A cap for chocolate lovers

While visiting family in Cleveland, I had the pleasure of getting dessert at a Malley’s ice cream parlor. Malley’s is an institution, famous in northeastern Ohio for its candies as well as ice cream. The company produces the “Pronk” bar named for oft-injured Indians slugger Travis Hafner.

Indians regalia is a common site around greater Cleveland, as is the “CHOC” logo affixed to many cars. Malley’s has a cash giveaway promotion, encouraging drivers to put the logo on their vehicles. It’s fitting that my first mobile blog post should feature the Malley’s “CHOC” cap.

Don’t knock the Rock!

By happy chance, I stumbled tonight onto a story on Cleveland.com about one of the great occasions in Cleveland Indians’ history, the night 50 years ago when Rocky Colavito slugged four home runs against the Orioles in Baltimore. That was June 10, 1959.

I wish I could say I remember the game, but I was only two years old at the time. The Rock’s performance is legendary in Cleveland history, and it was part of the Gospel of Baseball my father imparted to me.

The names Colavito (Rocco Domenico), Francona (Tito) and Minoso (Minnie) were among the first I learned after “Mommy” and “Daddy.” For years, Mom would laugh recalling my efforts to pronounce Minoso, which apparently came out something like “Mimoso.”

Colavito was my favorite player, always. I have no doubt that I cried, as many Clevelanders did, when Rocky was traded to the Detroit Tigers for Harvey Kuenn. But the Tribe got Rocky back a few years later, an event I still count among my greatest sports memories. (We post-’48 Clevelanders have to grab on to what we can, understand?)

The Cleveland Browns and a brand new NFL season

The Thursday night game between the Redskins and Giants notwithstanding, today marks the real kickoff to the 2008 National Football League season. In celebration, I took my natty corduroy Cleveland Browns cap out into the warm California sun for a morning portrait.

Classic Cleveland Browns corduroy cap

I call this a classic Browns cap because it dates not from the present franchise but from the last years of the old Browns, the team that the sinsister Art Modell carted off to Baltimore to become the dead-to-me Ravens.

The original Browns started in the All American Football Conference that was folded into the NFL in the early 1950s. My early childhood centered on baseball, and football didn’t enter my consciousness until early grade school. In fact, my earliest pro football memory is of the day of the 1964 championship game in which the Browns defeated the Baltimore Colts (another team that would ultimately and appallingly be wrenched from the hearts of its fans). The game was blacked out on television in Cleveland, so my dad sent me to the attic to move our antenna around so we could catch the game on a Toledo station.

The demise of the old Browns roughly coincided with my move to California, where I’ve since attached my primary allegiance to the San Francisco 49ers and, given a few beers and the right opponent, the Oakland Raiders. I have not bonded with the new Browns, but should they advance to the playoffs, I’ll be pulling for them hard. And yeah, I want them to crush the Dallas Cowboys today.

In the meantime, I reserve my Browns cap mainly for the winter months, always hoping for the delightful contrast of white snowflakes settling on its rich brown bill.

A Labor Day salute to the American Rust Belt

As a tribute to working men and women this Labor Day weekend, I offer this tableau featuring a lunch pail and a U.S. Steel cap. The cap was a gift from my daughter, an engineer with the big Pittsburgh-based steelmaker.

This post is also a salute to the Rust Belt, that swath of mostly Midwestern cities that through much of the 20th Century belched toxic fumes into the air and dumped foul sludge into the the region’s rivers and the Great Lakes.

To me, Rust Belt roots are a badge of honor. These are not the “little soft cities” that Carl Sandburg mocked in his famous poem about Chicago, city of broad shoulders. These are hard-working urban cores: Buffalo, Pittsburgh, Erie, Akron, Toledo, Cincinnati, Detroit, Flint, Gary, Indianapolis, Milwaukee, Chicago and Joliet.

The Rust Belt’s capital city? My hometown, Cleveland, Ohio, the Mistake on the Lake, the place favorably compared with the Titanic only by virtue of its orchestra.

As tough and proud as all those other cities are, none had a river (the Cuyahoga) so polluted that it burst into flames. None had a mayor (Ralph J. Perk) who turned down dinner at the White House because it was his wife’s bowling night. None, as far as I know, defaulted on its loans.

Most Rust Belt cities declined precipitously in the 1960s, 70s and 80s. Some — Cleveland, Indy and Pittsburgh — have clawed their way back to respectability. That didn’t happen without the hard work we recognize and honor on Labor Day weekend.