2/18/22 - Friday Forget-Me-Nots by Jim Silcott

Photo Caption: Third grade cafeteria helpers coming to the rescue this week.

Dear Our Lady of Peace Family,

John and Mary Lagore lived in the small apartment upstairs from me at 725 S. Fifth Street in the heart of German Village. Our little yellow house with a front wall that fit the curved angle of the brick street was next door to a german bakery called Bierbergs. By the time that I lived there, beginning in 1975 they were only open in December for their annual production of speciality Christmas cookies.

Gus Bierberg, his wife Emma and daughter Helen ran the bakery. The Beirbergs were the owners of our house and a tiny brick walk separated the two buildings. My rent was fifteen dollars a week, cheap even in 1970’s dollars, and included all utilities including a phone, the only catch being that my phone was also the bakery phone. If I was home when the bakery was open I was not to answer it. If it was for me the caller was told to hang up and call back. So, if the phone rang, stopped and rang again, I answered it. If the bakery was closed I was to answer and, if it was for the bakery, I wrote the order down and placed it on their side door.

Gus was a curmudgeon. He had a one eyed dog named Pepper that patrolled the bakery, my side porch, the walkway and back yard. There was a small wrought iron fence which kept him contained. He was a little mongrel mutt but his bark was mighty and the look he gave you with his single eye indicated that if he was a bigger dog he would eat you for dinner.

Gus was highly religious. He built the altar at Holy Cross Church which is still there inside the church. Gus also believed that if something was dirty, painting it silver would make it clean. “Just paint right over that dirt,” he would say, “and the dirt would be trapped underneath forever.”

John Lagore worked most of his life at the old Gambrinus Brewery on Front Street (you can still see King Gambrinus lofting a beer on a wall down there.) John taught me how to grow horseradish in our common yard in the spring and summer.

The three of them, John, Mary and Gus, were the night cleaners at my Dad’s place, Deibels. They would come in every night just before 1am. They swept and mopped the wooden floors, re-set the tables and chairs, and did whatever general cleaning we couldn’t get to as part of our closing rituals. Pepper came as well although I don’t think he contributed in any meaningful way to the work. He just barked and stared at you with his one good eye.

Waitresses and cooks and bartenders, especially after a long weekend night, would sit around and have a beer, eat some food and share good conversation. John, who always wore a dark green uniform with white suspenders, would get impatient with us because we were interfering with his cleaning. First, we would see him snap his suspenders in a kind of a passive aggressive stance. If we still didn’t take the hint, John got out the ammonia. Unlike Gu,s who would paint dirt silver, John was convinced that everything could be made clean with ammonia. He would whip out a gallon bottle, pour it liberally on a dish rag and start cleaning the very table at which we were sitting. It didn’t take long for us to exit the table and exit Deibels and head to Planks which didn’t close until 2:30pm.

Sometimes, though, John and Mary and Gus would sit down with us, drink a cold draught beer and tell stories. John, of working at the brewery and chasing the rats back down to the Scioto River. Gus told us about his original bakery on South 18th Street east of Parsons Ave. which burned to the ground one summer night. Sometimes John and Mary’s son-in-law, Kenny, would help out. He was on Iwo Jima during Word War II and carried a photo in his wallet of the beach there post-battle. First as a young kid, and later as a teenager and young man, I felt as if they and all the other people who worked at Deibels were family.

If you are looking for a moral to this story or a connection to the Catholic Church or Catholic schools you wasted the minutes you took to read this. Other than going down to Holy Cross and admiring Gus’s handiwork (it is not painted silver) I don’t have anything particularly religious to say here. But…I will be forever grateful that people like them have been part of my life, and I am deeply appreciative that my Dad and Mom had me working at Deibels starting in 8th grade. The fact that God made each one of us unique, and the fact that I have had the opportunity to know so many of God’s people, has been a most wonderful gift from Him, and I hope that I may continue to have the chance to converse and break bread with many, many more. Guess I got a little religious there anyway. God has a way of doing that.

Jim Silcott