Our family moved to Cleveland on Labor Day in 1954, my seventh birthday. A week later I was enrolled in a Ridna Shkola Saturday heritage class in a dismal upstairs room lighted by bare bulbs in a fading commercial building in the old Ukrainian neighborhood. It was all the immigrant community could afford, having come off the boat from DP camps four-five years before.
Soon after, I joined a Plast “novak” (cub scout) group with eight other boys. I remember that first meeting, sitting in a circle on cheap metal folding chairs in the basement of a low-rent storefront just a few blocks away. We didn’t know that we’d become life-long friends, that we would spend nearly every Saturday together for a decade to come and every summer in July at a scout camp in New York state and then enjoy all of August to prowl Cleveland’s parks and pathways on our bikes or walking the railroad tracks to Brookside Park or Clark Field in Tremont to play tennis and run track. Often, after a sweaty day, we’d climb up a forested hill to Estabrook Recreation to dive in the pool. Our parents didn’t know where we went, caring only that we come home before the street lights came on. And no concern for the company we kept. Our families recognized each other from their own childhood in Ukraine and a shared experience in the DP camps. They trusted their sons.
Our Plast “bratchyk” (older brother) Adrian Halarewicz taught us wrestling holds, played the memory game “Hra Kima,” took us to the Lake Erie shore to fly kites and set us loose in Lincoln Park. And he and other counselors instilled discipline, central to the Plast ethos. We were required to come to weekly meetings on time – and we did – and absorb the Plast scouting ideology: serve God, Ukraine and our adopted country, America, and aspire to live by 14 cardinal principles: honesty, punctuality, frugality, good cheer, dedication to good health, to justice and so on. Those were good guidelines and whoever adhered to all of them was a candidate for sainthood. None of us qualified.
Despite meager resources, Ukrainian immigrants purchased a 40-plus acre plot south of Buffalo for a summer camp – an investment in their children. The three-four weeks we spent at Novyi Sokil (New Falcon) in the late 1950s and early 1960s were idyllic. We had morning exercise, followed by breakfast, then half an hour of marching drill (“vporiad”) with the rest of the day devoted to nature exploration, pioneering, sports, ending with a campfire, during which we sang songs from the Old Country, had silly skits and then, clasping hands in a circle, bid good night to the melody of Taps, wishing quiet, tranquil sleep, assuring each other that “Here is God.” The memory still brings a lump to my throat.
Around 1960, our novak group graduated into “yunatsvo” (scouts). We called ourselves “Vovky” (Wolves). We met under the guidance of a counselor (“druh”), but he soon left for college and we were set adrift. Plast guidelines said we were to meet every week, so we did at the “domivka,” a century-house and a great improvement over the storefront a block away. We’d open our meeting with ritual words, do our signature wolf howl and then go across the street to Lincoln Park to play football. In season, we played basketball at the Lincoln Bath House a block away against similarly organized groups: Poles, Irish, Appala-chians, Hispanics, African Americans, whose families had largely come to Cleveland for industrial jobs. You kept the court as long as you were winning.
One of the Plast stipulations was a monthly “prohulka” (field trip). So we complied, going to Indians baseball games, the Cleveland Browns, riding our bikes to wooded areas far south of Cleveland and, for two years running, gathering at 7 a.m. at the “domivka” to hike 35 miles to “Sviato Vesny” (a camporee celebrating spring) in adjoining rural counties. Arriving mid-afternoon, we’d put up our tents and then take out a football to play yet another game of touch. Ah, youth!
We Vovky shared countless experiences amid a friendship we never pondered – it just was. College, the Vietnam war, careers – those were far from our minds until, with the passage of time, they couldn’t be avoided and we moved on. And yet, over the decades we kept in touch, sporadic to be sure, some ties closer than others, but memory biding us still.
Late-December 2018, I got word that Dr. Andriy Hruszkewicz, a lead cancer researcher at the National Institutes of Health and a Ukrainian human rights activist, had suddenly passed away. For years, he and I shared a tent at summer camps, then in the early 1970s traveled together in North America and Europe. I had the sad honor of speaking at Andriy’s funeral; a day after, word came that our fellow Vovk Adrian Huk had also died.
“Adi” was the most cerebral of our group. A brilliant mind with graduate degrees in psychology, he taught at Ontario and Missouri universities before he was stricken with multiple sclerosis and spent much of his life in nursing homes.
And then there’s Petro Basalyk, an investment specialist for a national energy company based in Cleveland. He died in early January. Petro and I had had lunch just weeks before, planning how to grow an endowment at the Ukrainian Museum-Archives (UMA) located in the same building where we would meet for our Vovky meetings decades ago. We’ll do our endowment, but sadly without Petro.
I’m moved how the friendships forged in the wake of post-war immigration endured for 60-plus years and profoundly saddened how the ties that bind are fraying. “Time flies,” Virgil wrote. Indeed, it does. With a nod to poet A.E. Houseman, rest in peace my golden friends, my brother Vovky. I’m grateful to have known you.
A couple of years ago, sitting on the porch at the UMA, I watched a group of Korean American boys from St. Andrew Kim a block away playing football in Lincoln Park. And wouldn’t you know it, the same two trees we Vovky once used, also served them as goal lines; only the two- to three-inch saplings from the ‘60s were now two-three feet wide. Life goes on.