ALAN writes:

In later years, after my father died, I met a woman who grew up on the same street two blocks down from my father’s boyhood home in St. Louis. Pauline told me how she remembered the small shops, dime stores, movie houses, a saddle shop, and a tobacco store that had been there in the 1940s-‘50s.

Photographs taken there as late as the 1950s show perfectly ordinary street scenes of people walking past stores and men putting up Christmas decorations on lampposts.  One little store after another stood side by side, block after block.  Some sold groceries, some were dinettes, some sold Red Goose Shoes, some offered Eagle Stamps or Top Value stamps with purchases.  The scenes do not suggest a “blighted” neighborhood—which was the official excuse for tearing down the whole neighborhood just a few years later.

In 2012, I wrote about the people who lived there.  [“Vanishing Americans (St. Louis Chapter)“, The Thinking Housewife, May 25, 2012]

Shortly afterward, Pauline sent me a card and wrote:

     “Just finished reading your essay again.  It is wonderful.  It brought back so many memories for me.  How I wish things were like they were back then.”

I am confident she meant the moral fabric of that neighborhood, upheld in those years both by the neighborhood churches and by the city government.  Her family lived in that area for a hundred years.

I miss my father terribly and I miss Pauline and others of her generation whose memories were the gossamer threads of connection to that time and place. People who lived there were incubated in down-to-earth common sense. There is no evidence that women wore tattoos or green or purple hair, or that men wore ponytails or earrings. I often think that theirs was the last generation who had grit.  They never whined, complained, or expected handouts. Making excuses was alien to their character. A nationwide welfare-feeding trough would have been unthinkable to them. They could not have imagined a frame of mind that would create such a monstrosity or try to justify it. They accommodated themselves to hardness; they absorbed it into their character and frame of mind, and they became better by doing so.  Because life was hard, they appreciated its occasional joys and pleasures more deeply.

Life for them was a series of concretes: Cold houses in winter, no air-cooling in summer, the routine chores of daily life, impromptu games of baseball on corner lots, walking everywhere—to a meat market or bakery or library or bath house, the weekly habit of window shopping on Saturday nights along stores on South Broadway, and deaths in the neighborhood when the deceased were laid out and visited in the family parlor.

“You might even say they courted death,” you wrote about the people in pre-1960 Chester [“Existentialism in Chester“, Aug. 25, 2021 ].

I might say it also about the people in the Kosciusko neighborhood. Children played on railroad tracks.  When they were young men, my father and some of his pals hopped aboard freight trains moving slowly between the factories.  At some point they hopped off, and sometimes got injured.  In those years people could walk all the way to the Mississippi River, across railroad tracks and past factories and industrial sites, which were not fenced off as they are today. Children played on giant sand piles next to the river, and at least one boy got so deep in the sand that his body was found hours afterward.

And as in Chester, so too in Kosciusko:  People made things in factories–soap, boxes, hinges, cabinets, pool tables, and industrial-strength canvas bags.

For such people, life was mostly unmediated. They confronted life head-on, not filtered through layer upon layer of propaganda promoted by the “mass communications industry” that makes Americans today imagine they are smarter than previous generations. They had no TV, no Internet, no “instant communication” devices to sap their attention and energy. Many families did not own a telephone. Those who did never played telephone tag. They had multiple daily newspapers, but “the news” did not dominate their lives. Radio and the neighborhood movie house were occasional enjoyments, never taken for granted.

All of which offered them little or no inclination to worry about abstractions promoted by the intelligentsia or the problems of people on the other side of the planet.  They had enough problems of their own.  They minded their own business and had no impulse to mind anyone else’s.

That was the Kosciusko neighborhood that Pauline remembered. To people like her and my father, it was “home”.

Today when shadows fall, Jane Froman’s 1950s’ recording of “Home (When Shadows Fall)” [1931] reminds me of evenings with my father 34 years ago when we sat in his apartment listening to the song and I knew he could remember scenes from 60 years previous.

“…..Night covers all,

And though fortune may forsake me,

Sweet dreams will ever take me home.”

Indeed, those dreams and memories are among my greatest riches.

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