The Bread Box
August 8, 2018
ALAN writes:
By the year 2003, an old friend and I had reached an age where we looked backward more than forward. We spent many hours riding through south St. Louis neighborhoods to see what remained from the streets, parks, schools, churches, theaters, buildings, and houses that he recalled from his boyhood and that I recalled from mine.
A letter I found by chance in a St. Louis newspaper from 1999 fitted perfectly into that frame of mind. It was written by a widow named Ann McGauly, who was looking back to her childhood in the 1920s in the 800 block of South Second Street, a short distance from downtown.
While reading her letter, I felt a certain kinship with that woman and a desire to visit that area. So my friend and I went there one day in July 2003. It looked very different from how she remembered it. She remembered a boarding house, two grocery stores, a corner saloon, a stable for horses, people who worked in the huge buildings of a woodenware company, and the freight trains that ran on the street where she and her two sisters and their parents lived.
She wrote of how she and a playmate roller-skated on the sidewalks; of watching men unload the freight trains; and of walking two blocks to a peanut factory and getting their baskets filled with peanuts for 10 cents. “We would run home with them, and our mom would bake them in the oven. These were happy days in our lives at that time. …I have never forgotten those wonderful years… To me, the neighborhood was very safe. We were all poor people but happy….”
And then came an example of the truth in the old saying “You can’t go home again.” At age 87, she told her children about that place and those years and wanted to show them that place. So one day they drove there. But when they got there, she discovered that the buildings in that block that she remembered so vividly from the 1920s were now all gone. She wrote of how, 80 years later, she tried to find pictures of that block as it was in the 1920s. Her daughter consulted a library, a historical society, Catholic churches, and a seminary’s archives. But no one had any pictures of that block. “It’s as if it never existed,” she wrote. She died a few weeks before her letter was printed.
My father had no such pictures, either. But he came close: Fifty years after that little girl lived and played there, he walked along that same block on a summer day in 1974 and took two color snapshots of buildings across from where she lived. The pictures he took show portions of precisely the streetscape recalled by that woman: A corner tavern, a café that had earlier been a grocery store, the railroad tracks in the middle of the street, and one of the woodenware company buildings.
Why did my father take those two pictures?, I asked myself. Did he know that woman or her family? I doubt it. I believe he took those pictures because he saw an object on the sidewalk in front of one of those storefronts that commanded his attention. It was a common sight in American cities in the 1920s—but a very uncommon sight indeed by 1974.
I am confident none of your readers will have any idea what I am talking about when I say that the object on the sidewalk was a bread box. So I will let St. Louisan Betty Pavlige describe it in this passage recalling her childhood in the 1920s:
“…the grocery store was our daily lifeline, and its corner a gathering place for the young, who could include a little visiting time in their errands. The special attraction was the store’s big bread box, which stood on the sidewalk the year around. This was a sturdy wooden container, usually painted dark green to match the cast iron trim of the building, with a top of sheet steel, slanted to shed rain. The bakery delivered the daily order of bread in the early morning, before the store was opened, and the bread was put in the padlocked box, to which both the grocer and the bakery man had keys.
“When youngsters gathered at the corner in the evening, the bread box was sat on, laid on and leaned on, while others stood around it, or sat on the doorstep of the store—closed by that time. The bread box was a fixture of our social life, and an accessory to street games of running, jumping, sliding, and hiding, in the same way that countless other bread boxes were all over St. Louis.”
[Betty Pavlige, Growing Up in Soulard, Knight Publishing Co., 1980, p. 96 ]
Absolutely correct. My father knew all about such things because he grew up on Third Street in the same years that Betty Pavlige wrote about and the same years when that little girl was growing up on Second Street—all three of them within a mile from each other.
And that, I believe, is why he stopped to photograph that bread box on that day in 1974: Because it reminded him of the bread box in front of the corner grocery store in the block where he lived as a boy, and he knew what an unusual sight it was in 1974. My father had a friend whose grandfather owned that corner store, which had been there since the 1800s. His friend wrote to me in a letter in 2003:
“I can remember sitting on that bread box, as many others did, including your father. He and a good friend of his spent many an afternoon there in the 1930s…..”
A bread box advertising Wonder Bread can be seen in a photograph of a grocery store in Indiana in the 1920s.
By the time I stood there in 2003, only a vacant lot was at the site where my father took those two pictures twenty-nine years earlier.
The massive brick buildings of the long-gone woodenware company are still there. They have stood idle now for decades, “such a waste of wonderful buildings”, as Mrs. McGauly wrote in her 1999 letter.
Indeed it is. But that is a measure of modern anti-culture: Deride or neglect the old, allow it to be vandalized and fall into ruin while erecting huge, tall, pretentious office buildings in the form of architectural monstrosities. One such building, 44 stories tall and indescribably ugly, was erected in the heart of downtown St. Louis less than thirty years ago after a whole block of smaller buildings was demolished to accommodate it. It now stands abandoned and lifeless. What can be said about the moral-philosophical bankruptcy of men who create and engineer such things?
As a girl, Mrs. McGauly attended a Lutheran Mission school. Her parents worked there and lived above it. Imagine my surprise, therefore, when I discovered that her gravesite lies in a Catholic cemetery, just down the hillside from that of my railroad uncle.
