Winter Love
January 22, 2016
ALAN writes:
Thank you for the richly-detailed and evocative memories of snow in Chester in the 1950s. At certain points they intersect with my own memories of snow in St. Louis in those same years. These memories are from three residential neighborhoods in south St. Louis, whose tone, texture, and character in those years now live only in memory.
My mother saw beauty in heavy snowfalls and would go outdoors to take color slides or snapshots. In the same month when your husband found such delight in the 13-inch snowfall in Chester, a less-impressive but still beautiful snowfall occurred in St. Louis. On Feb. 1, 1958, my mother took six color slides of untouched snow scenes in Tower Grove Park, one of them showing her eight-year-old son concealed in winter jacket, gloves, boots, cap, and earmuffs in front of snow-laden evergreen trees.
Slides two winters later show my classmate Jeff and me standing in our snow-covered back yard, people sledding down a hill in Forest Park, and a three-foot tall snow rabbit in someone’s front yard.
How well I recall winter nights in 1958-1960 when we watched weather reports on black-and-white television. When school closings were announced, I listened intently and hoped earnestly to hear that St. Anthony of Padua school (my school) would be closed the next day because of heavy snowfall. The list of closings went on and on. Many times we did indeed hear the words “St. Anthony’s School”…..but, gosh darn it, it always turned out to be a different school with the same name in some place I had never even heard of, like Herculaneum or Morse Mills or Hillsboro, small towns in counties around St. Louis. Seldom or never did they announce the right school. Invariably my hopes were crushed. The brown-robed Franciscan priests and the sisters in their black habits who ran our school were a tough breed; almost never did snow or sleet or winter winds induce them to cave in and cancel a school day.
The Weather Lady on local TV in those years was named Pat Fontaine. She had a sincere, down-to-earth manner that inspired our trust. One of my uncles always called her “Fat Pontaine.” But she was not fat; that was just his way of playing with names. He and my aunt also enjoyed watching the Sunday night TV western “Bonanza,” which he always called “Bananas.” He was a rascal. He would begin a telephone conversation with, “Hello, this is me. Is that you?” He was an inveterate cigarette smoker, kept a pet parakeet named Skipper, and drove a gorgeous baby-blue 1958 Pontiac.
On icy Christmas days we would visit them at their home near the top of a hilly residential street. But the snow and ice outside were quickly forgotten in the warmth of the home that my aunt kept immaculate and decorated in just the right proportions and tones. Late that evening when we left and bid them farewell, the last thing I would see were the Christmas tree lights through the frosted living room windows.
Thinking of walking in the snow reminds me of a certain scene in the 1948 motion picture “The Miracle of the Bells” in which Fred MacMurray and Alida Valli are seen walking along a snow-covered sidewalk on Christmas Eve in a nameless midwestern town. “There’ll never be a walk again like the one that night….yelling in the snow and laughing….you telling me to listen to the reindeer bells….”, MacMurray says in memory as the scene unfolds. The story in the movie is based on the life of a woman who lived in Glen Lyon, Pennsylvania. [ Read about it here and here]
The sound of chains on automobiles moving slowly along snow-covered city streets, and the heat and clinking of radiators in each room of the house where we lived in 1958 – these are more points in common with life in Chester.
When I read your husband’s memories of the wonderful silence and tranquility that are by-products of a big snowfall, I was reminded of a timeless record that came out in early 1963. “Our Winter Love” was recorded by pianist Bill Pursell and the Anita Kerr Singers in a studio in Nashville.
Chicago writer M.C. Antil heard in that record the same irresistible magic that I heard. Many years afterward, he wrote that the voices of the Anita Kerr Singers,
“…combined with Bill Justis’s angelic orchestration, propelled the verse, the melody, and in fact the entire song into some chilly, snow-covered netherworld. When it was released under Pursell’s name…..in January of 1963, ‘Our Winter Love’ became something of a minor phenomenon. It struck a chord with people who found themselves caught up in the simplicity and emotional solitude of its haunting melody. ….. [ It ] has become for many a song for the ages; a remarkable little melody that can be evocative, wistful, romantic and slightly melancholy, all at the same time…..”
It is, he wrote, “one of the most underrated songs of all time.”
That has always been my sentiment precisely. When “Our Winter Love” was released in 1963, I was thirteen years old and terribly ignorant. But I also knew or felt that that record was a musical gem. It impressed me so favorably when I first heard it on St. Louis radio in early 1963 that I purchased the orange-label Columbia Records 45-rpm single. In the winters of 1963-’64, I must have played it a hundred times or more. I thought it was enchanting. I still do. It provided the perfect musical accompaniment to winter days as I sat there listening to its gorgeous melody while glancing out through our living room windows at snowflakes falling on the quiet residential street outside. “Our Winter Love” was three minutes of sheer heaven.
