MEMORIES OF MEMORIES--The day little Toronto, Ohio took on the Pittsburgh Pirates

1911 Toronto Athletic Club, John Petras third from left

        

     I have memories of memories.  They were my grandfather's memories.   Mostly my grandfather, John Edward Petras Sr., talked about baseball, how he played for a semi-pro team--the Toronto Athletic Club--after the turn of the century.

            My grandfather played first base and sometimes second and batted cleanup for the town of 4000 residents.  I just remember bits and little chunks of his stories, but these odds and ends of this patchwork memory stick out like a seam in time.

            My grandfather played during the Dead Ball Era; so home runs were hard to come by, even on some fenceless fields that sometimes resembled more pasture than stadium.  He did tell me he hit a pitch at the old Kaul Field that landed on a fly beyond the Pennsylvania Railroad tracks, 400 and some odd feet in all.  Pappap wasn't a big man, standing 5-8 and weighing perhaps 150 pounds, and a pound of that was probably chaw tobacco.    But he had wrists and forearms as sinewy as cable steel, developed from working the sewer pipe factory since he was 12 years old, when he had to support his family of seven because his father, Joseph Petras, had become infected with tuberculosis. 

              I grew up in the 60s, my favorite players being Roberto Clemente, Bill Mazeroski and Mickey Mantle.  My grandfather always complained that the modern ball players were prima donnas, that they never played hurt like the old-timers did.  Maybe he held such sentiments because he took a high hard one that left his nose disfigured for life.  The dead ball was not so dead, after all.  

              My grandfather also played when the spitball was still legal, and besides taking an occasional high hard one to the kisser, a batter also got an occasional shot of Mailpouch squeezins right between the eyes.

            Pappap would tell me about trick plays the semi-pros would pull off once in a while, like one time a pitcher was attempting to pick off a runner on first base and he threw an errant pick-offf attempt down the right field foul line.  Turned out that errant toss was a potato and they nabbed the runner between first and second with the real ball.

            I was in my Biltmore Avenue backyard, pretending I was Whitey Ford, when suddenly out of the visitor's dugout via back porch next door appeared Fred Maple.  "Your grandfather was the greatest ballplayer from Toronto I have ever seen," Mr. Maple said.  I don't know exactly why he told me this, maybe because I was throwing rocks into his backyard.  After he told me this, I never threw rocks into his yard again.

            My grandfather, despite dropping out of school at such an early age, could speak several languages, including Slovak, Polish and German, and occasionally served as an interpreter in the trenches of Belgium and France during World War I.  He told me only the humorous anecdotes about capers he and his chums pulled off upon the officers, never about the horrors of the trenches.  But of all his tales of Army life and sports, the one I remember most is about the time the little town of Toronto, Ohio took on the mighty Pittsburgh Pirates.

            Back in the Dead Ball Era, the major league's regular season ended late September.  The players, by no means, earned the exorbitant salaries today's prima donnas do.  After the regular season, the Dead Ball Era players would supplement their incomes by returning home to farm or factory or by barnstorming against local nines.  The Pirates were one such team that regularly vied against semi-pro teams from Western Pennsylvania, and Ohio teams such as East Liverpool, Steubenville and Toronto.    

            I remember one Sunday afternoon.  My grandfather was sitting upon his threadbare red recliner, his hands clasped behind his neck, a plug of Union Workman bulging from his cheek.  My grandmother's house smelled of rhubarb pie, Neapolitan ice cream, cabbage rolls, Pinesol and Lemon Glade when suddenly I was smelling the coal soot from the kilns and giant smoke stack from the old wooden stadium across the tracks of parent company Kaul Clay.            

             The Pittsburgh Pirates came to town, hopped right off the train behind left field.   The Toronto Athletic Club had beaten their rivals East Liverpool and Steubenville and now had a star player on its squad to make this contest against the major league club more interesting.  Alva "Pick" Nalley was back on the Toronto nine.  Nalley had just returned from a stint on the Toledo Mud Hens and was looking to have a good showing against a Big League club to show he belonged. 

           

Toronto Athletic Club around 1906 or 1907.  John Petras third from the left, Pick Nalley, front row second front the left.  Nalley's presences this photo suggests it was taken during barnstorming season.

            On the visitors' squad was arguably the greatest Pittsburgh Pirate of all time, shortstop Honus Wagner.  He watched with interest my grandfather take batting practice and asked whether he could borrow my grandfather's bat for the game.  It was longer and heavier than most bats of the era and had a handle as thick as most men's wrists. With such a stick of lumber,  a batter needed strong shoulders to start the swing and whiplike wrists to finish it.  My grandfather said that it would be his honor for the Pittsburgh legend to use his bat. 

The legendary Honus Wagner would go on to play for the Toronto Athletic Club  in 1919 under  manager Bill McKechnie, another future Hall of Famer, who took up residency in the Gem City.

      

          I don't remember the details about the game, just those about the bat and that Toronto won.  I suspect my grandfather must have made the bat himself.  He and Honus Wagner rapped out a few hits apiece with this wonder bat that predated the real Hollywood Wonder Bat.  I don't know what happened to this bat, or maybe I was afraid to ask, to know like all things forgotten forever.

            Pick Nalley never did reach the big leagues, but he did play 13 years in the minors.  Throwing right, batting left, Nalley rapped out 1429 hits during his minor league career. After baseball, he worked as a longtime custodian for Toronto City schools.

            My dad once told me my his father was a little too slow a runner to play in the majors during an era when the main strategy relied upon stolen bases, the hit-and-run and bunting--small ball, they still call it.  The Dead Ball Era unofficially ended1919 when Babe Ruth hit a Major League record 29 home runs, the year after the Great War ended.   At 29, my grandfather was too old to be considered a prospect, and, besides, after taking that high hard one to the snoz, my dad also revealed, Pappap was never the same player again.

1913 Toronto Athletic Club.  John Petras standing third to left,  Pick Nalley kneeling in uniform.

            After the Kaul Clay riots of 1935, my grandfather became custodian at St, Francis Church.  My favorite story of his janitor days was when he learned World War II had officially ended and then sprinted from his Loretto Avenue home down the church to St. Francis to ring its massive bell, joining the resounding peels from all the steeples in town.  The bronze peels must have been the most melodious sounds ever heard in the Gem City.  

            The only rocks I throw nowadays are the stones I skip across the ponds of time; they ripple with memories, memories I like to share with five grandchildren, with another grandchild on the way, memories when I, like them, was a child, memories ever green, ever-sweet and wild-eyed, memories of memories.

          

See related stories: "The Kaul Clay Riots of 1935," and "Kaul Field Revisited."

A TALE OF TWO HALF-CITIES

            

THE NORTH END/SOUTH END RIVALRY OF TORONTO, OHIO

            More than the most common street name in the United States, Main Street of Toronto, Ohio has a most uncommon distinction, and might as well at one time have been the Mason-Dixon Line, or the Center of the Universe, as some Torontonians thought and still think; such was the rivalry between the North End and the South End of the Gem City.

            Although some Toronto residents have always disputed the true demarcation separating the town’s north from the south, Main Street marks the boundary between Knox Township on the north and Island Creek on the other side of the street.  No one, to this writer’s knowledge, from the City of Vision has ever publicly called himself a Knoxer or an Island Creeker; always a South-ender or a North-ender, or even a North-end Hunky, even those not of Slavic heritage.

            The term “Hunky,” in fact, was an ethnic slur, whose origin predated the turn of the 20^th Century and referred to Slovak and other Slavs who had emigrated to the U.S. to escape the oppressive rule of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a reign that forbid Slovaks to teach their own language.  Although their native land was Slovakia, their official entry papers listed them as immigrants from Hungary, and hence the ethnic slur, “Hunky.”  The Toronto Slovaks congregated in the north end of Toronto where an abundance of job opportunities attracted them, jobs with low pay and long hours, this tenure often requiring them to work 32 consecutive hours.

            My Slovak grandparents told me stories about prejudice toward Slavs back then, told me why they did not pass on their Eastern Slovak dialect onto their children and grandchildren, that they did not want them to grow up with accents and become targets of prejudice and derision.  My grandfather John Petras Sr. told me a story about the Ku Klux Klan marching up and down Loretta Avenue in 1935, and while standing upon his front porch, he shook his fist at one Klansman, recognizing him by his peculiar gait, and saying, “I know who you are, Charlie.  You look ridiculous!”  As the robes continued down street, he shouted again, “And by the way, Notre Dame will beat Ohio State again this season!”   And the Fighting Irish did—7 to 2.

            Back then Slavs were distinguished as a separate race.   Hitler wanted to eradicate them, and back home, if they held a position in City Hall, it was on their knees, scrubbing it.  In “Out of This Furnace,” a novel about an immigrant Slovak family—the Dobrejcaks—author Thomas Bell wrote that most Americans did not consider Eastern Europeans, such as Slovaks and Poles, as well as Southern Europeans, like Italians, white.

            In 1935, the same year as the Klan March, the racial tensions came to an ugly climax April 17, four days before Easter, when pickets at the perimeter of Kaul Clay, the majority of which were of Slavic descent and other minorities, met a storm of gunfire from Pinkerton Detectives, resulting in one death and another four wounded.  The fatality was Andy Lastivka, a Slovak whose residence stood two blocks from where he had fallen.  Another Toronto Slovak, Andy Straka, carried a Pinkerton slug in his leg for life.  No one was ever arrested or convicted for the shootings.

            Even to this day, one can see the stigma of prejudice by touring Union Cemetery and the headstones in the oldest section to discover not a soul of Slavic or Southeastern European descent buried amongst the obelisks and monuments dedicated to the Masons and other prominent residents of a municipality nicknamed the Gem City.  Union Cemetery was a site frequently marched by the Klan, often numbering more than 50 hoods.

            If Time is a great healer, it is because it is a great inducer of forgetfulness.  Gradually, the wounds of this culture clash became subsumed into oblivion.  North-enders moved southward, the direction by which the expanding city grew.  South-enders moved north.  Slavic names blended into a hodgepodge with those of Irish, Scottish, German, Anglo, Italian and others.  They intermarried.  And World War II united everyone.

            Second and third generation Slavs married sons and daughters of Toronto’s founding fathers, one of whom was Revolutionary War scout and Indian fighter Michael Myers, who had 11 children with his wife Katherine Strickler, and the Auver rumored to have fathered more.  It has been said by more than a few T-town old-timers that half the town is descended from a dude who lived to a ripe old age of 107 years while the other half is of Slovak descent.  Said more bluntly: half the town is related; the other half doesn’t know it.   Perhaps that is the reason the north end-south end rivalry eventually became reduced to brotherly banter and that, too, has faded.

            There are some striking geographical and demographic features distinguishing the two half-cities.  For the most part, the North End is flat, the streets straight while the South End is hilly, the streets often curvy.  The North End is overlooked by Meyers Knob, part of the Pennsylvanian Escarpment, the South End overlooked by a geological anomaly, Mount Nebo, where the Ohio River once flowed on the west of the mountain, the floodplain that is Walton Acres today. In geological terms, it is classified as Wisconsinian.  There were the clay works and the power plant in the Mosti side of town and the paper mill, block factory and Titanium in the Coulters side ; Rudy’s in the north and Melhorn’s and Happy’s south; the Power Plant houses in the north, the Mill Row south; and the North End Tavern in the draft root beer side of town, the South End Tavern in the Goonie Burger side, or simply called Skunk’s if you didn’t give a flying river rat’s ass about zonal distinctions.

            Even the currents of the Ohio are claimed by some to flow funny below Main Street.

            An old Kaul Clay veteran, a Hunky at heart, once exclaimed that City Hall had a conspiracy to move everything important in T-town south of Main Street.  Maybe there was a conspiracy, looking back, now that every grade school, K through 12, sits on one site.  (Rumor says this conspiracy began when the color blue initially appeared in Red Knight uniforms.).  The north-end and Slovak-language teaching parochial school St. Jopeph’s merged south with St. Francis until that, too, merged with oblivion, like Slovak Days, which incinerated into nothingness when Kaul Hall along Croxton’s Run Road burned to the ground in the 1970s.

  And the south end holds a wide margin in this pizza-consuming town of a four to one margin, a town further divided by loyalties to a square pie, and like an Ivy League rivalry in which you are a staunch Harvard man or a Yale man, in T-town you can distinguish oneself as an Iggy’s man or a Dicarlo’s or Domino’s dude, a Gem City Pizza gal or one of the diminishing few, the most loyal of the loyal, still holding out for the return of Johnny’s.

An interesting fact about the pizza logistics of the Gem City is that the town never has had a pizza shop operated its ovens north of Clark Street, not even the fabled monopolistic Johnny’s, which moved from site to site as often Bill Jaco, always in the South End.

            Some dispute, until this day, occurs about the true line separating the two halves of the city.  Some claim as far north as Myers while some say the south end begins at the Overhead Bridge.  And then there is the mythical midtown, a so-called neutral zone from Main to Clarke.  In truth, to the best of this Iggy’s man and anti-blue bring-back-the-Goonie advocate, and based on personal bar- and- tavern on-the-site research, no such establishment has been named anything close to “Midtown Bar”  while there has been fierce patronage for decades at the aforementioned North End and South End Taverns, the mythical midtown home to such neutrally named watering holes as the City Restaurant, Frogs and Gem City Restaurant, unless, of course, “Candyland” was some secret blue conspiracy code name for the “Center of the City Fish Bowl.”

            Perhaps, the north-south T-town rivalry became extinct at the advent of open enrollment.  Maybe too many Cernanskys and Scalleys moved south.  Who knows?  Ask the millennial and younger T-towners about the north end-south end rivalry and they’ll probably respond by asking if that’s a new video game.

            This town’s north end-south end rivalry is gone, faded like the advertising on the Daniels Building, memory-aided, barely discernible but to some.  Toronto, Ohio is one town, as it should be, a small city, as it has become, a hometown, always.

HAUNTED TORONTO

THE HANGING HEAD OF CAMP CRUMB

            The name is forgotten, maybe because those who remember simply want to forget.

            But the memory lingers like a child’s nightmare, the repressed one deep in the seat of the subconscious, this one deep in the woods outside Toronto, taking one deep in time, back to Camp Crumb, where time seems to cease and the human psyche surrenders to fear.

            The tale of the Hanging Tree and its vile fruit the Hanging Head has been passed on from generation to generation until now it looms high with other urban legends.  Is it truly legend, a myth worthy of the lunatic with the prosthetic hook, or just another haunted forest yarn to scare schoolboys on pitch dark, campfire nights?

            As the legend goes, a distraught man hanged himself near the cliffs at Camp Crumb sometime during the 1930s.  Camp Crumb is situated a quarter-mile up Sloane’s Run along the northeastern base of Wallace Hill.  During the latter decade of the 19^th century and the first decade of the 20^th, it was a popular site for picnics and other outdoor excursions.  Hundreds of initials tattooed into the bald gray beech trees still attest to this day how popular Camp Crumb once was. 

            These ancient gray trees cast gentle shadows upon a terrace tasseled with ferns and sitting-sized sandstones velveted with moss at a site during the day Zen-like, a setting tranquil enough to meditate.  But after the sun goes down…

“That’s where a man hanged himself,” said Dick Walker, who has lived all his 50-plus years in Toronto.  “My mother and some old-timers told me how the man hanged himself with a chain at Camp Crumb and that he remained missing for two weeks until his dog dragged his hand home.  When the search party finally arrived at Camp Crumb all they found was the man’s head swinging from a chain wrapped around a limb of a beach tree near a cliff.”

His late mother told Walker the hanged man’s name, but he can only remember the gruesome details and that the man worked for Mike Henry probably during the 1930s at the White Front Café.

“I heard too many people talk about the Hanging Tree to pass it off as some campfire tale,” Walker said.  “Besides, something is weird up there at night. Just makes your skin crawl.  Me and five other guys tried camping out there overnight when we were young, but it was just too spooky.  Plenty of other guys have tried sleeping out up Camp Crumb, too, and nobody can claim he made it to daylight.”

“I remember one night like it was yesterday,” said Pat Daughtery about the adventure he shared with Walker at Camp Crumb.  “There were six of us laughing up a storm, telling stories when suddenly we heard a chain clanging high in the beech trees.  We took off so fast we forgot to pick up our beer.”

“We called it the Hanging Tree,” said Joe Nemitt Sr. recalling boyhood excursions predating Walker’s by two decades to the tragic site.  We got scared quickly and didn’t stick around long.”

“I wouldn’t camp out there with 50 guys and two kegs and a bucket of holy water,” added Daughtery, “and I bet no one else would last there more than a couple of hours.”

Exactly where this desperate deed occurred is a matter of speculation these days, says J.L. Minor a former deputy sheriff for Colliers County, Florida, now returned to the Ohio Valley, bringing home his passions that include paranormal arboreal phenomena and crptozoology. 

“You have to remember that trees in a forest tend to grow a few stories high before branching out,” Minor said.  “So the branch from which he hanged himself probably jutted from a tree ten to 15 feet above some kind of platform from which he could have jumped off.  Such a tree would now be around 85 years old today and much too high to determine where a chain or rope once hung.”

The American beech, according to Wikipedia, averages 150 to 200 years of age and can live up to 300 years in ideal habitat.  These trees reach maturity around 40 years of age and can attain heights of around 100 feet.

The beech, also according to another electronic web site, The Masonic Druid, was the most used tree for lynching and ritualistic sacrifices during the 1700s and 1800s in the United States, the limbs valued for their pliability, the tree for its purgative power.

From Google Earth, if one knows where to look, the latitude and longitude coordinates can be found to locate the lost forest camp, on the map, that is, but on foot one’s cell phone service seems to vaporize mysteriously in the mist.

Why the victim chose Camp Crumb as the site for self-destruction is another matter of speculation.  The camp had fallen into disuse for about a quarter-century when he committed the desperate deed.  Perhaps some tragic event predates his hanging and left an evil energy summoning the distraught and the desperate.  And, indeed, there are tales of unholy rituals, whispered, from those who seek the refuge of anonymity, but it is best to leave these tales untold and buried deep beneath the cryptic dark shadows of the forest.

CAMP CRUMB

It’s called Camp Crumb

Because everything falls

Apart like the dude

That hanged himself.

Limb by limb by

Limb fell to fertilize

The forest floor

Until all that remained

Was his head, a trophy

Defying gravity,

Defying the senses until it

Fell to decay, rotting

Into an unholy fruit,

A stagnant weight

upon a rusty chain.

It still holds, sways

In the windless rustic night,

Clangs-clangs like a train

Steaming from Hell,

Pulling up to Scaffold Rock

To offer passage

From a platform

Where everything falls

Apart—your senses, your sanity,

Even your soul.

ORIGINS, GEM CITY

So you think this is your town?

Call it Gem City,

Have been calling it Gem City so long

You don’t even know why

You call it Gem City,

Just take it for granted

Like on the corner of Grant Street

Those little noises, tweaks, bumps-in-the-night

At the old Melhorns building

At times strolling by old Harry Goucher,

Lost, looking for his home, you know,

The one no longer on River Avenue.

He doesn’t feel at home in the grave,

Either, up in Union Cemetery, absent

With a few other absentees

Like Suzanne Daniels, a centenarian

Formerly of the living some 90 years ago

So formal in place-setting her tables,

She’ll rearrange your forks, spoons and sanity

For you with an unexpected appearance

Here and there in her building.

Then there’s that John Doe

You call the Hanging Head of Camp Crumb,

He was distraught, all right,

Found out he married the wrong woman,

Turned out his black-hearted half-sister,

So he took the eternal plunge

Right off Scaffold Rock, keeps

Sentry up there high in the trees

Whistling trespass alarm through

The hollows of his eyes.

These common folks had so much in common,

My descendents who descended

Through my dark side.

Some call me patriarch, some usurper,

Me, who bathed in Chief Logan’s baby’s blood

At Yellow Creek, me, who lived to be 107;

So strange, don’t you think,

Even for strange folks like you,

You whose sires I sired so so long ago,

Me, Auver Michael Myers, the  “great”grandsire

Of you who not esca

pe this caging city—

Cousins, kiss-of-death cousins—

Who shall live a long long time,

If you can call ghosting living;

Such glowing examples of kin you are,

Even for inbred hybrids.

Shine shine shine on,

All my little gems.

THE BERMUDA TRIANGLE OF THE OHIO VALEY 

            September 1781, It was a scene worth of a Hollywood plot:  Andrew Poe and Wyandot Chief Bigfoot combating along the meanering stream of Tomlinson Run with riffles and tomahawks and continuing their struggle into the Ohio River where they were reduced to the savagery of bare-hand combat where the half-foot taller Virginian. Wading waist deep, finally gave the Wyandot subchief a fatal baptism.

            Witnesses stated that before his brother Adam could reach them with his scalping tools, Chief Bigfoot slipped away on the surface, rolled over and howled in pain and hate before the blue-gray currents claimed him and swept him away to his ancestral sky lands.

            Some claim his final utterings were a curse, the dark tone of hatred in any language unmistakable.  Whether the curse theory is merely conjecture, there is some evidence to give credence to truth in it for drownings followed there by an unholy dozen.

            The first recorded drewning occurred April 12, 1912 when four young Port Homer men returning from a prayer meeting across river from Wesely Chapel in a john boat capsized, spilling Harry Brant, 20, and brother Earl, 18, along with Hugh Sproul, 18, and Clifford Howard, 17.  All four drowned.  A fifth passenger, J. Crosley, managed to desperately cling to the upturned craft until rescued.

            According to Crosly, during the boys’ return trip, they were rowing smoothly across the river, reached midstream, when for no apparent reason the boat overturned, spilling the crew of five into the swift spring currents of the Ohio River.

            It should be pointed out the Ohio River was much shallower and less wide at that period and that the navigational structure  Dam Number 9 just south of Empire was currently under construction. 

            The new dam when finished did slow the big blue stream some and widened it and then in 1960 the completion of a yet more modern structure, the New Cumberland Locks and Dam, made the water upstream deeper, almost lake-like, at times current-less, but not less dangerous.  Still the drownings happened at Port Homer, including one of a recreational boater in the chamber itself in the early 1980s and another on april 6, 2009 when 26-year-old Michael Harvey,  a deckhand for Campbell Towing Company, fell off a barge and drowned in harvor of the W.H. Sammis Plant’s harbor at Port Homer.

            The Sammis Plant harbor, incidentally, has also been a collectio point for victims drowning upstream, in colloquial river talk called “floaters,” three of which found their final passage downstream directl across te site of the deadly dunking of Chief Big Foot.

            Perhaps even outside the Ohio River did the Wyandot’s curse carry because in April 1935, a 12-year-old boy fishing in the lake used by Stratton Clay for industrial water slipped in and drowned, the accident occurring less than a mile from BigFoot’s watery grave, and what a quarter-century later would become the site of the New Cumberland Locks and Dam where two workers fell and drowned during its construction.

            Coincidence or curse-induced?  We will never know for sure, but a tally of 11 have found a watery demise within a one-mile distance of one another, and counting the first victim, the Wyandot subchief, a total of an unholy dozen, giving credence to the title “Port Homer—the Bermuda Triangle of the Ohio Valley.”