ALAN writes:

Fifty years ago, I lived in a four-family flat on a quiet street in a residential area of south St. Louis.

Last Sunday night, a thug fired four bullets into a black woman near the corner of that block.  The killing took place after “a large fight”, according to “news” accounts, which were typically uninformative.

The four-family flat where I lived was just down the street from that corner.  It was owned by a German couple who had come to the United States in the 1950s.  They lived there, as did their son and daughter-in-law.  They were courteous, thoughtful, and highly-disciplined people.  They attended the same Catholic church we did.  It was five blocks away.  They grew flowers in the back yard and took meticulous care of their property.  Neighbors did likewise.   

There were never any “large fights” on those streets, or even small ones, and no one ever got shot.

Scarcely a week went by when I did not shop at the small, family-owned corner market.   I purchased daily newspapers from the newspaper box outside the market.  I remember buying a newspaper there one day in 1982 and learning from a front-page article that former St. Louis Cardinals third baseman and team captain Ken Boyer had died from cancer at age 51.  He had been one of my boyhood baseball heroes in1958-’59.

On Saturday evenings, boys pulled newspaper wagons along that street, and people came out of their houses to buy the big weekend papers.

A cousin and her husband lived across the street.  They came to visit us on New Year’s Eve in 1966, and we had a wild time:  We sang Christmas songs, welcomed in the New Year with Guy Lombardo and his orchestra from New York City, and then watched the 1956 western movie “The Last Wagon” on late-night TV.  On Sunday mornings we walked with them to church.

One cold morning in 1966, I stood there in the back yard and watched a UFO high in the clear blue sky.  Thousands of other people also saw it.  But no aliens from outer space landed and no one got kidnapped and taken for a ride in a Flying Saucer.  The “UFO” turned out to be a high-altitude research balloon.

At Christmas in those years, my mother exchanged Christmas cookies with the German ladies.  When their family and friends came to visit them, we would hear their joyous conversation and good cheer in the hallway when their company left at evening’s end.   Since then, the classic Christmas carol “O Tannenbaum” has always reminded me of those kind, thoughtful people.

One morning in 1982 my mother went outside to take pictures of the lawn and backyard covered in 18 inches of snow.

I walked to a nearby bus stop late at night to go to my job.  Sometimes I walked late at night to a nearby store to purchase the early edition of next day’s newspaper.  Never any problems, never any concern for my safety.

All of that is gone now.  Beginning in the late 1980s, all of that changed because of stupid or treasonous whites who paved the way for thugs to destroy peaceful neighborhoods.   Assaults, robberies, and car theft are some of the talents they brought with them.  In separate incidents since 2005, three women were shot and killed within a two-block radius of that intersection, the same intersection where the thugs staged their “large fight”.

I walked by that intersection one day in 2004 to visit the old neighborhood.  The  storefront where the corner market had been in business for decades was then vacant.  There are no more boys pulling newspaper wagons on weekends.

One Catholic church closed and the parish was dissolved; another has a dwindling parish population.  Within walking distance, the Chariton Restaurant thrived for decades but has now stood boarded-up for fifteen years.  A corner tavern a block away is now boarded-up.  A home for old folks that has been there since before Lincoln was elected president is now boarded-up.

The German couple died, their son died and his wife moved far away.  But she did not forget my mother.  She came to visit her and bring her Christmas cookies in the last years of her life.  Four years ago she sent me a card in which she wrote, “….I am now 75 and it seems like everything is getting too much.”  I knew exactly what she meant, in more ways than one.

What I feel as I compose these words is what Wayne Allensworth must have felt when he wrote about growing up in a neighborhood of Houston in the 1950s and remembering how it had been then, as against what it became in later years.  From the perspective of sixty years, with his family home demolished, all the older members of his family gone, and the old neighborhood made into something utterly alien from what it was then, “it’s all gone, never to come back,” he wrote.

                           (“A Long Time Gone”, Chronicles magazine, May 7, 2015)

The same is true for the peace and safety that could once be felt in south St. Louis neighborhoods.  You can’t go home again, indeed.

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