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By Root 1726 0

back of the Weed Block, he found a small third-floor apartment with windows that faced south onto Swan Street. It required less than two minutes of exertion to get to work, down a flight of stairs and up another. Cleveland decorated his suite of rooms with all the predictable accoutrements of a well-to-do bachelor: deep easy chairs; a well-stocked library with books on history and law and some fiction, indicating a taste for literature; a collection of fishing and hunting trophies; and a humidor to keep his stash of cigars moist. Curiously, scattered about the apartment were photographs of youngsters—an indication, according to an authorized biography published in 1884, of his “fondness for children.”

A young law clerk from the firm took care of Cleveland’s laundry, and every morning the milkman left a quart of milk outside his door. A new favorite eating place was Gerot’s, a French restaurant just a block away. Sunday mornings he usually had breakfast with a friend, Major Milton Randall, at a restaurant where the specialty of the house was turtle. Cleveland’s Sunday evenings were set aside for sausages and sauerkraut at Schenkelberger’s.

Every so often a relative would visit Cleveland, for one, his nephew Cleveland Bacon, the son of his sister Louise and the architect from Toledo, Ohio, she had married. Uncle Grover’s drinking and consumption of fatty red meat diet had ballooned his weight to almost three hundred pounds; and young Bacon, who had a tart tongue, mocked him with the sobriquet “Uncle Jumbo.” Bacon was well aware that his uncle ate all his meals out, so he was surprised to see an icebox in the apartment. He asked Cleveland what was in it.

Cleveland’s eyes twinkled. “Watermelons!”

The bonds of affection Cleveland developed with his male comrades could be profound, even romanticized, but there was no man, not even Bass, whom Cleveland held in as much esteem as he did his best friend, Oscar Folsom. Like Cleveland, Folsom was tall and stout—“built in about the same mold.” Cleveland and Folsom were inseparable; and sometimes, when they stood next to each other, it was hard to tell them apart.

Impossibly handsome, Folsom was Cleveland’s ideal of what a man should be. Women found him debonair and roguishly charming, but he also excelled in hunting and fishing; so in that regard, Folsom was a man’s man. For a brief period before Cleveland ran for sheriff, he and Folsom had been law partners. Folsom had a fine mind, and even if he was not entirely studious, his contemporaries described him as a naturally gifted lawyer. One day, Folsom asked Cleveland for advice on a matter of law.

“Go look it up,” Cleveland told him, “and then you’ll remember what you learn.”

Sound advice, but Folsom begged to differ. “I want you to know that I practice law by ear, not by note.” Cleveland roared with laughter. Only Folsom could get away with a crack like that.

Folsom radiated a swashbuckling aura wherever he went, and Cleveland found him a joy to be around—except when he had to watch Folsom driving a rig. Folsom worshipped fast trotters and could be incredibly reckless with his mare, White Cloud, who was celebrated in Buffalo for her speed. Time and again, when Folsom was holding his buggy’s reins, Cleveland warned him to show some common sense.

Politically, Cleveland and Folsom were ideological twins. The night of the 1872 presidential election, hundreds of Democrats gathered at the party’s headquarters in Buffalo to await the returns. Folsom, with his natural stage presence, was given the honor of reading the returns as they poured in. The incumbent, Republican candidate Ulysses S. Grant, was running for reelection against Horace Greeley. When Folsom was handed a bulletin with some early returns, he glowered, then crunched the paper in his hand and proclaimed, “Grant’s reelected, and the country’s gone to hell.” It was a landslide victory for the Civil War hero. Horace Greeley, broken in mind and body, died twenty-four days later.

Folsom had grown up in a Federal-style house in Cowlesville, a small town thirty miles outside