“I grew up at 55 Fernwood Avenue…It was a street that was approximately two football fields in length yet the kids that occupied the houses on that stretch of land were as competitive as ever. It really didn’t take much to entertain ourselves in those days. There was always a baseball game going on in the summer and with the famous city landmark, Borts Field just a stone’s throw away, our parents knew exactly where we were if we weren’t in proximity to the house. “

“Being of Slovak extraction, I came to appreciate at an early age the traditions and rites of my ethnicity. Growing up in a mixed neighborhood where you could find a unique mixture of Italians, Germans, Hungarians, Irish, Croatians, Serbians and so on, my parents instilled in all of the Shuba children that you respected others, no matter what race, color or religious background they were.”

Shuba attended Holy Name School where an encounter with a nun affected his entire life. He tells the tale, “I was sitting in the last row and my buddy is sitting next to me and somebody misbehaved so the nun gave everybody homework for the weekend. So I said to my buddy, ‘Give me liberty or give me death.’ The nun said, ‘Who said that?’ nobody answered and I’m bluffing her. She says, ‘Well, I’m not going to let the class go home until that person raises his hand.’ So I raised my hand and I said, ‘Patrick Henry.’ She came down [the row] and hit me, really hit me. I went home but didn’t tell my mother how it happened and she put a hot water bag on my ear, but then I went to swim at Borts pool. I dove into the deep water and wow! It was like somebody put a nail in my ear. That kept me out of the army: that perforated ear drum. So it was a blessing in disguise. Otherwise I might still be in Germany.”

Shuba can only hear now with the assistance of hearing aids, and his son Mike says he and his dad are starting a foundation to help hard of hearing children, “To give students, underprivileged kids who don’t have the money, the opportunity for hearing aids to play sports and for their academics. We want to give hope to those with hearing loss.” He says his dad was lost in his own silent world until he obtained the hearing aids a few years ago.

Mike handles his dad’s schedule for speaking engagements, interviews and trips. In March, they spoke to 600 students at Canfield Schools and another group at Ohio Wesleyan in Delaware. Last year, the 60th anniversary of the historic handshake, he and his dad raised 78-hundred dollars for a charity event sponsored by the Ottawa Lynx minor league baseball club in Canada. The younger Shuba calls it a promotion for doing the right thing, “It’s a celebration of what George and Jackie stood for that day. They’ll have two young kids, one wearing dad’s uniform number and one wearing Jackie’s uniform number and they reenact the homer and the handshake.”

After a bout with Graves Disease, Shuba retired from baseball in ‘57 and returned to Youngstown. He’s been married to his wife Kathryn since 1958. Her maiden name, Ford, can be seen etched on a center stone of a brick building still standing in Brier Hill that her grandfather built decades ago.

He’s writing his memoirs with the help of newspaper clippings compiled by his sister Helen. She saved everything ever written about Shuba in nine big scrapbooks.

At 82, Shuba still exhibits the easy grace of an athlete and remains at his playing weight. His voice is strong and laced with the Eastern European flavor of Youngstown’s West Side. The website www.georgeshuba.com is still under construction but will be up and running in the next few weeks and his book should be available soon.

first printed in Metro Monthly, April 2007

When we were kids, we used two words to torture my oldest sister. We used them over and over again, whenever we wanted to embarrass her or whenever we were feeling mean or just to get a laugh. We’d, at times, whisper these two words to her or slowly and loudly repeat them. Her reaction was always the same. Her eyes rolled up, her head lolled back, her tongue would come out of her gaping mouth and she’d gag. And it wasn’t an ordinary gag, it was a deep guttural emission of sound that spawned spasms of chest and all over body movements. She was a multiple gagger. Once she started gagging, it was hard for her to stop. It was quite a sight, each time she began the gagging process, my middle sister, Collette and I would convulse with laughter. We’d laugh so hard and our stomachs would hurt so much, we’d fall on the floor yelling, “stop, stop” so we wouldn’t wet our pants. The two words we employed on a regular basis: “dog food.” To my sister, “dog food” meant Friskies-in-the-can. And Friskies-in-the-can smelled like all dog food in a can. The mere thought of that sickening odor of canned dog food was all it took to make Suzanne gag.

Suzanne was a good sport about it though, she knew she provided us with entertainment and accepted our behavior as her lot in life--the oldest sister. We teased her unmercifully when she started to develop. It caught us unawares and one day when she was exiting the shower, it was plain to see. Little buds of boobs and the telltale pubic hair. We screamed and hooted, chased her around the upstairs as she tried to cover herself with a towel. We pulled off the towel and pointed and stared and generally behaved like the jealous and curious idiots we were. And those little buds turned into double D’s it seemed in a matter of months. Suzanne inherited my grandmother’s boobs and the Davidson butt, which meant no butt at all (alas, Collette and I inherited, let’s say, our more generous hips, from the other side of the family). By her teens, Suzanne had grown into the kind of girl that makes men drool and boys goofy; a big-boobed, slim-hipped blond.

When she was 16 and learning to drive I went along for a trip. My dad was riding shot gun so he could instruct, and I sat directly behind her. As the gas gauge read nearly empty, my dad told her to pull into the neighborhood station. The attendant was a goner from the time Suzanne rolled down her window and asked to fill‘er up. His brain disengaged as he looked at her. Blood rushed to his face and probably elsewhere. He couldn’t talk, he stammered, he stared, he was immobile. My dad leaned in front of Suzanne, looked up at the attendant and repeated, “You can fill up the tank.” The teenager did as my dad asked and when Suzanne gave him a ten expecting change, an entire wad of bills shot out of his hand and wafted into the car and around it. She counted out what was due her and handed him the extra bills. Flustered, he didn’t know what to do or say, he just stared at Suzanne with this silly grin. When we got home we realized the little door over the gas tank had been left open and the gas cap was missing. My dad, without Suzanne, returned to the gas station to retrieve it.

It wasn’t just that Suzanne had boobs out to here and legs up to there, she had green eyes and long, blond, straight hair. (Collette and I, of course, were both born with curly hair, so in order to emulate our older sister and follow the fashion of the late 60’s, we’d sleep on gigantic rollers or orange juice cans to try to straighten our unruly locks. I eventually discovered if you line up the rollers just so, and clip them together, you can rest the back of your head on a pillow to fall asleep. But if your head moves a smidgen, you crankily wake up with a neck ache and have to rearrange them. I also discovered ironing wasn’t all that good for hair.) Suzanne modeled some locally, but never pursued it.

Suzanne was the first person to ever tell me about sex. I was in 5th grade, she was in 8th. We were talking upstairs, out of hearing range of my parents. When she explained how the deed was done I responded, “The boy sticks what, where? You’re lying. That’s gross. Who would want to do that?” For the where, she pointed. The word she used for the what: wiener. When you grow up in a house full of girls, a penis is not something you’re familiar with and you have a hard time visualizing. National Geographic showed naked breasts, but I don’t remember any naked penis pictures. I mean, of course the three of us had seen a neighbor’s penis when he was about four years old. He pulled down his pants at our and several other girls’ request. But I couldn’t quite put together the image of Bobby Johnston’s four year old penis being stuck anywhere.

But as with most things, Suzanne was right.

In high school and college she went by the name of Suzi and instead of a dot over the i, she placed a little flower there. A flower-child at heart, Suzi protested the Vietnam War and other worldly injustices while at Mount Union. She and all her girlfriends joined in the battles of the day by shouting, “Chicks Up Front” thinking (incorrectly as it turns out) that cops dispatched to break up demonstrations would be less likely to rough up girls.

In the true social worker fashion that was to become her career, she also happened to arrange my first French kiss. Well, she arranged for the blind date where I received my first French kiss. She had set me up with a friend of a friend of a friend to take me to see the ‘Lettermen’ on the Mount Union campus. I can remember running back to her dorm room and explaining to her and her friends how this bozo of a boy, a few years older than my 15, stuck his tongue in my mouth, I was aghast. They all responded with smiling, knowing looks but didn’t quite laugh out loud at me. Her second semester of her sophomore year, she attended Chapman College Afloat. This was a very cool thing for an older sister to do. For six months, she traveled around the world on a floating college campus, attending shipboard classes and visiting exotic and strange locales. She dutifully sent back postcards and we tracked her journey port-by-port on a map tacked up on the kitchen wall. Along with wonderful stories, she brought back incredible stuff; hand-carved masks from Africa, a silk sari from India where she had lunched with Indira Gandhi, a perfect little replica of a Japanese junk, trinkets from everywhere. She also brought back Malaria. One of those bad mosquitoes got her while she was on safari in Kenya. So now, I not only had a cool, older, globe-trotting sister who had lunch with Indira Gandhi but one who had contracted an exotic disease while overseas.

Suzanne had transferred to Ohio State by the time I got there. She happened to be a resident adviser in Canfield Hall, I was living in Bradley. Our rooms overlooked the same courtyard and we could wave to each other from our windows. We’d meet Collette (who was living off campus) for brunch many Sundays at Dirty Charberts. The ‘Dirty’--I think that’s just what my sisters called it--signified that it was different not necessarily dirtier than the other Charberts which was located a few blocks up High Street. But you never know. Both sisters helped me to adjust to living away from home. Telling me what to wear, where to go, what to drink. The usual stuff.

In late Winter-early Spring, I was suffering. Allergic and not yet aware of it, to a woolen hat that resembled Ali MacGraw’s in Love Story, I was sick as a dog. Swollen glands, red, swollen eyes—the whole deal. I get this call from one of Suzanne’s friends, Liz Ohle. It’s ten after twelve and I’ve been asleep for more than two hours. I climb down from the top bunk. Liz sounds very serious and says she’s got some bad news for me:

“What is it?”

“It’s about your sister.”

“What about her, is she okay?”

“Well, it’s really bad news.”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t know really how to tell you this, but if you look out your window, you can see her. Suzanne hung herself tonight.”

I start to shake but open the curtains above my roommate’s bed. I look across the courtyard and there she is. Her body appears to be hanging directly in front of her window. Her head’s askew and she’s dressed in a long pink robe. Her hands hang limp at her side. I can’t see her feet but I imagine them dangling.

Unable to breathe, I collapse on my roommate’s bed as the tears begin and then it hits me. For ten minutes now, it’s been April First. When I regain my voice, I scream into the phone, “April Fools and this isn’t funny.” I slam down the phone. A second later, the phone rings. I pick it up and hear my sister’s riotous laughter, “April Fool’s” she snorts. I scream at her, “I never want to talk to you again,” and slam down the phone again. A few minutes later, I called her then boyfriend (now husband) relate the story and tell him I never want to see or talk to her ever again. I call Collette and my parents the next day and with righteous indignation retell the story.

The whole incident was so out of character for her, so out of the realm of what I thought I knew about her, it shocked me. Collette and I could have done something like that and it wouldn’t have been thought of as vile, but my older, capable, sweet, considerate, non-temperamental, role-model sister had never revealed that side of her personality before. But I should’ve had an inkling.

A particular blanket we used now and again always bothered me, I never wanted it near me. For some reason that green and pink flowered blanket made me think of worms. I could never quite figure out why until some time in our teen years when Suzanne said, “I wonder if that’s the blanket from the worm incident.” “What worm incident?” I ask. She said, “You know, the one when you were little.” It was there, just on the periphery of my memory, “I was about two, still in the crib, I remember nightmares about worms.” Suzanne laughing, “Well, they weren’t really nightmares.” As the story goes, one night after my mom had tucked me in (with that exact blanket) Suzanne, under the guise of saying good night, came cribside and dropped bobby pins down my sleeper pajamas telling me they were worms. She went to school the next day all smug and satisfied, complaining to her kindergarten chums that she couldn’t get any sleep, “because my baby sister cried all night.”

That’s Suzanne, my oldest sister.

I prepare for an annual autumnal task, cleaning up crab apples from a neighbor’s tree that only seem to fall on our lawn. As a kid, I always underestimated the amount of time and effort it took to clean up the apples. As an adult, I do the same thing.

I start with one “Ironman” tall size, white kitchen plastic bag and then have to return to the house for more. Usually three trips and an hour or so later I think I’m done, only to find more apples underfoot or hiding in the lawn edge and flower bed. They don’t really rake up all that well unless you get one of those heavy duty garden rakes that your great grandfather used and even then you miss some, so you usually end up on hands and knees picking them up by the handfuls and throwing them in the bag that tips over when you put too much effort into it or it becomes lopsided and spills in the exact area that you just finished.

And when you actually are through, the bag is so heavy you can’t carry it to the curb until you divide it into more bags and so you go inside and get extra bags and then you forget the little twisties that go around the stupid bags so you go inside for the twisties and then you hurt your back carrying the damn apples to the curb and then one of the bags breaks and about a million little green apples cascade down the driveway into the street and a car comes by and squishes them on the pavement.

(At this point you become crabbier than Crabby Appleton ever thought of being and you want to shoot not only the singer but the lyricist who penned that insidious, relentless song that’s been going through your head all afternoon “Little Green Apples” and you vow never ever to spend any part of any season in Indianapolis. And don’t even talk to me about “Autumn Leaves”.)

First Published in Get A Life!, November 2004