If I had $.50 for each time Uncle Leroy picked me up at the Cleveland Train Terminal for a ride to his and Aunt Gladys’s Euclid Avenue apartment, I would have enough for a first class ticket on any airline from Coshocton, Ohio to Rochester, NY.

Actually, it wasn’t until I became president and C.E.O. of a major travel agency in 1966 that I was eligible for such luxury.

Anyway, as we drove through Cleveland’s unplowed streets that December in 1949, I listened to Uncle Leroy’s 12,362nd recitation of the same dialogue he had offered on countless other trips: “Your Aunt Gladys is the finest, unquestionably the most generous person God ever put on this green Earth.”

“I know, I know,” I said. “Tell me, is that the same train station where our twenty-first president was shot?”

“It most certainly was! James A. Garfield! Only he was our 20th, not the 21st - four presidents after Lincoln. Unless you count Tyler twice. Some do, you know. Garfield was shot by Charles Guinteau, a pissed-off office-seeker, who was hanged for his ilthy deed; the President died about ten weeks later.”

I said, “He wasn’t president very long.”

“Nope. Only Harrison was a shorter Chief Executive. But Garfield was there long enough to found the city. He got together with Moses Cleveland, and some other guys, and they sat down and founded this here city. You ought to see the mausoleum we built for him at Lake View Cemetery! It’s smack-dab in the center of all the people buried there."

Aunt Gladys, the oldest of Grandma and Grandpa Lasch’s five girls (my own mother was the third, long after Grandma married Grandpa); Aunt Gladys was the spitting-image of her mother, though much thinner; more gaunt and grayer than when Grandma left England as ‘Lizzy Maugham,’ a plump sixteen-year-old gypsy fortune-teller with a toddler bastard daughter named Gladys — allegedly (Lizzy) was a cousin to W. Somerset, and the spitting-image if she (Grandma) were still alive and 500 lbs. lighter.

“I am so glad to see you again!” Gladys said, kissing me soundly on the cheek. “My – you’ve grown! — hasn’t he, Leroy?
”
With my stomach stuffed with her pot-roast and their pull-out sofa pillows under my head, I learned (it being a Friday) Uncle Leroy had the day off tomorrow, so I asked him if I could borrow his car.
“Where do you wanna go?” they asked in unison. When I told them Lake View Cemetery, they said, also in unison, “We’ll take you!”

“No. I want to see the Garfield Mausoleum alone.”

The next morning I asked for the keys. “How far is it?”

“’Bout four miles, ‘zackly, give or take,” Aunt Gladys said.

Uncle Leroy added, “Be careful with the car. Has a tendency to slip from first to second gears un’speculantly.”

The Garfield Mausoleum was more ornate than I expected, and it was smack-dab in the center of the cemetery. There was a full-size statue of James A. Garfield, all 5’7” of him, standing, sculpted in brilliant marble — his gabardine suit and tufted shirt seemed authentic, as was his tie, obviously a gift the giver cared little about.

Over his head, however, was a symmetrically placed and perpetually-lighted chandelier, which cast a perfect halo above the memorialized icon.

If my ‘recall neurons’ continue to serve as I expect they will, I remember a halo above EVERY PICTURE OF JAMES A. GARFIELD IN EVERY HISTORY BOOK I HAVE EVER SEEN!!!

I can’t wait to tell of this ‘unique’ find to Aunt Gladys and Uncle Leroy – also that his gears slipped from first to second only once.


Robert A. Mills
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