December 1999

Vol. 10, No. 7

Father John went home to Cleveland to visit his mother between Christmas and New Years.  The snow was falling in a small flakes when he arrived, but it kept up for the next two days.  Eventually there was quite a bit of snow.  Except for lunch at the Great Lakes Brewing Company and a trip to Sam's Club, they stayed home.

The Great Lakes Brewing Company is a small brewpub and restaurant.  It is just two blocks from St. Ignatius High School (where John went to high school) and one block from the West Side Market in Cleveland.  The West Side Market is the largest indoor market, but it is also famous because it has so many different kinds of stands.  Besides some having baked goods, meats, etc., some are German, Hungarian, Slovak, Slovenian, Polish, etc.  You can still hear many languages there.

At the Great Lakes Brewing Company,  they make their own beer in small batches.  It is fresh beer and is not pasteurized.  They make many different kinds, but most of them have Cleveland names: Cleveland Brown Ale, Eliot Ness (he was Safety Director in Cleveland), Edmund Fitzgerald Porter (a famous ore ship which was headed for Cleveland when it sank in Lake Michigan), Burning River Pale Ale (named after the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland which once caught fire because it was so polluted with chemicals), Holy Moses (named after Moses Cleaveland who first surveyed the area.  It was named for him although the spelling was slightly changed.) Ohio City Oatmeal Stout, named after the neighborhood there which had once been a separate city.  You can see more of the Great Lakes Brewing Company at: http://www.greatlakesbrewing.com.

On New Year's Eve John returned to Austin.  He and Brother Thomas had a quiet New Year's Eve, and the new millennium arrived without their help.  We haven't had any Y2K problems.  At Dolores Parish one of the accounting programs kept changing the year 2000 back to 1940.  But by switching to a new program, they won't have that problem.