ALAN writes:

I am here only because of the Big Band Era. If such music had not become popular in ballrooms and dance halls in American cities in the 1930s-‘40s, I might never have been.

One place where people could enjoy such music was the Casa-Loma Ballroom in south St. Louis. Young men and young women went there to meet each other. That is how and where my parents met.

My father preferred the music of the “sweet” bands over that of the “swing” bands.  That kind of music and that ballroom would hold a place in his memory for the rest of his life.

My father’s grandfather was born in Bavaria in 1837. When I was from four to six years old, my father would take me for walks on Saturday afternoons. We often walked past a building in south St. Louis called the Bavarian Inn. He knew all about it, but at my age I couldn’t make any sense out of it.  It was a restaurant and bar with a large fireplace, stained glass windows, and outdoor beer garden. It was “a landmark of gemutlichkeit” where customers enjoyed oom-pah-pah music and the Ducky Dance.

We also walked past a shop that made awnings and tents.  Across the alley from there was a vacant lot next to a house. It was there on that lot that we played a game of imagination wherein we would take turns naming good things to eat, and each of us would try to outdo the other.

My father in south St. Louis, about 1918

In the middle of another block was a small confectionary. My father would buy a soft drink for each of us, and I was permitted to reach down into a large cooler filled with ice and pull out a frosty glass bottle of grape or orange soda.

As did my mother, my father lived by a scale of moral values that is wholly unknown to generations born after the revolutionary 1960s.

Like many men in his generation, my father graduated from the School of Hard Knocks. Masculine authority and my father were the same thing. I am confident he would agree with the judgment that American life took a turn for the worse when men began to surrender that authority or, worse, apologize for it. Whether he or I had more disdain for Feminism would be a very close call.

Trendiness never held any appeal for my father. He never had any impulse to join any crowd. Having grown up at a time and in a place that lacked many material comforts, he acquired a deep appreciation for essential things that Americans in later years would take for granted. He liked quiet. He liked moderation and understatement. Above all, he valued self-control, self-restraint, and self-discipline. Anything in excess was alien to him. The 1960s did not fill him with glee. In all the fifty years that I knew him, I never heard a single profane word or expression.

My father was always available for companionship or doing things with me. In 1964 he helped me build a carrying case for our telescope.

Whenever I wanted to talk at length about ideas, he was always available to listen, usually in extended telephone conversations. He was the only person in my life with whom I could have serious conversations. He was never impatient. He knew how to debate ideas fairly. It was part of the iron moral code he learned as a boy and by which he lived all the rest of his life. He had great respect for Robert’s Rules of Order.

In 1965 and for years afterward, he and I talked for hours and hours about music, ethics, language, baseball, life and death, science, the night sky, education, law, crime and punishment. He attached great importance to the careful use of words. Of course I was young enough then or stupid enough to take all of that for granted. Our conversations were often contentious because I was young and by no means immune to the zeitgeist of the 1960s.  Often we argued and disagreed. But every now and then we found ourselves in agreement on some point. It was a long road to reach that point, but to me it was a wonderful feeling when we did.

He clipped and saved newspaper obituaries for dozens of people whose work he admired. They ranged from Charles Lindbergh to newspaper columnists Ernie Pyle, Hal Boyle, and Mike Royko; and from entertainers like Fred Astaire, Bing Crosby, and Pat O’Brien to William Powell, Kate Smith, and Jackie Gleason.

Of the 1930s’ movies made by Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, Lawrence Auster wrote:

“See these movies, and be lifted up by the happiness, joy, beauty, and perfection that America was once able to create.”    

     [Astaire and Rogers, View from the Right, August 6, 2007]

Those were also my father’s exact sentiments.

In 1962, actor Paul Petersen recorded a song entitled “My Dad.” It was an expression of gratitude and appreciation to his TV father in “The Donna Reed Show.” My boyhood pal Jeff and I heard it when it was played on AM radio that year and we laughed at it. We thought we were smart to do so.  Only after many years had gone by did I begin to remember “My Dad” and understand the moral debt suggested in the lyric that I was too stupid to understand at age 12. We were not smart; we were as wrong as wrong could be.

My father never forgot those who preceded us. On one of his few bookshelves, he kept the 1951 anthology Light from Many Lamps, a series of essays that offered “the modern reader in our troubled times the foundations from the past for happiness, more confident living today and hope for the future.” [Bold added]

After he retired, he spent many quiet hours at the central St. Louis Public Library looking for information about his ancestors in city directories going back to the 1880s.

He compiled 80 pages of notes and 135 pages of news clippings about the Casa-Loma Ballroom, where he had spent so many happy evenings from the 1930s through the 1980s. One day in 1990 he paid a last visit to that ballroom after it had closed, knowing that it was the end of an era for people who remembered it as fondly as he did. Afterward he wrote about that visit, “It is hard to say goodbye to an old friend….”

He taught me the game of baseball and the importance of fair play and good sportsmanship. Fifty-five years afterward, one of my grade school classmates remembered how my father acted as the pitcher or umpire in games we boys played on the diamonds at Marquette Park in the summers of 1958-’59.  My father would have been gratified to know that.

He liked listening to baseball on radio because it reminded him of the joy he and his brother and their friends had found in playing baseball on corner lots and in city parks in the 1920s-‘30s, and because one thing he and Cardinals’ announcer Jack Buck had in common was a dry sense of humor.  But he would have no interest in the spectacle of excess and bombast that professional baseball has become in recent decades.

In 1985 he sent me a greeting card showing a boy holding a baseball glove in his outstretched hand, as if to catch a star falling from the night sky depicted above him.  It was a perfect representation and remembrance of two things that had once brought us together:  Baseball in the 1950s and the night sky in the 1960s.

He had two brothers and two sisters and he watched all of them die.

What raucous evenings he and I shared when I visited him at his apartment in the 1980s-‘90s:  Reminiscing about his life and St. Louis history, quiet music, a glass of orange juice and chocolate chip cookies.  It couldn’t get any wilder than that, could it?

I write these words while seated on a park bench on a beautiful Sunday afternoon in May, the kind of day my father appreciated most.

The fallout from my parents’ divorce was bad enough. Each of us paid a high price for that, and there were terrible years and heartaches for all three of us.  But all the other things I named above were there, too — my father saw to that.  “Remember the good times,” he would say.  And for all of them, I owed him my eternal gratitude and love.

— Comments —

Patrick O’ Brien writes:

I thank Alan for the memories he shared with your readers. That was normal life, with room for virtue, a sane world. His mention of music from the Big Band Era struck a chord. For thirty years I played piano, music from the 20s, 30s, 40s, on two Sunday afternoons per month at a nearby retirement home; you don’t need to be Liberace to entertain the geriatric set (into which group I have moved now.) Women in their 80s are not given to noticing your mistakes, and they even know a lot of the words. So healthy for them and for me as well. Covid put an end to this, and because I won’t get the jab, it won’t happen again. And that sums up so much of our crazy world now: good things won’t happen again.

I am Alan’s age, and now looking back I recognize what we had and how perverse we are now.

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