Spring Grove Cemetery.
On Friday morning Marti joined her parents & the rest of the reunion krew for a tour of historic Spring Grove Cemetery & a driving expedition to view former homes & neighborhoods where Greggs resided, went to school & worked. I took the morning off & went shopping on my own. At the cemetery intrepid explorer Bill Gregg uncovered a football-shaped tombstone marking the final resting place of Marti’s great-great-grandfather William Alford Gregg, an Ohio River steamboat owner & captain.
A reunion lunch & fourth birthday celebration.
The Greggs enjoyed lunch at a restaurant in one of the old neighborhoods. I decided to try genuine Cincinnati-style chili at a branch of Skyline Chili near our hotel. A huge mistake.
One of the old homes. John leads the visit to the Beta house.
The locations the group saw included the home where Bill grew up & the fraternity house where Marti’s grandfather Clifford served as president.
Nicholson’s. Chili from Hell.
The evening’s family dinner was held at Nicholson’s Scottish Tavern & Pub. I drove downtown to join the others, but it was not to be. During the afternoon I had phoned & spoken at length with a cousin who was recently diagnosed with fourth-stage cancer. As if that weren’t sufficiently upsetting, my chili lunch was beginning to take its toll. Ironically, this vile stuff was invented by a Greek-American dude in the 1920s, who decided to employ traditional Greek stew spices to make a chili sauce which he dolloped on spaghetti & topped with giant mounds of grated Velveeta-esque cheese. Nasty!
Roomful of Greggs.
I aborted my mission to get together with the gang for dinner. (Marti attended & had a great time.) On the trip back to the hotel, I managed to compound my misery by accidentally breaking my eyeglasses. For me, the reunion phase of our trip was suddenly going south.
Historic Union Terminal. John & Nan. A model of 1940s Cincinnati.
Still under the weather, I begged off Saturday morning’s tour of the Cincinnati Museum Center at the beautifully-restored Art Deco Union Terminal. While Marti hooked up with all the Greggs, I went looking for an optician to repair my glasses.
Replicas of murals depicting Cincinnati history.
Union Terminal was constructed between 1929 & 1933. As railroad travel diminished in the postwar period, the facility closed. By the early 1970s the terminal was transformed into a shopping center called "The Land of Oz." Former Cincinnati mayor Jerry Springer(!) was instrumental in saving the building & transforming it into a museum.
John A. Roebling Suspension Bridge. Great American Ball Park.
A kind specialist at a LensCrafters in a nearby mall repaired my smashed eyeglasses without a charge. By Saturday evening I had recovered from my close encounter with Cincinnati chili & was able to take in our long-planned visit to see the Reds vs. the Braves at the Great American Ball Park. We parked the Jeep under the landmark John A. Roebling Suspension Bridge, adjacent to the ballpark. If this 1866 bridge looks familiar, it’s because Roebling used a similar design for his Brooklyn Bridge in 1883.
Enjoying the view from nosebleed seats with ballpark tourheads
Michael Hall & Jeffrey Tait.
It had been a couple of years since Marti & I had been to a ballgame. (Our neighbors in the next-to-top row of the upper deck, on the other hand, were in the midst of a full-blown MLB stadium tour!) Atlanta had no problem beating lowly Cincinnati. Reds pitcher Eric Milton picked up the 6-1 loss; he gave up four runs, all by way of homers, in six innings of work. He suffered, but we had a fun night.
Best of all, the next morning my bride & I would be heading to Cleveland to continue our own two-stadium tour. We had a rendezvous with the Red Sox in Cleveland!
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Sunday night in Cleveland: Dinner at Mallorca.
On Sunday, June 19 Marti & I piled our bags into the Laredo & drove to Cleveland, stopping enroute for a bit of outlet mall shopping. After checking into our downtown hotel, we took a taxi to dinner at a restaurant called Mallorca. The food & service were outstanding: our waiter announced that this was his last night on the job; he would soon be repatriating to Portugal. We regaled him with our 15-word Portuguese vocabulary; in return, he plied us with Portuguese almond liqueur at the end of the meal. My lovely bride & I got pretty loaded; thank goodness we’d had the forethought to cab that evening.
The Rock Hall Of Fame & Museum has helped revive Cleveland.
We went to the Cleveland Public Library to check our e-mail messages first thing Monday morning, had lunch at a funky New Orleans-style restaurant called Fat Fish Blue, did some shopping at the nearby Tower City Center, then headed for the Rock Hall. We decided to enroll as members, which is a good deal if you're planning to visit the Hall of Fame & Museum more
than once during a stay in Cleveland. Because there's so much to see there, Marti & I wound up going four times in three days. We received $120 worth of admissions (actually we can have free admission for a year), a teeshirt, a members-only concert & discounts in the giftshop - all for fifty bucks.
Jerry Garcia’s Rosebud & Lightning Bolt guitars. ZZ Top’s Eliminator.
The items on display were amazing! My favorites included four of Jerry Garcia’s best-known guitars, Jim Morrison’s Cub Scout Troop 170 uniform shirt, a guitar & amp used by John Cipollina, Handsome Dick Manitoba’s jacket from 1975, John Lennon’s 1964 Gibson acoustic guitar & a giant amplifier & mic stand from Neil Young’s 1978 Rust Never Sleeps tour.
Posing at the Rock Hall with Mickey Hart’s Grateful Dead-motif guitar.
And with the Michael Jackson model. (Our long national nightmare is over!)
Earlier Marti & I had noticed a phenomenon: everywhere we went that day we encountered fellow Red Sox fans. Red Sox Nation had invaded tiny Cleveland! Of course, we’d be going to the game in the evening, but as soon as we hit the Rock Hall we slammed into a dilemma. In the lobby we ran into our friend Warren Haynes who, previously unbeknownst to us, was scheduled to do a Q & A session plus a mini acoustic concert at 7 p.m. – game time. Warren pinned us from the May Gov’t Mule dates in Paris & Amsterdam & asked what we were doing in Cleveland. We replied that we were in town for the Rock Hall & the Red Sox. I explained that we were planning to catch some of his gig & then go on to our game. Warren grinned & said that he would be happy to share us with the Sox.
Warren. Matt. The Jake.
As it turned out, the mini-set featured the full Gov't
Mule acoustic, in the Hall’s small auditorium - sweet! My bride & I took in the Q & A segment & part of the gig. Acoustic Mule was a treat. Unfortunately, for me this set was not without mishap: during “Beautifully Broken” – how ironic – I reached up to adjust my eyeglasses & snapped the left arm of the frame. I had trashed my glasses for a second time on this trip! I switched to sunglasses, we snuck out & hopped in a cab to Jacobs Field. We arrived late of course, but not too late to catch the Sox' 6-run fifth. They tried to blow it late, but Johnny Damon's solo homer kept the Native Americans at bay. Final score: Red Sox 10, Indians 9.
Sox fan in a homemade tee. Lunch crowd at Vivo. Rebecca waits.
Total Race Babe Marti loves dessert.
Once again I had to seek out an optician. On Tuesday morning Marti & I went to a downtown shop where I had my lenses fitted into a new frame. The woman who helped me gave us a recommendation for lunch, a terrific Italian restaurant called Vivo. There we enjoyed the best meal of our trip. (And I enjoyed ogling Rebecca, our hot little waitress.)
Pasta with clams & spinach. Sea bass with risotto-stuffed chard.
After our long lunch we hit the library for a bit of Internet, then returned to the Rock Hall. We had a limited stay, however: soon it was time to taxi back to The Jake.
At Jacobs Field. Bronson in the bullpen.
Marti & I had tubesteaks for dinner with a couple of other Sox fans at a table in the food court overlooking right field. On the way to our seats, we watched Bronson Arroyo warming up in the bullpen. It was the first day of summer. What better way to spend it than to watch the
Red Sox kick off the hazy, lazy days with home run blasts by David Ortiz (2!) & Manny Ramirez. The Sox dropped the Tribe, 9-2.
Tommy, can you hear us?
On Wednesday Marti & I got going early, stopped by the library for a quick e-mail session, bought lunch from & visited with a lovely Greek-American hot-dog cart lady named Joanna, then walked over to the Rock Hall to see the special exhibit on The Who’s Tommy. This show certainly evoked a host of memories: I saw a poster for a 1969 Who gig I attended at Tanglewood - four days before the band’s historic appearance at the Woodstock Festival. (I didn’t go to Woodstock because of my first wife’s prior commitment that weekend. Needless to say, we don’t have that wife anymore.) Also in the Rock Hall’s exhibit were a poster for a Tommy performance by the Royal Canadian Ballet that I saw in New York in 1970 & a promotional box set of 45 r.p.m. recordings of selections from the album. (I obtained a copy of this rarity from a radio station I worked for in 1969; I sure hope it’s still in my archives.)
The Goodtime III.
We took a break from rock ‘n roll history to board the Goodtime III cruise ship, docked behind the Rock Hall, for a two-hour tour of the Cuyahoga River & Lake Erie. I thought they should have been playing Randy Newman’s song about the apocryphal Cuyahoga river fire on the ship’s P.A.: . . . the Cuyahoga River / Goes smokin' through my dreams / Burn on, big river, burn on . . . Apparently, they don’t have that much of a sense of humor in Cleveland.
Cleveland skyline as seen from the river. A Great Lake.
Marti & I downed piña coladas & strawberry vodka daiquiris as the boat steamed down the river. (Actually, we did more time sitting in the sun waiting for railroad bridges to open than we did steaming.) And we spent a piddling total of ten minutes on Lake Erie.
Sox fans. Like Deadheads, we are everywhere.
We had a fun, relaxing time aboard this ship of fools nonetheless. We struck up a conversation with a trio of Red Sox fans from the Boston area who had stalked Kevin Millar earlier in the day at the Ritz-Carlton. Ever the gentleman, Kevin had let the ladies touch his World Series Championship ring. After the cruise, Marti & I did one last run around the Rock Hall, then headed for the ballpark.
David Ortiz takes a big swing on our last night at The Jake.
Thanks to doubles by Jay Payton & Edgar Renteria, plus a momentum-igniting home run by recent addition John Olerud, the Sox gained a third win against the Indians, 5-4. My only regret was that the jerk who was sitting next to me for most of the game - dissing former Indian Manny Ramirez’s looks & fielding ability (Indians fans wish they could have Manny back) - split before Renteria broke the game open with a ninth-inning RBI double to complete the sweep. What a sizzling series of games Marti & I had witnessed!
Robert Lockwood Jr. & band.
We celebrated the Red Sox sweep with postgame dinner at Fat Fish Blue. Robert Lockwood, Jr., at 90 years of age one of the last surviving roots bluesmen, was just winding up his regular Wednesday night set. Get this: Lockwood learned to play guitar from none other than Robert Johnson, whose seminal delta blues evolved into rock ‘n roll. Lockwood claims to have learned chords, timing & stage presence from Johnson, who was living with Lockwood’s mother. As a teenager, he even shared the stage with him! I got to say hello to Robert Lockwood & he was kind enough to autograph a live CD. Could there have been a more appropriate finale to our rockin’ tour of Cleveland?
* * * * *
Marti & I had a fabulous time on this trip, but I must
say I found 2005 Red State America a bit shocking. I'm a big dude, but I can't believe how fucking HUGE folks are in the American Heartland. Can you say, Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade inflatables? Every morning at the free buffet breakfast at the Cincinnati AmeriSuites seemed like a scene from a Fellini film. What with the Jesus-Is-My-Hero teeshirts on the titty-bit teenage girls & the enormous humanoids bellying up to those make-'em-yourself waffles with mounds of whipped cream on top, I really thought my little bride & I had woken in a nightmare & were visiting a bizarre, faraway planet.
Marti & I are both baptised, born-once, practicing Christians. But we believe that faith is a private, personal matter.
Moreover, I don't think you'll find a passage in the Bible that advises folks to eat every damn thing that isn't nailed down.
