Anthony P. Alexander was born, raised and educated in Cleveland. He grew up on E. 93rd Street and attended St. Marian’s Catholic Elementary School, Cathedral Latin High School, and John Hay High School. He graduated from John Hay in 1969 and attended Central State University for two years. He was employed by the Call & Post for over 40 years, working in circulation, distribution, printing and the photo lab. He has often been called Mr. Call & Post. Anthony loves Cleveland and continues to reside in the city, which he considers the best location in the nation.
I grew up at 2296 E. 93rd Street. I grew up on that block all my life. I went to St. Marion’s on Petrarcha Road, then went to Cathedral Latin, then across the street to John Hay. I went to Central State [University] for two years, then came back home to work at the Call & Post. I worked there 49 years. My anniversary of being laid off was on St. Patrick’s Day. I was laid off in 2009.
“I was going out, playing with the ladies and stuff, and I got up one day and my dad, whose name was Harry Alexander, said, “Come on, you going with me.” And he put me in the pressroom at the Call & Post newspaper, where he was general manager. We were called flyers. When the paper came off the press, we would catch it and stack it on the stackers, the little boards. It would go down the rollers and people would pick it up. And there were tiers – people who would tie the papers into bundles, and then they’d throw them in the cart. So many bundles to a cart, and then they’d throw them on the truck to be delivered. After that, I started working on the press.
The Call & Post was located at 1949 E. 105th, right at the corner of Chester and 105th. We were down in the basement. I think there were only like 10 Black papers that printed their own paper. The rest of them had it printed by the white newspapers nearby. Right now, the Call & Post is being printed by the News Herald out in Willoughby.
At the time, Cleveland Clinic was just one building. Cleveland Clinic started at Carnegie and went to Euclid. It looked like a house. Then everything grew around it. They’ve still got that building there, but everything around it goes all the way to 107th and then all the way down to 79th Street, and then all the way over to Chester and over to Cedar and almost to Quincy now.
The house we grew up in was a massive house. It had one, two, three, four bedrooms. It was solid brick. The house was made back in the 1800s by the commissioner [the city manager of Cleveland]. The commissioner had it built by city workers with city bricks, city slabs of concrete. It had a walkway in the backyard around the yard. 2296 was one side, and 2298 was the other side. It had a two-carriage garage that was built for horses. It even had a hayloft with beams sticking out, and with a hoist sticking out. We almost hung a fella playing around on the damn thing. Cowboys and Indians. We caught him and roped him up and threw him out, and we didn’t know it would stop before his feet hit the ground. They cut that thing down immediately.
Growing up there was fabulous. Back in the day, back in the ‘50s and ‘60s, with the white kids on the street, we had no problems. There was no whites and Blacks fighting about anything. We played together. Jesse Owens used to live across the street, but then he moved down to Short Scovill. He went to East Tech from there. He used to go to the store for people, and he would run down the street and hurdle the bushes in between people’s houses. I was like, “Man, he’s got to be nuts, there’s a fence in some of those bushes.” But he went over all of them.
We had a fella named Charles Hatchet who lived down the street. That was Edwin Starr. He made some songs, “25 Miles to Go,” “War” and other songs. There was Little Anthony and the Imperials, they stayed down on the corner. There was Minnie Gentry. She was an actress at the Karamu House.
All of us played together. Our yard was so big, we used to play baseball and football. We used to go up to the plateau (the Baldwin Reservoir at the top of Fairhill Road.). That was before they put fences and everything around it. We used to go into the reservoir building. You couldn’t hear nothing because of the generators and stuff, but we’d go in there and drink the water right out of the fountain. We’d climb up the hill, the top of the hill with just a plateau on it, just flat, and we’d make a baseball diamond out of it, and we would play kids from other streets. The grassy hill was on the other side, and we would sleigh ride on it in the winter time. Everybody would come there, from the Heights and everywhere. We never really had any problems. Sometimes the Black kids would jump the white kids, and then they would jump us if we was with them. It was like “Oh, you’re with the white kids,” because we were Catholic. And we had some bruisers.
My father, Harry Alexander, was the general manager of the Call & Post, and then when W. O. Walker died, he became the owner. He ran the paper eight or 10 years after that. The paper flourished during those eight years. But he had a heart condition. He had a quadruple bypass, and then he was walking on the treadmill and his heart couldn’t take it. He died in 1988. I continued working there until 2009. It was like a family. I ran the pressroom for years. I ran maintenance, cleaning and fixing the building.
The Call & Post was the eyes of the Black community for years. The Plain Dealer had the white version or the policeman’s version of the news. You had to get the right version of the news from the Call & Post. It wouldn’t give you just the Black version, but the closest-to-the-truth version. They wouldn’t color it up. They might give a bias, but they wouldn’t color it up. You would read both. My mother worked for the county auditor, when Voinovich was county auditor, and Ralph Perk before that, and the first thing all them white peoples, especially the higher-ups, did in the morning was read the Call & Post. They wanted to know what was going on in the Black community. The white community didn’t phase them. They knew what the white community was doing; they wanted to know what the Black community was doing, so they could change their views or attitudes to adjust because that was the votes they needed.
W. O. Walker was a powerful man. That’s why the old man – that’s what I used to call my father – ran the paper. Walker was the publisher, and the old man was the general manager. All the politicians would come see Walker. He was powerful. When they wanted his endorsement, they would come to him. My old man became the first RTA president. Matter of fact, you go down to Quincy, the RTA station there has a plaque with his name on it. We had a big dedication a few years ago.
Today, all the Call & Post is is a tax write-off for Don King. I think they print maybe 5,000 papers, maybe.
I used to hang at Leo’s Casino. The Fairfax Recreation Center. Art’s Seafood. I used to hang at the pool room up there. Cedar from 100th Street to 93rd Street, that’s where I was. If you were looking for me, like when the draft board came looking for me in ‘69 when I was dodging the draft, I’d say, “Look, all you had to do was come to 1949 E. 105th at the Call & Post building, and if I wasn’t there I was at 2265 E. 93rd Street, or I was up at Art’s Seafood, or I was up at my five women’s houses.” I wasn’t hiding from anybody. I went to five proms in 1968 and 1969. When I had my wall of pictures, I had all the prom pictures on there. I could use my family’s cars to go to the different proms; I just made sure these women didn’t have proms on the same day.
The community changed when the dope started running through it. And it just seemed like the younger kids, they didn’t give a damn, you know, they just were into their own little world. Instead of working for something, it was about trying to figure out a scheme to get something. I think cellphones and all this iPads and all that stuff has damaged the school system more than is healthy because it’s made the kids, especially our Black kids, it’s made them so damn lazy.
You go on 93rd, a lot of the same families are still there. It makes me feel good to know that people are still bound to their turf. The Cleveland Clinic’s cleaning out the neighborhood, building apartments and condos. In one sense, I think it’s a great thing. If it helps out the community more, and gives a lot of the Blacks in the area or out of the area a chance to get a job or advancement, and helps place a lot of them people in better homes than what they are in now, if it does that, then yeah, it’s a good thing. But if it just displaces a lot of people and puts them out in the street, I don’t think it’s a good thing then.”
