St. Joseph’s Home for Boys, 1945

[Part One of this essay can be found here.]

ALAN writes:

I remember listening on peaceful Sunday afternoons to baseball announcer Jack Buck on KMOX Radio broadcasts of Cardinals’ doubleheaders…..and standing at our kitchen sink early one evening while listening to Jack Buck interview retired Cardinals’ pitcher Lindy McDaniel, another of my boyhood baseball heroes whose baseball cards my classmates and I carried in our pockets in those golden summers of 1958-’59.

Two blocks from where we lived was a building that Bohemians built in 1903 as a gymnastic and cultural club.  They were there until 1956, at which time it became a VFW Post.

I remember walking countless times to and across a pedestrian walkway above Highway 55 to a bus stop on Broadway in the years when I worked downtown.  Behind me as I stood there waiting for my bus were two houses that dated from the 1850s and overlooked the Mississippi River.  In the early 1900s, passenger trains stopped behind one of those houses.  The trains and the houses are long gone.

As I walked up the steps leading to the walkway, I walked past an ordinary house that was always occupied and in good condition.

In some years I would get home from my job at or around midnight.  Then I would read the two daily newspapers, and perhaps a book or magazine, and fall asleep around 3 a.m. to the wonderful voice of John McCormick on KMOX Radio.  I remember reading Arthur Koestler’s book The Ghost in the Machine in that setting in 1968.

I remember walking along the streets around our house many times late at night with no need whatever for concern about safety.  That began to change in the late 1980s and reached bottom when the liars and frauds who call themselves “The Law” did nothing to stop thugs and parasites from converting that neighborhood and others around it into combat zones.

I remember Elisabeth’s thoughtfulness in visiting my mother in the last years of her life, and in exchanging cards and notes with me for years afterward.  Her mother lived the last years in her long life in a nursing home overlooking the river, the same location where my grandfather died in 1969.

When we were in grade school, my classmate Tony and his family lived two blocks from Pennsylvania Avenue.  (They were from Germany, too.)  But in the middle of those years, their house was demolished when the highway was built through that area.

St. Hedwig’s Catholic Church was built for Polish Catholics.  Baseball’s Hall of Fame sportswriter Bob Broeg was born in the kitchen of a house just down the street from the church and school.  The school closed in 1970, the church closed in 2005, and the parish was dissolved after 101 years.  Here is a picture of the St. Hedwig class of 1962:

Busiek’s Market closed many years ago. Carl’s Market was demolished decades ago.

From the house on Pennsylvania Avenue, I walked ten blocks to and from St. Mary’s High School. There was no iron-link fence around the school buildings then, but there is now.

I remember getting home from school on afternoons in 1965-’66 and watching television’s Mike Douglas interview guests like Minnie Pearl and Adela Rogers St. Johns.

As I recall, it was in our English class in 1964-’65 that we read Kon-Tiki, The Red Pony, Microbe Hunters, and Darkness at Noon. At intervals throughout, our teacher, Fred Slade, would discuss how and why their authors wrote as they did and why such books were significant. No one in our class ever called him Fred. He was always Mr. Slade. Not a day went by when he did not wear white shirt, tie, and sport coat. He was neither a clown nor an authoritarian. He was a grown-up who understood and respected the proper use of words, and took his job seriously. For all those reasons, I liked him and respected him, an estimate that I did not apply to certain other teachers.

Next to that high school was St. Joseph’s Home for orphan boys. The man who married one of my cousins grew up in that Home and gave much credit to the nuns and priests who ran it for guiding him along a straight path by which he created a happy, productive life for himself and his family. St. Joseph’s Home had been a fixture in that neighborhood for decades. It closed in 1988 and the buildings were torn down in 2018.

St. Joseph’s Home for Boys. 1941. Third floor, room adjacent to the hallway leading to the dorm.

The walkway over the highway was demolished a few years ago, and the house near the steps is now abandoned and boarded up.

Johnny Rion and Skeets Yaney died many years ago.  St. Louis radio listeners lost Silvia when she moved to Florida.

I doubt that Elisabeth or my mother knew that each of them had walked aboard the Queen Mary, but they did…..25 years apart.  Elisabeth and her parents came to the U.S. from Europe in 1956 on the Queen Mary.  During a vacation in California in 1981, my mother and a friend walked aboard the Queen Mary when it was docked at Long Beach.

The last card I received from Elisabeth was in 2012, when she wrote that she had reached age 75 and that it seemed everything was becoming too much for her.  I know exactly how she felt, because I feel exactly that way now.

Dakota Park was two blocks from where we lived on Pennsylvania Avenue.  A hundred years earlier, it had been the proverbial hole in the ground, 20 feet below the neighborhood surrounding it.  Residents never went there because they were afraid of falling into it.  In 1907, ducks, geese, frogs, and cows could be seen there.  It was a base of operations for mosquitos.  A news article in 1910 described it as a sunken garden of tin cans and weeds.

Half a century later, it had been brought up to street level and made into an attractive little park with playground and shelter building.  I walked through it many times in the 1960s-‘70s, often as late as midnight with never a worry.  In 1987 my mother stopped there to take pictures of snow scenes.

In 2005, a woman was shot and killed in that park, and another was shot and killed there in 2011.  In 1996, a Vietnamese man (55) was shot and killed outside his apartment a few blocks from Pennsylvania Avenue by a black thug (22).  In 2000, people visiting relations in the next block of Pennsylvania Avenue had their car stolen at gunpoint by three thugs from East St. Louis.

In 2016, two people were shot dead in a house in the same block of Pennsylvania Avenue where we lived decades earlier, and a woman (“Janay”) was shot and killed at the corner of that block.  In 2020, a man was shot dead in that block.  In the next block, a woman was shot dead in 2015, and a man shot dead in 2018.  In 2014, a woman was shot dead two blocks away, and on Valentine’s Day in 2015, a man (“Antoine”) was shot and killed there.  In 2012, a woman was assaulted and robbed by two thugs one block from St. Mary’s High School, and in 2015, a man was shot and killed across from that school.  Also in 2012, a woman was kidnapped and raped by three thugs just down the street from St. Joseph’s Home.  In 2019, a man (“Davaun”) was shot dead in a car in the same block where the Chariton Restaurant had been, and a woman (“Aaliyah”) was shot and killed across the street from where St. Joseph’s Home had stood.

Even as I was composing this essay, a news item reported that a 13-year-old boy (“a child”, it said) was shot on Itaska Street in the same block where St. Hedwig’s Church had been.  Along that same street between 2001 and 2011, people began to have barbecues on their front lawns and to sit there on living room chairs and couches, thugs fired gunshots at police cars, and a thug holding an 8-inch butcher knife lunged toward a police officer who shot him in self-defense.  All of that on a street that was as peaceful and pleasant as I could have desired when I walked along it every morning in 1965 on my way to that high school.

Today, within a mile radius from where we lived on Pennsylvania Avenue, there are four 3-story buildings abandoned, vandalized, and boarded up.  I remember when they were clean, well-maintained, and occupied by civilized beings.

Such degeneracy in that place would have been unimaginable to us and our neighbors in 1965.  How did it get there half a century later?  I know the answer.  The Germans didn’t shoot anybody.  The Poles didn’t shoot anybody.  The Bohemians didn’t shoot anybody.  Many of them got up and moved away to avoid getting shot.  The robberies, burglaries, assaults, bank robberies, and murders were perpetrated by other people.  You figure it out.

In retrospect, I consider myself extremely fortunate to have lived in a decent neighborhood in a house owned by such good people in the last years of a decent era in American life.    

Photos from Saint Joseph Home for Boys at Facebook

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