JAMES H. writes:

I’ve been meaning to write in response to the post about St. Elizabeth’s Academy which will be closing here in St. Louis.  My great aunt taught there her entire life. She was born in Centralia Illinois at the turn of the century.  She and my grandmother worked in their father’s drug store in Centralia and when she was old enough, she left and joined the Sister’s of the Most Precious Blood convent and then became a teacher at St. Elizabeth’s Academy.  I’m attaching a picture of my sister, Sister Veronica (my great-aunt) and me from 1955 – boy was that a different world! Read More »

 ALAN writes:

The second-oldest Catholic high school in St. Louis announced last week that it will close this year because of operating expenses and declining enrollment.  St. Elizabeth Academy for girls opened in 1882.  Today it has only 133 pupils.

There are still many decent people and beautiful old houses in the neighborhood around St. Elizabeth Academy. But that neighborhood is now poisoned (“enriched” in Orwellian Newspeak) by the presence of rappers, freelance thugs, arsonists, robbers, and militant agitators for queers.  None of them or anyone equivalent to them was there 50 years ago.

I suggest that they are the reasons for the declining enrollment that is causing St. Elizabeth Academy to go out of business.

Read More »

ALAN writes:

I have written previously about what “diversity” mongers have done to the once-peaceful “Dutchtown” neighborhood in south St. Louis. Here is their latest achievement:

To get the New Year off to a gala start, a Negro male, 33, shot and killed one man and injured another when they tried to stop his girlfriend from stealing a package of Chips Ahoy cookies in Sam’s Beauty Queen shop on the main street in Dutchtown on the night of Jan. 3. Read More »

ALAN writes:

Last January, in a post titled “A Tale of One High School,” I wrote about the decline of the neighborhood around Cleveland High School in St. Louis, the story of a “dead school in a decadent city.”

Here is a brief update:

Read More »

ALAN writes:

If my father had ever been asked to name the worst thing about American culture that he had witnessed during the second half of his life, I am confident he would have said:  The surrender of authority by American white men.  To yield their authority, he would say, is as good as yielding their families, neighborhoods, schools, cities, laws, borders, the armed forces, and national sovereignty.

It was common years ago to hear the words “no-nonsense man” applied to someone who was obviously serious about doing his job and meeting his responsibilities. How often have you heard that expression in recent years? Seldom or never? That is because there are so few American men today who fit that description. The no-nonsense men have been superseded by the Nonsense Men. In 1966 The Beatles sang about the “Nowhere Man.” Today they could sing about the “Nonsense Man:” The soft, feminized, acquiescent, “flexible,” adolescent-witted boy-man, visible today in every public place and replete with manners, clothing, and vocabulary to match. Tribes of such boy-men are what Americans got when American white men agreed to surrender their authority. Read More »

THE cold-blooded murder of Megan Boken, a 23-year-old graduate of the University of St. Louis who was gunned down in broad daylight last Saturday afternoon by an 18-year-old during an alleged robbery, is a stark example of how Americans react to a death of this kind. Family and friends have wept and prayed on Facebook. They have spoken of her many wonderful qualities. They have circled trees outside Megan’s former high school with blue ribbons. They have anxiously awaited the arrest of her assailants and expressed profuse gratitude to the police when two black men were charged.

But they have voiced no outrage. Megan could have been killed by a bolt of lightening, so anodyne is the reaction to her death. The blue ribbons signify nothing more than sadness. They do not make any demands. They are not a call for collective action on behalf of the many Megan Bokens who have been killed by merciless black gunmen in the last 50 years or the many more who are yet to be murdered. The ribbons are pure sentiment.

Megan Boken is one more sacrificial victim on the altar of white remorse and self-hatred.

A commenter at VFR, Robert B., writes: Read More »

ALAN writes:

The parish in whose church I was an altar boy at Sunday Mass, weekday Masses, and Christmas Midnight Mass half a century ago is about to mark its 150th anniversary. St. Anthony of Padua parish was founded in south St. Louis in 1863 by 14 white men. For many decades afterward, sermons could be heard there in English and in German. Its large and beautiful church was filled with respectably-dressed parishioners on Sunday mornings in the 1950s – with no air-conditioning.

There was no “diversity” in the parish or the neighborhood around it for years afterward. But there is today: In strict compliance with leftist dogma, the parish now celebrates the “multicultural neighborhood”around it. Read More »

JAMES H. writes:

My father grew up in south St. Louis. He’s 91. These old south St. Louis neighborhoods are exactly as Alan writes. They nurtured the soul and gave sustenance to the individual as part of a community and a people. There was a connectedness that has long since been lost. But then this was by design. For when men realize that they are part of a family, a community, a people and a nation of shared ethnicity, historical experience, values, religion and culture they grow more completely human. They are energized and strengthened by the whole rather than alienated and disconnected. Read More »

ALAN writes:

On a recent Sunday afternoon, I had the most incredible experience: I sat in a roomful of 50 men and women who had lunch, talked, reminisced, and enjoyed themselves for four hours. The incredible part was that they did all that without cell phones, without liquor, without vulgar language, without loud “music,” without blaring TV screens, and without wrecking the place. All of them are white. All of them are decent and disciplined. They are, therefore, atypical 21st-century Americans. They grew up in the 1930s, ‘40s, and ‘50s. They are Old School. They are not “cool” or trendy; if they were, I would have known I had walked into the wrong room.

The occasion was a reunion of people who attended schools in the neighborhood in south St. Louis where my father lived as a boy. He organized the first such reunion in 1988. One man was so grateful for the reunions that he sent my father a four-page handwritten letter describing his memories of schoolmates in the 1920s. Read More »

ALAN writes:

One of the most remarkable characteristics of modern Americans is their propensity to neglect the local and concrete while fawning over the distant, alien, and abstract.

Recently in St. Louis, thugs used spray paint to deface buildings and a hundred-year-old monument in a city park. The reaction was predictable: The pathetic weakness of “law enforcement” was nicely conveyed in a newspaper photo of two police officers (Christine and Kyle) gaping at spray paint on the wall of one park building. The headline read: “St. Louis park hit by pro-Occupy graffiti.”                         

This headline illustrates the decadence of modern journalism: Read More »

ALAN writes:

This is the story of a dead school in a decadent city.

Grover Cleveland High School was opened in St. Louis in 1915 in a building as massive and impressive as a castle. It was designed by renowned architect William B. Ittner. Today it stands closed and abandoned, a victim of decades of neglect and suicidal public policies.

My boyhood best friend’s family lived in a house just across the street from Cleveland High School. In the summers of 1958-’63, he and I roamed at boyish whim throughout that neighborhood, walking through city parks and past barber shops, corner markets, bakeries, confectionaries, and shoe repair shops, visiting other classmates, trading baseball cards, playing baseball, buying candy or ice cream in the dime stores and drug stores, and listening to Bobby Vee, Connie Francis, Neil Sedaka, Shelley Fabares, and Bobby Vinton on our plastic, pocket-size transistor radios – all without a fear in the world. No one ever bothered us. It was a pleasant neighborhood in which to play, attend school, and be an altar boy at morning Mass and a patrol boy after classes. 

Four photographs taken circa 1916 show dozens of people assembled on a bright, sunny morning in front of a house one block from Cleveland High School. They are taking part in a Catholic parish’s annual Corpus Christi Procession. The women wear attractive hats and ankle-length dresses. The men wear suits and straw hats. Altar boys are kneeling on the lawn.  The pictures convey a degree of civility and restraint unequalled by anything seen in that neighborhood today. In their place: “Security” bars, doors with entry codes, schools that push “diversity,” and the noise of rap “music” on the streets. Read More »

ALAN writes:

Your recent remark about vile crimes perpetrated by blacks and the absence of outrage against them prompted these thoughts. I write from the city of St. Louis, which is notorious for being infested with crime, most of it perpetrated by young black males. The mayor and all public officials know this to be true but do everything they can to deny it and whitewash it.

I have read many issues of The St. Louis Police Journal from 80-100 years ago. It is refreshing to see how crime was reported and dealt with then, as against how it is not reported and dealt with by today’s “newspapers” and “law enforcement” agencies drunk on diversity-and-multiculti worship.  

In each weekly issue of the Police Journal, a wealth of details was reported in plain language in two justified columns of fine print on every page. The men who wrote and published the Police Journal were not diversity-and-multiculti worshippers. They did not stop to worry whether what they wrote might “offend” anyone, least of all criminal thugs.   Read More »

The Majestic Theater, East St. Louis

ALAN writes:

East St. Louis, Illinois, was named an All-American city in the 1950s. It stands directly across from St. Louis, in the shadow of the St. Louis Gateway Arch. 

One morning in 1937 three hundred people attended a Cinema Breakfast in the lobby of the beautiful Majestic Theater in downtown East St. Louis. The breakfast was held by the Better Films Council of East St. Louis. A photograph in their bulletin The Motion Picture and The Family shows 18 white women standing in the lobby. All are attired in dresses and hats. The Better Films Council and groups like it around the nation were principled advocates for high moral standards in motion pictures. (Obviously no such groups are needed today.)  Read More »

ALAN writes:

In the 1950s, a life-size Nativity scene was displayed outside the Soldiers Memorial building in downtown St. Louis.  The mayor sent out Christmas cards bearing a likeness of that scene and the words “Merry Christmas.”  Lights in the tall Civil Courts building formed a cruciform pattern when viewed from a distance.  Christmas trees were everywhere downtown and always called “Christmas trees,”  not “holiday trees.”  Americans had not yet been softened up and dumbed down enough to accept idiotic neologisms like “holiday tree,” as they do today.   

Collier’s magazine, Dec. 1955:  “Christmas in St. Louis has a tone all its own.  The whole town resounds with carols.” 

Today the whole city surrenders to political correctness.  Read More »

ALAN WRITES: 

You and your readers made many excellent points in your recent discussion of public libraries. Permit me to add these.

The St. Louis Public Library is a model of political correctness. The building itself is an architectural gem that opened in 1912. But what goes on inside the building is another matter. 

Its policymakers worship at the shrine of egalitarianism. Shelves abound with books and periodicals favoring leftist causes. Posters promoting trendy music concerts proclaim “Not So Quiet” – a slap in the face to the American library’s traditional rule of enforcing quiet so that patrons may read, write, or do research. Pretentious comic books on slick paper are called “graphic novels” and shelved alongside Dickens and Twain. Shelves in the children’s department bulge with colorful, slickly-designed books promoting the standard leftist causes of multiculturalism, globalism, feminism, and egalitarianism. That department is also the site of many books designated by the non-word “parenting.” Can you imagine librarians in 1930 or 1950 assenting to an idiot-neologism like “parenting”? 

The library ceased long ago to be “just” a library; it is also now a movie and music rental store, and a trendy café is being added. If you took your children there fifty years ago, they would have seen a large Christmas tree and heard a concert of Christmas carols in its magnificent main hall. Such things brought joy, beauty, and inspiration to library staff, patrons, and visitors alike. If you take them there today, you will not risk exposing them to those things, because those things are now outlawed. Instead, you may browse among books like:  Read More »