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). Read More »