A customer at Behrmann’s Tavern in Dutchtown, St. Louis calmly smoked a cigarette while a gunman pointed his weapon at him during an armed robbery last week.

ALAN writes:

One night last week, a thug with a gun robbed customers in Behrmann’s Tavern in south St. Louis. In 2005, a newspaper reporter described the tavern as “a quintessential corner bar across from St. Anthony of Padua Church in the heart of Dutchtown.” Quite right.  It has been there since 1933. It was there when my classmates and I crossed that intersection every day during our school years more than half a century ago. In those years, a Catholic supplies store was next to the tavern, followed by a shoe repair shop, a bicycle shop, a Post Office, and a barber shop. Catholic nuns who taught in the school lived across the street.

For 25 years, customers in the tavern were entertained by a woman pianist who played classic old songs like “Paper Doll” and “It Had to Be You.”

The tavern was pictured in a newspaper article in 2002, in which the writer claimed the area “offers a touch of Mayberry,” referring to the town  in “The Andy Griffith Show” from the 1960s. As soon as I read the article, I knew the writer was an idiot.

The article quoted owners of small businesses near the tavern as saying they “feel safe” walking in that neighborhood.

That was a fine example of kindergarten “journalism”:  Tell readers how people “feel;” don’t tell them the facts; don’t print the crime statistics; don’t print a comparison of crime statistics from that neighborhood from one year to the next and one decade to the next.

The writer quoted one resident as saying, “There’s a lot of architecture here, old buildings with good architecture. It’s like a little Mayberry…”

Are you laughing as hard as I did when I read that line? You should be. Now we know that the fictional town of Mayberry had an extremely low crime rate. Selective quotation by this journalist led readers to think that “a touch of Mayberry” could be seen even in a real-life neighborhood that—unlike Mayberry—had been made “inclusive, diverse, and multicultural” by force of law. That is what he and the people who paid him to write such things wanted their readers to believe. But was it true? Let’s weigh and consider that idea:

Along the street where that tavern stands, between the years 1994 and 2002, newcomers to that neighborhood robbed a man (67), robbed a woman (62) of her purse in daylight, robbed a woman (88) of her coin purse, robbed a service station, robbed a Post Office, beat and killed a woman (74) in her apartment one block from the church, robbed a store, robbed another woman (90) of her purse in daylight, robbed another woman (79) of her money in daylight, robbed another woman (77) of her purse in daylight, tied up a woman (20) in her apartment, near the church, beat her, and then shot her in the head and back after she complained about loud music [probably not Bach or Mozart]; beat a girl (8) to death for not doing her homework properly, stole a collection box in that church, robbed a bank twice (right across from the tavern), and stabbed a man in front of the church’s parochial school.

Between 2003 and 2019, they robbed that bank again—twice, went to sleep in a dumpster, robbed another bank (for a little variety) three blocks away, shot a man (21) walking through an alley at half-past noon, shot a man working on his car, threw rocks at cars parked along that street, robbed a drug store, robbed the bank again, stole the church’s food pantry van, killed a man near the church, opened a “Halal Grocery” on that street, two blocks from the church, and then, when arrested and charged, pleaded guilty in federal court of defrauding the government of $200,000 in food stamp benefits;

…..killed a man while speeding through the intersection right outside that tavern, attacked and beat a man (89) in an alley two blocks from there (a 50-year resident of that area and World War II veteran who survived that war but was no longer safe on the streets of his own neighborhood); tried to rob a man (64) riding a bicycle and then shot him in the back when he resisted, shattered a window in a drug store, threw rocks through a window in a Post Office and then set it on fire, placed teddy bears as a “memorial” at a spot one block from the church where a thug (23) was killed by police after he pointed a gun at them, shot and killed a man at 2:20 p.m., shot a man at 4 a.m.;

…..robbed the bank again and shot at a “security guard” [sic], who promptly fled, shot two men (17, 18) at 5 p.m., shot a man multiple times in mid-afternoon near the building that was once the church’s parochial school but is now a “multicultural school,” took an automobile from a woman (81) in mid-afternoon, and fired multiple gunshots into a home just a few doors away from where one of my classmates lived in 1960.

The bank officers got so tired of seeing robbers walk in that they closed the bank—a measure of how effective “law enforcement” is in St. Louis.

In July 2019, a man was found shot to death in a house one block from the church.  A few weeks ago a woman wrote that she was moving into that neighborhood but now regretted it because a thief broke a window and door and stole her child’s clothing;  “…I called the police and was told after an hour of waiting they had no officers available,” she wrote.

A woman who bought a house there after she graduated from college wrote that crime and murder rates kept rising each year.  Her mother (81) was standing at an intersection two blocks from the church when she was threatened by an 8-year-old demanding bus fare or else.

Also this past week, another thug shot and killed two women in a house in the same block as the tavern.

Now the question is: Do those things remind you of Mayberry? Are those the kinds of things Andy and Barney had to deal with in Mayberry? Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha!

Did people in Mayberry speak different languages? Did they speak Ebonics? Were they afraid to walk the streets? Did they put “security cameras” in their churches and above their streets? Did their stores have bars on doors and windows? Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha!

In 2013, local promoters talked up the idea of “new housing” and “new apartments” as a means to improve the Dutchtown neighborhood, which by then had become notorious for its high crime rate—the opposite of Mayberry.

Now wait just a minute: Did you catch that switcheroo? Why were promoters now pushing “new buildings” and “new apartments” to make that neighborhood more livable when only ten years earlier that journalist told us that its “old architecture” made it “like a little Mayberry”?  Wasn’t that old architecture doing its job anymore?

Don’t bother to look for any sense in what such people say.  Observe instead that such men are willfully blind or morally obtuse or both.  They are feminized, yes.  But they are worse than feminized (assuming that to be possible).  They are determined not to see or say what is in plain sight:  That the degradation of that neighborhood was caused primarily by Blacks with a few young White anarchists contributing their part.

There was a lot of good architecture in Detroit, too, but that did not stop criminals and degenerates from doing what they do best.

There was a lot of good architecture in North St. Louis, but today it looks like Germany after World War II. Why is that? Who made it that way? Who destroyed or neglected all that architecture? Whose criminality and degeneracy—wholly unchecked by “The Law”—prompted decent residents to pack up and move away?  Courageous “journalists” and promoters deal with such questions by ignoring them.

What made that neighborhood what it was in 1960—the year “The Andy Griffith Show” began? A moral code. What made the town of Mayberry what it was?  A moral code.  What made the Dutchtown neighborhood what it is today?  Hatred of that moral code.  Our old neighborhood was made into what it is today by ethnic cleansing imposed upon it by the police power of the State.

Mayberry was a safe and orderly town because it was built by white men for themselves and other white men and their families.  They did not build it to “celebrate diversity,” “redistribute the wealth,” or accommodate groups of aliens with incompatible ways of living.

The mood and texture in the stories in “The Andy Griffith Show” pointed upward, not down into a sewer of unearned guilt. Only one culture was depicted in Mayberry: White American culture. Only one culture was present in the Dutchtown of old: White American culture. There was no “multiculturalism” in Mayberry because the men who wrote those scripts in the early 1960s were not foolish enough to imagine such a thing is possible, let alone desirable.

The stories were shown in black and white. The tempo was slow. The characters were well-mannered and restrained. One thing they valued highly was attachment to place:  They were loyal to home, family, church, town, and nation. There was no pampered class in Mayberry.

The stories took place in the early 1960s, a time long before Americans would agree to sit around and say nothing when their own heritage was being attacked:  Observe the framed portraits of American heroes and historic scenes that hang on the wall in the background in the homes and the courthouse in Mayberry in certain episodes.

There was masculine authority in Mayberry—not feminist claptrap.  The men in Mayberry wore that authority proudly—which is why they were men, not mice.  They were not “swamped in a soft pink jello,” as are the feminized men we see everywhere in American life today.  [The phrase is Taylor Caldwell’s.  She used it to characterize the feminization of American men in the 1960s.  See her autobiography, On Growing Up Tough, Devin-Adair, 1971, p. 98.  She was right.]

The humor was often understated.  There was never even a remote hint of profanity.  There was no trace of what Professor Thomas Bertonneau has called “the comedy of resentment,” which is so popular today and which includes hatred of the good for being the good and sympathy for degenerates for being degenerates.

“The Andy Griffith Show” was not written for children, let alone for the most pampered generation of adolescents in American history.  It was written for people who worked for an honest living and did not expect the moon and the stars when they relaxed at home in the evening. They were delighted with what “The Andy Griffith Show” gave them.  Episodes had happy endings, leaving viewers feeling uplifted. It was 30 minutes of clean humor and decent characters acting within a moral framework of longstanding rules and standards.

I am not and never was a fanatical admirer of “The Andy Griffith Show.” But I saw enough episodes to know that they ranged from the silly to the excellent and that the excellent were very enjoyable indeed. My impression is that the early seasons were by far the best, and that its magic dwindled when actor Don Knotts left the cast. Good writing and understatement made some episodes outstanding.  The background music was often wonderful; without that music, such episodes would lose much of their charm.  As examples, I would cite “Andy’s English Valet” from 1963 and “Man in a Hurry” from 1964.

And don’t tell me that Mayberry was “just a fantasy” whereas the Dutchtown neighborhood is “real.” That is nonsense.  Nothing could be more genuine than the sense of life that Andy and Barney represented and carried with them in that series—as genuine and true-to-life as the confidence, trust, authority, decency, and honor that we saw portrayed in men, women, and families in the Dutchtown neighborhood in the years when we attended school there.  All that they did and said and how they did and said it, and all that they hoped and dreamed and aimed for took place within that longstanding moral framework. To oppose or overturn that framework would not have occurred to those good people in our neighborhood any more than it would have occurred to the good residents of Mayberry.

How does that stack up against the crimes and lawlessness listed above, perpetrated by aliens to that neighborhood and to that moral framework?

If Dutchtown “offers a touch of Mayberry,” then why do people who move there say afterward they made a mistake? Why do people who once gave walking tours along the street right outside that tavern no longer do that? Would they hesitate to lead a walking tour in Mayberry?

It seems that neither that old architecture nor those new houses are making Dutchtown more civilized. Only feminized White men could be stupid enough to imagine such a thing.

The degradation of that neighborhood was not an act of nature or an act of God. It was therefore wholly avoidable. That it was not opposed and prevented is a measure of the depravity and spinelessness of those feminized white men.

What is absurdly called “The Law” in St. Louis protects the decent residents of Dutchtown the way that dozens of Dallas police officers “protected” Lee Oswald in the last minutes of his life. If they expect better from a city with a feminist mayor, a feminist prosecuting attorney, legions of house-tamed, feminized boy-men, and courts that compete to set new standards in leniency, they will be waiting a long, long time.

Please follow and like us: