5 days agoMexican Stand-OffBy Ed Staskus My nephew Wyatt was smart enough to get admitted into St. Edward High School and scatterbrained enough to get suspended. He made it to graduation day by the skin of his teeth. He wasn’t so lucky at Cleveland State University. After one thing and another they told…8 min read
Jul 29On Thin IceBy Ed Staskus When I lived on the west end of North Collinwood there wasn’t anything unusual about a dog barking. What was unusual was barking that never stopped. The dog was an American pit bull chained all day long to a stake in a front yard two houses down…10 min read
Jul 25Hillbilly HighwayBy Ed Staskus Ever since they were rug rats Oliver and Emma’s dad packed their mom and them up and they went on a one-week road trip to West Virginia. He streamed Steve Earle, and they sang along. “Now I’m standin’ on this highway and if you’re going my way…6 min read
Jul 22One Man ArmyBy Ed Staskus There has never been an excess of men who fight for a guerrilla group and three armies, one of them twice, during any single war. An army a day keeps the lion’s share of men busy enough. Leonas Lucauskas stayed busier than most other combatants during the…10 min read
Jul 21On the Right TrackBy Ed Staskus “Oy, where is it you are coming from?” William Murphy asked the pussycat going on becoming a tomcat at his feet. The half-pint was looking up at him. He had been in Thomas Spate’s coat pocket when Prince Albert’s hired gunman shot him dead. As the ferryman…7 min read
Jul 20Animal CrackersBy Ed Staskus Dave Bloomquist ran the show at the Plaza Apartments, trying to make it work on the near east side, on the fringe of Cleveland State University. What we called the house was on Prospect Avenue, a $.25 fare on a creaky CTS bus ten minutes to Public…10 min read
Jul 16Law of the LandBy Ed Staskus When I moved from the near east side of downtown Cleveland to Carpenter, Ohio the post office there had been gone more than ten years. The Baptist church was still standing, but the minister didn’t live in the whistle-stop. He drove in on Sundays, performed his mission…11 min read
Jul 13Tough as NailsBy Ed Staskus My grandmother hit the deck pretty as a prayer book the day she was born. She didn’t come into the world tough as nails. She wasn’t that way as a girl, a young woman, a schoolteacher, a newlywed, or a wife and mother. But that was the…17 min read
Jul 11Ready to RumbleBy Ed Staskus When I went to work for Gene Weiss in the 1980s all I knew about him was that he owned a racquetball club in Euclid and that he was a famous wrestler. The club was Racquettime, which also went by the name of Gene Weiss’s Place for…9 min read
Jun 21Shock WaveBy Ed Staskus “When Britain is at war, Canada is at war,” Prime Minister Wilfrid Laurier said in 1910. “There is no distinction.” Four years later when Britain entered World War One, Canada signed on, too. …11 min read
