In Cleveland, the term “the Dawgs” stuck. Especially after Who Let the Dogs Out. It fit the place. Cleveland never pretended to be noble or heroic. The local move was always redemption by confrontation. Put it in your face. Own the joke before someone else does.
After the long decline that set in by the early 1950s, natives were fully aware of how the city was viewed. A town of working-class losers. Rather than resist it, people absorbed it, flipped it, wore it. Not Lions or Warriors or Yankees. Maybe the White Sox, because that was a Cleveland affectation, even with a suit. Clevelanders were Browns and Wahoos. Dawgs and Indians.
This photograph was taken in 1989 at Dave’s rental house on Continental Avenue in the Buckeye neighborhood. Buckeye was once home to the largest Hungarian population outside Europe. By the 1970s it had begun a slow transition into a Black neighborhood. In 2022, when Joe Jambor died, the neighborhood locksmith, he was the last Hungarian left on Buckeye.
Dave lived here. He bartended at Mike’s Boros Café on Buckeye Road, which turned out to be the last Hungarian bar in a neighborhood once filled with ethnic joints. Boros closed in 1998. By then most of the old regulars were already gone.
Dave had a liver transplant in 2006. He may be dead now. George, who owned the house and drank at Boros, died in 1992. The list keeps growing. People vanish quietly. No ceremony. No cover story. And the list of the vanished goes on because it’s a dog’s life, where it’s not hidden, but flipped, the same way Blacks own the n-word.
Janet, one of the strawberries at the bar, part of the new crowd, used to describe the old man bar and its folks as prairie dogs.
It’s a dog’s life. Not hidden. Just flipped.