This year marks the centennial year of my dad’s birth. He was born above a saloon located at 14th and Clark in St. Louis, Missouri on October 10, 1914. Nowadays that’s a parking lot across the street from the ScottTrade Center but a century ago it was a gritty urban neighborhood right around the block from City Hall.
Over the course of the next year I plan on posting regularly about my dad and the times he grew up in. I write for multiple audiences here and one of them is my siblings and their kids. I think it’s important that I pass on what my dad told me. It might even prove interesting for a more general audience.
If not, bear with me.
My dad, who grew up, as did I, on Chicago’s South Side, loved to say:
If I had life to live over again, I’d live over a saloon.
It was no bed of roses. He grew up surrounded by drunks, drug addicts, layabouts, criminals, and ne’er-do-wells. And those were just the elected officials.