The reading room at the St. Louis Public Library

[Originally posted May 23, 2014]

ALAN writes:

Culture lovers will be pleased to learn that this week is “Hip-Hop Appreciation Week” at the central St. Louis Public Library.  This is the same library about which I wrote about four years ago and which re-opened two years ago after a big, expensive renovation.

An article afterward noted that visitors to the renovated building ooh-ed and aah-ed.  This is an example of what you once called “the superstitious veneration of technology.” Everything about the renovated building screams New, Now, High-Tech, The Latest, Cutting-Edge Movies and Music. If I were a cynic (which I am), I might ask:  Do those things make Shakespeare better?  Do they improve Aristotle, Milton, Aquinas, Burke, Franklin, Jefferson, Bronte, Browning, Carlyle, Scott, Dickens and Twain? Are language, philosophy, religion, history, and science made better by being shelved amid all that bright, shiny, high-tech décor?

The building is situated between a Christian home for vagrants and a Christian church that caters to them.  People who live downtown are sick and tired of the vagrants and want them out of the area.  One morning last week one of the vagrants knifed and killed another on a sidewalk between the library and the church.

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ALAN writes:

It is a challenge to keep up with the pace of progress in St. Louis:

Less than 24 hours before you posted my essay on St. Louis last Saturday, another black male was shot multiple times and killed by a black male on the same street and two blocks away from where a black male spent his last moments eleven days earlier.

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ALAN writes:

 A Progress Report from St. Louis

December, 2014:  Black female, 16, shot and killed by black thug, 21, two blocks from the Catholic high school that I attended in 1964.

December, 2014:  Black thug smashes windows at “Nu Fashion Beauty” store to steal “hair extensions”.  This was a repeat performance:  One day in 2006, the two doors and large glass windows at that store were completely boarded up.

This is called “breaking down barriers,” a cultural trend vigorously promoted by Liberals, Progressives, Anarchists, Feminists, Do-Gooders, and the Socialists and Communists who call themselves “Catholics.” The point of “breaking down barriers” is to get what you want.  Blacks understand this perfectly.  That is why they “break down barriers” in the form of inconvenient windows at “Nu Fashion Beauty” and other beauty supply stores, shoe stores, and electronic entertainment stores throughout St. Louis. It is a new and improved way of shopping.

Quintessential black culture:  A store owned and run by blacks that caters to blacks is targeted for theft repeatedly by blacks.  How does that improve my old neighborhood? I want to know.    Read More »

WHITE suburbanites react to the execution of a college student during a purse snatching with …. tears.

ALAN writes:

A traditional purpose of libraries was to educate and elevate, not celebrate contempt for law and morality. Six months ago, I wrote about a painting that hangs in the St. Louis Public Library and shows white men dressed respectably and sitting at a table reading. That painting must now share wall space with an “art exhibition” called “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot: Artists Respond,“ inspired by the events surrounding the shooting of Michael Brown by Police Officer Darren Wilson.

This is not art for the sake of art. It is not art at all. It is Communist-inspired propaganda for the grievance industry and those who run it:  Feminists, Marxist intellectuals, Fabian change agents, Communist planners, and black race agitators, among others.

Take it from former American Communist Party chairman William Z. Foster: “There must be a clear understanding that art is a weapon in the class struggle…a very potent one.”  It is a cardinal rule of Communist agit-prop never to let any opportunity go by to beat up on productive, law-abiding white men.

A police officer is brutally attacked by a thug and library directors respond by staging a Communist propaganda exhibit aimed at promoting sympathy for the thug or for loudmouth “protesters” who claim they are “seeking justice.” Read More »

ALAN writes:

Last month I attended the 50-year reunion of my eighth-grade class from 1964. It was organized by a few dedicated classmates and took place in a lovely park on a beautiful autumn day. Fifty years had gone by since I had seen or spoken with any of those classmates. For four hours that afternoon, I thought I had died and gone to heaven.

We attended a Catholic school in south St. Louis. That parish and the neighborhood around it were a decent and often wonderful place to live, play, grow up, and attend church and school. Our class included 80 to 90 children.  Not nearly that many came to the reunion. Some live in other states. A few have died. Read More »

An artist’s rendering of St. Louis Public Library in less enlightened times.

ALAN writes:

Readers who value good books will be delighted to learn that the St. Louis Public Library now makes the following titles available to its patrons (Warning: Indecent language):

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ALAN writes:

Four months ago I wrote about an 11-year-old black boy in St. Louis who was hit and killed by a bullet fired through a window by some black thug. But there was no looting, vandalism, or “protest marches” afterward – because his death gave blacks no opportunity to beat up on white men.

In the 1950s, one of my aunts lived in Ferguson, Missouri. My father took me there to visit her, and her young son and I played in their back yard.  Never a thought of lawlessness or vandalism.  If there had been, she and her husband would not have lived there.

Within the past few decades in St. Louis and St. Louis County, black men:

— Kidnapped a white woman and threw her off a bridge into the Mississippi River, where she died
— When driving while drunk, struck and killed a white woman motorist
— Kidnapped, raped, and shot two young white women, killing one
— Shot and killed a 60-year-old Korean woman cashier in a robbery
— Beat and strangled a 20-year-old white woman Read More »

RESIDENTS of Ferguson, Missouri, near St. Louis, held vigils and protests Sunday in response to the fatal police shooting of an unarmed black teenager, Michael Brown, 18. Word of the shooting quickly spread on Saturday via text-messaging. Rioting also broke out yesterday. Stores were looted, one was set on fire and bullets were fired at a police helicopter. According to police accounts, Brown was shot after he and a friend had a physical confrontation with a police officer in which Brown attempted to take the officer’s gun. Brown had recently graduated from high school and was planning to attend college in a few days. Benjamin Crump, the lawyer who represented Trayvon Martin’s family, has been retained by Brown’s family.

Leslie McSpadden, Brown’s mother

The St. Louis Post Dispatch reports:

A Post-Dispatch photographer on the scene moments earlier saw broken glass and people rushing into the store, with someone yelling, “Everything’s free at the QuikTrip!” Read More »

HERE is opening day in 1960 at Candlestick Park in San Francisco. Notice the attire of the fans. People don’t dress this well to go to church today.

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From the 1951 movie Angels in the Outfield

ALAN writes:

For your readers who enjoy movies from pre-Revolutionary times (i.e., before the 1960s), I would like to recommend one made by MGM in 1951. Angels in the Outfield is a black-and-white movie about the manager of a baseball team and an orphan. It is not primarily about baseball but about good and evil, self-control and its absence. It is not a great movie. It does not pretend to be. But it is charming and thoroughly satisfying to anyone who remembers American culture and baseball in the 1950s.

The story involves the influence of the orphan and a newspaper reporter on the manager and his bad habits.  It features excellent performances by Paul Douglas as the manager, Janet Leigh as the reporter, Donna Corcoran as the eight-year-old orphan, and Keenan Wynn as an obnoxious sports announcer.  Bing Crosby, Joe DiMaggio, Ty Cobb, and songwriter Harry Ruby appear as themselves in brief scenes.

The movie is a time capsule from 1951. There is no “diversity” or “multiculturalism.” There are no “messages.” There is a degree of orderliness in the behavior of the people in this movie that was common in 1951 and for some years after but would be astonishing to see in any public place today.  Shakespeare is quoted on a baseball field.  We get to see streetcars and scenes on the streets of Pittsburgh, where parts of the movie were filmed.  Baseball teams traveled by train, and one scene takes place in a dining car.

Inside a Catholic orphanage we see immaculate rooms, hallways, wooden staircases, and the quiet dignity that Catholic nuns enforced.  All those scenes are true to life:  That moral code and orderliness were always there in the red-brick parochial school building I attended in the 1950s and in other such places.

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Evangelical Deaconess Home and Hospital in 1930

ALAN writes:

On an overcast day in St. Louis in November 2011, I was walking near the huge building that was once the Evangelical Deaconess Home and Hospital. It stood on a high point of land across from Forest Park in the western end of St. Louis.

It struck me as odd that there were no cars in the parking lots, no sign of life around the seven-story main building, and no lights visible in any of its windows. Only then did it occur to me that the hospital was closed permanently. It was rather a stunning realization.

During my walk, I met a security guard: A young white woman. (This fact alone is proof of a cultural revolution.)  She seemed intelligent and conscientious. At that time, the future of the building was uncertain. We talked for about ten minutes. I told her some of my memories of the hospital.  She said there were still books and paintings and files of papers in the building.

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ALAN writes:

ALAN writes:

Apropos your discussion of city life (here and here), I vote in favor of neighborhood taverns—the old-fashioned kind that Mike Royko wrote about, not the silly, pretentious “sports bars” now favored by trendies.

In the 1940s-‘50s, every neighborhood in St. Louis had a dozen or more corner taverns. My grandfather would testify to that, since he worked in one and was a regular patron at others.

On Friday nights in the 1950s, he, my mother, aunts and uncles and I walked over to the Golden Oak Bar, a typical south St. Louis corner tavern in a red-brick building with a long bar on one side, tables, and a jukebox.  Read More »

The Stix Baer and Fuller Department Store in St. Louis in 1959

ALAN writes:

Speaking of savages:

One night last week, a thug fired eight to ten gunshots through a window of a house in south St. Louis.  An 11-year-old boy (black) was struck and killed, though he was not the intended victim.  The response by “The Law” and the “news media” was the standard mix of evasions, omissions, and ready-made phrases.

The context for that is this: That house is in an area that was occupied fifty years ago only by white men and families. I know, because I was there and walked through that area many times.  A miniature golf course was just down the street. I had cousins who lived a few blocks away. In 1962, I had friends who lived one block away.  They and I walked throughout that neighborhood that summer as we compared the merits of current hit songs by Pat Boone, Connie Francis, and Jimmy Dean. My boyhood doctor’s office was two blocks away.  The Little Sisters of the Poor were three blocks away and had been there since 1902.

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WILL G. writes:

Here is a picture of the mayor of St. Louis, Francis Slay, kissing the ring of a local drag queen at the Pride Parade. A new tradition perhaps? What will it mean if a mayor doesn’t kiss the ring in the future?

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The entrance of the Railway Exchange Building in St. Louis. It once housed the Famous-Barr department store

ALAN writes:

The last remaining department store in downtown St. Louis has announced it will close this summer.

That came as no surprise to me. Only the willfully blind could imagine downtown is not dying. A man who opened a restaurant downtown in 1968 was calling it “done-town” by the time he retired in 2005. I knew he was right because I, too, had watched it decline, year after year.

The department store is Macy’s but it was known for most of its life as Famous-Barr, a May Company store with ten floors of merchandise in a beautiful building called the Railway Exchange Building in the heart of downtown. One of my uncles worked there in the Katy Railroad office from the 1920s to the 1950s.

How well I remember walking into the store through its brass revolving doors and riding the escalators to the upper floors. My father and I spent many hours browsing in the large book department on the sixth floor. Mannequins in a display window of the soon-to-close department store now wear backward baseball caps – a splendid example of trickle-up stupidity that Diana West could include in an updated edition of The Death of The Grown-Up. It symbolizes what happened between 1959 and now: A department store run by grown-ups was surrendered to people who take their cues from adolescents.

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ALAN writes:

I came across a news article in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch recently about a school in St. Louis County. It was headlined, “Normandy High: The most dangerous school in the area.”

The article describes intimidation, fights, guns, pepper spray, and students with names like “Daija’h,” “Ta’Darrian,” “Damontae,” “Marquez,” and “Tamia.” The article states:

In 2012, the school reported 285 discipline incidents — such as assaults, drugs and weapons — that resulted in out-of-school suspension, a rate of more than one for every four students, the highest among high schools in the region.

A Kansas City school, the Central Academy of Academic Excellence, was the only school in the state to report a higher level of sheer bedlam and lawlessness. The article describes the standard excuse-making and excuse-validating by those who run Normandy High. It is the latter that make the former possible.

Why did all this command my attention? Because a good friend graduated from that same high school many years ago. Yet she never told me of having to dodge bullets or pepper spray during her school years.  Read More »