KING OF THE ROAD

I've never failed to be charmed by the men and women I've interviewed and profiled for Super Lawyers and other publications. My feature article, King of the Road, appeared in Ohio Super Lawyer in about 2004. In all, I've so far written about a dozen features and columns for the magazine's statewide editions in Ohio, Upper New York, Oklahoma and elsewhere.


Michael Leizerman had an inkling that he’d discovered an intriguing career direction after the Toledo personal injury lawyer took on the case of a trailer-truck driver who’d rear-ended another eighteen-wheeler. It wasn’t his client’s fault, he was ready to tell a jury. The other truck’s brake lights were out.

“Of course, my guy’s brakes weren’t working,” Leizerman concedes.

It made the young lawyer think. Was it really some giant coincidence that those two dangerously un-roadworthy behemoths had found each other in a grind of chrome, metal and glass? Or was it remotely possible that there were a number of big rigs out there with inadequate signals and braking systems? Trucks weighing a hundred thousand pounds and more, barreling down on the family minivan at highway speeds of sixty, seventy miles an hour, pads worn, lighting iffy.

Indeed it was, and mechanical failure was only the first detour on the road to safe driving.
There were, as Leizerman would learn, trucking firms that bullied drivers into overtiming well into the No-Doz hours. Ambitious drivers who falsified logs to shave hours behind the wheel. Truckers who shouldn’t have earned their Class 8 commercial license in the first place operating heavy metal like some nine-year-old who’s found his father’s handgun stash.

Take the wild-ass big-rig driver from the Ukraine Leizerman put in the crosshairs of a lawsuit. After the guy ran a light to plow into a middle-aged deli counter worker. Leizerman found that his injured client hadn’t been the hasty trucker’s first victim.

“In the five years since he’d come to the States, he’d had at least three prior hit-and-runs after disregarding a traffic sign,” he says.

Leizerman’s client ended up with a rotator cuff injury that precluded her from operating the cheese and meat slicer.

“We settled for around a half-million dollars.”

There are some 500,000 truck accidents a year in the Unites States. A hundred thousand involve casualties, including about 5,000 fatalities. And over a five-year period culminating in the year 2000, only four states had more fatal truck-involved accidents than in Ohio.

Leizerman, who also practices in Michigan and Tennessee, had found a crying need. He took on more and more truck cases in the late 1990s. He formed and still runs a truck litigation committee within the Association of Trial Lawyers of America (ATLA). He invested in an expensive website called http://www.truckaccidents.com/, runs phone directory and newspaper ads and TV spots in several cities, bylines legal articles and recently signed a contract to write a 1,000-page treatise on his favorite topic. Oh, and he went to truck driving school, earning all of his certification and passing his exam for a Commercial Drivers License in his first attempt. Just curious to see what it’s like behind the wheel.

“I want to be the national truck accident attorney,” Leizerman states flatly.

It’s not an entirely altruistic goal.

Doctored Logs and Paperwork Forests

“Mike is very cerebral, and he’s a good businessman,” says Steve Gursten, a Southfield, Michigan lawyer who has referred truck accident cases to Leizerman, and tried other cases in association with his Ohio counterpart.

Leizerman was happy to redirect his attention from the mostly routine auto accidents that hit his desk at E.J. Leizerman & Associates, his uncle’s firm and young Leizerman’s sole workplace since his recruitment as a seventeen-year-old file clerk. Leizerman, who grew up in the Detroit area with two younger brothers, went right to work here as an attorney upon graduating from the University of Toledo Law School and passing the bar exam, in late 1994. The firm specializes in personal injury cases involving railroad workers, as well as larger car accident cases.

“I wanted to stop taking car cases because many of my clients could have done as well without me and wouldn’t have had to split the settlement,” he says.

Meaning that when a policyholder is clearly at fault, auto insurers are eager to settle for up to the coverage limit. Since the faulty drivers seldom have much additional money to chase, there’s a fairly low settlement ceiling and rather uncomplicated process to get a check cut.

Truck cases? Different story. And much more of the challenge Leizerman relishes.
In the first place, there’s the forest of documents to wade through. Among the myriad laws established by an alphabet soup of federal and state regulatory agencies, commercial drivers must keep written journals, or logs, of their driving activity. That’s to ensure that the drivers of freight-transporting commercial carriers not exceed eleven hours of service without twelve consecutive hours of downtime. Driver fatigue, though usually hard to prove, is suspected as at least an underlying factor in many road accidents. So there are credit card receipts and cell phone records to go through to see if everything meshes with the documented activity.

After all, says Leizerman, “If drivers are falsifying their hours, who cares what the laws are?”

There’s also bill of lading paperwork, which can indicate excess cargo weight or load-shifting. There are alcohol and drug test results. And, since many trucking firms have in-cab satellite communications systems, incriminating messages can be found here.

Which is exactly what happened in a case handled by Leizerman. “It was right there in the messages picked up by the driver while offloading. He told the company he was at his service limit, and they sent him back out anyway.” And put it in writing.

In addition to the challenge, the payoff is better than car accidents. Minimum insurance coverage on commercial carriers starts at a million bucks and can work all the way up to $5 million on rigs carrying certain classes of hazardous materials. Lawyers might also go after the relatively deep-pocketed trucking firms that negligently hired or contracted with or overworked the driver, or inadequately serviced the vehicle.

Leizerman felt needed. “There’s almost never a million-dollar settlements without a lawyer,” he observes.

He’s won several seven-figure sums for his clients and firm, which earns about $10 million a year in total settlements. “The average is about $200,00 per case today, when ten or fifteen years ago it was maybe $15,000,” he says. “And the little cases take just as much time to do right as the bigger cases.”

The Young Tractor-Trailer King

Michael Leizerman hesitates when the question of age comes up. It’s not an unusual response from anyone being interviewed for publication. “Well,” he finally responds, “I’ll be thirty-five by the time this comes out.”

The problem, as it turns out, isn’t vanity. Quite the contrary, it’s his relative lack of years that concerns him. “It’s hard being taken seriously by a plaintiff on a million-dollar case when you’re twenty-eight,” he observes. “But I guess I’ve done this long enough now that I’ve built up some credibility…”

With his neatly trimmed salt-and-pepper beard and thinning hairline, Leizerman looks somewhat older than his birthdate. He’s a small, sober-looking man whose quiet but friendly mannerisms suggest nothing along the lines of what you’d expect from a trial lawyer dubbed “The Tractor-Trailer King” by his peers. No ten-gallon cowboy hat, snakeskin boots or trophy third wife on display here.

Leizerman’s office at E.J. Leizerman & Associates LLC, which occupies its own modest building on the outskirts of downtown Toledo, is as well-kept as the man. It’s a large-enough room done up in lawyerly fashion: cherry desk and credenza, rich green carpet, jet black leather sofa and guest chair, textured wallpaper the muted color of oatmeal. His desk holds a few razor-sharp stacks of paper and case files and little else. The credenza is stuffed with law books. An easel exhibits the self-portrait woodcut of his wife, Julie, an amateur sculpture, part-time bookkeeper at the firm and full-time homemaker.

His conversation ranges from his career and caseload to his obviously welcome home life. He’s the father of sons Kegan, 10, and four-year-old Daniel. He plays the piano for relaxation, enjoys cooking and even confesses to caring for twelve chickens and torturing the accordion.

Most importantly: “No matter how busy it gets, I get home most evenings,” he says.

“Home” is in Swanton, a toney suburb where he and his family own a home and 14 acres of gardens, scrubby woods and, apparently, free-ranging fowl.

Yes, he’s home most evenings, but not always “there,” insists Julie. “His office is in this little hiding place off of the kitchen. I’ve learned to look for him there first. He’s just always working or thinking about some aspect of work. But I suppose if he can mow the lawn while thinking about his cases, he’s multi-tasking.”

Gursten, his Michigan-based occasional partner, appreciates his friend’s effort and attentiveness. As he sees it, “The biggest reason people hate lawyers is their lack of responsiveness. But Mike is one of those rare lawyers who actually calls people back.”

Which is important to Gursten because some of his clients have suffered traumatic brain injuries.

“If they get ignored, they take it harder than someone else might.”

The phone calls don’t necessarily stop once the case is over. Leizerman won a $2.5 million settlement on behalf of Toledo tire salesman Richard “Willie” Lauffer in late 2003. He had suffered multiple fractured and become permanently disabled when a truck backed into him while he stood on a curb.

“That guy’s first class, more like family than a lawyer,” says Lauffer. “He still calls me once in a while just to say, ‘Hey, how ya doin’?’”

Road-Safe in ‘04

As he enthusiastically discusses advancements in truck safety, Leizerman almost sounds like he wouldn’t mind being put out of business. He chats about his favorite technology: electronic logs and satellite-positioning systems that can’t be falsified, in-cab satellite communications, and collision-avoidance systems.

“It’s radar that scans forward and on the sides,” he explains. “You get a siren when someone’s in your blind spot and the monitor graphs out the positions of all vehicles around the rig. Drivers can see what’s going on, and trucking firms can use it to preemptively examine the tailgating practices of drivers and send them back to driver simulation school if needed.”

Pretty cool. But couldn’t widespread adoption of the technology force him give up his crown and title of Tractor-Trailer King?

No matter, he says. “The hope is that there really is an increase in safety on the road.”

Worst case scenario, it just gives Mike Liezerman a little more time for accordion lessons and poultry breeding.

TINY'S BIG IDEAS

After nearly a decade in hiding, the truth can finally be told: I am Pat Halstead. I profiled multi-award-winning advertising copywriter Erin Pollock for the October, 2000 issue of The Plain Dealer Sunday Magazine. But at the time, I was working for another Cleveland ad agency and didn't think my superiors would think much of the publicity given a competitor. Hence, my one and only (so far) pseudonym. The last name comes from back a ways in my family ancestry on my dad's side. The first name, "Pat" was craftily designed to further confuse the reader by even muddling the gender. I'm devious when I have to be.

David Searls

“Anyone interested in a lesbian cruise? Besides every heterosexual male on the planet?”
Ad for Green Road travel Agency promoting lesbian vacation packages

Black on black is the fashion statement of the evening, the men in buttoned-to-the-throat shirts sans neckties, the women decked out stylishly or hip, depending on age or outlook. Stones glitter from earlobes of both genders and the sprinkling of round, horn-rimmed glasses puts one in mind of a Woody Allen movie. The account people work the room while the creatives hang back with their own kind, looking vaguely uncomfortable. After dinner and cocktails, the hosts dim the lights and steer the crowd to another room with another bar, and usher the attendees into chairs set before a stage.

Welcome to the Cleveland ADDYs, the annual Cleveland Advertising Association-sponsored award show which in 2000, as well as other recent years, seems to have been called to order predominantly to honor a tiny, tiny young woman in black leather pants and matching top. Erin Friedman—now Pollock, due to her recent marriage to Adam, a pediatric dentist—will be photographed receiving an award more than thirty times this evening, her exuberant grin never slipping into boredom or self-satisfaction. The girlish copywriter gleefully pops up to take home almost half of the first-place Golds and about a third of the Silvers. She nabs three out of four of the Judges’ Choice Awards, and, as a sort of industry coup d’ etat, earns the one and only Best of Show, an honor that must seem anticlimactic after she’s swept everything else.

In all, Pollock walks away this March evening with 25 of 66 top awards along with fourteen certificates of merit. To add insult to everyone else’s injury, several of the honors she doesn’t pick up are in such word-free categories as logo design or still photography.

“I’ve seen the judges’ reactions, and her work obviously lights up their eyes,” says Lane Strauss, a copywriter from Wyse Advertising who’s nabbed more than his share of ADDY recognition over the years, including seven of the major awards at the 2000 show.

Pollock’s accomplishments are the equivalent of Mark McGwire hitting not 70 homers a year, but 80 or 90 or a hundred. While she probably weighs as much as one of the famed slugger’s thighs, she’s obviously got the mental heft needed to have risen to the top of her profession in less than a half dozen years. At the tender age of 29, Bill Brokaw Advertising’s Erin Pollock stands as tall as any copywriter in Cleveland.

Ad agency folks love awards shows. Account people drag along their clients to prove what brilliant accomplishments have been made on their nickel. Winning writers and designers subtly lobby for more bucks or better jobs (as industry recruiter Laurie Mitchell phrased it in her ad in the last ADDY program, “You win. We place.”) or simply preen before peers. And everyone thinks the plaques and trophies look cool in the agency lobby.

Among such back-patting shows, the local segment of the American Advertising Awards—or ADDY—is a major draw as the first of three steps, followed by districts and nationals, to top-of-the-profession acclaim. The winners gleefully accept their plaudits while the losers are left to ponder the shortcuts that certain agencies might have taken to nab their victories.

Ad people whose clients manufacture camshafts or promote funeral services, for instance, might dwell on what they could do if given free rein to create posters for divorce lawyers or small-space ads for pet-sitting services or lesbian vacation packagers. Yes, Bill Brokaw Advertising has been known to snag such delightfully quirky clients with shoestring ad budgets that contribute little to the agency’s bottom line, but yield opportunities to create attention-grabbing messages that run on just enough of a media schedule to qualify for show entry.

In typically irreverent fashion, Pollock once addressed this controversy head-on when assigned to write copy encouraging agencies to submit work to the Cleveland ADDYs. “Hey, if it ran once, it ran,” read one award-winning poster. Another enthused: “Your cousin’s wife teaches naked yoga. Can you say poster campaign?”

But Pollock silences the naysayers in a bigger way, by also winning on behalf of such all-business and potentially mind-numbing clients as manufacturers of pressure-sensitive adhesives and sewer pipes. For the latter, for instance, she wrote a direct mail seminar invitation promising free sewer pipe design software. The kicker came in the subhead: “(You’ll just have to sit through some crap first.)”

“Going to the Van Halen concert tonight? Something tells us you’ll have the munchies.”
Ad for Mel’s Grille

“I’m not a writer,” Pollock proclaims with a shrug. “I’m a concepter."

Or at least not a writer like her classmates at The Portfolio Center in Atlanta, an intensive two-year copywriting training program, where she went after earning a journalism degree at The Ohio State University.

“A lot of them really wanted to do something more literate, and were writing copy as a means of getting paid,” says Pollock. “But for me, advertising is all I ever wanted to do. Journalistic writing is too much correct grammar and spell-checking.”

Words are not highly valued by volume in advertising. It’s a craft, not an art, the object being to cajole reluctant consumers into stopping, engaging, consuming. At The Portfolio Center, Pollock learned such golden rules as KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid) and ROI (Relevance, Originality, Impact). Steadily she nurtured her talent for the amusing headline and succinct few lines of copy.

Having grown up in Mayfield Heights, the only child of Ella and Joel Friedman, it was to the Cleveland area she returned during one semester break, with resume and school samples in hand. “Everywhere I went, they took one look at my portfolio and said I should take it to Brokaw,” she says.

This was 1995, and Bill Brokaw Advertising was in the early stages of establishing its reputation as a youthful shop creating sassy ads for clients willing to have a little fun, take a few risks.
Bill Brokaw—the man, not the agency—felt that the young writer now known agency-wide as Tiny would fit right in “She’s quick and bright and her ability to hit the nerve of her audience is very sharp.”

Initially, the nerves hit hardest by Pollock’s work were her own. “I’d be up at three in the morning writing down ideas. I used to freak out. I’d cry, like I wasn’t going to be able to come up with anything.”

The worst is when she gets a poor reaction for a new-business pitch. “A client will give you another chance if they have a history with you, but when I let down a prospect who doesn’t know me I feel so bad. It’s like I dropped the ball.”

Her daughter struggles this way with everything, according to Ella Friedman. “Erin’s got a Type A personality, and she’s always been hard on herself. At first, she was convinced she wasn’t even going to be able to get a job in Cleveland.”

Pollock says that she learned to fight the stress by keeping things fun and by trusting her gut reaction. As at many agencies, Pollock works in tandem with an art director, most frequently and successfully with low-key but humorous Steve McKeown. They’re about the same age, and have virtually the same start date at Brokaw. They work so well together, spinning ideas back and forth, that Pollock claims it’s hard to remember who came up with a good one.

“I scribble stuff down, and Erin makes fun of it,” McKeown jokes in explaining their easy work habits.

Pollock’s trademark irreverence isn’t just saved for agency clients. According to co-worker and fellow copywriter Chris Viola, “Erin will say stuff that everyone else thinks, but won’t say.”

In other words, Tiny is a bit profane?

“Oh God, don’t say that. My mother will read this,” Pollock wails. After a pause, she adds with a smile, “I’m outspoken, not profane. And I don’t have the best ‘edit’ button in my head.”

Mrs. Friedman’s feelings aside, Pollock fits right in at an agency with a cluster of photos of everyone who a staff amateur photographer could, over time, convince to pose in oblivious proximity to a phallic symbol sneaked somewhere onto the scene.

Conversation spills from Pollock in quick bursts. Then she stops and second-guesses everything she’s just said. Her most frequent target is herself: she’s not that good, she’s not really a writer, she gets an awful lot of help from the geniuses around her.

“Everyone I work with is funny but me,” she insists. “I’m funny in my obnoxiousness, I guess, but not really funny.”

While Pollock professes repeated disbelief that anyone would want to read about her accomplishments, her “You wanna talk to me?!” routine seems genuine rather than coy. After all, she doesn’t even let two of her biggest supporters go to the ADDYs.

“She says it’s queer if your parents go,” according to her mother.

Despite her rising profile in Cleveland, Pollock throws credit around as liberally as a summer intern hoping to get hired on fulltime. She seems to mention everyone in the creative department as an inspiration, but saves her highest praise for Creative Director Greg Thomas.

“He can fix anything. He’ll change one word and suddenly my headline’s working,” she says. It’s Thomas she credits for pushing her to work on her “voice,” the tone she assumes with each message. “You can’t be too irreverent or edgy if you’re working with a hospital,” Pollock admits. “At first it was hard for me to work in voices other than humor, but it’s getting easier.”

Respect is a two-way street between Pollock and her creative director. “Erin has an uncanny ability to cut right to the meat of the issue,” says Thomas.

The best example of that might be his favorite Pollock creation, a mailer promoting the services of a laser vision surgical center. Through the blank vellum cover a single word can be seen as no more than a blur. Only when the cover page is turned does the reader discover the word is “After.” As in: Before—blurry…After—clear. It might take the reader a second or two, but the payoff precisely hits the main selling point of laser surgery. Or at least that’s the way the American Advertising Federation saw it in awarding the agency a national Gold ADDY for the mailer.

“Hey, Sparky, you’ve just won 114 races, what are you going to do now?”
“I’m going to the incinerator!”
Poster for Greyhound Adoption

You’ve “met” Erin Friedman Pollock if you’ve turned on the tube and seen that series of Bryant & Stratton commercials featuring oddballs who are looking into admission to the small business school for all the wrong reasons. There’s the girl whose stated ambition is to be homecoming queen, and the slacker whose only questions are “Do I have to go to all my classes?” and “Do you have gum?”

Pollock also wrote the “Be a Moover” radio spots for Smith Dairy, like the one with the chatty Valley Girl who does her part for humanity by saying hi to a socially inept classmate spotted gulping milk from a carton rather than the client’s cute portable bottle.

Despite Pollock’s burgeoning—and award-winning—experiences with broadcast advertising, print is where she still feels most comfortable. After all, how could the magic of television improve upon the wry simplicity of designating a client restaurant and bar “The Official Celine Dion Concert Husband Drop-Off and Pick-Up” spot?

Naturally, Tiny won an ADDY for that one.

A MARKET FOR MERRIMENT

While working as a copywriter for Adcom Communications in downtown Cleveland in the late 1990s, I had the pleasure of doing lunchtime business with the delightful Catania brothers. I pitched an idea for a feature article to the Plain Dealer Sunday Magazine, and the following ran sometime in about 1998.

David Searls


Tommy’s in high gear by the time the lunch crowd strolls in—the construction workers, administrative assistants and executives who pick up to-go orders of pasta and Sammy’s "seven layers of love" eggplant, or grab one of the few kitchen-type tables by the window of the Cleveland Warehouse District’s Sixth Street Market.

"Take ‘em, take ‘em," Tommy, 40, the youngest and heftiest, Catania brother, shouts to one and all regarding a seasonal candy display. "My kids need food and my mistress wants a new car."

When a customer shows interest in an Italian sub piled so high it’s safer deconstructed and eaten with a fork, Tommy insists, "Go Italian and you’ll never go back. That’s what my third wife used to say."

Sammy Catania, the oldest brother at 46, doesn’t try to keep up with Tommy’s non-stop patter, but occasionally chimes in with "Lane thirteen now open, no waiting," while manning the store’s second of two cash registers.

Ross, 42, with half the girth of either of his brothers and none of the outrageousness, mostly keeps to the command center of the wholesale and retail liquor operation, in the basement. When he hustle to the front for one reason or another he looks mildly distracted, as if trying to mentally calculate profit/loss figures. Ross was, for twenty years, one of the best medical malpractice court reporters in Cleveland, according to his brothers. Attention to detail is everything to him, which cements his place in the family operation.

"We’re three legs of a stool," Tommy explains. "Sammy’s the creative, flamboyant one (though an outsider might assign that personality trait to Tommy himself), Ross is the methodical thinker, and I’m the hard-edged one. I do the books."

"Yeah, we can’t afford a Girl Friday," says Sammy, "so we put a blonde wig on him at five o’clock."

Now that’s a scary thought. Tommy is an immense, well-fed man who could arm-wrestle steers. He’s got a tiger tattoo sprawled over one massive forearm and a dragon on the other, a menagerie in honor of his two kids that must have deprived the parlor of a month’s supply of ink. But you could get the wrong idea about Tommy’s background from his appearance. He used to be vice president of an engineering firm before trading in his suits and ties for a white butcher’s apron and undershirt.

Back then, he’d spend months of the year in Asia, selling vehicular emissions testing equipment. "When I got back, my kids’d be two feet taller. Now, if I want to take the afternoon off to go to my son’s wrestling tournament, I go."

Despite the banter about mistresses and wives, Tommy’s been married to his high school sweetheart for 21 years, virtually the same amount of time brother Sammy’s spent wed to his own high school girlfriend.

"Rossie met his wife in a bar," Sammy cackles, to Tommy’s delight at the incongruity of the levelheaded brother having the raciest love life. Then Sammy feels compelled to add, "She’s a teacher, teaches handicapped kids. Great lady."

The Sixth Street Market sprang into existence as the result of three brothers growing up in a big, noisy household with five other siblings in Garfield Heights and threatening for years to go into business together. "I worked my entire career for brothers who made lots of money, so why shouldn’t we?" is how Tommy puts it.

The type of business was determined, more than anything else, by the background of the oldest of the three, the namesake partner in the legendary Sammy’s in the Flats. After selling out of that partnership, Sammy co-owned Cuisines at Playhouse Square and ran catering companies, commissaries and a restaurant consulting firm. With food serving as the backdrop to Sammy’s life, perhaps it was inevitable that he and his brothers would see untapped potential in the rapid residential expansion going on in the Warehouse District by the mid-nineties.

The 3,000 square-foot market is the closest the district has—and probably ever will have—to a supermarket, given the limitations of commercial space. But it’s a whole lot more than merely an oversized convenience store, with its tiny commercial kitchen in back and the catering and wholesale liquor operation and the coffee kiosk they just opened in the Bridgeview Building on West 9th.

Tommy gleefully points out that their place of business was a 30-booth porn shop before they took over. "This is where you used to come all the time," he bellows to an unsuspecting customer in a ballcap. "I got you on tape." Then he punctuates his comment with an obscene thrust of his ample hips, just in case he’s been too subtle.

The man at least has the presence of mind to mumble, ""So how’d you know I was there?"

The good-natured abuse is, according to Sammy, what keeps customers coming back to the Sixth Street Market for their breakfasts, deli sandwiches and entrees, fresh fruits and vegetables, beer, wine, liquor, household cleaners, lottery tickets, and even to drop off their dry cleaning.

"We crack a few jokes, have a little fun," he says. "Our parents taught us to smile. Whoa! What a concept."

But that doesn’t mean business has been full-time chuckles. Tommy admits with uncharacteristic seriousness, "It was a nightmare for the first two years."

The brothers found that the neighborhood was too transient to build an ongoing trade back in ’96. Executives relocated for a few weeks or months in the various corporate housing units scattered in the area were instantly smitten. The market reminded them of neighborhood places back home in Boston or New York, but there weren’t enough of the out-of-towners, and each would eventually leave. As for the locals, the Catanias couldn’t even attract many residents of the 94-unit Grand Arcade condominium that shares their building.

They sent our fliers, asking their neighbors what they needed in a market.

"For one lady we even carried a specific brand of dog food for her poodles," says Sammy. They’ve also been known to open early or close late to accommodate customers. "And we haven’t raised coffee prices in four years," Sammy adds.

While they don’t expect to turn a profit until next year—their fifth in business—the Catanias are at least starting to smell the French bread at the end of the tunnel. The gradual turnaround is due to a little creativity in product offering. When the State of Ohio got out of the liquor business in 1997, the brothers got a vendor license and filled their back shelves and 3,000 square feet of basement with beer, wine and the harder stuff. Today, they’re one of the largest liquor wholesalers in northeast Ohio, with a customer list that includes the Cleveland Browns and the Cavs. They also cater meals right to the departing charter planes of visiting professional sports teams, and last Christmas they prepared 4,000 corporate gift baskets. All through word of mouth. When they added a couple tables and some chairs to the front of the store and started putting tables out front during the mild months, they attracted dine-in customers they hadn’t had before.

Things are different, now. The brothers have steadily developed a stable of regulars, including Suzanne Drake of Shaker Heights who works at the Employers’ Resource Council on West 9th.

"These guys treat us like family," says Drake. "We make office runs every day because they’ve got the best food in the entire district."

All of those office runs keep the brothers and their five full-time and two part-time employees busy. "The sandwich god of downtown," as Tommy’s known to brother Sammy, spends an hour and a half in the morning and just as long in the afternoon to keep the sandwich case filled. All of the brothers get an early start. "If we get in at five, that’s late," says Tommy.

Fan favorites include the meatloaf, the eggplant and the two-inch-thick pork chops for five bucks. As for the chicken broccolini, "We’ve had customers send couriers from Westlake and Beachwood to pick it up," says Tommy.

Success, the brothers are learning, is really quite simple. According to Sammy, you just have to "give a valued product for a fair price, and they will come. I think Moses said that."

CADE'S PARTY

The following piece was the result of a particularly frazzling day with my five-year-old version of Evan. It ran in a 2000 issue of Cleveland Magazine.

David Searls

You won’t find mug shots of Evan and me on those ubiquitous coupon postcards under the heading, “Have You Seen Us?” Unlike the kidnapping parents who glare back at me from my mailbox, I haven’t the slightest notion that my five-year-old would flourish in a solo parenting environment. Experience teaches me daily that to have anything resembling a normal life, Evan desperately needs the contributions of my right brain and his mother’s left.

Last summer was at its height when I got a call from Laura. “I just got off the phone with Cade’s mom,” she said, sounding just a bit perplexed.

“Uhhh huh,” I replied slowly as I turned her words over and over in my head: Cade’s mom . . . Cade’s mom . . . Somewhere in the darkest, bleakest recesses of my consciousness, a bell almost went off.

“She’s wondering if Evan’s coming to Cade’s birthday party. She hadn’t heard from us, and it’s this Saturday.”

Ah, that Cade’s mom. The one whose son is in Evan’s pre-kindergarten class. I latched onto the distant memory of an invitation arriving by mail and a quick glance at a calendar telling me the date was a weekend Evan would be with me. There’d be no need to tell Laura. I could handle the situation myself. All I had to do was RSVP, but there’d be plenty of time for that.

“Uh, right,” I said to my ex-wife. “Cade’s birthday party. You’re sure it’s this Saturday?”

She was sure. “Since you didn’t respond, Cade’s mom was following up.”

“We’ll be there,” I said in a voice that I hoped conveyed breezy confidence. My mind tried picturing potential scheduling conflicts, but drew a blank. Not that that’s unusual.

“I suppose you don’t have a gift yet,” Laura said. A statement, not a question.

“Well, I was thinking . . . ”

“Don’t worry, I’ve got one from a party we had to skip. It’s wrapped and everything.”

As parents, we each have our talents. I tell our son stories and read to him and take him on outdoor adventures. We play ball, dig for worms, turn burps into phrases, and re-enact Star Wars scenes with cardboard giftwrap tube light sabers. We overrun bedtimes, ride bikes in the rain and occasionally forget birthday parties.

But that’s alright, because part of Laura’s job description is to remember bath schedules, gage fevers with the palm of her hand, combine clothing articles into outfits and relay the number and frequency of tablespoons (or is it teaspoons?) when medicine must be doled out. All of which she does with aplomb. If she believes I need more supervision than our child, she never says so. Not to my face, anyway.

“Don’t forget, swim class starts at 9:05,” she reminded me when she called that Friday evening. It was a new class at a new time and location, and I masked my irritation at an event that had to start five minutes after the hour just to rattle me. “Cade’s party’s at ten,” Laura continued. “They’ll be playing in the sprinkler, so I‘ll bring along an extra pair of swim trunks and we’ll change him in the locker room. You might be a few minutes late, but I’ve already told Cade’s mom and it’s not a problem.”

Then came detailed directions to the Y in the Cleveland suburb where the class would be held the following morning, and the best route to Cade’s house, which was in my suburb, but on a nearby street I’d never heard of.

“Are you writing this down?” she asked.

“Yep,” I said, wondering where I’d find a pen.

After breakfast on Saturday, I gave Evan the bath I’d obligated us to the night before, but there’d been ice cream and a rocket ship ride on the porch swing that lasted past bedtime. Although he was on his way to what amounted to a huge, chlorinated bathtub, I realized that his mother would know if I took such a shortcut. She’d just know.

So the morning bath set our schedule back a half hour, and my heart skittering at my first premonitions of trouble as we raced to the car with less than fifteen minutes until splashdown. Seven minutes later I was, miraculously, at least in the right 'burb, but wondering which of the three choices of exits Laura had directed me toward.

“Oh God,” I muttered.

“Are we lost?” Evan asked cheerfully.

“Of course not,” I replied. Information like that has a way of getting back to Mom.

Then I remembered that, although this was Evan’s first class, he and his mother had gone swimming at that YMCA before. “Hey, Ev,” I asked as casually as I could under the rapidly deteriorating situation, “do you remember what your swim class building looks like?”

“Um, no. Are we lost?”

I mumbled something that made me feel as reassuring as Amelia Earhart’s navigator. Then another thought struck like a wet towel—an appropriate simile.

“Ev, the last time you went here with Mom, did the people who work there give you a towel?”

“No.” Then the full ramifications of my question apparently set in. “We don’t have any towels?”

“I can’t talk right now. I have to drive.”

Laura met us at the door with a big, fluffy towel. Classes were running late and we were on time.
Afterward, as we dried Evan’s hair and got him changed into dry swim shorts, Laura shoved her regifted party gift into my hand and made me repeat the directions she’d given me the night before.

I rolled my eyes. “West 140th Street exit to Warren Road, left on Warren.” Then I went on to recite in perfect detail the route to the party.

How hopeless did she think I was?



“Are we lost?”

“Of course not,” I said.

The party was in Lakewood, my own neck of the woods, Cade’s house less than five minutes from my own. How could we be lost? I took the left on Warren, then another at the very next street. Only, that second left had dumped me onto a road with a name unlike the one in the directions still coursing through my head. Still, I found the right house by weaving in and out of residential streets until I ran out of wrong addresses.

It was off Alger, not Warren, I smugly told myself.

“Cool. They got Chief Wahoo!” Evan cried as our eyes tracked the crudely drawn birthday party signs tacked onto telephone poles to what was, presumably, Cade’s driveway. At the top of the drive stood a cardboard cutout of the Cleveland Indians’ mascot.

Which wiped the smug smile clean from my face as one small and foreboding detail of the invitation tickled my mind. It was to be a theme party, guests wearing their favorite Tribe clothing or at least something sporting the red, white and blue team colors. I turned to my son in back and my glance fell morosely to his green t-shirt and khaki shorts.

“Where are we going, Da?” Evan wondered as our car lurched forward, leaving Cade’s home and Chief Wahoo in the dust.

“We’ll be right back,” I promised with as much jauntiness as I could muster. Back home, I grabbed two officially sanctioned team ballcaps of widely contrasting sizes.

“Ouch, you’re hurting my head!” Evan complained as I tried to squeeze his skull into the smaller one.

Funny, it had fit him fine when he was two. My second choice settled around his eyebrows, drawing yet another complaint from my irritable offspring. There had been another cap which had fit him perfectly the day we lost it. I hadn’t had Evan’s head with me when I went shopping for its replacement, but I’d figured that if the new cap was a little big he’d grow into it someday.

Someday had not come. My son would be the party oddball, inappropriately clad, and clutching a hand-me-down gift that I could only hope would befit a five-year-old male.

“Alright, Evan,” I sighed, defeated, “let’s go to the party.”

Maybe I could make it look like I was taking a stand with my son’s attire, refusing to denigrate Native Americans with the buffoonish team caricature and politically incorrect nickname. My only hope, it seemed, was as an activist party pooper.

Laura would have committed the invitation to memory. She would have laid out his outfit the night before. She would have bought Cade’s gift the previous weekend, and mapquested her course before backing the car down the drive. Of course, if my ex hadn’t misdirected me onto Warren Road rather than Alger I might have had an extra minute to paw through Evan’s dirty clothes for something red, something blue.

My spirits picked up at the party . There were others as out-of-theme as Evan, and none of his friends seemed to know or care what anyone else was wearing. Cade loved all of his gifts, including ours—whatever we got him—and Evan and I left tired and sweaty and wet and satisfied with the day.

Until I checked my voice mail. Laura had apparently called soon after we’d left swim class.

“It just dawned on me that when you were going over the directions to Cade’s house you said you’d take the first left onto Warren. But it’s Alger, not Warren. I hope you find it alright.”

Which is why you’ll never see Evan and me among the missing on those postcard mailers. Unless we innocently lose our way to swim class one morning.

EVAN'S PLAYGROUNDS

As a professional writer with thirty-odd (occasionally very odd) years of experience, I've decided to showcase some of my favorite magazine essays, articles and columns. Many of my self-proclaimed best are among my most personal. These brief glimpses add up to a lifetime stew of emotions: joy, grief, humor, fear, poignancy, love and regret.

I'm leading off with Evan's Playgrounds, which appeared in the August, 1998 issue of Cleveland Magazine. My son being three at the time, I'd rediscovered with him the joys of neighborhood parks and playgrounds. The idea I'd pitched my editor was a review of some of the hot local play spots, but as I worked on the piece, it become something altogether different.

My editor loved it. Hope you do, too.

David Searls


It's a long, grassy patch of land at the corner of Bunts Road and Merl Avenue in Lakewood that someone stuck a couple of swing sets and slides on and forgot to even give a name.
My son and I know it as the Train Park.

Its setting, amid rows of houses, along its namesake tracks and across the street from a supermarket parking lot, won't win the Train Park any urban design awards. The place was a bit fancier when Evan was a baby and it included a climbing-crawling-jumping off-sort of thing made of timber planks as thick as telephone poles. But the wood had rotted and the whole structure disappeared one night about a year ago, leaving only holes where the foundation posts had been. It was as if the town's lawyers had carted it away before the lawsuits piled up.

That's okay, because the climbing-crawling-jumping off thing was never the Train Park's main attraction. It got its name and popularity in the Searls household by its proximity to those train tracks, with only a chain-link fence to keep the steel and smoke monsters from barreling right down on us.

As soon as Evan hears the train whistle, we have to dash for the baby swing he's getting too old for—but its the swing nearest the tracks. It took me awhile to realize that you can hear the whistle blasts from Cleveland or Rocky River, so there's really no need for dashing. But try convincing Evan of that. Once he's locked in position, I push him hard and high enough that he can peer down at the monster as it roars past, shrieking in futile competition with the sound-storm.

I've rediscovered trains for myself these last couple years. They used to be on this planet to annoy me, to clog intersections and make me late for work. But now I watch and listen even when Evan isn't there, and, by God, they really are amazing creatures!

The years will pass and the thunder-and-fire ambiance will become as wearisome to my son as the music he'll hear while on hold waiting to schedule a dentist appointment. But I think that on rare occasion when all-grownup-Evan has time to stop and really listen to the whistle's distant wail he might momentarily flash back to the days when his old man helped him fly high over the screaming monsters at the Train Park.

That would be a fine way to be remembered.



The playground in Baltic Park, at Baltic Avenue and West 110th Street in Cleveland, is brand-spanking-new. And not your grandfather's playground. That's what you notice as soon as you catch sight of the jungle gym that's like nothing you've ever seen before. Its daring, colorful loops and twists make it look less like play equipment and more like the kind of modern outdoor sculpture people admire but secretly hate. It's a tubular affair painted fluorescent red and purple and lime green, and I can't imagine what material it's composed of, but I'm guessing vinyl or some patented compound impervious to ice, rain, sun and vandals. One thing I know for sure: it doesn't sit as high as it appears and I keep smacking my head as I chase Evan under it.

The ground beneath us is covered with some kind of corky substance laid over tire strips, something that puts real spring in your step. I could pass out after rapping my head once too often on the op-art contraption above me and not break anything on the fall.

The first thing that catches your attention on this new slip of land, even before the artsy head-banger, is the sign by the curb that takes up more square footage than the entire playground. More, it seems, than the front yards of the modest wood-frame homes closing in. The sign is one of those temporary things politicians make contractors put up to show citizens that their tax dollars and votes are hard at work. This one proudly proclaims that the brand-spanking-new Baltic Park was erected, or excavated, or whatever, under the direction of the City of Cleveland, and it lists a whole inventory of commissioners and directors and city planners to thank.

Evan is not impressed.

They seem to have run out of money before they got to the swings. The op-art framework is in place and ready for action, but there are no swings in the fames, so Evan urges me to reroute our outing to the Train Park.

Too bad, because there's this blond woman here with her own young son, and she's so easy to talk to. I assure myself that she's not this friendly with just anyone, and she must have noticed I'm not wearing a wedding ring. I, by the way, have noticed that she's not wearing one either. She laughs and lightly touches my elbow as she points out something cute her boy is doing, and it's been a long time since a woman has lightly touched my elbow like that.

Let's go, Da. No swings.

Thanks to the politicians and bureaucrats who blew their budgets on self-congratulatory signs as broad as barns, I must leave this playground and this interesting blond-haired woman just when things are getting interesting. Leave her before I can work up the courage to ask her name. So I shrug and move off, convinced that she touches everyone's elbow like that.

But as we leave she smiles and waves and says maybe she'll see us again here sometime.

Months later, on a hot, summer day, I read about the Baltic Children's Park being officially dedicated, which entailed the mayor dropping by to pat sweaty little heads. The full-color, front-page photo is of a clown with a child on his lap. They're sitting on a swing.

Slightly creepy, but thought provoking. It might be time for Evan and me to experience a red, purple and lime-green playground again.



There's this school at Lake and Whippoorwill avenues in Lakewood. It sits right across from a congregation of tall brick homes that might be a bit cramped for mansions, but you wouldn't complain. I don't even know the school's name, but there's a playground in front of it. It's the playground where I broke my son's collarbone.

Evan had turned two that month, which was the month my wife moved out of our home, and we had an arrangement by which we shared overnight custody until we could work out something more permanent. I had Evan alone with me at one playground or another many times before, but this was the first outing of our new arrangement.

The playground includes a dignified wooden platform with a shaky bridge and a ladder and a railing that goes most of the way around it, except at the top of that ladder. I felt sanctimoniously good about having joined my two-year-old up on the bride on that crisp, late winter morning since I'd often seen younger fathers smoking or reading the newspaper or staring off into the distance while their children played alone.

Not me. I was right up there in the thick of things, climbing and crawling and straddling the top strut of that bridge, and leaping from it to land in front of my son and surprise him.

Which it did.

Chuckling, Evan took a startled step backward, where the top of the ladder was but the railing wasn't—which any responsible father would know. I watched as, in slow motion, my son disappeared from view. I heard him land a moment later like a sack of cement.

I don't remember climbing down from the platform, so maybe I jumped, but there he was on the ground, staring up at the cold sky and crying. His heavy coat had cushioned some of the impact, but when I gently picked him up, I could see that he was holding his arm funny.

No, not funny.

At Lakewood Hospital's emergency room, the admitting nurse asked me careful questions at first, but smiled when she saw a 40-year-old man fighting back tears, and said that everything would be fine. We were ushered in quickly and I sat holding Evan's hand and wondering how things had gotten this way so quickly, my marriage as broken as my son's collarbone.

The doctor told me that collarbone fractures are among the most common injuries to young children, and no one blamed me. Not even my wife who rushed to the hospital, sobbing, from her new home on the first day of her new life.

No one blamed me. Certainly not Evan who, by lunchtime, had forgotten about his fall. He only had to wear a harness for a couple of guilt-inducing weeks before healing completely. Young children are like that, the doctor said. They heal fast.

But we don't go to that playground anymore.



You're not supposed to notice, but Lakewood Park at Lake Avenue and Belle Road is where the Arab women take their children. I certainly don't point this out to Evan, who, despite being a three-year-old who notices everything, overlooks the inescapable fact that many of the women among us are adorned in flowing gowns and heavy veils that cover their faces against the day's warmth. I have no opinion of this, it's just an observation on a perfect late-spring afternoon.
Lakewood Park is everything the Train Park isn't. It's spacious, scenic and chock-full of whatever kind of equipment you can imagine for climbing over, crawling through and falling off of.

Evan's first stop is always the swings. His advanced age and size notwithstanding, he still prefers the baby swings. That's fine with me except when I notice other fathers pushing sons Evan's age or younger on the big-boy swings. What I want to do when I see that is to sit my boy down next to them and prove we're only hanging out at those other swings by choice, not because we have to. Fortunately, the urge passes.

The park sits on an expanse of land big enough to host picnics, softball games and kite flying all at once. It's even got its own lake, for God's sake. And I'm not talking some overgrown puddle, but Lake Erie, sitting out there vaster and more permanent than many nations. On nice days, the sky merges with the water to form a hazy backdrop of blue, the sea gulls screech low overhead, begging for picnic leftovers, and you'd swear you were elsewhere. Someplace where postcards come from.

I wonder about those Arab women sometimes, whether they've ever seen so much water before. Maybe that's what drew them here. Or maybe, I remind myself, they were born in Lakewood and, like me, haven't seen a desert except on TV.

While I mull over my complicated thoughts on culture and competitive fatherhood, all Evan does is swing, calling for my renewed effort on the pushing when my attention wavers. We make a game of it, Evan telling me he wants to go higher and me asking whether or not he's sure. The game requires me to put just a tinge of alarm in my voice, as if he should very carefully consider his answer before committing to such dizzying heights.

But he's always sure. I don't know what he's thinking up there. Maybe nothing at all. Maybe he's just enjoying the way the clear sky and the blue water come together while the gulls screech for food.

Life's perfect when you're three and can almost touch that sky.