Cleveland Vintage Blog

If you ask pretty much any group of lifelong Clevelanders to name what they feel are the five things or people that represent Cleveland best, you are likely to get a wide range of answers.   What we are willing to bet is that one name probably will not appear on most lists, and that is who we are going to tell you a little bit about today: Cleveland journalist and television icon Dorothy Fuldheim. If you are asking yourself who Dorothy Fuldheim is, don’t feel bad; her career was not about self-promotion or the limelight - it was about getting...

“When the hungries hit, when the hungries hit, hit the Red Barn!” The Red Barn Restaurant History If you grew up around the Cleveland area, you were no doubt very familiar with the catchy jingle of the Red Barn restaurants that originated in Springfield, Ohio by Don Six, Martin Levine and Jim Kirst (which sounds sort of like a law firm).  The popular fast-food chain was extremely aggressive with menu development, such as “The Big Barney," their equivalent to McDonald’s Big Mac. What isn’t really commonly known, or perhaps more accurately said, is that the Big Barney actually preceded the Big Mac...

When you think of the phrase, “We’re number one," what usually comes to mind is a sports team celebrating a big win or an actual championship. But in the 1970s, Cleveland was able to lay claim to the dubious distinction of being the top city in the country for car bombs, which led to the moniker of "Bomb City, USA." A Plain Dealer article at the time titled “Bombing Business Booming Here” told readers of Cleveland’s disturbing and dangerous rise in the national ranking of bomb crimes that had skyrocketed around the country since 1974. Danny Greene's Role in Turning Cleveland...

Where to begin? I have so many memories of Cleveland's Municipal Stadium, the grand old gray lady, I couldn’t possibly know where to start, but the beginning always seems to be the best spot. The vision of Cleveland’s city manager at the time, William Hopkins, then-Indians president Ernest Barnard, a future team president in Alva Bradley and the Van Sweringen brothers, Cleveland’s Municipal Stadium was dedicated on July 1st, 1931, carrying with it various cost overruns of roughly $500,000, a pretty substantial amount at the time. The first actual event held at the stadium was on July 3rd, 1931, a heavyweight...

Anytime you've looked for a 3/4 baseball tee, you might have seen it called a Raglan shirt. You might even use that terminology yourself, but have you ever wondered why it's called that? What in the World Is a Raglan Shirt? I know I've asked myself this question billions of times, but I've never had the drive to discover the answer - until now!  And it's actually a pretty cool story as to how this type of shirt came to be, dating all the way back to the 19th century. You can thank Lord Raglan for these 3/4 shirts you...