Remember Me
July 13, 2018
ALAN writes:
One evening many years ago, I was watching the 1942 B-Western Sunset on the Desert. One of its highlights was Roy Rogers’ singing of a song composed by his friend Bob Nolan. It was called “Remember Me.”
One sunny day in 1988, my father took a picture of an old, two-story, red-brick building that was home to a business offering “Vintage Clothing Costume Rental.” The name of the business appeared on a blue awning: Remember Me.
Indeed. How could I ever forget? How many times have I sat here remembering the days and nights I spent with my father in that old neighborhood of south St. Louis, so much of which has since been willfully destroyed?
Cold and windy winter days in 1969-’70 when he and I stood waiting for a bus outside a corner drug store; winter nights when he and I sat there in the warmth of his kitchen in his modest apartment; and summer days when a pleasant breeze came in through the open window looking out on the back yard.
There were days when we climbed a steep and narrow flight of wooden stairs up to the clean, uncluttered attic to look through one of the few boxes he kept there; and days when we sat on the wooden steps of the back porch, not talking much about anything; casual hours in his life and mine, moments to which I never gave a thought in those years but that now loom in memory as reminders of his unswerving modesty and decency, qualities I took for granted when I was a boy because I had so seldom come in contact with grown-ups who were not that way.
I remember the screen door, the sink in the corner, the radio on the kitchen table, and a picture he kept on a wall showing his brother with his teammates on an amateur baseball team in 1930. I remember the nights we sat there with a glass of orange juice and a plate of chocolate chip cookies.
I remember the black telephone on the wall and always a stack of daily newspapers on a chair. A woman who grew up in that neighborhood in the 1940s told me she remembered seeing my father walking many times along those streets and always with a newspaper in his hand.
Between 2000 and 2012, I went back several times to that old neighborhood. I walked for blocks and blocks along those old familiar streets, pausing here and there to take a picture of some house or building or sign or streetscape that struck my interest because I knew they had been significant to my father.
Most of that neighborhood was demolished in the early 1960s, a work of genius perpetrated by city planners and other do-gooders. As a boy at that time, I could not imagine what that demolition must have meant to the thousands of people who lived there.
On the 4th of July 1987, he and I walked for several hours along what remained of some of those streets. At points along the way, he stopped to tell me about that corner, this block, that factory, or the row-houses and shops and taverns that had been there when he was a boy. Even then I did not appreciate fully how much that simple walk must have meant to him. My mistake, for which I torture myself with regrets.
We walked past a small park where he had taken me to play when I was 4-5 years old, of which I had only the dimmest memory; past the public grade school from which he graduated in 1927 and where children learned penmanship, poetry, and how to read aloud; past another small park across from the school where he and his classmates played baseball; and past a corner building that had been a confectionary in those years where children could buy a bowl of chili with crackers for a nickel.
We walked past the Catholic Church he had attended (it is now thoroughly modernized); past a radio station that he listened to because it played music from the World War II years; past a company that had been manufacturing hinges since 1873; and past the storefront where I had gone to get haircuts from Steve the barber, who did excellent work, spoke with a German accent, but never talked too much.
We walked along a block where Roy Rogers stood one day in the mid-1940s and posed for this photograph with the owner of a cowboy store and saddle shop. It was possible in St. Louis in those years to rent horses for horseback rides along the greenway by a river. Everything in this picture is gone.
Roy Rogers with Walter Newell in front of Newell’s Cowboy Store in St. Louis, Missouri. Inset photo shows Roy inspecting the Newell saddle shop.
[From: Western film historian Boyd Magers’ Western Clippings]
We stopped at a huge building and my father talked about the factory that occupied it and manufactured industrial-strength bags. My Aunt Helen worked there for 31 years, but her travel expenses to and from her job were minimal: She and her husband lived two blocks away. On June 12, 1908, the public grade school she attended gave her a “Certificate of Award” for perfect attendance, signed in exquisite penmanship by her teacher. When she retired in 1966, she was earning $1.75/hour. By the time I went back there many years later, the huge building had been demolished and all that remained were a vacant lot and the railroad tracks.
In 2003 I walked past two buildings that resembled a scene out of the Old West. Built in the 1870s, they were long abandoned and were demolished in 2010.
I made my last walk there in 2012. Only a few storefronts were recognizable as remnants of the many corner grocers or bakeries or confectionaries or taverns that residents of that neighborhood had kept in business from the 1890s through the 1950s.
Everywhere I walked, I walked with ghosts. I was trying to cling to some part of that neighborhood that had been the setting for much of my father’s family’s life. His memories of that place and time had now become part of mine. Life in that area from the 1920s through the 1950s has been chronicled by three people who lived there but only one of whose writing has been published in book form.
My father enjoyed talking about his memories, but he never wrote a word about it or kept any letters or a journal. It was a working-class neighborhood and most people who lived there could not afford that luxury because they were busy earning a living. For the same reason, it is extremely hard to find photographs taken in that old neighborhood.
In a reminiscence of his boyhood there, a friend of my father wrote:
“….Of all my free-time activities, the one which had the most lasting effect on me was ‘Sand Lot Baseball’. It was the great summer activity. A game could be started up on very short notice. The playing field (sand lot) was only a block away. There was no grass on the field—only sand, dirt, or cinders. …a railroad track ran through the outfield, which was an impediment but was taken in stride….”
My father could have written exactly the same words. He especially enjoyed talking about baseball as he remembered it in that area: Schoolyard baseball with classmates, impromptu baseball games on corner sandlots, and Muny League baseball teams of boys and men who played it for the love of the game. And for him, it was not winning that mattered; it was the rules, always the rules.
The old neighborhood was a modest place to grow up. Any one of dozens of things Americans today take for granted would have been thought a luxury by people in that neighborhood. Few Americans today could imagine their scale of values. Feminism was unheard of. Agitation for “gay marriage” would have provoked gales of laughter (properly). Many people who lived there were born at home. Midwives charged $3.00 per child. Where can you find reasonable rates like that today?
For enjoyment, they window-shopped on Saturday nights, walked to the river on Sunday afternoon to watch the boats, and sat outside on summer evenings talking with their neighbors while the children made up games. Families with 8 or 10 children lived in 3 or 4 rooms. Children who grew up there had their heads on straight and kept them that way throughout life. My father was one of them. He was not a climber or an aggressor or a trend-follower. He lived moderation. His life was a textbook example of moderation. He lived by the principle, seldom expressed but always understood: Never too much of anything.
