Writer's On The Storm
Writer's On The Storm
It Was One Hundred Years Ago Today.
~ 2000 words ~ 15 minute read ~
Flying into Columbus, the greenery shocks the eye. I grew up here, but I’m always astonished at the full humid lushness of an Ohio summer. Living in the desert tunes the body differently. Our greens are gentle and sage-y, the air is dry, the sky big and open most of the time. I never feel socked in or claustrophobic.
I am calibrated to Arizona.
This visit was oppressively hot, too. Ohio during a heatwave doesn’t feel much different than Arizona except our air conditioning works much better, even during humid monsoon season. I forgot that it stays light until 9:30pm in Ohio, and that’s a big ‘no thank you’ from me. I enjoy Mountain Standard Time all year long.
Ohio also has tornados, which no one wants to experience, truly. There is nothing pretty or fun about a tornado. I remember all the sirens and drills. I’ll take the lightning drama and desert dust of an Arizona monsoon any day over a tornado.
But even with all that I don’t like about Ohio, I do still love it. I never get tired of the pizza. I love the wildlife and flowers. And family, of course.
I think when you’re born in a place - the molecules from that place never leave you.
–
I have quite a few projects going on right now in various states of being, and I’m fighting different fears with each of them, so instead of completely stalling on one thing, I poke at another project and consider it progress.
One of those projects is The Many Adventures of Little Giacomo - which started off as curiosity at family rumors and lore and has now taken on a life of its own as I unravel a fascinating story about a 5’1” Sicilian immigrant, my grandfather.
When I look out at the green lushness and humidity and big rolling rivers and old-growth forests of the Buckeye State, I try to look at it with the appreciation that my grandfather must have felt for this place when he arrived here in 1911, aged 18. Fertile, safe, full of promise, not too crowded.
I know from my work as a memoir coach and teacher that many of my readers are working on memoirs, and I’ve come to find out that I have quite a few of you also writing family histories.
And as I am doing both of those things, I realize now that there is a connection. Writing Papa’s story is part of my story. I feel like he’s communicating something through me, and I’m gently pulling at the threads to unravel it to share with you.
–
There are many chapters to his story, and most of them are set in Ohio, aside from his birthplace in a village in Sicily that has a history going back thousands of years.
If you’re a long-time reader, you may remember that Papa, as a younger man in Marion, Ohio, owned a fruit store. I have some evidence that he was being extorted by another Sicilian, or possibly the Black Hand Society, notorious for such crimes in Ohio at the time. The man he had a feud with ended up dead. Papa was convicted of manslaughter, along with his brother, Tony. Both were sent to the Ohio State Reformatory, in Mansfield, Ohio - a place made famous in The Shawshank Redemption.
They both served 18 months in what surely was hell on earth. Papa got out and registered for the draft in 1917. He listed his occupation as a waiter in a restaurant in Ashland, Ohio. He started over, again.
He started over again many times, as I’m finding out.
—
Of course, I didn’t know ANY of this years ago when I inherited an old hotel register book from The New Delmont Hotel, an establishment that Papa owned in Lorain, Ohio, from 1921-1925. It’s a giant book, too big to store upright vertically, so it lays flat, just as it was meant to do when it was a work-a-day book.
In that big book are signatures of hundreds of people from all over the upper Midwest, including the signature, multiple times, of a well-known Mafioso - but I can’t verify for sure if this is THE Frank Costello.
Not yet, at least. But wouldn’t that be something?
My mom has told me for years that Papa was offered a thousand dollars a month (back then!) by the mafia to run liquor and keep prostitutes at his hotel - which he staunchly refused to do even though it would have been easy.
The address, 21 E. Erie Street, no longer exists in Lorain, so I went to the Sanborn Fire Maps at the Library of Congress, and I found exactly where the building was.
The New Delmont was located next to the Black River, near the shore of Lake Erie. Shipyards and railroad tracks served one of the busiest ports on the lake and the hotel was just a block east of downtown Lorain along the Erie Viaduct Bridge, as it was called.
Then I started looking at old photos of Lorain, and researched the railroad and shipyards, and I found aerial shots and all kinds of visual information, and finally - there she was. A white 2-story building with a porch that led directly to the footpath across the bridge, and a unique cupola that made it stand out once you know what you’re looking at. She’s there, on the left, in the photo, taken about 1914.
The Lorain Historical Society was able to find the original lease that Papa signed.
(I love historians, archivists, and librarians. I will always be a part of that tribe.)
Anyways, the building had been a beer brewery owned by a German man. I’m assuming, with Prohibition in full swing, he could no longer do that. After researching the history of the German brewers in Cleveland and Cincinnati and realizing how many were decimated by Prohibition, I think it’s a safe assumption at this point.
I don’t suspect that The New Delmont was a high-class place given its very blue-collar location, but it seemed to have steady business except for a six-week interruption in guest signatures and dates in the summer of 1924.
-
I’m coming to the conclusion that Papa spent his life trying to outrun and outwit the Mob to some degree.
They’d extorted him and his brother in Marion and he ended up in prison. They were after him in Lorain. In Ashland, where he eventually settled and raised his family, he was visited by federal agents in the early 1950’s at his cement block factory asking if he knew anything about another certain mobster.
Papa was a smart man, self-educated, fluent in five languages, toughened by a hard life. My mom says he told the agents that he knew nothing, and even if he did know something, he wasn’t stupid enough to cooperate with the police. He was in his 60’s at that point. My mom was a little girl.
He didn’t want to be involved. He wanted to run a business, raise his family, and fully participate in the American way of life without being at the mercy of mobsters or the law. He’s had enough of both.
But Mother Nature?
She can be a real gangster.
–
On June 28, 1924 - One hundred years ago today, on a brutally hot Saturday afternoon - probably not unlike the week I just experienced - the deadliest tornado in Ohio’s history hit downtown Lorain.
It blew in off the lake, hit Sandusky first, then came ashore at the crowded beach at Lorain. It leveled the public bathhouse, made its way south through downtown and devastated the entire city.
I’d never heard about this tornado until I was researching Papa and Lorain.
Growing up in Ohio, all we ever heard about was the horrific Xenia tornado of 1974. It leveled the town in a mile-wide swath, and 32 people died.
The Lorain tornado of 1924 killed 85 people in total. It swept people out into the lake to drown, it toppled buildings onto children, it threw railroad cars around like toys and stripped houses clean off their foundations.
It’s a tornado that not many people remember anymore.
–
I asked my Uncle Johnny before he passed away last year, “Did Papa ever talk about a great tornado in Lorain?”
“Why, yes he did!” He said in astonishment. “Papa did tell me that there was a great storm in Lorain - he didn’t call it a tornado - that killed many many people. He was at the post office at the time the storm hit, and they huddled in a vault until the storm passed.”
Wow.
I found the old Post Office in Lorain. One of those solid federal buildings, it was only a half a mile away from The New Delmont, south on Broadway.
This is what Broadway looked like as he emerged from the Post Office.
.
His hotel is the white building at the bottom middle of the above photo. It survived!
The hotel register shows the last person checked in on June 26th. The next person checked in August 17th. He stayed open for almost another year.
I don’t know what Papa did during those six weeks after the tornado. Most able-bodied males volunteered for clean up and civic duty so I assume Papa did the same. It is estimated that more than 7000 people were left homeless.
The Red Cross took over and provided soup kitchens and tents for people to live in for the summer and Lorain rebuilt quickly.
In December of 1924, at the age of 32, Papa became a full American citizen at the Lorain County courthouse, nearby.
In 1925, he was back in Ashland, taking college classes and entering fitness contests. He had his picture published in Strength Magazine. He took correspondence courses for writing, and he wrote short stories and tried to get published. I have a couple of dozen of his rough drafts, written in his elegant hand, or typed out on the typewriter that lived in his office.
To make a living during these years, he opened a restaurant along Main Street in Ashland which he operated until mid-1929. He also had a torrid affair with a married woman who worked for him.
In October of 1929 he returned to his village in Sicily to marry my grandmother, stayed six months, and was back in Ashland by July of 1930, waiting tables again. I have his handwritten diary of this trip.
Mama joined him with their son, my Uncle Jim, in September 1931. Two more sons were born in 1936 and ‘37. My mom arrived in 1947, when Papa was 55 years old.
Born Giacomo Baptista Bonfiglio in Sicily, Convicted as James Bonfiglio in Marion, Naturalized as James B. Bon in Lorain. Known to his friends as Jim or Jimmy.
He was my Papa. He passed away at the age of 91 in 1983 when I was 11.
I didn’t know him well, but I do remember him. I understand that this project is one of his gifts to me. This is the next best thing to a real relationship I could have with him as his youngest grandchild, the only daughter of his only daughter.
Getting to know him this way helps me understand the ancestral lineage and resilience that flows through my veins. An absolute refusal to quit trying to live a life of freedom and dignity.
And now I need to finish this thing.
I need to finish ALL the things.
I’ve got a screenplay, a memoir, and a fiction project to work on. Many more books to publish. He’ll be there. I can’t help but think he’s watching over me.
He survived that tornado in Lorain one hundred years ago today and I am the only person left to know about it in our family, to figure it out, to bear witness to what I know he experienced. He was there.
And I am here. One hundred years later. Through him, I feel like a time-traveler.
And that’s why I have to write about it. I can’t write HIS memoir, but this might be close enough.
Thanks for leaving me all the clues, Papa.
Thank you for reading Life of O’Brien