Things You Remember About St. Louis (California, Benton: to live, safe, food)

[MissouriLovesCompany]

I miss St. Louis Centre... I spent my childhood in that mall! Taking the metrolink down to see the christmas display. All gone now.

[Barbara McCondra]

Ike and Tina Turner used to play the taverns on Cherokee street too.
the School Picnic Parades at Garfield School on Jefferson and Wyoming across from Benton Park were the biggest excitement of the year. We made banners covered in strips of colored crepe paper with strings flying and tassels.We were bussed to Forest Park Highlands in the 1940s.

Young boys could earn money by being paper boys, pin boys setting up pins at bowling alleys, and pretzel boys selling warm doughy breadlike pretzels on cherokee street where all the shops were in my south St. Louis neighborhood and by going into the taverns that were on every other corner. Or they would set up outside movie theatres like The Cinderella with folding wooden legs with canvas table tops to hold their huge baskets that held brown paper bags with a pretzel each in them! Also how about ma and pa tiny homemade potato chip factories tucked away in residential areas. You could by broken chips cheap.

How about the long walks to go to another school for home economics if yours didnt teach it. Like me at Garfield had to walk to Rose Fanning elementary. I believe there was a Velvet Freeze somewhere in between the two schools.

How about Kriwanik's Market that had live poultry, turkeys, geese and ducks in their windows and you'd go in order and pay, they would wring its neck and stuff it in your shopping bag to take home and pluck.

what about all those neighborhood little ma and pa confectionary stores where owners lived on the premises and you could buy cand, ice cream, bread and cigarettes.

Who can forget the little groceries like Joe's with the sawdust on wood floors and a magical brightly colored comic book rack where you stood with your hot little nickle or dime depending on the year, in your fist trying to choose one to buy! Whoo I feel the rush now.

Grampa would come home with his little pail of beer and throw red boiled craw dads into our galvanized tin tub swimming pool to hear us shriek in horrow and fight each other my sister and I to get out of the water.

How about peeking thru the venetian blinds slightly bent they were to peer thru a glass door to see holy rollers tossing themselves about. this was on the way to Concordia Turners (long torn down) across from Anheiser Bush Brewery.

I remember the Budweiser horses being excercised pulling a larg bee cart along the street next to Benton Park some days on my three block walk to school.

Remember patrol boys who helped us cross busy streets?

How about singing and dancing or quoting poetry as a performance the "trick" you had to do to get a "treat " on Halloween trick o treating midwest style?

[ShadowCaver]

Barbara - those are great memories, thanks for sharing them. So

lol, you paint very good images w/ you words - can just see your "Grampa tossing crawdads in the pool"!

[Barbara McCondra]

Go Mr. Twain!

And wasn't there a radio program that began with someone bellowing out "maaark twaaaain!" perhaps a series about riverboat adventures?

[Barbara McCondra]

Anyone remember the ride first called The Flying Turns then years later renamed The Bobsled. You slow climbed lika roller coaster inside a wooden tunnel and then dropped like a roller coaster but not on any track! You rocketed thru a twisting and turning three quarter wooden tube open to the sky overhead like a bobsled. I still have an occasional dream of waiting in long lines to get on that ride. The normal lookng roller coaster was called The Comet. Once a year our elementary school held its school picnic there. We saved up and bought small sheets of tickets for the rides ahead of time in the classroom weeks before the actual picnic. We're talking mid 1940s here.

[Barbara McCondra]

Walk past Benton Park and cross Arsenal. In fall you would walk past a church that was boiling up Apple Butter in a huge iron cauldron on its lawn. the tiny theater showed TWO yes two features plus a number of cartoons AND the short to be continued action serials ie: Rocket Man. Grandma took my little sister and I many Saturdays. I remember early enough to remember her being given free dishware just for coming.

I must have been pretty little as had to hang on tight to her hand to keep from tripping and falling when my toe caught often on the cracked and buckled old sidewalks.

This thread is lighting up memory cells like christmas lights at Famous and Barr.

[Barbara McCondra]

Taking your shoes to the Shoe Repair Shop to have metal taps put on them and sitting in the photo machine to get pix on a strip.

Scraping the skin off toes and knees on the rough gravel-in-cement lined swimming pools in little neighborhood parks. Ouch. Stopped going swimming when Polio raised its ugly head.

Eweuh. I watched Myra Grant chew hot tar off a tar truck like it was chewing gum. I didn't chew on petroleum products myself but did pick chips of ice off the iceman's truck. Am I as old as dirt or what?

My sister and I would race to get the milk man's glass bottled delivery so we could pull the cardbord flat plug cap off and lick the dream that stuck to it. Later Berlinger Dairy built a little factory one and half blocks away so we had to walk there with empty glass bottles clanking against our legs as we lugged them in a Berlinger Dairy canvas bag to take to the dairy and exchange for full bottles which was alot harder to lug home with less clanging and more grunting.

Health officials probably outlawed ashpits by now huh? We had a cement one. It was at end of corner of the backyard bordering of course the redbrick paved alley. Our streets and alleys were mostly redbrick paved. The ashpit was a five foot tall cemnt cube box into which you threw trash to later be burned when filled. It was great fun to claw our way upwith a leg lift or stand on a box and hang by our elbows to see if we could spot rats that were often seen in them. Rat watching was more popular BEFORE TV.

Some of the neighborhoods dad's used to have mini baseball-like games in the alley. It was played with broom handles for bats and tiny beer and soda bottlecaps for the ball. the pitcher would sail the bottle cap (tossed in a way similar to skipping rocks across water)and the batter to actually HIT THEM! And then run. Wow.

It was great excitement to walk with Grandma to Cherokee street and go into the Dime store. The trek walking to the back of the store has left me with tactile and audio memories as the floor was old old wooden planks and would both creak and hollowly clunk or tap as we traversed it.Very stagelike and I would do a little On the Good Ship Lollypop type of jig somewhere along the way unable to resist being Shirley Temple for a moment. Once in the back of the store we would pick out a pattern from a selection of many rolls of oilcloth. Oilcloth was a tablecloth for kitchen tables that came in big rolls. A sorta canvas that had a shiny bright patterned slick and smooth (when new) coating. The saleperson would cut off the length we asked for.We were going to have to live with our choice for a couple years. We would go home and cut into a circle for the BIG old round kitchen table with thick heavfty legs a real beauty, and then stretch over the top and tack it to the underside with many tacks. This was our wipeable table cloth. The whole excercise was a real treat.

[BabetteInSTL2]

Barb,

This is BarbinSTL. Do you remember the dance floor on top of the bandstand at the Highlands? And how the grownups all went up there and danced when it got dark? Also, the large swimming pool? I'm trying to remember how much money we got to spend. I'm thinking it was $5 worth of tickets, which seems like a whole lot!

[BabetteInSTL2]

Barb,

This is BarbinSTL. Do you remember the pigeons flying overhead a we walked down the alley, eating our sundaes on the way home from Rose Fanning? Ugh!!!!!! And more ughs!!!

[BabetteInSTL2]

Barb,

This is BarbinSTL. Do you have fond memories of Ms. Boggs in 8th grade at Garfield Elementary? She was the Sarge of the school, but I thought she was great. Also, Ms. Rowe was still principal at Garfield when my three kids started school there.

Do you remember the Cinderella Theater on Cherokee Street? I remember my brother having to take us with him to the show and yelling at us to pick up our feet and swing our arms and then when we got to the theater, "Sit down and don't get up until I come back", after supplying us with soda and popcorn. Of course, we snuck off to the bathrooms anyway. Memories, oh sweet memories. It sounds like we might have known one another!!!