'To us, it was the greatest place:' Longtime member of Sacred Heart, Guadalupe Society remembers South Lorain

LORAIN — Germaine Morales was born and raised in the heart of South Lorain. Soon-to-be 80 years old, she has no plans of leaving the International City. Flipping through a book from the 75th anniversary of the Mexican community in the city, she said she had so many memories of the city she could cry. Morales' father, Vincent Torres moved to the city in the late 1920s from Guadelejara as part of some of the first Mexicans to come to work in the steel mill. He met Aurora Leyva, who'd moved from Mexico, bringing her 2-year-old daughter Jovita, to the city to be closer to her mother and the pair married. Morales wasn't sure how her parents met, and they divorced when she was young. She had seven siblings in total, seven sisters and one brother, though two sisters died as infants. "In those days I was born at home," Morales said, laughing. "My kids say 'Oh My God Ma, how nasty.'" She added later, "Growing up we didn't have hardly nothing. We were lucky if we got one thing for Christmas. But that's the way it was." She remembers Christmas parties at the Mexican Mutual Society on Pearl Avenue and playing in the alleyway below the family's apartment. "We didn't have roller skates or nothing, we'd get old cans and we would stomp on them and bend them and they were like shoes and we would go clippity-clop like horses," she said. They'd read comics they couldn't afford while sitting on the floor of Roth's Pharmacy, she remembered. Summer days were spent at Oakwood Park at the pool and sprinklers. Her mother packed bologna sandwiches for lunch and they'd walk from their apartment above Mill Tavern on Pearl Avenue between East 28th and 29th streets. Her father would go to baseball games there, or catch the bus from East 28th Street to Cleveland to see the Indians play. Morales' father died when she was 13. Though long divorced, her mother handled his funeral service because his family was in Mexico. She wasn't sure why he stayed in Lorain, rather than returning to Guadelejara, but he left a surprise for his ex-wife, having never taken her off his life insurance policy. "She got the money and she bought her first — we always called it the old house — it was an older home," Morales said. "My mother did a little bit when she could." Aurora worked at Lorain Towel Supply, then in the laundry at St. Joseph's Hospital. As urban renewal began moving through the southside, she sold the old home for almost as much as she'd paid for it and bought another small house closer to Vine Avenue. "To us, it was the greatest place," Morales said. Morales never finished school at St. Ladislaus Parish, but took a job at St. Joseph Hospital the 60s, long before its merger with Community Health. She was the first person hired to work in the daycare there before applying to be a nurses' aid. "I didn't have a steady floor … I worked all of them," she said. "Emergency room, all of them." Fluent in English and Spanish, Morales ended up in the X-ray office, then the mammography department as the ward secretary. She worked for the hospital system for more than 50 years, picking up everything on her own. Looking at the rubble of the hospital complex off West 21st Street, she said she's sad to see what's become of the building. Through work, moving, her own marriage and divorce and the death of two of her own children, Morales has kept her faith and involvement at Sacred Heart Chapel. Her family was one of the first in the congregation. Many Mexican families were part of St. John's Parish at East 30th and Clinton Avenue, then off state Route 57 where St. Frances Cabrini is now. But an influx of Puerto Rican families in the late 1940s and early 1950s and a need for Spanish services saw the founding of Sacred Heart Chapel in 1952. A longtime member of the Lady of Guadalupe Society, Morales said the society itself has been in the city before the church, but faded away and then picked back up again. Her mother belong to the society, as well as her grandmother before she moved to California. The group cooks a meal the first Sunday of every month, with proceeds from the dinners going to the church. At almost 80 years old, it's one of the only times she cooks now — as her and her friends often go out to eat rather than spend the hours it takes to make homemade flour tortillas, she joked. What started out as mostly Puerto Rican traditions in the church has shifted, melding Mexican customs like mariachi for the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe, playing late Dec. 11 into the early hours of Dec. 12. The city around her has shifted. Longstanding restaurants and shops on Pearl and Vine avenues closing, and first-and-second generation Mexican families mingling with "Tejanos," or Mexicans from Texas or Puerto Ricans. But Morales' loyalty to her city has never waivered. "I was born there, raised there and I'm still there," she said. "And I'm going to die there." Contact Carissa Woytach at (440) 329-7245 or cwoytach@chroniclet.com.