The Circle Game: A Cleveland Memoir
Part 1

by John Stark Bellamy II

It’s no secret that Cleveland forsakes its past. Forest City journalist George Condon once wrote that no major city in the United States has a more deplorable record than Cleveland when it comes to venerating and preserving its historic sites. I couldn’t agree more--and I’m not alluding to the dismantlement of its industrial landscape or the eclipse of its fabled “Millionaires’ Row” mansions. Those are largely past physical recall but at least have been perpetuated, after a fashion, in various publications and archival institutions. No, I refer to scenes of the more recent, if somewhat raffish past. It’s a regrettable fact that there are no historical markers at the corner of East 115th Street and Euclid Avenue. And that’s a shame, because that intersection played a memorable role in the genesis of Cleveland’s first counterculture: the “hippie” drug scene of the mid-1960s.

Had you been an eagle soaring high above University Circle of an early winter’s night four decades ago, you might have observed a remarkable phenomenon. For from that lofty station you could have espied clusters of young Clevelanders, both city dwellers and suburbanites, stealthily converging on the hitherto shabby and unsought corner of East 115th and Euclid Avenue. By ones and twos, by foot and by automobile, from every quarter of the compass they trekked there as to a Holy Grail. Why? Because it was December 1966 and this unlikely intersection had become the fast beating heart of the Cleveland counterculture. Central to that culture was the unifying sacrament of illegal drug use, and it was already notorious that this juncture of “The Circle” was the chief portal to criminally chemical redemption.

Looking back, the modest locale of our youthful drug Mecca seems even more improbable and unprepossessing than it then did. Composed of just three elements, not a single one suggested its historic role in undermining the morals and character of Cleveland’s young. First was the Coffeehouse, situated on the northeast corner. Previously but a disheveled storefront, it blossomed, under the stewardship of 24-year-old ex-Western Reserve University zoology student Wade Ferrel, into a major hippie hangout by the fall of ’66. True, it was generally unheated, damp and drafty, as if someone had left a window open for a timely escape from the police. Dimly lit, it offered only a Spartan menu of mediocre coffees and other non-alcoholic beverages. (The most notorious of these leprous distilments was the “Psychocoke,” an odious blend of Coca-Cola and cider which Ferrel himself pronounced “not very good.”1) Nor was music the principal charm of the Coffeehouse ambiance, though its jukebox boasted offerings beyond the Top 40 ghetto (one fondly recalls “Scotch and Soda” by the Kingston Trio, Tim Hardin’s “The Lady Came From Baltimore” and—of course—“Mother’s Little Helper” by the Stones) and an attractively out-of-tune and battered piano huddling against the front wall.

Say what you will about the actual purpose and function of the Coffeehouse—and Cleveland Police officials and University Circle Development Foundation personnel said plenty—Wade Ferrel and its subsequent proprietors consistently insisted that it was simply a modest, inexpensive venue where students and other young people with no taste for alcohol could socialize. And Ferrel was probably stating the technical truth when he protested the druggy image of his establishment relentlessly promoted by local law enforcement officials and frequently echoed in the columns of Cleveland newspapers:

      They don’t all want to go to bars, you know. . . . People have the

      impression that a lot of mainliners hang around here. It simply isn’t

      true. I don’t know of single drug addict who comes in the

      Coffeehouse. Students come in here to talk and socialize. Our

      entertainment is spontaneous. Maybe somebody brings a guitar and

      then everybody sings folksongs. We tried poetry readings but

      nobody listened.

Two doors east of the Coffeehouse came the second vital element in Cleveland countercultural nexus, Stanley D. Heilbrun’s Headquarters. Known to most of its habitués simply as “the Head shop,” Heilbrun’s ramshackle and cluttered emporium featured the usual array of countercultural consumer goods, including lavish drug accoutrements (hash pipes, hookahs and Zig-Zag cigarette papers), posters (Bob Dylan, Allen Ginsberg, Jimi Hendrix and the other usual suspects), overpriced “thrift” garments and seductive novelties like penny Tootsie Rolls and miniature busts of Adolf Hitler carved from coconuts. And not for Stanley H. were the blushing disclaimers of a Wade Ferrel. No, indeed: Heilbrun was a self-styled chemical evangelist who minced no words about his sacred mission. Unabashedly promoting his store to delighted newspaper reporters as a “propaganda center for psychedelic drugs,” 2 Heilbrun pridefully boasted that every item for sale there was either “satiric, esoteric or acid-teric.” 3

Then there was Adele’s Lounge Bar, the last and perhaps most improbable unit of the block’s bohemian triad. Well predating both the Coffeehouse and Headquarters, Adele’s was then managed by feisty part-owner Martin Prengler, and his tavern was already undergoing its uncomfortable but inexorable transition from a funky neighborhood watering hole to a volatile nexus between Cleveland’s hippie and biker subcultures. For whatever their obvious differences, the shared preferences of the two groups for unconventional lifestyles and illegal chemical delights inevitably pushed them together, and Adele’s, whatever Prengler’s intentions, served as the necessary human interface. And, for the record, Prengler’s stance of outraged and injured innocence eclipsed even Wade Farrel’s arsenal of pious denials. Commenting on police charges that his bar was a center of drug activity, he fulminated to a Cleveland Press reporter:

      Those kids are lying about what is going on here. There are no

      narcotics here. I can’t control other places in the area. We run a nice,

      respectable place. This place is definitely not a nuisance. All this

      publicity has cut our business in half. You can’t chase customers out

      just because they have long hair and beards. I’m not their mother or

      father.

One still particularly recalls with a shudder one’s first encounter at Adele’s with the phenomenon of “biker” women with their painfully tight clothes, heavy makeup, hard faces, all of them invariably introduced as “my old lady.”

Such was the setting of our youthful drug follies as the fall of 1966 lurched towards winter. Every Friday and Saturday and many a weekday night we trudged to our fateful corner in anxious hope of “scoring” some “grass” or “hash”—the fabled glories of LSD, or “acid,” not having yet penetrated our high school milieu. Our procurement routine was simple and quite as rigid as a pre-Vatican II Tridentine Mass. Sauntering through the door of the Coffeehouse, we’d order something cheap to drink, convinced, like true drug sophisticates, that such a prop would cunningly mask our true purpose on the premises. Now, with more elaborate casualness, it was over to the juke box, where we self-consciously selected tunes that wouldn’t shame our hipness quotient in the hearing of any college students present.

Then we would sit, and sit and maybe sit some more, sullenly waiting for some acknowledged candy man to come through the door. Usually that blessed event would eventually occur, and after a whispered exchange and the furtive transfer of folding money from hand to sweating hand—transactions doubtlessly obvious to denizens of the planet Mars—our vendor would depart. More waiting, more sitting, more paranoia ensuing as the minutes crawled by with no sign of our seller or his precious cargo. Finally, almost without exception—as Bob Dylan noted at the time, “To live outside the law, you must be honest”--he would reappear at the entrance.

Even as the door opened, we were on our feet striding towards him, and as we passed each other in the open street door, we palmed the packet of drugs and were on out way out of the Circle, up to the Heights, up to our third-floor room and back into the magic realm of being stoned. And on those rare occasions that we failed to score, there was at least the consolation prize of a visit to Dean’s Diner, just across Euclid Avenue, where the staff was not over-scrupulous about selling their gigantic jugs of 3.2 beer to blatantly underage males.

Our second fallback option was the package store at the Commodore Hotel, where they would sell bottles of Colt .45 (“Colt .45 is not a beer—It is a completely unique experience in drinking pleasure!”) and Orange Flip (a disgusting but emphatically effective admixture of vodka and orange juice) to anyone who could reach the store counter. On one occasion I actually witnessed the sale of this potent liquid combo to a twelve-year-old boy, whose head barely reached the top of the retail counter.

What a scruffy, tatterdemalion lot we were! Rigidly conformist in our teenage non-conformity, the boys uniformly sported Beatle haircuts, Cuban-heeled “Beatle boots,” blue Levis and black pea coats, the collars turned up against the cutting Circle winds. Those with hats generally chose pork pie, poor-boy styles, with the more stylishly affluent opting for the model memorably worn by John Lennon in the movie Help! Our girls, already stigmatized with the sobriquet of “hippie chicks,” (Women’s Liberation was yet but a gleam in some angry eyes), usually wore flowing Indian print frocks, with flowers in their long Joan Baez-style hair and eye-popping hats. All the boys smoked Marlboros compulsively and many of us, alas, even attempted something of a public strut.

A few melodramatic scenes emerge from the fog of memory: The progressively desolate look of the Circle area, a broken lunar landscape of crumbling apartment buildings, deteriorating commercial blocks and the debris-strewn vacant lots which seemed to multiply by the month . . . A beautiful, terrified suburban girl of 15, brought to my Coffeehouse table by her friends to be talked down out of the terror of her first LSD trip . . . a half-dozen police cars, top lights blazing, suddenly screaming to a halt and their occupants erupting into the street to seize and search everyone in sight . . . the sudden dry feeling in my mouth as the cops grabbed the persons sitting right next to me in the Coffeehouse and took them outside and a little voice inside me screamed “Please don’t search me!”

Obviously, our clumsy routine of drug acquisition was not built to last. As should be clear from the above, we were a little less than shrewd pr smooth in the protocols and etiquette of our delinquencies—and Cleveland area cops were hardly as dumb as we presumed in our youthful ignorance. By the autumn of 1966 they were angrily aware of the burgeoning drug scene, both in its University Circle incarnation and its spreading cells metastasizing throughout Greater Cleveland suburbs.

After some months of observation and infiltration, the first busts went down on December 7, 1966, when Cleveland Heights police arrested a handful of student drug users and several of their adult suppliers. The gravity of this crackdown was clearly underscored by Cleveland Heights Police Captain Earl Gordon, who, in announcing the busts, solemnly emphasized that the arrested students had “come from good homes and their parents are mostly professional people.”5 More arrests followed over the next week, spreading quickly to Shaker Heights High School, and publicized with banner headlines in the afternoon Cleveland Press, whose editor Louis Seltzer, always keen to sniff out the latest social menace, knew he had a hot one this time. And, surely, this story had legs that wouldn’t quit:

POLICE SMASH NARCOTICS RING INVOLVING HEIGHTS HIGH STUDENTS (Cleveland Press headline, December 8)

MORE TO BE INDICTED IN SCHOOL DRUG CASE (Cleveland Press headline, December 9)

POLICE SAY DRUGS MADE ON EUCLID (Cleveland Press headline, December 13)

DOPE PROBE HITS STUDENTS OF 2 SUBURBAN SCHOOLS (Cleveland Press headline, December 14)

And—I think I said the cops were not dumb—inevitably:

TAVERN ON EUCLID AVE. LISTED IN DRUG PROBE (Cleveland Press headline, December 15)

ASK POLICE TO CLOSE HANGOUTS ON CIRCLE (Cleveland Press headline, December 16)

With suburban kids from good families now officially at risk, it was certain that stern retribution would follow, and it came swiftly. Citing “health and safety” violations that had hitherto eluded them, Cleveland Police officials forced the Coffeehouse to close down on December 20. After correcting the stated violations Wade Ferrel managed to reopen it, only to have it immediately reshuttered when Cleveland Police Lieutenant Sirkot conveniently discovered a padlock on an electrical switchbox. The pattern of police harassment continued for the duration, including an April, 1967 closing triggered by an unlicensed jukebox. (That technical breakage of the law was helpfully provided by a Cleveland policeman who obligingly dropped a dime in the music machine to establish the legal pretext.)

Two months later Ferrel threw in the towel but the Coffeehouse retained its fitful existence under manager Cleo Malone until the spring of 1968. But it was never the same after the initial closing, and the end came on March 12, when a fire of highly suspicious origin gutted the building housing both the Coffeehouse and the Graffiti Bookstore, the cultural successor to the Headquarters. It was symptomatic of the increasing paranoia of the time that rumor immediately suggested that Cleveland authorities had suborned some of their stoolies in the area to kindle the blaze...

Read Part 2 of The Circle Game next week in CoolCleveland.com

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Photo credits: 1) John Stark Bellamy II (before), courtesy of John Stark Bellamy II; 2) *The Coffee House and Adele's Bar & Lounge at E. 115th & Euclid 3) John Stark Bellamy II (after), courtesy John Stark Bellamy II; 3) *Police action on Coventry Road, 8/4/69. Photos marked * are courtesy Cleveland Press collection, Special Collections, Michael Schwartz Library, Cleveland State University.

Former Clevelander John Stark Bellamy II is most notorious for his books chronicling Cleveland murders and disasters, such titles as They Died Crawling, The Maniac in the Bushes and Women Behaving Badly. Countryman Press has also published an anthology of his Vermont murder tales, Vintage Vermont Villainies. This CoolCleveland.com exclusive is an excerpt from his memoir-in-progess, Wasted on the Young.

This fall Gray & Co. will publish a compilation of his disaster stories, including narratives of the Cleveland Clinic gas tragedy, the East Ohio Gas Co. explosion, the 1916 waterworks tunnel blast and a dozen more defining Cleveland castrophes.

Although he keeps a fond and constant eye on all things Cleveland cool and otherwise, John now lives with his wife Laura and their dog Clio in the most soothing part of Vermont, where he continues to recuperate from the excitements and follies of his excessively prolonged youth. (:divend:)