A photo of my grandfather, Dr. Albert B. Cleage jr. standing in a very heavy looking row boat. It was taken at Idlewild, Michigan in the early 1920s. Because my grandfather has the same tie and the same tired expression in both photographs, I believe they were taken on the same day. My aunt Gladys appears in the group photo and appears to be 2 or 3 years old so that would place it at 1925 or 1926.
The three photos below were taken earlier. My father and Henry look several years younger than they do in the photograph above. These two were part of a batch of photos all with the number 671 written on the back.
This post continues a series using the Alphabet to go through streets that were significant in my life as part of the Family History Through the Alphabet Challenge. Back to Springfield, Massachusetts for 643 Union Street. During the first 4 years of my life, my father, Rev. Albert B. Cleage, Jr, was pastor of the St. John’s Congregational church in Springfield, Massachusetts. After my father convinced the church to sell the parsonage to pay debts, we lived in the back of the church community house. Rooms upstairs were rented out. The church offices were in the front of the building down a long hall. When I was 22 we went back to visit. Everything seemed so much smaller.
Memories: Laying on a blanket in the yard looking up at the clouds with my mother. Holding my sister, Pearl, on the way home from the hospital. Sitting on the basement steps while my grandmother washed newborn Pearl’s diapers. Making Halloween cupcakes with orange icing. Looking at the clearing evening sky after rain. Going to the ice cream parlor down the street with my sister and parents. Leafless trees against the winter sky. Huge statues going past the house in a religious procession. Yellow leaves on fall trees, a stream and a dog in the park. Watching the milkman and his horse from my bedroom window. Watching my mother being taken to the hospital on a stretcher down the long hall. A friend of my mother cutting her hair. Ribbon candy at Christmas.
Just got back from a flying trip to Detroit for my aunt Gladys’ 90th birthday party. I saw relatives I haven’t seen since we moved from Michigan and some I hadn’t seen since they joined the family! A wonderful trip. Wish it could have been longer and I could have seen more family.
Gladys is my father’s younger sister and the 6th of the 7 children of Albert B. Cleage Sr and Pearl (Reed) Cleage. Click on both photographs to enlarge.
The two photographs below were taken in 1918 and feature my father, two of his younger brothers and a family friend. The water in the background of the second photo made me think they were taken on Belle Isle or perhaps across the Detroit River in Canada. I thought that I would be able to place the photos by using the cannon in the second picture. I was able to find several cannons in the Detroit area, unfortunately none looked like the one in the photo. The presence of a family friend makes me think it was taken in Detroit and not on a family trip to another state. At least it was labeled with names and dates.
The prompt for this weeks Sepia Saturday is a photograph of a boy in front of a theater next a sign advertising a movie about an ex-convict. Standing on the far right side is a man with his head cut off by the photographer. I looked through my photos and was disappointed to find no sepia headless ones. I thought I had seen some in a box of photographs that came from my uncle Henry Cleage.
I came across this photograph in the box. Most of the photographs are of Henry’s first wife, Alice Stanton. She is the one in the front holding the purse. I noticed Doris Graham, my mother and Henry’s second wife, dancing in the background. I do not know who either of the men are. The photo was taken in 1939 or 1940 in Detroit. Henry and Alice were married on 3 September, 1941 in Detroit and divorced not too many years later. At first I thought that this photograph was taken the same day as the one below, but when I compared them, the news photo was of a much posher affair.
For some reason, at this point, I noticed the address on the box that the photographs were kept in. It was addressed to Dr. L. J. Cleage at Homer Phillips Hospital in St.Louis.
Had my Uncle Louis done his medical internship at Homer Phillips Hospital? If so, it was probably around 1940. Although both Louis and my father were enumerated with their parents on Scotten Ave. in Detroit, both were listed as absent from the home. You can see them here in the 1940 Census. I went to Ancestry.com and looked for records for Louis Jacob Cleage. In the 1940 census he was indexed with his parents but there was also a Dr. Louis Cleage in St. Louis, MO. There he was, living in the doctor’s housing at Homer G. Phillips, as a Jr. intern.
The story of Homer G. Phillips hospital is a familiar one – black citizens tired of second class health care, black doctors tired of not being able to hospitalize and care for their own patients, of being unable to practice in the hospitals in their city. Click this link to read more about Homer G. Phillips Hospital’s interesting history. My husband’s younger siblings were born in St. Louis. He thought some of them might have been born at Homer G. Phillips. As luck would have it, his sister called right about then and confirmed that she and all of the youngest five Williams’ were born there from 1950 to 1963.
I seemed to be on a roll, so I decided to see if my father was enumerated in 1940 as a student at Oberlin where he attended Seminary. He did not turn up anywhere else outside of his parents home in the 1940 census. However, he was listed in the 1940 Oberlin Student Directory. His birth date is off by 9 years, but the home address is his parent’s Scotten Ave. address in Detroit.
After all this it was an anti-climax to find one photo with half a head missing – Henry holding up some fish while standing by Lake Idlewild. Since the focus is on the fish, perhaps this doesn’t really count. My family photographers seemed to have been more likely to leave lots of space with everybody crowded to the center than they were to chop off a head. Or maybe they just tossed all of those headless photographs.
In 1965 the idea of the Black Star Co-op was born at Central United Church of Christ. In 1968, the year after the Detroit riot, a grocery store was opened a block from the church. Due to a variety of reasons – inexperience of management and staff, costs of keeping enough stock, high prices – the store did not last long. Later the church operated a long running food co-op. Several people would go down to Eastern Market early Saturday morning and buy produce which was shared by everybody who paid $5 that week. There was no overhead and no paid staff. Later the church had a farm in Belleville, Michigan and the food for the co-op came off of that farm. Below is a short photographic story of the Black Star Market.
I was 16 and my mother was 39 in this photograph. We were getting ready to go bike down Old Plank Road. I was bare footed. We used to bike past the neighbors on the hill and down to a pond that was small and weedy. Sometimes we skated there in the winter. The neighbors had two big dogs that were often outside and we would peddle fast to get past before the dogs got to the road. We’d take enough time riding to the pond and looking at the water for them to go back up and then we’d repeat the ride back to the house. The dogs never got to us.
I got my first bike on my 8th birthday. It was a basic, blue bike. I didn’t know how to ride and it took me so long to learn that my mother finally threatened to give the bike to my cousin Barbara if I didn’t learn how to ride. I don’t remember anybody holding the bike and running with me. I do remember practicing in the driveway of the house on Chicago until I learned to ride. At that point I only rode around the block.
When I was older, I remember going bike riding all around the neighborhood with my cousins, Dee Dee and Barbara. We rode in the street, which I wasn’t supposed to do. My sister and I used to go bike riding too but we usually had a destination – the library or my grandmother’s house. I lost that bike when I left it unchained outside of a store on W. Grand Blvd. We were on the way home from the Main Library. Later it was replaced by a three speed bike. I had that one up at Old Plank until we sold the place and then I had it in the Detroit. It too was stolen when my husband left it unchained on a porch one night.
When we lived in Idlewild, from 1986 to 2007, I used to ride my Uncle Hugh’s old bike. It had a bigger than average seat which made it more comfortable for me to ride, however it was old and had been through a lot and the tires were sort of crooked. I enjoyed riding it the 4 miles around the lake and for one memorable 5 mile ride into town with my daughter, Ife. She was going to work so she had 6 hours between her rides. I had to turn around and ride 5 miles back. If the streets around my house here were flat and I didn’t see rottweilers trotting down the street alone, I would get a bike and ride now. I know I am not going to take a bike to a park to ride.
My uncles, Henry and Hugh Cleage owned and operated Cleage Printers for about a decade, from the late 1950s until the late 1960s. It’s difficult to pinpoint the time they started printing. They published a newspaper called The Metro in 1956. I’m not sure if they printed that themselves or put it together and had it printed elsewhere. On the March, 1960 marriage license for Henry and my mother, he listed his occupation as Printer/Lawyer. The plant, as we called it, was located behind Cleage Clinic at 5385 Lovett, near McGraw on Detroit’s Old West Side. Henry was an attorney and Hugh worked at the Post Office before they started printing. I don’t know if either of them had any experience printing before that. I asked my husband, who was also a printer for a number of year without much prior experience. He said it’s not that hard to learn while doing. Maybe armed with “In business with a 1250 Multilith” they were able to set up shop and learn on the job. I still have the book. Uncle Louis, the doctor, put in the start up money for the press. Later when they had to upgrade Henry said that family friend, Atty. Milton Henry, contributed that money.
According to the memories of family friend, Billy Smith and my aunt Anna, they went into business for themselves because they wanted the independence of being their own boss and Henry had always been interested in printing. They had several long term employees and a number of young people who worked there for a short period of time. My aunt Barbara worked there for awhile. My sister and I worked there the summer I was 16. I learned to run the small press and use the Varityper described below. I remember Ronald Latham keeping up a running story about being a Venusian now living on Earth. Henry kept our first weeks wages of $10 to make it like a real job. He was supposed to give it to us at the end of the summer, when we stopped work but we never saw that $10 and we didn’t bring it up. If we had, I’m pretty sure we would have been paid.
They made their money by printing handbills for neighborhood markets. In addition to that they printed up flyers, newsletters, magazines for various radical black groups, materials for the Socialist Workers Party and the Detroit Artist’s Workshop. The printing plant was a place where people came to find discussion of the issues of the day and in the 1960s there were plenty of issues to discuss. My Uncle Henry loved to hold forth on a variety of topics and his arguments were always well thought out and convincing. Hugh didn’t talk a lot but he would have something to put in, maybe just a quiet shake of his head over what Henry was saying. If Louis came back he would join in with his sarcastic comments and distinctive laugh.
Sometimes there would be things that had to be collated in the evening and all of us cousins and our mother’s would be down there at night putting whatever it was together. After the 1967 Detroit riot so many stores went out of business that they couldn’t make enough to keep going. Henry went back to law and worked with Neighborhood Legal Services. Hugh held on for another few years, printing for the church and teaching young people how to run the small press. Finally, he too left. I wish in all those photographs that were taken, one or two had been of Cleage Printers in it’s prime. All I have is a photograph I took in 2004 of the way it looks now, deserted and overgrown. I wish I had interviewed and taped Henry and Hugh talking about their experiences.
This was written as part of the 120 Carnival of Genealogy hosted by Jasia at CREATIVEGENE.
I have posted this photograph before as part of my discovery of the numbers on photographs as a means of sorting and dating them. My father’s cousin, Theodore Page, is ready at the bat while my father, “Toddy” seems oblivious to the fact that he could have his head knocked off when Theodore goes to hit the ball. The photograph was taken in the summer of 1922, probably at Belle Isle, an island park in Detroit. The day was an outing for the extended Cleage family.
My uncle Henry loved baseball and often described the game in terms that made it seem like a work of art or a piece of music. My mother’s mother used to listen to games on the radio. I never liked playing the game – I could not hit the ball. I didn’t like watching it, compared to basketball, baseball games seem so long and slow moving.