My Friend Kathy
June 25, 2021
1940s postcard view of the Dutch Girl Restaurant, later renamed Fischer’s. Kathy and I spent many pleasant hours there.
DAVID writes:
A quarter of my life has gone by since my friend Kathy and I met in the workaday world. It seems to have gone by faster than any of the three previous quarters.
She and I are thus at a point where we share memories from the past 18 years, along with memories of a vanished world in St. Louis, where I grew up, and in Belleville, Illinois, a city near St. Louis where she grew up. Neither of us will ever see 70 again.
What lingers most agreeably in memory are the many conversations and walks we shared, hours that were so alive, so vivid, so colorful, and so sparkling. We walked along city streets and residential drives and lanes on scorching summer days and bitterly cold winter nights. We attended Christmas parties at the Carondelet Historical Society in south St. Louis.
In 2003 we took part in a walk organized by the Illinois Trekkers throughout the grounds of the Shrine of Our Lady of the Snows, near Belleville, and dined in its restaurant, which closed for good last year.
In 2006 we walked a mile uphill to McAdams Peak in Pere Marquette State Park near Grafton, Illinois, and enjoyed the panoramic view of the Illinois River and surrounding countryside. On the way back we stopped at roadside bluffs to see the modern reproduction of the “Piasa Bird”, a legendary, menacing-looking creature that Father Jacques Marquette reported seeing on those bluffs in the form of a painting or petroglyph during his explorations along the Mississippi River in 1673. (And for those who collect coincidences: When I was a boy, I played in Marquette Park, and my Aunt Elsie lived on Marquette Avenue. Kathy’s mother’s name was Elsie.)
We rode a tractor at Eckert’s Farm and Orchards and gathered sacks of apples to take home with us.
Now we look back to those adventures and try to remember the energy we had then (in our fifties). After some such adventures, we deemed it only proper to reward ourselves with Haagen-Dazs ice cream.
We walked in parks and fed the ducks and geese.
We relaxed on a swing in the back yard where Gray Cat curled up in our lap and raccoons emerged after dark from the forest beyond.
We walked across Eads Bridge from East St. Louis to St. Louis and then around the Gateway Arch on the Riverfront. Kathy recalled taking a troop of girl scouts aboard the S.S. Admiral for a day trip down the Mississippi River. We recalled years when the river flooded, and Kathy remembered her father talking about a winter when it was so cold that he walked across the river when it was frozen solid.
Her father was a carpenter and musician. In a conversation late in his life, he told us he remembered playing a musical date with the Merry Macs, a vocal group who also appeared with Bud Abbott and Lou Costello in the 1942 motion picture “Ride ‘em Cowboy”, in which they sang the lovely song “Beside the Rio Tonto Shore”.
Kathy’s daughter Lisa took us to visit the Butterfly House in St. Louis County, where butterflies landed on us as we walked through the humid interior.
On a night in December 2003, Kathy sat at her piano and, at my request, played Jerry Herman’s song “We Need a Little Christmas” from the 1966 Broadway production of “Mame”, a song that my father and I loved.
Of course our friendship included occasional differences of opinion. Sometimes we couldn’t agree on anything. We quarreled, laughed, conversed, and commiserated. And we enjoy word play. Our conversations included musical allusions ranging from Johnny Cash to “Amazing Grace” to “South Pacific”.
In countless conversations, we talked about life, death, parents, siblings, office work, typewriters, carbon copies, libraries, childhood memories, and growing older.
We undertook long, meandering walks in Belleville as she pointed out the site of the school where her mother taught; the storefront that had been Marvin’s Camera Shop, where we had photos developed in years when people used real cameras; other storefronts that had been dime stores, bakeries, drug stores, or movie theaters; a corner confectionary where children brought empty bottles to redeem for pennies and nickels; and the two-story house where she and her siblings lived in their childhood.
We went to Mallo’s Bakery to buy donuts and pecan crispies. It was a much-loved family-owned bakery in business for 50 years. It closed in 2010.
On a side street we walked past a huge old building of the “Belleville Co-Operative Grain Company” that offered supplies for farmers. Good thing I took a picture of it, because later it was demolished and only an empty grass lot is there now. Across the street we saw two signs advertising “Bond Bread” on the doors of what must have been a grocery store in the 1930s or ‘40s.
We met many times for breakfast at a chili parlor in downtown St. Louis that has been there for more than a hundred years, one of the few small businesses to claim that distinction.
We dined at the Pie Pantry Restaurant on East Main Street, now closed and “just a memory”.
We walked throughout downtown St. Louis, pausing here and there to compare memories of dime stores, candy stores, office supply stores, the Mercantile Library, Dooley’s Pub, Trader Vic’s Restaurant, the Quiet Corner Restaurant, Blustein’s Brides House, a TWA office, and six cafeterias…..all of them there when downtown thrived and pulsed with life, all of them now demolished or closed forever.
Nor could we forget the Famous-Barr department store: Shopping there, dining in its restaurants, browsing in the book department, riding to upper floors on escalators or in elevators run by real live elevator operators, and walking across the walkway four floors above Olive Street that connected the store with its parking garage. All of it is now abandoned and vandalized.
On a winter evening in 2003, Kathy and I stood outside Famous-Barr to admire its model train layout in a corner window, recalling how our parents did that with us at Christmas fifty years earlier when we were children. It was the last time we saw the train window, and Famous-Barr closed a few years later.
I took pictures of a railroad passenger car on display at a corner lot in Belleville. It was a handsome Pullman car, black with orange trim and in excellent condition, and it bore the name “Empire Builder, Great Northern Railway”. Several years later, it was gone.
Kathy and I rode aboard the Rail Cruise America passenger train out of Union Station in St. Louis. Its cars were painted Kelly green and kept in sparkling condition, a reminder of the golden age of passenger trains. It, too, is now gone.
We attended a Cardinals’ baseball game at Busch Memorial Stadium in downtown St. Louis, not because we cared about baseball but because we knew the stadium was targeted for demolition because it was said to be “old”. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha! That was good for a few laughs. I remember when it was new in 1966. It was younger than us by far.
In 2015 we took part in a “Cookie Walk” in Belleville. But that was false advertising: We didn’t see any cookies walk; all they did was sit there.
Lisa came to visit her mother and told us tales of ranch life and rattlesnakes in Texas.
We dined here, there, and everywhere—at 40 restaurants or cafeterias, of which 22 have since closed.
Older people in St. Louis remember Pope’s Cafeterias. They were all over town. When we were children, Kathy and I were taken by our parents to dine at their main cafeteria downtown. It had dining areas on and below street level. It closed many years ago and the building it occupied was demolished. But the underground rooms were still there. In 2004, Kathy and I dined once again in that underground space when it had been made into a restaurant in a new hotel.
Our favorite place to dine in Belleville was Fischer’s Restaurant on West Main Street. In the 1940s it was called the Dutch Girl Restaurant. Just inside its front doors was a full-size red telephone booth like those in London. We went to Fischer’s for Easter Sunday dinner in 2004 and kept going back for years afterward. That someday it might close was inconceivable to us. But it did, in 2017. People wept when it closed and was then torn down.
One day we dined in the cafeteria at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Belleville and sat in the lobby, talking and admiring the grand piano. A few years later, the hospital had closed and was torn down. Before its demolition, we walked around the perimeter and paused to look at a gazebo on the grounds behind the main building. Both loomed large in her memory because it was from the roof of that hospital that one of her granddaughters was flown by helicopter to a hospital in St. Louis for emergency treatment, because it was at that gazebo where she and her grandchildren sat and enjoyed ice cream on summer days, and because Kathy herself occupied a room there when she was battling the Shingles Monster.
Just a few weeks ago, we walked up a formidable cemetery hill to visit the gravesites of her parents and her brother. It took days for us to recover.
Alas, my friend Kathy now approaches the 75-year milestone. I wish her good health, much happiness, and peace of mind.
— Comments —
Shani writes:
What a lovely, lovely tribute. Thank you, David, for taking the time to write it and you, Laura, for sharing it. A very happy birthday wish to Kathy from a reader in central Illinois.
