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Howdy Doody and Harvey Rice

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This is a repost from March 30, 2013.

That’s me on a tricycle, sometime around 1950. We were living at 2814 East 120th Street off Buckeye Road in Cleveland. The whole place was filthy with Hungarians. There were so many, in fact, that I did not know the English language existed until two things happened: First, we got a television set late in 1949, and I started watching the Howdy Doody show at 5 pm every day, just after Kate Smith closed her show by singing “When the Moon Comes Over the Mountain.” (It took me a while to understand what Howdy and Buffalo Bob Smith were saying.)

Secondly, I started kindergarten at Harvey Rice School on East 116th Street in January of 1950. My parents thought that, living as we did in a Hungarian neighborhood, the public school teachers would speak Hungarian. Nothing doing! Mrs. Idell sent me home with a note pinned to my shirt that asked, “What language is this child speaking?” As if she didn’t know!

That last factor decided my Mom that we had to leave our little Hungarian womb on the East Side and move to the suburbs. Gone forever would be the Reverend Csutoros and the First Hungarian Reformed Church; the Regent and Moreland movie theaters; Kardos’s Butcher Shop with its delicious Hungarian sausages; the College Inn, where my Dad would take me for French Fries; and the Boulevard Lanes where my Dad bowled and I kept score.

It was a cohesive little world, but my parents ate the apple from the Tree of Knowledge when they decided to raise me as a Hungarian. You know what? I’m grateful that they did. I made my adjustment to English (and I’m still making it), but my heart belongs to the Magyar Puszta.

You Can’t Go Home Again

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My Old High School Gets Razed

As I sit here sweltering in Los Angeles, I am conscious of the scenes of my past being erased from view, almost as if they had never existed.

But they did. Chanel High School in Bedford, Ohio was the scene of my triumphs. I was not only the valedictorian of my class, but also the recipient of the Mr. Chanel award for my contributions to the school. Because of budgetary constraints felt by the Catholic Diocese of Cleveland, Chanel was shut down in 2013. Today, I discovered in an email from my brother Dan that the school is now being wrecked by the City of Bedford.

Chanel High, which ended its life as St. Peter Chanel High, was opened in 1957. I was in the second graduating class of the school (1962), having started out as a freshman when there was only a sophomore class ahead of me.

old St. Henry Elementary School on Harvard Road, which I attended between 1951 and 1958. has been closed down for some time. No longer are the devoted Dominican Sisters who taught me walking the halls rustling the large wooden rosaries they wore, and Father John Hreha has no one to yell at. I believe it now exists as the Harvard Community Services Center.

My very first school, Harvey Rice Elementary at 2730 East 116th Street in Cleveland, still exists. I went there for Kindergarten and half of First Grade. I didn’t do well because I didn’t speak English at that time, only Hungarian. When we moved to the Harvard-Lee area in the summer of 1951, I was signed up for Second Grade at the new St. Henry School, never having completed First Grade. (Sometimes, I still fear that knock at the door in the middle of the night reminding me that I have to go back to Cleveland to finish First Grade.)

Dites-moi où, dans quel pays,
Est Flora la belle Romaine,
Archipiades, et Thaïs,
Qui fut sa cousine germaine,
Echo, parlant quant bruit on mène
Dessus rivière ou sur étang,
Qui beauté eut surhumaine ?
Mais où sont les neiges d’antan ?

Sometimes, I feel as if my life were one of the novels of the Argentinian César Aira, whose stories progress like one of those Roomba vacuums—always going forward, and never back.

Even though much of my past has been erased, Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire is still around. But since most of the stately elm trees died of Dutch Elm Disease, and the school decided to fill every open space with new buildings, I don’t recognize the place any more.