Cleve was my grandparents' first child and first son, named in honor of his father.  In our family he was the pacesetter, known for finding the "finest".  Cleveland was the one who discovered the good restaurants that the rest of us would then flock to for a treat, citing "Cleveland says this is the best place to eat steak (or shrimp, or whatever)."  All the Johnsons still eat a particular brand of peanut butter because it is the only one Cleve would buy.  The brand name labels in my father's suits were the ones admired by Cleve.  Cleve's comment, "I'm going first class --I don't care who pays for it!" has become a famous family quote, appealing to our ironic humor.  Cleve went bankrupt twice, losing his business twice and, the second time, losing his beautiful home.  Sadly, if I had to attempt to capture the core Cleve in a one word summary, that word would be "alcoholic", but one word summaries are one dimensional while Cleve was indeed multi-dimensional.

He saw no need for reasonable self-discipline.  His values were that when you achieve, you reap the prize and savor that prize to the hilt.  Cleveland wanted to achieve and to fully savor all the material pleasures.  He looked the part of success, all the right labels put together well --had style!  One weekend during the late 70's when my sister was living in Atlanta, Nan telephoned home to tell us that she had bought an issue of Money magazine and had seen Uncle Cleve's photo in it.  All of us thought, "How could that be?  It must be a mistake."  But it wasn't.  Uncle Cleve had been approached by a photographer as he walked down the street in Richmond, Virginia and was solicited to, for pay, be a model.  The photographer did a photo shoot of my uncle who was in his sixties and put his photo into a photo bank.  Cleve was tapped to be a model in two different national ad campaigns.  He forgot to mention it to his family until we saw the ads and asked him about it.

The last time I had a conversation with Uncle Cleve was when he visited me in Columbia, S.C. on a trip to have bargain dentistry to get himself some false teeth.  In old age, he was no longer "going first class", to paraphrase his famous quote, because anyone who might have been stuck with the tab was already alerted.  Cleve was having to live within his means, a little pension check.  He told me that he wanted to have supper in the finest restaurant in Columbia.  (Too bad he had not had the opportunity to "scope out" the area so he could tell us which restaurant that was.)  My husband John and I said, "In our opinion, the best meal in Columbia would be at the S&S Cafeteria."  (John and I are plebeians, no style whatsoever, just plain folks.)  Uncle Cleveland was horrified.  We ended up at a nice steak restaurant in Five Points.  I came to realize that part of Cleve's criteria for dining excellence included liquor being served.  Now it was John's and my turn to be horrified.  Cleve drank with his meal.  Then he went to the rest room and didn't return.  After so long, we got worried.  John went looking for him.  Cleve was still in the rest room unable to figure out how to exit.  He told John several times as John was trying to help him back to the table, "I want to live life to the fullest!  I want to grab the gusto and have no regrets!", this from a man stumbling into stall doors (such a full life!)  John could not get him out of that rest room.  His wife, my Aunt Mary had to go into the men's room and fetch Cleve out.

A look at Cleve's efforts to find satisfaction in life makes me sad for him because he just "didn't get it", never did.  He did have his moments of feeling pleasure from "having the finest", but they were only moments --his grasp on pleasure was very transitory.  Based on what I saw, his overall ledger tallied a great deal more pain than pleasure.  Because of venereal disease, he was childless.  Because of liquor and unpaid debts, he lost two businesses and his home.  Because of fleeing the state without officially declaring bankruptcy the second time he drowned in debt, he became an exile from family, friends, home.  He could not even return to attend his father's funeral.  In the second bankruptcy, he financially ruined his wife's wonderful brother who had co-signed a loan for him.  Cleveland burned out every source of help.  My father was the most long-suffering in efforts to assist him, but my father finally would say to his wife and children, "Trying to bail out Cleveland is like pouring money into a rat hole."  It was an exercise in futility that would have to be repeated and repeated and repeated, etc. ... .  Finally, because of addiction to cigarettes, both Cleveland and his wife Mary died awful premature deaths from lung cancer.  When they were gone, there was sadness but also a sigh of relief was breathed.  Cleveland consistently made messes and left others to clean up and pay for his messes.