One neighbor was Frieda Backoff who was quite a character. She owned the four-family flat (4612 Arsenal) and kept the walks and steps immaculate. She was from Germany and often called me “Struebelkopf” which I think meant messy hair. She lived in one of the flats which I visited on several occasions. It was very dark and had a lot of fancy dark furniture with Oriental rugs on the floor, and it always had a very sweet smell—it made me a little sick. I’m not sure if it was sweet-smelling from baking or if she used some kind of potpourri or incense. She was definitely “Scrubby Dutch” although mother always suspected she was actually Jewish because she was so dark. She always wore her hair in a hair net to keep it neat and was a devout Catholic despite Mother’s suspicions. She worked as a cleaning lady and my memories of her are of Frieda on her hands and knees (in a house dress, support stockings rolled into round garters below her knees and shoes) scrubbing the entry hall, the front steps and the sidewalk with powdered cleanser like Bon Ami. But, in her home, she always wore felt slippers---very typical of South St. Louis Scrubby Dutch—you did not wear your shoes in the house.
Prior to the 1950’s, St. Louis furnaces burned soft coal mined in southern Illinois. Our houses all had coal bins with chutes where the coal dribbled down into the bin. There was a small oven-sized door that the coal was poured in on the outside. Then, in the basement there was another door from which Daddy (or Grandpa) would shovel the coal and put it in the furnace. There was another door at the bottom, where the cinders and clinkers were shoveled out into a metal bucket before tossing them in the ash pit.
This soft coal did not burn cleanly---we always had smoke in our flat and there were times outside that the lights had to burn in broad daylight because the smoke was so heavy. The Missouri Botanical Garden (Shaw’s Garden) even planned to move the entire garden out of the city because the plants were suffering and MOBOT even purchased property out at Grey Summit. Our poor parakeet Babe even flew into the walls because he couldn’t see them for the smoke in our flat. So, the “Scrubby Dutch” (like Frieda) scrubbed the sidewalks, steps, porches and entry halls, to try to keep the dust and soot out of their homes. In the early 1950’s this coal was banned from being burned, the air cleared up and Shaw’s Garden stayed in the city.
Despite the air quality, I loved living in the city, but then I had Tower Grove Park across the street where I could climb trees, play baseball, go swimming, fish, hide in the bushes (which often had empty liquor bottles stored under them)---so I really had the best of the city. But, I had to have an adult with me to go to Tower Grove Park because it was across a busy city street (Arsenal) with streetcar tracks and “bums” or “boogeymen” who lived in the park. I loved the sound of the streetcars rumbling past at all hours of the day and night and still am lulled to sleep by street and train sounds. (crickets and birds chirping are very annoying when I am trying to sleep).
Also, we used to have vendors with carts come through the city streets chanting their services and wares. It wasn’t quite as musical as the scene in Oliver, but the chanting was very real. Each vendor had a different chant so when you heard the cadence of the voice, you knew if it was the scissor and knife sharpener man or the ice man or the produce man. The chants were very similar to what you might here at a baseball game. We also have the icecream man, today with his canned music which is similar but I loved the sounds of the chants. Even today, hearing someone say, “Get your ice cold lemonade heeeeeer, get it heeeeer,” it takes me back to a time when I could hear that on our screened in porch.
Or favorite was the ice man who would clip-clop through the alley with a horse and wagon selling ice. We would run after him and he would chip off a chunk of ice that we could suck on---delicious on a hot summer’s day. The ice was needed for ice boxes. Although we had an electric refrigerator, my grandparents and many in the neighborhood had ice boxes to keep food cold. We have one in our family room which we converted to a liquor cabinet many years ago. Most had a long door on the right with racks on the door for condiments. Then, on the left was a smaller door also with racks. On the bottom was a small door just big enough for a block of ice. There is a drain hole in the bottom which drained the melting water to a tray underneath. You had to lift the bottom panel to get the water out.
Behind us was the huge Continental Can Company. Once a year they had a huge picnic/carnival which all of the “neighbors” attended---we could see the assembly line at work, eat free food and play carnival games. But, my favorite business which we could walk to without an adult was the White Castle Bakery. The smell of baking buns filled the air. We would walk to the side door in the alley and wait for someone to come out and beg them for samples---delicious---bread is still my favorite guilty pleasure. . . .but not White Castle!
White Castle, a St. Louis fast-food burger place, was everyone’s favorite---long before McDonald’s was even in St. Louis. You could get a bag of burgers for a $1 (probably about 10 burgers). Dad would bring them home after work (when he worked shifts) and we would eat them as more of a snack than a meal. I can still taste the burger heavy on grilled onion. I remember begging Mom to make our hamburgers that way, so she would fry some onion in the grease with the burgers in a skillet (we didn’t really grill much living on the 2nd floor)
I could walk a couple of blocks to the Velvet Freeze ice cream parlor (east on Arsenal at Morganford) or I could hop on a bus (with Mom or Grandma) and go to Grand and Arsenal where there were all sorts of stores, taverns, movie theaters. Kingshighway and Arsenal was closer and also commercial, but it had car dealers, tire shops, Southwest High School and things I wasn’t too interested in until Southtown Famous-Barr was built.
As a young child Kingshighway was just a way to get to my favorite “shopping center” Hampton Village. They had a department store with pneumatic tubes that took your money up to the office AND a grocery store which had doors open for you when you stepped in front of them. I remember telling all of the kids in the neighborhood how magical that store was. There were shopping carts where you could pick out your own groceries. No more taking a list to a counter clerk and them bringing your food to you. You could see all of the wonderful things that weren’t even on your list and whine for Ovaltine because they sponsored your favorite TV show. They had produce in bins that you could pick out yourself—no more having to go to Soulard (gag!) where all I saw was the garbage and rotting vegetables on the ground under the bin. And, then, they gave you clean, neatly folded paper bags to put everything in---“Everything’s up to date in Hampton Village.” You didn’t have to go to a separate store for your meat---they had a meat counter like a little butcher shop right there in the store! I don’t think the in-store bakery had evolved yet because I still remember making trips to the bakery, but you could pick up a loaf of Wonder bread which was sold in a very colorful wax paper with balloons on it—“It builds bodies 8 ways.”
No comments:
Post a Comment