Recalling nicknames of past era

There were a lot of reasons to like Bob Meil.

I listed a lot of them in this space two weeks ago when he passed away at the age of 93.

He was one of the nicest people I have ever known, he was a joy to be around and he had a razor sharpness to his mind that never left him even at the very end.

He lived most of his life in the Willoughby area and worked at his father’s department store in Downtown Willoughby. He lived in Waite Hill with his wife Sue Ellen for many years until they moved to Grace Woods at Breckenridge Village fairly recently.

One of my main points in that previous column was his incredible memory for detail.

He never forgot any of the stores in Willoughby and could name all of them on both sides of Erie Street up and down all the side streets for generations. I’m talking about going a long ways back.

I knew a little bit about them myself because in high school I worked at Ernst Birkholz Haberdashery and Snyder Furniture and my friends worked at places like Beebower’s and Hughes Provision, all of them now long gone.

But I knew I couldn’t write a piece like that without getting an immediate response from Don Lewis, whose knowledge of Willoughby is legendary.

Don and his wife Pat, who was Pat Cedervall when she taught my kids at Browning Elementary, are the backbone of the Willoughby Historical Society.

Without them and Dr. Ron Taddeo it probably wouldn’t exist.

The Lewises, who live on Sherwin Road, make it their business to know everything there is to know about Willoughby.

His dad, by the way, ran the huge Wright Department Store in Willoughby when I was in high school. But I digress.

About the time the press started running with the column on Bob Meil, Don Lewis was on the phone. I expected as much.

He wanted know if I was aware that he had written a comprehensive history of all the stores in Willoughby, in pamphlet form, and it contained all of the information Bob had been regaling me with for years, plus a lot more I may not even have been aware of.

I said yes, I had a copy of it, and that it was a masterpiece of the same epic magnitude he had produced when writing on the Mounds Club, which I used for “research” to give talks on the erstwhile notorious gambling joint that is now the LaVera Party Center in Willoughby Hills.

Don is prolific in his research and in his documentation, which is extremely helpful to amateur speakers such as myself when giving programs under the pretense that it is original work.

Don and I had a long phone conversation. When the subject is Downtown Willoughby, you can never spend too much time on it.

I could probably talk for a few hours on it.

Let me tell you just a few things I may know more about than anyone else in the world, including the people who hung around Koster’s Sweet Shop in the 1940s and how they turned out, the telephone operators who worked upstairs (Jeannie Palmer and Arline Eason — they married Dick Stone and Jim Mulqueeny, respectively — the outrageous nicknames bestowed on virtually all of the folks by John Troy...)

I shall interrupt myself at this point and list some of the nicknames and then take a break because I am such a miserable typist on a laptop computer (Greg Patt, help! help!) that it is taking hours to perform a simple task.

If you can match up any real names with these nicknames, bless your heart. But there will be no prizes.

Zeke, Inhume, Fooch, Chots Ball Game, Schoolie, Jaydo (abbreviated from Jay Dub), Large Marge, Motts, Butt, Roundy, Ike, Derps, Lucky — but enough of that.

If any of these nicknames ring a bell let me know. Otherwise we will drop the subject for now.