I remember you, St. Louis

Following are excerpts from a classic book written by Arthur Proetz, a retired surgeon, medical writer and Emeritus Professor of Clinical Otolaryngology in the Washington University School of Medicine, St. Louis. According to the book jacket, Proetz wrote the book for his own amusement and illustrated it largely with his own photographs. It was published by The Zimmerman-Petty Company, Saint Louis in l963. As stated on the book jacket: "This book is an intimate glimpse of life in St. Louis during the 25 years that carried it out of the 19th Century and into the 20th, as seen through the eyes of a youthful third generation American in a family which had immigrated from Germany during the 1830s and '40s. It is expanded from a series of articles which appeared in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch between September 1962 and May 1963. All the incidents are factual and the people are real. They are sketched with some humor and with all their foibles, in their adopted habitat." Soulard is not identified as a neighborhood. However, several people and locations mentioned are recognizeable today as part of Soulard.

Page 23:

Hill [author of "Hill's Manual of Social and Business Forms"] did not have to tell us how to behave on skates and sleds. Vacant lots, including Grandpa's back yard, were dotted with ponds, and there was always Lafayette Park. After a heavy snow the city used to block off Lami Street from Twelfth to Seventh Street and firemen sprayed water on the snow to make a coasting hill; steep. Near Seventh Street cinders were scattered to brake the sleds and toboggans before they reached the car tracks. All this now seems so improbable that I had to verify it through a schoolmate who once lived on the street.

Born and raised in central Illinois, Kevin Bayless moved to St. Louis in 1990. An accountant with a local firm and a Tower Grove East resident, Kevin enjoys bicycle riding and is pictured stopped on the Eads Bridge, opened to vehicle, pedestrian and bicycle traffic in July, 2003. In the background is the St. Louis Arch and the "Delta Queen," moored to discharge passengers after a run from Chattanooga. (People Productions photo by Clark Rowley)

"Imagine shutting off five blocks of street for the kids," I ruminated. "What do you suppose they did with the traffic?"

"What traffic?" she said.

I had my answer and a thumbnail sketch of the whole era.

Pages 60 and 61:

At 2330 South Eighteenth Street there was a saloon ("taverns" were still in England) known as "Die Gesundheitsquelle" or spring of health. The other reason for the name was that a spring really flowed beneath the property, which emerged through a hand-pump by the curb and the lucky horses had equal quaffing facilities with their drivers presently behind the swinging doors.

The patron was one Henry Giessenbier, which means literally "to pour beer." One day this Giessenbier dropped a remark to the skat players in the back room, implying that his greyhound could eat a paperbagful of soda crackers. Doubt was expressed; Henry bet a dollar. They laid down their money and someone went across to Boever and Kunze's for the crackers. After the initial crunch the hound crawled under a table in the corner and feigned sleep. Henry welshed on his bet. He pointed out that no time limit had been stipulated in the wager and he would try again on the morrow. He put the crackers away under the bar, and unless the new throughway has reached there in the last couple of weeks, both saloon and crackers are still there.

Boever and Kunze, the grocers, maintained trade relations with their juvenile patrons through a liberal policy in the matter of jelly-beans, and on top of that they would show you, in a Mason jar, a live tarantula trapped at great personal risk on a bunch of bananas.

Steve Wolff, senior horticulturist, tends the coleus in one of the greenhouses of the Missouri Botanical Garden. Flowers from the greenhouses have been contributed to the annual Flower Festival of Christ Church Cathedral in downtown St. Louis for over a century, per the terms of a bequest by Henry Shaw.

Two blocks east, at 12th and Lami, lived Dr. Franz Arzt. "Arzt" is German for "physician." His house, an elegant abode, was faced with marble-in fact it still is. But gone is the little ornamental greenhouse at the side, with a hinged glass roof which swung straight up in summer, carrying an unbelievable display of night blooming cereus, which was illuminated and drew crowds from all over town on the one night that it bloomed.

Down the block lived the Tichacek family. I shall not pretend that "Tichacek" is the Bohemian for "painters and grainers," but it could be for all I know, and that is what they were.

During the streetcar strike of 1900, saboteurs burned down the trolley wires at Twelfth and Russell, in front of the Ursuline Convent, by simply touching them with a heavily grounded metal bar. The fireworks were impressive. In the audience was Charlie Tichacek, aged 9. Bent on making some sparks himself, Charlie found a length of discarded gas pipe and reached for the trolley wire.

The pipe was too short, by a foot or two, and so Tichacek is alive today, though he says that his father was annoyed when he heard about the experiment, and for months afterward refused to let him go anywhere near the Ursuline Convent.

Page 75:

On a walk, in the nineties we would visit the Sidney telephone exchange, then in a private house on Eleventh and Sidney streets, to see how the new gadget worked, as people in later times visited the airport when that was new. Switchboards, on the whole, were much like the manual boards of today. Operators have changed. In the cellar were tables upon tables of batteries in glass jars, and the air was acrid with fumes.

Pages 109 and 110:

On the afternoon of May 27, 1896 the weather became more inclement that it ever was before, or would be again in my time. Half of south St. Louis blew away. On this date (one which I never have to look up) schools had weather warnings by telephone and students were sent straight home. For half an hour the sky looked "like an inverted pan of black biscuits" (my mother's description); then hell broke loose.

We went downstairs in the old part of the house where the brick walls were two feet thick and watched big trees go straight up in the air, trailing roots and showering rocks. The two-foot walls held (they are still there at 2341 South Twelfth) but the copper roof rolled up like a cigarette and departed. We located it later on someone's lawn, but the attic was open to the cloudburst. The trap-door swelled shut and could not be budged, so the attic shipped water. Holes had to be drilled in the ceiling to drain, in a sketchy way, into wash tubs. In the middle of all this dampness I was put to bed on a red plush sofa. The dye was not fast on the sofa, but on my face and hair it certainly was.