ALAN writes:

It was probably in 1974 when Tom and I met in a meeting room of some bank in St. Louis County. We were not bankers, but we belonged to a discussion group that held monthly meetings there.

We were ordinary citizens who held a common interest in the night sky, the science of astronomy, and the controversy about reports of strange objects in the sky made by seemingly-reliable people like police officers and airline pilots. One man in the group had been a policeman years earlier, and others were engineers, photographers, businessmen, housewives, and amateur astronomers.

We presented lectures, reviewed books, held a picnic every summer, and learned aircraft identification procedures. In May 1975, Tom and I and other members worked as volunteers at a lecture given by a physics professor in Washington University’s Graham Chapel.

In the mid-1970s, we took part in late-night sky-watches in the small town of Pacific, Missouri, far from the lights of big cities. On some of those nights I rode with Tom in his car. We usually stopped in south St. Louis County to pick up a bag of White Castle hamburgers (also known as “belly bombers”) to sustain us throughout an evening of sky-watching.

We never saw anything inexplicable in the night sky, but we became expert observers and acquired experience in how to investigate and evaluate accounts of such incidents. I saw Tom at many meetings and we always talked and exchanged news.

Eventually I began to have more and more doubts about the reliability of eyewitness testimony. After I abandoned interest in the topic, Tom and I fell out of contact for more than 30 years.

Then one day in April 2013 I was walking along a street when, to my surprise, Tom was driving by, saw me, stopped, and offered me a ride. We talked and talked and dredged up ancient memories.

From then through 2018, I kept the passenger seat warm on many rides when Tom drove to dozens of places we could remember from half a century ago in St. Louis and St. Louis County.  Time after time after time, I would be out and about somewhere when, by chance, Tom happened to be driving by and stopped to offer me a ride on yet another miles-long sentimental journey into his past and into mine.

One day he joked about talking so much. When he was young, he said, people said he never talked much or at all. But now, people say he never stops talking. I laughed and knew exactly what he meant, because the same is true for me.

We discovered that each of us had been an altar boy: Tom at St. Andrew’s Church and me at St. Anthony of Padua.

His mother was a housewife and his father worked at the Great Lakes Carbon plant near the riverfront in far south St. Louis, a site with coke ovens, multiple buildings, and tall smokestacks. When architect Robert Powers visited that site years after it closed, he wrote:  “Ruined buildings and massive abandoned machinery abound, emerging from the trees like an ancient temple in the jungle.”

I can confirm that, because I walked through that area in 2006 and took pictures there — because I thought those decaying and vandalized buildings were a perfect symbol of a nation going downhill, and a remnant of what American industry had once been. When Tom and I drove there a few years ago, all of it had been demolished and paved over. Nor is there any trace of the popular amusement park and swimming pool that occupied the area nearby for decades, nor of the tracks once used by the Broadway streetcars.

My father was in the Army Air Corps in World War II and was given a large colorful certificate decorated with mermaids. It stated that he had been initiated into the Solemn Mysteries of the Ancient Order of the Deep and was signed by Neptunus Rex and Davey Jones.  It was a souvenir of “crossing the line.” Tom showed me a similar certificate his father had been given during his time in the Navy during World War II.

Tom drove me through the neighborhood where he grew up, in Lemay, a suburb of St. Louis. He pointed out the little house where his family had lived, and small buildings where there had been a corner tavern, a grocery store, and a barber shop.  He remembered walking across a bridge over a creek on his walk to school, and how certain boys in class enjoyed using him as a punching bag.

We talked about our memories of the floods of 1957 and 1973 when a bridge was under water and cars were buffeted about by flood waters.

Another memory we shared was how boys pulled newspaper wagons along residential streets on Saturday evenings in the 1950s-‘80s.  Hearing the boys’ voices and the clatter of the wheels on the streets, residents came out of their homes to purchase the fat weekend editions of the two daily St. Louis newspapers. In those years, they cost less than a weekday paper costs today.

Tom told me stories about gangsters and underground passageways. He drove to a modern shopping plaza that he told me was the site of the South Twin Drive-In Theater in the 1950s. We drove to huge factory buildings that were once the home of Liggett and Myers Tobacco Company, makers of L & M cigarettes and other tobacco products.  Years afterward, people who lived nearby remembered hearing the company’s 9 o’clock whistle every evening.

We rode along the main street in Lemay, comparing memories of a bank building, corner taverns, Poslosky’s Variety Store (which had been there since 1910), a lumber company, a corner confectionary, and two entire blocks of small stores.  All those places are gone now, and once again the (newer) bridge is under water.

We also drove past a small house that was once the home of a married couple who were traditionalist-minded Catholics.  They became friends to us in the 1970s.  I remember sitting at their kitchen table when Mrs. C served cake and ice cream, and sitting and talking with Mr. C on their back porch.  They were kind, thoughtful people—and implacably opposed to modern trends in the Church and American culture generally.

Tom worked for more than 30 years in an old folks’ home in St. Louis where many of the residents talked with him about their memories.  Some of them gave him things they had saved.

Three weeks ago I learned from Tom’s sister that nature dealt Tom an unkind blow last winter in the form of a heart attack.  But the medics did a good job.  When I visited him recently, I would not even have known that he had had that misfortune.  We talked for hours and he looked and sounded just as he did when we talked one day late last year.

If all continues to go well, I hope we will be able to go for another ride to Jefferson Barracks Park, in south St. Louis County. That is where Tom worked as a volunteer in recent years.

My father knew all about Jefferson Barracks, having been inducted into the army there in 1942. I imagine it was still vivid in his memory on the day in 1970 when he clipped and saved a newspaper article about Jefferson Barracks entitled “Old Army Forts Just Fade Away.”

Everything about Jefferson Barracks is old. It is drenched in American history: From the buildings dating from the 1850s, to the parade grounds, to the historic museums, to a fence and gates consisting of rifle barrels and cannons, to the bluffs overlooking the Mississippi River and the site of the old train station, to the rolling green meadows of the National Cemetery, the final resting place for Tom’s father, my father, and the traditionalist Catholic couple.

I remembered Sundays in 1964 when my mother and I visited Jefferson Barracks and stopped at a lookout point to absorb and admire the vista.  At that young age, I knew little or nothing about the place and its rich history.  But there was something magical about the name Jefferson Barracks.  Those uneventful Sunday afternoon drives to a quiet spot overlooking a mighty river were something wonderful to me.  I did not jump up and down in glee.  I simply (!) saw and heard and absorbed a kind of serenity at those moments when I was accompanied by the most decent human being I would ever know.  And so it was—thanks to Tom—that I was able to revisit those moments in memory half a century later when he drove to that same lookout point.

Meanwhile, I just want to say Thank You, Tom, for all those rides and conversations and memories of times, people, and places now long gone but still alive in his memory and mine. I could not have wished for a better friend.

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