On Classmates, Memories and the Ruins
December 10, 2020
Maryland Avenue, St. Louis on Dec. 1, 1986 during the 19th annual Central West End Christmas Walk. Post-Dispatch photo
ALAN writes:
This has been the worst year in American life that I have witnessed in my 71 years. I wish I had died rather than see a year like this. I was born among people who had enough sense to value their rights and their liberty. I will die among people who lack that sense and excel instead in taking orders and doing as they are told.
In contrast with what is out there today, here is a brief look back to better years and better people in my hometown of St. Louis.
PART ONE:
My best friend in 1st-grade class in our parochial school was a boy named Tony. We lived about two blocks apart. On First Communion day in 1957, he and I wore suits and ties and stood with classmate Kathleen, in her white dress, outside our church as my mother took a color slide.
Irma, Tony’s mother, was a housewife, and his father, Lester, a World War II veteran, worked for a typesetting company in downtown St. Louis in a building that was demolished by 1980. They became good friends of ours.
Tony came to my birthday parties in 1956 and ’57. In his back yard we played with his white rabbit. We went trick-or-treating together in our neighborhood when it was perfectly safe and expected for children to do that. Tony was Felix the Cat and I was Mighty Mouse, cartoon characters we had enjoyed watching on television.
I can picture us there in the warmth of Irma’s kitchen in their second-floor apartment after coming in from an outing on a cold and snowy day in 1956.
In 1960, all of us made a day trip to Meramec Caverns, about sixty miles from St. Louis, where we walked through the caverns and had a picnic lunch at a table on the park-grounds outside,
For 30 years, Irma and my mother remained friends, even after we moved into a different parish and Tony and I fell out of contact. I can remember picking up our telephone many times and hearing Irma’s voice, which always seemed so warm and comforting. She was a gentle woman who treated me so kindly and in a manner so soothing.
My mother did not attend the funeral Mass for Irma only because she did not know she had died.
Irma and Lester were two of the grown-ups I knew when I was a boy and then largely forgot about in later years when I was stupid. They were among the treasures in my life that I foolishly took for granted.
One evening in December 1956, Irma and Tony and my mother and I stepped aboard a red, Public Service Company bus to ride downtown: Two White women and their young sons alone in downtown St. Louis after dark, a circumstance not in the least out of the ordinary then but that White mothers today, if they have any sense, would not even consider.
Our mothers took us to see the Christmas display windows in the three big department stores. This was at a time when thousands of people filled the stores and the sidewalks. Police officers, all of them White men, stood in the middle of intersections and directed traffic. The Salvation Army had a huge Christmas tree at the corner of 8th and Olive Streets.
It was the very heart of downtown St. Louis and it was filled with shoppers, diners, theatergoers, Christmas lights, carols, and good cheer.
We walked west from there to Memorial Plaza, across from City Hall. We walked past a full-scale model of a steamship called the S.S. Reindeer, with Santa Claus in the crow’s nest. In the next block, my mother took color slides as Tony and I sat by giant illuminated Christmas cards depicting Christmas across the world. Then we walked over to see the life-sized Nativity Scene on the steps of the Soldiers Memorial building.
Today, if you would follow the path we walked on that night in 1956, you would not see any Christmas windows, any department stores, any crowds of shoppers or diners or theatergoers, any Salvation Army Christmas tree, any giant illuminated Christmas cards, any Nativity Scenes, or any White police officers.
What you would see instead are a few Christmas lights here and there, juxtaposed in Orwellian manner with empty streets and sidewalks, large boarded-up windows in numerous buildings, storefronts vacant for decades, huge buildings now abandoned and deteriorating, assorted vandalism, bums sleeping on benches, crumbling sidewalks, numerous dogs walking their well-trained pet humanoids, splendid examples of Communist art and sculpture, motorists driving at whim through stop signs and red lights, and rapid transit stations where escalators and elevators are usually out of order. (You can walk up or down the stairs, but the staircase may be poorly lit and filthy, and you may see daylight through holes in some portions of the stairs that have been eaten away by decades of rust and bums who find it convenient to urinate there.)
PART TWO:
In the later years of grade school, my best friend was a boy named Jeff. We were pals for five years and shared a passion for baseball cards, model trains, and rock and roll records. We walked everywhere in our neighborhood and could have done so if blindfolded. I visited Jeff at his home, where it seemed his mother was always doing the laundry or preparing the next meal and where quibbling with his three brothers was as inevitable as the dawn.
Six years ago, Jeff and his wife lived near Ferguson in St. Louis County, where thugs and vandals destroyed other people’s property and made life miserable for nearby residents while the impostors who call themselves “The Law” stood around watching. Since then, Jeff and his wife moved out of St. Louis County, a sure sign of their good judgment.
Last month I happened to pass through the intersection in south St. Louis near Jeff’s boyhood home. The house appeared to be intact and well-maintained.
But a four-family flat just across the alley from there is now in complete ruins and boarded up, a sight that Jeff and I could not have imagined as we sat in his bedroom and looked out toward that house in 1962.
Across the street, Ginny’s Confectionary, where Jeff bought candy and baseball cards during our school years, is long gone and its corner storefront now boarded up.
Across the street from there stands the massive building that was once Cleveland High School. It was often characterized as “The Castle”. It has stood closed and abandoned since 2006. Within the past few months, dozens of its windows have been boarded up. It had a long and proud history. I can picture myself sitting there in its classrooms in 1966-’67 as John Simpson taught American History and David Woodworth taught Physics. Many years after that, I spoke with Lois Waninger, who taught music for decades in that building. She lived her entire life in the Carondelet neighborhood and became one of the leading lights in the Carondelet Historical Society, which is now closed even to its own members because of the Great Flu Fraud.
In the same years when Jeff and his family lived in that house, a lot of gunfire was going on across the street. But it was not criminals who did the shooting; it was boys and girls (all of them White) taking part in marksmanship practice in their rifle clubs deep within the Cleveland High School building. There is no record that they ever shot each other or their teachers or anyone else. They were taught to use rifles responsibly and they did.
Today the building is abandoned and thugs fire guns at whim on the streets around it.
What was a perfectly normal and proper part of growing up for students in St. Louis public high schools for five decades—learning to use guns responsibly—is now prohibited by the fools and frauds who call themselves educators, in alliance with the massive fraud called “The Law”, while the irresponsible and criminal use of guns is now accommodated or ignored by those same fools and frauds.
It is a perfect symbol of the philosophical inversion of American life that I have witnessed over 60 years: The destruction of a clean, decent, civilized neighborhood and sensible code of moral standards and their replacement by vandalism, lawlessness, and hatred of moral standards.
Or to word it another way: It is a measure of how easily modern Americans can be induced—with scarcely a peep of opposition—to surrender their rights as citizens and taxpayers and to agree to accommodate wholly inept and incompetent local government.
What have I kept from those days and nights so long ago? The memory of three grown-ups who personified the best that grown-ups can be, and the memory of two pals who remained loyal friends.
— Comments —
Patrick O’Brien writes:
Alan’s memories of St. Louis in “On Classmates, Memories and the Ruins” are close to mine of Chicago. I am his exact contemporary. My old neighborhood, however, has not been ruined, because of a rule that city employees must live in the city; that neighborhood is full of policemen and firemen, and is virtually lily white. I hesitate at first to mention race, but the evidence is all around us; and I have sympathy for Blacks who live in decaying areas.
My wife and I were in St. Louis last July for a wedding at the magnificent cathedral there — I didn’t wear a mask, and just ignored the security guard. Reception was in the neighborhood called The Hill, which I found charmingly lower middle class. Drove by Yogi Berra’s boyhood home on the way back to the hotel. But I wonder how many of the people living there are now apostates.
And as you well know, the societal rot dates largely from the time of that miserable Second Vatican Council. When the Light of the World grows very dim, what is left but the chaos of darkness?
Laura writes:
Vatican II, as well as the Sexual Revolution and feminism, drained neighborhoods in St. Louis, Chicago, Philadelphia, Chester and many other places of children. It also drained away the lifeblood of our entire civilization — the sanctifying graces that flow from the true liturgy and faith.
