Leo Martin interview, 13 March 2014

Julie Gabb [00:00:01] Okay, so we are interviewing Leo Martin in Beachwood, Ohio. Today is April 10, 2014. And, Mr. Martin, could you tell me about yourself?

Leo Martin [00:00:13] I sure can. I’m 64 years old, grew up in Glenville, 10415 Empire Avenue. That was in zone eight at the time. Now it’s 44108. We moved to 676 East 120th off of St. Clair. And we lived there from 1964 to 1968, when I went to college. And I lived on Empire going back from 1950 till we moved over there, ’64, so, and I went to Ohio State. Did not finish. I graduated from Glenville, participated in sports, and I grew up– I had a wonderful time growing up. It was a great neighborhood. We had a lot of things that we did, a lot of things that people will never experience that we did. It was wonderful. So, and I had an aorta dissection three years ago. That’s where my aorta tore. And I almost left the world, but I didn’t, and I didn’t have surgery because I was healthy. So I’m here. I am, and God is good, and I’ve been blessed. So I like to dance. Ballroom, Chicago-stepping, Detroit-style ballroom. Played Pinochle, a lot of golf, and that’s it. And I’ve been married for 41 years, going on 42 years to the same woman, Debra Handy Martin. We met in high school. She went to one high school, I went to another. And we have three wonderful kids, Sarah, Victor, and Amanda, 33, 31, and 29. And they are all doing well. No grandkids. And I have a sister, Diane Gibson. Diane Martin Gibson, who went to Glenville, came out in class of ’66, January ’66. And I have– And that’s it.

Julie Gabb [00:01:59] Okay, so you said that you grew up in Empire. What was your impression of Glenville as a child?

Leo Martin [00:02:09] You are speaking of the neighborhood or the school or what?

Julie Gabb [00:02:13] The neighborhood itself.

Leo Martin [00:02:14] It’s the only thing I knew. So I thought it was great. Glenville was a wonderful neighborhood. It was just wonderful. It was all I knew. It was fun, safe, very, very homey, very villagey. Everybody knew everybody where you lived, you know, people took care of you. You took care of– It was just fun. It was wonderful. Children were fun. The schools were good. The schools were as good as we knew it. The more you get educated, you find out the flaws. But as we knew it, asking me as a child, I thought it was just perfect. You know, there’s nowhere else for me to live. I didn’t think anybody else had a better neighborhood than we did. Nowhere in the city. That’s just how it was.

Julie Gabb [00:02:55] So what elementary school did you go to?

Leo Martin [00:02:57] I went to Columbia. I lived right across the street.

Julie Gabb [00:03:02] What were your experiences at Columbia?

Leo Martin [00:03:06] Well, I went there in the kindergarten. I remember my kindergarten teacher, her name was Mrs. Travis, and I was in love with her, obviously. And then she had– She did– She got pregnant and had to leave, and I was hating her husband, you know, as a little boy. But it was fun, you know, I knew all my teachers there. I can name them all. But Columbia was wonderful. We had a lot of experiences. We had rag day sales where we had– We collected rags, I’m sorry, newspapers, and we had contests for classrooms. We put them on in the playgrounds. We had little contests, sales tax stamp contests, and we had these little red pins, I think they were called red, some kind of pins, red feather or Red Cross pins. You did it to sell something or do something. You got these little red pins. They always had us hustling for some money or something for your classroom. But the teachers were very good, very strict, and they were fun, but not as fun as I thought they should have been, because I thought teachers were a different breed. But I was a little boy, you know, and it was. It was very nice. Columbia was– It served us well as we knew it. But as I got older, I found the educational process was a whole lot different and a whole lot worse than what it should have been. So that’s it.

Julie Gabb [00:04:21] So did you participate in any, like, clubs or intramurals at Columbia?

Leo Martin [00:04:25] It was an elementary school, so we didn’t have teams, so to speak. But yeah, I participated in whatever they had going. We had races, we didn’t have clubs. I sang in a little glee club. They had, you know, and I was– They had little one little play. We acted in the fifth and sixth grade, and I was a banker. We used to bank on Thursdays. They had a teller and somebody else, and you would come in, the kids would come in on Thursday with a little bank book from Society for Savings bank, which is no longer, and it’s part of. What’s the bank? It’s part of Key Bank now. Society for Savings use bank on Thursday, and I was a bank teller. And you come in with your 50 cents or your dollar, whatever you put in your bank book, and that was your savings. Every kid had a savings. That was one of the things I participated in. And then I was like a projection boy. I walk around the rooms bringing movies to different rooms. We had a schedule for a movie that was wonderful. And I got in trouble, you know, I did have to stay after school a lot. And I got swatted and got notes sent home, and I never missed a day of elementary school. I had perfect attendance all the way through school. If I had to make a claim to fame, that’s what it would be. Seemed like I always got the mumps, measles, and chicken pox in the summer. I never got them during school time. And if I had a sore throat or something, my mother would wrap a towel around me, throw a lot of Vicks on my neck, and send me to school. And– Cause they didn’t want to break that perfect attendance, but she didn’t care who she infected. I was gonna get that perfect attendance, but it was fun. It was very nice. And our gym teacher taught us how to dance, how to be polite to girls, tell us how to ask a girl to dance, how you bowed, and that kind of thing. We did those kind of things and small things that we did then that I don’t think the kids learn now how to do. And I remember my principal, she was tough, but she was kind and the secretaries. It was just nice. It was very nice. And I did– I was in those clubs. So, yeah.

Julie Gabb [00:06:31] What sort of dances did you learn in Atlantic school?

Leo Martin [00:06:35] We learned nothing modern. We learned whatever the gym teacher taught us. Had to be like the two step and those kind of things. Just, you know, nothing that I could put a name on. But it was just kind of like a traditional style, couple dances that wasn’t too complicated for us to learn. It was a gym class, you know, and he basically was teaching us how to interact, how to touch a girl, how to girl touch a boy, because we wasn’t touching each other. That was like the fifth grade and sixth grade classics, because our elementary school went from kindergarten to sixth grade, and they’ve all changed since then. So fifth and sixth grade were the older kids, and primarily the fifth and sixth graders did these things, you know, and it was interesting, but I couldn’t put a name on them. It’s just little two-step dances, you know, and there were no videos back then, so I couldn’t even refer to anything or go to anything.

Julie Gabb [00:07:25] Where did you go to junior high at?

Leo Martin [00:07:29] Well, it’s funny you asked that question. There was 105th Street. That was like the line that divided the school districts at the time. So I lived on Empire, which was on the west side of 105th. If you lived on the west side of 105th in Glenville, you went to Empire. If you were on the east side of 105th address, you went to Patrick Henry. So I went to Empire and lo and behold, when I went to Empire, they built another school called Harry E. Davis. So that broke that line up. So I went to Empire in the 7-B, which opens a whole nother can of worms. And then we moved to 120th of St. Clair. And I went to Patrick Henry because I crossed to the east side of 105th new district, so, but there was Harry Davis. But Harry Davis was on the south side of the neighborhood. In other words, it was even south of Superior. If you know the neighborhood, you have St. Clair and Superior are the two main east-west streets. And then you have 105th is a north-south street. So Superior is south of the neighborhood. And Harry Davis was south of Superior. So it cut our dividing line. It cut our school dividing line. So people who lived on the southern ends of Glenville went to Harry Davis. So we lost a lot of our friends that junior high school. And then you have this A and B situation. You notice I said I went to empire in the 7-B. Once you leave elementary school from the sixth grade, you go to the seventh grade, A or B. We had this thing called, well, I thought it was a good system. It probably don’t work now, but the A and B. Have anybody spoken this to you?

Julie Gabb [00:09:11] I’ve heard people refer to their seminary or some people never win in death.

Leo Martin [00:09:16] Well, I’m gonna tell you what it is. The A and B depends on how your birthday fell. And I don’t know exactly the dates, but I’m gonna give you a general if your birthday fell before or by, let’s say October 1 or September 30, then you can go to school in September. We always start at school the day after Labor Day. And then if your birth– So you can go to school then. But if your birthday fell after that, then you can start school in January. That’s why it was A and B. So if your birthday fell by January 30, you can start school in January. Now think what I’m getting ready to tell you. So let’s say your birthday today. Let’s say your birthday fell October 6. Today. This time you have to wait, what, a whole year to next August to go to school, right? Am I right? Correct. So, but we had A and B. If your birthday fell on October 6, you had to just wait till January and you go to school instead of waiting till next August. You see? So they broke the K, they broke your, they broke your graduating year up into two halves. September and January. Or as we said today, August and January. So that’s A and B. So the B started in the– B started in September or the fall, and the A always started in January. So if I’m saying it right– I might be wrong. Okay, so I– So wherever you fall is still your calendar year of graduating. In other words, I might have said it wrong. The B starts in– Yeah, the B starts in August or September, and the A starts in January. But whatever it is, like Leslie Jones, he graduated in June. I graduated in January. Whatever. Whatever you start is when you graduate. I start in January. I graduated in January. He started in September. He graduated in June. That’s that year. You don’t go all the way through the summer. So he graduated in June. But we all are in the same year graduating class. His class was June, mine was in January. But we’re in the same year, so we’re basically in the same graduating class. It’s just broken up by half a year so that no one gets pimped. A whole year. In other words. Today, parents hold their kids back, which I think is an awful thing to do, but we don’t have to back then because they had A and B, you know, well, I want to hold my child back because he’s not mature enough or she’s not mature enough. There’s no five-year-old mature, you know, so what do you want? You want to be ahead of everybody? That’s what you want. You don’t want him to get mature. You just want to be ahead of the kids behind you. That’s the deal. So they shouldn’t allow it. They just shouldn’t allow it. It should be a test. If they think something’s wrong with the child, you do that. They don’t want that. So you understand my point? So that– That’s the A and B deal. So I went to school in January. I graduated in January. You go to school in September, you graduate in June. That’s how it worked. So and so after I went to. Get back to your question, you don’t mind me expound like that? Okay. So after I went to Empire for one half a year, I ran track for them. I was on the seventh grade relay team. It was a fun time. I liked Empire. We moved, and I had to go to Patrick Henry. Now, you gotta think about this when you’re in a neighborhood like Glenville. Well, back then, everybody lived in their neighborhood. I don’t care where you lived. It was your neighborhood. You took ownership. You can almost look at someone and tell where they live just by how they moved and stuff. I don’t care where you are. You can move to another neighborhood or walk to another neighborhood, and they can tell you didn’t belong in that neighborhood just by your swag. So Patrick Henry was out of my wheelhouse. I wanted to go. I was an Empire man. Then we moved to the Patrick Henry district. So now I’m out of my element, and I go to Patrick Henry. I gotta figure it out. So it didn’t take me long. Cause I wanna, like, in Patrick Henry just cause I had to. I lived there when my folks bought a house. We’re not moving no time soon, right? So I got– I wound up playing basketball for Patrick Henry and running track for Patrick Henry, and playing on a football team with Patrick Henry. And I was in a glee club. I was in the choir, and I stayed in trouble. I did stupid stuff and nothing that required me going to jail or anything. Just bad boy stuff, you know, we did stuff and went to dances and, you know, I had girlfriends and that kind of thing. Got little fights here and there, but nothing extreme, not like these kids do. So it was just part of growing up being a teenager, you know, and it was fun. We had days where they had– I had perfect attendance all the way up to there. Then one day they had a– When they were trying to build all these schools to keep segregation where it is, they had a day where we boycotted. Everybody boycotted all over the nation. So we didn’t go to school one day. And that was the first day I officially missed a day of school, because we boycotted the schools, because we were protesting. And during that time, they had building Stephen E. Howe and these other schools, and we were protesting all these schools being built. They needed the schools built, but they were designing the neighborhoods to keep all the Blacks in the neighborhood and not have them integrate. And there was a white preacher, pastor, or a minister who got run over by a bulldozer trying to stop them from building a school. There was protests everywhere at the same time. That was during the time of the Civil Rights movement in the mid sixties. And not understanding, because I was a teenager, I didn’t understand what was going on, but I still was out there doing what I did, you know, and doing all the riots and things like that. That’s what all that stuff was, all part of it. It’s just tremendous amount of things that happened that. Had I known then what I know now, I would have done a whole lot of things a lot different. But I probably wouldn’t be alive now either, because I would have been so angry. So Patrick King was really fun. We had a prom, and I got swatted a lot, and I got super good grades, and I got some not so good grades, but I was a good student. I did some good things, made a lot of great friends, a lot of girlfriends, a lot of boyfriends. Fun. We just have fun. It was a fun. It was some of the most fun time of my life, going to Patrick Henry. It was just fun, you know? So I enjoyed my education, but like that, I enjoyed the schools, but looking back at it, it could have been so much more beneficial.

Julie Gabb [00:15:36] So, like, you’re saying that about the schools, how they weren’t as good as you were thinking? Like, later, looking back, what were some of the shortcomings that you see looking back now?

Leo Martin [00:15:52] Okay, so Paul Briggs was our superintendent of schools. Paul Briggs was superintendent of schools for a long time. I can’t recall the mayors, but I do know this. They had the east side and west side of Cleveland. What they have right now, that they have right now. And the dividing line was the Cuyahoga River. Okay. And the west side schools got everything fresh. The east side schools got everything from the west side schools for the most part. Not all the time, but for the most part. And to be specific, we would get books that would be stamped West High School or Lincoln High School. Why would that even be? And they were halfway new. They were better than the books that we were replacing, but that’s what we would get. And I’m thinking, well, it didn’t dawn on me what was happening. What was happening is they were getting new books on the west side. We were getting their seconds. Okay. That’s one example to compare my folks and everybody’s folks in the neighborhood, in the Glenville neighborhood, my friend’s parents, most of them were migrants from the South, and probably a good portion of them did not have a high school education. They were blue-collar workers, hardworking people, and they only did what they were shown to do. And they were influenced by things that probably wasn’t as good as they think they were, but they were doing the best that they can, so you can’t knock them for what they didn’t know. And the politics was what it was in Cleveland. So you remember whole Paul Briggs in your mind. So I go like this. I’m 64, and I do understand that our tax dollars are equal. No matter what side of the tracks you are born or you come from or where you work. When they take your taxes, the government says, equal representation, your taxes are equal, but they don’t get equal representation. Looking back, knowing what I know now, it wasn’t happening. And that’s just one example of education, okay? If they wanted to give us a good education, they could have. We did not get a good education. We got the best that we could. All things being equal, we could have got a superior education. And in spite of what we did not get, we succeeded anyway. When I say we, people from Glenville, people from Huff, people from Mount Pleasant, people from parts of Collinwood, people from all over the minority parts of Cleveland, and that’s just the facts. Paul Briggs, Superintendent he was a big part of that segregation process because he had to know what was going on. He was in charge, and he let it happen. And if you ask my parents or people’s parents, they would have thought Paul Briggs was the super superintendent. And he was a rat bastard, to put it blankly, to put it mildly, because he wasn’t fair. It just wasn’t right. And then they brought in busing. Why would they bus? To keep control. To keep everything in control. If you go out and look at busing, I know it’s another topic you’re probably going to bring on, but you ask about the education, why? I didn’t think it was bad. I didn’t think it was good. You know, here’s a funny thing. I’m gonna give you another example of what happened. So Garfield Heights. There’s a whole section of Garfield Heights that was in the Cleveland school system when it should have been in the Garfield Heights school system. It was a minority section. There’s a whole section of Cleveland that was in the Garfield Heights school system, but it should have been in the Cleveland school system. Slavic Village. South High school. I didn’t even know South High School existed. When I found out, I thought it was in Garfield Heights. They should have been competing against us. And they were running, they were working, they were participating with Garfield Heights. How can that even be a possibility here? To go to the Supreme Court to change that, state Supreme Court to change all that. That happened about 10, 15 years ago. They changed all that. But South High School’s been in the system a little while now, but it should have never been in the first place. That’s politics. That was crooked politics, just not fair. And the worst part about the whole deal is all the people that thought they knew, black people, the politicians and things, they couldn’t affect a change with that because either they were afraid to lose their power position, or I can’t say they didn’t know. They didn’t know because they had to know, but they didn’t. I think they were more afraid about what would be the repercussion. That’s what I think, not knowing. I’m only looking back at what I see as an older man now, and I’ve seen all these politicians work now and I’ve seen how the results of some of the things, I’m not going to knock them. They did the best they could. But you ask the question, those are some significant flaws that affected our education, period, you know, and we just got penalized in every way. I don’t think we probably got the best teachers. We thought we did, but we don’t know what they got on the west side because we never got exposed. But we do know if they can give us their secondary books, what else are they doing? What do we know? What don’t we know? We should have gotten for our folks tax dollar. They pay property tax just like the guys on the west side. They take property tax where they take those taxes for those photo for education. It comes out of our taxes came out of those folks on the west side and we didn’t get the same. We did not get the same, so we got penalized. Then somebody will ask me, well, how come you guys don’t succeed? How come you guys didn’t get the education? How come you guys didn’t get this? Why does the neighborhoods run? Well, you’re not looking at the real picture ’cause you don’t want to. The real picture is we didn’t get the same. We didn’t get the same shot, we didn’t get the same chance. We didn’t have the same opportunities. I don’t care what someone says, we didn’t get the same opportunities. And you never hear what I’m telling you brought up, really. And the only time you hear it brought up is usually from people like myself who know, who really know. Like I’m gonna tell you about Scatter’s, so go ahead.

Julie Gabb [00:21:51] The other thing that you mentioned was busing. And that was something that even though busing like occurred shortly after you graduated, correct?

Leo Martin [00:22:01] Yeah, it was after I graduated.

Julie Gabb [00:22:03] What are your opinions of busing, just from living in Glenville?

Leo Martin [00:22:08] Well, you understand, what was the purpose of busing? The purpose of busing as I know it, and I don’t profess to know it to be exact or right, because I wasn’t really paying attention to those things when they came up because I was– My focus was on everything else but that, but politics and that kind of stuff. But I think the purpose of busing was to integrate the schools because there was a federal mandate, just like Boston. Most of these segregated cities had to bus. If they had done– If they had done what they’re supposed to do, this would have never been, you know, they had just done what they’re supposed to do. We never had the bus. Do you know how much money has gone away from education just to bus? That’s a waste to run those buses up and down the street. So my opinion of busing is negative, obviously, but the purpose of busing was to integrate the schools. As soon as they start busing, what happened? Just like in the neighborhood’s white flight, all the white folks started sending their kids to private schools, primarily Catholic schools. Well, whoever would take them, so long as they didn’t have to go to school with the Black kids from the east side. That’s how I looked at it. So you stand on the street, once busing got started, and you look at the buses, what did you see? Black kids going from the east side to the west side, Black kids going from the west side to the east side. You saw Black kids going across town, Black kids going to uptown, and who was getting penalized? The Black kids could have to get up early, get home late, had to maneuver. Right. And all those things always worked against Black kids. And you say, well, that sounds so negative. Well, we weren’t. The white folks weren’t that bad. Well, I don’t say you’re bad, but look at what happened. You guys are in power, so why didn’t you do it the other way? Once you saw the inequity of the busing program, it should have immediately been adjusted or stopped. They’re still doing it now for the name. They do it in the name of specialized education. Schools have names or whatever. This kind of school, that kind of school. So I want my child to go to this school, that school. You lose that neighborhood camaraderie and that village, you lose it. So consequently, other things that, there are other fallouts from that. You know, there’s other fallouts when you, before you just get in, you get up in the morning, you have breakfast, and you walk to school, you walk with your friends, you walk to school. There was Everybody knew where everybody was going safe. Now, kids get on buses, kids get in cars. Kids don’t go to school. Buses have accidents. Kids get lost on buses, and they expense of the buses. You got crime on buses, this and that. I’m not saying it wouldn’t happen walking to school, but I sure think it’d be a lot better if you had neighborhood schools, period. The funny thing is, when the white flight got out. When the whites got off the buses and got out of the neighborhoods, you know, the schools get tax dollars based on how many students they have in the system. All of a sudden, that just dropped because they took those kids out of the school system. And then a funny thing, when white people took their kids out of the schools, then black people started taking their kids out of schools because they said they didn’t want their kids to go to the inferior schools, too. So they started doing the same thing. So what did you have left? You had people who couldn’t move their kids or didn’t want to move their kids. So they’re at a school system now. The school system is failing because the money’s not going to the schools. And then you have still bad politics in the school, on the school, in the school system, and in the city, and the school is penalized. I think Cleveland has one of the. It’s probably one of the weaker school systems in this whole area, and it shouldn’t be. It just should not be. These kids in Cleveland should not have an inferior education. How is it that a school system can lay off teachers every summer and then hire them back every fall? That makes no sense to me. Just unbelievable. Teachers don’t even know where they’re gonna be, if they got a job, or kids get bused. They don’t even know if they got a teacher in the room. They don’t know their bus schedule until the week before school starts or this or that or this or that. You know, it’s just incredible. And then you can’t say they’re not building schools because they put very nice schools out there. But, you know, four walls don’t make a school. You know, that’s how I see it. You know, busing was not good. It was not good, but it did affect the change, but it wasn’t carried out all the way. Answer.

Julie Gabb [00:26:31] You mentioned about white flight with living in Glenville. In growing up, you know, from your childhood to your adolescence, did you see the neighborhood change composition?

Leo Martin [00:26:42] Absolutely, I did see neighborhood change composition. I was born there. I was born in 50, so I was a little baby. We stayed on one street empire till I was, I don’t know, 11, 12 years old or something like that. Okay. And when I was a little boy, it was primarily Blacks and Jews that lived in the neighborhood. There was, I don’t think there was five Italians or anybody else in there, just jewish and black, and that lasted about two blinks of an eye. Okay. I would say probably by the time I was about eight years old in ’58 or so, almost all the Jewish people had moved out. And they really lived in the neighborhood all over, you know. And where did they move to? They moved to Cleveland Heights. They moved to wherever they moved to. The ones that had money probably tried to move to Shaker. And if they could get to Beachwood or something like that, great. But most of the– And white folks move in ghettos, too. The Italians move where the Italians live, the Polish people move where they live. And the Jews move together, too. But they never get called ghettos. They never get called ghettos. Ghetto is synonymous with rundown, poor, negative, not positive. A ghetto is just a group of people living in the same community. That’s what a ghetto is. But we don’t see it that way. Am I right? I’m just trying to remember my history. Okay, so we lived in the ghetto. Once the white folks moved, it was called a ghetto. Yes. I saw a white flight and didn’t know what was happening at the time. I just thought they were just moving. No, because we moved in, they moved out. Why did they move out? Why was there space for us to move in? They moved out. And the funny thing is, when we moved in, we were renters. We moved into a two family. It was nice, very nice. The homes were very nice. And we cut the grass and everything. We did nice things. The neighborhoods were beautiful. I mean, sycamore trees, elm trees, oak trees. People had lawns. They would just tell you. We knew not to walk and ride our bikes on anybody’s lawn. We knew it. They raked the grass. They burned the leaves on the curbs in the fall. You could just smell the leaves burn. That’s what we did. We didn’t have– We didn’t have the machine come by and suck the leaves up like they do now. That was not even in the wheelhouse. We had a– Yeah, I did see white flight, and I didn’t know what was going on. I just thought the white folks moved out and it’s all a Black neighborhood. That’s all I knew.

Julie Gabb [00:29:01] You’re saying about, like, the neighborhood upkeep and all. So were you aware of the so-called Glenville Plan, where their goal was, you know, to keep things nice and clean, to attract, you know, to increase, like, housing value, things like that?

Leo Martin [00:29:20] Back in the fifties and sixties? Never heard of it. Never heard of it. I never– I never thought it was necessary. Why? Because all the neighborhood houses were up. Were nice. I mean, they were nice. I cannot recall in the fifties and early sixties. Probably all the way up to probably when I went to college. I cannot recall a rundown house in Glenville. People scraped and painted. They cut their grass, they repaired their homes. We sat on the porches. They fixed their sidewalks. The city did their part. It just seemed like it was very nice. Maybe I was looking through rose-colored glasses, but I didn’t see a flaw in Glenville. It didn’t seem like a poor neighborhood, didn’t seem like it was lacking of anything, you know what I mean? The streets were smooth, not like they are now, chuckhole city, but they were very nice. You know, I was not aware of the Glenville Plan at all. You know, I wasn’t really getting myself involved in community activities, really. But I did notice that the community, that the neighborhoods were very nice. You know, the playgrounds were good. We could play safely out in places, you know, we had city gardens, we had city parks. We had to park down by Rockefeller, by Liberty Boulevard as you know it now, Martin Luther King Boulevard. We had the lagoon where the art museum is. That’s on the edge of Glenville. We had all that. And we had– We had Forest Hills Pool. It was beautiful. We had a pool called Filter Bed, which is now called Glenview. It was beautiful, right in Glenville. We had playgrounds everywhere, and people would just manicure their yards. We had block– We had neighborhoods, clubs, block clubs, what do you call them? Street clubs. People vote for who’s going to be president, vice president. And I swear to God, these people had contests to see whose street could be the prettiest street, you know. Cause everybody had flowers, and grass was cut and greeny, and they’d be out watering their grass. And the dads would come home from work and they would get the hose out and water their grass. The dads watered the grass. You know, everybody had one car. It left at five or six o’clock in the morning. Dad went to work. Mom hung clothes, washed clothes, whatever they had to do. And at four o’clock dads come back home, watered the grass. We eat dinner just like anybody else. People don’t believe that, but that’s how it was, you know. Most of the time, your dads went to work, your mothers were home. If your mother had a job, it was some kind of job in the neighborhood somewhere, some little part-time job to supplement the income, you know? And we knew, and the kids were mannerable, you know, because everybody’s mother raised you, period. And you can read between lines there. You didn’t do wrong, and you had consequences to pay by anybody’s mother. And believe me, they were going to call on the phone and tell your mother later, and you got it again. But the neighborhoods, I didn’t know that they needed to have a Glenville Plan back then. I can see why they would have one because I probably wouldn’t seen everything, you know? But where we lived, even my wife can tell you, even where she lived, it was just, it was beautiful. It was just beautiful. That’s why they called this city the Forest City, because there were trees everywhere. It was trees like it is now. You can go in most big cities in this country and they don’t have nearly the parks and trees and greenery that Cleveland has. As bad as they talk about Cleveland, it’s a beautiful city. Go to Detroit, go to any of these cities, you’ll just go like, man, but they always want to talk negative about Cleveland. So I tell them, keep their behinds where they are and we’ll stay right here. Only thing we got going against us here is the weather. That’s all. Nothing we can do about that.

Julie Gabb [00:33:01] Earlier you’re saying that your family were first renters. Did you encounter any, like, zoning issues with, like, the house at all?

Leo Martin [00:33:11] No, because the people we rented from were Black and my dad came up from Alabama and they knew the people from– They bought a house and we rented from them. So, no, we never came across any kind of redlining or zoning, anything like that, renting. Done.

Julie Gabb [00:33:32] Earlier you were mentioning about Forest Hill Parks. I’ll ask about– Sometimes I’ll ask about Forest Hill Park. Some people think I’m talking about the one in East Cleveland, but–

Leo Martin [00:33:42] I’ll explain. Okay, so let me get Forest Hill Park. So Forest Hill, it was a pool. Forest Hills Pool, I guess you would call it Forest Hill Park. I don’t think it had a name. We just called it the park, you know, Forest Hills Pool. It was a wonderful swimming pool. I think everybody in Glenville, matter of fact, if you didn’t swim, you didn’t go there. But everybody in Glenville swam. Or we went and played in the water and they went to– Either went to Forest Hills or they went to Filter Bed or Glenview, as we call it. One is on– Forest Hills is right across the street from Patrick Henry Junior High School, where I went to junior high school. It was on Thornhill and 123rd. Filter Bed is on 110th Street, close to Bratenahl, more north, the northernmost point of Glenville. Forest Hills is kind of like in the middle of Glenville. And there were the only two city pools that we had. Forest Hills was a very big pool. In my mind, it was the biggest pool I’ve ever seen as a child growing up. Now, if I probably saw it, it would be small, but they tore it down and built a newer pool. They put a newer pool, and it appears that the newer pool is a lot smaller than our original pool, and it probably is, but in our heads, you know, when you’re a kid, things are a lot bigger than they are when you grow up, okay? So. And the park was nice because they had a baseball diamond, had tennis courts and that kind of thing. And we played baseball, but we didn’t play tennis too much because we weren’t taught tennis. We just didn’t do tennis in our neighborhood, but we played ball there. And we would go to Patrick Henry, and there was a park between Patrick Henry and the open space all the way around in St. Clair. We called it the hole because it was a playground down there. And that’s where the guys would shoot dice. The older boys shoot dice, built as a playground. And then they built– The new Glenville was built in that park, and the old Glenville became Whitney Young Junior High School. So. And then it had a Y across the street, the YMCA. Before that Y was built in all this park, there was nothing there. Let me back up a little bit. This park, Forest Hills Park, I’m gonna call it Forest Hills Park, went from 110th, almost by the railroad tracks, by Filter Bed, the same park went all the way around through Glenville. Never broke up. Just crossed St. Clair, same park, went all the way around past Patrick Henry, crossed 123rd, right to Forest Hills Pool, and just kept on going. Got to Thornhill, crossed the street, and it became East Cleveland, same park, just kept on going to Paterson Park in East Cleveland. Okay. Then it just kind of broke up for a minute because you had Euclid and all those streets, and it went up the hill, which is still the park up by Lee Road, same Forest Hill Park, you know, so. But the park was nice. It wasn’t one of my focal points to go play at, because we didn’t– We really played in our neighborhood. So I lived on Empire, so that’s where I play as a little boy. But when I moved to 120th off St. Clair, it was just one block. So I was in the park all the time. So it was a great place. It was a great homing ground for us to hang out at.

Julie Gabb [00:36:52] Yeah, you mentioned about the new Glenville. Were you able to go to the old Glenville at all?

Leo Martin [00:37:02] Can I move this? Yes. I went to the old Glenville in the 10-B. [laughs] Yeah. Matter of fact, I played football in the 10th grade for the old Glenville. I went to the old Glenville for a year, one solid year. The 10-B and the 10-A from September to June. That summer they completed a new Glenville. Then I went to the new Glenville in the 11-B in 11th grade. Okay? In 11-A, whenever, however it fall. In 11-A, that’s what it was. However it fall. I was at a new Glenville for two years, old Glenville for one. I went to the old Glenville. It was a hardwood floor school. Can you imagine that? The whole school was a hardwood floor. And when you walk down the halls, they creaked and squeaked, you know, but it was what it was, and it was a wonderful school. I have memories of it, but not great memories of how, of the hallways and things, because I was only there a year and I was so at awe of all the big kids by me being in 10th grade and they were in the 12th grade and 11th grade, I was just, I was just glad to get along without getting my head cut off, you know. But by me playing football and running track, I kind of fell into the cracks pretty easily. But it was a wonderful school. It was really a wonderful school ’cause it was a neighborhood anchor. If you lived in Glenville, you wanted to go to Glenville High School because generally your brothers and sisters went there and you want to follow in their footsteps. And it was one of the– It was one of the positive entities in the community, was the schools as we knew it, you know. And look at it now, it’s still a positive focal point, but it’s not strong anymore, you know? But we’re not talking about now. We’re talking about back 50 years ago. [laughs] Wow. Oh, my God, 50 years ago. Longer than that. But anyway, yes, I did go to the old Glenville. It was wonderful. Yeah, I remember some– I never– I didn’t have a negative experience growing up. It was just really good. You know, you did dumb stuff. But. But I’m not going to talk bad about Glenville because it was wonderful, you know, it was great, even during the riots. So go ahead.

Julie Gabb [00:39:15] What was the difference, like the appearance wise, of the old Glenville versus the new Glenville?

Leo Martin [00:39:20] Night and day. One was new. One was old. The old Glenville was red brick and brown brick wood floors, you know, the old style black chalkboards, slate chalkboards. There was a lot of quality in old Glenville because there’s a lot of quality in old things, you know, that school could be standing right now, just maintains a wonderful school. You know, if John Hay could still be standing, Glenville could still be standing. They put a lot of money in John Hay. They could have done the same thing with Glenville or John Adams or East Tech or East High, but they chose to tear these schools down. And probably to some degree, some of them probably should have been. But it was a great school. I mean, new Glenville was more contemporary for the times. The new Glenville was the same school as John F. Kennedy. John F. Kennedy was built a couple of years before the new Glenville. And from what I know, they took John F. Kennedy’s blueprint, flipped them over and built a new Glenville. And if you look at the schools, they’re exactly the opposite one. The doors on this side, that’s what they did. They’re exactly the same. It’s not even funny. What’s funny about it is that the architects and the engineers and the powers that be, the politicians, didn’t have enough guts or wherewithal to give us a unique, to build a unique building for another community. They just flipped it over. So I didn’t– I never see them do it anywhere else. They didn’t do anywhere. It’s a silly thing. It’s so silly. Sure, it’s a cheap way to do things, but it’s a silly thing because it doesn’t cost much more to do another school. You got blueprints all over the place. They could get a blueprint from a school built in Indianapolis and build it and build a school, you know, so that’s what it is. But it was a wonderful school. Beautiful. We thought it was great because we didn’t– We never experienced anything new in our academics from– Is that you? Okay. We never experienced– My elementary school was old. My junior high schools were old. And Glenville, my first experience in high school was old. But when we had new Glenville, lockers were built into the wall. We had our own lockers, didn’t have to share lockers anymore. We had a beautiful locker room and a gym, you know, hot water. It was just– It was good. Bathrooms were clean, you know, and they weren’t that. Other bathrooms weren’t clean. It’s hard to clean old and make it fresh. It was clean, but how much clean can you do old, you know, and all the desks were nice and you want to get it. And everything was very nice. We got– It appeared– We got all new books, all new everything. So we came with a fresh attitude, you know, and we, we just, we really respected that new building and tried to make sure it stayed that way, you know, and we left. We all graduated and left. And over a period of time, unfortunately, the kids that go there now and probably ten or 15, 20 years later, they didn’t experience the old, so they don’t know how to appreciate the new. So when they got to this new Glenville, they didn’t have the same appreciation and hence the school was kind of taking a hit. So there you go.

Julie Gabb [00:42:29] With going to Glenville High School, did you participate in any sports over there?

Leo Martin [00:42:37] I did. I participated in everything. I ran track, played football. I was on a wrestling team for two years. What else did I do over there? I think that’s about it. That’s what I did over there. Got in trouble a few times, but nothing crazy, you know, I’m probably missing some things, but yeah, I participated in those things. Yeah.

Julie Gabb [00:43:07] So were the sports in Glenville, track and football, were they good then?

Leo Martin [00:43:16] Football wasn’t, but the track was. Track was big. Football. We went our freshman year, we went 0 and 10 or something like that. We didn’t win a game, but it wasn’t for lack of effort. It just, just didn’t. The ball just didn’t fall that way, you know, for some reason. But track, we were very strong in track. Very, very strong in track. You know, they won the state three years in a row and it was. We had a very nice track team and it was fun, you know, and, you know, that’s where that busing has failed a lot of kids indirectly, probably directly, because it was a neighborhood and we wanted to run and represent our community and our neighborhood. So if you went to– If you lived on 65th and Woodland, your life’s dream was to go to East Tech. If you lived on 80th and Superior, your life’s dream was to go to East High. If you lived on Milverton, you wanted to go to John Adams. If you lived on, you know, a street like that in Collinwood, 140th, you wanted to go to Collinwood. So your whole focus sometimes was to get to Collinwood. Because I want to run track for Collinwood, I want to play football. I want to sing in the choir for Collinwood. I want to be this for Collinwood or whatever. But when they bused, you lost that allegiance to your community and you lost that allegiance to your school or to your friends. You just lost it because you didn’t know where you were going to go to school. You just left. Your friends, however they saw, to draw the straw to send you is where you went. So you didn’t have that same drive. Unfortunately. Unfortunately, I think a lot of kids, girls and boys, probably didn’t get a chance to excel and get the full fruit or the full benefit of their skills and their efforts, because they didn’t have that drive or that. That love or passion to succeed in something, in something or to represent in a positive way. And henceforth, you have a lot of failure, a lot of negligent, a negative attitude, and a lot of resistance, and then we get penalized. So back to your question. Because we didn’t have busing and because we had neighborhood camaraderie and strength and love for our community, we all tried to excel and beat the other neighborhoods and communities. So you got the best out of us. We didn’t have to go practice all year like these kids do now and have all this high-tech stuff. We did it out of guts. We practiced hard, but it was guts. These kids practiced because they have a goal. What’s their goal? They want to go to the pros, they want to go to college, they want to do this. We ain’t know about college. We just try to run to beat the guy who lived in the next community. That’s what it was all about. And if some guy was walk up to you and say, you got a scholarship, you didn’t know what he was talking about. He just did what he said because it didn’t cost you folks any money. There you go.

Julie Gabb [00:46:07] So what were some of the rivalries against Glenville High School?

Leo Martin [00:46:12] Well, you have football rivalry. Well, football rivalry. We were– We really made an effort when I was there to have a good football team. We had some good football players. But probably, let’s say rivalry would be more rivalry. More than basketball and track, more in track. It was always coming up between Glenville, East Tech, and John Adams. Pretty much everybody else was second fiddle. No, that’s where our competition came from. It was really just neighborhood rivalry through word of mouth. Nothing that was– There was never any kind of violent thing. It was just strictly competition and bragging rights, you know, and basketball. You know, you play with kids and you go to rec centers, and then you go to your different high schools and you’re gonna play against them. And that’s where the rivalry came from, too, you know? But I think the rivalry was more in junior high school because we did some crazy stuff. Boy, that’s where the rivalries came from. But you remember, if you go to elementary school, then you go to junior high school, you splinter off from some of your friends. Then you go to high school, you come all back together and you put all that strength together. So it was fun. That’s how it worked. It was a beautiful system. The city of Cleveland had a beautiful system, and it got– People got smart and destroyed it. Let’s put it like that. The fault was when you do things with the wrong intentions, things come out bad, and they did things with the wrong intentions to be self-serving. And it was all done, in my opinion, based on race, not on economics, based on race. Because in our neighborhoods, people worked and they worked in the same places everybody worked, although, you know, equal pay didn’t work either. But we made– We made it work, you know? So there you go.

Julie Gabb [00:48:05] I just thought, going back with your saying how 105th, like, split the neighborhood, was there any sort of, like, stratified within Glenville?

Leo Martin [00:48:16] What do you mean?

Julie Gabb [00:48:17] Explain like, in terms of, like, where there’s certain parts of Glenville that were, like, poor compared to other parts of Glenville.

Leo Martin [00:48:24] No, I think, you know, remember, now you’re speaking to a guy who’s speaking to you from– I’m giving you a perspective from age, baby, to about 16, okay, 18 from high school. So I would say by me living on Empire to move into 120th, they were all single- and two-family homes for the most part. And then you had some multiple dwelling apartments. And I don’t think anybody ever looked at anybody because you live in a two-family or a single-family home. Economically, I don’t think we looked each other any different in any section of the neighborhood was any better or less than, because they were all pretty the same like they are right now. Now, there were some streets that had some pretty nice homes in Glenville, like Pasadena and Drexel. Some of those streets, they’re still pretty nice now, where they used to be. They had some outstanding big homes on them, but there was just a few streets. But for the most part, all the streets were nice, and all the men and women there worked in the same basic places. So economically speaking, we all were about the same. And you could even step out of Glenville and go to another adjacent community, and it was pretty much the same. But you can tell as you moved out of communities where the economic line started falling down. But as far as Glenville is concerned and adjacent communities, just to give you, I’m using adjacent communities, they were all pretty much the same. You know, I didn’t see any economic line or better than, or less than, and I may be looking at it differently than other people can see it. But I didn’t see it, you know.

Julie Gabb [00:50:04] Did you ever encounter any sort of racial prejudice within Glenville?

Leo Martin [00:50:11] Wow. I’m thinking, boy, you know, I never had that question asked me. That’s a good question. Because it was always predominantly Black. So I’m trying to think, if anybody ever do anything to me or say anything to me, you know. No. You know– No, not really. No. You know, if it did, it came from the police, it came from the, from the government. It didn’t come from the community, because we were all the same, but it would come from the police. And when it did come, I didn’t know about it. I wasn’t, I wasn’t privy to it because I lived in a Black community. So I didn’t know I was a kid. But stepping out of Glenville now, it’s a whole different story. But no, I didn’t. Not in Glenville. No.

Julie Gabb [00:51:00] What were some of your cases outside of Glenville?

Leo Martin [00:51:04] How much time you got? [laughs] Collinwood was the worst, Collinwood was the worst. And Rockefeller Park, which is now called Liberty Boulevard, you know, Eaton, where Rockefeller Park and Eaton Park now it’s called. It used to be called, and I was called Martin Luther King, Martin Luther King Boulevard. Well, miss lady, we would go to Euclid Beach. I’m sure you heard of Euclid Beach. And Euclid Beach was an amusement park. So we’d go Euclid Beach, and then back in the day, you can get into the amusement park for free. You just had to buy tickets to ride the rides and buy popcorn, ice cream, that kind of thing. So our parents would not always go with us. We would ride out. We would ride the bus. We had a little couple of dollars. We get on the bus, let’s go Euclid Beach. We go Euclid Beach and go to rides. But to go to Euclid Beach, you had to go through Collinwood. Collinwood. The central part of Collin was called Five Points because there were five corners, okay? And the St. Clair bus stopped at Collinwood. So we all had to get off the bus and exchange to the Lakeshore bus to go to Euclid Beach. And we dare not walk from there to Euclid Beach because you had to walk through Collinwood. And sometimes you have to fight, you know, because the Collinwood kids fought. The white kids of Collinwood fought Black kids out of Collinwood. I don’t say Glenville, just out of Collinwood. And for no other reason than just cause we could. And it be some violent fights. And in Rockefeller Park, same thing. We were alright as long as we stayed on our side of East Boulevard, which is now called Martin Luther King Boulevard. But as soon as we crossed the street, it was all hell. Just cross the street. Not stand on the curb. Cross the street. You had to deal– Across the street, they had a playground with swings and baseball diamonds and all teeter totters, or, you know, what you call them. You know what a teeter totter is? Okay. All those kind of things. And we want to go swing and stuff, but we couldn’t, because we had to fight the white boys and whatever, and we did. We fought. We never backed down. We fought, and that’s just foolish. But as long as we stay on our side of the street, everything is good. Here you go. That tax dollar. Okay? So why should we– We should want to play. We just wanted to play, you know? So in Collinwood, we just want to ride a bus to Euclid Beach. We gotta come back. Sometimes they wait for us, you know, and we knew it was gonna be there, so it was on. Other than that, nah, we didn’t really experience anything. Like I said, more from the police. And the little things they did was subtle, because we really didn’t get in trouble. None of the guys, none of the girls got in trouble with the police for the most part. You know, we did stupid stuff, but it wasn’t really nothing to mention that we knew. We don’t know what our parents had to deal from our stupidity. But, no, those two things I can point out for sure, was Rockefeller Park and Collinwood. And I’m probably sure, maybe some of the boys might have mentioned that to you. The girls would never mention it because they don’t do it. They didn’t do this stuff, but the boys would, you know. Doug Patterson should have mentioned it. Did he? Yeah. Okay.

Julie Gabb [00:54:22] Was there any sort of thing like that in, like, University Circle or– Not really?

Leo Martin [00:54:30] Hmm. No, not really. Because, you know, when we went to University Circle the most, the only time we would go to University Circle, we were going, like, on Easter, and they had Easter egg hunts, and they had– Everybody got dressed up as families, and we’d be going for our little Easter holiday or Sunday walk or going to the museums. And there was never any– I never– I never experienced any kind of racial prejudice going to University Circle. We would even– We would even go as far as to go to the restaurant there, which was Howard Johnson’s. And I didn’t experience anything when I was a kid, so I don’t know what my dad and mom might have had a buffer off or had to take a seat in the back of the restaurant or wait till they decided to seat us when they felt like seating us. I don’t know of those things, so. But not to say it didn’t happen, but you asked me what I experienced, and going into the Health Museum, I mean, the Natural History museum and the art museum, it was just what it was, you know, I knew about it because we took field trips from school. So when we go as a family, it was the same. It’s like, mom, let me show you this. Let me show you this. We walk around, you know, not thinking. They didn’t know anyway because they didn’t go on the field trips. So I just walked around. But, you know, riding my bike around there as a free, willing young man, get on my bicycle and just riding around, I didn’t experience anything. All I knew was I knew what not to do. You know, I knew how to follow the rule, basically, because I knew I didn’t want to get in trouble with the white man. So you just kept your wits about you, you know, and that’s not how it should be. Should be able to be free, you know, should just be free and just do– But I had to– I had my– I knew that much. You learn how to– You learn in life, in your community, your parameters, and your boundaries, how far you can go left or right, you know? And as young men, I only can speak to the guys because I don’t think a lot of the girls pushed a button and had the experience, because I don’t think society on a racial line really affected the women as much as they affected the young men and men today. That’s what I think. Now it’s just all over. But back then, I think the young boys and stuff, we caught more hell than the girls. Cause they pretty much followed the rule. They stayed home or they played with their friends, and they didn’t really branch out like we did. We did stuff, you know, boys do stuff, you know, we get out. We want to get out and play, you know, not do wrong, just go out and do stuff, you know? So.

Julie Gabb [00:57:00] So were you present when MLK and Malcolm X came to Glenville as well?

Leo Martin [00:57:09] Yeah. I was there when Martin Luther King– You asked a good question. When Martin Luther King came to Glenville, I think Martin Luther King came to Glenville, and I think Robert Kennedy was there at the same time, if I’m not mistaken. His significance to me at the time was so unimportant that I was at wrestling practice, and he was on the stage, and I was right underneath him because the wrestling room was underneath the stage. And our, here’s another situation. As important as Martin Luther King was, our wrestling coach, which was white, did not see the importance of us going, taking 20 minutes off or a half hour off to go hear Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy speak. We wrestled. We practiced. Because we were, we were, we were obedient. We followed the rule. Practice. Gotta go to practice. Isn’t that something? We didn’t know. We didn’t know how significant he was going to be or how significant he was. We didn’t know. Makes sense. I mean, you got to think about that. How could you not go see Martin Luther King? What you think about it? Did you go see– I don’t know if you’re a Democrat or Republican, but did you go see Bush when he was here? Did you go see President Obama when he was here? Look how significant it could be. Pick somebody who’s significant. Did you go see him? No, I was– Same thing. Except here’s a white guy who should have said, you know, you guys need to go hear this guy speak. But it wasn’t significant to what? Him. It wasn’t important to him because it wasn’t his agenda. If we had been aware and had any kind of Black education, history, and made to feel very important, we would have just said, we’re not gonna practice as a team. We go up there and watch this. But you understand, in our educational system, we never had history taught fairly. We had history taught, but wasn’t taught fairly. But since the white man didn’t want to teach history fairly, what did the Black community have to do? They had to lobby and push to get what? Black history. It shouldn’t be Black history. It should just be history. But since you won’t teach Black history, we have to segregate it out. And now I hear my constituent, my white people I know at my age, they want to know why– I won’t tap the table, that goes in the mic. They want to know why. How come you got to have Black history and we don’t have white history? Because you won’t teach us our history. Everything we learn is negative. Everything we learn is only thing we learn is George Washington Carver or who invented the cotton gin or, you know, two things positive. All the rest, we’re just a bunch of dummies. We didn’t do anything right. Nothing we did was right. So. But there was too much Black history to go down the tubes. So we never had any role models. I always thought– Sidebar. Sidebar. I always thought watching TV in the fifties that I was gonna marry a white woman, that all white women were beautiful and all Black women were not. They were ancient mama kind of women they were– Had rags on their head, fat, had aprons on. All they did was work for the white, white lady. That’s what I thought, because that’s how it was portrayed. I’m a kid, but when I got older and I got educated to the Black race and bBack history, I understood. I started opening– My eyes were starting to be open. I got smart, I got educated. All of a sudden, the good old days weren’t so good. And I started seeing beauty in my race. But it wasn’t supposed to be. I wasn’t supposed to see that beauty. I was supposed to see the Marilyn Monroes of the world as beautiful. But I couldn’t have ’em. But I supposed to see it that way. You understand? So all those good things, when Martin Luther King came, Malcolm X came, no, I didn’t see the importance. But you see, the importance was squelched in me and a lot of people. It was quieted down. And now that we got education, people want to think we overreact. We don’t overreact. We just react because it’s not fair. It’s my tax dollar, equal. You look at, sidebar again, you look at, I don’t even want to start with the Republicans, with Congress. Let’s leave it alone. I can go crazy. Okay. I can hear my wife. She went upstairs. She knows I want to go crazy. I can go crazy. Okay, we’re gonna have conversation after this. She’s flipping ’cause she wants to get in this. You have to come interview her. You have to call her. Write her number. Write her number down. Write her phone number down.

Julie Gabb [01:02:02] Okay. So.

Leo Martin [01:02:05] Let me give you her email. Oh, I don’t go off hand. Just call her. Just call her.

Julie Gabb [01:02:09] Alright, that’s good. Okay. So.

Leo Martin [01:02:13] Did I answer your question?

Julie Gabb [01:02:15] Yes. With your saying, like, with your education, like with your coach discouraged, like not even giving you the opportunity, what were your teachers? Were they Black? Were they white? At Glenville?

Leo Martin [01:02:30] Mixed. It was pretty mixed. Let me see. It was probably predominantly white. We had some really great Black teachers. As a matter of fact, most of my Black teachers were superior because they really pushed us to succeed. They really pushed us to succeed. Miss Clements, Miss Smith, Mister Strouder, Mister– I can’t remember his name. Geez, how come I’m going blank all of a sudden? They were just all good. They were really good. They pushed us hard. They didn’t give us any slack. And not that the white teachers didn’t either. And they pushed us too. We speak of high school. In high school, I really think the teachers really wanted us to succeed for the most part. But I have an experience to tell you and this is a factual – everything I told you is fact as I know it – but I’m gonna give you a factual thing that happened to me in high school. Speaking of that. So I’m in the 12th grade and we’re all trying to decide what we’re gonna do in school, college, you know, what career, how we’re gonna go with our life. And so you go to your guidance counselor. He’s giving you, based on your test scores and things, what they think would be a good direction for you to go in when you leave high school. As a young man, one young woman, my wonderful guidance counselor told me based on my test scores, which weren’t bad at all, you know, I took college prep courses all the way up through– Mister Williams, by the way, was probably one of the best teachers I had. Sidebar. Math teacher. Mister Williams, Willie Williams. Oh my God. Was he a good teacher? I had to go back to him real fast. Couldn’t forget him. Mister Crowley, history teacher. You’re coming back in my head now. Mister Crowley, Mister Clayton sensed the principal, but he was a good teacher. They’re just coming back. Great teachers. These are all Black teachers. But I can name some good white teachers. But you didn’t ask me that. But they all pushed us hard. But here’s an experience I had. I had this guidance counselor, white guidance counselor. So it’s my turn. You’re on the schedule to go to your counselor and he sits down with you and tell you the direction that they think based on his, his judgment, his education. He’s the guidance counselor. What he thinks will be a good direction for you to point in based on what you fed back to them, right? And your test scores, ACT, SAT, all that kind of stuff. So this wonderful man told me – I’m in the room with him one on one like I am with you – he tells me that based on my test scores that I would be a good candidate to go into the service. What’s going on in 1968? The heart of the Vietnam War. Who’s dying in the Vietnam War that we see on the news every night? Black, young Black kids every night. It’s like somebody in our neighborhood was dying once a week that we knew was just dying. And I looked at this mother duck. You know, I had no aspirations of going to the service straight out of high school. Some of the kids did, but not me. And I know my test scores didn’t say that. He was just steering us around, okay? He said, oh, you’d be a great officer in the military. Your test scores, you should go into the Army or the Air Force. And so you know what I asked him, because now I’m in 12th grade, now I got kahunas, you know, I asked him, I said, I don’t remember his name. Let’s say it’s Mister Smith. I said, Mister Smith. I said, if these were the test scores of your son, would you tell your son to go into the service? Just about as nice as I could say it. And he suspended me. He told, you’re under suspension. Don’t come back till you bring your parents. So I didn’t know what he was. I didn’t want to get suspended. Because you get suspended, you can’t participate in some activities as a senior. I’m like, oh, this is the kick, you know? I’m like, well, okay, I’m not gonna argue with the guy. So I had a motorcycle, right? I jumped on my motorcycle, drove straight to my dad’s job. Hey, Dad, I just got suspended. I said, I need you come back to school. Same day. My dad came back to school. About an hour later, we came back to school. Went straight to the principal. And because I knew I didn’t do anything terribly wrong, I was not smart, smart alecky, you know? So I went right to the principal. And he came in. He knew how important it was. It must have been important for me to come to his job till I got suspended. I never got suspended before. Okay? So I tell him what happened. Story I just told you. And Mister Stafford was the principal. He came. So he called the guidance counselor down to the office, caught this bad boy off guard. He came out of the office and he was like, whoa, you know, told the story and that ended that situation. I don’t know what happened in the final analysis of that, but he, I don’t think he told anybody else that story. Tell him what they should do. So I never, I never talked to that counselor again either. So that’s how that went. So next. [laughs] That was a little story. Thought you might like to hear that. [speaking to Debra Martin] I just told her about a guidance counselor who tried to send me to the service.

Julie Gabb [01:07:27] Did you go to the service, or–?

Leo Martin [01:07:28] No.

Julie Gabb [01:07:29] Yeah.

Leo Martin [01:07:30] No, they had a lottery and I didn’t go to the service. No, thank God. If I had gone to the service, I wouldn’t be married to this woman right now. That’s for sure.

Julie Gabb [01:07:38] How did you meet your wife?

Leo Martin [01:07:42] [laughs] Ah, you’re not supposed to ask that question. I met my wife through a friend. I was going with this girl who lived across the street from me, and Debra was her friend, and she and my wife went to her 16th birthday party, I believe, and I was invited to the party, and a bunch of Catholic girls and a bunch of Glenville boys, city boys, we went to public school, went to the party, and that’s how I met my wife at her party, at my girlfriend’s party. And to make a long story short, the rest is history. We’ve been married 41 years. That’s how it goes. Had three kids. Life is good. [speaking to Debra Martin] That’s about right, dear?

Debra Martin [01:07:21] You’re leaving out all the details.

Leo Martin [01:07:22] Yeah, but she didn’t ask for details. She asked me how I met you.

Julie Gabb [01:08:26] You could go on. [crosstalk] Okay.

Leo Martin [01:08:29] Okay. [to Debra Martin] She already wrote your name down to interview you. So? So mine is a whole different story. She’ll give you a whole different side. Because she went to the Catholic school, not Glenville, and she went to school out of the community in high school, but we met. Told you. Did I tell you? I told you. I know her too well. And then we danced on the dance floor and stuff, and I like what I saw and blah, blah. And I’m not gonna give you every detail, Goddamn it. Anyway, so we went to Euclid Beach the next day as a group. You know, they spent the night over their house, and a whole bunch of girls spent the night and a lot of little details there. And we went to Euclid Beach the next day. And this child here, I was probably taking my girlfriend on all the rides, my neighbor across the street. But this child squeezed in between us all the time. Hey, come with me. Come with me. And then we pushed our dreams. We pushed Audrey off to the side, and she got kind of bumped off. And then I started dating her. And that’s what happened. We had a little separation there for a while. We wound up not taking each other to each other’s proms, by my hand. And then we got back together, and we’ve been together ever since. That’s it. One year.

Debra Martin [01:09:43] Did anybody show you a Glenville yearbook?

Julie Gabb [01:09:47] I didn’t get to see one.

Leo Martin [01:09:48] You know where it is, dear? Okay, I do, too. I know where it is, too.

Julie Gabb [01:09:51] And then the other thing, I was wondering, if you guys are interested at all, we were trying. We only have Glenville High School photos or like. Or just like. But we don’t have, like, any yearbook or anything like that. And so we’re wondering, like, if you guys would be happy, like, fine sharing your yearbooks so we could, like, use those images.

Leo Martin [01:10:14] You want some? You don’t, you never got any yearbook photos from anybody?

Julie Gabb [01:10:16] No.

Leo Martin [01:10:17] They didn’t bring you a yearbook? Nobody sat down with a yearbook with you? It’s sitting right now. You want to take it?

Julie Gabb [01:10:25] I mean, it’s up to you guys.

Leo Martin [01:10:26] Or if you’re going to interview my wife one day, you could take it and bring it back. I trust you.

Julie Gabb [01:10:31] That would be great.

Leo Martin [01:10:32] I trust you. It’s just my year now. My sister lives down the street. She went to Glenville. She came out two years before me. You know, you could interview her. I can get you to a lot of folks. Oh, my God. They’ll be happy to interview, [crosstalk] but we’re all the same age. You want a wide perspective. [crosstalk] You know, I’m gonna ask George, and if I. If I do, you gotta give me your information and you can contact him. He’s 83.

Julie Gabb [01:11:04] Yeah. Cause we’re trying to get–

Leo Martin [01:11:07] Super guy. So, yes, that’s how I met my wife and we. The rest is history. 40 something years. 40. About 47 years. As a matter of fact, we’ve been together. Right, dear?

Julie Gabb [01:11:20] Congrats. So did you go to church when you were younger?

Leo Martin [01:11:25] I went to Open Door Missionary Baptist Church on 83rd and Woodland. Out of the community. It was more in the East Tech neighborhood. Matter of fact, it was in the heart of the East Tech neighborhood. Yes.

Julie Gabb [01:11:39] And what were your experiences there?

Leo Martin [01:11:43] Well, I was on– I was a Boy Scout. I was on the usher board. It was a baptist church. I did all the things that families do in the Baptist church, the Black Baptist church, because I have discovered that white Baptist churches do things differently, so. And I was. I just. I did everything. We didn’t miss church every Sunday. We would go and Easter and everything. I was baptized and. And my mother was in the choir and my sister was on the usher board. And it was just part of the community. All my aunts and friends and stuff, they went to their different churches. But as far as I’m concerned, we had a lot of camaraderie in our church. And there were a few people that went to our church from Glenville, but there were so many churches, everybody picked their own church, you know? I thought church was very positive, very, very good. Eventually, I stopped going to that church and started going to another church for reason, if you ask me, I’ll tell you, but you didn’t ask me. And that was a whole ’nother story. But I went to my church till I was about 14, and it was wonderful. It was good. Open Door is still a nice church to this day.

Julie Gabb [01:12:44] What was your reason? I’ve heard other reasons for why people come to certain churches in Glenville.

Leo Martin [01:12:51] Alright, we gonna knock this whole church thing out right quick. So one day, you know, you start getting a free mind as you get older. I was about 14. My mother– We know you go to church every Sunday, you put on a suit and tie, the girls put on a nice dress, and everybody get dressed up, go to church. They do it. To this day, everybody gets dressed up, put on their glad rags, and go to church. Alright. So one day I decided I didn’t want to wear a tie. I just wanted to wear a nice shirt and pants and sweater. It was nice, very nice, you know. My mother wasn’t having it, and I told her I wasn’t gonna wear a tie. So I got a whooping, and I said, I’m not gonna wear a tie now for sure. So I didn’t go to church. Couldn’t go to church. And when I got punished for it, couldn’t eat with my family on Sunday. Couldn’t eat dinner with my family. Had to eat by myself, whatever was left over. Had to do all the dishes, everything. That went on for about three, four weeks. Every Sunday, no tie, whooping, punish. Every Sunday, no tie, whooping, punish. One day my dad, who did not go to church, he said, don’t whoop that boy anymore. I didn’t care about the whooping because it didn’t bother me. I was making a point. She whipped me till I was 20. I didn’t care. I wasn’t going to her church no more. My father put his foot down, said, don’t whoop me anymore. He’s not going to go. He don’t have to go. So I stopped going. So I started going to church with the girl that I was going with before I met my wife, across the street, who was Catholic. So I started going to St. Al’s, which was in the Glenville neighborhood, right in the heart of Glenville, 110th and St. Clair. So I started going to Catholic church, and it kind of put the seed in me to become Catholic later on in life, so. And then I became Catholic through my own chain of events, for the most part, not because my wife was Catholic – I wanted to marry her because she was Catholic – but my own choosing. And we were very active in the Catholic church around Cleveland. We were very active, very busy. We did everything we could do want to be specific? Okay. We did. Still. I coached and I was on literature commission. My wife was. She did things with education and that kind of thing. And then in recent times, in the last couple years, I decided to just stop going to church, period. I don’t have a religion anymore. I’m still Christian. I still have a strong faith and a strong spirituality. But I don’t have a religion. And I don’t think it’s necessary. I don’t think it’s necessary to be in the four walls in the church every Sunday. I just try to drop the man part out and just keep God there. That’s it.

Julie Gabb [01:15:14] Sounds good.

Debra Martin [01:15:15] Do you need paper?

Julie Gabb [01:15:17] I’m good, thanks though. I was wondering, so what businesses do you go to around Glenville area?

Leo Martin [01:15:26] What businesses I go to? Well, let’s start from scratch. There was a store in the corner of my street called Rappie’s, Rapaports. Everybody was Jewish. Nice Jewish name. Rapaport’s. Little candy store, corner store. Men went in there, had a beer every night and stuff. There’s a candy store, and there’s a store across the street called Crockett’s. I’m sure Doug Patterson probably knew about Crockett’s. And there was a drugstore in the corner of Gooding and 105th. And on the other block off Earle, there was a store, very popular and people talk about it to this day, called Perkle’s. It was a very good corned beef and lunch counter store. Well, my wife’s mother was a waitress there. And they got the best corned beef sandwiches. Their corned beef is probably rival, no less than Slyman’s is today. And if I recall, the first time I bought a corned beef sandwich from there. I couldn’t believe I was spending 45 cents for a sandwich. Now, those darn things cost ten bucks, you know, so. And they would look like they were about the same size. But I’m sure they weren’t that big. Because these sandwiches now are ridiculous. And then I went to a store. It was Sherwin Bakery, which was a great bakery in the neighborhood. There was Joe’s. There was Joe’s. Joe’s had a store, Singer sewing machines, right? There was Gold’s. Mister Gold had a grocery store called Gold’s. There was Scatter’s, who sold ribs and chicken and fries. Let’s see, there was– What was the grocery store? I went to Mixon’s Barber Shop, which is where everybody went to Mixon’s Barber Shop for the most part. Gordon Bike Shop, which was just closed down a couple years ago. Gordon Bike Shop. Three Sisters Restaurant. There was a hot tamale man across the street from Three Sisters. Let’s see, let me see. You had Dearing’s, Dearing’s Chicken. You had Roy’s Confectionery. You had Boston Shoes. We bought shoes from Boston shoes, and Red Goose shoes on the corner of Amor and 105th. I went to all these places I mentioned to you. Then I had family would go to. My dad went to Cafe Society, the bar. And then there was Riley’s pool room my brother went to. And the Tia Juana Cafe on the corner of Massie and 105th, a little neighborhood bar. My mother did Harriet Franz Style-Right. And it was on 105th, not too far from where we lived. And I’m just trying to go up down the street, and I know I’m missing some things, a lot of things. So, yeah, I went to– And there was some gas stations. It was a Sol Cohen Shell gas station on the corner of Gooding and 105th. That was Doug Patterson. He lived on Columbia. It was Sohio station on Columbia and 105th that we’d buy gas from. And there’s also Jack’s poultry. That was in the back of Roy’s where we all. We bought chickens and turkeys, Thanksgiving stuff. We wanted fresh, fresh chicken. And then there was a fish market. I don’t know the name of the fish market, but it was between Garfield and Yale, where you can buy fresh fish. And the guy scaled it and cleaned the scales off and everything like that. Everything we bought was fresh. And then getting off my block, ’cause I got stuck on the block, you go down towards St. Clair. You had Cleveland Trust bank on the corner of St. Clair in 105th, where we all banked at. For the most part. I think everybody banked at Cleveland Trust, which was just as prejudiced and crooked as the next entity. We didn’t know it. Next door to Cleveland Trust was Quickie’s Meats. We went to Quickie’s Meats on St. Clair. There was an A & P on 103rd and St. Clair, A & P grocery store. One block from A & P was a Kroger’s. There was a bowling alley called, not the Trianon, the– No, the bowling– That’s on Euclid. It wasn’t called Trianon. I forget the name. It was a bowling alley. Then coming back this way, the YMCA was two storefronts. Before they built a new YMCA, it was two storefronts. On the corner there was a drugstore, a Rexall drugstore. And then there was a chicken wing place next door to that on 105th and St. Clair. You come down a little further, going towards Bratenahl there was Fisher Foods. Right next to Fisher Foods there was a post office, which is still there now, a new one. Across the street from the post office was Oliver Wendell Holmes Elementary School, which is no longer there. Come back this way, there was Kronheim, I believe it was Kronheim or something like that, furniture store on the corner. Across the street there was a drugstore on that corner. And a Woolworth’s was next to the drugstore. And then you had, around the corner was the library on Parkwood. It was a library. And you go around a block, two more blocks, you had Glenville High School. So. And then you had Giant Tiger was right there. And Kroger was up by A & P. I already mentioned that. He had– There was a tire place, a battery and tire place. It was called Finn Tire. Finn Tires was right there. I’m getting you in the Glenville neighborhood, and down on 110th off St. Clair, there was an ice cream shop on 110th called Dairy Whip, Dairy King, ice cream shop. Everybody went there and got a milkshake. And the Epicure bar was on the corner. Monreo [phonetic] funeral homes on the corner of 110th, across the street from St. Al [St. Aloysius] Catholic School and Church. Now, that’s just on 105th and St. Clair that I can give you. Now, you step over and you go to another heart of Glenville. Also with that, which I keep missing was Superior and 105th. Now, let’s go up that way, because you talk to people who live in different sections of Glenville, they’ll tell you about this section. I just told you about my section, but I’m gonna tell you, see if I can stretch it a little bit. You’re going up a little further. You had Tom and Randy’s grocery store that was on the corner of Grantwood. It was called Tom and Randy’s. And then you had– There was a drug store. Shauter’s drugs, Shauter’s drugstore. You had Apollo weightlifting going close to superior and 105th. You had the Liberty Theater on Superior. Only cost 15, 20 cents to get in the Liberty Theater. There was also a Fisher’s down that end. [responding to Debra Martin] Alhambra’s on Euclid and 105, out of Glenville. I’m staying on it. I’m staying right in the Glenville community, you know? Let me see here. You had Dearing’s, which was another Dearing’s. There was one Dearing’s on Kempton and 105. You had another Dearing’s was 110th and Superior. Forest City Hospital was on right across from the library on Parkwood and St. Clair. It closed the hospital down. I did see Muhammad Ali in that hospital. He came to the hospital as a young boxer, and I came to see him. I saw him. Yep. He bugged with me. Like that kind of stuff, you know? Yep. And don’t forget, we got to talk about Scatter’s. I’ll tell you all about.

Debra Martin [01:22:24] Was Arlington House in Glenville?

Leo Martin [01:22:26] No, I never heard of Arlington House.

Debra Martin [01:22:28] It’s right across from Forest Hill on Arlington going towards Greater Friendship church.

Leo Martin [01:22:32] Oh, yeah. But I didn’t know too much about it as a kid. [crosstalk]

Debra Martin [01:22:34] That was where the remaining white people went.

Leo Martin [01:22: Yeah. Alright. [crosstalk] Well, see, she has a whole different view. She has a whole different view of the community. And then– And you see– Yeah, see, getting back to the schools, when I first was going to school there, there was Columbia Elementary School, Oliver Wendell Holmes, which we called O. W. Holmes, on Saint, on 105th and St. Clair. We had Doan, which is on Superior and 105th. I’m just giving you general proximity. We had Miles Standish, which was on Adams, at the very end of Adams where it turned close to the park, Rockefeller Park where we fought the white boys, okay? So you see the geographics. Then the politics of city of Cleveland decided we didn’t want these Black folks to get out of the neighborhoods. We started making a couple of dollars and getting smart, so we started wanting to branch out and buy some homes and things, right? They decided to build some, some more schools. So they built Stephen E. Howe, which is over by the lake. They built, I forget the name of the school on Lakeview, by Tuscora, elementary School. They built a new Whitney Young, the old Glenville, they remodeled it and built a new one. Okay. Patch Henry stayed the same. It was and old school. It was an old school. I will tell you something. Sidebar. Patrick Henry, Audubon. Audubon is in the John Adams district. Audubon is a junior high school over by Woodhill Park. Patrick Henry is over in Forest Hills. Audubon and Patrick Henry are just like Glenville and Kennedy. They flipped the blueprint way back when. Same school. Guess that’s why they did it. So back to the story. Okay. I didn’t, I didn’t remember that. I just remember that people don’t know that. They gotta look at the building. You’ll see. Okay, now back we are. Okay, so. So I’m just trying to think of stores and businesses that we catered to. And that’s what we catered to for the most part. We really stayed in our neighborhoods and shopped because we had very good businesses and very good store owners, and they catered to us. We didn’t have to go to anywhere. The only time we would go somewhere is downtown. And that was big. We put on suits and ties to go downtown to shop, you know. And you just didn’t go downtown just haphazardly, you know, it was, it was a reason. Well, one of the reasons we go downtown is your mother was turning in her stamps, you know, tax stamp day. She collects so many stamps, and they turn them in and redeem them for them dollars, and they go shopping. So everybody knows about them stamps if they told you, you ever heard them. H & H Green Stamps and Eagle Stamps. You never heard of that? Nobody mentioned that? Oh, my God. Oh, Lord Jesus. I’m giving you some information. So H & H Green Stamps and Eagle Stamps, everybody collected them. Everybody had stamps. It was, I think Wednesday was stamp day. And you had books, three dollars a book, stuff. It’s stuff. So that I’m just giving you–

Julie Gabb [01:25:44] How did you get stamps?

Leo Martin [01:25:47] When you buy stuff. Tax stamps. Tax. You buy something, you pay something. They give you tax stamps, just like, just like today, I guess they would be equivalent to a bonus card or the card, you know, same thing. It’s just, it’s a perk to shop at their place. You know, we get, today is double stamp day. So you buy something from here today, we give you double stamps. So everybody go shop there, get double stamps because it was more important to fill that book up so you can go downtown to redeem those stamps and get three bucks. Remember, $3 in the fifties was probably like 15, 20 dollars is now, Three dollars is a lot of money for, to a mother and a housewife. You know, men didn’t do that. Women, because women did what? They shopped. All the men do, go home, go work, go to work, make money, and give the folks, their wives, the money. And they did all the shopping, paid the bills. Men just worked, you know, so women, they cut corners where they could. They had them stamps. A lot of women, a lot of mothers when I was growing up that they don’t do today. Well, first of all, all the mothers cooked. There was no microwave. They cooked, scratch, everything. Good food, unhealthy, but it was good. But it wasn’t healthy, but it was good. But they sold, they had sewing machines. It was Singer’s, remember I told you went to Singer’s sewing machine. One of the stores, there was a sewing machine store almost in every neighborhood to get your sewing machine repaired or fixed or whatever. Women made clothes. They made dresses for the girls and coats and stuff for the boys. They made clothes, gloves, hats, everything. A lot of folks sewed. They stretched their drapes. You know how you stretch drapes. If you don’t know what a drapery stretcher is, it’s all these needles around this thing. They did all that kind of stuff. It’s just a– It’s a craft or housekeeping thing that women did. When you had drapes and curtains, they did their own. They didn’t send, they didn’t send stuff out. They did it. You know, they stretch drapes. They had curtains and stuff. They didn’t have customized anything. They did it themselves. They sold and did it. And we looked beautiful. Now we can’t. Now we lost the craft. So they gotta go to the, go to the drapery store, go to the carpet store, go to here. And, you know, it was a big deal back in the day to get wall-to-wall carpet. Didn’t have wall-to-wall carpet. They had big old area rugs. Big rugs. You got wall-to-wall carpet. Oh, that was like, oh, my God. And a sectional couch. And people put plastic on their furniture. And you couldn’t sit in that room and you’d vacuum your floor so that the streaks would be in a certain line. [in a different voice] Don’t walk on that floor, take your shoes off! You know, all that kind of stuff. You know, shadow boxes and doilies. You ever heard of a doily? What work! Shadow box. All the little things. You gotta take them off every Saturday and dust them and stuff. Man, what a pain in the ass. So go ahead.

Julie Gabb [01:28:36] You’re saying earlier you mentioned about Scatter’s. Could you go more in depth about Scatter’s?

Leo Martin [01:28:42] Well, Scatters was a pretty cool dude, you know, he was, he was, he was a businessman, let’s put it that way. I can’t speak ill of him because I don’t know of him as much as I was a kid. But his nephew, Eric Hereford, was my best friend at the time. And we both had paper routes, Press paper routes, like, you know, the Plain Dealer? At one point in time, the Plain Dealer was called the Cleveland Plain Dealer. Now it’s just Plain Dealer. And then they had the Cleveland Press. And prior to the Cleveland Press, there was a Cleveland News. There was three papers in Cleveland just as big as one, one was big as the other. The News, the Press, the Plain Dealer. Well, the News came out in the morning, the Press came out in the afternoon, and the Plain Dealer came out in the morning. And people used to get their numbers off the paper. You ever heard of numbers? Okay, well, that’s a gamble thing, anyway. [crosstalk] Okay. Yeah. Okay. Get the numbers. Okay? So I was a Press paper boy. So we would sit on the corner on 105th and wait for the paper truck to come down the street. So he’d throw the papers on the corner, and then you’d take them and go up and down your street and deliver papers, right? So one day we were, I think we had, either we were waiting for the paper route, paper man to come, or we had delivered them already and we were sitting in our wagon. Maybe we weren’t even delivering paper. We might have been just playing in the wagons, you know. And we went, and we just went over to Scatter’s and got some chicken wing– I’m sorry, some fries. And, you know, we had to bathe ’em in ketchup, you know. So we’re sitting across the street, just sitting on a hundred– Just sitting in the wagons, just chilling, eating fries. Me and Eric eating fries, you know, had a good time. And this is the honest to God, truest story if anybody ever knew the story. We witnessed it. Eric is– He lives in San Diego now, and if he was here, he would tell you the same thing. Two Cadillacs drove up. Black Cadillacs drove up. When a Cadillac came through your neighborhood, it was like everybody stopped to look. Who has a Cadillac? Or who died? It’s got to be a funeral. And we only knew Cadillacs would be black or white, okay? So these two Cadillacs drove up in front of Scatter’s. We’re just sitting in the wagons like, mm, look at them Cadillacs. Wow. They pretty, pretty, you know, and, you know, and then these guys got out of the car. I can’t tell you how many. These white guys got out of the car. They walked into his restaurant, and next door to his restaurant was a cigarette machine company, distributor company that he had, and jukebox. I don’t know if it was jukebox, but he has cigarette machines where he distributed machines and made money off cigarettes, right? So we heard this pop, pop, pop, shots. But we didn’t know they were shots. Cause we just– Out there, we didn’t hear shots. We didn’t hear shots in the neighborhood. It didn’t happen in our neighborhood, so we didn’t know what they were. And these guys nonchalantly came out of the restaurant, got in their Cadillacs, and just drove up, up towards Bratenahl, drove north on 105th. Nice. Not like sped off. Just drove away. And we said, well, it’s a nice car. Okay. Then a minute later or so, you saw Scatters come staggering out of the restaurant. We thought– See, back in the day, back then, men drank a lot of booze, and it was nothing to see a man drunk staggering down the street any time of day. He’s just a drunk man going home, you know? And we saw Scatters staggering out of the restaurant. We figured he was just drunk. He was shot, but we didn’t know it. He staggered from his restaurant right next door to his cigarette distributing place right next door, and he fell dead. We just thought he fell out drunk, you know. We didn’t, we didn’t know. And then when we realized what happened, we took off. We realized what happened, we took off. Like, there was no rush of police coming. I think the police probably, hindsight, probably knew what was happening. And as after I found out some things later on in life, it had something to do with the rackets, you know. So then I went home and told my folks what happened that same day. I told my dad and mom. We were sitting down eating. I said, guess what I saw today, Dad? I told, I just described to you. And my dad had heard about it, you know. He had heard about it where he at his little hangout spot. And he told me, don’t ever tell anybody the story. Don’t say it. Don’t tell anybody, especially, at least back then, you know. And he told me in such a way that I knew not to say it, not to tell the story. So I never told it till I got older, because now all them cats is dead, you know. So I was like, whoa. That’s the story. That is the– That is the true story. I would love for you to convey to me something of what Doug Patterson could have possibly said. Give me an idea.

Julie Gabb [01:33:17] Well, he was saying that– [laughs]

Leo Martin [01:33:20] Should we turn this off?

Julie Gabb [01:33:21] Oh, no. Because it’s definitely a conflicting story. He was saying that he walked into Scatter’s and saw him dead on the floor.

Leo Martin [01:33:33] Oh! [laughs] [crosstalk] Never happened that way. He didn’t see it. He didn’t see it. He couldn’t have. He wasn’t even around. He might have been around the corner somewhere, but he didn’t see it. Me and Eric was like– Well, we never stopped eating our fries. First of all, we never stopped eating our fries because it wasn’t unusual to see some drunk man stagger and fall. It just wasn’t un[usual]– Like, man, look at your uncle. We go over there and get free food. Cause that’s his nephew. We walk in there, give us fries, shrimp, whatever. We just go. Let’s go get some wings. Go in and get some wings. A little small pop. Go out across the street and eat them. You know? That’s what happened, you know. So Doug Patterson didn’t see a thing. I’m giving you the skinny, the real deal from these two eyes. That’s the deal.

Julie Gabb [01:34:24] I’ll definitely use that.

Leo Martin [01:34:26] There’s no way no how. Now, the funny thing is, I can’t tell you who was around the neighborhood when that happened. It was in the middle of the day. It was in a broad daylight. I’m guessing somewhere. Probably that’s why I don’t think we were delivering papers. Had to be somewhere around 1, 2 o’clock in the afternoon. It was broad daylight. And then his funeral. Oh, my. Scatter’s funeral must have lasted– They rolled past his store. It must have been 50 Cadillacs. Those racketeers paid their respects for what they did. It was the biggest funeral I have ever seen until my grandmother’s and my mother’s, other than John F. Kennedy or something like that. My grandmother’s funeral and my mother’s funeral and Scatter’s funeral was probably the biggest three domestic funerals that I have ever seen in my life, period. And my wife would tell you my mother’s funeral was unusual. I don’t know why. It was ridiculous. It was about several, not too long ago. And I can’t tell you when she died. About five, six years ago, something like that. Hey, Deb. She’s upstairs. So anyway, the funeral was so big. Oh, my God. What year did my mother die? ’08. So six years ago. Yeah, almost to the day. It’s alright. She’s gotta die sometime. She’s 86. Your mother’s gonna die one day and get old, you die. You can’t live forever. I work for, I volunteer for Hospice of the Western Reserve. So I have a different outlook on death. I think it’s wonderful. You gotta die. You gotta die, right? And you’re gonna be sad, but if you’re a good Christian or you have good faith and spirituality, you know, you gotta keep going. Don’t mean ’cause somebody died, you die. You gotta keep going. Right? They ended their life. Something happened. God said, come on, you did your job. Let’s go. And we keep going. Life is good. It’s a blessing to have them, see them go. Just keep on going. And you smile, once you can get over it. Make sense?

Julie Gabb [01:36:31] Sorry. Yeah, definitely. I feel the same way. I was wondering, with Scatter’s funeral, I heard that, I was reading from the Call & Post that there was Sugar Ray. Sugar Ray Robinson and– [inaudible]

Leo Martin [01:36:45] Oh, yeah.

Julie Gabb [01:36:46] Did you see them there?

Leo Martin [01:36:48] No, I didn’t know what I was looking at. I’m looking at the cars. [laughs] I’m a kid, like, wow, wow, wow. You know, I didn’t read the paper. I didn’t read papers back then. Newspapers. My dad read the paper, you know? I didn’t know the significance of Scatter’s death. I didn’t know. Just like it wasn’t made. It wasn’t that big a deal to me. He was just an old man. A man to me, you know, that had a restaurant and he had a lot of money to me, you know, because he drove nice cars, had big furry coats and stuff, you know. You know, I’m sure those cats probably went around because he was, he was in that fast lane, you know. I didn’t see any of that. I didn’t see any of that at all because I wasn’t looking for it, you know, they were. They could have been there. I’m sure they were. You know, it was a big deal. It was a big funeral. Unbelievable. I mean, like the buses, everything stopped. Like, man, it was like that big. It’s like the president, you know. Back then when the racketeers spoke, everybody listened because everything was crooked. [laughs] So, what’s next?

Julie Gabb [01:37:53] Did you hear at all about Scatter’s birthday parties that he would hold?

Leo Martin [01:37:57] I heard about them, but I didn’t know about them. I couldn’t, I can’t even honestly speak on them. So if I started talking about. I’d be telling you a lie because I don’t know about ’em. I was a kid, you know, when he died, he died. He died. I might, I think I was about eleven, something like that, you know. I don’t know. I don’t know if Scatter’s life, except that he was, had a store, had. He had a barbecue shack, Scatter’s and he sold cigarettes out of machines and that we can get free food. I knew his nephew. I got free food from him. That’s what I knew about. That was my extent of Scatter. He was very, very fun and nice to me. He knew my name. He was just nice. Just a nice guy. He was just a fun guy, you know? So very good to the neighborhood and stuff.

Julie Gabb [01:38:41] You mentioned Cafe Tia Juana?

Leo Martin [01:38:44] Cafe Society and Tia Juana.

Julie Gabb [01:38:45] Yeah.

Leo Martin [01:38:46] Two different places. Yeah.

Julie Gabb [01:38:49] What was– You said that your father went there.

Leo Martin [01:38:52] Yeah.

Julie Gabb [01:38:53] Could you give me some explanation about that?

Leo Martin [01:38:55] It don’t have anything to do with Glenville. You know, my dad would go there. That’s one of his little spots, I think, off work. Get him a drink, you know, have him a shot or a beer. It was a very nice– All the joints around the community back then were very elegant. They were– They had piano style bars and they had dance floors and very nice places. Really nice. They weren’t holes in the wall. You didn’t go to a beer joint. They were really nice. And it was just neighborhood place. It was beautiful. I wish I had some pictures of it. And the Tia Juana, likewise, you know. And they were just nice. We weren’t allowed to go in those places as underage people. The only time you go in there, you go in there looking for somebody. I’m looking for my dad. They knew you. People knew who you were. You know, Mama says, time to come home. She knew where you were, and go get your dad, go up there and get your dad. Your mother wouldn’t even ask you. She knew you knew where he was. Go get your dad. Tell him dinner’s ready. You know that if they had to do that, they was pissed. You know, dad be half croc. Okay, go home. Okay? Is your mother mad? Yeah, she mad, Dad. Okay. You know. [laughs] Oh, my God. That’s how it was. But they were very nice neighborhood bars. They didn’t cater to a negative element. It was just– And sometimes the mothers and fathers go to the bars on the weekend because it was very nice, you know? Just– They were good places. They were. You never heard people speak negative of them. I’ll tell you that right now. Probably everybody you talk to talked in a positive light of those places, you know, even, like she mentioned the Epicure on St. Clair and 110. The only thing about what happened back then was that the men, our dads, were all products of the South and product of minimal education, and they were a product of racism. So they had to take jobs in these factories and plants and wherever they were, almost all subservient type jobs. They couldn’t get on the line or they couldn’t get on a pieceworker. They couldn’t run a machine. They had be the porters and this and that, you know what I mean? Support cast until they had to– They had to skin and grin and brownnose to get on, you know what I’m saying? And that, sometimes you tend to lose your manhood to some degree and you come home and you take it out on the elements around you. So that’s what happened. So they would drink sometimes to manage. The men would drink to cope. And it looked like they were a failure because they did that, but they had to do something to cope. It’s no worse than what they call it when soldiers go to the war? What they call it? OCD or–

Julie Gabb [01:41:41] Post Traumatic– [Stress Disorder.]

Leo Martin [01:41:42] Yeah, PTSD or something. It’s similar because they took abuse from their jobs and they had to take it to make the check, make ends meet. They had to come home and be proud. And it’s hard to be proud when somebody’s kicking you in the ass all day and calling you names and you got to eat it, and you know darn well you really don’t have to eat it, but you have to. And on top of all that, you’re getting not the same salary, underpaid, and you got to eat it, you know. Then they want to know, well, how come you don’t move? Why don’t you guys get a better house? Why don’t you get this? Because we have to eat it, you know. And so, as an older man now, I can see what our fathers had to go through, and our mothers. I hate to leave the women out because they had to bear the brunt of that. We don’t know what they bore, but they had to bear the brunt of it because the men would come home and bring their frustrations out, take it out on the families, and who caught it more than the wives? We don’t know all the things that happened behind closed doors or out in the open, but they caught it, the women caught it, and they still managed to keep their families together for the most part. Do you know what was a rarity in our community, in the Glenville community, and probably most all Black communities? Divorce. There was– I didn’t know what divorce was. And when I heard divorce, that was what white folks did. We didn’t divorce. We managed. We made it work. If we had to knock each other in the head every day, they made it work. And in the end, it seemed to be the best way. But looking back at it, I don’t think I want to be with somebody I gotta knock in the head every day. But they were managing. That’s why they did the things they did, because they were coping with the situation that they were in. We got educated. When I say we, my generation got educated. We weren’t going to take it. We protested, we got laws changed. We got things changed. We weren’t going to take it. We got educated. We understood the laws, and we applied those laws. And when you apply the law, black and white, you got to give us something. If you go through a stop sign, gotta give him a ticket. If I didn’t go through the stop sign, you can’t keep giving me the ticket because I’m Black. You gotta give him the ticket. I’ll take it once in a while, even though I didn’t go through the stop sign, but give him one every now and then, make me feel good about it. That’s what I’m– You know what I’m saying? And so we fought. We’re not taking a ticket anymore. We don’t even want the ticket anymore. You know, take the ticket back. I’ll go to jail. Hence Martin Luther King. No more tickets. I’ll go to jail. I’m not gonna fight you, but I’ll go to jail. The funny thing about it is, what was the point? The point is fear was the point because they feared that somebody was going to measure up or succeed or go past. All you had to do was your best, and if you did your best, everything will fall out like it’s supposed to be. If you didn’t fight so hard to stop people from succeeding, we would have so much more in this country. So much more, correct? I don’t mean to ask you, I’m just saying rhetorically, we have so much more. It’s crazy. It’s just crazy. You know, none of these neighborhoods in this country should be segregated. People should be able to go back and forth any way you want to, but they are. They just are. The police departments. There should be no racial profiling. Everybody should be the same. It’s crazy how we see each other. And you can’t say, I don’t see color. First thing you see when you open your eyes is color. Unless you’re colorblind. First thing you see. I don’t see race. You a lie because you said it. You have to see it. We all see it. We live it. We’re born in it. You live in Independence. You had to see it. Oh, I didn’t have to see it. Yeah, because you live in a white community. Soon as you stepped out. Oh, no, we better cross the street. There you go, right there. Why’d you cross the street? Well, what I, my folks told me what I saw on TV. What? Am I right? And you probably looking at two or three kids that don’t know you like, oh, you know, so. And then if they sneeze two times, get handcuffed, thrown on the ground or, what are you doing in this neighborhood? I didn’t know I had to– I couldn’t come to your neighborhood. My folks pay taxes. I pay taxes. I thought this was America. Right?

Julie Gabb [01:46:17] Yeah.

Leo Martin [01:46:17] Make sense?

Julie Gabb [01:46:18] Even in my neighborhood. I live in Edgewater.

Leo Martin [01:46:19] Yeah, I know. Oh, I know, I know, I know, I know the city. I know the city. But I’m just speaking in general. What was the question you asked me? Oh, about Scatter’s. [crosstalk] About, oh, about the bars. About the bars. Yeah. There’s some good restaurants, boy, there’re nice good restaurants.

Julie Gabb [01:46:38] Yeah. Were you present for the Glenville, like, Glenville shootout? So, like the Hough riots?

Leo Martin [01:46:44] Mm hmm. Yeah. Heck, yeah. You wanna know about ’em? Well, the Hough riots started, I believe. Cause by me living on 120th and St. Clair, I don’t know exactly how it started, but I think they started around 79th and Hough, and it didn’t, it never had to be that way. None of that never had to happen. But, you know, things happen for a reason. It was about time for Hough to be gutted out, and they literally, they literally set the whole neighborhood on fire almost simultaneously. And it was in protest of– In a nutshell, it’s like your parent, it’s like your parents saying, I’m gonna get you. And every day you do something, they just keep building up and building up, and one of these days, she’s gonna grab you by your pigtail and tear you behind up for all those things. Well, it just kept building up in the Black community, things that were happening, and it was just so bad. And it got to be one hot summer day. It didn’t happen at night. One hot summer day, just couldn’t take it no more. And the pot just exploded. And once it– Once it exploded, you couldn’t get it back together. And it just went– It just went– It just went– It just kept going. And see, it didn’t just start from Hough. It happened in San Francisco, Chicago, Detroit. It happened all over the country almost simultaneously. It was just– It got to a point of a breaking point. The white folks just got stupid, pretty much, like, what do you think? We’re just gonna take it? You know, at what point? And you see, you had Malcolm X, his philosophy. You had Martin Luther King, his philosophy. You had Angela Davis and all that going on. You had all these social-conscious people doing things, making everybody more aware of their Black goodness. Not the Marilyn Monroe thinking about themselves and taking pride in themselves. And that’s what that all was all about, about taking pride in yourself. We’re just not gonna take it anymore. You’re just not going to use as a doormat, period. We work, we pay taxes, we go to war, we go to the service, we go to school. How come we got to be treated like this? We’re not going to take it anymore. Absentee landlords, unfair pricing practices, poor foods in the neighborhoods, all these things and more, just not gonna take it anymore, you know? And that’s what happened. I saw the riots, I saw horses running down the streets. My dad came out in the yard with a shotgun, telling the mounted police not to ride his grass ’cause he wanted to keep his grass nice. There go the nice neighborhood. So they had to ride those horses in those red brick streets. They had to walk real careful because they had, what, horseshoes? And they would slide. They had tear gas. We had to roll our windows up and close our windows at night in the summertime because the tear gas was all up in the air. It was like a war zone, you know. People were shooting. They were throwing fire bombs, Molotov cocktails. I was doing it. I was right there in it, too. Remember, I was a teenager. That’s who does this stuff. I was doing it. Our parents were at home. It was us, the young folks and the socially conscious college students and the older teenagers, 18 to 24. They were doing it, and we were supporting them doing it. It looked like we were doing bad, you know, in hindsight, it looked like we were doing bad because we were destroying private property and we were doing bad. But sometimes you got to take two steps back to go three steps forward or one step back to go two steps forward. And if those entities had been fair as a whole, this never would have happened. In other words, they supported all the negativity that we were incurring. They supported it because they didn’t do anything about it. Did you see the movie– Did you see the movie, Spike Lee’s movie about the pizza shop in the Black neighborhood? What’s it called? Same thing. Same thing. They exploded toys, place up, saying kind of, kind of the same thing. Not directly, but indirectly, kind of the same thing. That’s on one point. You see? All he had to do was be fair. He was not fair. What they want – if you remember that movie, it’s called Do the Right Thing – all they wanted was for him to put some pictures on the wall of Black role models. That’s all. A few. But he’s in a 100% minority neighborhood. Here’s an Italian, and he’s gonna put Italian guys on the wall and want the Black folks to cater to his restaurant. They didn’t have nowhere else to go, so he had to buy his pizza because there’s nowhere else to go. They don’t have cars, but he could have just put a couple pictures up. He would never had it happen. Same, same thing. Kind of the same thing that happened with the Hough riots and then the Glenville riots. They’re two different riots, but similar, you know, and people just got tired of it. They just exploded. And there was more positive that came out of all that than negative, period. It changed the face of Cleveland. And I hold at fault all the politicians, Black and white, but more white. I hold a police department. I don’t hold our parents, the working people, because they only were trying to make ends meet, and they only can play with the cars that was dealt them, and that was lack of education, coming up from the South, trying to keep food on the table and roof over our heads and being family. They were doing that, but they were doing it at such a uphill cost and hurdle. They weren’t trying to stop it. My folks weren’t trying to stop it. Nobody was trying to stop it. Hey, shit. Set it on fire. They would sit at home, and when I came back home at 10:00 at night looking like I’ve been doing something. I didn’t get punished. They knew where I was. They knew where I was, smelling like gasoline and stuff. I go upstairs, take a shower, mother wash my clothes. Tomorrow’s another day. And that’s just how it was.

Julie Gabb [01:53:03] What was your experiences with the Glenville riots?

Leo Martin [01:53:07] Glenville riots were really close to home because it started on Lakeview and Superior in that general area, and it moved all the way across to 105th and St. Clair. I knew some guys that got involved in it personally. At that point, I was getting more and more– I wasn’t too involved in that at all. I just tried to stay out of trouble. That got to be– Well, see, the Glenville riots came after the Hough riots, and then the police and the National Guard and everything, they got a little bit more violent. They were just killing you. So I just realized I couldn’t stop a bullet, see? And so I just kind of ducked out to keep alive. But those were very violent– It was. It was a short– The Glenville riots didn’t last as long as the Hough riots. They might have lasted a week or two. I’m not really sure about that. So if somebody want to contradict me they can, because I’m not sure. You talk about 40, 50 years ago, 50 years ago, so. But it was pretty violent and pretty scary, but. And see, it happened in our neighborhoods, you know, in this country, we never had a war in this country from another country. We fought ourselves in a civil war, but we never experienced a war in this country. Those riots were like a war in this country. We experienced what it would– We had a small taste of what a war would be like. You wake up in the morning, tear gas, you go to bed at night, tear gas, you can’t get fresh air, tear gas. We didn’t have air conditioning. Tear gas, you can’t really go to sleep tear gas. You put wet towels around your eyes so you can go to sleep. Tear gas. You hear shootings right outside your window, running down the street. Hear cops or you hear sirens up and down the street. Three, four o’clock in the morning. Your dad gotta go to work. He’s pissed because he can’t get sleep, right? Okay. It’s the war zone. It was a war zone. Get up in the morning, you go down to the– Get some– Go down to get some milk or something from the store, no store. Goddamn it. You know, you gotta walk somewhere else. Get somewhere, and you hope you don’t get in trouble. Cause there’s a curfew. Try and get some milk for some cereal or your mother’s sake. This, that, and the other. You do your best. You know where to go. Guess you got stuff, you know, and you didn’t want to steal anything, but you did what you did, you know, and it was, it was tough. And then you talk to somebody, like, I was like, in my car today. I’m working right now for 30 days for the board of elections, and I’m a team leader. I have several people under me. And we go to nursing homes, assisted living homes, and vote people. Absentee ballots, okay? We read the ballot to them, and we vote for them because they can’t get to the polls. So in my car, I have with me, in my van, I got three lily white people. They live in Westlake, Strongsville, and Garfield Heights. And they don’t– They fear the east side. They fear the east side. We had to go to Euclid Beach today, and we had to go to Eliza Bryant on 72nd and Wade Park, if you know where that is. They were definitely afraid. And so we were driving back, and they asked me a question about how come the neighborhood have to be like this. I said, I really don’t think you really want to ask that question. One of the guys is the guy I want you to interview from Glenville. He’s 83. He kind of knows. He’s pretty good about it, these other two women. I just, I ask the question the best I can. And my point to that conversation is that there’s a lot of white folks in the cities, in these cities, in this country, in this country, especially in a rural section, this is why they’re all Republicans. They just really haven’t experienced city life. Inner-city life. I didn’t say ghetto Black, just inner-city life. Inner-city life is different than living anywhere else. Suburbs, you know, in rural sections of the country. And the portrayal that we get because we live from inner city is the news portrays us. And the news, I told you, walking out and in here, it’s the worst enemy of this society. The news only gives you what they want you to see. The news has portrayed everything in this country as they want it to be seen, in a sensationalistic point of view, or as I see it, because of the way I am, the way you made me. Not you, but the way I was made in a society, in a racial line point of view. So you get people that like, people that was in my car and people that live in these rural communities, because most rural communities in Ohio are white. 99 2/3 percent are white, and almost all of them are Republican because they think all inner-city people are Black, thieves, rapists, drug addicts, lazy government recipient, handout, free, baby-making slobs. Crime. We wake up. We wake up. We come out of the womb with a knife and a gun in our hand. So society has made us that way. So here’s what happens. People don’t know how the inner-city life is, so they get the perception that everything is a failure because we’re lazy and we don’t want it to be right. So this lady asked me in a car today, how come these homes don’t have the windows fixed and the houses aren’t painted and stuff? I said, you don’t really ask me that question. So I said, let me give you a couple of points. I said, one, we have major absentee landlord. Do you know what that is? No. This chick is 60 some years old. You don’t understand. She lives in Westlake. I said, boy. She says, you know, I’ve been living a sheltered life. I’m white. I said, see, you’re white and you’re Republican, and you don’t know. And you’ll vote Republican till you die. And you’re not– You don’t know the real story because the Republican Party don’t want you to know the real story. And we’re not supposed to talk politics. There’s always a Democrat, Republican in the car. So there was two Democrats, two Republicans, but I don’t know one talking. And I says, well, I said, well, you have absentee landlords. When you– When a landlord moves out of a place, he’s absent, that’s called an absentee landlord. So he has a multiple dwelling facility, two-family home, whatever, and he rents it out. He moves. So he’s not there to keep it up like he would if he lived there. One. And you don’t expect renters to paint the house, do you? Okay. So the windows break. They call the landlord. Landlord say, I’m not gonna keep fixing the window ’cause it keeps breaking. Then the landlord needs to put his foot down, or the city needs to put it for their own inspections. Okay? One. Two. Economics. Economics dictate a whole lot. The homeowners can’t fix their homes because of economics, period. Why? Let’s go all the way back. I’m in the car talking to this. I said, one, don’t get equal pay. Don’t get a fair shake on jobs in plants and places like that. We don’t get a fair education. We don’t have the proper role models to give us the push. All those things. But yet, and still, back in the fifties, when Khrushchev was running Russia and he took his shoe off and pounded it on the podium, said, We will bury you. Speaking of the United States. Arch-enemy. Today we have Black men going to Afghanistan, went to Iraq, and you have Russians coming over here can’t even speak English, and you will give a Russian money from Social Security office, a job and a house, and you’ll put your foot on the neck of a Black soldier when he comes back. Something’s wrong with that picture. That is the damnedest thing. You understand? That’s what I was telling her. I said, what’s wrong with that picture? Do you understand how uneven that is? We’re not blind to that fact. And she was going like, I don’t know these things. That’s not what I’m talking about. I said, that is exactly what you’re talking about. So you see all these guys out here on the street? They don’t have jobs. We’re at now 105th and St. Clair. They don’t have jobs. Most of them were probably in the service. Vietnam or the– What do you call that war back in the eighties, or the Afghan war, the Iraqi war. They got. They got syndromes. They can’t find jobs. They have mental problems. They’re unemployed. You can’t blame the government because the government is not responsible for employment. I never understood why all these politicians want to blame the government because of high unemployment. That’s not their responsibility to give me a job. It’s my responsibility to get myself qualified for a job, period. But at least give me a fair shake to get qualified for the job. And then when I go stand in line to apply and I sell myself, give me a fair shake to get the job, and then don’t let me be the first one to get fired after I’m the last one to get hired. Do you understand now? They can’t fix the window ’cause they don’t have the glass. Why they break the window? Because it got broke. Because they’re kids. Kids break windows. Your kids don’t break windows ’cause you got a big old 3,000-square-foot house and they got their own bedroom, right? These kids living three in a bedroom. What do you want them to do? They don’t have an elevator. They gotta go up and down four flights of stairs, period. They don’t have a credit card. Their mom doesn’t run them to soccer practice and stuff. Don’t even know what that is. They don’t have nice cars. You see nice cars around here? That’s it. That’s the deal. I said, you don’t understand. It’s a whole different life in the city once you start. Well, what happened to East Cleveland? Same thing. I said, same thing. Exactly the same thing. You had absentee landlord, white flight. Well, just because white folks move don’t mean they gotta get run down. Well, they move from old dwellings, one. Two, they become absentee landlords. Everything that’s just didn’t get sold, it’s rental. Right? Then economics just change. Why do you have to move anyway? What, do I stink? Am I dirty? Are you afraid of me? I shower every day like you do. I eat dinner at the table with my family like you do. Why do you have to move? I’m not gonna bite you. I certainly don’t want to screw your daughter. So, what’s up with that? That’s how I had to go with her. Well, you take everything so extreme. It’s the facts. Why do you have to move? How come we’re the ones moving and you’re moving? If we flip the script, you’d be pissed. See? I flipped the script. My wife and I flipped the script. We moved to Beachwood long ago and those Jews couldn’t move because it was a good community. But by the same token, it was just one of me and then one more of me. It wasn’t a major deal and these homes were too pricey. So we weren’t going to get a major exodus or a flight in. And the realtors couldn’t steer because it was too heavy. The money was too heavy, so they stayed. Plus, it was a good community. No less than Glenville. No less than Glenville. This city is community. And I showed them where I live and they said, well, how come your neighborhood didn’t tear down? I said, boy, I swear to God. I said, because I own the home and I’m here. My neighbor owns the home, and he’s there. That’s not an absentee landlord. Two. They’re single-family dwellings. They’re three, 4,000 square foot homes. And let me tell you something. You invest two or $300,000 you’re gonna cut the grass, you’re gonna fix the window, and you’re gonna make damn sure that the politics of it takes care of your place. Period. Right? So on your street where you live in Westlake - I was talking to the lady – if five Blacks moved into your neighborhood, boy, you’d go paranoid, wouldn’t you? You would ask the question, why did they want to move on my street? Why do you wanna move my neighborhood? I asked you. Why are you even asking the question? Because you have a fear. Fear of change. How about acceptance? Everything’s– I’m driving. Everything, I’m driving. Slow down, St. Clair. Everything would be wonderful. They just want to get it. Everybody wants the same. Republican, Democrat, independent Black, white, Jewish, yellow, white, whatever. Know what we want? We want a good quality education for our kids, raise our families. We want a nice career. Go on vacation once in a while. Go to church, have home, two cars, little bill, little money here and there. We want to retire, kick it back and die. That’s all we want. That’s all we want. We don’t want to do anything else. That’s all we want. I think almost every American wants pretty much the same. But you go into the rural areas. I’m a rat bastard. You know? That is the strangest thing. And they have never set foot close to the city, in any big city. But they’ll vote against anything I’m for because they think all we want to do is take, take, take, welfare, Medicaid. Welfare, Medicaid. When in fact, as soon as they can turn 62 or 65 they’re in line to get Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Period. All your Republicans - two’s in the car, Republicans – all you Republicans getting Social Security. Do you know Congress would like that to be off the table? Do you understand what they’re telling you? They want it off the table. And they want Medicaid off the table. And they want you not to be in control of your female organs. These men in stuffy collars, white shirts and ties want to tell you how to have it, how not to have babies. And when you can put some pills in you or when you can put some contraceptive in you or not. Do you understand that? They’re all for their own good. And they want to tell you that– They want to tell you that your lifestyle is such that you don’t need to make the same amount of money as a man. Ain’t that a damn shame? But you support that bullshit. You should have heard me. I said, and you go right ahead, because they got you women thinking like second-class, dumbass citizens, and that’s what you are. They was pissed in my car, they gonna rob me tomorrow. I said, that makes no sense. Here I am, I’m getting my neck stepped on, and I want you to get equal pay. And do you know 50 years ago, if I looked at you in Alabama, just looked at you, I would get lynched or get hung. Just looked at you. God knows if you were riding the backseat of my car, what would happen to me like you are now. I said, you never even knew. You didn’t even think about that, did you? I said, do you know why Black folks were so happy about O.J. getting off? We didn’t even care if he was guilty or not guilty, although we have our spin. We were just happy that he beat the system. That’s all. He won by playing the system by their rules and won. Now, whether he was guilty or not had nothing to do with nothing, because how many Black folks got lynched and got put in jail and got killed just for looking or speaking to a white woman in the South. Didn’t have anything to do with the law, just because they did it and they got lynched. You never questioned that. But you want to question O.J. That’s why we were happy. He won. Now he’s a dumbass for getting back and put in jail. But he won, he didn’t care. We don’t care about what he won. He just beat the system. And the system was pissed ’cause they couldn’t help but let him win. Cause he played the rules by their rules. He played the game by their rules. And they tried to change the rules, just like you guys are trying to change the rules now in your favor when it comes to voter suppression. So all of a sudden you got to change the rule. How come? There is no voter fraud? Why even address the issue? Why are you voting 70 something times, voting down the Affordable Care Act when you know it’s never going to change again. It’s the law of the land. You’re just wasting taxpayers money. None of those Republican congressmen should get paid. You should hurry. They think I’m crazy, but I only speak– Did I say anything? That’s not true. I don’t know where you stand. I don’t know where you stand in politics, but if you, I would be willing to–

Julie Gabb [02:08:54] I almost wish that– Just like a digression. I guess I almost just wish, like, that you’re talking to people that, like, I went to school with, from Independence that have like, no–

Leo Martin [02:09:05] No side. No–

Julie Gabb [02:09:07] Seen the nursing.

Leo Martin [02:09:09] Get them together. I will come talk to them. Get them. Get them to– Get them together. I will come talk to them. I don’t know if any of your other interviewees have come like I come.

Julie Gabb [02:09:20] But, I mean, I guess it comes down to a lot of people–

Leo Martin [02:09:25] How they view life, how they view things.

Julie Gabb [02:09:26] Yeah. It’s just they get that education. Like, they’re just sort of. Some people just don’t take it proactive view– Or they just sort of are like, well, we’re the same. We’re the same ones. What it comes down to. But they don’t see that. You know, there’s that you have to account for all the times, the shortcomings of the past just to make the same opportunities now. Yeah, so that’s– people are just–

Leo Martin [02:09:52] Yeah, that’s– That’s what I thought. I don’t know what question you asked, but I get off into a tangent, so.

Julie Gabb [02:09:56] No, no, it was about the, you know, the Glenville shootout.

Leo Martin [02:10:01] Oh, the Glenville riots, right.

Julie Gabb [02:10:02] Yeah.

Leo Martin [02:10:02] My wife will give you a spin on that, too, ’cause she lived right in the heart of it. Yeah. Was she there? Yeah, she lived right in the heart of it. We both live in the heart. We pretty much both lived in the heart of it. You know, I can see it. I can visualize it in my head. I can see all the smoke and all the cops and all the National Guard and the horses and the mounted police and the tanks and all that stuff. I can see it. I can literally see it. And I can smell the tear gas. Just like the Ohio State riots. I can see it. You know, I can feel it burning my eyes and stuff. Taking showers and taking baths. Trying to get it off your skin. It still burns, you know. You can see it. What are you going to do? And these parents, these, these homeowners and these property owners and these store owners, it was, it was unfair to them, especially the homeowners, because it hurt their properties, it hurt their communities. They got a negative stigma. So who wanted to buy a house there? Who want to move there? Hence the neighborhoods out there are now. And nothing you can do. It’s just terrible. They didn’t have the rights in Cleveland Heights or in Independence, did they? They made sure they knew what they were doing. All that’s by design. Even though we did it to ourselves, but we couldn’t, we couldn’t get in cars and drive to Independence and start setting on fire. We only could put the wrath where we felt it, you know? So there you go. Because in the long run, well, in the short run, we penalize ourselves because when the smoke all cleared, we had nowhere to go, to go shopping, to go do anything. All our commerce was gone, up in smoke. So now we had to get cars and buses to go get food and stuff. And that’s crazy. We penalized ourselves on the one hand, but in the long run, it was the best thing that could have happened. You gotta take one step back to go two steps forward. Hope I’m not talking too low. That’s why I’m riding this mic. So.

Julie Gabb [02:11:47] The last thing I want to ask you was about, have you ever heard of the phrase Gold Coast at all?

Leo Martin [02:11:55] Gold Coast? Yeah, that’s just a, that was a new phrase. Gold. Gold Coast. My wife can speak on that. The Gold Coast. Oh, man. See, yeah, I heard of it. It’s the rich folks’ land. It’s the rich folks’ line. And I’m not directly– I can’t directly speak on it, but the Gold Coast was that vein– I want to ask my wife, but that wouldn’t be fair to the interview. The Gold Coast was that vein, a line, I’m gonna say. I’m guessing, I think it was, that line down Euclid, these big rich and fancy homes, rich and famous. The Rockefellers and the Eatons live around University Circle, Magnolia Drive. You ever heard of Magnolia? Beautiful street, which, where VA hospital is now? All that section, Wade Park and stuff. Now that might have been a little money section of Glenville probably, but it was on a border of Glenville to this other community next to, adjacent to Glenville, which I don’t think it really had a tag name, the University Circle area. Okay. It was starting to get less Black, but, um, that would be the Gold Coast. Um, and that was, that was the, the strong, rich old white money. And they moved. Where they moved? To South Park, North Park, Shaker, new Gold Coast, if I got it right. If you ever ride down Euclid, see Cleveland Clinic has kind of torn down all those big homes and stuff. But there used to be some– And the Gold Coast was Chester. Yeah, you can see some old home, not these new homes they’ve built some old homes that look all run down. Those were majestic homes. Hough and Chester had beautiful homes, and Euclid, just big, magnificent homes, you know, and that was, I think that’s what they were calling the Gold Coast, and it didn’t go. We didn’t have a lot to do with University Circle or Western Reserve University. What did I just say? Western Reserve? Then there was Case School of Technology. Two different schools. Did you hear anybody tell you that? Okay. We didn’t have a whole lot to do with them. The only thing we had to do with them is going past them to get to Rainbow, get to the hospital, because somebody busted their head or something, you know, or had a baby, and we didn’t have much to do with that. UH hospital was not called, UH hospital. It was called Lakeside. There was no University Hospital. It was just called Lakeside Hospital. Then you had McDonald House and all those kind of things. So in Cleveland Clinic, the original building is there. You’ve seen it, right? You have? Okay. And there was just a lot of entities around. And the Gold Coast was all that. Not anything to do with Black folks at all, because we didn’t have money. I don’t think anybody in our neighborhood made more than $20,000, $10,000 a year, you know, in the fifties and stuff. If you– Somebody bought a new car, it was big news. If your dad bought a car, everybody came to see that car. Every time somebody bought a new car, almost somebody got a new lawnmower. You didn’t buy stuff. We didn’t have power lawnmowers. Everybody used to push, push behind, walk behind lawnmower. And then somebody who decided to flex their muscles and go to Sears somewhere or western auto, one of these stores, and buy them a $35 lawnmower, that was a big deal to get a gas lawnmower. Oh, my God. That was a major deal, you know. And here’s, here’s a funny thing. You know how you got all these world-famous barbecue places now? Everybody got the best sauce, and they do this. They know how to cook barbecue. This way, that way, this way, that way? Never happened. I’m giving you a deal. No one barbecued but Black folks. White folks didn’t barbecue. They didn’t know what ribs were till they ate it from us. They didn’t eat greens, beans, Brussels sprouts, that kind of– They didn’t eat that stuff. They ate it from us. Now all of a sudden, they’re the world famous. You got Tony Roman’s and all these places got ribs because they got money and they got businesses. They got opportunities where we didn’t. What do we have? We got Hot Sauce Williams and places like that. We don’t have big food chains nationwide or citywide, not to any great degree of success that can go across racial lines. But you got Tony Roman’s, where. I’m just using Tony Roman’s as an example. You got restaurants where Black folks would go order ribs and sit down and eat. We don’t have that many places like that in Black communities. We don’t have that kind of opportunity to expand. But we were the ones nationwide who made this meal so good. Ribs and those kind of things. Cooking out. All of a sudden, cooking out became– We would cook out. Now it’s grilling. You know, charcoal, now it’s gas. You understand all those things. A lot of things that we initiated that we lost or didn’t get credit for, and those are positive things. And then when we did get credit for them, sometimes they would turn into a buffoonery kind of thing, you know. So. And I don’t know why it has to be that way, because we don’t try to do anything harmful. Just give us a fair shake. We just want to live. But it just don’t seem to be that way. Even in college, it was like that. But you learn how to play the game. If you’re gonna succeed, like Leslie Jones, you got to give him credit. And I know all my compadres, all my friends, and all the kids I grew up with who have grown and had families and retiring, like, I’m retired, and everybody’s starting to retire now. We’re all at that retirement age. I know if they succeeded in life to whatever they did, I don’t care what career or business or how they did it, to what degree of wealth or what degree of success or lack thereof, I know they caught holy hell and had to go through some hoops and jump through some hoops and go over some hurdles to do what they did. I don’t care how successful you are, you can’t smile at me and say you didn’t because it’s just not– You didn’t have that, that smooth of a road. Everybody did. Leslie Jones did. Pasco did. Margie Pyle did. I did. Anybody you interview from Glenville did. Trust me, they could have gone to a HBCU, historic black college or university, and they still did, because you got to come out. You can’t stay in that box or that bubble. You got to step out into the world. And fear is the optimum word on why things are the way they are. Fear. Once they went and got the slaves, brought ’em over to this country, then it became fear. We got this economy and this commerce off the backs. Then when they got– When this– When slavery was deemed to be unconstitutional, and they had to take that off the table, then fear really came in. We fear that these people who we know, really, we really know that they’re really people. They’re not animals. We know they’re really people, but we don’t want to say it. So we’re going to keep them at animals, and we fear that they may be our equals or they may succeed. So we got to keep ’em down because we got to treat them like property and stock, because this is our commerce. We don’t want to get our hands dirty. We don’t want to break our backs picking that cotton and doing that. We want to keep these people thinking. As long as we can keep them thinking small, they’ll be alright. Give them a little bit. Make ’em happy. Give ’em a little bit. Make ’em happy. Keep that fear. Keep ’em there. We fear. Keep them fearful. What happened was, we broke out of that box. We’re not fearful anymore. In general, we’re not fearful anymore. We get smart. We know the game. We know the rules, like you do. So let’s play. Anything, and I do pat myself on the back, not directly, but anything that Black people put their hands on, they succeed. Anything. I have yet to see something they haven’t gotten involved in where they don’t succeed to the top. Almost everything. They succeed right to the top of it, you know. And if you– If they were– If they were allowed to stay in it freely, they would take it over. And as soon as we start trying to take some over, not trying, because we succeed in it, the rules change. Or they change rules to handcuff us to a point. Let me give you an example? Then I’m gonna go eat my dinner. I’m late. I should be getting ready for bed. Example. Let’s use sports. Let’s use NBA basketball or football. Let’s use basketball. It just happened. You know, March Madness. So, at one point, we couldn’t shoot. We couldn’t shoot. We couldn’t dunk the ball. Why would they stop players from dunking the ball? It was a technical foul to dunk. You ever heard of that? It was a technical foul to dunk a ball in the game. Answer that question. Who couldn’t jump that high? Okay, now, so. So we say, okay, so we dunked the ball in warmups. They made it a technical foul if you dunk the ball in warmups. Isn’t that crazy? That’s the dumbest thing. So we started shooting the ball too well, because we couldn’t dunk the ball. So we came outside. No, first we started driving to the hole too fast, to the paint, into the basket. So they put the paint down, right? So then we started shooting the ball too well. So they put the three point arc up, make us go out further. Then, because it’s such a high-energy, high intense sport. When we get into a fracas, they made a rule. If you lean, if you even stand up, if there’s a fight, if you just stand up at your bench, penalize. If you take one step on the floor, penalize. Cruelly penalize. In baseball, which is pretty much a white sport, man, the pitcher hits a guy with a ball, the whole two teams can fall to the ground, go back, play ball. Hockey. Guy takes a stick, beat you in the head with it, crash your head into the glass. They start fighting. Take the gloves off. What the referee do? Stand at your fight. Independent box. Two minutes. Why? Because we haven’t taken those sports over. I can tell you why we haven’t taken them over, but we haven’t. We could. We haven’t. Okay, you see what I’m saying? Rules haven’t changed yet, but they changed for us. In football example, we can’t take helmets off anymore till we walk to the sidelines. Because we would take our helmets off to explain to referee ’cause we weren’t happy with a call. So he said, you can’t do it anymore. Intimidation, they thought. When we scored a touchdown way back when, Billy “White Shoes” Johnson, you never heard of him? This guy wore white shoes for Houston Oilers. He wore white shoes. He scored. Touchdown. He scored a touchdown. He’d take his helmet off, throw it down, and he’d do a dance with them white shoes. Touchdown. They said, foul. Showboating. He was happy. Now you had to go to the sidelines, then take a helmet off and then do your dance. Okay? They just changed the rule this year that guy’ll score a touchdown, and they’ll take the ball and dunk it over the basketball, over the goal post. Can’t do it no more. It’s crazy. It’s crazy. It just makes no sense because we dominate the sport. I just use sports example. Try to change rules. When we start succeeding in something. So as we can, soon as we can buy a house, they jack up the interest rate to make it hard, more down payment, all these kind of things. You buy a house in the community, all of a sudden they got do home inspections. They weren’t going to do a home inspection before. Now we got to do all kind of things. Keep house up. That crazy. You change the rules. You make it so hard for us to succeed but we still succeed in spite of, you know, we get beat down, you get wore out. So sometimes you just want to punch back and you go to jail. It’s just not fair, you know. Now I gotta go work tomorrow. I’m in charge of all these white folks. I didn’t ask for this job. I just go to work 30 days. They gave me, put me in charge, and I’m like, I don’t want to be in charge. So I go in there nice and smile every day. And it’s what it is, I gotta shave. I didn’t shave today, so it’s what it is. Oh, here’s the guy. I took a picture of this guy. Here’s the guy I want you to interview. I thought you were gonna come today. Here he is, right here. Turn around, turn around. My wife’s gonna say, I didn’t know it was gonna take this long. But we got to talking, so I see how Doug Patterson will get going.

Julie Gabb [02:25:05] I’ll stop the interview if that’s okay.

Leo Martin [02:25:07] Sure.