he asked.

“Here’s the piece.”

“What piece?”

“The obit...Jenny...Missions to Seamen?”

“Oh yes, cheers, Dan,” the editor said accepting the proffered sheet of paper and, for lack of any desk space in his cluttered office, laid it on a magazine on his knee, picking up a fountain pen from next to his typewriter and starting to edit in his scrawling hand.

Already by the second line, however, he was shaking his head and muttering, “Oh dear...Oh, bloody hell...Oh Christ!” And then he looked up at me and said, “Christ, Dan, you’ve made the poor woman sound like a tart! I mean... ‘providing aid, warmth and comfort to hundreds of sailors...Really?”

I could feel my face flush and my scalp prickle with embarrassment.

“Go back and rewrite the bloody thing, and try to stay away from language with dual meanings that can be misinterpreted.”

For the better part of an hour after that (an inordinate amount of time in a daily’s newsroom) I re-wrote and re-wrote the obituary until I figured it couldn’t be more perfect, then returned to the editor’s office. Cox was still at his typewriter, looking harassed, his hair in disarray from running his fingers through it. Standing apologetically in the doorway, I cleared my throat and he looked up.

“Ah yes, Dan again,” he said. “Let’s see,” and he held his hand out for the piece of paper I was holding.

I wanted to discuss the original version with him, offer my apology, tell him I knew I was better than that and had no idea what had gotten into me, but the editor’s body language and harried attitude invited no conversation. I stood in silence while he read, half expecting him to say something like, “Now this is a story!” But instead, he merely used his fountain pen to black out extraneous words, to draw lines and arrows changing word orders, to line out most of a paragraph entirely, and to write in a few words that he considered to be vital additions.

Then he penned in shop instructions and a headline at the top of the page, handed it back to me and said, “Drop it off at the Night Desk window, will you?”

“Sure.”

“Cheers.”

And that was it. I had written my first professional news story and the die was cast.  

SMOKE RINGS: PART 2 — A NEW KIND OF SOPHISTICATION

By the time I started smoking openly at home, the habit had become, I fancied, an added mark of sophistication in the new life I was suddenly setting out for myself. During the summer before the winter in which I would turn sixteen, my high school band director did me the honor of asking me to give summer private percussion lessons to beginners and junior high kids who were in the band. I could use the band room at the high school, he said, and earn a little extra money.

I was thrilled to say the least. But that wasn’t the end of the honors bestowed on me. The director also came to me during the following school year, and said that, if I wanted it, there was a part-time job for me at the top music store in the nearby city of Lima, Ohio, Monday and Friday evenings and Saturdays from nine to five, teaching whenever I had students and working as a sales clerk in between time. They’d let me have the use of a studio free of charge and the money from the lessons would be all mine. They would pay me about a dollar an hour (certainly not awful pay for a part-time high school kid employee in the mid-1960s) for the hours I accumulated on the sales floor, where I’d be expected to do some light maintenance and inventory as well.

Everyone...

I explained that while I’d love to say yes, it’d be another few months before I could get my driver’s license and even then, I’d have to see if my parents would lend me one of their cars to be able to commute the twelve or so miles that separated my home town of Wapakoneta from Lima. The director said not to worry, that he lived in Lima and on Monday and Friday evenings when the store was open until nine, he would take me, since he also taught there. Until I got my license, then, I’d only have to have my parents drive me home those two nights and take me in to work and pick me up on Saturdays.

Shaking my head, I said that my mother was too busy and I really doubted if I could talk Whitie (my dad) into coming to get me after he’d worked all day. But he insisted, saying it was a great opportunity that I shouldn’t miss. He was a regular customer at Whitie’s restaurant, the Teddy Bear, and evidently considered that would count for something in convincing my father, so he added, “And leave your dad to me.”

To my surprise, Whitie accepted the deal. Not only that, he had me take out a learner’s permit, and on the way home when he would pick me up after work, he would have me get behind the wheel of the big nine-passenger Olds 98 station wagon that he was driving at the time. Other than a certain penchant for road rage, Whitie was a more than competent driver and, surprisingly, since patience was not usually one of his virtues, also a serene and patient teacher.

I admired...

I recall one late-fall Monday evening, when I already had numerous trips under my belt, driving home to Wapakoneta from Lima, via the old North Dixie Highway, with Whitie in the passenger’s seat. It was raining pretty hard and visibility was far less than optimum. By this time, however, Whitie was no longer watching my every move and we were relaxed enough to chat a little as I drove, on topics beyond the scope of the myriad instructions that he had given me in the beginning. At one point, Whitie was sitting sideways, turned toward me on the broad bench seat—there were no seatbelts back then—and having just made some point in our conversation, had paused to pluck the hot cigarette lighter out of the dashboard, and was just then lighting up a Pall Mall, when suddenly, on the left, I saw a pick-up truck pulling out of a roadside tavern parking lot onto the two-lane highway in front of me as if I weren’t there.

I hit the brakes and lay on the horn simultaneously, saw Whitie fall sideways, shoulder first, against the dashboard, felt the big Olds start to fishtail, let off the brake, saw the pick-up’s brake lights and knew he’d stopped mid-lane, dropped two wheels onto the berm and gunned the engine to pull out of the slide as I slipped ever so closely past the side of the truck, still blasting the horn, before easing back onto the road.

Back under control on the pavement, shaking from head to toe, I saw Whitie calmly push himself back up onto his seat. He then went ahead lighting his smoke and after a deep drag, he said, “See that’s good training. And you handled it well. Know what the lesson is?”

“Be on the lookout for drunk assholes?”

“Nope. It’s that you have to drive defensively. You can’t take for granted, ever, that the other guy will do what he’s supposed to. In fact, you have to figure he won’t, that every other driver on the road is a stupid jerk, and know at all times what you’re going to do if the other guy screws up. It doesn’t matter who’s right. You’ll be just as dead if you’re right and the guy who plows into you is wrong.”

Smoking, to a certain almost imperceptible extent, changed, somewhat, my usually semi-hostile relationship with Whitie. Our feelings about everything from politics and sports to those about work and culture, our views and preferences were almost diametrically opposed and I’d come to find that avoidance was the best way to stay out of troubled waters. So at this stage, we seldom talked. But like boxing—one of the few passions and surely the only sport we shared as avid fans—smoking became a point of shared neutrality between us.

It wasn’t as if my father was glad I smoked. On the contrary, he early on told me it was a mistake to have taken up the habit. Afterward, however, he no longer preached about it. And as I say, there was a sort of tacit bond between us as smokers. It wouldn’t seem like much to anyone seeing us from the outside, but I could feel it. Like when I’d come home from somewhere and find him sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee and a smoke and I’d serve myself a cup as well and sit there with him in brief, uncontroversial communion for the length of a cigarette or two.

...smoked

A few weeks before my sixteenth birthday, and thus only days away from having my driver’s license, the band director said he had the solution for my travel problem. He had a car to sell me. A ’57 Dodge Royal that had belonged to his son, who was currently in the Army, serving a hitch in Vietnam. I said I was really grateful but didn’t have the money to pay for a car right now, since I was buying a new drum set in installments from the store where I worked. If he could, perhaps, wait a while...

“How much do you have to spare right now, Danny?” he asked.

“I don’t know...like maybe fifty bucks.”

“Done, fifty bucks and I’ll throw in tax and title fees.”

It was like a dream come true! I had a job as a musician. I was no longer being treated like a high school kid but as a responsible adult. And one of the old hands at work, a locally renowned organist in his sixties had just said, “Hey kid, my sax player and I are booked to play a four-hour gig at the Milano Club and our drummer just backed out. It’s a New Year’s Eve gig so it’ll pay fifty bucks for four hours. You free?”

Was I ever! My first pro jazz gig. I was in heaven. And now I had wheels! The very first day I had my license, the band director drove his son’s Dodge to school and had me drive him to work at the music store and then home. The car was now mine. Leaving his house, I flicked on the radio, dialed to a jazz station I knew and lit up a smoke. I felt like my whole life was changing and it was all good.

On the way home, I stopped off at a truck stop, ordered pie and coffee, put a quarter in the juke box and as Reg Owen’s rendition of Manhattan Spiritual started playing, I sat there with my coffee, pie and cigarettes feeling like a character from a movie about the Beat Generation. The menthol cigarette smoke and the strong black truck stop coffee felt like fluid happiness as they entered my gullet. It was a brand new world, and it was all mine. I was suddenly somebody.

To be continued...

SMOKE RINGS

It started as pilfering. Every time Whitie (my dad) opened a new pack of Pall Mall’s, which was about once a day, I’d wait until he’d smoked a few and then sneak one out of the pack and carefully into my pocket. I figured he’d never notice. But I had to be really cautious, because Whitie was nothing if not fastidious in his obsessive-compulsive tidiness. If you wrinkled or damaged the packaging in any way or left bits of tobacco lying around, he was going to notice. But, like any pre-teen, I figured I was way cleverer than he was. I was about twelve at the time.

His neatness was also what made it easy. He never liked bulges in his clothing, so whenever possible, he would leave his smokes lying on an end table, or on the telephone table, or on top of the TV, or wherever else they’d be handy without his having to carry them on him. He never used cigarette lighters for the same reason. He always used book matches that lay flat in his pockets and didn’t make a bulge.

Once I’d managed to nick one, I didn’t rush right out to smoke it. Instead, I’d take it to the room I shared with my little brother and, after making sure he wasn’t around—since he, Jim, would squeal on me for sure—I would place it in a piece of tinfoil with other purloined smokes, carefully re-wrap them, put them away in any of a number of hiding places I’d devised, and save them for a time when I could slip off by myself and “enjoy” them.

At this stage of my relationship with tobacco, “enjoy” was hardly the right word. Blowing the smoke out through my nose without actually inhaling caused a sinus pain not unlike “swallowing” water through my nose at the pool. And trying to inhale the way I’d seen Whitie do—deep and with apparent satisfaction, since he seemed to genuinely enjoy each smoke—made me cough, made my throat burn and made my eyes water. And usually, one deep drag was enough to make my head spin and make me feel a little nauseous so that I would have to sit down and put my head on my knees until the vertigo stopped and I got to feeling okay again. Of course, as soon as I did, I’d inhale again and have to go through the whole process all over. But, hey, practice made perfect, right?

Indeed it did, and it wasn’t long before I could smoke an entire cigarette without so much as a single cough, tear or dizzy spell. Most of my smoking I did down by the river, which was my haven as a boy, a place to be alone or with my closest friends and to do pretty much whatever I wished. It was there that, with my friend Dave, who lived across the river from me, we began acting out our Huck Finn fantasies, building log rafts and camouflaged shacks like hunting blinds in the scrubland behind his house. And part of that Mississippi fantasy on “our” Auglaize was corncob pipes. We fashioned them ourselves from dry cobs found in the cornfield along the riverbank with hard-dried hollow reeds as stems, stuck into holes worked open in the sides of the cobs with the leather punches on our pocketknives, once we’d used our blades to hollow out a bowl.

Most of our “pipe tobacco” was meticulously recycled from butts recovered from the trash when my dad dumped his ashtrays and Dave’s mother dumped hers. If we got lucky, Whitie would toss a San Felice cigar butt, but he usually only smoked those at work, because my mother, Reba Mae, didn’t like how they stank up the house. We kept our painstakingly harvested and rare assortment of “fine tobaccos” in small leather pouches that Dave generously provided. At home we had to carefully hide them from prying eyes. But they had extra-long drawstrings so that when we were living our fantasy lives down by the Auglaize, we could wear them like medicine bags around our necks in the tradition of the Shawnee braves who had made their home on these very banks a couple of centuries before us.

This kind of smoke was a nasty combination of stale, overdrawn cigarette filler and raw, scorched corncob inhaled through a moldy-tasting reed, but it fit so well with our adventures and our narrative that we could think of nothing finer than to sit by a small twig fire, puffing on our “Ohio Meerschaums” and swapping stories about everything from pirates, bank-robbers and murderers to the ghosts that supposedly rose up from the old, abandoned cemetery behind Dave’s dad’s barn and walked these riverbanks by the light of the moon.

By age fourteen, I had a habit. Not a bad one yet, but a habit all the same. Even before that I used to buy a pack of my own about once or twice a month besides swiping smokes from Whitie. I nervously bought them at corner grocery stores, always ready with some elaborate story about “buying them for my great-uncle who was up visiting from Florida,” or whatever. But seldom did anyone ask who they were for. So I started trying different brands until I found some that I liked better than Whitie’s harsh, filterless Pall Malls: smooth L&Ms, recessed-filter Parliaments, mentholated Salems (“one puff and it’s springtime”). Cigarettes that then made smoking the ones I stole from my dad seem a little like inhaling a brush fire...but smoke them I did, anyway.

Then I discovered cigarette vending machines and gas stations and there was no longer any need to make up stories of any sort. The machines were ubiquitous and often in the entrances of stores or restaurants where nobody paid any attention to who was or wasn’t buying cigarettes, and gas station attendants couldn’t have cared less whom they were selling smokes to.

I was in a teen rock band by this time. We were playing at teen centers and living the fantasy of one day becoming stars. Joe, our bass player, was the oldest boy in the band and had an old station wagon that became our band van. The rest of us were no older than fourteen at the time, but three of us were already regular smokers. Joe himself didn’t smoke, but with the way the rest of us left the inside of his battered old wagon smelling, he’d never have been able to convince his parents of that, I’m sure. He was, however, a really good and easy going guy and generous to a fault, so he not only let us smoke in his car and took us to our gigs and never wanted any extra for gas, but he also gave us driving lessons out on the rural back roads surrounding our home town. Joe was a hard guy not to like. Only his shy, quiet nature kept him from having more friends than he did.  

Dave, our lead singer and guitarist, was a wild kid who had no apparent complexes about his smoking—or anything else, for that matter. Pint-sized, bespectacled and as funny, entertaining, impertinent and irreverent as any teen could be. It was all part of his rocker persona. But keyboards man Ron and I (the group’s drummer) were often consumed by guilt about our habit (brought up as we both were in Methodism, where obligatory guilt and self-chastisement seemed almost as prevalent as in Judaism). Frequently, as we were lighting up, Ron would say, “God, man, I gotta quit doing this! I don’t want to get hooked.” And then, after a deep drag, “Do you think we’re hooked?”

Until finally, it started bothering me that he spoiled every other smoke I was about to have and I would snap, “Hell yes, we’re hooked! You wanna smoke, smoke. You don’t, don’t. But don’t lay this guilt trip on me!”

By fifteen, I was smoking, maybe, a half-pack or so a day. Still mostly down by the river. But now I also risked a smoke here and there at home: in my room with the window open and blowing the smoke out through the screen; in the basement, which had become my music studio, keeping the butts in a closed jar in an old cedar chest where I also kept my music books and percussion traps and accessories, until I could safely dispose of them; and on long walks around town that I often took after dark, my favorite places for a smoke being two of the bridges over the Auglaize, where I could stand as if gazing at the water and if anyone my parents knew happened by, flick my cigarette into the drink.

It was a few months after my fifteenth birthday that I one evening told my mother I was going over to the park to shoot some hoops with a couple of friends.

“Basketball players don’t smoke,” Reba Mae said, with a wry smile but a hurt look in her eyes.

I sputtered and started to think of something to say but she held up a hand to silence me. “God knows I don’t like it that you’re smoking, but I like it even less that you sneak around and think you can deceive me.”

“I didn’t want to hurt your feelings,” I said lamely.

“Too late for that,” she answered, cutting me to the quick.

When I came back from the park, I found her and Whitie together and said, “Listen, I’ve been thinking about it, and I don’t want to sneak around anymore either. I’m going to smoke and want to smoke at home. No more sneaking around.”

Reba Mae looked stern but said, “Well I suppose at your age, if I try to stop you you’ll just do it behind my back, so...”

And Whitie added, “I’d like to tell you not to do it, Dan, but I’d be a hypocrite if I stood here and told you not to and then lit up myself, so I’m in no position to tell you what the hell to do. But if you gonna smoke, buy your own goddamn cigarettes and stop stealin’ mine!”

To be continued         

IN THE HEART OF CLEVELAND

The Cleveland skyline

Before my parents and younger brother (almost collectively) died between 2003 and 2005, the City of Cleveland was “where my sister lived.” Darla, my sister, settled there right out of college in the late nineteen-sixties and never left. Whether in the city or in the suburbs, she always lived in or around that city. It made sense. She was a talented sociologist, and Cleveland was a city that had a demand for her talents.

Tom, her ex-husband—and the father of her two sons, Jon and Andrew—was from Cleveland originally. Or better said, from Berea, a West Side suburb. The city had need of his talents as well. Very soon after he graduated from Miami University (Ohio)—also Darla’s alma mater—he became a probation officer, a job from which he eventually retired after decades of keeping ex-cons on the straight and narrow and of putting them back in the slammer whenever they jumped their parole.

The city glistens by night

But my knowledge of the place—such as it was—always tended to be scant at best, and usually had to do with driving up with or without my parents for a couple of days whenever I was “back home” for a visit, following careful instructions as to how to get to my sister’s house without getting lost, enjoying a brief get-together at her place, and returning to our hometown of Wapakoneta, three hours southwest. Often when she could make it down to Wapak (as locals abbreviate the name of our town), there was no trip to Cleveland at all for the rest of us. Back then, we were all very busy people and visits were short if sweet.

My late brother Dennis lived there briefly as well, when he was an area manager for an Ohio-based chain of record stores, living in the area of Greater Cleveland known as Olmstead Falls. But that was at a time when I spent several years outside of the United States before getting back for a visit, and by the time I made it back, he was on his way to a knew destination and I only visited him in Cleveland for a single weekend.

After our parents both passed away in 2003, Dennis decided to sell his place in Lima, Ohio, and move into the Florida condo Mom and Dad had bought a decade and a half earlier as a winter home. It was an unlikely move on his part, but by then, he was doing a lot of unlikely things, trying to change something...change everything. Our family home of forty-two years in Wapakoneta we sold. And suddenly, I felt cut adrift. That place had been my anchor to the US and my official American address since I had moved to South America thirty years earlier. Now, suddenly, it was gone. So for the two years that my brother was alive after that, my also unlikely US address became Ocala, Florida, as well, and Dennis and I even shared a post office box there.

Following our brother’s untimely death, however, my sister and I decided to sell the condo. She wouldn’t be using it, she said, and with no further family ties there, I certainly wouldn’t be either. God knew Florida was low on my list of places to get to know back then— unless it were with my folks, who had chosen to live there.

Cleveland's Hope Memorial Bridge with its

massive Guardians 

Again, then, I was “homeless” in the US. At the time, Darla was living with someone—Ron, a widower—and they had set up housekeeping at his place. He was an ex-Airborne Ranger with whom I shared Army veteran status and memories of crawling around in the course red dust of Fort Bragg, North Carolina, if practically nothing else in the way of politics or beliefs. But he generously let me borrow his address in the Highland Heights area of Cleveland and gave me the run of the house and his liquor cabinet whenever I was in town. “You can drink the Scotch,” he would say. “I don’t mind.” And since that was back in the days when, left to my own devices, I tended to drink as much Scotch as I could hold, that was a truly tempting offer.

Eventually, however, Darla decided to take a whole new step, moved out, and bought herself a condo in Rocky River, just a few blocks away from the Cleveland Metro Parks. From then on, for her, it was mi casa tu casa with me. And this was at about the time that I started getting back to the US for a visit about once a year. Suddenly, Cleveland was no longer “where my sister lived” but my home away from home when I was in the States as well.

Oddly enough, Cleveland, way up north and way over by Pennsylvania from our central western Ohio home town, is connected to our history and geography. For one thing, the great Auglaize River which rises to the surface up by Harrod, Ohio, in the territory of the old Hog Creek Reservation that the Shawnee nation once occupied, meanders more or less south to Wapakoneta, then turns sharply west and runs, like a ribbon of liquid highway, right through our town before looping north and flowing over a hundred miles to its confluence with the Maumee that feeds Lake Erie, on the shores of which Cleveland was founded. The Auglaize was home to the Indians before it became the territory of the white man and is rich with the tragic history of the Shawnee, Mingo and other tribes that happily populated the area until a couple of decades into the nineteenth century when they were displaced and sent on a death march to Kansas after the government broke its treaty (and its word) with them.

My sister Darla can always be counted on for fascinating 

cultural outings, like this  exhibition of gardens painted by 

artists from Monet to Matisse at Cleveland's stunning Museum

of Fine Arts. 

But there’s an even stronger connection than the muddy waters of the Auglaize, mixed with the tears of the Shawnee nation. Cleveland, named (minus the “a”) for expeditionary General Moses Cleaveland who explored the area, laid out plans for the founding of a village and then left, never to return, wasn’t incorporated as such until 1814. But from the 1820s on, its growth was exponential, thanks to completion of the Miami-Erie Canal, a man-made waterway that was an early brainstorm of President George Washington but that didn’t become a reality until a quarter-century after his death. An incredible project for its time, the canal ran the south-north length of the state, from the Ohio River to Lake Erie, providing a major commercial and industrial link for the transport of resources from the new Ohio Territory to the Great Lakes and from the Great Lakes to the great ports of the American East Coast.

Beer-drinkers never go thirsty in Cleveland

The canal was a major building block in Cleveland’s growth as an important Midwestern lake port and thus too in its development as a great industrial power in the days before it went from being the capital of the steel belt to being a victim of the rust belt following the Vietnam War. And that same canal runs smack through our county—Auglaize County, of which our home town is the county seat. Grand Lake Saint Marys, Ohio’s largest man-made lake, a few miles from Wapak, fed that canal with water that carried barges north from the river to the lake, pulled by horses and mules along towpaths that stretched from Cincinnati to Cleveland along the narrow scar of waterway that was nicknamed “Deepcut”.

In the years since Cleveland agonized through the rustbelt era, the city has almost naturally reinvented itself—minus a big chunk of population that left when industrial job sources dried up—developing from being a once grimy, smoky mill town to being a more streamlined, glistening, cultural and business center, a city with, among other things, glass-sheathed skyscrapers, stunning natural parklands, one of the world’s finest art museums, upscale shops and galleries, and one of the most celebrated symphony orchestras in the United States. Of late, it has also gained a growing reputation for fine and varied cuisine,  and as a platform for the micro-brewing industry: Beer-drinkers never go thirsty in Cleveland and the city has served as the cradle for some of the finest craft brews imaginable.

The Cleveland church where the wedding scene from "The Deer Hunter" 

was filmed

Nor is old Cleveland forgotten. The city has given birth and praise to artists who document it, from film-makers and photographers to the likes of the late graphic novelist, Harvey Pekar, of American Splendor fame. Among other movie projects, it famously provided some of the exteriors and interiors seen in the now classic 1978 Michael Cimino feature film, The Deer Hunter, starring Robert De Niro, John Savage, Christopher Walken and John Cazale, despite the fact that the story was set in Pennsylvania (and Vietnam). There was an early role for Meryl Streep as well in The Deer Hunter, that of the “stock, vague girlfriend, Linda”. Cleveland figured most prominently in the scene in which the characters all go to the wedding of Steven and Angela (played by the John Savage and Rutanya Alda) filmed at the St. Theodosius Russian Orthodox Catholic Church in the City’s Tremont neighborhood, and in scenes in the mill where the male characters work, which were shot in US Steel’s Cleveland plant.  

It is to this City of Cleveland that I have come late in life as an adoptive son—making it official by voting in the last two presidential elections as a Cuyahoga County resident—and getting to know it through the eyes of my sister and my nephews, who swell with pride at their unique city. Doing so has made me defensive about the “hick-town” jokes of which Cleveland is often the brunt in movies as well as conversation with New Yorkers, LA residents and others from America’s better-known metropolises.

My guides are just the right balance of street and high-brow culture. Darla often plans outings for me that include museums and other points of cultural interest, and the city’s extraordinary Museum of Fine Arts is always a favorite—like last year when she and I visited a fascinating exhibition of gardens seen through the eyes of some of the greatest impressionist and expressionist painters of all time.

My nephews, Jon and Andy, meanwhile, can always be counted on to submerse me in the very fabric of popular Cleveland culture with every visit of mine including multiple tours of their favorite pubs, breweries, pool halls, neighborhood bars and restaurants—ranging from mid-twentieth-century retro diners and delis to high-end dinner clubs—as well as outings to points of interest in the downtown area. And spending a Christmas and a couple of Thanksgivings there has endeared the city to me all the more, since when I’m far away in my Patagonia home, I can imagine the days and the surroundings of my Cleveland family whenever I choose.

Cleveland, then, has become another bright brushstroke in the rich tapestry that I call “my dual life”, time shared between my native Ohio and my adoptive home in South America, a far-flung two-part world that allows me to refer to myself as “a southern Yankee”.

SORRY ABOUT MISSING MY DEADLINE...

...but I'm traveling right now. As soon as I get to where I can find a place to sit for a while and write, I'll tell you some stories about Cleveland. Not Grover...the city. Thanks for you patience!

WHERE THE WARMTH IS

Miami skyline

Years ago, when I first started flying back for visits to the United States from Argentina, where I long ago decided to reside, I avoided Miami like the plague. I’ve always hated tropical climates. My body is decidedly Nordic. Anything above, say, 68°F and I start to sweat. I can handle dry, desert heat pretty well, but the combination of high humidity and high temperatures I find unbearable. In fact, I’ve never understood how anyone could gladly and voluntarily live in that sort of climate. But then again, those people probably wonder how I could be overjoyed to get up in the morning and see frost on the ground.

Considering what I just said, anyone familiar with Buenos Aires might think that it was an odd choice of a home for me for twenty years. But then again, Buenos Aires is considered a “temperate” climate, even if, in summer, you’d swear you were in Havana, judging from the sticky, breathless heat. But it’s definitely a city with four seasons, even if the changes are way, way more subtle than in my native Ohio. And besides, it’s the city where my wife was born, so the choice was more sentimental than strategic, and, indeed, I fell in love with that chaotic metropolis and love it still, even after another twenty years of living a thousand miles away in the chilly climes of the Patagonian Andes.

Still, during the entire two decades that I lived in Buenos Aires, one of the things that I would, from time to time, grow most homesick for was the climate of my home state—where, the old saying goes, in Ohio there are four seasons: almost winter, winter, still winter and construction—although, admittedly, global warming is changing that somewhat. But comparatively, at least half the year in west central Ohio tends to be cool to downright frigid, while at least half the year in Buenos Aires tends to be insufferably hot and humid.

I remember once, when I was working for a business magazine, I was doing a story on corruption and collusion between a major worldwide multinational and certain IT officials in the Argentine government. I’d been talking to a lot of the rivals and enemies of those involved but now, after pulling a number of strings, I’d managed to land an interview with the CEO of the multinational in question. I’d read up on the guy, knew him by reputation, had even met him briefly once at a cocktail party at the American Club in downtown Buenos Aires. So I had an idea of what he was like and was planning my strategy accordingly. The best way to describe him would be as “a Trump-type” executive, a man who talked about “annihilating the competition”, and who wasn’t averse to bellowing, “You’re fired!” when one of his subordinates failed to meet his every expectation.

I figured if I could remain cool, phrase my questions to “punch his buttons”, field his answers, turn them into new questions and turn them back around on him while stroking his ego, I could get him to say a lot more than he intended to about the company’s government contracting operations. I could, that is, if I could just remain cool.

Of course, Murphy’s Law dictated that the day of the interview was a sultry, partly cloudy one, with thunder rolling in the distance, with mosquitoes thick in the air and with the mercury hovering and 85°F. I was late from another interview and had almost jogged the last few blocks from the subway station to the towering office building near the port, facing the sprawling River Plate estuary, where the company had its South American headquarters. Admittedly, I was nervous enough, running my strategy over and over in my head, without also being late, but once in the elevator on the way to the top floor of the building, I breathed deeply, closed my eyes, and briefly meditated to get my “cool” together.

By the time the doors slid open on the twenty-eighth floor, I was feeling—mentally at least—cool as an Eskimo’s nose. I was wearing my dark blue suit, my red and blue stripped tie and a starchily pressed white shirt and felt altogether presentable as I stepped boldly up to the reception desk and announced that I had a meeting scheduled with the CEO. It was then that I noticed how the receptionist looked at me a little strangely, then turned toward the window as if to gaze out over the vastness of the River Plate, and then back at me with a quizzical expression on her face. I smiled. She smiled back. And then she said, “Has it started to rain out, sir?”

“No, not yet,” I said, and should have left it at that, but instead embarrassed myself by saying, “Why do you ask?” Only to look immediately down at myself to see how the sweat had run off of my head and face and dripped all over my shoulders and lapels, how my now wilted white shirt was soaked through, and how big, dark rings had formed under the arms of my once impeccable blue suit.

In the end, my interview went well enough. I needled things out of the CEO that he’d never said before in public, and I was proud of what I was able to accomplish and the cover story to which it would lead. But, thanks to the climate, any illusion of playing “Mr. Cool” that I may have entertained evaporated—or perhaps condensed would be a better word—before I ever walked in the door.

Freedom Tower, Miami, monument

to Cuban refugees

But I digress (as usual)... Miami: As I say, I’d always avoided it. Early on, I would fly into New York’s JFK and—back before the decision of major airlines to fly their passengers through ridiculously far-flung hubs before allowing them to arrive at their destinations—I’d take a direct flight to Dayton, just an hour away from Wapakoneta, my home town. Later on, the newspaper I worked for in Buenos Aires had an advertising exchange deal with Canadian Pacific, and I could fly direct from Buenos Aires to Toronto and then “across the puddle” to Cleveland, where my sister lives, or to Detroit, near where my brother lived back then. For a while, that became my route home and I found that Toronto was a town I liked a lot and my wife and I would spend a few days there together before forging on to Ohio.

But then the CP-Air deal dried up and Aerolíneas Argentinas quit flying to New York and since it usually had the best rates and I was  now no longer a newspaper executive but a free-lancer, I took the cheapest route possible. And that meant landing in Miami.

The Urbano - home away from home

At first, Miami was just that—an airport and a place to rent a car cheaply. I didn’t even rest a day before making the journey north to Ohio. I would land at Miami International Airport at 6 a.m. after a fitful, restless night aboard a cramped aircraft, grab my bag in Customs, walk out onto the car rental bus island, hail the bus bearing the name of the company I was renting from, go get my car, get hopelessly lost a couple of times trying to get out of the veritable maze of backstreets where the car rental companies have their offices and lots in the swampy back-and-beyond behind the airport, and eventually find my way to the I-75 exit. From there, it was a straight shot east to west along Alligator Alley on a four-lane path wrested from the Everglades, before the highway turned sharply north on a two-day ride through four states to Ohio.

Saúl and his shiny black van

But then, a few years back, I started working for a client who had offices in both Buenos Aires and Miami and that meant I sometimes had business to do in Florida’s biggest city before heading home to Ohio to visit friends and family. I found the Hotel Urbano on Brickell Avenue by chance through a travel agency that got me a special price. But it turned out to be a place where I made friends fast. The staff was amiable, overwhelmingly Hispanic, and seemed to get a real kick out of this old gringo who spoke fluent Spanish with an Argentine accent. As my concierge friend described it, with a laugh, the second time I made a reservation there, “Oh, I know exactly who you are. You’re that guy who looks really white but speaks really good Spanish.”

A day-manager named Nestor, who was from Colombia and kidded me constantly about my Argentine-isms, was the one who told me, on my second trip, not to take a cab from the airport, that he’d send me a trusted driver friend of his, also from Colombia, who worked with the hotel. His name was Saúl and he’d be there waiting for me. When Saúl held the back door of his polished black van open for me, I said, “How ‘bout if I sit up front where we can talk,” and that was—as the line from Casablanca goes—the start of a beautiful friendship.

Touring Miami

I figured since I had to spend two or three days each way in hot, sultry, tropical Miami every time I flew into and out of the United States, I might as well have a look around. So Saúl and I struck a deal. Every time he found himself unoccupied, he’d give me a call, pick me up and take me to see a part of the city I’d never been to. It wasn’t long before Saúl went from being my driver to being my friend and over the last four years or so, he’s taken me on personalized tours of Brickell, Downtown, Bayside, Coral Gables, Wynwood, Little Havana, Biscayne Bay, Hialeah, Coconut Grove, the Port of Miami, Doral, Edgewater, etc., etc. We’ve shared lunches and dinner, museum tours and art exhibits and, everywhere, he’s introduced me to the city where he makes his home and to some of the friends he talks to everyday. We’ve forged a lasting friendship.

Saúl and Dan at Key Biscayne

Most importantly, Miami has become something other than a landing spot that I’m only too happy to high-tailed it out of. Thanks to Saúl, I’ve gotten past it’s hot, oppressive, tropical climate and learned to see it as the extraordinary place that it is, a melting pot, a part of the US where knowing Spanish is a major advantage, a US territory in name only, a sort of immigrant country of its own, a place where people have come following a dream and where many of them are actually making it come true, for their families if not for themselves. It’s a place whose streets and people I now know, where I feel comfortable and accepted, where I know and like folks and they know and like me.

Once, the quicker I could get out of Miami, the better, while today, I love to linger there for a while, rub elbows with its people, browse its streets and buildings... And sometimes when I’m far, far away, I’ll remember some corner of that city that I’ve learned to see through Saúl’s eye, and I’ll imagine the people there, doing what they do, speaking what they speak, and being who there are. And in the end, what that proves to me is that, whether I like the weather in a place or not, the only climate that matters when it comes to how I feel toward one destination or another is the human climate and whether I manage to get to know and empathize with those who live a different life from my own but with whom, given half a chance, I’m sure to find, I have almost everything in common.