by Tim Conway
To say that I was attached to my mother’s apron strings would be an understatement. I never left her side and, literally, lived in her shadow. She took me with her everywhere. She brought me along when she cleaned and would let me sit astride the mop handle as she pushed the mop back and forth over the highly waxed wooden floors of the rich folks she worked for. It was great entertainment for me, and a body builder for Sophia. A little over five feet tall in her stocking feet, she was strong and solid and had arms Popeye would have envied. Dan was about five feet ten and rail thin. I believe he weighed in at a swift 124 pounds. In deference to her memory, I’ll not speculate as to Sophia’s fighting weight, but she could have sent Dan to the moon with one uppercut to the jaw.
We remained in the White cottage until the winter of 1936 when we moved to Chagrin Falls, a small town on the Chagrin River.
Chagrin Falls is forty minutes or so from downtown Cleveland and was named for the waterfall that’s smack in the center of town. That waterfall got its name from the Chagrin River. How did the river and waterfall get their names, you might ask, and even if you don’t, I’m going to tell you. Ordinarily, when you hear the word “falls” you think of something majestic, like Niagara and its mist-covered, roaring, rushing waters. Erase that image. Think small. Chagrin Falls barely falls. Encyclopedias might tell you that the Chagrin River got its name from “Shagarin,” an Erie Indian word meaning Clear Water. That’s pretty dry. I prefer local lore, which goes like this:
Many moons ago, a canoe bearing a young Indian and his bride floated down the river. The boat came to the falls and lurched over. “Oh, Sha . . . garin,” (“Hang on!”) cried the groom. The canoe overturned, and the couple hit the water. They swam to shore, took a look around, liked what they saw, and built their tepee on the riverbank. Soon, others joined them and a town sprang up. In honor of the original couple, the town was called Chagrin Falls with Brave and Squaw in the Canoe. That mouthful was later shortened to Chagrin Falls. Sometimes, residents refer to it as just plain Chagrin.
Okay, you’ve got two choices, the encyclopedia account and what I like to call The Carol Burnett Show version. Come to think of it, the latter explanation could have been a sketch we did back then. (Can’t you just picture me in the bow and Carol in the stern of a rocking canoe tipping over a fake falls?)
Chagrin Falls is about as picturesque a place as you can imagine. A lot of the homes and buildings are listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Trust me, it’s a dream town, a living template of mid-nineteenth-century America. And, I haven’t even gotten to the people. The population was around four thousand when I grew up there and still is. People cared about their neighbors, really cared. Not just to stick their noses into other people’s business, but cared to make sure all was well with them. You simply couldn’t go wrong growing up there.
Our first home in Chagrin Falls was on Franklin Street. We stayed for almost a year when—and don’t ask me why—Dan moved us some sixteen miles down the road to the town of Kirtland. Kirtland was the home of the original headquarters of the Latter Day Saint movement. Led by their founder, Joseph Smith Jr., the Saints came marching into Kirtland from Upstate New York in 1831 and stayed until 1838. The Mormons, in fact, built their first temple there and it’s still standing. One hundred years later, in the summer of 1938, Dan Conway moved his flock out of Kirtland and back to Chagrin Falls. That’s where my folks stayed for the rest of their lives, and that’s the place I call home. It hasn’t changed a pebble since the day the Conways arrived, and I honestly believe that living in that wonderful village shaped my life.
Upon our return to paradise, Dan rented a house on Oak Street with a kitchen and living room on the first floor and two bedrooms upstairs. We thought it was a palace. The neighbors on either side of us more likely saw it as a remodeled garage, which indeed it was. That first night on Oak Street was memorable. Lying in my own bed, on a calm summer evening, the window open, a slight breeze carrying just the hint of a coming shower, comforted by the knowledge that my Dan and Sophia were on the other side of the wall, was heaven. Most nights I asked Sophia or Dan to turn on the hall light, but not that night; the moon was my beacon. I didn’t want to fall asleep, but how could I not when I was in the house of my dreams?
Dream house or no, the Conways never lingered. In a little over a year—1940 to be exact—we moved a few doors away to another Oak Street house. Sophia, Dan, and I actually carried our big, hunter green couch up the street to the new place. In 1942, we reached our final destination, 43 Orange Street. I spent the rest of my Chagrin years in that house, and, albeit two-family, what a house it was—a beautiful one-hundred-and-forty-year-old, two-story, white-pillared mansion, one parallel street away from the river. Financially, it was a bit of a stretch. The rent was a whopping eighteen dollars a month, about twice as much as we’d been paying on Oak Street. But it was sure worth it.
No question, we moved a lot in the early years. The good thing is, each house we occupied was a bit better than the previous one and usually located a few doors down the street or around the corner. Every move consisted of the same routine. Sophia would pack into boxes what few belongings we possessed, Dan would load them in our beat-up Ford, I would jump in the rumble seat, and away we’d go. At times it would have been quicker to walk than drive. No matter how close the new house was, Sophia always made the same comment as we inched our way down the street.
“Wait, I think this is it!” she’d cry, pointing to a particular house. You’d have thought she was sighting land after a long sea voyage. Dan would pull the car up to the curb, and we’d pile out and start to bring the boxes inside the house. As a rule, our new neighbors did not greet us, mainly because they weren’t new neighbors, just people who lived a hop, skip, or jump from our last residence.
After we finished unpacking—not a lengthy process—the three of us would sit down at our blue Formica-topped kitchen table. We’d sip our respective beer, tea, and milk and assess the surroundings while the denizens of afternoon soap operas babbled over the radio. Back then, family life was centered in the kitchen. A radio set was enthroned, either on a counter or on the table itself, and the sounds from it echoed throughout the house. I grew up with Stella Dallas, Lorenzo Jones, and Mary Noble in the afternoons, and The Shadow, Lum and Abner, Jack Benny, Bob Hope, and Fred Allen in the evenings. Whichever house we were in, Sophia, Dan, and I spent our downtime sitting at the kitchen table, staring at the lighted half-moon dial on our battered Philco radio, and listening to unseen, but all-enveloping, entertainment.
Our moves had a comforting sameness and never bothered me. Each time we arrived at a new residence, Sophia had to make the place ours. She did this by providing certain touches, specifically, curtains and wallpaper. Because she had a sewing machine, curtains were easy to produce; she made them for our first house and altered them to fit the windows of our subsequent homes, adding new ones if necessary. Those curtains followed us all the way to Orange Street. My Sophia had a sewing machine she operated by pumping a foot pedal. Dan was going to get her an electric model, but finances never seemed to be in the right moon, so to speak. I’d guess that the bad knee that plagued my mother in later years might have come from all that pumping. Sophia’s machine was a chain-stitch model, which means that the stitches are connected to each other. The admonition, “Don’t pull that thread!” accompanied any article she sewed and since she made most of our clothes, I heard that command a lot.
One Sunday morning we were in church, and as the sermon droned on I began looking around for something to do. I spotted a thread hanging from the collar Sophia had finished making for Dan that morning. I reached over and gave it a tug. To my surprise it continued to come at me. I kept pulling on it until there was nothing left to pull. By then I had a small wad of thread in my hand, which I shoved into my pocket. The last hymn was sung and we rose to leave. As we walked up the aisle Dan’s collar popped off. A lady behind us picked it up and, tapping Dan on the shoulder, ha
nded it to him. Dan thanked her. He turned and walked up the aisle and out of the church with his tie neatly tied around his neck and his collar tucked in his pocket. I did not mention the thread in my pocket. (By the way, we went to a Methodist church when we went to church, which wasn’t that often. I’d say Christmas and Easter might find us there for sure, the rest of the year was a crapshoot.)
As good as she was at sewing, Sophia was a similar whiz at paperhanging. The minute we settled into our first Oak Street residence, she was off to the local hardware store with me in tow. After looking at a number of samples, and after a bit of haggling, she purchased several double rolls. She had to buy the paper, but no way would Sophia pay for paste. “Paste too expansif,” she informed the clerk as she picked up the rolls and dropped them in my open arms. When we arrived home, Sophia grabbed a bag of Pillsbury flour, emptied it into a bucket, and added water while I stirred. That was the way the Murgois made paste in Romania (though not with Pillsbury’s), and it remained Sophia’s recipe. Admittedly, the resulting glue did not have the sticking quality of a commercial product. Then again, you couldn’t make pancakes with store-bought stuff.
I’ll never forget the wallpaper she chose for my bedroom. Perhaps in deference to Dan, it showed a fox hunt complete with horses, riders, fences, and trees. A challenging pattern, under the best of circumstances, was made more so because our home, the converted garage, had uneven walls—very uneven walls. Armed with the paper and paste, Sophia and I began our work. She masterminded; I assisted. It was almost impossible to match the seams and the result was a helter-skelter display of horses running in one direction in one segment, and the opposite way in the next. In the corners, you’d see a horse jumping a rail fence with the nose of the horse following him jammed up his butt. One day, a friend came over to play. We went up to my room where he immediately eyeballed the wallpaper.
“Why is the black horse sniffing the rear of the brown horse while they’re jumping over the fence?” he asked.
Dan overheard our conversation and called out, “They’re trained to do that so they won’t lose their way home.”
Sophia and I did a lot of paperhanging back then, and an awful lot of rehanging. Why? In cold weather, the heat from the furnace dried out the Pillsbury paste, causing the paper to crack and loosen. You could hear the snap, crackle, and pop all through the night, and the next morning there’d be shreds dangling from the wall. I worried most about the corners; the horse with the other’s nose up his behind was a valuable asset. I needn’t have worried; the rehangings simply brought the horses a little closer. Eventually, the wallpaper in my room stopped cracking and stayed firmly fixed. By that time, the black horse was stuffed up to his hind legs inside the brown one, and my wallpaper had become a neighborhood phenomenon. Friends were treated to private showings of the bizarre fox hunt that graced my walls, and they were suitably floored.
Growing Up and Liking It
There were plenty of kids to play with in Chagrin, and a constant stream of us ran in and out of each other’s homes gathering forces to make up teams. We carried our mitts and bats and balls over to a homemade diamond in an unoccupied field to play baseball. We nailed a bushel basket with the bottom punched out to a telephone pole and played basketball in the street. We played kickball in an empty lot. We played until it became too dark to see anything, even something as big as a basketball, and then we went to our respective homes for supper. One summer we all spent a memorable week splashing around in the Brights’ pool. Well, it wasn’t exactly a pool. The Brights had created a hole in their backyard to accommodate their outhouse, but before they moved the privy Mr. Bright filled the crater with water providing us with a solid week of private pool time. It was a sad day when the crapper was repositioned. But, that’s progress.
My childhood consisted of all the wonderful things a small town provides, or, maybe I should say, used to provide—plenty of places to play with no fear about anything bad happening to the children, no matter how late they came home. And I always had the joy of coming home to Dan and Sophia. I loved my Dan as much as I loved my Sophia, but my father and I rarely talked to each other. It was nothing personal; he was just a nontalker. Consequently, we never had arguments. Of course Dan, being Irish, felt he was right about everything so there really was no point in arguing with him. In his own Gaelic way, my father was as off-the-wall as my mother. He considered himself a jack-of-all-trades, someone who could make, fix, or do anything. His success rate didn’t quite match his estimation of his skills. To illustrate, the following stories are true and the names have not been changed because everyone was guilty.
In 1942, just after we moved to Orange Street, Dan bought and installed a doorbell, backward. Somehow he messed up the wiring, which resulted in a continuous low humming that stopped only when a visitor rang the doorbell. After two weeks of this subliminal droning, I finally spoke up.
“Dad, I think that the wires are crossed on the doorbell.”
“Leave it alone,” he answered.
So, we sat in the kitchen or the living room listening to the doorbell’s constant purr. And on the rare occasions that it stopped buzzing, Dan would get up and head for the door saying, “I’ll get it.” Some time after I called the situation to Dan’s attention, I got up to go to school, and, for the first time in nearly a month, everything in the house was still. No more buzzing. Whether it was a miracle or whether Dan secretly fixed it himself, the doorbell functioned normally.
Speaking of visitors, back in those days people actually visited one another. You didn’t wait for a formal invitation, either; most often you dropped over to a friend’s house just to say hello. As I remember, Sophia and Dan did less dropping in on folks than receiving them. People would appear at the front door and be invited in. Sophia would bring out some goodies and, depending on the time of day, she’d serve coffee or tea. Also, depending on the hour, Dan would offer up some of his home brew. We welcomed most everyone except for one particular family, a husband, wife, and their twin girls who were a couple of years younger than me. I honestly can’t remember why these folks weren’t welcome, but there are some people who simply aren’t pleasant to be around. If we were lucky we could avoid their visit. At her command headquarters at the kitchen window Sophia could spot anyone approaching. Whenever that particular family came around, we’d go into red alert. (I just had a thought. I have to say that Sophia Murgoi Conway spent 90 percent of her day in the kitchen. What’s more, I don’t think she was alone. Mothers were in kitchens when I was young. I’m not saying that’s where they should be—far from it—but it’s funny how you get used to something and then it all changes.) The minute Sophia caught sight of their car coming up the drive, she’d cry out, “O, Dumnezeule, sunt aici!” (“Oh Lord, they’re here!”)
That was the signal for us to dive under the kitchen table and pull the tablecloth down to the floor. We’d huddle together behind the protective cloth, whispering to each other, while they peered in through the windows to see if we were home. We wouldn’t come out until at least five minutes after we heard their car leave. At that point, Sophia would lift the tablecloth and cautiously take a peek. When she was pretty sure we were out of danger, she’d crawl out and take another look through the window just to make certain they weren’t doubling back. Then she’d give us the all clear. Rubbing his bad knee, my dad would emerge and slowly get to his feet. I liked being under the table—it was cozy—so I took my time surfacing. Even after the enemy forces were long gone, we’d continue our whispering, just in case. On those rare occasions when the family slipped under Sophia’s radar, they were admitted into the house and we would sit with them in the living room. Sophia didn’t offer any goodies or beverages and neither did Dan. Nor did my parents initiate any conversation. The enemy didn’t take the hint and hung around for what seemed like ages. It was torture. Funny, though, when I got older I actually missed those visits and the excitement of diving under the table. Sometimes I’d pretend that we were a fam
ily of French partisans hiding from the Nazis.
Like Sophia, Dan, a basically honest man, had a larcenous side that popped up now and again, especially on Christmas Eve. Although our Christmas was as normal as anyone else’s, the night before was different. My father was no more likely to buy a Christmas tree than my mother was to buy wallpaper paste. Starting in December of 1938, here’s how Dan got our trees.
He’d drive home on River Road till he reached the White’s property, when he’d pull over and turn off the ignition. Next, he’d take a long, slow look at the evergreens growing near the roadside. When he spotted one that suited him, he’d reach in the back, grab a handsaw lying on the seat, and get out of the car. He’d walk over to the chosen tree, cut off the top, and bring it home. I know exactly how many years he did this. In the mid-’60s and early ’70s, I’d bring my kids to Chagrin for a few weeks in the summer. During our visits, I’d take them for a ride down River Road and point out the topless evergreens. There were exactly fourteen. Unless some other crazy man was decapitating them, those trees were the remains of the Conways’ Tannenbaums.
Dan could pull a stunt like that and Sophie could load up on caviar and shoes and it was okay, but I was never supposed to do anything the least bit shady. It was inevitable that I would. I was around nine when Dan took me shopping at the Sears on Mayfield Road. When we walked out of the store, I showed him a screw I’d taken from a display bin in the hardware department. Dan didn’t say a word as we got into whatever rattletrap Ford he owned at the moment.