My Life in Cleveland, Part 1

Grandma and Grandpa Dinger with my dad and sisters.

I've had the good fortune of being a dual citizen of Cleveland, having been born and raised on the West Side and raised and educated on the East. It's pretty much been a theme running behind my life like an  underground crooked river.
My parents are both West-Siders, having gone to West Tech and Rhodes. Dad was actually born in a house on the East Side, and somehow Grandma and Grandpa Dinger ended up on Dearborn Avenue off West 73rd. They had dad and his two sisters, Joy and June, and lived in a big house with a small front yard and a big porch, with sycamores out front. They were from Romania and Germany, but since they had also lived in Crystal City, Texas, they brought with them the color cobalt blue, and trimmed the porch and painted the swing and rocking chair that color. Their living room was a dark, green-blue color, and Grandma had those vases with ladies faces on them on her end tables. The house smelled like baked bread, goulash and cigar smoke all at one time. Grandma had a hard time walking, so her bed, a hospital bed, was in the living room. The kitchen was decorated with Mexican motifs and decals and had a multi-colored linoleum on the floor, I think. The lion's foot table was covered with it also and had a stainless steel trim. Grandpa built the cabinets, the porch, the addition, the garden shed and more. The back yard had small rectangular stones leading to the vegetable garden and the shed. The yard was surrounded by the flower gardens with the grass in the middle. Grandpa even rigged a water line to fill the bird bath from inside the house. Dad had a paper route and was in Boy Scouts and youth group.

Gale and Mom

Mom's parents were from Scotland. They lived in a few different houses near the greenhouses and the valley. I never got to see their houses since Grandma died two years before I was born and by the time I could remember anything, we were in a house Grandpa lived in with us and was down the street from my great aunt. Mom got to work in the greenhouses and loved to look at the lights in the valley. She is an only child and her community was the Scottish community in Cleveland. They were held together by tradition, and gathered regularly for fun, dancing, food, and of course, music. Mom was a champion Scottish dancer, and everyone in the pipe bands knew her. So many of those are gone now, and it is sad. At least there are still Scottish traditions and games and some still gather, but it is not the same. When people came over off the boat in the 20s, 30s and 40s, they stuck together to find out where the good banks, grocers, butchers, and so forth were. They were in each others' lives all the time and family was all over the place. Now we don't seem to need each other as much, though that cannot be true.
So, we were on the best street-- West 56th. It was all I needed. Mom and Dad made our back yard a great place, putting in a swing set, a sand box, a swimming pool (above ground, of course, after we grew out of the blow-up pools). At that time, it was just me and my two brothers.

Grandpa built a playhouse for us. It was a nice yard and had a white picket fence. I can still smell the taste of water from the hose in the summer. We took our dolls out on the front sidewalk, set them out and tired of them, put them away. We ran wagons full of kids. We made mud pies on the slide. We slept with the windows open, waking to the sound of grass cutters. We watched cartoons on Saturdays, the only other time we could watch them outside of Captain Penney at lunchtime. We walked to Mark Twain School, home for lunch and then back to school. We had no gym, and no library. The bookmobile came to the parking lot.

We had neighbors to play with on  almost all sides. We had no fear, no color tv, no enemies. We had Velveeta cheese sandwiches or baloney sandwiches on white bread with butter. We drank Kool-Aid and had Kool-Aid popsicles made with the Tupperware Mom bought from Aunt Joy. We had Eskimo Pies and Fudgesicles and wore Keds. We practiced piano, went to ballet, spent time examining the water flowing down the seam in the driveway. We were bathed together, singing, with Krazy Foam and Fuzzy Wuzzy soaps. We had birthday parties and at Christmas, Santa would visit at the Christmas party and get us all excited about his visit later. Halloween was apples, plastic masks, and full-sized candy bars. We stayed out late on the front lawn, with the parents in lawn chairs, visiting each other while we caught lightning bugs. That was my West-Side life, which started to lose some of its happiness only when my favorite playmate, Pammy, moved to Colorado when I was in third grade. Third grade was also the highest grade in my school, so it was also time for me to make a move. Life was changing, but little did I know how much it would change.
Copyright Nancy Dinger Aikins, 2013 All photos and article should not be reproduced without permission of the author.