Les King grew up on E. 80th St. and still lives in the house he grew up in today. His father worked at TRW and had a shoe tanning business on the side, and King owned a men’s clothing store and shoe store in East Cleveland, King Shoes and Rhett’s Menswear, that he ran for more than 50 years. He served many well-known Clevelanders, including Carl and Louis Stokes and other local politicians, along the way.
I grew up on East 80th St. off of Cedar. When I was growing up, it was the ideal community. It was a transitional street, you know, because of white flight to the suburbs, but it was a very good class of people moving into the area. They were lawyers, politicians, doctors. So we went from white to black, but it was black professionals. I had two brothers and a sister. And my dad worked at TRW, and my mother was a housewife.
My dad was a pump driller for TRW, but he also had a business on the side. He was a shoe tanner. Back in the day, when we were coming up, we didn’t have these bright colors and so forth and so on that they have in today’s shoes. My dad used to mix dyes to match certain garments for some of the performances at Karamu Theater. And Sophie Tucker, out of New York on Broadway, she used to send her stuff to my dad and he would mix the dyes so they would match her outfits. That was in the early 50s. He also had a shoe concession stand in Stone Shoes at the corner of 9th and Euclid. My dad was one of the first Blacks in the business community in downtown Cleveland.
On our street, the parents were guardians over all the kids on the street, regardless of who lived where. They knew your name. They knew your mom’s name. All the parents always knew where we were. And we had a lot of fun on the street. It was a real close knit community. Unfortunately, there are only a few of us left; they either moved to other cities or died off.
I went to Quincy Elementary School, East Rollins Junior High School, and East Tech High School. I came out in ‘65. The schools were good. Teachers took a personal interest in you.
My parents are from the West Indies, Jamaica. Kingston, Jamaica. So I’m a descendant of Jamaica. They were looking for a good life. They landed in New York first, which was a big hub for Jamaicans coming from the West Indies. And then my dad had an opportunity to come here. They came to Cleveland for a job. Cleveland was seen as a good growing city. Cleveland became a hub. You had a lot of Jamaicans living here. It became home to them.
It was primarily an African-American neighborhood, but it was integrated a little bit. We bought our house from whites. It was going through a transition at the time, a changing of the guard.
Coming up as a kid, I used to carry groceries from the AP and Fishers. As a young kid, I used to jitney, taking folks’ groceries to the car, and in some cases, maybe the next street, to the elderly people. So that was my side hustle I guess you could say. I did it for lunch money and stuff like that.
This was a community that had just about everything in it. I grew up at 80th and Cedar and the next block over was 79th and Cedar, which had a corner drugstore called Adelstein’s, and next door was Steven Shoes, a men’s shoe store. I started working there when I was 12 years old, sweeping floors and stuff after school. So, you had a little strip of stores – a drugstore, tailoring store, shoe store, and two supermarkets. And then, believe it or not, we had Don King at the corner of 78th and Cedar. He had a club; called the Corner Tavern. Back in the day, he had Louie Price coming there, he was an R&B singer at the time. And that was a nice club, Don did a hell of a job on that. I used to sell Don King shoes in my early years. He was a businessman in the community and he and his group of friends all shopped at Stephen’s Shoes, because it was a fashion house in the black community for men’s shoes. So most of the business people, your doctors and lawyers and stuff like that, people who wanted something a little different than the traditional Florsheim shoe, they would come there. At the time we were a Stacy Adams dealer, which was a well known name at the time.
I worked with Steven Shoes and worked my way up. When I came out of school, I was a manager at one of his stores. And then as the company grew, I sort of grew, so by the time I was 19, 20 years old, I became a supervisor for seven of their 14 stores. A couple were in black neighborhoods, a couple were in white neighborhoods. And then when they started going downhill, I opened my own store when I was 22, and I had my store for 50 years—at Superior and Euclid in East Cleveland, in the shopping center there on the corner, I had a men’s shoe store and a men’s clothing store.
At the corner of 80th and Cedar was a black social club called the Douglass Club. We had a black gas station across the street. We had black businesses in the community as well as just businesses period. It was a mixed community. Especially in the nightclub and restaurant community. We had Art’s Seafood, a cornerstone of the black community, especially when it came to seafood on Friday. We had the Manhattan Lounge. We used to have a club here called Lancer’s, and back in the day, Monday night was council meeting downtown. After that, all the Black politicians used to come there and have their little rap session. George Forbes, Arnold Pinkey, all the Black politicians, that’s where they would gather Monday nights. Had great fish, too. Not as good as Art’s, but still had great fish. After I opened my store, a lot of them shopped with me. I created a little bond with them, and those that are left, I still see them from time to time.
I was a paperboy in the area as well as my two brothers. We were all paper boys. 89th Street was a focal point of the neighborhood because of the houses on the street. It was a well manicured neighborhood. My dad and I, our bonding time was like 7:30, 8 o’clock at night, standing out there, watering the grass, or sitting on the porch steps watering the grass. We talked about baseball, we talked about whatever it is that we talked about. You know, you’d see the ladies getting out in the morning, the elderly ladies taking care of their plants and so forth. You didn’t have this running up and down the street shooting guns and driving fast cars, and all the other stuff that goes on with the changing of the guard and the neighborhoods.
My dad, I loved the ground he walked on. My mother was great. She was a good housewife. Good mother. But my dad, that was my guy. He used to take me to New York on the train. In the summertime, he would go to New York, he would get in touch with his cousins and stuff. My dad would take me to baseball games. We’d sit on the porch at night and talk, watering the grass and stuff. My dad was my guy. Mom was great. But she was a tattletale. She’d tell him, ‘Do you know what your son did today in school?’ My dad used to get off work at 12 o’clock at night. And he’d come in and sit down at the kitchen table. And Mom would say, “Do you know what your son did today? Did you know he cut class?” And all of a sudden I’d hear the steps, I’d hear him coming upstairs. And he’d say, ‘Boy, do you want it now or in the morning?’ I love my mom dearly. I took care of her for the last 10 years of her life because I wasn’t going to put her in a nursing home. I wasn’t gonna do that. I gave up whatever I had to do, and I would do it again in a heartbeat.
The neighborhood started changing in the 70s. The people coming in didn’t care about the houses. There were a lot of people turning their homes into rental properties, which is a problem that I have right now. A lot of guys are taking advantage of the housing market in this community right now, and turning the houses into boarding houses, which is bad for any community, because you don’t know what you have in there. I had four boarding houses on my street. As a matter of fact, I just found out not too long ago that somebody died of an overdose in one of the boarding houses. So that was the downfall of the community, letting in a lot of tenants that would not deserve to be in these properties, did not take care of the properties. And what happened is when a lot of parents died, quite naturally, they left some of the properties to the kids and the kids didn’t give a rat’s ass about keeping the property up. And the next thing you know, they had liens on the house because they was buying cars or doing other things. The properties just went down.
I raised my family in Cleveland Heights and after I got a divorce, I came back to my parents’ house. I love the Cleveland Fairfax community. I had plenty of opportunities to leave when I was married, because I was doing fairly well at my store. I didn’t want to leave my mother by herself, so I just came in every day and checked on her and stuff like that. But there was no second thought that once I got a divorce, that I wouldn’t come back to East 80th in Fairfax. I love the community. I had the same friends that I had when I grew up. A lot of people knew me from the store and from being around my mother’s house every day. You know, it’s just the community I grew up in.
I stayed. I didn’t leave. When I could have left, I didn’t leave. There was a lot of flight. Everyone leaving for Warrensville, Lee Harvard. They had nice housing stock. The community that once was 80th and Cedar, that was the community over there. People keeping up their property, maintaining their grass.
The Hough Riots had a major impact on the neighborhood. I’m a believer, why the hell you gonna burn down your neighborhood to go someplace else? That was another flight problem. I had a problem with that. You had Fannie Lewis who was a Councilwoman in that Hough area, she was the driving force behind the comeback.
Comeback neighborhood is what it’s about now. Back then, the houses were beautiful, then we went into a downslide. Right now it’s coming back up, not only because of Cleveland Clinic, but people are moving back here and building expensive houses. They’re building a new apartment building at Cedar and Stokes. There’s a lot of building going on in the community. The Fairfax Market is a beautiful concept. I think, personally, you’re gonna have a lot of those who did the flight out of here, their kids might start coming back to communities like this. I saw it going down, and I’m seeing it come back. There’s a lot of interest in the community.”
