Mark Knows It All

On Saturday, I took my wife on our semi-annual shopping trip to Chico’s located in the beautiful, but let’s remodel it anyway, Beachwood Mall in Cleveland. For those folks not familiar with Chico’s, it is a ladies clothing store with an innovative concept. It sells clothes that fit. One of the fastest growing clothing store chains in the United States, the management realizes that most women don’t look like Brittany Spears, and really don’t want to show their belly buttons and as much skin surrounding said buttons from Poughkeepsie down below to the Twin Cities up above. The result has made Chico’s stock one of the darlings of Wall Street. Other times we have done this, we traveled to Cleveland during the week. But yesterday was such a beautiful day, and we had some other shopping to do, we thought we could handle Saturday in our stride. WRONG. Chico’s was a mad house. The women had just gotten their “cents off” coupons, and they were grabbing and pushing and tripping, and well, it was...

We got a new kitchen range this week. Our house is 34 years old, but the range was at least 10 years older than that. We bought our house from my aunt and uncle who were in their late 70’s when the built it. They brought the range from their previous house, and they had lived there for many years before. The old range was a “modern” wonder. It was a Frigidaire Flair range. It sat on top of built in cabinets. The top part had two ovens whose doors opened up rather than out. And the bottom part of the range was a drawer in which the cook top was located. You pushed a button and pulled it out from under the ovens. I guess you would call it a cook under. It dominated our kitchen’s decor, and we received many comments on this marvel of 1950’s kitsch. But Frigidaire, in its wisdom, decided to stop making the Flair in the early 1980’s, and soon thereafter stopped making replacement parts. For those of us lucky to have these things, the net result of the company’s business acumen was we couldn...

Friday night we treated my visiting mother-in-law to dinner at the Cafe Capri, a local long-time Italian restaurant recently moved to a brand new, sophisticated location. The food is outstanding, and it has turned into a local see and be seen hangout. We pointed out to my mother-in-law some of the notable people in the place. We also commented on some of the no goodniks that often frequent many of the local dining establishments. She looked out the window and pointed to two men walking in the parking lot and said, "There are a couple of shady looking characters right there". We all looked out, and there in all of his tanned, Palm Beach halfway house glory, was Mickey Monus. As he walked into the restaurant and then into the bar, the minions flocked around him as if he was the Messiah himself. I have observed the slow but steady return of these celebrity thugs to the area. There is an Italian phrase for people like this. Roughly translated it means "They put on the face...

Those of us from Mahoning County know about corruption. The entire area has always had a bad reputation as a mob connected area. Saturday Evening Post called us “Bombtown, USA”. Sometimes I will take visitors on “The Mob Tour” to show various landmarks of nefarious repute including gathering places, business fronts, locations of the various car bombings and shootings ranging from the late Calla Mar restaurant to the corn field where one of the syndicate leaders was murdered a few years back. The degree of this dirty business could not have happened without a complete corruption of the area's legal and political system. As a lawyer, I can tell you that it was difficult to make a living in a system where justice was governed by fee drawers, kickbacks, fee couches, and judicial and prosecutorial payoffs. It wasn’t that the system was corrupt. It was how deep the corruption went, including such innocuous entities as the local water and sanitary district, school boards, and local dentis...

Chicago, the vocal group, not the city, released a song back around 1970 the first line of which goes “Does anybody really know what time it is? Does anybody really care?” In my household, the answer to both of those questions is a resounding “NO”! This morning, while getting ready for church services, I looked at grandfather clock in the hallway and it said 9:45. The clock in the family room said 10:20. The clock in the kitchen said 10:05. I looked at my watch, and it said 5:08. The battery stopped. And the clock on the coffee maker simply blinked as the power had gone out for a few minutes yesterday. The clock in my car said 9:00 as I had yet to change it from standard time to daylight savings time. So using my extraordinary powers of deduction, I concluded that it was 10:00. The clock in the family room runs fast, and is now 20 minutes ahead of where it should be. We keep it that way so we don’t dally over our morning coffee as we start to get ready for work at 6:00 in the morning. ...

The United States is once again experiencing unprecedented growth with low inflation. While General Motors and Delphi are making the headlines, other businesses have been prospering. US Steel, for example, is making historically high profits. The restaurants are packed. Travel is up. Unemployment is at historic lows. Americans truly have much for which to be grateful. Maybe that is why we have our heads in the sand. Since the end of World War II, the United States has enjoyed 60 years of peace and prosperity. That isn’t to say that there haven’t been hot wars re: Korea, Vietnam, and Desert Storm. But large scale conflicts of world proportions have not been experienced by successive generations. Not in any of the above three conflicts have Americans at home been asked to sacrifice anything: not fuel; not sugar; not rubber; not nylon; only American lives in such statistically low numbers that the loss on the general population was barely felt at all. Are 45,000 dead Americans in Vietnam ...

We usually keep our flashlight in the cabinet under the television. We do that to make it handy in case the electricity goes out. For those of you who don’t live in the Mahoning Valley, our electric company is First Energy. Remember the northeast United States and Canadian blackout 2 years ago? That was First Energy. It started 40 miles from here in Akron. Of course, that is the one time OUR electricity did NOT go out. Go figure. But on any given seventy degree’d sunny day, you can bet we will be setting our digital clocks and resetting our surge protectors as the power pops on and off. For reasons known only to First Energy, several weeks ago my side of my street experienced such a power pop off. The houses in back of my yard had power, and the houses across the street had power. We did not have power, and I had paid the bill and everything. It happened at 2:00AM, a dreadful event for an insomniac like me. I franticly looked for the flashlight under the television in the dark. It was...