ALAN writes:

Not long ago I learned of the death last year of a woman whom we met in 1965.  She, her husband and her parents owned a four-family flat on Pennsylvania Avenue in south St. Louis.  All of them lived there.  We moved there in August 1965.  It turned out that we could not have chosen a residence owned and cared for by better people.  They were German, and they exemplified the spirit and determination of the “Scrubby Dutch” of south St. Louis.

Pennsylvania Avenue is a brick street.  It was a clean, safe neighborhood in 1965 and for years after.  We would never have moved there had it not been.  It was within walking distance of schools, churches, parks, and stores.  It was one block from the building that had been Maryville College.

Our years in that house left many priceless memories.

The woman who died was the last of the four. Elisabeth and her husband, Hans, had a son whom I remember from those years as being a few years younger than me.

I remember that Hans and his father-in-law were cigarette smokers.  There were numerous evenings in the warm weather months when the four of them would sit and talk in the backyard.

I remember the backyard itself:  Its evergreen tree, flowers along fences on both sides of the yard, the garage, painted white with green trim, and the walkway leading out to the alley.

The front lawn and back yard always looked clean and attractive because of the determination of those four people to keep them that way.

On evenings around Christmas, we would hear them exchanging Christmas greetings and cheerful goodbyes to their visitors in the hallway after an evening’s visit.  Elisabeth’s mother and my mother exchanged Christmas cookies in the 1970s-‘80s.

I remember Christmas Eve nights in 1965-’68 when my aunts, uncles, cousins, and friends came to visit us there.

I remember how I remember reading a paperback book written by an Air Force officer as I lay on my bed on the night in January 1967 when a tornado struck northwest St. Louis County.

I remember being in that room on a morning in November 1968 when we felt the unmistakable sensation of an earthquake, fortunately one that had no serious aftereffects.

The darkness in that room on autumn or winter nights is entwined in memory with the mood projected in that setting by certain songs from 1968-’70, like the wistfulness in Glen Campbell’s “Wichita Lineman”, the loneliness in Don Cherry’s “I’ll Catch the Sun”, and the melancholy in Marilyn Maye’s “Yesterday I Heard the Rain”.

I remember weekends in 1966 when we walked to St. Hedwig’s Catholic Church, five blocks away, with friends who lived across from us on Pennsylvania Avenue.

I remember sitting in our living room on weekday mornings in 1968 and watching the original “Jeopardy” program with host Art Fleming, and on the morning in 1969 when Apollo astronauts walked on the moon.

Also from that living room I remember the promise that some of us felt in early 1968 in the person of Senator Eugene McCarthy, the only American politician at that time who inspired my respect.  And I remember being in that living room on the morning in June 1968 when it was reported on television that Bobby Kennedy had just been shot in a room in the Ambassador Hotel, the very hotel where my mother and I stayed overnight during our visit to California in 1960.

The house on Pennsylvania Ave. had central heating, but I remember winter nights when we placed large sheets of plastic over windows to help keep out the bitter cold.

I remember the clear, cold morning of November 2, 1966, when I carried my telescope out to the backyard to get a closer view of a silvery, high altitude atmospheric research balloon visible for hours in the blue morning sky.

I remember walking outside that house early on Saturday evenings to purchase one or the other of the two big weekend newspapers from boys who pulled wooden newspaper wagons along Pennsylvania Avenue and the neighboring streets.  The sound of such wagons on a brick street could never have been mistaken for a Brahms lullaby.

I remember walking many, many times down to the corner market, Busiek’s Market, to buy groceries or a money order or to cash a check.  Carl’s Market, another corner grocer, was two blocks away.

It was there in that house that I discovered the radio program of Silvia von Versen, “The Little German Girl”, and her assistant, Olga the Cow.  Her program began in 1971.  Silvia was actually from Austria, but she spoke in German and English and played happy-go-lucky music like polkas and “The Ducky Dance”.  To listen to Silvia’s program was to become immersed in “Gemutlichkeit”.  As one commentator wrote about her, “If Silvia had been Der Fuhrer, she would have delighted the Allies to death.”  Absolutely right.

Another pleasant memory from those years was the voice of country-western musician Johnny Rion on KSTL Radio, filling in for the legendary “Skeets” Yaney.  Only decades afterward did I discover that Johnny Rion played musical dates in the 1950s in a building on South Broadway that I walked past numerous times in the 1960s-‘80s.  At the end of his program, Johnny Rion played Skeets Yaney’s theme song “Back Home Again in Indiana”, whose lovely, bittersweet melody lingered afterward in memory.

The building had been there since 1895.  It was called Triangle Hall.  It was a landmark for 100 years.  For half that time, it was an American Legion Post, and a World War I-era cannon stood at the corner.  I remember walking along that block on many Friday and Saturday nights and hearing the conversation and laughter of people (all of them white) who came there for the barbecues and sat at picnic tables under a wooden shelter.  They had a good time, but nobody wrecked the place or shot anybody.

At the other end of the block was Triangle Park.  For many years it was the site of German Day, with songs, recitations, barbecues, and Maypole dances.  In 1990 a man wrote about his memories of being taken to such events by his father when he was a little boy in the 1920s.  He especially remembered the Hassenjgad, a comical interlude in which 12 “hunters” in costume pretended to chase someone dressed in a rabbit costume, to the great merriment of the spectators.  Children could ride on ponies and a merry-go-round at Triangle Park.

All of that was demolished in 1996 and replaced by drug pushers (Walgreens).

Two blocks down the street was the popular Chariton Restaurant, another neighborhood landmark.  It closed and the building has now been boarded up for 25 years.

I remember purchasing a newspaper from the newspaper box on the corner just outside Busiek’s Market on the day in 1982 when an article on the front page reported the death of St. Louis Cardinals’ third baseman Ken Boyer, who had been my baseball idol twenty years earlier, the first to die among the men whose names became heroic to me in 1958 when I discovered the existence of something called baseball.

I remember the great weekend snowfall in 1982 that paralyzed St. Louis for weeks afterward, and how my mother ventured outside to take pictures of the snowdrifts in front and in back of that house.

Every year since 1878, St. Anthony of Padua Church held its Corpus Christi Procession along the streets around the church.   In June 1982, my mother walked along with the procession and took a series of snapshots. (Above is one of them.)

I remember that house and those years best of all because my mother was there.  I could depend on her as I could depend on the sunrise.  There were good times and sad times for her in that house.  It was during those years that her father, older brother and two older sisters died.  But she kept going.  She never faltered.  She never failed to accept the responsibilities that life handed her.    

I can close my eyes and picture her seated there in her easy chair, reading or enjoying an episode of “Little House on the Prairie”…..and see the miniature music box piano that played the melody of “Lara’s Theme” that she so loved…..and see the Christmas lights in the window, colorful and festive but not overdone, because excess and ostentation were never part of her character.

And I remember, too, the many lemon cakes and zucchini cakes that she baked in that kitchen.

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