The Monday After: Remembering 'Red' Romano and his bar in Malvern

The death of his father in a head-on car crash in 1964 could have been one of the reasons Malvern native Tom Romano penned his memoir, "A Boyhood At Red's: Growing Up In My Dad's Neighborhood Bar."

Long after the elder Romano's car was slammed into by drag racers, decades after the son moved with his mother from Malvern to Canton, and following a 41-year career teaching English and writing at the high school and college levels in Oxford, Ohio, there still seemed much to say about this traumatic experience in his life.

"I was 15 years old and I got the call," recalled Romano, 74, in a telephone interview. "It was a woman's voice, and she asked 'Are you one of the Romano boys?' My dad had six brothers and two sisters."

The caller believed she was talking to one of the victim's adult siblings.

"Then she just said, 'Well, we have Philip Romano here and he's dead,’" the son recalled. "I told her 'You've got to talk to my mother.'"

Scars from his father's passing, and from the call that alerted him to it, no doubt have lingered.

"It changed our lives," Romano said. "Any time after that when I went into a room I always believed that everyone was thinking, 'There's the kid whose dad was killed.'"

Despite having an early passion for writing with eight books now to his credit, Romano said it took him almost a decade to put down words about the tragic accident in a journal he kept.

"Yes, (writing about it) it is therapy," he admits now. "I probably should have had therapy then, but I didn't. People didn't do that then. My reaction was to put up armor."

Building Red's bar

Articles reporting on Philip "Red" Romano's death in May 1964 refer to the establishment he operated as Red's Bowling Alley and Night Club in Malvern.

"It wasn't a night club, it was a bar," explained his son. "What happened was there were only two liquor licenses in town at the time, for a bar and a night club. The bar was taken and the night club one cost no more, so he took that one. It he could have gotten the bar one, he would have taken that."

Red's was a "beer and shot" bar. A neighborhood hangout. A place where people know you.

"Mom called it a working man's bar, a good place to stop after working all day at a steel mill or brick yard," said Romano. "It sat at the intersection right in the middle of town, at Porter and Reed avenues. It was at the only stoplight in town.”

The elder Romano, who was born in Italy in 1905, built the bar in 1946, three years before Tom Romano was born. As was the custom at the time, it was paired with two bowling lanes.

The bar portion "was long and narrow – an old-time bar." There was room for sitting at the bar and walking past it, not much more.

"It was air-conditioned," said Romano. "Dad had a behemoth air-conditioner."

Night of the crash

Romano remembered that the night of his father's death was Friday, May 8, 1964.

"He and four customers--one was my Uncle Ralph, who really was my older cousin – went to a bowling tournament in Canton," recalled Romano. But, they got the wrong night. There wasn't a tournament. So they headed to Northfield Park, stayed for three races, and were coming home at about 11:30."

Then one of two men drag-racing on Route 44 struck Romano's car. A front-page article in The Canton Repository the next day provided details of the crash.

"A 59-year-old Malvern man died Friday night after a head-on collision on Route 44 about a mile south of the Stark-Portage County line," the article reported. "Injured were four passengers in the Romano car, all from Malvern.

Those men were Ralph Romano, 32, "Red" Romano's nephew; Joseph Romano (no relation), 50; Vincent Angeloni, 42; and Donald Russell, 38, the article reported. Injured in the car that crashed into Romano was the driver, Jerry Anderson, 28, and a passenger, John Higginbotham, 19, both of Hartville. Harold Butler, 21, of Hartville, the driver of the third car, was unhurt.

"Highway patrolmen said the Butler vehicle was racing with the Anderson car when it crashed into the car driven by Mr. Romano, who was southbound on Route 44," reported the article. "Anderson was attempting to pass the other car when the crash occurred. The two cars apparently had been racing along the highway and passing each other at different times."

Subsequent articles in the Repository show that Anderson and Butler were convicted in July 1965 of second-degree murder in connection to the drag-racing death. They were given life sentences, but served time in the Ohio Penitentiary only until early in October 1966 before they were released on bond pending appeal.

"I've often wondered," noted Romano, "how those men's lives turned out."

Red's stayed open

Tom Romano's mother, Mae Romano, with the help of his sister, Nancy, and Romano's brother-in-law, Rodger Vandergrift, stepped up to continue to operate Red's as a local watering hole.

In 1966, Mae Romano, who died in 1999, sold the bar to her daughter and son-in-law on land contract, and they continued to operate it for a few years, before changing it into a restaurant called the Branding Iron.

The site now is the location of a dentist's office.

In 2009, Romano and his sister, who still lives in Canton, visited Malvern for a "Dancing on the Bridge" event. Some of those involved in the event had asked for "Red" Romano's Coney Island sauce recipe, for which he was well-known.

On that day, they were invited by the dentist occupying the structure at the corner of Porter and Reed if they would like to revisit "Red's," which had been broken into offices but still offered evidence of its past.

Looking up, Romano could see the hole in one of the beams, put there when the revolver of a policeman answering an attempted robbery call at the bar accidently discharged and the bullet left its mark in the heavy wood.

And in the basement was an equally vivid reminder of when the building was used for something less medical in nature.

"The floor was concrete, but there was a big area of gravel in the middle," explained Romano. "The dentist said, 'We can't figure out what that was.' My wife and I answered at the same time. 'That was where the beer cooler was!'"

Memories are history

The stories are interesting in their own right. But, perhaps the take-away from recalling such incidents with Romano is that they serve as a reminder that all memoirs are history texts of a sort.

Such books recall personal memories. They offer family history. Recollections add details to the overall portrait of the community's past. Together, the pages of reminiscence provide a glimpse at the customs and behaviors of the times.

Romano serves up plenty of stories--lots of local history--that easily fit into all those categories in his memoir "A Boyhood at Red's," which is available through bookstores and online booksellers.

"It's my story, and I own it," said Romano, who, though now retired, still teaches a class on writing methods each semester at Miami University. "But, you want to write it in a way that others also experience it."

As with anyone's life, the experiences of one person weave among those of many others, coming together to form a tapestry of lives and legacies of the people in a community.

"I would want people to know that our lives are complicated and all can be forgiven," Romano said. "People are human and real. We have joys and heartache and trauma. Life is all those things."

Reach Gary at gary.brown.rep@gmail.com. On Twitter: @gbrownREP.

This article originally appeared on The Alliance Review: The Monday After: Remembering 'Red' Romano and his bar in Malvern