Up the dusty mountain road to the Yugoslavian village of Karlovac chugged the little blue Simca. Its driver, Cleveland Press Columnist Theodore Andrica, was on an extraordinary assignment for his paper: to find Mrs. Jela Grozdanovich, sister of Press Subscriber John Golubic, a retired railroad baggageman. Andrica's mission was only partly successful. He arrived at Pavla Miskina Ulica i only to find that Golubic's 75-year-old sister had gone to the country to help some relatives harvest hay. But her daughter, Mrs. Antonia Ivkovich, was home; she and Andrica had a long and sentimental talk —in Croatian. Then Andrica said, "Dovidjenja" ("Goodbye"), and pressed on to Plitvice, the place of waterfalls, where relatives of other Clevelanders dwell.
By one conveyance or other—sometimes a Simca, sometimes a Jeep, sometimes a mule—Theodore Andrica, 61, has ranged from Ireland to Israel on such kinship quests for 29 years. He is Nationalities editor of the Cleveland Press (circ. 385,347), a title that exists on no other U.S. newspaper and is handsomely suited to Andrica, Cleveland and the Press. Andrica was born in Radna, Rumania, and speaks six languages. The Cleveland area, with a population of 1,700,000, has some 750,000 residents who are either foreignborn or the children of foreign-born parents. The Press is a newspaper with an impressively comprehensive social conscience. It caters to every group in the community, registers newborn babes in the "Cradle Roll," sends mothers monthly bulletins on the care and feeding of their progeny and throws golden wedding parties for its readers.
Sidewalk in Mala Polana. A former bank teller, Andrica began his curious career in 1926, when he convinced the Press that it was missing a bet by ignoring Cleveland's immigrant population (then 65%). Andrica proved his point. Roving and reporting the city's European enclaves—the Italian colony on Mayfield Road, the Slovenes along St. Clair Avenue—Andrica watched with satisfaction as the walls of suspicion crumbled between nationalities. By 1932, when Andrica proposed that Editor Louis B. Seltzer send him abroad to look for relatives of Cleveland's foreign-born, the editor was only too happy to comply.
Now, for several weeks before Andrica's annual departure, the Press prints a coupon inviting readers to send in the name and address of the uncle, the cousin or the grandmother they want Andrica to talk to. The response runs into the thousands, and Andrica always finds plenty of people to visit. On a trip to Mala Polana, Czechoslovakia, Andrica heard about a villager who possessed the only concrete sidewalk in town, discovered an ex-Clevelander. Andrica seems in no danger of exhausting his material: in a single Yugoslavian province, Voivodina, live some 3,500 farmers and villagers with Cleveland connections.
Emotional Host. Home last week after five months covering Europe, Andrica confessed that his greatest pleasure was a trip to his native Radna (renamed Lipova II) in western Transylvania, now a part of Communist Rumania. There he played emotional host to a procession of townspeople who had not forgotten him: "I am the son of John the carpenter." "I am the granddaughter of Pavel of the green hat."