An Island of Memories
October 29, 2024
ALAN writes:
Ten years ago, I wrote about the fifty-year reunion of my eighth-grade parochial school class.(TTH, Nov. 4, 2014)
Last month I attended the sixty-year reunion. Fewer classmates were there, but it was a glorious feeling once again to be among the living; to be among people who can see straight, think straight, and talk straight. For one afternoon, we lived on an island of memories, laughter, animated conversations, and once-upon-a-time anecdotes. We shared reminiscences of life at St. Anthony of Padua grade school and high school and the neighborhood around it in the years 1956-’68. Both schools closed years ago because the kind of people who ran them and the parish and that neighborhood moved away in later years because they preferred to go on living.
We talked about the streetcars on Meramec Street and the Chariton Restaurant and Al Smith’s Restaurant, each a landmark for decades in that predominantly German neighborhood; about plays and other events that were held in the high school auditorium; and about teachers whom some of us remembered from pictures the parish included in a booklet it published in 1963, and Catholic nuns who were 125 years old (or so it seemed in those years to some of us children).
The talk ranged from an old school building torn down in the 1960s, to picnic day parades and Corpus Christi Processions throughout the neighborhood; from TV Westerns trading cards in 1958 to how boys played games with baseball cards on window ledges of their old school building; and from neighborhood stores like Kristof’s Market, Belko Drugs, and the St. Louis Bake Shop, to memories of Augustinian Academy preparatory school for boys and the night in 1973 when it burned and when residents came out of their homes and lined the sidewalks to witness the final hours of that century-old college building. (My mother and I were among them.)
In 1961, there were more than 135 bakeries in St. Louis. One classmate remembered how she stopped on so many mornings in Sobery’s Bakery on Grand Avenue during her 14-block walk to school that one day they offered her a job and she accepted it. In later years, she taught in several public schools in St. Louis and talked of how she and some colleagues tried to maintain high standards; they were able to do so for most of her teaching career. But she has no illusions about the lowering of standards today and the degree to which phones and screens diminish children’s ability to learn the things that she and all the rest of us learned quite well without such gadgets.
(The Board of Education’s journal published the articles “Moral and Spiritual Values in the St. Louis Public Schools” in 1954 and “Respect for Public Property” in 1959, in which they argued in favor of teaching honesty, loyalty, truthfulness, reverence, responsibility, respect for property rights and respect for elders. It is especially important to keep those articles in mind while traveling through St. Louis today and observing the countless buildings, public and private, that vandals are allowed to deface while the liars who call themselves “The Law” earn their pay by sleeping.)
One point we all agreed upon was the integrity of the neighborhood where we grew up, played, and walked to and from school, made possible by a strong Catholic parish, large families, and a long-standing moral code that was enforced rigorously and unapologetically by the people who filled our homes, parish, and neighborhood. They were known as “The Scrubby Dutch of South St. Louis”. We were fortunate to grow up in such a setting between the aftermath of World War II and the cultural dislocations that would accelerate in the late 1960s. We were even more fortunate to grow up among people who could think straight and speak plainly. Moral clarity and moral confidence were uppermost in their code of ethics.
Some of us remembered the portraits of students that our school took each year and then gave us wallet-size duplicates to share with family or trade with classmates. Some women said they kept and still have those wallet-size photos. But I was too witless to do that. (I overheard some people say, “He was too witless, period”.)
We talked about report cards, who lived where during our school years, Dad’s Cookie Company, Merb’s Candy store, Nettie’s Flower Shop and Ben Franklin dime store, both within a radius of one block from St. Anthony’s Hospital, where some of us were born, about the carefree days of baseball and soccer at Marquette Park, and the low stone wall at one end of that park where it was rumored that birdwatchers often spotted lovebirds.
We talked about the Sears department store, where one classmate’s mother worked, and how we remembered its interior layout and escalators. It was such a warm and friendly place, within walking distance from where many of us lived. It had merchandise on three floors. I remember going into Sears during our grade school years to buy birthday or Christmas presents for my mother. For many of us, those years remain lodged in memory alongside TV shows like “Lassie”, “The Rifleman”, and “Leave It To Beaver”.
A few blocks down the street was Cleveland Drugs on the ground floor of a three-story apartment building, across from Emil Frei Art Glass company, who made the stained glass windows for St. Anthony of Padua Church. I stopped there often to browse among the new magazines. It was always as clean and orderly as could be desired. Today the building is vacant and collapsing.
We also remembered the happy times we enjoyed at the wonderful old Western Bowl restaurant and bowling lanes. We saw it come and we saw it go. It opened in 1962 in an area that was still farmland in the 1940s and within sight from the house where one of my great-aunts lived and only a few blocks from the tall building where Hollywood actor Vincent Price’s father ran his National Candy Company in the 1930s-’40s. Opening day ceremonies featured cowgirls and a stagecoach ride through the neighborhood. The usual procedure upon arriving there was to tie up our horse at the porch railing and then walk into a carpeted hallway with cigarette vending machines on the left as we made our way toward the bowling lanes and the Chuck Wagon restaurant in a setting of dark-wooded, Old West-style decor. It was a great success and thrived with teams of bowlers, parties, and diners for more than forty years. It closed nearly twenty years ago, another victim of a neighborhood that had been clean and orderly for decades but was then undone by radical cultural changes and degradation.
The dancing team “4 Girls 4”, consisting of Annie, Christine, Lee, and Mary, provided the closing act at the reunion and received glowing reviews.
So we extend a Big Thank You to our classmates, our schoolmates, those who have worked to arrange such reunions, and those without whom such reunions would not mean anything and who live always in our memory: Our parents, families, teachers, nuns, priests, and residents of that neighborhood. It was they and their predecessors who settled and built that neighborhood.
“Deep in December, it’s nice to remember...” that place, those years, and that setting, the likes of which we will never see again.
— Comments —
George Weinbaum writes:
It’s so bad, I see college graduates who can’t work with fractions and percentages. They can’t read a map. They know no history. They don’t even know the US and USSR were allies in WWII. They couldn’t have passed my fifth grade math or history classes.
It’s hopeless. I give up.
Thanks for the Thinking Housewife.
