Bert Stratton

At synagogue, a congregant approached me and said I was cool. Why? “Because you went to Brush High,” he said. Brush High was cool? Charles F. Brush High, in Lyndhurst, Ohio? Located in suburban Cleveland, it was a place you graduated from and never…

Mike wanted to open a head shop in a building I own. The storefront was 650 square feet—not big enough for most retailers, at least by my Midwest “amber waves of grain” standards. The best tenant I ever had in there was a plumber who stored PVC pipe…

Old Poets: Reminiscences & Opinions, by Donald Hall (Godine, 296 pp., $27.95) In Old Poets, the late poet Donald Hall opines on everything literary (“I suspect that Emily Dickinson, bipolar like most poets, was as eccentric as Marianne Moore”), and…

“People do not go to the North Pole and fall off icebergs. They go to offices, quarrel with their wives, and eat cabbage soup,” wrote Anton Chekhov. I was just out of college and living at home; my mother had a bridge game scheduled for the next day.…

I just got back from a vacation to Guatemala. A friend in Cleveland said, “Seems like more people are leaving there, than going.” Definitely. “Guat’s up?” is a T-shirt slogan in the tchotchke shops down there, and very few people are buying. The…

The federal moratorium on evictions ends March 31—maybe. The government keeps pushing the date back. I’ve been in eviction court at least 100 times over the years. I always wear a tie to court. Usually the tenant doesn’t. Advantage, me. Occasionally…

I’m a musician who deals with rainouts, almost like a baseball player. When it’s raining, I’m out of a gig. Because of Covid, my last indoor gig was five months ago. I’ve still got a few outdoor gigs lined up for this month. Then what? My band, Funk…

I’ll probably be sick of potato pancakes by the fourth night of Chanukah. I’m in a klezmer band, Yiddishe Cup, and we do a fair number of synagogue parties, and the occasional Unitarian church gig. Everybody loves a crispy potato pancake (“latke” in…

I should have listened more when my dad taught me tennis. Instead, I moped on the courts. My dad, Toby, was the only father out there. This was in the 1960s, in suburban Cleveland. My dad was often shirtless on the courts. A bare-chested guy—wearing…

A Carnival of Losses: Notes Nearing Ninety, by Donald Hall (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 224 pp., $25) Donald Hall wrote 34 books, mostly short, half of which were poetry. In his Essays After Eighty (2014), he wrote, “There are problems in writing one…

The Super Bowl? In Cleveland, we’re still all about the Browns, record 7-8-1. Baker Mayfield, the team’s backup quarterback and Number 1 overall pick in last year’s draft, got the call midseason and saved us. Shake and bake. The Browns are no longer…

Bert Stratton joins City Journal associate editor Seth Barron to talk about Stratton’s experience as a member of one of the most despised but important professions: landlord. Stratton is a musician and blogger, but he makes his living managing…

When poet Donald Hall, who died Saturday at age 89, was on Terry Gross’s Fresh Air radio show in 2012, he said that he wouldn’t complain about being old, then proceeded to do just that. He had just published a piece in The New Yorker, in which he…

I fired my snowplow guy. He always showed up late and was a thief. He said he didn’t get my payment in the mail, so I gave him a second check. He cashed both checks. Did he think I wouldn’t look at my bank account? I yelled (to myself), “This guy is…

My wife spit into a test tube in January, sent it to AncestryDNA, and received an email back saying she’s half-Irish. Alice, who is adopted, is also Jewish and Italian. What’s one more ethnicity? She texted our 32-year-old daughter: “You can…

I didn’t renew Elizabeth Novak’s lease because the building manager, Steve, said that she locked herself out five times, wouldn’t stop smoking in the common area, and crawled in her windows too often. I hand-delivered the nonrenewal letter. Novak…

Baseball was near dead in Cleveland until about a month ago. Cleveland had the third-lowest attendance record in the major leagues this year. I didn’t make it to a game this year. I’ll admit, I’m fairweather—until the playoffs. I unloaded my baseball…

I’m a professional musician and I have the jitters—but not because I’m playing. I’m seeing my son’s funk band, Vulfpeck, headline at SummerStage in Central Park Wednesday night. It’s a lot scarier when your kid plays than when you do. Ask any Little…

“I don’t like rich people,” said Irwin, the singer in my klezmer band, as we loaded in our sound equipment at the country club. The club manager as usual made us go through the kitchen door. At the luncheon—a bar mitzvah—she wouldn’t let us eat the…

I had a Dag Hammarskjöld week. First a Korean immigrant, Hyun Jin Kim, called me and asked, “Is my rent going up this month?” Yes, and I had forgotten to remind him. He reminded me. I’m Kim’s landlord in Lakewood, Ohio, an inner-ring suburb of…