Lakewood Lore

Cream of the crop rises to the top of recollections

"There's nothing so sure as change," said the poet Robert Frost.

Hubert H. Schneider, 87, can affirm this, having just completed 90 pages of reminiscences about his family and of his life during the fledgling decades of the 20th Century.

A native West Sider who has lived in Lakewood for the past 63 years, Schneider tells of the horse-drawn milk wagons that came in the dark of early morning when he was a boy.

"There was no such thing as homogenized milk then," he points out. "The cream always went to the top. The lower part was bluish. In wintertime the milk froze and pushed the round cardboard lids out of the glass bottles."

Schneider also recalls the pre-supermarket days in these parts, when "mom and pop" stores had coffee grinders and barrels filled with crackers, beans and other dry foods.

"There were as many butcher shops as groceries," he says. "The butcher very often wore a boater straw hat, and it was customary for him to give half a wiener, or a piece of baloney, to any child who happened to be with a customer."

After the West Side Market opened in 1912, live chickens often were brought home on streetcars, Schneider explains. Wings and feet were tied, and the birds frequently were carried in the same basket as the groceries.

Early automobiles increased travel, but there were no motels. Travelers stayed in hotels or tourist homes. Most chose the latter, which were really private homes where families had an extra room or two they would rent out for $1 or $1.50 a night.

"Many tourist homes also served breakfast, usually for 50 cents," Schneider recollects.

He remembers, too, that in cities one could buy gasoline at car dealerships, and in the country at rural groceries or auto repair garages. Sometimes gas was brought home in 5-gallon cans and stored in the barn. It was comparatively cheap -- 10 or 11 cents a gallon -- but also dirty. One filtered it from the cans to the tank through a chamois cloth.

Tire blowouts, coming every hundred miles or so, were hazardous and a big nuisance. Tires had inner tubes then, and every motorist had to learn how to patch them and how to change a tire.

A retired attorney, Schneider had a law practice that spanned 62 years. His first Lakewood home was on Hilliard Road in 1927. He married Viola Hilgen in 1931, and today the couple resides on Kirtland Lane. They have two children -- Shirley Henderson and Janet Macbeth -- six grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.

Daughter Shirley, who is manager of information services for Lakewood Public Library, had a major role in the preparation of her father's lengthy remembrances of things past. He dictated them to her for compiling.

Before coming to Lakewood, Schneider lived on West 44th Street in Cleveland. From his home there he watched the great Lakewood fire that burned down the Kundtz Lumberyard between Giel and Bunts. It began May 21, 1920, and lasted two days.

Along with Schneider, many Lakewood old-timers like to muse about how much different were the things they did as kids, that is, before radio, television and VCR's.

For instance, I for one recall a boyhood friend, Jimmy, in the '20s. He spend most of his spare time each summer in an over-sized willow tree that grew in his back yard.

Whenever I moseyed to his side door wanting to play and let loose with a singsong "Oh, Jimmee . . . Oh, Jimmee" (common means of beckoning that no longer exits), his mother would open the kitchen window, stick out her head and yell, "He's up in the tree!"

Whereupon, I would join him there for a lazy, sun-stippled afternoon far removed from the nettles of the workaday world.

This article appeared in the Lakewood Sun Post April 12, 1990. Reprinted with permission.

[Note: Mr. Schneider died in 1994. His obituary appeared in the Cleveland Plain Dealer August 19, 1994]

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