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Chapter 1 GROWING UP DIFFERENT Cleveland, Ohio, an American city on the coast of Lake Erie and home to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum, may not seem at first glance to have been a glamorous destination that catered to the rich and famous. Indeed, the once-booming industrial mecca (coal and iron ore were the area’s main natural resources) experienced a decline after World War II that continued during the 1960s, but a landmark to a fading era stubbornly remained in business—the elegant Halle Broth- ers Co. department store, commonly known as Halle’s. Founded by siblings Samuel Horatio Halle and Salmon Portland Chase Halle in 1891, their main location was based in downtown Cleveland and turned into a chain with several locations in the suburbs. A destination for Cleveland’s well-to-do citizens, Halle Brothers sold designer cloth- ing, furs, makeup, accessories, and housewares. It was the place to see and be seen, where socialites and heiresses did their shopping and the less well-off dared to dream of a more luxurious life. For Judith Ann Hawkins, the fashionable allure of Halle’s was a life- time away from her roots in the town of Liverpool, England, where she was born in 1939 to Nellie and Earl Hawkins. Judith left her working- class hometown when she was 10 years old and relocated with her family across the Atlantic to the suburban enclave of Elyria, Ohio. Judith grew up to become a nurse and worked at a psychiatric hospital for war veterans in Cleveland, where she met Jerome Jessie Berry, an African-American man from Pennsylvania who was three years her