For some reason Cleveland Heights felt like the place where we should start our new life in America.  Gates Mills was way too expensive and we had no connection to any other city.  Plus, Royse’s mother lived in Cleveland Heights, so that put family nearby.  However, to put this plan into action we needed jobs and a place to live.  To cushion us financially, we had the Peace Corps readjustment allowance of several thousand dollars as well as the $3000 in severance pay we received from the Libyan government (under the terms of our contract) after Qaddafi threw us out.  As I recall, we stayed with my parents in Gates Mills at the beginning while we were job hunting and looking for an apartment. 

I had read a book by R. K. Irish with the breezy and optimistic title of “Go Hire Yourself an Employer”.  The principal idea it contained was the notion that, after you had identified your abilities and written a resume, you should conduct information-only interviews with people who are familiar with the field you’re interested in.  They may not have a job to offer you but, through the interview, you are making yourself known and can ask for the names of other people to interview, with the hope that eventually, as you plowed the ground, a job offer would materialize.  Royse and I built resumes that highlighted our Peace Corps cross-cultural experience and interpersonal skills and that’s how we sold ourselves to employers through a string of interviews.  And it worked.  Within three months, Royse had a job as a field organizer with the Lake Erie Girl Scouts Council and I got a job with the City of Cleveland’s Community Relations Board as a community organizer in the tough, racially-conflicted Collinwood neighborhood.  We found a spacious apartment on Derbyshire Road in Cleveland Heights near the Alcazar Hotel and Cedar Hill.  It had three bedrooms which meant that we each had an extra room to ourselves.  Royse set up sewing operations in hers. And I made a workshop out of mine for building projects, which included transforming thoseThai teak boards into a three foot by five dining room table.

Our building had six rental units and the dozen or so tenants there became a kind of instant village for us.  We had made an abrupt but pleasant financial transition from making a combined annual income of $3600 overseas to suddenly pulling down a collective $20,000 in our new jobs.  It was almost more money than we could imagine.  Our rent was only $175, which we paid to a greedy and unpleasant lawyer-landlord named Stanley Josselson, who drove a Bentley.  We saved $500 per month.  For $2200, we bought a new Chevy Vega – certainly the worst car GM had ever made.  I paid a lot of money for Ziebart rust proofing but that piece of junk still rusted through.  The only thing I liked about it was the four-speed manual transmission.  Generally, those were free and easy years.  We took a nice summer trip to the West Coast, where, after a visit to the City Lights bookstore in San Francisco, we rented a car for a lovely day trip down the coast to Carmel and Big Sur with lunch at the Nepenthe restaurant, where we enjoyed a wonderful lunch and spectacular coastal views of pounding surf.  From there we headed north on Interstate 5 all the way to Washington State where we stayed with our dear old Chiang Rai friend Nick Handy.  He took us to see the Pike Street market and drove us to his family cabin in the mountains for an overnight.  The finale was a three day backpacking trip east over the Cascades to Lake Chelan.  We camped one night at a cold and windy mountain pass.  As we sat around the campfire after dinner, Nick and Royse smoked a few joints, although I abstained.  That night, Royse, in her stoned condition, says that she nearly froze to death, despite her fancy warm sleeping bag.  For years afterwards she claimed that I had made her smoke the pot that evening against her will.  That is an allegation without basis in fact.

The daily lesson plan grind of the Peace Corps was behind us so we had evenings and weekends to ourselves.  We hung out with friends.  There was a rafting trip down the Black Lick river in Pennsylvania with Rick and Sue Taft.  I took karate lessons, actually won a real match in a real tournament, and tore up my knee, an event which would lead to other joint problems later in life..  Although we didn’t leave North America, we traveled pretty much whenever we wanted to.  We took a weekend trip to Toronto with Bob and Coleen Junilla, a couple who lived in our building.  My mother wanted a car delivered to an apartment they had in Pompano Beach,  so we hit the road and took a nice two day road trip.  I remember seeing cotton growing wild by the roadside in Virginia.  We made it all the way to Key West where we stayed at a 1950s-era motel called the Blue Marlin.  We had spent all day at the beach in the sun and at dinner the rum in the planter’s punch was so strong that it made my face numb.   We were Dinks (double income no kids), at least until our biological clocks told us to start a family.  In 1976, after I had helped to organize a tenants union in our building, we were handed an eviction letter by the ogre Josselson.  However, with felicitous timing, we had also bought a house at 3129 Yorkshire Road in Cleveland Heights so we just made the transition from renters to owners.  Our new home was quite spacious, with five bedrooms and a bath and a half

I can’t remember if we ever met the previous owners of the Yorkshire house – a Mr and Mrs Joseph Strela – but we may have felt their presence as we moved in and started to make the house our own.  One of the first times I opened up the front door after we had taken possession, I felt a spirit give me an unfriendly challenge, questioning why I was trespassing in their home.  This confrontation made me pause, but after I mentally stated the fact that Royse and I now owned the house, I felt the spirit fade away. My hunch was that it wasn’t the Strelas but a previous owner.  We actually tracked down and met a Mrs. Wright, the woman who, with her husband, were the original owners of the house when it was built in 1920.  She was widowed and living by herself in the Gates Mills Towers in Mayfield Heights.
Anyway, the place looked like it had belonged to old people: drab paint and old-fashioned wallpaper,  a dull and ancient kitchen, and badly overgrown shrubbery which hid the front of the house and its nice stone patio.  We set to work trying to freshen things up, and over the next few years we made some real progress, although, at least in my case, the greatest resource was youthful energy rather than money or refined taste.  I cut back the bushes in front and we had the house painted a  nice colonial yellow.  We contracted with Tom Gathy, the owner of Heights Hardware on Coventry Road, to put in a new kitchen.  He did a decent job and I think we paid him about $7000, which back then seemed like a king’s ransom and pretty much emptied out our savings.  Without anything as sensible as a respirator mask, I used many, many gallons of Strip-Eze to get all the floors and trim on the ground level down to bare wood.  Then, after we paid a fellow to sand the floors, I went toxic again and applied multiple layers of urethane.  The memories of this work are a little fuzzy since the fumes kept me high as a kite.

My work in the Collinwood neighborhood involved getting to know its various community leaders and looking for ways to facilitate discussion and cooperation across the sharp racial divide that marked the area.  Blacks were moving into the area from inner-city neighborhoods like Glenville and Hough and the Italians and Slovenes put up a strong, sometimes violent, resistance.  Most of the trouble was at Collinwood High School.  It was located on East 152nd Street, the racial dividing line between black and white.  In September of 1974, the neighborhood exploded with racial conflict.  There were two stabbings, then an Italian kid shot and killed a black kid.  In the high school itself, fights broke out constantly and the overwhelmed principal, Joseph Dizinno, would hide in his office in a state of paralysis.  One time I found myself in a school hallway trying to restrain two groups who were itching to mix it up.  I was never in danger but it was like I didn’t exist when they finally charged each other.  They just flowed right past me and started swinging.  I distinctly remember how much noise a fist makes when it lands on a jaw.  The National Guard was sent in to prevent rioting and looting.  Our community relations department started a bi-racial dialogue group of community leaders to try to cool things down.  The most colorful participant at these meetings was Brother Diablo (born Larry Thomas) from the Black Unity House on Hayden Avenue in East Cleveland.  He would show up in his dreadlocks and African robes and spout anti-white rhetoric.  He professed to be a Black Muslim and changed his name to Brother Daoud.  I made some brownie points by speaking to him in Arabic.  When some community-improvement money was made available from private foundations, Brother Diablo submitted a proposal for youth programs involving wilderness survival and drill marching.  I was perhaps the only one who thought this was a ploy to get the Cleveland Foundation to unknowingly finance a guerilla-style liberation army.  Luckily nothing came of it.

Working for the City of Cleveland put you into a mix of people you would never have met under any other circumstances, rather like being thrown together with several thousand strangers on a very large life raft.  When I started, the mayor was Ralph Perk, who was a master of ethnic ward politics.  He wasn’t above using the City’s plentiful manpower for personal use when he was up for re-election and I recall being sent out with my office mates on a work day to distribute campaign leaflets for him.  That was business as usual in Cleveland’s municipal world.  Dennis “the Menace” Kucinich, the future presidential candidate, became mayor in 1977.  He and I once rode an elevator together in City Hall.  He was short and looked insecure, although his public persona was very different.  I drove downtown every day to the Community Relations Department at City Hall before heading out to my satellite office in Collinwood.  My boss was Earl Williams.  His assistant was Paul Jackson, who also happened to be my neighbor since he lived on Yorkshire Road on the block west of Cottage Grove.  We didn’t hang out.  My job description as a neighborhood community relations organizer was very vague.  If a black resident was harassed by whites, I would interview the homeowner and write up a report.  I went to a lot of community meetings.  One member of my department, Dan Cabot, sold real estate part time and told me I should consider it as a part time job, and I did.  I got my license and worked for the Stuart Wallace company part time for a year or so.  Once I felt confident enough, I resigned from my community relations job in 1978 to sell real estate full time.
This was a busy time for Royse and me because we also started a family.  Pregnancy and birth are miraculous processes and I was blessed to be part of them.  We read all the current books about having a baby.  Royse ate all the recommended healthy foods.  No alcohol, no tobacco, no more pot.  We had Kaiser insurance and went to Lamaze classes with other excited first-time couples.  It was wonderful to feel our child moving around in the uterus. I put stereo headphones on Royse’s great rounded dome of a stomach to give Rebecca an early introduction to classical music.  At the time Royse worked for the Cuyahoga County Board of Mental Retardation and showed up for work until the day before she delivered.  Rebecca Chamberlin Crall was born on April 8, 1978 at the Kaiser hospital on Fairhill Road in Cleveland and changed our world for the better and forever.  Royse eventually quit her full time job to stay home and care for our little girl.  We somehow got by on my real estate income.  Although my parents had moved to Florida in 1977, Jane Hardy still lived on Dartmoor Road and helped us out a lot.  Alexander Reinhart Crall arrived on April 26, 1981, also at Fairhill.  He had been extremely active in the womb, as if he were in training for gymnastics.  He was born about 4:00 AM and an Indian nurse told us that’s the time that the Hindu gods wake up.  To make a perfect trifecta, James DeWitt Crall presented himself at Fairhill on April 24, 1985.  He had hardly moved at all in the womb, which was quite a contrast to his older brother, but his fetal heart rate was fine, so we didn’t worry.  We bought a stroller at a yard sale and, as I recall, we used it for all three kids.  We had decorated one bedroom for a newborn and each child did a stint there in turn.  As they grew they moved into their own rooms.

By the time James was born, Alex was four and Rebecca was seven.  She had started school at Coventry Elementary, although she had spent some preschool time at a Montessori school on Fairmount Boulevard.

So our nuclear family’s constellation was established and the children began their individual paths through life.  Any future stories will be written by them!