Posts filed under 'Oral/written Histories'
My name is Thomas J. Woznicki. I am 85 years of age, born December 10, 1919.
I was born in the Tremont area and resided there for 30 years, then moved to the Brooklyn area after my marriage. Our family resided on West 7th Street (2443) during our childhood and then moved to West 14th Street in 1936. While living on West 7th, we did go to the Lincoln Bath House and recreation center at times. The neighbors that we knew and associated with were Guzik, Harchar, Brookes, Proszek, Lestechin, Lapinski and Barr families. Read more …
July 27th, 2007
October 5, 2005 Interview with Ted Woznicki at the Jefferson Library
Interview done by Mollie Alstott and Eileen Sotak
Mollie: What is your age?
Ted: 82
Mollie: What years did you live in Tremont and where did you live?
Ted: I was born on W. 6th St. originally and uh incidentally, at that time all births were done by midwives. You didn’t go running to a hospital. And then we moved from there to W. 7th St., and I lived at 2443 W. 7th which is at the intersection of Jefferson and W. 7th.
Mollie: What did your house look like?
Ted: Well, we had really a 3-family house. Our family lived on the first floor and the front of the house had a small bakery store. My mother sold baked goods and upstairs we had two suites, two rental suites. Read more …
June 2nd, 2007
Interview with Mary Hennel on April 29, 2005
Interviewer was Eileen Sotak
Excerpt:
Eileen: Did you have indoor plumbing in that house when you were little?
Mary: We had to go outside.
Eileen: What was that like, was that scary?
Mary: Oh yeah, especially at night at 2-3:00 in the morning. Sometimes you would see a rat go by.
Read more …
June 2nd, 2007
“The South Side, the Tremont area, is a hillcrest neighborhood five minutes south of downtown Cleveland. North, south and east of it is The Flats, the industrial valley of the city.
The South Side was home. It was immediate family. It was aunts, uncles and cousins. It was schoolmates whose parents were Polish, Ukrainian, Russian, Slovak, German, Irish, Greek and Syrian. It proved to be a stage deep and wide enough for any dream.
The South Side was St. Augustine’s Catholic Church, St. Theodosius Russian Orthodox Church, Pilgrim Congregational Church—and fourteen others. It was Tremont Elementary School and Lincoln High. It was the Merrick House, one of the oldest settlement houses in the city. It was the Dinky, a yellow trolley pretty in memory as a toy. It was Lincoln Park, a square block of grass, trees, playgrounds and benches. A man named Dominic used to sit on a bench, smoke his pipe and talk about the old country, dream about it, as he must have talked and dreamed about the new. It was Fairfield Hill with three and sometimes four layers of children on a sled whistling down the January dark. It was the Jennings Theatre with nickel movie matinees every Saturday and Sunday afternoon; with love and innocence conquering all in double features every night; with dishes on Wednesday; with Banko and cash prizes on Saturday.
Read more …
March 27th, 2007
