I hope I inherited her longevity genes. "Kevin said, 'I don't think she was raped.' Carl Monday staked out Kevin's house, waiting for him to return.When Kevin was finally released on December 12, the frenzy kicked into high gear and the rumors dragged on for months. So it was a welcome surprise when he showed up at school that afternoon. "Could you describe what you remember of the screams that you heard?" This is a short blog post about one subset of that box: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle (TMNT) comic book knockoffs. Stupid, yes. Dan's father talked to Deb on the master-bedroom phone while his wife picked up the phone in the next room.
"In another note to Lisa: "Some day, I'll go too far and do something very bad and you'll yell at me and be serious and I won't be able to handle it. Herman married my grandmother Matilda (Tillie) Molter, an immigrant from Bavaria in 1912. They had four children, Carl Herman, Donald Alois, Ralph William, and Lorna. When Carl was born in 1914, the family lived at East 40th and Hough Avenue in Cleveland. Donald was also born in that house. The other two children were born after they moved to Alhambra Road in the Collinwood section of Cleveland in 1920. This coincided with the opening of the new GE Lamp Equipment Operations plant on East 152nd Street. At that time Carl was 6 years old and just starting school. He and his siblings attended the neighborhood public schools, William H. Brett Elementary School through grade 8 and Collinwood High School. Grandpa was first and foremost a good provider and a dedicated family man. Unfortunately his people skills were weak. His life revolved around his work. He didnât have any hobbies other than home handyman projects. His entertainment consisted of reading the Cleveland Press and listening to the radio and later the television. He had a strong work ethic and a strong sense of right and wrong. He attempted to convey these standards to his children and was a strict disciplinarian. His sense of humor was based upon sarcasm and wasnât always appreciated, especially by women. Grandma, on the other hand, was very easy going. The children and grandchildren could usually get their way with her. Grandpa never called her by her given name. He always referred to her as the Mrs. Of course she was Ma to the children and Grandma to the grandchildren of which there were eventually seven. With such a large family, Grandma usually served herself from the stove while the rest of the family ate at the table. This didnât seem to bother her; but it did upset the other women in the family. Before getting married, she had been employed as an office worker at the National Carbon Company. She had studied secretarial science at the Dyke Spenserian College in Cleveland. As with most German wives of that period her main interest was in being a good wife and mother. However her office training enabled her in later years to find work as a secretary at the White Motor Company to help fund Donaldâs college education and to support the war effort during World War II.Grandma related the story of their move to Collinwood as a great adventure. They moved early in the year and the snow was so high they didnât see the pavement on their street until the snow had melted that spring. Their moving van was a horse drawn sled. This part of Cleveland had previously been the Village of Collinwood and had been recently annexed by Cleveland. Much of the area was still undeveloped. The home they moved into was a small three bedroom, two story single-family house with an unfinished attic and a full basement. It had a covered porch across the front, which Grandma eventually enclosed with honeysuckle vines, hydrangeas, and other plantings. It also had a one-car garage, which was later expanded to two cars, for the family Model T Ford, Although it was a rather modest house and lot, it must have seemed like a mansion to them. It was a wonderful place to raise a family and it stayed in the family for almost sixty years. As the neighborhood filled in with houses, the lot next to the Dreifort house remained vacant, because the neighbors living in the next house to the South owned it. This always gave a spacious feel to what was actually a modest sized lot. As the street developed, many of the homes added were typical Cleveland two family units with a family downstairs and another upstairs. These two family units were known as âSpitz Housesâ, because a developer named Spitz had built them. The neighborhood was basically a blue-collar ethnic community with many Italian, Slovenian and various Eastern European immigrants represented. It was a residential enclave surrounded by industrial areas along East 152nd and Ivanhoe on the West, and land that would become industrial on the East side of London Road. At the time the Dreiforts moved to Alhambra, the property east of London Road was a small airfield. On the South side of the neighborhood was an industrial area between Euclid Avenue and Mandalay Road. The Nickel Plate Railroad ran through that area and there was a major switching yards just South of Mandalay. The Dreifort home was less than a block North of Mandalay and the Industry located there. St. Clair Avenue, a major commercial thoroughfare, bounded the neighborhood on the North. A little farther North was the New York Central Railroad with its own industrial area around it. All of this makes the area sound quite industrial and in some respects it was. But within the residential blocks the atmosphere was quite pleasant and in some ways almost bucolic. People could enjoy their yards and gardens, but still be only a few blocks from the factories at which they worked.  Grandpa actually walked to and from work every day, a distance of a little over one mile each way. The major shopping area of the community was called Five Points because it was the intersection of St. Clair, East 152nd Street and Ivanhoe Road. Collinwood High School is located at Five Points approximately three quarters of a mile from the Dreifort home. In later years, when his sons would suggest that he take up golf for some exercise, Grandpa would gruffly say, âI donât need to golf. I can get just as much exercise walking up to Five Points and back.â  All the streets in that community had names, which reflect a literary influence. They included names such as Stevenson, Nathaniel, Ivanhoe, Holmes, and two streets that give me my favorite intersection of Rudyard and Kipling. Brett School was located on Kipling as was Holy Redeemer Catholic Church, which was the center of life for many of the ethnic residents. Many members of that parish were Italian, resulting in the area being known as a second Little Italy in the Cleveland Community. In fact the Parish Feast of the Assumption celebration always rivaled the one held in the other Little Italy on Murray Hill. Although, Grandma was raised in the Catholic Church, as were most Southern German children, she did not attend Church as an adult. Grandpa had been baptized as a Lutheran as were all of his brothers and sisters. However, he never went to church except for the occasional wedding or funeral. The children were not churchgoers either as they were growing up. They obtained their moral and ethical upbringing primarily from the example set by their parents in the conduct of their daily lives. Later in life some of the children and grandchildren have looked to organized religion for spiritual support. That support has come from the Catholic, Protestant and Jewish religions.The decade of the 1920s was an interesting time in the Collinwood neighborhood. It was a time of economic boom for the most part and most of the community participated in that through their employment in the successful businesses of the area. Grandpa was a dedicated employee of GE throughout his working life. He was known as a hard worker and loyal employee. In 2006 C.F Sindy published a history of Collinwood. Mr. Sindy also was a long time employee at GE and resident of Collinwood.  Part of that employment coincided with Grandpaâs tenure at GE. Sindy remembered Grandpa fondly as âHerman the Germanâ.  Since Sindy was also from a German immigrant family, he used to practice his German with Grandpa. They both worked in Lamp Equipment Operations or LEO. Grandpa was a machinist and tool and die maker in the pilot lab in which new machines and improvements to existing machines were designed and produced. He was involved in every innovation in electric bulb manufacture from GEâs start in the business until he retired in 1952.Outside of work Grandpaâs main activity was working around the house. He always had some project underway or was helping one of his relatives with their projects. On a normal day he would come home from work and sit at his place at the kitchen table to read the Cleveland Press. After family dinner he would disappear to his basement or garage to work on his projects. Other than the newspaper and certain technical writings, Grandpa was not much of a reader. Grandma, on the other hand, was a voracious reader. In spite of having little formal education, she was quite knowledgeable and well informed. She was also pretty good at playing the piano. The children were encouraged to do well in school and they all graduated from Collinwood High School. Due to the economic depression of the 1930s, only Donald was able to go to college.   Fortunately Grandpa was able to work at GE through the hard economic times of the 1930s. So the family was better off than many who lived through that period. This is an example of the well-known pattern of Dreifort men being good supporters for their families. Grandpa retired from GE at age 65 in 1952. Unfortunately he died less than 2 years later. He became very sick and the doctors couldnât determine what was causing it. The symptoms pointed to a heart problem; but it wasnât until they performed an autopsy that they discovered he had emphysema. It is still a mystery how someone, who never smoked could have contacted that disease. It is unfortunate that he died so young; but it is also unclear how he would have enjoyed his retirement had he lived longer. All he ever knew in life was his work. Grandma lived about 18 years after Grandpa died. She stayed in the Alhambra Road house tending her garden and feeding the birds. She stayed active until the end while being supported by and giving support to her children and grandchildren. We like to say, âGrandma died with her boots onâ. She collapsed due to a cerebral hemorrhage on the sidewalk while pulling her grocery cart home from 5 Points one cold and snowy day in February 1971. They say she was dead when she hit the ground. Herman and Tillie Dreifort led rather normal and yet remarkable lives. Born in Germany and arriving in a new and unfamiliar country and needing to learn a new language, they achieved the American dream of a successful life for themselves and their children. They were able to do this in spite of the hardships of a great economic depression and two World Wars. Furthermore, they and others of their generation made it possible for the current generation of Dreiforts to achieve any success we currently enjoy. We all owe them more than we can express, because we truly stand on the shoulders of those who came before us. Since it was difficult to find work in 1932, Carl took some postgraduate courses in music at Collinwood High School. This led to his lifelong interest in music as a hobby, which included playing the piano and organ. This interest was surely supported by his mother, who was a piano player herself. He also did his best to find work to help the family cope during those hard times. He told me many times of all the jobs he took to bring home some money to supplement the family coffers and how hard it was to find those jobs. One of those jobs was at a key shop in the Rose Building in downtown Cleveland. It paid 15 cents per hour, hardly enough to pay for his streetcar fare, his lunch and have some left over. But in those days every little bit helped and it was important just to have a job. One side benefit of having a variety of jobs was the skills he developed. For example, he could fix locks as a result of his key shop experience.Those Depression years were not all hard work and no play. He had close friends with whom he spent time doing the fun things that young people enjoyed. These things included trips in the Model T Ford, hitchhiking to Chicago to see the Century of Progress Worlds Fair, and dancing at the many ballrooms then existing in Cleveland. One of his close friends, Kenny Miller, introduced him to a young girl from Canada named Greta. Kenny was living with the Dreifort family at the time. Carl and Kenny had converted the unfinished attic into a bedroom, which they shared. They were working as painters and handymen in an apartment building at East 116th Street and Euclid Avenue, where Kennyâs father was the custodian. Greta and her mother were tenants in the building. After a whirlwind courtship, which included dancing at the Trianon Ballroom and trips to Euclid Beach, they were married on September 5, 1938. Their first child, Robert Carl, was born on the eve of World War II in 1940. In recognition of his new responsibilities as a husband and parent Carl had moved his new family early in 1940 to a duplex on the corner of Shaw Avenue and Plymouth Place in East Cleveland. Dad always told me that the only way we could afford to live there was the fact that he did most of the work of maintenance and remodeling himself with the help of many family members. That tradition continued as he taught me how to do all the things required to maintain a home and be otherwise self-sufficient, skills I tried to pass on to my children as well. The first thing he did to the home in East Cleveland was convert the 3rd floor into a 2-bedroom apartment. Dad, Grandpa and several other relatives worked on that project, which included building a large dormer to enlarge the third floor and installing a bedroom, bathroom and kitchen. We stayed at Grandma and Grandpaâs house in Collinwood until the 3rd floor was ready. We then lived in that suite until my sister, Janet, was born in 1944. Then we moved to the first floor and lived there until 1952.Dad did not join the military service in World War II. He often told me that he considered making my middle name âweather-stripâ, because I kept him out of the draft. In any case, at the age of 27 with a pre Pearl Harbor child, he was working in an essential war industry, first in the maintenance department of National Acme Company located in northwest Collinwood and later as a toolmaker at Parker Appliance located at London Road and Euclid Avenue. Incidentally, the famous singer, Frankie Laine, was also employed at Parker Appliance at that time. Grandma and Grandpa kept a flag with two stars in their window during the war representing two sons in the service. Donald, a graduate of Case Institute of Technology with a degree in civil engineering, was a sergeant in the Army Corps of Engineers. He worked on the Lido Road in the China-Burma-India Theater. Ralph was in the Navy stationed on a destroyer in the Caribbean. Unfortunately, Dadâs friend, Kenny Miller, was drafted and lost his life in a blackout accident while stationed in England. Dad used to tease his brothers about how hard things were on the home front with all the rationing and other depravations endured by the civilians. One of the depravations he claimed didnât carry much weight, however. His brothers knew he didnât use cigarettes or chewing gum, commodities that were scarce on the home front but plentiful for servicemen. A real example of those depravations is the fact that he sold his new 1941 Chevrolet, because he couldnât get gasoline or tires. He walked to work at National Acme and later took the streetcar to his job at Parker Appliance. The Dreifort family did all it could to support the war effort and fortunately they came out of it with their lives and prepared to take advantage of the opportunities available in the post war world. The end of the War with the shift to a consumer economy provided new opportunities for those who had survived. Although he continued to have great respect for physical labor, Dad knew that he could be more successful in white-collar work. That also would require additional education. One incident that helped move him away from blue-collar work reflected his dislike of labor unions. He had been required to join the union in order to work at Parker Appliance. Things came to a head at the end of the war, when the union called a strike at Parker Appliance. This was a very contentious affair resulting in the police being called out.  Dad told of having to get a police escort into and out of the factory in order to retrieve his tools. After that incident, he left Parker Appliance to change the direction of his career. Dad started a new career as an engineer at Hauserman Company, a manufacturer of architectural interiors based upon a system of movable steel walls. He was one of a group of young employees, who joined a training program, which included some class work at Fenn College. This white-collar position was a departure from the skilled factory work he had been doing during the War. It was a part of the general post war growth and upward mobility experienced in this country. This eventually resulted in a family move to a single-family home in Cleveland Heights.