Chapter 10
The Middle Years in Cleveland
Another
house. — We lived in our first house on Coventry Avenue near Shaker Square
for eight years, but then I thought we ought to trade up to a larger
house. My textbook writing was looking
promising and I had contracts for two more books. Dorothy wasn't as eager to move as I was, and
it turned out to be more stressful than either of us expected.
We
spent the early months of 1980 looking at houses. Despite the high property taxes in Shaker—the
highest in Ohio then, and they still are today—we wanted to stay in this suburb. It was so convenient, only 15 minutes from
the university and downtown as well as cultural activities and shopping, and
its stately homes, mature trees and yards, and superb services were such a
treat after living far out in new developments as in the Washington suburbs.
I
thought we could afford something in the mid-$100,000 range, and could sell our
house on Coventry for maybe $112,000, which should easily take care of the
down-payment. After weeks of looking, we
thought this house on South Woodland was a dream house (at least I thought
that, Dorothy wasn't so sure). The
asking price at $170,000 was higher than we wanted to consider, but the realtor
thought we should be able to negotiate a considerably lower price because of
the economic situation. The sellers were
Dr. Barry Friedman and his wife Sue, and they wanted to move to San Diego, but
the house had been on the market for six months and prospects in the present
housing market were not promising. I was
able to get the price down to $157,000. However, such a housing market also made it
harder to sell our house on Coventry, and it would be late August, almost six
months after we closed on South Woodland, before we were able to sell it for
$105,000, well below the $112,000 we had hoped to get.
I
hadn't anticipated the difficulty in getting a mortgage for this more expensive
house. If Coventry had sold readily,
there would have been no trouble. But
with mortgage interest rates of 11.5% and points besides, housing sales had
almost dried up. Furthermore, lenders
were scrutinizing mortgage applications very carefully, and demanding large
down payments. Our house on Coventry had
a mortgage of 6 3/4%, and now I was waking up in the middle of the night
sweating with buyer's remorse, thinking that we were utter fools to undertake a
purchase at this time.
Our
regular bank, Society, would not consider giving us a mortgage even though we
had done business with them ever since coming to Cleveland. Several other banks and savings and loans
also refused. With the sale in jeopardy,
the real estate agent explored some creative financing.
She
knew the vice president of mortgage banking at Central National Bank, and he
consented to review my application. The major problem was the size of the
mortgage that would be needed for this property until the Coventry house was
sold, and in the uncertain economic conditions that might be many months
away. Dorothy and I winced at the
possibility of having to handle two mortgages until then.
Now the
real estate agent persuaded the Friedmans to give us a second mortgage of
$40,000 at the far-below-market rate of only 6 percent. The mortgage would be due in 4 years with a
balloon payment at the end, and this plan made our monthly payments within
reason and more palatable to the banker.
I still had to personally meet the vice president and his committee and
persuade them of the merits of my financial arrangements and ability to pay.
I was
fairly confident as I went to corporate headquarters downtown to sell my prospects. The fact that I was a Ph.D. in business and
had a well-structured business plan for handling this new commitment obviously
impressed them. As we shook hands at the
end, he wryly told me: "If you had
been an auto worker with the same income, I would have turned you down. Well, I could hardly turn down a business
professor, an expert, with a comprehensive budget plan."
"Thank
you," I said humbly. "You
won't be disappointed."
"I
have one more stipulation that I'd like to put in the contract," he said. "I want you now and in the future to do
all your banking with Central—checking
auto loans, etc. Okay?"
"I'll
be glad to."
With
that we had our new home, in a nice neighborhood of other nice houses, mostly
occupied by doctors, lawyers, and successful entrepreneurs. To me it was practically a dream house,
something that had seemed forever out of reach.
Sometimes when in a reflective mood, I would remember years ago when
evenings after work I would stroll past modest dwellings thinking how wonderful
it would be to live in one of them instead of the drab apartments that seemed
all we might ever be able to afford.
(Our children and grandchildren grew up in a different age, and little
appreciated our new quality of life.)
There
were a few early problems. The Friedmans
had let the property deteriorate to some extent. They were inveterate world travelers, and
probably spent most of their money on traveling rather than fixing up the
house. So the decorating was tired, as
were the kitchen, the bathrooms, as well as the landscaping, and the furnace
was the original, dating back before World War II. We spent considerable money in the early
years rejuvenating. We finally replaced
the old furnace in 2004, so it did last another twenty years.
Buying
a house from a MD presented other drawbacks.
The first year our family had more ailments than we had ever had
before. We attributed this to germs that
the good doctor brought home from the hospital.
While he and his family had developed resistance to such germs, our
family had not.
In
years to come, the house has become a warm, loving part of our family. Dorothy sometimes complains that it is too
much work, especially after Matt and Connie left the nest, although Matt has
returned to it several times, the last time before going to Berkeley and a
prestigious graduate school.
Occasionally Dorothy raises the possibility of moving to a smaller
condo. Still, I think we both have come
to love this house, the neighborhood, and the stability it affords. We have almost forgotten the worries it
brought us in 1980. But it is worth
whatever stress we had in those days when we were trying to live frugally and
accumulate enough resources to provide for college for our kids, and eventually
a comfortable retirement for ourselves.
Now our house is appraised at $356,000, and we only carry a home equity
loan of $70,000. If we pay just the
interest, this brings our monthly expense to less than renting a one-bedroom
apartment in a poor location.
Europe
with the kids. — Two years later, in 1982, we felt sufficiently affluent to
undertake a 3-week trip to Western Europe with Connie and Matt, now 17 and
13. We flew to London and rented a car
at Heathrow Airport. But the car turned
out to be a monster, mean and uncooperative.
It had a stick shift and I had not driven a stick shift since I drove
Dad's old Dodge out in Kansas when I was a boy of sixteen. (I have to take that back. I drove Dorothy's stick-shift Vauxhall—a
small English car—occasionally after we
were married, and ruined the clutch.)
As if
the car wasn't enough, England presented several other situations that added to
driving hell. Every intersection seemed
to have a traffic circle, something I had encountered a few times in Washington
D. C., but never on this scale. Entering
with busy traffic was bad enough, but finding the right place to get off and
dodging traffic to do it was worse.
Traffic
circles, however, paled in comparison with having to drive on the wrong side of
the road, which I had never done. As I
think back, it's a wonder we made it safely not only in the car but also as
pedestrians. For example, on busy city streets if an American pedestrian looks
for traffic in the same direction as at home, sees nothing coming and steps off
the curb, well . . .Some Londoners told us that increasing accidents of
American pedestrians were of great concern to the British government.
Added
to this potpourri of misery as we left Heathrow Airport to try to find our way
to our first destination, was Connie, who had come down with flu-like symptoms
upon landing.
Through
academic contacts, we had the key to a cottage in a small town in the Cottswold
Hills about fifty miles west of London.
The owner, Bill Anson, had been bringing students to Cleveland State for
month-long seminars, and graciously offered his house to us. The mighty problem was getting there from
Heathrow. Our road maps were not of much
help, but we finally stumbled on this secluded village in the gentle hills.
Our
stay at the comfortable Anson house would have been more memorable if Connie
had felt better. As it was, we spent two
extra days there, and came to know the quaint village well, its flourishing
roses, and beckoning hiking trails, and, yes, the local pubs. We were there on a Sunday and went to the
local Roman Catholic church. The church
was small, evidently most inhabitants of the village were Anglicans, and the
pastor did not seem top notch since he had the choir sing all the verses of every
hymn, something that took half the service time so he had little preaching to
do.
We left
right after Mass to drive north toward Scotland. That evening, we found ourselves at Carlisle
on the Irish Sea, just below the Scottish border. I remember it well. The day had been dour and misting, and
darkness was gathering when we got to Carlisle, and we were all tired and
fitful. But practically everything in
the city was closed because of it being Sunday, and we were famished.
We
found one place open near the harbor, and nosed our car down a hill to the
waterfront—at least the brakes worked.
From there we called a number of lodging places, with most either not
answering or full, and finally found a bed and breakfast up the hill on the
outskirts of town. After a supper
heroically unappetizing, we approached our car.
And I had one hell of a time with the stick shift to back out of our
parking place and get up the hill from the harbor. The car kept stalling on me, and only by pressing
the accelerator to the floor and slamming the stick shift to low was I able to
get out of that monster of a situation, sweating and cursing oblivious to being
a bad example for the kids. Dorothy kept
admonishing me. "Don't get so
angry, Bob. You're going to strip the
gears, like you did to my old car just after we were married."
"Would
you like to drive this monster?" I asked.
"After all, you're more familiar with stick shifts." But she
wouldn't take up the challenge.
Our bed
and breakfast was best left forgotten, too.
The car
did last until we got to Inverness, on the edge of Loch Ness in northern
Scotland. We got there during the
afternoon rush hour, when the car lurched to a stop downtown, and would not
budge. With our car impeding traffic, I
found a phone booth and called the local office of Hertz to explain our
predicament. They were most apologetic
about one of their cars failing and quickly came and hauled it and us to their
place, and gave us another car, one that seemed to have a smoother shift and
transmission. We would gladly have taken
a car with an automatic transmission, even though it cost more, but such were
rarities in Europe in 1982 (and even years later as we discovered in Slovenia
when with our dignitary status, we were able to rent one of the few cars with
automatic). "They don't know what a
wild man you are with stick shifts," Dorothy told me. "And they think the breakdown of the
transmission was all the car's fault."
"Shush,"
I said to her and the kids. "We mustn't
let on how hard I was on the poor little car."
"We'll
never tell, Dad," Matt said.
Well,
we didn't see the Loch Ness monster, and it rained almost every day in
Inverness. So what's new. Still, the country was intriguing, and we saw
the battlefield at Culloden where Bonnie Prince Charlie was defeated by the
dastardly English.
A few
days later we stopped for a few nights at Edinburgh, and saw Queen Elizabeth's
Scottish castle and the Tattoo of marching troops and bagpipes. We toured several more castles and the old
Roman walled town of York and its Yorkminster Cathedral on our way south to the
town my father's ancestors came from, Utley in Yorkshire.
We were
not able to contact any Hartley relatives, but the phone book of this small
town of Utley showed a page and a half of Hartleys, far more than could be
found in Cleveland or Washington, D. C. phone books. By now my driving with a stick shift had
improved, and it was with some regret that I left the car at
Kingston-on-the-Hull, where we would take the ferry across the channel to
Brugge in Belgium. The ferry left in
late evening, so we made a night crossing of the channel and reached Brugge the
next morning. I would be lying if I said
our quarters were spacious, but they were next to the engines and that noise
lulled most of us to sleep. In Brugge,
we walked and took pictures of this once major seaport of Belgium that now
because of silt was some twenty miles from the water that had brought it wealth
and fame in the Middle Ages.
From
Brugge we took the train to Brussels where we would make connections to the
train to Paris. In Paris we found a
modestly priced hotel just across the busy street from the Gar du Nord, the
north train terminal. Our room was
surprisingly quiet despite the traffic outside, and it was near the subway with
which we soon became very familiar, and took everywhere.
We saw
all the famous sights and museums. A
notable memory was of Matt and me climbing the several hundred narrow, curving
steps to the top of Notre Dame, where we could look out at the gargoyles
alongside on the roof, and the Seine and Left Bank below us, and the hazy
buildings in the distance, none skyscrapers like New York City, except for the
Eiffel Tower. Dorothy had a sore knee so
was not able to climb, and Connie, I don't remember why she didn't.
We had
dinner at an expensive restaurant on the Left Bank, where we should have had
the bottled water instead of the table water, for we all got sick. We noticed that practically everyone in Paris
was carrying bottled water, and now we knew why.
We
found the natives of Paris to be aloof and unfriendly. Even the policemen feigned no knowledge
either of English or sign language. I
remember that the women did not wear hosiery, so were bare legged, with hairy
legs. I commented on this to Dorothy,
and she remembered reading something about this, and that hairy legs were
supposed to be more sexy than hairless legs.
Well, maybe to Parisians.
We went
back to London for the last four days of our trip, taking the hovercraft over a
rather stormy channel. Matt and Connie
got seasick on the passage to Dover. We
stayed at a new Holiday Inn in the Marble Arch suburb of London, and again took
subways all over. It felt good to be
back in English-speaking country.
We had
only seen the airport when we arrived, so now we had four days to tour London
before heading back to the States. That
was plenty of time, since through the years I had become rather expert at
seeing all there is to see in a very short time. Dorothy often admonishes me about that: "How can you possibly say you've seen
some famous place, when you practically run through it?"
I try
to explain this, but don't succeed.
In any
case, we explored London, including even #10 Downing Street where the Prime Minister
resided behind a barrier of guards.
These guards were steely-eyed and looked formidable, unlike the soldiers
at Buckingham Palace who seemed more ceremonial and completely tamed. I frankly
was shocked how the kids were fascinated, and resisted my fast-paced
sightseeing at all the bloody and macabre sites. These included the wax museum, the Tower of
London, and some nearby museum of the instruments of torture. "What kind of kids are we raising?"
I asked Dorothy.
"They're
probably just like you were at their age," she said,
"Bloodthirsty."
I tried
to protest, but she didn't buy it. Come
to think of it, I enjoyed the Tower of London, etc., fully as much as Connie
and Matt.
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