The Cardalians is Ralph Horner’s third series of essays, recalling his days in the 1950s as a young man near Cleveland’s Glenville and Collinwood neighborhoods, and the large population of people who came to Cleveland from Cardale, Pennsylvania.

Like other inner-city youths in days past, I had attended many bars before I reached the legal drinking age. Let me rephrase that. The legal drinking age was 21, but 3.2 beer was available at age 18.

If you don’t know what 3.2 beer was, ask your father. If he doesn't know, ask your grandfather. It didn’t matter anyway in the old neighborhood. We would have a beer or two at the old Sachsenhim Club on 55th after our CYO basketball games when we were 14.

The reason that one bar in particular stands out is, not because it was a great watering hole, but because of the remarkable group of people who hung out there. I called them the Cardalians.

I have lived in and hung out in many different neighborhoods and have come under the influence of many ethnic and cultural groups. I would have to say that a lot of my likes, dislikes, and attitudes have been formed by my associations with all of these divergent cultures.

I have lived and associated with Polish, Slovenians, Slovaks, Italians, Jews, African Americans, Appalachians, Vietnamese, old money, white Anglo-Saxons, Puerto Ricans, and counter-culture Hippies.

To this day I think there might be a little bit of each of those groups inside of me.

However, I am not sure that my association with the Cardalians left me with any radical changes in my psychological makeup, but they were a definite source of wonderment, and they left me scratching my head sometimes.

The Cardalians were from a small town in Western Pennsylvania, near the West Virginia border, named Cardale—therefore, I call them the Cardalians.

Listening to them telling stories about Cardale, it sounded like the town was a hill with houses on it and not much more. I must say that it would be easier to list what it didn’t have instead of what it did have.

Cardale only had two paved roads up the hill, and a few side roads that were covered with a substance called “Red Dog”—small red rocks that were a throwaway product from coal processing.

The town did not have sidewalks, streetlights, garbage removal, or mail delivery. This was told to me by one of the Cardalians. He also told me that there was a side road halfway up the hill where the people took their garbage to throw it over a cliff.

He did tell me they had telephone service. He said his phone number exchange was Cherry 3 and his sister’s exchange was Cherry 5. They did have a lot of bars, though, and an unlimited number of barking dogs.

The men of Cardale were mostly coal miners. Some worked the day shift and others worked the night shift. The night shift slept during the day. Those sleeping did not complain about the dogs, though, because the dogs were hunting dogs and most of the men were hunters.

I don't know if the Cardalians emigrated to Cleveland en masse, like Moses and the Hebrews of the olden days, or trickled across the border one family at a time. I do know that they all settled in the Goodrich-Kirtland Park neighborhood, where I lived at the time.

I am somewhat familiar with the western movement into Ohio by Pennsylvanians when the coal mines played out because my parents also left Pennsylvania. After my parents came to Cleveland, they started housing other economically depressed individuals who came to Cleveland from Pennsylvania.

When some of the people left “back home” to come to Cleveland to find their life's work, they stayed with my parents until they found a job and suitable lodgings for their families. I was proud of my mother and father because they were like pioneers—leading DP's (Displaced Pennsylvanians) to the promised land of the factories of Cleveland.

I didn't even mind sharing my bed on the hideaway couch with relatives if it meant the deliverance of these wretches out of the killing coal mines.

I suppose that the Cardale folks may have had an immigration bureau just like the one my mother and father operated. In their version, when a new family came to Cardale, they usually stayed in the same neighborhood as the family that was running the Cardale version of the Wayfarers Lodge but did not branch out into the surrounding city like my mother and father's charges.

The Cardalians, to understate the facts, were not a sophisticated bunch. The unofficial leader of the Cardalians was a man named Harry McCall who had attained his status by receiving the Cardale Award for Lifetime Achievement by being able to drink beer, chew tobacco, and eat ice cream all at the same time.

Harry was a large man with a military haircut, a voice like a foghorn, and the gentle demeanor of Attila the Hun.

Most Cardalians had not evolved much past “Unnh!” “Beer!” “Steelers!” in verbal skills, but Harry McCall was a wordsmith by Cardalian standards, and he was a bit of a philosopher.

One night, I got my first sense of jaw-dropping wonderment of Cardalian wisdom from him. Someone told a joke about Black people and Harry angrily said, “I will not have nobody sayin' bad sh** about Black people! "Black people is good people and I don't want to hear nobody sayin' no bad shit about no Black people. If any of you bigot sons-a-bitches got something bad to say about Black people, you gonna have to deal with me.”

End of the story: No one wanted to deal with Harry. Harry was serious in his threats, and he did not like to hear his people disparage Black people. He did have Black friends and he respected them.

The other Cardalians adored Harry, and his elevated status enabled him to marry the pick of the Cardalian women, the fair Gertie. She was a petite woman by Cardalian standards—weighing in at a svelte 165 pounds on her five-foot-two frame.

The woman was a goddess. Her hair was teased into the ultimate beehive. At least eight inches from her brow to its apex and shockingly blonde! Her mustache was not as full as those of ordinary Cardalian women. Her breasts were like watermelons, a very desirable trait to bewitch Cardalain men. No doubt, she could bench press me 40 or 50 times without breaking a sweat. As man and wife, Gertie and Harry were the ideal Cardalian couple.