Growing Up in St. Louis: A Gateway to Shakespeare, A Monkey Trial, and a Decapitated Chicken

Part I: I was born in St. Louis, Missouri at Barnes-Jewish Hospital in 1946. St. Louis was my home until I moved to Dallas, Texas at twenty-two. I returned to my home city only once after that (I believe it was sometime in the late 1980s) and was so saddened by its condition, I never went back. Even so, today, Barnes Hospital is ranked as one of the top hospitals in the nation and St. Louis still brags three major universities: Washington University; St. Louis Catholic University; and UMSL - University of Missouri, St. Louis. Today, St. Louis continues to have much to offer. Historically it was one of the major centers of commerce and trade, attracting thousands of immigrants - Jews, Czech, Slavs, Italians, Greeks, Serbians, and Lebanese, with the influx of German and Irish immigrants by 1850 comprising 43% of the city's population. By 1950, St. Louis's population reached 856.000 and without room to expand, people pushed out to populate the suburbs. By 1980, the city's population had declined to less than 450,000 and yet, St. Louis held on to its status as a city that still hosts a Philharmonic Orchestra, which is considered to be among the top echelon of America's symphony orchestras, remains home to SLAM (St. Louis Art Museum), which is one of the principal art museums in the U.S., and is also known for its Gateway Arch built in 1966, the Blues hockey team (of which I am still an ardent fan), Anheuser-Busch, and five Fortune 500 companies. In spite of its decline, the city remains formidable, so imagine what growing up in such a place was like in the 1950s and 60s.

The high school I attended, Normandy Senior High, was established in 1923 in what had originally been a seminary. The school grew into a nationally renowned "lighthouse school" (similar to our National Blue Ribbon schools today) and was recognized for its progressive methods of teaching where hands-on learning, language labs, science labs, and interactive discourse was encouraged in an era when students were expected to feed back lectured-based learning on tests. I often wonder if, as a teenager, this exposure was not greatly responsible for my proclivity to question and debate, to consistently analyze, to require logic, my love of research, and to demand authentic sources. In other words, I truly learned how to learn and learned to love learning. This mindset followed me into college and thereafter. Questioning and learning remains an exciting proposition for me, even as I enter my 8th decade. Not only were Normandy H.S. teachers highly educated, they were demanding and challenged their students to think like adults. I believe they must have also been given a great deal of leniency in teaching style and presentation. My teachers ranged from the highly intellectual and demanding, like my honors senior English teacher Mr. Weinstock who instilled a love of literature and writing in me, to those who were passionate about their subject matter and loved hands-on learning like my biology teacher, to those who were dry and methodical, i.e. my French teacher. Mr. Weinstock, my favorite, awarded me a copy of Othello as a prize for an essay I had written on the play. By the end of my senior year in his senior honors class, he asked me where I intended to apply to college. My response was to stare at him stupidly and shrug, which he obviously found unacceptable so he backed me against a wall and pointed his finger in my face. Livid and red in the face while he waved that finger near my nose, he asked me why, with my intelligence and talent, I would fail to pursue further education. With his hands on his hips and looking somewhat like a very skinny, bespectacled army sergeant, he insisted that by the end of the month, I let him know which universities I planned to consider. He walked away, leaving me dumbfounded. I was a "girl" and no one other than Mr. Weinstock had seemed to care one way or the other what I would be doing after I graduated. Many of my girlfriends were planning on finding jobs in a bank or department store. Some wanted to go to secretarial school and others simply hoped to find a guy and get married, but a few talked about college and I began to listen to them. By the time I graduated, I had acclimated myself and my parents to the idea of attending college. Wherever you may be, Mr. Weinstock, thank you from the bottom of my heart for scolding me, pushing me, praising me, believing in me, and insisting on my best.

Another example of a rather unorthodox teacher is my sophomore English teacher who enjoyed jumping up on the top of his desk and yelling at us like a William Jennings Bryan from the play, The Scopes Trial that he did not hesitate to assign. The class was asked to find a partner and to write a critique on the play, with one student supporting the defendant and the other writing in favor of the prosecution. In addition, we were required to co-write a summary analysis. One of the key aspects of this paper required the students to ensure that any opinion presented was backed up by credible research and all sources were legitimate, authentic, and cited. No BS allowed!! Quite a challenge for a fifteen year old and I can't begin to imagine such an assignment in today's climate. But that assignment has stuck with me throughout the years. I recall my Catholic girlfriend, who decided to support the prosecution, and I having sleepovers where we stayed awake half the night in discourse about evolution, God's role in creation, how to wrap our heads around infinity, and whether we felt it was a good idea or not to attempt to control what people thought or believed. And by the way, what was belief anyway? We never argued about these issues, nor did we get angry about what one or the other might think. Instead, in the dark, side by side, as best girlfriends, we simple explored ideas and wondered about life itself. Later, we also explored other wonders: like, sex and boys. Neither of us had much of a clue! Being 15 or 16 years old in the 1960s was quite a bit different than today. No Google or Social Media to help educate us, so the world remained exciting and mysterious, a place filled with wonder and questions, and oh, so many giggles.

Not only were academic agendas challenging, but other aspects of Normandy Sr. High provided an environment that only private schools might be able to achieve today. In a college style setting, six buildings spread across the campus that included a lake and large forest area. Designed by the well-known St. Louis architectural firm of Ittner, the gymnasium with its curved amphitheater seating was well-known in the area. The school provided a solid, equitable education by providing classes for those who were college bound and preparing them so well that their high school degrees were on par with what many young people today earn as a Bachelor's degree at the university level. But in addition to college preparation courses, Normandy also included a highly regarded vocational school; however, even with state-of-the-art technical training, students who chose vocational training over college prep were regarded as "less." Regardless, these students graduated with skills for their futures.

Other telltale social-economic differences among students on the campus included what was called the "smoker's walk" found outside the school's cafeteria. This practice I am sure would surprise most people today. The walkway was provided for those teenagers who wanted to smoke cigarettes during their lunch break. Boys with shirt collars turned up against their necks, black leather jackets, and long hair slicked back from their faces, hovered in the cold over a lit Lucky Strike or Camel they called a square or a coffin nail. Girls in tight pencil skirts, seamed nylon stockings, belted jackets, and black flats wore their hair pulled back in ponytails high off their heads or long and swooped over one eye. Black eyeliner and lipstick broadcast what kind of girl she was. "Nice" girls either wore no makeup at all or a tiny bit of mascara and a bit of shine on their lips with no color. Nylons were reserved for church and loafers or saddle oxfords with bobby sox were worn to school. Skirts were loose and fell below the knees. Nice girls wore bangs with page boy cuts or "flips" which brought the hair above the shoulders. The students who frequented the smoker's walk were the greasers or the hoods. Think John Travolta and Olivia Newton John in the move Grease, only these students were not movie stars or tropes; they were real kids who often came from lower-income homes, sometimes troubled, and they were rarely college bound. No self-respecting high school student with any ambition would be caught dead on the smoker's walk, and yet, dozens of teenagers found the comfort of others on this walk of shame. Incredibly, smoking was allowed; however, wearing jeans or kissing was forbidden. Breaking the dress code or getting caught kissing in a hallway was grounds for expulsion, and yet if a kid wanted to smoke themselves into lung cancer . . . oh well, who cared? After all, they were just a bunch of hoods.

When I was in elementary school my best friend was Kathy S. Kathy lived down the street from me and from the time we were four until we entered the 7th grade, we played together nearly every day. But something happened once we entered the upper-level grades. Kathy and I began to grow in different ways. Not that she wasn't strikingly beautiful, the older she got the prettier she became. Not that she wasn't intelligent, talented, or creative (she beat me out of the only spot left on the school's performing dance team without ever having had a dance lesson). Kathy possessed the same aptitude and competence I did. The gap between us, however, was embedded in our parents' world views, their lifestyles, the opportunities they offered their children, and the expectations they had for their children. Thus, Kathy's path turned in an entirely different direction from mine.

Kathy's father moved from the hills of Tennessee to Missouri when he was in his late teens. At eighteen, he had never seen a train and claimed that at the first sight of the one he needed to board to ride to St. Louis frightened him so badly he wet his pants and thought he might throw up. Sedge S. worked hard, saved pennies, and eventually bought a ramshackle farmhouse on several acres of farmland 12 miles northwest of the city. He returned to Tennessee just long enough to marry his life-long love Barbara and brought her to his farm in Missouri. Sedge and Barbara worked the farm and happily welcomed three children to it: Tony, Joyce, and Kathleen.

Sedge had a keen nose for making money and he soon realized that with the post-war demand for housing and the suburbs mushrooming up all around his farm, he could make a good deal of money by developing a street of new homes. He may have been nothing but an uneducated hillbilly, but Sedge was sharp-minded and what he didn't know, he made it his business to find out. Eventually, he was able to get approval to have an asphalt road poured and county sewage, electric, and water installed. After selling multiple lots to couples who wanted to custom build their own homes - my father's sister Thelma and her husband being one of those couples - Sedge used the money he made to also build a dozen or so small stucco homes and sold those. Once he had amassed a hefty profit, he built a motel at the edge of his property adjunct to Natural Bridge Road, a corridor spanning the several counties through northwest St. Louis. Sedge's new street of homes, Springdale Avenue, is the street I lived on from age three to eleven in the stucco house my grandparents had previously owned. After my grandfather died, my grandmother Oberlin sold the house to my mom and dad and moved across the street to live with my Aunt Thelma and her husband Howard. From there, Grandma ruled her daughter's home and did her best to rule my poor mother's as well for the next nine years.

I was four when I discovered another four-year-old down the street. Her name was Kathy and few days went by that we didn't play at one another's house. I was intrigued with the S. farm. Sedge and Barbara retained a few acres, enough to keep several cows and a hen house full of chickens governed by a Banty rooster. Kathy and I played on the front porch of the house, in the barn, in the outhouse, and ran wild across the cow pastures, stepping lightly around the large, round cow patties that steamed in the summer heat. We picked Queen Anne's Lace and wildflowers to put in the mason jars we found in the barn. On the porch, we spent hours designing our own dress-up gowns from old dresses and scarves our mothers had discarded. In the meantime, Sedge continued to sell off acreage until he became a wealthy man. Once we grew old enough to ride bikes. Joyce, Kathy, and I pedaled our way up and down the hills of the new streets that popped up around our little neighborhood, streets filled with dozens and dozen of new houses, of which the majority were occupied by former G.I.s and their families.

And yet, even at four, I knew Kathy's family was different than mine. Regardless of Sedge's newfound wealth, the S. family lived in the old, unpainted farmhouse until I was nearly eleven whereupon he finally knocked it down and built a lovely ranch-style house that Kathy announced was the most beautiful house in the neighborhood. I agreed, but the old farmhouse is where most of my earliest memories reside.

The old farmhouse had only three rooms: a kitchen, living room, and bedroom. Initially, there was no bathroom; the outhouse was out back. Sedge installed a bathroom at some point, but I don't recall exactly when. Regardless, Kathy and I made a playhouse out of the outhouse, as disgusting as that sounds. I'm not sure why the odor didn't bother us, nor did the unsightly "things" we saw trapped down in the holes where people sat to relieve themselves. Seventy years later I can recall it all, but I have no clue as to why we loved playing in that space. I detest Porta Potties and will only use one in an extreme emergency, but my sensibilities must have been quite different at four than they are today. With a single bedroom, I am not even sure where everyone in the S. family slept and being so young, never thought to ask. I have a vivid memory of Barbara

in the kitchen standing at the stove barefoot in her cotton housedress and long hair held behind her ears with bobby pins, frying sausage. The house always had a warm, earthy smell like sausage and hot biscuits. Tomatoes ripened on the windowsill and my first fresh tomato was eaten sitting next to that window. My mother could never get me to eat vegetables and when she discovered I had eaten an entire tomato, she was shocked. And, I think somewhat annoyed, but at four years old, it was hard to explain why a can of tasteless peas could hardly hold a candle to a farm-grown tomato. I had little comprehension where the food in our house came from, believing the grocery store was the original source for it all. That is, until I witnessed Barbara killing a chicken.

Kathy, her sister Joyce, and I were running around the farmhouse yard when I spied Barbara sitting on a stool beneath a tree, holding a chicken in her hands. Oh, what fun! I wandered over to where she sat to take a good look at that feathered creature just as her hand holding an ax rose into the air and swiftly came down on that poor chicken's neck. The head fell to the ground and bounced close to my feet. I gasped and froze. The only other dead animal I had ever seen was my kitten that had been run over by a car and left squashed on the road. Fortunately, I was not witness to my kitten's death itself. To see that chicken fluttering its wings and clucking one minute and falling silent, limp, and headless in Barbara's hand the next, shocked me. The chicken's head no longer on the chicken's body was incomprehensible and the decapitation caused me to have nightmares long afterward. Before I could spew a stream of vomit on the fowl's head lying at my feet, Barbara sweetly asked: We're having fried chicken for dinner tonight. Do you want to stay for supper? Upon which, I wretched and released my breakfast at her feet. I don't recall whether I stayed for dinner or not.

By the time we reached high school, Kathy was one of the girls in a tight pencil skirt on the smoker's walk who left school early to go to a job required of those in the vocational work program; whereas, I dressed in pleated skirts and loafers, read Othello, and enrolled for college prep classes. Our paths had reached a crossroads from which we would never return. In our junior year, Kathy sat next to me in one of the general requirement classes necessary for all students to graduate. One day, after she pulled out a photograph and shyly passed it to me, I noticed a gold band on the ring finger of her left hand. In the picture, Kathy wore a white dress and held a small bouquet of flowers, her pretty face tilted up to kiss a rail-thin young man who wore his dark, long hair slicked back except for a single coil that hung over his forehead as he bent over Kathy to kiss her back. While I looked at the picture, Kathy looked at me from the corner of her eye but beneath her demure smile I sensed a quiet pride. In showing me her wedding picture, I wondered if she felt that by marrying, she had discovered initiation into adulthood and a newfound superiority that I was lightyears from sharing. I was not envious; instead, I was crestfallen. Not because I couldn't or wouldn't risk as bold a step but because I realized that like me, Kathy was still only sixteen. As naïve as I was, I knew her life was going to be very different than mine and somehow, I felt that she knew this as well. Regardless, she had hoped to impress me with what she most likely considered a romantic and daring fete accompli. I congratulated her and wished her well, and I meant it, but at the same time, even though I didn't quite know why, I was disheartened.

The incident, however, remains a casual but significant moment. In retrospect, it is easier to see that although I didn't fully comprehend the tweak I felt in my heart then, the intimation that our choices are crucial seeded itself along with the pain that my childhood friend and I had on that day forever parted ways.