Dwyte Paris grew up in the Fairfax community, worked in sales during his career, and now lives in the Glenville/University Circle neighborhood. A singer his entire life, he continues to perform and play music.
My mother and I moved to Fairfax with my grandparents after my father died in 1945. They already had the house. It was purchased from Quincy Savings and Loan. I was there until grandma decided to buy this place (on Wade Park). Our house was on E. 82nd Street, mid block, facing Amos Avenue.
Grandma was a very businesslike woman. She had taken the upstairs and cut it up into seven rooms, and then there were also four kitchenettes on the second floor. So, she had kitchenettes and she rented out the kitchenettes, and then she also rented out the third floor. There were four on the second floor and three on the third floor. Our family lived on the first floor. She was very enterprising. We had as many as seven people living upstairs on the second and third floors.
We lived there from 1945 to 1957. I was five years old when we moved there. All the tenants were nice people. They looked out. We had the kind of neighborhood where everybody looked out for everybody else, not like today where people are individuals and they could care less about what’s going on around them. Most of them were homeowners.
When I was 14, I was the Plain Dealer carrier for that neighborhood. Seven days a week. It was a pretty big route. It put me through high school, at least through my junior year.
My mom was born in Covington, Kentucky in 1912. My dad was born in 1910. My father was born here in Cleveland. He was a mail carrier. Mother was a graduate of Harlem Hospital nursing school. She was the first. My knowledge is that she was the first Black registered nurse in the city of Cleveland. She worked at all of the hospitals. She was a trailblazer, because they did not like to accept the fact that she was a registered nurse.
She was a trailblazer, and she passed that on to me. I started working at 3M in 1968 (Minnesota Mine and Manufacturing). They only had one Black man working there. I had a difficult time. I had been selling cars before that. My mom pulled into a parking lot and there was this gentleman giving out parking tickets, dressed in a suit and tie, and she said, “Do you work here?” and he said, “No, I’m just helping a friend out. He’s at lunch. I work for 3M.” And she said, “My son’s in sales, do they have any job openings?” He said, “No, they don’t have any.” And my mother told me, “You should just go apply and see what happens.”
I went out in a suit and tie and applied. They called me back for a second interview. I will always feel like they were doing the age-old thing of, “Well, we tried and it didn’t work out.” So they put me in a division of trying to sell to doctors and dentists. I never did make a sale. Then there was an opening in the copy division in downtown Cleveland, and I was to deal with this branch manager. His name was Jim Nelson. He turned out to be a very good friend, almost like a father to me. I said to him, “Give me downtown Cleveland. And if I don’t do well by the end of January, I’ll resign.” I was selling copy equipment and other heavy equipment. They had the small copiers and the large automatic ones, then later they had the color copiers. I stayed there for 11 years. Obviously, we were successful selling downtown.
I remember I was selling in January, and it was cold as all get out. We were selling plain paper copiers, not coated paper, and I had a small unit that had wheels on it. I was dragging that thing all over downtown. I think, if I’m not mistaken, I did $65,000 in sales that first January. Wow. I was the number one salesman in the branch, and I never looked back.
In the neighborhood, I spent Saturdays with my close friend, Bill Robinson or William Robinson, who became like a brother to me. He and I worked this deal on our parents, on our mothers, by saying that we were taking each other to the movies. There was a theater called the Quincy Theater. It was on Quincy Avenue, just east of 83rd Street. Every Saturday they had two features, so we spent the whole afternoon there. He’d get enough money to pay for me, and I’d get enough money to pay for him, and then we could spend the extra money. We had a good thing going until he got sick off of eating too much candy and blew it. “
