He was into jazz, too. As reported by Raoul Abdul of the Call & Post, during a Josephine Baker performance at the RKO Palace Theatre, he joined her in an “entertaining by-play across the footlights” after she spotted him in the front row and both exchanged Islamic greetings.

A Cleveland legend Part II

By RYAN MIDAY

Contributing Writer

In Part 2 of the Call & Post Tonelli series, Ryan Miday explores some of Emmet Cobb’s friends, acquaintances, and early hangout spots. Miday also takes a look into some of the Cleveland legend’s family history.

John Drake was Cobb’s closest friend. In reminiscing about his old friend, Drake, who maintains a daily reading of the Koran and the Bible at 80-years-old, as he cares for his 96-year-old mother, said with a big smile that he met Cobb in the 1940s at a dance.

Cobb was a regular at dances around town doing the jitterbug.

“He thought he could dance and I challenged him,” said Drake. “He [Cobb] laughed, when I started to tap dance. You see, I was taking tap dancing classes at the time.”

Drake, ten years younger, latched onto to Cobb, whose personality radiated pride and energy. Tonelli, in turn, surely was aware that Johnny Drake was the son of Arthur “Little Brother” Drake, one of the biggest numbers operators in Cleveland’s history; and the son of Catherine Drake, the owner of the Café Tia Juana on the corner of E. 105th Street and Massie Avenue, which was once known in the late 1940s as the plushiest café in the Midwest.

Almost every day, driving his mother’s Oldsmobile 98, Drake would pick up Cobb, who, like most people, didn’t have a car. He would pick him up at one of Cobb’s favorite hang-outs, Lam’s Chinese Restaurant on Cedar Avenue near E. 97th Street.

Drake recalls spending many a day and night together with Cobb, just hanging out and having fun, until Cobb was confined in 1954.

The development of Cobb’s worldview paralleled, in many ways, that of Malcolm X’s. Their experience of racism’s soul-rotting effects while growing up led to an ironclad resolve to challenge the status quo. To understand Cobb, Drake emphasized, one needs to understand what the Ku Klux Klan did to his mother.

Cobb was born in Alabama in 1921. Details of his upbringing and his mother’s death are not fully known. June V. Williams of the Call & Post profiled his sister’s relentless but unsuccessful effort to get Cobb out of the insane asylum. What is known, from his sister and people interviewed for this article, is that his mother was murdered by the Ku Klux Klan.
Drake remembers Cobb telling him how his mother suffered a ruthless death in 1926. The Ku Klux Klan tied a rope around her head and hair. They tied the rope to a horse and stood by as it dragged her until she died. Unconfirmed accounts suggest that Cobb’s father, in protecting his family, killed one or more Klansmen.

Terrified of the repercussions, the family fled the state.

Growing up, Cobb was a precocious student. He was far ahead of his Central High School classmates, where he graduated. By all accounts, he was gifted and had a high IQ. Call & Post’s Woody Taylor reported, in April 1954, that “an old acquaintance of his [Tonelli] remembered that during Tonelli’s high school days he had a fertile mind and was the envy of his classmates because he could cite classical and poetic masterpieces verbatim, with flawless diction and with the greatest of ease.”

In his senior year in 1941, Cobb participated in Central’s Question Mark Club, whose purpose was to study “Negro Life.” Years later, Drake and Cobb often went downtown to the three-story bookstore called Kay’s at 620 Prospect Avenue near E. 6th Street, where Tonelli would buy stacks of books. “He could read a book and recite a passage from any page,” Drake said. “He had a photographic memory.”

To go along with his superior intellect was an attitude, a deadly combination that left him restless as a teenager. He got into enough fights with the Italians to earn him the nickname Tonelli. His reputation turned infamous around the Cedar Avenue area, acquiring a bad boy image and the label of “dead end kid” from leading his high school friends in the Gunga Din Gang.

People’s reputations often become stretched, especially the self-assured ones, and Cobb’s was no different. It oversimplified the truth about a man with conflicting identities. His venomous attitude toward authority masked a jovial nature. He was voted most popular by the Gay Associates at an event, in 1947, held at the Paradise Auditorium. He was an avid roller skater at the Pla-Mor and he enjoyed theater at the Karamu House.

He was into jazz, too. As reported by Raoul Abdul of the Call & Post, during a Josephine Baker performance at the RKO Palace Theatre, he joined her in an “entertaining by-play across the footlights” after she spotted him in the front row and both exchanged Islamic greetings.

When Cobb wasn’t with Drake, he could be found walking the neighborhood of Cedar Avenue and E. 97th Street. He incessantly talked and he talked to everybody. He always stopped the kids, handing out dollar bills and empowering them to learn the true nature of the Black man. Drake’s friend since Audubon junior high school, 78-year-old Roy Strickland, grew up on E. 106th St. and Cedar Avenue. Strickland remembers being young, around 12 to 13-years-old, and knowing of Cobb.

“A lot of people looked up to him,” Strickland said. “He was no trouble maker but when trouble found him, he didn’t run away.” Strickland described Cobb as the type of guy who was for the underdog. “If you had a problem with somebody or somebody jumped on you, he would come to your side. That’s the way he was.”

* Editor’s Note: Stay tuned to the next week’s Call & Post for Part 3 of the “Tonelli Story.”

Read Part III